THE days have slain the days, and the seasons have gone by And brought me the summer again, Those songs half sung that yet were all and here on the grass I lie

divineThat woke Romance, the queen, to reign ere I meddled with right and with wrong. afreshWide lies the mead as of old, Had been but preludes from that lyre of and the river is creeping along

Could thy rare spirit's wings have pierced that turns its weedy stream;

"Life, the Khan !". while trailed the in the best of the latter June. corpse along, They are busy winning the hay, Sweeping the streets with flesh thou and the life and the picture they make,

From The Contemporary Review. THE PROSPECTS OF THE CIVILIZED

WORLD.1

THERE is a distinction in kind between predictions which refer to a remote future, and which are necessarily, if not professedly, more or less arbitrary, and those which profess to infer what soon will be from what now is.

Quidquid agunt homines, votum, timor, ira, voluptas,

may

quickly awaken the reader's respect; and he will be impressed by the keenness and originality of observation, the philosophic calmness, the apparent disinterestedness and openness of mind, with which tendencies are traced and probable results indicated. And the author touches upon all the things that concern us most closely upon our beA prophecy of the latter class, if it re-liefs as to the unseen world and the life lates to social history, is a criticism of beyond the grave, upon the relations of life. The Bible prophecies, according husband and wife and of parents and to the truer view of them which now children, upon town and country, upon prevails, are of this nature. They paint, trained armies and volunteers, upon indeed, imaginative scenes of ultimate poetry and art, upon science and inglory; but for the most part they ex-dustrial invention: press the liveliest interest in the present, and declare what, under the divine purpose and law, the present is about to bring forth in the future. Such a Gaudia, discursus, nostri est farrago libelli. prophecy pronounces judgment upon But what will probably most astonish existing tendencies, and serves both the reader is the success with which for a warning and for an encourage- Mr. Pearson conceals any interest he ment. No philosophy of causation will feel as a fellow-man in human drive out of the heads of living men doings and fortunes. There is somethe belief that they can do something thing abnormal in the dispassionate to guide the course of things, and so coolness with which he reports upon to modify the future. Men have always the world and the downward way on been accustomed to assume, and they which it is going-a coolness which will go on assuming, that they can set the impatience of his readers may be themselves against a tendency which tempted to resent as cynical. Almost they believe to be dangerous, and give the only sign of warmth is in the ansupport by their endeavors to one that gry bitterness of the remarks on "the promises to lead to good. Some of Churches" and theology, though some those who are most convinced that the other antipathies may be guessed. We future is a necessary consequence to be cannot help wondering what purpose developed out of the present, and most the author had in writing the book; sure about manifest destiny, happen to we feel as we read that so serious a be at the same time most earnest and thinker must have had some purpose importunate in denouncing what they besides that of making a good many consider to be hurtful habits and move- of his fellow-men unhappy; but the ments, and in urging their fellow-men object he had in view is not apparent. to adopt and favor those which they He gives us a dismal prospect, and judge to be beneficial. A forecast of he writes as if he held a brief for the future which shows genuine insight discouragement; but here and there he is not only interesting to intellectual suggests that it does not much signify. curiosity, but it can scarcely fail to He gives us leave to reject his forecast have some moral influence. if we please, on the ground that raNo one, I think, can read Mr. C. H. tional forecasts have often turned out Pearson's recent book without being in mistaken. Where he does refer to the an unusual degree excited and dis-effect which his prophecies may have quieted by it. The extraordinary range upon his readers' minds, his language of knowledge exhibited in it must is curiously confused, and we speculate 1 National Life and Character: a Forecast. By in vain as to what he can really mean. Thus at the close of chapter i. he says

Charles H. Pearson.

that, for us of the Aryan race and the Christian faith,

our pride of place will be humiliated. . . We shall wake to find ourselves elbowed

and hustled, and perhaps even thrust aside, by people whom we looked down upon as servile, and thought of as bound always to

minister to our needs.

The solitary consolation will be, that the changes have been inevitable. It has been our work to organize and create, to carry peace and law and

order over the world, that others may enter

in and enjoy. Yet in some of us the feeling of caste is so strong that we are not sorry to think we shall have passed away before that day arrives.

when the higher races will lose their noblest elements, when we shall ask nothing from the day but to live, nor from the future but that we may not deteriorate. Even so, there will still remain to us ourselves. Sim

ply to do our work in life, and to abide the

issue, if we stand erect before the eternal calm as cheerfully as our fathers faced the eternal unrest, may be nobler training for our souls than the faith in progress (p. 344). Here, again, we are evidently our descendants. "Eternal" is always an impressive word, but why is it applied either to the calm or to the unrest? The unrest, at all events, was not eternal, for it will have been superseded by the calm; and the calm at any moment can scarcely be more than a stage in the progress of decay ad non esse. Our fathers are not happily described as having cheerfully faced unrest, whether eternal or temporary; it should rather be said of them that, sustained by faith in Divine Providence, and animated by hope of a better future, they threw themselves into the struggle of their time, and were a part of its "unrest." To do our work in life, and abide the issue, has a good old sound; but what is the work of life to be, when people will ask nothing from the day but to live, when they know of no Taskmaster who sets them their work and takes account of its performance, when they see clearly that any good efforts which they might put forth would only make things worse, when the savor of va cant lives will go up to God from every home"? (p. 338). I could willingly be lieve that our author secretly intended to suggest to his readers an unspoken alternative; that he would wish “some of us" to say, "These depressing prognostics are not easy to refute; it looks as if decay may be coming upon our world; but it will be better to resist the coming evil with all our might than to stare blankly at it, or to acquiesce cheerfully in it; we have still enough of faith and hope at the back of our minds and the bottom of our hearts to give us courage to die fighting."

If we, who will have passed away, are
to wake, it will be presumably in the
persons of our descendants. For whom,
then, will the consolation be? For us,
to whose pain the author allows no
better name than that of injured caste-
feeling? Our consolation is, that we
shall not see, except in prevision, the
melancholy condition to which our hu-
mane endeavors, aided by opportune
circumstances, are bringing the world.
The deluge will be after our time. This
is a consolation which I should suppose
to be hardly worth offering. But it is
about as satisfactory as that which our
descendants will have, in the reflection
that the changes were inevitable. This
stoical acquiescence in the inevitable is
the solitary moral attitude which Mr.
Pearson suggests to his readers. But
can he really think that he is offering
them consolation? I should suggest
for this purpose the reflection :
did our best; it is not our fault, but
Nature's." Still stranger is the passage
which concludes the volume. The
author seems to feel that he must say
something in the way of moral reflec-
tion; but he has nothing to say, and he
does not shrink from saying that noth-
ing in curiously unmeaning phrases:

"We

When Christianity began to appear grotesque and incredible, men reconciled them selves to the change by belief in an age of reason, of enlightenment, of progress. It is now more than probable that our science, our civilization, our great and real advance in the practice of government, are only bringing us nearer to the day when the lower races will predominate in the world,

It seems possible that Mr. Pearson may have been vexed by the cheerful anticipations of those who believe in

reason; enlightenment, and progress.ganization which is already passing Those imaginative spirits who are most away, and will bring with it general excited by the movements of our time well-being, and oblige every one to be have been dreaming of universal peace amiable. To disturb these pleasant and happiness. In epochs of change, prospects of the augmenting happiness forecasts of the future have not been of the superior races, Mr. Pearson uncommon, and prophecies of evil have brings to the front the Chinese, the always added a growling accompaniment Negroes, the Indians of the tropical to the hopeful forecasts. There are parts of America, and the natives of plenty of disaffected persons in these British India. His primary argument days who rather enjoy telling us that is, that the yellow and black races are we are going to the bad; who look with bound to multiply and advance, and so disgust on triumphant democracy, and to squeeze into narrower quarters the are sure that we are in the way to lose hitherto dominant races of the temperrefinement and religion, if not on the ate zone. eve of a period of robbery and rioting. But these Cassandra warnings do not aim at being scientific; they are rather expressions of displeasure at the turn things are taking than attempts to conceive the actual condition of the world during the coming generations. It is impossible to take part in making changes, or to rejoice in their being made, without believing that mankind seen and tested in Australia. China will on the whole and in the long run be the better for them. The youthful and poetical, who dip into the future far as human eye can see, have always had visions of a better and happier as well as more wonderful world. Just now, philanthropy, which pervades all classes, and socialism, which is the creed of those who are most zealous in promoting social change, are looking forward to a millennium of general comfort and international harmony. Attempts have been made to give realistic representations of the socialist world of the future, in which life is to be made easy and happy for all by a skilful reconciliation of interests. Through no such revolution, but as a gradual result of evolution, a satisfactory future has been anticipated by philosophers also. Mr. J. S. Mill gave economic reasons for expecting a stationary condition of society, in which a quiet and general purIn time a distant time truly, but none the less certain the European, the quicksuit of things really desirable may developing race, will disappear altogether, the place of eager competition and the Medical science and philanthropy, increasing of wealth. Mr. Herbert though admirable for the individual, absoSpencer convinces himself that, by the lutely necessary for a high degree of civilcontinued action of existing causes, anization, and indispensable for the evolution industrial organization of society will of scientific thought, are decidedly detricompletely supersede the military or mental to the race. They keep alive and

The first and gravest danger with which Europe is threatened is from the expansion of China. Mr. Pearson, a distinguished Oxford student, has been minister of education in Victoria, and he looks back with keen satisfaction upon the policy adopted by the Australians towards the Chinese. What the yellow race is capable of doing was

take

has a multitudinous population, trained to habits of industry, habituated to privation and hardships, of singular toughness in body and spirit, ready to emigrate to any land to which they are attracted by a hope of bettering themselves. Mr. Pearson's auguries with regard to the future development of China have been to some extent anticipated by other observers, who have predicted that both Russia and the British Empire may find in that power a formidable rival on their Oriental frontiers. I have come across a physiological forecast, which goes beyond Mr. Pearson's, in a paper by Mr. S. S. Buckman on "Some Laws of Heredity, and their Application to Man," read before the Cotteswold Naturalists' Field Club, and published in their "Proceedings," vol. x., part iii. :

-

allow to multiply just those weakly mem- | throughout Asia, from England and Gerbers who would be so surely and summarily many (pp. 125, 126). weeded out by that rough-and-ready process known as Natural Selection. In the distant future, when that over-population which they do so much to cherish (teste

This is the check with which England is most immediately threatened -a deadly competition in the Eastern

markets. And Mr. Pearson makes the

66

India at the present day) precipitates a genuine struggle for existence, the races in shrewd observation, that "the Chinese which natural selection has been checked would be less dangerous than they are the most will assuredly go to the wall. A if they were as warlike as the Turks in race in which a high level of physical vital- the sixteenth and seventeenth centuity is maintained by a constant struggle for ries, because in that case they would existence under arduous but healthy condi- waste their reproductive forces in tions. a race able to subsist on a sparing arms quantity of food from the same cause, a race unaffected by so-called civilization, and a race sufficiently prolific withal, is the one which is destined to occupy the place of the Europeans. Strange as it may seem, the Chinese appear to be fitted for the work (pp. 315, 316).

Mr. Pearson takes shorter views, and does not look forward so far as to the extinction of the European race, but is content to threaten it with decline and torpor. He sees other inferior races advancing with minatory strides, the lower civilization showing more vigor than the higher; but it is with China that we have to reckon first :

(p. 96). Every year seems to increase the pre-eminence of industrial over essentially martial nations" (p. 95). But he believes that China will soon become formidable as a military power: –

Neither does it seem possible to imagine that the great inert force of China will not some day be organized and rendered mobile and capable of military aggression.

We have compelled her to come into the fellowship of nations. She has adopted steamers, and European artillery and army organization; she has accepted the telegraph; she is about to introduce railways; and she has credit enough to carry out the changes she needs with foreign capital. On three sides of her lie countries that she may

easily seize, over which very often she has some old claim, and in the climate of which her people can live. Flexible as Jews, they can thrive on the mountain plateaux of Thibet and under the sun of Singapore; more versatile even than Jews, they are excellent laborers, and not without merit as soldiers and sailors; while they have a capacity for trade which no other nation of the East possesses. They do not need even the accident of a man of genius to develop their magnificent future. Ordinary statesmanship, adopting the improvements of Europe without offending the customs and prejudices of the people, may make them a State which no Power in Europe will dare to disregard; with an army which can march by fixed stages across Asia; and a fleet which could hold its own against any the strongest of European Powers could afford to keep permanently in Chinese waters (pp. 111, 112).

No one in California or Australia, where the effects of Chinese competition have been studied, has, I believe, the smallest doubt that Chinese laborers, if allowed to come in freely, could starve all the white men in either country out of it, or force them to submit to harder work and a much lower standard of wages. In Victoria, a single trade, that of furniture-making, was taken possession of and ruined for white men, within the space of something like five years. Only two large employers excluded Chinamen altogether; and white men, where they were retained, were kept on only to supply a limited demand for the best kind of work. Now, what Chinamen can do in Melbourne... Chinamen at home could do incomparably better, if they worked in establishments fitted up with the best machinery and were directed by foremen knowing the European taste. Does any one doubt that the day is at hand when China will have cheap fuel from her coalThe reader sees with what verve our mines, cheap transport by railways and steamers, and will have founded technical author argues his case. schools to develop her industries? When-chief points is, that emigration has of ever that day comes, she may wrest the late years done much to promote the control of the world's markets, especially prosperity of the European, and espe

One of his