A CANADIAN ARCHBISHOP ON CIVILISATION.
IT was, we suppose, a good thing that the conceited and vulgar self-gratulation over the progress of man which was the note of the middle of this century, and which attained its height in 14351, should pass away ; but the angry pessimism which has taken its place grows not a little tiresome. It is so very contemptuous of historic facts. Dr. O'Brien, a Catholic Archbishop in Canada, for example, in the eloquent letter which was telegraphed to the Times on Wednesday, writes as if he sincerely believed that the modern system of lay government had ruined the masses of mankind, as if our civilisation were purchased at the price of a new degradation of the " poor," by which word he intends the mass of those who live by labour) There is not the smallest truth in the assumption. Civilisa- tion has much to answer for, and we should be far from asserting that it has greatly raised the morale of mankind, for though it has made them gentler, it has filled them with a lust for comfort which, while it exists, must always create a sense of unfulfilled desire, and with a ferocious envy which seems to true moralists the very attribute of devils. But certainly civilisation has not crushed the poor. The immense mass of those who work were never so well-off as they will find them- selves when the next century begins, and this not only as regards their physical well-being, their lodging, clothing, diet, and means of acquiring the chief source of happiness, intellectual interests. People direct their attention so exclusively to a class, a residuum or precipitate from the body of skilled artisans, that they forget the immense gains which the majority, after no doubt a long period of suffering, have at last obtained. Slaves foi the most part in the ancient world, under a system much more severe than the slavery of the United States, and supported by much more terrible " sanctions," the workers outside a, few cities were during the Middle Ages all serfs of one kind or another, working hard through life for superiors, who left them their lives and little else. Men like the Archbishop forget, in their passion of pity, that all white men outside England are now free, the last relic of white slavery disappearing in 1861, under Alexander IL's decree of Emancipation, and that the immense majority are freeholders, subject to no oppression except that of circumstances, the seasons, and the competition fos- tered, or rather generated, by scientific intercommunica- tion. There is not a peasant or artisan in Europe or North America who can be struck, without having a legal right either to strike back again, or to appeal to a Magistrate, whose business is impartiality, and who is usually impartial. There is not a man whose wife or daughter can be insulted without redress, who can be imprisoned without a charge of crime or wilful indebtedness, who can legally be tortured, or who can be held in perpetual durance to answer for claims he cannot possibly pay. The peasants are as free from personal terror, the old curse of Europe, as it is still the curse of most parts of Asia. as ever grandees were in the older time. Their taxes paid, which in most places do not exceed 2s. 6d. in the pound—the only exceptions to this are in parts of Italy and Russia—they are as much their own masters, as responsible to themselves alone, as were any knights in the Middle Ages, nay, more inde- pendent, for they have not to live perpetually under a necessity of self-defence. Very few of them are ever hungry, none are unclothed, and their over-work, though often, no doubt, a great evil, is dictated to them only by themselves and their own overmastering passion of thrift. No doubt millions of peasants are poor, so poor as to embitter life ; but they are not poor because of civilisation, but because they stand too thick upon the ground, because they are stolidly conservative in their agriculture—" it is a great scandal," said an Italian m6tayer to a priest last month, as he looked at an English plough imported for his education —or because the soil in half at least of Europe really can- not yield the means of comfort to those who toil without the aid of machinery. Their fathers were poor before them, right back through the ages till we come to the ergastula, and a time when the air was full of the cries of tortured husbandmen. If we could only see with our eyes what was the condition of the serf-labourers in Germany, France, Italy, and Spain during the latter half of the tenth century, when men in their misery hoped for the Day of Judgment, and refused to propagate beings so wretched as themselves, we should stand amazed at the progress that had been achieved. The laicising of government, the dominion of economists, the expulsion of religion from daily life, of all which the Canadian Archbishop complains, may have pro- duced some immense moral evils, and arrested much possible moral progress ; but that they have been accompanied by the material degradation or impoverishment of the majority of white men is not true.
The case of the artisans, who, for some inexplicable reason, now occupy the whole field of philanthropists' vision, is not so good, for they suffer more from competi- tion, and throw off a much larger proportion of incom- petents, whose lot is very sad ; but the position of artisans also has in most respects enormously improved. The competent among them—that is, 80 per cent. by the statistics of London, and 60 per cent. by those of the German cities—are as well off as the middle class were in the old times, eat, all they want, drink very often more than they want, are clothed as they please, and possess full means of acquiring the bases of education. They are the most prominent class in the world ; they have immense and direct influence on all legislation ; they are the objects of all economic philanthropy, for the peasants, who on the Continent maintain the State, can never strike ; and they govern to the most singular degree the direction of modern thought, every dreainer of Utopias, for instance, fixing his social Paradise in the city, and not either on the ploughed land, or the untilled forest or swamp. They can combine when they please, with a freedom under which the world of commerce rocks ; they are, when they please, almost the dictators of municipal action ; and they are rapidly curing all over Europe their master evil,—the tendency to make their hours of labour too long for health or cul- ture, a tendency which, though nearly extinct in England, has lingered in France, Germany, Italy, and the cities of Austria to an extent of which competition does not offer a complete explanation. There has been a failure, besides, in brain, an inability, owing to an evil tradition, to per- ceive that a man cannot do good work, much less artistic work, when dazed with weariness and fatigue. In all respects, however, but this one—for we fancy the ancient difficulty in procuring artificial light did once limit over- work pretty sharply—they are indefinitely better off than their fathers, and as little crushed by the economists as men need be. It is not they but the peasants who are feeling American and Asiatic competition, which they only perceive in cheapened bread and sugar. They are, too, sanguine of the future, advancing to their battle with the capitalists with a soft of exultation, and with the fullest and the oddest belief that all the genuine moral laws are on their side. Theirs certainly is no temper either of depression or timidity. It is true they work for wages, that is, in the Archbishop's phrase—if he meant that—they are subject to the tyranny of money ; but who that works, ever since the world began. ever worked for anything but wages, or was ever able to dispense with a customer, either for his labour, or, if he sat by himself in his cottage as shoemakers do and weavers did, for his labour's product ? There is no truth in the statement that modern civilisation has borne down the competent artisan, though there is, we fear, some in the belief that it has crushed in some degree the competent artisan's worst rival, the wretched being who can just learn, with pains, how to seem to work. The older world killed out its residuum of incompetence as it killed out its sickly people, starved them as in Central Europe, whipped or hanged them as under the Tudors ; and the modern world, in preserving them wholesale by poor- laws, sanitary laws, and efforts to supply work, has taken up a burden which as yet it does not know how to manage. But he is more cynical than Christian who alleges that he regrets the old famines and dearths and epidemics which were the purging medicines of the Middle Ages, slaughtering out the weak ; nor can even a Bishop fairly think that the survival of the unfittest can be counted to us for crime.
It is in the non-material region that the failure of the modern world is to be sought, in that decline of the ancient virtues of patience and endurance and tranquillity, which a Bishop may well sigh over when an agnostic like Matthew Arnold mourns it in melodious verse. In spite of all their progress and their relief from direct suffering, the inclina- tion to be joyous is less among modern workers than it was in their less easy forefathers. They are suffering from a malady of the mind which, though it is not the fault of the economists, or even of the Socialists, to whom, as we read him, the Archbishop is inclined to attribute it, must be in part the fault of the general body of the thoughtful. They have suffered themselves to be infected with Rous- senuism, and it has filtered down. The handicraftsmen, of all kinds—even the peasants showing this symptom—grow bitter with a sour envy of all comfort softer than their own, and a frantic hope of an equality which is impossible either in earth or heaven. They have not lost, perhaps, so much as appears, their faith in the ultimate right-putting of all things—for there is a strange trace of deep belief in the supremacy of right, as Christians interpret right, in their wildest agitations, and they plead for spoliation in the name of a supreme justice—but they are possessed of a fierce impatience, such as sometimes seizes on men in sickness or pain, and leads them almost to tear themselves. The cure for that, now almost the dominant emotion of the world, and one as manifest in the rich and philanthropic as in the poor and distressed, must be, we agree fully with Arch- bishop O'Brien, a spiritual one, but neither he nor any other believing churchman, be he lay or cleric, has much ground for exulting over the thinkers he denounces. The failure of the Churches must have been as great as that of the thinkers, or this spirit could never have grown so fast and so dangerous ; and of the two non-material powers, the Churches have had the longer life. They have, too, had much closer access to the people, who listened to the clergy long before they could read, and in most countries went to them for advice. We believe with Dr. O'Brien that men have divorced religion too much from daily life, and that its guidance will be the greatest help to the solution of the problem ; but there must be in the religion which is to work rightly, both humility and patience, and in both, his letter, for a prelate of a Church which knows how to wait for centuries and teaches Christianity, is, he must permit us to say, somewhat singularly deficient.
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