Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 20.djvu/34

24 ways by the absence of those "schools" in art, philosophy, etc., which, among Continental peoples, are formed by the submission of disciples to an adopted master. That in England men show, more than elsewhere, a jealousy of dictation, and a determination to act as they think fit, will not, I think, be disputed.

The diminished subordination to authority, which is the obverse of this independence, of course implies decrease of loyalty. Worship of the monarch, at no time with us reaching to the height it did in France early in the last century, or in Russia down to recent times, has now changed into a respect depending very much on the monarch's personal character. Our days witness no such extreme servilities of expression as were used by ecclesiastics in the dedication of the Bible to King James, nor any such exaggerated adulations as those addressed to George III by the House of Lords. The doctrine of divine right has long since died away; belief in an indwelling supernatural power (implied by the touching for king's evil, etc.) is named as a curiosity of the past; and the monarchical institution has come to be defended on grounds of expediency. So great has been the decrease of this sentiment which, under the militant régime, attaches subject to ruler, that nowadays the conviction commonly expressed is that, should the throne be occupied by a Charles II or a George IV, there would probably result a republic. And this change of feeling is shown in the attitude toward the Government as a whole. For not only are there many who dispute the authority of the state in respect of sundry matters besides religious beliefs, but there are some who passively resist what they consider unjust exercises of its authority, and pay fines or go to prison rather than submit.

As this last fact implies, along with decrease of loyalty has gone decrease of faith, not in monarchs only but in governments. Such belief in royal omnipotence as existed in ancient Egypt, where the power of the ruler was supposed to extend to the other world, as it is even now supposed to do in China, has had no parallel in the West; but still, among European peoples in past times, that confidence in the soldier-king essential to the militant type displayed itself, among other ways, in exaggerated conceptions of his ability to cure evils, achieve benefits, and arrange things as he willed. If we compare present opinion among ourselves with opinion in early days, we find a decline in these credulous expectations. Though, during the late retrograde movement toward militancy, state-power has been invoked for various ends, and faith in it has increased; yet, tap to the commencement of this reaction, a great change had taken place in the other direction. After the repudiation of a state-enforced creed, there came a denial of the state's capacity for determining religious truth, and a growing movement to relieve it from the function of religious teaching, held to be alike needless and injurious. Long ago it had ceased to be thought that Government could do any good by regulating people's