IMPERSONAL POLITICS.
poy cs are hardly used. The direct government of men is under the influence of lower motives than most other great branches of human action at present. We have been accustomed to hear that the world is ruled with little wisdom ; state craft has repeatedly been defined as the gambling of sharp wits against wisdom, and satirists have in other ways generalized the passing faults of political art. Each moralist finds his own age under some dominant vice, and is half prepared to agree with the Lat- ter-day Saints of his time in thinking that at last we have reach- ed the lowest depth, and that the reign of Lok, or else the millen- nium mustbe the next stage. Now, any well informed " party " knows well enough that we are not in that kind of predicament. The world is not worse that it ever has been. Englishmen when you have them out of their parlours and put them to their trial, are not less manly, less intelligent, less self-denying, or even less audacious than they have been in the days of the sublimest chivalry. Phi- lanthropists boast that peace has made greater progress than war; and although itstill remains for the generality of people to be converted to the Christian doctrine in its practical force ; al- though crime and vice still " stalk abroad," as the moral roman- cist says ; on the whole, men are more ashamed than they once were to be governed by flagrantly criminal motives ; while or the recognized good taste of highways and byways, is so generally spread that it has become " vulgar." There is less conflict in the world than there used to be—a glorious fact which is proved to us by a great number of testimonies, great and small, most especially in that favourite field of fighting —the world of religious controversy. Not only . have the Smithfield bonfires come to be traditions nearly incredible, but everybody says that we have seen the last prosecution for atheism ; while atheism and dogmatism have equally laid aside their vituperative and almost murderous antagonism. All this and a great deal more to the same effect is so true, and so inconvenient in some of its immediate results, that society, as the daily caterer for exciting news might say, is becoming vir- tuous "to a fault." Yet, while such is the case in the general round of daily life, and while improvement is the recognized condition of all general action public or private, unquestionably the conduct of political affairs has descended to a lower level. Men allow themselves to be actuated by much smaller and less praiseworthy motives, at least for the time. It would appear as if we had suspended any high purpose in carrying on the im- provement of organized society. The master statesmen have given way to the journeymen in the business. A man who would devote himself to a public mission becomes simply the object of
compassionate smiles. Parties used to consist of men who were originally banded together to sustain some high political principle, and remained banded because they found themselves taking their political fortunes, good or bad, in company ; but public men have slid even below that point. They are no longer banded together ; they do not believe in their own colleagues. Measures are introduced into the Queen's Speech merely because it is thought proper to parade certain words, and the epithet i "Reform " is " stuck in," as you say " My dear Sir ' to a stranger. We partly explained this last week when we remarked the number of important questions that we have settled, while the corresponding unsettled questions have not yet assumed so definite a shape as to enable men to take their sides. One gene- ral consequence of the state of things is, that although there is less disagreement on some of the gravest subjects of human con- templation, there is less positive agreement in publio business. There is a certain free-trade in differences of opinion, and, as in the case of our national sects, the subsections of a party differ from each other more than they differ from the factions with whom they used to contend in a ceaseless battle of life and death —with votes in the days of Peel, with ruinous calumnies in the days of the Georges, with fire and sword in the days of William, James, or Charles. There is less difference now between Whig and Tory than between two Whigs. Tory and Radical can combine where one Tory repels another as water does oil. Hence, in Parliament it is easy to negative every proposition, while it seems becoming hopeless to advance any proposition. We are not worse off in that respect than they are in the colonies. In a great number of the most important British settle- ments the Government consists of an established Ministerial crisis. Canada the Cabinet may be defined as an organized attempt of certain gentlemen, rather favoured by the Governor, to outwit the Constitution ; and this is thought a stroke of state, because the generally divided condition of political society renders responsible government absolutely impossible. The ministry which is res- ponsible to everybody becomes in turn irresponsible, because everybody disagrees with everybody else. It is indeed only a milder, but in some respects more incorrigible phase of the same social discord which destroyed the kingdom of, France and rendered the despotism possible. All parties neutralized each other and left despotism to walk off with the prey. We agree to differ in a more peaceable and parishioner fashion ; hence the Queen's Government, whether at home or in the colonies, has become nothing more than a board of directors ; a species of com- mittee formed of respectable gentlemen for carrying on affairs ad
interim.
Our statesmen accept the situation ; for statesmanship adopts the morals of its day. Hence, without any exception, the pos- sible Ministers of our day 'are so condescending that they will *Pee to carry on the Queen s government and the business of the
people in general, on principles of which they themselves have always heartily disapproved. Not long since that would have been called inconsistency—the one vice which was recognized in our political code as coming very near to high treason in general. As the thrifty Chinese housewife said, when she threw her baby into the tower provided for such purposes, " One must do as the world does !" so statesmen supply the demand in the market for statesmanship independently of principles, by suspending if not burying their principles. It is really obliging on their part, for it saves the public a vast deal of inconvenience. They waive their personal predilections, they copy the fashion of the day which sets aside the personal.
Aye, here we approach one of the most remarkable characteris- tics of the time ; and perhaps if we distinctly perceive and re- cognize it, our clearer vision may help us to find the way out of the present embarras. It is curious that while we have nearly extinguished the personal in public affairs, we have arrived al:- most at the point of neutralizing the public element in public affairs. We see this most distinctly in the metropolis. We have a capital so large that it is too big to constitute one Parlia- mentary constituency, and we have cut it up into seven ; or rather we have seven different towns, besides a few more, all close to- gether with a joint population nearly equal to the population of Scotland. Our habits of life to a great extent transfuse the whole of the society—that is in a purely mechanical sense. Your city man lives in the West-end ; your working man, who labours in the West, lives in the East or the South ; the clerks that form the population of the centre live at the circumference. But each of the districts has its own Government separate from the local Government of the parishes. In moat towns where there has been a public—Rome, Venice, Paris, or London, of an earlier date—the public men were known to the public,—the notables were acquainted with each other, and were recognized in a gene- ral assemblage. But let any large meeting be collected for any topic which will draw the members of the meeting together, and probably you will find scarcely half-a-dozen in the room person- ally acquainted with each other. The leading speakers are only known in a kind of hearsay or exhibition sense, and they are speaking to strangers. It is a mere "fortuitous concourse of atoms " without any personal feeling whatever, without any sympathy to bring the whole together, or any impulse to act as one man. If they shout in concert for the hour, as soon as thanks have been voted to the chairman they become as strange to each other as a shoal of fish brought into the London market. The abstraction of the personal neutralizes the existence of a public.
This neutralization, this expunging alike of the individual and of the mass-life, is brought about and confirmed by many of our greatest modern improvements. First, there is the enlargement of towns, which renders every town incapable of knowing who is i in it. The enlargement of intercourse makes men live less at London, or York, or on a particular estate in Somersetshire or Westmoreland, than in England—wherever the railway goes. Portions of London society literally live on the sea-coast. Inter- course, as it is called, is so universal that society has habitually become a something like the "fortuitous concourse of atoms" at the " pump-room " in a watering place. It is the same in an- other aspect of our social meeting. The enlargement of the mar- ket for printed writings is so vast, that one can know the litera- ture as little as a lawyer can know the laws of his country. The immense amount of able writing has neutralized the salient parts of literature. The national library is swamped by the booksel- ler's shop. Intellectual ideas are thus, except for the very few, reduced to averages ; and those very few, the more refined or the more exalted, take refuge in a certain kind of moral seclusion, and become a sort of upper ten, letting the lower world go as it may.
On the surface, this expunging of the personal, of the peculiar, or of the positive, is so general, that we might presume principle to be extinct, as we might say that passion is dead. Emotions have given way to manners. The very life of man seems to be in some degree suspended. Yet occasionally through the uphea- ving of the strata, we find that the elements are still the same. The tragedies of the police reports show us that the fires of passion are unextinguished. "One touch of nature" can still " make the whole world kin "—if the touch be • sufficiently broad and astonishing to make the crowd stand and look on.
In the midst of the suspended animation, the sort of half sleepy confusion of mind begotten by such a state of public so- ciety, we snatch at any little incident which seems to point to the way out of the calm—the slightest floating trait which like a feather tells us that there is a breeze coming—the lightest truth which by its motion informs us that we still live, and that the night- mare will pass. For example, " it's curious " as the Pepyses of society say, that in the records of art we find precisely the same principles, undying at the very, latest day, that we did when we first awoke to a sense of art. The Photograph repeats the truths to which Raphael or Titian attained. We recognize the perfection of organic life in the Elgin marbles, which the Turks nearly de- stroyed, and which Phidias moulded although his countrymen had not the slightest advantage from cheap literature, railways, or any similar short out to truth. The staple of man is exactly the same that it was ; personality is not crippled, it is only waiting for its opportunity. We need some machinery by which these huge towns shall be either redistributed, or reorganized into a more conscious symmetry ; by which these amorphoes masses of pub- lication should be reduced into something through which we can
see ; these extravagancies of locomotion should be made to turn upon some intelligible centres ; and then once more, with an or- ganization brought up to the growth of society, there will be that renewed intercourse between the personal and the public which will reestablish the chain of political electricity !
"Let us set up a society for the .purpose of restoring perso- nality !" cries some earnest man, mindful of the precept to be practical. " What is the good of pointing out an evil unless you will show us the remedy ?' The use of dearly perceiving any defect, is that it sharpens our perception for the said remedy. What we transitory men call evil has generally proved to be no- thing more than the harbinger of some new blessing which we call " the remedy."
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