FOOTNOTES:

[6] "Jude the Obscure."

[7] From article "Freedom in the American Colleges," in "Progressive Review," January, 1897.

CHAPTER VII.

PLUTOCRACY.

"Constant at church and change; his gains were sure,

His givings rare, save farthings to the poor."

Pope. "Of the Use of Riches."

"Here you a muckworm of the town might see

At his dull desk, amid his ledgers stall'd,

Eat up with carking care."

Thomson. "Castle of Indolence."

Everyone knows Pugsley, the great Pugsley, proprietor of Pugsley's Pure Piquant Pickles. You have seen his gracefully alliterative advertisements on the hoardings at the railway stations, and all down the Great Turnover Line, glaring at you in pastoral scenes, where Chloris led her lambkins in the pre-plutocratic days of "merrie England," and even obtruding their hideous drawing of the pickle bottles ("Ask for Pugsley's, Pure and Piquant") upon you in lonely mountain inns of the Grampians. There is no escaping the all-pervading Pugsley. Your grocer has foisted Pugsley's Pickles on you, and you have had to taste them, willy-nilly. He had a good reason for sending you Pugsley's Pickles. The firm are able to undersell all other competitors in the drysaltery interest, because they pay low wages to their workpeople.

But, though you are familiar with the name of the Great Pugsley, and know the flavour of his relishes and condiments, you have never troubled to learn how the man made his huge business. I will tell you his history. It is very instructive.

Pugsley's father was a village grocer at Hookham Nooton. He sold butter and cheese and tea for forty years, and left his son £500 at his demise. Young Pugsley early developed shrewd commercial instincts. At school he retailed his father's sugar to the boys, making a clear halfpenny profit on each penny; and when he had made a little capital by this huckstering, he launched out into bigger trading ventures, such as the vending of knives and cricket bats, and cheap magic lanterns, till he became a kind of "Universal Provider" at the select academy for young gentlemen. This was good training for his after career of buying, and selling, and exploiting. There is nothing like beginning these things when you are young.

At fifteen, Pugsley, junior, was installed behind the parental counter at Hookham Nooton, where he learned how to weigh tea with a bit of paper under the scale pan, and other recognised dodges of the trade, so that he soon became his father's right hand, and a great acquisition to the business. When Pugsley, senior, departed hence, his son took sole control of the shop. But the young man realised that he was born to be a great merchant, and not a petty trader in a remote village. One day he chanced upon an old book of practical recipes, which told you how to make ketchup and sauces, and, by dint of messing with vinegar and spices, he hit upon the famous blend that made his name as a sauce maker. Bottles of the stuff sold readily in the village and neighbouring small towns, for there is no denying that it was a tasty relish. Then came small wholesale orders, and trade began "to hum," as business slang has it. Five years later we find Pugsley the owner of a pickle factory in Spitalfields, and the employer of fifty hands, mostly girls and boys. Ten years after, his pickles are used in every Respectable family in the kingdom, and their repute has reached America and the Colonies; and so, before the prime of life, Pugsley is a pursy citizen, with a fine house at Richmond, a horse and chaise, a housekeeper, maidservants, and a gardener and coachman—all the proper rewards of industry.

At thirty-six, Pugsley married money, and further extended his business. His wife "received" local snobs, and gave "at homes," attended by inferior celebrities and "all the people who are likely to be of use to us." At forty Pugsley was a Constitutional candidate for Diddleham, the hope of the Respectables, the cynosure of the hide-bound conventionalists in politics. You may remember that he was returned by the imposing majority of six. Now came the zenith of his fame. Pugsley's politics like his pickles, are notoriously piquant. He has voted against every democratic measure, and prated about "the natural leaders of the working class."

See him now, in his honoured old age, hated of his workpeople, envied by Respectables, despised by the county gentry and feared by almost everyone, a millionaire to-day, with a seat in Clodshire, a house in Portland Terrace, a yacht at Brighton, and a deer forest in Inverness-shire. I have met his son, the Master of the Slowcomb Hounds, a good sort of Philistine, who would rather do his fellow-men a good turn than an ill one, but a terrible ignoramus and deadweight for all that; with far less real knowledge of men and books than my cobbler round the corner. There are three daughters. One of them, Miss Evelyn, is betrothed to Lord Durt, the young impoverished peer, who was lately earning thirty shillings a week as society reporter to the "Gadabout." I am glad for Durt. He has had a rough time, and Evelyn is an amiable, even hopeful specimen of the Respectable girl. She has lately talked about industrial questions, and I believe she is half ashamed already that papa has women in his employment earning nine shillings a week upon which to keep body and soul together.

Yes, it is with the sweat of women and children that Pugsley has become a plutocrat. His wife is the Patroness of the Refuge for the Fallen. How many of Pugsley's women have been forced to supplement their wretched earnings by prostitution? Someone once put this question to the pickleman. "Really, Mrs. ——," he said, "I am not responsible for the morals of my working people." But I say that it is such fellows as Pugsley who force girls to sell themselves in the street. I ask you, my Respectable sister, could you live yourself and help to support your widowed mother and two young children on a wage of seven shillings a week? I have known one of Pugsley's women workers try to do this till death came with its eternity of rest for that poor, semi-starved, aching body. To me it is a constant source of wonder, and a matter of profound respect for woman's moral courage that more of Pugsley's ill-paid women helpers do not walk the streets for hire.

O! Great Pugsley, I would that I could be certain of a day of reckoning betwixt you and an Almighty Judge! Sometimes, in dreams, I hear the tramp, tramp, of thousands of feet, and see the white faces of toilers gleam in the murk of a London night, a night of violent retribution. Must we wait for this? Must hands be stained with men's blood ere the rich will bestir themselves to render justice to the poor? I pray the fates that it may not be so! But everywhere, in the great cities, and out in the fields, I hear the murmur of deep, sullen discontent.

Think what such a man as Pugsley has wrought in the name of Respectability. He has systematically lied, cheated, and crushed the weaker to the wall. He has piled up wealth by defrauding the widow and the orphan of bare human rights, turning them into worse than slaves by his thrice-accursed lust for money. I have heard of old servants being deposed in his warehouse, and put into subordinate positions to make way for the young; of men dismissed for the expression of Liberal political opinions; of hands threatened with discharge for professing trades union principles; of fines wrung from hungry children for trivial offences; and of bullying and insult and injustices without number.

I hear my cut-and-dried economist calling me to account with his formulas and expositions. Ah! I have listened to them; I have read them; but they never have, and never will, persuade me that Pugsley, the plutocrat, does what is right and humane and reasonable towards those who have built up his fortune, and bought his mansions and his yacht, and dowered his daughters. I know about competition, and the law of demand and supply, and I take my stand on sound social science. But no science that I have studied convinces me that this plutocracy and plunder and monopoly are good for anyone but the plutocrats and the plunderers. And not good for them, either, in any moral sense. Is it moral to kill the social affections? I say that the professional burglar is a model of virtue by the side of Pugsley. He does not pose as a Christian philanthropist and a friend of the people when he goes about his nefarious business. Pugsley, the great successful gambler, fines poor country louts for playing pitch and toss with halfpence. The next day he perpetrates a filthy fraud on 'Change. Shelley was right, the true ruffian of a community is not the cutpurse who knocks you down in the Gray's Inn Road, and gags you, while his accomplice grabs your watch and valuables, but the "Respectable man—the smooth, smiling villain whom all the City honours, whose very trade is lies and murder; who buys his daily bread with the blood and tears of men." I want to know why the big thief, Pugsley, is made a peer, and the man who steals a handful of turnips is sent to the County gaol?

The other day, a labourer, out of work, wired a rabbit on Pugsley's estate, and went to prison for a week for the misdemeanour. But Pugsley annexed the very land that the rabbit was on, a good wide strip of it, too, which belonged to the people. I used to walk on that same ground, looking for the first primroses. Now I must ask Pugsley's permission before I dare set a foot there, on this property which I own in common with my neighbours! And you tell me that this sort of "law and order" is good for my morals.

I am glad that my ethical-cum-philosophical friend is not at my elbow just now, to suggest that I ought to be kind to Pugsley. Why, in the name of reason, am I to flatter and applaud this commercial gamester? I look upon him as a victim of morbid acquisitiveness induced by Respectability. Pugsley thinks he must keep up his reputation among the Respectables of his set, and to do this he is urged to plunder the poor. He is a dangerous maniac; he ought to be detained and set to hard labour to cure him of his derangement.

The stupidest farce played by the Pugsleys is when one of the girls goes district visiting, and tells the wives of the peasants earning twelve shillings a week, that they "ought to put by for a rainy day." I wonder that the women can keep their patience with the ninny. If Miss Clara Pugsley were to use her atrophied brain for five minutes, she would know that no woman with a husband and five children to feed and clothe, and a rent of eighteenpence a week to pay, can save a farthing out of such wages. It is gross insolence of this over-fed, idle, ignorant girl to talk in this fashion to the poor. But this fatuous nonsense is preached all over the country every day in the week. Ladies call it "helping the poor to be thrifty," "elevating the workers," etc.

O, Great Pugsley, it is not envy of your possessions that makes me dip my pen in gall, though I know well that is what you will think should you read these words of mine. I would be well content with the income of your under-steward. You have measured human nature with your little foot-rule, and come to the opinion that all men are naturally greedy vampires like yourself. Believe me, Pugsley, you are sadly wrong in this view. I know men and women who would not stain their fingers with your wretched blood-money for their own usage, though they would gladly employ it for the benefit of those from whom you filched it, drib and drab, by underpayment of their hard, dull toil.

I wish, how I wish in malignant moments, that I had assurance of a hereafter for Pugsley in a dark, noisome factory, where he would have to work for ten hours a day on skilly. The parson tells me that there is a mansion in the skies prepared for Pugsley. And another equally sumptuous residence for the more honest Bill Brown, the poacher? Why not?

London, Liverpool, Manchester, Sheffield—these are the paradises of the Pugsleys; they batten in the rechy air of these gambling centres. How do these dismal, over-crowded, smoke-blackened haunts of Respectability impress "the intelligent foreigner?" "Send a philosopher to London, but no poet," says Heine. "Everywhere we are stared down on by wealth and Respectability, while, crammed away in retired lanes and damp alleys, poverty dwells, with her rags and her tears." Heine, like many another thinker, was struck by the wretchedness and poverty of London, hiding away behind the mansions of plutocrats and Respectables. He saw "gaunt hunger staring beseechingly at the rich merchant who hurries along, busy and jingling gold, or at the lazy lord who, like the surfeited god, rides by on his high horse, casting now and then an aristocratically indifferent glance at the mob below, as though they were swarming ants, or, at all events, a mass of baser beings, whose joys and sorrows have nothing in common with his feelings;" and the poet cried to poor Poverty, "Well art thou in the right when thou alliest thyself to vice and crime. Outlawed criminals often bear more humanity in their hearts than those cold, blameless citizens of virtue, in whose white hearts the power of evil is quenched, but also the power of good."

Mr. Grant White has written a book entitled "England Within and Without," a very pungent and witty delineation of the English character from an American point of view. He tells us that the British Philistine is "perfect of his kind;" that "Philistinism pervades the whole society of Great Britain south of the Tweed." Mr. Grant says that this Philistinism is of late growth in England, a phenomenon of the last hundred and fifty years. We cannot find traces of it in the "spacious days," in the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Ford, and Massinger, nor in all the comedies of Shakspere. Master Ford and Master Page, the townsmen of Windsor, are neither snobs nor Philistines. But now, in this wonderful nineteenth century, the Philistines are as obvious as the poor; they swarm and teem everywhere. The dense-minded middle-class man, rich, purse-proud, vulgar, incapable of apprehending anything beyond the range of his own personal experience, comes upon the stage. Enter Pugsley, with a capacious abdomen, a red beef face, set off with cropped side whiskers, a shiny pow, a big voice, and an imposing cough. "He is the butt, it is true, of the courtier and of the travelled man; nevertheless, he is represented as the type of a large class, and as one who is becoming a power in the land, and who is recognised as one of the characteristic elements of its society. He is conscious at once of his importance, and of his social inferiority, and he submits, although with surliness, to the snubbing of his superiors, which sometimes takes a very active and aggressive shape."

One day they will be coming round to me for a subscription towards erecting a statue of the Great Pugsley. You know the kind of effigy—Pugsley in a pot-hat, beaming benevolence, on a granite pedestal, that all who pass by may behold and envy the glory of this apotheosis of the Successful Man. But why should not Pugsley have his monument? Could one devise a better way of advertising his Piquant Pickles? Yes, let us have a colossal bronze figure of Peter Pugsley, M.P., in the market place of Diddleham, with raised pickle-bottles in metal festooned around the pedestal, and the words, "Ask for Pugsley's" graven in the polished stone. There is not much artistic beauty in Diddleham in the way of statuary. The statue will supply a long-felt want. Besides, there is a purely utilitarian aspect to the question (they are very utilitarian at Diddleham). At six meetings of the Town Council, the question of where to put the public fire-escape has been discussed with great heat. Let me suggest that it should be stood against the memorial to Pugsley.

If I had a son who began to develop the faculty of "getting on" upon the Pugsley lines, I would do all I could to encourage the youngster. He would earn success so easily that he would not care a rap for it. I would go, unbeknown to him, and scatter pins on the ground in front of the office where he intended to apply for a clerkship, so that he might stoop to pick them up, thereby, like the youth in the story, convincing the employer of his thrifty and methodical qualities. His library should be stocked with the lives of self-made men, the biographies of smart bagmen, and works on how to grow money. Portraits of successful merchants should deck the walls of his bedroom, and he should be taught to revere them as patron saints. I warrant such methods of fostering the love of commercial success would have the desired effect. The boy would run away to "a hollow tree, a crust of bread, and liberty."

CHAPTER VIII.

VILLADOM.

"There is less inconvenience in being mad with the mad than by being wise by oneself."

Diderot.

"It is among the respectable classes of this vast and happy empire that the greatest profusion of snobs is to be found."

Thackeray.

"I sojourned perforce for a long while in Villadom," says an enemy of Respectability; "and I came away with some of its froust about my person." You can't bide there without getting harm; but the worst of it is, we have no option, many of us; we have to live in Villadom at some time or another in our lives. Thackeray, Guy de Maupassant, George Gissing, and George Moore have given us some clever studies of the kind of folk who live in those genteel residences in the suburbs. Mr. Moore's picture of Ashbourne Crescent, in the last chapter of "A Drama in Muslin," is about the finest of the sort I have met with in fiction. It is so good a description of the region that I am tempted beyond resistance to steal parts of it.

"In Ashbourne Crescent there is neither dissent nor Radicalism, but general aversion to all considerations which might disturb belief in all the routine of existence, in all its temporal and spiritual aspects, as it had come amongst them. The fathers and the brothers go to the City every day at nine, the young ladies play tennis, read novels, and beg to be taken to dances at the Kensington Town Hall. On Sunday the air is alive with the clanging of bells, and, in orderly procession, every family proceeds to church, the fathers in all the gravity of umbrellas and prayer-books, the matrons in silk mantles and clumsy, ready-made elastic sides; the girls in all the gaiety of their summer dresses, with lively bustles bobbing; the young men in frock-coats which show off their broad shoulders, as from time to time they pull their tawny moustaches. Each house keeps a cook and housemaid, and on Sunday afternoons, when the skies are flushed with sunset, and the outlines of this human warren grow harshly distinct—black lines upon pale red—these are seen walking arm-in-arm away towards a distant park with their young men.... And that Ashbourne Crescent, with its bright brass knockers, its white-capped maidservants, and spotless oilcloths, will in the dim future pass away before some great tide of revolution that is now gathering strength far away, deep down and out of sight in the heart of a nation, is probable enough; but it is certainly now, in all its cheapness and vulgarity, more than anything else representative, though the length and breadth of the land be searched, of the genius of Empire that has been glorious through the long tale that nine hundred years have to tell."

I have conceived of a suburban colony of houses where a man might live and be natural and healthy-minded among his neighbours; where he might, if he chose, walk about in cool, backwoods dress, a shirt, breeks, and wide-brimmed hat—or no hat—in hot weather, without inciting derision, or becoming a pariah. But Villadom cares nothing for naturalness, nor liberty of opinion and conduct; and, unconscious of the madness of its severe conventionality, it deems those insane who cultivate ideas and try to live up to them. What! is there one man in ten in this great sheep-pen who would like to be seen blacking his own boots or sweeping the snow from the front of his house? No, they prefer to ill-pay some man's daughter to do all their irksome and dirty work. What does Villadom read, talk of, and think upon? The fathers read the newspapers, the mothers and daughters peruse "John Halifax," and such like literature of the Pap-boat and Pumplighter sort; and the talk is of money, the neighbours, and the back-parlour window curtains and carpets—all good themes enough in their season, but not the only things in life of vast importance. The denizens of Villadom tell you that they have their livings to earn, dinners to cook, and houses to control; therefore there is no time for cultivating their intellects, and developing their sense of the beautiful in nature and art. No time! It is the old plea of the men and women who squander hours in tittle-tattle and loafing. Gerald Massey, a bargeman's son, and a fag in a factory; Elihu Burritt, a blacksmith; Thomas Edward, a shoemaker; Walt Whitman, a compositor; Bradlaugh, a soldier, and afterwards a clerk; James Hosken, a postman, not to mention a hundred other hard-working men, found time to read, and think, and improve themselves. It is the will, and not the leisure, that is lacking in Villadom, the will to be something better than mere Respectables in the eyes of society.

The foppery and frippery of Villadom are miserable outlets for human energy. If this is the end of civilised beings, give me rather the wildest life of primitive barbarians, for they, at least, wish to learn higher arts of living. No past civilisation presents this picture of Philistine apathy to the nobler interests of life. Karl Pearson says truly that the two most pitiful illustrations of our pseudo-civilisation may be seen in the main streets of the West End of London. In the afternoon you see crowds of idle, shallow women standing, rapt in the admiration of bits of ribbon in the windows of the drapery stores. A few hours later, when the shops are closed, another army of women parade the pavements, ogling and smirking in their nightly quest for the bread of prostitution. The "ladies" of the afternoon promenade are mostly the wives and daughters of Villadom. They do not know how largely responsible they are for that nocturnal orgy of the streets when they are snug in their luxurious drawing-rooms. It is the fetish-worship of Respectability that makes thousands of women redundant, drives some to the streets, and condemns others to withered celibacy. Men realise that the Respectable daughters of Villadom are luxuries that they cannot afford to maintain, in early life, at least; and the demi-monde know this, too. As Mr. W. R. Greg wrote: "While the monde has been deteriorating, the demi-monde has been improving; as the one has grown stupider and costlier, the other has grown, more attractive, more decorous, and more easy. The ladies there are now often as clever and amusing, usually more beautiful, and not infrequently (in external demeanour, at least,) as modest, as their rivals in more recognised society."

This writer, rightly or wrongly, affirms that the way to set things straight in this anomaly of polyandry for thousands of women, and celibacy for thousands of their sisters is by the respectable ladies emulating the manners, and attaining the charms of the hetæræ, in "cheerfulness and kindliness of demeanour," "economy of style," and "ease and simplicity."

I know the advanced women—some of them, at any rate—will tell me that men are not worth winning at this expense, and that they prefer to go their own ways alone. So be it. There is no coercion to matrimony for such as elect to remain in single independence. On the other hand, we have not yet killed the sexual attraction and the maternal instinct in all our emancipated women. And, as for the girls of Villadom, they, at all events, look upon marriage as their destiny. Then, I say, let them get rid of this spurious virtue of Respectability, which costs so much to maintain, and is worth nothing after all their pains. Villadom exists principally for women. Bachelor men do not, as a rule, need domestic whim-whams and nick-nacks to make them happy in their "diggings." Villadom has been built and embellished for the fair sex; they reign almost supreme there, and it is their part to refine the atmosphere of their domain.

CHAPTER IX.

THE TYRANNY OF RESPECTABILITY.

"Men, and still more women, who lift themselves above the ordinary standard by their philosophical tastes and speculations, may indeed be accounted fortunate if they escape calumny or obloquy from general society."

W. Carew Hazlitt.

"Mankind is an ass, who kicks those who endeavour to take off his panniers," says a Spanish proverb. When we are very young and enthusiastic about the great part we mean to play in the reformation of society, we work ourselves into fearful furies of indignation with those who have persecuted innovators in all ages. Later in life we learn that the persecutor is more of an ass than a villain; and the more we study humanity, not forgetting our own human nature, the more are we persuaded that this is the right scientific view to take. While we had the taint of Respectability in us (and very few men and women are born without it), we were disposed sometimes to do some of this asinine kicking upon those whom we considered dangers to society. We did not pause to think whether they wished to help us by removing the packs from our galled backs; but, as soon as a Samaritan approached us with kindly intent, we let fly our heels and attacked him. The fact is, as Thoreau says, there are really very few men, even of the Non-Respectables, without some trace of Respectable prejudice. Let us, therefore, be as tolerant as possible towards the misguided Respectables who brutally maltreat their would-be benefactors. Perhaps you have never thrown flints at an itinerant evangelist, nor hustled a Socialist in the parks; nevertheless, you have persecuted in some shape or form at one time of your life. Too lazy by nature to inquire into a novel social doctrine, or to dispassionately examine a new theory of morals, you have misunderstood and denounced the promulgators and theorists. This is very often the outcome of your Respectability, and a purely emotional manifestation of prejudice against something that you have not tried to understand. Thus persecution begins. If you have a large element of the savage in you, your opposition will take the form of actual physical violence and scurrilous abuse; if you are moderately humane and intelligent, you will merely scorn and deride the heretic. Your blood seethes when you read of the persecution of martyrs. Take heed of yourself that you do not evince the malevolent spirit that impels men to denounce others unheard, at the first suggestion of heterodox opinion.

Priestley, a Unitarian minister, of Birmingham, experimented in chemistry, and discovered oxygen, alone and entirely unassisted, in a laboratory fitted up at his own expense. The world owes much to this industrious man of science. But the human nature that killed Christ and Bruno, hated Priestley because he tried to convey new truths. A mob of fanatical Respectables burned down his house, and destroyed all his books, notes, and apparatus, and drove him from his native land.

Home, the author of the tragedy of "Douglas," was persecuted and turned out of the ministry by Scotch Respectables for writing a play to amuse and instruct his fellow men; and Dr. Alexander Carlyle was threatened with a prosecution for standing by Home, his friend. Religious Respectability persecuted the devout Hannah More for instructing the children of the poor. Moneyed Respectability hanged John Brown, mobbed Theodore Parker, and threatened to shoot Ernestine Rose for endeavouring to free negro slaves. Shelley, one of the humanest souls who ever lived, was driven from Eton by respectable young cads, expelled from Oxford by Respectability, and banished to another country. Byron, who taught men, by brave precept and example to love liberty, was reviled, slandered, and forced to live abroad. Walt Whitman, for showing men the beauty and purity of the reproductive function, degraded and assailed by Respectability, was "greeted with howls of execration." Respectability has cursed Ibsen, Zola, and Björnson, three mighty forces for righteousness in Europe. Charles Bradlaugh, who devoted his life to the service of man, was bitterly assailed and vilely aspersed by his contemporary Respectables. Respectable human nature kicks everyone who sets himself to benefit humanity. The history of this moral pest and mental blight abounds with instances of its venomous effect upon men's hearts and minds.

"I can bear it no longer," cries Thackeray, "this diabolical invention of gentility which kills natural kindliness and honest friendship. Proper pride, indeed! Rank and precedence, forsooth! The table of ranks and degrees is a lie, and should be flung into the fire. Organise rank and precedence! That was well for the masters of ceremonies of former ages. Come forward, some great marshal, and organise equality in society, and your rod shall swallow up all the juggling old court 'goldsticks.'" Carlyle calls England "the wealthiest and worst instructed of European nations." Respectability piles up money, accumulates vast stores of material products, and starves men's minds in the process. It tyrannises in every province of ethics, science, art, literature, and politics, laying continually on our shoulders burdens grievous to bear. You can scarcely move without coming into collision with Respectability; you are expected to eat, drink, dress, think, marry, and be buried in accordance with its canon. The Respectables of the Exchange will snub and insult an independent-minded man who ventures within the shoddy circle without a chimney-pot hat. I have heard this stupid tyranny of majorities defended as a safeguard of decency and order. What! These attempts to stamp out individuality of character promote social progress? This is an odd way of reasoning. But the Respectable doesn't reason; he follows the crowd mechanically.

You have only to give the Respectables plenty of rope, and they will strangle every effort of advance. They form societies for suppressing this thing and harrying that, with their wary scouts prowling in every direction; they try to "rob the poor man of his beer," while they gorge themselves with fat meats; they fought tooth and nail against the Sunday opening of museums and picture-galleries; they prosecuted Mr. Vizetelly for selling translations of Zola's novels; they oppose amelioration of our absurd, cruel, and ineffective prison system; they ban the teaching of physiological morality in sex matters; and they put hobbles and blinkers on women.

I have no especial veneration for Lord Beaconsfield as a politician, but I admire him for his unconventionality. How many young men possess the pluck to appear at a dinner party in green velvet trousers, a canary-coloured waistcoat, low shoes with silver buckles, lace at their wrists, and their hair in ringlets? On another occasion, Disraeli turned up at a diocesan gathering at Oxford clad in a black velveteen shooting jacket, with a wideawake hat. A Respectable booby, writing the other day to a Liberal newspaper, referred to these eccentricities as though they were vices in a man, instead of recognising that such flaunting of a dull, drab Respectability, betokened courage and individuality. Immediately you dress in accordance with your own taste, instead of in the mufti of convention, you are dubbed a mountebank and a posturer. Of course, after these aberrations of deportment and form, there is not a good word to be said for Dizzy, only vehement abuse and denunciation. Yet the same Radical Respectable knew perfectly well, when he sat down to write that diatribe, that many of his class affect peculiarities of dress.

CHAPTER X.

RESPECTABLE CIVILISATION AND AFTER.

"I announce a life that shall be copious, vehement, spiritual, bold."

Walt Whitman.

It is the boast of the ordinary patriotic Briton that he lives in a highly civilised country. During his tutelage, he learns that climate, or insularity of position on the face of the globe, or the system of monarchy, or the Bible, has, or have, combined or separately, made England the foremost nation on earth. In later life he is sometimes prone to exclaim against our "advanced civilisation," and even to go to the extreme of asserting that we could well dispense with much of it. The latter-day Anglo-Saxon, who thinks without thought, has for himself a very clear and satisfying idea of civilisation. Emerson, on the other hand, remarks that "nobody has attempted a definition of civilisation," and that "we usually suggest it by negations;" and he adduces instances of people lacking an alphabet, iron, and abstract thought. Thus, when we ask for an explanation of the term Civilisation, we usually hear an enumeration of the constituents of a state of primal savagery, and are then possibly referred to the material products, money, and Gatling guns of a nation for signs of its civilisation.

It is then much simpler for the majority to formulate intrinsic barbarism than to define refinement, and to delineate a reliable ideal of Civilisation. They are conscious that much, if not most of that which they would designate civilised could, upon close examination, be proved to be barbaric. Their easy exposition will not withstand keen scientific scrutiny; and a definition which will not stand this test is merely a stumbling-block in the way of inquiry. A member of a reputedly cultured community or class naturally resents attack upon those views and customs which in his estimate denote civilisation, and are of its very essence. If he is a pious Englishman, he will probably confess that in the matter of faith the people of Eastern countries are barbaric, while he fails to discern the trail of barbarity in his own creed and ritual. In like manner, a Philistine aristocrat will scarcely accede that there is barely one degree of coarseness betwixt his pleasures and those of the illiterate proletarian, who, in his turn, persuades himself that he is more intelligent and decent than his compeers of another land.

Yet the truth is that a very small number of the inhabitants of these isles can be justly labelled civilised. We must search, as it were, in the mode of Diogenes for "the highly organised man, brought to supreme delicacy of sentiment, as in practical power, religion, liberty, sense of honour and taste," who stands for Emerson's type of civilised humanity. That such examples are not unknown at this stage is as certain as the fact that many more are in the process of evolution. And although savagery in idea and practice confronts us this way and that in each scale of society, we shall do ill if we approach the study of modern barbarism in a vein of mocking pessimism. It is also necessary that a lively faith in the evolutionary principle applied to human nature should be tempered by a look behind while our hopes are young.

Slowly and painfully are we "working out the beast," slowly and painfully must we climb the stages till we cease to obey the blind dictates of instinctive impulse and to base our codes on the reigning opinions of the irrational mass. It is hardly needful to reiterate even one of the preliminary conclusions of all philosophers and humanists to prove that most men have no reasoned views upon the conduct of life. Seneca says that "the common sort find it easier to believe than to judge, and content themselves with what is usual, never examining whether it be good or no. By the common sort is intended the man of title as well as the clouted shoe." The veracity of Swift's aphorism that most men have as much turn for flying as for thinking, and of Carlyle's laconic "mostly fools," is unquestioned.

It is therefore no unsupported postulate that the larger part of civilised people always tend to lead barbaric lives, and that what each class is apt to accept as an approximation to a complete civilisation is a very inchoate form of that truer culture urged upon society by individualist reformers in each successive age. A very slight examination of the thought and pursuits of what is called the highest class in our existing social scale will serve to demonstrate the prevalence of barbarism. For there, as in the lower circles, we find the lines of apathy, vulgarity, and animalism graven on patrician faces, and proclaimed in the talk of the dinner-table, the smoking-room, and the covert-side. Obviously, all our peers are not ultra-barbarians; neither are all our bargees and coalheavers savages. Yet the dominant tone is just as often low and inane in the mansion as in the tenement, and with much less to offer in its extenuation. Millions toil and ache, and are vulgarised in order that a coterie of hereditary lords and titled parvenus shall enjoy the leisure which they mainly devote to frivolity and the killing of the æons of time. Upon these, the intimates of monarchs, the protectors of the sacred pheasant, the distributors of largess, a barbaric populace alternately lavishes its affection and its abuse. So long as the baron flings his groats to the churls, all is peace in vassaldom; but when rents are racked, game laws enforced to their utmost limits, and the dice rattled in the hall, the voice of the people is upraised in tumult, and the virtuous artizan, clinking his silver winnings on the way from the racecourse, thanks heaven he is not as these nobles are, gamblers, adulterers, and oppressors of the widow and the orphan.

Set a barbarian to lash a barbarian if you wish to see injustice done. The fact is that, being barbarous, we first allow an accident of birth to raise a man to a position of power, and then run atilt at our shoddy dignities because the power tends to impede general well-being. Worth of mind is the one qualification for esteem, a trite enough dictum in the mouths of those who persistently ignore its truth. But the time must come when the aristocracy of character will be the only recognised aristocracy in civilised nations.

I think that if one should suggest that it is right to hate the members of our "bloated aristocracy," he is no less absurd than those who fawn around the lackeys of a court. Our noble lords are not of one type, as our common people are not of one cast, though in many rude examples of nobility we can trace the basic elements of ruffianism, and see the bestial fruits thereof. What most concerns us is the question whether a society that grants titles to its successful money-grabbers is clean-purged of its antique barbarism. An academical diploma conferred upon a teacher of the arts or sciences is possibly one means by which the respectful heed of the uncultured is secured for new doctrine. For the one who appends certain characters to his signature will be held in esteem by the many as a man worth hearing. Even in the matter of degrees given to scholars of distinction, we too often discover that such award fosters moral and mental deterioration, and that it narrows and mars the career of thinkers who are elevated to a throne of authority. Our laureates must need be eminently wary in their main theories, though they may pipe an undernote of revolt in the sequestered grove, to ease their souls of the sting of the stultifying penalty of vulgar rank. Yes, titles of all kinds seem to have a tendency to degrade; and the sun of courtly favour often withers the real and aids the growth of the spurious nobility. "Brave old Samuel," ever a Respectable in leading sentiments, was more so when he took a dole from the palace. There is little hope for the amendment of the semi-barbaric prophet when he is taken from the wilderness and thrust into a position only tenurable by wily compromise with the Respectabilities.

Very engrossing is the study of Respectability in high places. "These be the men we are told to look up to," said a tattered plebeian, whose eyes had been blasted by the hunting magistrate who was riding on other men's land. But that we do "look up to" our rich, idle folk with an avid awe is undoubted. Few persons in a town are especially interested in hearing that Mr. Herbert Spencer is there on a visit; but we are most of us anxious to shake hands with a prize-fighter, or the "Jubilee Plunger," or to take tea with a millionaire's wife. We look up to or hunt after such because they have vulgar notoriety or money, and we are not concerned to know how they came by their popularity and their cash, and whether they deserve either, and make a good use of their power. Were it not for the few civilised beings who dare to be considered odd, this odious admiration of trivial character and empty claims would mean a ripening to the decay of society. Involuntarily, the civilised make the ways of barbarity easy to thousands, for they absolve the lethargic from the exertion of severe thinking.

The paradise towards which the bourgeoisie strive is not the leisure to refine the mind, but the opportunity to vie with the more commonplace section of the upper class in dissipation. The labourer who resents the lordling's contumely, and indicts him for living a lazy life, may only work when he is starving, and perhaps not then. His ideal may rise no higher than perpetual beer and ninepins, while the squire craves no higher satisfaction in life than hunting six days a week, and champagne, billiards, and the sporting papers on Sunday. The evil is in the setting up of a barbaric aim of life in all classes. Our greatest ideals are the commercial and the voluptuous. The eternal pursuit of the frivolous, which makes up the chief part of what is foolishly termed "high life," and the sordid middle-class struggle to amass money, are accepted by the shallow as tokens of our progress in civilisation. We are rich and luxurious; we are therefore far above the savage. Yet how far? Our leisured and affluent have for the greater number returned to the employment of a pre-pastoral epoch. Look at the lives of thousands of English gentlemen. Truer barbarians never existed of old than many of those whose whole thought, energy, and wealth are given up to sport. Many of them are restless nomads, ever hurrying from one quarter of the globe to another in search of fresh game to kill. I do not underrate the need for the development of the physical man, nor ignore the value of sports rightly comprehended as a means to the end of training and recreating the body. But what shall be said of that multitude of our countrymen who live to amuse themselves in such primitive fashion? It is these who waste their powers, and barbarise the vulgar by the force of ill example.

Let us not wonder that, in bygone days, a gaping peasantry, with quaint uncouth notions of what constituted an efficient mouthpiece of their wants, yelled at the hustings for the return of those who rode straight, and could pummel the best man of the mob in a brace of rounds. Of such order are still the credentials in some of the Pagan constituencies, where the beer-steeped intelligence pleads the election of "an old-fashioned sort and a thorough sportsman."

We are still rearing these rude types in our public schools and universities, and for these we laudably reserve the chief places on the senate, on justiciary benches, and in local boards. Despite their educational chances and social opportunities, these are surely among the retrograde, with their argot culled from the racing journals, their strange drawling pronunciation of the English tongue, their points of breeding, their caddish hauteur, their rampant John Bullisms, and their innate aversion to thought and earnestness. "The fop of Charles's time," says Leslie, in Mr. Mallock's "New Republic," "aimed at seeming a wit and a scholar. The fop of ours aims at being a fool and a dunce."

Quitting this strange horde, let us descend to the mart for an examination of the Commercial Ideal. No one denies that for a nation of shopkeepers we have done great things in the world's history. In a very large measure we are civilised by the shop, and it is only when the shop absorbs the best of us, mental and physical, that commercial activity tends to retard progress. Provide that a man's moral sense and intellect are not warped or unexercised in the making of money, and there is nothing degrading, but the opposite, in his desire to succeed commercially. But in the fierceness of competition in an over-populated country, cruel barbarity and detestable meanness and cunning arise. And not only these, but the curse of intellectual and æsthetic atrophy lights upon the host. Out of this undue stress is developed a tendency to sordid living, a preference for the lower gratifications of life. Yet need money-getting always degrade the people? Will the prosperous business career of the future be alone compatible with a low standard of thought, and a corrupt canon of commercial morals?

"Life without industry is guilt; industry without art is brutality." Now, in the push and drive of industry at the close of this century it is as hard for myriads to keep the soul alive, as it is for many thousands to find food for the body. The trader who makes Mammon his idol, who thinks money, and spends his wealth irrationally, brutalises life. But for the others, let us rather pity and try to amend the condition of those who cannot, in plain terms, "leave the shop." There are strong-minded and somewhat exceptional tradesmen who can shake off the dust of the warehouse, and spend the hours of freedom in the cultivation of the intellect. There are men of business who do excellent work in art and science, while their jaded associates are satisfying their purely animal wants. The question is—Can a man live the higher life, and succeed in the worldly meaning of prosperity? Men do not grow money by storing the brain with knowledge, and the merchant who ponders upon a phase of evolution, or murmurs a rhythm of Tennyson while he is at the ledger, will most probably be an indifferent money-maker. Lamb's Good Clerk, you will remember, "gets on" because his first aim is to be a good piece of mechanism. It is a grievous reflection that zeal for the desk should eat up the brain and better part of a good man, and leave him a machine. The expert clerk is as valuable as the clever author or the great painter; but the trouble is that while the trader is making himself efficient as a trader, he is frequently neglecting his mind, narrowing his social judgments, and tending backwards.

Is there no escape from a seemingly invincible fate that restricts the thought and energy of the million to the bare affairs of the shop? It does almost seem at first that there is none. What we have to determine is whether we shall aid the production of mediocre shopkeepers, who will desire to live cultured lives, while they devote a due share of thought to the shop, or whether we shall continue to rear a class who place business first and culture last, or practically without their scheme of life. For every sociologist this is a great problem. Speaking out of my own prejudice, I would rather live in a country of moderately prosperous men, who read, and speculated, and had aspirations for something higher than lucre, than in the land where the mass were rich and unintellectual.

There is an economic aspect of the alternatives. Art thrives where there is wealth; but money does not of necessity make good art. At present two formidable hindrances stand in the way of developing culture—over-population, and a passion for ostentation. Regulate the reproductive faculty, and save the potential slave of industrialism from a struggle that waxes keener yearly. This must be done in the individual and national interest, to the gradual diminishment of abject poverty and the lessening of the awful strain in the congested centres. Allied with this teaching, there should be a wide inculcation of the value of a refined simplicity of material life, a substitution of high-thinking for mere barbarous display in living. These were the leading precepts of John Stuart Mill to an unheedful generation; but I, for one, take courage in the view that this will become the creed of many as we advance in the art of living. In Liberty, Mill writes:

"The superior worth of simplicity of life, the enervating and demoralising effects of the trammels and hypocrisies of artificial society, are ideas which have never been entirely absent from cultivated minds since Rousseau wrote; and they will in time produce their due effect, though at present needing to be asserted by deeds, for words, on this subject, have nearly exhausted their power."

The way of the civiliser is hard. If the men and women of ideals and broad sympathies go, as Mills enjoins, into Barbaria and Philistia as apostles, they must be prepared to receive the hurts of primitive weapons. Missionaries are not welcomed with barbaric shouts of glee when they land to subvert ancient faiths. Neither are apostles of righteousness and sweetness and light beloved of our children of darkness in Belgravia and Bloomsbury. But as Mr. Hamerton asks in his "Intellectual Life": "Are the Philistines to have all the talk to themselves for ever; are they to rehearse their stupid old platitudes without the least fear of contradiction? How long, O Lord, how long?" Yet, let your apostle be the quintessence of tact and humility, he will not escape slander, odium, and contempt when he essays to contradict the ancient platitudes. Broach boldly any subject, from religion to corset-wearing, in the drawing-room at Bloomsbury, or in the back parlour at Lambeth, and you will have to contend against stubborn apathy. To cultivate eccentricity of opinion and conduct for the purpose of evoking the curiosity of the languid Respectables, is a form of insanity which no one will suppose I am advocating as an effort towards civilisation. But social danger is always to be apprehended from conventionality that is stagnantly content with the existing order, and has not the desire nor energy to advance. It is, then, the onerous duty of a thoughtful member of the respectable classes to awaken his relatives or associates from a blank contentment with mere animal well-being and trivial aims. He must not shrink from the burden because it is the habit of unthinking persons to believe that the conclusions of sounder brains have been gained by the same meagre thinking as their own flimsy theories, or that his wrought-out views are only crotchets advanced to flatter his egoism. For by those who shirk deep thinking, intellectual seriousness in others is merely regarded as a more or less peculiar temperamental trait. They do not know that the eternal voluntary martyrdom of thinkers is their salvation. They are unaware that the good and the earnest toil daily in order that the evil and the frivolous may be preserved to reap the reward of toilsome thought, in which the apathetic have had no share, and for which they have little praise. Reflect upon what Darwin has done for morality, science, and art, and then mark the mean ingratitude and ignorant misrepresentation of some of those who are now being made whole by his sane science. Will the Respectables always crucify their social redeemers?

Not wholly encouraging is the investigation of barbarism in our industrial and proletarian classes. Yet perhaps, if there is one party above another that appears to be progressing rapidly towards a higher civilisation, it is the operative. When one thinks of what the working class has done, with its lack of advantage in the past, and its scant opportunity in the present, the progress is one of the most wonderful and hopeful omens of modern times. It is inevitable that the acquisition of a little knowledge should bear some ill fruit among the sound; but the humanising influences of education far exceed in their proved result the expectation of the early pioneers of a noble movement. Much has been done, and much remains to be accomplished, in the work of constructing the foundations and superstructure of an ultimate democratic civilisation. Whitman and Ibsen, latter-day prophets of sound social foresight, predicted at the outset of their careers that in the fibre and stuff of a cultured democracy lies our hope.

Undoubtedly, the moral tone of the industrial class is growing higher yearly. The rough hand of the artisan has fashioned much of our civilisation, and his hard, calculating intelligence will have a larger share in the government of the near future. I confess that it thrills me to hear that a set of miners in the North have begged the custodian of a public library to provide them with Mr. Meredith's fine but "difficult" novels. Again, we should rejoice to learn that a factory worker, who has taught himself to read at the age of forty, is studying Mr. Spencer's "First Principles."

As I have before tried to show, the neglect of civilising thought and study is not voluntary in the case of many busy men and women. It is largely an outcome of complex commercial rivalry and overpressure that thousands should not share in the higher refinements of civilisation, and that science should be outside their rule of life instead of at the bottom of it. Thoreau speaks of the best part of the husbandman being ploughed into the soil for compost; and the figure represents the case for legions of toilers. Mr. Ruskin is among the oracles when he announces that "the final outcome of all wealth is the producing as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed, and happy-hearted human creatures." Perhaps so; but for the nonce, we mostly plod on in that "dim-eyed and narrow-chested state of being," which we are wont to describe as "getting on in the world."

It is a great thing, this educational advance of the tool-skilled. Yet there is much to be done. It is needless to rehearse the manifold savage characteristics, the mob frenzies, and the low pleasures of many of the working class—imperfections which all of us exhibit either in like kind or with faint difference. We forget that a mechanic who indulges in a weekly debauch, and sometimes beats a constable, has his counterpart in those who call themselves superior. Ruffianism, brutality, and gross sensuality are not restricted to one class. English epicurism is mostly of the lower kind in every rank. The uncivilised of the upper class spend the larger part of their incomes upon dishes and drinks; the coarse of the labouring class expend nearly half their wages on beer. Our sensuousness trends in the direction of sensuality. We pride ourselves that we are able to consume quantities of flesh, and we apotheosise John Barleycorn with Shakspere.

Very sombre is the spectacle of the life that bruises the million. To one who walks the streets observantly on public holidays, the white faces and worn bodies of his toiling brothers tell of dull, grinding lives. See the poor mercantile clerks and the shopmen, the genteel drudges, the indispensable factors of wealth which they will never share. Well does Guy de Maupassant picture the type:

"With sallow faces and twisted bodies, and one of their shoulders a little forced up by perpetual bending at work over a table ... they all belonged to the army of poor threadbare devils who vegetate frugally in a mean little plaster-house, with a flower bed for a garden."

How can we inveigh against these tired workers for the drowsy occupation of their few leisure hours? What is chiefly at fault is the crushing system that leaves so little time for expansion of the mind and the sympathies, the ideal that shapes the many to this level cast. Mr. Grant White gives a grimly sardonic sketch of a London shopkeeping pair in his "England Without and Within." He tells of faces that had probably "once expressed some of the vivacity of youth; but this had passed away, and nothing, no trace of thought or feeling, had come into its place—only fat; a greasy witness of content." But there is more pathos than humour in this study from lower middle-class life. Were there not originally the germs of ideas, imagination, and emotion, in these unfortunate contented souls? Are such doomed to take no thought for higher things than bread-getting and eating, and will their minds for ever starve on the Bethel hymn and the newspaper?

More pitiful and tragic is the state of the lowest, the lapsed, the untameable of the slums. "Our society," says M. Taine, "is a fine edifice, but in the lowest story what a sink of impurity.... It seems to me that the evil and the good are greater here than in France." The law cannot cure inherent propensities to evil doing, and pious philanthropy can merely patch a rotten vestment; but scientific criminologists will eventually probe to the root. Too long have we relied upon the gaoler and the priest. We are learning now that congenital crime is a subject for the physiologist and the mental pathologist. So, too, with the plague of chronic destitution, the prime infamy of pseudo-civilisation. Instinctive barbaric pity urges liberal almsgiving; but the beautiful emotion of sympathy needs as much control in its gratification as the purely animal appetites. We shall awake soon to the truth that it is our selfish Respectability that must be fought with the weapons of a new economic science, based upon righteousness. We should strive to destroy the sources of hopeless want, as we endeavour to exterminate disease microbes in the body.

Are these the visions of Utopianism? No; for when we consider what modern science has done in its infancy, we may surely reckon upon greater victory in days now dawning. To support this inspiring creed of science we do not need to fabricate evidences out of improbability, conjecture, and fallacy; for the proofs are plain and convincing, and will survive the severest criticism. Truly, if we make moan one day for the tenacity of unreason in the human brain, we may rejoice on the morrow in the thought that never in history has the outlook been brighter.

It is too evident that thousands who can no longer be satisfied with the guesses of primitive barbarians concerning man's origin and destiny still cover their inner convictions with the cloak of Respectability, and endeavour to seem that which they are not. Honesty will thrive with the wane of Respectability.

CHAPTER XI.

CONCLUSION.

"Respect is often paid in proportion as it is claimed."

Dr. Johnson.

Respectable reader, you are perchance by this time partly inclined to at least agree that this disease of yours may be harmful to yourself and to others. I have not minced my words in discussing the unpleasant symptoms of your ailment. You are a prey to hallucinations, and it behoved me, as a judicious physician, to jeer at your fancies and to deride your dreads. I have endeavoured to convince you that Respectability is anti-social, improgressive, and often cruel. You cannot deny that the world's greatest moral worthies have been the Non-Respectables, the Unconventionalists, the enlightened Eccentrics. They have all deviated in some particular, or in many ways, from the ordinary standards and customs of the majority. In many instances they have been accounted immoral, but that has not deterred them, because new morality has always been deemed immorality by the Respectables. Wesley, for example, thought it immoral to doubt the existence of witches. Yet, who to-day but the most degraded peasants of the wild hills believes in witches? Mr. Gladstone considers divorce immoral; but those who differ from him may be counted in millions. They are the adherents of a new morality, more reasonable, just, and humane than the old which has passed away.

Therefore, to make progress we are compelled to defy Respectability, and to outrage propriety. But that does not mean that we are to become ruthless Vandals, taking delight in destroying everything that is old. Far from it. We must pull down that idol Respectability from its throne, and set up some worthier object of veneration in its place. True worth and integrity of character can have no alliance with intellectual insincerity and social hypocrisy. We need more brave-hearted men and women, with the courage of their opinions, more heterodox thinkers, more consistent heretics to stand solidly together in a great attack on the shams and falsehoods that constitute Respectability.

Our children must be taught to use their brains, so that when they grow up they will not allow their little corner of the world to rule their lives and make them cowardly and deceitful. The words of the Knight in "Pericles" should be taught to boys: "We are gentlemen that neither in our hearts nor outward eyes envy the great, nor do the low despise." Education must be freed from the restrictions and hindrances of Respectability, and made catholic, comprehensive, and equal for both sexes.

The canker has eaten too long at the heart of our great nation. Its ravages, if unchecked, will ultimately destroy our prestige, and we shall fall as Babylon, Rome, and Greece have fallen. Our social affections are blighted and chilled by this fell disease, our emotions are shrivelled, our national virility enfeebled. Colonies in their youth offer us a good illustration of the rapid progress of a people who have abandoned the cant of Respectability. In such communities men and women work for the commonweal, on a fraternal basis, with no heed to rank and precedence, and it is in these societies that individualism, independence, and unconventionality have full play and outlet. Only at a later stage does the blight of Respectability descend upon the people of a new country, as we see it now in America, and, to a certain extent in Australia and Canada, where the bourgeoisie have established themselves and infected the populace with their disease. "This diabolical invention of gentility," as Thackeray terms it, is disintegrating society in England, slowly and surely. It is not foreign aggression, nor anarchy within, that we should most fear, but the insidious virus of the disease that is sapping our vitals.

It is the middle-men of the middle class who chiefly spread the contagion and transmit it to posterity. Antiquated political economists tell us that the middleman is useful to everyone, and that the man who gambles with other folk's money is a benefactor. There was a time when trade meant a handicraft; now it is a term for gambling with articles made by ill-rewarded workers. And the man who lives by this system of dealing expects the farmer, the miner, and craftsmen to doff their caps to him, and call him gentleman. "Since every Jack became a gentleman, there's many a gentle person made a Jack," says Shakspere. No one with a clear gaze on the future can delude himself that the middleman is a permanent institution, to be preserved and commended. His respectability, without dwelling upon his economic raison d'être, has made him the contempt of the upper class and the detestation of the working population. He has made himself king of provincial towns, censor of morals, and patron of the arts; and the mob has let him gain the upper hand, looking on with mouths agape at his cleverness. Respectability in its worst forms will last as long as the bourgeoisie possess this power over the masses.

I leave it to Anarchists, Socialists, Individualist, Tories, and the rest to settle whether the shoddy god, Respectability, is to reign despotically over England.

THE UNIVERSITY MAGAZINE
AND
FREE REVIEW.

Among the high-class magazines, the University Magazine and Free Review takes the first place in English advanced literature. Independence of thought, freedom from conventional fetters, and boldness where necessary, impart a freshness and vigour to the articles of this publication, which we miss even in the best and most earnest literature of the day.

It is the Magazine for such readers as care for progressive thought in all or any of the main fields of discussion—the religious, the political, the sociological, the ethical, the economic, the literary, the scientific, and the æsthetic.

It always takes the part of the weak and oppressed, and this Magazine has done much to call attention to indisputable evils.

Contents of the APRIL No., 1897, Vol. VIII., No. I—

Contents of the MAY No., 1897, Vol. VIII., No. 2—

Contents of the JUNE No., 1897, Vol. VIII., No. 3—

THE UNIVERSITY PRESS, LIMITED,
16, John Street, Bedford Row, London, W.C.

Just published, 10s. nett,

PSEUDO-PHILOSOPHY
AT THE END OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY.
By Hugh Mortimer Cecil.

An Irrational Trio: Kidd, Drummond, Balfour.

A vigorous refutation of the well-known Pseudo-Philosophical Works, Social Evolution (Kidd), The Ascent of Man (Drummond), and The Foundations of Belief (Balfour), showing the absurdity of the methods adopted on the one hand, and the insincerity of these Pseudo-Philosophers on the other.

The Academy, April 17, 1897:

Mr. Hugh Mortimer Cecil will have none of this legerdemain; the flank of the rationalist position shall not be so turned if his vigilance can frustrate the manoeuvre; and with a pen steeped in sulphuric acid, he has set out to confute these writers one by one.

... He is one who must be reckoned with as a clear thinker, a cogent reasoner, a lucid and accomplished writer....

It is impossible, in the space at our disposal, to consider at large Mr. Cecil's criticism of "Foundations of Belief." It is a very serious and capable attack which will have to be reckoned with. Especially damaging is the criticism of Mr. Balfour's theory of authority. That argument can be employed with effect only by one religious body, and it is not that body of which Mr. Balfour is a member. And here we venture to suggest to Mr. Cecil that it would be well were he to find out, before the issue of a second edition, the meaning of the Roman Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception, to which he more than once alludes; he appears to be under the impression that the phrase is equivalent to parthenogenesis.

The New Saturday Review, April 17, 1897:

The book is only one of many evidences of the fact that it is quite time the theologians recognised the real danger of their position, and sent into the lists stronger champions than those we have been writing about. It is little to the credit of the theological leaders that, after first condemning Darwin and vilifying some of his supporters, they should adopt his teaching only to misrepresent it, and to make a sophistical use of that misrepresentation. Of what moment are all the questions concerning ecclesiastical tradition and ritual in comparison to the great question of the relation between science and religion which is agitating the minds of those who will be the shapers and formers of the next generation?

It is not the simple souls who find their modern gospel in Kidd's "Social Evolution" or in Drummond's "Ascent of Man," good as those simple souls are, that will make the dominant public opinion of the next half century. Nor are the rank-and-file of the clergy—of all denominations—in many instances qualified to engage effectively in this controversy. Their pulpit science has long been a by-word. Unless some defenders of the orthodox position abler than those that have yet appeared can be found, the rationalists will be believed when they boast, as our author does, that they hold a "fortress that is quite impregnable." Pseudo-science and pseudo-philosophy are not science or philosophy at all.

Our author's book will probably win its way into only a few of the libraries of the orthodox. Rationalists will read it, and will find in it only a vigorous statement of their own opinions. The proper use of the book is to show the orthodox what they have to do, if they would defend their position....

It is a challenge which would deserve attention if it stood alone. But it does not stand alone; it is backed up by a great body of philosophers and scientists and social reformers, and men of the highest culture and noblest characters, as well as by a vast amount of smouldering suspicion and distrust and doubt among the people.

National Observer and British Review, April 17, 1897:

Portions of the author's criticisms are not only just, but valuable; and when he is judicious enough to suppress his own personality, he can often be read not only with assent, but with satisfaction. The chief object of Mr. Cecil's antipathy is any attempt at reconciling positive science with religion, whether the religion be Christianity, or merely a natural theism; and, as types of the methods by which the attempt is now being made, he takes the arguments of three modern apologists—Mr. Kidd, Mr. Drummond, and Mr. Arthur Balfour. He takes these in order. The first section of his work is a criticism of "Social Evolution"; the second of "The Ascent of Man"; the third, of "The Foundations of Belief." In completely discrediting the two first of these three works, Mr. Cecil's task has been easy, and he has shown considerable skill in accomplishing it. If we take Mr. Kidd's "Social Evolution" as it stands, it is difficult to imagine a more signal monument of self-deception; and when we recollect the avidity with which a large section of the public devoured the volume, and allowed themselves to be deceived with the author, we feel that such a fallacious guide can hardly be too trenchantly exposed. Mr. Cecil contrives, with the adroitness of a sharp solicitor, to collect and place side by side a number of Mr. Kidd's self-contradictions, and shows that his argument, taken as a whole, falls to pieces at one touch of serious criticism. He shows also that Mr. Kidd's history is as childish and imperfect as his logic.

... But, in spite of these omissions, he has said quite enough to discredit effectually what would rank as the most remarkable specimen of contemporary pseudo-philosophy, if it were not for a specimen produced by a Scottish writer, who has distanced altogether the fallacies of his English rival. This last is Mr. Drummond's "Ascent of Man;" and it is in his criticism of this that Mr. Cecil shows himself at his best. Had he only been less destitute of the rudiments of good behaviour and good feeling, we should have had little but commendation to bestow on the manner in which he exposes Mr. Drummond's absurd justifications of the ways of God to man, and the hopeless inaccuracies of his theories as to altruism, and "the struggle for the life of others." Few books in the long run do more harm than such books as "The Ascent of Man." Instead of really reconciling religion and science, they injure religion by making the attempt at reconciliation ridiculous.

The Morning Leader, March 25, 1897:

Mr. Cecil is a born fighter. He attacks with courage and cunning and resource, having at command a never-failing artillery of invective to complete the havoc he works by means of his sapping and mining. This latter plan of campaign he mercilessly pursues by quotation after quotation from previous essays and pamphlets of his "irrationalist trio," preparing his reader for the overthrow of the citadel by showing how hollow and unsubstantial are the outworks. So savagely complete, indeed is the attack that as one gazes upon the ruins of Kidd, Drummond, and Balfour, a feeling of sympathy with the fallen philosophers must take the place of joy in the whizzing of the rationalist shells.

The method of attack adopted by this new and puissant slogger shows, perhaps, a little too much contempt for the enemy, a little too much confidence in the impregnability of the attacking party's position. But, although the book may enrage the philosophic doubters, it is bound to make a glorious show for the robuster members of the rationalist party. The author's advice to the former is to "feed on the religious novel of Mrs. Humphry Ward, the geology of Sir J. W. Dawson, the apologetics of Mr. Gladstone, and the biographies of Jesus that are said to be in preparation by Mr. Hall Caine, Mr. Ian Maclaren, and Mr. Crockett—three gentlemen whose capacity for sentimental fiction is the best guarantee of their fitness for such a task." Language of this kind is distinctly provocative, but it may be found bracing enough to the energetic rejector of scientific compromise. Whatever "Pseudo-Philosophy" may lack in urbanity and serenity, no charge can be brought against it on the score of dulness or stupidity. The book is at once a brilliant and pitiless exposure of loose thinking, and a literary entertainment of the richest kind.