Let him go to Holland, and see that tho the Dutch early showed themselves good mechanics, and have had abundant practise in hydraulics, Amsterdam has been without any due supply of water until now that works are being established by an English company. Let him go to Berlin, and there be told that, to give that city a water supply such as London has had for generations, the project of an English firm is about to be executed by English capital, under English superintendence. Let him go to Paris, where he will if find a similar lack, and a like remedy now under consideration. Let him go to Vienna, and learn that it, in common with other continental cities, is lighted by an English gas company. Let him go on the Rhone, on the Loire, on the Danube, and discover that Englishmen established steam navigation on those rivers. Let him inquire concerning the railways in Italy, Spain, France, Sweden, Denmark, how many of them are English projects, how many have been largely helped by English capital, how many have been executed by English contractors, how many have had English engineers. Let him discover, too, as he will, that where railways have been government made, as in Russia, the energy, the perseverance, and the practical talent developed in England and the United States have been called in to aid.

And then if these illustrations of the progressiveness of a self-dependent race, and the torpidity of paternally governed ones, do not suffice him, he may read Mr. Laing's[47] successive volumes of European travel, and there study the contrast in detail. What, now, is the cause of this contrast? In the order of nature, a capacity for self-help must in every case have been brought into existence by the practise of self-help; and, other things equal, a lack of this capacity must in every case have arisen from the lack of demand for it. Do not these two antecedents and their two consequents agree with the facts as presented in England and Europe? Were not the inhabitants of the two, some centuries ago, much upon a par in point of enterprise? Were not the English even behind, in their manufactures, in their colonization, and in their commerce? Has not the immense relative change the English have undergone in this respect been coincident with the great relative self-dependence they have been since habituated to? And is not this change proximately ascribable to this habitual self-dependence? Whoever doubts it is asked to assign a more probable cause. Whoever admits it must admit that the enervation of a people by perpetual state aids is not a trifling consideration, but the most weighty consideration. A general arrest of national growth he will see to be an evil greater than any special benefits can compensate for. And, indeed, when, after contemplating this great fact, the overspreading of the earth by the Anglo-Saxons, he remarks the absence of any parallel phenomenon exhibited by a continental race—when he reflects how this difference must depend chiefly on difference of character, and how such difference of character has been mainly produced by difference of discipline; he will perceive that the policy pursued in this matter may have a large share in determining a nation's ultimate fate.

[Footnote 47: Samuel Laing traveled in Norway and Sweden in 1834, and published two books recounting his observations.]



III

THE ORNAMENTAL AND THE USEFUL IN EDUCATION[48]

It has been truly remarked that, in order of time, decoration precedes dress. Among people who submit to great physical suffering that they may have themselves handsomely tattooed, extremes of temperature are borne with but little attempt at mitigation. Humboldt tells us that an Orinoco Indian, tho quite regardless of bodily comfort, will yet labor for a fortnight to purchase pigment wherewith to make himself admired; and that the same woman who would not hesitate to leave her hut without a fragment of clothing on, would not dare to commit such a breach of decorum as to go out unpainted. Voyagers uniformly find that colored beads and trinkets are much more prized by wild tribes than are calicoes or broadcloths. And the anecdotes we have of the ways in which, when shirts and coats are given, they turn them to some ludicrous display, show how completely the idea of ornament predominates over that of use. Nay, there are still more extreme illustrations: witness the fact narrated by Captain Speke[49] of his African attendants, who strutted about in their goatskin mantles when the weather was fine, but when it was wet, took them off, folded them up, and went about naked, shivering in the rain! Indeed, the facts of aboriginal life seem to indicate that dress is developed out of decorations. And when we remember that even among ourselves most think more about the fineness of the fabric than its warmth, and more about the cut than the convenience—when we see that the function is still in great measure subordinated to the appearance, we have further reason for inferring such an origin.

[Footnote 48: From "Education, Intellectual, Moral and Physical." By permission of D. Appleton & Co.]

[Footnote 49: John H. Speke, who, in company with Sir Richard Burton, visited the lakes of Central Africa in 1850, and crossed the continent, discovering the Victoria Nyanza and the main source of the Nile in 1860-63.]

It is not a little curious that the like relations hold with the mind. Among mental as among bodily acquisitions, the ornamental comes before the useful. Not only in times past, but almost as much in our own era, that knowledge which conduces to personal well-being has been postponed to that which brings applause. In the Greek schools, music, poetry, rhetoric, and a philosophy which, until Socrates taught, had but little bearing upon action, were the dominant subjects; while knowledge, aiding the arts of life, had a very subordinate place. And in our own universities and schools at the present moment the like antithesis holds. We are guilty of something like a platitude when we say that throughout his after career a boy, in nine cases out of ten, applies his Latin and Greek to no practical purposes. The remark is trite that in his shop, or his office, in managing his estate or his family, in playing his part as director of a bank or a railway, he is very little aided by this knowledge he took so many years to acquire,—so little, that generally the greater part of it drops out of his memory; and if he occasionally vents a Latin quotation or alludes to some Greek myth, it is less to throw light on the topic in hand than for the sake of effect. If we inquire what is the real motive for giving boys a classical education, we find it to be simply conformity to public opinion. Men dress their children's minds as they do their bodies, in the prevailing fashion. As the Orinoco Indian puts on his paint before leaving his hut, not with a view to any direct benefit, but because he would be ashamed to be seen without it, so a boy's drilling in Latin and Greek is insisted on, not because of their intrinsic value, but that he may not be disgraced by being found ignorant of them—that he may have "the education of a gentleman"—the badge marking a certain social position, and bringing a consequent respect.

This parallel is still more clearly displayed in the case of the other sex. In the treatment of both mind and body, the decorative element has continued to predominate in a greater degree among women than among men. Originally personal adornment occupied the attention of both sexes equally. In these latter days of civilization, however, we see that in the dress of men the regard for appearance has, in a considerable degree, yielded to the regard for comfort; while in their education the useful has of late been trenching on the ornamental. In neither direction has this change gone so far with women. The wearing of earrings, finger-rings, bracelets; the elaborate dressings of the hair; the still occasional use of paint; the immense labor bestowed in making habiliments sufficiently attractive; and the great discomfort that will be submitted to for the sake of conformity; show how greatly, in the attiring of women, the desire of approbation overrides the desire for warmth and convenience. And similarly in their education, the immense preponderance of "accomplishments" proves how here, too, use is subordinated to display. Dancing, deportment, the piano, singing, drawing—-what a large space do these occupy! If you ask why Italian and German are learned, you will find that, under all the sham reasons given, the real reason is, that a knowledge of those tongues is thought ladylike. It is not that the books written in them may be utilized, which they scarcely ever are, but that Italian and German songs may be sung, and that the extent of attainment may bring whispered admiration. The births, deaths, and marriages of kings, and other like historic trivialities, are committed to memory, not because of any direct benefits that can possibly result from knowing them, but because society considers them parts of a good education—because the absence of such knowledge may bring the contempt of others. When we have named reading, writing, spelling, grammar, arithmetic, and sewing, we have named about all the things a girl is taught with a view to their direct uses in life; and even some of these have more reference to the good opinion of others than to immediate personal welfare.

Thoroughly to realize the truth that with the mind as with the body the ornamental precedes the useful, it is needful to glance at its rationale. This lies in the fact that, from the far past down even to the present, social needs have subordinated individual needs, and that the chief social need has been the control of individuals. It is not, as we commonly suppose, that there are no governments but those of monarchs, and parliaments, and constituted authorities. These acknowledged governments are supplemented by other unacknowledged ones, that grow up in all circles, in which every man or woman strives to be king or queen or lesser dignitary. To get above some and be reverenced by them, and to propitiate those who are above us, is the universal struggle in which the chief energies of life are expended. By the accumulation of wealth, by style of living, by beauty of dress, by display of knowledge or intellect, each tries to subjugate others, and so aids in weaving that ramified network of restraints by which society is kept in order. It is not the savage chief only who, in formidable war paint, with scalps at his belt, aims to strike awe into his inferiors; it is not only the belle who, by elaborate toilet, polished manners, and numerous accomplishments, strives to "make conquests"; but the scholar, the historian, the philosopher, use their acquirements to the same end. We are none of us content with quietly unfolding our own individualities to the full in all directions, but have a restless craving to impress our individualities upon others, and in some way subordinate them. And this it is which determines the character of our education. Not what knowledge is of most real worth is the consideration, but what will bring most applause, honor, respect—what will most conduce to social position and influence—what will be most imposing. As throughout life not what we are, but what we shall be thought, is the question; so in education the question is not the intrinsic value of knowledge so much as its extrinsic effects on others. And this being our dominant idea, direct utility is scarcely more regarded than by the barbarian when filing his teeth and staining his nails.



IV

REMINISCENCES OF HIS BOYHOOD[50]

Places where I gathered flowers and gazed with interest at the catkins of the hazel, have now become places covered with ironworks, where steam hammers make their perpetual thuds, and through which railway-sidings everywhere ramify. Quiet lanes in which, during early boyhood, I went with a companion trying to catch minnows with a hand-net in a clear little stream running by the hedge, have been transformed into straight roads between land-allotments, with scattered houses built by artizans. And where I picked blackberries, factories now stand.

[Footnote 50: From Part I, Chapter II, of the "Autobiography." Spencer's boyhood was passed in Derby. Copyright, 1904, by D. Appleton & Co., by whose kind permission passages from this work are printed here.]

There was a garden of some size behind the house containing fruit trees, and permitting a certain amount of floriculture; and my father rented an additional piece of land close by as a vegetable-garden. Not infrequently I had to join in gardening—more frequently, indeed, than I liked. Often when I ought to have been busy at some task which my father had set to me, I was otherwise occupied—throwing stones at the birds that settled on the walls and hedges; observing the bees on the kidney-bean flowers, piercing the base of each corolla to reach the honey; or, at a disused pump-trough containing stagnant water, watching the larvae of the gnats as they came wriggling to the surface, putting out their tails to breathe, and then descending. Most children are instinctively naturalists, and were they encouraged would readily pass from careless observations to careful and deliberate ones. My father was wise in such matters; and I was not simply allowed but encouraged to enter on natural history.

The majority of my activities, however, were those of the ordinary schoolboy, who, on Saturday afternoons and the like occasions of leisure, is commonly given to country rambles and the search for hedge-side treasures. During my early years the neighboring regions of Osmaston and Normanton were explored by me in all their details: every hedge becoming known in the course of expeditions, now in the spring seeking birds' nests, now gathering violets or dog-roses, and later in the year collecting sometimes mushrooms, sometimes blackberries, sometimes hips and haws, crab-apples and other wild products. Beyond the pleasurable exercise and the gratification to my love of adventure, there was gained during these excursions much miscellaneous knowledge of things, and the perceptions were beneficially disciplined. Of all the occupations, however, to which holidays were devoted, I delighted most in fishing. There was the river Derwent, at that time not the black dirty stream it is now, but tolerably clear and containing a fair supply of various fish; and there were the canals, which, on the whole, served better for boys' fishing. Many happy half-days, and, during the midsummer holidays, many whole days, were spent on their banks. Along with such exercise of skill as fishing itself implies, there came the exercise of skill in making fishing-tackle; for I was not so amply furnished with pocket-money that I could buy all the appliances I required. I was, I suspect, led by my father in that case, as in other cases, to use my own powers of manipulation for satisfying my needs. I made my own floats, and also "hair-tackles," as they were locally called—each some six feet of the line next the hook, made of single horse-hair instead of silk-worm gut. I remember I was cautious and systematic enough to use a test before trusting any one of them....

When I was something like nine or ten years old, the love of this sport led very nearly to loss of life. I fell into deep water in the Derwent and was close upon drowning. It is a curious fact that whereas dreams are, while in progress, regarded as real, the reality was in this case taken for a dream. During the first part of my immersion I thought to myself—"Oh, it is all a dream!"; and only after coming to the surface once or twice discovered that I was actually in the water. A youth of some sixteen or seventeen plunged in and rescued me. His name was George Holme. He was at that time a mill-manager. As may be inferred from the fact that he was the one out of a considerable number of spectators who risked himself to save me, he was of superior nature morally; and he turned out in after life to be also a man of much faculty. Gradually rising, he became a wealthy manufacturer; and was led, by the development of his business, to establish trade connections in various parts of the world—one being pushed even into Central Asia. When sixty he became mayor of Derby and magistrate. He had in a high degree that which another friend of mine describes as the business instinct—an instinct which experience tells him is quite special, and may or may not accompany other superiorities....

I may here name the fact that I was in boyhood extremely prone to castle-building—a habit which continued throughout youth and into mature life: finally passing, I suppose, into the dwelling on schemes more or less practicable. In early days the habit was such that on going to bed it was a source of satisfaction to me to think I should be able to lie for a length of time and dwell on the fancies which at the time occupied me; and frequently next morning, on awaking, I was vexed with myself because I had gone to sleep before I had reveled in my imaginations as much as I had intended. Often these dreams, becoming literally day-dreams, quite filled my unconsciousness when walking. Even in the streets my state of abstraction was such that I occasionally talked aloud as I went along: a fact of which I was from time to time made aware by people who turned to look at me.



V

A TRIBUTE TO E. L. YOUMANS[51]

Some years previously I had made the acquaintance of an American whose sympathies were enlisted on my behalf by perusal of some of my books or essays—Mr. E. A. Silsbee, of Salem, Mass. While yet the circular was in its unfinished state, I sent to him a copy, accompanied by the inquiry whether he thought that subscribers might be obtained in America. His reply, dated February 14, held out much encouragement; and a letter of March 6, written after the circular had been sent to New York, contained a sentence the significance of which was shown by subsequent events. The sentence runs—"Mr. Youmans, a very popular and intelligent lecturer on scientific subjects, well known by his works on chemistry, physiology, etc., entered with great enthusiasm into the project." Devoting himself with characteristic vigor to the furtherance of my scheme, this previously unknown friend succeeded in obtaining more than two hundred subscribers.

[Footnote 51: From Part VII of the "Autobiography." Copyright, 1904, by D. Appleton & Co.]

The relation thus initiated was extremely fortunate; for Prof. Edward L. Youmans[52] was of all Americans I have known or heard of, the one most able and most willing to help me. Alike intellectually and morally, he had in the highest degrees the traits conducive to success in diffusing the doctrines he espoused; and from that time to this he has devoted his time mainly in spreading throughout the United States the doctrine of evolution. His love of wide generalizations had been shown years before in lectures on such topics as the correlation of the physical forces; and from those who heard him I have gathered that, aided by his unusual powers of exposition, the enthusiasm which contemplation of the larger truths of science produced in him was in a remarkable degree communicated to his hearers. Such larger truths, I have on many occasions observed, are those which he quickly seizes—ever passing at once through details to lay hold of essentials; and having laid hold of them, he clearly sets them forth afresh in his own way with added illustrations. But it is morally even more than intellectually that he has proved himself a true missionary of advanced ideas. Extremely energetic—so energetic that no one has been able to cheek his over-activity—he has expended all his powers in advancing what he holds to be the truth; and not only his powers but his means. It has proved impossible to prevent him from injuring himself in health by his exertions; and it has proved impossible to make him pay due regard to his personal interests. So that toward the close of life he finds himself wrecked in body and impoverished in estate by thirty years of devotion to high ends. Among worshipers of humanity, who teach that human welfare should be the dominant aim, I have not heard of one whose sacrifices will bear comparison with those of my friend.

[Footnote 52: Spencer's debt to Professor Youmans has been well known in America. He was not only instrumental in securing the publication of his works here, but even more so in popularizing them through the Popular Science Monthly, of which he was the editorial founder. He had other distinction as a chemist and published a "Class Book of Chemistry" in 1852, and an "Atlas of Chemistry," in 1854.]



VI

WHY HE NEVER MARRIED[53]

Thus, if I leave out altruistic considerations and include egoistic considerations only, I may still look back from these declining days of life with content. One drawback indeed there has been, and that a great one. All through those years in which work should have had the accompaniment of wife and children, my means were such as to render marriage impossible: I could barely support myself, much less others. And when, at length, there came adequate means the fit time had passed by. Even in this matter, however, it may be that fortune has favored me. Frequently when prospects are promising, dissatisfaction follows marriage rather than satisfaction; and in my own case the prospects would not have been promising. I am not by nature adapted to a relation in which perpetual compromise and great forbearance are needful. That extreme critical tendency which I have above described, joined with a lack of reticence no less pronounced, would, I fear, have caused perpetual domestic differences. After all, my celibate life has probably been the best for me, as well as the best for some unknown other.

[Footnote 53: From Part XII of the "Autobiography." Copyright 1904, by D. Appleton & Co.]



HENRY THOMAS BUCKLE

Born in 1821, died in 1862; his father a wealthy ship owner in London; published the first volume of his "History of Civilization" in 1857, second volume appearing in 1861; his death occurred in Syria, where he was traveling for his health; his last words "Oh, my book; I shall never finish my book."



I

THE ISOLATION OF SPAIN[54]

The Spaniards have had everything except knowledge. They have had immense wealth, and fertile and well-peopled territories in all parts of the globe. Their own country, washed by the Atlantic and Mediterranean, and possest of excellent harbors, is admirably situated for the purposes of trade between Europe and America, being so placed as to command the commerce of both hemispheres. They had, at a very early period, ample municipal privileges; they had independent parliaments; they had the right of choosing their own magistrates, and managing their own cities. They have had rich and flourishing towns, abundant manufactures, and skilful artizans, whose choice productions could secure a ready sale in every market in the world. They have cultivated the fine arts with eminent success; their noble and exquisite paintings, and their magnificent churches being justly ranked among the most wonderful efforts of the human hand. They speak a beautiful, sonorous and flexible language, and their literature is not unworthy of their language. Their soil yields treasures of every kind. It overflows with wine and oil, and produces the choicest fruits in an almost tropical exuberance. It contains the most valuable minerals, in a profuse variety, unexampled in any other part of Europe. Nowhere else do we find such rare and costly marbles, so easily accessible, and in such close communication with the sea, where they might safely be shipped, and sent to countries which required them. As to the metals, there is hardly one which Spain does not possess in large quantities. Her mines of silver and quicksilver are well known. She abounds in copper, and her supply of lead is enormous. Iron and coal, the two most useful of all the productions of the inorganic world, are also abundant in that highly favored country. Iron is said to exist in every part of Spain, and to be of the best quality; while the coal mines of Asturias are described as inexhaustible. In short, nature has been so prodigal of her bounty that it has been observed with hardly an hyperbole that the Spanish nation possesses within itself nearly every natural production which can satisfy either the necessity or the curiosity of mankind.

[Footnote 54: From Volume II, Chapter VIII, of the "History of Civilization in England."]

These are splendid gifts; it is for the historian to tell how they have been used. Certainly, the people who possess them have never been deficient in natural endowments. They have had their full share of great statesmen, great kings, great magistrates, and great legislators. They have had many able and vigorous rulers; and their history is ennobled by the frequent appearance of courageous and disinterested patriots, who have sacrificed their all that they might help their country. The bravery of the people has never been disputed; while, as to the upper classes, the punctilious honor of a Spanish gentleman has passed into a byword, and circulated through the world. Of the nation generally, the best observers pronounce them to be high-minded, generous, truthful, full of integrity, warm and zealous friends, affectionate in all private relations of life, frank, charitable, and humane. Their sincerity in religious matters is unquestionable; they are, moreover, eminently temperate and frugal. Yet, all these great qualities have availed them nothing, and will avail them nothing so long as they remain ignorant....

In Spain there never has been a revolution,[55] properly so called; there never has even been one grand national rebellion. The people, tho often lawless, are never free. Among them we find still preserved that peculiar taint of barbarism which makes men prefer occasional disobedience to systematic liberty. Certain feelings there are of our common nature, which even their slavish loyalty can not eradicate, and which, from time to time, urge them to resist injustice. Such instincts are happily the inalienable lot of humanity, which we can not forfeit, if we would, and which are too often the last resource against the extravagances of tyranny. And this is all that Spain now possesses. The Spaniards, however, resist, not because they are Spaniards, but because they are men. Still, even while they resist, they revere. While they will rise up against a vexatious impost, they crouch before a system of which the impost is the smallest evil. They smite the tax-gatherer, but fall prostrate at the feet of the contemptible prince for whom the tax-gatherer plies his craft; they will even revile the troublesome and importunate monk, or sometimes they will scoff at the sleek and arrogant priest, while such is their infatuation that they would risk their lives in defense of that cruel Church which has inflicted on them hideous calamities, but to which they still cling, as it it were the dearest object of their affections.

[Footnote 55: It is here to be borne in mind that Buckle wrote long before the revolutionary successes achieved by Castelar, Prim and Serrano, and the overthrow and exile of Queen Isabella in 1868.]

Connected with these habits of mind, and in sooth forming part of them, we find a reverence for antiquity, and an inordinate tenacity of old opinion, old beliefs, and old habits, which remind us of those tropical civilizations which formerly flourished. Such prejudices were once universal, even in Europe; but they began to die out in the sixteenth century, and are now, comparatively speaking, extinct, except in Spain, where they have always been welcomed. In that country, they retain their original force, and produce their natural results. By encouraging the notion that all the truths most important to know are already known, they repress those aspirations, and dull that generous confidence in the future, without which nothing really great can be achieved. A people who regard the past with too wistful an eye will never bestir themselves to help the onward progress. They will hardly believe that progress is possible. To them antiquity is synonymous with wisdom, and every improvement is a dangerous innovation.

In this state Europe lingered for many centuries; in this state Spain still lingers. Hence the Spaniards are remarkable for an inertness, a want of buoyancy, and an absence of hope, which, in our busy and enterprising age, isolate them from the rest of the civilized world. Believing that little can be done, they are in no hurry to do it. Believing that the knowledge they have inherited is far greater than any they can obtain, they wish to preserve their intellectual possessions whole and unimpaired; inasmuch as the least alteration in them might lessen their value. Content with what has been already bequeathed, they are excluded from that great European movement, which, first clearly perceptible in the sixteenth century, has ever since been steadily advancing, unsettling old opinion, destroying old follies, reforming and improving on every side, influencing even such barbarous countries as Russia and Turkey, but leaving Spain unscathed.

While the human intellect has been making most prodigious and unheard-of strides, while discoveries in every quarter are simultaneously pressing upon us and coming in such rapid and bewildering succession that the strongest sight, dazzled by the glare of their splendor, is unable to contemplate them as a whole; while other discoveries still more important, and still more remote from ordinary experience, are manifestly approaching, and may be seen looming in the distance whence they are now obscurely working on the advanced thinkers who are nearest to them, filling their minds with those ill-defined, restless, and almost uneasy feelings, which are the invariable harbingers of future triumph; while the veil is being rudely torn and nature, violated at all points, is forced to disclose her secrets, and reveal her structure, her economy, and her laws to the indomitable energy of man; while Europe is ringing with the noise of intellectual achievements, with which even despotic governments affect to sympathize, in order that they may divert them from their natural course, and use them as new instruments whereby to oppress yet more the liberties of the people; while, amidst this general din and excitement, the public mind, swayed to and fro, is tossed and agitated—Spain sleeps on, untroubled, unheeding, impassive, receiving no impressions from the rest of the world, and making no impressions upon it. There she lies at the further extremity of the Continent, a huge and torpid mass, the sole representative now remaining of the feelings and the knowledge of the middle ages, and, what is the worst symptom of all, she is satisfied with her own condition. Tho she is the most backward country in Europe, she believes herself to be the foremost. She is proud of everything of which she should be ashamed. She is proud of the antiquity of her opinion; proud of her orthodoxy; proud of the strength of her faith; proud of her immeasurable and childish credulity; proud of her unwillingness to amend either her creed or her customs; proud of her hatred of heretics, and proud of the undying vigilance with which she has baffled their efforts to obtain a full and legal establishment on her soil.



II

GEORGE III AND THE ELDER PITT[56]

To a superficial observer, the accession of George III was one of the most fortunate events that could have occurred. The new king was born in England, spoke English as his mother tongue, and was said to look upon Hanover as a foreign country, whose interests were to be considered of subordinate importance. At the same time, the last hopes of the House of Stuart were now destroyed; the Pretender himself was languishing in Italy, where he shortly after died: and his son, a slave to the vices which seemed hereditary in that family, was consuming his life in an unpitied and ignominious obscurity.

[Footnote 56: From Volume I, Chapter VII, of the "History of Civilization in England."]

And yet these circumstances, which appeared so favorable, did of necessity involve the most disastrous consequences. The fear of a disputed succession being removed, the sovereign was emboldened to a course on which he otherwise would not have ventured. All those monstrous doctrines respecting the rights of kings, which the Revolution was supposed to have destroyed, were suddenly revived. The clergy, abandoning the now hopeless cause of the Pretender, displayed the same zeal for the House of Hanover which they had formerly displayed for the House of Stuart. The pulpits resounded with praises of the new king, of the domestic virtues, of his piety, but, above all, his dutiful attachment to the English Church. The result was the establishment of an alliance between the two parties more intimate than any had been seen in England since the time of Charles I. Under their auspices the old Tory faction rapidly rallied, and were soon able to dispossess their rivals of the management of the government.

This reactionary movement was greatly aided by the personal character of George III, for he, being despotic as well as superstitious, was equally anxious to extend the prerogative and strengthen the church. Every liberal sentiment, everything approaching to reform, nay, even the mere mention of inquiry, was an abomination in the eyes of that narrow and ignorant prince. Without knowledge, without taste, without even a glimpse of one of the sciences, or a feeling for one of the fine arts, education had done nothing to enlarge a mind which nature had more than usually contracted. Totally ignorant of the history and resources of foreign countries, and barely knowing their geographical position, his information was scarcely more extensive respecting the people over whom he was called to rule. In that immense mass of evidence now extant, and which consists of every description of private correspondence, records of private conversation and of public acts, there is not to be found the slightest proof that he knew any one of those numerous things which the governor of a country ought to know; or indeed, that he was acquainted with a single duty of his position, except that mere mechanical routine of ordinary business which might have been effected by the lowest clerk in the meanest office in his kingdom.

The course of proceeding which such a king as this was likely to follow could be easily foreseen. He gathered round his throne that great party, who, clinging to the tradition of the past, have always made it their boast to check the progress of their age. During the sixty years of his reign, he, with the sole exception of Pitt, never willingly admitted to his councils a single man of great ability; not one whose name is associated with any measure of value either in domestic or in foreign policy. Even Pitt only maintained his position in the state by forgetting the lessons of his illustrious father, and abandoning those liberal principles in which he had been educated, and with which he entered public life. Because George III hated the idea of reform, Pitt not only relinquished what he had before declared to be absolutely necessary, but did not hesitate to persecute to the death the party with whom he had once associated in order to obtain it. Because George III looked upon slavery as one of those good old customs which the wisdom of his ancestors had consecrated, Pitt did not dare to use his power for procuring its abolition, but left to his successors the glory of destroying that infamous trade, on the preservation of which his royal master had set his heart. Because George III detested the French of whom he knew as much as he knew of the inhabitants of Kamchatka or of Tibet, Pitt, contrary to his own judgment, engaged in a war with France by which England was seriously imperiled, and the English people burdened with a debt that their remotest posterity will be unable to pay. But, notwithstanding all this, when Pitt, only a few years before his death, showed a determination to concede to the Irish some small share of their undoubted rights, the King dismissed him from office; and the King's friends, as they were called, exprest their indignation at the presumption of a minister who could oppose the wishes of so benign and gracious a master. And when, unhappily for his own fame, this great man determined to return to power, he could only recover office by conceding that very point for which he had relinquished it; thus setting the mischievous example of the minister of a free country sacrificing his own judgment to the personal prejudices of the sovereign.

As it was hardly possible to find other ministers who to equal abilities would add equal subservience, it is not surprizing that the highest offices were constantly filled by men of notorious incapacity. Indeed, the King seemed to have an instinctive antipathy to everything great and noble. During the reign of George II the elder Pitt had won for himself a reputation which covered the world, and had carried to an unprecedented height the glories of the English name. He, however, as the avowed friend of popular rights, strenuously opposed the despotic principles of the court; and for this reason he was hated by George III with a hatred that seemed barely compatible with a sane mind.



MATTHEW ARNOLD

Born in 1822, died in 1888; son of "Arnold of Rugby"; educated at Rugby and Oxford; fellow of Oriel; lay inspector of schools in 1851: professor of poetry at Oxford in 1857; visited the United States in 1883 and 1886; published "Empedocles on Etna" in 1853, "Essays in Criticism" in 1865, "Literature and Dogma" in 1873, "Culture and Anarchy" in 1877.



THE MOTIVE FOR CULTURE[57]

The disparagers of culture make its motive curiosity; sometimes, indeed, they make its motive mere exclusiveness and vanity. The culture which is supposed to plume itself on a smattering of Greek and Latin is a culture which is begotten by nothing so intellectual as curiosity; it is valued either out of sheer vanity and ignorance or else as an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it. No serious man would call this culture, or attach any value to it as culture at all. To find the real ground for the very different estimate which serious people will set upon culture we must find some motive for culture in the terms of which may lie a real ambiguity; and such a motive the word curiosity gives us.

[Footnote 57: From "Culture and Anarchy."]

I have before now pointed out that we English do not, like the foreigners, use this word in a good sense as well as in a bad sense. With us the word is always used in a somewhat disapproving sense. A liberal and intelligent eagerness about the things of the mind may be meant by a foreigner when he speaks of curiosity, but with us the word always conveys a certain notion of frivolous and unedifying activity. In the Quarterly Review, some little time ago, was an estimate of the celebrated French critic, M. Sainte-Beuve, and a very inadequate estimate of it in my judgment it was. And its inadequacy consisted chiefly in this: that in our English way it left out of sight the double sense really involved in the word curiosity, thinking enough was said to stamp M. Sainte-Beuve with blame, if it was said that he was impelled in his operations as a critic by curiosity, and omitting either to perceive that M. Sainte-Beuve himself, and many other people with him, would consider that this was praiseworthy and not blameworthy, or to point out why it ought really to be accounted worthy of blame and not of praise. For as there is a curiosity about intellectual matters which is futile, and merely a disease, so there is certainly a curiosity—a desire after the things, of the mind simply for their own sakes and for the pleasure of seeing them as they are—which is, in an intelligent being, natural and laudable.

Nay, and the very desire to see things as they are implies a balance and regulation of mind which is not often attained without fruitful effort, and which is the very opposite of the blind and diseased impulse of mind which is what we mean to blame when we blame curiosity. Montesquieu says: "The first motive which ought to impel us to study is the desire to augment the excellence of our nature, and to render an intelligent being yet more intelligent." This is the true ground to assign for the genuine scientific passion, however manifested, and for culture, viewed simply as a fruit of this passion; and it is a worthy ground, even tho we let the term curiosity stand to describe it.

But there is of culture another view, in which not solely the scientific passion, the sheer desire to see things as they are, natural and proper in an intelligent being, appears as the ground of it. There is a view in which all the love of our neighbor, the impulses toward action, help, and beneficence; the desire for removing human error, clearing human confusion, and diminishing human misery, the noble aspiration to leave the world better and happier than we found it—motives eminently such as are called social—come in as part of the grounds of culture, and the main and preeminent part. Culture is then properly described not as having its origin in curiosity, but as having its origin in the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection. It moves by the force, not merely or primarily of the scientific passion for pure knowledge, but also of the moral and social passion for doing good. As, in the first view of it, we took for its worthy motto Montesquieu's words: "To render an intelligent being yet more intelligent!" so, in the second view of it, there is no better motto which it can have than these words of Bishop Wilson: "To make reason and the will of God prevail!"....

The pursuit of perfection, then, is the pursuit of sweetness and light. He who works for sweetness and light works to make reason and the will of God prevail. He who works for machinery, he who works for hatred, works only for confusion. Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred, culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and light. It has one even yet greater!—the passion for making them prevail. It is not satisfied till we all come to a perfect man; it knows that the sweetness and light of the few must be imperfect, until the raw and unkindled masses of humanity are touched with sweetness and light. If I have not shrunk from saying that we must work for sweetness and light, so neither have I shrunk from saying that we must have a broad basis, must have sweetness and light for as many as possible. Again and again I have insisted how those are the happy moments of humanity, how those are the marking epochs of a people's life, how those are the flowering times for literature and art and all the creative power of genius, when there is a national glow of life and thought, when the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive. Only it must be real thought and real beauty; real sweetness and real light. Plenty of people will try to give the masses, as they call them, an intellectual food prepared and adapted in the way they think proper for the actual condition of the masses. The ordinary popular literature is an example of this way of working on the masses. Plenty of people will try to indoctrinate the masses with the set of ideas and judgments constituting the creed of their own profession or party.

Our religions and political organizations give an example of this way of working on the masses. I condemn neither way; but culture works differently. It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely—nourished, and not bound by them. This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality. The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time, who have labored to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it; to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.

Such a man was Abelard in the Middle Ages, in spite of all his imperfections; and thence the boundless emotion and enthusiasm which Abelard excited. Such were Lessing and Herder in Germany, at the end of the last century; and their services to Germany were in this way inestimably precious. Generations will pass, and literary monuments will accumulate, and works far more perfect than the works of Lessing and Herder will be produced in Germany; and yet the names of these two men will fill a German with a reverence and enthusiasm such as the names of the most gifted masters will hardly awaken.

And why? Because they humanized knowledge; because they broadened the basis of life and intelligence; because they worked powerfully to diffuse the sweetness and light, to make reason and the will of God prevail. With Saint Augustine they said: "Let us not leave thee alone to make in the secret of thy knowledge, as thou didst before the creation of the firmament, the division of light from darkness; let the children of thy spirit, placed in their firmament, make their light shine upon the earth, mark the division of night and day, and announce the revolution of the times; for the old order is passed, and the new arises; the night is spent, the day is come forth; and thou shalt crown the year with thy blessing, when thou shalt send forth laborers into thy harvest sown by other hands than theirs; when thou shalt send forth new laborers to new seedtimes, whereof the harvest shall be not yet."



EDWARD A. FREEMAN

Born in 1823, died in 1892; educated at Oxford, remaining there as a fellow until 1847, and later for many years an examiner there in Modern History; made Regius professor at Oxford in 1884; published his "Conquest of the Saracens" in 1856, "Federal Government from the Foundation of the Achaian League to the Disruption of the United States" in 1863, this work being never completed; "The Norman Conquest" in 1867-79, "Historical Essays" in 1871, "Some Impressions of the United States" in 1893, and many other volumes on general and local history.



THE DEATH OF WILLIAM THE CONQUEROR[58]

The death-bed of William was a death-bed of all formal devotion, a death-bed of penitence which we may trust was more than formal. The English Chronicles,[59] after weighing the good and evil in him, sends him out of the world with a charitable prayer for his soul's rest; and his repentance, late and fearful as it was, at once marks the distinction between the conqueror on his bed of death and his successor cut off without a thought of penitence in the midst of his crimes. He made his will. The mammon of unrighteousness which he had gathered together amid the groans and tears of England he now strove so to dispose of as to pare his way to an everlasting habitation. All his treasures were distributed among the poor and the churches of his dominions. A special sum was set apart for the rebuilding of the churches which had been burned at Mantes, and gifts in money and books and ornaments of every kind were to be distributed among all the churches of England according to their rank. He then spoke of his own life and of the arrangements which he wished to make for his dominions after his death. The Normans, he said, were a brave and unconquered race; but they needed the curb of a strong and righteous master to keep them in the path of order. Yet the rule over them must by all law pass to Robert. Robert was his eldest born; he had promised him the Norman succession before he won the crown of England, and he had received the homage of the barons of the Duchy. Normandy and Maine must therefore pass to Robert, and for them he must be the man of the French king. Yet he well knew how sad would be the fate of the land which had to be ruled by one so proud and foolish, and for whom a career of shame and sorrow was surely doomed.

[Footnote 58: From "The History of the Norman Conquest."]

[Footnote 59: William of Malmesbury.]

But what was to be done with England? Now at last the heart of William smote him. To England he dared not appoint a successor; he could only leave the disposal of the island realm to the Almighty Ruler of the world. The evil deeds of his past life crowded upon his soul. Now at last his heart confest that he had won England by no right, by no claim of birth; that he had won the English crown by wrong, and that what he had won by wrong he had no right to give to another. He had won his realm by warfare and bloodshed; he had treated the sons of the English soil with needless harshness; he had cruelly wronged nobles and commons; he had spoiled many men wrongfully of their inheritance; he had slain countless multitudes by hunger or by the sword. The harrying of Northumberland now rose up before his eyes in all its blackness. The dying man now told how cruelly he had burned and plundered the land, what thousands of every age and sex among the noble nation which he had conquered had been done to death at his bidding. The scepter of the realm which he had won by so many crimes he dared not hand over to any but to God alone. Yet he would not hide his wish that his son William, who had ever been dutiful to him, might reign in England after him. He would send him beyond the sea, and he would pray Lafranc to place the crown upon his head, if the Primate in his wisdom deemed that such an act could he rightly done.

Of the two sons of whom he spoke, Robert was far away, a banished rebel; William was by his bedside. By his bedside also stood his youngest son, the English AEtheling, Henry the Clerk. "And what dost thou give to me, my father?" said the youth. "Five thousand pounds of silver from my hoard," was the Conqueror's answer. "But of what use is a hoard to me if I have no place to dwell in?" "Be patient, my son, and trust in the Lord, and let thine elders go before thee." It is perhaps by the light of the later events that our chronicler goes on to make William tell his youngest son that the day would come when he would succeed both his brothers in their dominions, and would be richer and mightier than either of them. The King then dictated a letter to Lafranc, setting forth his wishes with regard to the kingdom. He sealed it and gave it to his son William, and bade him, with his last blessing and his last kiss, to cross at once into England. William Rufus straightway set forth for Witsand, and there heard of his father's death. Meanwhile Henry, too, left his father's bedside to take for himself the money that was left to him, to see that nothing was lacking in its weight, to call together his comrades on whom he could trust, and to take measures for stowing the treasure in a place of safety.

And now those who stood around the dying King began to implore his mercy for the captives whom he held in prison. He granted the prayer....

The last earthly acts of the Conqueror were now done. He had striven to make his peace with God and man, and to make such provision as he could for the children and the subjects whom he had left behind him. And now his last hour was come. On a Thursday morning in September, when the sun had already risen upon the earth, the sound of the great bell of the metropolitan minster struck on the ears of the dying King. He asked why it sounded. He was told that it rang for prime in the church of our Lady. William lifted his eyes to heaven, he stretched forth his hands, and spake his last words: "To my Lady Mary, the Holy Mother of God, I commend myself, that by her holy prayers she may reconcile me to her dear Son, our Lord Jesus Christ." He prayed, and his soul passed away. William, king of the English and duke of the Normans, the man whose fame has filled the world in his own and in every following age, had gone the way of all flesh. No kingdom was left him now but his seven feet of ground, and even to that his claim was not to be undisputed.

The death of a king in those days came near to a break-up of all civil society. Till a new king was chosen and crowned, there was no longer a power in the land to protect or to chastise. All bonds were loosed; all public authority was in abeyance; each man had to look to his own as he best might. No sooner was the breath out of William's body than the great company which had patiently watched around him during the night was scattered hither and thither. The great men mounted their horses and rode with all speed to their own homes, to guard their houses and goods against the outburst of lawlessness which was sure to break forth now that the land had no longer a ruler. Their servants and followers, seeing their lords gone, and deeming that there was no longer any fear of punishment, began to make spoil of the royal chamber. Weapons, clothes, vessels, the royal bed and its furniture, were carried off, and for a whole day the body of the Conqueror lay well-nigh bare on the floor of the room in which he died.



THOMAS HENRY HUXLEY

Born in 1825, died in 1895; educated at Charing Cross Hospital, London; assistant surgeon a naval ship in 1846-50; professor at the Royal School of Mines and the Royal Institute; lord rector of Aberdeen in 1874; lecturer at Cambridge in 1883; president of the Royal Society in 1883; published, among other works, "Man's Place in Nature" in 1868, "Lay Sermons" in 1870; "Critiques and Addresses" in 1873, "Evolution and Ethics" in 1893.



ON A PIECE OF CHALK[60]

A great chapter of the history of the world is written in the chalk. Few passages in the history of man can be supported by such an overwhelming mass of direct and indirect evidence as that which testifies to the truth of the fragment of the history of the globe which I hope to enable you to read with your own eyes to-night. Let me add that few chapters of human history have a more profound significance for ourselves. I weigh my words well when I assert that the man who should know the true history of the bit of chalk which every carpenter carries about in his breeches pocket, tho ignorant of all other history, is likely, if he will think his knowledge out to its ultimate results, to have a truer and therefore a better conception of this wonderful universe, and of man's relation to it, than the most learned student who is deep-read in the records of humanity and ignorant of those of Nature.

[Footnote 60: From a lecture delivered to the workingmen of Norwich, England, during the meeting of the British Association in 1868, now included in "Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews." By permission of D. Appleton & Co.]

The language of the chalk is not hard to learn; not nearly so hard as Latin, if you only want to get at the broad features of the story it has to tell: and I propose that we now set to work to spell that story out together.

We all know that if we "burn" chalk, the result is quicklime. Chalk in fact is a compound of carbonic-acid gas and lime; and when you make it very hot, the carbonic acid flies away and the lime is left. By this method of procedure we see the lime, but we do not see the carbonic acid. If on the other hand you were to powder a little chalk and drop it into a good deal of strong vinegar, there would be a great bubbling and fizzing, and finally a clear liquid in which no sign of chalk would appear. Here you see the carbonic acid in the bubbles; the lime dissolved in the vinegar vanishes from sight. There are a great many other ways of showing that chalk is essentially nothing but carbonic acid and quicklime. Chemists enunciate the result of all the experiments which prove this, by stating that chalk is almost wholly composed of "carbonate of lime."

It is desirable for us to start from the knowledge of this fact, tho it may not seem to help us very far toward what we seek. For carbonate of lime is a widely spread substance, and is met with under very various conditions. All sorts of limestones are composed of more or less pure carbonate of lime. The crust which is often deposited by waters which have drained through limestone rocks, in the form of what are called stalagmites and stalactites, is carbonate of lime. Or to take a more familiar example, the fur on the inside of a tea-kettle is carbonate of lime; and for anything chemistry tells us to the contrary, the chalk might be a kind of gigantic fur upon the bottom of the earth-kettle, which is kept pretty hot below...

But the slice of chalk presents a totally different appearance when placed under the microscope. The general mass of it is made up of very minute granules; but imbedded in this matrix are innumerable bodies, some smaller and some larger, but on a rough average not more than a hundredth of an inch in diameter, having a well-defined shape and structure. A cubic inch of some specimens of chalk may contain hundreds of thousands of these bodies, compacted together with incalculable millions of granules.

The examination of a transparent slice gives a good notion of the manner in which the components of the chalk are arranged, and of their relative proportion. But by rubbing up some chalk with a brush in water and then pouring off the milky fluid, so as to obtain sediments of different degrees of fineness, the granules and the minute rounded bodies may be pretty well separated from one another, and submitted to microscopic examination, either as opaque or as transparent objects. By combining the views, obtained in these various methods, each of the rounded bodies may be proved to be a beautifully constructed calcareous fabric, made up of a number of chambers communicating freely with one another. The chambered bodies are of various forms. One of the commonest is something like a badly grown raspberry, being formed of a number of nearly globular chambers of different sizes congregated together. It is called Globigerina, and some specimens of chalk consist of little else than Globigerinae and granules. Let us fix our attention upon the Globigerina. It is the spore of the game we are tracking. If we can learn what it is and what are the conditions of its existence, we shall see our way to the origin and past history of the chalk.

The history of the discovery of these living Globigerinae, and of the part which they play in rock-building, is singular enough. It is a discovery which, like others of no less scientific importance, has arisen incidentally out of work devoted to very different and exceedingly practical interests. When men first took to the sea, they speedily learned to look out for the shoals and rocks; and the more the burden of their ships increased, the more imperatively necessary it became for sailors to ascertain with precision the depth of the waters they traversed. Out of this necessity grew the use of the lead and sounding-line; and ultimately marine surveying, which is the recording of the form of coasts and of the depth of the sea, as ascertained by the sounding-lead, upon charts.

At the same time it became desirable to ascertain and to indicate the nature of the sea bottom, since this circumstance greatly affects its goodness as holding-ground for anchors. Some ingenious tar, whose name deserves a better fate than the oblivion into which it has fallen, attained the object by "arming" the bottom of the lead with a lump of grease, to which more or less of the sand or mud or broken shells, as the case might be, adhered, and was brought to the surface. But however well adapted such an apparatus might be for rough nautical purposes, scientific accuracy could not be expected from the armed lead; and to remedy its defects (especially when applied to sounding in great depths), Lieutenant Brooke of the American Navy some years ago invented a most ingenious machine, by which a considerable portion of the superficial layer of the sea bottom can be scooped out and brought up from any depth to which the lead descends. In 1853 Lieutenant Brooke obtained mud from the bottom of the North Atlantic, between Newfoundland and the Azores, at a depth of more than 10,000 feet or two miles, by the help of this sounding apparatus. The specimens were sent for examination to Ehrenberg of Berlin and to Bailey of West Point; and those able microscopists found that this deep-sea mud was almost entirely composed of the skeletons of living organisms—the greater proportion of these being just like the Globigerinae already known to occur in the chalk.

Thus far the work had been carried on simply in the interests of science; but Lieutenant Brooke's method of sounding acquired a high commercial value when the enterprise of laying down the telegraph cable between this country and the United States was undertaken. For it became a matter of immense importance to know not only the depth of the sea over the whole line along which the cable was to be laid, but the exact nature of the bottom, so as to guard against chances of cutting or fraying the strands of that costly rope. The Admiralty consequently ordered Captain Dayman, an old friend and shipmate of mine, to ascertain the depth over the whole line of the cable and to bring back specimens of the bottom. In former days, such a command as this might have sounded very much like one of the impossible things which the young prince in the fairy tales is ordered to do before he can obtain the hand of the princess. However, in the months of June and July, 1857, my friend performed the task assigned to him with great expedition and precision, without, so far as I know, having met with any reward of that kind. The specimens of Atlantic mud which he procured were sent to me to be examined and reported upon.

The results of all these operations is, that we know the contours and the nature of the surface soil covered by the North Atlantic for a distance of I,700 miles from east to west, as well as we know that of any part of the dry land. It is a prodigious plain—one of the widest and most even plains in the world. If the sea were drained off, you might drive a wagon all the way from Valentia on the west coast of Ireland, to Trinity Bay in Newfoundland; and except upon one sharp incline about 200 miles from Valentia, I am not quite sure that it would even be necessary to put the skid on, so gentle are the ascents and descents upon that long route. From Valentia the road would lie downhill for about 200 miles, to the point at which the bottom is now covered by I,700 fathoms of sea-water. Then would come the central plain, more than a thousand miles wide, the inequalities of the surface of which would be hardly perceptible, tho the depth of water upon it now varies from 10,000 to 15,000 feet; and there are places in which Mont Blanc might be sunk without showing its peak above water. Beyond this the ascent on the American side commences, and gradually leads for about 300 miles to the Newfoundland shore.

Almost the whole of the bottom of this central plain (which extends for many hundred miles in a north-and-south direction) is covered by a fine mud, which when brought to the surface dries into a grayish-white friable substance. You can write with this on a blackboard if you are so inclined; and to the eye it is quite like very soft, grayish chalk. Examined chemically, it proves to be composed almost wholly of carbonate of lime; and if you make a section of it, in the same way as that of the piece of chalk was made, and view it with the microscope, it presents innumerable Globigerinae imbedded in a granular matrix. Thus this deep-sea mud is substantially chalk. I say substantially, because there are a good many minor differences; but as these have no bearing on the question immediately before us—which is the nature of the Globigerinae of the chalk—it is unnecessary to speak of them.

Globigerinae of every size, from the smallest to the largest, are associated together in the Atlantic mud, and the chambers of many are filled by a soft animal matter. This soft substance is, in fact, the remains of the creature to which the Globigerina shell, or rather skeleton, owes its existence, and which is an animal of the simplest imaginable description. It is, in fact, a mere particle of living jelly, without defined parts of any kind; without a mouth, nerves, muscles, or distinct organs, and only manifesting its vitality to ordinary observation by thrusting out and retracting from all parts of its surface long filamentous processes, which serve for arms and legs. Yet this amorphous particle, devoid of everything which in the higher animals we call organs, is capable of feeding, growing, and multiplying; of separating from the ocean the small proportion of carbonate of lime which is dissolved in sea-water; and of building up that substance into a skeleton for itself, according to a pattern which can be imitated by no other known agency.

The notion that animals can live and flourish in the sea, at the vast depths from which apparently living Globigerinae have been brought up, does not agree very well with our usual conceptions respecting the conditions of animal life; and it is not so absolutely impossible as it might at first sight appear to be, that the Globigerinae of the Atlantic sea bottom do not live and die where they are found.

As I have mentioned, the soundings from the great Atlantic plain are almost entirely made up of Globigerinae, with the granules which have been mentioned, and some few other calcareous shells; but a small percentage of the chalky mud—perhaps at most some five per cent, of it—is of a different nature, and consists of shells and skeletons composed of silex or pure flint. These siliceous bodies belong partly to the lowly vegetable organisms which are called Diatomaceae and partly to the minute and extremely simple animals termed Radiolaria. It is quite certain that these creatures do not live at the bottom of the ocean, but at its surface, where they may be obtained in prodigious numbers by the use of a properly constructed net. Hence it follows that these siliceous organisms, tho they are not heavier than the lightest dust, must have fallen in some cases through 15,000 feet of water before they reached their final resting-place on the ocean floor. And considering how large a surface these bodies expose in proportion to their weight, it is probable that they occupy a great length of time in making their burial journey from the surface of the Atlantic to the bottom....

Thus not only is it certain that the chalk is the mud of an ancient sea bottom, but it is no less certain that the chalk sea existed during an extremely long period, tho we may not be prepared to give a precise estimate of the length of that period in years. The relative duration is clear, tho the absolute duration may not be definable. The attempt to affix any precise date to the period at which the chalk sea began or ended its existence is baffled by difficulties of the same kind. But the relative age of the cretaceous epoch may be determined with as great ease and certainty as the long duration of that epoch.

You will have heard of the interesting discoveries recently made in various parts of western Europe, of flint implements, obviously worked into shape by human hands, under circumstances which show conclusively that man is a very ancient denizen of these regions. It has been proved that the whole population of Europe whose existence has been revealed to us in this way, consisted of savages such as the Eskimo are now; that in the country which is now France they hunted the reindeer, and were familiar with the ways of the mammoth and the bison. The physical geography of France was in those days different from what it is now,—the river Somme, for instance, having cut its bed a hundred feet deeper between that time and this; and it is probable that the climate was more like that of Canada or Siberia than that of western Europe.

The existence of these people is forgotten even in the traditions of the oldest historical nations. The name and fame of them had utterly vanished until a few years back; and the amount of physical change which has been effected since their day renders it more than probable that, venerable as are some of the historical nations, the workers of the chipped flints of Hoxne or of Amiens are to them as they are to us in point of antiquity. But if we assign to these hoar relics of long-vanished generations of men the greatest age that can possibly be claimed for them, they are not older than the drift of boulder clay, which in comparison with the chalk is but a very juvenile deposit. You need go no further than your own seaboard for evidence of this fact. At one of the most charming spots on the coast of Norfolk, Cromer, you will see the boulder clay forming a vast mass, which lies upon the chalk, and must consequently have come into existence after it. Huge boulders of chalk are in fact included in the clay, and have evidently been brought to the position they now occupy by the same agency as that which has planted blocks of syenite from Norway side by side with them....

Thus there is a writing upon the wall of cliffs at Cromer, and whoso runs may read it. It tells us with an authority which can not be impeached, that the ancient sea-bed of the chalk sea was raised up and remained dry land until it was covered with forest, stocked with the great game the spoils of which have rejoiced your geologists. How long it remained in that condition can not be said; but "the whirligig of time brought its revenges" in those days as in these. That dry land with the bones and teeth of generations of long-lived elephants, hidden away among the gnarled roots and dry leaves of its ancient trees, sank gradually to the bottom of the icy sea, which covered it with huge masses of drift and boulder clay. Sea beasts such as the walrus, now restricted to the extreme north, paddled about where birds had twittered among the topmost twigs of the fir-trees. How long this state of things endured we know not, but at length it came to an end. The upheaved glacial mud hardened into the soil of modern Norfolk. Forests grew once more, the wolf and the beaver replaced the reindeer and the elephant; and at length what we call the history of England dawned.



FREDERIC HARRISON

Born in 1831; educated at Oxford; one of the founders of the Positivist School; Professor of Jurisprudence and International Law at Lincoln's Inn Hall, 1877-89; alderman of London in 1889-92; published "The Meaning of History" in 1862; "The Choice of Books" in 1886; "Oliver Cromwell" in 1889; "Victorian Literature" in 1895; a Life of Ruskin in 1902; a book on Washington in 1902.



THE GREAT BOOKS OF THE WORLD[61]

I say it most confidently, the first intellectual task of our age is rightly to order and make serviceable the vast realm of printed material which four centuries have swept across our path. To organize our knowledge, to systematize our reading, to save, out of the relentless cataract of ink, the immortal thoughts of the greatest—this is a necessity unless the productive ingenuity of man is to lead us at last to a measureless and pathless chaos. To know anything that turns up is, in the infinity of knowledge, to know nothing. To read the first book we come across, in the wilderness of books, is to learn nothing. To turn over the pages of ten thousand volumes is to be practically indifferent to all that is good....

[Footnote 61: From an address on "The Choice of Books," read before the London Institution in the winter of 1878-79, and afterward made the basis of Mr. Harrison's book having the same title.]

I am very far from meaning that our whole time spent with books is to be given to study. Far from it. I put the poetic and emotional side of literature as the most needed for daily use. I take the books that seek to rouse the imagination, to stir up feeling, touch the heart; the books of art, of fancy, of ideals, such as reflect the delight and aroma of life. And here how does the trivial, provided it is the new, that which stares at us in the advertising columns of the day, crowd out the immortal poetry and pathos of the human race, vitiating our taste for those exquisite pieces which are a household word, and weakening our mental relish for the eternal works of genius! Old Homer is the very fountain-head of pure poetic enjoyment, of all that is spontaneous, simple, native, and dignified in life. He takes us into the ambrosial world of heroes, of human vigor, of purity, of grace. Now Homer is one of the few poets the life of whom can be fairly preserved in a translation. Most men and women can say that they have read Homer, just as most of us can say that we have studied Johnson's Dictionary. But how few of us take him up, time after time, with fresh delight! How few have even read the entire "Iliad" and "Odyssey" through! Whether in the resounding lines of the old Greek, as fresh and ever-stirring as the waves that tumble on the seashore, filling the soul with satisfying silent wonder at its restless unison; whether in the quaint lines of Chapman, or the clarion couplets of Pope, or the closer versions of Cowper, Lord Derby, of Philip Worsley, or even in the new prose version of the "Odyssey," Homer is always fresh and rich. And yet how seldom does one find a friend spellbound over the Greek Bible of antiquity, whilst they wade through torrents of magazine quotations from a petty versifier of to-day, and in an idle vacation will graze, as contentedly as cattle in a fresh meadow, through the chopped straw of a circulating library. A generation which will listen to "Pinafore" for three hundred nights, and will read M. Zola's seventeenth romance, can no more read Homer than it could read a cuneiform inscription. It will read about Homer just as it will read about a cuneiform inscription, and will crowd to see a few pots which probably came from the neighborhood of Troy. But to Homer and the primeval type of heroic man in his beauty, and his simpleness, and joyousness, the cultured generation is really dead, as completely as some spoiled beauty of the ballroom is dead to the bloom of the heather or the waving of the daffodils in a glade.

It is a true psychological problem, this nausea which idle culture seems to produce for all that is manly and pure in heroic poetry. One knows—at least every schoolboy has known—that a passage of Homer, rolling along in the hexameter or trumped out by Pope, will give one a hot glow of pleasure and raise a finer throb in the pulse; one knows that Homer is the easiest, most artless, most diverting of all poets; that the fiftieth reading rouses the spirit even more than the first—and yet we find ourselves (we are all alike) painfully pshaw-ing over some new and uncut barley sugar in rime, which a man in the street asked us if we had read, or it may be some learned lucubration about the site of Troy by some one we chanced to meet at dinner. It is an unwritten chapter in the history of the human mind, how this literary prurience after new print unmans us for the enjoyment of the old songs chanted forth in the sunrise of human imagination. To ask a man or woman who spends half a lifetime in sucking magazines and new poems to read a book of Homer would be like asking a butcher's boy to whistle "Adelaida." The noises and sights and talk, the whirl and volatility of life around us, are too strong for us. A society which is forever gossiping in a sort of perpetual "drum" loses the very faculty of caring for anything but "early copies" and the last tale out. Thus, like the tares in the noble parable of the Sower, a perpetual chatter about books chokes the seed which is sown in the greatest books in the world.

I speak of Homer, but fifty other great poets and creators of eternal beauty would serve my argument as well. Take the latest perhaps in the series of the world-wide and immortal poets of the whole human race—Walter Scott. We all read Scott's romances, as we have all read Hume's "History of England," but how often do we read them, how zealously, with what sympathy and understanding? I am told that the last discovery of modern culture is that Scott's prose is commonplace; that the young men at our universities are far too critical to care for his artless sentences and flowing descriptions. They prefer Mr. Swinburne, Mr. Mallock, and the euphuism of young Oxford, just as some people prefer a Dresden shepherdess to the Caryatides of the Erechtheum, pronounce Fielding to be low, and Mozart to be passe. As boys love lollipops, so these juvenile fops love to roll phrases about under the tongue, as if phrases in themselves had a value apart from thoughts, feelings, great conceptions, or human sympathy.

For Scott is just one of the poets (we may call poets all the great creators in prose or in verse) of whom one never wearies, just as one can listen to Beethoven or watch the sunrise or the sunset day by day with new delight. I think I can read the "Antiquary," or the "Bride of Lammermoor," "Ivanhoe," "Quentin Durward," and "Old Mortality," at least once a year afresh. Now Scott is a perfect library in himself. A constant reader of romances would find that it needed months to go through even the best pieces of the inexhaustible painter of eight full centuries and every type of man, and he might repeat the process of reading him ten times in a lifetime without a sense of fatigue or sameness.

The poetic beauty of Scott's creations is almost the least of his great qualities. It is the universality of his sympathy that is so truly great, the justice of his estimates, the insight into the spirit of each age, his intense absorption of self in the vast epic of human civilization. What are the old almanacs that they so often give us as histories beside these living pictures of the ordered succession of ages? As in Homer himself, we see in this prose "Iliad" of modern history the battle of the old and the new, the heroic defense of ancient strongholds, the long impending and inevitable doom of medieval life. Strong men and proud women struggle against the destiny of modern society, unconsciously working out its ways, undauntedly defying its power. How just is our island Homer! Neither Greek nor Trojan sways him; Achilles is his hero; Hector is his favorite; he loves the councils of chiefs and the palace of Priam; but the swineherd, the charioteer, the slave girl, the hound, the beggar, and the herdsman, all glow alike in the harmonious coloring of his peopled epic. We see the dawn of our English nation, the defense of Christendom against the Koran, the grace and the terror of feudalism, the rise of monarchy out of baronies, the rise of parliaments out of monarchy, the rise of industry out of serfage, the pathetic ruin of chivalry, the splendid death struggle of Catholicism, the sylvan tribes of the mountain (remnants of our prehistoric forefathers) beating themselves to pieces against the hard advance of modern industry; we see the grim heroism of the Bible martyrs, the catastrophe of feudalism overwhelmed by a practical age which knew little of its graces and almost nothing of its virtues.

Such is Scott, who, we may say, has done for the various phases of modern history what Shakespeare has done for the manifold types of human character. And this glorious and most human and most historical of poets, without whom our very conception of human development would have ever been imperfect, this manliest and truest and widest of romancers we neglect for some hothouse hybrid of psychological analysis, for the wretched imitators of Balzac and the jackanapes phrasemongering of some Osric of the day, who assures us that Scott is an absolute Philistine.

In speaking with enthusiasm of Scott, as of Homer, or of Shakespeare, or of Milton, or of any of the accepted masters of the world, I have no wish to insist dogmatically upon any single name, or two or three in particular. Our enjoyment and reverence of the great poets of the world is seriously injured nowadays by the habit we get of singling out some particular quality, some particular school of art for intemperate praise or, still worse, for intemperate abuse. Mr. Ruskin, I suppose, is answerable for the taste for this one-sided and spasmodic criticism; and every young gentleman who has the trick of a few adjectives will languidly vow that Marlowe is supreme, or Murillo foul. It is the mark of rational criticism as well as of healthy thought to maintain an evenness of mind in judging of great works, to recognize great qualities in due proportion, to feel that defects are made up by beauties, and beauties are often balanced by weakness. The true judgment implies a weighing of each work and each workman as a whole, in relation to the sum of human cultivation and the gradual advance of the movement of ages. And in this matter we shall usually find that the world is right, the world of the modern centuries and the nations of Europe together. It is unlikely, to say the least of it, that a young person who has hardly ceased making Latin verses will be able to reverse the decisions of the civilized world; and it is even more unlikely that Milton and Moliere, Fielding and Scott, will ever be displaced by a poet who has unaccountably lain hid for one or two centuries.

I know that in the style of to-day I ought hardly to venture to address you about poetry unless I am prepared to unfold to you the mysterious beauties of some unknown genius who has recently been unearthed by the Children of Light and Sweetness. I confess I have no such discovery to announce. I prefer to dwell in Gath and to pitch my tents in Ashdod; and I doubt the use of the sling as a weapon in modern war. I decline to go into hyperbolic eccentricities over unknown geniuses, and a single quality or power is not enough to arouse my enthusiasm. It is possible that no master ever painted a buttercup like this one, or the fringe of a robe like that one; that this poet has a unique subtlety, and that an undefinable music. I am still unconvinced, tho the man who can not see it, we are told, should at once retire to the place where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

I am against all gnashing of teeth, whether for or against a particular idol. I stand by the men, and by all the men, who have moved mankind to the depths of their souls, who have taught generations, and formed our life. If I say of Scott, that to have drunk in the whole of his glorious spirit is a liberal education in itself, I am asking for no exclusive devotion to Scott, to any poet, or any school of poets, or any age, or any country, to any style or any order of poet, one more than another. They are as various, fortunately, and as many-sided as human nature itself. If I delight in Scott, I love Fielding, and Richardson, and Sterne, and Goldsmith, and Defoe. Yes, and I will add Cooper and Marryat, Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen—to confine myself to those who are already classics, to our own country, and to one form of art alone, and not to venture on the ground of contemporary romance in general.

What I have said of Homer, I would say in a degree, but somewhat lower, of those great Ancients who are the most accessible to us in English—AEschylus, Aristophanes, Virgil, and Horace. What I have said of Shakespeare I would say of Calderon, of Moliere, of Corneille, of Racine, of Voltaire, of Alfieri, of Goethe, of those dramatists, in many forms, and with genius the most diverse, who have so steadily set themselves to idealize the great types of public life and of the phases of human history. Let us all beware lest worship of the idiosyncrasy of our peerless Shakespeare blind us to the value of the great masters who in a different world and with different aims have presented the development of civilization in a series of dramas, where the unity of a few great types of man and of society is made paramount to subtlety of character or brilliancy of language.

What I have said of Milton, I would say of Dante, or Ariosto, of Petrarch, and of Tasso; nor less would I say it of Boccaccio and Chaucer, of Camoens and Spenser, of Rabelais and of Cervantes, of Gil Blas and the Vicar of Wakefield, of Byron and of Shelley, of Goethe and of Schiller. Nor let us forget those wonderful idealizations of awakening thought and primitive societies, the pictures of other races and types of life removed from our own: all those primeval legends, ballads, songs, and tales, those proverbs, apologs, and maxims, which have come down to us from distant ages of man's history—the old idylls and myths of the Hebrew race; the tales of Greece, of the Middle Ages of the East; the fables of the Old and the New World; the songs of the Nibelungs; the romances of early feudalism; the "Morte d'Arthur"; the "Arabian Nights"; the ballads of the early nations of Europe.

I protest that I am devoted to no school in particular: I condemn no school; I reject none. I am for the school of all the great men; and I am against the school of the smaller men. I care for Wordsworth as well as for Byron, for Burns as well as Shelley, for Boccaccio as well as for Milton, for Bunyan as well as Rabelais, for Cervantes as much as for Dante, for Corneille as well as for Shakespeare, for Goldsmith as well as Goethe. I stand by the sentence of the world; and I hold that in a matter so human and so broad as the highest poetry the judgment of the nations of Europe is pretty well settled, at any rate, after a century or two of continuous reading and discussing. Let those who will assure us that no one can pretend to culture unless he swear by Fra Angelico and Sandro Botticelli, by Arnolpho the son of Lapo, or the Lombardic bricklayers, by Martini and Galuppi (all, by the way, admirable men of the second rank); and so, in literature and poetry, there are some who will hear of nothing but Webster or Marlowe; Blake, Herrick or Keats; William Langland or the Earl of Surrey; Heine or Omar Khayyam. All of these are men of genius, and each with a special and inimitable gift of his own. But the busy world, which does not hunt poets as collectors hunt for curios, may fairly reserve these lesser lights for the time when they know the greatest well.

So, I say, think mainly of the greatest, of the best known, of those who cover the largest area of human history and man's common nature. Now when we come to count up these names accepted by the unanimous voice of Europe, we have some thirty or forty names, and amongst them are some of the most voluminous of writers. I have been running over but one department of literature alone, the poetic. I have been naming those only, whose names are household words with us, and the poets for the most part of modern Europe. Yet even here we have a list which is usually found in not less than a hundred volumes at least.

Now poetry and the highest kind of romance are exactly that order of literature, which not only will bear to be read many times, but that of which the true value can only be gained by frequent, and indeed habitual reading. A man can hardly be said to know the twelfth Mass or the ninth Symphony, by virtue of having once heard them played ten years ago; he can hardly be said to take air and exercise because he took a country walk once last autumn. And so he can hardly be said to know Scott, or Shakespeare, Moliere, or Cervantes, when he once read them since the close of his school-days, or amidst the daily grind of his professional life. The immortal and universal poets of our race are to be read and reread till their music and their spirit are a part of our nature; they are to be thought over and digested till we live in the world they created for us; they are to be read devoutly, as devout men read their Bibles and fortify their hearts with psalms. For as the old Hebrew singer heard the heavens declare the glory of their Maker, and the firmament showing his handiwork, so in the long roll of poetry we see transfigured the strength and beauty of humanity, the dignity and struggles, the long life-history of our common kind....

In an age of steam it seems almost idle to speak of Dante, the most profound, the most meditative, the most prophetic of all poets, in whose epic the panorama of medieval life, of feudalism at its best and Christianity at its best, stands, as in a microcosm, transfigured, judged, and measured. To most men, the "Paradise Lost," with all its mighty music and its idyllic pictures of human nature, of our first-child parents in their naked purity and their awakening thought, is a serious and ungrateful task—not to be ranked with the simple enjoyments; it is a possession to be acquired only by habit. The great religious poets, the imaginative teachers of the heart, are never easy reading. But the reading of them is a religious habit, rather than an intellectual effort. I pretend not now to be dealing with a matter so deep and high as religion, or indeed with education in the fuller sense. I will say nothing of that side of reading which is really hard study, an effort of duty, matter of meditation and reverential thought.



JOHN RICHARD GREEN

Born in Oxford in 1837, died in 1883; graduated from Oxford in 1860; a curate in London in 1860; incumbent of St. Philip's, Stepney, in 1866; librarian at Lambeth in 1869; published his "Short History of the English People" in 1874, "A History of the English People" in 1877-80, "The Making of England" in 1882.



GEORGE WASHINGTON[62]

Chatham's measure was contemptuously rejected by the lords, as was a similar measure of Burke's by the house of commons, and a petition of the city of London in favor of the colonies by the king himself. With the rejection of these efforts for conciliation began the great struggle which ended eight years later in the severance of the American colonies from the British crown. The congress of delegates from the colonial legislatures at once voted measures for general defense, ordered the levy of an army, and set George Washington at its head. No nobler figure ever stood in the forefront of a nation's life. Washington was grave and courteous in address; his manners were simple and unpretending; his silence and the serene calmness of his temper spoke of a perfect self-mastery. But there was little in his outer bearing to reveal the grandeur of soul which lifts his figure, with all the simple majesty of an ancient statue, out of the smaller passions, the meaner impulses of the world around him. What recommended him for command was simply his weight among his fellow-land-owners of Virginia, and the experience of war which he had gained by service in border contests with the French and the Indians, as well as in Braddock's luckless expedition against Fort Duquesne.

[Footnote 62: From Book IV, Chapter II of the "History of the English People."]

It was only as the weary fight went on that the colonists discovered, however slowly and imperfectly, the greatness of their leader; his clear judgment, his heroic endurance, his silence under difficulties, his calmness in the hour of danger or defeat; the patience with which he waited, the quickness and hardness with which he struck, the lofty and serene sense of duty that never swerved from its task through resentment or jealousy; that never, through war or peace, felt the touch of a meaner ambition; that knew no aim save that of guarding the freedom of his fellow-countrymen, and no personal longing save that of returning to his own fireside when their freedom was secured. It was almost unconsciously that men learned to cling to Washington with a trust and faith such as few other men have won, and to regard him with a reverence which still hushes us in presence of his memory. But even America hardly recognized his real greatness while he lived. It was only when death set its seal on him that the voice of those whom he had served so long proclaimed him "the man first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his fellow-countrymen."



JOHN MORLEY

Born in 1838; graduated from Oxford in 1859; editor of the Fortnightly Review in 1867, and of The Pall Mall Gazette in 1880; elected to Parliament in 1883; made Chief Secretary for Ireland in 1886, and again in 1892; made Secretary for India in 1906; published "Edmund Burke" in 1867; "Voltaire" in 1872; "Rousseau" in 1876; a "Life of Richard Cobden" in 1881; and a "Life of Gladstone" in 1904.



VOLTAIRE AS AN AUTHOR AND AS A MAN OF ACTION[63]

The man of letters, usually unable to conceive loftier services to mankind or more attractive aims to persons of capacity than the composition of books, has treated these pretensions of Voltaire with a supercilious kind of censure, which teaches us nothing about Voltaire, while it implies a particularly shallow idea alike of the position of the mere literary life in the scale of things, and of the conditions under which the best literary work is done. To have really contributed in the humblest degree, for instance, to a peace between Prussia and her enemies in 1759, would have been an immeasurably greater performance for mankind than any given book which Voltaire could have written. And, what is still better worth observing, Voltaire's books would not have been the powers they were, but for this constant desire of his to come into the closest contact with the practical affairs of the world. He who has never left the life of a recluse, drawing an income from the funds and living in a remote garden, constructing past, present, and future, out of his own consciousness, is not qualified either to lead mankind safely, or to think on the course of human affairs correctly. Every page of Voltaire has the bracing air of the life of the world in it, and the instinct which led him to seek the society of the conspicuous actors on the great scene was essentially a right one.

[Footnote 63: From "Voltaire."]

The book-writer takes good advantage of his opportunity to assure men expressly or by implication that he is their true king, and that the sacred bard is a mightier man than his hero. Voltaire knew better. Tho himself perhaps the most puissant man of letters that ever lived, he rated literature as it ought to be rated below action, not because written speech is less of a force, but because the speculation and criticism of the literature that substantially influences the world, make far less demand than the actual conduct of great affairs on qualities which are not rare in detail, but are amazingly rare in combination,—on temper, foresight, solidity, daring,—on strength, in a word, strength of intelligence and strength of character. Gibbon rightly amended his phrase, when he described Boethius not as stooping, but rather as rising, from his life of placid meditation to an active share in the imperial business. That he held this sound opinion is quite as plausible an explanation of Voltaire's anxiety to know persons of station and importance, as the current theory that he was of sycophantic nature. "Why," he asks, "are the ancient historians so full of light? It is because the writer had to do with public business; it is because he could be magistrate, priest, soldier; and because if he could not rise to the highest functions of the state, he had at least to make himself worthy of them. I admit," he concludes, "that we must not expect such an advantage with us, for our own constitution happens to be against it;" but he was deeply sensible what an advantage it was that they thus lost.