which may be attempted for keeping alive a spirit at variance with his own. The result will be to make one narrow, mean type of human nature universal and perpetual, and to crush every influence which tends to the further improvement of man's intellectual and moral nature. Mill's conclusion is that it is on the whole right that the majority should be the paramount power in society, but that ' unless some centre of resistance can be found round which all the moral and social elements which the ruling power views with disfavour may cluster themselves,' the human race will degenerate, and the United States may become even as China. In his later life Mill appeared to find this centre of resistance' in the representation of minorities, but in 1838 he could only see the possibility of its discovery through the method of Montesquieu as it might be applied by De Tocqueville. Doubtless these opinions, which closely correspond to my own, were given to the world nearly fifty years ago. But I have much reason for believing that they are widely entertained at this moment by leaders of scientific thought and inquiry on the Continent who are sagacious enough to perceive that a common quarrel on certain points with the Church is not a sufficient basis for an alliance with democracy. In a book published only the other day, the Nouvelles Lettres d'Italie of M. Emile de Laveleye, I find the same misgivings most energetically expressed by an Italian man of letters and science who was also an experienced politician. writer, who died quite recently, was Dr. Pantaleone, of Rome.

The

Our age (he says), which professes the worship of science everywhere, hands over power to the classes which are the antipodes of science and knowledge. Suppose, on the one hand, the masses were addressed by a superior and truly learned man, who appreciated the difficulties included in political and social questions and stated them clearly; and on the other, by an orator of low estate who was ignorant of the first principles of those questions but who flattered the instincts and appetites of the crowd, which of the two would be listened to and elected? .. Thus, in proportion as government becomes a more difficult art, you trust it to people who are more and more unintellectual and incapable. Is not this to prepare your own downfall? When I see our statesmen becoming apostles of universal suffrage, and throwing the treasures of civilisation, which the best men of our kind have accumulated through centuries of toil, as pabulum to this flock of bipeds who are. . . . in no state to discover even what is for their true interest, I am astonished at the extreme of blindness shown by men who are in some respects most enlightened. I can only ascribe it to the influence of an epidemic peculiar to our time, the morbus democraticus.

I have myself attempted to carry the argument a little further in a passage which Mr. Godkin has quoted, but which I am afraid I must quote again :—

Such a suffrage (a widely extended or universal suffrage) is commonly associated with Radicalism; no doubt, amid its most certain effects would be the extensive destruction of the existing institutions; but the chances are that in the long

2 Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i. p. 378.

run it would produce a mischievous form of Conservatism, and drug society with a potion compared with which Eldonine would be a salutary draught. For to what end, towards what ideal state, is the process of stamping upon law the average opinion of an entire community directed? The end arrived at is identical with that of the Roman Catholic Church, which attributes a similar sacredness to the average opinion of the Christian world. 'Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus' was the canon of Vincent of Lerins. 'Securus judicat orbis terrarum' were the words which rang in the ears of Newman and produced such marvellous effects on him. But did any one in his senses ever suppose that these were maxims of progress? The principles of legislation at which they point would put an end to all social and political activities, and arrest everything which has ever been associated with Liberalism. A moment's reflection will satisfy any competently instructed person that this is not too broad a proposition. Let him turn over in his mind the great epochs of scientific invention and social change during the last two centuries and consider what would have occurred if universal suffrage had been established at any one of them. Universal suffrage which to-day excludes freetrade from the United States would certainly have prohibited the spinning-jenny and the power-loom. It would certainly have forbidden the threshing-machine. It would have forbidden the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar, and would have restored the Stuarts (p. 36).3

Mr. Godkin calls these deductions extraordinary. He has searched as carefully as he could for their basis. He thinks they were arrived at by the à priori method with a vengeance.' He observes that in no place has universal suffrage done anything like prohibiting a spinning-jenny or the threshing machine, or preventing the adoption of the Gregorian Calendar. He has not understood the argument, possibly through my own fault, in making tacit, instead of explicit, reference to events which I supposed to be extensively known. It is of course quite possible that they are not as clearly present to the mind of a highly educated American as they would be to an Englishman. As a matter of fact, they are among the most striking occurrences of the eighteenth and of the earlier part of the nineteenth centuries. In 1716 the notorious Jacobitism of the English masses, and the danger with which it menaced the establishment of the House of Hanover, already shaken by a rebellion, led the English Parliament to take one of the most remarkable steps in its history by passing the Septennial Act and prolonging its own existence from three years to seven.1 In 1751, the Act which introduced the Gregorian Calendar was passed. Great difficulty was found in appeasing the clamour of the people against it. . . . Years elapsed before

3 The last words of this passage which might have given Mr. Godkin a clue to my meaning are not quoted by him. It would have proscribed the Roman Catholics with the mob which burned Lord Mansfield's house and library in 1780, and it would have proscribed the Dissenters with the mob which burned Dr. Priestley's house and library in 1791.'

The Septennial Act (1 Geo. I. stat. 2, c. 38) recites in its preamble that Triennial Parliaments, if they should continue, may probably at this juncture, when a restless and popish faction are designing and endeavouring to renew the rebellion within this kingdom, be destructive of the peace and security of the government.

In 1767,

the people were fully reconciled to the new regulation.' 5 a series of destructive riots began, directed against the spinningjenny which had just been invented by Hargreaves. They lasted till 1779 and spread through the then manufacturing counties. Many mills were burnt; Peel's machinery was broken to pieces and thrown into the river; Arkwright's mills were wrecked and destroyed. The riots broke out again in 1812, now principally aimed at the lace-frames and stocking-knitting machinery which had been introduced into Nottinghamshire. Under an imaginary leader, General Ludd, they lasted till 1816, and were only put down by the unsparing severity of the criminal law. The terrible phantom, General Ludd, was before long succeeded by another, Captain Swing. The threshingmachine had been invented in the eighteenth century, but it did not come into common use till the earlier part of the nineteenth. The rick-burning and farm-burning, which began at about 1826 and lasted till after 1830, were believed by the most competent authorities to have been provoked by the earliest agricultural inventions, though their spread may be partly accounted for by the fact that incendiarism is one of the most contagious of crimes.

My argument, then, is that, if universal suffrage had been introduced into this country at the time when these violent prejudices existed--that is, if the classes who shared these prejudices had governed the country-they would have given effect to their opinions, not simply by rioting and violence, but by law. They would have found leaders who justified their hostility to machinery as unfairly competing with human labour, and they would have elected Parliaments in which their leaders would have been supreme. The new machines would have been treated just as a machine of another order, the bodily faculties of the immigrant Chinese labourer, has been treated in the Pacific States of the American Union. The argument, at all events, is perfectly simple and perfectly legitimate, and it has no affinity for à priori reasoning.

The few words which I have said on the subject of Population are criticised by Mr. Godkin, but I think that, if he will give them a little further attention, he will find that he has attached to them a meaning which they will not bear. The main part of the passage is as follows:

The central seat of all political economy was from the first occupied by the Theory of Population. This theory has now been generalised by Mr. Darwin and his followers, and, stated as the principle of the survival of the fittest, it has become the central truth of all biological science. Yet it is evidently disliked by the multitude and thrust into the background by those whom the multitude permits to lead it. It has long been intensely unpopular in France and on the Continent of Europe, and among ourselves proposals for recognising it through the relief of distress by emigration are visibly being supplanted by schemes founded on the assump5 Coxe's Pelham, vol. ii. p. 26.

Baine's History of the Cotton Manufacture, p. 150

tion that, through legislative experiments on society, a given space of land may always be made to support in comfort the population which from historical causes has come to be settled on it.

Mr. Godkin supposes me to be complaining that the principle of the survival of the fittest,' that is, the Theory of Population in its highest scientific expression, is not preached to the multitude by its leaders, and he taxes the suggestion with something like brutality. But I have too keen a perception of the inequality of intelligences' to make any proposal of the kind. I know that the 'survival of the fittest' cannot be rendered generally endurable without an art which I do not possess; for I am unable to rise to the level of the declaimers against the tyranny of compulsory vaccination, who manage to give their doctrine an air of philanthropy and are not the less proposing that the ignorant and careless, and the children of the ignorant and careless, shall be left to die of a loathsome disease. But I was simply contrasting the enormous importance now belonging to the Theory of Population in scientific inquiry with the neglect and disfavour into which it has fallen with the masses and the teachers of the masses. I was referring to the theory in its humbler and less dignified applications. I meant to complain, and I still complain, of the silence on the subject observed by the modern English demagogue. I am quite aware that it is possible so to preach the doctrine as to violate morality and social decency; but in my judgment a man has no right to profess for such a class as the English agricultural labourers a love as intense as Rousseau professed to feel for the entire human race and yet to hide from them that there are forces at work among them which, if left unchecked, will defeat the most successful attempts to increase their comfort and well-being. If he cannot do this with propriety, the demagogue should abandon the profession he has adopted. At the very least, if he wishes to suggest an expedient for relieving the effects of the pressure of population when it has once set in, it ought to be adequate. Nevertheless in Ireland and the English agricultural counties, emigration is just as often attacked as seriously discussed, and even Mr. Godkin condescends to speak of sending the surplus population to till English moors. The present position of the subject seems to me a distinct mark of the degradation of opinion in our day. The very delusions which the author of the Theory of Population made an end of for a time are reviving and overwhelming his principles. Before he wrote, the deluge of loose and aimless humanitarianism was flowing from France over this country under the influence of Godwin. There will be no war,' says Godwin in his Political Justice, 'no crimes, no administration of justice, as it is called, and no government. Besides this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek with ineffable ardour the good of all.” But Malthus, whom Cobbett, the prototype of the modern demagogue,

called a brute,' and who was at all times anything but a popular writer, completely disposed of these fancies by showing with unrivalled clearness what are the real causes which determine the comfort and happiness of the great majority of men in every society. 'Malthus,' said Sydney Smith, 'took the trouble of refuting Godwin, and we hear no more of Mr. Godwin.' If anybody seriously thinks that a great movement can neither be started nor arrested by a book written by a thinker in his closet, he should study Mr. Bonar's Malthus and his Work. The cardinal Malthusian doctrine laid strongly hold of the leaders of the people, of those who loved popular favour no less than those who cared little for it. It converted the flower of the Whigs no less than in the long run it converted William Pitt, and at a later date the foremost men of both parties hazarded their popularity, by joining in support of the New Poor Law Bill, the measure intended to abolish a system which Malthus had denounced, and which was in fact the negation of his principles.

The closing pages of Mr. Godkin's article are extremely remarkable. They supply information of the highest interest concerning the American voting class and its attitude towards new scientific inventions; and they also contain a number of admissions so candid as to leave me in doubt whether the writer seriously dissents from the argument which at first sight he appears to be criticising. He begins by strongly denying that the American people manifest any jealousy or dislike of new inventions and processes.

I think (he writes) I might safely appeal to American men of science to say whether they do not suffer in reputation and influence with the people, for not making more and greater calls on their faith or credulity; or, in other words, for their slowness rather than for their haste in making and accepting discoveries. The fertility of Americans in inventions-that is, in the production of new machines and new processes -great as it is, is not so remarkable as the eagerness with which the people receive them and use them. The large number of medical quacks who infest the country, and their great success in the sale of their nostrums-the like of which I think can be seen nowhere else—is undoubtedly due to a sort of impatience with the caution and want of enterprise of the regular practitioners. The kind of fame which came to Edison after he had made some improvements in the electric light and invented the phonograph was a very good illustration of the respect of American people for the novel and the marvellous. For a good while he was hailed as a man to whom any problem in physics would be simple, and he was consulted on a variety of subjects to which he had given no attention, such as the means of diminishing the noise of the trains on the elevated railroads in the streets of this city. In fact, for a year or two, he held the position-doubtless to his own amusement-of a 'medicine man,' to whom any mystery was easy.

I have not the smallest right to deny any of these assertions, and I will add that, for various reasons, they seem to me eminently credible. In a country of which the natural resources, vast and formidable as they seem to us on this side of the Atlantic, have not been in all probability more than very superficially developed, a new labour-saving machine must promise fortune to the average American