To Mr. Norton.

Cambridge, March 21, 1870.

. . . The newspaper man is the type of the worst side of our modern civilization, — its shams and artificialities. It is

he, and not the man of science, who presents the widest contrast to the poet. He deals with human interests in the gross, without delicacy. He numbers and paragraphs them, but never weighs them; and we, his readers, are apt to follow his lead. No discrimination of interests, no refining or artistic judgments, find place in his pursuit. To shock the nerves and arrest the attention of the busy multitude, whether agreeably or disagreeably, with facts or fictions, is his whole affair. The man of science often seems but little better, — not less a gossip but a more eccentric one, prizing a fact for a fact, with not even a correct judgment of whether it has any interest at all. Still, where he does not show imagination he is redeemed by a great faith of which the newspaper man has nothing. He may not be governed by a clear insight of remote though real relations: still, he is moved by a true faith in the possibilities of real but undiscovered ones, and so he prizes his facts genuinely.

My muse suggests that on this theme I might survey the great past of which you are a pious witness, when there were no newspaper men, and when men were governed, if not beneficently by reason, at any rate by great passions and noble devotions, so that Fine Art was possible. I am not overmuch inclined, however, to admire this old and now impossible concentration, or the kind of nobleness and the possibility of individual distinction, the incentive to individual ambition, which it implied. Humanity is conscious of too many and too massive interests to allow such concentration and singleness of purpose. It is utilitarian reason, and not religious passion, which must govern the modern world. “Fixed ideas,” once controlling elements, are now subservient instruments of great purposes or characters. They are still needed for discipline, but are not worshipped as masters. Representative men are, to be sure, no longer possible: the identification of a man and an idea, so that personal and

moral or æsthetic motives may reinforce each other, and history be presented to us in fine ideals of works and characters intensively grand but proportionately narrow, — in other words, perfection, under more or less arbitrary limitations, is not a leading modern aspiration. Our great men are the wise and painstaking promoters and guardians of extensive interests. They show moral greatness in fitness for great responsibilities which the needs of a highly organized society may impose upon them, and not merely in what their special genius, or combined taste and ability, define for them. They are lost, it is true, in the bright day they work in; yet they may be absolutely brighter than the religiously great artist or scholar or philosopher or reformer, who stands out against the surrounding darkness of barbarism. These personages present moral greatness in its elemental form, and in perfect correlation to the rudeness and violence of the ages to which they belong, in which all life was passionate. We cannot be too grateful for them; but this does not constitute them our types, — at least, not examples of what we would be perfect in, though types of perfection in their way. In the spirit of this distinction, we see in our day the great Christian type in the character of Jesus, studied as a phenomenon of a by-gone time, as an example to be imitated only “in the spirit,” or in its most essential but least particular qualities, and as almost identical with moral greatness itself.

I find on reflection that, instead of being indebted to Spontaneity for my inspiration, I am really led into this train of reflections by the questions of Miss Grace’s letter, and am anticipating what I should properly reserve for my answer to her. Nevertheless, all this is naturally connected with the suggestive thoughts in your letter on the conditions and prospects of modern society. I find it hard to admit that the future of Europe, which seems so dark to you, may have to pass, as you appear to anticipate, through phases like those

of the first thirteen centuries, attractive as the brighter side of that picture may be and dark as the worse side of modem life may seem. From what you say (if you can recall it at this late day) and from Macaulay’s observation that what modern civilization has to fear is no longer the incursions of outside barbarians but an irruption of the barbarism at its very heart, in the populations of its own great cities, we can see with sufficient clearness where the danger lies. The causes are, as you say, no longer political (at least in the modern historical sense of the word), but immediately social. To meet them, social science will have to amend essentially that fine Greek invention, the free city and its government. We have improved greatly on the Greek idea, and applied it with success to the government of empires through our representative system, but democracy is now the least successful in its earliest applications. . . .

The latest and best scientific explanation attributes the decline and fall of Roman civilization, not to the strength of outside barbarism, but to an avoidable governmental and financial mismanagement; and it would be a very improbable result of modern studies of social problems to find that the intrinsically weak inside barbarism of modern society is unmanageable, and must be permitted to undermine civilization in its turn. That the power of wealth, more firmly seated now than ever before in the history of mankind, must give way again to princely and military powers; that wars shall again be waged against it, instead of with its permission and aid; that all the mediæval train of horrors shall follow, — destruction not only of life, but of subsistence, followed by famine and pestilence, by diseases more fatal than warfare itself and unknown to modern life; and all this as the result of the ferment of social agitation, not peculiar to modern times, in a class, the offspring of cities and our defective city systems, subdued already in its rank and file by want and

debility, and likely to be the first victims of such a state of things, — is to me incredible. Of course, our rulers may make fatal mistakes, as the Romans did. One fatal mistake would be in not sustaining the class of prosperous and independent yeomanry, the true backbone of civilized communities as now constituted. Yet the privileges of wealth ought to be — will have to be — circumscribed. The rapacity of wealth is, of course, the taproot of all these evils, the source of the hostility which threatens social revolutions. We have got to amend the great Roman invention, the laws of property, as well as the constitutions of large cities and the management of their populations. But a scientific study of the subject from the point of view of utilitarian political economy will, I am convinced, meet the demands of the revolutionists at a point far short of their programme. It would be easier for it to do so, but for the complication introduced by the city problem. Looked at rationally and from a utilitarian point of view, the rights of private ownership, the protection of the individual in the possession, accumulation, consumption, productive administration, and posthumous disposal of his surplus gain, — is founded simply and solely in the motives they afford to his making such gains, and adding them, as he really does (in spite of his seeming private appropriation of them), to the store of public wealth. Without these laws or their main features, society would fast relapse into barbarism and ruin, and the first to suffer and to perish would be the rank and file of the discontented revolutionists themselves; and revolution would be checked at the very outset, provided the better parts of the population were not previously and fatally weakened, as in the Middle Ages, by persistently injurious and short-sighted legislation. But so far as the laws of property are inherently, or through changed circumstances have come to be productive, not of increased gains, but of a large and permanent class of unproductive consumers, so far they are devices of legalized robbery, and must be abrogated or amended, if justice is ever to be effected by legislation, through whatever political powers. It is perhaps unfortunate that the problem will have to be solved through democratic agencies and the unavoidable ascendency of the will of the masses in political matters. But, after all, it is a real question, which is the more untoward instrument for the truly just and wise philanthropist to work with, — the ignorant and prejudiced masses whose benefit is sought, or the equally prejudiced aristocracies, blinded by self-interest, whose unjust privileges must be curtailed? I am not an ardent admirer of democracy; but at the same time I regard the anti-democratic Macaulayan doctrine (I may say misapprehension) of democratic tendencies as not less unphilosophical and sentimental than such stupid worship of mere numbers. It is an equally stupid spite. Macaulay showed his utter incapacity for dealing philosophically with political problems in speaking, as he does, of the privileges of wealth, as if they were absolute rights, with no ulterior foundation; and in treating democracy as if it were essentially hostile to what in fact are the very conditions of its ascendency over despotic powers. Democracies and aristocracies are both blind, and if led by men of their own sort must inevitably carry the state with them to destruction. But do not let us dwell despondingly on the powers and tendencies of the instruments we have to deal with. What if there is in our hammer nothing but heaviness and inertia?

I have little to add byway of news. I met Mr. Godkin last Saturday at our club dinner. He had the evening before given his lecture on “Rationalism in Legislation,” which I did not hear, but hope to read in the “North American Review,” where he has consented to publish it.

I am studying a little for my lectures, or lessons as I shall call them, in mental science. I do not intend to read written lectures but to comment on a text-book, to expound and

explain the difficult topics and doctrines of Bain’s book, and expatiate on the interesting ones. I do not see the propriety of proving my competency to teach, by rivalling all the authors, and taking a step in advance of the latest. In most of the courses hitherto, the teachers have chosen the more laborious, but less difficult, task of reading written lectures; thus sacrificing, it seems to me, what such exercises can afford peculiarly and in contrast to books. I shall, if possible, excite discussion in the class. Perhaps, if I can do no better, I may have confederates to give the exercises the vivacity and interest there is in actual debate, and such as even the most artistically written dialogues cannot emulate. The dullest will listen eagerly to real metaphysical discussions. But, as I began with saying, it is not rational to trust to Spontaneity, happy and inimitable as her inspirations sometimes are; so I shall prepare a few written nucleuses for occasional use. I have often thought of you in connection with the scheme of these University lectures, and the opportunities it affords for bringing cultivated people together; its freedom from the narrowness of mere pedagogism.

I hope that you fully understand that letters from Florence are marked events among “the immortal incidents of [my] Cambridge;” and that you will regard the fact from the point of view of Christianity rather than that of political economy. And give my kindest, most affectionate regards to all.