Its logic is quick to see the flaws in the reasoning by which they are defended. It is free from the suspicion that its own abstract principles may mislead. And in its passion for the logical sequence that shall be artistically visible, as well as philosophically complete, it strikes without fear of practical consequences.

A keen-sighted French student could not look out of his window without observing a crowd of corporate iniquities. At the distance of a stone's throw was a proud church; by its side was a nunnery; a little way off was a monastery; and in the gardens and the corridors were troops of black-coated monks and priests. Most of them were good enough as things went; saints in comparison with the courtiers of both sexes. But they taught a creed which had become incredible to all thinking men. Their stories of the miracles that had been wrought by themselves and their forerunners; their doctrine that the Church was infallible; their assertion that God enabled them to turn a bit of bread into his own body; and their claim to the power of forgiving the repentant sinner,-all this fabric when struck by the contemptuous foot of reason, flew into pieces. You might as hopefully have asked a logical and irreverent Frenchman to believe in the existence of Jupiter Olympius as in such a mass of pious fictions. Had generations of profligacy not deadened the religious instincts of France, and had the moral atmosphere enabled culture to be devout, feeling might have guided logic to a different end. As it was, the Catholic Church was branded as the hugest corporate joke in the history of man. raged reason and defied facts. So, on scientific grounds, the new-born race of critics smote it without mercy.

It out

They also assailed it on another ground. The Church was political

as well as religious; she was so bound up with the State, that it seemed hardly possible to cut the two asunder. Prelates acted as ministers, often filling the highest places; often acting like the leech rather than the Christian; and often displaying a profligacy which, if not really worse than that of other men, seemed worse, because it held a crosier and wore a red hat. Again, priests had the ear of the Grand Monarque and his successors. Priests wielded the powers of the confessional at Versailles; they could, and did, put mischief into the head of the strongest sovereign; and they were naturally blamed for much of the misery and injustice that successive kings had lavished upon France. Now, while bitter things might be said against the Church without much danger, a lampoon against the State meant a passport to the Bastille. Since the stability of the State meant the stability of the whole titled order, which lived on the riches wrung from the blood of the poor, the open preaching of republicanism would have cost a man his ears. But when the priestly functions were hit with the shafts of ridicule or argument, so, indirectly, were those of the State. Hence the Church's connection with the State supplied an outlet for the pent-up wrath of the literary order against the governing classes. The first assaults on the monarchy took the form of assaults on the clergy. Those assaults accustomed people to hear authority questioned, and heralded the revolutionary change.

Destructive force was given to criticism by another important cause. One of the clearest facts in the history of opinion is, that a war of systems, scientific or dogmatic, has always a tendency to become a war of first principles. In other words, the scientific instinct which impels us to explain phenomena by a reference to the fewest laws that will suffice, constantly

sends us back to the root of beliefs, and turns the dogmatist into the metaphysician. Thus, to take a case from the history of philosophy, Hobbes and Locke strove to undermine the system of Descartes; Berkeley to undermine that of Hobbes and Locke; Hume to undermine that of Berkeley; Kant to undermine that of Hume; and Comte to undermine that of Kant. Each one attempts, not so much to criticise the details of his forerunners' teaching, as to show that the foundation is insecure. Each attempts to go deeper into the same ground, in the fashion of Kant; or to build on a new site, in the fashion of Comte. The history of physics also records, first, the discovery of what seem to be new forces, and then the attempts to resolve those into others already known; so that the latest results of science point to the conclusion that heat, light, and sound, are but different manifestations of the same central energy. Thus it is with politics also. Obeying the law of self-preservation, one age builds up a system on the idea that certain classes or certain men have inalienable rights, given to them by nature, ior flowing from their rank. To question the belief is treason and folly. It is accepted as a gospel; and, for a while, the sole point of dispute is, to whom do the rights apply? But with the death of the necessities that called the creed into being, with the decay of the fervour that first gave it vigour, or with the gradual growth of the national mind, comes the preliminary question, whether those rights exist at

all.

Thus the history of every political and religious system is the history of man's tendency to fly back to a battle-field of first principles; and to that pass educated France had come long before the Revolution. Thinkers had long ceased to notice dogmatic disputes, and were busy analysing the mental

VOL. LXXVII.-NO. CCCCLVII.

soil in which dogmas grew. They had also ceased to go in search of arguments which should prove that the social order of France was the best of all possible orders; that the nobles had a divine right to use spurs, and the peasants a divine obligation to wear saddles. They concerned themselves with the questions, how civil society arose; how moral systems took shape; how it came to pass that some men had a right to stand idle, and live on what other men had earned; how it happened that the land was tilled by one class and owned by another; how, in one word, the world of an Omnipotent Being could be so badly planned as to find its highest manifestation in a country cursed with the misery, the profligacy, the ignorance, and the tyranny of France. Different answers were given to these questions, according to the mental turn of the critic. A logical and constructive mind, like Montesquieu, built up society on the most common-place materials: on brutal instincts, on men's love of keeping what they had got, on their wish to get more, on family affection, on superstition, on reverence, on things which left no room for divine rights, and which suggested that there could be no great harm in pulling down a fabric composed of stuff that nature had distributed with such a lavish hand. A logical and destructive mind, like Voltaire, showed how utterly hollow was the theological sanction for existing political institutions; and how every political, as well as every religious belief, sprang from germs sown by the hand of immediate necessity, and not, as the priests said, miraculously planted by God, or miraculously watered by heaven. A logical and emotional mind, like Rousseau, instinctively felt that French society was hollow and rotten; pined for a state which should give the natural feelings of man free play; argued that the

G

best part of human nature had been more and more cramped with the advance of civilisation; and ended by setting forth, with marvellous eloquence, the superior charms of savage life.

De Tocqueville has pointed out another important fact, the fact that the literary men of France not only fought on the side of revolution, but fought with a power which their class had exercised in no previous age and in no other country. They attacked political institutions with the fury of men whose aggressive heat was untempered by the cold breath of experience. They knew nothing of public business. They had never governed men. They had neither the hope nor the ambition to enter public life. Unless they would consent to become clerkly tools, the doors of the State were for ever shut in their faces. Sometimes they did consent to drive the quill of routine, but in those cases they too often used the official ink to pen political lampoons; and, for that reason among others, the whole writing tribe was invited to confine the exercise of its administrative faculty within the bounds of its library. The writing tribe obeyed. Instead of studying blue-books, with a view to practical reforms, it gave the rein to its aspirations after artistic symmetry, and took to creating political Utopias. The work was at once easy and delightful. Shut out from the great restless world, the man of letters speedily drew the outlines of such a system of polity as the world had never seen. He threw up his logical scaffolding; he exhausted the quarry of thought and sentiment to furnish blocks of mathematical regularity and titanic size for the new Temple of State; he joined those blocks together with the cement of reason; he gave the columns of the portico a Doric simplicity, or a Corinthian richness; he filled the spacious halls with the sound of contentment and mirth;

and, standing at the doorway, he proclaimed aloud that all the nations of the earth might enter, and live in the midst of undying plenty, and forget the tyranny of noble and king. Had France possessed a Parliament like that of England, the invitation would have been greeted with a shout of laughter. Had France possessed the political experience which can be given by nothing but generations of political life, the people would have told the dreamers to seek for an audience in the nursery.

But the governing

class was a clique. The people had no means of learning that, of all complicated organisations, the most elaborate is a nation; that, of all practical tasks, the most difficult is the task of governing men; that to apply rigidly symmetrical laws to a community which had gathered complexity from the growth of centuries, was like setting all ages, sexes, and conditions to learn one lesson from one book; that the business of legislation must be essentially slow and experimental; and that, though good laws could do much for a country, they were powerless to effect radical changes without the aid of time. The French people did not know those things. On the other hand, they knew that they were often hungry, miserable, and badly paid. They knew that they had frequently been the slaves of aristocratic tyranny. They knew that the laws were framed for the good of a class; and, since their exclusion from the making of those laws had taught them to lean on the Government, they charged the Government with whatever wrong. Therefore, when the men of letters said, 'It is the laws which are answerable for your misery; it is we who can bring that political millennium which all past time has foretold,' the people listened with a believing ear, and unconsciously registered in their hearts the doom of feudalism.

was

If the official mind had seen whither the Voltaires and the Rousseaus were leading the nation, it would have done its best to put the extinguisher of a prison cell on the flickering flame of political philosophy. But, by the time that the ministers had learned the effect of the poison, the mischief was done; the doctrines of Voltaire had been wafted on the wings of epigram into the boudoir; the doctrines of Rousseau had found an echo in the hearts of the whole peasantry: and while culture was laughing at divine rights,' passionate ignorance was muttering the rights of man.' Even the classes which had most to fear from any political change, could not help going with the stream, and they powerfully assisted to bring the day that utterly and for ever destroyed their own order.

If we now turn to England, we shall notice a striking contrast. For as long a time as authentic history covers, the Englishman has been 'a political animal.' That is to say, his instincts have been such as specially to fit him for the work of governing himself and other people. From what sources those instincts spring, is too large a question to be debated here. Much is doubtless due to race, much to situation, and much to the historical accidents which have brought successive political elements to modify the force of each other. I shall content myself with taking the cause that lies nearest at hand-the fact that for many centuries the English people have been able to lead a comparatively free life. Even in feudal times, the common people were a great democratic force, who might easily be led, but not enslaved; and who by sheer weight bore down whatever they did not like, whether it was a palace or a monastery. They led a fiercely local life in little country or civic centres, which were almost like separate nationalities. They stubbornly in

sisted on managing local affairs in their own way, and thus the townships of England formed so many schools, in which the teacher was practice, and the lessons in the art of government were the most valuable that any people has ever received. Thus was developed in the English race a political instinct which, in a most unscientific, most inartistic fashion, has done wonders in the field of administration. Among its first commands was one of which philosophy did not see the wisdom for several centuries later. Old England told the priests and the men of letters, that is, the men of thought, to mind their own business and to leave the work of practical management to practical men. Not only has the command been obeyed, but the theorists are now the loudest eulogists of its wisdom. Even the prettiest of living thinkers, Mr. Matthew Arnold, sternly insists that the critic must keep out of the region of immediate practice in the political, social, humanitarian sphere, if he wants to make a beginning for that more free speculative treatment, which may, perhaps, one day make its benefits felt even in this sphere, but in a natural and thence irresistible manner.' Well, that is not precisely what was said by the idealess, money-grubbing Philistines who carried on the civic and parliamentary life of Old England. They could not talk so philosophically; they had a brutal contempt for speculation; and they did not dream of a day when England should be governed by the children of light, when there should be no God but Geist, and when Arminius should be his prophet. Still, in their blundering way, our fathers expressed a profound truth when they declared that even the ablest student must be blind to many supremely important things, which practice revealed to the commonest understanding. They meant that no effort of thought could bring