My Past and Thoughts

If any one had conceived the idea of writing from the outside the inner history of the political emigres and exiles from the year 1 848 in London, what a melancholy page he would have added to the records of con temporary man. \Vha t sufferings, what privations, wha t tears . . . and what triviality, what narrowness, wha t poverty of intellectual powers, of resources, of understanding, what obstinacy in wrangling, what pettiness of wounded vanity! . . .

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On one hand those simple-hearted men, who by heart and instinct have understood the business of revolution and have made for its sake the greatest sacrifice a man can make, that of voluntary beggary, form the small group of the blessed. On the other hand there are men, actuated by secret, ill-concealed ambition, for whom the revolution meant office, position sociale, and who scuttled into exile when they failed to attain a position.

Then there were all kinds of fanatics, monomaniacs with every sort of monomania, madmen with every variety of madness. It was due to this nervous, strained, irritable condition that tableturning numbered so many victims among the exiles. Almost every one was turning tables, from Victor Hugo and Ledru

Rollin to Quirico Filopanti1 who went farther still and found out everything that a man was doing a thousand years ago.

And with all that not a step forward. They are like the court clock at Versailles, which pointed to one hour, the hour at which the King died . . . . And, like the clock, it has been forgotten to move them on from the time of the death of Louis XV. They point to one event, the extinction of some event. They talk about i t, they think about it, they go back to it. Meeting the same men, the same groups, in five or six months, in two or three years, one becomes frightened: the same arguments are still going on, the same personalities and recriminations: only the furrows drawn by poverty and privation are deeper; jackets and overcoats are shabbier; there are more grey hairs, and they are all older together and bonier and more gloomy . . . and still the same things are being said over and over again.

The revolution with them has remained the philosophy of social order, as it was in the 'nineties, but they have not and cannot have the naive passion for the struggle which in those days gave vivid colouring to the most meagre generalisations and body to the dry outlines of their political framework; generalisations and abstract concepts were a joyful novelty, a revelation in those days. At the end of the eighteenth century men for the first time-not in books but in actual fact-began to free themselves from the fatal, mysteriously oppressive world of theological tradition, and were trying to base on conscious understanding the whole political system which had grown up apart from will or consciousness. In the attempt at a rational state, as in the attempt to found a religion of reason, there was in 1 793 a mighty, titanic poetry, which bore its fruits, but for all that, has withered and weakened in the last sixty years. Our I The pseudonym of Giuseppe Barilli ( 1 8 1 2-94) , mathematician, philosopher and patriot. (R.)

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heirs of the Titans do not notice this. They are like the monks of Mount Athas, who busy themselves about their own affairs, deliver the same speeches \vhich were delivered in the time of Chrysostom and keep up a manner of life blocked long ago by the Turkish sovereignty, which now is drawing towards an end itself . . . and they go on meeting together on certain days to commemorate certain events with the same ritual, the same prayers.

Another brake that slows down the emigres is their constant defending of themselves against each other; this is fearfully destructive of intellectual effort and every sort of conscientious work. They have no objective purpose; all the parties are obstinately conservative, and a movement forward seems to them a weakness, almost a desertion. You have stood under the banner?

Then stand under it, even though in time you have seen that its colours are not quite what they seemed.

So the years pass: gradually everything about them changes.

Where there were snowdrifts, the grass is growing; where there were bushes, there is a forest ; where there was a forest are only tree-stumps . . . they notice nothing. Some ways out have completPly crumbled away and are blocked up: they go on knocking at them; new chinks have opened and beams of light pierce through them, but they look the other way.

ThP relationships formed between the different emigres and the English might furnish by themselves wonderful data for the chemical affinity of various nationalities.

English life at first dazzles the Germans, overwhelms them, then swallows them up, or rather breaks them down into inferior Englishmen. As a rule, if a German undertakes any kind of business, he at once shaves, turns his shirt collar up to his ears, says yes instead of ja and well where there is no need to say anything at all. In a couple of years, he writes his letters and his notes in English, and liws entirely in an English circle. Germans never treat Englishmen as equals, but behave with them as our workpeople behave with officials, and our officials behave with noblPmen of ancient standing.

When they entPr English life, Germans do not really become Englishmen, but affect to be English, and partly cease to be Germans. The English are as whimsical in their relationships

\vith foreigners as they are in everything else; they rush at a ne\v arrival as thPy do at a comic actor or an acrobat and give him no peace, but they hardly disguise their sense of their own superiority and even a certain aversion they feel for him. If the foreigner keeps to his own dress, his ovvn \vay of doing his hair,

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his own hat, the offended Englishman jeers at him, but by degrees grows used to recognising him as an independent person. If in his first alarm the foreigner begins to adapt his manners to the Englishman's, the latter does not respect him but treats him superciliously from the height of his British haughtiness. Here i t i s sometimes hard, even with great tact, t o steer one's course so as not to err either on the minus or the plus side; it may well be imagined what the Germans do, who are devoid of all tact, are familiar and servile, too stiff and also too simple, sentimental without reason and rude without provocation.

But if the Germans look upon the English as upon a higher species of the same genus, and feel themselves to be inferior to them, it by no means follows that the attitude of the French, and especially of the French refugees, is any wiser. Just as the German respects everything in England without discrimination, the Frenchman protests against everything and loathes everything English. This peculiarity sometimes, I need hardly say, is pushed to the most comically grotesque extreme.

The Frenchman cannot forgive the English, in the first place, for not speaking French; in the second, for not understanding him when he calls Charing Cross Sharan-Kro, or Leicester Square Lessesstair-Skooar. Then his stomach cannot digest the English dinners consisting of two huge pieces of meat and fish, instead of five little helpings of various ragouts, fritures, salmis and so on. Then he can never resign himself to the 'slavery' of restaurants being closed on Sundays, and the people being bored to the glory of God, though the whole of France is bored to the glory of Bonaparte for seven days in the week. Then the whole habitus, all that is good and bad in the Englishman, is detestable to the Frenchman. The Englishman pays him back in the same coin, but looks with envy at the cut of his clothes and like a caricature attempts to imitate him.

All this is of significance for the study of comparative physiology, and I am not describing it in order to amuse. The German, as we have observed, recognises that he is, in a civilian capacity at any rate, an inferior specimen of the same breed to which the Englishman belongs, and subordinates himself to him. The Frenchman, belonging to a different breed, not so distinct that he may be indifferent, as the Turk is to the Chinese, hates the Englishman, especially because both nations arc each blindly convinced of being the foremost people in the world. The German, too, is inwardly convinced of this, particularly auf dem theoretisclzen Gabictc, but is ashamed to own it.

The Frenchman is really the opposite of the Englishman in

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every respect. The Englishman is a solitary creature, who likes to live alone in his own lair, obstinate and impatient of control ; the Fr('nchman is a gregarious animal, impudent but easily shepherded. Hence two completely parallel lines of development with the Channel lying between them. The Frenchman is constantly anticipating things, meddling in everything, educating everybody, giving instructions about everything. The Englishman waits to sec, does not meddle at all in other people's business and \vould be readier to be taught than to teach, but has not the time: he has to get to his shop.

The two corner-stones of the whole of English life, personal independence and family tradition, hardly exist for the Frenchman. The> coarsc>nc>ss of English manners drives the Frenchman frantic. and it really is repugnant and poisons life in London, but behind it he fails to see the rude strength with which this people has stood up for its rights, the stubbornness of character which makes it impossible to turn an Englishman into the slave who dc>lights in the gold lace on livery and is in raptures over his chains entwined with laurel, though by flattering his passions you may do almost anything else with him.

The> world of self-government, decentralisation, expanding capriciously of its own initiative>. sc>ems to the Frenchman so savage, so incomprehensible that, however long he lives in England, he never understands its political and civic life, its rights and its judicial forms. He is lost in the incongruous multiplicity of precedents on which English law rests, as in a dark forest, and does not observe the immense and majestic oaks that compose it, nor S£'e the charm, the poetry, and the significance of its very variety. His little Codex, with its sanded paths, its clipped shrubs and polic£'men-gardcners in every avenue, is a very different matter.

Shakespeare and Racine again.

If a Frenchman se('s drunken men fighting in a tavern and a policeman looking at them with th£' s£'renity of an outsid£'r and the curiosity of a man watching a cock-fight, he is furious with the policeman for not flying into a rage and carrying someone off au violon. He does not reflect that personal freedom is only possiblP when a policeman has no parental authority, when his intervention is reduced to passive readiness to come when he is summoned. The confidc>nce that every poor fellow feels when he shuts the door of his cold, dark, damp little hovel transforms a man's attitude. Of course, behind these jealously guarded, strictly observed rights, the criminal sometimes hides-and so be it. It is far better that the clever thief should go unpunished

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than that every honest man should be trembling like a thief in his own room. Before I came to England every appearance of a policeman in the house in which I lived gave me an irresistibly nasty feeling, and morally I stood en garde against an enemy. In England the policeman at your door or within your doors only adds a feeling of security.

As the successor of Maximilien Robespierre, Louis Blanc worshipped Rousseau, and was somewhat cold in his attitude to Voltaire. In his History he has separated all leading men into two flocks in biblical fashion-on the right hand, the sheep of brotherhood, on the left, the goats of greed and egoism. For the egoists such as Montaigne he had no mercy, and he caught it properly. Louis Blanc did not stick at anything in this classification, and meeting the speculator, Law, he boldly reckoned him among the brotherhood, which the reckless Scot had certainly never expected.

In 1 856 Barbes arrived in London from The Hague. Louis Blanc brought him to see me. I looked with emotion at the sufferer who had spent almost his whole life in prison. I had seen him once before, and where? At the window of the Hotel de Ville, on the 1 5th of May, 1 848, a few minutes before the National Guard broke in and seized him.2

I invited them to dine with me next day; they came, and we sat on till late at night.

They sat on recalling the year 1 848; when I had seen them into the street, and gone back alone into my room, I was overcome by an immense sadness. I sat down at my writing-table and was ready to weep.

I felt what a son must feel on returning to the parental home after a long absence: he sees how everything in it has grown dingy and warped; his father has grown old without being aware of it, but the son is very well aware of it, and he is cramped, he feels that the grave is not far off; he conceals this, but the meeting wearies him instead of cheering and rejoicing him.

2 The pitch reached by the ferocity of the guardians of order on that day may be j udged by .the fact that the National Guard seized Louis Blanc on the boulevard, though he ought not to have been arrested at all, and the police at once ordered him to be released. On receiving this order the National Guard who held him seized him by the finger, thrust his nails into it and twisted the last joint backwards.

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Barbes, Louis Blanc! Why, they were old friends, honoured friends of my effervescent youth. L'Histoire de dix ans, the trial of Barbes before the Chamber of Peers-all that had so long ago been absorbed into my brain and my heart, we were so closely related to all this-and here they were in person.

Their most malicious enemies have never dared suspect the incorruptible honesty of Louis Blanc, nor cast a slur on the chivalrous valour of Barbes. Everyone had seen, had known both men in every situation; they had no private life, they had no closed doors. One of them we had seen, a member of the government, the other half an hour from the guillotine. On the night before his execution Barbes did not sleep, but asked for paper and began to write: those lines3 have been preserved and I have read them. There is French idealism in them, and religious dreams, but there is not a trace of weakness; his spirit was not troubled nor cast down; wi�h serene consciousness he was preparing to lay his head on the block and was calmly writing when the gaoler's hand knocked loudly at the door. 'It was at dawn, I was expecting the executioners' (he told me this himself), but his sister came in instead and flung herself on his neck. Without his knowledge she had begged from Louis-Philippe a commutation of his sentence and had been galloping with post-horses all night to reach him in time.

Louis-Philippe's prisoner rose some years later to the pinnacle of civic glory ; the chains were removed by the exultant populace, and he was led in triumph through Paris. But the upright heart of Barbes was not confused: he was the first to attack the Provisional Government for the killings at Rauen. The reaction grew up round him, the republic could only be saved by impudent audacity and, on the 1 5th of May, Barbes dared what neither Ledru-Rollin nor Louis Blanc did and what Caussidiere was afraid to do. The coup d'etat failed and Barbes, now a prisoner of the republic, was once more before the court. At Bourges, just as in the Chamber of Peers, he told the lawyers of the petit bourgeois world, as he had told the old sinner Pasquier:

'I do not recognise you as judges: you are my enemies and I am your prisoner of war; do with me what you will, but I do not recognise you as my judges.' And again the heavy door of l ifelong imprisonment closed behind him.

By chance, against his will, he came out of prison. Napoleon III thrust him out almost in mockery, after reading during the 3 Probably the pamphlet of Barbes, Druz ;ours dr condamnation a mort, written in prison at Nimes in March 1847. (A.S.)

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Crimean War the letter in which Barbes, in a fit of Gallic chauvinism, speaks of the military glory of France. Barbes tried retiring to Spain, but the scared, dull-witted government expelled him. He went to Holland and there found a tranquil, secluded refuge.

And now this hero and martyr, together with some of the chief leaders of the February Republic, together with the foremost statesman of socialism, had been recalling and criticising the past days of glory and misfortune!

And I was oppressed by a weight of distress; I saw with unhappy clarity that they, too, belonged to the history of another decade, which was finished to the last page, to the cover. Finished, not for them personally but for all the emigres and for all the political parties of the day.

Living and noisy ten, even five years before, they had passed out of the channel and were being lost in the sand, imagining that they were still flowing to the ocean. They had no longer the words which, like the word 'republic,' roused whole nations, nor the songs like the Marseillaise which set every heart throbbing.

Even their enemies were not of the same grandeur, not of the same standard: there were no more old feudal privileges of the Crown with which it would have been hard to do battle; there was no king's head which, rolling from the scaffold, would have carried away a whole ruling system with it. You may execute Napoleon III, but that will not bring you another 2 1 st of January; pull the Mazas Prison to bits stone by stone, and that will not bring you the taking of the Bastille! In those days, amid those thunders and lightnings, a IH'W discovery was made, the discovery of the State founded upon Reason, a new means of redemption from the gloomy sla..-ery of mediaevalism. Since those days the redemption by revolution has been proved insolvent: the State has not been founded upon Reason. The political reformation has degenerated like the religious one into rhetorical babble, preserved by the weakness of some and the hypocrisy of others. The Marseillaise remains a sacred hymn, but it is a hymn of the past, like Ein' feste Burg; the strains of both songs evoke even now a row of majestic images, like the procession of shades in Macbeth, all kings, but all dead.

The last is hardly still visible from behind, and of the new there are only rumours. We are in an irzterregrzum; till the heir arrives the police have seized everything in the name of outward order. There can be no mention here of rights; it is lynch law in history, a case of temporary necessities, of executive measures, police cordons, quarantine precautions. The new regime, com-

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bining all that is oppressive in monarchy and all that is ferocious in Jacobinism, is defended, not by ideas, not by prejud ices, but by fears and uncertainties. While some were afraid others fixed bayonets and took up their positions. The first who breaks through their chain may perhaps even occupy the chief place, which is occupied by the police; only he will at once become a policeman himself.

This reminds me of how on the evening of the Z4th of February Caussidiere arrived at the Prefecture with a rifle in his hand, sat down in the chair just vacated by the escaping Delessert, called the secretary, told him that he had been appointed Prefect and ordered him to give him his papers. The secretary smiled as respectfully as he had to Delessert, as respectfully bowed and went to fetch the papers, and the papers went their regular course; nothing was changed, only Delessert's supper was eaten by Caussidiere.

Many have found out the password to the Prefecture, but have never learned the watchword of history. These men, when the time came, behaved exactly like Alexander I. They wanted a blow to be struck at the old regime, but not a mortal blow; and there was no Bennigsen or Zubov4 among them.

And that is why if they go down into the arena again they will be horrified by the ingratitude of men. And may they dwell on that thought: may they think it is only ingratitude! That is a gloomy thought, but easier to bear than many others.

But it would be still better if they did not go there at all ; let them stay and tell us and our children of their great deeds.

There is no need to resent this advice; what is living changes, and the unchanging becomes a monument. They have left their furrow, just as those who come after them will leave theirs, and these a fresh wave will over-take in its turn, and then everything: furrows, the living and the monuments, will be covered by the universal amnesty of everlasting oblivion!

Many people are angry with me for saying these things openly. 'In your words,' a very worthy man said to me, 'one hears an outside spectator speaking.'

But I did not come to Europe as an outsider, you know. An outsider is what I have become. I am very long-suffering, but at last I am worn out.

For five years I have not seen one bright face, I have not heard spontaneous laughter, I have not encountered an understanding 4 The assassins of Paul I. ( Tr.)

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look, I have been surrounded by fcldshers" and prosectors.6 The feldshers have been continually trying their remedies, while the others have been proving to them on the corpse that they have blundered-well, eventually, I have snatched up a scalpel too ; perhaps, through being unused to it, I have cut too deeply.

I have spoken not as an outside spectator, not to find fault: I have spoken because my heart was full, because the lack of general understanding has put me out of patience. That I was sobered earlier than the rest has been of no alleviation to me.

Even of feldshers only the worst smile with satisfaction as they look at the dying patient and say: 'Didn't I tell you he would turn up his toes by the evening? And he has.'

For what, then, have I held out?

In 1 856 the best of all the German emigrants, Karl Schurz,7

arrived in Europe from Wisconsin. On his return from Germany he told me that he had been struck by the moral desolation of the Continent. I translated to him aloud my West European Sketches, and he tried to defend himself from my conclusions, as though they had been ghosts in which a man is unwilling to believe, but of which he is afraid.

'A man who understands contemporary Europe as you do,' he said to me, 'ought to abandon it.'

'That is what you have done,' I observed.

'Why is it that you don't?'

'It is very simple. I can answer you as a certain honest German, before me, answered in a fit of proud independence: "I have a king of my own in Swabia." I have my own people m Russia ! '

5 1\iale nurses o r doctors' assistants. ( Tr. ) 6 Dissecting demonstrators. ( Tr. )

i Schurz, Karl ( 1 829-1 906) . fought i n the revolutionary mO\·ement of 1 848. I n 1 852 he "·ent to the United States. where he IPcturcd, took part in politics and fought in the Ci,·il \Var, as a major-general of ,·olunteers.

In 1 869 he was elect!'d to the Senate. and in 1 8i7 appointed Secretary of the Interior. He edited a paper, and wrote lives of Henry Clay and of Lincoln. ( Tr.)

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Joh11 Stztart J1!fill

and His Book 011 Libert)�"

I HAVE HAD to smart a good deal for taking a gloomy view of Europe, and for speaking my mind simply, without fears or regrets. Since I published my 'Letters from the Avenue Marigny'

in the Contemporary' some of my friends and unfriends have shovvn signs of impatience and indignation, and have objected

. . . and then, as though to spite them, with every development things in Europe havf' become darker, more suffocating, and neither Paradol's wise articles nor the worthless clerico-liberal stuff of :\lontalembert, nor tlw sup!•rseding of a king of Prussia by a Prussian prince, have been able to distract the eyes of seekers after truth. People in Russia do not care to know this, and naturally they are angry with the indiscreet discoverer.

vYe need Europe as an ideal, a reproach, a good example; if she were not these things it would be necessary to invent her.

Did not the naive free-thinkers of the eighte<'nth century, Voltair<' and Robespierre among them, say that even if there were no immortality of the soul it would be necessary to preach that there was, in order to maintain people in fear and virtue? And do we not see in history how the great have sometimes concealed the serious illness or sudden death of a king, and have governed in the name of a corpse or a madman, as happened not long ago in Prussia?

A pious lie may be a good thing, but not everyone is capable of it.

I was not cast down, however, by censure, but consoled myself by thinking that here, too, the thoughts I uttered were no better received, and still more by considering that they were objectivPly truP, that is independPnt of personal opinions and even of good intentions in education, correction of morals and the like.

Everything true of itself sooner or later rises up and reveals itself, kommt an die Sonnen, as Goethe says.

\Vhile I was being scolded by the heads of the literary depart-1 Tlu• Hussian pt>r-odical So!.orrllu'nnik, Octobt>r an.! 1\'ovl'mber 1 8+i. (R.)

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ments, time went on its way, and at last ten whole years had gone. Much of what in 1 849 had been new had become a cliche in 1859; what then had seemed an extravagant paradox had been transformed into public opinion, and many eternal and unshakeable truths had gone out with that year's fashions in clothes.

Serious minds in Europe began to take a serious view. There are very few of them, and this only confirms my opinion of the West, but they will go far, and I well remember how Thomas Carlyle smiled over the remains of my faith in English ways.

But now there appears a book that goes far beyond anything . I have said. Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt, and thanks b e to those who after us confirm with their authority what we have said, and with their talent clearly and forcefully hand on what we have feebly expressed.

The book that I am speaking of was not written by Proudhon, nor even by Pierre Leroux nor by any other angry socialist exile:

-not at all: it was written by one of the most celebrated political economists, recently a member of the India Board, to whom Lord Stanley three months ago offered a place in the government. This man enjoys enormous, well merited authority; in England the Tories read him with reluctance and the Whigs with anger; on the Continent he is read by the few people (specialists excepted) who read anything at all except newspapers and pamphlets.

The man is John Stuart Mill.

A month ago he published a strange book in defence of liberty of thought, speech and the person; I say 'strange' for is it not strange that, where Milton wrote two centuries ago of the same thing, it should be necessary for a voice once more to be raised

'On Libet·ty'? But men like Mill, you kno\\;, cannot \'Hite out of satisfaction: his whole book is imbued with a profound sadness, not fretful but virile, censorious, Tacitean. He has spoken u p because evil has become worse. Milton defended freedom o f speech against the attacks o f authority, against violence, and all that was noble and vigorous was on his side. Mill's enemy is quite different: he is standing up for liberty not against an educated government but against society, against custom, against the deadening force of indifference, against petty intolerance, against 'mediocrity.'

This is not the indignant old courtier of Catherine's time who, passed over for promotion at Court, grumbles at the younger generation, runs down the Winter Palace and cries up the Hall of Facets. No: this man, full of energy, long versed in affairs of state and theories deeply thought out, accustomed to regard the

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world calmly, like an Englishman and a thinker-this man at least could bear it no longer and, exposing himself to the wrath of the registrars of civilisation \vho live on the Neva and the bookmen with a Western education by the lVIoscow River, cried:

'V\'e are drowning!'

He was horrified by the constant deterioration of personalities, taste and style, by the inanity of men's interests and their absence of vigour; he looks closely, and sees clearly that everything is becoming shallow, commonplace, shoddy, trite, more

'respectable,' perhaps, but more banal. He sees in England (what Tocqueville observed in France) that standard, indistinguishable types are being evolved and, gravely shaking his head, he says to his contemporaries: 'Stop! Think again! Do you know where you are going? Look : rour soul is ebbing away.'

But why does he try to wake the sleepers? \Vhat path, what

\vay out has he devised for them? Like John the Baptist of old he threatens them with \vhat is coming and summons them to repentance; people will hardly be got moving a second time with this renunciatory lever. Mill n·ies shame on his contemporaries as Tacitus cried shame on his: he will not halt them by this means any more than Tacitus did. A few sad reproaches will not stem the ebbing of the soul, nor perhaps will any dam in the world.

'Men of another stamp,' he says, 'made England what it has been, and only men of another stamp can prevent its decline.'

But this deterioration of individuality, this want of temper, are only pathological facts, and admitting them is a very important step towards the way out; but it is not the way out. !\till upb1·aids the sick man and points to his sound ancestors: an odd sort of treatment, and hardly a magnanimous one.

Come: are we now to begin to reproach the lizard with the ant�diluvian ichthyosaurus? Is it the fault of one that it is little and the other was .big? Mill, frightened by the moral worthlessness, the spiritual mediocrity of his environment, cried out passionately and sorro\\·fully, like the champions in our old tales: 'Is there a man alive in the field ?'

V\'herefore did ht> summon him ? To tell him that he was a degenerate descendant of mighty forebears, and consequently ought to try to make himself like them.

For what? -Silence.

Robert Owen, too, was calling upon people for seventy years running, and equally to no purpose; but he was summoning thPm for something. \Vhethl·r this something was Utopia, phantasy or the truth is nut our business nO\v; what is important to us

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is that his summons had an object ; but Mill, smothering his contemporaries in the grim, Rembrandtesque shadows of the time of Cromwell and the Puritans, wants shopkeepers who are everlastingly giving short weight and short measure to tum from some poetic necessity, by some spiritual gymnastics, intoheroes!

We could likewise call up the monumental, menacing figures of the French Convention and set them beside the past, future and present French spies and espiciers, and begin a speech like Hamlet's:

Look here, upon this picture, and on this . .

Hyperion's curls; the front of Jove himself;

An eye like Mars . . .

Look you now, what follows:

Here is your husband . . .

This would be very just, and even more offensive; but would this make anyone leave his vulgar but comfortable life, and that in order to be majestically bored like Cromwell or stoically take his head to the block like Danton?

It was easy for them to act as they did because they were ruled by a passionate conviction-une idee fixe.

Catholicism was such an idee fixe at one time, then Protestantism, science in the age of the Renaissance, revolution in the eighteenth century.

Where is that sacred monomania, that magnum ignotum, that riddle of the Sphinx of our civilisation? Where is the mighty conception, the passionate belief, the burning hope, which could temper the body like steel and bring the soul to such a pitch of feverish obduracy as feels neither pain nor, privation but walks with a firm step to the scaffold or the stake?

Look about you: what is capable of heartening individuals, uplifting peoples, shaking the masses? The religion of the Pope with his Immaculate Conception of the Mother of God, or the religion with no Pope and its abstention from beer on the Sabbath Day? The arithmetical pantheism of universal suffrage or the idolatrous worship of monarchy? Superstitious belief in a republic or in parliamentary reform? . . . No, no: all this pales, ages and is bundled away, as once the gods of Olympus were bundled away when they descended from heaven, dislodged by new rivals risen from Golgotha.

Unfortunately our blackened idols do not command these sources of inspiration, or at all events Mill does not point them out.

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On the one hand, tht> English genius finds repellent an abstract generalisation, a bold, logical consistency; with his scepticism the Englishman feels that the extremes of logic, like the laws of pure mathematics, are not applicable without the introduction of the factor of the living environment. On the other hand, he has been accustomed physically and morally to do up all the buttons of his overcoat and turn up his collar, which protects him from damp winds and harsh intolerance. In that samP book of Mill's we see an example of this. With two or three blows of unusual dexterity he overturned Christian morality, somewhat unsteady on its feet, without saying anything in his whole book about Christianitv.

Instead of suggesting any way out Mill suddenly observes: 'In the development of peoples there is a limit, it seems, after which the people stands still, and becomes a China.'

When does this happen?

It happens, he replies, \vhen individualities begin to be effaced. to disappear among the masses; when everything is subjected to received customs, when the conception of good and evil is confused with the conception of conformity or non-conformity with what is accepted. The oppression of custom halts development, which properly consists in aspiration towards what is better, away from what is customary. The whole of history is made up of this struggle and, if the greater part of humanity has no histor�·, this is because its life is utterly subjected to custom.

Now let us see ho\v our author regards the present state of the educated world. He says that, in spite of the intellectual excellence of our times, everything is moving towards mediocrity, that faces are being lost in the crowd. This 'conglomerated mediocrity' hates everything that is sharply defined, original, outstanding: it imposes a common level upon everyone. And, just as in an average section of people there is not much intelligence and not many desires, so the miscellaneous mediocrity, like a viscous bog, submerges, on the one hand, everything that desires to extricate itself and, on the other, forestalls the disorderliness of eccentric individuals by educating new generations in the same flaccid mediocritv. The moral basis of behaviour consists principillly in living ilS other people do: '"\Voe to the man, and especially to the woman, who thinks of doing what nobody docs; but woP a lso to those \vho do not do what cvcrr one does.' For this sort of morality no intelligence nor <1ny particular will

PO\Wr is rPquired: people occupy themselves with their own affairs, and now and again, by way of diversion, with some

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'philanthropic hobby,' and they remain respectable but commonplace.

To this mean belong po\ver and authority; the very government is powerful in proportion as it serves as the organ of the dominant mean and understands its instinct.

What sort of thing is this sovereign mean? 'In America all whites belong to it; in England the ruling stratum is composed of the middle class.'

Mill finds one difference between the lifeless inertia of Oriental peoples and the modern petit bourgeois state; and in this, I think, is the bitterest drop in the ,..,.hole goblet of wormwood that he offers. Instead of a sluggish, Asia tic quiescence, modem Europeans, he says, live in vain unrest, in senseless changes: 'In getting rid of singularities we do not get rid of changes, so long as they are performed each time by everyone. \\'e have cast a\vay our fathers' individual, personal way of dressing, and are ready to change the cut of our clothes two or three times a year, but only so long as everybody changes it; and this is done not with an eye to beauty or convenience but for the sake of change itself!'

If individuals cannot get free of this clogging slough, this befouling bog, then 'Europe, despite its noble antecedents and its Christianity, will become a China.'

So we have come back and are facing the same question. On what principle are we to wake the sleeper? In the name of what shall the flabby personality, magnetised by trifles, be inspired, be made discontented with its present life of railways, telegraphs, ne\vspapers and cheap goods?

Individuals do not step out of the ranks because there is not sufficient occasion. For \vhom, for what, or against whom are they to come forward? The absence of energetic men of a ction is not a cause but a consequence.

The point, the line, beyond which the struggle between the desire for something better and the conservation of what is finishes in favour of conservation, comes (it seems to us) when the dominant, active, historic part of a people approaches a form of life that suits it; this is a kind of repletion, saturation: everything reaches an equilibrium, settles down and eternally pursues one and the same course-until a cataclysm, renovation or destruction. Semper idem requires neither enormous efforts nor menacing warriors. Of whatever kind they may be, they will be superfluous: in the midst of peace there is no need of gpnerals.

Not to go as far as China, look close at hand, at the country in

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the West which has become the most sedentary-the country where Europe's hair is beginning to turn grey-Holland. Where are her great statesmen, her great artists, her subtle theologians, her bold mariners? But wha t would be the purpose of them? Is she unhappy because she chafes and blusters no longer, because these men are no more? She will show you her smiling villages on the drained marshes, her laundered towns, her ironed gardens, her comfort, her liberty, and will say: 'My great men obtained for me this freedom, my mariners bequeathed me this wealth, my great artists embellished my walls and churches: it i s well with me-what do you want me to do? Have a sharp struggle with the government? But is it oppressive? We have more liberty even now than there ever was in France.'

But what comes of a life like this?

What comes of it? Well, what comes of life at all? And then: are there no private romances in Holland ? no clashes or scandals? Do people not fall in love in Holland, weep, laugh, sing songs, drink Schiedam, dance till morning in every village?

'What is more, it should not be forgotten that, on the one hand, they enjoy all the fruits of education, science and art, and, on the other, they have a mass of business: the great patience-game of trade, interminable household puzzles, the education of their children in the form and semblance of their own. The Dutchman has not the time to look round him, to enjoy some leisure, before he is carried off to 'God's acre' in an elegant, lacquered coffin, while his son is already harnessed to the trade-\vheel, which must be turned incessantly or business will come to a stop.

Life may be lived like this for a thousand years if it is not interrupted by a second accession of the brother of a Bonaparte.

I hPg leave to digress from the elder brothers to thP younger.

We do not possess enough facts, but we may suppose that the races of animals, as they have established themselves, represent the ultimate result of the long, vacillating succession of different changes of species, of a series of consummations and a ttainments.

This history was performed at leisure by the bones and muscles, the convolutions of the brain and the ripples of the nerves.

The antediluvian beasts represent a kind of heroic age in this Book of Being: they are the Titans or paladins; they diminish in size, adapt themselves to a new environment and, as soon as they attain to a type that is sufficiently skilful and stable, they begin to repeat themselves in conformity with their type, to such a dPgree that the dog of Ulysses in the Odyssey is as like all our dogs as two drops of water. And that is not all: has anyone said that political or social animals, not only living in a herd but

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possessing organisation of some sort, like ants and bees, established their ant-hills or nests out of hand? I do not think so at all. Millions of generations lay down and died before they built and stabilised their Chinese ant-hills.

I should like to explain from this that, if any people arrives at this condition, where its external social structure conforms to i ts requirements, then there is no internal need, before a change of requirements, for it to progress, make war, rebel or produce eccentric individuals.

An inactive absorption in the herd or the swarm is one of the prime conditions for the conservation of what has been achieved.

The world of which Mill speaks has not arrived at this state of complete repose. After all its revolutions and shocks it cannot precipitate its lees: there is a mass of muck at the top, and everything is turbid: there is not the cleanness of Chinese porcelain nor the whiteness of Dutch linen. There is much in it that is immature, misshapen, even sick, and in this connection there lies before it one more step forward on its own path. It must acquire not energetic personalities or eccentric passions, but the particular morality of its situation. For thE' Englishman to stop giving false weight, for the Frenchman to refuse to give assistance to every police-force, it is not only 'respectability' that is required, but a stable mode of living.

Then, in Mill's words, England can turn into a China (an improved one, of course), retaining all her trade and all her freedom and perfecting her legislation, that is, easing it in proportion to the growth of obligatory custom, which deadens the will better than any lawcourts or punishments; and France at the same time can launch herself into the beautiful, martial stream-bed of Persian life, which is enlarged with everything that an educated centralisation puts in the hands of authority, rewarding herself for the loss of all the rights of man with brilliant attacks on her neighbours and shackling other peoples to the fortunes of a centralised despotism . . . already the features of Zouaves belong more to Asia than to Europe.

Forestalling ejaculations and maledictions I hasten to say that I am not speaking here of my desires, or even of my opinions.

My task is the purely logical one of trying to eliminate the brackets from the formula in which Mill's result is expressed ; from his individual differE'ntials to form the historical integral.

So the question cannot be whether it is polite to prophesy for England the fate of China (and it was not I who did this, but Mill himself) , or in good taste to foretell that France will be a

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Persia; although in all fairness I do not know, either, how it comes that China and Persia may be insulted with impunity.

The really important question, that Mill does not touch upon, is this: do there exist the sources of a new vigour to renovate the old blood? Are there sprouts and sound shoots to grow up through the dwindling grass? And what this question adds up to is whether a people will let itself be used once and for all to manure the soil for a new China and a new Persia, condemned inescapably to unskilled labour, to ignorance and hunger, accepting in return that one in ten thousand, as in a lottery, for an example, encouragement and appeasement to the rest, shall grow rich and turn from eaten to eater?

This problem will be solved by events: it cannot be solved theoretically.

If the people is overcome, the new China and new Persia are inevitable.

But if the people overcomes, what is unavoidable 1s a social revolution.

Is this not indeed an idea that may be promoted to an idee fixe, in spite of the shoulder-shrugging of the aristocracy and the tooth-grinding of the petite bourgeoisieJ

The people feels this: very much so. Gone is its earlier, childish belief in the legality-or at all events the justice-of what happens: there is fear in the face of violence, and inability to exalt private pain into a general rule ; but blind faith there is not. In France the people menacingly declared its protest at the very time when the middle class, flushed with authority and power, was crowning itself king under the name of a republic, was lolling with Marrast in Louis XV's armchairs at Versailles and dictating laws. The people rose in despair, seeing that again it was being left outside the door and without a piece of bread; it rose like barbarians, with nothing decided, no plan, no leaders, no resources; but of vigorous personalities it had no lack and, what is more, it evoked from the other side such predatory, bloodthirsty kites as Cavaignac.

The people was utterly routed. The likelihood of a Persia increased and it has bt>en increasing ever since.

How the English working man will put his social question we do not know, but his ox-like stubbornness is great. He has the numerical majority on his side, but not the power. Numbers prove nothing. Two or three Cossacks of the line with two or three garrison soldiers each of them take five hundred convicts from Moscow to Siberia.

If the people in England is routed, as it was in Germany at the

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time of the Peasants' Wars and in France during the July days, then the China foretold by John Stuart Mill is not far off. The transition to it will take place imperceptibly; not a single right, as we have said, will be lost, not one freedom will be diminished: all that will be diminished is the ability to make use of these rights and this freedom.

Timid and sensitive people say that this is impossible. I desire nothing better than to agree with them: but I see no reason to.

The tragic inevitability consists in j ust this: the idea that might rescue the people and steer Europe towards new destinies is unprofitable for the ruling class; and for this class, if it were consistent and audacious, the only thing that is profitable is ruling-combined with an American system of slavery!

THE GERMAN EMIGRANTS were distinguished from the others1 by their ponderous, prosy and cantankerous nature. There were no enthusiasts among them, as there were among the Italians, no hotheads nor sharp tongues, as among the French.

The other emigrants had little to do with them; the difference of manners, of habitus, kept them at a certain distance: French arrogance has nothing in common with German boorishness.

The absence of a commonly accepted notion of good manners, the heavy, scholastic doctrinairism, the excessive familiarity, the excessive naivete of the Germans hampered their relationships with people who were not used to them. They did not make many advances themselves . . . considering, on the one hand, that they greatly excelled others in their scientific development and, on the other, feeling in the presence of others the awkwardness of a provincial in a salon at the capital and of a civil service clerk in a coterie of aristocrats.

Internally the German emigrants displayed the same friability as their country did. They had no common plan; their unity was supported by mutual hatred and malicious persecution of each 1 After the rout of the risinp; in the Palatinate and Baden in 1 848 there was a wave of emigration from Germany. The overwhelming majority travelled to Swi tzerland and thence to E•1�land and the U.S.A. In the autumn of 1 850 London became their headquarters. ( A .S.)

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other. The better among the German exiles were conscious of this. Vigorous men, intelligent men, like Karl Schurz, August Willich and Oskar Reichenbach, had gone to America. Men of gentle disposition, like Freiligrath, were making use of business, of distant London, to hide behind. The rest, except for a few of the leaders, were tearing each other to pieces with indefatigable frenzy, unsparing of family secrets or the most criminal accusations.

Soon after my arrival in London I went to Brighton to see Arnold Ruge, who had been intimately acquainted wi.th Moscow University circles in the 1 840s; he had published the celebrated Hallische lahrbucher, and we had drawn from them our philosophical radicalism. I had met him in 1 849 in Paris, where the soil had not yet cooled and was still volcanic. There was no time then for the study of personalities. He had come as one of the agents of the insurrectionary government of Baden to invite Mierosla,vski, \vho knew no German, to take command of the army of Freischiirler and hold discussions with the government of France, which \vas not at all eager to recognise revolutionary Baden. Karl Blind was with him. After 1 3th June he and I had to flee from France. Blind was several hours late and was imprisoned in the Conciergerie. I d id not see Ruge after that till the autumn of 1 852.

I found him at Brighton, a grumbling old man, angry and spiteful. Abandoned by his former friends, forgotten in Germany, without influence on affairs and at variance with his fellow emigrants, Ruge \Vas absorbed in slanderous gossip. In constant touch with him there were t\"\"O or three most inept newspaper correspondents, penny-a-liners, those petty free-lances of publicity, who are never to be seen in time of battle and always aften••ards, cockchafers of the political and literary worlds, who rootle about every evening, gloating and busy, in the discarded remnants of the day. Ruge composed newspaper paragraphs with these men, goaded them on, gave them copy and produced several periodicals in Germany and America.

I dined with him and spent the evening. He complained the whole time about the emigrants and ran them down.

'Have you heard,' he said, 'how things are going with our forty-five-year-old Werther and the baroness?2 It's said that when he revealed his love for her he tried to captivate her with 2 The reference is to August \Yillich and Baroness Bruning, a Russian by birth. who had helped to a rrange Kinkel's escape from prison. ( A .S. )

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the chemical prospect of a child of genius, to be born of an aristocratic mother and a communist father. The baron, they say, who was no amateur of physiological experiments, chucked him out neck and crop. Is that true?'

'How can you believe such absurdities?'

'No, in point of fact I don't really believe it. I l ive this parochial life here and only hear from the Germans what is going on in London ; all of them, and particularly the emigrants, tell God knows what lies; they're all quarrelling and slandering each other. I think that this Kinkel set that rumour going as a token of gratitude to the baroness, who got him out of prison.

He would have run after her himself, you know, but he's not free to: his wife doesn't let him get into mischief. "You got me away from my first husband," she says, "and that's quite enough.

There is a sample of philosoph ical conversation with Arnold Ruge!

He did once alter his tone and talk with friendly interest about Bakunin, but recollected himself half-way and added:

'However, he's begun to go to seed recently; he's been raving about revolutionary tsarism, panslavism or something.'

I left him with a heavy heart and a firm determination never to come back.

A year later he gave some lectures in London about the philosophical movement in Germany. The lectures were bad; the Berlin-English accent struck the ear unpleasantly, and besides he pronounced all the Greek and Latin names in the German way, so that the English could not make out who these Yofis and Yunos were . . . . A dozen people came to the second lecture, and to the third two-Worcell and I. As he walked through the empty hall past us Ruge shook me by the hand, and added:

'Poland and Russia have come, but Italy's not here; I shan't forgive Mazzini or Safli this when there's a new people's rising.'

When he left, wrathful and menacing, I looked at Worcell's sardonic smile and said:

'Russia invites Poland to dine with her.'

'C'en est fait d'ltalie,' Worcell observed, shaking his head, and we set off.

Kinkel was one of the most remarkable German emigrants in London. A man of irreproachable conduct, who had laboured in the sweat of his brow-a thing which, however strange this seems, was practically never met with among the emigrants-

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Kinkel was Ruge's sworn enemy. Why? That is just as hard to explain as that Ruge, the advocate of atheism, was a friend of the nco-Catholic Ronge. Gottfried Kinkel was one of the heads of the forty timl's forty� German schisms in London.

\Yhen I looked at him I always marvelled that the majestic head of a Zeus had found itself on the shoulders of a German professor, and how a German professor had found himself first on the field of battle and then, wounded, in a Prussian prison; but perhaps the oddl'st thing of all is that all this plus London did not change him in the least, and he remained a German professor. A tall man, with grey hair and a grizzled beard, he had a look that of itself was stately and inspired respect; but he added to it as it were an official unction, Salbung, something judicial and episcopaL solemn, stiff, and modestly self-satisfied. This nuance, in different variations, is encountered in fashionable priests, ladies' physicians, and especially in mesmerisers, advocates who are the special guardians of morals and the headwaiters of aristocratic hotels in England. Kinkel had studied thPology a good deal as a young man ; when he got free of it he retained the priestly manner. There is nothing surprising in this: Lamcnnais himself, who cut so deeply at the roots of Catholicism, kept the appearance of an abbot until he was an old man. Kinkel's deliberate, fluent speech, correct and eschewing extremes, ran on as if part of an edifying discussion; he listened to the other side ''"ith studied indulgence and to himself with frank self-satisfaction.

He had been a professor at Somerset House4 and at several insti tutl's of higher education, and had lectured publicly on aesthetics in London and Manchester: this could not be forgiven him by the liberators, roaming hungrily and idly about London, of thirty-four GC'rman fatherlands. Kinkel was constantly abused in American newspapers, which became the main channel for German libels, and at the scantily attended meetings held every yea r in memory of Robert Blum, of the first Schildcrhcbung in Baden, the first Austrian Schwcrtfahrt, etc. He was abused by all his compatriots, who never gave any lessons and were constantly asking for loans, never gave back what they had borrowed and

;{ Bv tradition there we1·e said to be fortv times forty churches in Mos-

-

cm;. (fl.)

� I n 1 7 7 1 the kinp; p;ranted the Royal Academy apartments in old Somer

S!'! HousP. ami in 1 780 in new Somerset House, where they remained till 1 8 30 when they removed to the National Gallery. (R.)

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were always ready, in case of refusal, to denounce a man as a spy or a thief. Kinkel did not reply . . . . The scribblers barked ; they barked and, as Krylov puts it, began to lag behind ; only now and then a rough, hairy, uncombed mongrel darts out from the bottom floor of German democracy into the feuilleton that is read by nobody and bursts out into a vicious yapping to recall the happy times of fraternal insurrections in the various Tiibingens, Darmstadts and Brunsvvick-vVolfenbiittels.

In Kinkel's house, at his lectures, in his conversation, it was all good and sensible--but there was some kind of grease lacking in the wheels, so that everything went round stiffly; his wife, a well known pianist, played splendid pieces: and the boredom was deadly. Only the children as they jumped about introduced a brighter element; their little shining eyes and resounding voices augured less virtue, perhaps, but . . . more grease in the wheels.

'Ich bin ein !Hensch der Moglichkeit,' Kinkel has said to me more than once to describe his position among the extremist parties ; he thinks he is a possibility for a future minister in the coming Germany; I do not think so, but Johanna, his wife, has no doubt of it.

A propos, a word about their relationship. Kinkel always preserved his dignity and she always marvelled at him. Between themselves they talk of the most everyday matters in the style of edifying comedies (modish haute comedic in Germany! ) and moral novels.

'Beste Johanna,' says he sonorously and without haste, 'du bist, mein Engel, so gut, schenke mir noch cine Tasse von den vortreff lichen Thee, den du so gut machst, ein!'

'Es ist zu himmlisch, Iieber Gottfried, dass er dir gesclzmeckt hat. Tue, mein Bester, fur miclz einige Tropfen Sclzmand lzinein!'

And he lets some cream drip in, regarding her with tenderness, and she gazes at him with gratitude. Johanna persecuted her husband fiercely with her perpetual, inexorable solicitude: when there was a fog she handed him a revolver in some sort of special belt; begged him to protect himself from the wind, from evil people, from harmful food, and in petto from \vomen's eyes,

'vhich were more harmful than any winds and pate de foie gras . . . . In a word, she poisoned his life vvith her acute jealousy and implacable, ever-stimulated love. In return she supported him in his idea that he was a genius, at any rate not inferior to Lessing, and that in him a new Stein was being provided for Germany; Kinkel knew that this was true, and

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mildly restrained Johanna in the presence of outsiders when her praises went rather too far.

'Johanna, have you heard about Heine?' Charlotte asked her once, running in much upset.

'No,' answers Johanna.

'He's dead . . . yesterday night.

'Really?'

'Zu wahr.'

'Oh, how glad I am. I was always afraid that he would write some caustic epigram against Gottfried: he had such a venomous tongue. You do amaze me,' she added, catching herself up;

'what a loss for Germany.'li

The source of these hatreds lies partly in a consciousness of the political second-ratedness of the German fatherland, and in their pretensions to play the chief part. Nationalistic fanfaronade is ludicrous even in the French, but at least the French can say that in a certain manner they have shed their blood for the sake of humanity. The pretension to some enormous national importance, going hand in hand with a doctrinaire cosmopolitanism, is the more ridiculous that it exhibits no other right to its claim than a disbelief in consideration for others, a desire sich geltend zu machen.

'Why do the Poles not like us?' a German seriously asked in a gathering of Gelehrter.

There happened to be a journalist there, an intelligent man, who had lived in England for a long time.

'Well, that's not so hard to understand,' he answered. 'You'd do better to ask who does like us, or why everyone hates us.'

'How do you mean, everyone hates us?' asked the astonished professor.

'All foreigners do, at any rate: Italians, Danes, Swedes, Russians, Slavs.'

'Excuse me, Herr Doktor: there are some exceptions,' returned the disquieted and embarrassed Gelehrte.

'Without the least doubt: and what are they? France and England.'

The man of learning began to blossom out:

5 I am sorry, in my turn, that I wrote these lines. Soon after this the poor woman threw herself out of a third-storey window into a paved yard.

Jealousy and a disease of the heart brought her to this fearful death.

6 There is a hiatus here in the text. (R.)

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'And do you know why? France is afraid of us and England despises us.'

The situation of the German is really a sad one, but his sadness is not interesting. They all know that they can settle with the internal and external enemy, but they do not know how to. How comes it, for instance, that peoples of the same stock as the Germans-England, Holland, Sweden-are free, and the Germans are not? Incapability also has its obligations, like nobility, and to modesty most of all. The Germans are conscious of this, and have recourse to desperate measures in order to get the upper hand: they point to England and the North American states7 as representatives of Germanism in the sphere of political Praxis. Ruge, infuriated by Edward Bauer's inane pamphlet on Russia, entitled, I think, Kirche und Staat, and suspecting that it was I who had led Bauer into temptation, wrote to me (and later published the same thing in the Jersey Almanac) that Russia was only rough material, undisciplined and disorganised, whose strength, glory and beauty proceeded only from German genius having given her its own form and l ikeness.

Every Russian who appears on the scene encounters in the Germans that malevolent amazement that not so long ago was directed by those same Germans at our mpn of learning who wished to become professors at Russian universities and the Russian Academy. 'Colleagues' who had been imported into Russia thought this was insolence, ingratitude, usurpation of other people's posts.

Bakunin nearly lost his head, for the sake of the Germans, a t the hands o f a Saxon headsman, a n d Marx, who knew him very well, denounced him as a Russian spy. In his paper he told a complete story8 of how George Sand had heard from Ledru-7 Ruge evinced similar ideas in a letter of his to H. seeking to prove the rights of the Germans to a dominion 'from Kamchatka to Ostend,' and reproaching H. for Russian 'nationalism.' He did not restric"t himself to this: he plainly included both England and the U.S.A. in the 'German world.' (A.S. )

8 Marx never denounced Bakunin as a Russian spy. This slander was spread by the Russian embassy in Paris before the revolution of 1 848 ; it was taken up by certain circles of Polish emigrants, and was current, after the March revolution in Germany, at Breslau, where B. had gone at the end of April to be nearer the Russian frontier. A Paris journalistic agency passed on this rumour to newspapers, among them Marx's paper Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Everbeck, a German emigre, included it in his correspondence with his newspaper, citing the finding at George Sand's of compromising documents of a Russian revolutionary: the ac-

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Rollin that, while he had been Minister of the Interior, he had seen a correspondence which compromised Bakunin. At that time Bakunin was in prison9 awaiting sentence, and suspected nothing. The slander tended to thrust him towards the scaffold, and to sever the last contact of love between the martyr and the mass that sympathised in silence. Adolf Reichel, a friend of Bakunin, wrote to George Sand at Nahant and asked her what the truth was. She answered Reichel at once and sent a letter to the editor of Marx's paper expressing the greatest friendship for Bakunin; she added that she had never talked about Bakunin to Ledru

Rollin, in virtue of which she could not have repeated what the newspaper said. Marx exonerated himself cleverly and printed George Sand's letter with a note which said that the notice about Bakunin had been printed 'at a time when he was absent.'

The finale \vas a completely German one: it would have been impossible not only in France, where the point d'honneur is so scrupulous and where the editor would have buried all the dirtiness of the affair under a heap of phrases, words, circumlocutions count appeared on 6th July, 1 848. 'The publication of the accusation,'

1\Iarx wrote later, 'was in the interests of the cause and in the interests of Bakunin.'

Bakunin"s protest and his request to George Sand to refute the rumour appeared in a Breslau newspaper; they were at once reprinted in Marx's paper of 1 6th July, 1 848. On 3rd August Marx printed a complete rehabilitation of Bakunin by George Sand, and gave his reasons for publishing the slander, one of which was to give Bakunin an opportunity of vindicating himself. Bakunin was satisfied. He and Marx met in Berlin towards the end of 1 848 and 'renewed their friendship.' (A.S.) This gloss by the Academy of Sciences is more academic than scientific.

An editor who prints a slanderous rumor about an opponent does afford the latter "an opportunity of vindicating himself," in a sense-a Pickwickian sense. But assuming Marx's chief concern was, as he states, to protect "the interests of Bakunin_" one might expect a simpler, less ambiguous method to occur to that formidable brain, namely, to ask George Sand about it before he printed anything. One wonders whether Marx reprinted the Sand refutation of the canard (and after Reichel, not Marx, had asked her to set the matter straight) as the foreseen climax of a Bakunin vindication campaign? Or whether he was simply, and cruelly, caught with his polemical pants down? I'm also curious about the source of "renewed their close friendship"-perhaps some Comrade Smooth-It-Away in the Soviet Academy? That Marx and Bakunin, given their politics-and their temperaments-were ever close friends, however briefly, seems unlikely, nor doo:>s this friendship figure in any histories or biographies I have read. ( D.M.) 9 Bakunin was arrested for participating in the Dresden rising of May 1 849-almost a year after the correspondence appeared in Marx's newspaper. (A.S.)

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and moral aphorisms, and would have masked it with his despair qu'on avail surpris sa religion; but even an English editor, though incomparably less punctilious, would not have dared to shift the responsibility to his colleagues.10

A year after my arrival in London Marx's party returned again to their vile calumny of Bakunin, who was then entombed in the Alexeyevsky ravelin.

In England, this time-honoured country of the crazed, one of the most egregious positions is occupied by David Urquhart? a man of talent and energy, an ex-conservative radical, who is obsessed by two notions: first, that Turkey is a superlative country with a great future, in virtue of which he has furnished himself with Turkish cooking, a Turkish bath and Turkish sofas; secondly, that Russian diplomacy is the slyest and most astute in the whole of Europe, and that it bribes and bamboozles all the statesmen in every country in the world, principally in England.

Urquhart worked for years to find a proof that Palmerston was in the pay of the cabinet in Petersburg. He published articles and pamphlets on this, introduced motions in Parliament and held forth at meetings. At first people were angered by him, replied to 10 I n spite of the fact that England takes fearful liberties. To give an idea of them I shall tell of something that happened to Louis Blanc. The Times published a report that Louis Blanc, when he was a member of the PrO\·isional Government, had spent '1 ,500,000 francs of the government's money, to form for himself a party among the workers.' Blanc replied to the editor that he had been m isinformed about him a nd that.

however much he had wanted to. he would not have been able to steal or to spend 1 Y2 million francs because, during all the time that he was at the head of the Luxemburg Commission, he had not had at his disposal more than 30,000 francs. The Times did not print his reply. Louis Blanc went to the editorial office himself and requested an interview with the editor-in-chief. He was told that there was no such person as an editorin-chief; that The Times was published as it were by a committee. Blanc demanded an accountable committee-man: he was told that nobody was personally answerable for anything.

'\Vhom, then, should I see, from whom demand an account of why my letter about an affair which concerned my good name, was not published.'

'Here,' one of the officials on The Times told him, 'things are not done as they are in France ; we have neither a gerant responsable nor a legal obligation to print replies.'

'There is absolutely no accountable editor?' Louis Blanc asked.

'I\o.'

'It's a very great pity,' remarked Louis Blanc, smiling angrily, 'that there is no editor-in-chief; othenvise I should certainly have boxed his ears. Good-bye, gentlemen.'

'Good day, Sir, good day. God bless you" repeated The Times's official, coolly and courteously opening the door.

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him and abused him; then they became a ccustomed to him.

Those he accused and those who listened to the accusations began to smile; they paid no attention . . . finally they burst out laughing.

Lecturing to a meeting in one of the big towns Urquhart was so carried away by his idee fixe that, representing Kossuth as a man not to be trusted, he a dded that even if Kossuth had not been bought by Russia he was under the influence of a man who clearly was working on behalf of Russia . . . and that man was Mazzini! Like Dante's Francesca, that day he read no more. At the name of Mazzini there rose such a gale of Homeric laughter that David himself remarked that he had not knocked over the Italian Goliath with his sling, but had dislocated his own arm.

A man who thought and openly said that from Guizot and Derby to Espartero, Cobden and Mazzini, they were all Russian agents, was a boon to the gang of unacknowledged German statesmen ,..,·ho surrounded an unrecognised genius of the first order-Marx. They made, of their unsuccessful patriotism and fearful pretensions, a kind of Hochschule of calumny and suspicion of anyone who came on to the stage with greater success than theirs. They were in need of an honourable name: Urquhart gave them one.

Urquhart had at that time great influence with The Morning Advertiser, one of those newspapers that are very peculiarly run.

This papPr is not to be seen in the clubs, at the big news agents or on the tables of respectable people, but it has a bigger circulation than the Daily News, and it is only recently tha t cheap sheets like the Daily Telegraph and The Morning and Evening Star have pushed The Morning Advertiser into the background.

It is a purely English phenomenon: The Morning Advertiser is the public-house newspaper, and no tavern would be without it.

With Urquhart and the customers of public houses the Marxists and their friends11 declared themselves in the pages of The Morning Advertiser. 'Where there is beer, there will be Germans.'

One fine morning12 The Morning Advertiser suddenly raised II In reality Marx not only d id not keep up any close connection with The Morning Advertiser but even expressed himself very sharply more than once about the paper's politics and about the personal qualities of the editor and publishers. He considered it to be 'Pam's [ i.e., Pal merston's ( D.M. ) l barrel-organ.' ( A .S. ) 12 2nd August, 1853. (A.S.)

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the question: 'Was Bakunin a Russian agent or not?' Of course, the answer was in the affirmative. This act was so outrageous that it perturbed even people who took no particular interest in Bakunin.

The affair could not possibly be left there. However annoying it was to have to sign a joint protestation13 with Golovin (there will be a separate chapter on this subject) ,14 there was no choice. I invited Worcell and Mazzini to associate themselves with our protest, and they agreed at once. One might have thought that, after the testimony of the President of the Polish democratic Central Government and of such a man as Mazzini, the whole thing was finished ; but the Germans were not satisfied with this: they dragged on a most boring polemic with Golovin, who kept it up on his side to interest in himself the customers of London public-houses.

My protest, and the fact that I had written to Mazzini and Worcell, was bound to direct Marx's rage against me. This anyhow was the time when the Germans realised their mistake, and began to encompass me with a boorish hostility on a par with the boorish advances that they had formerly made to me. They no longer wrote me panegyrics, as at the time when Vom andern Ufer and Letters from Italy appeared, but spoke of me as 'the insolent barbarian who dares to look down his nose at Germany.'15 One of the Marxist Gesellen wrote a complete book against me and sent it to Hofmann and Campe, who declined to publish it. Then he got it printed (I learnt this much later) i n The Leader, o f which I hav.e spoken. I d o not recollect his name.

The Marxists were soon joined by a knight with his visor 13 The letter signed by Golovin, Herzen and Worcell, appeared in The Morning Advertiser of 29th August, 1 853. See also the letter from Marx printed in The Morning Advertiser of 2nd September. (A.S.) H Later Herzen devotes twenty pages to his depressing encounters with I. Golovin, which are omitted here. Judging from Herzen's account, con·

crete and documented as usual, I. Golovin was a paranoid adventurer and clearly a man to avoid. But, unlike Marx, Herzen was unable to be reclusive either by temperament or on principle. "I was visited for the first time by I. Golovin, who until then was known to me only from his mediocre writings and from his exceedingly bad reputation as an in·

solent and quarrelsome man," he writes as of 1 848. But ten years later he was still entangled with the Golovin tar-baby. ( D.M. ) 15 This was written by one Kolachek in an American periodical on the subject of the second French edition of On the DPvelopment of Revolutionnry Ideas in Russia. The piquancy of it lies in the fact that the whole text of this book had been formerly published in German by that same Kolachek!

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lowered, Karl Blind, then a famulus of Marx, now his enemy. In his account in New York papers, mention was made of a dinner given to us by the American consul in London:16 'At this dinner there was a Russian, A. H. by name, who passes himself off as a socialist and republican. H. lives in close association with Mazzini, Kossuth and Saffi . . . . It is extremely careless of people who arc at the head of movements to admit a Russian to their acquaintance. We hope that they will not have to repent of this when it is too late.'

Whether Blind himself, or one of his assistants, wrote this I do not knO\v: I have not the text before me, but I will answer for the sense of it.

VVhile I am on the subject I must observe that both on Blind's side and on Marx's, whom I did not know at all, all this hatred was purely Platonic-impersonal, so to speak: they were sacrificing me to their Vatcrland out of patriotism. At the American dinner, by the '.vay, they were infuriated by the absence of a German-so they took it out on the Russian.

This dinner, which made a great deal of noise on both sides of the Atlantic, came about in the following way. President Pierce was being sulky with the old European governments and playing all sorts of schoolboy pranks. This was possibly in order to gain greater popularity at home, and partly to divert the eyes of all the radical parties in Europe from the main jewel on which his whole policy turned-the imperceptible expansion and consoliJation of slavery.

This was the time of

'\Ve send ambassadors,' the Americans said, 'not to kings but to peoples.' Hence arose the idea of giving a diplomatic dinner to the enemies of all existing governments.

I had no notion of the dinner that was being arranged. I 1 6 On 2 1 st February, 1 85-k ( A .S. )

17 Pierre Soule had emi�rated in 1 82-� from France to the U.S.A. He went ns arnhassador to Spain in 1 853; he fought a duPI with the Marquis de Turgot, the French ambassador, in Madrid. RobPrt Dale Owen took an active part in Arncric"n politics from the 1 830s onwMds, and from 1 853-8

was Uni ted S ta les ambassador at the Court of the Two Sicilies. ( A .S.)

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suddenly received an invitation from Saunders, the American consul ; with the invitation was enclosed a little note from Mazzini : he asked me not to refuse, saying that the dinner was being given to annoy someone and to demonstrate sympathy with somebody else.

There were at the dinner Mazzini, Kossuth, Ledru-Rollin, Garibaldi, Orsini, Worcell, Pulszki and myself, one Englishman, Joshua Wolmsley, M.P., and Buchanan, the United States ambassador, and all the embassy officials.

It should bt> mentioned that on<> of the objt>cts of the red dinner, given by the defender of black slavery, was that Kossuth and Ledru-Rollin should meet. The idea was not to reconcile them, for they had nPwr quarrelled, but to introduc<> tht>m to each other officially. The reasons why they had not made each other's acquaintance was as follO\ ... -s. Ledru-Rollin was already in London when Kossuth arrived from Turkey. The question arose, which should call first, Ledru-Rollin on Kossuth or Kossuth on Ledru-Rollin. The question greatly agitated their friends and supporters, their Court, the brigade of guards and the rabble that followed them. The pro and contra were considerable. One had been dictator of Hungary; the other had not been a dictator, but then he was a Frenchman. One was a guest of honour in England, a lion of the first magnitude, at the zenith of his glory which was about to decline ; to the other England was like a home, and calls are paid by the newer arrivals . . . . In a word this problem, like the squaring of the circle or the perpetuum mobile, was found by both courts to be insoluble . . . therefore it was solved by a decision that neither should call on the other, and a meeting between them was left to the will of God and to chance . . . . For three or four years Ledru-Rollin and Kossuth, living in the same town, having friends and interests in common and a common cause, had to ignore each other, and chance there was none. Mazzini decided to give destiny a helping hand.

Before dinner, and after Buchanan had shaken hands with all of us, expressing to each one his great pleasure at making his aquaintance personally, Mazzini took Ledru-Rollin by the arm, and at the same time Buchanan carried out the same manoeuvre with Kossuth and, both gently leading forward the two men who were the occasion of the dinner, brought them almost into collision and named each to the other. The new acquaintances did not hang back, and showered each other with compliments

Oriental and florid from the great Magyar, full of power and the colour and eloquence of the Convention from the great Gaul.

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All the time that this scene was being played I stood by the window with Orsini . . . as I looked at him I was fearfully glad to see a slight smile, more in his eyes than on his lips.

'Let me tell you,' I said, 'what nonsense has come into my head. In 1 847 I saw in Paris, at the Theatre de l'Histoire, a very stupid play about a war, in which the chief part was acted by smoke and shooting and the second by horses, cannon and drums.

In one of the acts the commanders of both armies came from opposite sides of the stage to negotiate; they walked bravely towards each other and, as they came near, one took off his hat and said, "Suvorov-Massena ! " to which the other, also hatless, answered, "Massena-Suvorov! " '

'I've hardly been able to keep from laughing myself,' said Orsini to me, with a completely grave face.

The sly old man Buchanan, who was then a lready dreaming, in spite of his seventy years, of the presidency, and therefore was constantly talking of the happiness of retirement, of the idyllic life and of his own infirmity, made up to us as he had made up to Orlov and Benckendorf at the Winter Palace when he was ambassador in the time of Nicholas. Kossuth and Mazzini he knew already; to the others he paid compliments specially selected for each, much more reminiscent of an experienced diplomatist than of the austere citizen of a democratic republic.

To me he said nothing except that he had been in Russia for a long time, and had brought away the conviction that she had a great future. I made no reply to that, of course, but observed that I remembered him from the time of Nicholas's coronation. 'I was a boy, but you were so conspicuous in your simple, black frockcoat and round hat, in that crowd of embroidered, gilded, uniformed notables.'

To Garibaldi he remarked: 'You have the same reputation in America as you have in Europe, only in America you have another title to fame as well : you're known there . . . you're known there as a distinguished sailor.'

At dessert, when Madame Saunders had gone and we had been offered cigars with another large quantity of wine, Buchanan, who was sitting opposite Ledru-Rollin, told him that he had 'a friend in New York who had said he was prepared to travel from America to France only to make Lf'dru-Rollin's acquaintance.'

Unfortunately Buchanan mumbled rather and Ledru-Rollin d id not understand English \vell; so that a most amusing quid pro quo occurred-Ledru-Rollin thought that Buchanan was speaking of himself, and with a French effusion de reconnaissance started to thank him, and held out his huge hand to him

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across the table. Buchanan accepted the thanks and the hand and, with the imperturbable coolness in difficult circumstances with which Englishmen and Americans go down with their ship or lose half their fortune, observed to him, 'I think this is a mistake; it was not I who thought so: it was one of my best friends in New York.'

The festal evening ended when, late at night, after Buchanan left, and when Kossuth did not think it possible to remain any longer, and went away with his Minister without Portfolio, the consul began begging us to go back into the dining-room, where he wished to make for us with his own hands an American punch of old Kentucky whisky. vVhat was more, Saunders wanted to compensate himself there for the absence at dinner of vehement toasts to the future universal (white) republic, which the cautious Buchanan must have forbidden. At dinner we had drunk to the health of two or three of the guests and Saunders, without speeches.

While he was burning some alcohol and seeing to the flavouring, seasoning and spicing, he proposed a ceremonial singing of the Marseillaise in chorus. It proved that only Worcell knew the tune properly, but he had an extinction of the voice, and Mazzini knew it slightly-so the American Mrs Saunders had to be summoned, and she played the Marseillaise on the guitar.

Meanwhile her spouse, having finished his concoction, tried it, was pleased with it and poured us out big teacups. With no thought of danger I took a big mouthful, and for a minute I could not draw breath. When I had recovered, and saw that Ledru-Rollin was preparing to gulp it just as eagerly, I stopped him with the words :

'If life i s dear t o you, approach the Kentucky refreshment with more circumspection: I am a Russian, and even so I've scorched my palate, my throat and my whole alimentary canal: \vhat will happen to you? Punch in Kentucky must be made from red pepper with an infusion of oil of vitriol.'

The American smiled ironically, rejoicing at the feebleness of Europeans. I, having followed from my youth in the footsteps of Mithridates, was the only one vvho held out my empty cup and asked for more. The chemical affinity with alcohol raised me terribly high in the consul's eyes.

'Yes, yes,' he said: 'it's only in America and Russia that people know how to drink.'

'\\'ell,' I thought, 'there is an even more flattering affinity: it's only in America and Russia that they know how to flog serfs to death.'

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With punch, then, of 70 degrees there came to an end this dinner, which did more harm to the blood of German foll iculaires than it did to the stomachs of the diners.

The transatlantic dinner was followed by the venture of an International Committee-the last endeavour of the Chartists and exiles to declare, with united power, their mode of life and their alliance. The idea of this committee came from Ernest Jones. He wanted to revivify Chartism, which was decrepit, considering its age, by bringing together the English workers and French socialists. The public enactment of this entente cordiale was to be a political meeting in memory of 24th February, 1 848.

The International Committee elected me a member, among a dozen others, and asked me to make a speech about Russia. I thanked them for their letter and declined to make a speech.

The matter would have rested there if Marx and Golovin had not compelled me to spite them by appearing on the platform at St Martin's Hall. I X

To begin with Jonr•s n�ceived a lettl'r from some German protesting against the choice of me. HP wrote that I was a known panslavist, that I had written of the necessity for conquering Vienna, which I called the Slavonic capital, and that I preached the serfdom of Russia as an ideal for an agricultural population.

In all this he relied on my letters to Linton (La Russic et le vieuz monde) . Jones threw the patriotic slander away and paid no attention.

But this letter was only a reconnaissance patrol. At the next meeting Marx declared that he considered my election inconsistent with the object of the committee and proposed that it should be quashed. Jones remarked that this was not as easy as he thought; that the committee, \vhich had elected a person who had expressed no desire to be a member, and had communicated to him his official election, could not alter its decision at the wish of one member; let Marx make his accusations formally and submit them for the consideration of the committee.

To this Marx replied that he did not know me personally, that he had no private accusation to make against me, bu t for him it was sufficil'nt that I was a Russian, and, moreover, a Russian who supported Russia in everything he wrote; in short, if the I� On 2ith February. 1 855. ( A .S. ) This was the meetin� at which Marx

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committee did not exclude me, he and all his people would be obliged to go.

Ernest Jones, the French, the Poles, the Italians, two or three Germans and the English voted for me. Marx was left with a tiny minority. He rose and, with his faithful followers, left the committee and did not return.

Beaten in the committee, the Marxists withdrew to their stronghold, The Morning Advertiser. Hurst and Blackett had published one volume of My Past and Thoughts, which included

'Prison and Exile.' In order to get a good sale for their wares they had not hesitated to put 'My Exile in Siberia' in the table of contents. The Express was the first to notice this piece of showing off. I wrote a letter to the publisher and another to The Express. Hurst and Blackett affirmed that the heading had been put in by them; that it was not in the original, but that Hofmann and Campe also had put 'in Siberia' in the German translation. All this was printed by The Express. It seemed that the affair was over; but The Morning Advertiser began to stick a pin into me two or three times a week. It said that I had used the word 'Siberia' to get the book a better sale; that I had protested five days after the appearance of the book: that is, giving time for the edition to sell. I replied; they printed a headline: 'The Case of Mr H.,' as reports of murders are usually printed, or of criminal cases. The Advertiser's Germans doubted not only the

'Siberia' affixed by the publisher, but even my banishment itself.

'At Vyatka and Novgorod Mr H. was on Imperial service: where was he banished to, and when?'19

19 The Marxists' accusation was both plausible and damaging. Siberian exile, such as Dostoevsky suffered in the same period (cf. The House of the Dead), was to Herzen's as Leavenworth is to parole. Herzen was not a convict like Dostoevsky--or Bakunin, Lenin or Trotsky later. He was a well-connected but imprudent aristocrat who was banished but not imprisoned; i.e., was merely required to ] i,-e in certain provincial towns (on the 'Vestern, civilized, non-Siberian side of the Urals) as a minor government official. So My Exile in Siberia was indeed a phoney title for his book, and his Marxist enemies made the most of it. Too much. Did they really believe their charge except as effective demagogy? ( Marxists weren't over-delicate in such matters then, from my reading, nor are they now, from my experience.) Herzen's explanation-that his English publishers, without consulting him. put "Siberia" into the title for the usual publ ishers' reasons-seems to me convincing because: (a) unless he was a fool, he must have realized that (since he reveals at length just where and when he was exiled; see the chapters on Perm, Vyatka, Vladimir and Novgorod ) the most cursory reader would detect the fakery

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Eventually interest evaporated and The Morning Advertiser forgot me.20

-and Herzen wasn't a fool; ( b) he was jealous of his honor to the point of touchiness; (c) he tended to minimize his achievements like a gentleman rather than to inflate them like a careerist; and (d) even granting, for argument's sake, that he was a foolish scoundrel careerist

-which is his Marxian enemies' polemical assumption-he was a rich man, the wealthiest revolutionary in London, including Engels, and really didn't need the extra royalties that "Siberia" hype might have brought him. As for the 1\larxists' accusation that Herzen was "On I mperial Sen-ice," this is the factual lie of demagogy: narrowly true and deeply false. \Yhen Tolstoy "served"' his Tsar at Sevastopol as an artillery officer (the same Tsar Nicholas Herzen had "served," more critically and less bloodily, twenty years earlier) he was also "On Imperial Service." Considering the writings that came out of these •·services," the formulation seems inadequate. (D.M.)

20 In Volume X I ( 1 957). pp. 678-80. of the Soviet Academy's edition of Herzen's works there is an account of the disparity in view and the hostility to each other of Herzen and Marx. They never met, although they were living in London in the 1 850s and 1 860s. (R.) See Appendix for a translation, made by Mr. Higgens at my request, of the Soviet Academy's history of, and political glosses on, the Marx-Herzen antagonism, which was mutual, intense and lifelong; also for some glosses of my own on their glosses.

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Robert Owen

Shut up the world at large, let Bedlam out

And you will be perhaps surprised to find

All things pursue exactly the same route,

As now with those of soi-disant sound mind;

This 1 could prove beyond a single doubt

Were there a ;ot of sense among mankind;

But till that point d'appui is found, alas!

Like Archimedes, 1 leave earth as 'twas.

BYRON, Don Juan, xrv, 84

I

SooN AFTER MY ARRIVAL in London in 1 852 I received an invitation from a lady2 to stay for a few days at her house in the country near Sevenoaks.3 I had made her acquaintance through Mazzini at Nice in 1850. My life was still sunny when she came to see us, and so it was when she left. I wanted to see her again, so I went.

Our meeting was awkward. There had been too much darkness in my life since we had seen each other.4 If a man does not boast of his misfortunes he feels ashamed of them, and this feeling of I The significance of this chapter extends far beyond a mere characterization of Owen and memories of him. It contains sharp criticism of bourgeois society and is remarkable for expressing the tendencies towards historical optimism in Herzen's Weltanschauung, of his faith in the role of historical activity [by l progressive people and of the importance of progressive thought. (A.S.) I agree with the Soviet academicians about the chapter's importance though I see it as a noble statement of Herzen's political philosophy which, like Owen's, was idealistic, moralistic, anarchistic and humanistic-in short, all the Soviet Academy of Sciences despises and the opposite of what it means by "progressive." ( D.M. ) 2 Matilda Biggs, the daughter of James Stansfeld, whose whole family was on friendly terms with the democratic emigres in London, and in particular with Herzen. ( A .S.)

3 A home was found for Owen at Park Farm, Sevenoaks, where he lived from 1 853 until his death. (R.)

4 Herzen is referring to the 'Family Drarna' and the death of Natalya, his wife. (A.S. )

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shame comes to the surface at every meeting with former a cqua in tances.

She had not had an easy time, either. She gave me her hand and took me into a park. This was the first old English park that I had seen, and one of the most magnificent. It had not been touched by human hands since the days of Elizabeth; shady, gloomy, it had grown without hindrance and spread more thickly in its aristocratic, monastic remoteness from the world.

The ancient mansion of purely Elizabethan architecture was empty. Although a solitary old lady lived in it there was nobody to be seen; only a grey-haired porter, sitting at the gates, remarked with some pomposity to people going into the park that they should not walk past the mansion at dinner-time. It was so quiet in the park that the fallow deer trooped across the rides and came calmly to a stop, raising their muzzles and sniffing the a ir. Nowhere was there an extraneous sound, and the crows cawed just as they had in our old garden at Vasilevskoye. Somewhere hereabouts I thought I might have lain down under a tree and tried to imagine myself at thirteen . . . . We came from Moscow only yesterday, and somewhere here, not far away, our old gardener is making some peppermint water. We dwellers in the oak-woods feel more kinship with forests and trees than with seas and mountains.

We talked of Italy, of my journey to Mentone; we talked of Medici, with whom she was slightly acquainted, and of Orsini, and we did not speak of what at that time probably occupied the minds of both of us more than anything else.

I saw the sincere sympathy in her eyes and silently thanked her for it. What could I have said to her that was new?

Soon rain began to fall and, since it might rain harder and might be lasting, we went back.

In the drawing-room there was a little, frail old gentleman, with snow-white hair, with an unusually good-natured expression and a bright, clear. gentle eye-that blue, child-like eye which remains with people until extreme old age, a reflection of their great kindness.

My hostess's daughters ran to their white-haired grandfather: it was obvious that they were friends.

I had stopped at the garden door.

'Here is something that could not have happened more appropriately,' said their mother, putting out her hand to the old gentleman. 'To-day I have a treat for you. Let me introduce our Russian friend. I think,' she added, turning to me, 'you will enjoy meeting one of your patriarchs.'

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'Robert Owen,' said the old gentleman, smiling goodnaturedly. 'I'm very, very pleased.'

I took his hand with a feeling of filial respect; if I had been younger I might perhaps have knelt and asked the old man to lay his hands on me.

So this was how he came by his kind, bright eye; this was why the children loved him . . . . This was he, the one sober, courageous jury-man 'among the drunken ones' (as Aristotle once said of Anaxagoras), who dared to pronounce 'not guilty' over humanity, 'not guilty' over the criminal. This was the second eccentric who was grieved for the publican and pitied the fallen and who, without sinking, walked, if not over the sea, yet over the bog of vulgarity of English life-not only without sinking but even without getting dirty!

. . . Owen's manner was very simple; but with him, as with Garibaldi, there shone through his kindliness a strength and a consciousness of the possession of authority. In his affability there was a feeling of his own excellence ; it was the result perhaps of continual dealings with wretched associates: on the whole, he bore more resemblance tn a ruined aristocrat, to the younger son of a great family, than to a plebeian and a socialist.

At that time I spoke no English, and Owen knew no French and was noticeably deaf, so the lady's eldest daughter offered to act as our dragoman: Owen was accustomed to talking to foreigners like this.

'I am expecting great things from your country,' he said to me.

'With you the field is clearer and the priests are not so powerful, prejudices are not so deeply rooted . . . and such strength! If the Emperor were willing to go into, to understand, the new requirements of the harmonious world that is coming into being, how easy it would be for him to become one of the greatest of men.'

With a smile I asked my dragoman to tell Owen that I had very little hope that Nicholas would become a follower of his.

'But he came to see me at Lanark,5 you know.'

5 Nicholas visited Owen in 1815 at New Lanark, where the cotton-mill was that Owen had established. Owen tells in his autobiop;raphy how the Grand Duke Nicholas invited him to move to Russia and set up there.

with support from the Tsar's government, industrial communities like New Lanark. Owen declined the invitation. (A.S.) According to Podmore (I, 1 73 ) , Nicholas wished to take one of Owen"s younp;er sons, David Dale Owen, to Russin and find him a place at his court; and, knowing that these islands were thought hy some statesmen to be overpopulated, he suggested that 0. should come to Russia and bring two

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'And I'm sure he understood nothing.'

'He was young then, and'-Owen laughed-'and was very sorry that my eldest son was so tall and was not going into the army. He did invite me to Russia, though.'

'Now he's old, but he understands just as little, and probably is even sorrier that not every tall man goes for a soldier. I've seen the letter you wrote to him and, I tell you frankly, I don't understand your purpose in writing it. You can't really have any hope?'

'While a man is alive one must not despair of him. There are so many kinds of happening that may lay open the soul. Well, and if my letter doesn't work and he throws it away, where's the harm? I shall have done what I could. It is not his fault that his upbringing and the environment in which he lives have made him incapable of understanding the truth. In such a case, one must not be angry but feel pity.'

So this old man extended his all-embracing forgiveness of sins not only to thieves and criminals but even to Nicholas. For a minute I felt ashamed.

Is not this why people have forgiven Owen nothing, not even his mental torpor before he died and his half-sick ravings about spirits?

When I met Owen he was eighty-one (he was born in 1 7 7 1 ) .

For sixty years h e had not left the arena.

Three years after Sevenoaks I saw Owen again for a moment.

His body was worn out, his mind was dulled and sometimes rambled unchecked about the mystical spheres of spectres and shades. But the same energy was there, the same blue gaze of child-like goodness and the same hope for man. He harboured no gn.Idge, he had forgotten old scores, he was the same young enthusiast, the founder of New Lanark, hard of hearing, grey, feeble, but still preaching the abolition of punishments and the harmonious life of communal labour. One could not see without deep veneration this old man walking slowly, with uncertain step, on to the platform, where once he had been greeted by the fervent applause of a brilliant audience, and where now his yellO\ved white locks evoked a whisper of indifference and an ironical laugh. The crazy old man, with the seal of death upon m illion of the surplus people with him. Both offers were gratefully declined. (R.)

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his face, stood without anger, asking meekly and with love for an hour of their time. He might surely have been given that hour in return for his sixty-five years of blameless service; but he was refused: he bored them, he kept repeating the same thing and, most important, he deeply offended the crov·:d. He wanted to take away from them the right to dangle from the gallows and to watch others dangling there; he wanted to take away from them the loathsome wheel that pushes them on from behind and to open the locked cage, that inhuman mater dolorosa of the soul, which the secular inquisition has substituted for the monkish chests filled with knives. For this sacrilege the crowd was ready to stone Owen to death, but the crowd, too, had become more humane: stones had gone out of fashion ; they preferred mud, hisses and articles in the newspapers.

Another old man, just such a fanatic, was more fortunate than Owen when, with his feeble, hundred-year-old hands he blessed small and great on Patmos and only murmured, 'Children, love one another!' The simple and the poor did not laugh at him, did not say that his commandment was absurd: these plebeians did not know the golden mean of the vulgar world-a world more hypocritical than ignorant, more narrow-minded than stupid.

Compelled to abandon his New Lanark, Owen crossed the ocean ten times, thinking that the seeds of his teaching would grow better in new soil, forgetting that this had been cleared by Quakers and Puritans, and probably not foreseeing that five years after his death6 the republic of Jefferson, the first to proclaim the rights of man, would collapse over the right to flog Negroes. When he was unsuccessful there too, Owen appeared on the old soil again and went round battering at every door, at palaces and hovels, starting markets which would serve as a model of the Rochdale community' and of the co-operativP

associations, publishing books and magazines, writing epistles, holding meetings, making speeches, availing himself of every opportunity. Governments from all over the world were sending delegates to the 'World Exhibition.'s OwPn was among them at once, asking them to take with them an olive branch and the hews of a call to a life of reason and concord-but they did not 6 Robert Owen died in 1 858. (A.S.)

7 The first consumers' co-operative society was founded at Rochdale m 1844 by workers in the textile industry. ( A .S.) 8 In London in 1 85 1 . (A.S.)

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listen to him, for they \'\'ere thinking of the jewelled crosses and snuff-boxes to come. Owen was not discouraged.

On a foggy October day in 1 858 Lord Brougham, knowing very

\Vell that the leak in the ramshackle barn of society was always gaining but still hoping that it could be caulked so that it would last our time, sought advice about oakum and pitch at Liverpool at the second meeting of the Social Science Association.

Suddenly there was a stir, and Owen, ill and pale, was gently carried on a stretcher on to the platform. He had overtaxed his strength and had come from London on purpose to give again his good news of the possibility of a society fed and clothed, of a society without a hangman. Lord Brougham received the old gentleman with deference (they had been intimates at one time ) ; Owen stood up quietly and in a faint voice began to speak of the different time that was approaching, of a new harmony9-his strength failed him and his speech stopped . . . Brougham finished his sentence for him and gave a sign: the old man's body was drooping and he was insensible ; he was gently placed on a stretcher and carried in dead silence through the crowd, who this time were struck with a kind of reverence: it was as though they felt that this was the beginning of a funeral not entirely of the usual sort, that something great, something sacred, something outraged was being extinguished.

A few days went by; Owen recovered a little and one morning told his friend and assistant, Rigby, to pack, because he \'\'anted to leave.

'To London again?' Rigby asked.

'No. Take me to the place where I was born. That is where I shall lay my bones.'

And Rigby took him to Newtown in Montgomeryshire, where eighty-eight years before this strange man had been born, an apostle among mill-owners . . . .

'His breathing stopped so gently,' writes his eldest son, who alone managed to get to Newtown before Owen's death, 'that I, who was holding his hand, hardly noticed it. There was not the sl ightest struggle, not one convulsive movement.'

In exactly thf' same way neither England nor the whole world noticf'd wlwn this witnPss a Ia c/,;rhar�c in tlw criminal action against humanity ceased to breathe.

An English priest troubled his dust with a funeral service, in

!J 1\"ew Harmony was the namP of a co-operative labouring community founded by Owen in I ndiana, U.S.A., in 1 82·k It came to an end in 1 829.

( R. )

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spite of the wishes of a small group of friends who had come to the burial ; the friends dispersed, Thomas Allsop10 protested boldly, nobly-and 'all was over.'

I wished to write a few words about him but, carried away by the general Wirbelwind, I did nothing; his tragic shade withdrew farther and farther and began to disappear behind the heads of others, behind painful events and the dust of every day.

Suddenly, the other day, I remembered Owen and my intention of writing something about him.

Turning over the pages of the Westminster Review11 I came across an article about him, and I read the whole of it with attention. The article was written not by an enemy of Owen's but by a reasonable, reliable man who could give merits their due and defects their desert; nevertheless, I put down the magazine with an odd feeling of pain, of outrage, of something stifling, with a feeling approaching hatred of what I had been subjected to.

Perhaps I was unwell, in a bad humour, did not understand? I took the periodical up again, read here and there-the effect was still the same.

'More than the last twenty years of Owen's life are without interest for the public.

Ein unnii.tz Leben ist ein frii.her Tod. 1 2

'He summoned meetings, but hardly anyone came, because he went on repeating his old principles which everybody had long forgotten. Those who wanted to hear from him something useful for themselves had to hear again how the whole life of society was based on false foundations. To this dotage there was soon added a belief in the rapping of spirits . . . the old man harped on his talks with the Duke of Kent, with Byron, Shelley and so on . . . .

'There is not the least danger that Owen's teachings will be accepted in practice. They were such feeble chains as cannot hold a whole people. Long before his death his principles were refuted, forgotten, but he continued to imagine himself the benefactor of the human race, a sort of atheistical Messiah.

10 He refused to be present at the religious ceremony. (A.S.) 11 The Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review published in its issue of October 1860 a long article, unsigned, about Owen. (A.S. ) 1� Goethe: lphigenie auf Tauris, I, 2. (A.S. )

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'His turning to the rappings of spirits is not in the least surprising. People of no education constantly pass with extraordinary ease from extreme scepticism to extreme superstition. They wish to determine every question by the light of nature alone.

Study, reasoning and care in judgment are unknown to them . . . .'

'In the foregoing pages,' the author adds at the end of the a rticle, 'we have dealt more with Owen's life than with his teachings; we desired to express our sympathy with the practical good which he brought about, and at the same time to announce our complete disagreement with his theories. The story of his life is more interesting than his writings. While the former may be useful and entertaining (amuse), the latter can only bewilder and bore the reader. But here, too, we feel that he lived too long: too long for himself; too long for his friends, and even longer for his biographers! '

The shade of the mild old man hovered before me: there were bitter tears in his eyes and, mournfully shaking his old, old head he seemed to try to say: 'Have I deserved this?' but he could not, and fell sobbing on his knees, and it was as though Lord Brougham hastened to screen him once more and made a sign to Rigby for him to be carried back as quickly as possible to the graveyard, before the frightened crowd had time to come to its senses and upbraid him with everything, everything that to him was dear and sacred, and even \vith having lived so long, with spoiling the lives of others, with unnecessarily taking up room by the fire. In fact, Owen, I think, was of the same age as

·wellington, that sublime incompetent in time of peace.

'In spite of his mistakes, his pride, his fall, Owen deserves our recognition.'-vVhat more could he expect?

Yet how is it that the curses of a Bishop of Oxford, Winchester or Chichester, damning Owen, are easier for us to bear than this requital of his services? It is because on that side there is passion, outraged faith, and on this, narrow dispassionatenessthe dispassionateness not simply of a man but of the judge in the court of first instance. In the court of ecclesiastical jurisdiction it is all very easy to judge the behaviour of some ordinary libertine, but not of such a man as Mirabeau or Fox. With a folding foot-rule it is easy to measure cloth with great accuracy, but it is very inconvenient for estimating sidereal space.

It is possible that for correctness in judging affairs which are outside the competence of either a police court or arithmetical verification, partiality is more necessary than justice. Passion may not only blind, but may also penetrate more deeply into the

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object, embrace it in its own fire and be blind to everything else.

Give a pedantic schoolmaster, if only he is not endowed by nature with aesthetic understanding-give him to analyse anything you like-Faust, Hamlet-and you will see how the 'fat'

prince of Denmark wastes away, crumpled up by a secondaryschool doctrinaire. With the cynicism of Noah's son he will display the nakedness and deficiencies of dramas which are the delight of generation after generation.

There is in the world nothing great or poPtical that could endure the gaze-not of stupidity, and not of wisdom-either: I mean the gaze of ordinary, vital intelligence. The French have hit the mark so accurately with their proverb that no man is a hero to his valet.

'If a beggar gets hold of a horse,' as people say and as the critic of the Westminster Review repeats, 'he'll hop on to its back and gallop off to the devil. . . . An "ex-linen-draper" ' (this expression is used several times) 13 'who has suddenly become' (mark: after twenty years of unremitting toil and colossal success) 'an important personage, on a friendly footing with dukes and ministers, must naturally become puffed up and make himself ridiculous, since he has not much moderation and not much sense.' The ex-linen-draper became so puffed up that his village was too cramped for him and he wanted to reconstruct the world ; with these pretensions he ruined himself, failed in everything and covered himself with ridicule.

But this is not all. If Owen had preached only his economic revolution, that folly would have been forgiven him, the first time, in the classic land of madness. This is proved by the fact that ministers and bishops, parliamentary committees and congresses of mill-owners sought his advice. The success of New Lanark attracted everyone: not a single statesman, not a single learned man left England without having travelled to see Owen ; even (as we have seen) Nicholas Pavlovich himself vis.ited him, and wanted to entice him to Russia and his son into the army.

Crowds of people filled the passages and vestibules of the halls where Owen was speaking. But Owen, with his audacity, destroyed at one blow, in a quarter of an hour, this colossal popularity which was based on colossal incomprehension of what he 13 Fourier began by being an assistant in a shop of his father's where cloth was sold. Proudhon was the son of an illegitimate peasant. \Vhat a base beginning for socialism! Is it from such demi-gods and semi-robbers that dynasties draw their origins?

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was saying; he saw this, and dotted the i, and the most dangerous i, too.

It happened on 2 1 st August, 1 8 1 7. The Protestant hypocrites, the most troublesome and glutinously boring, had long been plaguing him. 0\ven declined disputing with them, so far as he was able, but they gave him no peace. A certain inquisitor and ovmer of a paper-mill, Philips by name, went so far in his ecclesiastical fury that, in a parliamentary committee, suddenly, out of the blue, in the middle of an important discussion, he started badgering Owen with a cross-examination on what he believed and what he did not believe.

Instead of answering the paper-mill-owner with any such subtleties as Faust uses with Gretchen, Owen, the ex-linendraper, preferred to reply from the height of a platform, before a huge gathering of people, at a public meeting in England, in London, in the City, in the London Tavernf14 On this side of Temple Bar, near the umbrella of the cathedral under which the old City clings together, in the neighbourhood of Gog and Magog, within sight of Whitehall and of the secular cathedralsynagogue of the Bank, he announced clearly and unequivocally, loudly and extraordinarily simply, that the chief obstacle to the harmonious development of a new society was-religion. 'The absurdities of fanaticism have made of man a feeble, crazy beast, an insane bigot, a canting hypocrite. With the existing religious concepts,' Owen concluded, 'not only will the communal villages proposed by me not be built, but with them Paradise would not long continue to be Paradise.'15

Owen was so convinced that this act of 'folly' was an act of honour and apostleship, the inevitable consequence of his teaching, that he was compelled by probity and candour, by his whole life, to promulgate his opinion thirty years afterwards, \vhen he 14 Owen's speech of 21st August, 1 8 1 7, to which Herzen refers, was printed at the same time, with the title 'A l\'ew State of Society.' (A.S.) 15 Herzen's quotation of Owen's words is not exact. ( A.S.) Frank Podmore in Robert Owen . . . ( Hutchinson, 1 906) . I, 2%-7, quotes this passage of Owen's speech as follows: 'Then. my friends, I tell you, that hitherto you have been prt>vented from Hen knowing what happiness really is. solely in consequence of the errors-gross errors-that have been combined with the fundamental notions of every religion that has hitherto been taught to man. And, in consequence, they have ma,Je man the most incompetent, the most miserable being in existence. By the C'rrors of these systems he has been made a weak, imbecile animal ; a furious bigot and fanatic; or a miserable hypocrite ; and should these qualities be carried, not only into the projected villages, but into Paradise itself, a Paradise would no longer be found! . . .' (R.)

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wrote: 'That was the greatest day in my life: I carried out my duty.'

An impenitent sinner was this Owen! And he was paid out for it!

'Owen,' says the Westminster Review, 'was not torn in pieces for this: the time of physical vengeance in matters of religion had gone by. But no one, even nowadays, can offend our cherished prejudices with impunity!'

English priests do not, in fact, use surgical methods any more, although they are not squeamish about other, more spiritual means. 'From that moment,' says the author of the article, 'Owen brought down upon himself the fearful hatred of the clergy, and after that meeting begins the long list of failures which makes ridiculous the last forty years of his life. He was not a martyr, but he was an outlaw.'

Enough, I think. I may put the Westminster Review aside. I am very grateful to it for such a vivid reminder not only of the saintly old man but also of the environment in which he lived.

Let us turn to business, that is, to Owen himself and his teaching.

One thing I shall add as I bid farewell to the unwashed critic and to Owen's other biographer,16 also unwashed, less severe but no less earnest-that, while I am not an entirely envious man, I envy them from the bottom of my heart. I \'\'auld give much for their imperturbable consciousness of their own excellence, for their calm satisfaction with themselves and with their comprehension, for their sometimes pliant, always just and now and then slightly ironical condescension. What tranquillity must be conferred by this complete confidence in their knowledgeability, and in the fact that they are wiser and more practical than Owen was; that, if they had his energy and his money they would not behave so stupidly, but would be rich, like Rothschild, and ministers, like Palmerston!

I I

RoBERT OwEN called one of the articles in which he set out his system, 'An attempt to change this lunatic asylum into a Rational World,'17

16 Herzen is probably referring to William L. Sargant and his book, Robert Owen and his Social Philosophy ( London, 1 860) . ( A .S.) 17 In English in the originaL (R.) Owen's article 'The \Vorld a great lunatic asylum' was published in the first issue of Robert Owen's Journal

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One of Owen's biographers, prompted by this, tells how a madman who was confined in a hospital said: 'The whole world thinks me insane, and I think the whole world is so; the pity is that the majority is on the side of the whole world.'

This expands Owen's title and throws a clear light on the whole business. I am sure that the biographer did not consider how accurate his comparison was nor how far it carried. He only wanted to hint that Owen \Vas mad, and I shall not dispute that . . . but what his reason is for supposing that that whole world of his is sane, this I do not understand.

If Owen was mad it was by no means because the world thought him so and he paid it back in its own coin, but because, knowing well that he lived in a madhouse and was surrounded by the sick, he talked to them for sixty years as though they were well.

Here the number of the sick means nothing: sanity has its justification not in the majority of votes but in its own logical arbitrariness. If the whole of England is convinced that a certain medium can summon up the spirits of the dead, and one Faraday says that this is rubbish, then truth and sanity will be on his side and not on the side of the whole population of England.

More: if even Faraday does not say this, then the truth about this subject will not exist at all as something recognised ; but none the less the absurdity accepted unanimously by the whole people will still be an absurdity.

The majority of vvhich the sick man complained was not frightening because it was wise or foolish, right or wrong, false or true, but because it was powerful and because it held the keys of Bedlam.

Power does not admit consciousness within its understanding as a necessary condition ; on the contrary, it is the more irresistible the madder it is, the more to be feared the more it lacks consciousness. From an insane man it is possible to save oneself, from a pack of furious wolves it is harder, and before the irrational elements a man can only fold his arms and perish.

The act of Owen's that in 1 8 1 7 struck England with horror would not in 1 6 1 7 have astonished the country of Vanini and Giordano Bruno, would not have scandalised France or Germany in 1 7 1 7 ; but England, after half a century, cannot remember him without exasperation. Perhaps somewhere in Spain the ( London. 2nd l\'o,·emher, 1 850), and ends almost liternllv as in HPrzen's quotation : 'To change this lunatic asylu m into a ra tion�! world, will be the work to be accomplished by this journal.' ( A .S. )

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monks might have incited the savage rabble against him, the alguazils of the Inquisition might have put him in prison or burnt him on a bonfire, but the humane part of society would have been on his side . . . .

Could Goethe and Fichte, Kant and Schiller, or Humboldt in our time and Lessing a hundred years ago, have concealed their way of thinking or have had the unscrupulousness to preach their philosophy, in books and in the academies, for six days a week, and on the seventh to listen pharisaically to the pastor, and bamboozle the mob, [a plebe, with their devout Christianity?

The same thing in France: Not Voltaire nor Rousseau nor Diderot, not all the Encyclopaedists, nor the school of Bichat and Cabanis, nor Laplace nor Comte, pretended to be ultramontanists or bowed in veneration before 'cherished prejudices,'

and this did not lower or diminish their importance by one iota.

The Continent, politically enslaved, is morally freer than England ; the mass of ideas and doubts in circulation is much more extensive. They have become habitual and society does not shake with either fear or indignation before a free man-Wenn er die Kette bricht.1�

On the Continent people are powerless before authority: they endure their chains, but do not respect them. The Englishman's liberty is more in his institutions than in himself or in his conscience. His freedom is in the 'common law,' in habeas corpus, not in his morals or his way of thinking. Before the prejudices of society the proud Brit inclines without a murmur, with an appearance of respect. It stands to reason, then, that wherever there are people there are lies and pretence, but openness is not considered a vice, the boldly uttered conviction of a thinker is not confused with the indecency of a lewd woman who boasts of her own fall ; but hypocrisy is not exalted to the degree of a social and therewith obligatory virtue.19

IS From Schiller's poem 'Die Worte des Glaubens.' (A .S. ) The couplet runs: 'Vor dem Sklaven, wenn er die Kette bricht, Vor dem freien Menschen er::.ittert nicht.' (R.)

19 In the present year Temple, a justice of the peace, would not accept the evidence of a woman from Rochdale because she refused to take the oath in the form prescribed, saying that On of the celebrated friend

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Of course, David Hume and Gibbon did not pretend to mystical beliefs. But the England that listened to Owen in 1 8 1 7 was not the same in time or in profundity. The sense of understanding was no longer restricted to a choice circle of educated aristocrats and scholars. On the other hand, the country had spent fifteen years in a prison cell which Napoleon had locked upon it-in one way, it had moved out of the current of ideas, and in another, life had thrust forward a huge majority of that

'conglomerated mediocrity' of John Stuart Mill. In the new England a man like Byron or Shelley wanders as a foreigner; he begs the wind to carry him away, but not to his native shore; another man the judges, with the help of a family crazed with fanaticism, rob of his children because he does not believe in God.20

The intolerance, then, directed against Owen bestows no right to deduce the falsity or truth of his doctrine; it gives only a measure of the insanity, that is of the moral servitude, of England, and particularly of that stratum of the people that goes to public meetings and writes articles for the newspapers.

And now there turns up a freak who simply tells them straight, and even with a kind of offensive naivete, that all this is rubbish, that man is not at all a criminal par le droit de naissance, that he is as little responsible for himself as the other animals are and that, like them, he is not answerable to a court of law, but to his upbringing-very much so. And that is not all: before the faces of magistrates and parsons, who have as the only foundation, the only sufficient reason for their existence, the Fall, the punishment and the remission of sins, he announces publicly that a man does not create his character himself; that he has only to be put, from the day of his birth, in such an environment that it would be possible for him not to be a rogue, and he would be quite a decent fellow. But now society, with a of Byron and Shelley) asked the Home Secretary in Parliament on 1 2th February what measures he proposed to take to set aside such refusals.

The Minister answered, None. Similar cases have occurred more than once-with, for instance, the well known publicist Holyoake. To take a false oath is becoming a necessity.

20 Shelley in 1 8 1 7. The reasons for the Lord Chancellor's depriving him of the right to bring up his children were his illegal tie with Mary Godwin and the atheistical views that he uttered in his works. (A.S.)

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pack of absurdities, steers him into crime, and people punish not the social system but the individual.

And did Owen really suppose that this was easy to understand?

Did he really not know that it was easier for us to imagine a cat hanged for muricide, and a dog awarded a collar of honour for zeal displayed in the capture of a concealed hare, than a child unpunished for a childish prank-to say nothing of a criminal? To reconcile oneself to the idea that to a venge the whole of society on a criminal is vile and stupid, to inflict on the criminal in full synod, in safety and cold blood, as much injury as he inflicted when he was frightened and in danger, is repellent and unavailing, horribly hard and uncongenial to our gills.

It is too abrupt!

In the timorous obstinacy of the masses, in their narrowminded bolstering up of what is old, in their tenacious conservatism there is a kind of recollection that the gallows and penance, capital punishment and the immortality of the soul, the fear of God and the fear of temporal authority, the criminal courts and the Last Judgment, the Tsar and the priest-all these were once huge steps ahead, huge strides upward, great Errungenschaften, scaffoldings on which men, straining themselves to the utmost, clambered up towards a tranquil life ; canoes which, although they did not know the course, they paddled to harbours where they might rest from the hard struggle with the elements, from the labours of earth and from deeds of blood ; where they might find leisure free from alarms, and a blessed idleness, these prerequisites for progress, liberty, art and consciousness.

In order to preserve their dearly won tranquillity, men surrounded their harbours with bugbears of all kinds and gave to their Tsar a rod in his hand to drive them on and to defend them, and to the priest the power to curse and bless.

·

A conquering tribe naturally enslaved the conquered, and on its slavery founded its own leisure, that is its development.

Properly speaking, it was by means of slavery that there began the State, education, human liberty. The instinct of self-preservation led to ferocious laws, and unbridled phantasy completed the rest. Tradition, handed on from generation to generation, wrapped the origins more and more in a rosy cloud, and the oppressive ruler, just like the oppressed slave, bowed in terror before the decalogue, and believed that it had been dictated by Jehovah on Sinai to the flash of lightning and crash of thunder, or instilled into an elect man by some parasitical spirit dwelling in his brain.

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If we reduce all the different corner-stones on which states have been built to the chief principles that liberate them from

\vhat is fantastic, what is childish, what appertains to their age, we shall see that they are constantly the very same, co-eternal with every church and every state: the forms and scenery alter but the principles are the same.

The savage punishment of the king of a hunting tribe in Africa, who with his own hands cuts the criminal's throat, is by no means so far away from the punishment of the judge who delegates the killing to another. The point is that neither the judge in ermine and a white wig, with a quill behind his ear, nor the naked African king, with a quill through his nose, and quite black, has any doubt that he is doing what he is doing for the salvation of society, and that in some cases he has not only the right to kill but a sacred duty to do so.

Beside the fear of freedom-the fear that children feel when they begin to walk \vithout leading-strings-beside the habituation to those mandates steeped in sweat and blood, to those boats which have become arks of salvation in which peoples have survived more than one rainy day, there are also strong buttresses supporting the dilapidated building. The backwardness of the masses on the one hand, who are incapable of understanding, and, on the other, self-interested fear, which prevents any comprehension of the minority's point of view-for a long time these will keep the old order on its feet. The educated classes are ready, against their convictions, to walk in a leash themselves if only the mob is not released from it.

This, in fact, would not be entirely without danger.

Below and above are different calendars. Above is the nineteenth century, and below perhaps the fifteenth: or even that is not at the very bottom-there are Hottentots and Kaffirs of different colours, breeds and climates.

If one does consider this civilisation, of which the sediment is the la:::::.aroni and the rabble of London, people who have turned back half-way and are returning to the condition of apes and lemurs, while on its peaks flourish the talentless Merovingians of all dynasties and the feeble Aztecs of all aristocracies-really, one's head begins to go round. Imagine this menagerie at liberty, without church, inquisition or lawcourt, without priest, Tsar or executioner!

The ancient strongholds of theology and jurispmdence Owen

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considered to be a lie: that is, an obsolete truth; and this i s comprehensible. But when under this plea h e demanded that they should surrender, he had forgotten the gallant garrison defending the fortress.

There is nothing in the world more stubborn than a corpse : you can hit it, you can knock it t o pieces, but you cannot convince it. Besides, on our Olympus there sit not the complaisant, rakish gods of Greece who, when a message came, according to Lucian, while they were trying to devise measures against atheism, that the game was lost, and that it had been proved at Athens that they did not exist, turned pale, volatilised and vanished.21 The Greeks were simpler, both gods and men. The Greeks believed nonsense and played with marble dolls from a childish need for art; and we, for percentages, for profit, uphold the Jesuits and the old shop,22 to keep the people curbed and safely exploited. What kind of logic could get a hold of this?

This brings us to the question, not whether Owen was right or wrong but whether rational consciousness and moral independence are compatible with life in a State.