and crotchets--almost its crazes. For example, the leader of the
Positivist band took great trouble to argue that Europe ought to form
herself into a noble federation of States, to the exclusion of Russia,
which was to be regarded as an Oriental, barbarous, unmanageable,
intolerable sort of thing, and pushed out of the European system
altogether. Then a good many of the leading minds of the school are
imbued with a passionate love for a sort of celestial despotism, an
ideal imperialism which the people are first to create and then to
obey--which is to teach them, house them, keep them in employment, keep
them in health, and leave them nothing to do for themselves, while yet
securing to them the most absolute freedom. To some of these men the
condition of New York, where the State does hardly anything for the
individual, would seem as distressing and objectionable as that of
despotic Paris or even Constantinople. A distinguished member of the
school declared that nothing was to him more odious than any manner of
voluntaryism, and that he hoped to see State operation introduced into
every department of English social organization. The connection of this
theory with the principle of Positivism, which would mould all men into
a sort of hierarchy, is natural and obvious enough, and there is, to
support it, a certain reaction now in England against the voluntary
principle, in education and in public charities. But, as it is put
forward and argued by men of the school I describe, it may be taken as
one of the most remarkable points of departure from the common tendency
of thought in England. The Positivists are all, indeed, un-English, in
the common use of a phrase which is ceasing of late to be so dreaded a
stigma as it once used to be in British politics. They are, as I have
already said, a somewhat aggressive body, and are imbued with a
contempt, which they never care to conceal, for the average public
opinion of the British Philistine, whether he present himself as a West
End tradesman or a West End Peer.
The Positivists are almost always to be found in antagonism with this
sort of public opinion. They attack the Philistine, and they attack no
less readily the dainty scholar and critic who lately gave the
Philistine his name, and whose over-refining love of sweetness and light
is so terribly offended by the rough and earnest work of Radical
politics. Whatever way average opinion tends, the influence of the
Positivists is sure to tend the other way.
There was a time, nearly two years ago, when the average English mind
was suddenly seized with a passion of blended hate, fear, and contempt
for Fenianism. The thing was first beginning to show itself in a serious
light and it had not gone far enough to show what it really was. It
looked more formidable than it proved to be, and it seemed less like an
ordinary rebellious organization than like some mysterious and
demoniacal league against property and public security. When I say it
seemed, I mean it seemed to the average English mind, to the ordinary
swell and the ordinary shopkeeper. Just at this time the Positivists
drew up a petition to be presented to the House of Commons, in which
they called upon the House to insist that lenity should be shown to all
Fenian prisoners, that they should be regarded as men driven into
rebellion by a deep sense of injustice, and that measures should be
taken to prevent the British troops from committing such excesses in
Ireland as had been perpetrated in the suppression of the Indian mutiny,
and more lately in Jamaica. Now, if there was anything peculiarly
calculated to vex and aggravate the House of Commons and the English
public generally, it was such a view of the business as this. Fenianism
had not acquired the solemn and tragic interest which it obtained a few
months afterward. It is only just to say that Englishmen in general
began to look with pity and a sort of respect on Fenianism, once it
became clear that it had among its followers men who, to quote the
language of one of the least sympathetic of London newspapers, "knew how
to die." But, at the time I speak of, Fenianism was a vague, mystic,
accursed thing, which it was proper to regard as utterly detestable and
contemptible. Imagine then what the feeling of the English county member
must have been when he learned that there were actually in London a set
of educated Englishmen, nearly all trained in the universities and
nearly all moving in good society, who regarded the Fenians just as he
himself regarded rebels against the Emperor of Austria or the Pope of
Rome, and who not merely asked that consideration should be shown toward
them, but went on to talk of the necessity of protecting them against
the brutality of the loyal British soldier! The petition was signed by
all who had a share in its preparation. Such men as Richard Congreve, T.
M. Ludlow, Frederick Harrison and Professor Beesly, were among the
petitioners who risked their admission into respectable society by
signing the document. The petitioners did not feel quite sure about
getting any one of mark to present their appeal; and it is certain that
a good many professed Liberals, of advanced opinions and full of
sympathy with foreign rebels of any class or character, would have
promptly refused to accept the ungenial office. The petitioners,
however, applied to one who was not likely to be influenced by any
considerations but those of right and justice, and whom, moreover, no
body in the House of Commons would think of trying to put down. They
asked Mr. Bright to present their petition, and there was, of course, no
hesitation on his part. Mr. Bright not merely presented the petition,
but read it amid the angry and impatient murmurs of an amazed and
indignant House; and he declared, in tones of measured and impressive
calmness, that he entirely approved of and adopted the sentiments which
the petitioners expressed. There was, of course, a storm of indignation,
and some members went the length of recommending that the petition
should not even be received--an extreme and indeed extravagant course in
a country where the right of petition is supposed to be held sacred, and
which the good sense even of some Tory members promptly repudiated. Mr.
Disraeli did his very best to aggravate the feeling of the House against
the petitioners. During the Indian mutiny he had himself loudly
protested against the spirit of vengeance which our press encouraged;
asked whether we meant to make Nana Sahib the model for a British
officer, and whether Moloch or Christ was our divinity. Yet he now
declared that the language of the petition was a libel on the Indian
army, and that nothing had ever occurred during the Bengal outbreak to
warrant the imputations cast on the humanity of our soldiers.
I suppose it is not easy to convey to an American reader a correct idea
of the degree of boldness involved in the presentation of this
celebrated petition. It really was a very bold thing to do. It was
running right in the very teeth of the public opinion of all the classes
which are called respectable in England. It was, however, strictly
characteristic of the men who signed it. Most, if not all of them, took
a prominent part in the prosecution of Governor Eyre of Jamaica, for the
lawless execution of George William Gordon and the wholesale and
merciless floggings and hangings by which order was made to reign in the
island. Most of them, indeed, have a pretty spirit of contradiction of
their own, and a pretty gift of sarcasm. I think I hardly remember any
man who received, during an equal length of time, a greater amount of
abuse from the press than Professor Beesly drew down on himself not very
long ago. It was at the time when the public mind was in its wildest
thrill of horror at the really fearful revelations of organized murder
in connection with the Sawgrinders' Union in Sheffield. The whole
question of trades' union organization had been under discussion; and
even before the Sheffield revelations came out, the general voice of
English respectability was against the workmen's societies altogether.
But when the disclosures of organized murder in connection with one
union came out, a sort of panic took possession of the public mind. The
first, and not unnatural impulse was to assume that all trades' unions
must be very much the same sort of thing, and that the societies of
workmen were little better than organized Thuggism. Now, Professor
Beesly, Mr. Frederick Harrison and other signers of the petition for the
Fenians, had long been prominent and influential advocates of the
trades' union principle. They had been to the English artisan something
like what the Boston Abolitionist was so long to the negro. The trades'
union bodies, who felt aggrieved at the unjust suspicion which made them
a party to hideous crimes they abhorred, began to hold public meetings
to repudiate the charge, and record their detestation of the Sheffield
outrages. Professor Beesly attended one of these meetings in London. He
made a speech, in which he told the working men that he thought enough
had been done in the way of disavowing crimes which no one had a right
to impute to them; that there was no need of their further humiliating
themselves; and that it was rather odd the English Aristocracy had such
a horror of murderers among the poorer classes, seeing how very fond
they were of men like Eyre, of Jamaica! In fact, Professor Beesly
uplifted his voice very honestly, but rather recklessly and out of time,
against the social hypocrisy which is the stain and curse of London
society, and which is never so happy as when it can find some chance of
denouncing sin or crime among Republicans, or Irishmen, or workingmen.
There was nothing Professor Beesly said which had not sense and truth in
it; but it might have been said more discreetly and at a better time;
and it was said with a sarcastic and scornful bitterness which is one of
the characteristics of the speaker. For several days the London press
literally raged at the professor. "Punch" persevered for a long time in
calling him "Professor Beastly;" a a strong effort was made to obtain
his expulsion from the college in which he has a chair. He was talked of
and written of as if he were the advocate and the accomplice of
assassins, instead of being, as he is, an honorable gentleman and an
enlightened scholar, whose great influence over the working classes had
always been exerted in the cause of peaceful progress and good order. It
was a common thing, for days and weeks, to see the names of Broadhead
and Beesly coupled with ostentatious malignity in the leading columns of
London newspapers.
I give these random illustrations only to show in what manner the school
of writers and thinkers I speak of usually present themselves before the
English public. Now Mr. Harrison devotes himself to a pertinacious,
powerful series of attacks on Eyre, of Jamaica, at a time when that
personage is the hero and pet martyr of English society; now Professor
Beesly horrifies British respectability by pointing out that there are
respectable murderers who are quite as bad as Broadhead; now Mr. John
Morley undertakes even to criticise the Queen; now Mr. Congreve assails
the anonymous writers of the London press as hired and masked assassins;
now the whole band unite in the defence of Fenians. This sort of thing
has a startling effect upon the steady public mind of England; and it
is thus, and not otherwise, that the public mind of England ever comes
to hear of these really gifted and honest, but very antagonistic and
somewhat crochetty men. Several of them are brilliant and powerful
writers. Professor Beesly writes with a keen, caustic, bitter force
which has something Parisian in it. I know of no writer in English
journalism who more closely resembles in style a certain type of the
literary gladiator of French controversy. He has much of Eugene Pelletan
in him, and something of Henri Rochefort, blended with a good deal that
reminds one of Jules Simon. Frederick Harrison is fast becoming a power
in the Radical politics and literature of England. John Morley is a
young man of great culture, and who writes with a quite remarkable
freshness and force. I could mention many other men of the same school
(I have already said that I do not know whether each and every one of
these is or is not a professed Positivist) who would be distinguished as
scholars and writers in the literature of any country. However they may
differ on minor points, however they may differ in ability, in
experience, in discretion, they have one peculiarity in common: they are
to be found foremost in every liberal and radical cause; they are always
to be found on the side of the weak, and standing up for the oppressed;
they are inveterate enemies of cant; they hate vulgar idolatry and
vulgar idols. Looking back a few years, I can remember that almost, if
not quite, every man I have alluded to was a fearless and outspoken
advocate of the cause of the North, at a time when it was _de rigueur_
among men of "culture" in London to champion the cause of the South.
Some of the men I have named were indefatigable workers at that time on
the unfashionable side. They wrote pamphlets; they wrote leading
articles; they made speeches; they delivered lectures in out-of-the-way
quarters to workingmen and poor men of all kinds; they hardly came, in
any prominent way, before the public, in most of this work. It brought
them, probably, no notoriety or recognition whatever on this side of the
ocean; but their work was a power in England. I feel convinced that, in
any case, the English workingmen would have gone right on such a
question as that which was at issue between North and South. As Mr.
Motley truly said in his address to the New York Historical Society, the
workers and the thinkers were never misled; but I am bound to say that
the admirable knowledge of the realities of the subject; the clear,
quick, and penetrating judgment, and the patient, unswerving hope and
confidence which were so signally displayed by the London workingmen
from first to last of that great struggle, were in no slight degree the
result of the teaching and the labor of men like Professor Beesly and
Frederick Harrison.
If I were to set up a typical Positivist, in order to make my American
reader more readily and completely familiar with the picture which the
word calls up in the minds of Londoners, I should do it in the following
way: I should exhibit my model Positivist as a man still young for
anything like prominence in English public life, but not actually young
in years--say thirty-eight or forty. He has had a training at one of the
great historical Universities, or at all events at the modern and
popular University of London. He is a barrister, but does not practise
much, and has probably a modest competence on which he can live without
working for the sake of living, and can indulge his own tastes in
literature and politics. He has immense earnestness and great
self-conceit. He has an utter contempt for dull men and timid or
half-measure men, and he scorns Whigs even more than Tories. He devotes
much of his time generously and patiently to the political and other
instruction of working men. He writes in the "Fortnightly Review," and
sometimes in "MacMillan," and sometimes in the "Westminster Review." He
plunges into gallant and fearless controversy with the "Pall Mall
Gazette," and he is not easily worsted, for his pen is sharp and his ink
very acrid. Nevertheless, is any great question stirring, with a serious
principle or a deep human interest at the heart of it, he is sure to be
found on the right side. Where the controversy is of a smaller kind and
admits of crotchet, then he is pretty sure to bring out a crotchet of
some kind. He is perpetually giving the "Saturday Review" an opportunity
to ridicule him and abuse him, and he does not care. He writes pamphlets
and goes to immense trouble to get up the facts, and expense to give
them to the world, and he never grudges trouble or money, where any
cause or even any crotchet is to be served. He is ready to stand up
alone, against all the world if needs be, for his opinions or his
friends. Benevolent schemes which are of the nature of mere charity he
never concerns himself about. I never heard of him on a platform with
the Earl of Shaftesbury, and I fancy he has a contempt for all patronage
of the poor or projects of an eleemosynary character. He is for giving
men their political rights and educating them--if necessary compelling
them to be educated; and he has little faith in any other way of doing
good. He has, of course, a high admiration for and faith in Mr. Mill.
His nature is not quite reverential--in general he is rather inclined to
sit in the chair of the scorner; but if he reverenced any living man it
would be Mill. He admires the manly, noble character of Bright, and his
calm, strong eloquence. I do not think he cares much about Gladstone--I
rather fancy our Positivist looks upon Gladstone as somewhat weak and
unsteady--and with him to be weak is indeed to be miserable. Disraeli is
to him an object of entire scorn and detestation, for he can endure no
one who has not deeply-rooted principles of some kind. He has a crotchet
about Russia, a theory about China; he gets quite beside himself in his
anger over the anonymous leading articles of the London press. He is not
an English type of man at all, in the present and conventional sense. He
cares not a rush about tradition, and mocks at the wisdom of our
ancestors. The bare fact that some custom, or institution, or way of
thinking has been sanctioned and hallowed by long generations of usage,
is in his eyes rather a _prima facie_ reason for despising it than
otherwise. He is pitilessly intolerant of all superstitions--save his
own--that is to say, he is intolerant in words and logic and ridicule,
for the wildest superstition would find him its defender, if it once
came to be practically oppressed or even threatened. He is "ever a
fighter," like one of Browning's heroes; he is the knight-errant, the
Quixote of modern English politics. He admires George Eliot in
literature, and, I should say, he regards Charles Dickens as a sort of
person who does very well to amuse idlers and ignorant people. I do not
hear of his going much to the theatre, and it is a doubt to me if he has
yet heard of the "Grande Duchesse." Life with him is a very earnest
business, and, although he has a pretty gift of sarcasm, which he uses
as a weapon of offence against his enemies, I cannot, with any effort of
imagination, picture him to myself as in the act of making a joke.
A small drawing-room would assuredly hold all the London Positivists who
make themselves effective in English politics. Yet I do not hesitate to
say that they are becoming--that they have already become--a power which
no one, calculating on the chances of any coming struggle, can afford to
leave out of his consideration. Their public influence thus far has been
wholly for good; and they set up no propaganda that I have ever seen or
heard of, as regards either philosophy or religion. The course of
lectures I have already mentioned was the nearest approach to any
public diffusion of their peculiar doctrines which I can remember, and
it created little or no sensation in London. Indeed, little or no
publicity was sought for it. I have read lately somewhere that a
newspaper, specially devoted to the propagation and vindication of
Positivism, is about to be, or has been started in London. I do not know
whether this is true or not; but for any such journal I should
anticipate a very small circulation, and an existence only to be
maintained by continual subsidy.
So quietly have these men hitherto pursued their course, whatever it may
be, in religion or religious philosophy, that it was long indeed before
any idea got abroad that the cluster of highly-educated, ultra-radical
thinkers, who were to be found sharpshooting on the side of every great
human principle and every oppressed cause, and who seemed positively to
delight in standing up against the vulgar rush of public opinion, were
anything more than chance associates, or were bound by any tie more
close and firm than that of general political sympathy. Even now that
people are beginning to know them, and to classify them, in a vague sort
of way, as "those Positivists," they make so little parade of any
peculiarity of faith that, without precise and personal knowledge, it
would be rash to say for certain that this or that member of the group
is or is not an actual professor of the Comtist religion. I read a few
days ago, in one of the few sensible books written on America by an
Englishman, some remarks made about a peculiar view of Europe's duty to
Egypt, which was described as being held by "the Comtists." I do not
know whether the men referred to hold the view ascribed to them or not;
but, assuredly, if they do, the fact has no more direct connection with
their Comtism than Bright's free-trade views have with Bright's
Quakerism. An illustration, however, will serve well enough as an
example of the vague and careless sort of way in which doctrines and the
men who profess them get mixed up together insolubly in the public mind.
The Sultan of a generation back, who told the European diplomatist that
if he changed his religion at all he would become a Roman Catholic,
because he observed that Roman Catholic people always grew the best
wine, was not more unreasonable in his logic than many well-informed men
when they are striving to connect cause and effect in dealing with the
religion of others.