PRINCE HOHENLOHE'S IDEA.
AWEIGHTY opinion gravely uttered by Prince Hohen- lobe, the Chancellor of the German Empire, is sure to be well worthy of consideration. The Prince is now an old man, but he is still trusted by his master in all serious affairs, he has an almost matchless experience of official life, he has governed with absolute powers and the fullest responsibility a most difficult province, and he is now the Premier of the German Empire, with authority over every department except the military, with an exigeant Emperor to satisfy and a half-organised Parliament to manage. With this large measure of work well performed, he is himself a social magnate, a member of a mediatieed house, and therefore a man who has known on intimate terms every eminent person, not only within the German Empire, but also in Austria, and in a less degree in France. He is, moreover, personally a man with a tolerant temper, who sees the other side, and who reflects with a certain patience, as well as acumen, upon all he sees. The opinion of such a man so experienced and so placed upon the general drift of events around him must deserve attention, and we are sorry to perceive that as regards one important element in the outlook it is decidedly unfavourable. He has, he intimates, throughout his long life been in favour of progress, and on the whole until recently has perceived that it advanced, but of late he has begun to doubt whether it was not arrested by the too severe struggle for existence. In other words, progress is ceasing, at all events for a time, through the over-desire of all men for a larger amount of material well-being. That is a melancholy utterance, but it is, we fear, a true one. It is certainly true of the civilised nations. Their federa- tion for good was never so far off. The contest among them, whether express or tacit, is so bitter that they are all expecting war, that they all expend their sur- plus resources upon armaments, and that they all watch one another with a ceaseless jealousy which extends to trifles like the distribution of railway contracts and beneficial experiments like the cutting of ship canals. They are not perhaps willing to secure good bargains by actual force of arms, but they are willing to threaten it, and in Pekin, Constantinople, and Bangkok do actually threaten it every day. The classes are as eager for material things as the nations. Landowners all over the world are in a panic lest they should be deprived of the last remnant of their incomes, and are regulating their politics by that fear. The commer- cial classes, though prosperous, believe that ruin is always in the air, and actually rage with eagerness for new markets, the attainment of which they press on Governments as the first object of their foreign policy. Think of interests, they say, and not of ideas, or all is lost. They even propose wars out of positive fear of commercial competition. The masses of the people are even more excited. Everywhere, except in France, they feel the pressure of the new multitudes for whom there is barely room, and who must be fed, clothed, housed, and educated out of resources already insufficient. Moreover, they must be fed, clothed, housed,• and educated in A totally different way from the way that satisfied their
fathers. A new consciousness, a consciousness that comfort is delightful, has been born into the civilised world, and the supply of good things demanded, much of it reasonably demanded, may be taken as double what it was. The white men will no longer be herded, or half-starved, or left without the knowledge that makes careers possible, or if they submit to be refused it is with a sullen anger and sense of longing for redistribution which threatens the very foundations of society. It does not shake us here, for reasons which it would take volumes to explain, but in every European country, and even in America, great sections of the community are crying out for " more " with a kind of ferocious eagerness and wrath which makes society radically unhappy. The "struggle for existence" of which Prince Hohenlohe speaks is becoming the supreme interest, and in its intensity stops all progress, absorbing all time, and making reflection seem useless or inopportune. Some leisure- liness, some good temper, some room for meditation, are essential conditions of progress, and the hunger for advance- ment interrupts or extinguishes them all. Men are working into old age till there is no room for the young, with an industry that paralyses all power of thought, and with an eagerness that sours all tempers, makes of all rivals enemies, and so increases nervous disease that an appreciable section of the industrial world, masters and men alike, positively cannot be calm or tolerant or foresighted. The world is shaken by a vast stampede, during which true progress becomes impossible, or is secured only by accident, as when the feet of the rushing millions beat the road by no intention of theirs into a smooth, hard track. Litera- ture dies away as the rush proceeds, the path of science is deflected towards the attainment of profit instead of knowledge, and the care for individual freedom, with- out which progress is a dream, is swallowed up in the desire to make the rush stronger and more rapid by compel- ling all to join and to keep time. We are using no artifice of rhetoric. This is a true description of the general situation of the civilised world outside, and even within our own land, though happily a few classes and persons still stand aside,and it amply justifies Prince Hohenlohe's melancholy foreboding. The struggle for existence is acquiring an intensity which arrests progress.
The worst of it is that there is as yet no source of improve- ment visible. The pressure of increasing populations can only become more severe as the countries fill up, and the holes and corners get occupied, as they are in a Chinese delta, while new races, like the Russians for example, are pressing forward with their myriads to join in the general scramble. It is hardly possible that resources will increase in greater proportion than those who want them, for the peoples are already too industrious for happiness, which conditions some leisure; the earth cannot yield more fruit except under more labour over larger spaces ; and many essential things, healthy house-room, for example, timber, and coal, are becoming so scarce as to intensify in a marked degree the struggle of which Prince Hohenlohe speaks. The awful competition of Asia, which may yet halve all earnings from labour, has as yet but began to be felt ; nor has that continent, where the bulk of mankind dwell, yet begun seriously to pour out her overspill, which, if she did begin, might in a decade populate Australia or the waste lands of Spanish America. There is no certain prospect of new revenues for man to be gained from a little planet now rapidly filling up, nor any chance of such an increase in his force as shall make six hours of industry accomplish the work of twelve. Above all, there is no prospect of any diminution in the white man's wants. Rather they will increase, for he is resolved to educate himself, and education, whatever its other benefits, does not, when extended over masses, decrease esurience. The labourer of A.D. 2000, while pressed by a sharper competition, and with a more exhausted world beneath his feet, will demand to be housed and fed and provided for in old age like the tradesman of 1000 ; and if he is refused, will turn with a still more angry envy towards those projects of redistribution which, as Prince Hohenlohe, we suspect, clearly sees, begin to affect with fear or hope all who aspire, like himself, to direct mankind. The man who toils certainly will not give up wanting, or sink back into the old contented servitude without one fierce struggle amidst which many of the best results of progress may disappear as completely as leisureliness and content are disappearing now. The world of white men will continue, if calculation may be trusted, to thirst for more of material things, and in that thirst lie the conditions of a struggle for life to which the old struggles for supremacy may seem feeble and good natured.
Is there, then, no remedy ? There is none visible, none that an old statesman like Prince Hohenlohe can see, none so far thinkable as to afford grounds for any serenity of hope. Those who, like ourselves, believe that God directly governs may reasonably believe that, as it has not been his purpose hitherto to arrest progress except for intervals of time, a way for the renewal of confidence will he opened out, but even they cannot be certain that one of the intervals, possibly a long one, is not near at hand ; while for the materialist, who trusts only to calculation, the prospect is dark indeed. Summed up, that prospect means the conditions of China reproduced in Europe, Chinese numbers, Chinese industry, Chinese indifference to all but the means of living, upon a soil far less fertile, and with a people far less prepared to endure a continuity of unsatisfied material desire. Is it likely that, if those are the circumstances of the future, progress will continue? Prince Hohenlohe doubts it, and men with a tithe of his experience, and none of his elevation of standpoint, as they look around them and see the fierce glitter that is coming into eyes hitherto dull may reasonably share in his apprehension. We are not pessimists because we believe, but if we only calculated we should reject with some scorn the sanguine forecasts now so prevalent as to the future of European man.
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