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THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY.— SUPPLEMENT. 



What it implies is a strong sense of the necessi- 

 ty of knowing scientifically, as the expression is, 

 the things which have to be known by us — of 

 knowing them systematically, by the regular and 

 right process, and in the only real way. And this 

 sense the Germans especially have. Finally, there 

 is the power of social life and manners. And even 

 the Athenians themselves, perhaps, have hardly 

 felt this power so much as the French. 



Voltaire, in a famous passage, where he extols 

 the age of Louis XIV., and ranks it with the chief 

 epochs in the civilization of our race, has to spe- 

 cify the gift bestowed on us by the age of Louis 

 XIV., as the age of Pericles, for instance, bestowed 

 on us its art and literature, and the Italian Re- 

 nascence its revival of art and literature. And 

 Voltaire shows all his acuteness in fixing on the 

 gift to name. It is not the sort of gift which we 

 expect to see named. The great gilt of the age 

 of Louis XIV. to the world, says Voltaire, was 

 this : V esprit de societe — the spirit of society, the 

 social spirit. And another French writer, looking 

 for the good points in the old French nobility, 

 says that this, at any rate, is to be said in their 

 favor : they established a high and charming ideal 

 of social intercourse and manners, for a nation 

 formed to profit by such an ideal, and which has 

 profited by it ever since. And in America, per- 

 haps, we see the disadvantages of having social 

 equality before there has been any such high 

 standard of social life and manners formed. We 

 are not disposed iff England, most of us, to attach 

 all this importance to social intercourse and man- 

 ners. Yet Burke says, " There ought to be a 

 system of manners in every nation which a well- 

 formed mind would be disposed to relish." And 

 the power of social life and manners is truly, as 

 we have seen, one of the great elements in our 

 humanization. L'nless we have cultivated it we 

 are incomplete. The impulse for cultivating it is 

 not, indeed, a moral impulse. It is by no means 

 identical with the moral impulse to help our neigh- 

 bor and to do him good. Yet, in many ways, it 

 works to a like end. It brings men together, 

 makes them feel the need of one another, be con- 

 siderate of one another, understand one another. 

 But, above all things, it is a promoter of equality. 

 It is by the humanity of their manners that men 

 are made equal. " A man thinks to show himself 

 my equal," says Goethe, "by being grob — that is 

 to say, coarse and rude ; he does not show him- 

 self my equal, he shows himself grob." But a 

 community having humane manners is a commu- 

 nity of equals, and, in such a community, great 

 social inequalities have really no meaning, while 



they are, at the same time, a menace and an em- 

 barrassment to perfect ease of social intercourse. 

 A community with the spirit of society is emi- 

 nently, therefore, a community with the spirit of 

 equality. A nation with a genius for society, like 

 the French or the Athenians, is irresistibly drawn 

 toward equality. From the first moment when the 

 French people, with its congenital sense for the 

 power of social intercourse and manners, came 

 into existence, it was on its road to equality. 

 When it had once got a high standard of social 

 manners abundantly established, and, at the same 

 time, the natural, material necessity for the feudal 

 inequality of classes and property pressed upon it 

 no longer, the French people introduced equality 

 and made the French Revolution. It was not the 

 spirit of philanthropy which mainly caused that 

 Revolution, neither was it the spirit of envy ; it 

 was the spirit of society. • 



The well-being of the many comes out more 

 and more distinctly, as time goes on, as the ob- 

 ject we must pursue. An individual or a class, 

 concentrating their efforts upon their own well- 

 being exclusively, do but beget troubles both for 

 others and for themselves also. No individual 

 life can be truly prosperous, passed, as Obermann 

 says, in the midst of men who suffer — passee 

 au milieu des generations qui sovffrent. To the 

 noble soul, it cannot be happy ; to the ignoble, it 

 cannot be secure. Socialistic and communistic 

 schemes have generally, however, a fatal defect ; 

 they are content with too low and material a 

 standard of well-being. That instinct of perfec- 

 tion, which is the master-power in humanity, al- 

 ways rebels at this, and frustrates the work. 

 Many are to be made partakers of well-being, 

 true ; but the ideal of well-being is not to be, on 

 that account, lowered and coarsened. M. de La- 

 veleye, the political economist, who is a Belgian 

 and a Protestant, and whose testimony, therefore, 

 we may the more readily take about France, says 

 that Fiance, being the country of Europe where 

 the soil is more divided than anywhere except in 

 Switzerland and Norway, is at the same time the 

 country where material well-being is most widely 

 spread, where wealth has of late years increased 

 most, and where population is least outrunning 

 the limits which, for the comfort and progress of 

 the working-classes themselves, seem necessary. 

 This may go for a good deal. It supplies an an- 

 swer to what Sir Erskine May says about the bad 

 effects of equality upon French prosperity. But 

 I will quote to you, from Mr. Hamerton, what 

 goes, I think, for yet more. Mr. Hamerton is an 

 excellent observer and reporter, and has lived for 



