EQUALITY. 



485 



Sir Erskine May, after saying, as you have heard, 

 that France has pursued social equality, and has 

 come to fearful troubles, demoralization, and in- 

 tellectual stoppage, by doing so, continues thus : 

 " Yet is she high, if not the first, in the scale of 

 civilized nations." Why, here is a curious thing, 

 surely! A nation pursues social equality, sup- 

 posed to be an utterly false and baneful ideal ; it 

 arrives, as might have been expected, at fearful 

 misery and deterioration by doing so ; and yet, 

 at the same time, it is high, if not the first, in the 

 scale of civilized nations. What do we mean by 

 civilized? Sir Erskine May does not seem to 

 have asked himself the question. So we will try 

 to answer it for ourselves. Civilization is the 

 humanization of man in society. To be human- 

 ized is to comply with the true law of our human 

 nature: servare modum, Jinemque tenere, Natu- 

 ramque sequi, says Lucan ; " to keep our meas- 

 ure, and to hold fast our end, and to follow Na- 

 ture." To be humanized is to make progress 

 toward this, our true and full humanity. And to 

 be civilized is to make progress toward this in 

 civil society; in that civil society "without 

 which," says Burke, "man could not by any pos- 

 sibility arrive at the perfection of which his na- 

 ture is capable, nor even make a remote and 

 faint approach to it." To be the most civilized 

 of nations, therefore, is to be the nation which 

 comes nearest to human perfection, in the state 

 which that perfection essentially demands. And 

 a nation which has been brought by the pursuit 

 of social equality to moral deterioration, intel- 

 lectual stoppage, and fearful troubles, is perhaps 

 the nation which has come nearest to human per- 

 fection in that state which such perfection essen- 

 tially demands ! M. Michelet himself, who would 

 deny the demoralization and the stoppage, and 

 call the fearful troubles a sublime expiation for 

 the sins of the whole world, could hardly say 

 more for France than this. Certainly Sir Erskine 

 May never intended to say so much. But into 

 what a difficulty has he somehow run himself, 

 and what a good action would it be to extricate 

 him from it ! Let us see whether the perform- 

 ance of that good action may not also be a way 

 of clearing our minds as to the uses of equality. 

 When we talk of man's advance toward his 

 full humanity, we think of an advance, not along 

 one line only, but several. Certain races and na- 

 tions, as we know, are on certain lines preemi- 

 nent and representative. The Hebrew nation 

 was preeminent on one great line.' "What na- 

 tion," it was justly said by their lawgiver, " hath 

 statutes and judgments so righteous as the law 



which I set before you this day ? Keep there- 

 fore and do them ; for this is your wisdom and 

 your understanding in the sight of the nations 

 which shall hear all these statutes and say, Sure- 

 ly this great nation is a wise and understanding 

 people ! " The Hellenic race was preeminent on 

 other lines. Isocrates could say of Athens : " Our 

 city has left the rest of the world so far behind 

 in philosophy and eloquence, that those educated 

 by Athens have become the teachers of the rest 

 of mankind ; and so well has she done her part, 

 that the name of Greeks seems no longer to stand 

 for a race, but to stand for intelligence itself, 

 and they who share in our culture are called 

 Greeks even before those who are merely of our 

 own blood." The power of intellect and science, 

 the power of beauty, the power of social life and 

 manners — these are what Greece so felt, and 

 fixed, and may stand for. They are great ele- 

 ments in our humanization. The power of con- 

 duct is another great element ; and this was so 

 felt and fixed by Israel that we can never with 

 justice refuse to allow Israel, in spite of all his 

 shortcomings, to stand for it. 



So you see that in being humanized we have 

 to move along several lines, and that on certain 

 lines certain nations find their strength, and take 

 a lead. We may elucidate the thing yet further. 

 Nations now existing may be said to feel, or to 

 have felt, the power of this or that element in our 

 humanization so signally that they are character- 

 ized by it. No one who knows'this country would 

 deny that it is characterized, in a remarkable de- 

 gree, by a sense of the power of conduct. Our 

 feeling for religion is one part of this ; our indus- 

 try is another. What foreigners so much remark 

 in us — our public spirit, our love, amid all our 

 liberty, for public order and for stability — are 

 parts of it, too. The power of beauty was so felt 

 by the Italians that their art revived, as we know, 

 the almost lost idea of beauty, and the serious and 

 successful pursuit of it. Cardinal Antonelli, speak- 

 ing to me about the education of the common peo- 

 ple in Rome, said that they were illiterate, indeed, 

 but whoever mingled with them at any public show, 

 and heard them pass judgment on the beauty or 

 ugliness of what came before them — " e brutio" 

 "e hello' 1 '' — would find that their judgment agreed 

 admirably, in general, with just what the most 

 cultivated people would say. Even at the present 

 time, then, the Italians are preeminent in feeling 

 the power of beauty. The power of knowledge, 

 in the same way, is eminently an influence with the 

 Germans. This by no means implies, as is some- 

 times supposed, a high and fine general culture. 



