Chapter XXVI: Section V: What Forces Have Produced the Present Civilization

As the basis of the present as well as of the past ever reappears an inner and persistent cause, the character of the race; transmission and climate have maintained it; a violent perturbation--the Norman Conquest--warped it; finally, after various oscillations, it was manifested by the conception of a special ideal, which gradually fashioned or produced religion, literature, institutions. Thus fixed and expressed, it was henceforth the mover of the rest; it explains the present, on it depends the future; its force and direction will produce the present and future civilization. Now that great historic violences--I mean the destructions and enslavements of peoples--have become almost impracticable, each nation can develop its life according to its own conception of life; the chances of a war, a discovery, have no hold but on details; national inclinations and aptitudes alone now' show the great features of a national history; when twenty-five millions of men conceive the good and useful after a certain type, they will seek and end by attaining this kind of the good and useful. The Englishman has henceforth his priest, his gentleman, his manufacture, his comfort, and his novel. If we wish to know in what sense this work will alter, we must inquire in what sense the central conception will change. A vast revolution has taken place during the last three centuries in human intelligence--like those regular and vast uprisings which, displacing a continent, displace all the prospects. We know that positive discoveries go on increasing day by day, that they will increase daily more and more, that from object to object they reach the most lofty, that they begin by renewing the science of man, that their useful application and their philosophical consequences are ceaselessly unfolded; in short, that their universal encroachment will at last comprise the whole human mind. From this body of invading truths springs in addition an original conception of the good and the useful, and, moreover, a new idea of church and state, art and industry, philosophy and religion. This has its power, as the old idea had; it is scientific, if the other was national; it is supported on proved facts, if the other was upon established things. Already their opposition is being manifested; already their labors begin; and we may affirm beforehand, that the proximate condition of English civilization will depend upon their divergence or their agreement.

[Footnote 231: See the "Travels of Madame d'Aulnay in Spain," at the end of the seventeenth century. Nothing is more striking than this revolution, if we compare it with the times before Ferdinand the Catholic, namely the reign of Henry IV, the great power of the nobles, and the independence of the towns. Read about this history, Buckle's "History of Civilization," 1867, 3 vols. II. ch. VIII.]

[Footnote 232: Buckle, "History of Civilization," I. ch. VII.]

[Footnote 233: Léonce de Lavergne, "Economie rurale en Angleterre," passim.]

[Footnote 234: De Foe was of the same opinion, and pretended that economy was not an English virtue, and that an Englishman can hardly live with twenty shillings a week, while a Dutchman with the same money becomes wealthy, and leaves his children very well off. An English laborer lives poor and wretchedly with nine shillings a week, whilst a Dutchman lives very comfortably with the same wages.]

[Footnote 235: In familiar language, the father is called in England the "governor"; in France "le banquier."]

[Footnote 236: Let the reader, amongst many others, peruse the sermons of Dr. Arnold, delivered in the school chapel at Rugby.]

[Footnote 237: "The Wide, Wide World," by Elizabeth Wetherell (an American book). See also the novels of Miss Yonge, and chiefly those of George Eliot.]