education, is their own cultivation of a wise spirit of tolerance in
conduct. 'I should like to see explained,' Turgot says, 'the causes of
alienation and disgust between people who love one another. I believe
that after living awhile with men, we perceive that bickerings,
ill-humours, teasings on trifles, perhaps cause more troubles and
divisions among them than serious things. How many bitternesses have
their origin in a word, in forgetfulness of some slight observances. If
people would only weigh in an exact balance so many little wrongs, if
they would only put themselves in the place of those who have to
complain of them, if they would only reflect how many times they have
themselves given way to humours, how many things they have forgotten! A
single word spoken in disparagement of our intelligence is enough to
make us irreconcilable, and yet how often have we been deceived in the
very same matter. How many persons of understanding have we taken for
fools? Why should not others have the same privilege as ourselves?...
Ah, what address is needed to live together, to be compliant without
cringing, to expose a fault without harshness, to correct without
imperious air, to remonstrate without ill-temper!' All this is wise and
good, but, alas, as Turgot had occasion by and by to say, little comes
of giving rules instead of breeding habits.
It is curious that Turgot as early in his career as this should have
protested against one of the most dangerous doctrines of the
_philosophe_ school. 'I have long thought,' he says, 'that our nation
needs to have marriage and true marriage preached to it. We contract
marriages ignobly, from views of ambition or interest; and as many of
them are unhappy in consequence, we may see growing up from day to day a
fashion of thinking that is extremely mischievous to the community, to
manners, to the stability of families, and to domestic happiness and
virtue.'[29] Looseness of opinion as to the family and the conditions of
its wellbeing and stability, was a flaw that ran through the whole
period of revolutionary thought. It was not surprising that the family
should come in for its share of destructive criticism, along with the
other elements of the established system, but it is a proof of the
solidity of Turgot's understanding that he should from the first have
detected the mischievousness of this side of the great social attack.
Nor did subsequent discussion with the champions of domestic license
have any effect upon his opinion.
[Footnote 29: ii. 790.]
He makes the protest which the moralist makes, and has to make in every
age, against the practice of determining the expediency of a marriage by
considerations of money or rank. There is a great abuse, he says, in the
manner in which marriages are made without the two persons most
concerned having any knowledge of one another, and solely under the
authority of the parents, who are guided either by fortune, or else by
station, that will one day translate itself into fortune. 'I know,' he
says, 'that even marriages of inclination do not always succeed. So from
the fact that sometimes people make mistakes in their choice, it is
concluded that we ought never to choose.' Condorcet, we may remember,
many years after, insisted on the banishment by public opinion of
avaricious and mercenary considerations from marriage, as one of the
most important means of diminishing the great inequalities in the
accumulation of wealth.[30]
[Footnote 30: _OEuv. de Condorcet_, vi. 245.]
In the same letter he took sides by anticipation in another cardinal
controversy of the epoch, by declaring a preference for the savage over
the civilised state to be a 'ridiculous declamation.' This strange and
fatal debate had been opened by Rousseau's memorable first Discourse,
which was given to the world in 1750. Preference for the savage state
was the peculiar form assumed by emotional protests against the existing
system of the distribution of wealth. Turgot from first to last resisted
the whole spirit of such protests. In this letter, where he makes his
first approach to the subject, he insists on inequality of conditions,
as alike necessary and useful. It is necessary 'because men are not born
equal; because their strength, their intelligence, their passions, would
be perpetually overthrowing that momentous equilibrium among them, which
the laws might have established.'
'What would society be without this inequality of conditions? Each
individual would be reduced to mere necessaries, or rather there would
be very many to whom mere necessaries would be by no means assured. Men
cannot labour without implements and without the means of subsistence,
until the gathering in of the produce. Those who have not had
intelligence enough, or any opportunity to acquire these things, have no
right to take them away from one who has earned and deserved them by his
labour. If the idle and ignorant were to despoil the industrious and the
skilful, all works would be discouraged, and misery would become
universal. It is alike more just and more useful that all those who have
fallen behind either in wit or in good fortune, should lend their right
arms to those who know how best to employ them, who can pay them a wage
in advance, and guarantee them a share in the future profits.... There
is no injustice in this, that a man who has discovered a productive kind
of work, and who has supplied his assistants with sustenance and the
necessary implements, who for this has only made free contracts with
them, should keep back the larger part, and that as payment for his
advances he should have less toil and more leisure. It is this leisure
which gives him a better chance of revolving schemes, and still further
increasing his lights; and what he can economise from his share of the
produce, which is with entire equity a larger share, augments his
capital, and adds to his power of entering into new undertakings....
'What would become of society, if things were not so, and if each person
tilled his own little plot? He would also have to build his own house,
and make his own clothes. What would the people live upon, who dwell in
lands that produce no wheat? Who would transport the productions of one
country to another country? The humblest peasant enjoys a multitude of
commodities often got together from remote climes.... This distribution
of professions necessarily leads to inequality of conditions.'
So early was the rational answer ready for those socialistic sophisms
which for so many years misled the most generous part of French
intelligence. We may regret perhaps that in demolishing the vision of
perfect social equality, Turgot did not show a more lively sense of the
need for lessening and softening unavoidable inequalities of condition.
However capable these inequalities may be of scientific defence, they
are none the less on that account in need of incessant and strenuous
practical modification; and it is one of the most serious misfortunes of
society, and is unhappily long likely to remain so, that since the
absorbing question of the reformation of the economic conditions of the
social union has come more and more prominently to the front, gradually
but irresistibly thrusting behind both its religious and its political
conditions, zeal for the amelioration of the common lot has in so few
auspicious instances been according to knowledge; while the professors
of science have been more careful to compose narrow apologies for
individual selfishness, than to extend as widely as possible the limits
set by demonstrable principle to the improvement of the common life.
We may notice too in this Letter, what so many of Turgot's allies and
friends were disposed to complain of, but what will commend him to a
less newly emancipated and therefore a less fanatical generation. There
is a conspicuous absence of that peculiar boundlessness of hope, that
zealous impatience for the instant realisation and fruition of all the
inspirations of philosophic intelligence, which carried others
immediately around him so excessively far in the creed of
Perfectibility. 'Liberty! I answer with a sigh, maybe that men are not
worthy of thee! Equality! They would yearn after thee, but cannot
attain!' Compared with the confident exultation and illimitable sense of
the worth of man which distinguished that time, there is something like
depression here, as in many other places in Turgot's writings. It is
usually less articulate, and is rather conveyed by a running undertone,
which so often reveals more of a writer's true mood and temper than is
seen in his words, giving to them, by some unconscious and inscrutable
process, living effects upon the reader's sense like those of eye and
voice and accompanying gesture.
Dejection, however, is perhaps not the most proper word for the humour
of reserved and grave suspense, natural in those rare spirits who have
recognised how narrow is the way of truth and how few there be that
enter therein, and what prolonged concurrence of favouring hazards with
gigantic endeavour is needed for each smallest step in the halting
advancement of the race. With Turgot this was not the result of mere
sentimental brooding. It had a deliberate and reasoned foundation in
historical study. He was patient and not hastily sanguine as to the
speedy coming of the millennial future, exactly because history had
taught him to measure the laggard paces of the past. The secret of the
intense hopefulness of that time lay in the mournfully erroneous
conviction that the one condition of progress is plenteous increase of
light. Turgot saw very early that this is not so. '_It is not error_,'
he wrote, in a saying that every champion of a new idea should have
ever in letters of flame before his eyes, '_which opposes the progress
of truth: it is indolence, obstinacy, the spirit of routine, everything
that favours inaction_.'[31]
[Footnote 31: _OEuv._ ii. 672.]
The others left these potent elements of obstruction out of calculation
and account. With Turgot they were the main facts to be considered, and
the main forces to be counteracted. It is the mark of the highest kind
of union between sagacious, firm, and clear-sighted intelligence, and a
warm and steadfast glow of social feeling, when a man has learnt how
little the effort of the individual can do either to hasten or direct
the current of human destiny, and yet finds in effort his purest
pleasure and his most constant duty. If we owe honour to that social
endeavour which is stimulated and sustained by an enthusiastic
confidence in speedy and full fruition, we surely owe it still more to
those, who knowing how remote and precarious and long beyond their own
days is the hour of fruit, yet need no other spur nor sustenance than
bare hope, and in this strive and endeavour and still endeavour. Here
lies the true strength, and it was the possession of this strength and
the constant call and strain upon it, which gave Turgot in mien and
speech a gravity that revolted the frivolous or indifferent, and seemed
cold and timorous to the enthusiastic and urgent. Turgot had discovered
that there was a law in the history of men, and he knew how this law
limited and conditioned progress.
II.
In 1750 Turgot, then only in his twenty-fourth year, was appointed to
the honorary office of Prior of the Sorbonne, an elective distinction
conferred annually, as it appears, on some meritorious or highly
connected student. It was held in the following year by Lomenie de
Brienne. In this capacity Turgot read two Latin dissertations, one at
the opening of the session, and the other at its close. The first of
these was upon 'The Advantages that the Establishment of Christianity
has conferred upon the Human Race.'
* * * * *
Its value, as might well have been expected from the circumstances of
its production, is not very high. It is pitched in a tone of exaltation
that is eminently unfavourable to the permanently profitable treatment
of such a subject. There are in it too many of those eloquent and
familiar commonplaces of orthodox history, by which the doubter tries to
warm himself into belief, and the believer dreams that he is
corroborating faith by reason. The assembly for whom his discourse was
prepared, could hardly have endured the apparition in the midst of them
of what both rigorous justice and accurate history required to have
taken into account on the other side. It was not to be expected that a
young student within the precincts of the Sorbonne should have any eyes
for the evil with which the forms of the Christian religion, like other
growths of the human mind, from the lowest forms of savage animism
upwards, have ever alloyed its good. The absence of all reference to one
half of what the annals of the various Christian churches have to teach
us, robs the first of Turgot's discourses of that serious and durable
quality which belongs to all his other writings.
It is fair to point out that the same vicious exclusiveness was
practised by the enemies of the Church, and that if history was to one
of the two contending factions an exaggerated enumeration of the
blessings of Christianity, it was to their passionate rivals only a
monotonous catalogue of curses. Of this temper we have a curious
illustration in the circumstance that Dupont, Turgot's intimate friend
of later years, who collected and published his works, actually took the
trouble to suppress the opening of this very Discourse, in which Turgot
had replied to the reproach often made against Christianity, of being
useful only for a future life.[32]
[Footnote 32: _OEuv._ ii. 586, _n._]
In the first Discourse, Turgot considers the influence of Christianity
first upon human nature, and secondly on political societies. One
feature at least deserves remark, and this is that in spite both of a
settled partiality, and a certain amount of the common form of theology,
yet at bottom and putting some phrases apart, religion is handled, and
its workings traced, much as they would have been if treated as
admittedly secular forces. And this was somewhat. Let us proceed to
analyse what Turgot says.
1. Before the preaching and acceptance of the new faith, all nations
alike were plunged into the most extravagant superstitions. The most
frightful dissoluteness of manners was encouraged by the example of the
gods themselves. Every passion and nearly every vice was the object of a
monstrous deification. A handful of philosophers existed, who had learnt
no better lesson from their reason, than to despise the multitude of
their fellows. In the midst of the universal contagion, the Jews alone
remained pure. Even the Jews were affected with a narrow and sterile
pride, which proved how little they appreciated the priceless treasure
that was entrusted to their keeping. What were the effects of the
appearance of Christ, and the revelation of the gospel? It inspired men
with a tender zeal for the truth, and by establishing the necessity of a
body of teachers for the instruction of nations, made studiousness and
intellectual application indispensable in a great number of persons.
Consider, again, the obscurity, incertitude, and incongruousness, that
marked the ideas of the wisest of the ancients upon the nature of man
and of God, and the origin of creation; the Ideas of Plato, for
instance, the Numbers of Pythagoras, the theurgic extravagances of
Plotinus and Porphyry and Iamblichus; and then measure the contributions
made by the scholastic theologians, whose dry method has undergone so
much severe condemnation, to the instruments by which knowledge is
enlarged and made accurate. It was the Church, moreover, which
civilised the Northern barbarians, and so preserved the West from the
same barbarism and desolation with which the triumphs of Mahometanism
replaced the knowledge and arts and prosperity of the East. It is to the
services of the Church that we owe the perpetuation of a knowledge of
the ancient tongues, and if this knowledge, and the possession of the
masterpieces of thought and feeling and form, the flower of the ancient
European mind, remained so long unproductive, still religious
organisation deserves our gratitude equally for keeping these great
treasures for happier times. They survived, as trees stripped by winter
of their leaves survive through frost and storm, to give new blossoms in
a new spring.
This much on the intellectual side; but how can we describe the moral
transformation which the new faith brought to pass? Men who had hitherto
only regarded gods as beings to be entreated to avert ill or bestow
blessing, now learnt the nobler emotion of devout love for a divinity of
supreme power and beneficence. The new faith, besides kindling love for
God, inflamed the kindred sentiment of love for men, all of whom it
declared to be the children of God, one vast family with a common
father. Julian himself bore witness to the fidelity with which the
Christians, whose faith he hated or despised, tended the sick and fed
the poor, not only of their own association, but those also who were
without the fold. The horrible practice of exposing new-born infants,
which outraged nature, and yet did not touch the heart nor the
understanding of a Numa, an Aristotle, a Confucius, was first proscribed
by the holy religion of Christ. If shame and misery still sometimes, in
the hearts of poor outcast mothers, overpower the horror which
Christianity first inspired, it is still the same religion which has
opened sheltering places for the unhappy victims of such a practice, and
provided means for rearing foundlings into useful citizens.
Christian teaching, by reviving the principles of sensibility within the
breast, may be said 'to have in some sort unveiled human nature to
herself.' If the cruelty of old manners has abated, do we not owe the
improvement to such courageous priests as Ambrose, who refused admission
into the church to Theodosius, because in punishing a guilty city he had
hearkened to the voice rather of wrath than of justice; or as that Pope
who insisted that Lewis the Seventh should expiate by a rigorous penance
the sack and burning of Vitry.[33] It is not to a Titus, a Trajanus, an
Antoninus, that we owe the abolition of the bloody gladiatorial games;
it is to Jesus Christ. Virtuous unbelievers have not seldom been the
apostles of benevolence and humanity, but we rarely see them in the
asylums of misery. Reason speaks, but it is religion that makes men act.
How much dearer to us than the splendid monuments of antique taste,
power, and greatness, are those Gothic edifices reared for the poor and
the orphan, those far nobler monuments of the piety of Christian
princes and the power of Christian faith. The rudeness of their
architecture may wound the delicacy of our taste, but they will be ever
beloved by feeling hearts. 'Let others admire in the retreat prepared
for those who have sacrificed in battle their lives or their health for
the State, all the gathered riches of the arts, displaying in the eyes
of all the nations the magnificence of Lewis the Fourteenth, and
carrying our renown to the level of that of Greece and Rome. What I will
admire is such a use of those arts; the sublime glory of serving the
weal of men raises them higher than they had ever been at Rome or at
Athens.'
[Footnote 33: See Martin's _Hist. de la France_, iii. 422. Or Morison's
_Life of Saint Bernard_, bk. iii. ch. vi.]
2. Let us turn from the action of the Christian faith in modifying the
passions of the individual, to its influence upon societies of men. How
has Christianity ameliorated the great art of government, with reference
to the two characteristic aims of that art, the happiness of
communities, and their stability? 'Nature has given all men the right of
being happy,' but the old lawgivers abandoned nature's wise economy, by
which she uses the desires and interests of individuals to fulfil her
general plans and ensure the common weal. Men like Lycurgus destroyed
all idea of property, violated the laws of modesty, and annihilated the
tenderest ties of blood. A false and mischievous spirit of system
seduced them away from the true method, the feeling after
experience.[34] A general injustice reigned in the laws of all nations;
among all of them what was called the public good was confined to a
small number of men. Love of country was less the love of
fellow-citizens than a common hatred towards strangers. Hence the
barbarities practised by the ancients upon their slaves, hence that
custom of slavery once spread over the whole earth, those horrible
cruelties in the wars of the Greeks and the Romans, that barbarous
inequality between the two sexes which still reigns in the East; hence
the tyranny of the great towards the common people in hereditary
aristocracies, the profound degradation of subject peoples. In short,
everywhere the stronger have made the laws and have crushed the weak;
and if they have sometimes consulted the interests of a given society,
they have always forgotten those of the human race. To recall right and
justice, a principle was necessary that could raise men above themselves
and all around them, that could lead them to survey all nations and all
conditions with an equitable gaze, and in some sort with the eyes of God
himself. This is what religion has done. What other principle could have
fought and vanquished both interests and prejudice united?
[Footnote 34: _Les hommes en tout ne s'eclairent que par le tatonnement
de l'experience._ P. 593.]
Nothing but the Christian religion could have worked that general
revolution in men's minds, which brought the rights of humanity out into
full day, and reconciled an affectionate preference for the community of
which one makes a part, with a general love for mankind. Even the
horrors of war were softened, and humanity began to be spared such
frightful sequels of triumph, as towns burnt to ashes, populations put
to the sword, the wounded massacred in cold blood, or reserved to give a
ghastly decoration to triumph. Slavery, where it was not abolished, was
constantly and effectively mitigated by Christian sentiment, and the
fact that the Church did not peremptorily insist on its universal
abolition was due to a wise reluctance to expose the constitution of
society to so sudden and violent a shock. Christianity without formal
precepts, merely by inspiring a love of justice and mercy in men's
hearts, prevented the laws from becoming an instrument of oppression,
and held a balance between the strong and the feeble.
If the history of the ancient republics shows that they hardly knew the
difference between liberty and anarchy, and if even the profound
Aristotle seemed unable to reconcile monarchy with a mild government, is
not the reason to be found in the fact that before the Christian era,
the various governments of the world only presented either an ambition
without bound or limit, or else a blind passion for independence? a
perpetual balance between oppression on the one side, and revolt on the
other? In vain did lawgivers attempt to arrest this incessant struggle
of conflicting passions by laws which were too weak for the purpose,
because they were in too imperfect an accord with opinions and manners.
Religion, by placing man under the eyes of an all-seeing God, imposed on
human passions the only rein capable of effectually bridling them. It
gave men internal laws, that were stronger than all the external bonds
of the civil laws. By means of this internal change, it has everywhere
had the effect of weakening despotism, so that the limits of
Christianity seem to mark also the limits of mild government and public
felicity. Kings saw the supreme tribunal of a God who should judge them
and the cause of their people. Thus the distance between them and their
subjects became as nothing in the infinite distance between kings and
subjects alike, and the divinity that was equally elevated above either.
They were both in some sort equalised by a common abasement. 'Ye
nations, be subject to authority,' cried the voice of religion to the
one; and to the other it cried, 'Ye kings, who judge the earth, learn
that God has only entrusted you with the image of power for the
happiness of your peoples.'
An eloquent description of the efficacy of Christianity in raising human
nature, and impressing on kings the obligation of pursuing above all
things the wellbeing of their subjects, closes with a courtly official
salutation of the virtues of that Very Christian King, Lewis the
Fifteenth.
* * * * *