On the other hand, popular claims that were once violently resisted assume, when they have been admitted, the character of indefeasible rights. Every extension of the suffrage is a popular gain, not for a time only, but for ever. Every gain made by the friends of religious toleration, and by those who work in hope for a future condition of religious equality, is a sure and permanent gain. There is a great deal of conservatism in England, there is little or no reaction. Indeed, the words “reaction” and “reactionary” are scarcely English words at all in a political sense; they are French words. No Englishman ever has that spiteful hatred of the present which distinguishes the French réactionnaire.
The Conservatism of Antipathy.
Thiers and Railways.
England and the Suez Canal.
There is a species of conservatism both in England and France which is maintained by mutual antipathy. Each country clings desperately to its old ways when a better way has been shown by the other, and if one of them feels compelled, at last, to follow the other’s example, the utmost care is taken to disguise the imitation, so that it may not seem to be an acknowledgment of superiority. The reader may remember how unwillingly Thiers admitted the merits of railways, how he visited the north of England to see and try them, and how he reported unfavourably to his government, saying that railways might answer for England, but could never be suitable to France. The parallel instance is the well-known English unbelief in the Suez Canal, a French undertaking.
English Opposition to French Decimal Systems.
Intolerable English System of Weights and Measures.
French Objection to the Penny Post.
Here are two other examples, the English unwillingness to accept the French decimal systems, because they are French, and the unwillingness, on the other side of the Channel, to take the British penny postage stamp as it was. The English monetary system is inconvenient, but it is not intolerable, and may be retained for centuries; the system (or chaos) of weights and measures is incoherent and intolerable. Few Englishmen could part with the pound sterling without a pang, but surely it need not cost them much sorrow to see the extinction of the pound troy, which is two hundred and forty pennyweights, of the pound avoirdupois, which is two hundred and fifty-six drams, and of the apothecaries’ pound, which is two hundred and eighty-eight scruples. The objection to the metrical system is not absolute, the English are coming to it slowly, it is already legal, and men of science have long since adopted it. The French objection to the penny post is gradually giving way to the desire for increased cheapness, and now the letter has got down to three sous; but why this reluctance, on both sides, to adopt the neighbour’s good invention in its simplicity?[32]
Slow Assimilation of France and England.