THE PERMANENCE OF NATIONAL CHARACTER. WVERYBODY who looks at politics
from either the historic
I I or the philosophical point of view, is asking just now whether it is possible that a grave change has passed over the English national character. The people have seemed for some time so irresolute, so devoid of self-confidence, so timid in decision, so incompetent to state in what morality they believe, Bo reluctant to inflict suffering, and above all, so ineffective in action, that the question is not unreasonable, and the usual answer is obviously insufficient. The people, it is customary to Bay, have not changed, but the depositaries of power have. The country is now governed by the proletariat, and it is foolish to expect from a proletariat the qualities displayed either by a middle class or by an aristocracy. The Ten-pounders were not sentimental, but the Householders are. That answer implicitly asserts that there is no such thing as a national character, but only a class character, and is at variance with the leading facts of history; while, as applied to England, it presents this especial difficulty. The quality of hardness, now supposed to be growing deficient, was specially the quality of the class which has now come into power. No one was so hard, so little moved by senti- ment, so unforgiving, as the English peasant or worker of the towns. We are, therefore, on this theory, in presence of the phenomenon that a nation has not only become softer, but has become so because its hardest class has risen to the top. That is not likely, to say the least of it ; and as an in- crease of apparent softness in Englishmen is undeniable, we are driven to inquire whether national character ever does really change ; so change, that is, that it will, when under strong emotion, or from any cause acting instinc- tively, take a totally unexpected course. The question is one of great difficulty, because so many of the more ancient peoples of mankind have mixed their blood; but we should say that, on the whole, the answer must be in the negative. The Jewish character, for example, seems to resist all pressure of circumstance, and to be substantially what it always was,—the character, that is to say, of a singularly stubborn or " stiff- necked " people, very earthy in their desires, though full of capacity ; not spiritual, yet able to produce from time to time men of lofty spiritual gifts ; not artistic in temperament, yet possessing in the most marked and special degree the organise.- tion which enables those to whom it is given to surpass mankind in music, whether as composers, singers, or in- strumentalists. A certain receptivity has, it is alleged, come upon the Jews, who everywhere, except in England, acquire a veneer from the country of their adoption ; but it is acknow- ledged that the essential Hebrew character is never lost, and receptivity of a kind marked the nation always. One object of the Mosaic law was to keep the Jews separate; their chiefs were always afraid of Canaanitish or other Gentile influence; the Babylonians during the Captivity did materially alter Jewish theology, and the tendency of Hebrews to "Grecise"—recollect, nothing is so opposite as Hebraism and Hellenism—was in the time of Josephus the subject of angry comment and complaint among themselves. The Arabs, nearly as pure a race as the Jews—not quite, we fancy, for the Jews had not the Arab wealth of slaves, and were not brought into such contact with the Negro—appear, from the account of all travellers, to be pre- cisely the people they were when, twelve hundred years ago, they burst upon the decaying Roman world. We will not speak of Greece,—first, because the Greeks are deeply crossed with Slav and other blood ; and secondly, because when Englishmen speak of Greets, they mean the thirty or forty thousand families of Attica who displayed for a moment in history matchless intellectual qualities, and then in all human probability died out ; and we can only say of the Romans, who can hardly be proved to be the ancestors of modern Italians, that for a thousand years they exhibited an un-
changed type,—strong, narrow, resolute business-men, deter- mined to govern, but almost superstitious in their reverence for law. We may, however, quote the French as evidence of tin- changeableness. They are to-day in all essential qualities the Gauls whom Cmsar conquered, and Taine could still describe his countrymen in the great Roman's words. Where
is the change in Welshmen since they gave up the fight for independence; or can any one point out the charac-
teristic German trait which throughout her history can be proved to have died out in Germany ? The Spaniard remains the man he was in all but his fierce energy, and that may have declined only because those who possessed it trans-
ferred themselves almost en mane to the New World, where the Spaniard has made an impression in many respects as wonderful, though possibly not as enduring, as that made by the Saxon. The evidence is not perfect, because we know so little of the past outside Greece and Rome, and because of the existence in so many States of the slave system, which corrupts, or, at all events, mixes the blood ; but there is a heavy balance of probability that national character changes less than language, and is always, under all circumstances, in its essence the same. Even faith changes it very slowly, the barbarians who accepted Christianity remaining for ages the half-tamed savages that they were before.
Then, can anything be added in the course of the ages to
character so as materially to modify its manifestations That is a subtle question, requiring a wider knowledge, perhaps, than any one man can possess ; but we should say that it could. The singular tolerance or placability of the Italians, which weakens all their jurisprudence and much of their statesman- ship, is entirely modern, yet is regarded by all foreiga observers as a main factor in the Italian character. It is difficult to believe that the history of France could have gone on as it did for nearly a thousand years, had the passion of envy so dominated the people as it does now ; while in England, the quality of sympathy for suffering which now affects the whole people, is of less than two centuries' growth. Up to 1700, and probably much later, the people, though not exactly cruel, and comparatively free from the thirst for blood, were entirely callous to suffering not their own, thought an outrageous code of punishments quite natural, felt nothing for slaves, did. nothing to relieve the sufferings of the mass of the feeble poor, and tolerated scenes of brutality which now would drive whole cities mad. Now, sympathy with suffering, especially the suffering of the weak, has grown so strong, that it disturbs the judgment, interferes with the repression of crime, threatens many of the rights—we mean the moral rights—of property, and constantly makes the whole nation doubtful as to its freedom to use force. A masterful race bears rebellion if justified by allegations of suffering; a fierce people scarcely endures the punishment of death ; and a nation singularly given to the subjugation of others, is uneasy whenever, it acquires more subjects, or is told that others had better . be enfranchised. The feeling is so powerful, that it modi- fies all action as much as if it had modified national, character; but still, as we conceive, it has not done so.' Sympathy is a snperaddition, and therefore liable to disappear. whenever events are rough enough or the provocation is direct enough to cause it to be inconvenient. When Hindoos murder officers, or Socialists threaten shops, or Invincibles assassinate popular men—that is, when the people are really stung, actually feel loss, or injury, or insult—the old character seems to us to revive at once, and there is as little pity in the punishment as weakness in the fighting. We do not see that unpopular murderers are let off the gallows, or that open rebels are allowed to win, or that there is any hesitation in using armed force in repressing insurgent Socialism. If Ireland rose in rebellion, Ireland would be quelled ; and if the rebel- lion involved massacre, the repression would for a time be pitiless. The nation has become merciful to weakness not through a change of nature, but through an acquired sense of sensitiveness to others' pain ; and the moment the new sense produces visible evil instead of good, it is laid aside or repressed, and the genuine cliaracter, which is hard both to inflict and to suffer, reappears in all its strength. The people, in fact, is English, though in its new rest from pain it has begun to feel sympathy for the pained ; but the sympathy, as an active force, would not survive keen suffering. At least, that is how we should read phenomena which are not a little puzzling, but the reality of which has as yet hardly been tested by events.
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