silence in those cases where usage requires speech, is debasing, in whatever occupation it is manifested, whether in ruling a great nation or in selling matches. A man is perfectly justified in asking what price he pleases for his own property: -no one is compelled to purchase it. But he has no right to tell lies about it,—no right, by active lying, to conceal defects, nor to keep silence (passive lying) about such as exist, when there is the slightest reason for presuming that the purchaser assumes their non-existence. Now it is too true that in the wholesale, not less than the retail trade there is a vast amount of this and other kinds of lying practised. Indeed the practice is so well known to be very prevalent that individuals justify it on the ground that "everybody does it." But I deny that trade, as trade, is debasing. Political life has never been considered in itself debasing; yet is there not almost as much direct and indirect lying in politics as in trade? Traders are found to sell oxidized mercury for cayenne, and chicory for coffee; and the British public is indignantly taking measures to check the deceits. But there is another kind of adulteration that, nationally speaking, it is of far more importance to check. If the British Empire is to flourish, the British public must manifest some practical indignation at the large quantities of red-oxide religion and chicory patriotism which are unscrupulously manufactured and unblushingly retailed by its political traders. It may be doubted if the lying and swindling which exist in commercial life are nationally so discivilizing as the lying and swindling in political life. Deceit must be put down, both in trade and in politics, by an improved moral tone-a higher cultivation of the moral faculties-and by a practical, effective reprobation on the part of society of all ascertained lying; or in spite of multifold promising appearances, England must cease to prosper. I have shewn that civilization may be described as all sound science and true art. But sound science and true art are simply the discovery of facts, called natural laws in the animate and inanimate

world, and the acting in accordance with these facts for improving and useful purposes. Civilization may, accordingly, be described as Man's ascertaining of truths in the animate and inanimate world and harmonizing with them in order to preserve himself and species in greatest perfection. Now, wherever a lie is told, looked or acted, there is dis-harmony and dis-accord; and hence all lies are discivilizing. More directly, our theory declares lying discivilizing, as one of the most decided abnegations of the moral agencies. Again, the saving of time is a process of civilization. Hence whatever wastes time is a process of discivilization. Now let the reader reflect what a fearfully large portion of our time is actively occupied merely in guarding against falsity of some sort, further, how much is wasted in sheer inactivity because we cannot trust each other, and he will see what a powerful element of discivilization, lying necessarily is. As to the proof of experience, have not explorers ever found savages the greatest of liars as well as great thieves? And was not universal deceit most dominant among the Greeks at the period when, as we know, their national decadence had already commenced?

I may as well say now the little I shall be able to say in this essay on the subject of Government. I mean government in general, for I may have occasion to allude to the military department of our government in speaking of war.

I have as yet said nothing on the subject. Though governments are a necessary result of the subdivision of labour which inevitably takes place with the advancing substitution of moral and intellectual, for physical agencies, i. e. are a necessary result of Civilization, it does not appear that any one of the forms of government hitherto discovered is absolutely necessary to the constant operation of the civilizing process. Some known to us are manifestly more favourable to that constant operation than others; but we have not yet seen the Civilizing and Civilized Government.

Governments are not a result simply of that subdivision of

labour to which man is ultimately conducted by the influence of the four chief natural impellants, so often named. They spring in a great degree from other two human impellants, which come into operation immediately after the first four have received moderate satisfaction; viz. man's desire to rule. or regulate; and his craving for the admiration of his fellows. Mung tsze or Mencius, himself the second great political teacher of the Chinese, said whether in regretful self-censure or not, we do not learn: "Jin che hwan, tsae haou wei jin she, Man's chief disease (or craving) consists in his desire to be a teacher of his fellows." About 2,200 years later, Arnold, a much respected teacher of British youth, called "the desire of taking an active share in the great work of government, the highest earthly desire of the ripened mind."* Both sayings point to what I call man's desire to rule or regulate. As to man's craving for admiration, it operates more or less in almost every act of his life, which is not strictly personal. The manifestation of these two cravings constitutes overt ambition; and they, more than the wish for pay (as a means of satisfying his other desires) impel men in every country to strive for place in the ruling body. I have not hitherto noticed them, because they did not seem to me to lead specially to social results, which are generally felt to be embraced by the term Civilization.

But considering their unmistakeable universality and great strength, our view of Civilization, as a problem in practical solution, is not complete unless it includes their most perfect satisfaction. For Civilization requires that no craving, which forms an essential part of normal human nature, shall be ignored or absolutely repressed. It only requires that the indulgence of these cravings shall be limited by, or subordinated to, its own highest rule of doing to others as we would be done by. Any form of government, therefore, which steadily ignores or suppresses, in a large portion of society, man's desire to rule and his craving for admiration, Quoted from Creasy's Rise and Progress of the Constitution.

PP

is in so far discivilizing. Unless this discivilizing tendency is sufficiently counterbalanced by some other, potently working aids to civilization, such a government must inevitably produce national decay. The real cause of the Chinese being the only people that has, in spite of occasional checks and stoppages, progressed from the earliest times to the present, as one and the same strictly national nation, while so many others have risen to great power, and then utterly disappeared, is, that the Chinese, alone of all nations, have by one and the same measure systematically satisfied these two cravings, besides making them serve in the extension of mental cultivation and the conscious use of moral agencies rather than the physical, in man's dealings with man. It is their Public Service Competitive Examinations, and their fundamental maxim,-nationally inculcated by means of these Examinations, that men must be ruled by conquering their hearts, which has made the Chinese by thousands of years the oldest, and by hundreds of millions the largest of nations that the world has seen.

I now return to the discrepancies and conflicting notions enumerated on pages 573, 574. Mr. Mill's censure of the Americans, as mere dollar-hunters, occurs in the chapter "On the Stationary State.”

Time prevents my condensing largely from it; and I must therefore assume, in making a few remarks, that those who read an Essay on Civilization, will take the trouble to refer to the book itself.

Mr. Mill points out, as a desirable state of society one in which each coming generation will be restrained by prudence and public opinion within the numbers necessary for replacing the actually existing one; the object of thus permanently arresting population at a certain amount, being to render the progress of wealth and of the productive arts unnecessary, and so get rid of the trampling, crushing, elbowing, and treading on each other's heels, which form the existing type of social life. We should then, Mr. Mill says, have a state

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of society in which a much larger body of persons than at present would not only be exempt from the coarser toils, but would have sufficient leisure, both physical and mental, to cultivate freely the graces of life. Though capital and population would be stationary, there would, Mr. Mill observes, be as much scope as ever for all kinds of mental culture and moral and social progress. And he objects to the cultivation of every rood of land which is capable of growing food for human beings; to every flowery waste and natural pasture being ploughed up, nothing left to the spontaneous activity of nature, and the world deprived of that solitude in the presence of natural beauty and grandeur, which is the cradle of thoughts and aspirations good for the individual and for society.

Few or none will venture to deny the extreme desirability of the objects Mr. Mill points out: a beautiful inanimate nature, and an animate nature (man), in which the graces of life are freely cultivated. But the reader is already aware that I consider his great measure for ensuring the desired state to be radically ineffective, even if its institution were practicable,-which may fairly be doubted. If we, for the sake of argument, suppose the first great practical difficulty overcome, and every nation of the world to have recognised the advisability of taking care that the number of births should be equal to the number of deaths, how is the thing to be done? If in speculating on the different positive regulations by which the end might at first seem attainable, the reader does not come immediately on manifest impracticabilities, he will be much more ingenious and successful than I have been. One may suppose all males and females to be married, and each married couple to have only two children; but would the existing law of sexual equality of birth still operate under a system so constrained, supposing the great natural difficulties in the way of the maintenance of that system overcome? Again, we may suppose married life to be as it now is, but each actually existing generation to fix