TOPICS OF THE DAY.
POLITICAL VIVISECTION. u-NDER the heading " Some Forecasts of the Coming Dispensation " Mr. Stephen Reynolds makes (on June 2nd) a very interesting contribution to the New Age. And here we should like to take the opportunity of expressing our appreciation of the literary and journalistic ability with which the New Age is conducted. We dis- agree profoundly with its political, moral, social, and religious views, and often find in it articles, especially on foreign affairs, which seem to us wrong-headed and unjust in a high degree. We should not be sincere, however, if we did not admit, as journalists, the courage and independ- ence of those who conduct it. The easiest thing for a newspa.per is to grind the barrel-organ and emit the standard tunes of that party, or section of a party, with which the paper is connected. Willingness to face facts is, on the other hand, the rarest, and also the most difficult, of the qualities to which a paper can attain. To this the New Age from its own standpoint does attain. We trust such praise from us may not be embarrassing to a paper most of whose readers no doubt talk of the "toothless ferocity " of the Spectator, and consider that our criminality is only equalled by our fatuity and want of intelligence. We cannot, however, resist the tempta- tion to express our admiration for the way in which, during the most strenuous period of the Constitutional crisis, the New Age faced the facts, and spoke the words of soberness and truth rather than of enticing sophistry as regards the political situation. In response to the invitation of the New Age to record a forecast of the character of the coming era, several gentlemen and ladies let themselves go. We are bound to say, however, that the majority of these vaticinations are merely empty boomings " in the illimitable inane,"—talk about the Victorian age as " the age of half-truths and fig-leaf virtue," and so forth. Amid this hubbub of words it is a pleasure to find Mr. Stephen Reynolds's piece of downright good sense in regard to what he calls the prophesying game. We do not—it was not likely that we should—agree with everything that he says, but there are certain statements of his which we believe not only contain true political wisdom but also show true observation. We think that he exaggerates when he talks about class antagonism, and about "the class fight" becoming in the future " less noisy, more tolerant perhaps, and more deadly." On the whole, however, Mr. Reynolds is not pessimistic ; and though he is in deadly earnest in his arraignment of those whom he regards as the capitalist class, he is also perfectly fair. He thinks that the working man has many enemies, but that his worst enemy is himself, and he feels that working men are too much swayed by suspiciousness and by their dislike of responsibility, and that they are not cohesive enough. They want, he holds, to develop qualities essential to sound fighting. " I do not, I cannot," he proceeds, " see how they are to develop those qualities without losing or spoiling others that are still more valuable to the race— their courage to live, their fertility, their happy-go-lucki- ness, their recklessness even." That is a very suggestive remark ; but even more striking is the passage which follow : - " We seem, in short, to have come to a point when the welfare of society and the welfare of the race are far from identical, and we have now to choose between the two. Perhaps I am not very plain Take this illustration: Blake says, with profound truth, Prudence is a rich, ugly old maid, waited upon by incapacity.' Society demands more prudence. The good of the race demands less. Society demands a damping-down of individual life. Does the race P The race demands more and more life ; and it cares nothing whether that lifefulness (to coin a word) dove- tails into any industrial or political system whatever. It is no use offering me art, comfort, scope for my inclinations if, as a con- dition, outlet for my passions is denied me. My passions will bust it all up. It is no use offering me freedom from destitution if, as a condition, I must knuckle under to a scheme of industrial con- scription like the Webbs' Minority Report. That's the sort of thing I mean; and I do venture to make one prediction : any society whose welfare involves racial harm will go to pieces; and any reform which involves the slowing down of life will be destroyed by life itself."
Finally comes the remarkable passage with which we wish to deal on the present occasion :- "There or thereabout lies my quarrel with the ordinary forms of Socialism. Useful as a leaven, it carries as a system, I believe, its own destruction within it. Were it practicable it would be unnecessary. I greatly admire your NEw AGE for its outspoken- ness and the hospitality it gives to all sorts of opinions ; but I have read in your columns socialistic schemes which give one the shivers and make me savage ; for they deal with the life, however imper- fect it is, that I and those I care for live. The greatest tyragay to beware of in the next era is that of the intellectuals ordesing other people's lives—they are so well-intentioned and so cruel."
This passage contains a profound truth. We too, like Mr. Stephen Reynolds, have noted in the New Age and elsewhere Socialistic schemes which make one's blood run cold because of their icy inhumanity,—their appalling willingness to deal with human society and with the human citizen as a doctor deals with a corpse in the post-mortem room. The authors of these schemes seem to know nothing and to care less about hungering and thirsting men and women and the realities of existence. With passionless eves and cold fingers they probe and grope in the entrails of humanity, and shred with lancet and scalpel their fragments of human flesh. But our metaphor is in- adequate. The body is not dead, but only drugged and rendered helpless with the chloroform or stovaine of rhetoric and sophistry. Most truly does Mr. Reynolds declare that " the greatest tyranny to beware of in the next era is that of the intellectuals ordering other people's lives—they are so well-intentioned and so cruel." We should like to see these words made the common property of the nation, for unless they are realised the State is in danger. We are not pessimists but optimists ; but to justify our optimism for the future it is absolutely necessary every now and then to strike Cassandra's note. Burke in a passage which comes very near inspiration, in almost his last piece of political writing, " A Letter to a Noble Lord," speaks of the easy optimism of the upper classes in France just before the Revolution, and of how they lent themselves to the schemes of the extremists under the belief that all would go well. The fears and warnings indulged in by outsiders were, they held, not worth attending to,—mere piezes of alarmist sensationalism. Yet, as Burke points out, they were very soon drowned in a sea of horrors,—overwhelmed in the whirlpool of the Terror. "If," says Burke, "they had been aware that such a thing might happen, such a thing never could have happened." Unquestionably there is a need to make people understand before it is too late that such a thing may happen here, for if we recognise that it may happen, it never will happen. We have mentioned Burke's " Letter to a Noble Lord," but have by no means exhausted its application to Mr. Stephen Reynolds's warnings of the danger of turning loose the political philosopher with his schemes that give one the shivers and make the plain man feel savage. Mr. Reynolds, who can appreciate good literature as well as good sense, will find that Burke in the " Letter to a Noble Lord " has anticipated his wholesome and instinc- tive horror of the political philosopher, and has expressed it with a mixture of passionate inspiration and felicity of phrase which justified Windham's words that in his last years Burke spoke as the oracle of God. Burke begins by declaring that the philosophers who had ruined France, and against whom he warns his country, were essentially fanatics. "Independent of any interest, which if it operated alone would make them much more tractable, they are carried with such an headlong rage towards every desperate trial, that they would sacrifice the whole human race to the slightest of their experiments." Burke goes on to say that he is better able to enter into the character of men of this type than the noble Duke can be,—i.e., the Radical Duke of Bedford, to whom his ironic gpistle is addressed.—" I have lived long and variously In the world."—Therefore he can form a tolerable estimate of what is likely. to happen from handing over government to the experiments of the philosophers and men of letters :- "Naturally men so formed and finished are the first gifts of Providence to the world. But when they have once thrown off the fear of God, which was in all ages too often the case, and the fear of man, which is now the case, and when in that state they come to understand one another, and to act in corps, a more dreadful calamity cannot arise out of hell to scourge mankind. Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thorough-bred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a incorporeal,
pure, It is like that of the principle of evil himself ncorporeal,
pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate humanity from the human breast. What
Shakespeare calls the compunctious visitings of Nature' will sometimes knock at their hearts, and protest against their murderous speculations. But they have a means of compounding with their nature. Their humanity is not dissolved. They only give it a long prorogation. They are ready to declare, that they do not think two thousand years too long a period for the good that they pursue. It is remarkable, that they never see any way to their projected good but by the road of some evil. Their imagination is not fatigued with the contemplation of human suffering through the wild waste of centuries added to centuries of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at their horizon,— and like the horizon, it always flies before them. The geometrician., and the- ohymists bring, the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions that makp them worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes, which are the supports of the moral world. Ambition is come upon them suddenly; they are intoxi- cated with it, and it has rendered them fearless of the danger, which may from thence arise to others or to themselves. These philosophers consider men in their experiments no more than they do mice in an air pump or in a recipient of mephitick gas."
Burke goes on to declare that, whatever the Radical Duke of Bedford may think of himself, these philosophers will show him very scant mercy :- " They will look upon him, and everything that belongs to him, with no more regard than they do upon the whiskers of that little long-tailed animal that has been long the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two legs or upon four."
Let us say again that we are not pessimists, and that we have not the slightest fear of what foolish and intolerant people sometimes call " the mob," which they in reality know nothing of. It is not from the working classes of this country that any danger is to be feared. We are in entire agreement with Mr. Stephen Reynolds in believing them to be sound at heart and moved by true human instincts and human passions. They are men, not calcu- lating, inhuman devotees of political -vivisection. The danger to the fabric of human society, to human liberty, and to progress in the true sense never has been, and never will be„ found in the mass of the people. The danger, to return once more to Mr. Reynolds's phrase, is in the intellectuals who try to order other people's lives by their dreadful, theories and abhorred syllogisms,— the men who, he tells us, are " so well-intentioned and so cruel." The danger is that such men, usurping the name without the substance of liberty, and indulging the license without the temper of knowledge, may get possession of the helm of State, and may steer that noble ship into such a position that she can only be extricated by a reaction even more bloody, more terrible, and more fraught with injury to the human race than that which followed the mad excesses of the Revolution in France. In truth, it is not so much the revolution that is to be feared as the reaction which is certain to follow it.
Though it may not be entirely d propos of our present subject, we cannot, with the " Letter to a Noble Lord " open before us, resist the temptation of further quotation in the hope that it may lead some of our readers to turn to the letter itself. It contains perhaps the very best description of the essential antithesis between change and reform which was ever penned. Take, for example, the following account of the doings of the set of literary men " converted into a den of robbers and assassins " who brought about the Revolution :— • " But if they are formidable as foes, as friends they are dreadful indeed. The men of property in France confiding in a force, which seemed to be irresistible, because it had never been tried, neglected to prepare for a conflict with their enemies at their own weapons. They were found in such a situation as the Mexicans were when they were attacked by the dogs, the cavalry, the iron, and the gunpowder of bearded men, whom they did not know to exist in nature. This is a comparison that some, I think, have made: and it is just. In France they had their enemies within their houses. They were even in the bosoms of many of them. But they had not sagacity to discern their savage character. They seemed tame and even caressing. They had nothing but dews humanity in their mouth. They could not bear the punish- iment of the mildest laws on the greatest criminals. The slightest severity of justice made their flesh creep. The very idea that war existed in the world disturbed their repose. Military glory was no more with them than a splendid infamy. Hardly would they hear of self-defence, whic.h they reduced within such bounds as to leave it no defence at all. All this while they meditated the con- fiscations and massacres we have seen. Had any one told these unfortunate noblemen and gentlemen 'how and by whom the grand fabrick of the French monarchy under which they flourished would be subverted, they would not have pitied him as a visionary, but would have turned from him as what they call a mauvais plaisant. Yet we have seen what has happened." Admirable, if perhaps too self-complacent from the point of view of history, is Burke's description of how he when in office conducted his reforms, of how he did not follow the principle of " winning hearts by imposing on the understandings of the people," and of how he carried out the work before him. " I heaved the lead every inch of way I made." " I had a state to preserve as well as a state to reform. I had a people to gratify, but not to inflame or to mislead. I do not claim half the credit for what I did, as for what I prevented from being done. In that situa- tion of the publick mind I did not undertake, as was then proposed, to new model the house of commons or the house of lords ; or to change the authority under which any officer of the crown acted or was suffered at all to exist. Crown, lords, commons, judicial system, system of adminis- tration, existed as they had existed before ; and in the mode and manner in which they had always existed. My measures were what I then truly stated them to the house to be, in their intent healing and mediatorial." Most poignant, and also just now most a propos, is Burke's summary of the doings of the Constitution-monger, in which he shows how easy it is to fall into the quackeries of Constitutional change :— "Abbe Sieyes has whole nests of pigeon holes full of constitu- tions ready made, ticketed, sorted, and numbered ; suited to every season and every !fancy; some with the top of the pattern at the bottom, and some with the bottom at the top ; some plain, some flowered ; some distinguished for their simplicity, others for their complexity ; some of blood colour; some of boas de Paris; some with directories ; others without a direction ; some with councils of elders, and councils of youngsters; some without any council at all. Some where the electors choose the representa- tives ; others, where the representatives choose the electors. Some in long coats, and some in short cloaks ; some with pantaloons ; some without breeches. Some with five shilling qualifications; some totally unqualified. So that no constitution-fancier may go unsuited from his shops."
We must not weary our readers with more. They will, however, pardon us if we quote, though it is so well known, the magnificent comparison of the British Constitution to the Keep of Windsor :— " Such are their ideas ; such their religion, and such their law. But as to our country and our race, as long as the well compacted structure of our church and state, the sanctuary, the holy of holies of that ancient law, defended by reverence, defended by power, a fortress at once and a temple, shall stand inviolate on the brow of the British Sion—as long as the British Monarchy, not more limited. than fended by the orders of the state, shall like the proud Keep of Windsor, rising in the majesty of proportion, and girt with the double belt of its kindred and coeval towers, as long as this awful structure shall oversee and guard the subjected land—so long the mounds and dykes of the low, fat, Bedford level will have nothing to fear from all the pickaxes of all the levellers of France. As long as our sovereign lord the king, and his faithful subjects, the lords and commons of this realm, the triple cord which no man can break; the solemn, sworn, constitutional frank pledge of the nation ; the firm guarantees of each other's being and each other's rights ; the joint and several securities, each in its place and order, for every kind and every quality, of property and of dignity. As long as those endure, so long the Duke of Bedford is safe ; and we are all safe together : the high from the blights of envy and the spoliation of rapacity; the low from the iron hand of oppression and the insolent spurn of contempt. Amen! and so be it ; and so it will be."
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