CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
Among the stock fallacies which belong to public writers and thinkers, and which exercise a kind of conventional influence as often as they are paraded, there is none greater than this,—that History always repeats herself, because Human Nature never changes. The Tories of all ages and countries content themselves and alarm their neighbors by an adroit interpolation of this formula in their speech. They create the alarm because they are contented and intend to remain so. Successive audiences yield, as to the circus-jokes of the clown, who hits his traditional laugh in the same place so often that it is a wonder the place is not worn through. But people of a finer wit are not so easily surprised. If they bore a fair numerical proportion to the listeners of doctrinaires and alarmists, the repetition would be eventually resisted, with an indignation equal to the amount of literary and political damage which it had effected.
If people mean, when they say that Human Nature is always the same, that a few primitive impulses appear through the disguise of all ages and races, which can be modified, but never extinguished, which work and are worked upon, are capable of doing good or harm according to circumstances, but are at all events the conditions of life and motion, it is fortunately true. That is to say, it is very fortunate that men and women inhabit the earth. Their great, simple features uplift and keep all landscapes in their places, and prevent life from falling through into the molten and chaotic forces underneath. These rugged water-sheds inclose, configure, temper, fertilize, and also perturb, the great scenes and stretches of history. They hold the moisture, the metal, the gem, the seeds of alternating forests and the patient routine of countless harvests. Superficially it is a great way round from the lichen to the vine, but not so far by way of the centre. The many-colored and astonishing life conceals a few simple motives. Certainly it is a grand and lucky thing that there are so many people grouped along the lines of divine consistency.
Men will not starve, if they can help it, nor thirst, if water can be gathered in the palm or reached by digging. If they succeed in making a cup, they betray a tendency to ornament its rim or stem, or to emboss a story on its side. They are not disposed to become food for animals, or to remain unprotected from the climate. They like to have the opportunity of supplying their own wants and luxuries, and will resist any tyrannical interference with the methods they prefer. They propagate their race, and collect in communities for defence and social advantage. When thus collected, they will learn to talk, to write, to symbolize, to construct something, be it a medicine-lodge or a Parthenon. Their primitive sense of an invisible and spiritual agency assumes the forms of their ignorance and of their disposition: dread and cruelty, awe and size, fancy and proportion, gentleness and simplicity, will be found together in the rites and constructions of religion. They like to make the whole tribe or generation conform; and it is dangerous to oppose this tendency to preserve the shape of society from within and to protect it against assaults from without. These are motives originally independent of circumstances, and which made the first circumstances by coming in contact with the elements of the physical world.
But these circumstances are not always and everywhere as invariable as the primitive wants which first set them in motion. Enlargement of knowledge, of political and human relations, of the tenure of the earth, increases the number and variety of circumstances, and combines them so unexpectedly that it is a science to discover their laws, and the conditions of action and reaction between men and things that happen. We can depend upon Human Nature, but the problem always remains, What shall be expected of Human Nature under this or that modification of its external environment? Great laws from without act as well as great laws from within. If we knew all the laws, we should know what average consequences to expect. But in the mean time we shall commit the error of supposing that History does nothing but repeat itself, fretfully crooning into the "dull ear" of age a twice-told tale, if we do not allow for the modifications amid which the primitive impulses find themselves at work.
And besides, there is a difference in individuals; one set of people alone is too poor to furnish us with an idea of human nature. It is natural for Themistocles, Pausanias, or Benedict Arnold, under suspicion or ill-treatment, to desert to the enemy, and propose crushing his country for a balm to apply to wounded feelings. But General Fremont, in similar circumstances, will derive comfort from his loyal heart, and wait in hopes that at least a musket may be put into his hands with which to trust him against the foe. These are very simple variations; they turn upon the proportion of selfish feeling which the men possess. A self-seeking man will turn villain under the encroachment of other people's egotism. The sight of too many trophies will convert a friend into a covert enemy, who, without being treacherous, will nevertheless betray a great cause by his jealousy of its great supporter. But the latter will not always become a traitor to suit the expectations of an envious friendship. And your own judgment of men and prophecy of events, if based entirely upon selfish calculation, will entirely fail.
Nations differ also, in spite of the similar things that they do in analogous circumstances. Both Rome and England will not have too ambitious neighbors. They hate a preponderating power, and find out some way to get rid of the threat to their national egotism. The Romans exterminate the Veians and Carthaginians; they want no colonizing or commercial rivals. If England rules the sea, and uses its advantage to create markets where it can buy at the cheapest and sell at the dearest rates, we can understand its inexpensive sympathy for the people who can manufacture little and therefore have to import a great deal, who are thus the natural, disinterested lovers of free trade. It is very easy to see why England turns red in the Crimea with the effort to lift up that bag of rags called Turkey, to set it on the overland route to India; one decayed nation makes a very good buffer to break the shock of natural competition in the using up of another. It was the constant policy of Rome to tolerate and patronize the various people in its provinces, to respect, if not to understand, their religions, and to protect them from the peculator. She was not so drunk with dominion as not to see that her own comfort and safety were involved in this bearing to inferior and half-effete races. On the other hand, England, with far stronger motives of interest to imitate that policy, disregarding the prophecies of her best minds, takes no pains to understand, and of course misgoverns and outrages her poor nebulous Bengalese, and forces the opium which they cultivate upon the Chinese whom it demoralizes. Is this difference merely the difference between a pocket in a toga and one in the trousers? But a nerve from the moral sense does, nevertheless, spread into papilloe over the surface of the tighter pocket, not entirely blunted by yellow potations; so that the human as well as financial advantage of Jamaica emancipation is perceived. Should we expect this from the nation which undertook the destruction of the Danish fleet before Copenhagen in 1801, without even the formality of a declaration of war, on the suspicion that the Dane preferred to sympathize with France? What moral clamor could have made the selfish exigency of that act appear more damaging than a coalition of all the fleets of Europe? Yet plantation fanaticism did not prevent the great act from which we augured English hatred of a slaveholders' rebellion. Probably the lining membrane of a pocket may have intermitted accesses of induration: we must consult circumstances, if we would know what to expect. An extraordinary vintage or a great fruit year will follow a long series of scant or average crops; but we can count upon the average.
But unless circumstances are constant, it matters little how constant tempers and tendencies may be; and the expectations which we found upon the general action of avarice, credulity, bigotry, self-seeking, or any of the debased forms of legitimate human impulses, will often be disappointed by results. Prepare the favorite climate, moisture, exposure of a foreign plant, imitate its latitude and air and soil: it will not necessarily grow at all, or, growing, it will only surprise you by some alteration of its native features. Results are better chemists than we, and their delicate root-fibres test the ground more accurately; we shall find them languishing for some favorite elements, or colored and persuaded by novel ones. History must remember the constants of Man and of Nature, but be always expecting their variables, lest her prophetic gift fall into ill-repute.
Thus, give unlimited power to the Catholic, and he cannot anywhere set up his old-fashioned absolutism, unless you can manage at the same time to furnish him with Roman and Spanish people, and the fifteenth century. Yet we, too, have trembled at the imaginary horrors of Popery. All the power you can thrust and pile upon the Catholic in America will become an instrument to further the country's tendency towards light, as it drags the human impulses away from the despotic past. All the Jesuits, and prize bulls by every steamer, relays of papal agents, and Corpus-Christi processions in the streets of Boston, will hardly lift the shoulders of the great protesting country, as it turns to stare from its tilling, steaming, pioneering, emancipating task.