Goldwin Smith

“ It seems to me still that history is a vast struggle, with varying success, toward the attainment of moral perfection, of which, if the advent of Christianity furnished the true ideal, it may be deemed in a certain sense a revelation. Assuredly it may if in this most mysterious world there is, beneath all the conflict of good with evil, a spirit striving toward good and destined in the end to prevail. If there is not such a spirit, if all is matter and chance, we, can only say, What a spectacle is History! ”

“ How violent and sweeping have been the revolutions of this people compared with those of the stronger and more self-controlled race! In England, the Tudor mansions, and not unfrequently even the feudal castles, are still tenanted by the heirs, or by those who have peacefully purchased from the heirs, of their ancient lords; and the insensible gradations by which the feudal guard-room has softened down into the modern drawing-room, and the feudal moat into the flower-garden, are emblematic of the continuous and comparatively tranquil progress of English history. In France, how different! ”

“ Our early histories, sciences, poetries, and theologies are all false, yet they comprehend by far the major part of human thought. Priesthoods have ruled the world by deceiving our tender souls, and yet they command our most enduring reverence. Where, then, do we discover that any law of universal nature prefers truth to falsehood, any more than oxygen to nitrogen, or alkalies to salts? So habituated have we become to assume that truth-telling is a virtue, that nothing is more difficult than to tell how we came to assume it; nor is it easy of proof that it is a virtue in an unrestricted sense. ”

“ The more a community can afford to dispense with government the more Christian it must be, and no great country has yet been able to dispense with government so much as America.
No man of any depth of character will worship democracy any more than he will worship monarchy or aristocracy. All alike are embodiments of force: monarchy is the rule of one over all; aristocracy, of the few over the many; democracy, of the many over the few. An unjust democracy is perhaps the most deeply wicked of all governments, because so many must be implicated in the injustice. ”

“ And now, Israel, what doth the Lord thy God require of thee, but to fear the Lord thy God, to walk in all His ways, and to love Him, and to serve the Lord thy God with all thy heart and with all thy soul, to keep the commandments of the Lord, and His statutes, which I command thee this day for thy good? Behold, the heaven and the heaven of heavens is the Lord’s thy God, the earth also, with all that therein is. Only the Lord had a delight in thy fathers to love them, and He chose their seed after them, even you above all people, as it is this day. ”

“ The most malignant feelings which enter into the present struggle have been generated especially in England by the ostentation of idle wealth in contrast with surrounding poverty. No really high nature covets such a position as that of a luxurious and useless millionaire. Communism as a movement is a mistake but there is a communism which is deeply seated in the heart of every good man and which makes him feel that the hardest of all labour is idleness in a world of toil and that the bitterest of all bread is that which is eaten by the sweat of another man's brow. ”

“ Between the Pale and the Celt incessant war was waged with the usual atrocity of struggles between the half-civilized and the savage. Fusion there could be none. There was not the bond of human brotherhood or that of a common tongue. On neither side was the murder of the other race a crime. Never was there a more inauspicious baptism of a nation.
Anglo-Norman and Celt, feudalist and tribesman, alike were Catholics. A common religion might have been a bond, a common clergy might have been a mediating power. But race and language prevailed over religion. ”

“ Migrating to Lisieux, I found myself in such pleasant quarters that I was tempted to settle there for some days. The town is almost an unbroken assemblage of the quaintest and most picturesque old houses. There are whole streets without any taint of modern architecture to disturb the perfect image of the past. Two magnificent churches, one of them formerly a cathedral, rise over the whole; and there is a very pretty public garden, with its terraces, pastures, and green alleys. A public garden is the invariable appendage of a city in France, as it ought to be everywhere. ”

“ Let the main object of association be ever so important, must there not be always, to preserve discipline and beat the enemy, a terrible sacrifice of conscience and of freedom of opinion? Is not legislation, on the most vital subjects, apt to be governed, not by regard for the public good, but by the exigencies of the conflict and the necessity of keeping up the ministerial steam, or raising an agitation to drive opponents from power? ”

“ Fed upon such food daily, what will the mind of a nation be? I say that there is no flame at which we can light the Lamp of Fiction purer or brighter than the genius of him in honour to whose memory we are assembled here to-day. Scott does not moralize. Heaven be praised that he does not. He does not set a moral object before him, nor lay down moral rules. But his heart, brave, pure and true, is a law to itself; and by studying what he does we may find the law for all who follow his calling. If seven lamps have been lighted for architecture, Scott will light as many for fiction. ”

“ Is “that which is just and equal” given to a slave when he is forbidden to learn to read, when he is denied legal marriage, when he is separated by force from his wife and children, when his evidence is refused in a court of law, when he is made by custom, though not by law, the victim of a penal code under which a master who kills a slave goes unpunished, while a slave who kills a master may be burned alive at a slow fire? ”

“ The free cities of Italy, of Germany, of Flanders, produced in virtue of their freedom fruits of civilisation, as well as of industry, far nobler and more abundant than those which were produced by great feudal kingdoms. But their liberties were mere burgher liberties, deeply tainted with the tyranny of guild over guild, of city over city, of the inhabitants of the cities over the peasantry beneath their sway; based upon no broad principles of equity or respect for human rights, and doomed by their vices to an extinction which we mourn for the sake of art, but which we cannot call unjust. ”

“ It was not the opponents of Slavery, however, that roused the North at last, but the slave-owners themselves. Evil always contains in it the germ of its own destruction. The tyrannical violence of the slave-owner carried him beyond what subserviency could endure—his tendency to aggression beyond what apathy could overlook; while his uneasy conscience led him to exact securities for his institution, which were effectual only in multiplying and exasperating his enemies. The fugitive slave-law was a final appeal to whatever of morality and honour might linger in the heart of the nation. ”

“ But I repeat, the religion of privilege has lost its power to awe or to control, and if society wishes to rest on a safe foundation, it must show that it is at least trying to be just.
Wealth, real wealth, has hardly as yet much reason to complain of any encroachment of the labour movement on its rights. When did it command such means and appliances of pleasure, such satisfaction for every appetite and every fancy, as it commands now? When did it rear such enchanted palaces of luxury as it is rearing in England at the present day? ”

“ It leads men now to put their own children under the lash of the overseer. Nor does the Slave Power fail, in its extremity, to receive the sympathy of the element from which it is sprung. The heart of capitalist tyranny everywhere is with that supreme tyranny of capital which makes its victims slaves. Feudalism, too, knows its own, and feels its affinity to a system under which, as in the times of serfdom, the labourer is under the absolute dominion of the lord. ”

“ The better a party is in point of intelligence, individual sense of responsibility, individual regard for the public good, the less submissive to the whip, and therefore the weaker, it becomes; a singular result of the only perfect system. What do we see in England now? On one side is a party weak to the verge of impotence, unable to act together even for one evening, to all appearances hopelessly excluded from power; and this because it is a party of opinion, of individual intelligence, of individual conscience, of individual desire to improve the condition of the people. ”

“ Huntingdon was a quiet little town with less than two thousand inhabitants, in a dull country, the best part of which was the Ouse, especially to Cowper, who was fond of bathing. Life there, as in other English country towns in those days, and indeed till railroads made people everywhere too restless and migratory for companionship or even for acquaintance, was sociable in an unrefined way. There were assemblies, dances, races, card-parties, and a bowling-green, at which the little world met and enjoyed itself. ”

“ An American city with its spacious streets all planted with avenues of trees with its blocks of buildings far from unimpeachable probably in detail yet stately in the mass with its wide spreading suburbs where each artizan has his neat looking house in his own plot of ground and light and air and foliage with its countless church towers and spires far from faultless yet varying the outline might not please a painters eye but it fills your mind with a sense of well rewarded industry of comfort and even opulence shared by the toiling man of a prosperous, law-loving, cheerful, and pious life. ”

“ In no ancient writer is there to be found a protest like his against the oppression of the weaker races. But to get this sensible, warm motion to lose itself in a mere generalization, whether the generalization be humanity, animality—which for all that we can see has just as good a claim as humanity—or simply evolution, and to be content with the prospective welfare of this generalization instead of thinking about its own, does seem to us absolutely impossible, unless it be in the case of a very extraordinary temperament, or during the brief continuance of an artificial mood. ”

“ Without social fusion, how can we hope for political equality? And without political equality, what security can there be for justice? Kindness and wisdom would cure, in course of time, the slowly receding vices of the slave. Fair wages, paid at set of sun, so that even his shortened vision may see his reward as he works, would in time teach him industry: education, in the course of two or three generations, would raise his intelligence, and give him the power of self guidance. ”

“ The authors of the Declaration of Independence, on which the American Constitution, for the Slave as well as for the Free States, is founded, say, “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.” ”

“ He would not, even, think it wholly irrational that the gloom of the work-house should cast a momentary shadow on the enjoyments of the palace. I should also expect him to understand the impression that a man of "brain," even one free from any excessive tenderness of "heart," would not like to see a vast apparatus of luxury, and a great train of flunkeys devoted to his own material enjoyment—that he would feel it as a slur on his good sense, as an impeachment of his mental resources, and of his command of nobler elements of happiness, and even as a degradation of his manhood. ”

“ The era of elective government has come, and in the wise ordering of it, so as to give public reason the upper hand, and to reduce as far as possible the influence of passion, class interest, selfish ambition, faction, and corruption, lies the political hope of the world. If hereditary monarchy and aristocracy are dead or doomed, dead also is the light hope of the Revolution that all the evils of government would be swept away and the reign of reason and justice at once opened, if only monarchy could be overthrown. ”

“ The Western States of America are a colony of New England. The original company of pilgrims is the seed from which the whole tree has grown. No creative monad, imagined by science, could be more pregnant with a new order of things than that little band of exiles; no moment in history is more solemn or more big with consequences than that in which the colony on its arrival in the New World made a set of laws for itself—laws for self-government—rational, unfeudal laws. ”

“ The slave would live constantly with his master, have daily opportunities of winning his regard, and derive from his society all the benefits which an inferior can derive from the society of a superior. On the great American plantations, on the contrary, the slaves live in “quarters” of their own, separate from the whites: they work in the field by themselves all day, no white being present but the overseer. The master of the plantation seldom appears upon the scene of labour, and barely knows his human chattels by sight. ”

“ All the arguments which have been used against design seem to tell with equal force against order. We have no other universe wherewith we can compare this, so as to assure ourselves that this universe is not a chaos, but a cosmos. Both on the earth and in the heavens we see much that is not order, but disorder; not cosmos, but acosmia. If we divine, nevertheless, that order reigns, and that there is design beneath the seemingly undesigned, and good beneath the appearance of evil, it is by virtue of something not dreamed of in the philosophy of materialism. ”

“ We were led to believe that while the South was all dignity and self-sacrifice, the North was revelling in a ghastly and almost fiendish whirl of gaiety and dissipation. It no doubt was so among a certain set at New York, in the vortex of contracts and gambling speculation. But elsewhere I can bear witness that it was not. Elsewhere I can bear witness that society wore an aspect not unbecoming a nation under a great affliction. If people could only believe it there were too many mourners in Northern homes for mirth and feasting to prevail. ”

“ There is one part of Lincoln's early life which, though scandal may batten on it, we shall pass over lightly, we mean that part which relates to his love affairs and his marriage. Criticism, and even biography, should respect as far as possible the sanctuary of affection. That a man has dedicated his life to the service of the public is no reason why the public should be licensed to amuse itself by playing with his heart-strings. Not only as a storekeeper, but in every capacity, Mr. Lincoln was far more happy in his relations with men than with women. ”

“ It receives its reward, not only in the respect which proved valour ensures, but far more in liberation from the worst doom which can fall on man, that of being the active minister of evil. To oppress is worse than to be oppressed. If Slavery is degradation to the slave, it is far deeper degradation to the master; and emancipation is a far greater boon to the master than to the slave. To that cruel, corrupt, and barbarous society a hope of better things has come, though in the stern form of conquest. ”

“ Every one who has a heart, however ignorant of architecture he may be, feels the transcendent beauty and poetry of the mediaeval churches. For my part I look up with admiration, as fervent as any one untrained in art can, to those divine creations of old religion which soar over the smoke and din of our cities into purity and stillness and seem to challenge us, with all our wealth and culture and science and mechanical power, to produce their peer till the age of faith shall return. ”

“ With the power of voluntary association, which the members of a real community alone possess, they aided their government in its new and colossal task. They sustained it through all reverses, and in spite of all its errors, with the loyalty which can be paid only by a real community to the government of its choice. They animated it, and all who under it fought or laboured for the common cause, with the spirit of a united people. Gradually the resources of the slave oligarchy began to fail. ”

“ But mythology is merely the primaeval matrix of religion. Mythology is the embodiment of man's childlike notions as to the universe in which he finds himself, and the powers which for good or evil influence his lot; and, when analysed, it is found beneath all its national variations to be merely based upon a worship of the sun, the moon, and the forces of Nature. Religion is the worship and service of a moral God and a God who is worshipped and served by virtue. We can distinctly see, in Greek literature for instance, religion disengaging itself from mythology. ”

“ Americans are supposed to be slaves to money. It is true that many Americans are slaves to money, and are hurried by the eagerness with which they pursue it through lives of unrest into early graves. It could scarcely be otherwise when human covetousness was excited by the opening wealth of a new world. It is not wonderful that the looks of the throng should be keener, and their steps more hurried in the mart of New York than in the mart of London. ”

“ We must not forget that industrial wars, like other wars, however just and necessary, give birth to men whose trade is war, and who, for the purpose of their trade are always inflaming the passions which lead to war. Such men I have seen on both sides of the Atlantic, and most hateful pests of industry and society they are. Nor must we forget that Trade Unions, like other communities, whatever their legal constitutions may be, are apt practically to fall into the hands of a small minority of active spirits, or even into those of a single astute and ambitious man. ”

“ His example and the type of character which he has set before public men, as much as the victory which his patient wisdom, his constancy, and integrity mainly achieved, will protect for ever the cause for which he toiled and died; so that, in his own words, government for the people and by the people shall never perish from the earth.
It would be wickedness, the greatest wickedness, to make a eulogy of war. War, besides the misery that it inflicts, stirs up from their depths all the evil passions of human nature. ”

“ Those heaps of stones broken by the hammer of a poor wretch who bends over his dull task through the weary day by the roadside, scantily clad, in sharp frost perhaps or chilling showers, are they more lovely to a painter's eye than if they had been broken, without so much human labour and suffering, by a steam stone-crusher? No one doubts the superior interest belonging to any work however imperfect, of individual mind ”

“ No doubt to secure courtesy in America you must cordially accept equality; but in what community is it not necessary cordially to accept the leading principle of society if you wish to be courteously treated? Manners in a certain sense are free. You are not required to put on a dress coat when you dine with a friend. But as a general rule, it did not seem to me that there was among Americans a want of mutual respect, or an unwillingness to pay reasonable deference to real social claims of any kind. In truth, equality is the necessary condition of courtesy in the proper sense of the word. ”

“ Honest ignorance in the mine, on the sea, at the forge, striving to do its coarse and perilous duty, performing the lowliest functions of humanity, contributing in the humblest way to human progress, itself scarcely sunned by a ray of what more cultivated natures would deem happiness, takes in as fully as the sublimest philosopher the idea of a God who sees and cares for all, who keeps account of the work well done or the kind act, marks the secret fault, and will hereafter make up to duty for the hardness of its present lot. ”

“ All are politically equal, all are comparatively on a level in education and even in property; any man may rise rapidly, and numbers are daily rising from the lowest round of the ladder to the chief places in commerce and the highest honours of the State. Equality, therefore, is the rule of life. It is the rule, as inequality is with us, throughout society. The farm labourer lives as an equal at his employer’s table, and I have seen very well-dressed children, the children I was told of wealthy parents, in school with the shoeless children of the emigrant. ”

“ You can hardly imagine how those who come fresh from a new country like Canada, or parts of the United States—a land just redeemed from the wilderness, with all its untrimmed roughness, its fields half tilled and full of stumps, its snake fences, and the charred pines which stand up gaunt monuments of forest fires—are impressed, I might almost say ravished, by the sight of the lovely garden which unlimited wealth expended on a limited space has made of England. ”

“ By a fatal compromise with evil, sure, if God is strong and just, to bring down in the end a full measure of retribution, it was received into the constitution of the new Republic—received by men who had the highest doctrines of liberty and equality on their lips, and had just vindicated their own rights as freemen with the sword. But then it wore the harmless aspect of an aged and sickly man, whose life could not be brought at once to a violent close, but who would soon die in the course of nature. In those days the production of cotton by slave labour was unprofitable. ”

“ There may be in the long lines of buildings too much of the autocratic monotony of the Empire, but the city, as a whole, is the perfect image of a brilliant civilization. From London beauty is almost banished by smoke and fog, which deny to the poor architect ornament, colour, light and shadow, leaving him nothing but outline. No doubt besides the smoke and fog there is a fatality. There is a fatality which darkly impels us to place on our finest site, and one of the finest in Europe, the niggard facade and inverted teacup dome of the National Gallery ”

“ The United States have thus proved to the world that “a government of the people, by the people, for the people,” is competent to organise and wield vast combinations of power; to administer resources of extraordinary magnitude; to carry out the highest purposes of statesmanship to their most successful issues; and in the hour of triumph can exhibit a moderation of spirit and clemency towards the vanquished unexampled in history. ”

“ But what is to prevent the withdrawal of the traditional sanction from producing its natural effect upon the morality of the mass of mankind? The commercial swindler or the political sharper, when the divine authority of conscience is gone, will feel that he has only the opinion of society to reckon with, and he knows how to reckon with the opinion of society. If Macbeth is ready, provided he can succeed in this world, to "jump the life to come," much more ready will villainy be to "jump" the bad consequences of its actions to humanity when its own conscious existence shall have closed. ”

“ No student of history can fail to see the moral interest of the Middle Ages, any more than an artist can fail to see their aesthetic interest. There were some special types of noble character then, of which, when they were done with, nature broke the mould. But the mould is broken, and it is broken for ever. Through aesthetic pining for a past age, we may become unjust to our own, and thus weaken our practical sense of duty, and lessen our power of doing good. I will call the age bad when it makes me so, is a wise saying, and worth all our visionary cynicism, be it never so eloquent. ”

“ True, the perfect concord of art and science, like that of religion and science, may be still to come, and come, we hope, both concords will. One word more before we distribute the prizes. A system of prizes is a system of competition, and to competition some object. We can readily sympathise with their objection. Work done from love of the subject, or from a sense of duty, is better than work done for a prize, and, moreover, we cherish the hope that co-operation, not competition, will be the ultimate principle of industry, and the final state of man. ”