The Contemporary Review, January 1883. VariousЧитать онлайн книгу.
greatly to material advance of the society—develops the industrial arts, extends and improves the business organizations, augments the wealth; but that it raises the value of individual life, as measured by the average state of its feeling, by no means follows. That it will do so eventually, is certain; but that it does so now seems, to say the least, very doubtful.
The truth is that a society and its members act and react in such wise that while, on the one hand, the nature of the society is determined by the natures of its members; on the other hand, the activities of its members (and presently their natures) are redetermined by the needs of the society, as these alter: change in either entails change in the other. It is an obvious implication that, to a great extent, the life of a society so sways the wills of its members as to turn them to its ends. That which is manifest during the militant stage, when the social aggregate coerces its units into co-operation for defence, and sacrifices many of their lives for its corporate preservation, holds under another form during the industrial stage, as we at present know it. Though the co-operation of citizens is now voluntary instead of compulsory; yet the social forces impel them to achieve social ends while apparently achieving only their own ends. The man who, carrying out an invention, thinks only of private welfare to be thereby secured, is in far larger measure working for public welfare: instance the contrast between the fortune made by Watt and the wealth which the steam-engine has given to mankind. He who utilizes a new material, improves a method of production, or introduces a better way of carrying on business, and does this for the purpose of distancing competitors, gains for himself little compared with that which he gains for the community by facilitating the lives of all. Either unknowingly or in spite of themselves, Nature leads men by purely personal motives to fulfil her ends: Nature being one of our expressions for the Ultimate Cause of things, and the end, remote when not proximate, being the highest form of human life.
Hence no argument, however cogent, can be expected to produce much effect: only here and there one may be influenced. As in an actively militant stage of society it is impossible to make many believe that there is any glory preferable to that of killing enemies; so, where rapid material growth is going on, and affords unlimited scope for the energies of all, little can be done by insisting that life has higher uses than work and accumulation. While among the most powerful of feelings continue to be the desire for public applause and dread of public censure—while the anxiety to achieve distinction, now by conquering enemies, now by beating competitors, continues predominant—while the fear of public reprobation affects men more than the fear of divine vengeance (as witness the long survival of duelling in Christian societies); this excess of work which ambition prompts, seems likely to continue with but small qualification. The eagerness for the honour accorded to success, first in war and then in commerce, has been indispensable as a means to peopling the Earth with the higher types of man, and the subjugation of its surface and its forces to human use. Ambition may fitly come to bear a smaller ratio to other motives, when the working out of these needs is approaching completeness; and when also, by consequence, the scope for satisfying ambition is diminishing. Those who draw the obvious corollaries from the doctrine of Evolution—those who believe that the process of modification upon modification which has brought life to its present height must raise it still higher, will anticipate that "the last infirmity of noble minds" will in the distant future slowly decrease. As the sphere for achievement becomes smaller, the desire for applause will lose that predominance which it now has. A better ideal of life may simultaneously come to prevail. When there is fully recognized the truth that moral beauty is higher than intellectual power—when the wish to be admired is in large measure replaced by the wish to be loved; that strife for distinction which the present phase of civilization shows us will be greatly moderated. Along with other benefits may then come a rational proportioning of work and relaxation; and the relative claims of to-day and to-morrow may be properly balanced.—H. S.]
UNIVERSITY ELECTIONS
The late election for the University of Cambridge had an ending which may well set many of us a-thinking. That Mr. Raikes should have been chosen by an overwhelming majority rather than Mr. Stuart means a good deal more than a mere party victory and party defeat. Combined with several elections of late years at Oxford, it is enough to make us all turn over in our minds the question of University representation in general. The facts taken altogether look as if those constituencies to which we might naturally look for the return of members of more than average personal eminence were committed, in the choice of their representatives, not only to one particular political party, but to absolute indifference to every claim beyond membership of that particular party. It would be unreasonable to expect a conscientious Conservative to vote for a Liberal candidate; but one might expect any party, in choosing candidates for such constituencies as the Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, to put forward its best men. And we cannot, after all, think so ill of the great Conservative party as to believe that the present representatives of Oxford and Cambridge are its best men. We ought indeed not to forget that, whatever Mr. Beresford-Hope has since shown himself, he was brought forward, partly at least, as a man of scholarship and intellectual tastes, and that he received many Liberal votes in the belief that he was less widely removed from Liberal ideas than another Conservative candidate. This would seem to have been the last trace of an old tradition, the last faint glimmering of the belief that the representative of an University should have something about him specially appropriate to the representation of an University. In Oxford that tradition had, on the Conservative side, given way earlier. Another tradition gave way with it, one which I at least did not regret, the tradition that an University seat should be a seat for life. It sounded degrading when a proposer of Mr. Gladstone stooped to appeal to the doctrine, "ut semel electus semper eligatur." But be that rule wise or foolish, it was on the Conservative side that it was broken down. It gave way to the rule that Mr. Gladstone was always to be opposed, and that it did not matter who could be got to oppose him. Again I cannot believe that the Conservative ranks did not contain better men than the grotesque succession of nobodies by whom Mr. Gladstone was opposed. But in the course of those elections the rule was established at Oxford, and it now seems to be adopted at Cambridge, that anybody will do to be an University member, provided only he is an unflinching supporter of the party which, as recent elections show, still keeps a large majority in both Universities.
Mr. Gladstone was very nearly the ideal University member. I say "very nearly," because to my mind the absolutely ideal state of things would be if the Universities could catch such men as Mr. Gladstone young, and could bring them into Parliament as their own, before they had been laid hold of by any other constituency. The late jubilee of Mr. Gladstone's political life ought to have been the jubilee of his election, not for Newark but for Oxford. The Universities should choose men who have already shown themselves to be scholars and who bid fair one day to be statesmen. I am not sure about the policy of bringing forward actual University officials. There is sure to be a cry against them, and it is not clear that they are the best choice in themselves. It may be as well however to remember that the example was set, though in rather an amusing shape, by the Conservatives themselves. Dr. Marsham, late Warden of Merton, who was brought forward thirty years ago in opposition to Mr. Gladstone, did not belong to exactly the same class of academical officials as Professor Stuart and Professor H. J. S. Smith; still, as an academical official of some kind, he had something in common with them, as distinguished from either Mr. Gladstone or Mr. Raikes. At the last elections both for Oxford and Cambridge, the Liberal candidate was an actual Professor. Mr. Stuart indeed is much more than a mere professor; he has shown his capacity for practical work of various kinds. But I could not but look on the Oxford choice of 1878 as unlucky. Mr. H. J. S. Smith was brought forward purely on the ground of "distinction," distinction, it would seem, so great that moral right and wrong went for nothing by its side. Just at that moment right and wrong were emphatically weighing in the balance; it was the very crisis of the fate of South-Eastern Europe. But we were told that Mr. Smith's candidature had "no reference to the Eastern Question;" he was, we were told, supported by men who took opposite views on that matter. That is to say, when the most distinct question of right and wrong that ever was put before any people was at that moment placed before our eyes, we were asked to put away all thought of moral right and moral duty in the presence of the long string of letters after Mr. Smith's name. Better, I should have said, to choose, even for the University, a man who could not read or write, if he had been ready to strive heart and soul for justice and freedom alongside of Mr. Gladstone