Chapter XI: Section III (3)

Times may have been when the great mass, while placed in such decided separation from the upper orders, combined such a quietude with their ignorance, that they had little other than submissive feelings toward these superiors, whose property, almost, for all service and obsequiousness, they were accustomed to consider themselves; when no question would occur to them why there should be so vast a difference of condition between beings of the same race; when no other proof was required of the right appointment of their lot, however humble it might be, than their being, and their forefathers having been, actually in it; and when they did not presume, hardly in thought, to make any inferences from the fact of the immense disproportion of numbers and consequent physical strength between them and their superiors. [Footnote: Here, however, it should be observed that in the former age, when there was far less of jealous invidious feeling between the upper and lower classes than has latterly intervened, there was a more amicable manner of intercommunication. The settled and perfectly recognized state of subordination precluded on the one side, all apprehension of encroachment, and on the other the disposition to it.] But the times of this perfect, unquestioning, unmurmuring succumbency under the actual allotment have passed away; except in such regions as the Russian empire, where they have yet long to continue. In other states of Europe, but especially in our own, the ignorance of the people has nowhere prevented them from acquiring a sense of their strength and importance; with a certain ill-conceived, but stimulant notion, of some change which they think ought to take place in their condition. How, indeed, should it have been possible for them to remain unaware of this strength and importance, while the whole civilized world was shaken with a practical and tremendous controversy between the two grand opposed orders of society, concerning their respective rights; or that they should not have taken a strong, and from the rudeness of their mental condition, a fierce interest, in the principle and progress of the strife? And how should they have failed to know that, during this controversy, innumerable persons raised from the lower rank by talent and spirit, had left no place on earth except in courts (and hardly even there) for the dotage of fancying some innate difference between the classes distinguished in the artificial order of society?

The effect of all this is gone deep into the minds of great numbers who are not excited, in consequence, to any worthy exertion for raising themselves, individually, from their degraded condition, by the earnest application and improvement of their means and faculties. The feeling of many of them seems to be, that they must and will sullenly abide by the ill-starred fate of their order, till some great comprehensive alteration in their favor shall absolve them from that bond of hostile sentiment, in which they make common cause against the superior classes; and shall create a state of things in which it shall be worth while for the individual to make an effort to raise himself. We can at best, (they seem to say,) barely maintain, with the utmost difficulty, a miserable life; and you talk to us of cultivation, of discipline, of moral respectability, of efforts to come out from our degraded rank! No, we shall even stay where we are; till it is seen how the question is to be settled between the people of our sort, and those who will have it that they are of a far worthier kind. There may then, perhaps, be some chance for such as we; and if not, the less we are disturbed about improvement, knowledge, and all those things, the better, while we are bearing the heavy load a few years, to die like those before us.

We said they are banded in a hostile sentiment. It is true, that among such a degraded populace there is very little kindness, or care for one another's interests. They all know too well what they all are not, to feel mutual esteem or benevolence.

But it is infinitely easier for any set of human beings to maintain a community of feeling in hostility to something else, than in benevolence toward another; for here no sacrifice is required of anyone's self-interest. And it is certain, that the subordinate portions of society have come to regard the occupants of the tracts of fertility and sunshine, the possessors of opulence, splendor, and luxury, with a deep, settled, systematic aversion; with a disposition to contemplate in any other light than that of a calamity an extensive downfall of the favorites of fortune, when a brooding imagination figures such a thing as possible; and with but very slight monitions from conscience of the iniquity of the most tumultuary accomplishment of such a catastrophe. In a word, so far from considering their own welfare as identified with the stability of the existing social order, they consider it as something that would spring from the ruin of that order. The greater number of them have lost that veneration by habit, partaking of the nature of a superstition, which had been protracted downward, though progressively attenuated with the lapse of time, from the feudal ages into the last century. They have quite lost, too, in this disastrous age, that sense of competence and possible well-being, which might have harmonized their feelings with a social economy that would have allowed them the enjoyment of such a state, even as the purchase of great industry and care. Whatever the actual economy may have of wisdom in its institutions, and of splendor, and fulness of all good things, in some parts of its apportionment, they feel that what is allotted to most of _them_ in its arrangements is pressing hardship, unremitting poverty, growing still more hopeless with the progress of time, and of what they hear trumpeted as national glory, nay, even "national prosperity and happiness unrivalled." This bitter experience, which inevitably becomes associated in their thoughts with that frame of society under which they suffer it, will naturally have a far stronger effect on their opinion of that system than all that had ever rendered them acquiescent or reverential toward it. That it brings no relief, or promise of relief, is a circumstance preponderating in the estimate, against all that can be said of its ancient establishment, its theoretical excellences, or the blessings in which it may be pretended to have once abounded, or still to abound. What were become of the most essential laws of human feeling, if such experience _could_ leave those who are undergoing its discipline still faithfully attached to the social order on the strength of its consecration by time, and of the former settled opinions in its favor,--however tenacious the impressions so wrought into habit are admitted to be? And the minds of the people thus thrown loose from their former ties, are not arrested and recovered by any substitutional ones formed while those were decaying. They are not retained in a temper of patient endurance and adherence, by the bond of principles which a sedulous and deep instruction alone could have enforced on them. The growth of sound judgment under such instruction, might have made them capable of understanding how a proportion of the evil may have been inevitable, from uncontrollable causes; of perceiving that it could not fail to be aggravated by a disregard of prudence in the proceedings in early life among their own class, and that so far it were unjust to impute it to their superiors or to the order of society; of admitting that national calamities are visitations of divine judgment, of which they were to reflect whether they had not deserved a heavy share; of feeling it to be therefore no impertinent or fanatical admonition that should exhort them to repentance and reformation, as an expedient for the amendment of even their temporal condition; and of clearly comprehending that, at all events, rancor, violence, and disorder, cannot be the way to alleviate any of the evils, but to aggravate them all. But, we repeat it, there are millions in this land, and if we include the neighboring island politically united to it, very many millions, who have received no instruction adequate, in the smallest degree, to counteract the natural effect of the distresses of their condition; or to create a class of moral restraints and mitigations in prevention of a total hostility of feeling against the established order, after the ancient attachments to it have been worn down by the innovations of opinion, and the pressure of continued distress.

Thus uninstructed to apprehend the considerations adapted to impose a moral restraint, thus unmodified by principles of mitigation, there is a large proportion of human strength and feeling not in vital combination with the social system, but aloof from it, looking at it with "gloomy and malign regard;" in a state progressive towards a fitness to be impelled against it with a dreadful shock, in the event of any great convulsion, that should set loose the legion of daring, desperate, and powerful spirits, to fire and lead the masses to its demolition. There have not been wanting examples to show with what fearful effect this hostility may come into action, in the crisis of the fate of a nation's ancient system; where this alienated portion of its own people, rushing in, have revenged upon it the neglect of their tuition; that neglect which had abandoned them to so utter a "lack of knowledge," that they really understood no better than to expect their own solid advantage in general havoc and disorder. But how bereft of sense the _State_ too must be, that would thus _let_ a multitude of its people grow up in a condition of mind to believe, that the sovereign expedient for their welfare is to be found in spoliation and destruction! It might easily have comprehended what it was reasonable to expect from the matured dispositions and strength of such of its children as it abandoned to be nursed by the wolf.

While this principle of ruin was working on by a steady and natural process, this supposed infatuated State was, it is extremely possible, directing its chief care to maintain the splendor of a court, or to extort the means for prosecuting some object of vain and wicked ambition, some project of conquest and military glory. And probably nothing could have appeared to many of its privileged persons more idle and ridiculous, or to others of them more offensive and ill-intentioned, than a remonstrance founded on a warning of such a consequence. The despisers would have been incomparably the greater number; and, "Go (they would have said) with your mock-tragical fortune-telling, to whoever can believe, too, that one day or other the quadrupeds of our stalls and meadows may be suddenly inspirited by some supernatural possession to turn their strength on us in a mass, or those of our kennels to imitate the dogs of Actæon."