THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 Ex Libris 
 [ C. K. OGDEN
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 a
 
 " Sidney Whitman shows to keen a sense of the present parlous condition of 
 art and the demoralization of artists that we may look to him for guidance. 
 SATURDAY REVIEW. 
 
 FETISH WORSHIP IN THE FINE ARTS. 
 
 SIDNEY WHITMAN. 
 
 Crown 8vo, cloth, 3*. 6d. 
 REMINGTON & CO., 18, HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 "If Mr. S. Whitman's little book possessed more literary finish and sobriety 
 of expression it would be by no means unworthy of attention." Westminster 
 Review. 
 
 "This sharply critical sketch of the present condition of the drama, music, 
 and painting touches many weak points, . . . many will echo the ridicule heaped 
 upon those who ' worship hysterical intensity for true intellectuality,' and ' bow 
 down before what is diseased in a literary and artistic sense.' " Daily Chronicle. 
 
 "Mr. Sidney. Whitman writes vigorously against one-man rule generally, in 
 ' Fetish Worship in the Fine Arts.' . . . Mr. Whitman is undoubtedly right 
 in thinking that there is much that is repulsive to common sense in the way in 
 which the crowd of men and women rush unintelligently after what has become 
 the rage, whether it be a theatrical star or an eminent painter." Graphic. 
 
 "... There is much in his observations that deserves consideration. His 
 remarks tend in the direction of a higher general standard of thought, as dis- 
 tinguished from the mere following of a fashionable sentiment in any of the 
 phases of art from time to time." {3^. 
 
 " There is no denying that for a good deal of his pungent animadversion there 
 is more or less of justification to be urged. . . . Mr. Whitman's essay will be 
 found a piquant bit of reading." Scotsman. 
 
 " The general public are indebted to Mr. Whitman for an energetic attempt to 
 bestow upon them the dubious ' giftie to see themsels as ithers see them.' "- 
 Whitehall Review. 
 
 "... There is so much truth in what the author says, there is so much 
 ' Fetish- worship ' to combat, that his little book may not be without service, and 
 so far it is deserving of welcome. Plain-speaking is a good thing in these days 
 of compromise, and for some earnest and thoroughly justified plain-speaking the 
 author of ' Fetish Worship in the Fine Arts ' deserves thanks." Glasgow Herald. 
 
 "... The author of ' Fetish Worship ' is a person of taste ... he tells the 
 plain truth about a good many matters, and his book may help us out of the 
 night, to use his own phrase, and show us where common-sense has got to." 
 Life. 
 
 "... He is undoubtedly possessed of a right-minded appreciation of genius, 
 and a healthy contempt for hypocrisy and hunting with the multitude." Lady. 
 
 "... Its manliness is refreshing." Fifeshire Journal,
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT 
 
 77S XSULTS AND REMEDY 
 
 BY ' 
 
 SIDNEY WHITMAN 
 
 LONDON 
 
 KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH & CO., I, PATERNOSTER SQUARE 
 
 1887
 
 (TJie rights of translation and of 'reproduction are reserved.)
 
 My muse by no means deals in fiction, 
 
 She gathers a repertory of facts ; 
 
 And that's one cause she meets with contradiction 
 
 For too much truth, at first sight, ne'er attracts ; 
 
 And were her object only what's called glory 
 
 With more ease too she'd tell a different story. 
 
 BYRON.
 
 PREFACE. 
 
 THE idiosyncrasy of which I purpose to treat 
 I have called " Conventional Cant," in order to 
 avoid, at the outset, the suspicion of referring 
 to simple religious hypocrisy, which is common to 
 humanity at large, and with which, specially, my 
 work has nothing to do. 
 
 It may seem presumptuous, if not audacious, to 
 describe Cant as our national failing, as an idiosyn- 
 crasy which taints us collectively, whilst we boast 
 so large an amount of individual moral excellence. 
 Now, a daring procedure calls for a justification, 
 or, at least, for an explanation to start with, and 
 for that purpose I append a few quotations from 
 the writings of some of the most acute thinkers of 
 our time. 
 
 Schopenhauer tells us : " To deny what is bad
 
 Vlll PREFACE. 
 
 is a duty towards what is good ; for to him who 
 holds naught to be bad, nothing can seem good." 
 
 "Idiosyncrasies are pepper and spices of question- 
 able aroma," according to George Eliot ; and then, 
 again, she has the following : " Whilst on some 
 points of social duty public opinion has reached a 
 tolerably high standard, on others a public opinion 
 is not yet born, and there are even some functions 
 and practices with regard to which men far above 
 the line in honourableness of nature feel hardly any 
 scrupulosity, though their consequent behaviour is 
 easily shown to be as injurious as bribery, or any 
 other slow poisonous procedure which degrades 
 the social vitality." 
 
 If this be so, it is not my fault that my descrip- 
 tion of our Cant will not turn out to be a hymn of 
 praise. And if I should be met with the objection 
 that there is no necessity to lay bare what is ugly, 
 whilst we can glory in what is beautiful, I would 
 respectfully submit, that it is a less worthy task 
 to point to the glorious rays of our national sun, 
 which all of us can only too readily discern, than 
 to draw attention to some spots on its surface. 
 
 John Stuart Mill has it : "I do not know how a 
 public writer can be more usefully employed than 
 in telling his countrymen their faults. If so doing
 
 PREFACE. IX 
 
 is to be considered anti-national, I am not at all 
 desirous to avoid the charge." 
 
 This book does not attempt to preserve the 
 dramatic or rhetoric unities, though this is always 
 desirable. The fault, if any, lies partly in the 
 subject, if the title be unattractive or even re- 
 pellent, and the work itself incongruous in treat- 
 ment something like Sindbad's old man of the 
 sea or Caliban in their physical proportions. But 
 having set myself to describe what I feel bound 
 to deprecate, I am powerless to alter the conditions 
 of the task. They involve the necessity of con- 
 stant reiteration and comparison, perhaps even 
 beyond what might be termed either harmonious 
 or agreeable. And, though comparisons are odious, 
 I contend that, as physical anatomy cannot get on 
 without them, so anatomy of custom and character, if 
 undertaken at all, cannot forego their employment. 
 
 In pointing to many instances of friction in the 
 social body, to want of harmony of colour and feel- 
 ing in our midst, I am aware of the one-sidedness 
 of the task. I am not only fully conscious of short- 
 comings of treatment, but, what is of more im- 
 portance, I am fully conscious of laying myself 
 open to the charge of fault-finding in a mean spirit 
 for the mere gratification of so doing. Human
 
 X PREFACE. 
 
 nature is, perhaps, not above finding pleasure in 
 such a proceeding, though many may be unwilling 
 to admit it. But, then, we are so little inclined to 
 admit anything, except our antagonist pins us to 
 the figurative wall, and leaves us no option but a 
 graceless surrender. 
 
 This much is clear to me, and yet I hold that 
 mere fault-finding unless it bear the distinct marks 
 of a disordered liver, and thus is apt to render us 
 impatient is not only justifiable, but beneficial, 
 even if no remedy be pointed out, and no lights 
 thrown-in to blend with the dark shadows, so 
 long as honesty of purpose is apparent. That 
 such honesty of purpose should be apparent is 
 my earnest wish. It has been the main-spring that 
 prompted me to write, and I can only hope it may 
 have leapt from my heart and impressed itself on 
 these pages. But I do not trust to making clear 
 what my motives may have been ; I must be pre- 
 pared to find them misunderstood and sneered at ; 
 and I will therefore endeavour to supply my justi- 
 fication in pointing out, in conclusion, to the best 
 of my ability, the remedy for what I find fault 
 with. If somewhat Utopian in this, I doubt not 
 that many may opine I make up for it in the 
 despairing pessimism of my description of the evils
 
 PREFACE. xi 
 
 from which we suffer. Even if it be thought 
 necessary to tone down a little the ills I have 
 pictured, and the remedies I suggest, I shall still 
 consider that I have not laboured in vain, if it 
 causes others to discriminate and to guide, where 
 I have felt only able to grope in the dark, in 
 the desire to gain light. 
 
 THE AUTHOR.
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 PREFACE ... ... ... ... vii 
 
 INTRODUCTION ... ... ... xv 
 
 I. PHARISAISM ... ... ... ... i 
 
 II. CANT DEFINED AND TRACED ... ... 22 
 
 III. SOCIAL CANT ... ... ... ... 36 
 
 IV. CANT IN OUR MANNERS ... ... 58 
 
 V. CANT IN THE PRESS ... ... ... 84 
 
 VI. CANT IN POLITICS ... ... ... 107 
 
 VII. CANT .IN OUR PRINCIPLES ... ... 139 
 
 VIII. THE RESULTS AND REVOLT ... ... 167 
 
 IX. REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION ... ... 204
 
 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 "Strike, but.hear me." 
 
 "We laugh heartily to see a whole flock of sheep jump because 
 one did so : might not one imagine that human beings do the same 
 and for exactly the same reason?" GREVILLE. 
 
 IN showing up our Cant, I mean to point to the unhealthy 
 influence it exercises over our thought and action, even 
 now that we are on the eve of tremendous social and 
 political changes, if we are not already in the midst of 
 them. In doing so, I am conscious of wading through 
 a morass, in which one is only too likely to lose one's-self 
 and to grope after a Will-o'-the-wisp. The danger of 
 coming to hasty and one-sided conclusions must be 
 guarded against by disclaiming any pretension to infal- 
 libility of statement in detail, and by basing my hopes 
 on the expectation that any little inaccuracies or fallacies 
 may be forgotten by the reader, if I succeed in convey- 
 ing an impression of truth and honesty of purpose on the 
 whole. 
 
 After stating that our conventional cant exercises an
 
 XVI INTRODUCTION. 
 
 undue and unhealthy influence, I endeavour to present 
 proofs by quoting a number of instances in all spheres 
 of its action. But these alone, however numerous, would 
 hardly suffice. I therefore endeavour to show, by a few 
 side-lights and comparisons, how disastrously our cant has 
 acted by indirect processes on the different classes of 
 the community ; how it has intensified the selfishness of 
 the privileged classes, and is mainly answerable for the 
 vulgarity and fawning snobbishness of the middle classes ; 
 and, last but not least, how it is partly answerable for 
 the undue isolation, wretchedness, and degradation of 
 our poor. To trace part of the miseries of the latter to 
 the sins of the former, and to suggest some hope for the 
 future, is the ultimate aim of these pages. 
 
 In attempting this, I have here and there compared 
 our idiosyncrasies and customs unfavourably with those 
 of the people of other countries ; and I contend that 
 you cannot invalidate the force of such comparisons by 
 answering that others have failings on other sides that 
 equalize, if they do not even reverse, the account. I 
 maintain that many shortcomings of other communities 
 are more or less inseparable from exceptionally unfavour- 
 able conditions of life and unfortunate evolvements of 
 history. It is true that the Conquest vitiated our Saxon 
 element, and gave us a Norman landed feudality, under 
 which, even down to the present hour, we groan. But 
 we have long had the remedy to a great extent in our
 
 INTRODUCTION. xvii 
 
 own hands. With a sea-board uninvaded for centuries, 
 with an early emancipation from the trammels imposed 
 upon thought by mediaeval Catholic intolerance, we 
 might well expect to be free from many ills from which 
 we suffer, without being cursed with any of those con- 
 comitant disadvantages to which other communities still 
 have to submit. We might expect this much, even if 
 Englishmen were less sound of nerve and less full of 
 energy than they undoubtedly are. And yet we are still 
 blessed with feudal land laws; with a leasehold system 
 such as no country in Europe would tolerate for a day, 
 and with a cumbersome civil law founded on contradic- 
 tions and precedents dating from the Conquest, which 
 is the ridicule of all civilized countries. The governing 
 executive is all but the monopoly of a privileged caste, 
 and our administration tends to crush out talent instead 
 of fostering and encouraging it. Our middle classes, in 
 lieu of an honest loyalty, worship the aristocracy body 
 and soul, without being able to assimilate any of the 
 better qualities to which they profess to bow down in 
 senseless and slavish adulation. Their ideas of respecta- 
 bility lead them to treat poverty as worse than a mis- 
 fortune, as a crime. And, lastly, we are blessed with the 
 hideous outcome of all this in a hopeless and degraded 
 proletariat. 
 
 I do not contend that all this is traceable to our cant 
 alone. I do hold, however, that a large amount of it
 
 xviii INTRODUCTION. 
 
 undoubtedly is. Cant blinds us to things as they are, 
 and thus performs the part of the vilest pair of blinkers 
 that were ever clapped on the eyes of mortal bipeds.* 
 
 These preliminary remarks I have judged necessary to 
 back the contention. I hope to prove further on that, 
 notwithstanding our boasted freedom and our ballot- 
 boxes, we are still mentally enslaved far more than we 
 are prepared to admit, and out of all proportion to the 
 spirit of our written laws one-sided though these often 
 are. We are swayed by shibboleths, from the power of 
 which nothing but an entire revolution in our modes 
 of thought and feeling can liberate us. I humbly submit 
 that the sooner this revolution comes the better. Admit- 
 ting that our civilization may be credited with its best 
 product the "gentleman " and its complement the "lady," 
 pity has made me not only feel that we may have paid 
 too dear a price for the article, but also that there must 
 be something even beyond and above our ruling-class 
 product, namely a type that can no longer be satisfied 
 with its own culture and refinement from the moment 
 the conviction is gained, that this superiority is partly 
 purchased at the price of an undue isolation of others 
 and want of sympathy with them. 
 
 Only when we have shaken off our cant, our Pharisaism, 
 our gush, and other kindred concomitant nuisances, 
 shall we really, as a nation, fulfil the glorious destiny 
 * Carlyle's definition.
 
 INTRODUCTION. xix 
 
 which foreigners who are only familiar with our best 
 minds sometimes enviously feel to be our birthright. 
 But before that comes to pass, a word will have to be 
 spoken to a few elements which have contributed so much 
 to vitiate our middle classes, to keep our masses in dark- 
 ness, and which are mainly answerable for our unclean 
 state. Foremost among these, from the past downwards, 
 is the Established Church, with its preponderating worldly 
 social position and its powerlessness to influence our 
 uncultured masses, and the leviathan Metropolitan Press, 
 with its commercial character and influence. These two 
 things once set right, many others will right themselves, 
 and find a healthier level. The people of this country 
 will take care of that. For there are among us men 
 Englishmen to the backbone who can even see beyond 
 that definition the broader disc of humanity.
 
 ^ 
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 PHARISAISM. 
 
 "Woe unto you, Pharisees !" JESUS CHRIST. 
 I. 
 
 PHARISAISM is the essence of our individual and national 
 self-sufficiency, and, blended with cant, goes to make up 
 the full-bodied insular quality of the latter. 
 
 Taken by itself, it shows some affinity to French 
 Chauvinism, to German Philistinism, or, perhaps, to 
 Slavonic aggressiveness. But the likeness is only a 
 superficial one. Probed beneath the surface, Pharisaism 
 is, after all, something different, something essentially 
 middle-class English. We do not contend that it is con- 
 fined to our middle classes ; but from them it takes its 
 character, even when pandered to by the aristocracy or 
 by the press. It is a speciality of conceit, of false pride ; 
 
 B
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 but it is not like the harmless pride of the Spaniard, who 
 is only afraid of his own redoubtable self in the looking- 
 glass. It is the " toupet " of the fair-haired Anglo-Saxon 
 race, more aggressive, if not more impertinent and vulgar, 
 than that of any other people. 
 
 That our press should continually presume to lecture 
 foreign countries is, perhaps, not a striking feature. We 
 too have been lectured by others in our turn. But in 
 our attempts to " believe in " our Pharisaic estimate of 
 ourselves we are unique. Of course there is no govern- 
 ment like our Parliamentary system; no family-life like 
 ours; and no cleanliness like that procurable by means 
 of Pears's soap. Our cleanliness, moral and physical, is 
 one of our noblest Pharisaic war-horses ! Some may 
 believe it is an open question how far we are justified 
 in riding it ; but as this is not a disquisition based on 
 the statistics of soap consumption, we will not dwell 
 further on the subject, save to remark that our constant 
 asseverations of the importance we attach to cleanliness 
 make us suspicious with regard to its too general pre- 
 valence among us. Here, as elsewhere, it may sometimes 
 
 be true 
 
 " The lady protests too much methinks." 
 
 Our press periodically congratulates the Crown Prince 
 of Germany on having an English wife. We hardly 
 know on what English blessing we should not be 
 prepared to congratulate outsiders. It is not only with
 
 PHARISAISM. 
 
 reference to our home life and its purity that we are 
 enabled to feel a Pharisaic satisfaction in contemplating 
 our less-favoured neighbours. Oh no ; all along the 
 line, in every phase and walk of life, our Pharisaism 
 enables us to attain that most desirable consummation 
 a feeling of our own superiority. Our Pharisees have 
 but to say a thing is English, and it is accepted by them 
 as synonymous with being the right thing. They are 
 presumably unaware that there may exist a feeling which 
 has but to qualify a thing as English, as being synony- 
 mous with wrong. One extreme is as absurd as the 
 other ; but absurdity itself has ever been as characteristic 
 of Pharisaism as its viciousness and its vulgarity. 
 
 Notwithstanding all our Pharisaic missionary work, 
 hardly an instance is on record of a high-caste Hindoo 
 being converted to our creed. Still we send our mission- 
 aries up into the hills and villages inhabited by races 
 that detest us and despise our religion, or, at least, our 
 mode of professing it and inculcating it Schopenhauer 
 tells us : to those Indian children of nature our ideas of 
 a supreme " Maker " only suggest the unethical con- 
 ception of " Shoemaker," " Bootmaker," etc. ; an idea 
 of le faiseur, der Macher, suggesting something to be 
 got, to be gained, to be bartered, to be bargained for. 
 That such is the case has not only been stated on 
 foreign authority, but on the unimpeachable testimony 
 of some of the most eminent Anglo-Indians, some of
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 whom have also enthusiastically given vent to their 
 admiration for the spirit of the Buddhist creed. And 
 yet we grind these Asiatic races to powder under our 
 dominion,* literally crushing millions out of existence. 
 But not only subject races feel the iron hand through 
 the gaudy velvet glove ; our Pharisaism presses hard 
 enough on our subject classes at home. 
 
 II. 
 
 That we should still persist in converting so-called 
 "inferior" races is not a unique peculiarity of ours. 
 Other Christian communities are still engaged in the 
 same thankless work. But our attempts to convert races 
 on an equal, if not on a superior, intellectual and moral 
 level, mark a proud privilege which our Pharisaism 
 confers on us almost solely. Have we not a Society for 
 the propagation of the gospel among the Jews? And, 
 if we are not misinformed, are not its offices in the centre 
 of London itself? 
 
 The muscular Anglo-Saxons endeavouring to convert 
 the kinsmen of Spinoza and Heine ! If that be not 
 delicious, those in quest of delight must be difficult to 
 please. 
 
 We cannot help recalling and putting on record here, 
 for the delectation of those evangelical busybodies who 
 * "Progress and Poverty," Henry George, p. 104.
 
 PHARISAISM. 5 
 
 devote their money to sending out unctuous incapables 
 to distant parts to convert Jews, instead of devoting it 
 to relieve the abject misery at their own doors, such as 
 Judaism knows nothing of, the following memorable re- 
 joinder which Moses Mendelssohn made to Herr Lavater 
 and others, when in the spirit of their tribe they made 
 their impertinent efforts to convert him : 
 
 "Let me humbly request your advice in a given 
 emergency, and one which is by no means impossible. 
 Suppose that a fire should break out in my dwelling 
 let the flames have already burnt out the ground floor, 
 and that the foundations begin to shake would you 
 have me fly for safety to the top story ? Can I reason- 
 ably hope to find safety on the roof, if the lower part of 
 the structure which supports it is already falling in? 
 When you find a man of judgment hold opinions subver- 
 sive of the Mosaic dispensation, does the question not 
 occur to you, What will become of the Christian one, 
 which is founded on it ? Of a truth, thou searcher after 
 light and the right, were I not purely for the sake of 
 light and the right inclined to expatiate somewhat further, 
 I should here have closed my discourse, by showing you 
 that your concluding wishes are in directest contradiction 
 to the principles with which you set out." * 
 
 But not only are the Jews the subject of our Pharisaic 
 
 * Translated in "German Life and Literature." T. Fisher 
 Unwin : London.
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 converting solicitude. The wave of hatred, or envy, for 
 that indomitable and gifted race, which is at the present 
 passing more or less over the whole continent of Europe, 
 has supplied us with endless unction and food for self- 
 satisfaction. When Jew-baiting in Germany first at- 
 tracted attention, the Times treated us to one of its 
 leaders on the subject. The alpha and omega of that 
 article was to thank Heaven that we were not as others 
 are. We need not refer to the comparatively recent 
 time when the dislike of foreigners was almost as marked 
 in England as any continental antipathy to the Jews is 
 to-day; nor need we refer to our dislike of our Irish 
 neighbours, when it used to be no unusual thing to see 
 advertisements in the papers ending with the qualification 
 that "no Irish need apply." Even without being con- 
 versant with such facts, to anybody however superficially 
 familiar with currents of continental social and political 
 life, it must have been at least amusing to read a paper 
 speaking in the name of England and accusing Germany 
 of religious intolerance. Not that we would question 
 the right of the Times to speak in the name of England. 
 Did not even Mr. Henry Irving, only the other day, 
 thank Americans in the name of England for his recep- 
 tion among them? No, it is not the Jovine voice \ve 
 object to, only the conclusions to which it gives expres- 
 sion. Or, if we listen to it, why not urge it to continue 
 its homily, and accuse the Americans of religious intoler-
 
 PHARISAISM. 
 
 ance, because some Americans object to be undersold 
 by Chinese labour ? 
 
 Now, it is perfectly understood, on the other side of 
 the Channel, that the Jews persistently represent every 
 manifestation of enmity towards them as a display of 
 religious intolerance ; whilst every dispassionate observer 
 knows, that Jew-hatred is more or less the result of a 
 race-hatred, all the fiercer because it is handed down to 
 us by tradition, but otherwise similar to that shown in 
 San Francisco towards the Chinese, in England formerly 
 towards the Irish, and up to the present day in the 
 colonies towards rival and inferior races. Of course 
 that view of the question does not suit the Semitic 
 element. It would immediately raise the collateral 
 inquiry in how far the Jews had given cause for such 
 hatred among a race which is the most tolerant in the 
 world in religious matters ? It might involve the reply 
 that the Jews have done a great deal to account for it, 
 if only in creating envy by their extraordinary success 
 in the battle of life, as it is waged in the latter half of 
 the nineteenth century. Whether such hatred is morally 
 justifiable is another matter. We are not concerned 
 with the question of deserts, of reward and punishment. 
 Such adjustments may be in their place in the nursery, 
 or in the state penitentiaries, but they are entirely out 
 of place in the consideration of race struggles and race 
 predominance. One thing is certain : the Jews as a race
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT, 
 
 owe us Christians small thanks for anything ! But our 
 Pharisee loves to think that everybody gets treated in 
 this world according to his deserts, and hence it is 
 concluded that the extraordinary blessings vouchsafed 
 to us are only the results of our exceptional merits. 
 The blessings of our bigotry, of our temperance crusade, 
 of our salvation craze, the hideous immorality which 
 stalks in broad daylight through our great towns and 
 flourishes like disease in the vicinity of sewer gas, all 
 these things are legitimate food for our Pharisee ! But 
 he is accustomed to ignore the main issue of anything, 
 if it prove inconvenient to his bumptious self-sufficiency ; 
 and if he should come face to face with an awkward fact, 
 so much the worse for the fact. 
 
 III. 
 
 We turn up the whites of our eyes when we see 
 women working in the fields abroad, whilst we shut our 
 eyes to the degradation of womanhood in each and all 
 of our great manufacturing centres, not to mention 
 London in particular. We pity the poor dogs we see 
 harnessed to little carts on the continent, and cantingly 
 make ourselves believe that our pity is a result of our 
 sympathy with the faithful quadruped, instead of its 
 being in reality nothing else than the result of a little 
 bit of our aristocratic class legislation which objected to
 
 PHARISAISM. 
 
 the quadrupeds reserved for the sports of our better 
 classes being turned to menial occupations. Yes, our 
 superior morality has ever been a favourite feeding- 
 trough for the canting biped, and ridiculous enough it 
 has made us appear from time to time. 
 
 And yet our Pharisee aims high ; he has lofty ideals. 
 And high aspirations are all very well; but, according 
 to a Danish proverb, the jackdaw carries its dirty tail 
 with it through the air, though it may attempt to soar to 
 the clouds. If our Pharisee does not come up to the 
 jackdaw in the altitude of its flight, he at least resembles 
 it in the universality of his presence. We find him 
 everywhere. In the church, he is to be expected in the 
 pulpit, but we find him also invariably represented in the 
 well-fed churchwarden, handing round the offertory plate 
 after Sunday morning service. In our press, in the 
 editorial "we," where he reflects the triumphant Civis 
 Romanus sum. In reading the Times, who would ever 
 imagine that there existed such a thing as a provincial 
 press in this country, let alone a provincial public 
 opinion ? Who would imagine that there exists a Scotch 
 and an Irish press ; and who would believe that the 
 reading public of the capital, with four millions of inhabi- 
 tants, is almost ignorant of the tenor of the one and of 
 the other ? And yet it is so, and that is by no means in 
 itself the worst. The results of this Pharisaic narrowness 
 of vision and thought are stumbling-blocks in the path
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 of all true progress. For we cannot assimilate tons of 
 printed matter without being impregnated with its cha- 
 racter. By being daily diluted with washy concoctions 
 mixed in a vile Pharisaic crucible, not only our thinking 
 powers become washy, but also those of our adminis- 
 trators. The vagaries resulting therefrom have before 
 now brought us within measurable distance of serious 
 trouble, and often earned us as a nation the temporary 
 ill-will, if not the contempt, of foreigners. And yet it has 
 never been in the true interests of the masses of this 
 country to caw and crow : it is only the trade of our 
 Pharisees, and if it happens to represent bad trade, it is 
 the masses that have to bear the loss. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Let those who take an interest in the backstairs, or 
 rather in the undercurrents, of diplomacy refer to the 
 correspondence of Queen Victoria and of Prince Albert 
 with the King of Prussia, at the time of the Crimean 
 war. Surely they will stand aghast at the monitory 
 tone our royal couple adopted towards the sovereign 
 of a friendly great power. Nothing but a Pharisaic 
 conviction of our own lofty position could explain it, 
 and if we refer to the Times of the period we have the 
 explanation. 
 
 The above-mentioned instance of Pharisaism becomes
 
 PHARISAISM. \ \ 
 
 doubly interesting when we note the marked contrast 
 of the position of Prussia then and now. For to-day 
 the Times is able to discover, when the Prince of Wales 
 is installed as a Prussian field-marshal, that it is an 
 honour to England that the heir apparent is a Prussian 
 officer. 
 
 Tempora mutantur. But the Pharisee, unfortunately, 
 changes little; he only changes his grazing ground, if 
 we may be allowed to put him metaphorically on four 
 legs. 
 
 Another crass working of Pharisaism can be traced 
 through our diplomacy during the Franco-German war. 
 The whole tone of our action estranged us from both 
 belligerents, but particularly from the Germans. That 
 is not surprising, it is true, when we remember that 
 that sinistre vieillard Lord Granville was entrusted with 
 our foreign affairs. It was not very likely that the holder 
 of the good office of the Lord Warden of the Cinque 
 Ports, sauntering gaily along the Dover Marine Parade, 
 with a flower in his buttonhole, as the mouthpiece of the 
 mistress of the seas, would be listened to by two great 
 nations engaged in a death struggle. Subsequent events 
 have proved this. But such is Pharisaism ; it estranges 
 even when it inanely means well. A Dutch friend of 
 ours said he thought continental hatred of the English 
 (which exists as a great reality) is very much due to 
 the Times, which is so overbearing in teaching every
 
 12 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 foreign nation how to manage its own affairs, and 
 assuming on all hands that what is English is best 
 after the manner of some of the intolerable elderly 
 English travellers one meets on every tour abroad. 
 
 Our exposure of Pharisaism would be incomplete 
 without reference to the supposed antagonism between 
 Prince Bismarck and certain English statesmen Prince 
 Bismarck, the earnest strong man after Carlyle's own 
 heart, and our tricky, loquacious, Pharisaic after-dinner 
 orators. Can a greater contrast be imagined ? It is true 
 Prince Bismarck is said to be of an imperious nature, 
 and British Pharisaism might well resent his name being 
 introduced into a consideration of purely English virtue, 
 if it were not that both parties in the state to conciliate 
 him have lately taken such pains, as almost to warrant 
 the mention of his name. Well, such as he is, he is 
 not a likely man to fall in love with the average type 
 of casuistic verbosity or verbose casuistry, that often does 
 duty with us for statesmanship. The reasons for his 
 supposed animosity must be sought deeper. They lie 
 as close to Pharisaism as the apple lies to the tree. 
 They spring unconsciously from the feelings of ill- 
 concealed dislike half akin to contempt which a man, 
 who has staked his existence and that of his sovereign 
 and his people on the issue of battle, must feel for a 
 plutocratic class, which for generations has only risked 
 the life and substance of others, and always profited
 
 PHARISAISM. 13 
 
 and enriched itself by the process. That such a man 
 as Prince Bismarck must feel more sympathy with an 
 Austrian, French, or Russian ruling class, which, like 
 his own, have in our time staked their existence, sword 
 in hand, on the fall of the iron dice, is only to say 
 that blood is thicker than water. But it is not only the 
 want of a common blood-baptism that might account 
 for the above-mentioned supposed antipathy of Prince 
 Bismarck; it is the existence of the Pharisaic hauteur 
 with which up till lately our leaders were in the habit 
 of treating foreign authorities, political as well as social. 
 Prince Bismarck, if not vindictive, has a splendid 
 memory ; and his experiences in St. Petersburg, Frankfort, 
 etc., could doubtless supply a key to much that we think 
 inexplicable in him. Of course our canting press is 
 ready to sneer at the mere thought of a man of Bismarck's 
 eminence being swayed by personal motives ; but it is 
 all the same safe to assume that they do not go for 
 nothing when they happen to go hand in hand with 
 the supposed interests of his policy. His is a towering 
 and militant, not to say an aggressive, nature, but not a 
 paltry mean one. In our discussions with him, when 
 we found that the Pharisaic, civis-Romanus-sum attitude 
 did not take, we jumped backwards and forwards catlike 
 over the meaning of our own words, and ended by 
 eating the leek, grinning and ejaculating, " Thanks so 
 much," to the meal !
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 But our Pharisees were none the worse for it ; it cost 
 them none of their life's blood ; only a little of the self- 
 respect they are ready to surrender to anybody who 
 is strong enough to make them eat their own words. 
 That a nature like Bismarck's should turn in disgust 
 from such fighters who cannot fight and cannot grasp 
 the hand of friendship is but natural. For our 
 Pharisees grin again and tell us we want no allies, only 
 the goodwill of all. You crocodiles ! Only the good- 
 will of all, when we are about to crush a weak antagonist. 
 And yet we had allies almost at all times, and quite 
 lately did we not call the most transparent political sham 
 of modern times our ally? Did not our press toady 
 to him for nearly a generation ? And did we not find 
 out overnight that we had our eggs in the wrong basket, 
 and whilst we turned up our eyes in pious horror at the 
 solid terms of the conqueror, thank heaven, that it was 
 no business of ours, except, if possible, to profit by 
 circumstances ? 
 
 Yes, it is but too true that such was the attitude of 
 our press (with few exceptions), and in accordance with it 
 was the language of our Pharisees, who shame the arts of 
 Machiavelli. Nor is it to be wondered at that, remem- 
 bering it all, an antagonist should feel like calling out to 
 us : " Come on, you rascals, draw your rat tail, and let 
 me see whether I cannot make cat's-meat of you ! "
 
 PHARISAISM. 15 
 
 V. 
 
 As we were not very grateful that Bismarck used his 
 influence at the Congress of Berlin, 1878, in our favour, 
 it is not surprising that we should have lately had a 
 taste of what his indifference meant. And as there is 
 no bully like our Pharisee, so there is also no grovelling 
 cur like him, when his usually successful bounce is of 
 no avail. Our Pharisees are the only ones in the world 
 whose facial construction shows the prominent teeth aid- 
 ing the graceless grin that accompanies the " Thank you " 
 for the kick contemptuously applied. 
 
 Luckily the Pharisees are not the true-hearted people 
 of England, nor are their interests often our interests, 
 and a kick or two applied to the former, whether by 
 Prince Bismarck or anybody else, has in reality little to 
 interest us, except to make us feel indignant that they 
 should so often be in a position to compromise us in the 
 eyes of the world. That they should ever again have 
 the power to make us seriously responsible for their 
 vagaries, is most unlikely. If we want allies, it is the 
 intelligence of the country that will find them for us, not 
 our daily press and its Pharisaic followers. 
 
 Thackeray, during his lecturing tour in America, ob- 
 served to an English officer * that it did an Englishman 
 
 * " Canada and the Crimea," Major Ranken, R.E. Longmans, 
 Green & Co. 1863.
 
 16 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 a great deal of good to travel in the United States, as 
 it removed a little of his pride and self-sufficiency, etc. 
 The days of the " Book of Snobs " and of " Vanity Fair " 
 have long passed away, but little has changed of the 
 malodorous self-sufficiency and the bumptious Pharisaism 
 of large sections of our people. Luckily for the true 
 interests of our race, the time is near at hand, if it 
 has not already arrived, when the daily crowing and 
 loud blustering of our glorious middle classes have be- 
 come, if not innocuous, at least ridiculous. It is almost 
 necessary to be placed far away, and only to come in 
 contact with us now and then, in order to grasp the 
 Pharisaic impertinence of a paper like the Times, to 
 which we almost become insensible by reading it daily. 
 
 The struggles and aspirations of other nations, their 
 justification of self-defence, their moderation or want of 
 moderation in the moment of victory, all are legitimate 
 subjects for the final decision of the oracle of Printing 
 House Square. Other mortals give an opinion on current 
 events ; our Pharisee gives his moral verdict, his decision 
 from which there is no appeal. 
 
 Continental nations are told, in and out of season, to 
 admire our laissez-faire principle of political and social 
 development, our toleration of adulteration, and such like 
 trifles, and are exhorted to behold the errors of their 
 centralization and their bureaucracy. All this usually 
 winds up with the Pharisaic hope that some day their
 
 PHARISAISM. 17 
 
 eyes may be opened to the glories of British Constitu- 
 tionalism. 
 
 Not that we are necessarily worse than others. We 
 may, perhaps, on the whole, be a trifle better than many, 
 but it is because we Pharisaically endeavour to appear 
 so much better than we are, that we are so hated by 
 others. If lately we have become more popular for 
 instance in the United States it is mainly owing to the 
 fact of our having, under the influence of our masses, 
 dropped some of our Pharisaism, at least in our dealings 
 with that quarter of the world. 
 
 VI. 
 
 Yes, there can be no doubt we have lately, now and 
 then, shown some compunction in our behaviour, where 
 we would formerly have never stopped to look to the 
 right or to the left. There are signs abroad that we 
 are no longer so cocksure of our own excellence in 
 everything, as we used to be. Common-sense, towards 
 which the Pharisee bears a mortal hatred, insists now 
 and then on putting in his placid appearance, like Ban- 
 quo's ghost, and, worse than it, asks pertinent ques- 
 tions. If you glory in your successes, how about your 
 responsibility for your failures ? If you possess the wealth 
 of half the globe, how about the responsibility for the 
 misery and degradation in your midst ? If your State- 
 
 C
 
 1 8 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Church and its figure-head is the Defender of the Faith, 
 how about your Nonconformists, your Dissenters, your 
 hundred and thirty religious sects, your latest craze 
 the Salvation Army raging, seething in the masses 
 of your religionless poor? And how about fifty other 
 questions honest truth could put to you, and wait in 
 vain for a reply ? 
 
 How irrevocably Pharisaism is still mixed up in our 
 very nature, we can judge for ourselves by noting the 
 vulgar boasting which is the time-honoured tone at public 
 dinners. " Our glorious navy," " our army," with which 
 our commanders are prepared to do everything, except 
 their quiet duty when combined with self-effacement, are 
 lauded to the skies. Lord Wolseley has never known a 
 bad naval officer, and presumably our admirals will give 
 a similar testimony to our army. What must be the 
 feelings'of the different illustrious personages presumably 
 men with a keen sense of tact and modest good taste 
 at having periodically to pander to Pharisaic instincts 
 like these ! 
 
 What must our vulgar Pharisaism be, when a man, in 
 the position of Lord Salisbury, Prime Minister of Great 
 Britain, does not hold it beneath his dignity to wind up 
 the session of 1885 with a vainglorious, boasting speech 
 about the unequalled qualities of the British army, such 
 as an alderman might indulge in. 
 
 Lord Derby is another representative public man,
 
 PHARISAISM. 19 
 
 whom the Times held up to us for many years as the 
 coming light, which, however, did not prevent his political 
 career from being a dismal failure. And yet we find this 
 resident in a glass-house throwing Pharisaic stones, and 
 telling us that the diplomacy of Europe is nothing but a 
 sanguinary muddle ! This conscientious muddler beholds 
 his own image daubed with blood in the diplomatists of 
 Europe, Prince Bismarck, of course, among them. What 
 perfect taste ! Fancy the flutter of our oracles if a 
 foreign minister were to call out to us, " Hands off ! " 
 How calculated is all this to gain us the goodwill of our 
 neighbours ! But our Pharisee has never been afraid to 
 tread on others' corns if he can score a wretched point 
 by so doing ! 
 
 Even a true-hearted man like the late Lord Shaftes- 
 bury a man whose whole life was one continual benefit 
 to others cannot escape the pestilential influence of 
 our idiosyncrasies. Though he may rise superior to 
 cant, he yet stumbles over the block of Pharisaism. For 
 what is it but the pure unadulterated article, when we 
 hear Lord Shaftesbury assuring his audience that no 
 Church can boast such unselfish devotion of its members 
 as ours ? Such boasting would be in questionable taste 
 if it were founded on truth ; but it is far worse when it 
 is a matter open to grave doubt. 
 
 So much for the Pharisaism of some of our most 
 eminent public men.
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 VII. 
 
 In conclusion, let us give an instance in the domain of 
 philosophy, usually held to be above local party or even 
 national feeling and influences. Professor Henry Drum- 
 mond's " Natural Law in the Spiritual World " has 
 attracted attention, and been largely accepted as a 
 wonderfully impartial and objective work on the subject 
 indicated by the title. And yet, what do we find after 
 wading through three hundred pages ? We come across 
 the following crass instance of vulgar British Pharisaism: 
 
 "Need we proceed to formulate objections to the 
 parasitism of evangelicism ? Between it and the religion 
 of the Church of Rome there is an affinity as real as it 
 is unsuspected. For one thing, these religions are 
 spiritually disastrous as well as theologically erroneous 
 in propagating a false conception of Christianity." * 
 
 Further on, the Catholic religion is described as a 
 cheap religion, inevitably accompanied by a cheap 
 life ! etc. 
 
 This man feels himself qualified to hold the balance 
 between science and the spiritual world, and yet he falls 
 ignominiously foul of the Catholic Church, which he will 
 not accept as a fair sample of the spiritual world. He 
 meets every scientific reasoning that might tax the 
 
 * Henry Drummond, "Natural Law in the Spiritual World," 
 P- 534> Semi- Parasitism.
 
 PHARISAISM. 
 
 strength of religious belief with the words, " Christ is 
 life;" and yet gives us to understand that the sole 
 representative Church of Christ, for sixteen centuries, was 
 a cheap one ; is a religion " as spiritually disastrous as it 
 is theologically erroneous ! " Surely this utterance does 
 not possess even the elements of religious tolerance of 
 the humblest Freemason. 
 
 And yet Mr. Drummond is the fashion. Pious ladies, 
 Bible in hand, flock to hear him wed evangelical 
 theology to Darwinism in his own peculiar way. His 
 book is a very clever attempt to make analogy do the 
 work of argument ; and, great as its success has been in 
 a publisher's point of view, it is not in originality or 
 in power such as could excuse, not to say justify, such 
 Pharisaism. 
 
 Oh, most foul Pharisaism, even now that at home an 
 obscure Irish country gentleman is making Parliamentary 
 Government a farce, your Times daily dares to indulge 
 in hortative, admonitory sermons to the French on their 
 own business that of expelling the Orleans princes 
 instead of covering your face with your hands, and only 
 withdrawing them in order to attend to your own affairs. 
 Such is one of the qualities that cause us to be disliked 
 where without them we might fairly claim our share of 
 sympathy, goodwill, and esteem. The direct injury it 
 inflicts on ourselves we will endeavour to show further 
 on in dealing with its sister quality, cant.
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 CANT DEFINED AND TRACED. 
 
 " Cant is organized hypocrisy." CARLYLE. 
 I. 
 
 PHARISAISM is hardly an amiable quality, but in cant we 
 have the real thing, the Apollyon of Revelation, the 
 arch insular speciality among our idiosyncrasies. Our 
 bigotry and our drunkenness are in truth widespread, 
 but they are, after all, only sporadic compared with cant ; 
 which, directly or indirectly, is allied to almost every form 
 of our selfishness and vice. 
 
 Growing up, as we do, under the contradictory 
 influences of thoughts instilled into us from early youth, 
 and referring to the difficulty attending the salvation of 
 the rich, and yet beholding all the world most eager to 
 become rich, it is no wonder that hypocrisy need not be 
 specially created ; it comes to us with our mother's milk. 
 
 It is not that we lie straightforwardly; we are too 
 long-headed for such a transparently losing game, and
 
 CANT DEFINED AND TRACED. 23 
 
 prefer leaving it to the weaker-gritted Latin race. We 
 circumvent, we elude truth. We do not hide our heads 
 like the ostrich, which, on the approach of an enemy, 
 fancies it has hidden its whole carcase too; we simply 
 ignore and avoid the enemy truth. For instance, when 
 we cant about the loyalty of our colonies, we smile away 
 the fact that the Dominion taxes our produce as im- 
 partially as that of other countries. When we repro- 
 duce foreign public opinion that is favourable to our 
 momentary political current, we quietly ignore much 
 bigger volumes of similar foreign expressions of opinion 
 that tell the other way. 
 
 Gambetta cried out, " Le clericalisme, voila 1'ennemi!" 
 Our privileged classes, in heaping every opprobrium on 
 a leading statesman, plainly say, " Voila notre ennemi ! " 
 And an unbiased Englishman, wishing to see his 
 countrymen a little better than they are, even though it 
 be vain to hope they may become as perfect as they wish 
 to appear, might boldly call out, " Cant, thou art our 
 curse ! " For there is hardly any of our idiosyncrasies 
 that do not show a trace of it, as sulphur shows itself 
 invariably in silver mines. Such being the case, we owe 
 it a few words of elucidation as to character and origin, 
 whilst reserving a fuller explanation to be evolved from 
 detailed instances of its working in our midst 
 
 An introduction to cant is like an introduction to the 
 head of a family : it precedes, if it does not include, the
 
 24 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 acquaintance of its minor members ; thus when we know 
 cant, we are soon on nodding terms with most of our 
 insular idiosyncrasies. 
 
 II. 
 
 Now, let us *ask ourselves what is this influential 
 quality ? What does it consist of? And lastly, how did 
 it originate, how and where does it flourish? It is a 
 glittering weapon in the armoury of hell, though it is by 
 no means identical with the conventional lies of modern 
 society in general ; it has only identified itself with a few 
 of them. Nor is it at all to be mistaken for the hypocrisy 
 of any religious creed. Cant is essentially English, and 
 more especially Protestant English, although totally dis- 
 connected from any dogma or formula of belief. It may 
 be defined as a "sly affectation" of superiority of 
 morality which, by long practice, has become an affecta- 
 tion of every form of conventional excellence. Whereas 
 Pharisaism might be termed a "bumptious conscious- 
 ness " of our own superiority. The latter is pernicious 
 enough, as we have endeavoured to show in the pre- 
 ceding chapter; but cant holds the palm. Pharisaism 
 is invariably allied to stupidity, against which, as Schiller 
 neatly says, even the gods fight in vain. 
 
 Cant is the result of a mental reservation like unto 
 hypocrisy, and it vitiates the character almost as much 
 as the honest square lie ! It destroys the love of truth,
 
 CANT DEFINED AND TRACED. . 25 
 
 perhaps unconsciously, at its very roots ; it makes us 
 gradually incapable of seeing anything but ourselves and 
 our o\vn material interests, and even these in their 
 meanest aspects. It so successfully shuts out the light 
 of day from us, that we gradually come to prefer the 
 noxious darkness it creates. 
 
 In his " Life of Carlyle," Mr. Froude renders the senti- 
 ments of the latter on this very subject as follows : 
 
 " At the bottom of his whole nature lay abhorrence of 
 falsehood. To see facts as they actually were, and, 
 if that was impossible, at least to desire to see them ; 
 to be sincere with his own soul, and to speak to others 
 exactly what he himself believed, was to him the highest 
 of all human duties. Therefore he detested cant with 
 a perfect hatred. 
 
 " Cant was organized hypocrisy, the art of making 
 things seem what they were not ; an art so deadly that 
 it killed the very souls of those who practised it, carrying 
 them beyond the stage of conscious falsehood into a 
 belief in their own illusions, and reducing them to the 
 wretchedest of possible conditions that of being sincerely 
 insincere. With cant of this kind he saw all Europe, 
 all America overrun ; but, beyond all, his own England 
 appeared to him to be drenched in cant cant religious, 
 cant political, cant moral, cant artistic, cant everywhere 
 and in everything." 
 
 The middle classes, under the guidance and earnest
 
 26 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 co-operation of the clergy, have brought this vicious 
 idiosyncrasy oftenest met with in its social disguise of 
 "respectability" into such universal acceptation and 
 practice, that the aristocracy pay tribute to it, whilst the 
 poor invariably suffer by it. For it is largely answerable 
 for our want of true sympathy with those less fortunate 
 than ourselves, whether as classes or as individuals, and 
 it has branded poverty as worse than a misfortune, as 
 a crime. Its practice has erected a barrier round our 
 poorer classes, which has become one of the causes 
 of their hopeless isolation and consequent despairing 
 brutality, ignorance, and drunkenness. 
 
 Now, let us ask ourselves what exceptional circum- 
 stances are answerable for this unique product ? Can it 
 be our insular position ? No other islands are infected 
 with it, not even Catholic Ireland. Our insular position 
 and consequent freedom from foreign aggression may, at 
 most, be the cause that cant has never yet been thrashed 
 out of us, but it is not the cause of its origin. 
 
 III. 
 
 Can it be our form of government ? Similar forms 
 of government know it not. Besides, as Pope truly 
 has it 
 
 " For forms of government let fools contest ; 
 Whate'er is best administered is best."
 
 CANT DEFINED AND TRACED. 27 
 
 Thus any well-administered form of government of 
 any description, would be unlikely to assist in the 
 cultivation of such a noxious quality. 
 
 Can it be ingrained in the character of the race ? It 
 is true the Anglo-Saxon element is a good one to 
 encourage its growth : for up to the present day the 
 Saxons are under the faint suspicion of that social and 
 political deceit which is so nearly related to cant ; and the 
 old German proverb still has it, " Sachs und Bohm trau 
 schau wem ? " (Anglice, Saxon or Bohemian, which are 
 you to trust ?) And if we look back to the distant past, 
 we find in our history record of several splendid in- 
 stances of hypocrisy, very difficult to distinguish from 
 the quality of which we are now treating. Richard III.'s 
 anxiety for the welfare of his nephews is a striking 
 instance in point. The incident of Richard III. accusing 
 Lord Hastings of witchcraft, and his swift decapitation, 
 are also most instructive. Following the line of our 
 rulers, we find in good Queen Bess and her tender 
 regrets over the execution of Mary Queen of Scots 
 another salient feature of early budding cant ! Almost 
 equally interesting as instances of freedom from cant are 
 the first two George's, both of whom took little trouble 
 to disguise their hatred of England. 
 
 But predisposition of race alone must not be taken 
 for the sole cause of such an abundant crop of our full- 
 blown cant of to-day. We have instances of sections of
 
 28 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 our race, living under changed conditions, who are 
 comparatively free from it. If this be so, then the 
 " conditions " of our existence must account for it ! 
 Therein we must seek the explanation, and ask in how 
 far are the conditions changed that free us from cant ? 
 First of all, we must rank the emancipation from the 
 artificial restrictions imposed on our daily life by our 
 slavery to our special forms of its conventionality, and 
 what we term respectability ; emancipation from the 
 social influence of our Established Church and its ruling 
 class bias and tendency. We can prove this best by 
 noting that even in our midst, in the very cauldron of 
 cant, these elements that are untouched by our Church 
 influence the humbler classes have no cant. They 
 may have hysteria, brutality, and drunken savagery, but 
 they have no cant ! They may offend every esthetic 
 feeling man is capable of, but they do not cant ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 Our social cant is a distinct product, as compared 
 with the religious hypocrisy of other communities. The 
 social cant which our Established Church has during 
 generations filtered into our very being is still omnipo- 
 tent, now that doctrinary influence is struggling in the 
 epileptic fits of senility. 
 
 Let us hold to the contention that our cant is the
 
 CANT DEFINED AND TRACED. 29 
 
 outcome of the worldly form of our Protestant State 
 Church, and endeavour to prove it. 
 
 Professor Johannes Scherr, the German historian, 
 says of the origin of our Anglican Church, " A product 
 of the adulterous frenzy of Henry VIII. , it has never 
 been able to efface the traces of its unclean origin." 
 
 When our executive, headed by his most gracious 
 majesty King Henry VIII., seceded from the Church 
 of Rome, and marked England as the champion of 
 Protestantism by Act of Parliament, it cut the com- 
 munity adrift from an iron hierarchy, swayed and directed 
 in the interests of a creed largely based on the feelings 
 and the imagination, and appealing to them. We phari- 
 saically adopted a superior article a ruling-class edition 
 of our own, which discarded almost all that constitutes 
 the vitality of the Catholic Church. We undoubtedly 
 cast off its abuses as well, many of which, however, were 
 temporary, whereas we took over in our new creed dogma 
 left entirely out of consideration worldly vices that have 
 adhered to us, like the shirt of Nessus, until the present day. 
 Henry VIII. in robbing the Church, also robbed the 
 poor, to whom one-third of Church property was assigned 
 and devoted. For the oldest laws, the canons of Egbert 
 (A.D. 750), lay it down that one part of the revenue of 
 the Church be spent in ornamenting the church, one 
 part be applied to the use of the poor, and one part to 
 the use of the priests themselves.
 
 30 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Unlike the Protestants of other countries, we retained 
 the outward character of the Catholic system ; that is to 
 say, we retained, above everything else, the powerful 
 hierarchy of the Catholic Church. No longer powerful 
 in matters of dogma and policy versus the State, our 
 ecclesiastics, now that they were allowed to marry and 
 found a family, became the social power they are even 
 up to the present day. 
 
 Preferment became a social lever for the benefit of 
 the younger sons of the upper classes, instead of a 
 political one, and the appointments being almost exclu- 
 sively in the hands of the Crown and the great land- 
 owners, were distributed in their interests exclusively. 
 
 Instead of working, as hitherto, in the interests of the 
 vicar of St. Peter, our princes of the Church, in harmony 
 with the classes they sprang from, directed their influence 
 towards consolidating the worldly position of their caste, 
 and of that of their families and relations. Their 
 activity has become the motive power of the whole 
 Anglican clergy down to the humblest curate who hopes 
 for an incumbency; and this has continued, with one 
 memorable interruption an interruption memorable 
 from its absence of worldly cant from the time of 
 Henry VIII. down to the present day. Being allowed 
 to marry, the activity of the Anglican clergy has ever 
 since been divided between their profession and care 
 for their family. Not that it is the family tie by itself
 
 CANT DEFINED AND TRACED. 31 
 
 that need have acted in the spirit indicated, for all 
 Protestant clergymen of other denominations marry 
 without marriage interfering with their spiritual vocation. 
 But the Church of England, being essentially aristocratic, 
 the addition of the family tie intensified a direction 
 already prescribed. It strengthened the foundation of 
 a powerful clerical oligarchy, which has ever since been 
 intent, not only on maintaining the worldly interests of its 
 profession, but on furthering the worldly position of 
 its offspring and connections. Forced by the strongest 
 of instincts, that of self-preservation, to look upward 
 to the fountain of worldly grace, it is not to be wondered 
 at, that one of the first results was an estrangement from 
 the humble classes, which was intensified by the fact, 
 that our clergymen were never, as in other countries, 
 drawn from all classes alike, but only from the higher 
 and upper middle classes. To be a gentleman first, 
 and the shepherd of a flock only afterwards, has ever 
 been the aim of our clergy, a gentleman with all the 
 narrowness that the term often implies, where a regard 
 for the wants and feelings of others is unknown. 
 
 V. 
 
 Herein we note a marked difference between our 
 priesthood and that of the Roman Catholic Church, 
 which is drawn equally from all classes. There we
 
 32 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 see the descendant of Crusaders working among the 
 poor on an equality with the peasant's son. There 
 we see this equality carried out even in the placing of 
 the congregation of their churches ; where the poor kneel 
 down beside the rich, the only division being the sex. 
 Hence, partly, the gigantic influence we behold, even to 
 this day, in the hands of the Catholic priesthood over the 
 humble classes. They feel with each other. Our Protes- 
 tant priesthood as a class, whatever brilliant exceptions 
 there may have been, never have done so from the first ! 
 
 It is this looking up socially of our clergy, and the 
 fact of its having had the education of our youth solely 
 in its hands for generations, and thus inoculating the 
 young of three centuries with the instincts to which it 
 owed its own advancement, that has mainly produced 
 that lying reptile our English respectable conventional 
 cant. It has laid the foundation of that toadying 
 debasement before rank and social power which has 
 ever remained one of the greatest blemishes of the 
 English race. It has been fostered at our public schools, 
 where to be gentleman first and to learn something 
 afterwards has been the watchword for generations. 
 Not only that, but the definition of the word " gentle- 
 man " has been exclusively in the hands of a body of 
 men, the chief of whom the head-master invariably 
 makes ^6000 to ^8000 a year for inculcating it ! 
 
 We do not intend to enlarge at present on the world-
 
 CANT DEFINED AND TRACED. 33- 
 
 wide results of our clerical social influences, but merely 
 to point out their being, among other things, the main 
 source of our conventional cant. 
 
 The advertisements of advowsons and next presenta- 
 tions week by week in the most able and respectable 
 Guardian, are bad enough ; but that is an evil which, 
 though inveterate, is above-board, .and is likely before 
 long to be modified in important particulars ; though 
 the bishops, with their extreme respect for property in 
 any form, are inclined to treat it gingerly enough. We 
 do not here take note of the exchanges of livings, quietly 
 effected in a college room or in a back parlour in after- 
 dinner talk, " across the walnuts and the wine," as the 
 laureate says, with sometimes, at all events, too little con- 
 sideration for the wants or feelings of the poor denizens, 
 it may be, of two remote parishes. No wonder the 
 Church fails to reach the poorer classes ; that our rectories 
 and our vicarages are really centres of cant, and that our 
 peasants are simply sheep to be shorn. They bow to the 
 vicarage people as they pass, but they wink to each 
 other at the same time, and as the vicar goes " bummin' 
 awaay," they lounge and talk at the corners of the village 
 till the " public-house " opens, where they really do hear 
 something that bears on fact and life. 
 
 These influences have now been at work for over 
 three hundred years, and have permeated the com- 
 munity from the four points of the compass and down 
 
 D
 
 34 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 into the humble classes, who have remained untouched 
 alike by spiritual and by canting influences, having had 
 nothing to gain by the one, nor to lose by the other. 
 They have even penetrated these elements which repre- 
 sented a conscientious religious conviction, namely the 
 followers of Wesley and the numerous dissenting bodies 
 in this country. What would not yield to spiritual 
 persuasion has, through the influence of countless 
 generations of worldly social conditions, yielded in- 
 directly to the promptings of self-interest. Cant has 
 vitiated our very instincts ; and it would be an interesting 
 problem, whether it has not left its mark even on our 
 cast of features. It is still an open question whether 
 the physiognomists of the future will not, by following 
 out the theory that the bent of our minds impresses 
 itself on our faces, arrive at the conclusion, that the 
 peculiar construction of the mouth the dial of our 
 moral character which so largely characterizes the 
 English race, cannot be traced to a suspicion of cant 
 in our moral character. How largely it enters into our 
 very train of thought may be seen in the legal fiction, 
 that nothing can undo the finding of twelve English 
 jurymen. If a man be innocently condemned to penal 
 servitude, he can only be pardoned, not reinstated and 
 indemnified for his sufferings. The law of our country 
 is infallible, or rather its interpreters, even if they strike 
 the law of logic full in the face.
 
 CANT DEFINED AND TRACED. 35 
 
 To point to trifling straws that suffice to show the 
 way the wind has long blown, we may observe, that our 
 very language shows unmistakable signs of cant grafted 
 on it. We term a class of men " Licensed Victuallers," 
 who are not licensed to sell victuals at all, and, in fact, 
 rarely do so. They are licensed to sell alcoholic drinks, 
 and are allowed to adulterate even these. The very 
 term contains a canting lie, by which common use and 
 consent now designates a body of men who before now 
 have decided the fate of a ministry ! 
 
 In our hotels we style the dining-room the " coffee- 
 room ; " coffee fit to drink being about the last thing 
 you can procure in any one of them from Land's End 
 to John o' Groats.
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 
 
 " Why should I want to get into the middle classes because I 
 have some learning ? The most of the middle classes are as ignorant 
 as the working people about everything that does not belong to 
 their own Brummagem life. That's how the working men are left 
 to foolish devices and keep worsening themselves : the best heads 
 among them forsake their boon comrades, and go in for a house 
 with a high door-step and a brass knocker." GEORGE ELIOT 
 (Felix Holt}. 
 
 I. 
 
 THAT want of honest pride in their position, the only 
 justifiable class pride, is not confined to the humble 
 orders, but is typical of the whole community. George 
 Eliot compares this condition of things to the wriggling 
 of eels in a jar, each restlessly endeavouring to get 
 uppermost. The middle classes provide the worst types 
 of these wriggling eels. As, in endeavouring to lift our- 
 selves socially, not intellectually, above our fellows, there 
 is no more effective assistance to us than the constant 
 striving to make ourselves and others believe we are in
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 37 
 
 every way more than we really are, so by this one cause 
 alone a certain amount of social cant becomes innate in 
 most of us. And this it is that gives such a tinge of 
 unreality to our whole existence, its occupations and 
 pleasures. Our servants are only happy when they don 
 the silks or broadcloth of their so-called betters. The 
 same applies to our artisans, and holds good through the 
 humble classes. Our middle classes use their best 
 endeavours to make us believe they have some connect- 
 ing link with their social superiors, and invariably make 
 themselves unhappy, if not miserable, by doing so. And 
 yet there is no place like home, for the rich say so and 
 the poor mouth it over after them ; so there is no home- 
 life like that of our chosen people, who debar us from 
 marrying our deceased wife's sister. Even the Duke of 
 Argyll tells us, "if people of this country were once 
 allowed to marry their deceased wife's sister, year after 
 year we should sink to a lower depth on this subject of 
 marriage." This either means, in our cant phraseology, 
 that we should sink to the depth of our own colonies 
 and other nations that sanction marriage with a deceased 
 wife's sister, or it means nothing ! What would then 
 become of the sanctity of our English home, and what 
 would become of that beautiful relationship of a man 
 towards his wife's sister? that ideal conjunction of 
 Platonic friendship and brotherly confidence, only attain- 
 able in our favoured isles, where the sister can remain
 
 38 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 under the roof of her bereaved brother-in-law and comfort 
 him and care for his children without the foul breath of 
 scandal touching her or him? And yet the analyst of 
 cant might venture to point out, as was done in a leading 
 journal lately, if the above be honest truth and not one 
 of our canting lies, how comes it that a widower could 
 most certainly not travel about with his deceased wife's 
 sister without scandal? But our conventional morality 
 is not made for travelling consumption ; it is for home 
 use; and in our homes it is that we are seen at our 
 greatest advantage. This brings us, by a natural associa- 
 tion of ideas, to a passing glance at their arrangements ; 
 and in scarcely anything is our engrained tendency to 
 cant more evident than here. 
 
 II. 
 
 Enter the houses of the wealthy or the great who keep 
 a luxurious staff of servants unknown elsewhere. You 
 meet scrupulous cleanliness and brightness notwithstand- 
 ing the overloaded heavy character of the furniture. 
 A continual warfare seems to be kept up by the domestics 
 against the depressive influence of small rooms, dark 
 curtains, sombre carpets, elephantine furniture, and heavy 
 ornaments ; constantly brightening, varnishing, dusting, 
 shaking, and cleaning. That is called "comfort!" home 
 comfort ! The middle classes must also have their walls
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 39 
 
 crowded with pictures (invariably bad ones), or cheap 
 prints. They must also have heavy curtains, thick dust- 
 retaining carpets : in fact, all in imitation of their betters 
 that their means can run to. Only they generally lack 
 the service and discrimination that are necessary to have 
 their ponderous emblems of home comfort properly kept 
 As the neatness, etc., make us overlook the tasteless 
 interior of the rich man's houses, so the want of them 
 makes us abhor the interior of the middle-class houses. At 
 the same time it is only fair to add that the last ten years 
 have wrought a great change in the arrangement of the 
 houses of the rich : the same can hardly in any way be 
 said of the lower middle classes ; perhaps it will come. 
 
 As for cleanliness, in its wider and truer sense, being 
 a national virtue, some have been bold enough to declare 
 it a fond delusion, which can be excused in a devoted 
 patriot, but which betrays a serious want of judgment in 
 an observant cosmopolitan. In most countries we find 
 cleanliness go hand in hand with wealth, and the want 
 of it go hand in hand with poverty ; except in Holland, 
 where cleanliness seems almost universal. England is in 
 this respect as unlike Holland as any other country is 
 unlike it. The conditions of private life, let alone of 
 climate, are uncongenial to cleanliness, or rather, make 
 cleanliness more difficult of attainment than elsewhere. 
 First of all, the lower classes, unlike those of other 
 countries, have no distinctive garb of their own, but
 
 40 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 vainly endeavour to copy their superiors (or betters) in 
 dress. By this it is meant that small tradesmen, me- 
 chanics, domestics of both sexes, ape the cloth and silks 
 of their betters, but omit to don the fine clean linen, etc., 
 of the well-to-do-classes : neither can they devote the 
 care and time to the unseen details of adornment that 
 go to make a man or woman look tidy. The conse- 
 quence is that, among the above-mentioned classes, we 
 see untidy sluts, such as you can but rarely find else- 
 where, among women. 
 
 A great Russian lady once told us, our country life, 
 our castles, were superb, the like of them nowhere ; but 
 she had never been able to forget the hopeless degrada- 
 tion of our poor, the like of which she had also never 
 witnessed. And yet students of Shakespeare will find 
 there was once a humble class country life in England, 
 as there is still to be found in other countries, where 
 the small land cultivator, represented by our extinct 
 yeoman, still exists. But our social and land system 
 have swept away all that for us. Pass through some 
 of the loveliest agricultural and scenic districts of Eng- 
 land, and you will see the mansions of the rich, their 
 orchards and gardens peeping out from behind clustering 
 trees, or over dead brick walls surmounted with glass 
 bottles. Everywhere you will find the rights of property 
 strictly safeguarded. Boards and notices meet your eye 
 at every turn : " Trespassers beware," " Trespassers will
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 4 i 
 
 be prosecuted according to the law," etc. ; and in sight 
 of it all. skulks the country serf, as degraded as any 
 Russian serf, and far more hopelessly forlorn ! 
 
 III. 
 
 A mild form of social cant, which has come down to 
 us from former times when it was strong, is the tiresome 
 habit of our public men interlarding their speeches with 
 Latin and Greek quotations. One might almost fancy 
 it were necessary, in order to be able to understand the 
 aspirations of the English people, to know first by heart 
 your Juvenal, Horace, and Homer, although the intellects 
 of ancient Greeks and Romans, and consequently their 
 literatures, had, in reality, far less in common with our 
 present wants and sympathies, than other literatures more 
 nearly related to us by ties of race and time. The key 
 to our inconsistency is easy to find. Seek it in cant, 
 and you have it. These interlarded Latin and Greek 
 quotations are not meant for popular consumption ; they 
 are merely canting clap-trap, recalling references to the 
 social position of the speakers and their hearers. But 
 just as at Eton, to be a gentleman first, and then to learn 
 a little Greek and Latin is the curriculum, or the role ; 
 so it may shrewdly be suspected that those who quote 
 most Greek and Latin often know least of these litera- 
 tures, and indulge in the habit as a gentlemanly exercise,
 
 42 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 believing with the poet that more attention will be paid 
 
 " To him who can express 
 No sense at all in several languages," 
 
 than to him who can discourse like a Solon in his 
 own. 
 
 It is a well-understood fiction that only the gentle- 
 born are familiar with Greek and Latin, and only they 
 are capable of sympathizing with the man who fondly 
 fancies himself addressing the Roman Senate ; whereas 
 he is generally addressing an assembly of drowsy, post- 
 prandial English common-place beings, who do not so 
 much want to understand, as to be understood in their 
 sham social pretensions, and treated accordingly. 
 
 Fortunately, at a recent (1883) Lord Mayor's dinner, 
 the Lord Mayor evidently with the intention of show- 
 ing the common-place vulgarity of the practice, and prob- 
 ably to the dismay of the party assembled led off with 
 a Greek and a Latin quotation one after the other ! It 
 is too much to hope that this ludicrous incident may 
 act as an immediate deterrent to others. Still, the 
 example of Lord Mayor Fowler may ultimately have 
 excellent results in leading some hardened classical pla- 
 giarists to restrict these " lardings," if not in the name 
 of common sense, then at least for fear of ridicule. 
 We feel all the more justified to hope that such may be 
 the case, when we bear in mind that, forty years ago, 
 the fatal duel of two drapers' assistants hailing from the
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 43 
 
 Tottenham-court-road cast ridicule on duelling, and thus 
 disgusted our gentry with its practice. It could no 
 longer be considered a social distinction to be drilled at 
 fifteen paces by the bullet of a Joe Manton's smooth- 
 bore, if it could be done equally well in humble life by 
 a pair of rusty horse-pistols. The splendid literature 
 of Shakespeare's mother-country contains sufficient 
 thoughts to borrow and to quote from, without con- 
 tinually going to the Latins and Greeks. And if it 
 should be necessary to quote German or French in the 
 future, perhaps by that time we shall have disestablished 
 our mouthing classical dons, and introduced the cultiva- 
 tion of modern languages, not as a superfluous luxury, 
 but as an intellectual necessity. If Mr. Gladstone, 
 with his enormous capacity for learning, knew less of 
 the subtleties of his beloved Latin and Greek authors, 
 and had grasped a little more of the heart and soul of 
 Teuton culture, to be found in the pages of Lessing 
 and Goethe, he would have indulged in fewer dreams 
 about the future of the Latin and other races, and saved 
 himself from many disenchantments, and many political 
 inconsistencies and discomfitures. But the history of our 
 idiosyncrasies would have been the poorer if it could 
 not point to the patron of the English High-Church party 
 peacefully babbling about ideal government with M. 
 Clemenceau. Such are the results of a one-sided culture 
 allied to a dreamy, ideal, and mercurial temperament
 
 44 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 the whole based on a Herculean Scotch frame and in- 
 tellect. 
 
 The truth is, our masters at Eton and Harrow, and 
 even our very learned professors at Oxford and Cam- 
 bridge, need to devote a good deal more attention to 
 their mother-English, even if they give a little less to 
 Latin and Greek. Mr. Washington Moon has taken the 
 translators of the Revised Version smartly to task for 
 their bad English, and has got a good laugh out of them, 
 too; and the impeccable Mr. Matthew Arnold, whose 
 style is so vaunted, is shown to blunder helplessly over 
 his pronouns, to tie singular nouns to plural possessive 
 pronouns, and to deal in a very free and easy manner 
 with adverbial forms and the " to " of the infinitive, in 
 an article in the April number of the British and Foreign 
 Evangelical Review, and in a manner which makes us 
 feel that a good deal of his conceit might even have 
 been thrashed out of him at school by a thoroughly good 
 teacher. But the cant of criticism must have its way, 
 and Mr. Arnold is a wonderful stylist ! 
 
 IV. 
 
 Whenever a new scandal is brought to light in other 
 countries, that most canting of emblematical beasts, the 
 British Lion, treats us to his Pharisaic growl. But how 
 qualified his attitude when the unsavoury matter exhales
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 45 
 
 its poisonous gases nearer home ; for, in common fair- 
 ness, it must be admitted that cant and Pharisaism have 
 had rather a bad time of it of late. Literary memoirs are 
 of intense interest to gauge cant in society and in politics. 
 Cant does not like the secrets of the grave made public, 
 and hence the howl of indignation of press and society 
 every time a new revelation shows us that our Jupiter 
 Ammon is stuffed with sawdust. Hardly had society 
 got over the disagreeable impression of the Greville 
 memoirs, in which we were reminded that we were only 
 quite recently reigned over by a blockhead (and before 
 him by a vile debauchee), when the biography of Samuel 
 Wilberforce and the letters of Mr. and Mrs. Carlyle, 
 saw the light of day. And what a revelation the above 
 proved to the howling well-dressed multitude ! What 
 a universal outcry against the abuse of lifting the veil 
 from the personal life of deceased eminent men ! What 
 unpardonable indiscretion on the part of Mr. Reginald 
 Wilberforce in one case, and of Mr. Froude in another ! 
 They are accused of disregard for the fitness of things, 
 want of tact, heartlessness. In short, what social law 
 had they not transgressed ? What man of mark would 
 ever care to face the ordeal of death in future, if his 
 posthumous fame was thus to be dealt with ? Who 
 would be safe if such laying bare of the arteries of the 
 mind of greatness is to be indulged in ? Very dreadful, 
 and very shocking to be sure, we may say ; and yet,
 
 46 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 it is possible for some men to hold back and be of 
 opinion that Mr. Wilberforce and Mr. Froude were 
 justified in the course they thought fit to take. To be 
 of that opinion, it is but necessary to disconnect our 
 minds from the parrot-like twaddle of the educated 
 multitude, and calmly and disinterestedly to ask our- 
 selves, Whence these tears? Are the canting many- 
 headed really so anxious to have nobody's feelings hurt, 
 and their idols left unstained and unblemished? or is 
 all this hubbub nothing else than the disgust of society 
 at being caught in the act of bowing down to men who, 
 with all their brilliant gifts, could hardly be said to adorn 
 the doctrine they professed ? 
 
 As for the Carlyle letters, they surely do not impeach 
 the truth of a single line of Carlyle's teachings. But 
 what they did most forcibly, besides showing his human 
 frailty, at which only cant could be surprised, was to 
 show the severe, and unmercifully small, opinion Carlyle 
 held of many who had come in contact with him during 
 a long life, mostly passed in ill-health and bitterness of 
 spirit. Cant would have soon forgotten any individual 
 injustice Carlyle may have been guilty of, had it not 
 been impossible to do so without his small opinion of 
 them being disclosed, and his contemptuous estimate 
 of many being brought home to them. They could not, 
 in a word, help any longer reflecting from their idols 
 to themselves. Cant alone, therefore, must be the
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 47 
 
 reason we should feign surprise at his human imper- 
 fection. 
 
 V. 
 
 The upper middle class in England is continually 
 exclaiming against the rottenness of ideal sentimentalism, 
 of whatever description. Yet no class is more ready to 
 encourage the growth of noxious sentiment when it suits 
 its purpose. Is not the aristocratic narrow character of 
 our public-school curriculum largely a matter of un- 
 healthy sentiment; and do not our toadying upper 
 middle classes bow down to it and worship it? The 
 abstract and speculative sciences are cold-shouldered for 
 the full glory of classic belles-lettres. Technical science, 
 involving a possible soiling of the hands, comes in still 
 later. As for modern languages, why, up till quite lately, 
 they were the monopoly of the respective foreign masters, 
 the pupils remaining innocent of them. Is not sentiment 
 mainly at the bottom of all this ? And what sentiment ? 
 Why, principally the aristocratic class sentiment of our 
 clergy, which unfortunately is still so largely answerable 
 for the education of our youth. If it be not a matter of 
 vulgar class sentiment, why do not the middle classes 
 send their children to learn the curriculum and the 
 languages that are necessary to enable them to fight 
 the battle of life and compete better with the foreign 
 elements that come over here and take the bread out of
 
 48 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 their mouths, instead of socially sneaking, toadying, and 
 fawning in the endeavour to find favoured appointments 
 for their offspring ? " gentlemanly occupations ! " Why 
 do they send their sons to the colonies to be cattle 
 drivers ? Because they are ashamed of seeing them in 
 counting-houses in the land of their birth, and thus 
 prefer to let German Jews, Greeks, Armenians, and others 
 gradually oust the native element from the city and the 
 great provincial commercial houses. Surely the race 
 that is hard enough to fight as Englishmen can fight, 
 would, if washed clean of cant and class vulgarity, and 
 under fair conditions, hold its own against foreign Jews, 
 Germans, or Armenians. But social interest stops short 
 at the "gentleman," as also does ruling class intelligence. 
 Beyond that it sees green, yellow, or any but the true 
 colour. Only lately a General Feilding wrote an article 
 in the Nineteenth Century, endeavouring to answer the 
 question, What are we to do with our sons? with the 
 usual fighting shy of the realities of the question. But 
 our daily press finds it a most sensible article, and cant- 
 ingly adds : " If they (our sons) will but remember that 
 honest work always ennobles and can never degrade," etc. 
 Delightful ! 
 
 We do not want you to tell us such a platitude as 
 that work can never degrade, but we know that were it 
 possible you would have rendered it so. For yours are 
 the instincts that pooh-pooh the novels of Dickens, not
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 49 
 
 for their exaggerated idealism, but because you dislike 
 to see the poor, the humble, and the lowly made the 
 subjects of this idealism. Yours are the instincts that 
 make you prefer the novels of Thackeray, not for their 
 literary excellence, but because his heroes are mostly 
 taken from your own class. For with all your apprecia- 
 tion of him as a novelist, you conveniently forget that as 
 a satirist he was greater still, and that he vented his 
 satire on your class exclusively. But we can produce 
 " gentlemen " who will not only blandly tell you that they 
 have neither read Dickens nor Thackeray, nay, that they 
 have not even read Shakespeare and Carlyle. They will 
 harmlessly assume that others may have thought fit to do 
 so, but they are satisfied with being conscious of gen- 
 tility. In their efforts to be gentlemen, many do not 
 seem to see that the greatest vulgarity is ignorance, 
 particularly when coupled with bumptious self-sufficiency ; 
 and that it is as impossible to be a gentleman without 
 being free from cant and class prejudice, as it is im- 
 possible to make a sweet omelette with rotten eggs. 
 
 And that class prejudice is instilled into us as soon 
 as we are able to walk. The sense of our superiority to 
 those in humbler stations and our longing to come near 
 to those above us are fostered from our earliest days. 
 The country squire's children are taken by the nurse to 
 play in the grounds surrounding the Manor House and 
 shut off from the country roads by gates and walls. 
 

 
 50 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 We ourselves have lived in a sweet rural retreat, not a 
 hundred miles from London, where the worthy vicar 
 (now dead) did not allow his children to speak their own 
 tongue, but kept them, even when big boys, under a 
 French bonne, lest they should interchange ideas with 
 the children of the village not to say play with them 
 even the all-uniting harmless English game of cricket ! 
 
 Exclusiveness in its meanest sense is bred in us. The 
 poor may peep in through the gates or through the 
 crevices of walls and boards, but a barrier is between 
 them, unknown among their like elsewhere. Even in 
 London, which is supposed to level us all, the children 
 of the well-to-do middle classes are taken to the enclosed 
 squares open only to their inhabitants. It may be 
 unavoidable, but we find such things only among us. 
 Thus our youths before they enter their teens are made 
 to feel a certain class superiority. Naturally, those who 
 live in less fortunate circumstances try to procure for 
 their children the privileges that have been beyond their 
 own reach. This is one of the causes of our restlessness, 
 which bids us seek our happiness in striving for that 
 which, when attained, is found to be scarcely worth the 
 having. 
 
 vi: 
 
 Our provincial press, which, as we have seen, is 
 usually treated by the metropolitan press as non-existent,
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 51 
 
 has lately been beforehand in gauging many signs of 
 the times. Recently a Manchester paper brought out 
 a series of articles treating of the superior technical 
 education that the sons of the German middle and 
 humble classes enjoy, and the advantages thus derived 
 by the country in all departments of manufacture and 
 general industry. 
 
 Why are our hotels admittedly so bad ? Why are the 
 best hotels in London and in the provinces managed 
 and waitered by foreigners ? Because when an English- 
 man has made a little money he is ashamed of being an 
 hotel-keeper. His children cannot play in the square ; 
 he must send them to a fashionable school to mix with 
 their betters, and rise above their station. A German 
 or Swiss hotel-keeper sends his sons, after they have had 
 a better education than the average Eton boy, to foreign 
 countries to serve as waiters, so that when they return 
 home they can take over the business of their father 
 with a thorough knowledge of its requirements. Thus 
 they rise in prosperity, and when a war breaks out 
 neither their prosperity nor their training prevents them 
 from doing their duty in the ranks, or as officers in the 
 army. 
 
 And we cannot help thinking that one of the reasons 
 our pastry-cooks seem incapable of improving the cha- 
 racter of their indigestible wares is to be found in the 
 circumstance that, in the second generation, they will not
 
 52 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 seek the field of their ambition in the improvement of 
 their products. 
 
 The American ambassador in Berlin (Mr. White), in 
 his observations on German affairs, drew attention to 
 this very point, noting the splendid opportunities offered 
 in Germany for technical education to all, even down 
 to the humblest class. We have copied our School- 
 Boards from the Germans; our competitive examina- 
 tions ; and perhaps before long we shall, in our own crazy 
 way, take a leaf out of their book in regard to technical 
 education. 
 
 But up to the present we find apparent throughout 
 our whole educational system the most disastrous play of 
 social class cant. As a straw will suffice to show the 
 direction of the wind, so a very trifling matter becomes 
 valuable as an indication of our mental subserviency to 
 a class. For instance, the accepted mode of pronounc- 
 ing certain aristocratic family names. It is almost in- 
 conceivable that in an age that lives on at such a pace 
 absolutely forgetting on the morrow what occupied all its 
 thoughts to-day that in such an age a ruling class should 
 have the audacity to expect us to pronounce some of 
 its family names according to its own wayward taste. 
 That a man whose name is spelt " Marjoribanks " should 
 call himself " Marchbanks ; " that a family spelling its 
 name " Leveson Gower " should pronounce it " Lewson 
 Gore ; " or a person whose name is spelt " Cholmon-
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 53 
 
 deley " should call himself " Chumley ; " or " Menzies " 
 pronounced " Minnis," etc., is somewhat astounding, 
 and, in other communities, might lead to a doubt as to 
 his sanity. But that the class to which these personages 
 belong should succeed in exacting of the community 
 the parrot-like acceptation of these wayward pro- 
 nunciations that is one of the strongest proofs of its 
 social power, as it is undoubtedly one of the strongest 
 proofs of the mental debasement of those who are not 
 ashamed to submit to such dictation. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Next to our slavish affectation in the pronunciation of 
 names, our affectation of a certain coldness of manner 
 deserves to be mentioned. That coldness of manner is 
 only natural and original in the aristocracy, and its 
 assumption by our middle classes is as vulgar as it is 
 unnatural. Its unnaturalness is best seen when rapidly 
 succeeded by that hideous grin of amiability which our 
 middle classes ever hold ready for instant use. That 
 a certain deadening of the home affections and a con- 
 sequent coldness and apathy of manner are more or less 
 natural to the aristocracy will readily be seen, when we 
 remember what their family life is when we bear in 
 mind that they grow up with the knowledge of the 
 eldest son inheriting alone the family title and property ;
 
 54 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 thus from the beginning forming a barrier to the affec- 
 tions which are so inseparable from community of 
 interests. Such are the instincts we grovel to and try 
 to imitate without having the excuse for their existence 
 among us. And as we imitate even what we do not 
 understand, is it to be wondered at that we bow down 
 to what we are able to realize, namely the social power 
 of our great families ? We have but to note the angry 
 passions let loose by the latest political events in order 
 to realize the social power of a great name. Whilst we 
 hurl anathemas at the head of a Gladstone, and turn 
 up our noses in disgust at his followers, we hardly have 
 an indecorous word for those of great historical names 
 who share his opinions and follow him through thick 
 and thin. The hatred of Mr. Gladstone is not an affair of 
 yesterday ; and yet how completely have his colleagues 
 for years past the Granvilles, the Hartingtons, and 
 many others escaped the opprobrium heaped on him 
 and on Mr. Chamberlain ! Cant would answer it was 
 because Mr. Gladstone is mainly answerable for all their 
 actions. But we know it is not so : it is simply because 
 the chicken-hearted middle classes do not like to attack 
 their social superiors. 
 
 It has been whispered that the Prince of Wales has 
 certain radical sympathies ; if so, it is not difficult to 
 find an explanation for them. Quite independent of the 
 motives which a member of the royal family may have for
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 55 
 
 seeking in the sympathies of the masses a make-weight 
 against the solidarity of a powerful aristocracy; the 
 Prince of Wales must be thoroughly disgusted with what 
 he has been forced to see of the middle classes. No 
 wonder a sickened heart turns to any alternative from 
 such a diet ! Besides, the sympathies of the masses for 
 the royal family are based on a truer instinct than the 
 so-called loyalty of the middle classes. It is true they 
 are willing to grovel before royalty, but their strongest 
 feeling is worship of the aristocracy. Loyalty to the 
 crown is more a feeling for an individual, which such 
 personages as George IV. and William IV. nearly suc- 
 ceeded in obliterating ; but the feeling of worship for the 
 aristocracy is traditional and more deeply national. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 In conclusion, we might mention a speciality of social 
 cant, which is almost the creation of the generation we 
 live in. It consists of a peculiar conversational eifort at 
 self-depreciation combined with a hideously gushing 
 appreciation of others, mixed in now and then with 
 sundry gleams of vulgar self-asserting arrogance. Culti- 
 vated women will plaintively assure you that they feel 
 unequal to the strain of duty towards their dear and 
 dearest ones. They do their best, but are conscious of 
 the woeful inadequacy of this "best." They have so
 
 56 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 much to be thankful for; they are only buoyed up by the 
 fond love and appreciation of their dear and dearest 
 friends, etc. If you happen to think their dear and 
 dearest ones are a lot of spoilt, selfish creatures, hardly 
 deserving of such a mother, and you venture to opine 
 they are far above the average in their fulfilment of their 
 duties, they cantingly differ from you. But if, relying on 
 their display of unselfish self-estimation, you venture to 
 speak out frankly on social or political matters in general, 
 you run a woeful risk of ruffling their prejudices and 
 their tempers. No more humble self-effacement then. 
 If you are enthusiastic over Dickens or Carlyle, you will 
 be reminded that the one was only a cotter's son, and 
 the other was never a gentleman ! And if you speak 
 disparagingly of Lord Granville, or the late Samuel 
 Wilberforce, Bishop of Winchester, you will be informed 
 that, whatever else might be their failings, they were the 
 very creme of gentility ! 
 
 Such are a few instances of the vulgar cant of the 
 upper middle classes in the time we live in. What the 
 " Hero of Heroes " thought of it all, we glean from the 
 following extract of Gordon's Journal (Kegan Paul, 
 Trench, & Co.) : 
 
 "I dwell on the joy of never seeing Great Britain 
 again, with its horrid, wearisome dinner parties and 
 miseries. How we can put up with those things passes 
 my imagination ! It is a perfect bondage. At those
 
 SOCIAL CANT. 57 
 
 dinner parties we are all in masks, saying what we do not 
 believe, eating and drinking things we do not want, and 
 then abusing one another. I would sooner live like a 
 Dervvish with the Mahdi, than go out to dinner every 
 night in London." 
 
 Our canting fraternity does not relish being found out ; 
 but a certain hardness of nerve, innate in the race, places 
 us above sensitiveness to ridicule, and enables us to 
 bear the ignominy with indifference.
 
 CHAPTER IV. 
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 
 
 " Manners maketh man." LA ROCHEFOUCAULD. 
 
 I. 
 
 NOTHING so much prevents our being natural as the 
 desire of appearing so. The manners of a community 
 are an important item to be taken into consideration in 
 dwelling on its idiosyncrasies of character. Hepworth 
 Dixon somewhere remarks, that the more a nation 
 advances in freedom and material prosperity, or what we 
 term civilization, the coarser and more aggressive its 
 manners become; and he instances a comparison be- 
 tween the manners of the Italian and the Anglo-Saxon 
 race. That may be so or not ; but one fact is undoubted, 
 viz. that England became politically great and powerful 
 in times when the country was perhaps unequalled for 
 the coarseness and brutality of its manners and customs. 
 We have but to refer to the immediate past the begin- 
 ning of the century and peruse some of the memoirs
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 59 
 
 of the time to form an idea of the brutality even of our 
 patricians at that period, not to mention the sports and 
 games of our plebeians, their brutal pastimes at country 
 fairs and on popular holidays. And yet the beginning 
 of this century was certainly a period of great national 
 power. 
 
 One of the first things that strike us in following up 
 this subject is the analogy between our manners and our 
 other characteristics. They are bound up indissolubly 
 with our oligarchic social and political character. They 
 originate in our aristocracy the summit of our governing 
 classes and sink in a diluted vulgar form through our 
 middle classes, till the contact is entirely lost in our 
 humble classes. 
 
 When it belonged to aristocratic manners to get drunk, 
 the middle classes got drunk too, and the humble classes 
 drank, whether it was the aristocratic fashion to do so or 
 not ; and they do so to this very hour, although drunken- 
 ness has long come to be tabooed in polite society. 
 
 II. 
 
 We have somewhat improved on our brutality, but in 
 all our different phases of manners the one stumbling- 
 block, the one rock we strike on, is the hopeless attempt 
 to be natural. That seems almost impossible of attain- 
 ment by our race, except, perhaps, by the very highest
 
 60 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 and the very humblest. And that is why we hold of the 
 latter that, although they be coarse, being at least un- 
 affectedly natural, their manners are better than those of 
 the classes immediately above them. Unfortunately the 
 condition of our middle-class society has long been such 
 that, eaten up with social cant, they have hardly dared 
 to " TRY " to be natural. Until lately, the aristocracy has 
 invariably made free use of its natural inclination in the 
 way of manners as in other things. Whether inclined 
 towards brutality in the latter Stuart time, or to sottish- 
 ness or vice in the Georgian era, it was all the same. It 
 was the free and entirely unrestrained tendency at the said 
 periods. But the Victorian era, which has witnessed the 
 final suppression of duelling as a factor in regulating the 
 niceties of social intercourse, has seen our aristocracy 
 drift towards artificiality of manners too; and that 
 artificiality of the aristocracy is the model of the middle 
 classes of to-day. A vulgar imitation of an honest 
 original article is bad enough ; but what are we to say to 
 a vulgar imitation of an artificial original ? For such are 
 the manners of the greater part of our well-dressed 
 multitude of the present day. Now, notwithstanding 
 our inability to be natural, there still lurks behind all 
 our artificiality the hopeless attempt to try and be so, pro- 
 ducing often the most ludicrous, if not alarming, results. 
 Now we are told over and over again royalty is so gracious, 
 the marked value of graciousness striking us so, because
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 61 
 
 we have ever been unaccustomed to meet with it in a 
 social superior. Again, our greatest praise of anybody, 
 man or woman, is that they are unassuming and, above 
 all, so unaffectedly natural. This clearly points to the 
 rarity of the accomplishment. All this applies to men 
 and women, though to the latter in a much greater 
 degree. For it would seem, after all, that the struggle of 
 life does so fill up the average existence of man, that he 
 is brought to a more even level of manner than woman, 
 who, particularly in this country, has generally got so 
 much spare time on her hands. Now, it is but fair to 
 assume that a portion of this spare time is devoted to 
 the cultivation of outward appearances and manners, and 
 often with what results ? Not only in middle-class life, 
 but with women even in the so-called upper classes, the 
 unconscious art of manner removed equally from servility 
 and haughtiness (such as is invariably met with in France, 
 even down to the' housemaids in good families) is rare 
 indeed. Cobden is reported to have said, that a French 
 washerwoman had as much manners as an English 
 duchess, which seems to be only one proof the more of 
 his deep insight into our social conditions of life. 
 
 We must consider ourselves fortunate if, in a drawing- 
 room of ladies belonging to the upper middle-class society, 
 we are not struck with the thought, that a fair average 
 of those present, particularly those who have no longer 
 the charms of youth to do duty for want of mind, might
 
 62 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 be more in their proper place, and feel themselves far 
 more at their ease, in their respective kitchens sipping 
 tea with the cook ! And yet, with all that, we are the 
 very people who originated that most hair-splitting of 
 refinements the custom of ladies bowing first. We, who 
 have hardly an accepted code of manners, regulating 
 the minor points of social intercourse, or, if we possess 
 it, most of us seem hardly to be aware of it, let alone 
 practise it, we leave the initiative of recognition to ladies. 
 How courtly considerate ! How extremely inconsistent ! 
 In speaking of our wife we invariably refer to her as 
 Mrs. X, and if our name beginneth with an H, how 
 often that letter is lost to our ear in our nervousness 
 to come up to the dignity of the occasion. How intensely 
 vulgar ! For can we speak of a woman in more dignified 
 terms than by referring to her by the honoured title of 
 " wife " ? A word in itself of more distinct significance 
 and value than its synonym in either French or German. 
 But no, our conventional manners cantingly insist on 
 us speaking of our wife as Mrs. Smith or Mrs. Brown ! 
 Luckily, some people can rise superior to our conven- 
 tionality : for instance, the Crown Prince of Germany, 
 who, introducing Mr. Hall to the Crown Princess at 
 the Crystal Palace, simply named her "my wife." The 
 Crown Prince of Germany could afford to be natural. 
 Would to heavens that a few of us humbler folks could 
 see our way to afford ourselves the same luxury.
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 63 
 
 Our stilted artificiality has much to answer for. In 
 writing to a man you address him as " Sir ; " if you were 
 to do so in speaking to him, it would either be thought 
 you wished to be monitory, or that you were unaccustomed 
 to the usages of polite society, which exact a grin, but 
 avoid the direct address. Mr. Escott tells us, in his 
 notice of Bernal Osborne, that he so impressed the 
 Radicals that they used to address him as " Sir." Some 
 may be permitted to doubt whether the Radicals in 
 question were impelled by any great impression in the 
 matter. For it is ten times more sensible to address 
 a man pointedly as Sir, the same as all other nations 
 do in its equivalent, than to hem and haw, and end by 
 that dreadful grin which is the nightmare of all those 
 who have come across our middle classes. 
 
 The fashion of the present day of giving vent to one's 
 views, or stating an argument in a manner that would 
 not break the shell of a new-laid egg, is also artificial, 
 and doubly so in a country the upper-classes of which, 
 only a couple of generations ago, used to curse and 
 swear to their heart's content. But we could not cast 
 off the coarseness of our grandfathers without drifting 
 to the other extreme which whines and turns up the 
 whites of its eyes when venomously attacked by a political 
 opponent, and calls Heaven to witness our belief, con- 
 viction, and knowledge that no personal reflection was 
 intended by our adversary !
 
 64 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Our manners have no logical sequence, no beginning, 
 no end. An instance of them which just missed the 
 sublime was when poor old General Haynau, who had 
 ordered some Hungarian murderesses to be flogged, was 
 assaulted in a country where wife-beating ranked among 
 the fine arts ! And yet, notwithstanding all appearances, 
 if once we could rid ourselves of cant, we might reach 
 a high standard of manners, for there is more innate 
 good-nature to be found in the unspoilt Anglo-Saxon 
 than in almost any race. 
 
 If we in this or in other things prefer the shadow to 
 the substance, the empty form to the real article, and 
 attach a supreme value to an outward grace of manner 
 as the clearest indication of the inner man, even then 
 we are in a woeful plight, for we seek in vain for 
 urbanity and graceful ease of manner in any part of the 
 community. It is not indigenous to our soil ; in other 
 words, it is not an attribute of the Anglo-Saxon race at 
 all, high or low, though both high and low have been 
 known to assimilate a little of it in mixing with the 
 Latin races on the Continent And yet, co-existent with 
 the most incomprehensible dulness of mental perception 
 and want of true delicacy of feeling, there is often a 
 hypersensitiveness in our manner that reminds us of the 
 agonizing process of trying to walk over new laid eggs. 
 This hypersensitiveness, often going side by side with 
 the utmost indifference to the feelings of others, especially
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 65 
 
 in the middle classes, reminds us of fever-patients, whose 
 foreheads are bathed in perspiration whilst their other 
 extremities are icy cold. What would become of our 
 manners if we could no longer discuss the weather ? 
 
 III. 
 
 There are manners and manners, though a due regard 
 for the feelings of others, added to a certain naturalness 
 and ease, ought to characterize them all. To excel in 
 good manners it is necessary not only to .show these 
 qualities among equals, but also towards inferiors even 
 more than towards superiors. The average Englishman 
 is usually cold if not harsh to his inferiors and toadying 
 towards his social superiors. To strike the right note 
 in our intercourse with different classes, especially our 
 inferiors, an amount of tact, a certain sensitiveness of 
 mind are necessary, and these are impossible without a 
 certain cultivation of the intellect. Therefore it is the 
 greatest possible mistake of our civilization to think an in- 
 tellectual nonentity can be a gentleman, as long as good 
 manners go to form a part of that proud distinction. This 
 holds good even though, it must be admitted, that high- 
 placed people, however unintellectual, hold a certain 
 advantage in a world ruled by outward show and glitter, 
 because they can easily afford to show themselves as 
 they are, and can thus at least be natural. But, un- 
 
 F
 
 66 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 fortunately, they do not always avail themselves of this 
 advantage, and particularly in our time show an exaggera- 
 tion and insincerity of manner that can only be classed 
 as bad manners. Although excess of compliments and 
 thanks are not confined to society in our country, still 
 somehow foreign exaggeration is not so obtrusively 
 hideous and awkward as our own. We began to go 
 rapidly downhill in this respect, when we went in for 
 those conventional terms of " so kind/' " so glad," " so 
 pleasant," etc., which are in such marked contrast to the 
 self-possesion of our manners towards our inferiors. But 
 we are not true to ourselves, for we pretend a sympathy 
 that is totally foreign to our nature. 
 
 Almost the best mauners in England are those of the 
 policemen, the railway officials, and other distinct classes 
 of men who know their duties and position exactly the 
 rarest thing an Englishman ever knows. How is he to 
 know it, floundering amidst the waves of a tuft-hunting 
 middle class ! 
 
 It is a relief at least to know, that one form of want of 
 sympathy of manner is not often called into play among 
 our highest and wealthiest society, namely the result of 
 the direct contact with domestic servants that rock of 
 shipwreck in so many thousand English middle-class 
 homes. Our rich have their trained housekeepers as 
 lightning-conductors for the humours and angularities 
 of their ladies. But our middle-class women, with their
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 67 
 
 hopeless deficiences of tact and manner, are answerable 
 for the wretched servants we constantly hear complaints 
 about : their incapacity to foster attachment among their 
 dependents ; their inability even to exact respect, except 
 by the aid of an artificial reserve, are well known and 
 deplorable. They give their servants high wages and rich 
 living, and yet they cannot gain in return that one doglike 
 attribute attachment or sympathy. 
 
 The English race does not supply bad servants ; on 
 the contrary, few races produce such good material. The 
 English aristocracy is servanted as no other aristocracy in 
 the world is. And why ? Because it understands how to 
 treat servants ; the middle classes do not, and the result 
 is chaos ! What a theme to enlarge upon ! How many 
 men have sought refuge in the dreary club-house from 
 the family spectre the topic of the servants ! the ever- 
 lasting servants ! The ceaseless, hopeless confession of 
 the floundering helplessness of our womanhood ; the mene, 
 mene, tekel of our artificial social existence. It seems to 
 be one of the curses of our social life, that we must either 
 be very exalted or very humble in rank in order to dare 
 to be natural. For we have a unique instance in our 
 midst of a talented man (Corney Grain) making a good 
 income by simply portraying in one perpetual sameness, 
 from year's end to year's end, our social awkwardness 
 and vulgarity. 
 
 The Standard of January 22nd, 1883, contained a
 
 68 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 leading article which pointed out the fact of the Empress 
 of Germany having in six years distributed over a 
 thousand gold crosses and diplomas to domestic servants 
 who had remained in the service of one and the same 
 family for forty years. The Standard fancies that if a 
 Long-Service Order were instituted in England the can- 
 didates would be few indeed, and proceeds to deplore 
 the disappearance of feudal manners which causes us to 
 be so changeable, etc. The disappearance of feudal laws 
 and feudal manners has less to do with it than most 
 Englishmen fancy. Far more complex causes account 
 for the instability of our domestics. To begin with, the 
 canting gentility of our clergy has done more to degrade 
 labour and to make domestics and other workers dis- 
 satisfied with their status than anything else. Besides 
 that, we must always have in our eye the want of tact 
 and the vulgarity of our middle classes, the awkward 
 haughtiness and artificiality of our middle-class women, 
 as already pointed out. Intent on fawning and toadying 
 to their social superiors, and in practising social cant 
 towards their equals, what wonder that they are stiff 
 and unnatural towards their inferiors. Hence we have it 
 that long service is almost only to be met with among 
 the landed gentry who at least know how to inspire 
 personal attachment among their dependents. 
 
 Even when honestly intent on doing our best, it is 
 extraordinary what a gift we have for making our amia-
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 69 
 
 bility, our conscientiousness, and most of our other 
 virtues, unsympathetic We no sooner go in for a set 
 of conscientious, well-meaning men, than their unlovable 
 awkwardness puts us out of humour with them and with 
 ourselves. We long for a change. We never seem to 
 believe that people will take us at our true valuation ; 
 we must aggressively persist in rubbing it again and 
 again under each other's noses. We cannot practise our 
 devotions singly and unpretentiously; we must needs put 
 on the face of a plate-passing churchwarden ; or, if that 
 be not enough, then even read the Lessons in public; 
 thus realizing the apt words of Bishop Middleton, 
 " Virtue itself offends when coupled with forbidding 
 manners." 
 
 We have pointed out elsewhere our want of the power 
 of conciliation towards inferior races, and that is found 
 again in all the above conditions of intercourse. We 
 seem to possess the power of the Romans to exact 
 obedience, but not the Roman, the Greek, or even the 
 Slavonic power of assimilation. That our race does not 
 mix with an inferior one is, perhaps, no result of our 
 manners, but the consequence of a natural law. But 
 we have intensified the sternness of a natural law, and 
 failed to gain sympathy even when commanding respect. 
 Our manners may not be the only cause of this, but they 
 must be and are one of the causes. As a rule, with 
 more blunt honesty of purpose and soundness of heart,
 
 70 CONVENTIONAL CANT. , 
 
 our manners, even amongst ourselves, but particularly 
 towards our social inferiors, are somewhat awkward, not 
 to say cold and unsympathetic. 
 
 But it is principally towards inferior races that we 
 may be termed cold and unsympathetic in one word, 
 without " touch." Our insular Pharisaism, and the 
 manner bred therefrom, will account for that, even if 
 our religious and social cant had not already some- 
 thing to do with it. We can enforce obedience; our 
 hardness of nerve secures that, and none since the 
 Romans have understood this better ; but we have never 
 succeeded in gaining touch with the races over whom we 
 rule. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Society in England, except that small cosmopolitan 
 section thereof which is almost international, is painful 
 enough by its hollowness, its pretentiousness, its gush, 
 its fetish-worship, but also more especially by its want 
 of any intelligible code of manners. That we do not 
 put our knives into our mouths or use our forks as 
 tooth-picks has long been our boasted national pride; 
 but these virtues seem a small set-off against other 
 crudities of manner. Who has not noticed our pain- 
 ful indecision and clumsiness in bowing, in making or 
 offering introductions? We are told it is not usual to 
 introduce people promiscuously who meet at friends'
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 71 
 
 houses, for it is assumed that they are already known 
 to one another. Here again we have an aristocratic idea 
 engrafted on the vulgar middle-class stem. What is true 
 of a society that is strictly defined and intimate amongst 
 itself from one generation to another, is a canting lie 
 with the well-dressed multitude, which still considers 
 itself as belonging to society, although the title-deeds 
 of its drawing-room qualifications might have to be 
 sought for in queer places. How is it likely that the 
 members of a society are invariably known to one 
 another beforehand, when the hosts themselves are often 
 unknown to many of their guests a short time previously, 
 and in many instances, in a London season, would not 
 be known by them next day if they met them in the Park. 
 And yet of such materials is the society of the upper 
 middle classes in the centre of our social life largely 
 composed. But there is no rest for the wicked, and the 
 penalty of being guilty of a lie is as sure as the penalty 
 that overtakes any other form of vice. The punishment 
 is the more inevitable, as it does not so much depend 
 on a divine interposition, as on the fact of every form of 
 vice and weakness carrying its own retribution in itself. 
 
 V. 
 
 Let us take the artificiality and monotony of behaviou' 
 of our countrymen at tables d'hote in England a proot
 
 72 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 of the utter hopelessness of any attempt at altering 
 us by merely introducing continental conditions of life. 
 We had far better dine alone in our tavern horse-boxes, 
 as our fathers did. However coarse they might have 
 been, they were at least natural in their coarseness and 
 gigantic in their digestive powers ! Why do we take 
 pleasure in reading ,of Dr. Johnson's coarseness and 
 vulgarity? Because it was natural to him. It was 
 individual. If we cannot have individual and natural 
 refinement, let us have at least natural coarseness and 
 uncouthness. It is healthier for the community at large, 
 and not half so ugly as artificial refinement. Yes, our 
 manners are not only often vulgar, but when they are 
 meant to express loyalty, often very ugly. What can be 
 more ugly than the way we surround and mob royalty 
 on all occasions, making it next to impossible for 
 prominent members of the royal family to walk abroad 
 at their ease as other mortals do. We prate and 
 pharisaically dwell on our feelings of loyalty, as if the 
 same were a speciality of our own, unknown to other 
 communities. We need not point by comparison to the 
 loyalty of other races to their sovereigns, which has 
 stood the test of political misfortune. We have to go 
 back to the times of the Pretender on the Scotch hills 
 to recall anything in our own history to test the value of 
 loyalty in misfortune ; but of the loyalty to the reigning 
 sovereign it may boldly be asserted that whether our
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 73 
 
 own be deeper and more sincere than that of other 
 nations, it is undoubtedly more vulgar than that of any 
 other nation. 
 
 We have prostituted the very word "loyalty," which, 
 in its original signification, simply meant "law-abiding." 
 We have brought it to mean a quality which is incom- 
 patible with the faintest suspicion of self-respect. And 
 when we carry the word with us into remote parts of 
 the earth, we call those natives " loyal " who treacherously 
 assist us to slaughter their fellow-men. 
 
 If you want to know what that sentiment is that 
 worships the representative of a royal house with a 
 romantic if not a religiously venerating attachment, you 
 must look back to the history of the Stuarts and their 
 fortunes in Scotland. If you want to go farther afield, 
 glance at the history of those military despotisms you 
 have been such adepts in deriding, and you will find 
 touches of "loyalty" that might shame your middle 
 classes out of ever employing the word. For we are not 
 of those that laugh at the sentiment of loyalty ; far from 
 it. Let us by all means be loyal to a principle, and 
 loyal in our admiration and devotion to a person, if we 
 can find one deserving our best sentiments. 
 
 We cannot help admiring the loyalty of the poor half- 
 starved Berliners who came out to welcome back the 
 great Frederick after the death-grapple of seven years. 
 Even more do we admire the loyal devotion of the
 
 74 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Austrian people during the Napoleonic wars, when their 
 capital was repeatedly taken and they themselves were 
 bleeding from the wounds of a hundred pitched battles 
 lost ! Or even the loyalty of the Sardinians to Charles 
 Albert, after the disastrous day of Novara, might call for 
 our admiration. For these are instances of loyalty in 
 misfortune, and go to prove the old saw that blood is 
 thicker than water. 
 
 Holy Russia, with all her mediaeval wickednesses and 
 abuses, can still show us what loyalty is, and the power 
 of sentiment among a mighty people. Side by side 
 with Nihilism and Revolution there is still among the 
 Russians a fund of loyalty, which has stood the test of 
 misfortune in the past and which, if we are to credit keen 
 observers, would rise superior to misfortune if called 
 upon. Cant prefers to dwell on Russian corruption, 
 Russian aggression, and that favourite English fault 
 impecuniosity : want of respectability ! But some can 
 remember the riot in St. Petersburg during the cholera 
 scare, when that archtype of a despotic ruler, but 
 honourable man, the Emperor Nicholas rushed alone 
 and bareheaded among the frantic throng calling upon 
 them to go down on their knees and pray ! Do not 
 undervalue the power underlying such sentiment, but 
 do not confound it with your middle-class loyalty ! What 
 that is like the following extract of a London paper will 
 show : " Half-a-dozen of the royalties who have been
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 75 
 
 staying at Osborne during the last fortnight drove Over 
 to Ryde one afternoon last week, and, having put up 
 their carriages, they walked down to the Esplanade, in- 
 tending to take a turn along the pier; but they had 
 forgotten the pertinacious impudence of the British snob, 
 for, being quickly recognized, they were so unpleasantly 
 mobbed by a ' genteel ' crowd, that they were obliged 
 hurriedly to take refuge in an hotel, and while they 
 stayed there for tea, in the hope of getting away quietly, 
 quite a crowd of people assembled in front At Ems, 
 the Emperor and other royalties walk about without any 
 fuss, and nobody ever thinks of giving them a second 
 glance, much less of assailing them ; but at an English 
 watering-place a royal personage cannot walk a dozen 
 steps without annoyance." 
 
 VI. 
 
 Some little time ago, the Emperor of Austria visited 
 the Adelsberg caves, and, moved by the grandeur of the 
 scenery, exclaimed to a local dignitary, "How weak 
 and small we all are compared to the almightiness of 
 Nature." The latter, somewhat in a fix, ejaculated, " But 
 surely not your Majesty." Whereupon Francis Joseph 
 smilingly replied, "Yes, even I, as well as you." If we 
 could imagine a similar episode occurring in our country, 
 it would in all probability have put the English civic 
 mind into a still greater fix. " May it please your
 
 76 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Majesty to except your Majesty from all comparison 
 with common nature, your Majesty." Yes, we have 
 a style peculiar to ourselves. If we consider what cir- 
 cumstances have surrounded the Prince of Wales for so 
 many years, we must almost wonder if he does not long 
 to kick a lot of people to whom he is bound to be polite. 
 What must such a man, if only endowed with ordinary 
 acumen, and there is little doubt that he is endowed 
 with more than ordinary perspicacity, think of the 
 manners of those that will not allow him to breathe 
 without receiving addresses. They say he is a Radical 
 at heart ; if so, it is easy to guess the reasons, namely his 
 disgust at the flunkeydom and arrogance of those upper 
 middle classes he has to come in perpetual contact with 
 and to endure ! There have been toadies and flunkeys 
 alternately cringing and impertinent in all times and 
 in all social fabrics, but they were not all freeborn 
 Englishmen. There were poor dogs with doglike 
 natures among them, but few of them were adept disciples 
 of cant, who, whilst clumsily shuffling and grovelling 
 in the dirt, prided themselves on being freeborn Church- 
 going Britons, whose houses are their castles. Others 
 might fawn like dogs or savages, but the fawning Eng- 
 lishman is not only more offensive than they, he is uglier 
 and clumsier than any fawning animal. Like our modern 
 British drunkard, man or woman, who carries off the 
 palm of transcendent bestiality, he is unique.
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 77 
 
 We are ourselves even perfectly conscious at heart 
 that it is so that we are mostly without manners ; and 
 when we try to ape those of others, we make a vulgar 
 fiasco of it. Who does not remember the surprise of 
 many that the two working-men sent to Parliament 
 should have shown themselves so able, not only in mental 
 powers, but in manners too ! They were natural. We 
 were so little accustomed to it. Then again, lately, as 
 mentioned elsewhere, note the surprise of the public at 
 the decent behaviour of the masses when admitted into 
 aristocratic pleasure-grounds on Sundays. Your middle 
 class finds it hard to believe in decency, even though 
 discovered outside its own sacred limits. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Sometimes it seems as if we almost expected to be 
 knocked down like ninepins by our social superiors, or 
 at le.ast to meet with haughty brutality; and this not- 
 withstanding that aristocratic brutality has long since 
 been discarded by our social rulers. For they have 
 long discovered that the suaviter in modo can be advan- 
 tageously combined with the fortiter in re. 
 
 If good manners were not so rare among us, surely 
 it would not be possible to gain such enormous personal 
 popularity by a small display of amiability, as not only 
 royalty, but even the aristocracy constantly do. Yes,
 
 78 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 we need not despair. There are still good manners to 
 be found in England, as there is still gold to be found in 
 the sand of some continental rivers. But the difference 
 between continental gold and good manners in England 
 is this, that whereas the former does not repay the trouble 
 of seeking, the latter repays those exceedingly well that 
 practise them; for, being so rare, they are at a high 
 premium, and when once their cultivation is thoroughly 
 understood, there are few things we cannot hope to 
 attain by their aid. That is at all events a negative 
 advantage we possess over foreigners, who are unable 
 to gain much popularity by urbanity of manner; it is 
 too much a general attribute to excite remark, much 
 less admiration. But we even sometimes go the length 
 of being suspicious of graciousness, unless we meet with 
 it in a distinguished foreigner. 
 
 In the political arena we have cast off the blunt 
 brutality of the Palmerston era and adopted the style 
 of manner of the immortal Pecksniff and Micawber. 
 Our leaders hasten to inform the public that they feel 
 sure the last venomous political attack of an opponent 
 was not meant to convey any personal animosity. Of 
 course not ! Cant ! where does thy sweet union with 
 our manners begin and end ? There are some ex- 
 planations for our comparative want of a distinct code 
 of manners that might rid us of our artificiality and the 
 consequent encrusted cant of our social demeanour.
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 79 
 
 Do our youth learn manners at the universities? If 
 so, they have a very extraordinary way of showing the 
 texture of the article at the various university comme- 
 morations and installations, where horse-play is the order 
 of the day. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Let us take a glance at the influence of our " manners " 
 in politics. It is a peculiar fact that, whereas the Tories 
 generally end in tiring the public by their want of touch 
 with the home aspirations of the country, the Liberals 
 invariably come to grief, not only by their attacks on 
 vested interests, but also by disgusting a large section 
 of the community with their gross want of tact and 
 manners. That disastrous diplomatic episode between 
 Lord Granville and Prince Bismarck can be traced to 
 the want of tact and manners of that most oily of after- 
 dinner orators. And what a conveniently forgotten lesson 
 it conveyed to us ! Our home politics supply numerous 
 instances where, with all our Micawber-like dexterity, 
 we have estranged, where we might have conciliated and 
 carried our point besides ; but after the above crowning 
 incident of arrogance, followed by a humiliating apology, 
 they are scarcely worth instancing. 
 
 We keep a foreign secretary and a large diplomatic 
 staff, and a nice mess they often make of our foreign 
 affairs through want of tact alone ! But it is in our re-
 
 so CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 lationship with our colonies, in our selection of pro-con- 
 suls after the Roman type, that we challenge unenviable 
 comparisons. There it is that our national awkwardness 
 of manner shows itself most disastrously that want of a 
 fine perception of the feelings of others commonly called 
 tact, but in politics meaning, in a great measure, the art 
 of ruling our fellow-men, not by the rod of iron alone, 
 but by the superiority of a finely trained mind over an 
 inferior one. Our political laissez-faire system is found 
 unequal to the task of conciliating foreign elements and 
 keeping our dependencies in good humour. We have 
 to take refuge in a little bureaucracy for that purpose. 
 By the time our laissez-faire engine of public opinion is 
 put in motion, we are often hopelessly involved in com- 
 plications, if not in disasters, often merely the result of 
 the perverse harshness of manner of our colonial satraps. 
 Witness, for instance, the impervious Sir Bartle Frere 
 with his Indian manners in South Africa. Where the 
 problem to be solved can be settled by the rod of iron 
 alone we are comparatively successful ; witness India : 
 but where tact is required, we have our headstrong 
 representatives pigheadedly pursuing a course of obsti- 
 nate, though often perhaps well-meant, perversion, which, 
 before it can be stopped by the ponderous working of 
 red-tape officialism, has before now done incalculable 
 harm. For what we call public opinion is invariably too 
 late in such matters to prevent mischief, though it may
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 81 
 
 now and then tardily try to make up for it, as in the case 
 of the last Transvaal trouble. 
 
 Lord Beaconsfield was fully alive to the importance 
 of' refined personal influences as a factor for conciliating 
 our dependencies; but what materials had he to work 
 with ? He sent the Marquis of Lome to Canada ! With 
 what results we all know. And Mr. Gladstone sent an 
 unsympathetic Irish and English landowner there to 
 succeed him. 
 
 Let us turn for a moment to the pro-consuls our 
 Prussian neighbours employed in 1866 and 1870 in the 
 annexed provinces. Compare men like Field-Marshal 
 Manteuffel and Prince Hohenlohe with our administra- 
 tive material our Lornes, our Lyttons, our Lansdownes ! 
 No wonder comparisons are odious, particularly to those 
 disadvantageously compared. But the comparisons are 
 more eloquent when we compare results. Only the other 
 day the elections at Strasburg and Metz showed such a 
 favourable result for the Germans, as to arouse the 
 surprise of Europe and the especial disgust of France. 
 For the Prussians can show a greater amount of success- 
 ful conciliation in the two provinces of Alsace and 
 Lorraine after fifteen years' possession, than we can show 
 in Ireland after a union of the best part of a century ! 
 We do not maintain that the result in Alsace-Lorraine 
 is alone owing to the choice of the governors themselves, 
 or we might show good results in Ireland, from the 
 
 G
 
 82 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 choice of such men as Lord Spencer and Lord Aberdeen, 
 but we do contend that the results referred to are largely 
 owing to the manner and tact that are, from high to low, 
 a part of the system of conciliation the Prussians pursue. 
 As it is, we have the unique example of Ireland ever 
 before us to remind us of the hopelessness of our 
 attempts to conciliate ! It is the old story : our manners 
 make it difficult for us to please our friends, much less 
 to conciliate our enemies ; for our attempts in the latter 
 direction are often as awkward as our grinning attempts 
 at a smile. 
 
 Lately a wave of gush has bidden us feast the colonists 
 that have come among us, and what a vulgar mess we 
 have made of it I But that may be inseparable from the 
 commonplace character of the whole enterprise. It is 
 when the elected first representatives of our colonies 
 come among us that we show our innate want of tact. 
 We break away from our canting aphorism of virtue 
 being its own reward, and confer trumpery distinctions 
 on men who at home hold positions analogous to our 
 ministers. We offer them gewgaws, which men of science 
 often decline in our midst, and which are only accepted 
 fittingly and gratefully by our city magnates. 
 
 Compare such shabby treatment with the effusive 
 prodigality and distinction with which the Russians, or 
 even the French, treat those whom it is their interest to 
 conciliate. While France honoured Abd-el-Kader, and 
 Russia feted the renowned Schamyl, we treat the Prime
 
 CANT IN OUR MANNERS. 83 
 
 Minister of a mighty continent (Western Australia) 
 according to the standard we adopt in rewarding a 
 provincial alderman. 
 
 Can it be doubted that, when once our dependencies 
 recognize that their interests are not only distinct, but 
 perhaps antagonistic to our own, we are not likely to 
 hold them by the tie of sentiment ! 
 
 Even Lady Bloomfield, whom the Queen herself 
 honours with the familiar appellation of "Georgy," in her 
 Reminiscences, cannot help telling us that she was in no 
 way religiously impressed by the Catholic service at St. 
 Peter's, in Rome. This notwithstanding that for years 
 she mixed in Catholic society in Vienna and elsewhere, 
 and to many members of which she would doubtless 
 present her book. Why not keep her want of being 
 impressed to herself? 
 
 We have stated elsewhere that the Times newspaper 
 is partly answerable for, or at least represents, some of 
 our most unsympathetic coldness of manner and thought. 
 We cannot help being reminded of the dark working of 
 Nemesis, when we read that the last years of the greatest 
 editor of the Times, the late Mr. Delane, were embittered 
 by the cold-blooded letter in which Mr. Walter dis- 
 pensed with his services. 
 
 " My dear Delane, The time has come when it is no 
 longer to your advantage, or to that of the Times, that 
 you should remain its editor. . . . Your pension will be 
 ^2000 a year. . . ."
 
 CHAPTER V. 
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 
 
 " Combined usurpers on the throne of taste, 
 To these, when authors bend in humble awe, 
 And hail their voice as truth, their word as law 
 While these are censors, 'twould be sin to spare ; 
 "While such are critics, why should I forbear ? " 
 
 BYRON. 
 
 I. 
 
 THE Times, in reviewing Mr. J. C. Jeaffreson's "Real 
 Lord Byron," gives us the following : 
 
 " But the question still naturally arises, how came the 
 marriage to turn out so ill when it was one of mutual 
 affection." 
 
 Delightful little bit of unconscious, almost childlike, 
 cant ! Why not honestly admit that the marriage of an 
 erratic, egotistical genius like Byron was almost bound 
 to turn out unhappily, whether based on mutual affection, 
 or on any other factor that drives men into matrimony ? 
 That would have been plain common-sense ; but the 
 writer wanted to affect surprise the usual backsheesh
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 85 
 
 to that Moloch cant. But it cannot be wondered at 
 that we should cant about marriage, when even things 
 of still higher import are not free from our attempts. 
 
 Certain notorious books are prosecuted for propagat- 
 ing the very doctrines which are found in the works of 
 men like John Stuart Mill, which are actually recom- 
 mended, and given away at our public schools for 
 prizes, while Bradlaugh is denounced as if he were the 
 Beast in Revelation. 
 
 The fact of many leading periodicals disseminating 
 free-thought ; the fact of thousands of educated men 
 being practically unbelievers, or men of the social posi- 
 tion of Lord Queensberry openly avowing himself one, 
 are passed over in silence. But we have not yet noticed 
 that our press, in its character of the " watch-dog of 
 civilization," should take upon itself to inform us that 
 while we are vainly splitting hairs (for Mr. Bradlaugh, 
 after all, is admitted to Parliament), the skilled artisan 
 and mechanic of the metropolis, in his tens of thousands, 
 is being nurtured every week by every form of agnos- 
 ticism and materialism. We do not refer to a trifling 
 minority who listen to wild theories of occult socialism. 
 No; let any unbiased inquirer take one of the weekly 
 papers to hand, the circulation of which ranges from one 
 hundred thousand to half-a-million copies ! There he 
 will find a weekly list of Sunday lectures, equalling in 
 extent and variety the lis>t of Church preachers in the
 
 86 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 metropolis to be found every Saturday in the Morning 
 Post ! These lectures deal almost exclusively with politics 
 and ethics, and as it is only to be expected, with a 
 marked leaning towards unbelief in all religion, and to- 
 wards republicanism in politics. Thus the existing forms 
 of belief are being attacked by the highest- class magazines 
 from above, and by the Sunday-lecture system from be- 
 low. Yet we have never noticed one of our daily papers 
 draw attention to this, although their occasionally doing 
 so would eminently assist us to understand some of the 
 signs of the times, and perhaps partially prevent that 
 periodical feverish astonishment of the British public, 
 when, putting on its hideous grin at any unexpected turn 
 of affairs, it exclaims, " Who would have thought it ? " 
 " You don't say so ! " " How dreadful ! " But it seems 
 ordained that almost every turn of the wheel of time 
 should come on us as a revelation to surprise and 
 unnerve us ! * Cant is largely answerable for this ! 
 For it has ever been a characteristic of ours to vilify 
 those who differ from us, only to bow down slavishly 
 to them later if they and their ideas were strong enough 
 to brave and to outlive our obloquy. The fact of being 
 insincere ourselves makes it impossible for us to believe 
 in and respect the sincerity of others when differing from 
 us. Men of science are quoted as crotcheteers, and 
 Darwin although he honestly avowed that he was 
 * London Riots.
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 87 
 
 agnostic as to the future is buried in Westminster Abbey 
 by a clergy that cannot exchange pulpits with other 
 Christian ministers who have not received Episcopal 
 ordination. " How inconsistent ! " we are tempted to 
 exclaim, and yet how "cantingly consistent ! " 
 
 We have honestly set to work to stop gambling, and 
 woe unto the poor man who is caught suspiciously toss- 
 ing up halfpence. Betting, as one of the most insidious 
 manifestations of the gambling instinct, is sat upon in 
 more senses than one ; it is draconically prohibited ! 
 And yet if we were to accuse a newspaper like the 
 Times, or any other, of inconsistency not to say of an 
 offence against all moral law in publishing day after 
 day the betting list on the Derby (perhaps with a lot 
 of mild letters to the editor, in the same number, 
 advocating the suppression of gambling at Monaco), we 
 should most seriously wrong those papers. They are 
 perfectly consistent in their inconsistency, and strictly 
 within the letter of the law that safeguard of the rights 
 of property. It is only cant ; they have long ceased 
 to distinguish it : it has passed into their convictions 
 as birds have, according to science, gradually passed from 
 the condition of reptiles. They do not know it them- 
 selves, and therefore may almost claim the questionable 
 extenuating circumstance of sinning in ignorance, though 
 want of knowledge in ethics ought to be no more a 
 palliative than want of knowledge of the criminal laws. ,
 
 88 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 II. 
 
 There may be difference of opinion as to the aggre- 
 gate amount of happiness procurable under an autocracy 
 or under a democracy, but there can be no doubt about 
 the greater amount of vulgarity in a community so largely 
 influenced by a canting press as is our own. Our press, 
 which is so well trained, so self-contained and discreet 
 that it strictly adheres to the legal fiction of even treat- 
 ing a palpable murderer as innocent until legally con- 
 victed, goes off the metals at the slightest foreign political 
 temptation : it then becomes aggressive and vulgar. 
 Russia declares Batoum can no longer be allowed to 
 remain a free port. The whole press is in the wildest 
 excitement about Russian treachery ; everything else falls, 
 for the moment, into the background. The Standard 
 pharisaically exclaims that "we" are not going to take 
 the chestnuts out of the fire for "others." How delight- 
 ful is that single word " others ! " How full of cant 
 full as an egg is of meat. A week afterwards nobody 
 looking through the papers need know that a place of 
 that name exists. This little game of bark and brag, 
 and subsequent relapse into silence, is not the less 
 ridiculous because it is of such constant occurence. A 
 little self-respect, however, might make us sick of the 
 vulgarity of the thing. Mr. Charles Marvin, than whom 
 no man has done more to open our eyes to the designs
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 89 
 
 of Russia, is about the last man in the world to use 
 the conventional language of the press with regard to 
 the Russians. 
 
 When our national blood is roused our press is ever 
 well to the fore. Our military pawns are not only heroes, 
 but the heroes of heroes. Our soldiers are not only 
 brave, but the bravest of the brave. Our exploits are not 
 only glorious, but we must go back to antiquity if we 
 want to draw breath in contemplating a parallel. Our 
 enemies invariably become rebels and ruffians, black- 
 guards, liars, and deceitful intriguers, their bravery 
 fiendish, and their astuteness diabolical. Renegade na- 
 tives that side with us and betray their brethren are 
 dubbed loyal. No sooner have we set up some puppet 
 in one of our dependencies, than our press invests him 
 with all imaginable flattering attributes, among them that 
 gushing quality we call loyalty. Should we experience a 
 reverse in the course of our conquests, that which would 
 have been a brilliant victory becomes a treacherous 
 massacre. For we alone are entitled to stand erect, 
 holding aloft the banner of St. George as the type of 
 unsophisticated and confiding truth and courage. For 
 when we discuss the politics of foreign races and peoples, 
 if they happen to collide with our own interests, and 
 venture to opine that others may have the same aims 
 and ambitions as ourselves, cant laughs us to scorn. 
 " Oh no, you don't know them," we are told, on referring
 
 90 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 to inferior races; " they like to be governed by us;" " they 
 like a good thrashing ; you must not judge those ' damn'd 
 niggers ' by our standard." The same as some old fox- 
 hunter, when every other argument in favour of fox- 
 hunting fails him, will tell you that the fox enjoys the 
 fun most. 
 
 In the same way we were told that the Abyssinians 
 were longing to be freed from their tyrant king ; ditto the 
 Ashantees; ditto the Zulus; and lastly, ditto the Egyptians 
 with regard to Arabi Pasha. Though this is not to be 
 wondered at, considering that up till lately we were daily 
 regaled on the tyranny of Mr. Parnell in Ireland, the 
 Irish people desiring nothing better than his discomfiture. 
 And yet what a parcel of canting lies all these assertions 
 have since been proved to be. Nevertheless, our press 
 still cants about our being popular with the natives in 
 India. Governing races have never been popular with 
 subject races; but it can safely be asserted that the 
 austere religious temperament and the strong class-feel- 
 ing of the Anglo-Saxon were about the least likely of any 
 to win over the sympathies of the sensitive Hindoo. 
 
 Surely many can remember the foul indignity with 
 which our press treated the Emperor Nicholas during 
 the Crimean war, not to mention the late Emperor Alex- 
 ander II. , who alone, by the liberation of thirty millions 
 of serfs, showed more greatness of soul than any English 
 monarch that has sat on the throne since the Conquest.
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 91 
 
 The ruling authorities and the press of this country 
 having behaved themselves better lately in an inter- 
 national sense, at all events towards the United States, 
 there has been a feeling of increased cordiality between 
 that country and ourselves, set off on the side of the 
 Americans by the natural personal admiration of a 
 chivalrous people for a blameless Queen. This senti- 
 ment is distorted by journalistic cant into the assertion 
 that Queen Victoria is as popular among Americans as 
 among Englishmen, meaning, of course, that the Ameri- 
 cans are such fools as almost to prefer English institutions 
 to their own. Then the appearance of a little satire on 
 certain side-lights of American public life was a golden 
 opportunity for our journalistic pharisaic cant. This is 
 how one of our most influential weekly journals avails 
 itself of it (July 8, 1882): "We may hope for other 
 novels from the author of ' Democracy,' but it is scarcely 
 possible that he will outdo the excellence of what is 
 apparently a first attempt in fiction, a book in which he 
 unpacks his heart, and smiles bitterly over the latest and 
 greatest disappointment of human hopes and dreams." 
 Oh indeed ! It would be interesting to know whether, 
 within the range of " human hopes and dreams," the 
 hopes and dreams of this weekly journal are supposed 
 to be comprised. The Americans can afford to smile 
 " pityingly" (the author of " Democracy " is said to smile 
 "bitterly") at this unique bit of cant. They might
 
 92 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 point to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, and Manchester, 
 and ask us if the lower classes of those towns are a 
 sample of the realization of our oligarchic hopes and 
 dreams. Might they not ask us to wash a little of the 
 dirt of those towns off our hands before preaching to 
 others ? 
 
 The Times of October 25, 1883, had the following, in 
 reference to the Chilian peace proposals : " Any termina- 
 tion of such a struggle will be welcomed ; but whether it 
 was worth while, for the sake of some guano and some 
 nitrate, to carry on for all these years an internecine 
 struggle is a question that may be left to the consciences 
 of the combatants." 
 
 Oh indeed ! the responsibility of a struggle, during 
 which a small but strong community fought for its very 
 existence against overwhelming odds, without breaking a 
 single international engagement, is to be left according 
 to the Times to the consciences of the combatants. 
 Why not have left it at once to the consciences of our 
 spiritual lords? If the Frenchman was right who laid it 
 down that hypocrisy is the homage vice renders to virtue, 
 surely it ought to be reserved for an Englishman to give 
 us an immortal aphorism to define cant. In expectation 
 of a better definition, we venture to style it the apotheosis 
 of the white lie in the land, which, above all others, prides 
 itself on its truthfulness.
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 93 
 
 III. 
 
 Our cant is not always a backstair, sneaking vice ; for, 
 though it never disdains to strike in the dark, yet it can 
 be as boldly aggressive and vicious in broad daylight as 
 the mad fury of any South Sea Islander. But aggressive- 
 ness is not always to the purpose. There are instances 
 when cant shows itself by the masterly inactivity of 
 silence. For instance, when Gambetta died, it was 
 natural for the Times to pass over in silence the subject 
 of his mistress's presence at the death-bed scene, 
 although to report the filthiest details of divorce cases 
 for consumption at the British breakfast-table was quite 
 another matter. But then cant, like certain animals, 
 has a predilection for its own effluvia; and the Times 
 has long had a name for canting inconsistency before it 
 developed into its latest stage of senility. 
 
 But neither intellectual senility nor moral elasticity 
 mean necessarily loss of power to injure or to harm ; 
 and the influence of the Times, if not as great as in the 
 Crimean days, is still powerful even when it chooses to 
 be silent. 
 
 The expansion of the telegraph has introduced a new 
 feature into our journalism, namely that of quoting 
 foreign press opinion often wrongly termed public 
 opinion on every passing phase of our own insular 
 political life. Herein the masterly inactivity of silence
 
 94 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 is often illustrated by the manner in which our papers 
 pass over and ignore an opinion that does not fit in with 
 the one they themselves profess. And when a foreign 
 opinion is quoted that happens to add weight to our own, 
 another form of the suppressio veri is often perpetrated by 
 the intentional omission to qualify its value, by stating 
 what section of opinion it represents a point on which 
 the middle classes are invariably perfectly ignorant. 
 Quoting foreign opinion at all is an anachronism to the 
 imperial mind, swayed by the conscious civis Romanus 
 sum. And yet we cant about a foreign-paid press, an un- 
 representative press, a fettered press, and what not. As if 
 our own organs were not invariably owned by wealthy 
 individuals, who see that they pay, and that they repre- 
 sent the opinions of those that enable them to make 
 them pay. And as for fetters, it may sometimes be a 
 matter of regret that we are unfettered to the extent of 
 having full liberty to make ourselves ridiculous, if not 
 contemptible. In some respects even the Russian press 
 has great advantages over our own. Not being yet 
 blessed with our feverish hunger for the latest news, it 
 culls its information more gradually, and having little 
 journalistic initiative of its own, it impartially reproduces 
 the best press matter of other countries. By that means, 
 a far greater impartiality of judgment is attained ; and 
 not being in a hurry, that judgment is not so likely to 
 be coloured with the excitement of the hour, as our own.
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 95 
 
 These advantages were very apparent during the late 
 war scare. Every hour of the day brought us some news 
 of our own warlike preparations ; and what matter they 
 supplied us with to rant and to threaten. We really 
 worked ourselves up into believing we were frightening 
 the Russians ! Anybody who read the Russian papers at 
 the time would have soon had that notion dispelled. 
 Not by their vying with our vulgarity; no, by very 
 different indications : by their quiet, sober, and earnest 
 tone. Hardly had the war-cloud drifted into sight, when 
 the most influential inhabitants of Moscow met together 
 and agreed to subscribe an enormous sum we forget the 
 exact amount, but it was many million pounds sterling 
 to help the white Czar to defend the interest of Holy 
 Russia ! No, you blustering printer's-ink heroes, you 
 will not frighten Russia. You have ceased to think you 
 could frighten the United States, and the sooner you 
 realise the fact that you will never frighten Russia the 
 better. Neither is it in the true interests of this great 
 people that our press should be able to frighten other 
 nations. Those qualities that make our strength, and 
 would eventually bid those pause who sought to intrench 
 on our rights, are hardly represented in our press. 
 
 IV. 
 
 But if our press is hardly able to bully great rival 
 powers, it is most apt in making and marring our own
 
 96 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 history. In fact, it has had the making of it a little too 
 much of late. That it should have a potent voice in 
 shaping our home policy is, perhaps, but natural and un- 
 avoidable from the small amount of serious, independent, 
 and, above all, unprejudiced thought of the middle 
 classes. But it does far more than that : it designates 
 our heroes for us, and tells us when and where and to 
 whom to bow down in all the walks of our national 
 life. 
 
 The Times of July, 1885, mentioning the death of Dr. 
 Moberly, the Bishop of Salisbury, tells us there are seven 
 of that name in the Church, and notes it as a proof of 
 the culture of the Moberlys. But the Church supplies 
 comparatively few instances for hero-making ; its best 
 men have achieved their popularity in spite of the press 
 only, when too late, to be grudgingly recognized. We 
 name Bishop Fraser and Dean Alford. 
 
 The navy and army militant, the diplomatic service, 
 and the parliamentary arena provide the legitimate scope 
 for our press effusiveness to vent itself. The last twenty 
 years have been devoted to this work, and with results 
 that become daily more vulgar and disastrous. 
 
 The navy in this, as in other matters, has come off 
 second-best ; the naval heroes our press has crammed 
 down the throat of our middle classes are few and far 
 between ; but our army has supplied the press with endless 
 opportunities of exercising its baneful influence. The
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 97 
 
 special war correspondent, as a historiographer, is a 
 peculiar innovation of our time, and a godsend to the 
 eager middle classes. For when the fight is done, our 
 press emissaries don evening-dress and, armed with 
 copious notes and a glass of water, proceed to Exeter 
 or St. James's Hall, to let us " have it." Then it is that 
 the mission of these gentlemen is made manifest, and, to 
 the ecstasy and applause of the audience, it is informed 
 where to apportion blame or praise. Note the murmur 
 of canting surprise when our own special unctuously tells 
 his audience that the biscuits were rotten, the bayonets 
 wouldn't perforate the niggers, and the cartridges wouldn't 
 go off! 
 
 Lord Chelmsford was described at Ulundi as the storm- 
 directing power, until crackled up and gently eclipsed on 
 his return home, by a public who, for once, would have 
 none of him. Lord Wolseley in Egypt was the object of 
 the canting solicitude of our press, ami with what results 
 we fairly know by this time. The same game was 
 attempted with Sir Frederick Roberts in Afghanistan, 
 with what results we equally know. He would have none 
 of them, and the moral is duly pointed. Sir Garnet 
 Wolseley has been written up into the House of Lords ; 
 Sir Frederick Roberts is Sir Frederick Roberts still. 
 And we can be thankful that he has been allowed to 
 remain with us still ; too few men of that stamp these 
 times call forth. The influences at work, like a sirocco 
 
 H
 
 98 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 wind, are too baneful not to vitiate all but the strongest 
 natures. 
 
 It is not only that our press, cantingly assuming the 
 role of representing the vox populi vox Dei, makes our 
 heroes for us, it is worse by far to note that these said 
 heroes do not wear. 
 
 For years, as we have seen already, the Times pointed 
 to Lord Derby as the coming man the man who was to 
 harmonize the feelings of the Stanleys of old with the 
 requirements of our utilitarianism of to-day ; and what a 
 mistake that has shown itself to be. That almost belongs 
 to ancient history now, for it has been eclipsed so 
 completely by recent attempts of a similar nature. Lord 
 Derby at least represented the decorum of a great name 
 and position. It was reserved for our time to discover 
 political genius in a manifestation of aristocratic im- 
 pertinence allied to tame vulgarity. Lord Randolph 
 Churchill is essentially the enfant gdte of our press, that 
 is willing to pay tribute to qualities in the son of a duke, 
 that would have ruined the chances of fifty men of talent 
 of humbler descent. That there are elements in our 
 midst that are only too willing to admire the prize-fighter 
 instincts (though exercised under conditions that pre- 
 clude the possibility of their coming suddenly to grief) of 
 an aristocratic ranter may be admitted, but our press has 
 intensified an admiration that our middle classes were 
 too vulgar to be proof against. To vilify your opponents
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 
 
 99 
 
 to appeal to every vulgar instinct of the community, to 
 trample down every consideration that could weigh with 
 true culture without contributing one generous or genial 
 idea of your own, such is the road to political success as 
 taught by the career of Lord Randolph Churchill with 
 the patronage of our press. 
 
 Side by side with the above, how refreshing appears 
 the platonic admiration of our type-leaders for Sir Staf- 
 ford Northcote of old. It evidences that reverence for 
 social rank that bids, as we are assured, the most violent 
 radical to uncover in the presence of a lord. It is an 
 instinct that has been dwelt upon by every satirist 
 from Fielding down to Thackeray. But when it took 
 the form of listening to poor Sir Stafford Northcote's 
 platitudes in the hope of discovering something coherent 
 in them, it was at least harmless. Much more so than 
 the sneering references of some of our papers to the 
 humble social station of some members of the late 
 Parliament, an idea that has been feverishly laid hold of 
 by our middle classes. And yet the Standard, perhaps 
 dimly conscious of previous fears of what evils the day 
 might have brought forth, presents the following glow- 
 ing reference to the new Parliament in its number of 
 December 12, 1885 : 
 
 " We are now in a position to compare the materials 
 of which the new House of Commons is composed with 
 those of its immediate predecessors. It need not shun
 
 ioo CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 the contrast ; for, in spite of those prophets of evil who 
 tell us that every enlargement of the Constituencies must 
 necessarily lower the quality of the representatives 
 returned by them, we think it is impossible to maintain 
 that the Parliaments elected after 1867 were worse than 
 those that went before, or that the House of Commons 
 of to-day is inferior to those which flourished before the 
 last Reform Bill Taken man by man, we should say 
 that the House of Commons of 1885 is a better one, on 
 the whole, than the House of Commons of 1880. We 
 observe no infusion of those elements of violence and 
 ignorance which were anticipated by the alarmists. The 
 rural constituencies have shown no partiality for any 
 worse type of candidate than has hitherto been favoured 
 by the urban ones. There has been no revolution in 
 the materiel of the Popular Chamber. What it was 
 before, it is still," etc. 
 
 Surely we must be grateful that, whilst we are buoyed 
 up with the hope of progressing, we are allowed the 
 certainty of not retrograding. As in the army so in our 
 diplomatic service ; when one of our representatives does 
 his work half-way creditably, our press begins to cant 
 about his tact and ability, till he not only receives 
 some mark of royal favour, but is passed on from 
 shoulder to shoulder up to the top of the tree. Some- 
 times a serious crisis arrives, calling for exceptional ability 
 in those to whom our interests are entrusted, our press-
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 101 
 
 fed mutton looks up to its shibboleth, and it invariably 
 turns out to be an overrated article. Such is the process 
 we continually witness going on in our midst. 
 
 When our press has temporarily tired of making and 
 marring our history for us, it has its moments of reaction. 
 It longs for something tangible to rest its weary brain 
 in contemplating with the certainty of making no mis- 
 take. Such a mood must have produced the following 
 little bit of cant, culled from the Times in June, 1885, 
 in referring to the parliamentary crisis, when it de- 
 lightedly exclaims, " how great and active " the power 
 of the Crown has shown itself! The above is almost 
 worthy to be bracketed with the following excerpt of 
 the Daily News, June 29, 1885, referring to Lord Salis- 
 bury's action and motives : " The idea, as we have 
 shown, is the precise opposite of the truth. No doubt 
 Lord Salisbury honestly holds it." Why, of course ! 
 
 V. 
 
 Crabbe says somewhere, "The press is to all men 
 something, and to some men all 'The pity of it, 
 lago.'" Sad enough, if true. For when we come to 
 consider that the bulk of the daily press only produces 
 ephemeral " opinion," which as often as not is found 
 to be worth very little on the morrow, it is truly alarming 
 what an amount of gaseous matter is daily let loose
 
 102 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 upon us under the false flag of knowledge, instruction, 
 and information ! 
 
 In how many instances, where the greatest world- 
 issues were concerned, has the burden of provincial 
 opinion been right, and that of the press of the metro- 
 polis been entirely wrong, as proved by the incontestable 
 logic of events. It was so in the case of the American 
 war more especially when it became a war waged 
 against slavery. The London press, with a few excep- 
 tions " Abdiels, faithful found amid the faithless "- 
 boldly declared for Southern interests and Southern 
 claims. The "Thunderer" specially had to execute one 
 of its most surprising manoeuvres in the art of trimming 
 and turning right round, and in the process it cooed 
 as gently as any sucking dove. But that alone would 
 not have mattered much ; we have eaten our own words 
 too often for the meal to disagree with us ; far worse 
 was the result. Our moneyed class and our money 
 market were influenced by our London press, and, as 
 fast as we got rid of the depreciated greenbacks, they 
 were bought up by the clear-headed Frankfort Jews, by 
 every continental hotel boots and chambermaid who 
 had any savings to invest. The consequence was that 
 our press ignorance cost us millions, for to John Bull 
 what he misses making is so much money lost ! That 
 touches him if nothing else will. 
 
 But we are less concerned with the ignorance of our
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 103 
 
 press, and the ignorance of those that believe in it, than 
 with its cant. 
 
 Our watchdog of civilization never believed in the 
 Suez Canal till it was an accomplished fact. Suddenly 
 it became alive to the supreme importance of that water- 
 way to India, and has ranted about it in and out of 
 season. Just as suddenly it came to find out that the 
 sinking of a single dredger may make it totally useless 
 for months. 
 
 In 1870, almost all the London press, except the 
 Daily News, was on the wrong side, particularly the 
 Standard and the Morning Post, the two latter being 
 now foremost as toadies to Prince Bismarck, as they 
 were before 1870 on their knees to Napoleon III. The 
 fulsome article of the Morning Post on the recall of 
 Count Miinster from London, may be said to be the 
 climax of its vagaries. The hypocrisy and duplicity of 
 our press is equal to its ignorance. 
 
 Perhaps the most stupendous instance of daring press 
 cant ever published were the Pall Mall Gazette revela- 
 lations of Modern Babylon. It was stupendous in its 
 audacity and in the baneful character of its results. It 
 was, lastly, unique in being perpetrated under the lying 
 banner of warfare against cant. In scattering filth over 
 the breadth of the land, it caused a wave of unhealthy 
 gush, the indirect effects of which will not be effaced in 
 this generation. It was bad enough to have to stand
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 by and behold a newspaper literally living on sen- 
 sationalism, cantingly lifting its eyes to heaven and 
 asking us to take it au serieux as the stable-cleansing 
 Hercules of the period ! It was bad enough to have 
 to admit that the state of our laws could be amended 
 by such means ; but it was worst of all to think that 
 the paper in question had succeeded in befooling and 
 enlisting the sympathies of so many honorable men 
 and women, and had thus given colour to a belief in the 
 austere purity of its motive, instead of its being stamped 
 as what it really was sensational cant of the most 
 malignant description. 
 
 Publicity is our panacea. We have witnessed an 
 evening paper shock every sense of decency, under 
 the plea of fighting against the cant of our supposed 
 virtue, and, in the process, drift into practising the cant 
 of our supposed vice ! But we have not yet noticed an 
 influential newspaper start an agitation for the suppres- 
 sion of the publication of the details of indecent divorce 
 cases. Our press prefers to dedicate half-a-dozen 
 columns daily to such matters when it has the chance, 
 and, in conclusion, to wind up with Pecksniffian lamen- 
 tations, that its duty to the public should have imposed 
 such a sacrifice to its feelings. If our press were sincere, 
 it could as easily unite not to publish indecent trial 
 reports, as it unites not to give an opinion on a pending 
 case. It could do that as easily as some newspapers
 
 CANT IN THE PRESS. 105 
 
 decline to publish complaints against railway companies 
 and other vested interests that advertise largely in their 
 columns. 
 
 If our press be sincere, why does it not lead the van 
 and tell us every morning that the sale of clerical 
 advowsons is a disgrace to Christianity ? If our press 
 be sincere, why does it not tell us, in and out of season, 
 that our leasehold system and our land laws will lead 
 to revolution unless altered? that our barristers being 
 allowed to retain fees for work no law can compel them 
 to perform, is a disgrace to our civilization ? Why are 
 we not told the truth, namely that intelligent Americans 
 and continentals know the above-mentioned facts, and 
 laugh and sneer at our stupidity, and at the cant that 
 leads us along blindfolded, but grinning? 
 
 No ; a leading paper, commenting on a royal 
 marriage, prefers to tell us that, whatever the pecu- 
 liarities (delightful !) of Englsh life, nobody who has 
 once become accustomed to it cares to live elsewhere ! 
 
 That is easily explainable, quite apart from the known 
 gullibility of the many. English life particularly its 
 social aspect is intensely artificial, and it is a well- 
 known fact that no tastes are so persistent and enduring 
 as artificial ones. 
 
 The fourth estate revels in its liberty, and continually 
 tells us -that in that liberty our progress is indissolubly 
 bound up. It forgets to inform us that liberty is but
 
 io6 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 a means and not an end ; and if the means are mis. 
 applied, the end can but come in the shape of disaster 
 and disgrace. 
 
 But our press only manifests, in more marked features, 
 what may be noted elsewhere in other countries with 
 similar results. 
 
 What a part the American press played in hounding 
 the North against the South. Who breasted the waves 
 of angry passions and made the reconciliation after the 
 war one of the most unique instances of statesmanlike 
 wisdom in history ? The great characters of the war 
 such as Grant, Sherman, Seward, and others. 
 
 Who hurried the French into their 1870 catastrophe? 
 In a large measure the Paris press, which is keeping 
 the dying embers of hate ablaze now with the breath of 
 revenge. 
 
 The same may be seen, under different circumstances, 
 in almost every country. Who intensifies the angry pas- 
 sions of the hour ? The press. Therefore we are led to 
 believe that if it were thoroughly understood that, should 
 a war break out, those journalists who had advocated 
 war would be "pressed," and driven in front among the 
 sharpshooters' skirmishing columns ; if that could be 
 done, we venture to say that the millennium, as far as 
 " universal peace " may be thus termed, would have 
 dawned.
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 
 
 " I like expressions when they come plainly from the heart, and 
 are not strained nor affected." OLIVER CROMWELL. 
 
 I. 
 
 LORD PALMERSTON is reported to have said, " The people 
 of England participate in the government of the country 
 by reading the Times" 
 
 Lord Palmerston did not cant ; neither does Prince 
 Bismarck, although he has a keen perception of what 
 it consists in, as the following remarks of his in reference 
 to our form of government may serve to prove : 
 
 " The basis of so-called constitutional government is 
 that clever phrase invented by the English aristocracy 
 for the purpose of consolidating its own power after the 
 great Revolution : the king can do no wrong ; but if 
 the king can do no wrong, it can only be because the 
 king can do nothing. To close the sovereign's mouth 
 to make him (or her) a weapon for the maintenance of
 
 io8 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 the dominion of aristocracy ; to keep him out of sight, 
 to prevent him from becoming too powerful, by interposing 
 between him and his subjects ; thus has been the policy, 
 and to-day the English people imagine that it is above 
 Queen Victoria. All this, from the aristocratic point of 
 view, is a clever arrangement," etc. 
 
 Walter Bagehot, in his work on the British Constitu- 
 tion, dwells at length on the power of the sovereign 
 versus a parliamentary majority, and regrets that such 
 power, to be of any good, would have to be wielded by 
 rulers of such exceptional qualities as are hardly likely 
 to be found in hereditary royal families. He evidently 
 thinks, in contradiction to Prince Bismarck, that the 
 power of the sovereign is a reality, though fortunately 
 nowadays, seldom exercised. 
 
 Now, whatever difference of opinion there may be as 
 to the political power of the sovereign, there can be no 
 doubt of the immense political and social power still 
 wielded in this country by that comparatively small 
 minority, which we will take the liberty of styling our 
 oligarchy, popularly called the upper ten thousand. They 
 form the basis and nucleus of our governing middle 
 classes, and in the present time are more than ever 
 engaged in bolstering up each other against the assaults 
 from without of the newly enfranchised masses. 
 
 But one of the newest tenets of cant is to deny this, 
 as up till quite recently it used to be one of the most
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 109 
 
 glorious war-horses of middle-class cant to praise up 
 parliamentary government as a panacea for everything ! 
 But, then, up till quite recently, that " everything " meant 
 in its results the clipping of aristocratic political influence 
 in the country for the benefit of the plutocratic middle 
 classes. Now that parliamentary government in its 
 latest development means the rising to the surface of the 
 unthinking and unreading, at the expense of the aris- 
 tocracy, and particularly of the middle classes, we hear 
 less of parliamentary patent medicines. 
 
 Now, whereas we readily see the true position of the 
 different classes of other countries, we cantingly affect 
 to ignore the ruling-class character of our own, at the 
 same time bowing down and toadying socially to an" 
 aristocracy like no free community under the sun. But, 
 then, we are not "free" in the word's truest and noblest 
 meaning. For what is the value of freedom to him who 
 knows not how to use it ? It is as if we were to declare 
 that the deaf are at liberty to attend Mr. Bradlaugh's 
 lectures, or the blind at liberty to look at the Queen, or, 
 to put it even more plainly, we may give the following 
 anecdote : On the accession to the throne of the Czar, 
 Alexander II., the state prisons were thrown open. 
 Among those set free was an old white headed man, who 
 had been confined in a prison cell for over half-a-century. 
 But when he came to use his freedom, it was discovered 
 that the totterin? old man had become a mere automaton.
 
 no CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 After having paced his cell backwards and forwards 
 for fifty years, when set at liberty he was only able to 
 walk three steps mechanically forwards, and three back- 
 wards. Thus it is with us. We have been in social 
 bondage for so many generations, that we are as yet 
 hardly able to do more than our three steps forwards 
 and our three steps backwards, notwithstanding ballot- 
 boxes and extended franchise. The poor old Russian 
 officer died in a few days : freedom killed him. Luckily 
 we are still alive, and with us it can only be a question 
 of time to use our freedom and extend it and consolidate 
 it, either violently or gradually by moral pressure only. 
 But, of course, we do not admit the foregoing. We 
 should not be canting nineteenth-century Britons if we 
 did. We bow down before nobody except our superior 
 selves, like the Spaniard who was afraid of nobody but 
 his own terrible person in the looking-glass. 
 
 Some of our clearest minds have now and then shown 
 remarkable shrewdness in gauging the state of social 
 and political helplessness in which we still are. The 
 late Lord Derby anxiously styled the process of extending 
 the franchise and "dishing the Whigs" [1867] a leap 
 in the dark ; but Mr. Disraeli strenuously surmised, that 
 the extension of the franchise was as likely to benefit 
 the Tories as the Whigs. Facts have since proved him 
 to have been not far wrong; yet, notwithstanding, we 
 have to-day [1886] our whole Liberal press exulting
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 
 
 over the new extension of the franchise, and the Con- 
 servative press as unanimous in fear as a herd of 
 frightened sheep huddled together, at the prospect of 
 the leverage of political power going against them. It 
 were in reality a far greater danger for the Tories to 
 teach the already enfranchised multitude to respect 
 themselves and to think, than to enfranchise a new social 
 stratum, to which it may take generations to teach the 
 rudiments of thought. In the mean time, it seems to 
 us just as likely that the masses might become a weapon 
 in the hands of a Beaconsfield as in those of a Gladstone 
 or of a Chamberlain. Lord Sherbrooke, in characteristic 
 style, lately deplored that we were no longer governed by 
 the classes of culture and refinement. Some people may 
 think that the classes referred to have had the exclusive 
 right of governing us long enough, and proved them- 
 selves unequal, if not unworthy, to monopolise the task 
 any longer. But nobody can deny that our ruling classes 
 are still likely to exercise an unproportionate social, and 
 consequently also political, power, for many a long day 
 to come, notwithstanding Mr. Matthew Arnold's affect- 
 ing gospel of "Sweetness and Light." The spot of 
 blood in the race the cringing before our social superiors, 
 that has been matured for a thousand years, and more 
 than ever since the Georgian era of Protestant halo 
 is not eradicated by an Act of Parliament, nor by fifty 
 Acts of Parliament ; nor is it, perhaps, desirable that it
 
 ii2 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 should be so. Still some of us may wish that we could 
 be a little quicker in taking to what is good in our time 
 without casting away what was sterling in the past But 
 that is neither here nor there. Our contention is two- 
 fold, namely that our social and political character is 
 still, out of all proportion to our written institutions, 
 aristocratic, and that, instead of seeing it and admitting 
 it, we cantingly try to make ourselves and others believe 
 that it is not so. 
 
 II. 
 
 It is a dangerous thing to dogmatize on politics. If 
 you are dissatisfied with the present, you are a deplor- 
 able pessimist. If, besides being dissatisfied with the 
 present, you dare to hope for the future, you are a 
 radical optimist with a low moral standard ! If you are 
 a man of strong feelings, you are liable to be told you 
 are one of those vicious beings who would set class 
 against class. As if class had not been "dead set" 
 " above " class since time immemorial. Your hopes for 
 the future are cantingly characterized as wild generali- 
 zations of everything having been wrong in the past ; 
 you are credited with a blind belief in the divine wisdom 
 of majorities, etc., ad absurdam. 
 
 And yet, if you are not of a type to be easily fright- 
 ened and put out of countenance by adverse criticism,
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. n 3 
 
 you may feel inclined to take up the challenge, and 
 boldly ask yourself and others : Have not many things 
 been iniquitious in the past ? are not many things 
 wrong still, that might be righted in the present and 
 future, whether by a mutton-like majority, or by one 
 ruling mind like Bismarck, who cares ? 
 
 You might further ask : Did the possession of land 
 in the past involve obligations on the owner, of which 
 he has rid himself, and placed them on the shoulders 
 of the community, or did it not ? 
 
 Has class legislation and the aristocratic source and 
 character of our Protestant creed intensified the isolation 
 and misery of our humble class, or has it not ? Or, to 
 wind up with a question slightly out of the sphere of 
 insular politics, and therefore more likely to be judged 
 free of cant : Were the Germans wrong to allow their 
 country to supply the battle-fields of Europe for two 
 centuries ? And are they right now to let others break 
 their heads any where they like, only not on German 
 soil, or are they still wrong? If they are right, why 
 will not cant frankly admit it, although the result has 
 been achieved in face of the opposition of our glorious 
 fetish Parliamentarianism ? And yet our upper and 
 middle classes sympathized madly with France, though 
 they have since cantingly recanted. Need we point to 
 the wretched fudge of our press at the time of the 
 annexation of Alsace and Lorraine ? What did the Times
 
 ii4 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 know of the legitimate aspirations of a people struggling 
 for very life, and hurling back an enemy that had chosen 
 its battle-field on German soil for centuries, and left 
 ineffaceable memories of fire and sword ? 
 
 But we are diverging from our subject. Our aristocracy, 
 in alliance with our rich middle classes and the clergy, 
 by opposing every innovation, every concession to de- 
 mocracy, and in the end with cautious cant accepting 
 the inevitable and preparing to oppose, tooth and nail, 
 the next instalment of concessions demanded by the 
 times, the majority of our ruling class had always repre- 
 sented the vis inertia of Conservatism ; and it may be 
 asked whether humanity at least the English portion of 
 it would not have been better off, if, for instance, the 
 aristocracy had not been endowed with that canting 
 cautious foresight it invariably possessed at critical 
 moments, and had rushed headlong into a cataclysm, 
 out of which it would have emerged, phoenix-like, as 
 harmless for evil, as the French nobility of to-day. But 
 it was not to be ; and we continue to wage war against 
 political cant in all its panoply of pride, and ruling- 
 class power, until further notice. 
 
 Our legislators were moved by a very shrewd and 
 true instinct when they showed their contempt of the 
 Jesuits by tolerating them in our midst They could 
 not be dangerous to the debased and callous poorer 
 classes ; and as for the well-dressed multitude, why, the
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 115 
 
 people, or rather the Church, that could produce men 
 like Samuel Wilberforce and other clerical luminaries, 
 need fear no rivalry in the casuistic arts, not even from 
 the general of the Jesuits himself. 
 
 The slippery Whiggism, represented by a Samuel 
 Wilberforce, is a powerful political weapon, and has 
 more to do with the miscarriage of all reform than the 
 most acrid opposition of fairly frightened Tory land- 
 lords. Yes, as the miller told Frederick the Great, " there 
 are still judges in Berlin ; " so we can still boast of a 
 few episcopal lights, the very creme de la creme of the 
 hierarchical staff, who need not fear Jesuitical comparison. 
 And this, notwithstanding that they no longer show that 
 militant aggressive ferocity, to be without which is, ac- 
 cording to an eminent writer, a sign of the decay of a 
 Church. Our hierarchy may indeed be incapable of 
 firing a nation to martyrdom, or, like Peter of Amiens, 
 initiating a crusade, but it still holds good as the guar- 
 dian of Anglo-Saxon cant and hypocrisy. 
 
 III. 
 
 Lord Randolph Churchill, having been proclaimed 
 the coming man by an enlightened press, visits India. 
 On his return he is ready to indict the colonial policy of 
 the empire ; ready to hurl invective and slander at the 
 Government, and is reported to have been effusively
 
 n6 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 shaken by the hand by Mr. Gladstone. Middle-class cant 
 glories in such a spectacle of political warfare, being so 
 loftily removed from personal animosity, such as exists in 
 other countries ! As the Globe neatly puts it on another 
 occasion : " English politicians have not yet acquired 
 that personal malignity which a few days ago influenced 
 a notorious (how choice !) Parnellite member (cant pre- 
 scribes the term ' honorable member,' not notorious) to 
 rejoice openly at Mr. Forster's sufferings. The fight has 
 to be fought, and some hard and harsh things will, no 
 doubt (how deplorable), be said before the new Parlia- 
 ment is created. But we do not believe (incredulous 
 'we') that amid the whole turmoil on this side of 
 St. George's Channel, a single voice will be raised in 
 rejoicing at the serious illness of a political antagonist. 
 These ferocities have no place, as yet, in English poli- 
 tics, and we devoutly trust they never may." And yet 
 this very political engine applauded the idea of the 
 resources of civilization not being exhausted, when Mr. 
 Parnell and other honourable members were clapped into 
 jail like common malefactors. 
 
 In politics, it will always be found more advantageous 
 to snub our privileged classes than to make advances to 
 them. Bismarck could never gain a grin from us till 
 he had snubbed us. Lord Beaconsfield sneered at them, 
 and lived to lead them like sheep. In gratitude, now that 
 he is dead, he is looked up to by them with veneration.
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 117 
 
 Yes, when Lord Beaconsfield died, there passed one of 
 those few men who did not take kindly or aptly to cant 
 (partly explainable, perhaps, by the fact of descending 
 from a race which is clever at almost every thing but 
 that). Thereupon great canting expectation of the 
 middle classes, what his famous rival would say in the way 
 of a tribute to his memory. And Mr. Gladstone, though 
 seemingly hesitating at first, did not disappoint their 
 longing. He gave a fervent assurance of his delightful, 
 lifelong, personal friendship with Lord Beaconsfield ! 
 What an opportunity for the crocodile tears of the middle 
 classes ! When Lasker died, Bismarck had few kind 
 words to say of his late opponent. It may not be nice, 
 but it was honest. 
 
 Now, there can be little doubt that, besides the ex- 
 plainable hatred of the governing classes for Mr. Glad- 
 stone, as the most dangerous enemy of them and their 
 privileges, no small amount of the hatred of which he is 
 the object can be traced to his having rightly or wrongly 
 created the impression that he is an adept in the art of cant. 
 That would account both for hatred and envy; for there is 
 no denying that there are individuals among our aristocracy 
 that do not stoop to cant Some, perhaps, on ethical 
 grounds ; others doubtless because they have been born 
 and bred to stoop to nothing, except to gratify their own 
 whims and fancies ; and some because they do not possess 
 the art of practising it, even if they tried : hence the envy.
 
 u8 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 In Mr. Gladstone we see some of those great qualities 
 that enabled the English aristocracy to break the power 
 of Napoleon I. ; but we also detect some of the weak- 
 nesses that mark its decay in the present day. Those who 
 believe in the lessons of physiognomy will not be slow 
 to trace a certain likeness in his features to those of 
 Lord Granville, and notably to those of the late lamented 
 Samuel Wilberforce, Bishop of Winchester, both past- 
 masters in the art an ominous indication of a talent 
 for cant ! But the possession of a talent does not always 
 imply a readiness to practise it, and thus proof of ability 
 would not in this case necessarily mean guilt of com- 
 mission ! But if not directly and personally, then in- 
 directly by the action of his lieutenants, Mr. Gladstone 
 has stood more than once dangerously near the suspicion 
 of gross and clumsy political cant and intrigue. The 
 first mission of Mr. Errington to Rome, in order to gain 
 the ear of the Pope against the Home Rulers, was none 
 the less a canting, doubtful trick, though it failed so dis- 
 astrously. That idea was worthy of having been sug- 
 gested to the late government by a London evening 
 paper, as so many other of their disastrous political 
 moves undoubtedly have been ! 
 
 Mr. Errington's second fruitless attempt in that direc- 
 tion to thwart the appointment of Dr. Walsh to the 
 see of Dublin was about as dirty a trick as was ever 
 undertaken in party politics, which is saying a good
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 119 
 
 deal. The Pecksniffian Protestant Jesuitism, which 
 would fain have crushed out a popular Catholic wish, 
 lying all the time in the House of Commons, was 
 enough to make the hardiest Neapolitan or Levantine 
 blush. Why not openly adopt at once that much- vilified 
 Jesuitic axiom, "the end justifies the means"? It 
 certainly has the advantage of pregnant lucidity and 
 frankness advantages difficult to overrate. 
 
 How delightful by contrast to think of Lord Palmerston 
 and his blunt declaration already alluded to, that the 
 English people participated in the government of the 
 country by reading the Times (the London evening 
 papers had evidently not risen to their present position 
 in his time). 
 
 The serene impartiality of young Disraeli also demands 
 a word of recognition his ingenuous freedom from any 
 casuistic scruples or bias at the outset of his political 
 career that impartiality which bade the Duke of Rut- 
 land of the time warn his sons to beware of him ! And 
 how the Liberals and Radicals of our time have been told 
 to see the "cause of all evil" in those sardonic sharp- 
 cut features, which seemed to reflect so small an opinion 
 of those around him ! And yet who to-day would care 
 to deny that Lord Beaconsfield was a great individuality, 
 and, be our political opinions what they may, that he 
 was a great controlling political power, a man of the 
 governing type, a born ruler of inferior men ? Neither
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 can there be any doubt that Lord Beaconsfield enjoyed 
 a much larger amount of personal popularity than his 
 opponents cared to avow ; in fact, this is more clearly 
 visible since his death. And who would be prepared to 
 say that a portion of Lord Beaconsfield's popularity was 
 uot owing to his freedom from cant ? For the man who 
 frankly told us all, that he had to educate his party 
 the stupid party; and, later on, openly sneered at the 
 " exuberant verbosity " of his opponent, was not likely to 
 condescend to cant ! 
 
 Many people have professed to find a certain similarity 
 between Lord Randolph Churchill and the late Lord 
 Beaconsfield. It would seem to us that the points of 
 dissimilarity between these two politicians far outweigh 
 any points of likeness. And yet we are almost inclined 
 to think that there is a slight likeness between the two, 
 if only in the freedom from cant of the former. It is 
 true Lord Randolph Churchill is the son of a Duke, and 
 has done things that only the son of a great noble dare 
 do, still in this freedom from cant, in these reckless 
 assertions, which scorn the trouble of giving proofs, 
 which laugh at the flattest contradictions, lies hidden an 
 unfailing popularity. For there are many among us who 
 hate cant so thoroughly, that they will forgive a man 
 almost any tergiversation, contradiction, not to say non- 
 sense, if he will only show himself to be free from this 
 one vile insular idiosyncrasy. However, it is only fair to
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 
 
 the community at large to remember, that the scion of a 
 great house has great facilities for drawing attention to 
 his reckless inconsistency of speech, thanks to the 
 press and the toadying character of the community at 
 
 large. 
 
 IV. 
 
 As already instanced, Irish contemporary politics 
 supply endless material to illustrate cant. 
 
 Mr. Parnell whom we were instructed by our edu- 
 cating press, only a short time ago, to consider to be a 
 Celtic bore, a worthy compeer of Mr. Biggar, and a 
 very unworthy successor to the late Mr. Isaac Butt 
 Mr. Parnell has gradually risen to be one of the wire- 
 pullers of the empire. The man we locked up in 
 Kilmainham jail in one of those sham fits of Roman 
 sternness the resources of civilization not being ex- 
 hausted has since developed into the " Premier maker ; " 
 the man whose irresponsible will changes the policy of 
 this world-empire and sends " the people's William " into 
 sudden temporary retirement [1885] ! But British cant 
 did not admit this, though it has since done so, and is 
 still smarting from the blow and sulking over it. And, 
 all said and done, it is too bad ! Mr. Parnell has not 
 even the excuse of being a Catholic. He is a Protestant 
 of the governing classes, who has even accepted a cheque
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 for ^30,000 from the Irish poor, without sacrificing one 
 iota of his popularity or power. But worse than this ; he 
 has more than once outraged conventionality by re- 
 solutely refusing to sacrifice to the British Moloch. 
 This man has ruffled cant as no man of our generation 
 has dared to do ! That would be bad enough, in all 
 conscience, but the worst is, he has been successful in 
 doing so, and seems very likely to be even more suc- 
 cessful in the future. Yet you are still canting about the 
 wicked influences that account for his popularity the 
 intriguing priests that coax the ignorant masses to the 
 ballot box ! Why don't you get your own Protestant 
 priests to coax your own masses to vote in favour of all 
 your vested interests ? 
 
 If we look back and compare Mr. Parnell's work with 
 that of the last great Irish agitator, Daniel O'Connell, 
 we get a fuller estimate of Mr. Parnell's eminence and 
 his mastery of all the arts connected with British state- 
 craft Daniel O'Connell was admittedly a great orator ; 
 he electrified the House of Commons. Our senatorial 
 barbarians (Mr. Matthew Arnold's pet term) were put on 
 their mettle and, of course, outvoted the Celtic enthusiast ! 
 It was a grand sight to see the Irish bull roaring in the 
 excitement of hopeless combat; but it was even a 
 grander sight to behold him in the end securely pinned 
 by the teeth of that tenacious beast, the British bulldog. 
 Mr. Parnell, on the contrary, dislikes the part of the
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 123 
 
 bull ; it doesn't pay ; besides it is slightly loud and vulgar, 
 and sometimes even liable to become ridiculous. Mr. 
 Parnell prefers to let the ruling-class menagerie have its 
 fill of howling and roaring. Now and then a government 
 myrmidon becomes obstreperous if not monotonous in 
 his invective, like the late Mr. Forster, at the time of the 
 Phoenix Park murders, when the sense of propriety of the 
 House seemed to demand a denial of sympathy, or com- 
 plicity with crime. That was an occasion for Parnell, 
 and he availed himself of it by turning on his assailant 
 and venting all his powers of invective on his head. That 
 done, he sat down again without giving the House the 
 assurance it was panting for ! How much more in 
 accordance with British ideas of propriety it would have 
 been if he had met fiery Forster with equally cheap 
 and passionate expressions of detestation of crime and 
 criminals, and the two augurs had afterwards over a 
 friendly glass indulged in mutual congratulations over 
 their oratorial display for the benefit of the British thistle- 
 feeder ! 
 
 Poor eloquent indignant O'Connell presided at mass 
 meetings, ranted about the wrongs of Old Ireland. 
 And our executive looked on, asking for nothing better 
 than a breach of the peace, which would enable it to 
 impeach the Liberator ! Poor Dan collapsed ! He 
 threatened, but dared not strike. Cant only wanted him 
 to try, and as he did not, it rode over him. Parnell
 
 124 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 does not go in for wasting ammunition for useless debate, 
 he quietly hints at what is coming, and goes into the 
 lobby in order to strike the enemy silently under the 
 third rib. And yet you expect the man you have vilified 
 in every key of the political key-board to be anxious to 
 snatch at the olive twig you alternately hold out and 
 pull back ! 
 
 When Charles XII. of Sweden defeated Peter the 
 Great at Narva, the latter is reported to have said that 
 his cousin Charles would ultimately end by showing him 
 " how it was done," and in truth the battle of Pultowa 
 proved the trick had been learnt. Mr. Parnell has been 
 most successful in showing us week after week all the 
 year round "how it is done." It may not be a nice 
 clean game though we should be sorry to declare it is 
 at all an unfair one ; it may not be a game to be played 
 in kid gloves ; but at least it has the one transcendent 
 merit that calls for unstinted admiration : it is a game 
 entirely free from British cant ! 
 
 The Phoenix Park murders, or rather the death of 
 Lord Frederick Cavendish, caused a vacancy in the 
 representation of the West Riding. The noble attitude 
 of the Conservatives, who, with the magnanimity of old 
 Romans were not going to contest the seat, was another 
 delicious bit of cant. A cynic might well have smiled 
 at its shortlivedness ; but it would have been taking 
 Carlyle's estimate of our simplicity a little too literally to
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 125 
 
 expect the Roman attitude to last more than twenty-four 
 hours. And it did not last longer. It lasted just long 
 enough to enable a night's rest to clear the matutinal 
 understanding to allow party politics to unmask all their 
 ugly batteries. Luckily, the West Riding election went 
 to prove that the three-card or confidence tricks, how- 
 ever effective on a race-course or in a back-slum public- 
 house, are not invariably winning games in the politics of 
 the period. 
 
 We all remember the horror of the middle classes at 
 the entry of Mr. Bradlaugh into Parliament. We have 
 some dim recollection of an iconoclastic proposal of his 
 to put a sudden end to the interminable pension list, 
 which is a disgrace to our civilization ; doubly so, when 
 we bear in mind the origin of some of the items ! Of 
 course it was tabooed, but cant has not informed us yet 
 that, since Mr. Bradlaugh's irreverent proposals, over 
 three hundred pensions have been silently and hurriedly 
 commuted. But such are the facts ! 
 
 V. 
 
 The solidarity of the governing class supplies numerous 
 instances of cant. The speaker of the House of Com- 
 mons retires to serener spheres on a pension of ^4000 
 a y ear a larger sum than Prince Bismarck receives for 
 guiding the destinies of the German empire Mr.
 
 126 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Gladstone indulges in a speech of insufferable soft- 
 sawder, eulogizing the lucky pensioner to the skies. 
 
 Sir Thomas Erskine May, after fifty-four years of labour 
 as secretary of the House of Commons, is also trans- 
 ferred to a better place. He had long been considered 
 one of our greatest authorities on parliamentary pro- 
 cedure, but somehow declined to have anything to do 
 with Mr. Gladstone's latest parliamentary measures : in 
 fact, Mr. Gladstone is said to have refrained from even 
 asking him to do so. And yet Mr. Gladstone is the very 
 man who sets himself the task of praising Sir Thomas 
 Erskine May to the skies before his elevation to the 
 House of Lords. The irony of fate was complete when 
 the very measure was defeated with which Sir Erskine 
 May had declined to have anything to do. 
 
 Poor General Gordon whom the ruling-class instinct, 
 led by an hysterical newspaper, sends to the Soudan, 
 where he is first isolated, then " hemmed-in," and finally 
 massacred also finds his panegyrist in Mr. Gladstone, 
 who qualifies him as the " hero of heroes." Cant does not 
 stop to ask, if that superlative figure of speech is to have 
 any meaning, what are we to style Gordon's companions 
 and thousands of others, who had not Gordon's fatalistic 
 belief to fire them to duty and death? Such is the 
 solidarity of the governing class, when ventilated by the 
 gusts of the hour : the ladder of ridicule has no more 
 rungs up which to climb.
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 127 
 
 But there are also instances of freedom from cant, of 
 a contempt for cant, though they are not always of a 
 satisfactory character. 
 
 A change of ministry brings with it an immense dis- 
 posal of patronage, representing perhaps in its money 
 value more than the united patronage of all the govern- 
 ments of Europe put together. In its disposal, our 
 executive is not always troubled with the canting affecta- 
 tion of trying to make the recipient a qualified person 
 for the bestowal of the gift. The division of the spoil 
 by the victors, which we find so reprehensible in the 
 Americans, is represented with us by the division of the 
 spoil among a class. Whether the sop-recipient belong 
 to our party or not is often a matter of secondary im- 
 portance ; the first consideration is, that he belong to our 
 class. If he happen to be in the opposite camp, all the 
 better ; we can tempt him to come over. We can sound 
 him first, and if he be get-at-able, we can offer him place, 
 as he will not care for money ; for it is recognized to be 
 far higher strategy to gain over a few stiff-necked Whigs, 
 than to divide the spoil recklessly among the hard-work- 
 ing party-men of small social influence. Even gratitude, 
 like courage, must be tempered with discretion. 
 
 A man of social position has been knocking a cricket 
 ball about in the colonies ; he must be an authority on 
 the wants and aspirations of our colonists : we make him 
 colonial secretary. Another easy-going man of pleasure,
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 blessed with enormous wealth and an ambitious wife, has 
 been round the world in his own yacht ; he is the man 
 to "fix up" our navy. Another has libelled the Russian 
 Government ; he is the man selected to rule India, and 
 so on. But, according to Mr. Walter Bagehot, a great 
 eulogist of, and authority on, the English Constitution, 
 this is as it should be, for it would be dangerous to have 
 too much talent to rule us ; we have more than enough 
 already. He sees rather an advantage than otherwise 
 in having dummies to preside over our administrative 
 departments, and to change with each change of ministry : 
 it prevents our administration becoming the victim of 
 crotchety earnestness ! 
 
 And yet how grateful the people of these islands are 
 when they get somebody to preside over an administra- 
 tive department who is really qualified for the post. The 
 success and popularity of the late Mr. Fawcett at the 
 Post-office is a striking instance in point. And that, 
 although many of his reforms were nothing more or less 
 than a simple imitation that subtlest flattery of reforms 
 lately introduced in Germany by Dr. Stefan. The latter 
 fact has never been recognized by our press : surprising 
 enough, when we remember that these very innovations 
 were taken from a country which, only two decades ago, 
 was about the most backward in Europe in postal as 
 well as in many other matters. If Mr. Bagehot were 
 alive he might have some difficulty to reconcile the
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 129 
 
 above with his views on administration in general. And 
 yet this is only a straw, where whole haystacks could be 
 blown over to show the direction the wind is taking. 
 We need only mention our army, our navy, in fact, every 
 department in the government. 
 
 But it has long been a characteristic of our race to 
 worship power out of all proportion to intellect ; for we 
 have more affinity with the Romans of old, than with the 
 Greeks who represented the culture of antiquity. The 
 English mind is so impressed with the dignity of position, 
 social or political, that it has little energy left to ask in 
 whose hands it reposes. Yes, notwithstanding Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold's affecting "sweetness and light," it 
 seems that, however much we may be possessed of 
 " sweetness," our middle classes are certainly not 
 possessed of enough righteous " light " to realize the 
 political power the written laws of the country give them; 
 or if they do, they have not the moral courage to use it 
 for the benefit of the community at large. But there are 
 signs in the heavens that the new elements that are 
 coming to the fore to weaken the middle classes will 
 gradually awaken to a more direct care of all our 
 interests. When that takes place, they will gently but 
 determinedly unloosen the grip of a class, and gradually 
 disestablish the present irresponsible method of distribu- 
 tion of political rewards and favours. 
 
 K:
 
 130 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 VI. 
 
 After pointing to the solidarity of the governing 
 classes, as exemplified by the distribution of rewards and 
 the paeans of praise to those who belong to them, it is 
 interesting to note the working of the instinct of self- 
 preservation, when once it is fairly roused. It is interest- 
 ing to note the bitterness of their hatred (and with 
 all our cant no race has ever gone so far in hatred and 
 vilification of its enemies as our own, except, perhaps, 
 the Romans) and the viciousness with which a portion 
 of the press lends expression to it. Let those who care 
 to convince themselves only peruse or try to recall to 
 memory the vicious press attacks and platform accusations 
 levelled against Mr. Gladstone, and, above all, against 
 Mr. Chamberlain, during the last few years. Particularly 
 with regard to the latter, who can forget the foul attempt 
 of press and platform to vilify his personal character ? 
 Yet cant blandly assures us all the year round that Eng- 
 lish public life is supremely removed from the bitter 
 personal animosity so deplorable in other countries. 
 This is all most delightfully interesting, when it goes 
 hand in hand with the usual platform hypocrisy which 
 addresses electors with abject humility, which deplores 
 its own unworthiness, and only asks for confidence in its 
 goodwill only craves for the doglike part of supreme 
 devotion.
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 131 
 
 Compared with the above, something is to be said for 
 old Tory landlords, who went home in coach-and-four, 
 distributed parcels of crisp bank-notes, and told their 
 tenants either to vote according to their bidding or to 
 quit ! And even nowadays there is something to be 
 admired in the frank avowal of a Chaplin or of a Lowther 
 that protection is the only panacea for a languishing 
 agriculture. He who hates cant cannot help sympa- 
 thizing with this freedom from it in the expression of 
 views, though he may not agree with them. 
 
 We believe Sir Rowland Hill for one hated cant. He 
 told the Post-office subordinates that, although he 
 officially subscribed himself as their obedient servant, 
 he was nothing of the sort. But somehow he failed to 
 conciliate ; he was always rubbing against people. Are 
 we, then, to assume, that to conciliate is to cant, and to 
 disdain to do so is to be irreconcilable? 
 
 VII. 
 
 In our foreign policy cant has played us some sad 
 tricks ; sometimes in the form of the vilest gush, which, 
 being an offspring of cant, is often difficult to distinguish 
 from it. 
 
 When the Australian and Canadian contingents came 
 to our assistance in the late Egyptian imbroglio, how we 
 canted and gushed ! The children coming to the rescue
 
 132 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 of the " hemmed-in " mother ; the solidarity of the Eng- 
 lish-speaking race all over the globe ; the enthusiasm of 
 the colonies (that will not let our goods in duty-free, 
 etc.). Anybody with the slightest knowledge of the 
 idiosyncrasies of our colonial population might indeed 
 smile at this. He would be able to give a different 
 version of the fable ; he could tell of a blood tie, which 
 only makes itself felt when it is a question of getting 
 something in return. He could tell of a tie that re- 
 quires the gentlest handling in order that it may not snap 
 asunder. We assume that our colonists are idealists with 
 a vengeance, and even if they were so, instead of being 
 the most sober realists under the sun, our administration 
 would be about the last in the world to feed or foster 
 such a sentiment. If only cant would allow us to cast 
 off our ugly pair of blinkers and see truly, we should 
 soon kick against being treated to such arrant trash as 
 the devotion of our colonies. We should soon see what 
 slight grounds there are to believe that they could ever 
 be induced to assist us in fighting our battles. This 
 would'be all the more desirable, as it would by no means 
 involve the renunciation of our optimistic hopes and 
 dreams; only it might involve our looking in another 
 direction for their realization. If you wish to cant about 
 the cohesion of the Anglo-Saxon race, then look, at least, 
 in a direction where you may find something to base 
 your hopes upon. Look towards the United States.
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. i 33 
 
 The Americans are not likely to be impressed by our 
 game laws, our feudal land-laws with the leasehold 
 system ; they are not likely to become enamoured with 
 us by contemplating our perpetual-pension list, our 
 governing class sinecures, or by hearing of the degrada- 
 tion of the scum of our large cities ; but they love the 
 genius of the English people. They love England as 
 the cradle of their own greatness. Their feelings lean 
 largely towards our history, our literature, our glorious 
 traditions, and that feeling becomes intensified when we 
 behave ourselves in a political sense, and show our- 
 selves from our best side. This feeling, which has been 
 much endangered in the past, has been fostered and 
 strengthened by the democracy of England. 
 
 Our ruling-class power for foreign bluster and bullying 
 has declined considerably of late years. Figuratively 
 speaking, it has shrunk in size and paled in aggressive 
 redness of colour during the last generation. Among the 
 many causes that have contributed to so desirable a result, 
 besides the increase of the Radical party in England, are 
 foremost the growth of two foreign powers notably 
 Germany and the United States. In fact, it is almost 
 refreshing to find a corner in the globe where the influence 
 of that most objectionable of modern bullies, oligarchic 
 England, is not felt. Just a sentence from Washington 
 is usually sufficient to quiet any little uncertainty of 
 temper that may arise from our part towards that quarter.
 
 134 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 And how grateful our oligarchic lions are for a few 
 sympathetic flappings of the wings of the Democratical 
 eagle ! Let us only refer to our smiling press notices on 
 General Grant's British friendly speech in New York in 
 May, 1883. 
 
 The world has lately been far more interested in the 
 movements of the German ambassador in Constantinople 
 than in those of her Britannic Majesty's envoy extra- 
 ordinary. 
 
 The English diplomatic noble is still a very powerful 
 animal, but, fortunately, not quite so powerful as formerly. 
 Of course now, as ever, the English ambassadors abroad 
 are distinguished by their indifference to the wants of 
 those who may be really in need of assistance and pro- 
 tection in a foreign country ; whereas they are never 
 known to be wanting in obsequious attention to any 
 affluent member of our ruling classes who may be passing 
 through the capital they are accredited to. They must 
 keep well in with the powers that be ; for is not ours a 
 popular government, and is not our whole political 
 system built up on the principle of self-help ; meaning 
 helping yourself and your class whenever you have a 
 chance ? For at the root of our oligarchic chauvinism is 
 to be found that personal egotism, which has enlarged 
 its bounds and passed on to the selfishness of the class 
 to which it belongs. The idea of silent duty for its own 
 reward is not one that finds favour with our aristocratic
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 135 
 
 diplomatists any more than with our latest military and 
 naval heroes. 
 
 When one of our ambassadors resigns or dies, we are 
 told, that is to say, our governing class say so, and 
 our press gushingly verifies, that there never was such 
 popularity, such tact and urbanity, such personal influence 
 and political foresight. Witness the necrological press 
 notices recorded of the late Lord Ampthill. Yet, during 
 his ambassadorship, Germany and England were per- 
 petually nagging and drifting towards estrangement Not 
 that he caused it ; still, the fact of such having been the 
 case shows us the fulsome character of his panegyrists. 
 
 The failure of our diplomatists, whether ambassadorial 
 or ministerial, is conspicuous almost whenever they are 
 called upon to act : their old trump-card, threatening 
 to call the fleet, and their general tone, that of clumsy 
 aggressiveness. But the world is gradually growing out of 
 the old Palmerstonian tactics, and has become practical 
 enough to know that an ironclad may be a most interest- 
 ing monster in the water without attracting much atten- 
 tion five miles inland. Lord Lyons, whom the press 
 seems never tired of extolling as the perfect union of 
 aristocratic urbanity and firmness, may have received 
 instructions not to remain in Paris whilst the German 
 armies advanced on that capital in 1870. What would 
 have been the use of having an establishment, French 
 cooks, etc., if there were no longer any guests to be
 
 136 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 catered for? For it was never intended for an English, 
 or even an Irish peer to be inconvenienced by the move- 
 ments of foreign armies. So his excellency left Paris, 
 and the care of our countrymen fell upon the shoulders 
 of the American minister, Mr. Washbourne, who remained 
 at his post right through the siege. Thus it seems that 
 the Americans have a different notion of the duties of a 
 national representative from ours. 
 
 Even comparing our ambassadors with those of 
 European military despotisms, (anglice) like Prussia, we 
 are still struck by the far greater capacity of the latter 
 for endearing themselves to those whose interests they 
 are partly sent to look after. A short time ago (May, 
 1884), Prince Hohenlohe, having been ten years German 
 ambassador in Paris, all the German gymnastic societies, 
 choral unions, and other gatherings among the middle and 
 humble class German colony, spontaneously vied together 
 in doing honour to him. What English mechanic, or 
 English middle-class business man in Paris cares two- 
 pence whether Lord Lyons has been our ambassador 
 ten years or ten days. The only popular demonstration 
 an English ambassador could hope for would be from 
 the ambassadorial tailors and the soiled fringe of the 
 English shabby-genteel colony which dies to be noticed 
 by his excellency ; a few seedy half-pay officers ; the 
 begging English clergy ; and the parvenu tradesmen who, 
 having managed to be presented at Marlborough House,
 
 CANT IN POLITICS. 137 
 
 flee their insular antecedents and hang on to the coat- 
 tails of the ambassadorial staff. It is a most unfortunate 
 fact for us politically, that our diplomatists do not possess, 
 to any marked degree, the very qualities with which 
 our toadying press is constantly crediting them. They 
 bear the impress of that narrowness of sympathy which 
 characterizes the class from which they spring. 
 
 Besides, it must be admitted that our diplomatists 
 have often very difficult work marked out for them. For 
 in cases where bluster will not answer, and we try the 
 unaccustomed method of conciliation and persuasion, 
 we unfortunately have the Russians to deal with. The 
 bland urbanity of a Lord Granville, when trying to 
 prevent the Russians from going to Merv, Herat, or 
 Candahar, is painful. And yet what are we to do unless 
 we can call upon the Russians peremptorily to halt ? 
 That we cannot do ; for our governing classes have an 
 uncomfortable inkling that, for every man we could send 
 against the northern Colossus, the latter could produce 
 a hundred ragamuffins, fit food for powder and shell. It 
 is true we do our best, ostrich-like, to 1 hide our heads 
 from the naked facts of the case, and when they will 
 come before us we try all sorts of consoling reflections. 
 We try to make ourselves believe that native Hindoos, 
 partly officered by Englishmen, would give a good account 
 of any Russians, and similar sophisms. Cant assists us, 
 and we succeed for the time being ; and we will only
 
 138 CONVENTIONAL CANT.- 
 
 hope the day may never come when an awakening may 
 be synonymous with national misfortune and disgrace. 
 
 All in all, things look as if the day was coming when 
 our ambassadors need not, as far as our national interests 
 are concerned, be men of any particular importance. 
 That will be all the more to be deplored, as no other 
 class of men are ever likely to succeed so well in forcing 
 the British lion to get on its legs and cut off its nose to 
 spite its face. 
 
 Other countries have aristocratic diplomatists too, but 
 none go quite so far as we in the appointment and 
 retention of hopeless incapables.
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 
 
 ' ' First, we must consider what we are ; secondly, what we possess ; 
 and thirdly, what we seem." SCHOPENHAUER. 
 
 "Thoughts are but dreams till their effects be tried." SHAKE- 
 SPEARE. 
 
 WE are born and bred in the belief of the unsurpassed 
 excellence of our parliamentary government, and our 
 ingrained Pharisaism assists us a step farther, namely to 
 the conclusion that it is the only form of government 
 worth thinking of, or worth discussion. We have shown 
 elsewhere that this opinion is not quite shared by all who 
 live outside our insular influences; but that affects us 
 little. Cant successfully prevents our attaching much 
 value to the opinions of those who are unfortunate 
 enough not to see things with our eyes. 
 
 We will endeavour to point out, from among ourselves, 
 what can be said against the silent assumption that we 
 are the one chosen people in our form of government.
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 For the spirit of Joshua is ever strong within us, that 
 would bid us ask the Lord to stop the motion of the sun 
 (or, according to our modern version, stop the motion of 
 the earth), in order to enable us to complete the righteous 
 destruction of our enemies. For, like true disciples of 
 the gospel of love, we glory in confounding our enemies, 
 forgetting only too readily that we are often our own 
 worst enemies. 
 
 The cant of politics, of society, as well as that of 
 theory, one and all will tell us, first, that parliamentary 
 government enables us to govern ourselves and decide 
 our policy in the best possible of ways that of the' un- 
 fettered free decision of the majority. Secondly, they 
 will tell us that this majority is supposed to have the 
 political wisdom of the nation at its disposal, by means 
 of its unrivalled acumen in discovering and selecting it 
 
 This sounds very plausible, and yet it is true only in 
 theory ; and what a canting theory it is that calls it true ! 
 
 According to theory, the people make their own will 
 felt and give expression to their own wishes for legisla- 
 tion, which only remain to be carried into effect by their 
 representatives in solemn conclave assembled. According 
 to theory, our wisest and best men are chosen to carry 
 out and give effect to the will of the nation. 
 
 According to fact, taking the last point first, it is not 
 the wisest and best that we select to represent us, but 
 the hardest, the most unabashed, the most able to meet
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 
 
 the vulgar requirements of success under our form of 
 government. Our wisest and best sons have only too 
 often been unable and unwilling to fulfil the conditions 
 required to represent us. Our wisest and best only too 
 often shrink from the conditions of a life that is apt to 
 destroy conscientious conviction instead of fostering it. 
 
 With how little wisdom we are ruled anybody can best 
 see for himself, by skimming the personal memoirs dealing 
 with the politics of the last fifty years, and also by look- 
 ing at random through the columns of our newspapers 
 of twenty or thirty years ago. 
 
 In order to form an idea in how far we are represented 
 by the wisest and best, we ne*ed but to look a little closer 
 at the modus operandi of our parliamentary elections, 
 and at the incidents preceding and succeeding them. 
 In order to do this, we take the liberty of transcribing 
 the following reflections from a foreign writer on the 
 subject : 
 
 " How does a man become a candidate for parlia- 
 mentary honours? That the electors seek out and 
 solicit an individual to become their candidate because 
 of his transcendent qualities is a very rare occurrence ; 
 and, when it does happen, the chances are that other 
 motives are the cause of it. But, as a rule, an ambitious 
 or wealthy individual foists himself on the attention of 
 his fellow-citizens, and seeks to convince them that he, 
 above all others, deserves their confidence. And what
 
 142 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 motive impels him ? Because he longs to be useful to 
 the community ? Who will believe that ! 
 
 " In the first place, men, whose feelings of solidarity 
 with the community, or with broader humanity, are so 
 keen as to make them seek gratification in the self- 
 sacrifice involved in working for others, are few and far 
 between in these days. In the second place, such men 
 are generally of such an ideal and sensitive nature, that 
 they are the least likely to be fitted to encounter the 
 mental and bodily worries and vulgarities of an election 
 campaign." Such men might suffer and die for their 
 fellow-creatures, but would never demean themselves to 
 soft-sawder an electorate. Such men might serve their 
 fellow-men without any prospect of reward or even of 
 recognition, but would not alternately sing their own 
 praises and cant about their own unworthiness before a 
 popular meeting. Such men are only too likely to suffer 
 from that bashfulness which fools often call arrogance, but 
 which is only the fear of having their ideals besmirched, 
 and which would prompt them to retire within their own 
 privacy and to the society of sympathetic minds. 
 
 " Reformers and martyrs have sought the publicity of 
 the many, but only to teach them, to reprove them, not 
 to flatter them and strengthen them in their prejudices 
 and errors. Therefore such are more often stoned than 
 cheered." Wycliffe and Knox, Huss and Luther, Arnold 
 of Brescia and Savonarola, have certainly moved great
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 143 
 
 multitudes, and excited, beside tremendous hate, also 
 passionate devotion. But I do not believe that they, or 
 that a Jean Jacques Rousseau, a Goethe, a Kant, or a 
 Carlyle, would ever have gained a seat in our modern 
 Parliament. These men do not lower themselves to 
 court electors for the sake of their vote, and particularly 
 not to fight an opponent, who is ready to tread the con- 
 ventional path that alone leads to victory. 
 
 The way a popular mandate has to be gained, acts 
 from the very start as a deterrent on a high-strung 
 character, but it is no hindrance to the egotist who 
 is determined to do anything to gain recognition and 
 influence. 
 
 II. 
 
 Let us take a man who wishes to enter upon a political 
 career. The spur of his action is egotism ; but as it is 
 necessary to take an interest in public affairs in order to 
 reach the public eye, so he must endeavour to do so, or 
 simulate such interest. In order to be successful, he 
 must possess a variety of qualities that are not calculated 
 to enlist our sympathies. He must not be of a modest 
 disposition, otherwise he would be unable to push him- 
 self to the front and attract our attention. He must be 
 able to cant and to lie, for he is obliged to show a pleasant 
 face to many who must be indifferent or even distasteful 
 to him. Otherwise, he would make many enemies.
 
 144 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 He is forced to make promises that he knows in advance 
 he will be unable to keep. He must bring himself to 
 appeal to the lower tastes, passions, and prejudices of 
 the many, because they are the most prevalent, and he 
 is bound to seek to please the majority. 
 
 " These features give us the picture of a physiognomy 
 that cannot attract a refined being. In a word, such a 
 character would never awake the sympathies of the 
 reader. In real life, however, we give our vote to such 
 a man with rare exceptions." 
 
 Without following our authority into further details, 
 which most inhabitants of these islands can easily sup- 
 ply for themselves, we can readily call to mind how 
 many of our best men have shrunk from the ordeal of 
 canvassing, or have become disgusted with its details, 
 after passing through the ordeal itself. 
 
 Mr. Joseph Cowen, late M.P. for Newcastle, was so 
 disgusted with election tactics, although he himself had 
 declined to do all canvassing work, or to employ others 
 to do it for him, and although returned at the head of 
 the poll in 1885, that he announced his intention of not 
 seeking re-election on the very day of his victory. An 
 eminent thinker like Mr. A. E. Freeman shrunk from 
 entering Parliament, and even a man like Mr. Anthony 
 Trollope whom even his greatest admirers will not 
 accuse of hypersensitiveness of feeling, for he had ridden 
 half through England in his capacity of Post-office official,
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 145 
 
 meeting and canvassing all classes, even he tells us in 
 his autobiography how a parliamentary election disgusted 
 him. 
 
 It is, therefore, not to be wondered at that we find 
 parliamentary candidates coming more and more from 
 certain classes that are more remarkable for self-assertion 
 than for any other quality. Newspaper correspondents, 
 London barristers, local grandees, and, last but not 
 least, the members of town-councils. In some places, 
 the town-council is the very nursery for parliamentary 
 honours, and that, although it is well known, the best 
 men in a town are rarely asked, or, if asked, would not 
 care to sit in a town-council. 
 
 We are supposed to elect the best and wisest among 
 our fellow-citizens, but our votes go to him who pushes 
 himself most daringly to the front. We cant about his 
 courage and admire him for it. Education, experience, 
 conscientiousness, intellectual superiority are unimportant 
 qualifications, and they avail him little. What he is 
 most in want of is self-consciousness, audacity, a ready 
 tongue, and often a healthy admixture of glaring vul- 
 garity. In the best case, the man of our choice may 
 be an honest and shrewd man, but he will hardly ever 
 be of a high-rninded, refined, and modest nature. That 
 explains how, in all our representative bodies, talent is 
 often met with, but " character " only in the rarest of 
 cases. 
 
 L
 
 146 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 The men who rule us do not do so by force of their 
 best instincts, but by force of will. And that is not all ; 
 for, if it were to remain there, we should produce nothing 
 but a conglomeration of little despots, each fighting for 
 his own hand. That would at least have the advantage 
 of simplicity, and we might hope to find one among 
 them now and then who, d la Cromwell, endowed with 
 exceptional determination, would knock their heads 
 together, gain supreme power, and use it for the benefit 
 of the community at large. But that seems unattainable 
 in the present day ; we behold our sucking senators, in 
 their turn, moved backwards and forwards, like mario- 
 nettes, by the most irresponsible, backboneless element in 
 the community the daily expression of public opinion 
 on the platform and in the press. Those whose hard- 
 ness of will and nerve has brought them to the front, 
 truckle to the noisiest agitation, which, perhaps, is so bare 
 of all characteristics of persistent will-power, that to-day 
 it often calls for what it condemns to-morrow the very 
 archetype of mental debility. 
 
 III. 
 
 Next to our " form " of government and the character- 
 istics of our lawgivers, we cant, perhaps, most about our 
 "method" of legislation, our means of discovering and 
 supplying our wants and needs, the direct outcome of
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 147 
 
 our government by ourselves for ourselves "self-govern- 
 ment in more than one sense. 
 
 " Agitation " is our password as an expression of our 
 wants, and its systematic furthering by our press, the 
 direct means of bringing it to bear on our legislature, we 
 regard as the lawful outcome of popular opinion under 
 the old canting banner of " Vox populi, vox Dei ! " We 
 have become great proficients in this method of legisla- 
 tive salvation. From a cry being first started in a 
 thousand independent centres and thence taken up by 
 the press, we have come to allow a cry to be started by 
 one solitary sensational newspaper, and thence to com- 
 mend itself to our ministers and be hurried through 
 Parliament and embodied as law, without much, if any, 
 inquiry or support from the nation at large. As with 
 law-making, so also with such a course of action as requires 
 no fresh legislation, though its results are often as dis- 
 astrous as if it did. This is our latest development of 
 hysterical legislation, and it is a consolation to know that 
 we cannot proceed much farther in that course without 
 being brought face to face with national disgrace and 
 chaos, things we hope to avoid even on the brink of them. 
 
 That was not the way the framers of the American 
 Constitution went to work. Not thus, they gave it the 
 stability it is now at last enviously admitted to possess, 
 even by the most rabid Tories, a constitution which 
 Mr. Gladstone thinks " the most wonderful work ever
 
 148 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 struck off at one time by the brain and purpose of man," 
 possessing a Senate and a Supreme Court, the like of 
 which Lord Salisbury deplores that we do not possess. 
 
 Neither is it the method employed in the framing of 
 other constitutions, from the study of which we could only 
 reap advantage. It has not found great favour among 
 the Scandinavians, whose country is never visited by our 
 enlightened few, without their coming back enthusiastic 
 over the amount of happiness and contentment to be 
 found there among the many. 
 
 But cant soon drives such reflections from our minds 
 and consoles us with the thought that, whatever others 
 may enjoy, we are possessed of the inestimable advantage 
 of a constitution which, built up in the earliest ages, has 
 happily conformed itself to the requirements of the times 
 by the free unfettered expression of opinion of a free 
 and enlightened people ! The suffering and misery, let 
 alone other disadvantages, which this process of assimi- 
 lation, this sternest application of the law of the survival 
 of the fittest, has had in its train, is never dwelt upon. 
 
 Men like Henry Thomas Buckle would laugh at the 
 suggestion of human misery resulting from the unfettered 
 working of natural laws to which it is our destiny to sub- 
 mit. The man who told us that, do what we may, we 
 cannot get over the average of suffering we inherit, 
 would scorn the idea that individual human genius could, 
 if not change our defective nature, at least better the
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 149 
 
 conditions under which we have to encounter the ills 
 that flesh is heir to. What good could individual effort, 
 however sublime, effect, where " causes " lie so much 
 deeper hidden beyond our ken than any effects, however 
 patent and disastrous ? 
 
 According to that, agitation would be the only legi- 
 timate expression of an opinion which is in itself but 
 the reflex of a deep-seated righteous want, making itself 
 thus felt and heard, and its results can but be taken as 
 universally beneficial Such would seem to be the 
 philosophy of our laissez-faire teachers. 
 
 We have witnessed or read of many agitations in our 
 time, from the emancipation of our West Indian slaves 
 down to the latest item the Criminal Law Amendment 
 Act of 1885 ; and what an alternative picture of cant and 
 ignorance do they present to us. 
 
 Mr. Benjamin Disraeli, in his " Life of Lord George 
 Bentinck," says : " The movement of the middle classes 
 for the abolition of slavery was virtuous, but it was not 
 wise. It was an ignorant movement. It showed a want 
 of knowledge both of the laws of commerce and the 
 stipulations of treaties; and it has alike ruined the 
 colonies and aggravated the slave trade. But an en- 
 lightened aristocracy, who placed themselves at the head 
 of a movement which they did not originate, should 
 have instructed, not sanctioned, the virtuous errors of 
 a well-meaning but narrow-minded community."
 
 150 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 IV. 
 
 But we will refrain from entering into a detailed review 
 of all that is false and meretricious in connection with 
 the agitations ard election cries of the last fifty years ; 
 let any intelligent reader do that for himself unaided. 
 It is worth the trouble of doing, and can best be done 
 in solitude and with earnest concentration of thought. 
 
 There are exceptions to all things, and the agitation 
 of Mr. Plimsoll, against the crime of laissez-faire, that 
 allowed our merchant princes to do as they liked with 
 the lives of our sailors, is one of them. Cant would 
 point to agitation with satisfaction as the principle that 
 has shown its capacity for good. We would prefer to 
 point to the disgraceful indifference of those principles 
 of non-interference that made such a remedy as agitation 
 beneficial and, as ultima ratio, imperative ! 
 
 We tremble before the ordeal of perusing the orations 
 of our great orators. We have had earnest orators, as 
 we have had honest men in every walk of life, even 
 returned convicts who have earnestly devoted their lives 
 to reclaim their fellows ; but, as a rule, it is very unlikely 
 a great orator should be an earnest single-minded states- 
 man ; he is too self-conscious. Bismarck is no orator 
 such a man could be no orator but he is a patriotic 
 statesman. 
 
 This system of government by press and platform
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 151 
 
 agitation is making true statesmanship impossible with 
 us. The Americans, it is true, are also blessed with 
 similar institutions, but their power for evil is limited. 
 The press and the platform may send forth their gaseous 
 miasma, they are powerless to influence the decisions 
 of the Supreme Court of the Senate, or to affect the 
 immovable lines of American foreign policy. 
 
 How different with us. As before said, a single second- 
 rate newspaper is able to" start a cry that reaches over 
 a thousand platforms, and is thrown forth in type by a 
 thousand printing presses, and at last embodied as law ! 
 What next? In the mean time, we make the wildest 
 tentative efforts in every direction, only to turn back 
 and revolve on our own axis. Instead of being led by 
 ideas of equity and justice, we adopt the cheaper formula 
 of enlightened generosity, and make ourselves often 
 ridiculous. The agricultural labourers have grievances ; 
 they agitate, and we generously give them the franchise 
 for which they are not ripe. 
 
 Ah, it is a proof of very shallow intellect to revile a 
 despot, so long as we find humanity so ready to grin 
 and truckle to worse than he. Agitate by all means, 
 but try to be honest in your estimation of what agitation 
 is made of, and where it is likely to land us. 
 
 The principles of parliamentary government have made 
 it possible for a man to he barefacedly night after night 
 during a whole session, and yet to be considered a man
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 of honour in private life. The French are at our heels 
 in this ; the poor Austrians try their best at the same 
 game; the Germans have hitherto not gone far in it, 
 thanks to Bismarck. But that is not all ; the principles 
 of party government allow us to vilify an opponent for 
 doing the very thing we ourselves attempted 
 
 Such are some of the outcomes of the principles of 
 self-government. Does anybody suppose if we had self- 
 government, or deserved to have it, that we should allow 
 a knot of blunderers to hurry us into Egyptian darknesses ? 
 Cant says we possess self-government, and cant lies ! 
 
 Representative self-government! Yes, even our uni- 
 versities are represented. Then, why not allow Lloyd's, 
 the Stock Exchange, the Liverpool Cotton Market, the 
 Army and Navy Clubs, the trade unions, why not allow 
 them separate representation ? They are, surely, more 
 important in their representative character than any 
 single university? 
 
 No, let well alone is our motto. No violent changes 
 that would imperil our principles; let us continue in 
 the wake of our glorious traditions. Sensible and gradual 
 progress and reform are our legitimate wants, and we 
 supply them. We call it sensible progress when we 
 alter our bankruptcy and commercial liability laws, after 
 they have been a disgrace to a Christian state for genera- 
 tions. The knowledge of their past iniquity does not 
 quicken our anxiety as to whether we have no other
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 153 
 
 crying cruelties working in our midst. Agitation has 
 not spoken audibly as yet. Agitation has not yet, 
 shrieked out that if we go on believing in the fetish of 
 freedom of contract, without any countervailing checks 
 we shall end in violence and socialism. Our respectable 
 principles incline us to whine over the rights of property. 
 They have allowed the working of the leasehold system 
 to go on unhindered until the land is in fewer and fewer 
 hands. Now that it has become unbearable, and agita- 
 tion is looming in the distance, we prate about the rights 
 of property. Our principles did not tell us to think 
 about the rights of humanity in a humble, but in a timely 
 sense. Property has been our canting fetish, though it 
 so seriously jeopardizes our chances of salvation in 
 another world. 
 
 Our governing class may rail at an appeal to the 
 masses, but it is nevertheless true that there are the 
 seeds of a deep class-hatred ripening in our midst, and 
 the cant in our principles of government has had its 
 share in fostering it 
 
 V. 
 
 Beneath the trade maxims that have helped us to 
 become the nation we are, the cloven foot of cant is 
 easily discernible. We are not satisfied with the pos- 
 session of free trade as an arrangement suitable to our 
 national requirements, but we must needs accept it as a
 
 i54 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 shibboleth, as a sort of patent medicine for universal 
 application. Our great orators hold their audiences spell- 
 bound by a coruscation of figures showing, as with a 
 limelight, how much better off we are than we used to be. 
 Cant prevents us from seeing, that if we earn more, so 
 also the value of money has depreciated, and not only 
 that, but of greater moment still, other communities, not 
 free trade fed, are also better off than they used to be. 
 The silly many-headed cheer to the cry of the " free break- 
 fast-table," which they owe to free trade ; but cant blinds 
 them to the fearful tale of adulteration, which is not un- 
 connected with free trade, and, above all, with the 
 doctrine of laissez-faire, of which hereafter. Cant will 
 not allow us to see that, though our breakfast-table may- 
 be free, other articles, which only cant would contend 
 not to be necessaries, such as tobacco and beer, are 
 taxed higher than in any other country. Adulteration 
 is even characterised by Mr. John Bright as an unavoid- 
 able if not fair form of competition. The Germans do 
 not think so, and woe unto him who is found guilty of 
 deleterious adulteration. Our penalties for adulterations 
 are such that they fail to act as a deterrent (like our 
 penalties for perjury, or, rather, their application), and 
 as a consequence our humble classes are being literally 
 poisoned out of health and life. 
 
 We can remember a friend who, entering a public- 
 house in the neighbourhood of the docks, drank almost
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 155 
 
 unadulterated sulphuric acid under the name of 
 whiskey ! 
 
 Our only guarantee against adulteration, and that an 
 inefficient one, is great wealth. For we may be so 
 wealthy, and pay our tradesmen so unstintedly, that they 
 may be moved by the prompting of an enlightened self- 
 interest to see that we get the best of every thing. But 
 how do the masses fare? A Royal Commission if 
 worth the name could easily show, and send our dailies 
 howling as of yore. 
 
 Whilst free trade has enabled the upper middle classes 
 to amass fortunes beyond the dreams of avarice, it has 
 doubtless had the indirect effect of raising wages, and 
 enabling the masses to buy some necessaries of life (not 
 all, witness beer and tobacco) cheaper. But buying 
 cheap, particularly when the widest scope is allowed to 
 adulteration, is not everything. Nor are high wages 
 everything, when such counterbalancing items as high 
 rent and high price of tobacco and alcoholic drinks have 
 to be met. Besides, the whole community is not in receipt 
 of wages. The small shopkeeper, for instance, is over- 
 burdened with many disadvantages, from which free trade 
 is powerless to relieve him. We believe we are correct 
 in stating, that this very numerous section of the com- 
 munity lives a hand-to-mouth existence in a far greater 
 proportion than does the same class in either France or 
 Germany. We have a certain number of immensely
 
 156 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 wealthy leviathan shopkeepers, but side by side with 
 them are a very different class, and we make bold to 
 say, that for every one of the broader ruck who can 
 handle fifty pounds, independently of his business, ten 
 will be found in either France or Germany. 
 
 But even our free-trade maxims do not always bring 
 us our main desideratum cheapness. Up till lately, any- 
 body who had failed as a pork-butcher could set up as a 
 chemist Our London streets swarm with the glaring, 
 luring chemist-shop bull's-eyes, and yet the poor man 
 pays in some items several hundred per cent, more for 
 his drugs than his poor brethren pay in Germany. But the 
 Germans are a slow, stolid people ; they insist on their 
 chemists passing a severe State examination, and subject 
 them to rigorous regulations for the benefit of the com- 
 munity at large. On the other hand, they do not poison 
 quite so many people by misadventure as our chemists 
 do ; and that is perhaps the reason why a chemist in 
 Germany is invariably supposed to belong to the pro- 
 fessional classes, and takes a position in society a little 
 ahead of his English compeer. 
 
 Cant will at once retort that our poor get their medi- 
 cines gratis, if they apply for them. Yes, our charity is 
 ever a ready handle to turn aside the true issues of a 
 question. But how about our Patent Medicine Act, that 
 foulest premium upon quackery? 
 
 How can a nation indulge in pharisaic contentment
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 157 
 
 with its trade maxims, as long as it collects a huge sum 
 yearly as the proceeds of the vilest pandering to baneful 
 ignorance known in any civilized country ? Has it not 
 been stated in courts of law times innumerable, that even 
 some of the less iniquitous patent medicines often pro- 
 duce death, when carelessly or ignorantly administered ? 
 But what does it matter to cant ; we continue to buy in 
 the cheapest market, to sell in the dearest, and our ex- 
 chequer takes the premium on stupidity, in exchange for 
 its licence, until further orders. 
 
 Inconsistency has no terrors for cant when our direct 
 interests are at stake, so we soon cease to prate about 
 the value of competition when it suits our purpose. (Like- 
 wise we can be conveniently silent on the benefits of 
 Habeas Corpus, when it suits us to suspend that pal- 
 ladium of English liberty, and incarcerate an incorrigible 
 Celt.) 
 
 VI. 
 
 Lately we have been blessed with a perfect plethora 
 of exhibitions. Our mentors call the masses together 
 like sheep, pass them through turnstiles that register 
 their number, and bid them be happy to the braying of 
 a brass band. We give them every thing except the 
 capacity and spirit to enjoy and benefit by it. An old 
 proverb says, it is no use preaching to an empty stomach. 
 Our exhibition crowds want to eat and drink ; and on
 
 1 58 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 similar occasions abroad, they can do so to their heart's 
 content There the grounds are studded with beer- 
 gardens and restaurants for every pocket, strictly con- 
 trolled to sell fair. Walk in among them, and you will 
 see the people enjoying themselves quietly, rationally ; 
 all classes intermingled and well-behaved. 
 
 How different with us ! Cant sails under the flag of 
 opening up a source of pleasure and culture to the 
 million, but underhandly takes care to tap the stream 
 of lucre for its own benefit. Not fairly and openly is 
 this done in the common course of commerce ; no, 
 slyly, shrewdly, even dishonestly ! Secret influence 
 secures the monopoly of catering for the million. It 
 is a big thing, it must be done in a big way, by a big, 
 influential firm ; and how cunningly it is done ! There 
 is so much to turn over, so much to make out of it. 
 Dinners are arranged from 3*. 6d. to 7*. 6d. a head, and 
 even to those you often have no direct access, whilst 
 the common fry are fed off like so much cattle. You 
 must take a ticket in advance, pass through a turnstile, 
 and be served and turned off like a piece of luggage on 
 a railway truck ! You have no choice ; it is one of the 
 glorious results of free trade. If you are dissatisfied, 
 and feel that, though you have escaped poisoning, you 
 have at least been hustled and robbed, write to the press, 
 it will most likely print your effusion ! But it will not 
 prevent the same thing happening to you next time.
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 159 
 
 Is it worth while describing the catering for the poorer 
 masses at these gatherings? Who does not know and 
 shudder at the sight of those beery bars loaded with 
 stale buns, dry sandwiches, and reeking with foul liquors 
 of manifold denominations ? It is the old tale over 
 again our inability to see and to remedy. It repeats 
 itself at our licensed railway bars (the vilest in Europe), 
 at our athletic meetings, at our Volunteer camps, every- 
 where, the same eternal privileged licencecs poisoning us 
 in the land of free trade. In some instances, cant steps 
 in, glorious, patronizing, resplendent ; as, for instance, at 
 Wimbledon, where annually the caterers for that meeting 
 generously and spontaneously give a hundred-pound prize 
 in return for the sole licence to supply the thousands of 
 people who frequent that meeting. It is a big thing, and 
 it is done by a big firm ; but how is it done ? Cant doesn't 
 care ! The public spirit of the said firm of Licensed 
 Victuallers is duly appreciated at the meeting of the 
 National Rifle Association, over which the Duke of Cam- 
 bridge presides. Everybody is satisfied, and they pass 
 on to the order of the day. 
 
 VII. 
 
 It is all very well for cant to tell us that free trade by 
 itself vill help us over all our industrial and commercial 
 crises, and thus shut our eyes to other causes that act
 
 160 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 perniciously against our best attempts at self-help. Has 
 free trade enabled our poor to get cheap medicines 
 (except by charity), or is the retail trade in drugs and 
 medicines in the hands of an irresponsible set of men, 
 uncontrolled in their trade-union, like the working out of 
 the problem of making the supply meet the commercial 
 demand ? Has our legal encouragement of pernicious 
 quackery by the tax that legalizes patent medicines been 
 a blessing or a curse ? Then, again, our iron output ; 
 how does it stand in comparison to that of other coun- 
 tries. Are we not informed by debates in the House of 
 Commons that the royalties paid to landowners are from 
 35. 6d. to 6$. zd. per ton, whilst in Belgium and Germany 
 they vary from $d. to Sd., and thus lame us in com- 
 petition with foreign iron beyond all remedy free trade 
 can bring us ? Is this so, or is it not so ? Cant tells us 
 our wicked and drunken workmen will not work for the 
 same wages as foreigners ! 
 
 This brings us to the sister shibboleth of free trade, 
 namely our maxim of laissez-faire. We cry out, " Leave 
 us alone ; let us work out the problem of the survival 
 of the fittest, unfettered and untrammelled by State 
 legislation : " the glorious doctrine of Manchester and 
 its sleek counting-house evils ! Let the weak perish 
 of drink and despair in the back slums of Salford; 
 do not the strong stand before us in the Manchester 
 Free Trade Hail, and lead their famiiies to church of
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 
 
 a Sunday ? Let the State mind its own business ; let it 
 misrule us, estrange our colonies, and tie up the arteries 
 through which pulsates the blood of this mighty nation ; 
 we will regulate supply to demand ; we will make money, 
 and even spend some to reclaim the truculent savage, 
 and get him to appreciate our whiskey and our adul- 
 terated calico stuffs. We want no State interference, nor 
 State initiative ; and the State has not interfered, and the 
 result is, that never before was such wealth side by side 
 with such poverty. Never before was such vainglorious 
 self-satisfaction side by side with such hopelessness, dirt, 
 darkness, and despair. 
 
 We must credit the cant of our directing minds with 
 having kept their eyes steadily on the main chance 
 throughout the working of our trade maxims. They 
 early foresaw the benefit to enterprise of ridding it of the 
 shackles of the Middle Ages the glorious dawn of 
 the era of freedom of contract. So far so good ; but 
 cant, in taking the credit of this enlightened policy, has 
 added its drop of poison to the cup of our joys : it threw 
 the apple of State indifference in our midst the indif- 
 ference to misery, despair, and death. Let them fight it 
 out ; let the strongest survive : we will rule them all the 
 weak and the strong, the quick and the dying. If a 
 warning voice sayeth, " If you believe blindly in the 
 gospel of buying in the cheapest and selling in the 
 dearest market, you will gradually land up against a 
 
 M
 
 162 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 dead wall the Chinese and Hindoos." No matter. 
 Let the populace buy unfettered in the cheapest and sell 
 in the dearest market ; let them sell their souls even to 
 the highest bidder, as long as they mind that business 
 and leave us the imperial task of governing them through 
 ourselves for ourselves. This has been done ; cant has 
 eaten our very eyesight away, like some terrible Egyptian 
 eyesore, and now we find our executive ready to do 
 anything feudal, radical, or communistic, if we will only 
 allow them to do it for us to remain our canting heart- 
 less figure-head. Our executive still grasps the helm 
 convulsively, sees our army mismanaged, our navy the 
 victim of jobbery, our legal and journalistic professions 
 triumphant, and yet sneers at American professional 
 politicians and Yankee corruption ! 
 
 Our political doctrinaires of the Radical school are 
 not without their share of canting gush, not without 
 their share of responsibility for our tergiversations in 
 foreign politics. Not content with uncompromising 
 opposition to every effort of rival schools of political 
 thought at home, they extend their antipathies and sym- 
 pathies abroad, without any regard to the interests of 
 their own country. For instance, Mr. Cowen has in his 
 time shown as extravagant an admiration for Italian 
 conspiring patriots as he has ever shown an uncom- 
 promising animosity towards the so-called great conti- 
 nental military despotisms : both attitudes ill-becoming
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 163 
 
 a serious politician, which Mr. Cowen's friends presume 
 him to be. But he, like many others, is a doctrinaire 
 enthusiast first, and a politician only afterwards. Nor 
 does it make up for the enthusiastic vagaries of men 
 like him, if they, at any given crisis in national 
 affairs, purse their mouths in classic folds, and rant in 
 the name of imperial interests. Common sense could 
 tell them that their whole bent of thought is full 
 of danger to imperial interests, and cannot be annulled 
 by occasional outbursts of what the Americans call 
 " spreadeagleism." What should we say if Bismarck or 
 lesser German politicians were to go about the country 
 ranting about the wrongs of the Irish ? And yet the 
 conduct of our Radical doctrinaires, ay, even of our 
 responsible statesmen, has been of that description from 
 time immemorial. 
 
 Instead of trying to galvanize a dead frog in the effort 
 of sympathizing with the French Republic because it 
 is a republic, and of trying to cold-shoulder a military 
 monarchy because it is by necessity one, our Radicals 
 should endeavour to learn political wisdom, whenever they 
 cast their eyes abroad, and not to indulge in their faddish 
 likes and dislikes. They would see the greatest republic 
 in the world fostering the most cordial relations with the 
 greatest autocratic military despotism ever known. They 
 would be able to note that Gambetta, whom they all 
 admired so much, did not carry his hatred of Catholic
 
 1 64 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 priesthood beyond the frontier of France, but con- 
 tinually dwelt on the importance of France being the one 
 representative Catholic power in the Levant and in the 
 far East. We might well wish that such lessons of politics, 
 being no ground for doctrinal fads, might not be lost on 
 our Radicals. It would be something to see a group of 
 men, that are at all events honest, show a grasp of 
 international politics in a broader sense than the average 
 town-council spirit. For if they are clear-headed and 
 consistent, the future must belong to them in the direc- 
 tion of our foreign policy, as it already does more or less 
 in the shaping of our home activity. The other parties 
 in the State are but weathercocks, without the excuse of 
 the weathercock, that it is its function to turn according 
 to the wind. We complain of the indifference of Europe 
 and the duplicity of Russia that perennial journalistic 
 war-horse ! But if the Russians lie, we cant, and that is 
 the worse of the two, for a liar is far the more easily 
 detected and discredited. The Russians lie, therefore 
 our line of action is clear : trust them no more ; trust to 
 yourselves. As our knowledge is limited by our cant 
 and our incapacity to see international politics in an 
 impartial spirit, we require at least the only excuse for 
 fanaticism faith faith in ourselves. 
 
 But you have no faith. Whereas but yesterday the 
 Times used to assure the world we wanted no allies, we 
 only wanted the goodwill of all ; to-day we are cantingly
 
 CANT IN OUR PRINCIPLES. 165 
 
 looking to Berlin, and asking ourselves and others how 
 Bismarck can be so blind to " his " interests as to let 
 Russia play her little game on the Danube. " His " 
 interests indeed ! If that is the only key-note you can 
 squeeze out of your wizened thorax, then good-bye to 
 all your dreams of blocking Russian influence. 
 
 The old true-blue Tory is above such tricks they are 
 the specialty of the plutocratic, church-going middle 
 classes. The true Tory never had any sympathy with 
 the transparent cheap ranting of the Latin races, they 
 were always too keen to grasp the substance to lose 
 much time over the shadow. It is true they were not 
 divinely inspired beforehand to see what Prussia was 
 made of; it was easier to look down on the beggarly 
 Germans, with their sixty-four quarterings and an empty 
 cash-box. But 1866 and 1870 changed all that. The 
 Tories can understand the language of blood and iron : 
 they always had a weakness for it themselves. Thus, if 
 they had their will and way to-day, it would probably 
 reflect itself somewhat in the following words addressed 
 to Bismarck : " Let us have no more nonsense ; if France 
 breaks the peace, she will find us on your side ; and if 
 Russia tricks us again, we will count on you." That 
 would be a policy. We do not say it would be the only 
 one ; but we do say it would be a better one than the 
 outcome of our Radical fads, our press hysteria, and our 
 middle-class cautious, canting trimming. But just as in
 
 166 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 the eyes of the Chinese we are nothing but opium 
 dealers, so in the Levant we have got the reputation of 
 egging our friends on to their ruin in order to desert 
 them. 
 
 We are imitating Prussia in many things lately, but in 
 the letter have we appropriated not in the spirit. We 
 are impressed by the victories of 1866 and 1870, but we 
 do not see that those victories are as nothing compared 
 to the spirit that made them possible, and the spirit that 
 has utilized them. Our teachers never tell us this ; but 
 when Bismarck dies we shall suddenly be bidden to 
 admire the retreating shadow, and be as wise as before. 
 No laissez-faire fetish in that man, no sympathy with our 
 cant !
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 
 
 "That smooth-faced gentleman, tickling Commodity ; 
 Commodity, the bias of the world : 
 The world, who of itself is peised well, 
 Made to run even upon even ground, 
 Till this advantage, this vile-drawing bias, 
 This sway of motion, this Commodity, 
 Makes it take head from all indifferency, 
 From all direction, purpose, course, intent. " 
 
 SHAKESPEARE. 
 
 " The end of all government and social reform ought to be the 
 greatest happiness of the greatest number." BENTHAM. 
 
 I. 
 
 WE have endeavoured to prove the existence of cant by 
 illustrating it as it is met with in all walks and spheres 
 of life. These illustrations may be taken, in one sense, 
 as embodying its results as well. In this chapter we will 
 endeavour to confine ourselves to the problem of tracing 
 some of its indirect results, including a few instances of 
 revolt against its influence. For no stronger proof can 
 be advanced of the virulence of our idiosyncrasies than
 
 i68 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 the fierceness of individual and collective rebellion and 
 warfare against them. 
 
 When the action of the Crown at the Restoration, 
 instead of healing the differences between our various 
 religious denominations, only gave a conscientious mino- 
 rity the choice of hypocrisy or secession, it chose^ the 
 latter. Two thousand clergymen left the Church of 
 England, and we have since had in our midst the 
 grandest instance of revolt against organized worldly cant 
 in history : our Nonconformists a dual spiritual life in 
 one people. But that is matter of ancient history, and 
 hardly calls for more than a passing notice here. It 
 is a miserable history, a recent writer says, of contention 
 ever new, determined only by tyranny never tired. In 
 our time we are struck by two most instructive facts as 
 signs of dissatisfaction with our ethics, and as embodying 
 a revolt against them : the first is the tendency to seces- 
 sion to the Church of Rome among the upper classes, 
 and the other is the spreading of the Salvation Army 
 propaganda among the humble classes. 
 
 In reference to the first, many will opine that it is 
 merely an indication of one of those waves of sentiment 
 that Macaulay refers to, as peculiar to us from time to 
 time. But it is in reality far more than that, through the 
 causes that account for it. The fact is, man is not 
 governed by logic alone, but by a large amount of senti- 
 ment also, and have been so from time immemorial. No
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 169 
 
 greater mistake is made by our doctrinaires than trying 
 to ignore such sentiment. When we seceded from the 
 Church of Rome, we discarded a large amount of the 
 sentiment that had come to be one of the life-giving 
 qualities of that Church, that had held it together for 
 over fourteen centuries. We adopted a creed of our 
 own, almost devoid of appeals to the imagination, 
 supposed to rest its claims for acceptance almost solely 
 on the fact of the Divine revelation, unaided by any 
 appeals to an imaginative sentiment. The northern 
 temperament of our people could certainly better afford 
 to dispense with that auxiliary to faith than those of 
 more emotional races, and has so far thriven in doing so. 
 But our time has witnessed such persistent attacks on 
 the dogma of Christianity from without, that it is not to 
 be wondered at that many, unable to ward off their 
 doubts any longer by an appeal to their reasoning 
 faculties, have felt themselves intensely dissatisfied, if not 
 unhappy, by the little ground left for the imagination to 
 appeal to. Those who found themselves unable to 
 accept the infallibility of our dogma any longer unques- 
 tioned, had but to turn round and behold with sobered 
 eyes a Church embracing but a part of the community, 
 'nbued with greater antagonism towards sects divided 
 from it by the most trifling of definitions, than towards 
 those in direct antagonism with them on most vital points 
 of dogmatic belief. They beheld a Church with spiritual
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 aims almost solely following the instincts of a worldly 
 ambition. They beheld a Church, which, truckling to the 
 fountain of worldly grace, showed a scandalous indiffer- 
 ence and inability to enlist the sympathies of the poor. 
 Such results could not be expected to enlist the imagina- 
 tion in their favour, when the faculties of reason were 
 clamouring aloud with doubt ! On the other hand, they 
 beheld not so much the dogma as the practice of the 
 Roman Church, which, built up on the appeal to the 
 imagination, in reality has ever succeeded in that appeal 
 among all classes. They beheld a Church which, in 
 exchange for a blind acceptance of faith, holds out the 
 olive-branch of salvation to all equally the high and the 
 lowliest born, and carries its care for their welfare into 
 practice. Comparing the unreality of our practice with 
 our precepts, it is but natural that those among us, who 
 sought refuge in an appeal to the imagination from the 
 doubts to which their reasoning faculties were subject, 
 should have largely turned towards the Church of Rome. 
 And the proof is, that they have done so in no insig- 
 nificant numbers. This is one of the most striking 
 features of our time, although our press scarcely ever 
 refers to it. And why does our press not refer to it? 
 First, because it would gain nothing by doing so ; and 
 secondly, because it would have to rid itself of cant, and 
 openly ask why these secessions to Catholicism have 
 been so much more numerous in our midst than in
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 171 
 
 other Protestant countries. And if the question were 
 asked, it would have to be answered; and the answer 
 would be, that no Protestant clergy show such signs 
 of disenchanting, worldly cant as ours. The answer 
 would be, that nowhere do Protestant bishops exist, 
 who, enjoying princely incomes, have been so unable 
 to reach the sympathies of the poor and suffering. 
 Nowhere do the favoured nominees of an aristocratic 
 Church appeal so exclusively to the well-born ; nowhere 
 are they so entirely cut off from contact with the lowly- 
 born many, as in our midst. 
 
 Now, it may be opined with some show of reason, if 
 the shallow worldliness of the members of our State 
 Church has disgusted many among us, why have they 
 not joined the ranks of our Methodists, for instance, who, 
 at least as a body, are above the suspicion of worldly self- 
 seeking ? The answer thereto is not far to seek : because 
 once the roots of faith are shaken, as they have been by 
 abstract thought and by the worldly cant in our midst, 
 they could only find nourishment again in a creed so 
 largely watered by appeals to the imaginative faculties as 
 that of the Church of Rome. 
 
 II. 
 
 Referring to some of the extravagances of the Salvation 
 Army, the Times blandly informs us that such things are 
 only possible in our country. But that cunning augur
 
 172 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 does not tell us "why" such things are only possible in 
 our country. It does not tell us, that almost the same 
 influences account for the rise of the Salvation Army as 
 for the secessions among us to Catholicism : only, the 
 former appeals to the uneducated, whereas the latter 
 have influenced the well-born. 
 
 It is true the Salvation Army is an ugly, even a 
 hideously vulgar and profane thing : it is wanting in the 
 first condition of all true religion "reverence." But 
 what influences have made our masses so sadly deficient 
 in all feelings of reverence ? Why, the total want of all 
 spiritual influence of any kind whatever. 
 
 But want of spiritual influence has still left them some 
 imagination, and what an imagination it is, is best shown 
 by the kind of provender that appeals to it. Yes,the 
 Salvation Army is a dire and degrading fact, but we 
 cannot blandly explain it away. It is a hideous protest 
 against our social cant. It is a profane, blasphemous 
 thing, if you like, but it is free of worldly cant. Some 
 connected with it may practise religious hypocrisy ; the 
 " General " himself may or may not be sincere ; but he 
 succeeds where our Church fails ; he succeeds in inspir- 
 ing his followers with the belief that he is one with 
 them. There is a solidarity in that institution which is 
 its strength, the result of community of work and of a 
 belief in community of feeling. For the poor man's heart 
 turns sick at the porch of the well-dressed middle-class
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 173 
 
 place of worship. And if he enters he is met by the 
 cold aristocratic character of the congregation. The cosy 
 closed pews, the gaudy dresses, the comfortable-looking 
 churchwardens, with their silver-plated platter of hypo- 
 critical charity they all turn on the stomach of the poor 
 man, for whom our creed promises equality before God, 
 whilst we accentuate inequality in our place of worship 
 more sharply than any other Church on the face of the 
 earth. Is it to be wondered at that this state of things 
 this middle-class respectability chokes him off, isolates 
 him, and sends him in despair to the nearest public- 
 house, where he is only too often joined by his wife and 
 belongings ? And it is not " drink " alone ; for the Dutch, 
 the Norwegians, and Swedes drink strong drinks in large 
 quantities. That which impels them to drink is the 
 root of the mischief. Whilst others drink freely and 
 immoderately, our people are the only ones that drink 
 from despair, for no soothing influences reach them. 
 Our humble classes have no idea of the dignity of life, 
 however humble ; cant has crushed it out of them by 
 thrusting them out into the cold, and leaving them less 
 to live for than the Russian serfs whom our maudlin 
 humanitarians sympathized with. 
 
 Almost the only chance an average Englishman gets 
 of viewing the rural beauties of his native country is from 
 a railway-carriage window : for everything else is fenced 
 in if not bricked round. At every turn in a pretty
 
 174 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 country-lane boards meet your eye with : " Caution," 
 "Trespassers, beware," "Trespassers will be prosecuted," 
 "Trespassers will be dealt with according to the law," 
 (signed) " The Lord of the Manor." Outside of all 
 skulks the poor country labourer, whose only refuge in 
 old age is the workhouse, unless he be lucky enough 
 to fall in with almost more degrading clerical charity. 
 And these poor devils, who for generations have lived 
 a life in many respects more miserable and hopeless than 
 Russian serfs these are the men we have enfranchised, 
 instead of educating those that are enfranchised already. 
 Truly we aie an hysterical people. 
 
 III. 
 
 We have no peasant class like many other countries 
 the true Conservative element in every country but 
 our own. Why not admit it at once, and allow that 
 it is one of our greatest misfortunes. We have only got 
 to look to our landscape pictures. Where are the 
 peasantry in them peasantry, as a self-respecting class, 
 with customs, enjoyments, and long-inherited class 
 feelings of its own, as in other countries? To some 
 it would be difficult to find much poetry or sentiment 
 in English scenery, however beautiful, where the total 
 absence of the well-to-do rustic element, as we see it 
 abroad, leaves a void that nothing can fill up. And yet
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 175 
 
 our farm labourer, if he emigrates, holds his own all 
 over the world, and turns deserts into gardens. Are 
 we, then, not to be allowed to denounce a state of 
 things that has such power of holding our fellow-crea- 
 tures in poverty and suffering, when it can not only 
 be shown that this is not peculiar to the race, but is 
 consequent solely on the circumstances of its forced 
 existence ? Yet nowhere is an orchard so certain to 
 be robbed as among us, notwithstanding our fetish of 
 the sacred rights of every form of property ! 
 
 Lord Salisbury lately told the working classes that 
 French habits of thrift were owing to the facilities the 
 French Government securities offered for investing 
 savings in small sums. French thrift is owing to the 
 French peasant not having such an old man on his back 
 as the class Lord Salisbury so nobly represents. 
 
 Raise the moral status of a man and he will soon look 
 after his own better interests. But cant thinks it has 
 gone the right way to work in giving the suffrage, and 
 thus placing weapons which they do not know how to 
 use in the hands of men who have been held in degraded 
 serfdom for generations. 
 
 For if cant has not blinded you, cast your eyes abroad. 
 Look at the Dutch peasants, the German peasants, the 
 Scandinavian peasants ; look at their rich picturesque 
 apparel ; look at their gold and silver jewellery, and ask 
 yourselves whether they are not evidences of a dignity,
 
 1 76 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 of a pride and enjoyment of existence unknown among 
 us. For their very jewellery, invariably handed down 
 through generations, evidences a stability of family life 
 and thrift that is one of the surest indications of happi- 
 ness. Look at the works of the idyllic painters of the 
 above countries, and behold the pictures of characteristic 
 popular life, full of health and honest sentiment. Where 
 are you to find such amongst us ? Birket Foster seems 
 to shrink from anything more realistic than poor little 
 country girls sitting forlorn on a stile. Hark to the 
 songs of other countries, particularly to those of the 
 Germans, the Hungarians, the Russians, and other 
 Slavonic peoples. Do- they not breathe popular life 
 and happiness ? We have not even got a word in our 
 language to render the meaning of the German Volkslied. 
 And if we examine the few humble ditties that may be 
 said to be known among our working classes, what 
 melancholy stuff they are ! Darby and Joan, for 
 instance, one of the most popular of them, a poor 
 moaning complaint of an old couple, ready for the 
 workhouse, and ready to die there together. What 
 else can one expect when, passing through our fertile 
 country on a Sunday, the stranger sees the country 
 yokels waiting, hands in pockets, outside the public- 
 houses, for the regulation hour of the opening of their 
 harbour of refuge ! And yet these very men could be 
 moved to something better, if it came to them in
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 177 
 
 any form, except the cold respectable form of English 
 monachism. Watch these same humble folks when 
 brought up for a day's sight-seeing by private charity ; 
 watch the silence in listening to the organ, or to the 
 admonitions of those who they know mean kindly by 
 them, and you will perceive that the basis of all true 
 religion, the feeling of " reverence," is still dormant in 
 the poorest and humblest Cant has nearly stifled it, 
 but not quite killed it outright. As in the country, so 
 in our towns ; and in some suburban districts the con- 
 dition of things is even worse. 
 
 Cardinal Manning, in the Contemporary Review of 
 July, 1882, speaking of the population of London, says : 
 " What numbers of them have never been baptized, have 
 never been taught the Christian faith, have never set 
 a foot in a church ! How many are blinded, or besotted, 
 or maddened, by drink ! " 
 
 And is this not equally true of Manchester and Liver- 
 pool, of Leeds and Bradford, of Glasgow and Edinburgh ? 
 
 And who must accept the responsibility for all this ? 
 What influences have blinded us to all this and kept us 
 from endeavouring to follow out the words of Christ, 
 who went among the poor and called out to them that 
 they too belong to the kingdom of God ? 
 
 Many will urge that we can boast of our charity, 
 which is greater than that of any other country. Yes, 
 it is great, it must be admitted, but it is unable to help 
 
 N
 
 178 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 us, even when honest, let alone when vitiated in instinct 
 and unsuited in practice. We can also boast of earnest 
 preachers. We have men among us who, shrewdly 
 tacking to meet the sentiment of the period, combine 
 worldly wisdom with a thin dilution of evangelical 
 dogma. They delight the middle classes, who flock to 
 listen in their gaudy apparel. But the poor do not 
 venture there : they stand sadly aside and listen still to 
 those narrow-minded bigots, who tell them that all our 
 instincts are sinful, that our very nature is lust, sin our 
 inheritance, and death our reward, unless a camel can 
 get through the eye of a needle. What hope can that 
 hold out ? Of what use can that be, when we have 
 been told of all our iniquities for generations, and are 
 still so helpless, hopeless, and forlorn ? 
 
 Once the above is thoroughly realized, the appearance 
 of the Salvation Army in our midst is explained and 
 accounted for. If our public-houses, our alleys, and 
 back slums, had not been full of poor degraded humanity, 
 longing for some little ray of light, however dim, could 
 such a hideous mockery of every refined instinct of 
 reverence be possible ? Could such a thing take shape 
 and flourish, if the lower strata of the community had 
 not been left out in the cold by those whose duty it was 
 to reach and to influence them ? It is logically impos- 
 sible to get out of this quandary. And it is equally 
 impossible to find any answer but one, namely that the
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 179 
 
 Salvation Army is the grandest indictment in our time of 
 our aristocratic Church and its middle-class offshoots.* 
 
 As surely as the revolt of Arnold of Brescia, of Huss, 
 of Luther, of Calvin, of Wesley, and many others, 
 invariably pointed to abuses and more or less of wide 
 dissatisfaction, so also this latest upheaval of religious 
 fanaticism in an age of eclectic pessimism points to a 
 deep-rooted cancer in our midst It points to the 
 aristocratic unsympathetic character of the creed of our 
 respectable classes, the social and political pillars of 
 which rest on a broad basis of social more than religious 
 cant. Our humble classes, unable to breast the waters 
 of Protestant respectability, have gone in for spiritual 
 mountebankism to the accompaniment of brass bands 
 and bedlamic raving ! 
 
 The present Archbishop of Canterbury once made an 
 attempt to fill the hierarchical sails with this ugly gust 
 of spiritual wind ; with what result we all know. 
 
 Cant has long been answerable for much of our 
 Cimmerian darkness : religious frenzy of the most blas- 
 phemous kind is its latest outcome. 
 
 * At the recent clerical Congress of the Church of England at 
 Wakefield, it was openly stated by a clergyman of the Church of 
 England that the British workman is almost entirely a stranger in 
 our churches. In large towns hardly five per cent, of the population 
 ever enter a church. One of the principal causes of this deplorable 
 state of things is held to be the system of letting seats : a unique 
 invention of ours, which only the Americans have adopted.
 
 i8o CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 IV. 
 
 We have quoted two instances of wholesale revolt 
 against cant and its results. We will now endeavour 
 to point to a more individual reaction. 
 
 A gradual undermining of dogma was evident in the 
 effort after manliness, and a robust Christianity seen in 
 Charles Kingsley's life, works, and in his circle. (The 
 same process was so far represented in Scotland by 
 Dr. Norman Macleod, Principal Tulloch, and others, 
 passing into the semi-naturalism of the late Rev. Dr. John 
 Service, of Glasgow, and those influenced by him ; some of 
 his sermons have been published by Messrs. Macmillan.) 
 This prepared the way for, and was succeeded by, a more 
 definite scheme of freethought and rationalistic manli- 
 ness, typified in the movement which gave birth to the 
 " Essays and Reviews," several of the writers of which, 
 Dr. Rowland Williams among them, underwent prosecu- 
 tion. The incapacity of the law-courts to deal with such 
 things effectively has given loose to all manner of varia- 
 tions of reactionary and sentimental expression in Mr. 
 Stopford Brooke, Mr. Haweis, and others. Mr. Haweis, 
 in his lectures on the heathen religions as precursors 
 of Christianity, has, perhaps, gone further in naturalistic 
 theology as reaction than any one else, and has excelled 
 himself in wedding it with popular sentiment. 
 
 He certainly said what half-a-century ago would have
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 181 
 
 subjected him to severe prosecution, probably expulsion. 
 Dr. Parker and his compeers simply represent the same 
 development on the dissenting side. And all this has 
 gone on alongside of a ritualistic gushing protest quite 
 as significant. 
 
 However, it is not with honest men and their differences 
 of theological views that we are so much concerned, as 
 with the deep and growing influence such men exercise 
 over the middle classes, for they do not exist for the 
 masses. 
 
 We are in the land of contrasts and extremes. The 
 guardians of social and religious respectability our stolid 
 middle-classes present an edifying spectacle, when we 
 see them dabbling in heresy, under the idea that they 
 are worshipping the progressive spirit of the age in the 
 form of strict conventionality : for that is what the 
 audiences are endeavouring to do that flock to the dis- 
 courses of the half-mystical divines alluded to above. 
 
 Some of us in fact, not a few have intuitively or 
 instinctively become possessed of the idea that we have 
 been too cantingly austere in the past, and are deter- 
 mined to show that we can undo it in the present. 
 This determination is encouraged and fostered by our 
 press. To illustrate at random. 
 
 We used to cant about being above the petty vanity 
 of wishing for orders or decorations as foreigners do. 
 The reaction has set in, and not only has her Majesty
 
 182 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 created new orders, but lately they have been literally 
 showered broadcast. And not enough with that ; the 
 servant-girl instinct for tawdry Birmingham jewellery 
 has been successfully called into play as a political 
 weapon. The success of the " Primrose League," with 
 its legions of ladies strutting about with fifteen-shilling 
 Birmingham jewels on their breasts, is now almost matter 
 of political history. Why not honestly admit that the 
 Primrose League is a product of the unconscious alliance 
 of the middle classes against the encroachment of the 
 masses ? 
 
 We used to pride ourselves on being free from the 
 vainglorious boasting of other nations. We have lived 
 to witness the creation of the song, " We don't want to 
 fight," etc. We have lived to see our soldiers, who 
 bear the names of Blenheim, Plassy, Waterloo, on their 
 standards, bespattered with trumpery war medals that 
 they are ashamed to wear. And now the pawnshops 
 are full of them. Our military prowess, which was the 
 envy of the world, has become, not only the subject 
 of ridicule abroad, but worse than that, even among our- 
 selves. We used to pride ourselves on a certain prudery 
 in matters bearing on the breaking of the seventh com- 
 mandment. We have lived to see an ex-minister, under 
 the most damning suspicion of its dastard infringement, 
 not only seek parliamentary honours, that would be but 
 little, but we have lived to see a very considerable
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 183 
 
 feminine influence exercised in his favour. In our 
 reaction against cant we come dangerously near the 
 brink of a precipice losing all sense of decency. 
 
 We have nearly traversed the whole span that sepa- 
 rates the sublime from the ridiculous. We have but few 
 steps to make. We only want the next Premier to make 
 a bishop Lord Chancellor, and an actor keeper of the 
 Queen's conscience. 
 
 It is as if the community were to say : " Just look at 
 us, we who have been such a set of canting hypocrites 
 in the past ; see the condition to which we have come ! 
 We who have been the proudest race since the Romans ! " 
 
 Other significant changes of front are noticeable. From 
 being bold innovators, we have come to be servile imita- 
 tors ; not the spirit of what was worth imitating have we 
 seized, but rather the mere letter, or worthless husk. 
 For instance, from being the first country in the world 
 in postal matters, we have come to have to imitate a 
 whole series of Prussian innovations, for they had dis- 
 tanced us. But not content with that, we abolish our 
 easy-working telegraph charges, and substitute the Ger- 
 man clumsy arrangement, counting each word extra, 
 giving the public and the officials needless extra labour. 
 
 But we are not inclined, after all our ill-timed imita- 
 tion, to admit the true reasons of things, or trace eifects 
 honestly to causes. Are we not nowadays accustomed to 
 admit, blandly enough, that the Germans are better edu-
 
 184 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 cated than we are. We even send Mr. Matthew Arnold 
 to Germany to report on their methods of education. 
 But we never ask ourselves how it is that Germans have 
 come to be our superiors in this important matter. Be- 
 cause we should have to confess, that an honest State, 
 deeply solicitous for the welfare of all its children, has 
 devoted itself for generations to their wants. Whereas 
 we have carelessly left the education of our better classes 
 in the hands of a clergy, some of whom, as we have 
 seen, make as much as six thousand pounds a year in 
 the process. As for our efforts to educate our poor, 
 prior to the world-awakening event of 1870, silence is 
 more eloquent than words. 
 
 In fairness it must be said, that the Times, if not free 
 from cant, usually manages to steer clear of gush. As 
 a proof of this, it recently wrote : " It is worth while to 
 recall, on the occasion of the present enthusiastic spasm 
 of virtue, those words of Lord Macaulay, ' There is 
 nothing more ridiculous than the British public in one 
 of its periodical fits of morality,' etc. In stamping out 
 public vice the danger of promoting private immorality 
 should never be out of sight; the suppression of the 
 casinoes has not made London more moral." 
 
 V. 
 
 The Romans of old were outrageously given to cant, 
 in fact as only the English are in our times. Their
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 185 
 
 augurs were worthy of our hierarchical staff. It would 
 be an interesting study for psychologists to inquire, in 
 what relation cant and hypocrisy stand to the hardness 
 of race, that has made the English in many respects the 
 Romans of modern times. Do we owe part of our great 
 qualities to the mixture of cant, as some sweets owe their 
 delicacy of flavour to a suspicion of acidity ? Or are we 
 what we are in spite of the above idiosyncrasies ? 
 
 We who, in the immediate past, cast up our eyes in 
 horror of the stage, are now universally stage-struck, 
 actor- and actress-struck. 
 
 We who let our classic intellect starve at a time 
 when Voltaire was the companion of a great king, we 
 have suddenly realized that we thought too little of our 
 genius, and the middle classes set to work in their own 
 peculiar way to remedy it. We vulgarly lionise brains, 
 and do all we can to turn the heads of their possessors. 
 Lord Macaulay was disgusted with the vulgar lionising 
 of the Americans : if he lived to-day, he need not 
 cross the Atlantic in order to become familiar with its 
 results. It is not to be expected that we should show 
 the splendid appreciation of our intellect that educated 
 Germany has so long shown for " our " greatest sons, but 
 we might at least hope not to see them spoilt by our 
 middle-class worship. 
 
 In our reaction against cant, we become noisy lionisers, 
 and set to work to ruin the best intellect among us.
 
 186 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Mr. Matthew Arnold, who is a graceful writer of English 
 verse and prose, we have succeeded in inspiring with the 
 belief that he is the one superior person who possesses 
 the secret of directing our social and political efforts. 
 Still, it would seem out of all proportion to his impor- 
 tance to dwell on his peculiarities at length, if it were 
 not that they supply so striking an instance of the idio- 
 syncrasies of our time. And he has no right to complain. 
 But we are sorry to see serious men reel and stagger 
 under our noisy social admiration. No wonder they 
 have some difficulty in keeping their balance and not 
 degenerating into social jackdaws. Our great Oxford 
 Apostle of "Sweetness and Light," is an inveterate 
 offender against, and not a sufferer by, this. First of all, 
 he is a poseur of doubtful originality. In giving us the 
 gospel of " Sweetness and Light," he forgot to tell us 
 that the idea may not be his own, for the German writer 
 Herder had already, a hundred years ago, given us 
 " Licht, Liebe, Leben," as his motto. That is essentially 
 the same, except that Herder's motto is more compre- 
 hensive, and, above all, more euphonious. But when 
 Mr. Arnold unburdened his heart in that wonderful book, 
 " Culture and Anarchy," and initiated us into his defini- 
 tion of the "Philistines," he only cleverly "adapted." 
 The expression " Philistines." nearly in the same sense 
 as he uses it, or as near as the difference of national 
 circumstances will admit, is as old as the hills, and as
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 187 
 
 general as the common sparrow in Germany ! Yes, 
 there is a wonderful difference between introducing the 
 noblest thoughts of one nation to the readers of another, 
 trying to engraft the best of one race on another, as 
 Carlyle did there is a vast difference between that and 
 merely "adapting" a few words, and dexterously running 
 over a gamut of variations of them. And this writer, 
 who holds up the mirror of German Geist for our edifica- 
 tion, fancied he saw the standard-bearers thereof, in 
 Benedeck's camp, in 1866. And when he in words 
 that remind us of a process like walking on new laid 
 eggs describes our aristocracy as the "barbarians," 
 he does not forget to add, after nolens volens admitting 
 himself to belong to the Philistines, that when he takes 
 a gun in his hand and seeks the grouse amidst the 
 heather, he feels he has "barbarian" blood in his veins 
 too ! Of course he does. How could he have lived in 
 Oxford without feeling that, and a great deal more ? 
 Some people may deplore, when they remember the 
 broad sympathies for humanity with which that wonder- 
 ful book, " Culture and Anarchy," is brimming over, that 
 its author did not feel the propriety of refusing the pen- 
 sion of two hundred and fifty pounds a year which he 
 accepted from Mr. Gladstone : for some needy strugglers 
 might have benefited by what was evidently never in- 
 tended for men in Mr. Matthew Arnold's position. But 
 what can we expect in this age of gush and self-adver-
 
 1 88 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 tisement, with all our canting theoretical altruism, our 
 gospel of self-denial, and what not? The battle of 
 existence is not an easy one in the age in which we 
 live ; and if we happen to live in a country where our 
 hopes of getting-on in any walk of life are almost certain 
 to be doomed to disappointment, unless we manage to 
 tap the stream of gush or cant, is it to be wondered at 
 that we are, often unconsciously perhaps, anxious to 
 do so? 
 
 This coxcombry of literary affectation and superiority, 
 however, has its own drawbacks, and proclaims its own 
 weakness to the eyes of common sense. After all, Mr. 
 Matthew Arnold, though he would repudiate the idea 
 of being a follower, is hardly the founder of a lasting 
 philosophy, but only of a sectarian method of thought. 
 " He who comes from the kitchen," as Lavater says, 
 " smells of its smoke ; he who adheres to a sect, has 
 something of its cant ; the collegian pursues the stu- 
 dent, and dry inhumanity him who herds with literary 
 pedants." 
 
 VI. 
 
 Now, as we have allowed one class, into which in our 
 time a part of the middle class has* become merged, to be 
 our oracles politically, socially, as well as in the fields of 
 thought and morality, it follows that we could only remain 
 in a healthy state so long as that one prevailing tone-
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 189 
 
 giving class remained healthy itself. Now, if it be proven 
 that it is strongly tainted with narrow-hearted selfishness, 
 it is but natural that its influence should seriously affect 
 the tone of the community at large. The middle classes 
 canting, the humble classes brutalised, indifferent, or 
 hysterically salvational, as we see them, we can but 
 consider the whole a sight displeasing in the eyes of God 
 and men. 
 
 We have been told that the Lord Mayor is the King 
 of Snobs for the year, and the idea may have some truth 
 in it ; but it might be opined that the Lord Mayoralty, 
 the Court of Aldermen and the Common Council, form 
 an institution wrought and perpetuated by aristocratic 
 cunning, to keep the ^-dropping classes continually before 
 us ever and again as objects of ridicule and contempt 
 For if our oligarchic system is rotten, our Bumbledom, 
 as evidenced by the late effusions of the City dignitaries 
 at the prospect of their extinction, is more rotten still, and 
 ten times more vulgar ; and we are thus forced to seek 
 elsewhere for something to which to pin our faith in the 
 future. 
 
 We have no such thing, socially or politically, as anni- 
 hilation by ridicule or contempt : our daily press and our 
 middle classes have taken good care of that Instead of 
 it, there is no country under the sun where annihilation 
 is so dangerously near for those who are honestly and 
 fearlessly in earnest among us. Our middle classes do
 
 190 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 not like earnestness or enthusiasm ; they are things to be 
 discouraged ; we know not their limits. " Sweetness and 
 Light " cannot bear enthusiasm, except it be for ideals over 
 two thousand years old. They cannot come to life again, 
 and inconveniently decline our worship and suggest com- 
 parisons in the mind of the unwashed. Our admiration 
 of remote classic civic virtue is not dangerous by closely 
 suggesting analogous contemporary comparisons. 
 
 Our press accepts aristocratic presents of game to 
 hospitals, which is eaten by the medical staff, as charity 
 worthy of publication. 
 
 We accept the Duke of Cambridge's gushing state- 
 ments about our army, notwithstanding the criminal 
 statistics of the said army. We accept the pricking of 
 the thistle for the whisking of the laurel round the hero's 
 brow. Are solitary mortals, then, to stand aloof and damn 
 themselves by calling out to the well-dressed herd, 
 " Mutton ! you are getting near the edge of the cliffs : 
 beware." Who will thank us, and what chance is there 
 of being heard in a community so deadened to the sense 
 of the ridiculous as our own ? 
 
 Now that we are treating of sentiment, may we not ask, 
 what was it but sentiment the sporting sentiment of the 
 prize-ring that bade our upper classes side with the Con- 
 federates in the American Civil War, and vote Grant, 
 Lincoln, and the other Federal leaders cads, whereas the 
 Southerns were supposed to be gentlemen, one and all ?
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 191 
 
 Was not Mr. Gladstone stricken with this class senti- 
 ment ? Did he not say that Jefferson Davis had called 
 a new nation into life, and has he not since recanted ? 
 
 To show that this feeling was not the fitful ebullition 
 of the moment, but the ingrained sentiment of a class, 
 only the other day Lord Wolseley had the bad taste to 
 express himself in the following way about General 
 Grant : 
 
 "I have only known two heroes in my life, and 
 General R. E. Lee is one of them, so you can well 
 understand how I value one of his letters. I believe 
 that when time has calmed down the angry passions of 
 the ' North,' General Lee will be accepted in the United 
 States as the greatest general you ever had, and second 
 as a patriot only to Washington himself. Stonewall 
 Jackson I only knew slightly ; his name will live for ever 
 also in American history, when that of Mr. U. S. Grant has 
 been long forgotten ; such at least is my humble opinion 
 of these men, when viewed by an outside student of 
 military history who has no local prejudice." 
 
 The idea of Lord Wolseley having no "local" pre- 
 judice is delicious ; but how about having no canting 
 class prejudice? 
 
 If exhortation could influence opinions so thoroughly 
 devoid of reason, it might be of use to ask these partisans 
 to wash their hands, and try and take a lesson from the 
 conduct of such men as Lincoln and Grant ; the latter in
 
 192 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 the hour of victory stepping forward to shield his noble 
 antagonist from popular passion. 
 
 Now, bearing in mind that Pall Mall and St. James's 
 Street have ever been in the habit of drawing their 
 political sympathies (when their direct interests were 
 not at stake) from the prize-ring and the hunting-field 
 constantly showing themselves utterly unable to 
 grasp a political question on its merits, as appealing 
 to heart and mind, it seems rather incongruous to 
 find these very people hard on sentiment. Who can- 
 not remember our aristocratic, though useless, cavalry 
 charges, and our bragging, which made us the laugh- 
 ing-stock of thinking men, whilst our administrative 
 blunders raised a storm of indignation at home. Then 
 how we howled over our losses, whilst other nations 
 bore theirs in silence. That our boundless resources 
 enabled us to pull the cart out of the mud of blunder 
 and bustle never occurred to aristocratic "sentiment." 
 In those days, our enthusiasm, and, later on, our serious 
 appreciation of the indigestible chauvinistic bragging 
 historian of the same, Mr. Kinglake, were worthy of 
 the best days of glorious French bunkum. And yester- 
 day, what was it but ruling-class sentiment that was 
 at the bottom of that most disastrous step of the govern- 
 ment, the bombardment of Alexandria ? In fact, when- 
 ever we come upon a blunder of the Liberal party, 
 we may be sure it arises, in nine cases out of ten, from
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 193 
 
 giving way to the ruling-class sentiment of the Whig 
 wing, in defiance of more sober counsels. 
 
 Whilst referring to this latest and disastrous instance 
 of ruling-class sentiment, let us ask what part our press 
 played in the transaction? Where was the warning 
 voice heard ? Nowhere. The public educator the 
 fourth estate was itself bitten by the sentiment of 
 the hour. 
 
 VII. 
 
 Yes, our monitors do not disdain the use of sentiment, 
 although they revile it when employed by an opponent. 
 Still, there is sentiment and sentiment, and we can sooner 
 understand sentiment when appealed to by the repre- 
 sentatives of our great historic houses than when it is 
 appealed to by the alien and Semitic elements that have 
 forced themselves to the fore in our press and our legisla- 
 ture. 
 
 How much of the influence of Lord Salisbury is owing 
 to the aristocratic sentiment pure and simple, the venera- 
 tion of the middle. classes for the representative of the 
 Cecils ? How much is owing to the qualities of heart 
 and intellect of the man ? That an assembly of generous- 
 hearted and intelligent Englishmen can cheer the cold 
 platitudes of such a man to the echo is after all a poor 
 testimony to the moral and mental height of human 
 nature. Far be it from our thoughts to attach no value 
 
 o
 
 194 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 to an honoured historical name and lineage ; quite the 
 reverse : it is an incentive to high aims and noble 
 actions ; but such aims must be proved to exist, and not 
 doggedly accepted as existing, where all indications point 
 the other way. 
 
 The Victoria Cross was to herald the millennium by 
 giving all classes an equal chance of favour and distinc- 
 tion, though it already carried the seed of our usual one- 
 sidedness in it, for even the private soldier is with us 
 part and parcel of a privileged class institution, not of 
 a national army. But even taken with that qualifica- 
 tion, what a farce its award is ! In military Ger- 
 many the Iron Cross was on the soldier's breast before 
 any recompense was broached for their leaders. In 
 aristocratic England clumsy and unlovable as ever the 
 leaders are rewarded extravagantly and the rank and file 
 get nothing. 
 
 If our oligarchy were honest in its intention of putting 
 all classes on an equal footing, why have we not got 
 rewards for other bodies of men that do not belong to a 
 ruling-class institution, as in other countries. Where are 
 the rewards for our policemen, our firemen, our railway 
 officials ? Or are we still lying to ourselves that we are 
 not a people to confer trumpery medals and crosses like 
 foreigners because we only reserve them for a favoured 
 class ! Or are we going to repeat the cant of the Times, 
 in 1878, which expressed its " wonder " that a man of
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 195 
 
 Sir Henry Bessemer's eminence should complain that 
 our authorities had dissuaded Napoleon III. from giving 
 him the intended Grand Cordon of the Legion of 
 Honour? What are we to say to the spirit of an 
 oligarchy that allowed men like Darwin, Thackeray, 
 Dickens, and many others, to live and die without a word 
 of recognition from the State at most to be insulted by 
 vile flattery at their death and immortalized by viler 
 monuments ? Of course our commercial enterprise 
 secured them an unhindered sale for their books; but 
 not long ago our aristocracy thought it even an indignity 
 to receive money for literary labour : witness Lord Byron. 
 Countless others, who have benefited the community by 
 their labour, have to wait for their death for a mite 
 of recognition ; but none the less surprising is it 
 when \ve note the ease with which members of aristo- 
 cratic families gain power and distinction, not only 
 in public life, but in every department of the public 
 service. We need but cast a glance at the numerous 
 peerages that are vested in one and the same family, and 
 in many instances have been separately bestowed on 
 younger members of powerful families. If we were 
 honest instead of canting as usual, why, if we object to 
 our countrymen receiving foreign decorations, do we allow 
 our Court favourites to accept foreign Orders, even if they 
 be Turkish emblems of imbecility ? Let us be true to 
 ourselves at least, if we want to walk in Mr. Matthew
 
 196 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Arnold's path of "sweetness and light," and let that 
 delicate critic begin by setting us an example himself, 
 instead of accepting a pension which would benefit half- 
 a-dozen deserving but needy men. It is all very well for 
 us to pooh-pooh foreigners for distributing Orders of 
 personal distinction, and cant about leaving public and 
 private opinion to reward civil deeds of usefulness, of 
 daring, and of greatness. How did public opinion 
 reward Waghorn, the pioneer of the overland route ? 
 How should we have rewarded Lesseps had he been a 
 middle-class Englishman? Perhaps placed him on a 
 footing with our graceful alderman? Oh no, cant 
 answers ; we do not believe in these gewgaw things : 
 and yet our fountain of grace is more ridiculously over- 
 flowing than that of any other monarchy, only it is 
 showered forthwith true British cant, narrow-heartedn ess, 
 and unsympathetic cold-blooded class selfishness. Even 
 quite recently we have noticed the creation of two brand- 
 new English Orders. We presume to laugh at foreigners 
 for giving people their full titles, but do we not even the 
 same as they ? * 
 
 * If you get to know the limit of a man's mental range in Prussia, 
 you can venture to assert boldly that such a man might be able to 
 attain such and such a post in the public service, and no more. 
 With us, intellectual power is a secondary affair altogether : given 
 the required amount of self-assurance, and it is within the range of 
 possibility that you may live to govern countries of greater territorial 
 area than that of half the nations of Europe put together, or preside 
 over a department the proper administration of which is of vital
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 197 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Our amiable middle-class apostle of "sweetness and 
 light " revels in dreams of " culture and anarchy," sows 
 soft-sawdering heresy broadcast, and yet manages to 
 handle a knife and fork side by side with a bishop. His 
 interest stops short of the masses, and when he is invited 
 to the East End of London by a noble-minded clergy- 
 man, working hard to reclaim the poor by devoting his 
 life to them, his exquisite barbarian tact prompts him to 
 sneer at Christianity ! He shows the want of that tact 
 which ought to be the essence of the very culture he 
 pretends to inculcate the sense of harmony and of the 
 fitness of things. 
 
 Conservative W. H. Mallock asks " whether life is 
 worth living," and well-dressed followers join him in 
 answering the question in the affirmative by continuing 
 to live. 
 
 Such are our middle-class lights that affect to be dis- 
 satisfied with the times we live in, and have not the 
 courage to avow that middle-class cant is one of the 
 factors that are answerable for so much that is deplorable 
 in our existence. 
 
 We can even turn to the clergy of the Established 
 
 importance to the very existence of the empire ; but not only 
 this, you will do it to the satisfaction, yea, even to the short-lived 
 applause of our middle classes.
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Church, if we desire to find honest sympathy with 
 those that middle-class cant has done so much to isolate 
 and to crush. There, as elsewhere, we find that splendid 
 individualism which revolts against what it holds to be 
 wrong and cruel, and by its revolt only throws a lurid 
 light on everything that is ugly in our midst For as 
 the power of a blow may be tested by the strength of 
 the recoil, so the mass of our entangled cobweb of un- 
 savoury idiosyncrasies and follies connected therewith 
 may be measured by the glorious instances of individual 
 rebellion and struggle against them, with which the 
 history of our land is studded as with lustrous diamonds. 
 
 We meet self-sacrificing heroism and genius in all 
 civilized communities, but the unselfish genius of philan- 
 thropy has brighter examples perhaps among us than in 
 all the world put together. If that be true, some would 
 credit our laissez-faire development with it, but we prefer 
 to think that though it may not be entirely unconnected 
 with the form of our political and social development, 
 that is more an accusation thereof than an encomium. 
 We prefer to think that it is caused by there being no- 
 where such need for it, and there being nowhere so 
 splendid a race that could have risen to the height of 
 so many occasions. 
 
 Not only may it be fearlessly stated that no country 
 in the world has hitherto (America's chance has yet 
 to come) produced such a cluster of individuals who
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 199 
 
 have devoted their thoughts and their lives to the 
 attainment of happiness for their fellow-creatures, but 
 in no country in the world has each class produced 
 such instances of self-denial, of self-sacrifice and devo- 
 tion to a broader humanity as we have. When we have 
 stated this much, and when it has been proved that we 
 have still understated the case in treating of our time 
 especially we can repeat almost the same assertion with 
 regard to our women. What must be the power of the 
 counter-influences that have nullified so much of our 
 best effort ! 
 
 Baron Holtzendorf, in his social and political sketches, 
 besides pointing with admiration to our many instances 
 of enlightened and noble clerical individualism, also 
 refers in glowing terms to the bright array of female 
 philanthropists we possess. Women like Florence 
 Nightingale, Mary Carpenter, Mrs Meredith, of the 
 Nine-Elms Prison Mission, Octavia and Florence Hill, 
 Helen Taylor, and many others are rare in any country. 
 With us they are indirect though unerring proof of the 
 existence of deep-seated misery and degradation that 
 have called forth such noble efforts to relieve them. 
 
 Further on Baron Holtzendorf refers to men like the 
 Rev. Mr. Vincent, of Norwich, the late Bishop Fraser, 
 of Manchester,- and many others, with the remark that 
 it would be difficult to find such independence of thought, 
 such initiative, such bold individualism in any hierarchy
 
 200 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 save our own. This is a testimony to the race and an 
 indictment of the forced conditions of its existence. 
 For it is but natural that the cry for help should come 
 from those most qualified by their position to know the 
 extent of the ills they war against. How different is 
 such action from the weak attempt of the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury to take the wind out of the sails of rampant 
 Salvationism, to succeed only in advertising whilst 
 estranging it 
 
 As stated above, it is not one class or even one sex 
 to whom our individualism is confined, but to every 
 section of the community. The aristocracy, whose power 
 is bound up with the possession of land, just as 
 the woe and degradation of the masses are con- 
 nected with the impossibility of its acquisition, this 
 aristocracy has also always produced champions for a 
 popular cause, and thus shielded the class from the 
 reproach of any selfish proceeding of its more recalcitrant 
 majority. Here, again, we have that individualism, 
 without which our aristocracy could never have ridden 
 the storms of modern convulsions. Even at the present 
 moment, when we see a majority holding on to the solid 
 remnants of a mighty political lever slipping from its 
 grasp, we also see numberless instances of voluntary 
 reductions of rent, besides even more tangible and noble 
 proofs of honest conviction leading men to steer a 
 course visibly in direct opposition to their own class
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 
 
 interest. The want of that spirit of enlightened un- 
 selfish individualism among the German and French 
 aristocracy has been one of the causes of their downfall, 
 and their present non-existence as a great political power. 
 
 IX. 
 
 It is not our intention to draw up a long list of Eng- 
 land's men of genius, and exult on our supremacy over 
 others in the possession of a Shakespeare, a Newton, 
 a Clive, a Watts, or a Stephenson : our Pharisees are not 
 likely to lose sight of that Our aim in dwelling on our 
 individualism is to point to that form of heroic rebellion 
 against the ugliness and cruel working of our conditions 
 of life, that more than anything else prove their exist- 
 ence. Of course, we already hear the voice of cant ex- 
 claim, " Is not our individualism a direct outcome of our 
 glorious laissez-faire principle, which allows the strong 
 and good in the community to work itself out for the 
 benefit of all ? " Yes, good friends, it is the result in the 
 same sense as the heroism of the policeman facing 
 the armed burglar is the direct result of the murderous 
 instincts of the latter. But how about the case, if the 
 race did not produce that heroism ? Fortunately it does, 
 but not as a "result" of our cant, or of any of its 
 illusory theories and applications. We have dwelt OH 
 this point elsewhere, but we may state that these are
 
 302 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 instances of individualism which can have little connec- 
 tion with any real or imaginary principle of government, 
 but which are rather the direct outcome of the " hardness 
 of race " which has triumphed over obstacles under con- 
 ditions that would have swamped any less hard-fibred 
 people. Thus, without blindly swearing by a laissez-faire 
 fetish, or by an iron centralization, with all our hopes for 
 the future based on the greatness of the Anglo-Saxon 
 race, assisted and guided by the dawn of the spirit of 
 enlightenment and culture, we pass on to the suggestion 
 of some remedies. 
 
 Unfortunately, " We mistake men's diseases," says 
 Richard Baxter, " when we think there needeth nothing 
 to cure them of their errors but the evidences of truth. 
 Alas ! there are many distempers of mind to be removed 
 before they receive that evidence." But Ruskin adds : 
 " Nevertheless, when it is fully laid before them, my 
 duty will be done. Conviction will follow in due 
 course." 
 
 In the mean time the glorious individualism to be 
 found among all classes will assist us, and augurs well 
 for the splendid possibilities of the future. 
 
 Lastly, let us ask to what our idiosyncrasies, with 
 their crop of vagaries and fallacies, with their bacillus- 
 like tenacity, point ? 
 
 Are they the parasites naturally congenial to our 
 organism, and therefore without marked influence on its
 
 THE RESULTS AND REVOLT. 203 
 
 vitality, or are they of mushroom growth, born and bred 
 of the miasma of temporary mental sloth and unclean- 
 liness, and only to be cast out by a process of fumigation, 
 compared to which the fumes of our London chimney- 
 pots are as the curling vapours of a red-Indian's peaceful 
 pipe? 
 
 Is this fumigation if such a process be necessary 
 to be violent in its character, thickened by the blood 
 of a hundred thousand men, or is it all to be worked 
 out peacefully by the aid of the grinning aphorism 
 of laissez-faire, cantingly called the " survival of the 
 fittest " ? 
 
 Are gush, hysteria, reeking and rising from the 
 Pontine marshes of our selfishness, to breed as hitherto 
 their epileptic product, while we continue to hide our 
 heads in the sand and call our neighbours to admire 
 the only visible parts of our persons, or are we drifting 
 Heaven knows we are not steering towards a cata- 
 clysm, out of which a new life, born of a new morality, 
 shall bid us regard the past as a hideous nightmare ? 
 
 A later generation may be able to answer this, as it 
 may safely be trusted to answer many other questions. 
 We can but see the ills we suffer from, and crave indul- 
 gence for our optimism and presumption in venturing to 
 point to some remedies.
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 " Begone, and make place for better men." CROMWELL. 
 
 "We are told that this country is the paradise of the rich; it 
 should be our task to see that it does not become the purgatory of 
 the poor. It should be our task to strive, each according to his 
 opportunity, to leave the world a little better than he found it." 
 J. CHAMBERLAIN, Spswich, Jan. 14, 1885. 
 
 I. 
 
 IT has been a thankless task to dwell at length on 
 cant and on some of its deplorable results, the more so 
 as the latter are so palpable and self-evident from the 
 moment the widespread existence of the idosyncrasy 
 itself has been fairly demonstrated. Let us, in conclusion, 
 turn to the outlook, the hope for the future, the remedy. 
 The outlook seems tolerably clear before us, and, taken 
 all round, may well fill us with hope for the future. The 
 ways and means, the influences at work wherewith our 
 hopes are to be worked out, are not so easily to be 
 denned and described, however keenly it may be felt to
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 205 
 
 be the only way out of the present state of things ; for 
 where ills are complex, the work of recovery must be 
 many-sided and various. 
 
 As our pharisaic cant is largely mixed up with our 
 endeavour to make ourselves and others believe we are 
 better than we really are, so the first stage on the road 
 to recovery will be to get rid of this tendency. We 
 must endeavour to become humble without being unduly 
 self-depreciatory. It is not the humility of affectation 
 we require, but rather the earnest humility of the Puritans 
 of old, which did not for one moment hinder them from 
 keeping their powder dry, whilst they bowed their heads 
 in earnest interpretation of biblical texts. 
 
 We must strive to gain self-knowledge, or what the 
 Germans call Selbsterkenntniss self-insight Not that 
 we suffer from want of knowledge ; far from that ; we are 
 learning almost too precipitately, before our mental 
 digestion is able to assimilate the matter. We try to 
 seize too many ideas, and bestow too little attention on 
 the cultivation and hardening of character. It is one 
 of the great defects of our education of youth in the 
 present day, that we place too much importance on 
 the receptivity of ideas and not on the development of 
 character, which would greatly help us to appreciate and 
 to utilize our learning. In a partial reversal of this order 
 of things will be found one feature of hope for the 
 future.
 
 206 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Our Pitts, Foxes, Dundases, were splendid characteristic 
 animals, the descendants of whom we can see lounging 
 in the bow-windows of Brooke's or Boodle's during the 
 London season. But they rule us no longer. Our 
 dominant spirits in the past ruled largely by force of 
 character. Men like Cromwell, Pitt, and even Canning, 
 were all character ; but then they were not weighted by 
 having to pander to a canting middle class in alliance 
 with a leviathan press. Their sympathies, at least those 
 of Pitt and Canning, might not have fitted them to deal 
 with the grievances of the present day, but they will 
 ever remain splendid instances of the force of character. 
 And it is to force of character, whether shown by one 
 man towering above his fellows, or by an earnest com- 
 munity of men, that we must also look for salvation in 
 the future. 
 
 II. 
 
 England is no ground for Utopian social remedies ; the 
 common sense of the nation will always be proof against 
 them. But it is no Utopian wish that the influence of the 
 metropolitan leviathan press and its hysterical hangers-on 
 may decrease, even if that of the more sober and honest 
 provincial press increase in proportion. 
 
 One of the grandest clap-trap phrases of our cant is, 
 that our press is our great educator, and it is a most 
 disastrous lie. A press may be an educator in a back-
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 207 
 
 ward community ; but a daily press like ours is certainly 
 an instrument of general stupefaction in any community 
 which has reached a certain stage of primary education. 
 We say " our " press, for we can imagine " a " press that 
 might fulfil an educating mission far beyond our ex- 
 perience hitherto. But such a press would be a very 
 different one from "our" press. It would have to be, 
 first of all, less ambitious, less hypocritical, more like a 
 part of our provincial press more honest, more unas- 
 suming. But, above all, it would have to be less jovine, 
 less infallible, less impertinent, less hypocritically anony- 
 mous. We want a press to help to keep awake our 
 better nature, to point more to the beauties of existence, 
 to quicken our perceptions of what is refining and worth 
 living for, instead of endeavouring to keep us in a per- 
 petual state of unhealthy unrest. We do not want our 
 press to tell us blindly whom to worship : it has made 
 hideous blunders in endeavouring to do so ; but it can 
 assist us to discern for ourselves, to weigh for our- 
 selves whom and what we are to pin our taith to. We 
 want no dictatorial organs of public opinion let our 
 chosen best men, calmly assembled, represent our public 
 opinion ; we do not want the policy of this world-em- 
 pire, hysterically influenced overnight by ambiguous 
 rags hawked about the metropolis of an evening at so 
 many copies for a shilling, and vomiting forth cant and 
 gush in the name of patriotism and morality.
 
 208 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 And yet such is daily the case with us, and no more 
 striking exemplification of its perniciousness can well be 
 imagined than the fact that, whilst every nine out of ten 
 persons are ready to admit the viciousness of a great 
 part of our press influence, no public man dare come 
 forward and say so ! Like men floating along a rapid 
 current, they know it is only wasting strength to try to 
 swim against it, besides risking personal discomfiture, if 
 not annihilation ! Yes, what a power this fourth estate 
 wields. Only to think what it must be when we know 
 that the heir to the throne considers it policy to invite 
 some of its most vulgar representatives as guests to his 
 house. What he must suffer ! It is a case for pitying. 
 Oh, duties of wealth and station J But there are some 
 that stand on the banks and can afford to call out to the 
 seething, struggling mass of humanity which they see 
 hurrying on to the main, that the evil is a real and a 
 serious one, though our insular position and a certain 
 hardness of the national character have hitherto preserved 
 us from some of its most disastrous results. 
 
 Let our press scribes sign their articles. Let us every 
 morning before breakfast, on an empty stomach, but with 
 a clear head, distinctly understand that these leading 
 effusions are the hastily crystallized emanations of a small 
 unknown coterie of commercial men, banded together 
 for purposes of self-interest and commercial success. 
 Let it be distinctly understood that these men meet
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 209 
 
 nightly with the praiseworthy regularity of every other 
 body of salaried commercial workers; that they are 
 bound to accept the password of the chief, like every 
 other commercial staff, and are told off to do their 
 work regularly and mechanically, like any other paid 
 workmen. Let it be distinctly understood that these 
 commercial ventures have their gas bill to pay, their 
 paper and ink bill to settle, to keep their Walter presses 
 well oiled and greased, etc., long before they can 
 strike out and thunder at us in the name of the interests 
 of an empire on which the sun never sets ! Let us rid 
 ourselves of the cant of a mercenary press; almost 
 every paper is mercenary in a sense. 
 
 Let the silly many-headed of the middle class once 
 seize these facts, and they will be ashamed of themselves 
 for bowing down to a shibboleth of clay. Gradually 
 they will turn to other standards to form their judgments 
 on matters social and political. Fortunately we are not 
 in want of something better to turn to : the English race 
 has produced prototypes enough : luminous examples in 
 every department of thought and action to look up to 
 and live by. Only let cant enable us to recognize them. 
 To profit by their teaching, so that we may learn to 
 think for ourselves humbly, but earnestly, so that it may 
 assist us to see our way for ourselves, or at all events 
 without blindly accepting the conclusions our press gives 
 us cut and dried on every imaginable subject, is not the 
 
 p
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 work of a day, or of a year ; but it is to be done, and 
 must be done nevertheless. Only we must set to work 
 about it without cant; we must rid ourselves of that 
 enemy first. 
 
 And there is no time to lose, for gradually, but surely 
 as the rising tide, there are elements coming to the fore 
 that laugh at our fond crotchets, that care not for the 
 editorial "we" which has crushed all independent 
 thought out of us ; elements that know little religion 
 as we understand religion, but even less cant ; ele- 
 ments that are in earnest, and whose thoughts are filled 
 with menaces which might be rendered by the well- 
 known French saying, Ote toi de Id, que je nfy mette. 
 Among these new elements are men who, as Bishop 
 Fraser, of Manchester, once eloquently said in com- 
 menting on the heroic conduct of some miners, " prac- 
 tise true religion, whilst we are only preaching it." We 
 must begin to realize that the gigantic commercial suc- 
 cess of our press is not an unmixed blessing, but in 
 many ways a curse a weapon in the service of cant ; 
 a wall that hinders us from seeing ahead. Such is in 
 reality the power we bow down to and worship. Let us 
 get the better of this state of things and we shall be 
 another step up the ladder of hope for the future. 
 
 Our provincial press, with its comparative sobriety of 
 tone, with its comparative emancipation from governing 
 class influence, with its comparative emancipation from
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 211 
 
 the ambitious legal clique that so largely influences our 
 leading London journals, supplies us with some hope 
 in a desirable direction. Yes, to clip the power of our 
 preponderant press, by learning to discern its true 
 nature, is the first step to disestablish cant and pave 
 the way to raise the moral and mental tone of the com- 
 munity at large ; particularly to raise the poorer portions 
 thereof, those most in want of light and truth. It would 
 seem as though the time were near at hand, too, if we 
 take some crazy indications in that direction as signs 
 of healthier action to follow. But our people want none 
 of Mr. Matthew Arnold's " Sweetness and Light ; " they 
 want honester and sterner stuff. Neither do they want 
 a canting propaganda of the equality of all men, the 
 clap-trap " same flesh and blood " phrase. That idea is 
 practically impossible as it is theoretically ridiculous. 
 
 III. 
 
 It is necessary, for the healthy advancement of the 
 community at large, that the position of the classes of 
 culture and refinement should be recognized and receive 
 their due of consideration and respect; but not at the 
 expense of the rights of others; not by means of class 
 legislation, brought about by the selfish cant of a ruling 
 minority. It should be our aim to be as happy as we 
 can in the world we are placed in, for the purpose of
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 seeking our happiness, but not at the expense of others. 
 There are predominant and favoured classes more or 
 less everywhere : true equality seems as impossible 
 among individuals, as it undoubtedly is among nations 
 and races, be they republics or monarchies. But it 
 should be the task of our teachers and our legislators, 
 without indulging in Utopian hopes and dreams, to clip 
 the power of class pretensions where they contain a 
 wrong or injustice towards the weaker, though the 
 greater number. This can be done without wrong to 
 the minority. We do not say it can be done without 
 "loss" to the minority; we contend it can be done 
 without " wrong; " but "loss " of what we have no right 
 to arrogate to ourselves is not necessarily synonymous 
 with " wrong." 
 
 A cabinet minister (Mr. Chamberlain, Birmingham, 
 June 3, 1885) tells us, " I do not believe that any Liberal 
 policy, mine or any other, will ever take away the 
 security which property rightly enjoys that it will ever 
 destroy the certainty that industry and thrift will meet 
 with their due reward ; but I do think that something 
 may be done to enlarge the obligation and responsibility 
 of the whole community towards its poorer and less 
 fortunate members." 
 
 Many will re-echo this sentiment; and, fortunately, 
 things have come to such a pass, notwithstanding middle- 
 class cant and journalistic time-serving, that our governing
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 213 
 
 classes are ready to grant almost anything, provided we 
 will accept it from them and allow them to continue as 
 the sole fountain of grace and dispensers of patronage. 
 We repeat we look for no Utopian millennium ; we only 
 want what others have already got, without the disadvan- 
 tages which unfavourable circumstances have hitherto 
 denied to them. And when both the governing parties 
 in the State have exhausted their efforts of ousting each 
 other by concessions to popular clamour, we shall get 
 what we want; not so much by virtue of Acts of 
 Parliament, as by emancipating ourselves from cant and 
 utilizing political power, which will be of little good till 
 that is accomplished. 
 
 We need not care whether it be a Chamberlain, a 
 Gladstone, a Hartington, or even a Salisbury or Churchill 
 that assists us to break the power for evil of our vested 
 interests. Nor need we care what classes assist us in 
 the work. If the classes that put " respectability " first 
 and the happiness of their fellow-men only afterwards ; 
 if these classes will not lead in the van, we must look to 
 those who place the solidarity of their fellow-creatures 
 above every other consideration. The Germans did 
 not at first expect their national aspirations to be 
 realized by a Bismarck. But we do not want national 
 unification; disunion has never been our national mis- 
 fortune, as it has ever been the curse of the Germans ; 
 we want amalgamation, assimilation of our different
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 classes, and debrutalization of our poorer classes. We 
 want to lower the gaudy ruling-class top of our edifice 
 (not our harmless royalty, whose power for good exceeds 
 its power for harm), and cleanse the basement of the 
 building. We want that harmonious blending and sym- 
 pathy, among ourselves at least, which we have always 
 been unable to attain among the subject races we 
 rule over. 
 
 We want to produce a greater number of a type 
 already referred to in our Introduction as being some- 
 thing more than the mere ruling-class gentleman 
 a type that will no longer be narrowed in sympathy to 
 its own class, but will feel restless at enjoying advantages 
 purchased at the cost of the degradation of others. It 
 is likely that mankind will never agree as to the best 
 form of government, though the choice narrow itself 
 between a strong centralized authority and a divided 
 decentralized one. But on one question we may hope 
 to see the world agree one day, namely that, in the 
 interests of the many, the aristocratic class oligarchy of 
 a few, in possession of the land, foully worshipped by a 
 clergy in alliance with the middle classes, and sailing 
 under the canting flag of popular government, is about 
 the worst ! 
 
 The change from all this will be complex and many- 
 sided, but come it must, whether gradually or with com- 
 parative suddenness. The alteration of our feudal land
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 215 
 
 laws, the reform of the House of Lords, the disestablish- 
 ment of a Church that has ignominously failed to do its 
 work, the removal of its representatives from the Upper 
 House, a cheapening and simplification of civil law, and, 
 lastly, a " discantation" of society at large, these are some 
 of the items that will help us to a higher and healthier 
 level ; these are some of the items that will raise our 
 masses and give them more self-respect, a greater sense 
 of the dignity and value of life, however humble its 
 sphere. 
 
 These are no wild Utopian dreams, for the leading 
 continental nations have already got the reality ; they 
 have almost all got what we shall have to fight hard for. 
 
 IV. 
 
 Baron vom Stein, the regenerator of Prussia, at the 
 beginning of this century already recognized the danger 
 of the rights of property in land being pushed to the 
 extent of constituting a wrong to the community at large. 
 He initiated measures to bring the laws relating to land 
 property more in accordance with the spirit of the age, 
 and the revolution of 1848, particularly in South Ger- 
 many, consummated reform in that direction all over 
 Germany. France we need not dwell on ; the French 
 Revolution of 1789 settled that question violently, and 
 to-day we see the land in the hands of a peasantry
 
 216 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 who form the backbone of security for peace in the 
 country. In France, eighteen millions of acres of land 
 are owned by two and a half millions of people ; in 
 England, the same number of acres are owned by 4217 
 people ! 
 
 The reform of the House of Lords would only give it 
 the representative character which it lacks, and which the 
 Herren-Haus in Prussia and Austria and the Senate in 
 France enjoy. That it should have greater power than 
 they have has long enough been our curse. With regard 
 to a simplification and reform of our civil laws, to bring 
 them into harmony with our times, it is scarcely necessary 
 to assert that other nations have long had that boon. 
 With regard to ridding ourselves of cant, we cannot 
 unfortunately find an exact precedent elsewhere to draw 
 deductions from. It is our own insular speciality, and 
 we believe the main cause of our not yet enjoying those 
 blessings which other communities already enjoy. For 
 if cant had ever allowed us to see things as they are, 
 we may assume we should have put our shoulder to 
 the wheel ere this to fashion things as they ought to be. 
 These things will not be given to us, we must work for 
 them and earn them. 
 
 Yes, as before said, not from Acts of Parliament alone 
 can we expect better things, unless they go hand in hand 
 with the disestablishment of a greater enemy than our 
 worst laws, that blinder of our better-self, our lying to
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 217 
 
 ourselves, our sincere insincerity, our cant, that vilest 
 pair of coloured-glasses ever clapped on eyes of mortal. 
 
 The middle classes have had their chance since the 
 first Reform Bill, and missed it Let the masses now 
 have theirs. In the words of Dickens, " the ' great gen- 
 teel ' have made such a mess of things, that ' the great 
 vulgar ' can't do worse." As the middle classes have 
 proved themselves unequal to the task and incapable of 
 unselfishness or enthusiasm, let us try the masses and 
 see whether they can improve on their predecessors; 
 either directly by their own action, or indirectly by dis- 
 cerning a true hero, or a constellation of heroes, to do it . 
 for them. 
 
 If noble individualism alone could do the work, men 
 like Sir Samuel Romilly and Lord Hatherley would have 
 already done for civil law what they did for our criminal 
 law. The canting solidarity of legal class power has 
 hitherto prevented that from being accomplished. Men 
 like Maurice, Charles Kingsley, Dean Stanley, Dean 
 Alford, Bishop Fraser, would have enabled our Church 
 to embrace the elements so long standing . outside its 
 influence, if individualism alone could help us. 
 
 But we must still look to our individualism ; it is one 
 of the noblest signs of what our race is capable. But 
 we must be clean of cant in order to recognize and assist 
 its efforts, to meet it half-way with the shield of earnest- 
 ness and honest sympathy. Yes, we may well be proud
 
 2i8 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 of the glorious names of those who have from time to 
 time devoted their life energies to the endeavour to 
 rescue us from darkness, notwithstanding Henry Thomas 
 Buckle's chilling conclusions, that the work of the indi- 
 vidual means nothing beyond an irresponsible indirec- 
 tion of influences that laugh at personal effort. But 
 Henry Thomas Buckle was essentially a product of the 
 middle classes, of those who discovered that the sum of 
 human happiness consisted in being able to buy in the 
 cheapest and to sell in the dearest market ; a colossus in 
 conscientious work and grasp of detail, but without ima- 
 gination, without sentiment, with a weak heart. Even 
 the Pooley episode only evinced a certain sentiment by 
 its animus. Such men as Buckle cannot assist us much, 
 for, having devoted their lives to get rid of sentiment, 
 because they now and then discover it to be unhealthy 
 and false, they have lost sight of the fact that, after all, 
 sentiment is a great factor in the problem of our happi- 
 ness. The chief aim is to be influenced by healthy and 
 true sentiment. Let us have no more ridiculous journal- 
 istic waving of Jove's thunderbolt. Let us recognize 
 the sawdust running out of Jove's ugly stitched-up car- 
 case. Let us re-echo Dante's words, " guarda e passa." 
 Let us be strong enough to look and pass on to better 
 things.
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 219 
 
 v. 
 
 A wave of sympathy with the masses is passing over 
 us. Men like Dean Stanley, Kingsley, and others, taken 
 up by royalty, have set a noble example, and the idea 
 has filtered into the canting middle classes. But what 
 was honest, even noble in its origin, becomes vitiated in 
 the process of filtration. The purest spring water is 
 the soonest tainted ; what purity of thought could pass 
 through our middle classes and remain undefiled ? They 
 have shown what noble ideas mean when worked out by 
 them. They result in our sham charities, in their endea- 
 vour to identify themselves with the wants of those 
 beneath them. We have been working from the top, or, 
 at best, from the surface. We must come to work from 
 beneath the surface. We must start from the basement 
 of the social edifice, from underground, from the very 
 earth we all spring from and go back to from the land 
 question. We have been working from "without," we 
 must begin to work from " within," whilst gladly accept- 
 ing all honest co-operation from without, from above. 
 To undo the harm of generations of cant and wrong it 
 will take generations. But we hope to live to see a 
 beginning, a start. 
 
 We are gradually sending our masses to the picture 
 galleries, into the parks of the great. No wonder they now 
 and then give just cause of complaint by their bad
 
 220 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 behaviour, as in the case of Lord Essex ; they are yet 
 too unaccustomed to privileges which have long been 
 the birthright of their fellows in other countries. 
 
 We are in the midst of an Exhibition mania ; we are 
 raising the artistic taste of the multitude. Officious 
 busybodies, trading on the goodwill of royalty, feel the 
 divine mission of spreading culture over the land. The 
 whole affair becomes a gigantic shop for the benefit of a 
 few privileged licencees and of the different railway com- 
 panies at the expense of the metropolitan taxpayer. 
 
 No, all this is of little good. We must cleanse our 
 hearts and wash our hands, and then we shall soon see 
 that such efforts alone will not help us far. And we shall 
 come to see more clearly. We are becoming honester 
 than we were, for the sterling qualities of the race are 
 gradually asserting themselves, and have already slowly 
 insisted on and gained a reform of laws which, shaped by 
 a callous governing class, were till lately a premium on 
 dishonesty. Well may we hope for a people that grew 
 great under our land- and civil laws. It is the fashion, 
 both at home and abroad, to say that England has seen 
 her best days, to hint at Holland or Rome as fitting 
 comparisons. We, on the contrary, believe that Eng- 
 land's day has yet to come, and that it will come as soon 
 as we choke cant. 
 
 We want no temperance, nor Salvation crazes ; they 
 will only defer our salvation. They are not manifesta-
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 
 
 tions of the true spirit of Christianity, but simply an out- 
 come of the blind fanatic narrow spirit of Old Testament 
 Judaism, whose God was the avenging Jehovah, Adonai. 
 We want no more of that spirit. Let our spiritual 
 teachers, of whatever denomination, whether they hold 
 forth in the gorgeous Gothic tabernacle, or of a Sunday 
 evening in our parks and streets, let them cease to revile 
 our instincts and degrade humanity by their morbid 
 reflections on our lusts and passions. They have tried 
 this long enough without bringing us nearer to salvation. 
 Let them point to the beauty of life, if properly under- 
 stood, and to the merit of finding our happiness in realiz- 
 ing that life can be made worth living in every walk of 
 it, however humble and lowly. The true life-giving 
 instincts of Christianity are still to be found in our midst, 
 not in the dogmatical casuistries of our theologians 
 they never possessed them but in the strata unaffected 
 by such as they. To strengthen and to ^elevate these 
 instincts must now be our task. 
 
 The true heroism of our race not its savagery that 
 indomitable hardness of nerve, which has ever enabled 
 us to fight on in the battle of life when others have 
 despaired and been vanquished ; these are the qualities 
 that supply us with matter for congratulation and for 
 hope. We should be surprised if any Englishman could 
 hear of a wreck at sea, where the captain perishes with 
 his vessel ; of a mining accident, where volunteers crowd
 
 222 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 to the rescue ; of a life-boat's crew dashing through the 
 breakers in a winter's night, without feeling his bosom 
 swell at the thought of being an Englishman. 
 
 There is no Pharisaism in this, it is a bit of true, 
 honest human nature. Why, even the savagery of our 
 people is not without its redeeming features, for the 
 English race is the only one that, even in its roughest, 
 lowliest type, has the sense of fair-play, and disdains to 
 strike an antagonist when he is down. The word " fair- 
 play " even has no synonym in any other language. 
 
 What race in the world has produced a body of men 
 taken from the humblest ranks, like our police force, 
 a member of which, single-handed and unarmed, will face 
 an armed burglar, yes, even throw and capture him. 
 
 These remarks are not intended as a sop to Cerberus, 
 or a glorification of the uncultured at the expense of the 
 cultured, but merely to point with hope to the innate 
 noble instincts of a race, when freed from cant and the 
 meanness that is its direct outcome. For it is not con- 
 science alone, but mainly cant that " maketh cowards 
 of us all." 
 
 VI. 
 
 Our aptitude for organization and united effort is 
 another of our national characteristics that furnish us 
 with hope. Need we compare the work done by our 
 minor officials, whether soldiers, sailors, policemen, ra ; l-
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 223 
 
 way, Post-office, Foreign-office officials, or others, with 
 the unsatisfactory performances of the favoured-privileged 
 class individuals that invariably direct their efforts ? A 
 splendid race, indeed, that could produce such men 
 under such disadvantageous conditions. The organiza- 
 tion of our trade-unions, of some of our advanced elec- 
 torates, the effacement of the individual before the 
 common interests to be achieved, are, notwithstanding 
 their drawbacks, all instances in point of that indomitable 
 hardness of race which bids us believe that it will win in 
 the end. 
 
 And yet there are many among us who turn with 
 disgust from the organization of the masses. But more 
 wonderful still, these very people pooh-pooh the strong 
 man too. These doctrinaires delight in our being ruled 
 by Micawber-orators in alliance with gush and with 
 'other unhealthy instincts of the hour. 
 
 Walter Bagehot may be quite right in saying it would 
 not be desirable to have more talent in our representative 
 bodies,but he omits to say that we could do with a 
 little more character and a great deal less class egotism. 
 If so, we must seek to develop character and strike a blow 
 at class egotism, which is none the less a curse though 
 it is often found in conjunction with great individual 
 unselfishness and generosity. If we have lost faith in 
 our power to do good, we must strive for knowledge 
 in order that we may regain faith.
 
 224 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 There is no better road to knowledge than that which 
 opens up to our perception how wretched is our present 
 state. We must endeavour to realize what dreadful 
 canting bunglers the oracles are from whom we have 
 taken our cue supreme, among them our daily papers. 
 That done, things will broaden out before our vision, 
 and gradually assume shape in their true light and pro- 
 portions. 
 
 We shall perceive that our governing classes must 
 be credited with many of the finest characters, not only 
 in English history, but in the history of the world. But 
 we shall also perceive that, whenever they have shown 
 an antagonism to the special interests of their class, they 
 have either had to bend, or have been crushed : witness 
 Sir Robert Peel. But it is not our intention to dwell 
 further on this matter than to emphasize that we must 
 endeavour to check the class egotism of our age. 
 
 The individual shall retain the lustre of his father's 
 exploits, but no privileges. The achievements of the 
 father must be an incentive to the son, and not go to 
 make his life a privileged sinecure. This means that we 
 must abolish the hereditary character of our lawgivers, or 
 at least modify it. We must disestablish not only the 
 Church, and lay hold upon the national funds now in 
 its hands, and see they are rationally utilised, but we 
 must also extirpate the toadying, fawning spirit of our 
 time. We must begin to have a word to say with regard
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 225 
 
 to the curriculum of our public schools, and to inquire 
 into their working under clerical don influence, as we 
 have now and then inquired into the working of our 
 public baths, and wash-, and work-houses. Our narrow 
 classical education-^for it has never been classical in 
 the broad enlightened sense, instead of being a refining 
 influence has become a hindrance to our recognizing 
 the wants of the age. Our sucking senators, imbued 
 with the achievements of Cicero and Caesar, suffer from 
 a species of vocal diarrhoea, and fancy they are address- 
 ing a Roman audience, whereas they are invariably 
 talking to a set of men imbued with less ideality than 
 an average rat. 
 
 The possession of land by the masses would not 
 produce a millennium, but the greater division of land 
 would do away with the ridiculous social prestige 
 attached to its possession, and thus tend to level 
 the different classes. It would tend to weaken the 
 influence of the wealthy at elections, and help to strip 
 our executive of its narrow class character. We will 
 spend twenty millions on our navy, but we do not want 
 our privileged classes to direct the spending of it. 
 
 We sneer at the foul place-hunting and corruption of 
 American politicians. Let us look among ourselves. 
 There is hardly a parvenu among us who is possessed 
 of a large income that could not force himself into our 
 legislative assembly and lay down the law in the name 
 
 Q
 
 226 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 of the traditions of the Conquest, and all for the sake 
 of social recognition and distinction. 
 
 We must endeavour to train ourselves to look upon 
 character as a true aristocratic distinction, and vulgar self- 
 seeking as a thing to smile on and to pity ! We have 
 not yet come to that, for our senatorial vulgarians pose 
 before us in all their glaring and gaudy arrogance. Let 
 us hope we may disestablish this sort of thing, and the 
 sooner the better. 
 
 American politicians go in for place and its pecuniary 
 emoluments ; our middle classes go in for social recog- 
 nition : only our aristocratic younger sons go in for the 
 cash emoluments of place. We all aspire to what we 
 do not possess, and it ought to be our care to see that 
 the getting of it does not take place at the expense of 
 the well-being and health of the community. But it 
 does at present, and cant is the coloured glass that 
 prevents our seeing that it is so. 
 
 VII. 
 
 We are told our advanced statesmen are setting class 
 " against " class. What have we been doing hitherto but 
 persistently setting class " above " class ; keeping class 
 "from "class; estranging where we might have assimi- 
 lated and welded together in the common interests of 
 enlightened humanity.
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION". 227 
 
 Our cant-ridden doctrinaires prevent us from seeing 
 that we are not likely to be assisted to abolish the 
 abuses of a class with the concurrence of that class, but 
 only in spite of its opposition. This truth we must 
 grasp firmly, and by its assistance see through the 
 sophisms of those who are ever endeavouring to divert 
 our eyes from the main issue. For instance, while the 
 House of Commons is being befooled by endless dis- 
 cussions as to oaths and affirmations three hundred 
 interminable pensions are being quietly commuted. Did 
 the public stop to inquire " whence this haste ? " Did it 
 perceive that all this panic, the opposition to affirmation, 
 was the result of the deliberate determination of one 
 low-born man to propose the abolition of one of the 
 most scandalous abuses even this aristocratic country 
 can boast of? We think not. 
 
 Did the Prussians make their army what it is with the 
 help of crotchetty doctrinaires or mouthing Parliamen- 
 tarians ? Did the French break the power of the feudal 
 landlords with their concurrence ? Surely not ; but 
 cant asks us to believe that we shall get privileged 
 human nature to vote cheerfully for the extinction of all 
 that it clings to. 
 
 We who expect lawyers to assist us to make their 
 profession less lucrative, less like the character of a bird 
 of prey on the public, we may well ask whether the 
 parliamentary interest of the legal profession would ever
 
 228 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 have produced the Code Napoleon by gradual evolution, 
 by seeking the aid and advice of a majority of those 
 whose interest it was to leave well alone. 
 
 Did the Americans get their magnificent Constitution 
 by the gradual evolvement of precedent, by the unerring 
 instinct of universal suffrage ? or was it the work of strong 
 men; in fact, of such strong men that even universal 
 suffrage and the vile vulgarity of a money-crazy age have 
 been unable to move a stone of its foundation ? Let us 
 bear this in mind, and we shall have to admit that we 
 must look for salvation too from strong and good men ; 
 whether from one single man or a set of men it is all 
 the same. Better be many, so that there be some left 
 standing to take the place of him who falls. It is the 
 vilest middle-class cant to inveigh against " one man 
 rule : " the great thing is to be ruled by the best, the 
 most righteous, whether they be twelve apostles, or one 
 Saviour. 
 
 Such men as we are in want of would soon teach us 
 to cleanse our hearts of that foul fetish, laissez-faire. 
 They would teach us to take the initiative seriously and 
 earnestly to produce a greater amount of happiness for 
 the greatest number than has been attainable hitherto ; 
 not by organizing sham Exhibitions, and driving our 
 masses into them like sheep, but by spreading technical 
 and scientific education far and wide to enable us to 
 fight the battle of life under better conditions than
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 229 
 
 hitherto. Instead of squandering our money by millions 
 in putting down Asiatic railways and pulling them up 
 again, we want technical education spread by means of 
 these millions of money, if need be. 
 
 We want influences to reach our lower classes that 
 will give them more self-respect, more sobriety, more 
 cleanliness, more contentment, more happiness. We 
 want to make a stand and undo some of the dreadful 
 harm that an unfettered working out of the " survival 
 of the strongest " has wrought among us. 
 
 As, next to riches, we worship strength, so also, next to 
 poverty, the greatest crime with us is weakness. 
 
 If you want to do away with the drunkenness and 
 excessive misery of the poor, change your method of 
 dealing with them. Take the first step to break down 
 the class barrier that makes poverty almost a crime, by 
 giving them a chance of gradually gaining self-respect. 
 Instead of prating about only the poor entering the 
 kingdom of God, give the poor a better chance of living 
 in this world. Educate the women of the working 
 classes to cook, to come up at least to the standard of 
 the same classes in other nations ; that is surely no 
 optimistic expectation or wish. Drop the cant of your 
 charity, and try more and more to put the object of 
 your philanthropy beyond the necessity of appealing 
 to it. 
 
 The foul leasehold system and its corollary the
 
 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 jerry builder are answerable for much of the hideous 
 indignity of our masses. 
 
 We must take a bold initiative and exercise control, 
 direct and assist where we have hitherto callously only 
 looked on and praised the Lord for our virtue of non- 
 interference with His decrees. We have ridden long 
 enough through the night on the dirty broomstick of 
 " Freedom of Contract," " Liberty of the Subject," " Non- 
 interference ; " it is high time to interfere. The United 
 States have only just shown us how to interfere with the 
 Socialistic Anarchy : we must take the initiative now in 
 dealing with avoidable misery and its principal cause 
 cant In other words, we must rid ourselves of all sham, 
 so that we may see clearly ; and be sure that, whatever 
 way we wander republican, monarchical, or oligarchical 
 we are at least able to read the names of the stations 
 on the road, and feel sure that honesty of purpose is our 
 companion and guide. 
 
 Our country is literally covered with charitable institu- 
 tions, friendly societies, and trusts for the poor. The 
 funds at their disposal are fabulous, and yet the State 
 exercises hardly any control over their administration, 
 which is largely in the hands of the clergy. Here is a 
 chance of dealing a blow at cant ; but it must not be a 
 blow in the dark. We are told these are continental 
 ideas and will not work with us ! Of course not, but 
 cant does not tell us why ? Because there are too many
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 231 
 
 interests at stake that are determined they shall not 
 work. The German nobility were determined that 
 citizens should not be allowed to bid for great land 
 holdings ; the Kings of Prussia were determined they 
 should, and with one blow decided a question against 
 which the whole aristocracy of England might have fought 
 successfully for generations if circumstances had brought 
 such a question forward with us. 
 
 Thus we want some forcible remedies to be struck with 
 one blow, like a bright gold sovereign fresh from the Mint. 
 We want the penal laws against perjury to be recoined, 
 to be struck anew, bright and capable of instant healthy, 
 unimpeded circulation. We want it to be distinctly 
 understood that perjury is the foul sister of forgery, that 
 it is a felony involving the felon's cell and the felon's 
 doom. When the character of this respectable crime 
 and its consequences are duly recognized and realized, 
 then we must look about for reliable men to inquire into 
 the administration of our Charitable Trusts and Friendly 
 Societies. 
 
 Cant smiles and thinks of the utter failure of our 
 attempt at instituting a public prosecutor. Yes, it was 
 a failure, the whole legal profession was dead against the 
 idea, and it was doomed to failure. But it ought to have 
 succeeded ; it was a move in the right direction, and it 
 must eventually succeed if the influences at work on the 
 side of darkness are to be overcome. We are a long
 
 232 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 way off yet, and no wonder; but we shall be much nearer 
 if we once clearly realize where we are. Let us realize, 
 for instance, that a poor man among us cannot plead his 
 cause however plausible in the higher courts, unless 
 he can furnish security for the excessive costs of appli- 
 cation, let alone security for more, that are as sure to 
 follow as sneezing follows the too close proximity to 
 the onion. 
 
 When we can trust ourselves to treat perjury as it 
 deserves, then we can revise the laws respecting injurious 
 adulteration of victuals. When we have protected the 
 masses from wholesale fraud, we will protect them from 
 wholesale poisoning. Not from motives of sentimental 
 philanthropy will we do so, but from a stern sense of 
 duty to our fellow-men. As we are not likely to find 
 the germs of such action in the breast of our self-seeking 
 middle classes, we would advise the sending over of a 
 commission to Prussia to inquire and examine into the 
 working of the modus operandi over there, in dealing with 
 adulteration. Act on that, and it will suffice. 
 
 When our masses are able to get unadulterated victuals, 
 it will be time to look forward to the day when their 
 women will gradually learn how to use them sensibly and 
 economically. Perhaps then a little more light will have 
 cast its rays over their life, bringing cleanliness, self- 
 respect, and with it comparative sobriety. For let there 
 be no mistake about one thing, namely, that our masses
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 233 
 
 drink from want of self-respect, from despair ! It is a 
 lie that they axe forced to drink by our climate, as it is a 
 delusion to think that salvational or soberer preaching 
 will ever eradicate it. No, pointing to another world 
 will never stop vice among us ; shedding light over this 
 world alone can help us. 
 
 VIII. 
 
 Let us, then, hope some day will dawn on us when, 
 despite all difference of means, even the humblest can 
 find some enjoyment in his own healthy sphere of life. 
 We indulge in no fantastic dreams ; we want to see in the 
 land of our birth a little of that harmless enjoyment of 
 life we have witnessed in other climes. We wish to see 
 those most in want of a little recreation assisted by the 
 State to attain it Let us remove the restrictions against 
 harmless amusements, let music, dancing, the theatre, 
 properly controlled ay, even subsidised by the State 
 help to lead our masses gradually to a healthier, happier 
 level. It can be done ; it is done elsewhere. 
 
 A new spirit will gradually dawn upon us, we shall 
 discard our sawdust idols. We shall come to revere 
 honesty and intellect before mere glamour and brute 
 force. We shall come to recognize and distinguish 
 between those that rule us for their own ends and those 
 that wish us well in the interests of broad humanity 
 
 Thus we must centre all our efforts on reform at home.
 
 234 CONVENTIONAL CANT. 
 
 Foreign politics, as hitherto, can only bring us a continua- 
 tion of the daily disaster and disgrace we have witnessed 
 for years. Our best plan might be, as it would have 
 been long ago, to hold on to Germany, the great nation 
 from which we partly spring, and with whose interests our 
 own nowhere collide; Germany, the nation that most 
 appreciates all that is good and noble among and in us : 
 our poets, our thinkers, our men of science, our energy, 
 and our history of courageous effort and battle. Let 
 our diplomatic representatives abroad imitate those of 
 Prussia, who not only attend to court duties and the 
 daily routine of official life, but enter into the spirit of 
 commercial enterprise of their country, and back up the 
 interests of their humblest citizens by word and deed. 
 
 Perhaps some day we shall think there is something 
 to be said for universal compulsory military service to 
 guard us against our periodical scares of foreign invasion. 
 If we, then, adopt some plan on the Swiss system, we 
 shall find that the habits of military discipline, obedience, 
 and duty are worth having, although they are not to be 
 found in the catechism of laissez-faire. 
 
 By that time our Radicals may have rid themselves of 
 their silly sympathy with the Latin races with whom we 
 have no sentiment in common, except the self-interest of 
 leaving one another alone. 
 
 In the mean time we would say to our middle classes, 
 " Go down on your knees and pray that you may be
 
 REMEDY, AND CONCLUSION. 235 
 
 endowed with a little honest enthusiasm ; that you may 
 become honestly earnest, or earnestly honest ; that you 
 may gain the moral courage necessary to believe in 
 something worth believing. Shake off the belief in the 
 canting shams that have hitherto surrounded you, and 
 look up to purer and higher things." Farewell. 
 
 THE END. 
 
 PRINTED BY WILLIAM CLOWES AND SONS, LIMITED, LONDON AND BECCLES.
 
 A LIST OF 
 
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 PUBLICATION-S.
 
 I, Fati'nwsltr Square, 
 
 London. 
 
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 PUBLICATIONS. 
 
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 Within Sound of the Sea. With Frontispiece. Crown Svo, 6s.
 
 44 A List of Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.'s Publications. 
 
 BOOKS FOR THE YOUNG. 
 
 Brave Men's Footsteps. A Book of Example and Anecdote for 
 Young People. By the Editor of "Men who have Risen." With 
 4 Illustrations by C. Doyle. Eighth Edition. Crown 8vo, $s. <jd. 
 
 COXHEAD, Ethel. Birds and Babies. Imp. i6mo. With 33 
 Illustrations. Cloth gilt, 2s. dd. 
 
 DAVIES, G. Christopher. Rambles and Adventures of our 
 School Field Club. With 4 Illustrations. New and Cheaper 
 Edition. Crown Svo, 3*. &/. 
 
 EDMONDS, Herbert. Well Spent Lives : a Series of Modern Bio- 
 graphies. New and Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo, 3^. 6</. 
 
 EVANS, Mark. The Story of our Father's Love, told to Children. 
 Sixth and Cheaper Edition of Theology for Children. With 4 
 Illustrations. Ecap. 8vo, is. 6ef. 
 
 JOHNSON, Virginia W. The Catskill Fairies. Illustrated by 
 Alfred Fredericks. $s. 
 
 MAC KENNA, S. J. Plucky Fellows. A Book for Boys. With 
 6 Illustrations. Eifth Edition. Crown 8vo, 3*. 6d. 
 
 REANEY, Mrs. G. S. Waking and Working ; or. From Girlhood 
 to Womanhood. New and Cheaper Edition. With a Frontis- 
 piece. Crown 8vo, $s. dd. 
 
 Blessing and Blessed : a Sketch of Girl Life. New and 
 Cheaper Edition. Crown 8vo, y. (xi. 
 
 Rose Gurney's Discovery. A Story for Girls. Dedicated to 
 their Mothers. Crown Svo, 3.?. &/. 
 
 English Girls : Their Place and Power. With Preface by the 
 Rev. R. W. Dale. Fourth Edition. Fcap. Svo, 2s. 6d. 
 
 Just Anyone, and other Stories. Three Illustrations. Royal 
 i6mo, is. (xt. 
 
 Sunbeam Willie, and other Stories. Three Illustrations. Royal 
 i6mo, is. 6(/. 
 
 Sunshine Jenny, and other Stories. Three Illustrations. Royal 
 
 i6mo, u. 6d. 
 
 STOCKTON, Frank R.K Jolly Fellowship. With 20 Illustra- 
 tions. Crown Svo, $s. 
 
 STORK, Francis, and TURNER, Jfawes. Canterbury Chimes; 
 or, Chaucer Tales re-told to Children. With 6 Illustrations from 
 the Ellesmere Manuscript. Third Edition. Fcap. Svo, 3J. &/. 
 
 STRETTON, Hesla. David Lloyd's Last Will. With 4 Illustra- 
 tions. New Edition. Royal i6mo, 2s. 6d. 
 
 IVHITAKER, Florence. Christy's Inheritance. A London Story. 
 Illustrated. Royal imo, is. (xi. 
 
 HUNTED BV WILLIAM CLOWES AND SOXS, LIMlTtl>, LONDON AND BECCI.ES.