Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 25.djvu/479

Rh and without us, to which, from moment to moment, our lives must conform under penalty of one or other evil; and that therefore our first business must be to study this Order of Nature. Nor is estimation of this intelligence raised on contemplating the outcome of this established culture, as seen in Parliament; where any proposal to judge a question by reference to general laws, or "abstract principles" as they are called, is pooh-poohed, with the tacit implication that in social affairs there is no natural law; and where, as we lately saw, 300 select spokesmen of the nation cheered frantically when it was decided that they should continue to vow before God that they would maintain certain arrangements prescribed for them by their great, great, great, etc. grandfathers.

On turning to the moral manifestations, we find still less that is calculated to excite the required religious feeling. When multitudes of citizens belonging to the classes distinguished as "the better," make a hero of a politician whose sole aim throughout life was success, regardless of principle, and have even established an annual commemoration of him, we are obliged to infer that the prevailing sentiments are not of a very high order. Nothing approaching to adoration is called forth by those who, on the death of a youth who went to help in killing Zulus, with whom he had no quarrel, and all that he might increase his chance of playing despot over the French, thought him worthy of high funeral honors—would, many of them, indeed, have given him the highest. No feeling of reverence arises in one's mind on thinking of people who looked on with approval or tolerance when a sailor of fortune, who has hired himself out to an eastern tyrant to slay at the word of command, was honored here by a banquet. A public opinion which recognizes no criminality in wholesale homicide so long as it is committed by a constituted political authority, no matter how vile, or by its foreign hired agent who is indifferent to the right or wrong of the question at issue, is a public opinion which excites, in some at any rate, an emotion nearer to contempt than to adoration.

This emotion is not changed on looking abroad and contemplating the implied natures of those who guide, and the implied natures of those who accept the guidance. When, among a people professing that religion of peace preached to them generation after generation by tens of thousands of priests, an assembly receives with enthusiasm, as lately at the Gambetta dinner, the toast, "The French army, the highest embodiment of the French nation"—when, along with nominal acceptance of forgiveness as a Christian duty, there goes intense determination to retaliate; we are obliged to reprobate either the feeling which they actually think proper, or the hypocrisy with which they profess that the opposite feeling is proper. On finding in another advanced society that the seats of highest culture are seats of discipline in barbarism, where the test of