MR. LOWELL'S CONUNDRUM,
MR. LOWELL deserves the praise which is the due of every man who can make a clever speech about nothing in particular. Speakers who can improve the occa- sion, and improve it for some considerable time, when they have something to say, we have in abundance ; nor is there any lack of men who can make a speech shoat nothing which is not clever. But the happy combination, the ability to play with what seems like a subject, and yet is not one, is a rare gift, and Mr. Lowell has it in perfection. He can get up after dinner and sit down again without having told you anything about the politics of his own country or his opinion of yours, without having said a word about theology, or philosophy, or the Social Problem, or any other of the subjects which alone are supposed to interest men who are worth interesting. Yet, in spite of the many self-denying ordinances which taste or position impose upon Mr. Lowell, he is never dull. Scoffers may say that it is be- cause, not in spite of, these self-denying ordinances that he escapes the common destiny of man. But if this were the ex- planation, other men who steer equally clear of heavy subjects would be equally secured against making heavy speeches. Alas they are not. It is true they do but skim the stuface of things, but they do it with as grovelling a flight, as though
their object were to dive into abysmal depths, and there find congenial rest. Mr. Lowell, on the contrary, has always something pleasant to say, and the terrible monotony of after- dinner speeches has been sensibly broken since he became the Minister of the United States in England. We trust that the exigencies of American parties will long permit of his remain- ing among us. On Tuesday, Mr. Lowell was the guest of the London _
ber of Commerce, and he had to propose," The Chambers of Commerce of the United Kingdom and of the whole world." There are things without number to be said about commerce, but it is not very easy to pick out something that will be pertinent to the subject and yet not wearisome to the listener. Men who have risen to the top of the commercial tree, and are no longer anxious as to their ability to remain there, do not care to hear speeches in praise of Free-trade or demonstrations that bimetallism is a heresy. After a good dinner, provided that their digestions are pretty good, even the thought of a double standard no longer vexes. What they like best is to be gently flattered and a little puzzled, and Mr. Lowell's speech answered both purposes. It was in the nature of a complimentary conundrum. It implied that commerce conferred a particular benefit upon the human race, and ft left his audience wondering,—at least, we fancy it must have done so,—what connection there could be between the thing that gives and the thing given? If Mr. Lowell had enlarged on the obvious benefits that commerce confers on the world, he would have been no better than any other after- dinner speaker. He would have paid his audience the expected compliment, but he would not have furnished them with the unexpected interest. That commerce makes nations rich, that it supplies them with the material advan- tages of life,—these and the like statements would have pre- sented no difficulty. But Mr. Lowell took quite another ground for his glorification of commerce. "The great com- mercial States have been centres of civilisation, and centres of those forces which keep civilisation from becoming stupid. I do not say which is the post and which the propter in this inference, but I do say that the two things have been almost invariably associated." That is a very pretty thesis, and one which would support a great deal of argument on both sides. Only it would be necessary, in the first instance, to define the converse of "stupid." A force which keeps nations from becom- ing stupid is a force which keeps them,—what? Lively, cultured, wise ? Each of these terms is sometimes used as implying the opposite to stupid, and the truth of Mr. Lowell's statement will, in a measure, depend upon the choice the interpreter makes between them. "Lively" is, perhaps, the most commonly taken of the three, and it is also the one which Mr. Lowell would find it hardest to bring within his theory. The Irish are one great standing exception to it. Until lately, they were the liveliest people probably in Europe,—the most quick-witted, the most humorous, the most mirth-provoking, though not, per- haps, the most mirthful. Yet they were at the same time the least commercial people in Europe the one which had least of this world's goods, and gave out feast of what it had. The Dutch, again, are an exception on the other side. They are among the most commercial of modern nations, but they are hardly the liveliest. Indeed, their enemies—herein following a long tradition—would say that they were the least lively. If, on the other hand, we take the opposite to stupid to be wise or cultured, both these instances answer Mr. Lowell's purpose fairly well. The Irish have not shown much wisdom as regards the things that make for national prosperity, and its absence has mainly been due to having so very little to be wise about. How can a nation which has no manufactures and an unsuitable land system be very-wise in the conduct of life ?The Dutch, on the other hand, are pre-eminently wise ; wise in agriculture, wise in trade, wise in politics. If they had not been wise in the first two respects, they would pro- bably not have had the opportunity to show themselves wise in the third ; and if they had had no commerce and no ac- cumulated wealth, their agricultural and commercial skill would have remained hidden beneath a bushel. Or, if culture be taken as the antithesis to stupid, Venice and the Italian towns will sustain Mr. Lowell's argument. Culture requires leisure, a leisured class requires realised wealth, and realised wealth is commonly acquired in commerce.
There is another aspect of Mr. Lowell's riddle which may have exercised the diners at the Cannon-Street Hotel a little less pleasantly. Given that it is true of nations that commerce keeps them from becoming stupid, is it equally true of indi- viduals I Is a commercial man more lively, or wiser, or more cultured than his neighbours ? If you are a guest at a man's dinner-party, do your spirits rise or fall if you hear that you . are to sit between a wool merchant and a stockbroker If you were given the choice of sitting instead between a Civil Ser- vant and a dramatic author, would you avail yourself of the alter- native, or let it pass? These be hard questions to answer. Indeed, we are rather inclined to think that they have no answer, that the wise guest, if he knows nothing more of his neighbours than their callings in life, will let things take their chance. We have known stockbrokers who were very lively—hostile critics said too lively—and charitable friends have certainly attributed the excess to the bad influence of "the House." But woe be to the man who thinks that a stockbroker is necessarily lively He will surely find some day that nature knows a rule chiefly as an occasion for exceptions. Culture, indeed, is sometimes a characteristic of men engaged in commerce ; living instances will at once occur to every reader. But is it not a character- istic of them rather in right of the wealth that commerce brings with it, than of the occupation it affords them? We are not sure that this is the case, for some men have thought that their trade rendered something of the same service to their in- tellectual work that Gibbon's Militia experiences did to the "Decline and Fall." But more commonly, we suspect, it is the leisure, the absence of care, the means of making researches of all kinds which accompany realised wealth, that make com- merce the ally of culture. Commerce, that is, is a cause of culture in the future—in the third or fourth generation— rather than a cause of culture in the present. While the fabric is in building, it makes too severe a demand on the energies of the workman to allow of his being diverted to any other pursuit. And as to practical wisdom, is it profanity to say that so far as our observation has extended, bankers, merchants, and the like are neither better nor worse than. other people
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