_eis oianos aristos amúnesthai perì pátrês;_
the belief of the Roman that he was to trust in the gods of Borne, for
those gods are stronger than all others; the belief of Cromwell's
soldiery that they were 'to trust in God and keep their powder dry,'
are great steps in upward progress, using progress in its narrowest
sense. They all enabled those who believed them 'to take the world as
it comes,' to be guided by no unreal reason, and to be limited by no
mystic scruple; whenever they found anything to do, to do it with their
might. And more directly what I may call the fortifying religions, that
is to say, those which lay the plainest stress on the manly parts of
morality--upon valour, on truth and industry--have had plainly the most
obvious effect in strengthening the races which believed them, and in
making those races the winning races.
No doubt many sorts of primitive improvement are pernicious to war; an
exquisite sense of beauty, a love of meditation, a tendency to
cultivate the force of the mind at the expense of the force of the
body, for example, help in their respective degrees to make men less
warlike than they would otherwise be. But these are the virtues of
other ages. The first work of the first ages is to bind men together in
the strong bond of a rough, coarse, harsh custom; and the incessant
conflict of nations effects this in the best way. Every nation, is an
'hereditary co-operative group,' bound by a fixed custom; and out of
those groups those conquer which have the most binding and most
invigorating customs, and these are, as a rough rule, the best customs.
The majority of the 'groups' which win and conquer are better than the
majority of those which fail and perish, and thus the first world grow
better and was improved.
This early customary world no doubt continued for ages. The first
history delineates great monarchies, each composed of a hundred
customary groups, all of which believed themselves to be of enormous
antiquity, and all of which must have existed for very many
generations. The first historical world is not a new-looking thing but
a very ancient, and according to principle it is necessary that it
should exist for ages. If human nature was to be gradually improved,
each generation must be born better tamed, more calm, more capable of
civilisation--in a word, more LEGAL than the one before it, and such
inherited improvements are always slow and dubious. Though a few gifted
people may advance much, the mass of each generation can improve but
very little on the generation which preceded it; and even the slight
improvement so gained is liable to be destroyed by some mysterious
atavism--some strange recurrence to a primitive past. Long ages of
dreary monotony are the first facts in the history of human
communities, but those ages were not lost to mankind, for it was then
that was formed the comparatively gentle and guidable thing which we
now call human nature.
And indeed the greatest difficulty is not in preserving such a world
but in ending it. We have brought in the yoke of custom to improve the
world, and in the world the custom sticks. In a thousand cases--in the
great majority of cases--the progress of mankind has been arrested in
this its earliest shape; it has been closely embalmed in a mummy-like
imitation of its primitive existence. I have endeavoured to show in
what manner, and how slowly, and in how few cases this yoke of custom
was removed. It was 'government by discussion ', which broke the bond
of ages and set free the originality of mankind. Then, and then only,
the motives which Lord Macaulay counted on to secure the progress of
mankind, in fact, begin to work; THEN 'the tendency in every man to
ameliorate his condition' begins to be important, because then man can
alter his condition while before he is pegged down by ancient usage;
THEN the tendency in each mechanical art towards perfection begins to
have force, because the artist is at last allowed to seek perfection,
after having been forced for ages to move in the straight furrow of the
old fixed way.
As soon as this great step upwards is once made, all or almost all, the
higher gifts and graces of humanity have a rapid and a definite effect
on 'verifiable progress'--on progress in the narrowest, because in the
most universally admitted sense of the term. Success in life, then,
depends, as we have seen, more than anything else on 'animated
moderation,' on a certain combination of energy of mind and balance of
mind, hard to attain and harder to keep. And this subtle excellence is
aided by all the finer graces of humanity. It is a matter of common
observation that, though often separated, fine taste and fine judgment
go very much together, and especially that a man with gross want of
taste, though he may act sensibly and correctly for a while, is yet apt
to break out, sooner or later, into gross practical error. In
metaphysics, probably both taste and judgment involve what is termed
'poise of mind,' that is the power of true passiveness--the faculty of
'waiting' till the stream of impressions, whether those of life or
those of art have done all that they have to do, and cut their full
type plainly upon the mind. The ill-judging and the untasteful are both
over-eager; both move too quick and blur the image. In this way the
union between a subtle sense of beauty and a subtle discretion in
conduct is a natural one, because it rests on the common possession of
a fine power, though, in matter of fact, that union may be often
disturbed. A complex sea of forces and passions troubles men in life
and action, which in the calmer region of art are hardly to be felt at
all. And, therefore, the cultivation of a fine taste tends to promote
the function of a fine judgment, which is a main help in the complex
world of civilised existence. Just so too the manner in which the more
delicate parts of religion daily work in producing that 'moderation'
which, upon the whole, and as a rule, is essential to long success,
defining success even in its most narrow and mundane way, might be
worked out in a hundred cases, though it would not suit these pages.
Many of the finer intellectual tastes have a similar restraining effect
they prevent, or tend to prevent, a greedy voracity after the good
things of life, which makes both men and nations in excessive haste to
be rich and famous, often makes them do too much and do it ill, and so
often leaves them at last without money and without respect.
But there is no need to expand this further. The principle is plain
that, though these better and higher graces of humanity are impediments
and encumbrances in the early fighting period, yet that in the later
era they are among the greatest helps and benefits, and that as soon as
governments by discussion have become strong enough to secure a stable
existence, and as soon as they have broken the fixed rule of old
custom, and have awakened the dormant inventiveness of men, then, for
the first time, almost every part of human nature begins to spring
forward, and begins to contribute its quota even to the narrowest, even
to 'verifiable' progress. And this is the true reason of all those
panegyrics on liberty which are often so measured in expression but are
in essence so true to life and nature. Liberty is the strengthening and
developing power--the light and heat of political nature; and when some
'Caesarism' exhibits as it sometimes will an originality of mind, it is
only because it has managed to make its own the products of past free
times or neighbouring free countries; and even that originality is only
brief and frail, and after a little while, when tested by a generation
or two, in time of need it falls away.
In a complete investigation of all the conditions of 'verifiable
progress,' much else would have to be set out; for example, science has
secrets of her own. Nature does not wear her most useful lessons on her
sleeve; she only yields her most productive secrets, those which yield
the most wealth and the most 'fruit,' to those who have gone through a
long process of preliminary abstraction. To make a person really
understand the 'laws of motion' is not easy, and to solve even simple
problems in abstract dynamics is to most people exceedingly hard. And
yet it is on these out-of-the-way investigations, so to speak, that the
art of navigation, all physical astronomy, and all the theory of
physical movements at least depend. But no nation would beforehand have
thought that in so curious a manner such great secrets were to be
discovered. And many nations, therefore, which get on the wrong track,
may be distanced--supposing there to be no communication by some nation
not better than any of them which happens to stumble on the right
track. If there were no 'Bradshaw' and no one knew the time at which
trains started, a man who caught the express would not be a wiser or a
more business-like man than he who missed it, and yet he would arrive
whole hours sooner at the capital both are going to. And unless I
misread the matter, such was often the case with early knowledge. At
any rate before a complete theory of 'verifiable progress' could be
made, it would have to be settled whether this is so or not, and the
conditions of the development of physical science would have to be
fully stated; obviously you cannot explain the development of human
comfort unless you know the way in which men learn and discover
comfortable things. Then again, for a complete discussion, whether of
progress or degradation, a whole course of analysis is necessary as to
the effect of natural agencies on man, and of change in those agencies.
But upon these I cannot touch; the only way to solve these great
problems is to take them separately. I only profess to explain what
seem to me the political prerequisites of progress, and especially of
early progress, I do this the rather because the subject is
insufficiently examined, so that even if my views are found to be
faulty, the discussion upon them may bring out others which are truer
and better.
[THE END]