Modern Leaders: Being a Series of Biographical Sketches Part 6

Of a mould utterly different is John Bright, at the very root of whose character are found simplicity and straightforwardness. By simplicity I do not mean freedom from pretence or affectation; for no man can be more thoroughly unaffected and sincere than Gladstone. I mean that purely intellectual attribute which frees the judgment from the influence of complex emotions; which distinguishes at once essentials from non-essentials; which sees at a glance the true end and the real way to it, and can go directly onward. Men supremely gifted with this great practical quality are commonly set down as men of one idea. In this sense, undoubtedly, John Bright is a man of one idea; but the phrase does not justly describe him, or men like him, who are peculiar merely in having an accurate appreciation of what I may call political perspective, and thus knowing what proportion of public consideration certain objects ought, under certain circ.u.mstances, to obtain.

So far as ideas are the offspring of information, Mr. Bright has undoubtedly fewer ideas than some of his contemporaries. He is not a profound cla.s.sical scholar like Gladstone; he has had nothing like the varied culture of Lowe; he makes, of course, no pretence to the attainments of Mill, who is at once a master of science, of cla.s.sics, and of _belles-lettres_. But given a subject, almost any subject, coming at all within the domain of politics or economics, and time to think over it, and he is much more likely to be right in his judgment of it than any of the three men I have named. He is gifted beyond any Englishman now living with the rare and admirable faculty of seeing right into the heart of a subject, and discerning what it means and what it is worth. Nor is this ever a lucky jump at a conclusion. Bright never gives an opinion at random or off-hand. Some new policy is announced; some new subject is broached in the House of Commons; and Bright sits silent and listens. Friends and followers come round him and ask him what he thinks of it. "Wait until to-morrow and I will tell you," is almost invariably, in whatever form of words, the tenor of his reply--and to-morrow's judgment is certain to be right. I can remember no great public question coming up in England for the past dozen years in regard to which Mr. Bright's deliberate judgment did not prove itself to be just.

This quality of sagacious judgment, however valuable and uncommon, would not of itself make a man a great statesman or even a great party leader; but it is only one of many remarkable attributes which are found harmoniously ill.u.s.trated in the character of Mr. Bright. I do not mean, however, to dwell at any length here on the place John Bright holds in English political life or the qualities which have won him that place.

He has lately been the subject of an article in this magazine, and he is indeed better known to American readers than any other English political man now living. One or two observations are all that just now seem necessary to make.

Men who have not heard Bright speak, and who only know him by repute as a powerful tribune of the people, a demagogue ("John of Bromwicham,"

Carlyle calls him, cla.s.sing him with John of Leyden), are naturally apt to think of him as an impetuous, pa.s.sionate, stormy orator, shaking people's souls with sound and fury. Almost anybody who only knew the two men vaguely and by rumor, would be likely to a.s.sume that the style of the cla.s.sical Gladstone was stately, calm, and regular; that of the popular orator and democrat, impetuous, rugged, and vehement. Now, the great characteristic of Gladstone, after his fluency, is his impetuosity; that of Bright is his magnificent composure and self-control. Intensity is his great peculiarity. He never foams or froths or bellows, or wildly gesticulates. The heat of his oratorical pa.s.sion is a white heat which consumes without flash or smoke or sputter. Some of his greatest effects have been produced by pa.s.sages of pathetic appeal, of irony, or of invective, which were delivered with a calm intensity that might almost have seemed coldness, if the fire of genius and of eloquence did not burn beneath it. Another remark I should make is that Mr. Bright is the greatest master of pure Saxon English now speaking the English language. As the blind commonly have their sense of sound and of touch intensified, so it may be that Mr. Bright's comparative indifference to cla.s.sic and foreign literature has tended to concentrate all his attention upon the culture of pure English, and given him a supreme faculty of appreciating and employing it. Certain it is that his unvarying choice of the very best Saxon word in every case seems to come from an instinct which is in itself something like genius.

Finally, let me remark, that the extent of Mr. Bright's democratic tendencies would probably disappoint some Americans. I may say now what I should probably have been laughed at for saying two or three years ago, that there is a good deal of the conservative about John Bright; that he is by nature disposed to shrink from innovation; that change for the mere sake of change is quite abhorrent to him; and that he is about the last man in England who would care to make political war for an idea. He seems to me to be the only one Englishman I have lately spoken with who retains any genuine feeling of personal loyalty toward the sovereign of England. But for his eloquence and his power, I fancy Mr.

Bright would seem rather a slow sort of politician to many of the younger Radicals. The "Times" lately attributed Mr. Bright's conservatism to his advancing years. This was merely absurd. Mr. Bright is little older now than O'Connell was when he began his Parliamentary career. He is considerably younger than Disraeli, or Gladstone, or Mill.

What Bright now is he always was. A dozen years ago he was defending the Queen and Prince Albert against the attacks of Tories and of some Radicals. He never was a Democrat in the French or Italian sense. He has always been wanting even, in sympathy, with popular revolution abroad.

He never showed the slightest interest in speculative politics. I doubt if he ever talked of the "brotherhood of peoples." He has been driven into political agitation only because, like Schiller's Wilhelm Tell, he saw positive, practical, and pressing grievances bearing down upon his neighbors, which he felt called by duty to make war against. I have many times heard Mr. Bright say that he detests the House of Commons, and would be glad if it were permitted him never to mount a platform again.

But if Mr. Bright had little natural inclination for a Parliamentary career, what is one to say of Mr. John Stuart Mill's natural disinclination for such a path of life?

Physical const.i.tution, intellectual peculiarities, temperament, habits--all seemed to mark out Mr. Mill as a man destined to close his career, as he had so long conducted it--in almost absolute seclusion. He is a silent, shy, shrinking man, of feeble frame and lonely ways. Until the general election of three years back, Mr. Mill was to his countrymen but as an oracle--as a voice--almost as a myth. The influence of his writings was immense. Personally he was but a name. He never came into any public place; he knew n.o.body. When the promoters of the movement to return him to Parliament came to canva.s.s the Westminster electors, the great difficulty they had to contend with was, that three out of every four of the honest traders and shopkeepers had never heard of him; and the few who knew anything of his books had a vague impression that the author was dead years before. The very men who formed the executive of his committee could not say that they knew him, even by sight. Half in jest, half for a serious purpose, some of the Tories sent abroad over Westminster an awful report that there was no such man in existence as John Stuart Mill. "Did you ever see him?" was the bewildering question constantly put to this or that earnest canva.s.ser, and invariably answered with an apologetic negative. I believe the services of my friend Dr. Chapman, editor of the "Westminster Review," were brought into pressing requisition, because he was one of the very few who really could boast a personal acquaintance with Stuart Mill. The day when the latter first entered the House of Commons was the first time he and Bright ever saw each other. I believe Cobden and Mill never met. Mill had no university acquaintances--he had never been to any university. He had no school friends--he had never been to a school. Perhaps the best educated man of his time in England, he owes his education to the personal care and teaching of his distinguished father, James Mill, who would have been ill.u.s.trious if his son had not overshadowed his fame.

a.s.suredly, to know James Mill intimately was, if I may thus apply Leigh Hunt's saying, in itself a liberal education. Following his father's steps at the India House, John Mill worked there methodically and quietly, until he rose to the highest position his father had occupied; and then he resigned his office, declined an offer of a seat at the Indian Council Board, subsequently made by Lord Stanley, and lapsed wholly into private life. Of late he rarely met even his close and early friends. Some estrangement, not necessary to dwell on, had taken place, I believe, between him and his old friend Thomas Carlyle, and I suppose they ceased to meet. After the death of the wife whom he so loved and revered, Mill lived almost always at Avignon, in the south of France, where she died, and where he raised a monument over her remains, which he visits and tends with a romantic devotion and constancy worthy of a Roland.

Only a profound sense of duty could drag such a man from his scholarly and sacred seclusion into the stress and storm of a parliamentary life.

But it was urged upon Mill that he could do good to the popular cause by going into Parliament; and he is not a man to think anything of his personal preference in such a case. He accepted the contest and won.

Some of his warmest admirers regretted that he had ever given his consent. They feared not so much that he might damage his reputation as that he might weaken the influence of his authority, and with it the strength of every great popular cause. Certainly those who thought thus, and who met Mr. Mill for the first time during the progress of the Westminster contest, did not feel much inclined to take a more encouraging view of the prospect.

Mr. Mill seems cut out by nature not to be a parliamentary success. He has a thin, fragile, awkward frame; he has a nervous, incessant twitching of the lips and eyes; he has a weak voice and a sort of stammer; he is over sixty years of age; he had never, so far as I know, addressed a political meeting of any kind up to the time of the Westminster contest. Yet with all these disadvantages, Mill has, as a political leader and speaker, been an undoubted success with the country, and a sort of success in the House. An orator of any kind he never could be. One might call him a wretchedly bad speaker, if his speaking were not so utterly unlike anybody else's, as to refuse to be cla.s.sified with any other speaking, good or bad. But, so far as the best selection of words, the clearest style, the most coherent and convincing argument can const.i.tute eloquence, Mill's speeches are eloquent. They are, of course, only spoken essays. They differ in no wise from the speaker's writings; and I need hardly say that a speech, to be effective, must never be just what the speaker would have written if it were to be consigned at once to print as a letter or an essay. As speeches, therefore, Mr. Mill's utterances in the House have little or no effect. Indeed, they are only listened to by a very few men of real intelligence and judgment on both sides. Some of the more boisterous of the Tories made many attempts to cough and laugh Mill into silence; indeed, there was obviously a deliberate plan of this kind in operation at one time. But Mill is a man whom nothing can deter from saying or doing what he thinks right. A more absolutely fearless being does not exist. He is even free from that fear which has sometimes paralyzed the boldest spirits, the fear of becoming ridiculous. So the Tory trick failed. Mill went on with patient, imperturbable, proud good-humor, despite all interruption--now and then paying off his Tory enemies by some keen contemptuous epigram or sarcasm, made all the more pungent by the thin, bland tone in which it was uttered. So the Tories gave up shouting, groaning and laughing; the more quickly because one at least of their chiefs, the Marquis of Salisbury (then in the House of Commons as Lord Cranbourne) had the spirit and sense to express openly and loudly his anger and disgust at the vulgar and brutal behaviour of some of his followers. Therefore Mr. Mill ceased to be interrupted; but he is not much listened to. That supreme, irrefutable evidence that a man fails to interest the House--the fact that a hum and buzz of conversation may be heard all the time he is speaking--is always fatally manifest when Mr. Mill addresses the Commons. But the House, after all, is only a platform from which a man endeavors to speak to the country, and if Mill does not always get the ear of the House, he never fails to be heard by the nation. I have no doubt that even the Tory members of the House read Mill's speeches when they appear in print; a.s.suredly all intelligent Tories do. These speeches, in any case, are never lost on the country. They form at once a part of the really successful literature of each session. They always excite controversy of some kind--not even the great orations of Bright and Gladstone are more talked of.

So far they are a success, and there is something in the personal character of Mr. Mill himself, which makes him specially popular with the working cla.s.ses of England. I doubt if there is now any Englishman whose name would be received with a more cordial outburst of applause at a popular meeting. Working-men, in fact, are very proud of Mr. Mill's scholars.h.i.+p, culture, and profundity. They can perceive easily enough that he is remarkable for just those intellectual qualities which the conventional demagogue never has. Tory newspapers and the "Sat.u.r.day Review" sometimes affect to regard Mr. Bright as a man of defective education, but it is impossible to pretend to think that Mill is ignorant of Greek or superficial in his knowledge of history. When such a man makes himself especially the champion of working-men, the working-men think of him very much as the Irish peasants of '98 and '48 did of Edward Fitzgerald and Smith O'Brien, the aristocrats of birth and rank, who stepped down from their high places and gave themselves up to the cause of the unlettered and the poor.

There is something fascinating, moreover, about the singular blending of the emotional, and even the romantic, with the keen, vigorous, logical intellect, which is to be observed in Mill. Even political economy, in Mill's mind, is strangely guided and governed by mere feeling. Somebody said he was a combination of Ricardo and Tom Hughes--somebody else said, rather more happily, I think, that he is Adam Smith and Fenelon revived and rolled into one. The "Pall Mall Gazette" found his picture well painted in Lord Macaulay's a.n.a.lysis of the motives which influenced Edmund Burke, when he flung his soul into the impeachment of Warren Hastings. The mere eccentricities, the very defects of such a nature have in them something captivating. The admirers of Mr. Mill are therefore not unusually somewhat given to exalting admiration into idolatry. The cla.s.ses who most admire him are the scholarly and adventurous young Radicals, who have a dash of Positivism in them; the extreme Radicals, who are prepared to go any and all lengths for the mere sake of change; and the working-men.

This is the Triumvirate of the English Liberal Party. Combined they represent, guide, and govern every section and fraction of that party that is worth taking into any consideration. Mr. Gladstone represents official Liberalism; Mr. Bright speaks for and directs the old-fas.h.i.+oned, robust, popular Liberalism of which Manchester was the school; Mr. Mill is the exponent of the new Liberalism, the Liberalism of Idea and Logic. Bright's programme is a little ahead of Gladstone's, but Gladstone will probably be easily pulled up to it. Mill goes far beyond either, far beyond any point at which either is ever likely to arrive. Indeed, Mr. Mill may be fairly described by a phrase, which I believe is German, as a man in advance of every possible future--at least in England. But he is quite prepared to act loyally and steadily with his party and its leader on all momentous issues. On some minor questions he has lately gone widely away from them, and given thereby much offence; and indeed I am sure there are not a few of the old-fas.h.i.+oned Liberals and the Manchester men who would rather Mr. Mill had never come into Parliament and sat at their side. But on nearly all questions of Parliamentary Reform, and on that of the Irish Church, Mill and his Liberal colleagues will pull cordially together. So, too, on most economic questions, reduction of taxation, imposition of duties and the like. Where a sharp difference is likely to arise will only be in relation to some subject having an idea behind it--some question of foreign policy perhaps, something not at present imminent; and, let us hope, not destined in any case to be vital to the interests of the party. Only where an idea is involved will Mr. Mill refuse to allow his own judgment to bend to the general necessities of the party. It was his objection (a very unwise one, I think) to the idea behind the system of the ballot, which led him to separate himself sharply from Bright and other Liberals on that subject; it was the idea which lies at the bottom of a representation of minorities, which beguiled him into lending his advocacy to that most chimerical, awkward, and absurd piece of political mechanism which we know in England as the three-cornered const.i.tuency.

The cohesion of Gladstone and Bright is decidedly more close and likely to endure than that between Bright and Mill. But on all immediate questions of great importance, these two men are sure to be found side by side. Mill has a deep and earnest admiration for Bright, who is sometimes, perhaps, a little impatient of the Politics of Idea.

During the session of 1868, I attended a meeting of a few representative Liberals of all cla.s.ses, brought together to decide on some course of agitation with regard to Ireland. Mr. Mill was there, so were Professor Fawcett, Mr. Thomas Hughes, Lord Amberley, and other members of Parliament; Mr. Frederick Harrison, with some of his Positivist colleagues, and several representative working men. Mr. Bright was unable to attend. A certain course of action being recommended, Mr. Mill expressed his own approval of it, but emphatically declared that he considered Mr. Bright's judgment was ent.i.tled to be regarded as authoritative, and that should Mr. Bright recommend the meeting not to go on, the scheme had better be given up. Mr. Bright subsequently discouraged the scheme, and it was, on Mr. Mill's recommendation, at once abandoned. I mention this fact to ill.u.s.trate the loyalty which Mr.

Mill, with all his tendency to political eccentricity, usually displays toward the men whom he regards as the leaders of the party.

Mill and Bright are alike warm admirers of Gladstone and believers in him. Indeed one sometimes feels ashamed to doubt for a moment the steadfastness of a man in whom Bright and Mill put so full a faith.

Certainly the English Liberal has reason to congratulate himself, and feel proud when he remembers what sort of men his party's leaders used to be, and sees what men they are to-day. It will not do to study too closely the private characters of the chiefs of any political band in the House of Commons, from the days of Bolingbroke to those of Fox. The man who was not a sinecurist or a peculator was pretty sure to be a profligate or a gambler. Not a few eminent men were sinecurists, peculators, profligates, and gamblers. The political purity of the English Liberal leaders to-day is absolutely without the faintest shade of suspicion--it never even occurs to any one to suspect them, while their private lives, it may be said without indelicacy, are in pure and perfect accord with the n.o.ble principles they profess. Not often has there been a political triumvirate of greater men; of better men, never.

THE ENGLISH POSITIVISTS.

Some few months ago, a little bubble of interest was made on the surface of London life, by a course of Sunday lectures of a peculiar kind.

These lectures were given in a small room in Bouverie street, off Fleet street--Bouverie street, sacred to publis.h.i.+ng and newspaper offices--and only a very small stream of persons was drawn to the place. There was something very peculiar, however, about the lectures, the lecturer, and the audience, which might well have repaid a stranger in London for the trouble of going there. I doubt whether such a proportion of intellectual faces could have been seen among the congregation of any London church on these Sunday mornings; and I know one, at least, who attended the lectures, less for the sake of what he heard than because such listeners as the auth.o.r.ess of "Romola" were among the audience. The lecturer was Mr. Richard Congreve, and the subject of his discourses was the creed of Positivism.

I do not know how familiar Mr. Congreve and his writings and his doctrines are to the American public. In London, Mr. Congreve is, in a quiet way, a sort of celebrity or peculiarity. He is the head of the small, compact band of English Positivists. It is understood that he goes as far in the direction of the creed which was the dream of Auguste Comte's later years as any sane human creature can well go. I have, however, very little to say here of Mr. Congreve, individually; and I take his recent course of Sunday lectures only as a convenient starting point from which to begin a few remarks on the political principles, character, and influence of that small, resolute, aggressive body of intellectual, highly-educated and able men who are beginning to be known in the politics and society of England as the London Positivists.

A discourse on the principles of Positivism would be quite out of place here; but even those who understand the whole subject will, perhaps, allow me, for the benefit of those who do not, to explain very briefly what an English Positivist is. Positivism, it is known to my readers, is the name given to the philosophy which Auguste Comte, more than any other man, helped to reduce to a system. Regarded as a philosophy of history and human society, its grand and fundamental doctrine merely is that human life evolves itself in obedience to certain fixed laws, of which we could obtain a knowledge if only we applied ourselves to this study as we do to all other studies in practical science, by the patient observation of phenomena. Auguste Comte's reduction of this philosophical theory to a scientific system is undoubtedly one of the grandest achievements of human intellect. The philosophy did not begin with him or his generation, or, indeed, any generation of which we have authentic record. Whenever there were men capable of thinking at all, there must have been some whose minds were instinct with this doctrine; but Comte made it a system at once simple, grand, and fascinating, and he will always remain identified with its development, in the memory of the modern world. Unfortunately, Comte, in his later years, set to founding a _religion_ also--a religion which has, perhaps, called down upon its founder and its followers more ridicule, contempt, and discredit than any vagary of human imagination in our day. I speak of all this only to explain to my readers that there is some little difficulty in defining what is meant by a Positivist. If we mean merely a believer in the philosophical theory of history, then Positivists are, indeed, to be named as legion, and their captains are among the greatest intellects of the world to-day. In England, we regard Mr. John Stuart Mill as, in this sense, the greatest Positivist, and undoubtedly he is so regarded here. But Mill utterly rejects and ridicules the fantastic religion which Comte, in his days of declining mental power, sought to graft on his grand philosophy. In his treatise on Comte, Mr.

Mill showed no mercy to the Positivist religion, and, indeed, bitterly offended many of its votaries by his contemptuous exposure of its follies. What is said of Mill may be said of nineteen out of every twenty, at least, of the English followers of Comte. They accept the philosophy as grand, scientific, inexorable truth; they reject the religion with pity or with scorn, as a fantastic and barren chimera. Mr.

Congreve is, in London, the leader of the small school who go for taking all or nothing, and to whom Auguste Comte is the prophet of a new and final religion, as well as the teacher of a new philosophy. Now this little school is the nucleus of the body of Englishmen of whom I write.

When I speak, therefore, of English Positivists, I do not mean the men who go no farther than John Stuart Mill does. These men are to be found everywhere; they are of all schools, and all religions. I mean the much smaller body of votaries who go, or feel inclined to go, much farther, and accept Comte's religious teaching as a law of life. It is quite probable that, even among the men who are now identified more or less, in the public mind, with Mr. Congreve and his school, there may be some who do not adopt, or even concern themselves about the religion of Positivism. A community of sentiment on historical and political questions, the habit of meeting together, consulting together, writing for publication together, might naturally bring into the group men who may not go the length of adopting the Comte wors.h.i.+p. It is quite possible, therefore, that, in mentioning the names of English Positivists, I may happen to speak of some who have no more to do with that wors.h.i.+p than I have.

I mean, then, only the group of men, most of whom are young, most of whom are highly cultured, many of whom are endowed with remarkable ability, who are to be found in a literary and political phalanstery with Mr. Congreve, and of whom the majority are understood to be actual votaries of the religion of Comte. Of course I have nothing to do here with their faith or their practices. If they adopt the wors.h.i.+p of woman I think they do a better thing after all than the increasing and popular cla.s.s of writers, whose princ.i.p.al business in life is to persuade us that our wives and sisters are all Messalinas in heart and nearly all Messalinas in practice. If, when they pray, they touch certain cranial b.u.mps at certain pa.s.sages of the prayer, I do not see that they inst.i.tute anything worse than the genuflections of the Ritualist or the breast-beating of the Roman Catholics. If, finally, one is sometimes a little puzzled when he receives a letter from a Positivist friend, and finds it dated "5th Marcus Aurelius," or "12th Auguste Comte," instead of July or December, as the case may be, one must remember that there never yet was a young sect which did not delight in puzzling outsiders by a new and peculiar nomenclature. I never heard anything worse charged against the Positivists than that they wors.h.i.+p woman, touch their foreheads when they pray, and arrange the calendar according to a plan of their own invention; except, of course, the general charge of Atheism; but as that is made in England against anybody whom all his neighbors do not quite understand, I hardly think it worth discussing in this particular instance. We are all Atheists in England in the estimation of our neighbors, whose political opinions are different from our own.

The English Positivists, then, are beginning to stand out sharply against the common background of political life. They are a little school; as distinctly a school for their time and chances as the Girondists were, or the Manchester school, or the Ma.s.sachusetts Abolitionists, or the Boston Transcendentalists. They are Radical, of course, but their Radicalism has a curious twist in it. On any given question of Radicalism they go as far as any practical politician does; but then they also go in most cases so very much farther that they often alarm the practical politician out of his ordinary composure. They are generally incisive of speech, aggressive of purpose, defiant of political prudery, and even of political prudence. Their politics are always politics of idea.

Some three or four years ago the Positivists published a large and ponderous volume of essays on subjects of international policy. Each man who contributed an essay signed his name, and although a general community of idea and principle pervaded the book, it was not understood that everybody who wrote necessarily adopted all the views of his a.s.sociates. The book, in fact, was constructed on the model of the famous "Essays and Reviews" which had sent such a thrill through the religious world a few years before. The political essays naturally failed to create anything like the sensation which was produced by their theological predecessors; but they did excite considerable attention, and awoke the echoes. They astonished a good many Liberal politicians of the steady old school, and they set many men thinking. What surprised people at first was the singular combination of literary culture and ultra-Radical opinion. Literary young men in England, of late, are generally to be divided into two cla.s.ses--the smart writers for periodicals, the minor novelists and dramatists, and so forth, who know no more and care no more about politics than ballet girls do, and the University men, the men of "culture," who affect Toryism as something fine and distinguished, and profess a patrician horror of democracy and the "mob." If at the time this volume was published one had taken aside some practical politician in London and said, "Here is a collection of practical essays written by a cl.u.s.ter of young men who all have University degrees after their names--will you read it?" the answer would certainly have been--"Not I, it's sure to be some contemptible sham Tory rubbish; some 'blood-and-culture' trash; some schoolboy impertinence about demagoguism and the mob." Therefore the surprise was not slight to such men when they read the book and found that its central idea, its connecting thread, was a Radicalism which might well be called thorough; a Radicalism which made Bright look like a steady old Conservative; invited Mill to push his ideas a little farther; and poured scorn upon the Radical press for its slowness and its timidity. A simple, startling foreign policy was prescribed to England. Its gospel, after all, was but an old one--so old that it had been forgotten in English politics. It was merely--Be just and fear not. Renounce all aggression; give back the spoils of conquest. Give Gibraltar back to the Spaniards who own it; prepare to cast loose your colonial dependencies; prepare even to quit your loved India; ask the Irish people fairly and clearly what they want, and if they desire to be free of your rule, bid them go and be free and G.o.dspeed. All the old traditional policies seemed to these men only obsolete and odious superst.i.tions. They would have England, the State, to stand up and act precisely as an Englishman of honor and conscience would do, and they treated with utter contempt any policy of expediency or any policy whatever that aimed at any end but that of finding out the right thing to do and then doing it at once.

This seemed to me, studying the school quite as an outside observer, its one great central idea; and it would of course be impossible not to honor the body of writers who proposed to show how it was to be accomplished.

But no school lives on one grand idea; and this school had its chimeras and crotchets--almost its crazes. For example, the leader of the Positivist band took great trouble to argue that Europe ought to form herself into a n.o.ble federation of States, to the exclusion of Russia, which was to be regarded as an Oriental, barbarous, unmanageable, intolerable sort of thing, and pushed out of the European system altogether. Then a good many of the leading minds of the school are imbued with a pa.s.sionate love for a sort of celestial despotism, an ideal imperialism which the people are first to create and then to obey--which is to teach them, house them, keep them in employment, keep them in health, and leave them nothing to do for themselves, while yet securing to them the most absolute freedom. To some of these men the condition of New York, where the State does hardly anything for the individual, would seem as distressing and objectionable as that of despotic Paris or even Constantinople. A distinguished member of the school declared that nothing was to him more odious than any manner of voluntaryism, and that he hoped to see State operation introduced into every department of English social organization. The connection of this theory with the principle of Positivism, which would mould all men into a sort of hierarchy, is natural and obvious enough, and there is, to support it, a certain reaction now in England against the voluntary principle, in education and in public charities. But, as it is put forward and argued by men of the school I describe, it may be taken as one of the most remarkable points of departure from the common tendency of thought in England. The Positivists are all, indeed, un-English, in the common use of a phrase which is ceasing of late to be so dreaded a stigma as it once used to be in British politics. They are, as I have already said, a somewhat aggressive body, and are imbued with a contempt, which they never care to conceal, for the average public opinion of the British Philistine, whether he present himself as a West End tradesman or a West End Peer.

The Positivists are almost always to be found in antagonism with this sort of public opinion. They attack the Philistine, and they attack no less readily the dainty scholar and critic who lately gave the Philistine his name, and whose over-refining love of sweetness and light is so terribly offended by the rough and earnest work of Radical politics. Whatever way average opinion tends, the influence of the Positivists is sure to tend the other way.

There was a time, nearly two years ago, when the average English mind was suddenly seized with a pa.s.sion of blended hate, fear, and contempt for Fenianism. The thing was first beginning to show itself in a serious light and it had not gone far enough to show what it really was. It looked more formidable than it proved to be, and it seemed less like an ordinary rebellious organization than like some mysterious and demoniacal league against property and public security. When I say it seemed, I mean it seemed to the average English mind, to the ordinary swell and the ordinary shopkeeper. Just at this time the Positivists drew up a pet.i.tion to be presented to the House of Commons, in which they called upon the House to insist that lenity should be shown to all Fenian prisoners, that they should be regarded as men driven into rebellion by a deep sense of injustice, and that measures should be taken to prevent the British troops from committing such excesses in Ireland as had been perpetrated in the suppression of the Indian mutiny, and more lately in Jamaica. Now, if there was anything peculiarly calculated to vex and aggravate the House of Commons and the English public generally, it was such a view of the business as this. Fenianism had not acquired the solemn and tragic interest which it obtained a few months afterward. It is only just to say that Englishmen in general began to look with pity and a sort of respect on Fenianism, once it became clear that it had among its followers men who, to quote the language of one of the least sympathetic of London newspapers, "knew how to die." But, at the time I speak of, Fenianism was a vague, mystic, accursed thing, which it was proper to regard as utterly detestable and contemptible. Imagine then what the feeling of the English county member must have been when he learned that there were actually in London a set of educated Englishmen, nearly all trained in the universities and nearly all moving in good society, who regarded the Fenians just as he himself regarded rebels against the Emperor of Austria or the Pope of Rome, and who not merely asked that consideration should be shown toward them, but went on to talk of the necessity of protecting them against the brutality of the loyal British soldier! The pet.i.tion was signed by all who had a share in its preparation. Such men as Richard Congreve, T.

M. Ludlow, Frederick Harrison and Professor Beesly, were among the pet.i.tioners who risked their admission into respectable society by signing the doc.u.ment. The pet.i.tioners did not feel quite sure about getting any one of mark to present their appeal; and it is certain that a good many professed Liberals, of advanced opinions and full of sympathy with foreign rebels of any cla.s.s or character, would have promptly refused to accept the ungenial office. The pet.i.tioners, however, applied to one who was not likely to be influenced by any considerations but those of right and justice, and whom, moreover, no body in the House of Commons would think of trying to put down. They asked Mr. Bright to present their pet.i.tion, and there was, of course, no hesitation on his part. Mr. Bright not merely presented the pet.i.tion, but read it amid the angry and impatient murmurs of an amazed and indignant House; and he declared, in tones of measured and impressive calmness, that he entirely approved of and adopted the sentiments which the pet.i.tioners expressed. There was, of course, a storm of indignation, and some members went the length of recommending that the pet.i.tion should not even be received--an extreme and indeed extravagant course in a country where the right of pet.i.tion is supposed to be held sacred, and which the good sense even of some Tory members promptly repudiated. Mr.

Disraeli did his very best to aggravate the feeling of the House against the pet.i.tioners. During the Indian mutiny he had himself loudly protested against the spirit of vengeance which our press encouraged; asked whether we meant to make Nana Sahib the model for a British officer, and whether Moloch or Christ was our divinity. Yet he now declared that the language of the pet.i.tion was a libel on the Indian army, and that nothing had ever occurred during the Bengal outbreak to warrant the imputations cast on the humanity of our soldiers.

I suppose it is not easy to convey to an American reader a correct idea of the degree of boldness involved in the presentation of this celebrated pet.i.tion. It really was a very bold thing to do. It was running right in the very teeth of the public opinion of all the cla.s.ses which are called respectable in England. It was, however, strictly characteristic of the men who signed it. Most, if not all of them, took a prominent part in the prosecution of Governor Eyre of Jamaica, for the lawless execution of George William Gordon and the wholesale and merciless floggings and hangings by which order was made to reign in the island. Most of them, indeed, have a pretty spirit of contradiction of their own, and a pretty gift of sarcasm. I think I hardly remember any man who received, during an equal length of time, a greater amount of abuse from the press than Professor Beesly drew down on himself not very long ago. It was at the time when the public mind was in its wildest thrill of horror at the really fearful revelations of organized murder in connection with the Sawgrinders' Union in Sheffield. The whole question of trades' union organization had been under discussion; and even before the Sheffield revelations came out, the general voice of English respectability was against the workmen's societies altogether.

But when the disclosures of organized murder in connection with one union came out, a sort of panic took possession of the public mind. The first, and not unnatural impulse was to a.s.sume that all trades' unions must be very much the same sort of thing, and that the societies of workmen were little better than organized Thuggism. Now, Professor Beesly, Mr. Frederick Harrison and other signers of the pet.i.tion for the Fenians, had long been prominent and influential advocates of the trades' union principle. They had been to the English artisan something like what the Boston Abolitionist was so long to the negro. The trades'

union bodies, who felt aggrieved at the unjust suspicion which made them a party to hideous crimes they abhorred, began to hold public meetings to repudiate the charge, and record their detestation of the Sheffield outrages. Professor Beesly attended one of these meetings in London. He made a speech, in which he told the working men that he thought enough had been done in the way of disavowing crimes which no one had a right to impute to them; that there was no need of their further humiliating themselves; and that it was rather odd the English Aristocracy had such a horror of murderers among the poorer cla.s.ses, seeing how very fond they were of men like Eyre, of Jamaica! In fact, Professor Beesly uplifted his voice very honestly, but rather recklessly and out of time, against the social hypocrisy which is the stain and curse of London society, and which is never so happy as when it can find some chance of denouncing sin or crime among Republicans, or Irishmen, or workingmen.

There was nothing Professor Beesly said which had not sense and truth in it; but it might have been said more discreetly and at a better time; and it was said with a sarcastic and scornful bitterness which is one of the characteristics of the speaker. For several days the London press literally raged at the professor. "Punch" persevered for a long time in calling him "Professor Beastly;" a a strong effort was made to obtain his expulsion from the college in which he has a chair. He was talked of and written of as if he were the advocate and the accomplice of a.s.sa.s.sins, instead of being, as he is, an honorable gentleman and an enlightened scholar, whose great influence over the working cla.s.ses had always been exerted in the cause of peaceful progress and good order. It was a common thing, for days and weeks, to see the names of Broadhead and Beesly coupled with ostentatious malignity in the leading columns of London newspapers.

I give these random ill.u.s.trations only to show in what manner the school of writers and thinkers I speak of usually present themselves before the English public. Now Mr. Harrison devotes himself to a pertinacious, powerful series of attacks on Eyre, of Jamaica, at a time when that personage is the hero and pet martyr of English society; now Professor Beesly horrifies British respectability by pointing out that there are respectable murderers who are quite as bad as Broadhead; now Mr. John Morley undertakes even to criticise the Queen; now Mr. Congreve a.s.sails the anonymous writers of the London press as hired and masked a.s.sa.s.sins; now the whole band unite in the defence of Fenians. This sort of thing has a startling effect upon the steady public mind of England; and it is thus, and not otherwise, that the public mind of England ever comes to hear of these really gifted and honest, but very antagonistic and somewhat crochetty men. Several of them are brilliant and powerful writers. Professor Beesly writes with a keen, caustic, bitter force which has something Parisian in it. I know of no writer in English journalism who more closely resembles in style a certain type of the literary gladiator of French controversy. He has much of Eugene Pelletan in him, and something of Henri Rochefort, blended with a good deal that reminds one of Jules Simon. Frederick Harrison is fast becoming a power in the Radical politics and literature of England. John Morley is a young man of great culture, and who writes with a quite remarkable freshness and force. I could mention many other men of the same school (I have already said that I do not know whether each and every one of these is or is not a professed Positivist) who would be distinguished as scholars and writers in the literature of any country. However they may differ on minor points, however they may differ in ability, in experience, in discretion, they have one peculiarity in common: they are to be found foremost in every liberal and radical cause; they are always to be found on the side of the weak, and standing up for the oppressed; they are inveterate enemies of cant; they hate vulgar idolatry and vulgar idols. Looking back a few years, I can remember that almost, if not quite, every man I have alluded to was a fearless and outspoken advocate of the cause of the North, at a time when it was _de rigueur_ among men of "culture" in London to champion the cause of the South.

Some of the men I have named were indefatigable workers at that time on the unfas.h.i.+onable side. They wrote pamphlets; they wrote leading articles; they made speeches; they delivered lectures in out-of-the-way quarters to workingmen and poor men of all kinds; they hardly came, in any prominent way, before the public, in most of this work. It brought them, probably, no notoriety or recognition whatever on this side of the ocean; but their work was a power in England. I feel convinced that, in any case, the English workingmen would have gone right on such a question as that which was at issue between North and South. As Mr.

Motley truly said in his address to the New York Historical Society, the workers and the thinkers were never misled; but I am bound to say that the admirable knowledge of the realities of the subject; the clear, quick, and penetrating judgment, and the patient, unswerving hope and confidence which were so signally displayed by the London workingmen from first to last of that great struggle, were in no slight degree the result of the teaching and the labor of men like Professor Beesly and Frederick Harrison.

If I were to set up a typical Positivist, in order to make my American reader more readily and completely familiar with the picture which the word calls up in the minds of Londoners, I should do it in the following way: I should exhibit my model Positivist as a man still young for anything like prominence in English public life, but not actually young in years--say thirty-eight or forty. He has had a training at one of the great historical Universities, or at all events at the modern and popular University of London. He is a barrister, but does not practise much, and has probably a modest competence on which he can live without working for the sake of living, and can indulge his own tastes in literature and politics. He has immense earnestness and great self-conceit. He has an utter contempt for dull men and timid or half-measure men, and he scorns Whigs even more than Tories. He devotes much of his time generously and patiently to the political and other instruction of working men. He writes in the "Fortnightly Review," and sometimes in "MacMillan," and sometimes in the "Westminster Review." He plunges into gallant and fearless controversy with the "Pall Mall Gazette," and he is not easily worsted, for his pen is sharp and his ink very acrid. Nevertheless, is any great question stirring, with a serious principle or a deep human interest at the heart of it, he is sure to be found on the right side. Where the controversy is of a smaller kind and admits of crotchet, then he is pretty sure to bring out a crotchet of some kind. He is perpetually giving the "Sat.u.r.day Review" an opportunity to ridicule him and abuse him, and he does not care. He writes pamphlets and goes to immense trouble to get up the facts, and expense to give them to the world, and he never grudges trouble or money, where any cause or even any crotchet is to be served. He is ready to stand up alone, against all the world if needs be, for his opinions or his friends. Benevolent schemes which are of the nature of mere charity he never concerns himself about. I never heard of him on a platform with the Earl of Shaftesbury, and I fancy he has a contempt for all patronage of the poor or projects of an eleemosynary character. He is for giving men their political rights and educating them--if necessary compelling them to be educated; and he has little faith in any other way of doing good. He has, of course, a high admiration for and faith in Mr. Mill.

His nature is not quite reverential--in general he is rather inclined to sit in the chair of the scorner; but if he reverenced any living man it would be Mill. He admires the manly, n.o.ble character of Bright, and his calm, strong eloquence. I do not think he cares much about Gladstone--I rather fancy our Positivist looks upon Gladstone as somewhat weak and unsteady--and with him to be weak is indeed to be miserable. Disraeli is to him an object of entire scorn and detestation, for he can endure no one who has not deeply-rooted principles of some kind. He has a crotchet about Russia, a theory about China; he gets quite beside himself in his anger over the anonymous leading articles of the London press. He is not an English type of man at all, in the present and conventional sense. He cares not a rush about tradition, and mocks at the wisdom of our ancestors. The bare fact that some custom, or inst.i.tution, or way of thinking has been sanctioned and hallowed by long generations of usage, is in his eyes rather a _prima facie_ reason for despising it than otherwise. He is pitilessly intolerant of all superst.i.tions--save his own--that is to say, he is intolerant in words and logic and ridicule, for the wildest superst.i.tion would find him its defender, if it once came to be practically oppressed or even threatened. He is "ever a fighter," like one of Browning's heroes; he is the knight-errant, the Quixote of modern English politics. He admires George Eliot in literature, and, I should say, he regards Charles d.i.c.kens as a sort of person who does very well to amuse idlers and ignorant people. I do not hear of his going much to the theatre, and it is a doubt to me if he has yet heard of the "Grande d.u.c.h.esse." Life with him is a very earnest business, and, although he has a pretty gift of sarcasm, which he uses as a weapon of offence against his enemies, I cannot, with any effort of imagination, picture him to myself as in the act of making a joke.

A small drawing-room would a.s.suredly hold all the London Positivists who make themselves effective in English politics. Yet I do not hesitate to say that they are becoming--that they have already become--a power which no one, calculating on the chances of any coming struggle, can afford to leave out of his consideration. Their public influence thus far has been wholly for good; and they set up no propaganda that I have ever seen or heard of, as regards either philosophy or religion. The course of lectures I have already mentioned was the nearest approach to any public diffusion of their peculiar doctrines which I can remember, and it created little or no sensation in London. Indeed, little or no publicity was sought for it. I have read lately somewhere that a newspaper, specially devoted to the propagation and vindication of Positivism, is about to be, or has been started in London. I do not know whether this is true or not; but for any such journal I should antic.i.p.ate a very small circulation, and an existence only to be maintained by continual subsidy.

So quietly have these men hitherto pursued their course, whatever it may be, in religion or religious philosophy, that it was long indeed before any idea got abroad that the cl.u.s.ter of highly-educated, ultra-radical thinkers, who were to be found sharpshooting on the side of every great human principle and every oppressed cause, and who seemed positively to delight in standing up against the vulgar rush of public opinion, were anything more than chance a.s.sociates, or were bound by any tie more close and firm than that of general political sympathy. Even now that people are beginning to know them, and to cla.s.sify them, in a vague sort of way, as "those Positivists," they make so little parade of any peculiarity of faith that, without precise and personal knowledge, it would be rash to say for certain that this or that member of the group is or is not an actual professor of the Comtist religion. I read a few days ago, in one of the few sensible books written on America by an Englishman, some remarks made about a peculiar view of Europe's duty to Egypt, which was described as being held by "the Comtists." I do not know whether the men referred to hold the view ascribed to them or not; but, a.s.suredly, if they do, the fact has no more direct connection with their Comtism than Bright's free-trade views have with Bright's Quakerism. An ill.u.s.tration, however, will serve well enough as an example of the vague and careless sort of way in which doctrines and the men who profess them get mixed up together insolubly in the public mind.

The Sultan of a generation back, who told the European diplomatist that if he changed his religion at all he would become a Roman Catholic, because he observed that Roman Catholic people always grew the best wine, was not more unreasonable in his logic than many well-informed men when they are striving to connect cause and effect in dealing with the religion of others.

I do not myself make any attempt to explain why a follower of Comte's wors.h.i.+p should, at least in England, be always on the side of liberty and equality and human progress. Indeed, if inclined to discuss such a question at all, I should rather be disposed to put it the other way and ask how it happens that men so enlightened and liberal in education and principles should yield a moment's obedience to the ghostly shadow of Roman Catholic superst.i.tion, which Auguste Comte, in the decaying years of his n.o.ble intellect, conjured up to form a new religion. But I am quite content to let the question go unanswered--and should be willing, indeed, to leave it unasked. I wish just now to do nothing more than to direct the attention of American readers to the fact that a new set or sect has arisen to influence English politics, and that their influence and its origin are different from anything which, judging by the history of previous generations, one might naturally have been led to expect.

"Culture" in England has, of late years, almost invariably ranked itself on the side of privilege. The Oxford undergraduate shouts himself hoa.r.s.e in cheering for Disraeli and groaning for Bright. Oxford rejects Gladstone the moment he becomes a Liberal. The vigorous Radicalism of Thorold Rogers costs him his chair as professor of political economy, although no man in England is a more perfect master of some of the more important branches of that science. The journals which are started for the sake of being read by men of "culture" are sure to throw their influence, nine times out of ten, into the cause of privilege and cla.s.s ascendency. The "Sat.u.r.day Review" does this deliberately; the "Pall Mall Gazette" does it instinctively. Suddenly there comes out from the bosom of the universities themselves a band of keen, acute, fearless gladiators, who throw themselves into the van of every great movement which works for democracy, equality and freedom. They invade the press and the platform; they write in this journal and in that; they are always writing, always printing; they are ready for any a.s.sailant, however big, they are willing to work with any ally, however small; they shrink from no logical consequence or practical inconvenience of any argument or opinion; they take the working man by the hand and talk to him and tell him all they know--and it is something worth studying, the fact that their scholars.h.i.+p and his no-scholars.h.i.+p so often come to the same conclusion. They will work with anybody, because they go farther than almost anybody; and they will allow anybody the full swing of his own crotchet, even though he be not so willing to give them scope enough for theirs. Thus they are commonly a.s.sociated with Goldwin Smith, who has a perfect horror of French Democracy and French Imperialism, and who sees in Mirabeau only a "Voltairean debauchee;" with Tom Hughes, who is a st.u.r.dy member of the Church of England, and does not, I fancy, care three straws about the policy of ideas; with Bright, whose somewhat Puritanical mind draws back with a kind of dread from anything that savors of free-thinking; with Auberon Herbert, the mild young aristocrat, converted from Toryism by pure sentimentalism and philanthropy; with Connolly, the eloquent Irish plasterer, whose vigorous stump oratory aroused the warm admiration of Louis Blanc. It would be impossible that such a knot of men, so gifted and so fearless, so independent and so unresting, so keen of pen, and so unsparing of logic, should be without a clear and marked influence on the politics of England. It is quite a curious phenomenon that such a group of men should be found in close and constant co-operation with the English artisan, his trades' union organizations, and his political cause.

Frederick Harrison represented the working men in the Parliamentary commission lately held to inquire into the whole operation of the trades' unions. Professor Beesly writes continually in the "Beehive,"

the newspaper which is the organ of George Potter and the trades'

societies. I cannot see how the cause of Democracy can fail to derive strength and help from this sort of alliance, and I therefore welcome the influence upon English politics of the little group of Positivist penmen, believing that it will have a deeper reach than most people now imagine, and that where it operates effectively at all, it will be for good.