When I was at Chicago last year, I was asked whether Lord Coleridge
would not write a book about America. I ventured to answer confidently
for him that he would do nothing of the kind. Not at Chicago only, but
almost wherever I went, I was asked whether I myself did not intend
to write a book about America. For oneself one can answer yet more
confidently than for one’s friends, and I always replied that most
assuredly I had no such intention. To write a book about America, on
the strength of having made merely such a tour there as mine was,
and with no fuller equipment of preparatory studies and of local
observations than I possess, would seem to me an impertinence.
It is now a long while since I read M. de Tocqueville’s famous
work on Democracy in America. I have the highest respect for M. de
Tocqueville; but my remembrance of his book is that it deals too much
in abstractions for my taste, and that it is written, moreover, in a
style which many French writers adopt, but which I find trying—a style
cut into short paragraphs and wearing an air of rigorous scientific
deduction without the reality. Very likely, however, I do M. de
Tocqueville injustice. My debility in high speculation is well known,
and I mean to attempt his book on Democracy again when I have seen
America once more, and when years may have brought to me, perhaps, more
of the philosophic mind. Meanwhile, however, it will be evident how
serious a matter I think it to write a worthy book about the United
States, when I am not entirely satisfied with even M. de Tocqueville’s.
But before I went to America, and when I had no expectation of ever
going there, I published, under the title of “A Word about America,”
not indeed a book, but a few modest remarks on what I thought
civilisation in the United States might probably be like. I had before
me a Boston newspaper-article which said that if I ever visited America
I should find there such and such things; and taking this article for
my text I observed, that from all I had read and all I could judge,
I should for my part expect to find there rather such and such other
things, which I mentioned. I said that of aristocracy, as we know it
here, I should expect to find, of course, in the United States the
total absence; that our lower class I should expect to find absent in a
great degree, while my old familiar friend, the middle class, I should
expect to find in full possession of the land. And then betaking myself
to those playful phrases which a little relieve, perhaps, the tedium of
grave disquisitions of this sort, I said that I imagined one would just
have in America our Philistines, with our aristocracy quite left out
and our populace very nearly.
An acute and singularly candid American, whose name I will on no
account betray to his countrymen, read these observations of mine, and
he made a remark upon them to me which struck me a good deal. Yes, he
said, you are right, and your supposition is just. In general, what
you would find over there would be the Philistines, as you call them,
without your aristocracy and without your populace. Only this, too,
I say at the same time: you would find over there something besides,
something more, something which you do not bring out, which you cannot
know and bring out, perhaps, without actually visiting the United
States, but which you would recognise if you saw it.
My friend was a true prophet. When I saw the United States I recognised
that the general account which I had hazarded of them was, indeed, not
erroneous, but that it required to have something added to supplement
it. I should not like either my friends in America or my countrymen
here at home to think that my “Word about America” gave my full and
final thoughts respecting the people of the United States. The new and
modifying impressions brought by experience I shall communicate, as I
did my original expectations, with all good faith, and as simply and
plainly as possible. Perhaps when I have yet again visited America,
have seen the great West, and have had a second reading of M. de
Tocqueville’s classical work on Democracy, my mind may be enlarged and
my present impressions still further modified by new ideas. If so, I
promise to make my confession duly; not indeed to make it, even then,
in a book about America, but to make it in a brief “Last Word” on that
great subject—a word, like its predecessors, of open-hearted and free
conversation with the readers of this Review.
* * * * *
I suppose I am not by nature disposed to think so much as most people
do of “institutions.” The Americans think and talk very much of their
“institutions;” I am by nature inclined to call all this sort of
thing _machinery_, and to regard rather men and their characters.
But the more I saw of America, the more I found myself led to treat
“institutions” with increased respect. Until I went to the United
States I had never seen a people with institutions which seemed
expressly and thoroughly suited to it. I had not properly appreciated
the benefits proceeding from this cause.
Sir Henry Maine, in an admirable essay which, though not signed,
betrays him for its author by its rare and characteristic qualities of
mind and style—Sir Henry Maine in the _Quarterly Review_ adopts and
often reiterates a phrase of M. Scherer, to the effect that “Democracy
is only a form of government.” He holds up to ridicule a sentence of
Mr. Bancroft’s History, in which the American democracy is told that
its ascent to power “proceeded as uniformly and majestically as the
laws of being and was as certain as the decrees of eternity.” Let us be
willing to give Sir Henry Maine his way, and to allow no magnificent
claim of this kind on behalf of the American democracy. Let us treat
as not more solid the assertion in the Declaration of Independence,
that “all men are created equal, are endowed by their Creator with
certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit
of happiness.” Let us concede that these natural rights are a figment;
that chance and circumstance, as much as deliberate foresight and
design, have brought the United States into their present condition,
that moreover the British rule which they threw off was not the rule of
oppressors and tyrants which declaimers suppose, and that the merit of
the Americans was not that of oppressed men rising against tyrants, but
rather of sensible young people getting rid of stupid and overweening
guardians who misunderstood and mismanaged them.
All this let us concede, if we will; but in conceding it let us not
lose sight of the really important point, which is this: that their
institutions do in fact suit the people of the United States so well,
and that from this suitableness they do derive so much actual benefit.
As one watches the play of their institutions, the image suggests
itself to one’s mind of a man in a suit of clothes which fits him to
perfection, leaving all his movements unimpeded and easy. It is loose
where it ought to be loose, and it sits close where its sitting close
is an advantage. The central government of the United States keeps in
its own hands those functions which, if the nation is to have real
unity, ought to be kept there; those functions it takes to itself
and no others. The State governments and the municipal governments
provide people with the fullest liberty of managing their own affairs,
and afford, besides, a constant and invaluable school of practical
experience. This wonderful suit of clothes, again (to recur to our
image), is found also to adapt itself naturally to the wearer’s growth,
and to admit of all enlargements as they successively arise. I speak of
the state of things since the suppression of slavery, of the state of
things which meets a spectator’s eye at the present time in America.
There are points in which the institutions of the United States may
call forth criticism. One observer may think that it would be well if
the President’s term of office were longer, if his ministers sate in
Congress or must possess the confidence of Congress. Another observer
may say that the marriage laws for the whole nation ought to be fixed
by Congress, and not to vary at the will of the legislatures of the
several States. I myself was much struck with the inconvenience of
not allowing a man to sit in Congress except for his own district; a
man like Wendell Phillips was thus excluded, because Boston would not
return him. It is as if Mr. Bright could have no other constituency
open to him if Rochdale would not send him to Parliament. But all
these are really questions of _machinery_ (to use my own term), and
ought not so to engage our attention as to prevent our seeing that the
capital fact as to the institutions of the United States is this: their
suitableness to the American people and their natural and easy working.
If we are not to be allowed to say, with Mr. Beecher, that this people
has “a genius for the organisation of States,” then at all events we
must admit that in its own organisation it has enjoyed the most signal
good fortune.
Yes; what is called, in the jargon of the publicists, the political
problem and the social problem, the people of the United States does
appear to me to have solved, or Fortune has solved it for them, with
undeniable success. Against invasion and conquest from without they
are impregnably strong. As to domestic concerns, the first thing to
remember is, that the people over there is at bottom the same people
as ourselves, a people with a strong sense for conduct. But there
is said to be great corruption among their politicians and in the
public service, in municipal administration, and in the administration
of justice. Sir Lepel Griffin would lead us to think that the
administration of justice, in particular, is so thoroughly corrupt, that
a man with a lawsuit has only to provide his lawyer with the necessary
funds for bribing the officials, and he can make sure of winning his
suit. The Americans themselves use such strong language in describing
the corruption prevalent amongst them that they cannot be surprised if
strangers believe them. For myself, I had heard and read so much to
the discredit of American political life, how all the best men kept
aloof from it, and those who gave themselves to it were unworthy, that
I ended by supposing that the thing must actually be so, and the good
Americans must be looked for elsewhere than in politics. Then I had the
pleasure of dining with Mr. Bancroft in Washington; and however he
may, in Sir Henry Maine’s opinion, overlaud the pre-established harmony
of American democracy, he had at any rate invited to meet me half a
dozen politicians whom in England we should pronounce to be members of
Parliament of the highest class, in bearing, manners, tone of feeling,
intelligence, information. I discovered that in truth the practice, so
common in America, of calling a politician “a thief,” does not mean
so very much more than is meant in England when we have heard Lord
Beaconsfield called “a liar” and Mr. Gladstone “a madman.” It means,
that the speaker disagrees with the politician in question and dislikes
him. Not that I assent, on the other hand, to the thick-and-thin
American patriots, who will tell you that there is no more corruption
in the politics and administration of the United States than in those
of England. I believe there _is_ more, and that the tone of both is
lower there; and this from a cause on which I shall have to touch
hereafter. But the corruption is exaggerated; it is not the wide and
deep disease it is often represented; it is such that the good elements
in the nation may, and I believe will, perfectly work it off; and even
now the truth of what I have been saying as to the suitableness and
successful working of American institutions is not really in the least
affected by it.
Furthermore, American society is not in danger from revolution. Here,
again, I do not mean that the United States are exempt from the
operation of every one of the causes—such a cause as the division
between rich and poor, for instance—which may lead to revolution. But I
mean that comparatively with the old countries of Europe they are free
from the danger of revolution; and I believe that the good elements in
them will make a way for them to escape out of what they really have
of this danger also, to escape in the future as well as now—the future
for which some observers announce this danger as so certain and so
formidable. Lord Macaulay predicted that the United States must come
in time to just the same state of things which we witness in England;
that the cities would fill up and the lands become occupied, and then,
he said, the division between rich and poor would establish itself on
the same scale as with us, and be just as embarrassing. He forgot that
the United States are without what certainly fixes and accentuates the
division between rich and poor—the distinction of classes. Not only
have they not the distinction between noble and bourgeois, between
aristocracy and middle class; they have not even the distinction
between bourgeois and peasant or artisan, between middle and lower
class. They have nothing to create it and compel their recognition of
it. Their domestic service is done for them by Irish, Germans, Swedes,
Negroes. Outside domestic service, within the range of conditions which
an American may in fact be called upon to traverse, he passes easily
from one sort of occupation to another, from poverty to riches, and
from riches to poverty. No one of his possible occupations appears
degrading to him or makes him lose caste; and poverty itself appears to
him as inconvenient and disagreeable rather than as humiliating. When
the immigrant from Europe strikes root in his new home, he becomes as
the American.
It may be said that the Americans, when they attained their
independence, had not the elements for a division into classes, and
that they deserve no praise for not having invented one. But I am
not now contending that they deserve praise for their institutions,
I am saying how well their institutions work. Considering, indeed,
how rife are distinctions of rank and class in the world, how prone
men in general are to adopt them, how much the Americans themselves,
beyond doubt, are capable of feeling their attraction, it shows, I
think, at least strong good sense in the Americans to have forborne
from all attempt to invent them at the outset, and to have escaped
or resisted any fancy for inventing them since. But evidently the
United States constituted themselves, not amid the circumstances of a
feudal age, but in a modern age; not under the conditions of an epoch
favorable to subordination, but under those of an epoch of expansion.
Their institutions did but comply with the form and pressure of the
circumstances and conditions then present. A feudal age, an epoch of
war, defence, and concentration, needs centres of power and property,
and it reinforces property by joining distinctions of rank and class
with it. Property becomes more honorable, more solid. And in feudal
ages this is well, for its changing hands easily would be a source
of weakness. But in ages of expansion, where men are bent that every
one shall have his chance, the more readily property changes hands
the better. The envy with which its holder is regarded diminishes,
society is safer. I think whatever may be said of the worship of
the almighty dollar in America, it is indubitable that rich men are
regarded there with less envy and hatred than rich men are in Europe.
Why is this? Because their condition is less fixed, because government
and legislation do not take them more seriously than other people,
make grandees of them, aid them to found families and endure. With
us, the chief holders of property are grandees already, and every
rich man aspires to become a grandee if possible. And therefore an
English country-gentleman regards himself as part of the system of
nature; government and legislation have invited him so to do. If the
price of wheat falls so low that his means of expenditure are greatly
reduced, he tells you that if this lasts he cannot possibly go on
as a country-gentleman; and every well-bred person amongst us looks
sympathising and shocked. An American would say: “Why should he?” The
Conservative newspapers are fond of giving us, as an argument for the
game-laws, the plea that without them a country-gentleman could not
be induced to live on his estate. An American would say: “What does
it matter?” Perhaps to an English ear this will sound brutal; but the
point is that the American does not take his rich man so seriously as
we do ours, does not make him into a grandee; the thing, if proposed
to him, would strike him as an absurdity. I suspect that Mr. Winans
himself, the American millionaire who adds deer-forest to deer-forest,
and will not suffer a cottier to keep a pet lamb, regards his own
performance as a colossal stroke of American humor, illustrating the
absurdities of the British system of property and privilege. Ask Mr.
Winans if he would promote the introduction of the British game-laws
into the United States, and he would tell you with a merry laugh that
the idea is ridiculous, and that these British follies are for home
consumption.
The example of France must not mislead us. There the institutions,
an objector may say, are republican, and yet the division and hatred
between rich and poor is intense. True; but in France, though
the institutions may be republican, the ideas and morals are not
republican. In America not only are the institutions republican, but
the ideas and morals are prevailingly republican also. They are those
of a plain, decent middle class. The ideal of those who are the public
instructors of the people is the ideal of such a class. In France
the ideal of the mass of popular journalists and popular writers of
fiction, who are now practically the public instructors there, is, if
you could see their hearts, a Pompadour or du Barry _régime_, with
themselves for the part of Faublas. With this ideal prevailing, this
vision of the objects for which wealth is desirable, the possessors of
wealth become hateful to the multitude which toils and endures, and
society is undermined. This is one of the many inconvenience which
the French have to suffer from that worship of the great goddess
Lubricity to which they are at present vowed. Wealth excites the most
savage enmity there, because it is conceived as a means for gratifying
appetites of the most selfish and vile kind. But in America Faublas is
no more the ideal than Coriolanus. Wealth is no more conceived as the
minister to the pleasures of a class of rakes, than as the minister to
the magnificence of a class of nobles. It is conceived as a thing which
almost any American may attain, and which almost every American will
use respectably. Its possession, therefore, does not inspire hatred,
and so I return to the thesis with which I started—America is not in
danger of revolution. The division between rich and poor is alleged to
us as a cause of revolution which presently, if not now, must operate
there, as elsewhere; and yet we see that this cause has not there, in
truth, the characters to which we are elsewhere accustomed.
A people homogeneous, a people which had to constitute itself in a
modern age, an epoch of expansion, and which has given to itself
institutions entirely fitted for such an age and epoch, and which suit
it perfectly—a people not in danger of war from without, not in danger
of revolution from within—such is the people of the United States. The
political and social problem, then, we must surely allow that they
solve successfully. There remains, I know, the human problem also;
the solution of that too has to be considered; but I shall come to
that hereafter. My point at present is, that politically and socially
the United States are a community living in a natural condition, and
conscious of living in a natural condition. And being in this healthy
case, and having this healthy consciousness, the community there uses
its understanding with the soundness of health; it in general sees its
political and social concerns straight, and sees them clear. So that
when Sir Henry Maine and M. Scherer tell us that democracy is “merely
a form of government,” we may observe to them that it is in the United
States a form of government in which the community feels itself in a
natural condition and at ease; in which, consequently, it sees things
straight and sees them clear.
More than half one’s interest in watching the English people of the
United States comes, of course, from the bearing of what one finds
there upon things at home, amongst us English people ourselves in these
islands. I have frankly recorded what struck me and came as most new
to me in the condition of the English race in the United States. I had
said beforehand, indeed, that I supposed the American Philistine was a
livelier sort of Philistine than ours, because he had not that pressure
of the Barbarians to stunt and distort him which befalls his English
brother here. But I did not foresee how far his superior liveliness and
naturalness of condition, in the absence of that pressure, would carry
the American Philistine. I still use my old name _Philistine_, because
it does in fact seem to me as yet to suit the bulk of the community
over there, as it suits the strong central body of the community here.
But in my mouth the name is hardly a reproach, so clearly do I see the
Philistine’s necessity, so willingly I own his merits, so much I find
of him in myself. The American Philistine, however, is certainly far
more different from his English brother than I had beforehand supposed.
And on that difference we English of the old country may with great
profit turn our regards for awhile, and I am now going to speak of it.
Surely if there is one thing more than another which all the world
is saying of our community at present, and of which the truth cannot
well be disputed, it is this: that we act like people who do not think
straight and see clear. I know that the Liberal newspapers used to
be fond of saying that what characterised our middle class was its
“clear, manly intelligence, penetrating through sophisms, ignoring
commonplaces, and giving to conventional illusions their true value.”
Many years ago I took alarm at seeing the _Daily News_, and the
_Morning Star_, like Zedekiah the son of Chenaanah, thus making horns
of iron for the middle class and bidding it “Go up and prosper!” and my
first efforts as a writer on public matters were prompted by a desire
to utter, like Micaiah the son of Imlah, my protest against these
misleading assurances of the false prophets. And though often and often
smitten on the cheek, just as Micaiah was, still I persevered; and at
the Royal Institution I said how we seemed to flounder and to beat
the air, and at Liverpool I singled out as our chief want the want of
lucidity. But now everybody is really saying of us the same thing: that
we fumble because we cannot make up our mind, and that we cannot make
up our mind because we do not know what to be after. If our foreign
policy is not that of “the British Philistine, with his likes and
dislikes, his effusion and confusion, his hot and cold fits, his want
of dignity and of the steadfastness which comes from dignity, his want
of ideas and of the steadfastness which comes from ideas,” then all the
world at the present time is, it must be owned, very much mistaken.
Let us not, therefore, speak of foreign affairs; it is needless,
because the thing I wish to show is so manifest there to everybody.
But we will consider matters at home. Let us take the present state of
the House of Commons. Can anything be more confused, more unnatural?
That assembly has got into a condition utterly embarrassed, and seems
impotent to bring itself right. The members of the House themselves
may find entertainment in the personal incidents which such a state
of confusion is sure to bring forth abundantly, and excitement in the
opportunities thus often afforded for the display of Mr. Gladstone’s
wonderful powers. But to any judicious Englishman outside the House
the spectacle is simply an afflicting and humiliating one; the sense
aroused by it is not a sense of delight at Mr. Gladstone’s tireless
powers, it is rather a sense of disgust at their having to be so
exercised. Every day the House of Commons does not sit judicious
people feel relief, every day that it sits they are oppressed with
apprehension. Instead of being an edifying influence, as such an
assembly ought to be, the House of Commons is at present an influence
which does harm; it sets an example which rebukes and corrects none
of the nation’s faults, but rather encourages them. The best thing to
be done at present, perhaps, is to avert one’s eyes from the House
of Commons as much as possible; if one keeps on constantly watching
it welter in its baneful confusion, one is likely to fall into the
fulminating style of the wrathful Hebrew prophets, and to call it “an
astonishment, a hissing, and a curse.”
Well, then, our greatest institution, the House of Commons, we
cannot say is at present working, like the American institutions,
easily and successfully. Suppose we now pass to Ireland. I will not
ask if our institutions work easily and successfully in Ireland; to
ask such a question would be too bitter, too cruel a mockery. Those
hateful cases which have been tried in the Dublin Courts this last
year suggest the dark and ill-omened word which applies to the whole
state of Ireland—_anti-natural_. _Anti-natural_, _anti-nature_—that
is the word which rises irresistibly in my mind as I survey Ireland.
Everything is unnatural there—the proceedings of the English who
rule, the proceedings of the Irish who resist. But it is with the
working of our English institutions there that I am now concerned.
It is unnatural that Ireland should be governed by Lord Spencer and
Mr. Campbell Bannerman—as unnatural as for Scotland to be governed by
Lord Cranbrook and Mr. Healy. It is unnatural that Ireland should
be governed under a Crimes Act. But there is necessity, replies
the Government. Well, then, if there is such evil necessity, it is
unnatural that the Irish newspapers should be free to write as they
write and the Irish members to speak as they speak—free to inflame
and further exasperate a seditious people’s mind, and to promote the
continuance of the evil necessity. A necessity for the Crimes Act is
a necessity for absolute government. By our patchwork proceedings we
set up, indeed, a make-believe of Ireland’s being constitutionally
governed. But it is not constitutionally governed; nobody supposes it
to be constitutionally governed, except, perhaps, that born swallower
of all clap-trap, the British Philistine. The Irish themselves,
the all-important personages in this case, are not taken in; our
make-believe does not produce in them the very least gratitude, the
very least softening. At the same time it adds an hundred fold to the
difficulties of an absolute government.
The working of our institutions being thus awry, is the working of
our thoughts upon them more smooth and natural? I imagine to myself
an American, his own institutions and his habits of thought being
such as we have seen, listening to us as we talk politics and discuss
the strained state of things over here. “Certainly these men have
considerable difficulties,” he would say; “but they never look at them
straight, they do not think straight.” Who does not admire the fine
qualities of Lord Spencer?—and I, for my part, am quite ready to admit
that he may require for a given period not only the present Crimes
Act, but even yet more stringent powers of repression. _For a given
period_, yes!—but afterwards? Has Lord Spencer any clear vision of the
great, the profound changes still to be wrought before a stable and
prosperous society can arise in Ireland? Has he even any ideal for
the future there, beyond that of a time when he can go to visit Lord
Kenmare, or any other great landlord who is his friend, and find all
the tenants punctually paying their rents, prosperous and deferential,
and society in Ireland settling quietly down again upon the old basis?
And he might as well hope to see Strongbow come to life again! Which
of us does not esteem and like Mr. Trevelyan, and rejoice in the high
promise of his career? And how all his friends applauded when he turned
upon the exasperating and insulting Irish members, and told them that
he was “an English gentleman”! Yet, if one thinks of it, Mr. Trevelyan
was thus telling the Irish members simply that he was just that
which Ireland does not want, and which can do her no good. England,
to be sure, has given Ireland plenty of her worst, but she has also
given her not scantily of her best. Ireland has had no insufficient
supply of the English gentleman, with his honesty, personal courage,
high bearing, good intentions, and limited vision; what she wants is
statesmen with just the qualities which the typical English gentleman
has not—flexibility, openness of mind, a free and large view of things.
Everywhere we shall find in our thinking a sort of warp inclining it
aside of the real mark, and thus depriving it of value. The common run
of peers who write to the _Times_ about reform of the House of Lords
one would not much expect, perhaps, to “understand the signs of this
time.” But even the Duke of Argyll, delivering his mind about the
land-question in Scotland, is like one seeing, thinking, and speaking
in some other planet than ours. A man of even Mr. John Morley’s gifts
is provoked with the House of Lords, and straightway he declares
himself against the existence of a Second Chamber at all; although—if
there be such a thing as demonstration in politics—the working of the
American Senate demonstrates a well-composed Second Chamber to be the
very need and safeguard of a modern democracy. What a singular twist,
again, in a man of Mr. Frederic Harrison’s intellectual power, not,
perhaps, to have in the exuberance of youthful energy weighted himself
for the race of life by taking up a grotesque old French pedant upon
his shoulders, but to have insisted, in middle age, in taking up the
Protestant Dissenters too; and now, when he is becoming elderly, it
seems as if nothing would serve him but he must add the Peace Society
to his load! How perverse, yet again, in Mr. Herbert Spencer, at the
very moment when past neglects and present needs are driving men
to co-operation, to making the community act for the public good in
its collective and corporate character of _the State_, how perverse
to seize this occasion for promulgating the extremest doctrine of
individualism; and not only to drag this dead horse along the public
road himself, but to induce Mr. Auberon Herbert to devote his days to
flogging it!
We think thus unaccountably because we are living in an unnatural and
strained state. We are like people whose vision is deranged by their
looking through a turbid and distorting atmosphere, or whose movements
are warped by the cramping of some unnatural constraint. Let us just
ask ourselves, looking at the thing as people simply desirous of
finding the truth, how men who saw and thought straight would proceed,
how an American, for instance—whose seeing and thinking has, I have
said, if not in all matters, yet commonly in political and social
concerns, this quality of straightness—how an American would proceed
in the three confusions which I have given as instances of the many
confusions now embarrassing us: the confusion of our foreign affairs,
the confusion of the House of Commons, the confusion of Ireland. And
then, when we have discovered the kind of proceeding natural in these
cases, let us ask ourselves, with the same sincerity, what is the cause
of that warp of mind hindering most of us from seeing straight in them,
and also where is our remedy.
The Angra Pequeña business has lately called forth from all sides many
and harsh animadversions upon Lord Granville, who is charged with the
direction of our foreign affairs. I shall not swell the chorus of
complainers. Nothing has happened but what was to be expected. Long ago
I remarked that it is not Lord Granville himself who determines our
foreign policy and shapes the declarations of Government concerning it,
but a power behind Lord Granville. He and his colleagues would call it
the power of public opinion. It is really the opinion of that great
ruling class amongst us on which Liberal Governments have hitherto had
to depend for support—the Philistines or middle class. It is not,
I repeat, with Lord Granville in his natural state and force that a
foreign Government has to deal; it is with Lord Granville waiting
in devout expectation to see how the cat will jump—and that cat the
British Philistine! When Prince Bismarck deals with Lord Granville,
he finds that he is not dealing mind to mind with an intelligent
equal, but that he is dealing with a tumult of likes and dislikes,
hopes and fears, stock-jobbing intrigues, missionary interests,
quidnuncs, newspapers—dealing, in short, with _ignorance_ behind his
intelligent equal. Yet ignorant as our Philistine middle class may be,
its volitions on foreign affairs would have more intelligibility and
consistency if uttered through a spokesman of their own class. Coming
through a nobleman like Lord Granville, who has neither the thoughts,
habits, nor ideals of the middle class, and yet wishes to act as
proctor for it, they have every disadvantage. He cannot even do justice
to the Philistine mind, such as it is, for which he is spokesman;
he apprehends it uncertainly and expounds it ineffectively. And so
with the house and lineage of Murdstone thundering at him (and these,
again, through Lord Derby as their interpreter) from the Cape, and the
inexorable Prince Bismarck thundering at him from Berlin, the thing
naturally ends by Lord Granville at last wringing his adroit hands and
ejaculating disconsolately: “It is a misunderstanding altogether!” Even
yet more to be pitied, perhaps, was the hard case of Lord Kimberley
after the Majuba Hill disaster. Who can ever forget him, poor man,
studying the faces of the representatives of the dissenting interest
and exclaiming: “A sudden thought strikes me! May we not be incurring
the sin of blood-guiltiness?” To this has come the tradition of Lord
Somers, the Whig oligarchy of 1688, and all Lord Macaulay’s Pantheon.
I said that a source of strength to America, in political and
social concerns, was the homogeneous character of American society.
An American statesman speaks with more effect the mind of his
fellow-citizens from his being in sympathy with it, understanding
and sharing it. Certainly one must admit that if, in our country of
classes, the Philistine middle class is really the inspirer of our
foreign policy, that policy would at least be expounded more forcibly
if it had a Philistine for its spokesman. Yet I think the true moral
to be drawn is rather, perhaps, this: that our foreign policy would be
improved if our whole society were homogeneous.
As to the confusion in the House of Commons, what, apart from defective
rules of procedure, are its causes? First and foremost, no doubt, the
temper and action of the Irish members. But putting this cause of
confusion out of view for a moment, every one can see that the House
of Commons is far too large, and that it undertakes a quantity of
business which belongs more properly to local assemblies. The confusion
from these causes is one which is constantly increasing, because, as
the country becomes fuller and more awakened, business multiplies, and
more and more members of the House are inclined to take part in it. Is
not the cure for this found in a course like that followed in America,
in having a much less numerous House of Commons, and in making over a
large part of its business to local assemblies, elected, as the House
of Commons itself will henceforth be elected, by household suffrage?
I have often said that we seem to me to need at present, in England,
three things in especial: more equality, education for the middle
classes, and a thorough municipal system. A system of local assemblies
is but the natural complement of a thorough municipal system. Wholes
neither too large nor too small, not necessarily of equal population
by any means, but with characters rendering them in themselves fairly
homogeneous and coherent, are the fit units for choosing these
local assemblies. Such units occur immediately to one’s mind in the
provinces of Ireland, the Highlands and Lowlands of Scotland, Wales
north and south, groups of English counties such as present themselves
in the circuits of the judges or under the names of East Anglia or
the Midlands. No one will suppose me guilty of the pedantry of here
laying out definitive districts; I do but indicate such units as may
enable the reader to conceive the kind of basis required for the local
assemblies of which I am speaking. The business of these districts
would be more advantageously done in assemblies of the kind; they
would form a useful school for the increasing number of aspirants to
public life, and the House of Commons would be relieved.
The strain in Ireland would be relieved too, and by natural and safe
means. Irishmen are to be found, who, in desperation at the present
state of their country, cry out for making Ireland independent and
separate, with a national Parliament in Dublin, with her own foreign
office and diplomacy, her own army and navy, her own tariff, coinage
and currency. This is manifestly impracticable. But here again let
us look at what is done by people who in politics think straight
and see clear; let us observe what is done in the United States.
The Government at Washington reserves matters of imperial concern,
matters such as those just enumerated, which cannot be relinquished
without relinquishing the unity of the empire. Neither does it allow
one great South to be constituted, or one great West, with a Southern
Parliament, or a Western. Provinces that are too large are broken up,
as Virginia has been broken up. But the several States are nevertheless
real and important wholes, each with its own legislature; and to each
the control, within its own borders, of all except imperial concerns
is freely committed. The United States Government intervenes only to
keep order in the last resort. Let us suppose a similar plan applied
in Ireland. There are four provinces there, forming four natural
wholes—or perhaps (if it should seem expedient to put Munster and
Connaught together) three. The Parliament of the empire would still be
in London, and Ireland would send members to it. But at the same time
each Irish province would have its own legislature, and the control of
its own real affairs. The British landlord would no longer determine
the dealings with land in an Irish province, nor the British Protestant
the dealings with church and education. Apart from imperial concerns,
or from disorder such as to render military intervention necessary, the
government in London would leave Ireland to manage itself. Lord Spencer
and Mr. Campbell Bannerman would come back to England. Dublin Castle
would be the State House of Leinster. Land-questions, game-laws,
police, church, education, would be regulated by the people and
legislature of Leinster for Leinster, of Ulster for Ulster, of Munster
and Connaught for Munster and Connaught. The same with the like matters
in England and Scotland. The local legislatures would regulate them.
But there is more. Everybody who watches the working of our
institutions perceives what strain and friction is caused in it at
present, by our having a Second Chamber composed almost entirely of
great landowners, and representing the feelings and interests of the
class of landowners almost exclusively. No one, certainly, under the
condition of a modern age and our actual life, would ever think of
devising such a Chamber. But we will allow ourselves to do more than
merely state this truism, we will allow ourselves to ask what sort
of Second Chamber people who thought straight and saw clear would,
under the conditions of a modern age and of our actual life, naturally
make. And we find, from the experience of the United States, that such
provincial legislatures as we have just now seen to be the natural
remedy for the confusion in the House of Commons, the natural remedy
for the confusion in Ireland, have the further great merit besides
of giving us the best basis possible for a modern Second Chamber.
The United States Senate is perhaps, of all the institutions of that
country, the most happily devised, the most successful in its working.
The legislature of each State of the Union elects two senators to the
Second Chamber of the national Congress at Washington. The senators
are the Lords—if we like to keep, as it is surely best to keep, for
designating the members of the Second Chamber, the title to which
we have been for so many ages habituated. Each of the provincial
legislatures of Great Britain and Ireland would elect members to the
House of Lords. The colonial legislatures also would elect members to
it; and thus we should be complying in the most simple and yet the most
signal way possible with the present desire of both this country and
the colonies for a closer union together, for some representation of
the colonies in the Imperial Parliament. Probably it would be found
expedient to transfer to the Second Chamber the representatives of the
Universities. But no scheme for a Second Chamber will at the present
day be found solid unless it stands on a genuine basis of election
and representation. All schemes for forming a Second Chamber through
nomination, whether by the Crown or by any other voice, of picked
noblemen, great officials, leading merchants and bankers, eminent men
of letters and science, are fantastic. Probably they would not give
us by any means a good Second Chamber. But certainly they would not
satisfy the country or possess its confidence, and therefore they would
be found futile and unworkable.
So we discover what would naturally appear the desirable way out of
some of our worst confusions to anybody who saw clear and thought
straight. But there is little likelihood, probably, of any such way
being soon perceived and followed by our community here. And why is
this? Because, as a community, we have so little lucidity, we so little
see clear and think straight. And why, again, is this? Because our
community is so little homogeneous. The lower class has yet to show
what it will do in politics. Rising politicians are already beginning
to flatter it with servile assiduity, but their praise is as yet
premature, the lower class is too little known. The upper class and the
middle class we know. They have each their own supposed interests, and
these are very different from the true interests of the community. Our
very classes make us dim-seeing. In a modern time, we are living with a
system of classes so intense, a society of such unnatural complication,
that the whole action of our minds is hampered and falsened by it. I
return to my old thesis: inequality is our bane. The great impediments
in our way of progress are aristocracy and Protestant dissent. People
think this is an epigram; alas, it is much rather a truism!
An aristocratical society like ours is often said to be the society
from which artists and men of letters have most to gain. But an
institution is to be judged, not by what one can oneself gain from it,
but by the ideal which it sets up. And aristocracy—if I may once more
repeat words which, however often repeated, have still a value from
their truth—aristocracy now sets up in our country a false ideal, which
materialises our upper class, vulgarises our middle class, brutalises
our lower class. It misleads the young, makes the worldly more worldly,
the limited more limited, the stationary more stationary. Even to the
imaginative, whom Lord John Manners thinks its sure friend, it is more
a hindrance than a help. Johnson says well: “Whatever makes the past,
the distant, or the future, predominate over the present, advances us
in the dignity of thinking beings.” But what is a Duke of Norfolk or
an Earl Warwick, dressed in broadcloth and tweed, and going about his
business or pleasure in hansom cabs and railways like the rest of us?
Imagination herself would entreat him to take himself out of the way,
and to leave us to the Norfolks and Warwicks of history.
I say this without a particle of hatred, and with esteem, admiration,
and affection for many individuals in the aristocratical class. But
the action of time and circumstance is fatal. If one asks oneself what
is really to be desired, what is expedient, one would go far beyond
the substitution of an elected Second Chamber for the present House of
Lords. All confiscation is to be reprobated, all deprivation (except in
bad cases of abuse) of what is actually possessed. But one would wish,
if one set about wishing, for the extinction of title after the death
of the holder, and for the dispersion of property by a stringent law of
bequest. Our society should be homogeneous, and only in this way can it
become so.
But aristocracy is in little danger. “I suppose, sir,” a dissenting
minister said to me the other day, “you found, when you were in
America, that they envied us there our great aristocracy.” It was his
sincere belief that they did, and such probably is the sincere belief
of our middle class in general; or at any rate, that if the Americans
do not envy us this possession, they ought to. And my friend, one of
the great Liberal party which has now, I suppose, pretty nearly run
down its deceased wife’s sister, poor thing, has his hand and heart
full, so far as politics are concerned, of the question of church
disestablishment. He is eager to set to work at a change which, even
if it were desirable (and I think it is not,) is yet off the line of
those reforms which are really pressing.
Mr. Lyulph Stanley, Professor Stuart, and Lord Richard Grosvenor are
waiting ready to help him, and perhaps Mr. Chamberlain himself will
lead the attack. I admire Mr. Chamberlain as a politician because he
has the courage—and it is a wise courage—to state large the reforms we
need, instead of minimising them. But like Saul before his conversion,
he breathes out threatenings and slaughter against the Church, and
is likely, perhaps, to lead an assault upon her. He is a formidable
assailant, yet I suspect he might break his finger-nails on her walls.
If the Church has the majority for her, she will of course stand. But
in any case this institution, with all its faults, has that merit which
makes the great strength of institutions—it offers an ideal which
is noble and attaching. Equality is its profession, if not always
its practice. It inspires wide and deep affection, and possesses,
therefore, immense strength. Probably the Establishment will not
stand in Wales, probably it will not stand in Scotland. In Wales it
ought not, I think, to stand. In Scotland I should regret its fall;
but Presbyterian churches are born to separatism, as the sparks fly
upward. At any rate, it is through the vote of local legislatures that
disestablishment is likely to come, as a measure required in certain
provinces, and not as a general measure for the whole country. In other
words, the endeavor for disestablishment ought to be postponed to the
endeavor for far more important reforms, not to precede it. Yet I doubt
whether Mr. Chamberlain and Mr. Lyulph Stanley will listen to me when I
plead thus with them; there is so little lucidity in England, and they
will say I am priest-ridden.
One man there is, whom above all others I would fain have seen in
Parliament during the last ten years, and beheld established in
influence there at this juncture—Mr. Goldwin Smith. I do not say that
he was not too embittered against the Church; in my opinion he was.
But with singular lucidity and penetration he saw what great reforms
were needed in other directions, and the order of relative importance
in which reforms stood. Such were his character, style, and faculties,
that alone perhaps among men of his insight he was capable of getting
his ideas weighed and entertained by men in power; while amid all favor
and under all temptations he was certain to have still remained true to
his insight, “unshaken, unseduced, unterrified.” I think of him as a
real power for good in Parliament at this time, had he by now become,
as he might have become, one of the leaders there. His absence from the
scene, his retirement in Canada, is a loss to his friends, but a still
greater loss to his country.
Hardly inferior in influence to Parliament itself is journalism. I do
not conceive of Mr. John Morley as made for filling that position in
Parliament which Mr. Goldwin Smith would, I think, have filled. If he
controls, as Protesilaos in the poem advises, hysterical passion (the
besetting danger of men of letters on the platform and in Parliament)
and remembers to approve “the depth and not the tumult of the soul,” he
will be powerful in Parliament; he will rise, he will come into office;
but he will not do for us in Parliament, I think, what Mr. Goldwin
Smith would have done. He is too much of a partisan. In journalism, on
the other hand, he was as unique a figure as Mr. Goldwin Smith would,
I imagine, have been in Parliament. As a journalist, Mr. John Morley
showed a mind which seized and understood the signs of the times; he
had all the ideas of a man of the best insight, and alone, perhaps,
among men of his insight, he had the skill for making these ideas pass
into journalism. But Mr. John Morley has now left journalism. There is
plenty of talent in Parliament, plenty of talent in journalism, but
no one in either to expound “the signs of this time” as these two men
might have expounded them. The signs of the time, political and social,
are left, I regret to say, to bring themselves as they best can to the
notice of the public. Yet how ineffective an organ is literature for
conveying them compared with Parliament and journalism!
Conveyed somehow, however, they certainly should be, and in this
disquisition I have tried to deal with them. But the political and
social problem, as the thinkers call it, must not so occupy us as to
make us forget the human problem. The problems are connected together,
but they are not identical. Our political and social confusions I
admit; what Parliament is at this moment, I see and deplore. Yet
nowhere but in England even now, not in France, not in Germany, not in
America, could there be found public men of that quality—so capable
of fair dealing, of trusting one another, keeping their word to one
another—as to make possible such a settlement of the Franchise and
Seat Bills as that which we have lately seen. Plato says with most
profound truth: “The man who would think to good purpose must be able
to take many things into his view together.” How homogeneous American
society is, I have done my best to declare; how smoothly and naturally
the institutions of the United States work, how clearly, in some most
important respects, the Americans see, how straight they think. Yet Sir
Lepel Griffin says that there is no country calling itself civilised
where one would not rather live than in America, except Russia.
In politics I do not much trust Sir Lepel Griffin. I hope that he
administers in India some district where a profound insight into the
being and working of institutions is not requisite. But, I suppose, of
the tastes of himself and of that large class of Englishmen whom Mr.
Charles Sumner has taught us to call the class of gentlemen, he is no
untrustworthy reporter. And an Englishman of this class would rather
live in France, Spain, Holland, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Switzerland,
than in the United States, in spite of our community of race and speech
with them! This means that, in the opinion of men of that class,
the human problem at least is not well solved in the United States,
whatever the political and social problem may be. And to the human
problem in the United States we ought certainly to turn our attention,
especially when we find taken such an objection as this; and some day,
though not now, we will do so, and try to see what the objection comes
to. I have given hostages to the United States, I am bound to them by
the memory of great, untiring, and most attaching kindness. I should
not like to have to own them to be of all countries calling themselves
civilised, except Russia, the country where one would least like to
live.—_Nineteenth Century._