Full text of "The Dublin review"

i ij . " i gARSWELL Co., Limited Bookbinders. ErwT„o1.s, A TORONTO PCBLISHKBS.etC.U QNT. aooooooooQooooQooeq oBoo aas M Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2007 with funding from IVIicrosoft Corporation http://www.archive.org/details/3sdublinreview16londuoft THE DUBLIN REVIEW, JULY, 1886. Art. I.— novelists AND NOVELS. " Novels, as they were long manufactured, form a library of illiterate authors for illiterate readers; but as they were created by genius, are precious to the philosopher." — I. D'Israeli. NOVELS form so large a portion of the literature now pub- lished, and hold so wide a circulation among all classes of society, that a sweeping condemnation of novelists and their works would be at variance with the pronounced verdict of the literary world. In truth, all writers have considered fiction as one of the most appropriate methods of imparting to mankind great principles and important moral lessons. The reason is obvious. The writer of fiction has at his command many charm- ing illusions in which to drape the most unpalatable truths of religion or morality, and thus present them in a form attrac- tive to the most fastidious. Seeds of goodness are thus easily sown broadcast in the world, and as the novelist can play largely on the softer passions, he may by a judicious manage- ment so warm the heart as to produce an artificial hotbed in which the germs of virtue fructify, strike root, and develop into the finest exotics that the garden of our soul is capable of producing. But fiction has another advantage, which, as it is less generally known, deserves to be the more carefully considered. On study- ing the psychological constitution of man, we find that his education, especially his earlier education, depends very much on the power of the phantasy or imagination. It is this faculty which receives, aids to reproduce, separate, and combine those sensible pictures (phantasmata) on the fecundity, clearness, and brilliancy of which the success of intellectual operations greatly depends. Without a rich and strong imagination the orator ' L. xvi. — NO. I. [Third Series.] B 2 Novelists and Novels. would be feeble and the artist barren ; the author would fail to write with graphic lucidity, and the poet would no longer charm us with the beauties of fancy ; the philosopher would be unable to ascend to the heights of speculation, and the inventor would never produce his marvels of skill and ingenuity ; in a word, all the politer arts would be paralyzed, and the lower branches of industry would suffer in proportion. It is therefore easy to understand how great is the necessity that the imagination should be cultivated and perfected while it still retains the flexibility of youth. To this end fiction is eminently suited. Its charac- teristics are animation of language, brilliancy of description, richness of colouring, excitement of incident, and play of passion ; all of which powerfully excite the imagination and urge it to take that exercise which is necessary to its development and perfection. The novelist causes the young reader to wander through the wildest plains of romance, such as can be crossed only by the springs and flights of fancy, and thereby supplies to the mind what physical exercise gives to the body. The object, therefore, which the writer of fiction should always hold in view is to exercise the phantasy in pleasant but lawful subjects, to fill it with novel and happy images, and by this indirect, as well as by a direct, appeal to the heart, so to temper and control the passions as may be most suitable to the formation of virtue and the extirpation of vice. For this reason, his representations should be chaste, his sentiments pure, and his leading characters noble-minded and virtuous. The great variety of virtue which the human soul can acquire place at the author's disposal so many springs of action by which the plot may be kept moving, and so many labyrinths of sentiment through which the reader may be conducted, that the novelist never need look beyond the sphere of every-day life for his subjects, nor fear to weary by harping on the often-touched strings that run through every heart. It will, of course, be understood that the representations of virtue are usually accompanied by the descriptions of vice. The author must follow the same principle as the artist. His high lights must be brought out by shadow, and the brightness of his picture be toned down by judicious shading. But in the intro- duction of human weakness, crime, and sin, he must be realistic in his moral, and, as he cannot conduct the reader beyond the stage of this world, he must anticipate the final end of sin, and this is misery. In connection with the depicting of vice there is a point in which vitiated writers constantly offend. As concupiscence is rooted in fallen nature, and as its desires are inflammable and violent, allusions to this passion and descriptions of its play are Novelists a'iid Novels. 3 among the most frequent means by which indifferent authors seek to arouse their reader^s interest. Yet no literary process is more opposed to the principles of art and morality. The office of the artist is to raise and elevate, to excite a hatred of the bad and inspire a love for the good, to aid mankind in overcoming sin and in winning virtue. Moralists, however, unanimously agree that the lusts of sensuality are not to be conquered by pon- dering on their lowness and brutality, but by ignoring their existence, by occupying the mind with other subjects, and turning a deaf ear to their seductions. To introduce the reader, then, ta vices that are not named in polite society, and to surround them with all the seductive paraphernalia of love and beauty, is to quit the path of art and to violate a well-founded rule of ascetical life. The virtue of innocence is, in fact, like a highly polished mirror, before which, no dark object can pass without casting a stain on its burnished surface, and sullying the lustre of its brightness. Immoral books present the greatest danger to the frailest virtue. This fact, acknowledged by all that have had a painful experience in such matters, is easily explained. Shame hinders such as are not entirely abandoned from indulging freely in licentious talk, but the book is a companion so confidential and private that modesty is soon reconciled to its language. The spoken word, too, is transient, and its meaning often ambiguous ; but the printed page is durable, and may be studied until its full sense has thoroughly penetrated the mind. The one, moreover, is mostly the product of the moment, but the other is long premeditated, artfully composed, carefully coloured and dressed, so that innocence is lost before the peril is fully remarked. The former, again, has only a narrow circle of auditors ; but the latter can speak to thousands in the present and in the future. The reproduction by the press can give it a multitude of tongues, and the pens of translators can teach it as many languages. Without a conscience, remorse, or fear, the book as readily betrays the innocence of youth as it pampers the sensuality of old age ; and, reckless of consequences, it produces in the world confusion of ideas, loss of principle, knowledge of sin, perversion of morals, irreligion, and practical paganism. There is a very charming fable illustrative of the permanent and widespread misery immoral books produce : A robber and an author are in hell ; both are enclosed in huge iron cauldrons^ beneath which fires burn ; yet with this difference, that beneath the robber is continually decreasing, while that beneath the author is ever growing worse. The author deems his sins to have been less than those of his companion ; he complains of the gods' injustice, and one of the infernal Sisters is sent to vindicate the sentence of Providence. B 2 ^ Novelists and Novels, *' Wretch I '' she exclaims, " dost thou compare thyself with ihe robber ? His crime is as nothing compared -with thine. Only as long as he lived did his cruelty and lawlessness render him hurtful. But thou ! Long ago have thy bones crumbled to dust, yet the sun never rises without bringing to light fresh evils of v/hich thou art the cause. The poison of thy writings not only does not weaken, but, spreading abroad, it becomes more malignant as years roll by. Look there! " — and for a moment she enabled him to look upon the world — " Behold the crimes, the misery, of which thou art the cause. Look at these children who have brought shame upon their families, who have re- duced their parents to despair. By whom were their heads and hearts corrupted ? By thee. Who strove to rend asunder the bonds of society, ridiculing the right of authority and law, and rendering them responsible for all human misfortunes ? Thou art the man ! Didst thou not dignify unbelief with the name of enlightenment? Didst thou not place vice and passion in the most charming and alluring lights ? And now, look ! A whole country, perverted by thy teaching, is full of murder and robbery, of strife and rebellion, and is being led onward by thee to ruin. For every drop of that country's tears and blood thou art to blame. And now, dost thou dare to hurl thy blasphemies against the gods ? How much evil have thy books yet to bring upon the world ? Continue then to suffer, for here the measure of thy punishment shall be according to thy deserts." Thus spoke the angry Fury, and slammed down the cover on the cauldron.* To the uses of fiction as a medium for education might be added its services for the purposes of affording relaxation and amusement, of enabling us to forget for the time the hard realities of life in the ideal pictures of romance. But what has already been said of novelists as teachers equally applies to them as providers of innocent recreation. We may therefore now pass on to consider several disadvantages that attend the perusal of novels, and that must accordingly be weighed by such authors as earnestly desire to improve their readers. The charms of fiction, in the first place, are calculated to kindle a love for the unreal and romantic, to make readers discontented with the dull routine and the burdensome duties of their daily life. Thus the wayfarer through the world is removed from the sphere in which Providence has placed him, to a society and a life into which the fancy of the novelist has transplanted him. There he lives, and thinks, and feels. The affections of his heart, the light of his intellect, and the energy of his will — in a word, all that should be devoted to the benefit and the happiness of his fellow-creatures, is transferred to a set of beings that exist only in imagination. Thus are produced that listless, sentimental class of persons who are as much a burden to themselves as to the world in general. ♦ "Krilof and his Fables." By W. R. S. Kalston, M.A. Novelists and Novels, 5 Their energy, love, compassion have been squandered on the ideal, and for the reality of life, with all its misery and woe, they have no sympathy left. The heart that has become accustomed to the thrillinjr sensations of fiction no longer vibrates on contact with their counterparts in real life. On mental training the continued perusal of fiction has an effect well worth notice. When we read for pleasure, we shall remark that we soon learn to skim the pages, and, like the butterfly in the flower garden, to fly from point to point in quest of honey. This is especially the case in the reading of fiction. The plot interests us ; we wish to know its continuation, develop- ment, and termination ; and in our interest in these points we are apt to skip over the intervening matter, and to consider as dry what is probably the most instructive portion of the book. In this way we readily fall into the habit of desultory and superficial reading, and this accompanies us when we turn to ;j:rave subjects, so that all serious study is rendered a work of infinite difiiculty. The novelist, then, who would as far as possible guard his readers against these dangers, must endeavour to give the mind and will a practical turn, to inspire a knowledge of life as it is and a compassion with actual miseries, and a desire to think and feel and labour for this world around us. Few writers, perhaps, have so fully grasped the true scope of fiction as Charles Dickens. We defy a reader to peruse his v/orks without at least desiring to become a practical philanthropist. What Dickens wrote was in one sense apostolic, and what a former Bishop of Manchester judged of his writings was not. far wrong. "I believe," he said, " that the literature of which he was the author has been pregnant with consequences of incalculable benefit to our people. It has made us see truly simple virtues under rugged exteriors. It has taught us the great lessons of Christian sympathy ; and though in all things Charles Dickens is not what we might have desired or what he might have been, yet we are not his judges. We do not know the circumstances of trial through which his life was passed. But I feel that England owes a debt of grati- tude to her great novelist for what he has done to elevate and purify the human life where it most needs elevation and purifi- cation.^' But let me now turn to a specific disadvantage of novel- reading — a disadvantage arising from the prevailing character of modern novels. Frederick Schlegel remarked of the Press in his day : The art of printing, in itself one of the most glorious and useful, has become prostituted to the speedy and universal circulation of poisonous 6 Novelists and Novels, tracts and libels. It has occasioned a dangerous influx of paltry and superficial compositions, alike hostile to soundness of judgment and purity of taste — a sea of frothy conceits and noisy dulness, upon which the spirit of the age is tossed hither and thither, not without great and frequent danger of entirely losing sight of the compass of meditation and the polar star of truth. These observations are eminently true of the present. We live in a realistic age, and realism in a bad sense has set its mark on the literature of fiction. The Press teems with realistic novels. To establish this fact by an exhaustive analysis of current works would here be out of place. I shall therefore rather seek to establish it by a process of classification. To begin with the incipient novel, the fairy-tale for the young. The libraries for youth are flooded at the present time with a class of juvenile stories fraught with evils. In these fanciful tales there are no fairy-like personifications of virtue, nor beautiful religious truths, nor charming moral fables, such as may serve to awaken and foster noble sentiments and generous love of goodness. The ideal in such books is Uealism — Materialism. There is a plentiful supply of gold and silver, of feasting and love-making. The heroes and heroines are mostly princes and princesses, whose great business in life is to wed one another, after surmounting the difiiculties that strew the path of love. The inspirations derived from such books are " the lusts of the flesh, the lusts of the eye, and the pride of life,'' and the little readers, before they have scarce entered their teens, have learned from their perusal how to dress and flirt with all the art of a vain and amorous coquette. Heaven, it is said, lies about us in our infancy : what heavenly notions do these books inspire ? But it is in the novel, properly so-called, that realism is most apparent. A favourite theme for novel-writers of the present age is the realism of fallen nature. The novelist no longer chooses an idealized phase of life nor even the better and purer aspects of actual society ; but, on the plea that the path of virtue is too sterile for fiction, or that the light side of nature has been sufii- ciently treated, he selects life as it is lived by the refuse of mankind. The insincerities of friendship, the arts of deceit, the frailties of love, the stratagems of intrigue, and the sensualities of debauch supply the material for his pen. These subjects readily find access to the soul of the reader. There is so much sympathy between the eye and the heart that what the one consents to read the other agrees to receive. Why should it not ? What is printed cannot be so dreadful. It is perused by thousands ; why not by us also ? It is, after all, knowledge — new and curious too : why should we not know what others know ? Thus the reader. And the author ? He must of course live. Refined descriptions Novelists and Novels. 7 of vice are easily written ; they require no originality, very little wit ; they stimulate curiosity, they flatter human weakness, and they sell : so they are written. Authors throw the responsibility on the public, and the public casts it back on the authors. Yet both are guilty. For how can man conscientiously give or seek knowledge of a society that he is bound to avoid, or risk attach- ment to vanities and sins which he has vowed to renounce ? If an individual has already reason to deplore his own vicious inclinations, will they become less by familiarity with the vices of others, and by initiation into the mysteries of iniquity? There is, however, another type of novels still more injurious because more seductive, and this is the realistic art novel. Here the author — usually a woman — appears as the artist. As a word- painter the writer professes to follow in the footsteps of the sculptor, the modeller, the painter, and delineates in writing the outline, the colouring, and the plastique of human, and chiefly feminine beauty. Pages and pages of graphic sensualism are laid before the reader's eye ; the bath, the dressing-room, the sleeping apartment are thrown open, and the technology of the purveyor of the toilet, of the costumier, and even of the anatomist, are exhausted in depicting the charms of a Juliet or Romeo. It is needless to say that realism is here, as elsewhere, a degradation of art and a departure from its right principle. True art every- where aims at depicting the ideal and spiritual side of nature, and it uses the material only so far as is necessary to render the immaterial sensible and intelligible to the human mind. To invert this process is to flagrantly violate all that the great masters have laid down on art under whatsoever form. The refined realistic or sensualistic novel is some way more pernicious than the vulgar, obscene compositions in which all regard to decency is abandoned, and the expressions of slang must supply the deficiency of recognized language for the turpitude of the contents. Obscenity may revolt us by its grossness, but covert impurity, decked in sprightly, brilliant language, allures with the voice of a siren. How many a reader, bewitched by its entice- ments, has said : " Sing, siren, to thyself, and I will dote." Besides those classes of novels which have just been mentioned there are certain religious — or, more properly, impious books which are more distinctively characteristic of French novelists. There are several writers who can make no other use of religion than to clothe vice. They place guilt within the very pale of the Church ; their sinners rave in the words of Scripture, and invoke the Deity in the act of sin ; their unconverted Magdalens dream of the sacred ceremonies of the altar and the sanctuary. 6 Novelists and Novels. and mingle a polluted love with all that is most pure and holy ; their stories of dark crime are whitewashed with a mock sanctity, and all that mankind is most bound to revere is suborned to prostitute the creature and to blaspheme the Creator. There is, in regard to the practical effect, scarcely a distinction between thes3 works and the professedly antichristian tendential novels, in which the mysteries of faith are cast down, and in their stead the most fantastic systems that have ever sprung from misguided reason are set up for the worship of mankind. Few as the above remarks are, and briefly as they have been stated, they may perhaps in some way serve both novelists and novel-readers. The author of fiction has a great field and a great work. Both are increasing. There is now an inseparable con- nection between reading and every sort of education. Not so many years ago, books, except in the highest education, were unusual; but nowadays they are general in all branches of instruction. If not the widest, at least one of the most important spheres of mental and moral training lies within the range of fiction. Men are social beings, destined to live and work in society. A vast portion of their duties are thus social obligations, and as such are best learned from and in contact with society. It is this conjunction with society that novels are mostly destined to affect : they should treat of life as it ought to be conducted ; they should inculcate social lessons that purify and refine, raise and ennoble mankind. Did novelists understand this task and attempt conscientiously to fulfil it, there might be fewer works of fiction, for high-class, moral, yet interesting novels require study, knowledge, and talent ; but the world would be better for such as were written, and would gratefully endorse of their authors the words of Lockhart on Scott. " We may picture to ourselves in some measure,^' he says, '^the debt we owe to a succession of books, unapproached in charm, and all instilling a high and healthy code ; a bracing and invigorating spirit ; a contempt of mean passions, whether vindictive or voluptuous; human charity as distinct from moral laxity or from unsyrapathizing austerity ; sagacity too deep for cyniciam, and tenderness never degenerating into sentimentality ; animated throughout in thought, opinion, feeling, and style, by one and the same pure energetic principle, a path and savour of manhood ; appealing to whatever is good and loyal in our natures, and rebuking whatever is low and selfish." To such tributes of grateful esteem authors may in their lifetime be indifferent, but there will surely come a moment when they would desire to say, with the great author of " Waver- ley " : "I am drawing near to the close of my career. 1 am fast shuffling off the stage. I have been, perhaps, the most Toluminous author of the day ; and it is a comfort to me to The Progress of Nihilism, '9 think that I have tried to unsettle no man's faith, to corrupt no man's principles, and that I have written nothing which on my deathbed I should wish blotted out." But it roust not be supposed that the public are altogether innocent of the frequent abuse of literature by novelists. Did readers refuse to open the book that was not fit to pass the censorship of a moralist, writers would have little inducement to abuse their art. Yet how many reasons have not readers to maintain the purity of fiction. It is this class of literature which is widest spread and most perused, and as such is one of the most powerful formatives of society. Both young and old are readers of fiction : no age, no position, is so reduced or so elevated as not to owe its highest pleasures to the sentiments of the heart and the conceptions of the mind, nor is there any character which is impervious to the influence of novels. Speaking of the moral power of a single l>ook, Benjamin Frank- lin has said : ** When I was a boy, I met with this book."^ .... It gave me such a turn of thinking as to have an influence on my conduct through life ; for I have always set a greater value on the character of a doer of good than any other kind of repu- tation ; and if I have been a useful citizen, the public owes the advantage of it to that book." Franklin has but expressed what with still greater truth applies to the influence of novels on novel-readers. C. C. LONGRIDGE. »«i9S««o* Art. II.— the PROGRESS OF NIHILISM. VARIOUS observers, not given as a rule to admiring the works and ways of the Catholic Church, have begun to wonder why the French Republic persecutes it with such deadly and increasing violence. A notable answer has been suggested in the columns of the Spectotor. It is there said that this new fanaticism springs from a new religion; that Republicans look on the Church as thwarting their religious even more than their political propaganda, and hinc illcB lacrymce; that is why Christianity, as represented in the universal and living system which has its centre at Rome, must be destroyed root and branch. A new religion, not a sect of the old, which might arise to-day only to come to an end • ♦• Essays to do Good." 10 The Progress of Nihilism. to-morrow ; a religion as doirmatic, peremptory, exclusive in its claims, as full of promises and threatenings as Christianity itself, and much more level to the capacity of the multitude which both address. If, on the negative or protesting side, we term the Trench Republican system Atheism, we shall go not a step beyond its adherents, whose boast it long has been that in their discerning eyes every belief which transcends the earthly and the visible is superstition. To what lengths their impatient zeal has carried them against all that is worshipped or called God the public journals bear witness ; nor is it a part of my undertaking just now to dwell on it. For I would rather call attention to the human, ethical, and social aspect of that most portentous move- ment of our time, which would effect little and last but a moment, did it not substitute its own beatitudes for those of the Sermon on the Mount. Denying God, it affirms the rights of man ; it aims at a present heaven ; and its official name is the Religion of Humanity. It cannot rest within the borders of France. It has spread East and West, creating Socialism beyond the Rhine and the Alps, and in Russia making of the young, the enthusiastic, the better educated, that forlorn hope of this new crusade which fought under the banner of Nihilism, and hurled the lightning upon its adversaries till itself also was utterly consumed. What else has it wrought ? It has broken down the party walls between nation and nation, outstripped the wings of culture, discovered or made its own the most formidable agencies of science, swept away local associations, traditions, and rivalries, absorbed or compelled to serve its designs the older societies, such as Freemasonry, which arose in the Deistic stage of the movement, and, as a token of all this, has ranged side by side on the Paris barricades in 1871 men of every nation under heaven. Its disciples are Poles and Italians, Germans and Russians and Irishmen, whose sole bond, they tell us, is that all alike have been trodden under foot by the mighty world-rulers. And it is found everywhere. Here, then, are signs of a false religion coming to the birth, surrounded and followed by its diabolic martyrs, confessors, workers of lying marvels and prodigies, to whom no enterprise seems impossible, and the round world is a field for their sowing and reaping. Of what kind the harvest shall be, whether of life or death, is indeed the question. But they do not falter. A type of them is that insignificant mortal (his name history has already' forgotten) who, when his comrade cast the horrible fire between the feet of Alexander II. of Russia, stepped forward, and, to make all sure, flung a second phial, which as it burst shattered the Emperor and killed himself. A belief that kindles such enthusiasm — The Progress of Nihilism. 11 Atque metus omnis et inexorabile fatum ^ Subjecit pedibus, strepitumque Acherontis avari — may well be deemed the instrument of boundless good or ill, according to its nature. This creed, which I propose to consider in its origin and prospects, is not good but evil ; a doctrine of anarchy, and a spectre menacing civilization with a bloody hand. But it fascinates men and women alike. The revolutionary frenzy has its Msenads, its Furies, its loathsome Harpies, unfeminine bearers of the dagger and flaming torch, to whom murder, fire, and rapine appear the natural means of inaugurating a golden era. Protestantism, as we know it, is a weak reminiscence of the faith from which it revolted, a negation for the most part, or, in the words of Dr. Fairbairn, a method rather than a religion. But anarchy is positive, rests on its own foundation, and appeals to facts. We may grasp the meaning of it, if we lay to heart such words as the following, written by Thomas Carlyle, forty-three years ago, of England, but now too sadly applicable to most European countries : — The condition of England [he says] is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind ; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows, waving with yellow harvests, thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, the willingest our earth ever had ; these men are here ; the work they have done, the fruit they have realized, is here ; abun- dant, exuberant on every hand of us : and behold, some baleful fiat as of enchantment, has gone forth, saying, ** Touch it not, ye workers^ ye master-workers, ye master-idlers ; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it ; this is enchanted fruit." * Carlyle compares our civilization to Midas, whose touch, turning all things to gold, left the too covetous rich man to die of hunger. For he could not eat gold. As I think of another characteristic of our age — of the blatant rhetoric which finds acceptance with so many— I am tempted to say that it resembles Midas, not only in his power of creating the precious metal, but in the pair of asses' ears with which mythology has garnished him. As much talk as gold, and little wisdom with either. Franchise, free trade, compulsory education, whatever be the worth of these things, it remains true that, in a world teeming with resources, endlessly fruitful, with a blue sky over it, and the * " Past and Present," introduction. 12 The Progress of Nihilism. great ocean ways bringing wealth to every land, the multitudes must not only work, but too often must work and starve. Or say merely — for my argument requires no more — that the relations between work and wealth on one side, and work and want on the other, appear at first blush to many in the highest degree anomalous and unjust. It is this feeling which has called up from the deep the red spectre of Nihilism. Political economists talk, in their easy way, of the accumula- tion and distribution of wealth, assigning its laws to each. But they are not alive as yet to the great fundamental difficulty of their science, or rather of human society, which they disguise and turn to an abstraction by their terms of art. Here is the problem. One set of men accumulate wealth by their hard labour, and another, much smaller set, distribute it more or less according to their good pleasure. The new religion — call it anti-religion if you please — begins by asking, " Why should I toil that thou mayest eat? Is it not fairer that both thou and I toil, and then we may both eat the fruit of our labours ? " " Paucis vivit humanum genus,^' it has been said, either as a cynical piece of philosophy or the statement of an undeniable fact. Whichever way we take it, I cannot think that reason will approve. Each man should live for himself and for his fellows ; and no man simply for another who happens to have chained him up in a mill and bidden him grind. Liberty I That is the first word of the Revolution: the right to live for oneself. We may ask how far we, as Christian men, can allow such a right, how it is to be distinguished from selfishness. But at present what we shall do wisely to observe is the striving in every land for a liberty which shall go beyond the too often ridiculous power of voting at a Parliamentary election. Men having tasted of that so-called franchise, begin to ask, as the philosopher does of a new system when he comes upon it, " In what can .you help me ? '' Nor v/ill the satisfaction of reading your member's speeches in St. Stephen's make up for an empty cupboard, want of work, a cold hearthstone in winter, and tools in pawn to furnish the children with a morsel of bread. Dives has long gone clad in purple and fine linen, while Lazarus lies, full of sores, at his gale. True ; but Lazarus during many, many ages could only lie at the gate : he was helpless, ignorant, isolated. A mighty change has come over the world. There is a social organism forming in the depths, with its own laws, instincts, powers, and sentiments. We may, if we will, see these new barbarians — for so they have been called — rising up towards the light, arnied and confederated, aware that they have been nothing, and convinced that when they choose they can be everything. It is a part of their creed that the aristocracy overturned the The Progress of Nihilism. 1^ throne, the middle classes the aristocracy, and that fate has chosen them to overturn the middle classes. They believe in reading- and writing, in science, in a social philosophy of which the out- lines, to their thinking, may be clearly sketched ; and they da not believe in religion, art, culture, refinement, manners, marriage, political forms, inequality of birth, poetry, or anything whatso- ever of the ideal order. The things they do not understand they despise. Long acquaintance with misery in its acutest forms has made them impatient of the delicate observances with which we veil over our common infirmities; and they are gross, cynical, violent, and unclean. It is their delight to know only so much of history as will warrant them in pulling down the Tuileries and turning its site into a potato garden. The chivalries and courtesies of mediaeval usage are to them more than suspect; they irritate and madden like beauty when it disdains an ill- favoured suitor. The French proverb says, " Les absents ont toujours tort." Revolutionists say, '^ Les riches ont toujours tort." They quarrel as vehemently with capital in the stocks as with property in land ; both are in their moral teaching, robbery, sins against mankind such as shall never be forgiven. They look down upon a soldier as the vile creature who forgets that he is a man, and suffers himself to be made a machine and a weapon in the hands of injustice. And a priest is to them only a baser species of soldier, wanting in the courage to face artillery, but seduced by the prospect of an easy life to become the defender on the altar-steps of institutions which perpetuate slavery. The Pontiff and the King — whoever cares to know what the new religion has to say of them, how it compares and how it con- demns both, let him read a book which prophesied half a century ago of what has since become an international propaganda throughout Europe — let him read, " Les Paroles d^un Croyant,^* by the unhappy Abbe de Lamennais. For these men are not only the new barbarians ; they are the- new Mahometans, warring against established religions as being a part of the doomed regime. A logic as clear as it is pitiless compels them to recognize in the preachers of any and everv supernatural doctrine their resolved opponents. Priests, they say, offer the people Heaven as a bribe to be quiet and submissive ; the churches take this world to themselves and leave the next to- any one who can get thither. It is no part of the revolutionary tactics to treat hoar antiquity with reverence, to distinguish be- tween the teaching of Christianity and its corruptions, to be just, or discriminating, or generous in assailing social order» The very name Nihilism, which truly expresses the genius of the- whole movement, is a fiery sign, threatening to burn up good and bad alike. Its power is intensified by the melancholy which 14 The Progress of Nihilism. has inspired it. The Nihilist philosopher is subject to an un- heard-of disease, which is, to use Aristotelian language, the excess of a healthy feeling ; he suffers from Welt-schmei^z, the pain of the world ; and this, it will be granted, whatever its direful effects, is in the beginning of one nature with philanthropy. But ^' virtue itself turns vice, being misapplied/^ The feeling for our kind, which, going beyond creed and country, embraces all that suffer in this lower world, is noble, human, Christ-like. It has made saints and heroes ; it is, perhaps, the one quality which softens and exalts that hard English character so little loved by foreign races. In the English man or woman it shines out in its clearest light ; but abroad, especially among down-trodden peoples, to whom hope has been denied for ages, it takes on the colour of pessimism, and despairing of individual efforts under a cast-iron system, appears lawless and even unfeeling. Like Orestes about to slay Clytemnestra, it becomes " pitiless, not to lose pity." Its idol, which tends by a very strange reaction to become that mere phantom, " the people,^^ instead of the millions upon millions of suffering creatures whose sad contemplation first gave rise to the " pain of the world,^^ cries out without ceasing for blood. And blood has been given it — the blood of friends and enemies. Neither passive obedience nor passive resistance will content it. The " sacred right of insurrection '' has been deve- • loped into a yet more terrible right of assassination. Tender- ness for the famine-stricken has armed itself with dynamite ; a kind of frenzied passion to right all wrong has sent on every pathway the modern Don Quixote, sometimes ridiculous to iook at, often pitiable and even cowardly, yet a danger to the world which no Government is able to control. And these men hate religion with a deadly hatred. They see in it the main hindrance to realizing their hopes. Nor is there a form of religion they detest as they do the Catholic Church, for it preaches order, obedience, authority, and has long been associated in the popular mind with the powers that be. It is looked upon as essentially Conservative ; and the overthrow of the Pope's temporal sovereignty was brought about in large measure by those very societies which have since shaken the world to its foundations. Though once and again the Church has been in- volved in disputes with secular Governments, these have seldom arisen, since the Middle Ages, on questions of popular rights ; they were diplomatic quarrels between high contending powers, and, like thunderstorms on the Alps, broke out in regions too lofty for the common man. This is the great, unmistakable, porten- tous fact, which few of us can as yet have grasped, that to multitudes Church and State in European lands appear as two functions of the same authority, equally foreign and equally The Progress of Nihilism. 15 opposed to the classes held in check by them. Astonishing confusion, it will be said. I answer, No, not so astonishing if we look at things from below, which is all the multitude can ever do. Their dim vision is not exercised in perspective ; what they feel is that the State presses them on one side and the Church will not let them put forth their power on the other. Hence they conclude that churchmen and politicians are all in a tale. Now comes this dangerous, enthusiastic, secret propaganda, abounding in sympathy and troubled with no scruples of con- science, asserting that the whole order of things is unjust, that it is nothing but organized selfishness in State policy, organized hypocrisy in religion, offering the round world and the fulness thereof to men whose bread has never been sure, declaring that the obligation to labour carries with it the duty on the part of rulers to find work, and reiterating Fourier's demand, that employments «hall be made proportionate to capacities ; in fine, scorning the golden age of the poets as a fable, laughing at Eden as a myth, and bidding all men look forward, instead of backward, to the true golden age which is yet to come. Is not this a religion in its power to move, to excite, to create man to its own likeness, in its bold afiirmations, and swift diffusion, and readiness for the •combat, and tremendous anathemas, and appeal to what is deepest in the human heart — to love, and pity, and hunger ? Let us con- sider it well ; for the problem of the future must be solved here, in the chaotic tumult of class against class, and not in windy debates, where the eloquent Premier " cannot tell what o^clock it is under half a column,'^ and then does not know. The ques- tion is not, *'' Who is to vote, and whom is he to vote for ? " but one far more elementary, " What is there to devour, and who shall devour it?" Wolves against wolves, such are men as the philosophy of the revolution pictures them. But stay a moment. Is there not a watchword of the Revolu- tion called Fraternity ? How does that allow of man becoming a wolf to his fellow ? The paradox is only apparent. This new religion does really look upon men as brethren one of another; but it requires a condition precedent. They are all brethren, if all consent to be equal, to labour in the same society on the same terms, to abdicate the privileges which caste, and riches, and education have bestowed on a few and denied to the millions. Fraternity is the badge, if I may venture on the similitude, of that great religious order, commensurate in idea with mankind, which every one is called to enter, but of which none becomes a member without renouncing property and the distinctions of the past. These are the brethren; and those who cling to their privileges are to be hewn down like heathen or heretic, until not one of them is left. Such was the fraternity of Marat, of 16 The Progress of Nihilism, Robespierre, clothing these hideous creatures with a terrible beauty in the eyes of their followers even now. A.narchy is its prelude and its condition ; but we shall understand it better if we bear in mind that anarchy is to the Nihilist what " the pomp and circumstance of glorious war^' have long been to the ambi- tious statesman, a necessary means for working out his plans. Were we not accustomed to the sight of uniforms, the parade, and glitter, and martial music which fill the everyday life of cities, especially foreign cities, with colour and sound, we should perhaps find it no less diflScult to acquiesce in the notion of war, as a normal function of the State, than we do to comprehend anarchy as the beginning of an immense social regeneration. Count von Moltke loved, as a Christian, the French regiments that his artillery overwhelmed at Gravelotte; but he blew them out of existence all the same. And such is the genuine, not satirical, meaning of Chamfort's gloss on Fraternity, as he saw it applied in 1793 — Sois man fr^rCj ou je te tue. The sword of. Mahomet gave a similar choice ; but his God was transcendental, the Creator ; whereas the God of the Revolution is one we can see and feel. Humanity. On a previous page I have written the word caste. It is well known that in India, where we may view the thing most clearly, caste is founded on the deepest race-distinctions, going back bej'Ond the dawn of history. But learned men have lately suggested that our European social order rests on the same foundation, and that the ruling classes, taken as a whole, are of difi'erent descent from the ruled, both in town and country. In the great foreign aristocracies, Aryan blood pre- dominates; the common people represent, on the other hand, populations which entered Europe before the Kelts or the Pelasgi. And the remarkable movements of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which may be summed up as so many Jacqueries, or revolts of the peasants, and which paved the way for the Reformation, are now looked upon as uprisings, in large measure, of the pre-historic peoples, consequent on the decay of Norman and Frankish blood. However this may be, it is im- possible to deny that the barriers to intermarriage between class and class, of whatever origin, have in course of time distinctly led to the formation of sub-races, so to call them, whose instincts are antipathetic and between whom fusion is now almost hopeless. There has even grown up a royal caste, to which every reigning family in Europe, whether Catholic, Greek, or Protes- tant belongs, and of which the " clannishness " could perhaps no more strongly be indicated than by the circumstance that our own royal family speaks, not English, bat German, within the domestic precincts. It is, in fact, a High German caste, with The Progress of Nihilism. 17 marked characteristics, such as Mr. F. Galton may some day think it worth his while to note. Now the races which are breaking away from Government, whether political or religious, have in them a definite, perhaps prevailing, tendency to split into numberless factions. They have hardly come under the modifying influences of education, their constructive genius is little, and guided much more by passion than by interest or reflection. Their Christianity, also, has consisted very much in traditional observances, without in- sight into the spirit or meaning of the New Testament ; it has been, and still is, largely compounded of the superstitions of a bygone time, of crude paganism, and in many parts of Europe of devil-worship. Literary education, rare until the Revolution even in Germany, and in England not quite a matter of course as yet, has touched the working classes of our great cities, but remains in that opening stage when the lowest branches of know- ledge seem the most certain, and Materialism makes its way as a pre-eminently intelligible and therefore true philosophy. These phenomena may be studied in Florence or in Berlin ; they are not peculiar to one country nor lacking under any form of the Christian faith. Whole Protestant populations around us are sinking into heathenism ; the artisan class tends to be fiercely and fanatically anti-Christian ; it has been said, and, so far as I can see, with entire truth, that, " despite the efforts of the churches, the speculations of the day are working their way down among the people ;" and again, that " those among the working class who eschew the teachings of the orthodox, slide off towards, not the late Mr. Maurice, nor yet Professor Huxley, but towards Mr. Bradlaugh." But we should greatly err if we supposed that only Protestant populations are thus falling off. The French ouvriers, descended from Catholic grand-parents, are Positivists, and born with a passion for anarchy. Catholicism among the Irish race, all the world over, is passing through a difficult crisis. It has been in conflict these many years with the new forms of unbelief on both sides of the Alps ; whilst the Slav peoples are the very hotbed and focus of that incendiary Nihilism which, most energetic in Russia, has spread a flame of discontent far and wide into the neighbouring States. Evidently we see here the outcome of causes which lie beneath the whole order of thing?, and are at work in every church. If one is to blame, all are to blame. But, instead of discussing an idle question, and raking up the ashes of the past, our duty is to fully estimate the forces ranged against religion, and then to ask how they should be met. For we have not, even now, exhausted the resources of anarchy. One of the most formidable, in a sense I shall jroaeed to ex- voL. XVI.— NO. I. [Third Series.] c 18 The Progress of Nihilism. plain, is, to my thinking, education. Let it not be supposed for an instant that I would shut up a single school, or deny one poor man in this world the right to educate his children. But we must bear in mind that, as the invention of printing revolutionized Europe, so the spread of education will do even more. It will assuredly create a new world ; we can see it now making an end of dialects and village customs, abolishing superstition, and eliciting individual traits, whilst bringing men into the closest intimacy and kindling sympathies where before there were none. It stands to reason that the development of mind under the most imperfect education will make a man less dependent on authority than before ; he will often require to be persuaded as well as commanded ; and the method of government suited to him will be more human and less mechanical. With the multiplica- tion of books and newspapers we enter on the reign of " public opinion ;" and a despotism, tempered in France by epigrams, in Turkey by the bowstring, cannot but be seriously modified when its acts are discussed by millions on both sides of the Atlantic with entire freedom. '^ The fierce light that beats upon a throne " is the light of education, which has almost done away with privacy, and opens a window from the street into every man's house. But observe the danger. In what degree a man is educated, in the same he becomes critical of existing insti- tutions; he cannot help trying them by the standard of his own judgment ; nay, he feels a pleasure in doing so. His knowledge of what the world is like grows from day to day ; and he begins, even if domestic troubles and privations do not force him, to inquire into the reasonableness of social arrangements and to note their defects. Suppose him young, ardent, unselfish, with little or nothing to lose, his affections not bound up in any form of religion, whilst the course of his education has divested him of the old unconscious loyalty to King or Kaiser which survives among us from earlier ages — is not this the very stuff of which Nihilists are made ? Educated they must be, but only in a certain degree ; members of a class that hangs loosely upon society, as being a voluntary profession, not a rank inherited ; and they must feel with those who have no privileges, nothing assured for the morrow or old age. " The pain of the world " comes as natural to a man of this stamp as political ambition to a peer, and earth-hunger to a French or Irish farmer. He sees just far enough to comprehend that many things of long-standing name and venerable appearance are simply relics of the past, with neither life nor spirit in them. The unreality, the hollow- ness of social arrangements is what strikes him, not the necessity which created and still accounts for imperfect institutions. His eyeSj fixed on a distant ideal, overlook the everyday faults. The Progress of Nihilism, 1& limitations, and ignorance of most men, who make so little pro- gress because they are incapable of serious sustained thought and original action. I am taking the pattern Nihilist, endowed with the qualities for which he gives himself credit ; and of such a one I say that it is the very passion of pity which turns him to evil courses, awakes murderous anti-social instincts, and deafens his €ar when the shocked and outraged conscience of mankind cries aloud that no wrongs endured will justify the vengeance or the acts of war in which he engages. What we must endeavour to grasp is, therefore, the undeniable fact that education, in its <;arlier stages and divorced from religion, tends to anarchy with as great a force as culture tends to individualism. It is love that says with the Buddhist, ** Thou art I." Intellect throws each man back upon himself, into a solitude from which he looks out with absolutely strange eyes on society. And if the spectacle touches him, if it rouses interest and compassion, his feeling will be for those tender ones of the great human flock whom the shepherds shear, and starve, and sell, but do not feed. Imperfect education makes the rank and file of revolutionists ; but from time to time a leader steps down to them out of the highest circles — a Mirabeau, a Rochefort, a Prince Krapotkine. The desire of the sons of anarchy is, indeed, to dispense with leaders ; for since all men in the formula are equal, it is un- reasonable that one should lead rather than another. I believe there are curious revelations to come of the attempts which have been made repeatedly in this direction, by Nihilists, to carry on war without generals; and perhaps the failures of Socialism in several countries are due to the unnatural efibrt. Leaders there must be, men of science, learning, marked individual character, and indomitable genius ; and though M. Rochefort is little more than a journalist, and Prince Krapotkine has been described as an uninteresting, be-spectacled German professor, these high-born conspirators against society are evidence that the spirit of revolt will find a way into the most exclusive circles, and there make its disciples. No doubt the aristocracies of the world are a serried rank, but we should deceive ourselves if we supposed that all the riches, science, education, and social training are on their side. Science, that mighty engine of change, has made a present of dynamite to anarchy, and its loud explosion has startled, if not thrown down, our cities. As usual, men have looked for the greatest consequences where there was most noise. But dynamite is not the chief product of science, nor the worst revolutionary weapon. Science breeds thought, strips off illusions, brings out the true and exact bearings of one thing upon another, makes it impossible to narrow one's convictions to party issues^ shows that wovds like c 2 20 The Progress of Nihilism, Liberalism, Conservatism, Radicalism, are mere labels, not definitions, and cannot stand as the final account of society or even of polities. It helps, therefore, in the general process of dissolution begun by bad government, famine, ignorance, irreligion, and the other thousand causes which led to '89 and '93. Science is now a potent factor in the world, and who will say that it testifies to the reasonableness of existing forms or is altogether friendly to the establishments under which men are governed? The study of the physical sciences gives a rude shock to many deep-seated conventionalisms. It has again and again suggested the application of its own methods in politics, and discovered affinities with Jacobinism and the more mechanical or Spartanlike forms of Socialist theories. And what may be called the Social Sciences — for we are a long way off" any such grand generalization as would be entitled to the name of tlie Social Science — have enabled us to criticize with severity the haphazard, make-shift, and too often hopelessly unjust laws and institutions which are all that mankind has to show after its thousands of years upon earth. The scientific genius, like the poet, looks forward. He observes that " the processes which have brought things to their present stage are still going on, not with a decreasing rapidity, indicating approach to cessation,, but with an increasing rapidity that implies long continuance and immense transformations ; " and to him there follows ^* the conviction that the remote future has in store forms of social life higher than any we have imagined ; there comes a faith transcending that of the Hadical, whose aim is some re-organization admitting of comparison to organizations which exist.'' "^ And though, as would be easy to prove in its place, there are reasons why a man of science cannot, if he is loyal to his own teaching, abet anarchy, or wish to promote revolution with its senseless pulling-down of Bastilles which have long been empty of captives, his analytic instinct, if left unchecked, may easily make of him a partisan on the destructive side; or at least one of the indifi'erent multitude whose coldness in the day of battle means victory to the anarchist. Meanwhile, the feeling which has spread into many lands, that there exists an essential affinity between science and revolution, warns us of a real and a growing danger. For the common man (perhaps even more than the cultivated) believes in science as holding the keys of truth. Infallibility, ascribed of old time to religion, has found, he thinks, a new seat ; it appears to him as an attribute, not of science in the abstract, but of the science which is actually taught in our universities, and to a large extent of the men * H. Spencer, " Study of Sociology," p. 399. The Progress of Nihilism, 21 that profess it. Thus public opinion, in one of its most for- midable shapes, has begun to pronounce that science and anarchy are one in principle, differing only as action does from ''the bookish theoric." Is it not indeed a token of at least a passing alliance between them that the same horrible formula will express unbelieving science and Nihilist politics, the war-cry so often raised of late years — Ni Dieu ni maitre ? And so we come round to what I said at the beginning : there is a new religion, but it denies God ; it is a militant Atheism, which has for its purpose, if not to make all things new, at any rate to make an end of all things old. And the oldest thing now existing in Europe is the Catholic Church. Let us see how the matter stands. When I say anarchy, I do not mean the unorganized lawlessness that has ever been in the depths of society. Vulgar, unprincipled thieves, murderers, chevaliers d'industrie, may be dealt with by the police ; and al- though, as should be well known, these outcasts tend to form a society of their own, intermarry, and transmit their evil pro- pensities through a series of generations, they have but an accidental connection with anarchists, and know nothing of philosophic systems. We must think of anarchy as a sect, a religion, a crusade. It is not the insurrection of entire peoples against their rulers, which happens only once in a century, and is at all times of the briefest duration. It corresponds rather to the old Gnostic propaganda throughout the Middle Ages, with one important distinction — viz., that, owing to the spread of edu- cation, many more are capable of becoming intelligent proselytes of a secret movement than was the case in any former time. And like all societies which go below the surface, it has degrees of initiation, of membership and enthusiasm ; it has friends, and half- friends, and well-wishers, and enemies who do not quite know what to make of it. The Templars, the Assassins, the freemasons, the Carbonari, suggest parallels, but on a local or merely national scale, to that immense and confused (because not completely organized) movement which at one side of the globe becomes visible as Nihilism and at the other as Fenianism, traversing all the grades between, of comparative guilt or inno- cence, to arrive at the two extremes which concur in the worship of nitro-glycerine. Their common principle is dissatisfaction with government. They are against the powers that be. It is their aim to sveep them away and begin a new era, when society shall govern itself, and kings, aristocracies, oligarchies — whether official like the Russian, or hereditary, like the Austrian and English — shall cease to exist. But with the new federation must come, they say, not a fresh distribution of property, but its abolition. All things shall be in common ; not land only, but ^2> The Progress of Mhilisni. .every species of capital ; nay, the very labour exacted from each shall be regulated with a view to the good of all. The destructive formula, as we have seen, is '' neither God nor master ; '' the constructive is already a hundred years old, but has not been realized. " Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity "—such is the aurea cetas ventura. And what of the Catholic Church ? It is only just to remember that while the anarchist hates Catholicism, he does not hate it alone. He means, if possible, to get rid of "^ all religion and all religiosity ; '^ and he includes in the common destruction every sect which turns men's thoughts away from earth to what he calls " the priest's heaven.^' An admirable specimen of this anti-religion among ourselves is Mr. John Morley; from his writings, tempered as they are with English gravity, we may estimate with what raorino^ fanaticism the anarchists of the Contment pursue religion to its last retreat, and would fain put the knife to its throat. Indeed, a philosophic atheist has rebuked his violent brethren for " hating God as if He really existed. '^ They certainlj- do, and thereby excite a suspicion that "religion and religiosity^' have still some terrors for them. But whilst breathing out threatenings and slaughter against every Church, they look upon Rome as the head and front of that which they mortally detest. If they could employ the language of the Apocalypse, we should be astonished at the likeness between their way of thinking and that with which we are so familiar when the Scarlet Woman of Babylon is identified with Home, and is seen making drunk the kings and rulers of the earth with the wine of her fornications. The Scriptural language is become obsolete in these men's mouths ; but the spirit which dictated its application stirs in their bosoms. They are the off- spring of the earliest Protestant fanatics and law-abolishers, of the Lollards, Hussites, Poor Men of God, and of the Anabaptists whom Luther savagely trampled upon, though he could not extin- guish them. The filiation is easy to establish ; the aims are not dissimilar ; and a bold theorist would say that the Atheism which in our day is manifest was latent yet active in these great Antinomian outbursts. We cannot overlook the remarkable fact that in all of them the reigning religion was assailed on social rather than spiritual grounds. It has been recently pointed out, with as much acuteness as accuracy in my opinion, that there is a close kinship between Wickliffe and Mr. Henry George. The attack five hundred years ago was directed against the feudal system, daily becoming more oppressive and, in the growth of civilization, less defensible. But with the system of land tenure and service the Church seemed to be inextricably bound up. Monasticism, too, was feudal; the bishops were I 'The Progress of Nihilism. ' 23 barons, abbots sat in the House of Lords, and tithes hdd become a kind of rent. We know what the end of these thihigs was : the feudal system perished, and the monasteries weie pulled down. But the great mass of the people gained little or nothing by the change. What the Church lost was on the wbole lost to them. Still, it seemed, down to the French Revolutibn, that, however kings might smite and plunder her, the Church would shield them with her sacred text, "^ Nolite tangere Christos meos.^' She became identified in the minds of the educated vulgar, and in many places of the uneducated also, with a system of absolute rule and never-ending injustice. She was taken to be a part of the ancien regir)ie. The prejudice is still against her, and after 1815 was for a time strengthened. Legitimists claimed the Church for their own; the Bourbons forgot that she had crowned Napoleon ; and King Ferdinand of Naples was not antiquarian enough to remember that his own dynasty was steeped to the lips in Febronianism. Despite her priesthood taken from the people in France and Ireland, the Church was summed up and characterized as anti-popular, aristocratic, a tool and mouthpiece of so-called paternal governments when they wished to terrify their subjects into obedience by means of the pulpit. Certain it was that Rome condemned anarchy in all its forms ; she began to cry out against the secret societies ere any govern- ment was well aware of them; and she has kept up her protest from Clement XII. to Leo XIII. She has held out the right hand of fellowship to Courts which take a perverse delight in refusing her advances ; and at this moment she is making treaties, or striving to keep them, with Germany, Russia, and France — countries in which her existence for years has been a lingering martyrdom. No wonder that anarchists in Paris as in New York detest a power which they see always at work to repress their efforts, and which they have no means of pro- pitiating. Nor is it perhaps more wonderful if, in their hatred, they cannot distinguish between her principles and the methods of the Governments which, as a matter of fact, she helps to maintain ; nor discern the spiritual elements in her teaching that enable her to acquiesce in the most unsatisfactory forms of social organization, while she is incessantly occupied in difiPusing those true ideas whereby even the most imperfect may grow better. On this point I wish to lay the utmost stress. It is the premise of my reasoning that we must distinguish between what is tem- poral in the Church and what is eternal, between the accidents of an age and the message entrusted for all time to apostolic keep- ing. And, therefore, those grievously misunderstand our faith, be they friends or enemies, who cannot see that the alliance between 24 The Progress of NihilisTn, Kome and any mere human institutions is of its nature transi- tory. Rome cannot be the bond-slave of an imperial house ; she is not for one people against another ; her politics are not a part of her infallibility, and we should err in taking them for a guide as to her future action. She was obedient to Constantine the Great j she shook from her the yoke of his feeble successors on the throne of Byzantium. She acted a bold part all through the Middle Ages, and told Caesar his place and warned him within his limits. Her theologians, in tracing a prince's duties, make him, not indeed the delegate^ but yet the designate, of the nation's voice. And when absolute monarchy erected its crest in Spain — a disastrous day for Spain as for the world — there were found religious men to qualify its claims, not only by insisting that the end of government is the public good and not the king's private pleasure, but, as in the illustrious example of Suarez, by declaring, that while all power comes from on high, society, as a whole, is invested in the beginning with the right to choose its depositary. This is no anticipation of the " Contrat Social '^ of E-ousseau. It is something better; it implies, once for all, that men are neither brutes nor chattels ; that reason, not violence or caprice, is the originating principle of the social organism, and should determine the place of every member in it, from the least to the greatest. It is the direct negation of that doctrine of passive obedience and unlimited divine right which was for so long the badge and the disgrace of the Church of England. A wise and good man, the late Dr. Arnold, used to say that there was a text in the Psalms which no English Churchman could read without blushing. How did it run? "Loquebar de testimoniis tuis in conspectu regum et non confundebar.'^ The Church of Henry, of Elizabeth, of Charles II. was silent in the presence of kings, or opened its mouth only to extol their sacred and inviolable majesty. Not so has it been with the Catholic Church. For good or for evil, that contest between the Sacerdotium and Imperium which fills so many pages of history, is a standing demonstration that Rome had a stern message to the highest of crowned heads, and delivered it with the straightforward eloquence of a prophet. It is no part of my contention that in all disputes the Holy See had reason on its side ; nor that it spoke at all times when the duty of speaking was, so far as events have since declared, im- perative on it. I do not conceive that theology rec^uires or the facts will allow such an assertion. But this, I think, no candid student of the past will deny, that, even when her interests seemed knit up with those of absolute monarchy, the Church kept her old free doctrine, set a limit to arbitrary power in the State, and, in her parochial clergy and many Orders of religious I The Progress of Nihilism. 26 men and women, showed that tenderness to the poor and miser- able which, in a less degraded time, was her chief characteristic. But she did more. She preserved the Gospel teaching for an «poch when, human authority being at its lowest ebb, there is an urgently felt and growing need that the kingship of Christ should be everywhere acknowledged, and become the keystone of social order. The ancien regime ? It is nearly extinct in the outward forms by which men knew it ; but that centralizing despotism which was its heart survives as ever, and keeps many nations in bondage. England alone, of European lands, has till now been free from it. But was the Church ever a friend to the system which made the estates of the realm a tool in the hands of Richelieu and Mazarin, as it now prostrates the noble and long-suffering French clergy at the feet of a Minister of Public Worship, wlio is not even a pious heathen, let alone a Christian? So much for the political alliance imagined between Rome and her inveterate foe, State Absolutism. Had it been part of the Socialist effort to break down that overweening power, then, putting aside the question of means, we cannot fancy the Church disapproving. But no, the Socialist would make it sheer omni- potence; his State is to be everything, and the individuals com- posing it automata. He cannot rise to the idea of rational freedom, and though his brother, the Nihilist, recognizes no leader, and his creed is absolute equality, yet he too is a despot over the souls and bodies of men. But now look at the question of questions, which concerns not political supremacy, but the distribution of wealth. How stands the Church towards that multitude which is learning from Nihilist and Socialist that in the coming era there will be neither rich nor poor? To every man draws near this Red Spectre, and, showing him the kingdoms of the world and the glories thereof, whispers, ''All this will I give thee, if, falling down, thou wilt adore me." What countervailing promise has religion to make ? And here when I speak of rehgion I am thinking of Christianity and its historical embodiment, the Catholic Church. No vague sentiment will cope with the power which has given itself a shape, and taken deadly weapons in hand, and wrecked palaces, and assassi- nated emperors, and sent a thrill of expectant horror through civilization, as though the last hour of European society were oome. Neither can I believe, on the other hand, that a power which is merely military or secular, which has no religion to hallow it, will in the long run hold up against a fanaticism that has arisen from the nether deeps, and is infra-natural and diabolic. The sword alone cannot lay this spectre. If it has the nature and peculiarities of a religious propaganda, there must be religion 26 The Progress of Nihilisni, to meet it. The question of the day requires a double solution, for it is a twofold problem ; it concerns the spirit as much as tlie flesh. And the beginning of social redemption is ever a change of ideas. I believe, indeed, that other and far-reaching changes are destined to follow, of which hardly any man has more than a dim presentiment. But we need not fear the greatest material changes, if they are undertaken in accordance with Chris- tian principles. Our confusion and distress this moment are due, in my opinion, simply to this, that during the last hundred years spiritual progress, the true inward civilization, has not kept pace with physical. We have been enriched by science, by the planting of colonies, and discovery of gold in two continents ; the disparity of condition, however, which these new and multi- plied resources should have lessened, has to a fearful extent been increased ; while, to borrow an apt though exaggerated saying of Mr. Bright's, " The lower classes have not known the Ten Commandments, and the higher have not kept them.'' We want, therefore, a Gospel for the nineteenth century ; not a new one, for it has been in the world this many a day, but to have that brought home to the millions " of the word of life which we have seen and handled'-' from the beginning. There is a " word of life '^ in the treasure-house which we call God^s Church ; and there is a whole world of poverty, crime, and spiritual ignorance waiting for it. The message uttered by Divine lips eighteen hundred years ago must have sounded strange in the ears that first heard it ; for it was like a two-edged eword. It began with con- solation, " Beati pauperes ; " such was the healing exordium; but it went on solemnly as the prophetic warning that judgment was at hand, " Vse vobis divitibus.''' Mark then how Nihilism has taken to heart the second part of the message, imagining that it understood and had received a com- mand to fulfil that woe upon the guilty. Blind and passionate, how could it enter into the mind of Christ, or comprehend that He meditated no vengeance, but would have saved the rich from the consequences of their injustice and luxury, as He taught the poor how from their sufferings they might reap salvation ? If we may venture to speak of a master-principle in the New Testa- ment, surely it is this : " Be not overcome of evil, but overcome evil by good." What is the Nihilist principle ? It is the old hard doctrine, " Smite him back that smiteth thee.'' With astonishing patience, founded on a knowledge of its own power, Christianity has forborne to alter the decaying or corrupt in- stitutions with which it has come in contact. It found slavery in the world ; and slavery must cease if the brotherhood of all men in Christ is to be realized. Yet the New Testament will not The Progress of Nihilism. 27 directly assail slavery ; and an apostle contents himself with saying', " Art thou a slave ? care not for it/' The need of the day was a sense of spiritual freedom ; when that was gained, all other freedoms would follow, as we know they did. It is the great mistake of Socialism to underrate the individual,, to begin at the wrong end, by endeavouring to create a public order for which, supposing it an indefinite impuovement on the present, men are not prepared, and to see in a change of material condi- tions that path to happiness which lies only in the bettering of the human character by religion, virtue, and self-sacrifice. The pro- cesses of Nature are slow, yet irresistible; they are silent, and achieve their ends little by little. Christianity in this is like Nature ; a silent, inward, continuous power, acting always, equal to every fresh emergency if the spirit does not refuse its aid ; building up a new character, line upon line, till the old is utterly transformed. It destroys as little as possible ; and what some have considered a blot on historical Christianity, that it absorbed into itself so many of the customs, usages, festival rites, and family institutions of the pre-Christian world, is to me a proof of its wise largeness and acquaintance with human nature. "A people is no more capable of suddenly receiving a higher form of religion than it is capable of suddenly receiving a higher form of government.^' There is so much truth in this sentence of Mr. Herbert Spencer's, that it would serve to condemn the methods of Socialism, taken at its own valuation, and whether looked at as a form of religion or a scheme of politics. Yes, of course ; but I do not hold that Christianity, addressed as it is to the individual, and proceeding by ways of peace, con- tains no message to society at large. It is meant for all tribes, and tongues, and peoples, and nations. It is not too high for the Australian savage, whom St. Benedict is even now taming and civilizing under the Southern Cross. Nor is it too low for the pioneers of science or the ruling spirits in the Press and the Senate. It must therefore contain social principles applicable under all forms of government and independent of them. It has nothing to say about franchises, or the laws which regulate supply and demand, or even about the rate of interest — in themselves* These things are the subject-matter of their own sciences. Where it gives light is in the spirit ; first, by showing the true value of this phenomenal world — for it has a true, but only a relative value ; and next, by insisting that self-interest shall not be the standard of judgment in legislation. I might illustrate my meaning in detail, were it necessary, and point out that the Christian axiom, " Do as you would be done by,'' has a worth for society as for every member of it, and is incumbent on all. But I would rather indicate how larjre a field is here for £8 The Progress of Nihilism, theologians and practical workers, as yet unoccupied. It is not enough to recognize that a Christian " social science '' is possible ; we must endeavour to ascertain its elements. Without advocating the introduction into our pulpits of those perplexed questions, on which the wisest may differ, touching land, capital, and labour, I would remark that Socialists are spreading their cathechisms and fly-leaves broadcast, and that religious teachers would do well to note it, and, while there is time, to supply the antidote. Oar position is one of great difiiculty, standing as we do betvveen Governments which are far from corresponding with the Christian ideal, and visionary fanatics ready to draw a blank cheque on the future, who delude the people with golden promises and involve the Church in one condemnation with the State that has tyrannized over her. Such is our danger ; we are assaded on both sides. But see the resources of Christianity. It makes no promises about this lower world ; it discourses of the kingdom of heaven, and tells men to renounce all things. Poverty and obedience, say the Socialists, have been the necessary conditions under which a few flourished on the toil and sufferings of the multitude. And the Gospel makes of poverty a beatitude, and of obedience a counsel. Does it, then, perpetuate the servile past ? Let history, a faithful witness, give the answer. In that mysterious way which is proper to a living organism, the Christian faith seems to combine impossibilities. It is severe, unworldly, ascetic ; and yet it has built up, by virtue of its own principles, a civilization which abounded in wealth, individual energy, and artistic power, and which, moreover, possessed in itself the germs of progress since unfolded. The crisis of that civilization is upon us ; and only those principles which created will preserve it from ruin. Christian poverty does not mean starving millions ; nor does the obedience of the saints imply a cowardly yielding to the powers of darkness in high places. The fever-dreams of Socialism are but reminiscences of a fair ideal, which religion alone can bring down from heaven to earth. On the venerable gates of Notre Dame at Paris one may read, in the coarse print of the Republic, ** Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite/'' as if the new religion would proclaim in these words, set up in such a place, its triumph over the old. What a strange, suggestive thought! For if we desire to learn the sense of that much-abused formula, and how it may become real in the lives of men to their lasting good, we must pass through the gates of Notre Dame, and listen to the Gospel which resounds in its far-echoing aisles. But they are few that enter. The stream of nations sweeps by; and to most who catch sight of the words on the portal it seems that The Progress of Nihilism. 39 Christianity is yielding to a more humane if less imposing creed. Our duty, then, is unmistakable. We may not preach a sensual or earthly doctrine, as neither do we need ; but preach we must that the beginning of the kingdom of heaven is here and now^ E/cdemption from sin brings with it social regeneration ; for mankind, as for the individual, there are sacraments of healing. We have long taught that " One is our Father in Heaven ; '^ it is required now to prove by every means in our power that men are brethren. Point by point we must take the Socialist doctrine, which assumes to start from this very principle, and show that its conception of man's brotherhood, however like in terms to that of the Gospel, is diametrically the opposite, because it does not recognize the deepest foundation of our nature, which is spiritual. The same Gospel which condemns inhuman greed of wealth, teaches us that we cannot live by bread alone. But the supreme social duty is justice, apart from which neither rich nor poor can be what they ought to be, servants of the Eternal. "What is justice? That, on the whole, is the question of the Sphinx for us." The Gospel does not enter into infinite detail ; but surely, even now, in a time when " men and nations perish as if without law,''' it is possible for Christian teachers, thinking steadily over the matter, to deliver righteous judgments on the problems under which we stagger. This, I say, it is our bounden duty to attempt. We have no message to the thirteenth or the sixteenth centuries, now gone before God with all their imper- fections on them. Our message is to our own day or to no day.. We cannot pretend that it may be learnt by merely opening the Bible, quoting the Fathers and Doctors, or uttering by rote what is affirmed in schools of theology. A living doctrine reveals itself only to a living spirit which is constantly engaged in translating the dead words of the past into such language a& men will understand. What is more, the grander that past, the larger the inheritance it has bequeathed us, so much the more likely are we to sit down contented with the thought that it is all there, and we need trouble no further to make it ours. Between possessing the faith and comprehending it lies the whole immense difference which divides the implicit from the explicit, or, in plainer terms, the acorn from the oak under whqse wide-spreading leafy branches a host may find shelter. There are in the Christian social doctrine a multitude of unfolded germs, waiting to be tended and made to yield their increase. Religion has raised up the saints who devised and propagated Monasticism ; the saints who eonsecrated to Christian uses Greek philosophy and Latin literature ; the saints who sent out missionary orders all over the world. At this day we are sorely in need of loyal and devoted spirits, filled 30 [The Progress of Nihilism, with enthusiastic love for the brethren, who shall discern the signs of the times, and help to make that new social order which is surely coming '^ the kingdom of God and His Christ." It will not resemble the state of things we have hitherto known ; it can be founded neither on slavery nor on a proletariat crowded into unwholesome cities, neither on aristocracies that do not work and are wanting in light, nor on military despotism : so much, I think, we may safely affirm. If, as high authorities hold, the law of progress is from status to contract, from fixed hierarchies, where each man abides as he was born, to the largest individual freedom, then it is clear the Gospel principles of justice, charity, and brotherhood will be needed more than ever. Equally clear it is that the problem of their application, becom- ing so much more complex and delicate, will demand a higher wisdom than politicians as yet have dreamt of. The ultimate purpose of industries, inductive sciences, and the whole machinery of civilization is, we know well, " the glory of God and the relief of man's estate." Socialism, which takes not into account God's glory, can do nothing for man except plunge him into war with his kind till confusion reigns without check. But the Gospel, in revealing a Divine Incarnation, has given us principles which establish the only true social order and union of each with his fellow in wealthy rest. I do not say that words without the '' chivalry of labour '' will avail much. But yet, again, " it is €0 easy to act, so hard to think.'"' There will go a great deal of strenuous thinkinjr to this task of ^^etting^ the multitudes imbued with a genuine Christianity, and convincing rich, as well as poor, of sin, and justice, and judgment. It means no less than the second conversion of Europe, and is " work for a god.'"* Yes, truly. But it remains to be done. "The sooty hell of mutiny and savagery and despair can, by man's energy, be made a kind of heaven ; cleared of its soot, of its mutiny, of its need to mutiny; the everlasting arch of Heaven^s azure overspanning it too, and its cunning mechanisms and tall chimney- steeples, as a birth of Heaven ; God and all men looking on it well pleased." This noble vision of the day when science and industry, consecrated to God, shall make an end of Nihilism, is for times, alas ! far distant. But there is a Catholic Church in the world ; and it will be due to blindness, cowardice, self-in- dulgence, and disloyalty to their own ideal on the part of Catholics, if, sooner or later, it be not in a measure realized. William Baeuy. \ ( 31 ) Art. III.— the FUTURE OF PETROLEUM. 1. The Region of the Eternal Fire. By Chaules Marvin-. London : W. H. All^n & Co. 1884. 2. Report by Consul Lovett on the Petroleum Trade of Baku, Parliamentary Papers. 1882. 3. The Petroleum Industries of Europe, By Herbert TwEDDLE, Jun. Engineering, Jan. 29, 1886 et seq, 4. Petroleum and its Productsf. By A. Norman Tate, F.C.S. London : John W. Davies. 1863. THE allegories by which popular fancy has in all ages symbo- lized the mineral wealth of the earth seem in this realistic century translated into sober fact. The dragon-guarded gold of Teutonic fable, the jewel fruits of Aladdin^s garden, the Nibelung's shining hoard, the treasure of Morgana's realm, are fetched from the nether world, 'no longer by gnomes and sorcerers, but by adroit financiers and speculative joint-stock companies. These modern wizards wield spells not less potent than those of the older necromanc}', for steam-perforator and dynamite charge are as efficient rock-openers as were ever magic wand or mystic chafing-dish. Nature^s subterranean treasure-house still holds the secret of a charm as powerful as that conferred by lamp and ring on the fortunate son of Mustapha the tailor ; nor are the genii of the cave less active and zealous now than in those days of yore in ministering to the will of those who have divined the method of their subjugation. But folk-lore dealt only in such glittering spoil as suggested riches to the eye no less than to the mind, and would have scorned fairy gifts in the unprepossessing form of pitchy oils or petrified charcoal. Yet nature in these latter has conferred boons on man more substantial far than in largesse of dazzling gem or yellow ore, for while the so-called precious stones and metals have a purely adventitious value, the reserve of light and heat stored in the more unpretending mineral deposits is an indispensable auxiliary in the battle of humanity. Rock-oil and rock-carbon, or petroleum and coal, are in a sense rivals, since they vie in the same field of usefulness ; while many contend that the reign of the latter is passing away, and that to the former will fall the chief share in controlling the economic future of the world. Though closely resembling each other in their chemical constituents and products, these two carbon com- pounds differ essentially in outward and visible characteristics. 82 The Future of Petroleum, Petroleum belongs to the class of substances generally known as bitumens ; a group of hydrocarbons varying in density and darkness of colour in the direct degree in which oxygen or pro- ducts of oxidization enter into their composition. At one end of the scale is solid bitumen, or asphalt, and at the other, naphtha — a light and volatile fluid, perfectly limpid or tinted only with pale straw-colour ; while intermediate between the two, and passing into them by insensible gradations, are maltha, or mineral tar, a dark and pitch-like substance as its name implies, and petroleum found in its natural state in varying degrees of density from that of molasses to that of fine olive-oil. Its hue, which has also many gradations, is due entirely to the inter- mixture of impurities; its true constituents being absolutely colourless. Among these a large place is filled by paraffin, which derives its name, parum ajffinis, from its refusal to combine with any other body. Of the distinctive properties of petroleum the most striking is its fluorescence, or capability of rendering visible the ultra-violet rays of light, shown in a blue glare from its surface wherever massed in considerable quantity. Chemists are at issue as to its origin, for though obviously a product of organic life, it is an open question whether it be due to animal or vegetable decomposition. The actual manufacture of similar oils from the artificial distillation of coal seems to countenance the supposition of its having been derived from a similar process naturally carried on. Its origin is thus referred to the distillation of coal and other bituminous minerals at very low temperatures, and it is asserted that though frequently found remote from coal deposits, carbonaceous shales are always disco- verable in its neighbourhood. Another conjecture seeks its genesis in the decay cf woody fibre ; a process in which are evolved such volatile hydrocarbons as marsh-gas, parent of the familiar will-o'-the-wisp, and typical of a large class of the constituents of petroleum termed hydrides. Those who see in it a resultant of animal life base their theory on its occurrence in the lower palaeozoic strata, where no traces of land plants exist, and where its formation is supposed to be due to marine organisms. But whatever the process carried on for its elaboration, it is probably still in operation, since a sub- stance, whose lighter constituents are so easily volatilized, could scarcely continue to subsist in the liquid state in situations whence the gases evolved from it frequently find an outlet to the open air. It is, as a rule, thicker and heavier when near the surface, from having undergone partial evaporation, and more fluid when found at greater depths, since it has not there parted with its lighter elements. In colour it is generally dark-greenish, brown, or nearly black. i The Fioture of Petroleum. 33 from the presence of impurities, eliminated by a protracted process of refining. Exceptionally, however, it is drawn from the well as bright and limpid as the best purified oil. Such a spring exists at Smith's Ferry, Pennsylvania; others in the Caspian region yield naphtha clear and pale as Saulerne, and much of the Persian oil is devoid of colour, and fit to be burnt crude. That of Rangoon, on the contrary, is dense and dark as pitch, and that produced in Africa is equally heavy. In odour, too, it is not less distinctively varied, Canadian oil being remark- able for a peculiarly offensive smell, like that of garlic. Petroleum is not, as commonly supposed, explosive, and as long as it remains in the liquid form will, even when ignited, burn gradually and steadily. It is the inflammable vapour evolved from it, which forms a fulminating compound in combi- nation with oxygen or atmospheric air, and even this mixture requires contact with actual flame to kindle it, the passage of a spark or of incandescent metal not being sufficient. The fitness of oil for domestic use is determined by the temperature at which it gives off inflammable gas, technically known as its " flashing- point/' and various methods have been devised to apply this criterion. The earliest used was the " open test,^' so called be- cause the oil, with a thermometer immersed, is heated in an open vessel, above the surface of which a flame is passed. As soon as the volatile vapour is given off" in sufficient quantity, a pale-blue flash or flicker follows, proving the oil dangerous at that tempera- ture. The Petroleum Act of 1868 prescribed a flashing-point of 100° Fahr. by this test, as the minimum for safety in general use. The " close test,'-* invented by Professor Abel in 1876, consists of a covered vessel, an orifice in which is disclosed at intervals by a slide, at the same moment that a lamp swings across it. The vapour thus confined breaks into flame much sooner than when in free contact with the air, and a flashino'-point of 73" Fahr. in the Abel apparatus, corresponds to 100° Fahr. in the open test. It is a curious fact that petroleum has an affinity for lightning, which frequently explodes the surface gas and kindles the oil. Ordinary conducting-rods are found useless as a protection, and from April to August 1876, 242,41^ barrels were thus destroyed in the United States, the tanks struck being invariably those with wooden covers. Though deposits of mineral oil and bitumen are widely distri- buted over the globe, the great petroleum zone, where it is found in large quantities, lies mainly between the 35th and 45th parallels of north latitude. Within these comparatively narrow limits, it can be traced at intervals round the entire circuit of the earth, with a focal point, or centre of greatest production, in each hemisphere. The line of the prodigious deposits of the VOL. XVI. — NO. I. [Third Series.] d 34 * Tlie Future of Petroleum. Caucasus is tlius continued westward across the Black Sea to the Crimea, lloumania and Galieia, and eastward beyond the Caspian to Turcoraania, Tashkend and China; while the great western oil-fields of the Alleghany slopes have outlying prolon- .s2:ations in Upper Canada, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Tennessee, Colorado, Oregon, Montana and California, giving a total area of bituminous production estimated at 63,000 square miles. In both hemispheres, again, the main belt throws off feebler ramifi- cations to the south ; following in Asia the peninsular formation of Burma to reappear in Java, and in Europe, that of Italy reached through intermediate connecting links in Dalmatia and Zante; while in America it tracks the main axis of the continent to Mexico, and outlines the intermittent land ridge enclosing the Caribbean Sea by appearances in Cuba and Trinidad. The island of Java is the only portion of the southern hemisphere where it is yet known to exist in any appreciable quantity. With petroleum deposits are associated other evidences of mineral activity, such as natural gas-jets, brine and sulphur springs, beds of asphalt and asphaltic limestones, gypsum, rock- salt, salt lakes and mud volcanoes. In regard to the geological distribution of rock-oil, it is not easy to generalize, since though found principally, according to Mr. Herbert Tweddle, in the cretaceous formation, it exists in every formation from the granite and volcanic rocks to the highest and most recent deposits in the Aral-Caspian region. It is thus assumed [he says] that one or more great cracks or faults in the earth's surface run east and west from a point in the central Caucasus, where the uplift attains its greatest height There can be little doubt that petroleum exists more or less freely along the base of all the great volcanic uplifts. Its great fluidity and the enormous pressures under which it is produced, diifuse it through strata which it can penetrate for long distances from the cracks by which it can find a vent to reach the earth's surface. In the bitumi- nous schists and argillaceous rocks it is absorbed and held fast, while in the sandstones and sands enclosed by impermeable rocks, it is stored up ready to be released by the miner's drill. According to this theory it percolates underground, often for long distances, until stopped by impermeable strata, and the accumulation at any given spot may represent the subterranean drainage of a large area. The oil-bearing stratum in the Old World is generally a bed of sand, and the last slope of a mountain range where it subsides into sea or plain, is almost invariably the spot where the deposits approach the surface. Somewhat different are the geological conditions of its exist- ence in the New World, where the rocks of the oil districts Tke Future of Petroleum. 35 belong principally to the Silurian, Devonian, and Carboniferous series. The wells are for the most part sunk in the sandstones ; but the oil-springs of Ohio and Western Virginia rise through the coal measures overl>4ng the Devonian strata, and the oil- wells of Enniskillen in Canada are sunk in the Hamilton shales, overlying the Devonian limestone. Among superficial signs of oil are inflammable gas-jets, surface oil floating on water or impregnating the soil, and in many cases brine-springs. In the Crimea its presence is supposed to be indicated by the colour of the vegetation, showing in bands of more vivid green in spring, and of sicklier yellow in summer than elsewhere. The oil-belts in America run in roughly parallel lines from north-east to south-west, while the petroleum cells are supposed to lie in transverse fissures inclined obliquely to the sur- face. Immediately above the oil is a layer of gas, which generally ■escapes first, and below it one of water^ whose appearance heralds the failure of the supply. This order may, however, be reversed iiccording to the point of the fissure first reached by the boring. The Pitch Lake of the island of Trinidad, three miles in cir- oumference and of unknown depth, is one of the most singular asphaltic deposits. The bitumen, which is supposed to float on water, is solid on the surface, but spongy when cut into, and perforated with cells containing petroleum. At one point it wells up freshly as though from a subterranean source, and flows over the more compact masses. As the semi-fluid and sulphureous mineral advances [says Dr. Oesner]* and is exposed to the atmosphere, it becomes more solid, but €ver continues to advance and encroach upon the water of the harbour. The surface of the bitumen is occupied by small ponds of water, clear and transparent, in which there are several kinds of beautiful fishes. The sea near the shore sends up considerable quantities of naphtha from submarine springs, and the water is often covered with oil which reflects the colours of the rainbow. In the clifEs along the shore there are strata of lignite, in which it has been supposed by some the bitumen and naphtha had their origin. Mixed with grease this natural pitch is found useful for caulk- ing the sides of vessels, but does not seem to be turned to account in any other way. Of a somewhat similar character is the bitu- minous region of California, where oil of a tarry consistence is produced, and the principal well, thirty feet in diameter, kept in constant ebullition from the escape of marsh-gas, occupies the centre of a field of asphalt nearly a square mile in extent, * "A Practical Treatise on Coal, Petroleum, and other ])istilled Oils.** By Abraham Gesner, M.D., F.G.S. New York. 1861. d2 36 The Future of Petroleum. « The tardy modern development of the natural supply of mineral oil seems the more strange, as its utility has been recog- nized from the earliest ages. A bituminous cement, still trace- able in the remains of ancient Babylonian buildings, was drawn from the fountains of Hit, on the right bank of the Euphrates, visited, as a natural curiosity by Alexander, Trajan, and Julian. Bitumen, mixed with saline sulphurous water, poured forth from this source, may still be seen floating on the surface of the Euphrates, and is turned to account in caulking the wicker coracles in use on that river. A passage in Herodotus is supposed to refer to the still existing oil-springs of Zante, and Pliny and Dioscorides mention the oil of Agrigentum, commonly burned in lamps in Carthage and elsewhere, under the name of Sicilian oil. Petroleum was known to the Chinese from the date of their earliest records, and the fountains of the Caucasus are described by Marco Polo as furnishing the oil supply of all the neighbour- ing countries. Yet it is only within the last quarter of a century that rock- oil has begun to figure largely as an industrial product, owing to the impulse recently given to its use by its discovery, in extraordinary abundance, in two localiti