III.] THE NEW CODE OF SEXUAL MORALITY. 97

anything look so like old-fashioned impudence." Reverse the precepts of "pure religion breathing household laws," which have made the family what it is in Europe, and apparently you will get the code of sexual morality and domestic piety prescribed by the new gospel. We should, however,

wrong Mr. Morley if we supposed him to approve, or to recommend, unbounded licence in the gratification of the sexual appetite. On the contrary, he expressly characterises the view of "the great intellectual leaders," above set forth as "disastrous sophisms, "* and solemnly eulogizes, "some continence and order in the relations of men and women as a good thing." "Some!" It is vague. Still, whatever it may amount to, we may be thankful for it. To speak frankly, however-and the occasion calls for plain speaking-I fear it does not amount to much. In a suggestive passage dealing with the early excesses of "the great preacher of the Declaration of the Rights of Man"-Robespierre Mr. Morley counsels, not "the keeping under, the bringing into subjection," but "the better ordering and governance" of "the young appetite,"

*Voltaire, p. 150. But he proceeds, more suo, to lay the blame on those who "made morality an appendage of a set of theological mysteries!"

↑ Rousseau, vol. i. p. 217. See also Diderot, vol. ii. pp. 20-23. The "castigo corpus meum et in servitutem redigo," of the Vulgate-emphatic as it is-very inadequately represents the force of the original : “ ὑπωπιάξω μου τὸ σῶμα, καὶ δουλαγωγῶ.”

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and insists that thereby "a diviner brightness would be given to the earth." * Again, in describing Rousseau's mock espousals with his filthy concubine, while declining to pronounce authoritatively whether this was or was not, "a marriage according to the truth of Nature," he admonishes us that "Rousseau was as free to choose his own rites as more sacramental performers."†

Paternity appears to be of as litle account as marriage in the new gospel, which is perhaps natural. Evidently it can be little more than matter of opinion in such a state of society as that which "the progressive formula" must produce. It will be of interest in this connection to hear Mr. Morley upon the great author of the Revolutionary dogma in the character of father. After allowing that "no word is to be said in extenuation of Rousseau's crime" in sending his new-born children, one after another, to the Foundling Hospital, he proceeds :

"At any rate, let Rousseau be a little free from excessive reproach from all clergymen, sentimentalists, and others, who do their worst to uphold the common and rather bestial opinion in favour of reckless propagation, and who, if they do not advocate the despatch of children to public institutions, still encourage a selfish incontinence which ultimately falls in burdens on others than the offenders, and which turns the family into a scene of squalor

Miscellanies, vol. i. p. 7. † Rousseau, vol. i. p. 130,

III.] THE NEW ETHICS AND HOME LIFE.

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and brutishness, producing a kind of parental influence that is far more disastrous and demoralising than the absence of it in public institutions can possibly be. If the propagation of children without regard to their maintenance be either a virtue or a necessity, and if afterwards the only alternatives are their maintenance in an asylum, on the one hand, and their maintenance in the degradation of a poverty-stricken home on the other, we should not hesitate to give people who act as Rousseau acted all that credit for self-denial and high moral courage which he so audaciously claimed for himself. It really seems to be no more criminal to produce children with the deliberate intention of abandoning them to public charity, as Rousseau did, than it is to produce them in deliberate reliance on the besotted maxim that he who sends mouths will send meat, or any other of the spurious saws which make Providence do duty for self-control, and add to the gratification of physical appetite the grotesque luxury of religious unction." *

How irreconcileably at variance are the traditions of the English home with the Revolutionary ethics may be judged from the following passage:—

"There is probably no uglier growth of time than that mean and poor form of domesticity which has always been too apt to fascinate the English imagination ever since the last great effort of the Rebellion, and which rose to the climax of its popularity when George III. won all hearts by living like a farmer. Instead of the fierce light beating about a throne, it played lambently upon a stye.† And the nation who admired, imitated. When the Regent came, and with him that coarse profligacy which has alternated with cloudy insipidity in the annals of the line, the honest part of the world, out of antipathy to the son, was driven even further into

Rousseau, vol. i. p. 127.

It is worth while to compare the judgment of M. le Play. "En Angleterre les mœurs avaient été restaurées sous la salutaire influence des bons exemples donnés par George III.," writes that publicist. (L'Organisation du Travail, p, 188.)

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domestic sentimentality of a greasy kind, than it had gone from affection for the sire." *

"Byron," Mr. Morley continues, "helped to clear the air of this." That, apparently is his great merit, and brings him within "the progressive formula." "The domestic sentiment almost disappears in those works which made Byron most popular, or else it only appears, to be banished with reproach. This is quite in accordance with the revolutionary spirit."

So much must suffice to indicate the nature of the Revolutionary religion, its faith and morals, of which Mr. Morley is the zealous preacher. How burning his zeal is will have been evident from the passages of his works which I have cited. We may truly say of him, as he has truly said of Condorcet, that there is "something theological in his hatred of theology;"† that in every page of his writings "the distant ground-swell of repressed passion sounds in the ear;" that "urgent, heated, impetuous, with a heavy vehemence all his own," he is "the incarnation of the Revolutionary Spirit." He insists strongly that those who are convinced that the Christian " dogma is not true, and that

Miscellanies, vol. i. p. 242. † Miscellanies, vol ii. p. 175. ‡ Ibid. p. 181.

111.] A FUNCTION OF REVOLUTIONARY DEVOTEES. 101 both dogma and church must be slowly replaced by higher forms of faith"-we have seen what those "higher forms of faith" are "have as distinctly a function in the community as the ministers. and upholders of the churches." And this function of course is to destroy the dogma and the churches. That is the great end. The means must vary according to time and place. But there is one means just now of universal application throughout Europe, which is recommended both by its obvious efficacy and by the authority of the revolutionary leaders. What this means is, let us learn from a personage who being dead yet speaketh-the late M. Paul Bert-" a new glory of the Revolution," as he was designated by a sorrowful and admiring countryman. The designation seems to me very just. I discern in him a worthy successor of Chaumette, not inferior either in impiety or in ferocity to his great prototype. Unpropitious fates withheld from him the power of rivalling the exploits of that Apostle of the guillotine. He was reduced to seek his solace, during the intervals of blasphemy, in the blood and cries of creatures lower than man in the scale of sentient existence. Possibly, he may have found some consolation for the inferiority of his victims in the exquisite refinements of prolonged cruelty, whereby he was

*Compromise, p. 221.