Conclusion
It is in the reign of the last of the Stuarts, whose sex made her perforce rely on ministers to rule for her, and whose unenlightened zeal1240 thus missed the disaster which similar qualities had brought upon two of her predecessors—it is in the reign of Anne, swayed by favourites to an extent that might have made monarchy ridiculous1241 if monarchists had gone by reason and not by superstition—that there begins recognisably the era of government by parliamentary leaders, representing at once, in varying degrees, monarch and people; and it is at this point that we begin the biographical studies1242 to which the foregoing pages offer an introduction. But under new conditions and phases we are to meet for the most part repetitions and developments of the forces already recognised as at work from time immemorial. Thus early have we seen in action, on the field of English history, most of those primary forces of strife whose play makes the warp of politics, ancient and modern; and the distinct emergence, withal, of that spirit which, rare and transient in ancient times, seems destined to inherit the later earth—the spirit of science, which slowly transmutes politics from an animal to an intellectual process, raising it from the stage of mere passional life to the stage of constructive art, and from the social relation of rule and subjection towards the relation of mutuality and corporate intelligence. Politics, we formally say, is the process of the clash of wills, sympathies, interests, striving for social adjustment in the sphere of legislation and government. The earlier phases are crude and animalistic, and involve much resort to physical strife. The later phases are gradually humanised and intelligised, till at length the science of the past process builds up a new phase of consciousness, which evolves a conscious progressive art. That is to say, the conscious progressive art develops in course of time: it had not really arisen in any valid form at the period to which we have brought our bird’s-eye view. It had transiently arisen in the ancient world, as in Solon and, far less effectually, in the Gracchi; but the conditions were too evil for its growth, and the course of things political was downward, the animal instincts overriding science, till even when there was compulsory peace the spirit of science could no more blossom. In English politics, soon after the beginning of the eighteenth century, the conditions brought about civil peace under a new dynasty, which it was the function of the statesmanship of the dynasty to maintain. At the same time the spirit of science had entered on a new life. It remains to trace, under successive statesmen and in the doctrine of successive politicians, the fluctuations of English progress towards the great Utopia, the state of reconciliation of all the lower social antipathies and interests, and of free scope for the inevitable but haply bloodless strifes of ideals, which must needs clash so far as we can foresee human affairs. The progress, we shall see, is only in our own day beginning to be conscious or calculated: it has truly been, so far as most of the actors are concerned, by unpath’d waters to undream’d shores. The hope is that the very recognition of the past course of the voyage will establish a new art and a new science of social navigation.
To make a new aspiration pass for a law of progress merely because it is new would, of course, be only a fresh dressing of old error. There is no security that the scientific form will make any ideal more viable than another; every ideal, after all, has stood for what social science there was among its devotees. The hope of a moral transformation of the world is a state of mind so often seen arising in human history that some distrust of it is almost a foregone condition of reflection on any new ideal for thoughtful men. A dream of deliverance pervades the earliest purposive literature of the Hebrews; a fabled salvation in the past is made the ground for trust in one to come. Wherever the sense of present hardship and suffering outweighs the energetic spirit of life in the ancient world, the young men are found seeing visions, and the old men dreaming dreams; and the thought of “the far serenity of Saturn’s days” becomes a foothold for the Virgilian hope of a golden age to come. A hundred times has the hope flowered, and withered again. Confident rebellions, eager revolutions, mark at once its rise and its fall. In our own age the new birth of hope arises in the face of what might have seemed the most definitive frustration; it becomes an ideal of peaceful transformation under the sole spell of social science, with no weapons save those of reason and persuasion. The science of natural forces has widened and varied life without greatly raising it in mass. Yet the new science, we would fain believe, will conquer the heightened task. In the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of that hope lies for the coming age the practical answer to the riddle of existence.
Without such a hope, the study of the past would indeed be desolating to the tired spectator. Followed through cycle after cycle of illusory progress and conscious decline, all nevertheless as full of pulsation, of the pride of life and the passion of suffering, as the human tide that beats to-day on the shores of our own senses, the history of organised mankind, in its trivially long-drawn immensity, grows to be unspeakably disenchanting. Considered as a tale that is told, it seems to speak of nothing but blind impulse, narrow horizons, insane satisfactions in evil achievement, grotesque miscalculation, and vain desire, till it is almost a relief to reflect how little we know of it all, how immeasurable are the crowded distances beyond the reach of our search-light. Alike the known and the unknown, when all is said, figure for us as fruitless, purposeless, meaningless moments in some vast, eternal dream.
Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
D’ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa
Girando senza posa,
Per tornar sempre là donde son mosse;
Uso alcuno, alcun frutto,
Indovinar non so.1243
The untranslatable cadence of Leopardi has the very pulse of the wearied seeker’s spirit. Yet, through all, the fascination of the inquiry holds us, as if in the insistent craving to understand there lay some of the springs of movement towards better days. We brood over the nearer remains, so near and yet so far, till out of the ruins of Rome there rise for us in hosts the serried phantoms of her tremendous drama; till we seem to catch the very rasp of Cato’s voice, and the gleam of Cæsar’s eye, swaying the tide of things. Still, the sensation yields no sense of fruition; Rome the dead, and Greece the undying, drift from our reach into the desert distance. Beyond their sunlit fragments lies a shoreless and desolate twilight-land, receding towards the making of the world; and there in the shadows we dimly divine the wraiths of a million million forms, thronging a hundred civilisations. The vision of that vanished eternity renews the intolerable burden of the spirit baffled of all solution. For assuredly, in the remotest vistas of all, men and women desired and loved, and reared their young, and toiled unspeakably, and wept for their happier dead; and the evening and the morning, then as now, wove their sad and splendid pageantries with the slow serenity of cosmic change. Great empires waxed to the power of wreaking infinite slaughter, through the infinite labour of harmless animal souls; and seas of blood alternately cemented and sapped their brutal foundations; and all that remains of them is a tradition of a tradition of their destruction, and the shards of their uttermost decay. Not an echo of them lives, save where perchance some poet with struggling tongue murmurs his dream of them into tremulous form; or when music with its more mysterious spell gathers from out the inscrutable vibration of things strange semblances of memories, that come to us as an ancient and lost experience re-won, grey with time and weary with pilgrimage. But to what end, of knowledge or of feeling, if the future is not therefore to be changed?
Save for such a conception and such a purpose, the civilisations of to-day could have no rational hope to survive in perpetuity any more than those of the past. The fullest command of physical science, however great be the resulting power of wealth-production, means no solution of the social problem, which must breed its own science. The new ground for hope is that the great discipline of physical science has brought with it the twofold conception of the reign of law in all things and the sequence of power upon comprehension, even to the controlling of the turbulent sea of human life. With the science of universal evolution has come the faith in unending betterment. And this, when all is said, is the vital difference between ancient and modern politics: that for the ancients the fact of eternal mutation was a law of defeat and decay, while for us it is a law of renewal. If but the faith be wedded to the science, there can be no predictable limit to its fruits, however long be the harvesting.
Footnotes:
1207 Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, i, 332 ff. The Merchant Adventurers were incorporated under Elizabeth (id. i, 350).
1208 Hume, History of England, ch. 62, near end.
1209 Dr. Cunningham (ii, 101, 102, 104) notes the feeling under the first Stuarts.
1210 See Buckle, 3-vol. ed. ii, 42, 1-vol. ed. pp. 308-9, and his citations, as to the anti-ecclesiastical character of the Peace of Westphalia.
1211 Cp. Storch, quoted by M’Culloch, Principles of Political Economy, Introd., and Schoell’s addition to Koch, Hist. of Europe, Eng. tr. 3rd ed. p. 110. On the tendency of economic science to promote peace, see Buckle, i, 217, 218; 1-vol. ed. pp. 120-25.
1212 See the so-called Political Testament of Colbert, Eng. tr. 1695, p. 351.
1213 Petty, Political Arithmetic, ch. x (Essays, ed. 1699, p. 273). Even noblemen are mentioned as sometimes putting their younger sons to merchandise. Cp. Toynbee, Industrial Revolution, p. 63; and Josiah Tucker, Essay on Trade (1751), 4th ed. p. 43.
1214 Gardiner, History of England, 1603-42, ed. 1893, i, 100.
1215 Id. iv, 2.
1216 Id. iv, 1.
1217 See Gardiner, as cited, iv, 8, for a sample, and in particular pp. 41-43 for the notorious case of Sir Giles Mompesson and the inn licences.
1218 Id. iv, 6, 7.
1219 Id. v, 233.
1220 Id. iv, 125.
1221 Id. vii, 71.
1222 Id. viii, 74, 75.
1223 Hallam, Constitutional History, ii, 11.
1224 Sir Josiah Child, New Discourse of Trade, 4th ed. p. 9.
1225 Id. p. 87.
1226 Lingard, Hist. of England, 6th ed. v, 262.
1227 Epistolæ Ho-elianæ, ed. 1891, i, 25.
1228 Child, New Discourse of Trade, p. 88. As to the good management of the Dutch in this regard, cp. Howell, as cited above, p. 334.
1229 Child, whose main concern was to reduce the rate of interest by law, proposed (p. 98) to sell paupers as slaves on the plantations, “taking security for... their freedom afterwards.” An antagonist (see pref. p. xi) proposed a law limiting wages.
1230 Above, p. 434.
1231 Josiah Tucker, Essay on Trade, 4th ed. pp. 46, 105.
1232 Id. pp. 28, 50, 51; Richardson’s Essay on the Decline of the Foreign Trade (often attributed to Decker), ed. 1756, pp. 46-64.
1233 France also, of course, still kept up trade monopolies (Tucker, p. 36).
1234 The fallacy was indeed soon exposed as such by the more enlightened economists. Thus the French writer Samber, in his Memoirs of the Dutch Trade (Eng. tr. ed. 1719, p. 75), speaks of the French rulers of Colbert’s day as having “entertained a notion that they could carry on trade after a new unheard-of method: they proposed to sell their goods to their neighbours, and buy none of theirs.” But this was none the less the prevailing ideal of the age. Cp. Jansen’s General Maxims of Trade, 1713, cited by Buckle, i, 217.
1235 Cp. A. von Brandt, Beiträge zur Geschichte der französischen Handelspolitik, 1896, pp. 25-28.
1236 L. Dussieux, Étude biographique sur Colbert, 1886, ch. vi, § 2.
1237 Cp. Child, New Discourse, p. 17; Petty, Essays, p. 205; Tucker, Essay on Trade, 4th ed. pp. 45-57. For a general view of the discussion see Schulze-Gävernitz, Der Grossbetrieb, 1892, Einleitung.
1238 As early as 1641 the Manchester woollen industry is noted as flourishing. Early in the next century it had immensely increased. Schulze-Gävernitz, as cited, pp. 26, 27.
1239 Mandeville, Fable of the Bees, Remarks Q and Y.
1240 “That narrow and foolish woman.” Hallam, Constitutional History, iii, 124, note. Cp. Buckle, i, 419: “a foolish and ignorant woman.”
1241 “It seems rather a humiliating proof of the sway which the feeblest prince enjoys even in a limited monarchy, that the fortunes of Europe should have been changed by nothing more noble than the insolence of one waiting-woman and the cunning of another. It is true that this was effected by throwing the weight of the Crown into the scale of a powerful faction; yet the house of Bourbon would probably not have reigned beyond the Pyrenees but for Sarah and Abigail at Queen Anne’s toilet” (Hallam, iii, 210).
1242 A work in course of preparation.
1243 “Then as to all this activity, so many movements of all things celestial and all things earthly, turning without ceasing, only to return forever there whence they set forth, I can divine no use and no fruition” (Leopardi’s Nocturnal Song of a Nomad Shepherd in Asia).