A MISCONCEPTION OF HISTORY.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR7]
Sra.,—In an article in your issue of August 9th, entitled "A Misconception of History," you raise a very interesting historical question. I may rather say that you raise two questions,—viz., whether since the year 1789 "the progress of events in the world of human life has gone on with a rapidity unknown in former ages ;" and whether "England, and the world, changed fully ten times more during the three hundred years which separate us from the middle of Elizabeth's reign, than during the thirty years which separate us from the Crimean War."
The latter question I should be loth to answer. Thirty years are, as you remark, but part of a lifetime. There are few men whose minds are so well constructed for prosecuting historical studies, that they can fairly compare the importance of those events that have passed under their own eyes, with the import- ance of those which they have studied in books. Still fewer are the minds capable of multiplying a moral advance by ten. For these reasons I prefer to compare the longer periods of one hundred and three hundred years, involving as they do a smaller numerical ratio.
The mass of mankind is made up of the poor. A hundred years ago a vast majority of the inhabitants of every European country were peasants. A great, although a smaller majority, are peasants to-day, in spite of the fact that by no means the least of the changes of the last hundred years is the greater relative importance of city to country life. (Had any corre- sponding change occurred in the world before ?) The life of the peasant to-day is hard, and often brutal ; but if we compare him, as we find him, with the peasant described by Arthur Young, do we not see that a great change has come upon his life ? In the first place, he is not so much oppressed ; in the second, he is richer and more comfortable. But there has been a greater change than either of these. It may make little dif- ference, at least to the speculative philosopher in his arm-chair, that the peasant is a little warmer, a little fatter, a good deal more secure ; that the poor are a little happier, and that on the whole they may enjoy their happiness a little longer. But one change the philosopher is bound to notice. The peasant has, if ambitious, acquired a new hope. If he be restless he may seek a change, and none can prevent him. A door has been opened to talent and to ambition. This door was never absolutely closed ; and it does not always lead anywhere; but it is open wider than ever before, and the prospect to be seen through it by strong eyes is broader,
Now, I am not aware that any change similar to this, or equal to it in importance, has taken place in the position or the pro- spects of the mass of people in Europe within historical times. It is a change rather moral than material. That which can be best compared with it is the change occasioned by the acquisition of religious freedom. A hundred years ago, religious freedom— the earliest sought and most precious form of freedom of thought —was held by sufferance rather than as a right. It had not been held long, and was held precariously. There was, perhaps, no country in Europe where the free exercise of religion was allowed by positive law.
Was there any advance in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries which correspond to the spread of popular education in the nineteenth ? To find any change in the condition of the human mind comparable to this in importance, must we not go back to the Renascence of the fifteenth century, or at least to the Reformation of the sixteenth ? And have not the inventions of the last fifty years, and especially the improved means of travel and of diffusion of news, done something to enlarge the not over-broad minds of the industrial and trading classes ? Was there any corresponding improvement between 1600 and 1800? And has not the discovery of ana3sthetics, delivering us not only from the most severe forms of pain, but from the fear of them, added to the sum of happiness of the human race to an extent to which no previous improvement in the condition of human affairs has added to it P It is the fate of most nations to spend a part of every century in a state of warfare. The condition of non-combatants in war- time is, therefore, an important factor in the happiness of the race. Now, if we compare the condition of the non-combatants in the invaded countries in the Franco-Prussian or the American Civil wars, on the one hand, with that of the non-combatants in the wars of the eighteenth century on the other, it seems to me that we shall recognise a greater improvement during the last hundred years than during many centuries before. Were the laws of war milder under Tilly than under Titus ? Are they not milder under Moltke than they were under Napoleon?
That the changes above-mentioned were preparing before 1789, there can be no doubt—no event in history stands by itself and disconnected ; but it is since that date that they have mani- fested themselves, and had their effect on the mass of European mankind, and I think we may, therefore, hold that "the pro- gress of events in the world of human life has gone on," during the century that is just passing away, with a rapidity greater than that attained during the two centuries which immediately preceded it, and probably "with a rapidity unknown in former ages."—I am, Sir, &c.,
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