hands more political and social influence would be placed by a higher culture. The aristocracy do not want to create competitors for their own children.' They welcome, no doubt, to their own ranks the few individuals who get what the present ill-organised system of education can give them, and who struggle through from obscurity to eminence by commercial success. But where one remarkable man succeeds, twenty average men are defrauded of educational development and the career which it opens. The individual is filled, and the

public is sent empty away.'

As

The middle class, however, do not need the patronage of any other section of the community, in order to secure a culture suitable to their social position: they have the power to get what they want, if they determine to use it. Hitherto they have not combined for this purpose, they have not expressed their wishes, they have not urged them upon their political representatives and leaders. And so successive governments pay very little attention to their wants. our critic exclaimed some years ago: Twenty-three articles in the Liberal programme, and middle class education is not one of them!' But this class will evidently not be content. to remain much longer the milch-cow of the educational system. They will insist on having the rights as well as the burdens of citizenship. Their interest in the reputed problems of the day, such as county franchise or disestablishment, is after all a very small or even a sentimental one. But it is a vital question for them whether their children shall receive a full and suitable culture, and the training necessary to maintain their social position. Let them give their political representatives a respite from disputed and unprofitable topics: and let them in season and out of season urge this all-important subject on their notice: and before long their just claims will be admitted, and their wants supplied.

ART. II.-EMERSON'S SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY.

UR expense is almost all for conformity

OUR

it

is for cake that we run into debt.' These remarks of Emerson-quaint in their simplicity-strike hard at the root of certain evils in the present which threaten to develope into terrible dangers for the future. They lay bare the principle underlying certain false modes of life which can only exist by the oppression of many individuals, and which tend to the disintegration of society. Yet they were uttered by one who appreciated as fully as any man could, the true value of custom; for Emerson was ever ready to acknowledge that the majority of social traditions, foolish and dead though they may now be, have lived and had their origin in some real need. He himself says that

'Fashion, though in a strange way, represents all manly virtue. It is virtue gone to seed.'

and elsewhere

'Fashion is funded talent.'

'There is always a best way of doing everything, if it be to boil an egg. Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love,-now repeated and hardened into usage

'Genius invents fine manners, which the baron and baroness copy very fast, and by the advantage of a palace, better the instruction.'

And he tells us, speaking of the difficulties which every man would find in ordering his own life if he had to decide each particular of it himself.

'Help comes in the custom of the country

I know not how to build or to plant. . . . Never fear; it is all settled how it should be, long beforehand, in the custom of the country.'

Of genius itself he observes

'Every master has found his materials collected, and his power lay in his sympathy with his people, and in his love of the materials he wrought in. What an economy of power! and what a compensation for the shortness of life! all is done to his hand. The world has brought him thus far on his way. The human race has gone out before him, sunk the hills, filled

the hollows, and bridged the rivers. Men, nations, poets, artisans, women, all have worked for him, and he enters into their labours. Choose any other thing, out of the line of tendency, out of the national feeling and history, and he would have all to do for himself; his powers would be expended in the first preparations.'

It is evident that Emerson was no mere enemy of 'custom,' or the existing order of things. He desired to disturb nothing that did not stand in the way of something better. He even teaches us that where fashion is no hindrance to us we may use it as a help. His denunciations of the social weakness which he designated as 'conformity,' have therefore the more weight as coming from one who did not love change and eccentricity for their own sake, but who perceived, in his serene wisdom, that virtue can hardly be attained by the majority without a manly independence of life; that a sacrifice must be made, whenever facts require it, of the form to the spirit; and that, if a man wishes to reach excellence in anything, he must be prepared to abandon the nonessentials of existence for the sake of the essentials.

If we look into almost any modern book, whether of history, of travel, of biography, or of romance, we see how wide-spread is the evil against which he spoke so strongly. From the savage who sallies out of his rude shelter to slaughter beasts little more savage than himself, to the European who lives refinedly and studies the wisdom of all ages, the folly extends.

The ryot of the Deccan, who is contented to spend sixpence a week on his own requirements, is nevertheless weighted by money embarrassments as heavily as any younger son who is a slave to the requirements of a hereditary luxury. For the frugal Hindoo, whose food and clothing are of the simplest, spends his life struggling to pay off, with extortionate interest, his father's marriage debts; and he hands down to his descendants a similar burden, incurred probably for the sake of paying the cost of his daughter's wedding. He will ask, Mr. Wedderburn tells us, for a year's wages in advance for this purpose; and rather than forego the useless expenditure which is customary on such an occasion, he would kill his daughter in infancy, and so save his household from the disgrace of an unceremonial marriage.

This conduct seems to us strange enough; whole lives are ren.

dered hard and anxious in order to achieve a result which is in itself nothing—an illusion-a fallacy-a mere compliance or conformity with what has been done before on a similar occasion. Perhaps there was once a reason for such an arrangement, now at least there is none; there are, on the contrary, many reasons against it; nevertheless, the thing must be done; the dead old form must continue to stifle human lives.

But although we look at the Hindoo with wonder, we may see the same thing near home. The Oxford student hampers his future career for the sake of having cigars and wine like other men, even if he does not care for them himself. The young wife encourages her husband to buy furniture which is not essential to the comfort of either, simply because her friends have such things as a matter of course,' and the young couple start life under real difficulties in order to supply themselves with apparent luxuries.

And so it goes on through all the ranks and ranges of society, until we find among the customs of respectable' people something very like robbery. There has come to be actually a certain conscientiousness in adherence to fashionable vices, not unlike that which sustains the Hindoo in his self-inflicted miseries, and encourages the savage in his immoral habits. We are not ashamed of procuring luxuries without paying for them, but rather of going without such luxuries when we cannot afford them. If we are detected in acts of personal self-denial, which are simply our duty and not works of supererogation—we blush guiltily; but we ask boldly for sympathy when we find it impossible to meet the cost of our self-indulgence. That 'trade is bad' is a sufficient excuse for paying sixpence in the pound of our debts and calling ourselves martyrs; it is no reason for diminishing our establishment and retrenching our expenditure. Our individual life is to us no sacred thing for which we are responsible; it is no more than a block round which to hang customs and fashions as we find them. We desire the utmost legal freedom and immunity from public burdens; but it is only that we may embarrass ourselves the more thoroughly with the trammels of sacred habits. No tax for the general good costs us so much as our subservience to senseless fashions; yet we

cry out piteously under the burden of our necessary contributions to the commonwealth, and great rulers, hearing us, grow as timid as the shopkeepers who are afraid of offending their best customers by pressing for payment of their account; governments follow the example of individuals, thrusting the responsibilities of their conduct on the shoulders of their descendants, and mortgaging the unrealized future for the realizable present.

Emerson tells us that, 'Poverty demoralizes.' It is not, however, poverty absolute which demoralizes so much as poverty comparative; especially that contraction of habits of expense without regard to means of outlay which is so common in society. The most dangerous of all is the poverty of character which cannot give dignity to personal life without the aid of extraneous circumstances, and which is obliged to sell all its possibilities of usefulness, all its freedom of action, all its larger aims, in order to satisfy the petty demands of extraneous custom. Few of us dare to retain our own freedom in the face of our neighbours' opinions; and yet, had we but courage to put it to the proof, we should find that the world will give us the position which we choose to take, and will respect and judge us accordingly. We do not purchase its indulgence by an easy subservience to its decrees; rather do we secure its life-long tyranny. 'What forests of laurel we bring,' Emerson reminds us, and the tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion. of their contemporaries! The measure of a master is his success in bringing all men round to his opinion twenty years later.'

Happily, the nobler part of our nature requires few extraneous means for its satisfaction. It is the folly and not the wisdom of mankind that costs so much. We are almost tired of hearing that if we would win happiness in another world, we must deny ourselves in this; but it is not sufficiently received among the theoretical bases of our life that in this world itself it is necessary to choose between the sorts of good which we shall strive to attain, and to deny ourselves in one direction if we would satisfy ourselves in another. We lead our boys and girls to suppose. from the quality of the advice, and the nature of the