Harriet Martineau

“ An individual here and there may scoff at the credulity of others, and profess unbelief in human virtue; but no society has ever yet wanted faith in man. Every community has its saints, its heroes, its sages,—whose tombs are visited, whose deeds are celebrated, whose words have become the rules by which men live.
Now, the moral taste of a people is nowhere more clearly shown than in its choice of idols. ”

“ The observer must have sympathy; and his sympathy must be untrammelled and unreserved. If a traveller be a geological inquirer, he may have a heart as hard as the rocks he shivers, and yet succeed in his immediate objects: if he be a student of the fine arts, he may be as silent as a picture, and yet gain his ends: if he be a statistical investigator, he may be as abstract as a column of figures, and yet learn what he wants to know: but an observer of morals and manners will be liable to deception at every turn, if he does not find his way to hearts and minds. ”

“ This is not the place in which to enlarge on the power—the greatest power we know of—which man exercises over men through their affections; but it is a fact which the observer should keep ever in view. The existence of a great man is one of those gigantic circumstances,—one of those national influences,—which have before been mentioned as modifying the conscience—the feelings about right and wrong—in a whole people. The pursuits of a nation for ever may be determined by the fact of the great man of five centuries being a poet, a warrior, a statesman, or a maritime adventurer. ”

“ The observer will note whether the pursuits and amusements of the provincial inhabitants originate in the circumstances of the locality, or whether they are copies from those of the metropolis; whether the great city be spoken of with reverence, scorn, or indifference, or not spoken of at all: whether, as in a Pennsylvanian village, the society could go on if the capital were swallowed up by an earthquake; or whether, as in Prussia, the favour of the central power is as the breath of the nostrils of the people. ”

“ If an unsympathizing stranger is so perplexed by a mere matter of external arrangement,—a royal procession, or a popular election,—what can he be expected to make of that which is far more important, more intricate, more mysterious,—neighbourly and domestic life? If he knows and feels nothing of the religion of these, he could learn but little about them, even if the roofs of all the houses of a city were made transparent to him, and he could watch all that is done in every parlour, kitchen, and nursery in a circuit of five miles. ”

“ Swindlers, drunkards, people of low tastes and bad passions, are found in every country, and nowhere characterise a nation; while the reverence of man in America, the pursuit of speculative truth in Germany, philanthropic enterprise in France, love of freedom in Switzerland, popular education in China, domestic purity in Norway,—each of these great moral beauties is a star on the forehead of a nation. Goodness and simplicity are indissolubly united. The bad are the most sophisticated, all the world over ”

“ He cannot have sat in conversation under the village elm, or in sunny vineyards, or by the embers of the midnight fire, without knowing how spirit is formed to unfold itself to spirit; and how, when the solitary is set in families, his sympathies bind him to them by such a chain as selfish interest never yet wove. He cannot have travelled wisely and well without being convinced that moral power is the force which lifts man to be not only lord of the earth, but scarcely below the angels ”

“ The highest creations [36] of literature itself, however long ago produced, are now discovered to bear as close a relation to the future as the past. They are for all time, through all its changes. While pillars of light in the dim regions of antiquity, they pass over in the dawn, and are still before us, casting their shadows to our feet as guides into the dazzling future. Pre-eminent among them is the Book which never had any retrospective character in it. It never sanctioned physical force, pride of ancestry, of valour, of influence, or any other pride. ”

“ It is a perpetual wonder to an inexperienced person that the students of particular classes of facts can learn so much as they do from a single branch of inquiry. Tell an uninformed man of the daily results of the study of Fossil Remains, and he will ask how the student can possibly know what was done in the world ages before man was created. It will astonish a thoughtless man to hear the statements about the condition of the English nation which are warranted by the single study of the administration of the Poor Laws, since their origin. ”

“ Statesmen rarely command an overwhelming majority of worshippers, because interest enters much more than sentiment into politics: but every author, or other artist who can reach the general mind,—every preacher, philanthropist, soldier, or discoverer, who has risen into an atmosphere of worship in pursuit of a purpose, is a fresh Peter the Hermit, meeting and stimulating the spirit of his time, and exhibiting its temper to the observer,—foreign as to either clime or century. ”

“ An observer who can also speculate,—one who looks before and after,—will conclude that, amidst some evil, the change is advantageous; and that good must, on the whole, arise from enlarged intercourses between men and societies. Seeing in commerce the instrument by which all the inhabitants of the earth are in time to be brought into common possession of all true ideas, and sympathy in all good feelings, he will mark the progress made by the society he visits towards this end. He will mark whether its merchants as a body have a spirit of generous enterprise or of sordid self-interest ”

“ In the midst of a general worship of power, birth, and wealth, the affections have wrought out in individual minds a preference of obscurity and poverty for the sake of spiritual objects. Amidst the supremacy of the worship of honour and social ease, there have always been confessors who could endure disgrace for the truth, and martyrs who could die for it.—Such individual cases have never been wanting: and, in necessary connexion with this fact, there has always been a sympathy in this pure moral taste,—an appreciation which could not but help its diffusion. ”

“ If you can converse face to face with a convict, as man with man, you can hardly fail to be instructed. If he has been long deprived of equal conversation, his heart will be full; his disposition will be to trust you; his impulse will be to confide to you his offence, and all the details connected with it. By thus conversing with a variety of offenders, you will be put in possession of the causes of crime, of the views of society upon the relative gravity of offences, and of the condition of hope or despair in which those are left who have broken the laws, and are delivered over to shame. ”

“ Meantime, the wisest and happiest traveller is the pedestrian. If gentlemen and ladies want to see pictures, let them post to Florence, and be satisfied with learning what they can from the windows by the way. But if they want to see either scenery or people, let all who have strength and courage go on foot. I prefer this even to horseback. A horse is an anxiety and a trouble. Something is sure to ail it; and one is more anxious about its accommodation than about one's own. The pedestrian traveller is wholly free from care. There is no such freeman on earth as he is for the time. ”

“ Of the large number of tourists who annually sail from our ports, there is probably not one who would dream of pretending to make observations on any subject of physical inquiry, of which he did not understand even the principles. If, on his return from the Mediterranean, the unprepared traveller was questioned about the geology of Corsica, or the public buildings of Palermo, he would reply, "Oh, I can tell you nothing about that—I never studied geology; I know nothing about architecture." But few, or none, make the same avowal about the morals and manners of a nation. ”

“ Whatever may be the restrictions imposed by rulers upon discourse, whatever may be the penalties imposed upon particular kinds of communication, all are unavailing in the presence of sympathy. At its touch the abundance of the heart will gush out at the lips. Men are so made that they cannot but speak of what interests them most to those who most share the interest. This is a decree of nature by which the decrees of despots are annulled. The power of a ruler may avail to keep an observer on his own side the frontier ”

“ The valour of the Spartans, the love of glory of the Romans and the French, the pride of the Spaniards,—these infantile moral qualities have belonged to a people as distinctly as to an individual.—Those which are in alliance with intellectual eminence are not so strikingly characteristic of entire nations; though we praise the Athenians for their love of letters and honour of philosophy; the Italians for their liberality towards art, and their worship of it while a meaner glory was the fashion of the world; the Germans for their speculative enterprise, and patience of research ”

“ Classes, crowds, nations of sufferers are aided and protected by strangers, powerful and at ease, who never saw an individual of the suffering thousands, and who have none but a spiritual interest in their welfare. Since missions to barbarous countries, action against slavery, and the care of the blind, deaf and dumb, and paupers, have become labours of society, the fraternity of men has ceased to be a mere aspiration, or even prophecy and promise. ”

“ He has the best chance of ascertaining these best qualities who has them in himself; and he who has them not may as well pretend to give a picture of a metropolitan city by showing a map of its drainage, as report of a nation after an intercourse with its knaves and its profligates. To stand on the highest pinnacle is the best way of obtaining an accurate general view, in contemplating a society as well as a city. ”

“ To the prospects of the sufferers of society let the observer look; and he will discern the prospects of the society itself.
Useful arts and inventions spread so rapidly in these days of improving communication, that they are no longer the decisive marks of enlightenment in a people that they were when each nation had the benefit of its own discoveries, and little more. Yet it is worthy of remark what kinds of improvement are the most generally adopted; whether those which enhance the luxury of the rich, or such as benefit the whole society. ”

“ In this boundless field, strewn with all the blossoms of all philosophy, the human observer may wander for ever. He can never have done culling the evidence that it presents, or enjoying the promise which it yields. All that we can now do is just to suggest that as the superstitions of all [91] nations are the embodiment of their idealized convictions, the state of religious sentiment may be learned from them almost without danger of mistake.
No society is without its superstitions, any more than it is without its convictions and its imaginations. ”

“ During this stage of society there is little domestic refinement and comfort. The furniture is coarse; the library is not tempting; and the luxurious ease of cities is out of the question. The pleasures of the owner lie abroad. There he devotes himself to rough sports, and enjoys his darling luxury,—the exercise of power. Within the dwelling the wife and her attendants spend their lives in handiworks, in playing with the children and keeping them in order, in endless conversation on the few events which come under their notice, and in obedience to and companionship with the priest. ”

“ For instance, the domestic are the primary interests among all human beings. It is so where the New England father dismisses his sons to the West,—and where the Hindoo mother deserts her infants to seek the shade of her husband through the fire,—and where the Spanish parent consigns her youngest to the convent,—as truly as where the Norwegian peasant enlarges his roof to admit another and another family of his descendants. It is for the traveller to trust the words and tones of parental love which meet his ear in every home of every land ”

“ His food is welcome, be its quality what it may, while he eats it under the alders in some recess of a brook. He is secure of his sleep, be his chamber ever so sordid; and when his waking eyes rest upon his knapsack, his heart leaps with pleasure as he remembers where he is, and what a day is before him. Even the weather seems to be of less consequence to the pedestrian than to other travellers. ”

“ There are none who see that it is by a large divine benignity that all the living creatures of that region are made happy in their rank seclusion. There is no feeling of gratitude in the minds of those who see the myriads of gay butterflies that flit in the glare of noon, and the river-horse which bathes in the shady places of the mysterious great stream. ”