“It is a pity. He is much better when he is alone with me. I think he has heard from some of the set that you are a furious Protestant, and sees an immense amount of stiff-neckedness in you.”
“But about England and Carthage,” said Tom, shirking the subject of his own peculiarities; “you don’t really think us like them? It gave me a turn to hear you translating ‘Punica fides’ into Brummagem wares just now.”
“I think that successful trade is our rock ahead. The devil who holds new markets and twenty per cent. profits in his gift is the devil that England has most to fear from. ‘Because of unrighteous dealings, and riches gotten by deceit, the kingdom is translated from one people to another,’ said the wise man. Grey falls back on the Church, you see, to save the nation; but the Church he dreams of will never do it. Is there any that can? There must be surely, or we have believed a lie. But this work of making trade righteous, of Christianizing trade, looks like the very hardest the Gospel has ever had to take in hand—in England at any rate.”
Hardy spoke slowly and doubtfully, and paused as if asking for Tom’s opinion.
“I never heard it put in that way. I know very little of politics or the state of England. But come, now; the putting down the slave-trade and compensating our planters, that shows that we are not sold to the trade-devil yet, surely.”
“I don’t think we are. No, thank God, there are plenty of signs that we are likely to make a good fight of it yet.”
XCVII.
The newest school of philosophy preaches an “organized religion,” an hierarchy of the best and ablest. In an inarticulate way the confession rises from the masses that they feel on every side of them the need of wise and strong government—of a will to which their will may loyally submit—before all other needs; have been groping blindly after it this long while; begin to know that their daily life is in daily peril for want of it, in a country of limited land, air, and water, and practically unlimited wealth. But Democracy—how about Democracy? We had thought a cry for it, and not for kings, God made or of any other kind, was the characteristic of our time. Certainly kings, such as we have seen them, have not gained or deserved much reverence of late years, are not likely to be called for with any great earnestness by those who feel most need of guidance and deliverance, in the midst of the bewildering conditions and surroundings of our time and our life.
Thirty years ago the framework of society went all to pieces over the greater part of Christendom, and the kings just ran away or abdicated, and the people, left pretty much to themselves, in some places made blind work of it. Solvent and well-regulated society caught a glimpse of that same “big black democracy,”—the monster, the Frankenstein, as they hold him, at any rate the great undeniable fact of our time—a glimpse of him moving his huge limbs about, uneasily and blindly. Then, mainly by the help of broken pledges and bayonets, the so-called kings managed to get the gyves put on him again, and to shut him down in his underground prison. That was the sum of their work in the great European crisis; not a thankworthy one from the people’s point of view. However, society was supposed to be saved, and the “party of order,” so called, breathed freely. No; for the 1848 kind of king there is surely no audible demand anywhere. In England in that year we had our 10th of April, and muster of half a million special constables of the comfortable classes, with much jubilation over such muster, and mutual congratulations that we were not as other men, or even as these Frenchmen, Germans, and the like. Taken for what it was worth, let us admit that the jubilations did not lack some sort of justification. The 10th of April muster may be perhaps accepted as a sign that the reverence for the constable’s staff has not quite died out amongst us. But let no one think that for this reason democracy is one whit less inevitable in England than on the Continent, or that its sure and steady advance, and the longing for its coming, which all thoughtful men recognize, however little they may sympathize, with them, in the least incompatible with the equally manifest longing for what our people intend by this much-worshipped and much-hated name.