the introduction of trade or manufactures-which the history of all nations proves to be the great means of raising to power the democratic element. The wonderful foresight of the Spartan legislator was not possessed by the law-makers of other aristocracies; but though they did not sufficiently anticipate the causes of change to be able to prevent them, their legislation, unlike that of most other stages of national progress, was always intended to provide for the maintenance of the established order. They administer for the guidance of the commonwealth, as they would for their own estates; but above all, when their supremacy is in danger, they legislate for its support, and provide that military habits should be taught the youth of the aristocrats, so as to enable them to retain by the sword that which their ancestors had gained by it. Thus, says Aristotle, it would seem as if politics, in the view of the statesmen of Sparta, of Crete, of the Persians, the Thracians, and the Scythians, were the science of absolute power. In the progress of nations, may be traced two distinct currents of feeling-one, strong in the origin of nations, and becoming weaker as they advance; the other, hardly perceptible at first, becoming dominant in the later stages of national progress. They may be described, the one as predominating in sentiment, the other in calculation. The first inspires men rather to hold fast by those connected with them, whether by feudal or military ties, consanguinity, or neighbourhood. The aristocratic legislator regards those tied to him in any of these methods with a peculiar interest. Hence arise his notions of the duty of patronising home manufactures, of employing "our people" rather than foreigners, and estimating with the more tenderness each narrowing circle. as it approaches towards himself in the centre; he would rather give a job to his own tenants, or to his own parishioners, or to his own townsfolk, or his own country people, than to persons more remote, though better skilled. These sentiments are of the very essence of poetry, producing all that devotion to a chief, that village idolatry, and those local jealousies and rivalries which infuse into earlier national life a very large poetic tinge, and induce men of poetical mind in later ages to live mentally in the early ages; as, for example, Walter Scott, Wordsworth, Coleridge. When society becomes more settled, and the declining turbulence of the nobles calls forth less seldom to private and local war the great lords and their retainers, this current of sentiment, though not perhaps dimmed in its intensity, has a different practical manifestation. It then gives their usefulness and stability to the resident gentry, who, no longer by arms, but by a certain grandeur of position, by hospitality, participation in sports, and by the graceful benefactions of their "Ladies Bountiful," attach to themselves the same loyalty and devotion which belonged of old to the military chieftains their ancestors, and enable themselves to take the lead in influencing thought in their neighbourhood, not by intimidation, but by the force of example and the persuasion of sympathy. It may be no longer necessary to lead their dependants to war, but they gather round them the similar interests of their neighbours, prepared to defend them in the national councils, to which the gentry go with all the prestige and power of the ancient Roman patrons. As Warwick Castle recalls to our imaginations, perhaps better than any other of the feudal remains of this country, the earlier ages of a settled warrior aristocracy, so the Elizabethan mansions of England remind us of the time when persons believed with Raleigh, "that a resident gentry in the provinces are the garrisons of good order spread through the realm," and acted upon that belief, which even now is not entirely exploded. As the other current predominates, men consider rather what will be advantageous to themselves and to the general community, in whose welfare they partake. If it is cheaper to buy of foreigners they will not hesitate to do so, although their fellow-countrymen may be starving at their doors, because if they employ foreigners for what foreigners are fittest, foreigners will employ their countrymen for what their countrymen are fittest; and this will in the end be more profitable to both parties than if each were employed at what they were least fit to execute, merely because they lived near their employers. Machinery, and the duty of every private trader to attend solely to his private interest, can be defended on the same grounds. None, perhaps, have carried it further in practice than the chief magistrate of Antwerp, who when that city was besieged by the Spaniards openly sold arms, ammunition, and provisions to the besiegers, and gloried in it, and said that to prosecute his trade he would sail through hell at the risk of singeing his sails. He was not wrong, say the political economists, because if the arms and provisions were taken by his countrymen, so much the more gain to them; if delivered to the enemy and paid for, so much the more gain to him and to the state of which he was a member. Somebody must supply the arms and food to the Spaniards, and was it not better for Antwerp that the purchase money should belong to an inhabitant of that city.* In the same way the Venetians, who incurred the odium of the rest of Christendom for driving a trade with the Turks, might be defended. This spirit is essential to those who would be good political economists. Coleridge, for instance, who was continually discussing questions belonging to that science, always erred, because he looked at them in the sentimental point of view the point of view in which early ages naturally regarded them. Those who often unconsciously to themselves regard each man as an equal unit, and consider it desirable for the interest of the nation that each man should be * This is Franklin's defence of him: Works, ii. 387. able to purchase the greatest possible amount of the products of nature and art at the lowest possible price, disapprove of the existence of gentlemen; and if they must exist they had better (say these theorists) reside in towns, for, according to this view, a resident country gentry inculcate idleness, and keep a crowd of retainers and half-employed dependants, while a large portion of their land is given up to parks, and game-preserves, and hunting grounds; whereas if all the gentry are agglomerated in the capital, the number of their retainers kept in unproductive idleness is less, and their money goes to support industrious artisans, who manufacture silks, and carpets, and knicknacks, while their estates are managed by agents, who extract much more rent from the tenants, and consequently compel the latter to produce more from the ground wherewith to pay it. The state of society which ought to-I know not whether it does excite the most admiration from this school is the state of society in France. There are, comparatively speaking, no great country mansions which would lie waste while the owners are at Paris, and the Parisian plutocrats spend their money in the purchase of articles of luxury and show, the production of which is by economists supposed to contribute to the national wealth. There is no class of gentry gathering round them local interests and sympathies. The Parisian plutocrat, whatever may have been the protective policy of his government. has never been personally particular as to the place whence his luxuries come, nor is he particular as to the persons upon whom his money is lavished; while scarce any of the surface of France is devoted to parks, pleasure grounds, or game preserves. Probably the economist would rather see the plutocrats of Spain spend their lives as they do in the costly idleness of the capital, than upon their estates; though his satisfaction with Spanish society can hardly be so great as with French, since in Spain the possession of domains by the nobles, though they never inhabit them, takes so much land out of cultivation. "The Madrid life of the grandees,” said one who was not an economist, but possessed an intimate acquaintance with that country, "is truly deplorable; they herd amongst each other, and yet unsocially; they are mere funnels of expense. They waste their ill-paid revenues in tasteless gaspillage, without order, show, elegance, luxury, or common hospitality; they are ruined by their establishments of servants who live under their roofs - the expensive clientela of Rome without the support. Their huge, uncomfortable, ill-furnished houses are whitened sepulchres, wherein all that enters is consumed in unseemly corruption. Meanwhile their uncultivated domains, decaying hamlets, povertystricken tenantry, dismantled castles, treeless parks, and weed-encumbered gardens, demonstrate the effects of a constant absenteeism, and the complete annihilation of the wholesome relation of landlord and tenant. These are the effects of absenteeism in Spain." These are, then, the two opposite currents running through national society - the one extreme conspicuous in most feudal ages, the other conspicuous in the late ages of plutocracy; which latter, as has been sufficiently noted, are the ages when political economy is most in vogue. Each has its school of statesmen- the former, Raleigh, and all our old English statesmen; the latter, Mr. M'Culloch, and those who, throwing overboard sentiment and emotion, pursue reason and calculation exclusively, and, in short, worship Mammon scientifically. Now English society -as in fact does, more or less, the society of every nation in its acme-combines these two opposite cur rents. "An English gentleman who lives on his estate," says Archbishop Whately, "is considered as a public benefactor, not only by exerting himself, if he does so, in promoting sound religion, and pure morality, and useful * Annotations to Bacon's Essays, p. 358. |