LORD BROUGHAM ON AMERICA.
" LORD BROUGHAM," once said an acute reviewer, " has enough of misanthropy to be a philanthropist ;" and if we supplement this ingenious observation by the remark that he has also enough incapacity for truth to give him zeal in " promoting " science, we shall have adequately indicated his qualifications for the chair of the Social Science Association, which lie is just now filling with so much more éclat than credit to that useful body. Lord Brougham, as we all know, long ago became conservative, but his most valuable posses- sions are still that agitating temper and advocating intellect which so remarkably disqualify him both for accurate obser- vation and dispassionate exposition. As he formerly scolded aristocracies, he now, but with less power, scolds democracies, namely, with a kind of undiscriminating, uneducated zeal. There is no man in this country who has picked up more various knowledge and done more for the cause of " educa- tion " than Lord Brougham. There is no man who, with even half or a quarter of his encycloptedic powers and accomplishments, has an intellect so distinctly marked as uneducated still. He is, indeed, far too learned a man to have learned, as Mr. Cobden would wish, " more from a single copy of the Times newspaper than from all the works of Thucydides ;" but he always impresses us as having an intellect and moral nature constructed a good deal on the type of the Times newspaper,—equally omnivor- ous, equally strong of digestion, equally adapted to the task of popularizing knowledge, with that large admixture of error which popularizing necessarily implies, —and, above all, equally furnished with that convenient little organic arrangement,— the intellectual equivalent of the spleen,—for secreting on the popular side of any question a kind of anger which, both to him- self and others. shall answer all the purposes of moral indigna- tion. In his address to the Social Science Association at Edin- burgh, Lord Brougham has evinced these his old great talents, with something even of his old force. His oratory is as oycloptedic as ever, with, perhaps, even less mere wind than in recent years ; his knowledge flaps about him with the same heavy effect of not fitting close to his intellect, or rather, perhaps, of not finding any pure intellect to fit close to, and of consequently serving only his prejudices or temper ; his philanthropy shines out chiefly in the misanthropic force of his philippic against his opponents; and his " pro- motion" of science in his zeal to show that political truth means the body of plausible opinions held by Henry Lord Brougham. Let us examine gravely what Lord Brougham wishes to teach his disciples concerning the American civil war. First he denies it the name of " civil war," not in order to diminish its horrors, but in order to mark more clearly the territorial division which would secure peace. " The term civil war' is now hardly applicable to this miserable contest. The people of the South are banded against those of the North, exactly as any two European nations, differing in all respects save language, have been banded against each other—the Austrians and Prussians for example." Could not this, and a great deal more than this, have been said of England and Scotland before the Union, or of England and Ireland now? The truth is, that there was never a stricter case of civil war, except in the matter of territorial distribution, than this. It is a war of citizens against citizens, who have but one quarrel with each other, and that a civil quarrel. There is no such distinc- tion of race as in a war between England and Ireland ; no conflict like theirs of political traditions—for the South is so proud of its political inheritance as to have copied it almost slavishly; no dynastic rivalry as between Prussia and Austria; no clash of religious convictions, such as long separated Scotland from England, and still divides Great Britain from Ireland ; in short, never was a quarrel more purely and absolutely civil, or more limited to a single head. Supposing all the cavaliers had lived in the South of England, and all the Puritans in the North, at the time of our Great Rebellion, would any one have denied on that account the civil charac- ter of the strife ? And, yet had that been so, there would have been a broad social, religious, and political distinction of creed and principle between the contending parties,—while in America there is but one great moral chasm, which, if they cast into it but one revolutionary measure, would in the course of a few years be filled up. If Lord Brougham wishes, by denying it the name of a "civil war," to hint that the obstacles to final Union are greater than they would be between-States with rival dynasties and opposite faiths and incompatible political institutions, he is talking at random and for effect. The gulf is broad and deep enough ; but the sacri- fice of one civil institution alone might close it effectually, and would, at all events, rob the remaining differences of all sting. And if this does not define it as a civil strife, we know not what would.
Lord Brougham then goes on to a burst of rhetoric in verve and point worthy of his earliest days, and not the less worthy of them that its moving force is Grudge, and its guiding intel- ligence a mixture of plausible falsehood and distorted truth. " Whatever," he says, "may have been the proximate cause of the contest,"—and he obviously means by " proximate cause " the ultimate cause, which, with a true scientific spirit, he treats as profoundly immaterial,—" its continuance is the result of a national vanity without example and without bounds. Persons subject to this failing are despised, not hated ; and it is an ordinary expression concerning him who is without the weakness that ho is too proud to be vain. But when a people are seized with it, they change the name, and call it love of glory. Of the individual, we often hear the remark, that, despicable as the weakness is, it leads to no bad actions. Nothing can be more false ; it leads to many crimes, and to that disregard of truth which is the root of all offences. Certainly it produces none of the worst crimes. The man who is a prey to vanity thirsts not for the blood of his neighbour. How fearfully otherwise is it when a nation is its slave ! Magnifying itself beyond all measure and despising the rest of mankind, blinded and intoxicated with self-satisfaction, persuaded that their very crimes are proofs of greatness, and believing that they are both admired and envied, the Americans have not only been content with the destruction of half a million, but vain of the slaughter. Their object being to retain a great name among nations for their extent of territory, they exulted in the wholesale bloodshed by which it must be accomplished because others were unable to make such a sacrifice. The struggle of above two years, which has loosened all the bonds that held society together and gave to millions the means of showing their capacity, has produced no genius civil or military; while the submission to every caprice of tyranny has been universal and habitual, and never interrupted by a single act of resistance to the most flagrant infractions of personal freedom The people are determined on their course, far from feeling shame at the cruel scenes, which modern eyes,—nay, which Christian times—have seen nothing to equal—a spectacle at which the whole world stands aghast almost to incredulity, they actually glory in it as a proof of their higher nature, believe themselves to be the envy as the flower of mankind, and fancy that their prowess would triumph over the most powerful States of Europe." Such is Lord Brougham's social science, which seems to come nearer the mark of furious international loathing, though the noble thinker says shortly after, with perfect self- possession, in alluding to the anti-English feeling in the Northern States, " We are hated and despised. Neither feeling is at all reciprocal, but among our kinsfolk it prevails in a degree almost amounting to mental alienation." Now, we venture to say, that not even Mr. Cassius Clay has contrived to express a fraction of the hatred and contempt which,—for ore- torical purposes we suppose,—the aged Peer pours out in so full a stream.
But now as to the anatomy of this wonderful social science. The first assumption is that the root of the Northern war feel- ing is unexampled and boundless national vanity. If flinging a good hard stone at any combatant's head is a social and scientific act, this statement of Lord Brougham's may be social and scientific. As regards its social influence, however, it appears carefully calculated to bring two national societies into war ; and as regards its science, it is absolutely incapable of even presumptive evidence. That national vanity enters as an element into every resolve to keep a State intact is probable enough ; but that it enters even as much into the Federal resolve to maintain the Union, as it did into tho Austrian resolve to keep Italy in 1859,—or the Russian resolve to keep Poland now,—or the British resolve to keep India in 1857,—or the permanent British determination to keep Ireland for all time,—is beyond proof, and not very likely,—unless we assume that the greater the sacrifice the more likely is it that inordinate vanity is the motive. There can be no question, as Lord Brougham points out, but that the sacrifice is enormous—indeed, far greater and more closely brought home to the whole people than it was in any of these cases,—whence, we suppose, he infers that it must be due to inordinate vanity, as the only motive capable of so gigantic an effort. To no mind but Lord Brougham's would such reason- ing even seem plausible. We can understand its force to him.
But it is not only the national sacrifice on which Lord Brougham dilates ; it is the cruelty. Could any motive be so cruel as vanity? The cruelty of every war is great ; as far as we know, no war was ever conducted with nearly so little, in proportion to the numbers engaged, as this. Assuredly Generals Berg and Mouravieff in Poland, and the bush- whackers and border ruffians in Kansas and Missouri (who fought more ferociously still in 1856, and will probably fight after the war is over) have surpassed all its cruelties a thou- sand times. The cruelties now going on in Cuba,—the cruelties of a generation of slave-drivers to the gangs of plan- tation slaves,—are probably fur worse than all the cruelties of a regular war, and we do not know that slave-drivers are particularly vain. Indeed, vanity is a comparatively humane motive, as Lord Brougham testifies, in individuals, though he thinks it rises into brutality in States. What, then, shall we say of national revenge, pride, or self-esteem, which we suppose, a peculiarly English state of mind ? Was the whole- sale blowing away of Sepoys from guns, and the cry for the immediate razure of Delhi to the ground humane, because it was not due to vanity ? Lord Brougham's social science is either a melancholy piece of blind English pharisaism, or an outgrowth of that intellectual prevarication to which he so feelingly alludes as the necessary fruit of personal vanity. It is almost sickening to see Englishmen holding up their hands in horror at this war on account of tho " cruel scenes which modern ages and Christian times have seen nothing to equal ;" as if 1857 were not a modern age and Christian time, and the well at Ujnala were beyond the range of the English empire. Englishmen know very well that they could not in any equal, or nearly equal, fight, entered on to put down rebellion in the United Kingdom, wage war with even as little brutality and vindictiveness as have been shown in America. The Yankee is, perhaps, vainer than the Englishman ; he is certainly less proud and less vengeful.
The Social Science Association will suffer greatly if it permits its President to pour forth mischievous and insincere declamations of this sort under the cloak of its neutrality. It may be true, as Lord Brougham says, " that persons subject to inordinate vanity are despised, not hated," and Associations which permit themselves to be their organ may, perhaps, share the same milder fate. But the Social Science Association has done good work, and has good work yet to do, and cannot afford, we hope, even to be despised.
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