If at this stage we seek to discover the manner of life of the working class in England, we shall find it hard to reach a confident conception. Many phrases in Shakespeare remind us that as towns grew there grew with them a nondescript semi-industrial class, untrained for any regular industry and unable to subsist without industry of some sort. In the latter part of the seventeenth century we seem to see a process of elimination at work by which the organisms capable of enduring toil are selected from a mass to which such toil was too irksome. In 1668 Sir Josiah Child writes that the English poor in a cheap year "will not work above two days in a week; their humour being such that they will ... just work so much and no more as may maintain them in that mean condition to which they have been accustomed." That, accordingly, a high price for bread was a good thing, as forcing the poor to industry, became the standing doctrine of such publicists as Petty.[1237] In the next generation, Mandeville puts as indisputable the statement that "the poor" will not work any more than they need to maintain bare existence. When, late in the eighteenth century, we find Adam Smith, with French testimony to support him, denying that the pinch of poverty makes for industry, we are left in doubt as to whether the improvement came by a positive dying out of the lazy types through the new plague of alcoholism, or through the gradual exemplary force of a higher standard of comfort as seen among the more industrious. Probably both influences were at work. But it was at best in a grimy under-world of degeneracy and hunger, squalor and riot, that there were laid the roots of the new mechanical industries which were to make England the chief mill and counter of Europe.[1238] And when we find one of the acutest observers of the next generation arguing that a large body of the needy poor is the right and necessary basis of industry and public wealth,[1239] we realise that the new life was to be as hard for the toilers as that of any earlier age.
It is in the reign of the last of the Stuarts, whose sex made her perforce rely on ministers to rule for her, and whose unenlightened zeal[1240] thus missed the disaster which similar qualities had brought upon two of her predecessors—it is in the reign of Anne, swayed by favourites to an extent that might have made monarchy ridiculous[1241] if monarchists had gone by reason and not by superstition—that there begins recognisably the era of government by parliamentary leaders, representing at once, in varying degrees, monarch and people; and it is at this point that we begin the biographical studies[1242] to which the foregoing pages offer an introduction. But under new conditions and phases we are to meet for the most part repetitions and developments of the forces already recognised as at work from time immemorial. Thus early have we seen in action, on the field of English history, most of those primary forces of strife whose play makes the warp of politics, ancient and modern; and the distinct emergence, withal, of that spirit which, rare and transient in ancient times, seems destined to inherit the later earth—the spirit of science, which slowly transmutes politics from an animal to an intellectual process, raising it from the stage of mere passional life to the stage of constructive art, and from the social relation of rule and subjection towards the relation of mutuality and corporate intelligence. Politics, we formally say, is the process of the clash of wills, sympathies, interests, striving for social adjustment in the sphere of legislation and government. The earlier phases are crude and animalistic, and involve much resort to physical strife. The later phases are gradually humanised and intelligised, till at length the science of the past process builds up a new phase of consciousness, which evolves a conscious progressive art. That is to say, the conscious progressive art develops in course of time: it had not really arisen in any valid form at the period to which we have brought our bird's-eye view. It had transiently arisen in the ancient world, as in Solon and, far less effectually, in the Gracchi; but the conditions were too evil for its growth, and the course of things political was downward, the animal instincts overriding science, till even when there was compulsory peace the spirit of science could no more blossom. In English politics, soon after the beginning of the eighteenth century, the conditions brought about civil peace under a new dynasty, which it was the function of the statesmanship of the dynasty to maintain. At the same time the spirit of science had entered on a new life. It remains to trace, under successive statesmen and in the doctrine of successive politicians, the fluctuations of English progress towards the great Utopia, the state of reconciliation of all the lower social antipathies and interests, and of free scope for the inevitable but haply bloodless strifes of ideals, which must needs clash so far as we can foresee human affairs. The progress, we shall see, is only in our own day beginning to be conscious or calculated: it has truly been, so far as most of the actors are concerned, by unpath'd waters to undream'd shores. The hope is that the very recognition of the past course of the voyage will establish a new art and a new science of social navigation.
To make a new aspiration pass for a law of progress merely because it is new would, of course, be only a fresh dressing of old error. There is no security that the scientific form will make any ideal more viable than another; every ideal, after all, has stood for what social science there was among its devotees. The hope of a moral transformation of the world is a state of mind so often seen arising in human history that some distrust of it is almost a foregone condition of reflection on any new ideal for thoughtful men. A dream of deliverance pervades the earliest purposive literature of the Hebrews; a fabled salvation in the past is made the ground for trust in one to come. Wherever the sense of present hardship and suffering outweighs the energetic spirit of life in the ancient world, the young men are found seeing visions, and the old men dreaming dreams; and the thought of "the far serenity of Saturn's days" becomes a foothold for the Virgilian hope of a golden age to come. A hundred times has the hope flowered, and withered again. Confident rebellions, eager revolutions, mark at once its rise and its fall. In our own age the new birth of hope arises in the face of what might have seemed the most definitive frustration; it becomes an ideal of peaceful transformation under the sole spell of social science, with no weapons save those of reason and persuasion. The science of natural forces has widened and varied life without greatly raising it in mass. Yet the new science, we would fain believe, will conquer the heightened task. In the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of that hope lies for the coming age the practical answer to the riddle of existence.
Without such a hope, the study of the past would indeed be desolating to the tired spectator. Followed through cycle after cycle of illusory progress and conscious decline, all nevertheless as full of pulsation, of the pride of life and the passion of suffering, as the human tide that beats to-day on the shores of our own senses, the history of organised mankind, in its trivially long-drawn immensity, grows to be unspeakably disenchanting. Considered as a tale that is told, it seems to speak of nothing but blind impulse, narrow horizons, insane satisfactions in evil achievement, grotesque miscalculation, and vain desire, till it is almost a relief to reflect how little we know of it all, how immeasurable are the crowded distances beyond the reach of our search-light. Alike the known and the unknown, when all is said, figure for us as fruitless, purposeless, meaningless moments in some vast, eternal dream.
Poi di tanto adoprar, di tanti moti
D'ogni celeste, ogni terrena cosa
Girando senza posa,
Per tornar sempre là donde son mosse;
Uso alcuno, alcun frutto,
Indovinar non so.[1243]
The untranslatable cadence of Leopardi has the very pulse of the wearied seeker's spirit. Yet, through all, the fascination of the inquiry holds us, as if in the insistent craving to understand there lay some of the springs of movement towards better days. We brood over the nearer remains, so near and yet so far, till out of the ruins of Rome there rise for us in hosts the serried phantoms of her tremendous drama; till we seem to catch the very rasp of Cato's voice, and the gleam of Cæsar's eye, swaying the tide of things. Still, the sensation yields no sense of fruition; Rome the dead, and Greece the undying, drift from our reach into the desert distance. Beyond their sunlit fragments lies a shoreless and desolate twilight-land, receding towards the making of the world; and there in the shadows we dimly divine the wraiths of a million million forms, thronging a hundred civilisations. The vision of that vanished eternity renews the intolerable burden of the spirit baffled of all solution. For assuredly, in the remotest vistas of all, men and women desired and loved, and reared their young, and toiled unspeakably, and wept for their happier dead; and the evening and the morning, then as now, wove their sad and splendid pageantries with the slow serenity of cosmic change. Great empires waxed to the power of wreaking infinite slaughter, through the infinite labour of harmless animal souls; and seas of blood alternately cemented and sapped their brutal foundations; and all that remains of them is a tradition of a tradition of their destruction, and the shards of their uttermost decay. Not an echo of them lives, save where perchance some poet with struggling tongue murmurs his dream of them into tremulous form; or when music with its more mysterious spell gathers from out the inscrutable vibration of things strange semblances of memories, that come to us as an ancient and lost experience re-won, grey with time and weary with pilgrimage. But to what end, of knowledge or of feeling, if the future is not therefore to be changed?
Save for such a conception and such a purpose, the civilisations of to-day could have no rational hope to survive in perpetuity any more than those of the past. The fullest command of physical science, however great be the resulting power of wealth-production, means no solution of the social problem, which must breed its own science. The new ground for hope is that the great discipline of physical science has brought with it the twofold conception of the reign of law in all things and the sequence of power upon comprehension, even to the controlling of the turbulent sea of human life. With the science of universal evolution has come the faith in unending betterment. And this, when all is said, is the vital difference between ancient and modern politics: that for the ancients the fact of eternal mutation was a law of defeat and decay, while for us it is a law of renewal. If but the faith be wedded to the science, there can be no predictable limit to its fruits, however long be the harvesting.
FOOTNOTES:
[1207] Schanz, Englische Handelspolitik, i, 332 ff. The Merchant Adventurers were incorporated under Elizabeth (id. i, 350).