A Modern Zoroastrian

by S. Laing

The contrast of English and French colonisation affords a striking instance of this difference of races. A century and a half ago France stood as well as England in the race for colonial supremacy. She had the start of us in Canada, and her pioneers had explored the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, and a large part of the continent of North America west of the Rocky Mountains. To-day there are sixty millions of an English-speaking population in that continent, while French is scarcely spoken beyond the single province of Quebec. Political events had doubtless something to do with this result; but it has been mainly owing to the innate qualities of the two races, for even the genius of Chatham might have failed to establish our supremacy if it had not been backed by the superior intelligence, energy, and staying power of the English colonists. The ultimate cause of the triumph of the English over the French element in America and India is doubtless to be found in the stronger individualism of the former. The character of the French is eminently social, they like to live in societies, and shrink from encountering the hardships and still more the isolation of the life of early settlers. They like to be administered, and shrink from the responsibility of hewing out, each for themselves, their own path in the relations of civil life or in the depths of primæval forests.

It is so to the present day, and they fail conspicuously in creating a large French population even at their own doors in Algeria; while in their more distant colonies they conquer and annex, but to see their commerce fall into the hands of English, Germans, and Chinese, as in Cochin China, or to stagnate as in New Caledonia. As a witty French writer puts it, the trade of a remote French colony may be summed up as—imports, absinthe and cigars; exports, stamped paper and red-tape. Individualism in this case has been fairly pitted against Socialism, and has beaten it out of the field by the verdict of Fact, which is more conclusive than any amount of abstract argument.

To return, however, to the field of politics. Where the essential quality of being law-abiding is wanting in individuals, it is hopeless to look for real liberty. The centripetal force in societies, as in planets, must be supplied somehow, or they would fly into dissolution; and if not by the integration of the tendencies of the individual units, then by external restrictions. Socialists may be allowed to make inflammatory harangues in a non-explosive atmosphere, but hardly to let off their fireworks in a powder-magazine. In order, however, that a nation shall be law-abiding, it is essential that the great majority should feel that, on the whole, the law is their friend. It is not in human nature to love that which injures, or to respect that which is felt to be unjust. The volcanic explosion of the French Revolution was due to the feeling of the French nation, with the exception of a few courtiers, nobles, and priests, that the existing order of things was their enemy, and law a tool in the hands of their oppressors. Even among English-speaking races we find, in the unfortunate instance of Ireland, that under specially unfavourable circumstances the same effects may be produced by the same causes. What has English law practically meant for centuries to an average peasant of Kerry or Connemara? It has meant an irresistible malevolent power, which comes down on him with writs of eviction to compel him to pay a high rent on his own improvements. More than half the population of Ireland consists of tenants and their families occupying small holdings, paying less than 10l. a year of rent. Of an immense majority of these small holdings two things may be safely asserted: first, that the total gross value of the produce is insufficient, after paying the rent, to leave a decent subsistence for the cultivator. Secondly, that this rent is levied to a great extent on the improvements of the tenant or his predecessors. Throughout the poorer parts of Ireland the greater part of the soil, in its natural state of bog or mountain, is not worth a rent of a shilling an acre; but some poor peasant, urged by the earth-hunger which results from the absence of other sources of employment, squats upon it, builds a wretched cottage, delves, drains, fences, and reclaims a few acres of land so as to bear a scanty crop of oats and potatoes. When he has done so the landlord or landlord’s agent comes to him and says, ‘This land is worth ten or fifteen shillings an acre, according to the standard of rents in the district, and you must pay it or turn out;’ and the law backs him in saying so by writs of eviction and police. Put yourself in poor Pat’s place, and say if you would love the law and be law-abiding.

It would take me too far from the scope of this volume into the field of contemporary politics if I attempted to point out who is to blame for this state of things, or what are the remedies. It is enough to say that this is the real Irish problem, and to point to it as an instance of the calamitous effects which inevitably follow when the instincts of a whole population are brought by an unfavourable combination of circumstances into necessary and natural antagonism with the laws which they are bound to obey.

Conservative legislation, by whatever party it is introduced, really means making the law correspond with the common sense and common morality of all except the criminal and crotchety classes, so that the majority may feel it to be their friend. For instance, the most truly conservative measure of recent times was probably that which legalised trades’ unions and gave working-men full liberty to combine for an increase of wages. The old legal maxim, that such combinations were illegal as being in restraint of trade, was so obviously an invention of the members of the upper caste who wore horsehair wigs, to give their fellows of the same caste who employed labour an unfair advantage, that it could not fail to cause feelings of discontent and exasperation among the masses of working-men. By its repeal the sting has been taken out of Socialism, and the British working-man has come to be, in the main, a reasonable citizen, on whom incitements to violence in order to inaugurate Utopias, fall as lightly as the howlings of the barren east wind on the chimney-tops. It has led also to reasonable and peaceful adjustment of disputes between employers and labourers by arbitration and sliding-scales instead of by strikes and lock-outs. In the United States of America the law-abiding instinct is even stronger. We find that strikes attended with violence are almost always confined mainly to the foreign element of recently imported immigrants, and that the native-born American citizen considers the laws as his own laws, and is determined to have them respected.

The balance between the conservative and progressive tendencies is, however, at the best, always imperfect, and inclines too much sometimes in one and sometimes in the other direction. In England the conservative tendency has had on the whole too much preponderance. I do not speak of political institutions, for in these of late years the balance has been pretty equally preserved; but in practical matters there is still a good deal of old-fashioned stolid obstruction. This is most apparent in law and in education. The common or judge-made law, though on the whole well-intentioned and upright, is fettered by so many technicalities and musty precedents, that it fails in a great many instances to be, what civil law ought to be, a cheap, speedy, and intelligible instrument for enforcing honest dealings between man and man. One of our greatest railway contractors once said to me, ‘If I want to make an agreement which shall be absolutely binding, I make it myself on a sheet of note-paper; if I want to have a loophole, I send it to my lawyer to have it drawn up in legal language and engrossed on sheets of parchment.’ Another man of large experience in commercial and financial matters laid down this axiom: ‘If you want to know what is the law in a doubtful case, reason out what is the common-sense view of it, and assume that the direct opposite is probably the law.’ These may be extreme instances, as all such epigrammatic sentences generally are, but it is undeniable that they have a considerable basis of substantial truth; and that law, with its dilatory processes, its enormous expense, and its uncertain conclusions, may be, and often is, not an instrument of justice, but a weapon in the hands of an unscrupulous adventurer or of a dishonest rich man, to extort blackmail or to defeat just claims.

Again, what nation but England would tolerate so long a system of land law, so bristling with antiquated technicalities, so tedious, and so expensive, as almost to amount to a prohibition of the transfer of land in small quantities; or could let the private interests of a mere handful of professional lawyers stand in the way of a codification of laws and a registration of titles?

Education is another subject which shows how difficult it is to move the sluggish ultra-conservative instincts of the English mind in the direction of progress, when not stimulated by political conflict. What is education? The word tells its own story; it is to draw out, not to cram in; to unfold the capacities of the growing mind, strengthen the reasoning faculty, create an interest in the surrounding universe; in a word, to excite a love of knowledge and impart the means of acquiring it. For the mass of the population, education is necessarily confined in a great measure to the latter object. The three R’s—reading, writing, and arithmetic—are indispensable requisites, and the acquirement of these, with perhaps a few elements of history and geography, absorbs nearly all the time and opportunity that can be afforded for attendance at school. For any culture beyond this the great majority must depend on themselves in after life. But there are a large number of parents of the upper and middle classes who can and do keep their children at school for eight or ten years, and spend a large sum of money in giving them what is called a higher education. What is there to show for this time and money, even in the case of the highest schools, which ought to give the highest education? On the credit side, a little Latin and less Greek, plenty of cricket and athletics, good physical training, and, best of all, on the whole a manly, honourable, and gentlemanlike spirit. But on the debit side, absolute ignorance, except in the case of a few unusually clever and ambitious boys, of all that a cultivated man of the nineteenth century ought to know. No French, no German, and, what is worse, no English. The average boy can neither write his own language legibly nor grammatically, and, if he goes straight from a public school into a competitive examination, stands an excellent chance of being plucked for spelling. And, what is worst of all, he not only knows nothing, but cares to know nothing; his reasoning faculty has never been cultivated, and his interest in interesting things has never been awakened. What is the first lesson he has had to learn? ‘Propria quæ maribus dicantur mascula dicas,’ that is, words appropriated to males are called masculine—a lesson which elicits as much reasoning faculty, and creates as much interest, as if he had been made to commit to memory that things made of gold are called golden. Suppose instead of this that the lesson had been that two volumes of hydrogen combine with one volume of oxygen to form water. The exercise to the memory is the same, but how different is the amount of thought and interest evoked, especially if the experiment is made before the class and each boy has to repeat it for himself! How many new subjects of interest would this open up in the mind of any lad of average intelligence! How strange that there should be airs other than the air we breathe, which can be weighed and measured, and that two of them by combining shall produce their exact weight of a substance so unlike them as water! Or if the exercise of a class were to look through a microscope at the leaf of a plant or wing of an insect, and try who could best draw what they had seen and write a description of it in a legible hand and in good English, how many faculties would this call into play compared with the dull routine of parsing a Latin sentence or writing a halting copy of Greek iambics! Even grammar, the one thing which is supposed to be taught thoroughly, is taught so unintelligently that it awakens no interest beyond that of a parrot learning by rote. From ‘propria quæ maribus’ the scholar passes to ‘as in præsenti perfectum format in avi,’ without an attempt to explain what language really means, how it originates from root-words, and how these inflections of ‘as’ and ‘avi’ are part of the devices which certain families of mankind, including our own, have invented as a mechanism for attaching shades of meaning, such as present and past, to the primitive root. Even the alphabet intelligently taught opens up wide fields of interesting matter as to the history of ancient nations, and their successive attempts to analyse the component sounds of their spoken words, and to pass from primitive picture-writing to phonetic symbols. But the instructors of the budding manhood of the élite of the nation, like Gallio, ‘care for none of these things,’ and the organisation of our higher schools seems to be stereotyped on the principle that they are made for teachers rather than for scholars, and that their chief raison d’être is to enable a limited number of highly respectable gentlemen from the Universities to realise comfortable incomes with a maximum of holidays and a minimum of trouble. And the parents support the system because so many of them really reverence rank more than knowledge, and are willing to compound for their sons growing up ignorant, idle, and extravagant, if by any chance they can count a lord or two among their acquaintance.

Mr. Francis Galton, in the course of his interesting inquiries as to the effect of heredity and education on character and attainments, took the very practical course of addressing a set of questions to some hundred and eighty of our most distinguished men as to the hereditary qualities of their ancestors, and the various influences which they considered had done most to promote or to retard their success in life. Of course he received a variety of answers, ‘quot homines tot sententiæ,’ but upon one point there was a striking unanimity. ‘They almost all expressed a hatred of grammar and the classics, and an utter distaste for the old-fashioned system of education. There were none who had passed through this old high and dry education who were satisfied with it. Those who came from the greater schools usually did nothing there, and have abused the system heartily.’

And yet the system goes on, and the Eton Latin grammar will probably be taught, and hexameters written, for another generation. Surely the needle swings here too strongly towards the negative or obstructive pole.