“Oh wondrous Mother Age!”
Wondrous!—such is the title this Age assumes. She wears it written broadly on her phylactery, trumpets it loudly on quay and bourse, on platforms and at market-places, blabs it at clubs and reading-rooms, placards it in railway carriages, puffs it in steam-ships; everything she buys or sells is docqueted, everything she says or does, engraven with the epithet—Wondrous! This is the Age of ages—so she says. The Golden, the Silver, the Brazen, the Iron ages were as nought: it combines them all, and is grander, richer, stronger in its fusion than any of these separate stages. Men are now only beginning to live. In former times they merely dosed or daundered, trifled or philandered, brawled or rioted, dreamed or philosophised through life, wasting its golden sands in writing love-songs, and calling that—poetry; in fighting great battles, and calling that—heroism, chivalry; in sitting by the midnight lamp, gathering knowledge, which in after years might ripen into wisdom, and calling that—study; in sitting by hearth or board, quaffing from the wine-cup, drinking toasts, telling old stories, singing old songs, and calling that—conviviality, good-fellowship; in giving alms to beggars, in feeding the hunger of the idle and the vagabond, and calling that—charity; in uttering strong words, in doing strong deeds, and calling that—manliness; in upholding nationalities, and calling that—patriotism. Such are a few delusions in which men were ever wrapping themselves, until the day of enlightenment dawned, and this Age burst upon us, with its railways and its steam-ships, its doves of peace and arks of commerce, its treaties and tariffs, its leagues and institutes, its unions and schools, its ledgers and invoices, its cotton-mills and manufactories—proclaiming to the world that the true purpose of life, the true destiny of man, was to trade, to manufacture, to make money and circulate it, and, through the medium of cotton bales, silken freights, cargoes of coal, and sacks of corn, to fulfil the great mission of peace and goodwill. Knowledge, learning, courage, perseverance, mind, thought, enterprise, strength, were not to be utterly repudiated; they were only to be converted to the one purpose, driven out of the old slow processes of development, touched with the impulses of the time, and quickened to a more rapid production and circulation. What boots it that our locomotives go at the rate of forty, fifty, sixty miles an hour? that our ships cross the Atlantic in eleven days? that our electric wires carry messages from one end of the land to the other? that our printing-presses throw forth papers by the hundred and books by the thousand? Of what use are our political economics, our statistics, our lectures, our leagues, our steam-power, our mechanical inventions, our liberalism, if men are to move, talk, think, and legislate no faster than in bygone days? This must be, and is, the age of fastness,—of fast travelling, fast talking, fast thinking, fast reading, fast writing, of fast—no! not fast statesmanship—not fast law. These remain, like the old vans and coaches in the by-roads of Cornwall and Wales, to show the world what slow-going was. Men must not now await the long results of time. They are not to sow in youth that they may reap in old age—to labour and conceive in patience that they may produce in strength. The Age will not admit of such stagnation. Its maxim is, that the greatest production in the shortest time, and at the least cost, the best markets and the quickest returns, are the only worthy aims of labour and intellect—the only fit investment for capital of the brain or the pocket.
Thus the Age is to go on growing stronger, busier, faster, doubling the power of machinery, multiplying its mills, increasing its exports and imports, sending forth its freights, machinery, and products as missionaries to all lands, until, by a loving interchange of cotton and corn, a sweet intercourse with ledgers and bills of exchange, men are knit together in a beautiful unity of commerce, and some glorious consummation be attained, such as the poet sees in his vision—
“When the war-drum throbbed no longer, and the battle’s flags were furled,
In the parliament of man, the federation of the world,
There the common cause of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe,
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law.”
And what is to be this universal law, according to the Age, if not to the poet’s meaning? Love? Honour? Charity? Truth? Religion? These are all old-world principles. We, in our blindness, ever believed that love, inspired and propagated by religion, was to be the benign influence which would still the discords, close the schisms, unite the jarring creeds and warring nationalities, soothe the angry passions, and wither the petty jealousies, which set man against man, nation against nation, and bind them in a world-wide brotherhood. We were walking in darkness. The illumination of this Age throws its light upon us, and we know there are other means to this great end: that self-interest, the reciprocity of producers and consumers, buyers and sellers, the sweet persuasions of barter, are ultimately to level nationalities, quench the animosities of race and creed, and create a sort of commercial millennium, in which Swede, Russ, and Turk, Hun, Austrian, and Lombard, Dane and German, are to lie down together under one universal tariff.
Gold—the lust of which has been the bitterest curse of sin, and has ever and ever, through the long roll of ages, begotten hatred, wrath, envy, oppression, bloodshed, and division,—is at last to be the peace-maker, the love-mission of the world. This, however, is a vision of the future—“a wonder that shall be.” Let us turn to the Age as it stands before us—wondrous. All ages have had their characteristics. There have been ages of simplicity, ages of grandeur, ages of heroism, ages of degeneracy, ages of barbarism, ages of civilisation, ages of intellect, ages of darkness, ages of superstition, ages of philosophy, ages of faith, ages of infidelity—ages when men have lived the patriarchal life, sitting under their own vines and their own fig-trees, tilling the ground, tending their flocks, worshipping earnestly, enacting justice severely—ages when they revelled in magnificence and luxury, spread their splendour over the earth, and set it up in palaces and monuments—ages in which the strong heart and the strong deed, the bold thought and the generous impulse, were the master agencies, in which strong men, brave men, noble men, were recognised as the natural chiefs—ages in which the earth reeked with the pestilential vapours of vice and dissoluteness, in which manhood and honour had set in long nights, and the profligate, the profane, the sybarite, walked abroad without scorn, and sat in high places without shame—ages when man’s lordship of creation was manifested only in power over brute life, and in the tenancy of fen, forest, and mountain—ages, again, when culture, art, refinement, found a ripe maturity and gorgeous development—ages in which the light and glory of intellect shone on dark places, and the voices of the gifted echoed through many lands—ages in which such voices were silent, and both mind and intellect lay shrouded in thick darkness, or veiled in twilight—ages when men doubted, speculated, and rationalised—ages when they accepted superstitions as creeds, lies as living truths, serpents for fish, stones for bread—ages in which faith was strong, and earnest men lived in it, strove, fought, died for it—ages when men, worse than devils, neither believed nor trembled. Our Age was none of these. It ignored, repudiated, superseded all others. It is the Age of production, of utility, of circulation—to produce the utmost, by forced processes, from brain and muscle, man-power and steam-power, hand and loom, energy and ingenuity, capital and labour; and to circulate the products with a power which almost commands, and a rapidity which almost outstrips the elements: this is the great wonder of the age.
Heroism, chivalry, faith, imagination, romance—these are all at a discount with it; they are unremunerative, unmarketable, could not be cashed or negotiated. Everything, every man, is to be measured by productive capacity or practical uses. “He who makes a blade of corn grow where a blade of corn ne’er grew before, is of more service to mankind than fifty warriors.” The wit and politician who wrote this, or something like it, would have stared to see the present development of his doctrine—to find production and utility the great tests of progress and civilisation. And is this progress? Is this civilisation? So says the Age. We had dreamed that progress was of the mind and heart; that its stages would be marked by the recognition of justice, the advancement of the knowledge which leads to wisdom, the increase of honesty, courage, faith, honour, truthfulness, the growth of love, and the spread of virtue and godliness, as well as by census tables, statistical returns, financial budgets, and the stock exchange. We had dreamed that civilisation meant mental and social development as well as the existence of wealth; that it must be based on a well-balanced prosperity, which should include a comparative equality in the happiness of all classes, giving each man a power of well-being and comfort in his own sphere—the maintenance of the due proportions in society, and a fair ratio in the increase of riches and the decrease of crime; that it involved the moral, intellectual, religious, and social growth of man, as well as the productiveness of his industry and the development of his science; that it involves the expansion of courtesy, honour, generosity, kindliness, and good faith, as well as the diffusion and circulation of merchandise and gold. Were we dreaming dreams? Are these phantasies? So says the Age; and we, who are living in the glare of its noontide glory, must fain accept its interpretations with humble submission, and expand our faculties to the comprehension of its wonders. But whilst we do this, we may at least indulge in a retrospect of the past,—note what this great change has cost us, and compare our losses with our gains. This has been an age of supercession, and ere we swell the triumph which shall seat the conqueror on its throne, it may be permitted us to look back on the smouldering walls of old homes, the trampled fields of old principles, and the ruined fanes of old faiths, which it has left in its onward march—to mourn over and bury our dead. And what time more fitting for such a valedictory survey than this?—now, when the Age has paused in its career at the grim apparition of war, and the world is undergoing a partial relapse—now, when heroism is once more a power in the land, when men are talking, exulting, and watching over brave deeds, more than over funds, invoices, or railway scrip—when fair women are weeping for the brave dead, and praying for the living brave—now, when a great battle, or the fall of a city, stirs a stronger pulsation in the nation than the rise and fall of stock, or the most stupendous bankruptcies—now, when old things are becoming new, and men are looking back with tolerance, if not with affection, on old principles and old faiths. Let us then cast a glance on the past—our own past—the past of our own generation—think of what we were, and what we are, and strike the balance.