POLITICAL PROPHECIES.
THAT fascinating form of intellectual gambling guessing by rule is not confined to interpreters of the Apocalypse or the disciples of Gall and Spurzheim. There is-scarcely a public man who has not at some time or other risked his reputation by a prophecy more or less distinct which the result has proved more or less erroneous, and the mass of mankind has a permanent hankering after such utterances, which no amount of argument or ridicule is sufficient to root out. There is hardly a country in the world except England in which some rhythmical saying or oracular text utterly without visible warrant is not current, and exercises some considerable influence over public opinion. An old tradition that the advent of the Russians was prophesied before the Greek Empire fell takes much of the heart out of the Turks, and the Elbidoos during the mutiny obtained a real access of courage from the two doggrel lines which assigned to the Company a hundred years and one of rule. Oddly enough that prediction, which the writer heard himself in 1852, was fulfilled, like most prophecies, as to the letter, though not as to the spirit, for the Company was abolished one hundred and one years after Plasaey, though the British rule grew stronger and more secure. The GI' ...reran peasantry hope still for the advent of the Redbearded Emperor of the West who is to restore to them their unity and com- mence a millennial reign, and a prophecy that Napoleon's heir should yet rebuild Napoleon's throne visibly smoothed the way for the election of 1848 and the coup d'e'tat of 2nd December, 1852. England, inhabited by a people without traditions, is singularly devoid of such legends, but we doubt if even the educa- ted would read a prophecy of national disaster said to have been just discovered with entire contempt. The notion that prophecy of the secular kind has occasionally been fulfilled, that there is in some men a power apart from and beyond insight, having no con- nection with mere ability, operating from without instead of within, is rooted in the popular imagination, if not in the popular habit of thought, and will be as little disturbed by this article as by any of the logical demonstrations by which it has been so often assailed.
The idea, which is in itself one very foreign to the English mind, a mind which has never invented a theory of second sight or worried itself with precautions against the evil eye, seems to spring from three separate causes, two of which are reasonable. The first is the habit kept up by the clergy of wringing modern meanings out of the prophetical Scriptures. Of course if we once believe that the Creator really revealed to Jewish poets not only the great truths of His policy towards the world,—which is quite in accord- ance with analogy, He having revealed other truths indubitably to other great minds,—but the minute facts of modern history, such, for instance, as the rise of Napoleon or the accession of his nephew any accuracy of prediction becomes possible. Cloudy as the utterances are it may still be within the scope of human intellectto discover their precise meaning, and of course when the meaning of a divine utterance is once made clear any further discussion is waste of words. If Fleming's marvellous guess that thefleur-de-lis should be abolished by a man born in a Mediterranean island, that this man should fill the world with his fame, that he should be dethroned, and that his dynasty should revive was anything else than a guess, why of course cadit qutestio. The belief in predictions becomes as reasonable as the belief in geological hypotheses, and the only thing required is certainty that the prediction is an accurate ren- dering of a divine statement. As the majority of English ten- pounders believe in their hearts that the Book of Daniel and the Apocalypse were really written to help them in guesses about the future of the fractions of the world called England and France, this cause operates to produce faith in predictions more than any other. The second is the idea, almost universal, that certain secular predictions have been from time to time fulfilled, an idea repeated for ages, in spite alike of presumption and evidence. We venture to say that in the whole range of historic literature there is not one solitary instance of a true prediction, i. e., a forecast of the future beyond the range of induction, which has been exactly fulfilled, but the masses believe that there has, and no man ever proves a negative to popular satisfaction. Driven to bay they
will produce twenty prophecies which seem to them genuine pre- dictions, but which are neither more nor less than splendid intel- lectual inductions. They-cannot see that, any more than a savage can see that the receipt of a telegram involves no miracle, and will quote a mere effort of the reasoning faculty as a proof that man can foresee through a power which is something not directly of God, yet higher than human reason.
This, the confusion between prediction and induction, is we con- ceive the very root, and so to speak justification, of the popular theary. The mass of men know so little, are so unaccustomed to follow out any fact to its consequences, that the foresight of those who do strikes them as almost miraculous. The letter, for instance, of the Marquis de Montealm just disinterred by Carlyle will, we have no doubt, strike numbers of his readers as an instance of pure prediction. It is undoubtedly one of the most remarkable instances of political induction which has of late appeared, really elevates one's idea of the power which may reside in statesmen's minds. The Marquis was writing to a cousin in France on the 24th of August, 1759, a few days before Wolfe, aided by the good-will of all the thirteen colonies, hadiwrested Quebec from France, and says the Marquis, "I shall lose Quebec, and France disappears from this continent, if Wolfe knows his business, but the defeat will be worth more to my country than a victory. Of all men in the world the English are the most impatient of obedience, but if the English of Europe are so, much more are the English of America. One great section of these colonists are the children of men who expatriated themselves in those times of trouble when Old England, a prey to divisions, was assailed in its privileges and rights, and went out to America to seek a land where they could live and die free and almost independent, and their children have not degene- rated from the republican sentiments of their fathers. Others are children of the enemies of all control, all subjection, whom the Go- vernment had transported for their crimes; others, again, are a heap made up of the different nations of Europe, and hold to Old England neither by heart nor feeling ; all as a general matter care neither about the King nor Parliament of England . . . Each province would long since have formed an independent little republic, but for the fear of seeing France at their gates. Masters for masters they prefer their countrymen to strangers, taking the while as their maxim to obey just as little as they can. But when Canada has been conquered, and the colonists and habitans are one people, on the first occasion that England touches their interests, do you think, my dear cousin, the colonists will obey ? What have they to fear in revolting? I am so sure of what I say that I would not allow ten years after the conquest of Canada. for its accomplishment.' There is the occurrence, the mode of the occurrence, and almost the time of the occurrence clearly predicted, and yet it is visibly only an induction. Very great brain, deep insight into the past, wide knowledge of the facts of the present, a passionless judgment, a habit of relying on great streams of cause rather than minute causes, were necessary to produce such a prediction, but still it was only a thoughtful deduction from facts now as patent to us as they then were to the soldier-statesman who, being unsuccessful, has been so nearly forgotten. In the same way a still more wonderful utterance, that of John Brown upon the scaffold, was not a predic- tion, but an induction from long observance of the policy which governs the world. " I am sure," said the grand old man,— perhaps the only American who passing to the scaffold could have kissed a negro child, not from benevolence, but from love,— " that I am of more use to hang than for any other purpose." Slavery culminated as he breathed his last, and it was in its hour of triumph that John Brown saw, almost as prophets see, that in his death was the doom he had given his life to hasten, yet even then we cannot say his insight was more than the just induc- tion which a man like him, who believed firmly in the immediate government of the Almighty, would draw from the events around him. Whether in the immediate presence of such a death, rendered easy by the recollections of such a life, the natural power of the man's brain might not be exalted beyond all the precedents of his career it is not for us to decide, but the brain, whatever its power, certainly exerted itself upon a deduction from visible facts.
But what, then, is the limit of induction ? Is it not conceivable that as there have been men in whom the faculty of memory is deve- loped to an extent miraculous to those less gifted, so there may be other men in whom imaginative reason may be developed in a degree which amounts to the power of prophecy, of prediction apparently independent of basis in existing facts ? We cannot of course deny that assumption. Even the foreknowledge of the Deity may be expressed in a scientific formula. That the Being who can see the consequence which, under the laws He himself has made, must spring from every fact, should foresee those consequences is inevitable, and we can conceive of man rising to a knowledge of data and-of laws so wide as to involve in a limited degree the possession of the same attribute. But that degree of knowledge is conceivable only with the imagination, is not existing, least of all exists in the kingdom of politics. To foreknow the faintest political change distant any length of time a politician must have data which are as utterly beyond his grasp as the laws which make his own heart beat or give to drugs their potency. He must know not only the habitual power of ordinary motives operating amidst vast numbers, but the effect indiVidual genius may have on that operation, — not only the circumstances controlling nations, but those which affect individuals. So long as his prediction can be affected only by the operation of the great laws which guide humanity he may be right, for they are ascertain- able, but the moment the great web is shot with the lights of in- dividual action he becomes nearly powerless. Montealm perceived that great causes visible to all men would induce the colonists to resist pressure from England for English interests, and believed from his experience of human nature that the pressure would speedily come, but set Montcahn to predict the course which France would follow on the death of Napoleon. He would have to ascertain first the relative strength of opinions in France, and then the comparative capacity of the Generals and the Parisians who hold them, then the position of those powers to each other at the probable time of the occurrence, then the time itself, and finally the exact condition of the weather at the hour when action would become necessary. There is, we fully admit, no such thing as accident. It is perfectly conceivable that a being lower, than a Deity might attain the capacity to understand accurately all the data we have mentioned, to predict to a second, for example, the time at which the vital energy of the Emperor must be exhausted,. but it is infinitely improbable that any human being should at this time possess any such knowledge. A man of large informa- tion and minute knowledge of France, without bias, or prejudice, or interest, and with a coldly-bright imagination—imagination like De Tocqueville's—might of course give a guess which, sup- posing his calculation as to time tolerably correct, and France in the meanwhile to produce no erratic genius, and the weather to be of the ordinary kind, and no Providence or, as we call, it, accident to intervene, might approximate to the truth, but that in all. A great statesman may make a general prediction worth listening to, because he simply points out the drift of currents- which he sees and other people do not see, but as to a particular prediction he is as blind as a ploughboy. He has no data on which to employ his power. When Mr. Disraeli says, as he is understood to say, that the next great movement in England will be produced by a spasm of mental exaltation, either religious or social, among working-men, he is worth listening to, for he is speaking from evidence present to his mind, but suppose he were to predict the moment of an opponent's death? Somebody or other has this week sent us a whole pamphlet full of " prophe- cies," as he calls them, all of which are conceitedly-clever in- ductions from visible facts, and as such worth the ten minutes we have expended on their perusal, but suppose he informed the world of the price of Consols this day twelvemonth, or the first ten lines of the first leader in to-morrow's Times I That would be a prediction, his is only an induction. The value therefore of a political prophecy depends, like that of a political argument, mainly on the capacity of the man who utters it, and who sees with his mental eyes the consequences of certain events just as other men see the causes of them. The faculty is a rarer one, and is sometimes found, like capacity for music, in men from whom the casual observer would expect nothing, but it is none the less an objective exercise of the brain. The vague idea current among certain classes that there is more than this, that it is given to some men to see the future without mental calculation, without reckon- ing up data, is a superstition merely.
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