MR. BALFOUR'S DOUBTS OF PROGRESS.
WHATEVER reasonable doubt there may be,—and we think there is a good deal,—concerning the truth of the proposition that the progress of the race is assured by any natural law independent of indi- vidual wisdom and effort, it is certainly a happy augury for progress in the present generation of men, that two such Rectorial addresses as Mr. Goschen's in Edinburgh and Mr. Balfour's in Glasgow should have been delivered within a week of each other. Both of them seem to us very remarkable intellectual efforts, and both of them show how far beyond the arena of political life the minds of the two principal statesmen of the Unionist Party in the House of Commons, habitually range. Mr. Balfour's address to the University of Glasgow on Thursday is intended to show that we have no adequate justification for that vague optimism which regards the progress of the race as an immutable truth on the strength of which we might, if we pleased, even relax our efforts to improve the state of society in which we live, resting secure that the laws of Nature would themselves bring about that for which the energy of man had ceased to struggle. Mr. Balfour doubts the existence of any such laws of Nature. Clearly they are not involved in what are now known as the laws of evolution. For if, as is universally assumed, the reference is to the laws which worked in constituting the present types of organic life, vegetable and animal, they worked by a process of elimina- tion which in human society has long ago ceased amongst civilised races. Instead of the weaker and less effective members of our race being eliminated by the extirpation of the unfittest, the social instincts of the race now carefully preserve the weaker and less fit specimens of humanity. Nor can it be demonstrated by any satisfactory evidence that this disappearance of the selective process has been replaced by the appearance of any power to transmit to children the acquired faculties and aptitudes of experience. So far as we know, it is very doubtful whether any characteristic quality is transmitted to the child, which was not born with one or both of the parents ; so that though a man may transmit any natural aptitude of his own organisation, it is probable that he never transmits any purely acquired skill or discipline. Still, of course it is possible to conceive that the efforts of each generation may leave so greatly an improved environ- ment to its posterity, that even though the raw material of man's nature may not be any further improved by the hereditary accumulations of talents, the circumstances under which each successive generation is born may be so much more favourable to the development of all the better side of human intellect and character, as to produce far more perfectly evolved talents and virtues and. tastes than the ancestors of these happier beings ever had the opportunity of displaying. The intellectual and moral climate may be so greatly improved by the painstaking of successive generations, that even though acquired characteristics may not be transmitted, the best qualities which are transmitted may reach a very much higher state of perfection. This Mr. Balfour is very far from denying. On the contrary, he greatly hopes that it may be so. But then he asks very acutely what guarantee we have that the higher creative genius of man will be reproduced as largely as the power to enjoy it. "Mr. Spencer," he says, "cherishes the belief that his fully evolved' man will spend much more time in sesthetic enjoyment than our toil-worn generation is able to do. I hope he may. But what art is he going to enjoy ? Leisure and fashion will produce audiences and spectators. We know of nothing that will produce musicians or painters ; and I sometimes fear that if Mr. Spencer's fully evolved' man ever comes into being, he will not only find perfect harmony with his environment' intolerably tedious, but will be in the humiliating position of having to depend for all his higher pleasures on the poetry and painting of his 'imperfectly evolved 'forefathers, whose harmony with their environment was, fortunately for the cause of Art, not quite so perfect as his own." That involves, of course, the suggestion that it is precisely the collision between the ideal faculty and the resistance of a disappointing world, which stirs the artist, sculptor, and poet into productive work. And undoubtedly without some gadfly-sting at the heart, very little of the highest work of the world has ever been done.
Then Mr. Balfour goes on to ask what the State can do to ensure progress, and he infers that, except by keeping order and protecting liberty, it can do very little. Look, he says, at the totally different histories which the political development of the State in such different countries as Germany, Holland, France, Belgium, and Great Thitair presents to us. In all these countries there have been the most deadly struggles between the different parties and factions, and it has been assumed in all these struggles that the very secret of civilisation was at issue. Yet in all these States, different as their political constitutions are, though they do not speak the same language, nor profess the same religion, nor claim the same ancestry, and though their fates have been very different, "their culture at the present moment is practically identical ; their ideas form a common stock ; the social features they have to face are the same ; and such differences as exist in the material condition and well-being of their populations, are unquestionably due more to the economic differences in their position, climate, and natural advantages, than to the decisions at which they may from time to time have arrived on the various political controversies by which their peoples have been so bitterly divided." That does not say very much, argues Mr. Balfour, for the power of the State to alter for the better by legislation the conditions under which the people live. And when we notice that on one most important subject, the subject of religion, they have almost all come to the conclusion that they had better not interfere authoritatively at all, this depreciatory esti- mate of the influence of the State is confirmed. Indeed, the notion that any people manages, or can manage, the most important class of its own affairs, is, as Mr. Balfour shows, a singular illusion. Even in strictly political matters, though a people may more or less fix their own institutions, they do not and cannot fix how those institutions are to be worked. What organic statute, for instance, ever settled that a representative assembly should be divided between two or three great parties ? Indeed, no State could have any stability at all if habit, prepossession, prejudice did not do a vast deal more to secure the unity of the people than any amount of con- scious manipulation and reason can ever do ; and a State in which conscious reasoning has too much influence, is a State of which the mortar is already so much loosened that it may almost at any time go to pieces. "We habitually talk as if a self-governing or free community was one which managed its own affairs. In strict-. ness, no community manages its own affairs, or by any possibility could manage them. It manages but a narrow fringe of its affairs, and that in the main by delegation. In healthy societies it is only the thinnest surface-layer of law and custom, belief and sentiment, which is either subjected to destructive treat- ment, or becomes the nucleus of any new growth." For the most part, the affairs of a nation are governed by habits of thought and long-established customs with which the political or formal institutions of the State have no more to do than they have with the revolutions of the earth or the ebb and flow of the tides. Hence, in Mr. Balfour's opinion, there is no evidence of a necessary "law of progress" in human affairs which guarantees us against the collapses which so many civilised States have in various ages undergone, and there is no power in any State Govern- ment so to organise society as to secure it against such catas- trophes for the future. Even the greater amenability to reason which sometimes besets a particular society, ren- dering its public opinion, as it were, fluid and plastic, he regards rather as a peril menacing its cohesion, than as a guarantee for progress. Such is Mr. Balfour's view, and we heartily concur with him in thinking that there neither is nor can be any automatic law of progress which can secure any human society against the unfaithfulness and apathy of the indi- viduals who constitute that society, or against the influence of the various potent solvents which Providence sometimes seems to use for the purpose of decomposing a society whose fresh springs have run dry. But Mr. Balfour's account of the matter seems to us to suggest two very important riders. The first is, that the cohesion of human society, which depends, as he justly points out, on a profusion of influences of the binding force, and often of the very existence of which the members of that society are as com- pletely unconscious as they are of the circulation of their blood and the condition of their nerves, must owe its fine constructive energy to a power far higher than any of which we can sound the depths or fathom the purposes. And though we can never pretend to know whether that power has or has not in view to put an end to a particular form of civilisation, and to raise up another in its place, we may at least trust that, so long as any national society is full of life and elasticity, the signal for its dissolution has not yet been given. The more Mr. Balfour insists on the strength of the unconscious prepossessions and customs which bind together human societies, the more he depre- ciates the power of the State to interfere effectively and im- pressively in the organic structure of such a society, the more he throws us back on the mighty Power which "foreknew what it did predestinate." And though we may be quite incompetent to command any view of its august designs, nay, though those designs may include the dissolution of existing societies, whether new ones are to arise out of them or not, we may yet trust that the doom of any society is not at hand until we can perceive the gradual failure of those pulses of hope and life and joy and conviction which, so long as they beat strong and steady, are not only symptoms of strength, but omens of future growth. And the next rider is, that hearty faith in the guidance of this Power is one of the most effective of all securities against the social languor and decay to which every society is otherwise liable. Mr. Balfour was only concerned to show that we have no reason for believing in a " law " of progress, in the sense in which we believe in a law of gravitation, and he has given good reason for his view that that which is to determine the future character of men must depend on the past character of men, and cannot be summed up in any mere automatic agency. Still, there is fair reason to think that, before the shock of any social catastrophe, history has usually chronicled protracted symptoms of dwindling faith, clouded hope, infirm purpose, and feeble will. Till these prognostics appear, we need hardly fear that a period of retrogression is at hand ; and one of the agencies which most effectually staves off that fatal era, is a lively faith in the only power which can avert its coming.
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