Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 131.djvu/824

818 Every country has a large mass of restless, dissatisfied spirits, idealists, haters of order, the very salt and the very scum of humanity. That is the class which most quickly feels the breezes of speculation, and England has had her share of it, as well as France. Nor has England had any lack of a destructive philosophy. Her literature of the eighteenth century is much richer in the critical solvents of society than a careless reader would infer from the pages of Mr. Stephen. But those influences misled our revolutionary classes much less than those of France, for a reason which even De Tocqueville has missed, and which has received too little attention. Protestantism gave a religious outlet to much of the critical spirit which in France would have attacked religion itself. Many persons who, in the one country, would have retailed the doctrines of Voltaire, were content, in the other, to rail at the Established Church, and at bishops whose apostolic poverty was consistent with the possession of fifteen thousand a year. They were vigorous Non-conformists, instead of sneering infidels. Or if their logical faculty was more intrepid, they stopped short at the half-way house of deism, instead of proceeding to a blank defiance of religion. The whole literature of the deists was a left-handed tribute to the necessity of religion itself. In France, Toland, and other chiefs of the deist school would have been the literary lackeys of Voltaire. France drove the restless and irreverent minds into scepticism when she shut up the natural avenues of Protestantism, for she left no resting-place between Catholicism and utter unbelief. The revocation of the Edict of Nantes, did more than any other single act to make speculation irreverent, and. the people ready to apply the boldest of its lessons.

Another reason why speculative philosophy was more destructive in France than in England has been pointed out by De Tocqueville. The local and Parliamentary institutions of the one country had trained a great proportion of the people in the practice of public affairs. Thus they instinctively knew how little guidance they could get from general theories, when they were making laws for the management of their own political business. They were disposed to make too much rather than too little of philosophical guidance. And the philosophers themselves were kept in check by the same practical training. Town councils, select vestries, quarter-sessions, contested elections, and divisions in the House of Commons, taught the most intrepid literary disciples of Locke the practical absurdity of such books as that by which Rousseau set France on fire, Burke was, of course, by far the greatest example of the profundity which the management of practical affairs gives to political philosophy. The differences between the "Contrat Social" and the "Reflections on the French Revolution," is the difference between a logical dreamer and a philosopher with a consummate knowledge of the infinite complexity of human affairs. Another conspicuous example of the restraint imposed by practical life has been witnessed in our own day. Mr. Mill was so much of an idealist that, if he had been born four hundred years ago, he would have founded a religious order, and if he had lived in the eighteenth century he might have been a purer if a less-gifted Rousseau. But he breathed the practical atmosphere of England; he was tied by the hard facts of the India House; he knew from personal experience the enormous difficulties in the way even of despotic government; and thus he was made the apostle of a refined expediency. The French philosophers of the eighteenth century, on the other hand, had no such training. It was impossible for them to learn what the art of government meant, and thus will it always be in a despotic country. They could not help being pure theorists. Most of them had gathered a sentimental love of republics from the literature of Rome, and they appealed to the conduct of Cato or the maxims of Cicero as glibly as if Rome and France were identical. Happily a sounder philosophy is now seen even in France. It is now recognized that nations change and grow as well as men; that each generation inherits an infinite endowment of sympathies, ideas, and tendencies, as well as verified convictions; that the thread of this constantly accumulating wealth can no more be cut than the personality of a man can be changed into the mental nature of a child, and that a legislator must look to the traditions of a people at least as carefully as to his own sense of logical fitness. The tendency of such philosophy will be profoundly conservative, in the best sense of the word. Had it been taught before the Revolution, it would have helped to reform, rather than destroy, the monarchy; and now that the social buttresses of a monarchy have been undermined or destroyed, it will equally help to establish the Republic.