In this manner politics or discussion broke up the old bonds of custom
which were now strangling mankind, though they had once aided and
helped it. But this is only one of the many gifts which those polities
have conferred, are conferring, and will confer on mankind. I am not
going to write an eulogium on liberty, but I wish to set down three
points which have not been sufficiently noticed.
Civilised ages inherit the human nature which was victorious in
barbarous ages, and that nature is, in many respects, not at all suited
to civilised circumstances. A main and principal excellence in the
early times of the human races is the impulse to action. The problems
before men are then plain and simple. The man who works hardest, the
man who kills the most deer, the man who catches the most fish--even
later on, the man who tends the largest herds, or the man who tills the
largest field--is the man who succeeds; the nation which is quickest to
kill its enemies, or which kills most of its enemies, is the nation
which succeeds. All the inducements of early society tend to foster
immediate action; all its penalties fall on the man who pauses; the
traditional wisdom of those times was never weary of inculcating that
'delays are dangerous,' and that the sluggish man--the man 'who
roasteth not that which he took in hunting'--will not prosper on the
earth, and indeed will very soon perish out of it. And in consequence
an inability to stay quiet, an irritable desire to act directly, is one
of the most conspicuous failings of mankind.
Pascal said that most of the evils of life arose from 'man's being
unable to sit still in a room;' and though I do not go that length, it
is certain that we should have been a far wiser race than we are if 'we
had been readier to sit quiet--we should have known much better the way
in which it was best to act when we came to act. The rise of physical
science, the first great body of practical truth provable to all men,
exemplifies this in the plainest way. If it had not been for quiet
people, who sat still and studied the sections of the cone, if other
quiet people had not sat still and studied the theory of
infinitesimals, or other quiet people had not sat still and worked out
the doctrine of chances, the most 'dreamy moonshine,' as the purely
practical mind would consider, of all human pursuits; if 'idle
star-gazers' had not watched long and carefully the motions of the
heavenly bodies--our modern astronomy would have been impossible, and
without our astronomy 'our ships, our colonies, our seamen,' all which
makes modern life modern life could not have existed. Ages of
sedentary, quiet, thinking people were required before that noisy
existence began, and without those pale preliminary students it never
could have been brought into being. And nine-tenths of modern science
is in this respect the same: it is the produce of men whom their
contemporaries thought dreamers--who were laughed at for caring for
what did not concern them--who, as the proverb went, 'walked into a
well from looking at the stars'--who were believed to be useless, if
any one could be such. And the conclusion is plain that if there had
been more such people, if the world had not laughed at those there
were, if rather it had encouraged them there would have been a great
accumulation of proved science ages before there was. It was the
irritable activity, the 'wish to be doing something,' that prevented
it. Most men inherited a nature too eager and too restless to be quiet
and find out things; and even worse--with their idle clamour they
'disturbed the brooding hen,' they would not let those be quiet who
wished to be so, and out of whose calm thought much good might have
come forth.
If we consider how much science has done and how much it is doing for
mankind, and if the over-activity of men is proved to be the cause why
science came so late into the world, and is so small and scanty still,
that will convince most people that our over-activity is a very great
evil. But this is only part, and perhaps not the greatest part of the
harm that over-activity does. As I have said, it is inherited from
times when life was simple, objects were plain, and quick action
generally led to desirable ends. If A kills B before B kills A, then A
survives, and the human race is a race of A's. But the issues of life
are plain no longer. To act rightly in modern society requires a great
deal of previous study, a great deal of assimilated information, a
great deal of sharpened imagination; and these pre-requisites of sound
action require much time, and, I was going to say, much 'lying in the
sun,' a long period of 'mere passiveness.' Even the art of killing one
another, which at first particularly trained men to be quick, now
requires them to be slow. A hasty general is the worst of generals
nowadays; the best is a sort of Von Moltke, who is passive if any man
ever was passive; who is 'silent in seven languages;' who possesses
more and better accumulated information as to the best way of killing
people than any one who ever lived. This man plays a restrained and
considerate game of chess with his enemy. I wish the art of benefiting
men had kept pace with the art of destroying them; for though war has
become slow, philanthropy has remained hasty. The most melancholy of
human reflections, perhaps, is that, on the whole, it is a question
whether the benevolence of mankind does most good or harm. Great good,
no doubt, philanthropy does, but then it also does great evil. It
augments so much vice, it multiplies so much suffering, it brings to
life such great populations to suffer and to be vicious, that it is
open to argument whether it be or be not an evil to the world, and this
is entirely because excellent people fancy that they can do much by
rapid action--that they will most benefit the world when they most
relieve their own feelings; that as soon as an evil is seen 'something'
ought to be done to stay and prevent it. One may incline to hope that
the balance of good over evil is in favour of benevolence; one can
hardly bear to think that it is not so; but anyhow it is certain that
there is a most heavy debit of evil, and that this burden might almost
all have been spared us if philanthropists as well as others had not
inherited from their barbarous forefathers a wild passion for instant
action.
Even in commerce, which is now the main occupation of mankind, and one
in which there is a ready test of success and failure wanting in many
higher pursuits, the same disposition to excessive action is very
apparent to careful observers. Part of every mania is caused by the
impossibility to get people to confine themselves to the amount of
business for which their capital is sufficient, and in which they can
engage safely. In some degree, of course, this is caused by the wish,
to get rich; but in a considerable degree, too, by the mere love of
activity. There is a greater propensity to action in such men than they
have the means of gratifying. Operations with their own capital will
only occupy four hours of the day, and they wish to be active and to be
industrious for eight hours, and so they are ruined. If they could only
have sat idle the other four hours, they would have been rich men. The
amusements of mankind, at least of the English part of mankind, teach
the same lesson. Our shooting, our hunting, our travelling, our
climbing have become laborious pursuits. It is a common saying abroad
that 'an Englishman's notion of a holiday is a fatiguing journey;' and
this is only another way of saying that the immense energy and activity
which have given us our place in the world have in many cases descended
to those who do not find in modern life any mode of using that
activity, and of venting that energy.
Even the abstract speculations of mankind bear conspicuous traces of
the same excessive impulse. Every sort of philosophy has been
systematised, and yet as these philosophies utterly contradict one
another, most of them cannot be true. Unproved abstract principles
without number have been eagerly caught up by sanguine men, and then
carefully spun out into books and theories, which were to explain the
whole world. But the world goes clear against these abstractions, and
it must do so, as they require it to go in antagonistic directions. The
mass of a system attracts the young and impresses the unwary; but
cultivated people are very dubious about it. They are ready to receive
hints and suggestions, and the smallest real truth is ever welcome. But
a large book of deductive philosophy is much to be suspected. No doubt
the deductions may be right; in most writers they are so; but where did
the premises come from? Who is sure that they are the whole truth, and
nothing but the truth, of the matter in hand? Who is not almost sure
beforehand that they will contain a strange mixture of truth and error,
and therefore that it will not be worth while to spend life in
reasoning over their consequences? In a word, the superfluous energy of
mankind has flowed over into philosophy, and has worked into big
systems what should have been left as little suggestions.
And if the old systems of thought are not true as systems, neither is
the new revolt from them to be trusted in its whole vigour. There is
the same original vice in that also. There is an excessive energy in
revolutions if there is such energy anywhere. The passion for action is
quite as ready to pull down as to build up; probably it is more ready,
for the task is easier.
'Old things need not be therefore true, O brother men, nor yet the new;
Ah, still awhile the old thought retain, And yet consider it again.'
But this is exactly what the human mind will not do. It will act
somehow at once. It will not 'consider it again.'
But it will be said, What has government by discussion to do with these
things? Will it prevent them, or even mitigate them? It can and does do
both in the very plainest way. If you want to stop instant and
immediate action, always make it a condition that the action shall not
begin till a considerable number of persons have talked over it, and
have agreed on it. If those persons be people of different
temperaments, different ideas, and different educations, you have an
almost infallible security that nothing, or almost nothing, will be
done with excessive rapidity. Each kind of persons will have their
spokesman; each spokesman will have his characteristic objection, and
each his characteristic counter-proposition, and so in the end nothing
will probably be done, or at least only the minimum which is plainly
urgent. In, many cases this delay may be dangerous; in many cases quick
action will be preferable. A campaign, as Macaulay well says, cannot be
directed by a 'debating society;' and many other kinds of action also
require a single and absolute general. But for the purpose now in
hand--that of preventing hasty action, and ensuring elaborate
consideration--there is no device like a polity of discussion.
The enemies of this object--the people who want to act quickly--see
this very distinctly. They are for ever explaining that the present is
'an age of committees,' that the committees do nothing, that all
evaporates in talk. Their great enemy is parliamentary government; they
call it, after Mr. Carlyle, the 'national palaver;' they add up the
hours that are consumed in it, and the speeches which are made in it,
and they sigh for a time when England might again be ruled, as it once
was, by a Cromwell--that is, when an eager, absolute man might do
exactly what other eager men wished, and do it immediately. All these
invectives are perpetual and many-sided; they come from philosophers,
each of whom wants some new scheme tried; from philanthropists, who
want some evil abated; from revolutionists, who want some old
institution destroyed; from new aeraists, who want their new aera
started forthwith. And they all are distinct admissions that a polity
of discussion is the greatest hindrance to the inherited mistake of
human nature, to the desire to act promptly, which in a simple age is
so excellent, but which in a later and complex time leads to so much
evil.
The same accusation against our age sometimes takes a more general
form. It is alleged that our energies are diminishing; that ordinary
and average men have not the quick determination nowadays which they
used to have when the world was younger; that not only do not
committees and parliaments act with rapid decisiveness, but that no one
now so acts. And I hope that in fact this is true, for according to me,
it proves that the hereditary barbaric impulse is decaying and dying
out. So far from thinking the quality attributed to us a defect, I wish
that those who complain of it were far more right than I much fear they
are. Still, certainly, eager and violent action IS somewhat diminished,
though only by a small fraction of what it ought to be. And I believe
that this is in great part due, in England at least, to our government
by discussion, which has fostered a general intellectual tone, a
diffused disposition to weigh evidence, a conviction that much may be
said on every side of everything which the elder and more fanatic ages
of the world wanted. This is the real reason why our energies seem so
much less than those of our fathers. When we have a definite end in
view, which we know we want, and which we think we know how to obtain,
we can act well enough. The campaigns of our soldiers are as energetic
as any campaigns ever were; the speculations of our merchants have
greater promptitude, greater audacity, greater vigour than any such
speculations ever had before. In old times a few ideas got possession
of men and communities, but this is happily now possible no longer. We
see how incomplete these old ideas were; how almost by chance one
seized on one nation, and another on another; how often one set of men
have persecuted another set for opinions on subjects of which neither,
we now perceive, knew anything. It might be well if a greater number of
effectual demonstrations existed among mankind; but while no such
demonstrations exist, and while the evidence which completely convinces
one man seems to another trifling and insufficient, let us recognise
the plain position of inevitable doubt. Let us not be bigots with a
doubt, and persecutors without a creed. We are beginning to bee this,
and we are railed at for so beginning. But it is a great benefit, and
it is to the incessant prevalence of detective discussion that our
doubts are due; and much of that discussion is due to the long
existence of a government requiring constant debates, written and oral.
This is one of the unrecognised benefits of free government, one of the
modes in which it counteracts the excessive inherited impulses of
humanity. There is another also for which it does the same, but which I
can only touch delicately, and which at first sight will seem
ridiculous. The most successful races, other things being equal, are
those which multiply the fastest. In the conflicts of mankind numbers
have ever been a great power. The most numerous group has always had an
advantage over the less numerous, and the fastest breeding group has
always tended to be the most numerous. In consequence, human nature has
descended into a comparatively uncontentious civilisation, with a
desire far in excess of what is needed; with a 'felt want,' as
political economists would say, altogether greater than the 'real
want.' A walk in London is all which is necessary to establish this.
'The great sin of great cities' is one vast evil consequent upon it.
And who is to reckon up how much these words mean? How many spoiled
lives, how many broken hearts, how many wasted bodies, how many ruined
minds, how much misery pretending to be gay, how much gaiety feeling
itself to be miserable, how much after mental pain, how much eating and
transmitted disease. And in the moral part of the world, how many minds
are racked by incessant anxiety, how many thoughtful imaginations which
might have left something to mankind are debased to mean cares, how
much every successive generation sacrifices to the next, how little
does any of them make of itself in comparison with what might be. And
how many Irelands have there been in the world where men would have
been contented and happy if they had only been fewer; how many more
Irelands would there have been if the intrusive numbers had not been
kept down by infanticide and vice and misery. How painful is the
conclusion that it is dubious whether all the machines and inventions
of mankind 'have yet lightened the day's labour of a human being.' They
have enabled more people to exist, but these people work just as hard
and are just as mean and miserable as the elder and the fewer.
But it will be said of this passion just as it was said of the passion
of activity. Granted that it is in excess, how can you say, how on
earth can anyone say, that government by discussion can in any way cure
or diminish, it? Cure this evil that government certainly will not; but
tend to diminish it--I think it does and may. To show that I am not
making premises to support a conclusion so abnormal, I will quote a
passage from Mr. Spencer, the philosopher who has done most to
illustrate this subject:--
'That future progress of civilisation which the never-ceasing pressure
of population must produce, will be accompanied by an enhanced cost of
Individuation, both in structure and function; and more especially in
nervous structure and function. The peaceful struggle for existence in
societies ever growing more crowded and more complicated, must have for
its concomitant an increase of the great nervous centres in mass, in
complexity, in activity. The larger body of emotion needed as a
fountain of energy for men who have to hold their places and rear their
families under the intensifying competition of social life, is, other
things equal, the correlative of larger brain. Those higher feelings
presupposed by the better self-regulation which, in a better society,
can alone enable the individual to leave a persistent posterity, are,
other things equal, the correlatives of a more complex brain; as are
also those more numerous, more varied, more general, and more abstract
ideas, which must also become increasingly requisite for successful
life as society advances. And the genesis of this larger quantity of
feeling and thought in a brain thus augmented in size and developed in
structure, is, other things equal, the correlative of a greater wear of
nervous tissue and greater consumption of materials to repair it. So
that both in original cost of construction and in subsequent cost of
working, the nervous system must become a heavier tax on the organism.
Already the brain of the civilised man is larger by nearly thirty
percent, than the brain of the savage. Already, too, it presents an
increased heterogeneity--especially in the distribution of its
convolutions. And further changes like these which have taken place
under the discipline of civilised life, we infer will continue to take
place.... But everywhere and always, evolution is antagonistic to
procreative dissolution. Whether it be in greater growth of the organs
which subserve self-maintenance, whether it be in their added
complexity of structure, or whether it be in their higher activity, the
abstraction of the required materials implies a diminished reserve of
materials for race-maintenance. And we have seen reason to believe that
this antagonism between Individuation and Genesis becomes unusually
marked where the nervous system is concerned, because of the costliness
of nervous structure and function. In Section 346 was pointed out the
apparent connection between high cerebral development and prolonged
delay of sexual maturity; and in Sections 366, 367, the evidence went
to show that where exceptional fertility exists there is sluggishness
of mind, and that where there has been during education excessive
expenditure in mental action, there frequently follows a complete or
partial infertility. Hence the particular kind of further evolution
which Man is hereafter to undergo, is one which, more than any other,
may be expected to cause a decline in his power of reproduction.'
This means that men who have to live an intellectual life, or who can
be induced to lead one, will be likely not to have so many children as
they would otherwise have had. In particular cases this may not be
true; such men may even have many children--they may be men in all ways
of unusual power and vigour. But they will not have their maximum of
posterity--will not have so many as they would have had if they had
been careless or thoughtless men; and so, upon an average, the issue of
such intellectualised men will be less numerous than those of the
unintellectual.
Now, supposing this philosophical doctrine to be true--and the best
philosophers, I think, believe it--its application to the case in hand
is plain. Nothing promotes intellect like intellectual discussion, and
nothing promotes intellectual discussion so much as government by
discussion. The perpetual atmosphere of intellectual inquiry acts
powerfully, as everyone may see by looking about him in London, upon
the constitution both of men and women. There is only a certain QUANTUM
of power in each of our race; if it goes in one way it is spent, and
cannot go in another. The intellectual atmosphere abstracts strength to
intellectual matters; it tends to divert that strength--which the
circumstances of early society directed to the multiplication of
numbers; and as a polity of discussion tends, above all things, to
produce an intellectual atmosphere, the two things which seemed so far
off have been shown to be near, and free government has, in a second
case, been shown to tend to cure an inherited excess of human nature.
Lastly, a polity of discussion not only tends to diminish our inherited
defects, but also, in one case at least, to augment a heritable
excellence. It tends to strengthen and increase a subtle quality or
combination of qualities singularly useful in practical life-a quality
which it is not easy to describe exactly, and the issues of which it
would require not a remnant of an essay, but a whole essay to elucidate
completely. This quality I call ANIMATED MODERATION.
If anyone were asked to describe what it is which distinguishes the
writings of a man of genius who is also a great man of the world from
all other writings, I think he would use these same words, 'animated
moderation.' He would say that such writings are never slow, are never
excessive, are never exaggerated; that they are always instinct with
judgment, and yet that judgment is never a dull judgment; that they
have as much spirit in them as would go to make a wild writer, and yet
that every line of them is the product of a sane and sound writer. The
best and almost perfect instance of this in English is Scott. Homer was
perfect in it, as far as we can judge; Shakespeare is often perfect in
it for long together, though then, from the defects of a bad education
and a vicious age, all at once he loses himself in excesses. Still,
Homer, and Shakespeare at his best, and Scott, though in other respects
so unequal to them, have this remarkable quality in common--this union
of life with measure, of spirit with reasonableness.
In action it is equally this quality in which the English--at least so
I claim it for them--excel all other nations. There is an infinite deal
to be laid against us, and as we are unpopular with most others, and as
we are always grumbling at ourselves, there is no want of people to say
it. But, after all, in a certain sense, England is a success in the
world; her career has had many faults, but still it has been, a fine
and winning career upon the whole. And this on account of the exact
possession of this particular quality. What is the making of a
successful merchant? That he has plenty of energy, and yet that he does
not go too far. And if you ask for a description of a great practical
Englishman, you will be sure to have this, or something like it, 'Oh,
he has plenty of go in him; but he knows when to pull up.' He may have
all other defects in him; he may be coarse, he may be illiterate, he
may be stupid to talk to; still this great union of spur and bridle, of
energy and moderation, will remain to him. Probably he will hardly be
able to explain why he stops when he does stop, or why he continued to
move as long as he, in fact, moved; but still, as by a rough instinct,
he pulls up pretty much where he should, though he was going at such a
pace before.
There is no better example of this quality in English statesmen than
Lord Palmerston. There are, of course, many most serious accusations to
be made against him. The sort of homage with which he was regarded in
the last years of his life has passed away; the spell is broken, and
the magic cannot be again revived. We may think that his information
was meagre, that his imagination was narrow, that his aims were
short--sighted and faulty. But though we may often object to his
objects, we rarely find much to criticise in his means. 'He went,' it
has been said, 'with a great swing;' but he never tumbled over; he
always managed to pull up 'before there was any danger.' He was an odd
man to have inherited Hampden's motto; still, in fact, there was a
great trace in him of _mediocria firma_--as much, probably, as there
could be in anyone of such great vivacity and buoyancy.
It is plain that this is a quality which as much as, if not more than,
any other multiplies good results in practical life. It enables men to
see what is good; it gives them intellect enough for sufficient
perception; but it does not make men all intellect; it does not' sickly
them o'er with the pale cast of thought;' it enables them to do the
good things they see to be good, as well as to see that they are good.
And it is plain that a government by popular discussion tends to
produce this quality. A strongly idiosyncratic mind, violently disposed
to extremes of opinion, is soon weeded out of political life, and a
bodiless thinker, an ineffectual scholar, cannot even live there for a
day. A vigorous moderateness in mind and body is the rule of a polity
which works by discussion; and, upon the whole, it is the kind of
temper most suited to the active life of such a being as man in such a
world as the present one.
These three great benefits of free government, though great, are
entirely secondary to its continued usefulness in the mode in which it
originally was useful. The first great benefit was the deliverance of
mankind from the superannuated yoke of customary law, by the gradual
development of an inquisitive originality. And it continues to produce
that effect upon persons apparently far remote from its influence, and
on subjects with which it has nothing to do. Thus Mr. Mundella, a most
experienced and capable judge, tells us that the English artisan,
though so much less sober, less instructed, and less refined than the
artisans of some other countries, is yet more inventive than any other
artisan. The master will get more good suggestions from him than from
any other.
Again, upon plausible grounds--looking, for example, to the position of
Locke and Newton in the science of the last century, and to that of
Darwin in our own--it may be argued that there is some quality in
English thought which makes them strike out as many, if not more,
first-rate and original suggestions than nations of greater scientific
culture and more diffused scientific interest. In both cases I believe
the reason of the English originality to be that government by
discussion quickens and enlivens thought all through society; that it
makes people think no harm may come of thinking; that in England this
force has long been operating, and so it has developed more of all
kinds of people ready to use their mental energy in their own way, and
not ready to use it in any other way, than a despotic government. And
so rare is great originality among mankind, and so great are its
fruits, that this one benefit of free government probably outweighs
what are in many cases its accessory evils. Of itself it justifies, or
goes far to justify, our saying with Montesquieu, 'Whatever be the cost
of this glorious liberty, we must be content to pay it to heaven.'