a great external warrior, Napoleon I.; and the Americans have been censured as mere "dollar-hunters" by our most eminent writer on political economy,- a subject intimately connected with trade. Further, the proposition that "trade is debasing" is among those which are most widely accepted. Again, for a long course of years, we kept congratulating ourselves on the blessings of the peace we were enjoying, and on the "consequent progress of civilization." Now, our poetlaureate, our national bard, writes a long "poem," apparently for the purpose of denouncing vulgarizing, debasing peace, and of glorifying, ennobling and elevating war. One is somehow made to feel, on reading the last verses, as if it was rather a vulgar and debased trait, that one has no desire whatever to rush out into the street, and hit the first man one meets a knock on the head, in order to have with him a mutually ennobling and improving set-to.

The reader will observe that in the above paragraph there are stated a number of apparently discrepant facts and conflicting notions. Do our conclusions as to civilization remove the appearance of discrepancy and help us to detect the false notions?

Commerce is a portion of the struggle that is mainly maintained for the object of satisfying the nutritional appetite and the aversion to pain. Trade, in so far as it subserves its main object, has nothing debasing about it. It is on the contrary an indispensable requisite of civilization. If the whole of a man's attention is devoted so completely to one occupation as to exclude all general cultivation, the life of that man becomes anti-civilizing. It might be right to say of a man who pursued trade in that fashion, that his manner of life was debasing; but not that trade is debasing. Of course, by trade, I mean commerce in nourishing, sheltering, protecting and curing substances and instruments; and not such traffic as panders directly to vice; which is not what is referred to, when it is said that "trade is debasing." Lying, in any shape, whether by words or looks, or even by deceptive

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silence in those cases where usage requires speech, is debasing, in whatever occupation it is manifested, whether in ruling a great nation or in selling matches. A man is perfectly justified in asking what price he pleases for his own property: -no one is compelled to purchase it. But he has no right to tell lies about it,-no right, by active lying, to conceal defects, nor to keep silence (passive lying) about such as exist, when there is the slightest reason for presuming that the purchaser assumes their non-existence. Now it is too true that in the wholesale, not less than the retail trade there is a vast amount of this and other kinds of lying practised. Indeed the practice is so well known to be very prevalent that individuals justify it on the ground that everybody does it." But I deny that trade, as trade, is debasing. Political life has never been considered in itself debasing; yet is there not almost as much direct and indirect lying in politics as in trade? Traders are found to sell oxidized mercury for cayenne, and chicory for coffee; and the British public is indignantly taking measures to check the deceits. But there is another kind of adulteration that, nationally speaking, it is of far more importance to check. If the British Empire is to flourish, the British public must manifest some practical indignation at the large quantities of red-oxide religion and chicory patriotism which are unscrupulously manufactured and unblushingly retailed by its political traders. It may be doubted if the lying and swindling which exist in commercial life are nationally so discivilizing as the lying and swindling in political life. Deceit must be put down, both in trade and in politics, by an improved moral tone-a higher cultivation of the moral faculties-and by a practical, effective reprobation on the part of society of all ascertained lying; or in spite of multifold promising appearances, England must cease to prosper. I have shewn that civilization may be described as all sound science and true. art. But sound science and true art are simply the discovery of facts, called natural laws in the animate and inanimate

world, and the acting in accordance with these facts for improving and useful purposes. Civilization may, accordingly, be described as Man's ascertaining of truths in the animate and inanimate world and harmonizing with them in order to preserve himself and species in greatest perfection. Now, wherever a lie is told, looked or acted, there is dis-harmony and dis-accord; and hence all lies are discivilizing. More directly, our theory declares lying discivilizing, as one of the most decided abnegations of the moral agencies. Again, the saving of time is a process of civilization. Hence whatever wastes time is a process of discivilization. Now let the reader reflect what a fearfully large portion of our time is actively occupied merely in guarding against falsity of some sort, further, how much is wasted in sheer inactivity because we cannot trust each other, and he will see what a powerful element of discivilization, lying necessarily is. As to the proof of experience, have not explorers ever found savages the greatest of liars as well as great thieves? And was not universal deceit most dominant among the Greeks at the period when, as we know, their national decadence had already commenced?

I may as well say now the little I shall be able to say in this essay on the subject of Government. I mean government in general, for I may have occasion to allude to the military department of our government in speaking of war.

I have as yet said nothing on the subject. Though governments are a necessary result of the subdivision of labour which inevitably takes place with the advancing substitution of moral and intellectual, for physical agencies, i. e. are a necessary result of Civilization, it does not appear that any one of the forms of government hitherto discovered is absolutely necessary to the constant operation of the civilizing process. Some known to us are manifestly more favourable to that constant operation than others; but we have not yet seen the Civilizing and Civilized Government.

Governments are not a result simply of that subdivision of

labour to which man is ultimately conducted by the influence of the four chief natural impellants, so often named. They spring in a great degree from other two human impellants, which come into operation immediately after the first four have received moderate satisfaction; viz. man's desire to rule or regulate; and his craving for the admiration of his fellows. Mung tsze or Mencius, himself the second great political teacher of the Chinese, said whether in regretful self-censure or not, we do not learn: "Jin che hwan, tsae haou wei jin she, Man's chief disease (or craving) consists in his desire to be a teacher of his fellows." About 2,200 years later, Arnold, a much respected teacher of British youth, called "the desire of taking an active share in the great work of government, the highest earthly desire of the ripened mind."* Both sayings point to what I call man's desire to rule or regulate. As to man's craving for admiration, it operates more or less in almost every act of his life, which is not strictly personal. The manifestation of these two cravings constitutes overt ambition; and they, more than the wish for pay (as a means of satisfying his other desires) impel men in every country to strive for place in the ruling body. I have not hitherto noticed them, because they did not seem to me to lead specially to social results, which are generally felt to be embraced by the term Civilization.

But considering their unmistakeable universality and great strength, our view of Civilization, as a problem in practical solution, is not complete unless it includes their most perfect satisfaction. For Civilization requires that no craving, which forms an essential part of normal human nature, shall be ignored or absolutely repressed. It only requires that the indulgence of these cravings shall be limited by, or subordinated to, its own highest rule of doing to others as we would be done by. Any form of government, therefore, which steadily ignores or suppresses, in a large portion of society, man's desire to rule and his craving for admiration,

* Quoted from Creasy's Rise and Progress of the Constitution.

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is in so far discivilizing. Unless this discivilizing tendency is sufficiently counterbalanced by some other, potently working aids to civilization, such a government must inevitably produce national decay. The real cause of the Chinese being the only people that has, in spite of occasional checks and stoppages, progressed from the earliest times to the present, as one and the same strictly national nation, while so many others have risen to great power, and then utterly disappeared, is, that the Chinese, alone of all nations, have by one and the same measure systematically satisfied these two cravings, besides making them serve in the extension of mental cultivation and the conscious use of moral agencies rather than the physical, in man's dealings with man. It is their Public Service Competitive Examinations, and their fundamental maxim,-nationally inculcated by means of these Examinations, that men must be ruled by conquering their hearts, which has made the Chinese by thousands of years the oldest, and by hundreds of millions the largest of nations that the world has seen.

I now return to the discrepancies and conflicting notions enumerated on pages 573, 574. Mr. Mill's censure of the Americans, as mere dollar-hunters, occurs in the chapter "On the Stationary State."

Time prevents my condensing largely from it; and I must therefore assume, in making a few remarks, that those who read an Essay on Civilization, will take the trouble to refer to the book itself.

Mr. Mill points out, as a desirable state of society one in which each coming generation will be restrained by prudence and public opinion within the numbers necessary for replacing the actually existing one; the object of thus permanently arresting population at a certain amount, being to render the progress of wealth and of the productive arts unnecessary, and so get rid of the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life. We should then, Mr. Mill says, have a state