Charles Henry Pearson

“ We are so accustomed to the fierce rapture of struggle and victory, to that rough training of necessity by which the weak are destroyed, to revolutions of the political order, transferences of power and wealth, and discoveries in science, that we can hardly conceive a quiet old age of humanity, in which it may care only for sunshine and food and quiet, and expect nothing great from the toil of hand or thought. ”

“ The world at large is just as reverent of greatness, as observant of a Browning, a Newman, or a Mill, as it ever was; but the world of society prefers the small change of available and ephemeral talent to the wealth of great thoughts, which must always be kept more or less in reserve. The result seems to be that men, anxious to do great work, find city life less congenial than they did, and either live away from the metropolis, as Darwin and Newman did, or restrict their intercourse, as Carlyle and George Eliot practically did, to a circle of chosen friends. ”

“ In every department of thought there appears to be promise of infinite possibilities. The physiologist dreams of penetrating the mystery of life; the chemist of forming all possible natural combinations in his laboratory from the diamond to sugar; the engineer of extending his triumphs over space. Beyond and above all these there is the vague hope that science may succeed better than religion, either in lifting the veil of the unseen world, or in demonstrating that we need nothing but the seen. ”

“ When Christianity itself began to appear grotesque and incredible, men reconciled themselves to the change by belief in an age of reason, of enlightment, of progress. It is now more than probable that our science, our civilisation, our great and real advance in the practice of government are only bringing us nearer to the day when the lower races will predominate in the world, when the higher races will lose their noblest elements, when we shall ask nothing from the day but to live, nor from the future but that we may not deteriorate. ”

“ The love of money is perhaps more likely to survive the changes of modern society than either the lust of power or the passion for fame. Even if we assume the State to encroach more and more upon the domain of private industry, and to undermine large properties with taxes and succession-duties, human nature will still remain with its inextinguishable cravings for whatever gold can purchase, and with a fertility of resource for acquiring wealth that will defy legislation. ”

“ The fear of Chinese immigration which the Australian democracy cherishes, and which Englishmen at home find it hard to understand, is, in fact, the instinct of self-preservation, quickened by experience. We know that coloured and white labour cannot exist side by side; we are well aware that China can swamp us with a single year's surplus of population; and we know that if national existence is sacrificed to the working of a few mines and sugar plantations, it is not the Englishman in Australia alone, but the whole civilised world, that will be the losers. ”

“ For Europe and North America to be brought up to this state of development—other things being as they are—would imply a levelling-up of wages that is not at first sight impossible. Practically, the highest-paid artisans hold their own in the race for supremacy, so that England and the United States have nothing to fear from the competition of Russia and Austria. Indeed, in America the opportunities of money-making afforded by a young country are so great, that private enterprise is not as yet seriously threatened by Socialism, except in the bastard form of Protection. ”

“ It is certain that pride of family has often been unreasonable, even where the ancestors were men who had served their country with distinction; and where the boast is to descend from a king's harlot, or through a long line of close-fisted fox-hunters, it can only be regarded as a very sad example of human weakness. On the other hand, if there be any truth in scientific doctrines of heredity, the descendants of ancestors who have an honourable record of integrity, of labour, it may be even of splendid public service, are surely entitled to pride themselves on their pedigree. ”

“ All that can be said with certainty is, that as towns grow to dimensions never dreamed of as possible, it must be increasingly difficult for a few men, however brilliant, to give direction to the thought of the whole urban community. What, however, can admit of no doubt is, that if wealth and numbers and uniform habit of life and speech and opinion may tend to set aside genius or cramp originality even when they act on a small coterie, they are incomparably more calculated to exercise an influence for evil upon the masses. ”

“ It is fashionable to talk regretfully of the unrest of modern civilisation. We have become conscious of the cravings for something better than they have which animate almost all classes of society, but especially those who toil with the hand. Emigration to America or Australia is the great outlet for the most energetic in Western Europe; the less imaginative merely go from the country into the large towns, and many of these latter, as they find their hopes disappointed, are seized with the desire to reconstruct society. ”

“ We were struggling among ourselves for supremacy in a world which we thought of as destined to belong to the Aryan races and to the Christian faith; to the letters and arts and charm of social manners which we have inherited from the best times of the past. We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside by peoples whom we looked down upon as servile, and thought of as bound always to minister to our needs. ”

“ Such men were necessities of an imperfect civilisation. It needed two men of such different, yet sympathetic genius, as Julius and Augustus Caesar to rescue Roman administration and the fortunes of the whole civilised world from the violence and rapacity of the patrician order. Only a dictator could have crushed the nobles, established French unity, and inaugurated a new and national policy as Richelieu did. Only Chatham's will and insight could have given England an empire; and only a soldier, wielding the whole military force of the country, could have rescued France from anarchy. ”

“ There is an inevitable companionship in country life which draws rich and poor together. At the cricket-ground and in the hunting-field, in church and in social gatherings, from harvest-home to school-feast, squire and parson, farmer and hind, meet together animated for the hour with the same kindly thoughts. In the great majority of villages, at least, the cottager looks for sympathy in his troubles to the Rectory and the Hall. Even where the clergyman has been torpid and the landowner non-resident, the village has still been a community of neighbours interested in one another. ”

“ When we consider how careless of gain the greatest men of the past have been—from Roger Bacon and Newton to Faraday and Brunei—or, in another department of thought, from Leibnitz and Pascal to Herbert Spencer and Littre, it seems that we need hardly apprehend that philosophy will cease to labour, even though the State, like the old French terrorists, should conceive that it has no need of chemists. On the other hand, there seem to be some strong reasons for expecting that science will do more for us in the future than she has attempted in the past. ”

“ It seems not quite visionary to suppose that a day will come when service of some sort will be exacted from every man under pain of social discredit, or legal liabilities, as military service is now exacted from every able-bodied man on the Continent; when the immigration of aliens will be restrained within reasonable limits, when wealthy men will be forced by public opinion to give money for national endowments as freely as they did in the Middle Ages;, and when the doctrine that men can divest themselves of obligations to their country by leaving it will seem extravagant. ”

“ Must we not assume that personal feeling and peculiarities of temperament enter into the criticism of taste to such an extent that no single judgment can be accepted except as the argument of an advocate? May we not also say that though it is always possible to distinguish excellence, it is not always easy to define proportions while a work is yet new? Of two books that deservedly achieved an immediate and great success—Buckle's History of Civilisation and Maine's Ancient Law—Buckle's was the greatest triumph at the moment and Maine's has been incomparably the more enduring. ”

“ But the most visible effect to the world will probably be the decay of energy. If youth is the season of unrest, when change is welcomed for its own sake and when orderly growth is despised, it is also the brooding-time of speculation, the maturing-time of adventure. Old men are probably best fitted for carrying on the mechanical and routine work of the world, but the artists, the poets, the explorers, the propagators of new ideas are habitually to be found among the young. ”

“ It appears possible to imagine a not very distant time when the student will recoil from every new variation in worse verse of the old themes, as a lover of music closes his ear against familiar melodies ground out on a barrel-organ, and when men gifted with the power to feel and write will be paralysed if they attempt earnest work with the recollection that almost this exact thing has been done before, and has passed into household words or speech. ”

“ Neither is it merely material benefits with which a great country endows its citizens. The countrymen of Chatham and Wellington, of Washington and Lincoln, of Joan of Arc and Grambetta,—in short, the citizens of every historic State,—are richer by great deeds that have formed the national character, by winged words that have passed into current speech, by the example of lives and labours consecrated to the service of the Commonwealth. The religion of the State is surely as worthy of reverence as any creed of the Churches, and ought to grow in intensity year by year. ”

“ At present the State is everywhere regarded as the protector from whom the people have most to hope. The popular impulse is not to set the action of government aside, but to awaken it to what is conceived of as a healthier activity; and this belief in the omnipotence of law is a great guarantee for order and peaceable change; though it may of course be that the man who cries to the State to help him, when he ought to help himself, will gradually suffer paralysis of strength and will. ”

“ No one supposes that a Corneille or Victor Hugo can be born in every generation; and therefore, if the best work of these men is still appreciated in their own country, if there are men, however inferior, still working upon the same lines, it would not be safe to say that the character of the drama in that country has deteriorated. Let us admit this, and allow that Paris—even though it is an overgrown city—retains one very perfect form of amusement which has seemed to decay in England as the novel superseded it for the highest work. ”

“ The settlers of Victoria, and to a great extent of the other colonies, have been men who carried with them the English theory of government: to circumscribe the action of the State as much as possible; to free commerce and production from all legal restrictions; and to leave every man to shift for himself, with the faintest possible regard for those who fell by the way. Often against their own will the colonists have ended by a system of State centralisation that rivals whatever is attempted in the most bureaucratic countries of the Continent. ”

“ So overwhelmingly strong are these reasons, that many even of those who regard divorce with horror and alarm are constrained to support it as a requirement of justice. They feel, too, that it is idle to talk about the sanctity of home -life being impaired where the home has had no sanctity; and that to keep men and women, who are in a false position, miserable and in a condition that inclines to immorality, is a heavy price to pay for the peace of mind of those who, having no discomfort themselves, take a pleasure in thinking that the marriage-bond is indissoluble. ”

“ Only the sense of obligation, of duty to God, of living forward into eternity has disappeared. When all is said, the man who orders his life as if it were to end with the grave, or as if his thoughts and works here would not follow him beyond the grave, can scarcely fail to live more in the present than the future. He may have wider perceptions and sympathies and enjoyments than the Puritan, but he will have less self-restraint and will. He will clutch with a fierce avidity at power or wealth, or at the pleasures which are purchased by the possession of power and wealth. ”

“ Now, when we have discarded all that was temporary in the old system of family relations the need of defence against enemies, the obligation of a common family worship, and the pledges for good behaviour exacted by the State—there remains something indescribably holy and serious in the conception of the household. It might be better for society in one way that a father should never feel bound to pay his adult son's debts, or the son his father's, but the moral gain of such examples, which are still fortunately very frequent, is incalculable. ”

“ It is quite possible that if the noblest Greeks and Romans had foreseen how short-lived the supremacy of Athens was to be, or at what cost of national character the empire of the world was to be achieved by Rome, they would have folded their arms, or have set sail, as Sertorius thought of doing, in quest of the Fortunate Isles, [56] where life was nothing more than lotos-eating. We are able to see that though the aspirations of patriotism have been defeated, the greater world of humanity has been the richer for what these men ventured and thought. ”

“ Eighty years ago it might have been sufficient to deal with the Jews of Russia, as the wise policy of Napoleon dealt with those of France, and to give them absolute social and civil equality. The Jews of France are Frenchmen of another faith, and show no tendency to disproportionate increase, being, in fact, as nearly stationary as the rest of the population. The remedy is not as simple in Russia, because the Jews are now a nation in themselves—herding together, too numerous, and, it may be feared, too detested to be absorbed into the general population. ”

“ It is difficult to see that we could retrace a single step if we went back sixty years. Most of the liberal changes of the century have been nothing more than acts of justice; but almost all have been unavoidable. Religious tolerance; the mitigation of the penal laws; the recognition of the labourer's right to associate; the diffusion of education; the extension of the suffrage, were measures eminently defensible in themselves. To have withheld education would have been to weaken the country in the scale of nations; to have denied the other reforms would have been to provoke revolution. ”

“ It is needless to trace the infinite divagations into which even the morality sanctioned by science would stray from religious practice. We must either admit that two theories of religion are equally possible, and to appearance equally good, or we must be content to allow that the Stoic conception of a sublimated humanity, which is the counterfeit of religion that science would naturally adopt, is not to be called religion, though it is very beautiful and grand. Nevertheless it is probable that either system of thought gains in proportion as its teachers succeed in understanding one another. ”

“ The remarkable point is that even in modern society, when population is so much larger, when thought is comparatively unshackled, when burning questions are in the air, when the public is a better Maecenas than Martial prayed for, there are periods in the life of large communities which seem almost as sterile as the later centuries of the Roman Empire. Whom did England produce between Swift and Byron, outside of politics, who will be read for either power or beauty of form as an imaginative writer? ”

“ It was recommended in the first centuries of our era by the abject misery in which men and women lived. The cities and provinces burdened with debt; the nobles suspected at court, and tracked by informers; the peasantry mostly slaves at the mercy of their lord and of every government official; barbarians rushing in to destroy, or pestilence ravaging; it seemed as if the very perfection of mechanism in the central government made it all the more an inexorable fatality, crushing out hope and self-respect. ”

“ The English Poor-Law system, as competent observers found it in 1834, was so administered as to promote inefficiency in men and immorality in women. Still the spirit of all English legislation on this subject is in its intentions sound and liberal. What lies at the bottom of every Poor-Law Act is the feeling that every man born into the body politic is bound to work, and must have work found for him if he cannot find it for himself, on the ground that every man is responsible for the support of his family—parents or children. ”

“ Unhappily, those who anticipate that science and faith may be reconciled, or that science will give us a new and better religion, seem a little to have underrated the difficulties that have to be overcome before either dream can be realised. It is possible, no doubt, to find theologians who think they can substitute belief in the benevolence of Divine law for belief in a sympathetic and personal God, and who are prepared to discard all that has constituted religion hitherto belief in miracles, belief in a life beyond the grave, belief in a God who cares for man so that He has put on humanity. ”