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SOCIAL RE-FORMATION.

* 165 sounding brass and tinkling cymbal. If we fear to break the fair surface of our decorous society," lest it should cave in, the system is not worth preserving. To break it up with conscious mind, and strive to make it pure and sweet throughout, would be no revolution of blind force, but a re-formation—the rational action of a free and civilized race, a race resolved that the surroundings of its social life shall be such as will present no vicious temptations to young men, no constant strain upon their moral instincts, tending to reduce the innocent, impulsive, unreflectiveness of youth to mean and despicable hypocrisy. A fair and decorous surface is no compensation for an inwardly diseased organism, and this great social evil festering in our midst is like a canker that saps and undermines our truthfulness, and utterly destroys our moral growth.

The changes that are necessary are numerous and complex in detail. But they admit of being generalized in very simple. form, for one and all of these changes will be movements on the lines of greater reverence for human nature, greater simplicity in social life, equality and unity of the sexes, and enlightened training of the young to social sympathy, and to the steady repression of every anti-social feeling.

CHAPTER XI.

THE SUBJECTIVE REQUIREMENTS OF SOCIAL LIFE.

"In any case, let us know the facts about human nature, the pathological facts no less than the others; these are the first thing, and the second, and the third also."-JOHN MORLEY.

"Passion may burn like a devouring flame; and in a few moments, like flame, may bring down a temple to dust and ashes; but it is earnest as flame, and essentially pure."-Autobiography of Mark Rutherford.

In the year 1789 all British subjects sufficiently developed to be altruistic, ie. individuals possessing over and above the selfregarding qualities, intelligence to apprehend and sympathy to feel the struggles of Humanity, engaged in a great effort to break down the tyranny of circumstance in search of happiness, had their whole attention fixed upon events in France. To such individuals it was well known that the miserable condition of the down-trodden French people made revolution justifiable, and the great idea which lay at the heart of the revolution, viz. simplification of life-a return to nature, accompanied by the shaking off of all the artificial, conventional intricacies of an old and corrupt civilization-was in itself a noble ideal that kindled the enthusiasm of distant spectators as well as of the actors in these memorable scenes.

In proportion, however, to the expansion of feeling experienced by distant onlookers (in proportion to the strength of their generous desires and ardent hopes for the French people) was their disappointment when the collapse came. The Great Revolution culminated in a paroxysm of savage violence, a debauch of every barbarous and brutal passion that humanity is capable of; and sympathy for the sufferings of the lower classes at the moment was quenched in horror by the spectacle of their bloodthirsty and insatiable revenge. But we

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who look back upon the awful tragedy and calmly survey events from a distance in time as well as space--we at least perceive that it left valuable fruits behind. With these fruits we are not, however, here concerned, but rather with its errors and the causes which conspired to make the judgment of a thoughtful, not unsympathetic, British mind find expression in these words: "The French Revolution disgraced reason." * One great factor of the phenomena was the spirit and teaching of a single man. Rousseau had, as Mr. Morley tells us, "hold over a generation that was lost amid the broken maze of fallen systems." Now, Rousseau died in 1778; but what Mr. Morley means is, that in the minds of the leaders of the Revolution Rousseau's ideas held dominion, and, unfortunately, his central idea was "disparagement of the reasoning faculty." It was a true case of the blind leading the blind. Rousseau was a man of unusual sensitiveness, and his whole surroundings in childhood and later life tended to make his character morbid or ill-balanced. His self-regarding feelings became excessive and exaggerated, his intelligence was untrained, his social sympathies were repressed, and because the artificial system of Parisian life was wholly uncongenial to him, he developed a marked unsociability, and gave himself up to a brooding imagination, a sensuous expansion over a purely ideal "natural life," which had no real basis in the facts of human nature. But all reform, to be true and lasting, must be based upon the facts of human nature, and the false notes in Rousseau's teaching were bound by law (as sure and natural as the law of gravitation) to produce discord and confusion. Rousseau was not responsible for the defects of his training. Before he was seven years old he had learned from his father to indulge a passion for romance. His father, Isaac Rousseau, and the boy of six would together spend whole nights in reading romances to one another in turn till the morning note of the birds recalled them to actual life, and the elder would cry out that he was the more childish of the two! In reference to this practice, Rousseau himself says, "It gave me bizarre, romantic ideas of human life, of which neither reflection nor experience has ever been able wholly to cure me." Every wide and powerful stream has its many tributaries, and each tributary has its tiny, thread-like sources, could we but trace them out. Now here, in this fact of life, this young imagination feeding day by day * George Combe. "Rousseau," by John Morley, vol. ii. p. 206. Ibid., vol. i. p. II.

on fiction, we come upon a source, a tiny spring of cosmic force, destined to converge and to contribute to the great outbreak wherein "a generation was lost amid the broken maze of fallen systems." But we see in it more than this-a partial explanation of one of many causes why the great French Revolution was not a rational reform throughout, but objectively a wild saturnalia, and subjectively a phantasmagoria of ideas, false and true, inextricably mixed. Rousseau's psychology was defective, and the modern moral sentiment of universal justice was in him little developed. True, he desired equality of class, but of sex equality he had simply no conception. He revolted against all tyranny of aristocracy over plutocracy and of the rich over the poor, but of private or domestic tyranny, such as the despotic rule of husband over wife, he took no notice whatever. His ideal of womanhood was not even up to the civilization of his own period and race; it was Oriental, and his conception of the natural state meant social freedom for man, but for woman entire subjection! In his great work, “Emilius,” of which Mr. Morley writes, "It is one of the seminal books in the history of literature. . . . It touched the deeper things of character. It was the veritable charter of youthful deliverance," manhood is extolled. The hero, Emilius, was to be first and above all a man. Not so with the heroine, Sophie. Her individual dignity is nowhere recognized. The duties taught to women are to please men, to be useful to men, to console them, to make their lives agreeable and sweet to them. Woman's orders are caresses, her threats are tears. Now, even in the seventeenth century, says Mr. Morley, French history had shown a type of womanhood in which "devotion went with force . . . divine candour and transparent innocence coexisted with energetic loyalty and intellectual uprightness and a firmly set will." * Clearly, then, on this point Rousseau was behind his age, and his doctrine was a false one. But, again, his conception even of manhood was incomplete. Because he saw the goodness of humanity under its coarsest outside he scorned contemptuously all literary culture, social position, and social accomplishments. He taught the supremacy of emotion over reason, and never analyzed emotion or pointed out that there are certain phases of human emotion which, if indulged in, will degrade man below the brute. In the training of the young he imagined that self-love is the one quality of embryo character on which to work, and did not recognize that *"Rousseau," vol. ii. p. 247.

THE PHYSIOLOGICAL FACTS OF LIFE.

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"sympathy appears in good natures extremely early, and is susceptible of rapid cultivation from the very first.”*

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That the great French Revolution was not productive of unmixed good, that it disgraced reason, and that a generation was lost amid the broken maze of fallen systems" creates now no surprise in minds accustomed to look to antecedents and see throughout phenomena the course of natural sequence. But it stands for us a terrible warning-a warning of how false teaching plays a part in bringing into action forces that are overwhelming in their destructive power, incapable of all control, and how in all forward movement intelligence must be the guide, the pioneer, the supreme ruler of human destiny. For social units to act aright spontaneously as Rousseau desired is, no doubt, a beautiful dream; but before that dream can become a reality, habits that harmonize with general well-being must be formed in the social units, and under the directing intelligence of an adult generation each young generation must be trained into fitness for social life far more thoroughly than has ever as yet been accomplished or attempted.

The known facts about human nature are quite indispensable to a theorizer upon social systems, and some comprehension of these facts must be established in the general mind ere we can hope to see a widespread, individual, and yet general preparation for a better system. The facts are, of course, both physiological and psychological, and these terms embrace the emotional nature of human beings as well as their intellectual nature and bodily structure. The purely animal appetites and propensities are of transcendent importance, because unless these are exercised there could be no life at all, and unless exercised in proper measure, there is no healthy foundation on which to raise a superstructure of elevated, widely intelligent life.

The importance of eating and drinking has never been wholly misunderstood, and the British race has long since passed out of the stage of mental ignorance in which fasting and inanition could be regarded as more holy than paying due attention to the laws of nature. Whilst, however, the necessity for sufficient eating and drinking is recognized, and we are in no danger of loss of life through wilful abstinence, the pleasurable sensation given by exercise of the function is often unduly esteemed and overstrained, and the epicure is as much the victim of this error as the glutton or the drunkard, although

* "Rousseau," vol. ii. p. 217.