to account for the extraordinary progress that, during several centuries, Europe has continued to make." Now, the gist of the whole matter seems to be in this-whether a stationary condition of morals does not produce a stationary condition of society, and a progressive a progressive. Mr. Buckle tells us, very superciliously, that not one discovery has been made in morals for two thousand years, and yet that civilization has made immense progress. In Lord Macaulay's sparkling but shallow summary of the Baconian philosophy, the same verdict is come to. "It is a better thing to have a good temper than to cobble shoes well," says the sparkling essayist; but we can succeed, by the Baconian method, in cobbling shoes, whereas the stoical method of restraining the temper has failed-ergo, we are more indebted for our civilization to physical than to moral progress. Mr. Buckle and Lord Macaulay are at one in their theory of civilization. But are there not certain moral maxims which lie deep at the foundations of all society, on the sacredness of which society itself depends, and which are to modern civilization as the base in any chemical compound? The laws of marriage, the rights of women, even liberty of conscience, though long lost sight of during many ages of Christendom-all these are moral elements, without which our modern civilization would be impossible. Mr. Buckle sneers at the theological age, as an obstructive age, and rejoices at the emancipation of the European intellect from the bonds of superstition into the glorious liberty of positive science. He is right, no doubt, in this, that the theological spirit, as enforced by a hierarchy, has a repressive influence adverse to modern civilization. But, underneath all this religious worldliness, there was another spirit at work-not earthly, but heavenly. Those ages that Mr. Buckle denounces as the dark ages, during which society was at a stand-still, were, when we take a deeper view of things, ages of real and substantial progress. Christianity, plunging into the forests of Germany, Gaul, and Britain, was like the sun, in winter, struggling through banks of clouds and fog, and hardly gaining a clear space to shine at noon, and then hid again during a long night. It has little light, and VOL. LI-NO. CCCI. apparently no heat; but where there is light there is life-vegetation is torpid, but not dead; and every day, as the sun climbs higher, it gives more light and chases away more vapours. First, the light rays give life to the buried seed, and afterwards the heat rays nourish and cherish it; and, at last, summer sets in, and the victory of life over death is complete. We would, therefore, seek the beginnings of European civilization in the very darkest periods of the dark ages. What Mr. Buckle considers retarding influences, we must consider as quickening. There is a thousand years' interval, it is true, between the effete civilization of Rome and the new civilization of modern Europe. As Mr. Hallam has elegantly expressed it, the contrast between the age of Gregory I. and the age of Nicholas V. is that between Michael Angelo's figures of Night and Morning: "they seem to stand at the two gates of the middle ages, emblems and heralds of the mind's long sleep, and of its awakening." But this interval was not altogether time lost in the history of human progress. The sun had not yet warmed the earth-he only seemed to draw out more exhalations; and as a mist goes up from the face of the earth to hide the sun in January as soon as it rises, so that night is often clearer than day, so the first dawn of Christianity among the barbarous tribes of Europe, so far from dispelling the darkness, only drew up the mists of superstition, so that the greater the light of revelation, the thicker the mantle of ignorance to hide it from view. Still there was progress; these mists could only hide the sun-they could not extinguish it. At last the earth was dry-at last the exhalations of Pagan ignorance had been all drawn out, and the spring-time of positive science and discovery had set in. The forerunners of the father of the inductive method, and his modern disciples of the positive school, are to be sought in those monkish missionaries who, in Christianizing Europe, civilized it. The institutions of the middle ages prepared the way for the discoveries of our modern. Theirs were the light rays, and ours the heat; theirs gave life, and ours growth. Ancient history is pregnant with example, that any society whose foundations are 2 out of course, is ready to perish; and that stability depends not upon intellectual advance so much as moral principle. The sacredness of marriage and the family tie made Rome great in her early days of conquest; as she grew dissolute, she grew weak. Those old-world stories of Noah, and Sampson, and Lot, teach the same lesson of chastity and temperance: by the neglect of these, nations and men fall. The same lesson that the chosen people were raised up to teach their more civilized neighbours in Babylon and Egypt, the Christianity of the dark ages also taught. Both were imperfect and partial systems. As Judaism, when its mission was ended, was superseded, so, with the theological spirit of the middle ages, we have no wish to revive either; but we are quite certain that neither one nor the other deserve the sneers of M. Compte or his English disciples. Mr. Buckle's reason for selecting the history of England as the best illustration of the progress of modern civilization, is this, that here the progress of the people has been less disturbed by agencies not arising from themselves: "Every foreign or external influence which is brought to bear upon a nation is an interference with its natural development." Again he says: "Of all European countries, England is the one where, during the longest period, the Government has been most quiescent, and the people most active; where popular freedom has beer, settled on the widest basis; where each man is most able to say what he thinks, and do what he likes; where every one can follow his own bent, and propagate his own opinions; where religious persecution, being little known, the play and flow of the human mind may be clearly seen unchecked by those restraints to which it is elsewhere subjected; where the profession of heresy is least dangerous, and the practice of dissent most common." Hence it is that the history of England is more valuable than any other. As it is with the body of the stripped Athlete, the anatomist can best study the free play of muscle, so the freest people in Europe must furnish the fittest model in which to study the progress of modern civilization. Mr. Buckle is at the opposite extreme from those who hold that good laws make good states. So far from the English constitution making the English people-it is the people who have made the constitution. He attacks, without mercy, the Tory position, that the governing classes have made the people what they are; his position, from first to last, is the opposite one-that the people have made themselves what they are, in spite of the governing classes. He dwells with peculiar complacency on the paradox, that the worst men have made the best rulers, and the best men the worst rulers. Neander remarks of the rise of Christianity in the Roman empire, that the best emperors were its most bitter persecutors. Marcus Aurelius and Julian were the ablest upholders of the majesty of Rome, and, therefore, the most consistent persecutors of those who would not burn incense to Cæsar. Commodus and Elagabalus, on the other hand, were the most infamous, and neither of them cared to check the new religion which was undermining the empire. In Spain we have another example of the same paradox:-"Llorente, the great historian of the Inquisition, and its bitter enemy, had access to its private papers; and yet, with the fullest information, he does not even insinuate a charge against the moral character of the inquisitors; but, while execrating the cruelty of their conduct, he cannot deny the purity of their intentions." Mr. Buckle finds a fresh illustration Turning to the history of England, of the same paradox in the case of two of our kings-the one the most moral, the other the most profligate who ever sat upon the throne of England. The domestic virtues of George III. are as much above the level of our kings as the domestic vices of Charles II. are below that level. Yet under a corrupt king and court the cause of liberty throve, while under a decorous king and court liberal opinions stood still. Charles was the most un-English of our kings-bred up on the continent, a papist at heart, bribed by the French king, and lolling out his existence between the caresses of spaniels and mistresses. George III. was perhaps the first king who ever thought the seventh commandment binding upon kings as well as people, the first of his house who could speak English, and who hated Popery and Frenchmen with a hatred which the traditional John Bull only can feel. Who would have thought that constitutional England owes a deeper debt of gratitude to the profligate Charles than to the pious George? But so it is. The paradox is not novel-but it is nowhere more clearly traced out than in Mr. Buckle's pages: "Never before was there such a want of apparent connexion between the means and the end. If we look only at the characters of the rulers, and at their foreign policy, we must pronounce the reign of Charles II. to be the worst that has ever been seen in England. If, on the other hand, we confine our observations to the laws which were passed, and to the principles which were established, we shall be obliged to confess that this same reign forms one of the brightest epochs in our national annals. Politically and morally, there were to be found in the Government all the elements of confusion, of weakness, and of crime. The king himself was a mean and spiritless voluptuary, without the morals of a Christian, and almost without the feelings of a man. His ministers, with the exception of Clarendon, whom he hated for his virtues, had not one of the attributes of statesmen, and nearly all of them were pensioned by the crown of France. The weight of taxation was increased, while the security of the kingdom was diminished. By the forced surrender of the charters of the towns, our municipal rights were endangered. By shutting the Exchequer, our national credit was destroyed. Though immense sums were spent in maintaining our naval and military power, we were left so defenceless, that when a war broke out, which had long been preparing, we seemed suddenly to be taken by surprise. Such was the miserable incapacity of the Government, that the fleets of Holland were able not only to ride triumphant round our coasts, but to sail up the Thames, attack our arsenals, burn our ships, and insult the metropolis of England. Yet, notwithstanding all these things, it is an undoubted fact that, in this same reign of Charles II., more steps were taken in the right direction than had been taken, in any period of equal length, during the twelve centuries we had occupied the soil of Britain. By the mere force of that intellectual movement, which was unwittingly supported by the crown, there were effected, in the course of a few years, reforms which changed the face of society. The two great obstacles by which the nation had long been embar rassed consisted of a spiritual tyranny and a territorial tyranny-the tyranny of the Church and the tyranny of the nobles. An attempt was now made to remedy these evils-not by palliatives, classes who did the mischief. For now but by striking at the power of the it was that a law was placed on the statute-book, taking away that celebrated writ which enabled the bishops or their delegates to cause those men to be burned whose religion was different to their own. Now it was that the clergy were deprived of the privilege of taxing themselves, and were forced to submit to an assessment made by the ordinary legislature. Now, too, there was enacted a law forbidding any bishop or any ecclesiastical court to tender the ex-officio oath, by which the church had hitherto enjoyed the power of compelling a suspected person to criminate himself. In regard to the nobles, it was also during the reign of Charles II. that the House of Lords, after a sharp struggle, was obliged to abandon its pretensions to an original jurisdiction in civil suits, and thus lost for ever an important resource for extending its own influence. It was in the same reign that there was settled the right of the people to be taxed entirely by their representatives; the House of Commons having ever since retained the sole power of proposing money bills and regulating the amount of imposts, merely leaving to the peers the form of consenting to what has been already determined. These were the attempts which were made to bridle the clergy and the nobles. But there were also effected other things of equal importance. By the destruction of the scandalous prerogatives of purveyance and pre-emption, a limit was set to the power of the sovereign to vex his refractory subjects. By the Habeas Corpus Act, the liberty of every Englishman was made as certain as law could make it; it being guaranteed to him that, if accused of crime, he, instead of languishing in prison, as had often been the case, should be brought to a fair and speedy trial. By the statute of Frauds and Perjuries, a security hitherto unknown was conferred upon private property. By the abolition of general impeachments, an end was put to a great engine of tyranny, with which powerful and unscrupulous men had frequently ruined their political adversaries. By the cessation of those laws which restricted the liberty of printing, there was laid the foundation of that great Public Press, which, more than any other single cause, has diffused among the people a knowledge of their own power; and has thus, to an almost incredible extent, aided the progress of English civilization. And, to complete this noble picture, there were finally destroyed those feudal incidents which our Norman conquerors had imposed the military tenures, the court of wards, the fines for alienation, the right of forfeiture for marriage by reason of tenure, the aids, the homages, the escuages, the primer seisins, and all those mischievous subtleties, of which the mere names sound in modern ears as a wild and barbarous jargon, but which pressed upon our ancestors as real and serious evils." During the reign of George III., on the other hand, the cause of liberty and progress languished under conditions that we should have thought favourable to it. To the excellence of George III.'s private character Mr. Buckle hardly does justice; but had he lived and died one of those Berkshire farmers, whose dress he adopted and whose ideas were more congenial to him than the caviare of a court, the philosophy of Burke, or the wit of Sheridan-the tombstone in some village church, that described him as a good husband, faithful in the discharge of all conjugal duties, a good father, and a loyal subject to the constitution, in Church and State established, would have been as true an epitaph as was ever set up. But this king, who first brought reform into the corrupt atmosphere of a court, seems to have been born with an innate horror of reform anywhere else. His obstinacy cost us our American colonies. In Africa he protected the slave trade, and opposed emancipation as a measure akin to revolution. He withstood the liberty of the press, the relaxation of the law of libel, the repeal of the game laws, and a penal code, the most bloody in Europe. George III. was consistently, and throughout his long life, opposed to every measure of reform. His boast was that he would hand the crown to his successor unimpaired by any reforms; and he made good his boast during the longest reign in English history. The two greatest measures of this century, Catholic Emancipation and the Reform of Parliament, were staved off to the next generation by the king's obstinacy. Had he been a worse man, he would have dismissed all scruples about his coronation oath; had he been a wiser king, he would have understood, with Burke, that the coronation oath was not intended to bind the crown in its legislative capacity. In George III. we have a striking instance that a good man is not always a good ruler. The cause of this is evident. A good man is anxious to act conscientiously-to let conscience, as he thinks it, decide in every case. But conscience is not the absolute king, he has many councillors who govern in his name, a whole camarilla of prejudices use the signet and sign manual of conscience to cover their own selfish designs. So it often is with minds of the calibre of George III., proving that responsibility and power are dangerous trusts to commit even to the clearest heads; they often turn the heads of weaker men, who, in an humbler station, would have passed through life honoured and beloved. Mr. Buckle has pointed out most clearly the gain of liberty under a corrupt king, and the loss of liberty under a correct king. In fact, it falls in with his whole theory of civilization, which is simply this, that the powers that be are always obstructive, and that government, laws, and religion, at least in their outward shape, are impediments, not helps to progress. It is curious to contrast this modern theory of the use, or rather uselessness of both Church and State with the ancient and time-honoured theory of their divine right. In China the scholar is taught at a government school to repeat, "Oh! how magnificent are the affairs of government;" "Ah! what respect is due to the officers of government !" In China society goes by machinery. Men and women are only puppets, and the barrel of state is wound up to go a certain length of time, and perform certain airs without further adjustment. The same theory has travelled further west than China. To this day the statescraft of modern Europe has no more favourite maxim than this, "Every thing for the people, nothing by them." Set the government machine going pay priests and politicians to keep it in working order amuse the people, employ them, flatter them; but never let them think or act for themselves. Hobbes, who did not, and the Jesuits, who did believe in the dogma of original sin, came to the same conclusion, that human nature was not to be trusted-that man was a great beast, to be caged and starved into submission by a keeper, who was responsible to God alone for his conduct to those under authority. This politico-religious theory is as fresh to-day as two centuries ago, when Hobbes wrote the Leviathan. In Naples Hobbism is the court creed. Il padrone assoluto e unico is the "Leviathan or mortal God" of Hobbes. In Vienna, Rome, and Paris, the doctrine, in one shape or another, has met with much acceptance of late. Berlin even does not disdain it, and court preachers, with that keen sense of the prerogative which becomes their office, have held up the theory in Protestant as well as Popish pulpits. The whole question turns upon this are these two classes, not de facto, but de jure, the governing and the governed? Is the progress of mankind most promoted by allowing every man to do what is right in his own eyes, and wrong too, as the Irishman would have it or by dictating to every man what he shall do, and what he shall believe, whom he shall worship, and with whom he shall trade. Mr. Buckle takes his stand on the side of independence. He has pledged himself to prove that our greatness as a people depends upon the policy of non-interference of authority with private judgment. Another modern historian, equally keen and conscientious, has taken the opposite side. Mr. Fronde has told us that the secret of English greatness, that which got her the name of "Merry England," "In times ere England's griefs began, When every rood of ground maintained its man," was the opposite policy of interference. The Church then regulated men's belief, and the State their conduct. Trade guilds and corporations directed men in what market to deal. Tradesmen who took advantage of the fluctuations of the market were rebuked by Parliament for "their greedy and covetous minds, as more regarding their own singular lucre and profit; the commonweal, in a high and remarkable degree, being presumed to be the first object with every honest man." Mr. Fronde writes with all seriousness, "the people, not universally but generally, were animated by a true spirit of sacrifice, by a true conviction that they were bound to think first of England, and only next of themselves; and unless we can bring ourselves to understand this, we shall never understand what England was under the reigns of the Plantagenets and Tudors." Mr. Fronde admits over and over again that these principles are contrary to those of political economy, and even of human nature. No laws, he says, are of any service that are above the working level of public morality, and the deeper they are carried down into life, the larger become the opportunities of evasion; and yet with this wise caution before him, he has written a philosophical romance, like the "Cyropædia" of Xenophon or the "Germany" of Tacitus, to prove that we are not so wise as we think ourselves, and that there was some method in these preventive and protective schemes in Church and State which we have long since discarded. At present, our task is not with Mr. Fronde. We only wish here to indicate the strange contrast between Mr. Buckle's position and that of Mr. Fronde. The two books, indeed, are complementary, one of the other. Mr. Buckle's deficiencies Mr. Fronde supplies, and the contrary. Mr. Buckle is deficient in sympathy with the past, Mr. Fronde is almost in excess. Mr. Buckle will allow no credit for these ages of history when the human mind was not so much set upon discovery without as within; when men went to school to know themselves, rather than the properties of matter, and their application to the useful arts. Mr. Fronde is of opinion that this moral cultivation must precede material. With Mr. Buckle modern civilization began with the age of Bacon; with Mr. Fronde with the monks and missionaries who kept schools or converted savages in the ninth and following centuries. The reaction from the assumptions of the age of priestcraft has left Mr. Buckle with little or no sympathy for that submissive, it may be credulous, spirit which underlies all priestcraft-the latent electricity of spiritual religion, which worldly-minded and ambitious priests collect in a battery, to terrify mankind with successive shocks of superstition and tyranny. The reaction from the same spirit of priestly assumption has left Mr. Fronde with a genial admiration for our fore |