WILL THIS GENERATION REST?
IT seems an odd thing to believe amidst the hubbub of the moment, with everybody apparently athirst for excitement, but we believe it is true that the civilised world would greatly like a period of rest. We do not mean by that a time of sleep, but a period of a few years, such as has occasionally been recorded in history, during which nothing particular happened, and men ceased to expect sensational news, and thought to-morrow was sure to go on very much as to-day and v The statesmen certainly long for such a period, for they are most of them. elderly men, and besides distrusting much of what is called progress, they are a little bewildered by the far- reaching effects of everything they do. A King or a. Premier nowadays cannot throw a stone into the sea without trembling for the disturbance he may create upon some far distant shore. Increased facility of intercom- munication has brought to them at least nothing but wider responsibilities, and what they dislike even more, a more peremptory necessity for hurry. They are expected. to repair the ruin wrought by an earthquake or a tornado before the echoes of the explosion have completely died away. If the Legations in Pekin were attacked next Monday, every statesman in Europe would be expected on Tuesday to declare his policy, and on Wednesday to have an army on the sea. The Christian Churches confess the same desire of rest, for tranquillity is one of their avowed ends ; almost everything that happens annoys or menaces them, and amidst the roar of theological and ecclesiastical controversy they have a sense of growing deaf. Com- mercial men, even when successful, declare that "the pace is too fast," that they have no time to grow quietly rich, that something is always happening, or being rumoured, or being invented which, for a time at least, bewilders them, and makes them feel as a Viceroy of India once declared that he felt when the number of his executive orders exceeded a hundred a day,—" Oh for the peace of my Ministry at Munich ! " Above all, the thoughtful of Europe sigh for a period of quiescence, for they see, or think they see, that a generation is growing up with an inaptitude for reflection, whose thoughts are like atoms of quicksilver, which form no solid, and whose characters are not buildings, but only sandheaps. It is not in a dust-storm, they say, that healthiness is generated, or that men acquire the ability to do anything. Nothing gets settled in all this welter and whirl, and it is when the world is settled and change is not expected that great minds gather their strength. We all perceive this in the present aspect of literature, which produces everything except great poems, great dramas, and great ideas ; and it is equally true of that perpetual rush of events which has followed the modern pooling of the world. It pulverises rather than solidifies character.
There may be exaggeration in the opinion of the thought- ful, for they are apt to be the first to get tired, and they forget that men, like schoolboys, have a power of rejecting one half the knowledge forced upon their attention. It is as possible to be ignorant of events in a telegraph-office as to be solitary in a crowd. A great deal of it, however, is true. It is difficult to doubt that, as there are cycles of calm weather and cycles when storm-winds are frequent, so. there are cycles in history when things happen, and that we are in the vortex of one of them now. It is not all. illusion produced by the fact that we see farther and notice events which a century and a half ago would no more have been visible to us than events in Mars. The stream of events is running faster. Great movements are in progress, as they were in the fifteenth century, and every great move- ment produces from time to time highly dramatic events.
The passionate desire of the white world for transmarine territory produces every year successes and catastrophes which enchain attention. Democracy is not yet reconciled to anything, but heaves restlessly with its own fears and hopes ; and Democracy is a Behemoth, which cannot stir as a mouse can, and, when stirring, excite nothing big to pay it even the compliment of regard. Its sprawlings are events, its rushes cataclysms, its bellowings threatenings of the cyclone. The cry of the working peoples for more comfort arrests the march of the comfort- able as the scream of a murdered man would arrest the march of the passers-by in the Strand. The groans of an ancient civilisation in the Far East, which can neither accrete power to itself nor continue to exist without it, pro- duce across the seas all the impact of events, which in a way they are. The redistribution of a nearly forgotten conti- nent yields great events by the score,—battles, victories, catastrophes, discoveries, heroes of soldiership and adminis- tration. There is always something new from Africa. A new religion cannot be born, and assert its right to universal dominion, without events happening ; and humanitarianism is nothing less in myriads of minds than that new religion. The deadly struggle between ecclesiasticism—we do not mean religion—and the belief that the conscience is suf- ficient to itself, that, in fact, men can now become learned without schoolmasters or desks, yields almost every week some dramatic event. Science for eighty years past has been striking blows which reverberate through the modern world, and will reverberate through history more loudly than any war; and this whether she alters all the relations of man to the country or continent around him, as Stephen- son did, or shatters whole systems of thought, as Darwin did, or makes men half believe, as Marconi is doing, that to the physicist nothing is impossible. The great movements are endless ; and with every great movement comes the desire for a pause in it, if it be only that we may have time to see what the flood is doing as it sweeps on, what it is destroying, what fertilising, where repairs are peremptory, and where new powers are given into the hands of the dwellers on the bank. The predominant thought of men in a cyclone is not one of fear, even for themselves or their dwelling places, but—" Oh, that the wind would stop, if only for a moment, so that we might think and see ! "
-Whether it will stop or no it is hard to decide. We incline to think that it will not for some considerable time. The Kings and statesmen, who, Lord Beaconsfield said, still govern Europe, are doing their best to preserve peace, but events are by no means favourable to their efforts, and one great force constantly impedes them. The peoples rule in the long run, and the peoples have grown jealous and suspicious of each other. Each people sighs and wearies to be richer, and each thinks that its rivals endeavour to impede or prevent its prosperity, even if they do not devise plans for taking away that prosperity's fruits. The jealous hunger for wealth works as strongly as the old ambitions, and, like them, must produce considerable events. Men are talking already of " heritages " soon to fall in and sure to be hotly contested, as if great States like Austria and Turkey were properties which would enrich their heirs beyond the dreams of avarice, yet which must first produce great lawsuits. There may even be great campaigns fought to defend trade monopolies, or to resist, as in the case of the Continent versus America, dangerous com- petitions. The nations are not starving on heaps of gold, as Kingsley saw them, but tossing and sighing because in their sleep they dream of gold which they can never reach. The Churches show every symptom rather than the desire to rest ; and when they move there are always events, for behind them are the millions whom, as they themselves complain, they do not convert, but whom nevertheless they strangely and most powerfully affect. Commercial men are nearly as jealous as the peoples, and hunger for territory as the Kings used to do, till dreamers ask what, if the whole world is exploited for the benefit of one generation., the next will have to live upon, and predict a time of exhaustion, not for mankind, but for their mother-earth. The traders have often pro- duced events, and even in the time of Elizabeth they never were more careless what they did or not, so only that routes might be " open" and they themselves enriched, As for Science, she is all alive with the hope of new victories—especially new enchanted armour which no savage's thrust may pierce—scientific men perpetually re- peating, and, as we conceive, fully believing, that they are on the edge of discoveries which will change the face of the world. They, at least, will not cease from revelations which are events as great as battles, and sometimes more lasting in their effects. As to the thoughtful, though they rule in the end, they win their dominion by processes so slow, and so nearly invisible, that events seem never to stop for them ; and if they decided on the necessity for rest, it would take at least two generations to make their advice prevail. We can see little hope of rest for this generation at least, even though amidst all its feverish activities we can detect the longing. A change, no doubt, may come over the spirit of the white men, and they may develop the patience which in all countries enables the husband- man to wait for his harvest without cursing ; but of such change there is as yet no trustworthy sign. Rather, we should say the active classes are losing even the power to comprehend the husbandman's tranquillity, and are asking themselves in amazement how he can bear to be content with his one event a year—the harvest—and with the long delay which intervenes before even that one occurs. To the husbandman events are misfortunes ; but the husbandman no longer rules.
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