IT T is a confusing thing to many candid persons to read the statements which are often put forth, exhibiting the contrast between the English life of to-day and that of the last century, or the last century but one. Setting aside the large number of men whose constitution inclines them to a violently peculiar view of the past in its comparison with the present, there are always to be found a good many open-minded thinkers who ask for nothing but facts to guide them in forming their conclusion. They neither depreciate nor glorify that extinct state of affairs, of which all they really know is, that it no longer exists. They believe neither in the superlative wisdom nor the lamentable ignorance of their ancestors. They are quite ready to believe anything whatever concerning the past in its contrast with the present, which can be established by real proofs. All that they require is that the question shall not be settled by à priori hypotheses, or by any assumption of the existence of some mysterious law which condemns the English people to continuous degradation, or which confers on them the blessing of irresistible progress.

That unprejudiced and truth-seeking persons of this class should at the same time be bewildered and almost awe-struck by the social phenomena of to-day, is not, I think, to be wondered at. These phenomena are, in some respects, nothing less than appalling. Moreover, there

often seems to be no way out of our present difficulties. Every agency that is brought to bear upon these gigantic evils seems to fail. Philanthropy and benevolence appear sometimes to be the most mischievous of all elements in English social life. Theological teaching has failed, and now simple charitableness has failed also; and what more remains? The old organic system which existed a hundred years ago, and has come down even to our own time, is breaking up in all quarters, and what is to take its place? It is all chaos and confusion, and the shattering of landmarks, and the uprooting of habits, and the rending of ties, and what is to come of it all? It is not, therefore, surprising that the most prudent thinkers should be sometimes led to accept the dogmatic assertions of those who believe in the existence of a bygone golden age, which, according to their temperaments, they fix either in the middle ages, the renaissance period, the Commonwealth, the revolutionary epoch, the earlier days of George III., or even the days of George IV. himself.

Nor do I for a moment pretend that this question of the comparative happiness of the present, and let us say, the last century, is one that is easy of solution. The popular cant about the blessedness of the English life of to-day is as odious to me as it is to the most irrational believer in an extinct period of perfection. Of all the rubbish that has been uttered, none is more worthless than the current praises of our modern civilization, and no word is more grossly abused than this very word "civilization" itself. I cannot see that we are anything more than a semi-civilized people up to this day; or, to use the word which is precisely identical in meaning, but more unpleasant in the sound, we are nothing more than a semi-barbarous people, judging by any rational standard of civilization and barbarism. Morally, religiously, æsthetically, in politics, in diplomacy, in legislation, in administration, in education, in our amusements, in our very dress and our dinners, we are still but half civilized, or semi-barbarous, choose whichever form we will.

If, then, I venture upon giving some reasons why I think that we are not worse than our fathers, it is from no absurd belief in the nineteenth century, as an age in which self-glorification may be tolerated, or as an age, indeed, which is not full of perils, and in which the evils which were generated in the past may not be tending to some tremendous crash at some not far distant period. The social atmosphere is, indeed, filled with explosive materials, and it is simply absurd to assume that because we have hitherto escaped any tremendous convulsion, we are, therefore, secure for the future. There is an unquestionable political and economical truth in the old Hebrew saying, that "the fathers have eaten sour grapes, and the children's teeth are set on edge," which may be pre-eminently appli

cable to ourselves. The mistakes, whether selfish or unselfish, of one generation are often as slow as they are prolific in bearing their natural fruits; and it is quite possible that it may be our lot to suffer through the operation of social and economical laws, whose revolutionary work is really due to the follies, the ignorance, or the vices of our ancestors. The organic life of a people is continued from generation to generation, and it is no more possible to avert the effects of past errors, by simply opening our eyes to their existence, than it is for an old debauchee to enjoy the blessings of a vigorous old age by simply avowing and lamenting the excesses of his youth.

At the same time the difficulty of instituting any comparison between the operation of the social forces of to-day, and that of those which were at work at the beginning of the present century, or a hundred years ago, is very great. It is difficult enough to form a fair estimate of the tendencies of the life in which we are ourselves taking an active part. But when the inquiry is transferred some two or three generations backwards, the scarcity of trustworthy materials is doubly striking. The moment we apply ourselves in a thoroughly critical spirit to test the value of the records of the English life of the latter half of the eighteenth century, and of the beginning of our nineteenth, the visionary character of the popular ideals is irresistibly apparent. Whether those ideals are true or false, the fact is undeniable, that to a large extent they are the result of unmitigated guess-work. The very statistics of the period are not to be relied on, our present system of statistics-gathering being then unknown. Statistics in those days were the work of a few isolated individuals, urged on by a scientific instinct, and altogether in advance of their age. The figures they got together were, therefore, drawn from most limited areas, and even as far as they went, were often extremely partial and misleading. And seeing how hard it is to interpret the full significance of the carefully-sought statistics of to-day, it needs no words to prove that when the statistics themselves were fragmentary and incorrect, they can serve scarcely any purpose beyond that of giving hints to the cautious and acute inquirer.

But it is not merely in the matter of formal statistics that we are at a loss for materials for comparing our own life with that of our recent forefathers. Wherever we turn in examining the records of their personal and social history, we are struck with the absence of the two characteristic phenomena of the English life of to-day. They knew nothing of our intense self-consciousness, and of our passion for decorum. Surely never before, since men became civilized, was there an age which so fondly cherished this habit of selfinspection, in which we now delight. Everybody now is a critic of something or other, and has his views of the internal condition of

society and of the future of his country. The whole nation is possessed with a mania for examining, so to say, its own conscience, and discerning its short-comings, and tabulating its offences in a sort of spiritual diary. Spontaneity seems dying out amongst us, while rarely has an age been more thoroughly un-selfconscious and spontaneous, both in its vices and its virtues, than was the period with which we are in the habit of comparing our own. A hundred years ago the violence of political party-spirit was nothing less than ferocious, and the distinctions of caste were absolute walls of separation between the noble and the plebeian, the rich and the poor. But all alike spoke their mind without fear of consequences, and whatever were their faults, no love for morbid self-inspection and selfcriticism is to be detected among them.

As a consequence, or perhaps rather as a cause, they knew nothing of that devotion to decorum which amounts among ourselves to a perfectly fanatical worship. The very notion of being "content to dwell in decencies for ever" may have suited the idiosyncrasies of an infinitesimally small minority. But of that adoration of "propriety," which runs throughout the whole of English society, high and low alike, the age had none. Our grandfathers and great-grandfathers had thrown off the unbridled licence of the Restoration period. They had come to recognise the eternal differences of right and wrong. They had learnt to admire great ideas, and to struggle for them like men. But they had not yet fallen in love with decency, as such, and for its own sake, without regard to the hideous body which decency might be clothing. At this day, their talk, their diaries, their letters, their plays, their novels, their caricatures, their newspapers, are often not producible in their integrity, so free-spoken were they, and so rigidly decorous are we.

And further, the reign of universal philanthropy had not then set in. It was a coarse, rough, vigorous, nay, brutal age, when the finest sensibilities of to-day were not awake and alive. Its virtues took another form, and effeminacy was comparatively unknown, except as a mark for insult and derision. Now, with ourselves, it is a very suggestive fact that effeminacy is rarely made a butt for public ridicule. We have adopted the softer virtues into our moral code; and the possession of refinement, of delicacy, of cultivation, is no longer supposed to indicate a want of manliness and courage. Comparatively speaking, the very idea of the "fop" of the last century is now forgotten. He is a rarity, even when he appears in a modified form amongst us. Refinement and manliness have, apparently at least, shaken hands with one another; and the "fop" is, so it seems, a relic of the past, still lingering amongst us. I say "so it seems,' for the very question is, how far we have gained in true manliness

and the more vigorous virtues. The difficulty is to ascertain how far the contemporary pictures of the latter half of the eighteenth century were real pictures or gross and untrustworthy caricatures. We want to learn whether its apparent brutality was real brutality, or only a deficiency in nervous sensibility; whether its coarseness was in word only; and whether its disregard of human suffering arose from ignorance or from sheer cruelty. All we can assume, on first studying its literature, is that it was unquestionably rough, rude, and regardless of many things which we now cherish as the most lately developed results of the spirit of Christianity and civilization.

In the midst of these puzzling phenomena we have but one trustworthy clue to their interpretation. A wise man will surely devote himself to a wide and careful study of the whole range of social facts which have come under his own personal observation. He will inquire whether these facts seem to indicate a forward or a retrograde movement in the national life, and how far they fall in with the ordinary laws of human action, or are due to the violent operation of transient external causes. He will then apply his conclusions to the investigation of the records of the periods lying beyond his personal experience, and ask himself whether the movements which he has traced are the simple working out of principles which have been long in operation at the heart of English life, or whether they are due to some sudden incursion of radically new and temporary ideas. In a word, if the inquirer is satisfied that English society has moved in one direction during some thirty or forty years, during which he has been personally cognizant of its true character, and that this character harmonizes with every detail that he can gather as to its nature when it passes beyond the range of his personal experience, then surely he is justified in concluding that the movement of the last thirty or forty years is but the continuation of a movement which is a hundred or a hundred and fifty years old. If, during his own knowledge of it, it has been a backward or downward movement, then undoubtedly we are in bad case altogether. If the reverse, the vaticinations of the desponding are the mere moanings of ignorant discontent, and the country is far indeed from being on the road to ruin.

Turning, then, to details, it is to be noted that the complaints of those who believe in our present degeneracy are nearly all of them the results of one single conviction-the conviction that the structure of society has become more or less disorganized, and that its elements are resolving themselves into a chaotic confusion. This, I think, is a fair account of the source of the dread which has taken possession of not a few of the more moderate and sensible believers in our national decay. They do not believe in the degeneracy of the individual Englishman so much as in the operation of certain tendencies which