prefer to put simply the difficulties of the conception. A cessation of war is not only easily conceivable, but likely; but a cessation of strife of aspiration would mean a state of biological equilibrium throughout the civilised world. Now, pure equilibrium is by general consent a state only momentarily possible; and the state of dissolution of unions, were that to follow, would involve strife of opinion at least up to a certain point. But just as evolution is now visibly towards an abandonment of brute strife among societies, so may it be reasonably expected that the strife of ideals and doctrines within societies, though now perhaps emotionally intense in proportion to the limitation of brute warfare, will gradually be freed of malevolent passion as organisms refine further. Passion, in any case, has hitherto been at once motive-power and hindrance—the omnipresent force, since all ideas have their correlative emotion. A perception of this has led to some needless dispute over what is called the "economic theory" of history; critics insisting that men are ruled by non-economic as well as economic motives.[155] The solution is perfectly simple. Men are proximately ruled by their passions or emotions; and the supremacy of the economic factor consists in its being, for the majority, the most permanent director or stimulant of feeling. Therefore, the great social rectification, if it ever come, must needs be economic.
Certainly, on the principle laid down, there is a likelihood that strife of ideals and doctrines may be for a time intensified by the very process of social reform, should that go to lessen the stress of the industrial struggle for existence. It is easy to see that England has in the past hundred and twenty years escaped the stress of domestic strife which in France wrought successive revolutions, not so much by any virtue in its partially democratic constitution as by the fact that on the one hand a war was begun with France by the English ruling classes at an early stage of the first revolution, and that on the other hand the animal energies of the middle and lower classes were on the whole freer than those of the French to run in the channels of industrial competition. People peacefully fighting each other daily in trade, not to speak of sports, were thereby partly safeguarded from carrying the instincts of attraction and repulsion in politics to the length of insurrection and civil war. When the strife of trade became congested, the spirit of political strife, fed by hunger, broke out afresh, to be again eased off when the country had an exciting foreign war on hand. So obvious is this that it may be the last card of Conservatism to play off the war spirit against the reform spirit, as was done with some temporary success in England by Beaconsfield, and as is latterly being done by his successors.[156] The climaxing movement of political rationalism is evidently dependent on the limitation of the field of industrial growth and the absence of brute warfare. And if, as seems conceivable, political rationalism attains to a scientific provision for the well-being of the mass of the people, we shall have attained a condition in which the forces of attraction and repulsion, no longer flowing freely in the old social channels, may be expected to dig new ones or deepen those lately formed. The future channels, generally speaking, would tend to lie in the regions of political, ethical, and religious opinion; and the partial disuse of any one of these will tend to bring about the deepening of the others.
But this is going far ahead; and it is our business rather to make clear, with the help of an analysis of analogous types of civilisation, what has happened in the modern past of our country. The simple general laws under notice are universal, and will be found to apply in all stages of history, though the interpretation of many phases of life by their means may be a somewhat complex matter.
For instance, the life of China[157] (above discussed) and that of India may at first sight seem to give little colour to the assumption of a constant play of social attraction and repulsion. The "unprogressiveness of Asia" is dwelt on alike by many who know Asia and many who do not. But this relative unprogressiveness is to be explained, like European progress, in terms of the conditions. China is simply a case of comparative culture-stability and culture-isolation. The capital condition of progress in civilisation has always been, as aforesaid, the contact of divergent races whose independent culture-elements, though different, are not greatly different in grade and prestige. Now, the outside contacts of China, down till the eighteenth century, had been either with races which had few elements of civilisation to give her, like the Mongols, or with a civilisation little different from or less vigorous than her own, like that of India. Even these contacts counted for much, and Chinese history has been full of political convulsions, despite—or in keeping with—the comparative stagnation of Chinese culture. (On this see Peschel, Races of Men, Eng. tr. pp. 361–74. Cp. Huc, Chinese Empire, Eng. tr. ed. 1859, p. xvii; Walckenaer, Essai sur l'histoire de l'espèce humaine, 1798, pp. 175, 176; and Maine, Early History of Institutions, pp. 226, 227). The very pigtail which for Europe is the symbol of Chinese civilisation is only two hundred years old, having come in with the Mantchoo dynasty; and the policy of systematically excluding foreigners dates from the same period (Huc, p. 236). "No one," writes Professor Flint, "who has felt interest enough in that singular nation to study the researches and translations of Remusat, Pauthier, Julien, Legge, Plath, Faber, Eitel, and others, will hesitate to dismiss as erroneous the commonplace that it has been an unprogressive nation" (History of the Philosophy of History, vol. i, 1893, p. 88).
China was in fact progressive while the variety of stocks scattered over her vast area reacted on each other in virtue of variety of government and way of life:[158] it was when they were reduced under one imperial government that unity of state-system, coupled with the exclusion of foreign contacts, imposed stagnation. But the stagnation was real, and other factors contributed to its continuance. The fecundity of the soil has always maintained a redundant and therefore a poor and ignorant population—a condition which we have described as fatal to progress in culture if not counteracted, and which further favours the utter subjection of women and the consequent arrest of half the sources of variation. Mencius, speaking to the rulers of his day (3rd c. B.C.), declared with simple profundity that "They are only men of education who, without a certain livelihood, are able to maintain a fixed heart. As to the people, if they have not a certain livelihood it follows that they will not have a fixed heart. And if they have not a fixed heart there is nothing they will not do in the way of self-abandonment, of moral deflection, of depravity, and of wild license" (Legge, Life and Works of Mencius, 1875, p. 49). That lesson the rulers of China could not learn, any more than their European congeners.
We cannot, therefore, accede to Professor Flint's further remark that "The development and filiation of thought is scarcely less traceable in the history and literature of China than of Greece"—that is, if it be meant that Chinese history down till our own day may be so compared with the history of pagan Greece. The forces of fixation in China have been too strong to admit of this. The same factors have been at work in India, where, further, successive conquests, down till our own, had results very similar to those of the barbarian conquest of the Roman Empire. Yet at length, next door to China, in Japan, there has rapidly taken place a national transformation that is not to be paralleled in the world's history; and in India the Congress movement has developed in a way that twenty years ago was thought impossible.[159] And while these things are actually happening before the world's eyes, certain Englishmen vociferate more loudly than ever the formula of the "unchangeableness of Asia." A saner, though still a speculative view, is put forth by Mr. C.H. Pearson in his work on National Character. It was anticipated by—among others—M. Philarète Chasles. See his L'Angleterre politique, édit. 1878, pp. 250, 251. And Walckenaer, over a hundred years ago (Essai cited, p. 368), predicted the future civilisation of the vast plains of Tartary.
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