[Delivered at the Royal Institution, London, 1867.]
These Lectures are meant to be comments on the state of France before the
French Revolution. To English society, past or present, I do not refer.
For reasons which I have set forth at length in an introductory
discourse, there never was any Ancien Regime in England.
Therefore, when the Stuarts tried to establish in England a system which
might have led to a political condition like that of the Continent, all
classes combined and exterminated them; while the course of English
society went on as before.
On the contrary, England was the mother of every movement which
undermined, and at last destroyed, the Ancien Regime.
From England went forth those political theories which, transmitted from
America to France, became the principles of the French Revolution. From
England went forth the philosophy of Locke, with all its immense results.
It is noteworthy, that when Voltaire tries to persuade people, in a
certain famous passage, that philosophers do not care to trouble the
world--of the ten names to whom he does honour, seven names are English.
"It is," he says, "neither Montaigne, nor Locke, nor Boyle, nor Spinoza,
nor Hobbes, nor Lord Shaftesbury, nor Mr. Collins, nor Mr. Toland, nor
Fludd, nor Baker, who have carried the torch of discord into their
countries." It is worth notice, that not only are the majority of these
names English, but that they belong not to the latter but to the former
half of the eighteenth century; and indeed, to the latter half of the
seventeenth.
So it was with that Inductive Physical Science, which helped more than
all to break up the superstitions of the Ancien Regime, and to set man
face to face with the facts of the universe. From England, towards the
end of the seventeenth century, it was promulgated by such men as Newton,
Boyle, Sydenham, Ray, and the first founders of our Royal Society.
In England, too, arose the great religious movements of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries--and especially that of a body which I can never
mention without most deep respect--the Society of Friends. At a time
when the greater part of the Continent was sunk in spiritual sleep, these
men were reasserting doctrines concerning man, and his relation to his
Creator, which, whether or not all believe them (as I believe them) to be
founded on eternal fact, all must confess to have been of incalculable
benefit to the cause of humanity and civilisation.
From England, finally, about the middle of the eighteenth century, went
forth--promulgated by English noblemen--that freemasonry which seems to
have been the true parent of all the secret societies of Europe. Of this
curious question, more hereafter. But enough has been said to show that
England, instead of falling, at any period, into the stagnation of the
Ancien Regime, was, from the middle of the seventeenth century, in a
state of intellectual growth and ferment which communicated itself
finally to the continental nations. This is the special honour of
England; universally confessed at the time. It was to England that the
slowly-awakening nations looked, as the source of all which was noble,
true, and free, in the dawning future.
It will be seen, from what I have said, that I consider the Ancien Regime
to begin in the seventeenth century. I should date its commencement--as
far as that of anything so vague, unsystematic, indeed anarchic, can be
defined--from the end of the Thirty Years' War, and the peace of
Westphalia in 1648.
For by that time the mighty spiritual struggles and fierce religious
animosities of the preceding century had worn themselves out. And, as
always happens, to a period of earnest excitement had succeeded one of
weariness, disgust, half-unbelief in the many questions for which so much
blood had been shed. No man had come out of the battle with altogether
clean hands; some not without changing sides more than once. The war had
ended as one, not of nations, not even of zealots, but of mercenaries.
The body of Europe had been pulled in pieces between them all; and the
poor soul thereof--as was to be expected--had fled out through the gaping
wounds. Life, mere existence, was the most pressing need. If men
could--in the old prophet's words--find the life of their hand, they were
content. High and low only asked to be let live. The poor asked
it--slaughtered on a hundred battle-fields, burnt out of house and home:
vast tracts of the centre of Europe were lying desert; the population was
diminished for several generations. The trading classes, ruined by the
long war, only asked to be let live, and make a little money. The
nobility, too, only asked to be let live. They had lost, in the long
struggle, not only often lands and power, but their ablest and bravest
men; and a weaker and meaner generation was left behind, to do the
governing of the world. Let them live, and keep what they had. If signs
of vigour still appeared in France, in the wars of Louis XIV. they were
feverish, factitious, temporary--soon, as the event proved, to droop into
the general exhaustion. If wars were still to be waged they were to be
wars of succession, wars of diplomacy; not wars of principle, waged for
the mightiest invisible interests of man. The exhaustion was general;
and to it we must attribute alike the changes and the conservatism of the
Ancien Regime. To it is owing that growth of a centralising despotism,
and of arbitrary regal power, which M. de Tocqueville has set forth in a
book which I shall have occasion often to quote. To it is owing, too,
that longing, which seems to us childish, after ancient forms,
etiquettes, dignities, court costumes, formalities diplomatic, legal,
ecclesiastical. Men clung to them as to keepsakes of the past--revered
relics of more intelligible and better-ordered times. If the spirit had
been beaten out of them in a century of battle, that was all the more
reason for keeping up the letter. They had had a meaning once, a life
once; perhaps there was a little life left in them still; perhaps the dry
bones would clothe themselves with flesh once more, and stand upon their
feet. At least it was useful that the common people should so believe.
There was good hope that the simple masses, seeing the old dignities and
formalities still parading the streets, should suppose that they still
contained men, and were not mere wooden figures, dressed artistically in
official costume. And, on the whole, that hope was not deceived. More
than a century of bitter experience was needed ere the masses discovered
that their ancient rulers were like the suits of armour in the Tower of
London--empty iron astride of wooden steeds, and armed with lances which
every ploughboy could wrest out of their hands, and use in his own
behalf.
The mistake of the masses was pardonable. For those suits of armour had
once held living men; strong, brave, wise; men of an admirable temper;
doing their work according to their light, not altogether well--what man
does that on earth?--but well enough to make themselves necessary to, and
loyally followed by, the masses whom they ruled. No one can read fairly
the "Gesta Dei per Francos in Oriente," or the deeds of the French
Nobility in their wars with England, or those tales--however legendary--of
the mediaeval knights, which form so noble an element in German
literature, without seeing, that however black were these men's
occasional crimes, they were a truly noble race, the old Nobility of the
Continent; a race which ruled simply because, without them, there would
have been naught but anarchy and barbarism. To their chivalrous ideal
they were too often, perhaps for the most part, untrue: but, partial and
defective as it is, it is an ideal such as never entered into the mind of
Celt or Gaul, Hun or Sclav; one which seems continuous with the spread of
the Teutonic conquerors. They ruled because they did practically raise
the ideal of humanity in the countries which they conquered, a whole
stage higher. They ceased to rule when they were, through their own
sins, caught up and surpassed in the race of progress by the classes
below them.
But, even when at its best, their system of government had in it--like
all human invention--original sin; an unnatural and unrighteous element,
which was certain, sooner or later, to produce decay and ruin. The old
Nobility of Europe was not a mere aristocracy. It was a caste: a race
not intermarrying with the races below it. It was not a mere
aristocracy. For that, for the supremacy of the best men, all societies
strive, or profess to strive. And such a true aristocracy may exist
independent of caste, or the hereditary principle at all. We may
conceive an Utopia, governed by an aristocracy which should be really
democratic; which should use, under developed forms, that method which
made the mediaeval priesthood the one great democratic institution of old
Christendom; bringing to the surface and utilising the talents and
virtues of all classes, even to the lowest. We may conceive an
aristocracy choosing out, and gladly receiving into its own ranks as
equals, every youth, every maiden, who was distinguished by intellect,
virtue, valour, beauty, without respect to rank or birth; and rejecting
in turn, from its own ranks, each of its own children who fell below some
lofty standard, and showed by weakliness, dulness, or baseness,
incapacity for the post of guiding and elevating their fellow-citizens.
Thus would arise a true aristocracy; a governing body of the really most
worthy--the most highly organised in body and in mind--perpetually
recruited from below: from which, or from any other ideal, we are yet a
few thousand years distant.
But the old Ancien Regime would have shuddered, did shudder, at such a
notion. The supreme class was to keep itself pure, and avoid all taint
of darker blood, shutting its eyes to the fact that some of its most
famous heroes had been born of such left-handed marriages as that of
Robert of Normandy with the tanner's daughter of Falaise. "Some are so
curious in this behalf," says quaint old Burton, writing about 1650, "as
these old Romans, our modern Venetians, Dutch, and French, that if two
parties dearly love, the one noble, the other ignoble, they may not, by
their laws, match, though equal otherwise in years, fortunes, education,
and all good affection. In Germany, except they can prove their
gentility by three descents, they scorn to match with them. A nobleman
must marry a noblewoman; a baron, a baron's daughter; a knight, a
knight's. As slaters sort their slates, do they degrees and families."
And doubtless this theory--like all which have held their ground for many
centuries--at first represented a fact. These castes were, at first,
actually superior to the peoples over whom they ruled. I cannot, as long
as my eyes are open, yield to the modern theory of the equality--indeed
of the non-existence--of races. Holding, as I do, the primaeval unity of
the human race, I see in that race the same inclination to sport into
fresh varieties, the same competition of species between those varieties,
which Mr. Darwin has pointed out among plants and mere animals. A
distinguished man arises; from him a distinguished family; from it a
distinguished tribe, stronger, cunninger than those around. It asserts
its supremacy over its neighbours at first exactly as a plant or animal
would do, by destroying, and, where possible, eating them; next, having
grown more prudent, by enslaving them; next, having gained a little
morality in addition to its prudence, by civilising them, raising them
more or less toward its own standard. And thus, in every land,
civilisation and national life has arisen out of the patriarchal state;
and the Eastern scheik, with his wives, free and slave, and his hundreds
of fighting men born in his house, is the type of all primaeval rulers.
He is the best man of his horde--in every sense of the word best; and
whether he have a right to rule them or not, they consider that he has,
and are the better men for his guidance.
Whether this ought to have been the history of primaeval civilisation, is
a question not to be determined here. That it is the history thereof, is
surely patent to anyone who will imagine to himself what must have been.
In the first place, the strongest and cunningest savage must have had the
chance of producing children more strong and cunning than the average; he
would have--the strongest savage has still--the power of obtaining a
wife, or wives, superior in beauty and in household skill, which involves
superiority of intellect; and therefore his children would--some of them
at least--be superior to the average, both from the father's and the
mother's capacities. They again would marry select wives; and their
children again would do the same; till, in a very few generations, a
family would have established itself, considerably superior to the rest
of the tribe in body and mind, and become assuredly its ruling race.
Again, if one of that race invented a new weapon, a new mode of tillage,
or aught else which gave him power, that would add to the superiority of
his whole family. For the invention would be jealously kept among them
as a mystery, a hereditary secret. To this simple cause, surely, is to
be referred the system of hereditary caste occupations, whether in Egypt
or Hindoostan. To this, too, the fact that alike in Greek and in
Teutonic legend the chief so often appears, not merely as the best
warrior and best minstrel, but as the best smith, armourer, and
handicraftsman of his tribe. If, however, the inventor happened to be a
low-born genius, its advantages would still accrue to the ruling race.
For nothing could be more natural or more easy--as more than one legend
intimates--than that the king should extort the new secret from his
subject, and then put him to death to prevent any further publicity.
Two great inventive geniuses we may see dimly through the abysses of the
past, both of whom must have become in their time great chiefs, founders
of mighty aristocracies--it may be, worshipped after their death as gods.
The first, who seems to have existed after the age in which the black
race colonised Australia, must have been surely a man worthy to hold rank
with our Brindleys, Watts, and Stephensons. For he invented (and mind,
one man must have invented the thing first, and by the very nature of it,
invented it all at once) an instrument so singular, unexpected, unlike
anything to be seen in nature, that I wonder it has not been called, like
the plough, the olive, or the vine, a gift of the immortal gods: and yet
an instrument so simple, so easy, and so perfect, that it spread over all
races in Europe and America, and no substitute could be found for it till
the latter part of the fifteenth century. Yes, a great genius was he,
and the consequent founder of a great aristocracy and conquering race,
who first invented for himself and his children after him a--bow and
arrow.
The next--whether before or after the first in time, it suits me to speak
of him in second place--was the man who was the potential ancestor of the
whole Ritterschaft, Chivalry, and knightly caste of Europe; the man who
first, finding a foal upon the steppe, deserted by its dam, brought it
home, and reared it; and then bethought him of the happy notion of making
it draw--presumably by its tail--a fashion which endured long in Ireland,
and had to be forbidden by law, I think as late as the sixteenth century.
A great aristocrat must that man have become. A greater still he who
first substituted the bit for the halter. A greater still he who first
thought of wheels. A greater still he who conceived the yoke and pole
for bearing up his chariot; for that same yoke, and pole, and chariot,
became the peculiar instrument of conquerors like him who mightily
oppressed the children of Israel, for he had nine hundred chariots of
iron. Egyptians, Syrians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans--none of them
improved on the form of the conquering biga, till it was given up by a
race who preferred a pair of shafts to their carts, and who had learnt to
ride instead of drive. A great aristocrat, again, must he have been
among those latter races who first conceived the notion of getting on his
horse's back, accommodating his motions to the beast's, and becoming a
centaur, half-man, half-horse. That invention must have tended, in the
first instance, as surely toward democracy as did the invention of
firearms. A tribe of riders must have been always, more or less, equal
and free. Equal because a man on a horse would feel himself a man
indeed; because the art of riding called out an independence, a
self-help, a skill, a consciousness of power, a personal pride and
vanity, which would defy slavery. Free, because a tribe of riders might
be defeated, exterminated, but never enchained. They could never become
_gleboe adscripti_, bound to the soil, as long as they could take horse
and saddle, and away. History gives us more than one glimpse of such
tribes--the scourge and terror of the non-riding races with whom they
came in contact. Some, doubtless, remember how in the wars between
Alfred and the Danes, "the army" (the Scandinavian invaders) again and
again horse themselves, steal away by night from the Saxon infantry, and
ride over the land (whether in England or in France), "doing unspeakable
evil." To that special instinct of horsemanship, which still
distinguishes their descendants, we may attribute mainly the Scandinavian
settlement of the north and east of England. Some, too, may recollect
the sketch of the primeval Hun, as he first appeared to the astonished
and disgusted old Roman soldier Ammianus Marcellinus; the visages "more
like cakes than faces;" the "figures like those which are hewn out with
an axe on the poles at bridge-ends;" the rat-skin coats, which they wore
till they rotted off their limbs; their steaks of meat cooked between the
saddle and the thigh; the little horses on which "they eat and drink, buy
and sell, and sleep lying forward along his narrow neck, and indulging in
every variety of dream." And over and above, and more important
politically, the common councils "held on horseback, under the authority
of no king, but content with the irregular government of nobles, under
whose leading they force their way through all obstacles." A race--like
those Cossacks who are probably their lineal descendants--to be feared,
to be hired, to be petted, but not to be conquered.
Instances nearer home of free equestrian races we have in our own English
borderers, among whom (as Mr. Froude says) the farmers and their farm-
servants had but to snatch their arms and spring into their saddles and
they became at once the Northern Horse, famed as the finest light cavalry
in the world. And equal to them--superior even, if we recollect that
they preserved their country's freedom for centuries against the superior
force of England--were those troops of Scots who, century after century,
swept across the border on their little garrons, their bag of oatmeal
hanging by the saddle, with the iron griddle whereon to bake it; careless
of weather and of danger; men too swift to be exterminated, too
independent to be enslaved.
But if horsemanship had, in these cases, a levelling tendency it would
have the very opposite when a riding tribe conquered a non-riding one.
The conquerors would, as much as possible, keep the art and mystery of
horsemanship hereditary among themselves, and become a Ritterschaft or
chivalrous caste. And they would be able to do so: because the conquered
race would not care or dare to learn the new and dangerous art. There
are persons, even in England, who can never learn to ride. There are
whole populations in Europe, even now, when races have become almost
indistinguishably mixed, who seem unable to learn. And this must have
been still more the case when the races were more strongly separated in
blood and habits. So the Teutonic chief, with his gesitha, comites, or
select band of knights, who had received from him, as Tacitus has it, the
war-horse and the lance, established himself as the natural ruler--and
oppressor--of the non-riding populations; first over the aborigines of
Germany proper, tribes who seem to have been enslaved, and their names
lost, before the time of Tacitus; and then over the non-riding Romans and
Gauls to the South and West, and the Wendish and Sclavonic tribes to the
East. Very few in numbers, but mighty in their unequalled capacity of
body and mind, and in their terrible horsemanship, the Teutonic
Ritterschaft literally rode roughshod over the old world; never checked,
but when they came in contact with the free-riding hordes of the Eastern
steppes; and so established an equestrian caste, of which the [Greek
text] of Athens and the Equites of Rome had been only hints ending in
failure and absorption.
Of that equestrian caste the symbol was the horse. The favourite, and
therefore the chosen sacrifice of Odin, their ancestor and God, the
horse's flesh was eaten at the sacrificial meal; the horse's head, hung
on the ash in Odin's wood, gave forth oracular responses. As
Christianity came in, and the eating of horse-flesh was forbidden as
impiety by the Church, while his oracles dwindled down to such as that
which Falada's dead head gives to the goose-girl in the German tale, the
magic power of the horse figured only in ballads and legends: but his
real power remained.
The art of riding became an hereditary and exclusive science--at last a
pedantry, hampered by absurd etiquettes, and worse than useless
traditions; but the power and right to ride remained on the whole the
mark of the dominant caste. Terribly did they often abuse that special
power. The faculty of making a horse carry him no more makes a man a
good man, than the faculties of making money, making speeches, making
books, or making a noise about public abuses. And of all ruffians, the
worst, if history is to be trusted, is the ruffian on a horse; to whose
brutality of mind is superadded the brute power of his beast. A ruffian
on a horse--what is there that he will not ride over, and ride on,
careless and proud of his own shame? When the ancient chivalry of France
descended to that level, or rather delegated their functions to
mercenaries of that level--when the knightly hosts who fought before
Jerusalem allowed themselves to be superseded by the dragoons and
dragonnades of Louis XIV.--then the end of the French chivalry was at
hand, and came. But centuries before that shameful fall there had come
in with Christianity the new thought, that domination meant
responsibility; that responsibility demanded virtue. The words which
denoted rank, came to denote likewise high moral excellencies. The
nobilis, or man who was known, and therefore subject to public opinion,
was bound to behave nobly. The gentleman--gentile-man--who respected his
own gens, or family and pedigree, was bound to be gentle. The courtier,
who had picked up at court some touch of Roman civilisation from Roman
ecclesiastics, was bound to be courteous. He who held an "honour" or
"edel" of land was bound to be honourable; and he who held a "weorthig,"
or worthy, thereof, was bound himself to be worthy. In like wise, he who
had the right to ride a horse, was expected to be chivalrous in all
matters befitting the hereditary ruler, who owed a sacred debt to a long
line of forefathers, as well as to the state in which he dwelt; all
dignity, courtesy, purity, self-restraint, devotion--such as they were
understood in those rough days--centred themselves round the idea of the
rider as the attributes of the man whose supposed duty, as well as his
supposed right, was to govern his fellow-men, by example, as well as by
law and force;--attributes which gathered themselves up into that one
word--Chivalry: an idea, which, perfect or imperfect, God forbid that
mankind should ever forget, till it has become the possession--as it is
the God-given right--of the poorest slave that ever trudged on foot; and
every collier-lad shall have become--as some of those Barnsley men proved
but the other day they had become already:
A very gentle perfect knight.
Very unfaithful was chivalry to its ideal--as all men are to all ideals.
But bear in mind, that if the horse was the symbol of the ruling caste,
it was not at first its only strength. Unless that caste had had at
first spiritual, as well as physical force on its side, it would have
been soon destroyed--nay, it would have destroyed itself--by internecine
civil war. And we must believe that those Franks, Goths, Lombards, and
Burgunds, who in the early Middle Age leaped on the backs (to use Mr.
Carlyle's expression) of the Roman nations, were actually, in all senses
of the word, better men than those whom they conquered. We must believe
it from reason; for if not, how could they, numerically few, have held
for a year, much more for centuries, against millions, their dangerous
elevation? We must believe it, unless we take Tacitus's "Germania,"
which I absolutely refuse to do, for a romance. We must believe that
they were better than the Romanised nations whom they conquered, because
the writers of those nations, Augustine, Salvian, and Sidonius
Apollinaris, for example, say that they were such, and give proof
thereof. Not good men according to our higher standard--far from it;
though Sidonius's picture of Theodoric, the East Goth, in his palace of
Narbonne, is the picture of an eminently good and wise ruler. But not
good, I say, as a rule--the Franks, alas! often very bad men: but still
better, wiser, abler, than those whom they ruled. We must believe too,
that they were better, in every sense of the word, than those tribes on
their eastern frontier, whom they conquered in after centuries, unless we
discredit (which we have no reason to do) the accounts which the Roman
and Greek writers give of the horrible savagery of those tribes.
So it was in later centuries. One cannot read fairly the history of the
Middle Ages without seeing that the robber knight of Germany or of
France, who figures so much in modern novels, must have been the
exception, and not the rule: that an aristocracy which lived by the
saddle would have as little chance of perpetuating itself, as a
priesthood composed of hypocrites and profligates; that the mediaeval
Nobility has been as much slandered as the mediaeval Church; and the
exceptions taken--as more salient and exciting--for the average: that
side by side with ruffians like Gaston de Foix hundreds of honest
gentlemen were trying to do their duty to the best of their light, and
were raising, and not depressing, the masses below them--one very
important item in that duty being, the doing the whole fighting of the
country at their own expense, instead of leaving it to a standing army of
mercenaries, at the beck and call of a despot; and that, as M. de
Tocqueville says: "In feudal times, the Nobility were regarded pretty
much as the government is regarded in our own; the burdens they imposed
were endured in consequence of the security they afforded. The nobles
had many irksome privileges; they possessed many onerous rights: but they
maintained public order, they administered justice, they caused the law
to be executed, they came to the relief of the weak, they conducted the
business of the community. In proportion as they ceased to do these
things, the burden of their privileges appeared more oppressive, and
their existence became an anomaly in proportion as they ceased to do
these things." And the Ancien Regime may be defined as the period in
which they ceased to do these things--in which they began to play the
idlers, and expected to take their old wages without doing their old
work.
But in any case, government by a ruling caste, whether of the patriarchal
or of the feudal kind, is no ideal or permanent state of society. So far
from it, it is but the first or second step out of primeval savagery. For
the more a ruling race becomes conscious of its own duty, and not merely
of its own power--the more it learns to regard its peculiar gifts as
entrusted to it for the good of men--so much the more earnestly will it
labour to raise the masses below to its own level, by imparting to them
its own light; and so will it continually tend to abolish itself, by
producing a general equality, moral and intellectual; and fulfil that law
of self-sacrifice which is the beginning and the end of all virtue.
A race of noblest men and women, trying to make all below them as noble
as themselves--that is at least a fair ideal, tending toward, though it
has not reached, the highest ideal of all.
But suppose that the very opposite tendency--inherent in the heart of
every child of man--should conquer. Suppose the ruling caste no longer
the physical, intellectual, and moral superiors of the mass, but their
equals. Suppose them--shameful, but not without example--actually sunk
to be their inferiors. And that such a fall did come--nay, that it must
have come--is matter of history. And its cause, like all social causes,
was not a political nor a physical, but a moral cause. The profligacy of
the French and Italian aristocracies, in the sixteenth century, avenged
itself on them by a curse (derived from the newly-discovered America)
from which they never recovered. The Spanish aristocracy suffered, I
doubt not very severely. The English and German, owing to the superior
homeliness and purity of ruling their lives, hardly at all. But the
continental caste, instead of recruiting their tainted blood by healthy
blood from below, did all, under pretence of keeping it pure, to keep it
tainted by continual intermarriage; and paid, in increasing weakness of
body and mind, the penalty of their exclusive pride. It is impossible
for anyone who reads the French memoirs of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries, not to perceive, if he be wise, that the aristocracy therein
depicted was ripe for ruin--yea, already ruined--under any form of
government whatsoever, independent of all political changes. Indeed,
many of the political changes were not the causes but the effects of the
demoralisation of the noblesse. Historians will tell you how, as early
as the beginning of the seventeenth century, Henry IV. complained that
the nobles were quitting their country districts; how succeeding kings
and statesmen, notably Richelieu and Louis XIV., tempted the noblesse up
to Paris, that they might become mere courtiers, instead of powerful
country gentlemen; how those who remained behind were only the poor
_hobereaux_, little hobby-hawks among the gentry, who considered it
degradation to help in governing the parish, as their forefathers had
governed it, and lived shabbily in their chateaux, grinding the last
farthing out of their tenants, that they might spend it in town during
the winter. No wonder that with such an aristocracy, who had renounced
that very duty of governing the country, for which alone they and their
forefathers had existed, there arose government by intendants and sub-
delegates, and all the other evils of administrative centralisation,
which M. de Tocqueville anatomises and deplores. But what was the cause
of the curse? Their moral degradation. What drew them up to Paris save
vanity and profligacy? What kept them from intermarrying with the middle
class save pride? What made them give up the office of governors save
idleness? And if vanity, profligacy, pride, and idleness be not
injustices and moral vices, what are?
The race of heroic knights and nobles who fought under the walls of
Jerusalem--who wrestled, and not in vain, for centuries with the equally
heroic English, in defence of their native soil--who had set to all
Europe the example of all knightly virtues, had rotted down to this;
their only virtue left, as Mr. Carlyle says, being--a perfect readiness
to fight duels.
Every Intendant, chosen by the Comptroller-General out of the lower-born
members of the Council of State; a needy young plebeian with his fortune
to make, and a stranger to the province, was, in spite of his greed,
ambition, chicane, arbitrary tyranny, a better man--abler, more
energetic, and often, to judge from the pages of De Tocqueville, with far
more sympathy and mercy for the wretched peasantry--than was the count or
marquis in the chateau above, who looked down on him as a roturier; and
let him nevertheless become first his deputy, and then his master.
Understand me--I am not speaking against the hereditary principle of the
Ancien Regime, but against its caste principle--two widely different
elements, continually confounded nowadays.
The hereditary principle is good, because it is founded on fact and
nature. If men's minds come into the world blank sheets of paper--which
I much doubt--every other part and faculty of them comes in stamped with
hereditary tendencies and peculiarities. There are such things as
transmitted capabilities for good and for evil; and as surely as the
offspring of a good horse or dog is likely to be good, so is the
offspring of a good man, and still more of a good woman. If the parents
have any special ability, their children will probably inherit it, at
least in part; and over and above, will have it developed in them by an
education worthy of their parents and themselves. If man were--what he
is not--a healthy and normal species, a permanent hereditary caste might
go on intermarrying, and so perpetuate itself. But the same moral reason
which would make such a caste dangerous--indeed, fatal to the liberty and
development of mankind, makes it happily impossible. Crimes and follies
are certain, after a few generations, to weaken the powers of any human
caste; and unless it supplements its own weakness by mingling again with
the common stock of humanity, it must sink under that weakness, as the
ancient noblesse sank by its own vice. Of course there were exceptions.
The French Revolution brought those exceptions out into strong light; and
like every day of judgment, divided between the good and the evil. But
it lies not in exceptions to save a caste, or an institution; and a few
Richelieus, Liancourts, Rochefoucaulds, Noailles, Lafayettes were but the
storks among the cranes involved in the wholesale doom due not to each
individual, but to a system and a class.
Profligacy, pride, idleness--these are the vices which we have to lay to
the charge of the Teutonic Nobility of the Ancien Regime in France
especially; and (though in a less degree perhaps) over the whole
continent of Europe. But below them, and perhaps the cause of them all,
lay another and deeper vice--godlessness--atheism.
I do not mean merely want of religion, doctrinal unbelief. I mean want
of belief in duty, in responsibility. Want of belief that there was a
living God governing the universe, who had set them their work, and would
judge them according to their work. And therefore, want of belief, yea,
utter unconsciousness, that they were set in their places to make the
masses below them better men; to impart to them their own civilisation,
to raise them to their own level. They would have shrunk from that which
I just now defined as the true duty of an aristocracy, just because it
would have seemed to them madness to abolish themselves. But the process
of abolition went on, nevertheless, only now from without instead of from
within. So it must always be, in such a case. If a ruling class will
not try to raise the masses to their own level, the masses will try to
drag them down to theirs. That sense of justice which allowed
privileges, when they were as strictly official privileges as the salary
of a judge, or the immunity of a member of the House of Commons; when
they were earned, as in the Middle Age, by severe education, earnest
labour, and life and death responsibility in peace and war, will demand
the abolition of those privileges, when no work is done in return for
them, with a voice which must be heard, for it is the voice of truth and
justice.
But with that righteous voice will mingle another, most wicked, and yet,
alas! most flattering to poor humanity--the voice of envy, simple and
undisguised; of envy, which moralists hold to be one of the basest of
human passions; which can never be justified, however hateful or unworthy
be the envied man. And when a whole people, or even a majority thereof,
shall be possessed by that, what is there that they will not do?
Some are surprised and puzzled when they find, in the French Revolution
of 1793, the noblest and the foulest characters labouring in concert, and
side by side--often, too, paradoxical as it may seem, united in the same
personage. The explanation is simple. Justice inspired the one; the
other was the child of simple envy. But this passion of envy, if it
becomes permanent and popular, may avenge itself, like all other sins. A
nation may say to itself, "Provided we have no superiors to fall our
pride, we are content. Liberty is a slight matter, provided we have
equality. Let us be slaves, provided we are all slaves alike." It may
destroy every standard of humanity above its own mean average; it may
forget that the old ruling class, in spite of all its defects and crimes,
did at least pretend to represent something higher than man's necessary
wants, plus the greed of amassing money; never meeting (at least in the
country districts) any one wiser or more refined than an official or a
priest drawn from the peasant class, it may lose the belief that any
standard higher than that is needed; and, all but forgetting the very
existence of civilisation, sink contented into a dead level of
intellectual mediocrity and moral barbarism, crying, "Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die."
A nation in such a temper will surely be taken at its word. Where the
carcase is, there the eagles will be gathered together; and there will
not be wanting to such nations--as there were not wanting in old Greece
and Rome--despots who will give them all they want, and more, and say to
them: "Yes, you shall eat and drink; and yet you shall not die. For I,
while I take care of your mortal bodies, will see that care is taken of
your immortal souls."
For there are those who have discovered, with the kings of the Holy
Alliance, that infidelity and scepticism are political mistakes, not so
much because they promote vice, as because they promote (or are supposed
to promote) free thought; who see that religion (no matter of what
quality) is a most valuable assistant to the duties of a minister of
police. They will quote in their own behalf Montesquieu's opinion that
religion is a column necessary to sustain the social edifice; they will
quote, too, that sound and true saying of De Tocqueville's: {1} "If the
first American who might be met, either in his own country, or abroad,
were to be stopped and asked whether he considered religion useful to the
stability of the laws and the good order of society, he would answer,
without hesitation, that no civilised society, but more especially none
in a state of freedom, can exist without religion. Respect for religion
is, in his eyes, the greatest guarantee of the stability of the State,
and of the safety of the community. Those who are ignorant of the
science of government, know that fact at least."
M. de Tocqueville, when he wrote these words, was lamenting that in
France, "freedom was forsaken;" "a thing for which it is said that no one
any longer cares in France." He did not, it seems to me, perceive that,
as in America the best guarantee of freedom is the reverence for a
religion or religions, which are free themselves, and which teach men to
be free; so in other countries the best guarantee of slavery is,
reverence for religions which are not free, and which teach men to be
slaves.
But what M. de Tocqueville did not see, there are others who will see;
who will say: "If religion be the pillar of political and social order,
there is an order which is best supported by a religion which is adverse
to free thought, free speech, free conscience, free communion between man
and God. The more enervating the superstition, the more exacting and
tyrannous its priesthood, the more it will do our work, if we help it to
do its own. If it permit us to enslave the body, we will permit it to
enslave the soul."
And so may be inaugurated a period of that organised anarchy of which the
poet says:
It is not life, but death, when nothing stirs.