Part 7 (2/2)
COLERIDGE.
”Then let us pray that come it may, As come it will for a' that, That sense and worth, o'er a' the earth, May bear the gree, and a' that.
For a' that, and a' that, It's coming yet, for a' that, That man to man, the warld o'er, Shall brothers be for a' that.”
BURNS.
However widely men may differ as to the way to social perfection, all whose minds have turned in that direction agree as to the end. All agree that if the whole race could live as brethren, society would be in the most advanced state that can be conceived of. It is also agreed that the spirit of fraternity is to be attained, if at all, by men discerning their mutual relation, as ”parts and proportions of one wondrous whole.”
The disputes which arise are about how these proportions are to be arranged, and what those qualifications should be by which some shall have an ascendancy over others.
This cl.u.s.ter of questions is not yet settled with regard to the inhabitants of any one country. The most advanced nations are now in a condition of internal conflict upon them. As for the larger idea,--that nations as well as individuals are ”parts and proportions of one wondrous whole,” it has hardly yet pa.s.sed the lips or pen of any but religious men and poets. Its time will come when men have made greater progress, and are more at ease about the domestic arrangements of nations. As long as there are, in every country of the world, mult.i.tudes who cannot by any exertion of their own redeem themselves from hards.h.i.+p, and their children from ignorance, there is quite enough for justice and charity to do at home. While this is doing,--while the English are striving to raise the indigent cla.s.ses of their society, the French speculating to elevate the condition of woman, and to open the career of life to all rational beings, the Germans waiting to throw off the despotism of absolute rulers, and the Americans struggling to free the negroes,--the fraternal sentiment will be growing, in preparation for yet higher results. The principle, acted upon at home, will be gaining strength for exercise abroad; and the more any society becomes like a band of brothers, the more powerful must be the sympathy which it will have to offer to other such bands.
Far off as may be the realization of such a prospect, it is a prospect.
For many ages poets and philosophers have entertained the idea of a general spirit of fraternity among men. It is the one great principle of the greatest religion which has ever nourished the morals of mankind.
It is the loftiest hope on which the wisest speculators have lived.
Poets are the prophets, and philosophers the a.n.a.lysers of the fate of men, and religion is the promise and pledge of unseen powers to those who believe in them. That cannot be unworthy of attention, of hope, of expectation, which the poets and the a.n.a.lysers of the race, have reposed upon, and on which the best religion of the world (and that which comprehends all others) is based. That which has never, for all its splendour, been deemed absurd by the wisest of the race is now beginning to be realized. We have now something more to show for our hope than what was before enough for the highest minds. The fraternal spirit has begun to manifest itself by its workings in society. The helpless are now aided expressly on the ground of their helplessness,--not from the emotions of compa.s.sion excited by the spectacle of suffering in particular cases, but in a n.o.bler and more abstract way. Cla.s.ses, crowds, nations of sufferers are aided and protected by strangers, powerful and at ease, who never saw an individual of the suffering thousands, and who have none but a spiritual interest in their welfare.
Since missions to barbarous countries, action against slavery, and the care of the blind, deaf and dumb, and paupers, have become labours of society, the fraternity of men has ceased to be a mere aspiration, or even prophecy and promise. It is not only that the high-placed watchmen of the world have announced that the day is coming,--it has dawned; and there is every reason to expect that it will brighten into noon.
The traveller must be strangely careless who, in observing upon the morals of a people, omits to mark the manifestations of this principle;--to learn what is its present strength, and what the promise of its growth. By fixing his observation on this he may learn, and no otherwise can he learn, whether the country he studies is advancing in wisdom and happiness, or whether it is stationary, or whether it is going back. The probabilities of its progress are wholly dependent upon this.--It will not take long to point out what are the signs of progression which he must study.
It is of great consequence whether the nation is insular or continental, independent or colonial. Though the time seems to be come when the sea is to be made a highway, as easy of pa.s.sage as the land, such has not been the case till now. Even in the case of Great Britain,--the most accessible of islands, and the most tempting to access,--before the last series of wars, a much smaller number of strangers visited her than could have been supposed to come if they had only to pa.s.s land frontiers. During the wars, she was almost excluded from continental society. The progress that her people have made in liberality and humanity since communication has been rendered easy, is so striking that it is impossible to avoid supposing the enlarged commerce of mind which has taken place to be one of the chief causes of the improvement. It is probable that the advancement of the nation would have been still greater if the old geological state of junction with the continent had been restored for the last twenty years. She would then have been almost such a centre of influx as France has been, and by which France has so far profited that the French are now, it is believed, the most active-minded and morally progressive nation in the world. Much of the vigour and progression of France is doubtless owing to other causes; but much also to her rapid and extensive intercourse with the minds of many nations. The condition of the inhabitants of other islands is likely to be less favourable to progression than that of the British, in proportion as they have less intercourse. They are likely to have even more than the English proportion of self-satisfaction, dislike of foreigners, and reserve. Generally speaking, the inhabitants of islands are found to be to those of continental countries as villagers to citizens: they have good qualities of their own, but are behind the world. Malta has not the chance that she would have if we could annex her to the South of France; nor will the West India islands advance as they would do if we could throw them all into one, and intersect the whole with roads leading on either side from the great European and American cities.
Malta and the West India islands have, however, the additional disadvantage of being colonies. The moral progression of a people can scarcely begin till they are independent. Their morals are overruled by the mother-country,--by the government and legislation she imposes, by the rulers she sends out, by the nature of the advantages she grants and the tribute she requires, by the population she pours in from home, and by her own example. Accordingly, the colonies of a powerful country exhibit an exaggeration of the national faults, with only infant virtues of their own, which wait for freedom to grow to maturity, and among which an enlarged sympathy with the race is seldom found. This is a temper uncongenial with a confined, dependent, and imitative society; and the first strong symptoms of it are usually found in the persons of those whose mission it is to lead the colony out of its minority into independence.
These are conditions of a people which may guide the traveller's observations by showing him what to expect. Remembering these conditions, he will mark the greater or less enlargement and generosity of the spirit of society, and learn from these the fact or promise of progression, or whether it is too soon to look for either.
There is another important condition which can hardly escape his notice: whether the people are h.o.m.ogeneous or composed of various races. The inhabitants of New England are a remarkable specimen of the first, as the inhabitants of the middle states of America will be of the last, two or three generations hence. Almost all the nations of Europe are mongrel; and those which can trace their descent from the greatest variety of ancestors have, other circ.u.mstances remaining the same, the best chance of progression. Among a h.o.m.ogeneous people, ancestral virtues flourish; but these carry with them ancestral faults as their shadow; and there is a liability of a new fault being added,--resistance to the spirit of improvement. If the chances of severity of ancient virtue are lessened in the case of a mongrel people, there is a counterbalancing advantage in the greater diversity of interests, enlargement of sympathy, and vigour of enterprise introduced by the close union of the descendants of different races. The people of New England, almost to a man descended from the pilgrim fathers, have the strong religious principle and feeling, the uprightness, the domestic attachment, and the principled worldly prudence of their ancestors, with much of their asceticism (and necessarily attendant cant) and bigotry.
Their neighbours in the middle states are composed of contributions from all countries of the civilized world, and have, as yet, no distinctive character; but it is probable that a very valuable one will be formed, in course of time, from such elements as the genial gaiety of the cavaliers, the patient industry of the Germans and Dutch, the vivacity of the French, the sobriety of the Scotch, the enterprise of the Irish, and the domestic tastes of the Swiss,--all of which, with their attendant drawbacks, go to compose the future American character. The chief pride of the New Englanders is in their unmixed descent;--a virtuous pride, but not the most favourable to a progression which must antiquate some of the qualities to which they are most attached. The European components of the other population cherish some of the feudal prejudices and the territorial pride which they imported with them, and this is their peculiar drawback: but it appears that the enlarged liberality which they enjoy from being intermingled more than countervails the religious spirit of New England in opening the general heart and mind to the interests of the race at large. The progression of the middle states seems likely to be more rapid than that of New England, though the inhabitants of the northern states have hitherto taken and kept the lead.
It is the traveller's business to enter upon this course of observation wherever he goes. When he has ascertained the conditions under which the national character is forming,--whether its situation is insular or continental, colonial or independent, and whether it is descended from one race or more, he will proceed to observe the facts which indicate progress or the reverse.
The most obvious of these facts is the character of charity. Charity is everywhere. The human heart is always tender, always touched by visible suffering, under one form or another. The form which this charity takes is the great question.
In young and rude countries, an open-handed charity pervades the land.
Everyone who comes in want to a dwelling has his immediate want relieved. The Arab gives from his mess to the hungerer who appears at the entrance of his tent. The negro brings rice and milk to the traveller who lies fainting under the palm. The poor are fed round convent-doors, morning and evening, where there are convents. In Ireland, it is a common practice to beg, in order to rise in the world,--a clear testimony to the practice of charity there. In all societies, the poor help the poorer; the depressed cla.s.s aids the dest.i.tute. The existence of the charity may be considered a certainty.
The inquiry is about its direction.
The lowest order of charity is that which is satisfied with relieving the immediate pressure of distress in individual cases. A higher is that which makes provision on a large scale for the relief of such distress; as when a nation pa.s.ses on from common alms-giving to a general provision for the dest.i.tute. A higher still is when such provision is made in the way of antic.i.p.ation, or for distant objects; as when the civilization of savages, the freeing of slaves, the treatment of the insane, or the education of the blind and deaf mutes is undertaken. The highest charity of all is that which aims at the prevention rather than the alleviation of evil. When any considerable number of a society are engaged in this work, the spirit of fraternity is busy there, and the progression of the society is ascertained. In such a community, it is allowed that though it is good to relieve the hungry, it is better to take care that all who work shall eat, as a matter of right: that though it is good to provide for the comfort and reformation of the guilty, it is better to obviate guilt: that though it is good to teach the ignorant who come in one's way, it is better to provide the means of knowledge, as of food, for all. In short, it is a n.o.bler charity to prevent dest.i.tution, crime, and ignorance, than to relieve individuals who never ought to have been made dest.i.tute, criminal, and ignorant.
This war against the evils themselves, in preference to, but accompanied by, relief of the victims, has begun in many countries; and those which are the most busily occupied in the work must be considered the most advanced, and the most certain to advance. The observer must note the state of the work everywhere. In one country he will see the poor fed and clothed by charity, without any effort being made to relieve them from the pressure by which they are sunk in dest.i.tution. The spirit of brotherhood is not there; and such charity has nothing of the spirit of hope and progress in it. In another country, he will see the independent insisting on the right of the dest.i.tute to relief, and providing by law or custom for such relief. This is a great step, inasmuch as the interests of the helpless are taken up by the powerful,--a movement which must have something of the fraternal spirit for its impulse. In a third, he hears of prison discipline societies, missionary societies, temperance societies, and societies for the abolition of slavery. This is better still. It is looking wide,--so wide as that the spirit of charity acts as seeing the invisible,--the pagan trembling under the tabu, the negro outraged in his best affections, and the criminal hidden in the foul retreat of the common jail. It is also a training for looking deep; for these methods of charity all go to prevent the woes of future heathen generations, future slaves, drunkards, and criminals, as well as to soften the lot of those who exist. If, in a fourth society, the observer finds that the charity has gone deep as well as spread wide, and that the benevolent are tugging at the roots of indigence and crime, he may place this society above all the rest as to the brightness of its prospects. Such a movement can proceed only from the spirit of fraternity,--from the movers feeling it their own concern that any are depressed and endangered as they would themselves refuse to be. The elevation of the depressed cla.s.ses in such a society, and the consequent progression of the whole, may be considered certain; for ”sooner will the mother forget her sucking child” than the friends of their race forsake those for whom they have cared and laboured with disinterested love and toil. Criminals will never be plunged back into their former state in America, nor women in France, nor negroes in the colonies of England. The spirit of justice (which is ultimately one with charity) has gone forth, not only conquering, but still to conquer.
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