And that is why if they go down into the arena again they will be horrified by the ingratitude of men. And may they dwell on that thought: may they think it is only ingratitude! That is a gloomy thought, but easier to bear than many others.
But it would be still better if they did not go there at all ; let them stay and tell us and our children of their great deeds.
There is no need to resent this advice; what is living changes, and the unchanging becomes a monument. They have left their furrow, just as those who come after them will leave theirs, and these a fresh wave will over-take in its turn, and then everything: furrows, the living and the monuments, will be covered by the universal amnesty of everlasting oblivion!
Many people are angry with me for saying these things openly. 'In your words,' a very worthy man said to me, 'one hears an outside spectator speaking.'
But I did not come to Europe as an outsider, you know. An outsider is what I have become. I am very long-suffering, but at last I am worn out.
For five years I have not seen one bright face, I have not heard spontaneous laughter, I have not encountered an understanding 4 The assassins of Paul I. ( Tr.)
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look, I have been surrounded by fcldshers" and prosectors.6 The feldshers have been continually trying their remedies, while the others have been proving to them on the corpse that they have blundered-well, eventually, I have snatched up a scalpel too ; perhaps, through being unused to it, I have cut too deeply.
I have spoken not as an outside spectator, not to find fault: I have spoken because my heart was full, because the lack of general understanding has put me out of patience. That I was sobered earlier than the rest has been of no alleviation to me.
Even of feldshers only the worst smile with satisfaction as they look at the dying patient and say: 'Didn't I tell you he would turn up his toes by the evening? And he has.'
For what, then, have I held out?
In 1 856 the best of all the German emigrants, Karl Schurz,7
arrived in Europe from Wisconsin. On his return from Germany he told me that he had been struck by the moral desolation of the Continent. I translated to him aloud my West European Sketches, and he tried to defend himself from my conclusions, as though they had been ghosts in which a man is unwilling to believe, but of which he is afraid.
'A man who understands contemporary Europe as you do,' he said to me, 'ought to abandon it.'
'That is what you have done,' I observed.
'Why is it that you don't?'
'It is very simple. I can answer you as a certain honest German, before me, answered in a fit of proud independence: "I have a king of my own in Swabia." I have my own people m Russia ! '
5 1\iale nurses o r doctors' assistants. ( Tr. ) 6 Dissecting demonstrators. ( Tr. )
i Schurz, Karl ( 1 829-1 906) . fought i n the revolutionary mO\·ement of 1 848. I n 1 852 he "·ent to the United States. where he IPcturcd, took part in politics and fought in the Ci,·il \Var, as a major-general of ,·olunteers.
In 1 869 he was elect!'d to the Senate. and in 1 8i7 appointed Secretary of the Interior. He edited a paper, and wrote lives of Henry Clay and of Lincoln. ( Tr.)
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Joh11 Stztart J1!fill
and His Book 011 Libert)�"
I HAVE HAD to smart a good deal for taking a gloomy view of Europe, and for speaking my mind simply, without fears or regrets. Since I published my 'Letters from the Avenue Marigny'
in the Contemporary' some of my friends and unfriends have shovvn signs of impatience and indignation, and have objected
. . . and then, as though to spite them, with every development things in Europe havf' become darker, more suffocating, and neither Paradol's wise articles nor the worthless clerico-liberal stuff of :\lontalembert, nor tlw sup!•rseding of a king of Prussia by a Prussian prince, have been able to distract the eyes of seekers after truth. People in Russia do not care to know this, and naturally they are angry with the indiscreet discoverer.
vYe need Europe as an ideal, a reproach, a good example; if she were not these things it would be necessary to invent her.
Did not the naive free-thinkers of the eighte<'nth century, Voltair<' and Robespierre among them, say that even if there were no immortality of the soul it would be necessary to preach that there was, in order to maintain people in fear and virtue? And do we not see in history how the great have sometimes concealed the serious illness or sudden death of a king, and have governed in the name of a corpse or a madman, as happened not long ago in Prussia?
A pious lie may be a good thing, but not everyone is capable of it.
I was not cast down, however, by censure, but consoled myself by thinking that here, too, the thoughts I uttered were no better received, and still more by considering that they were objectivPly truP, that is independPnt of personal opinions and even of good intentions in education, correction of morals and the like.
Everything true of itself sooner or later rises up and reveals itself, kommt an die Sonnen, as Goethe says.
\Vhile I was being scolded by the heads of the literary depart-1 Tlu• Hussian pt>r-odical So!.orrllu'nnik, Octobt>r an.! 1\'ovl'mber 1 8+i. (R.)
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ments, time went on its way, and at last ten whole years had gone. Much of what in 1 849 had been new had become a cliche in 1859; what then had seemed an extravagant paradox had been transformed into public opinion, and many eternal and unshakeable truths had gone out with that year's fashions in clothes.
Serious minds in Europe began to take a serious view. There are very few of them, and this only confirms my opinion of the West, but they will go far, and I well remember how Thomas Carlyle smiled over the remains of my faith in English ways.
But now there appears a book that goes far beyond anything . I have said. Pereant qui ante nos nostra dixerunt, and thanks b e to those who after us confirm with their authority what we have said, and with their talent clearly and forcefully hand on what we have feebly expressed.
The book that I am speaking of was not written by Proudhon, nor even by Pierre Leroux nor by any other angry socialist exile:
-not at alclass="underline" it was written by one of the most celebrated political economists, recently a member of the India Board, to whom Lord Stanley three months ago offered a place in the government. This man enjoys enormous, well merited authority; in England the Tories read him with reluctance and the Whigs with anger; on the Continent he is read by the few people (specialists excepted) who read anything at all except newspapers and pamphlets.
The man is John Stuart Mill.
A month ago he published a strange book in defence of liberty of thought, speech and the person; I say 'strange' for is it not strange that, where Milton wrote two centuries ago of the same thing, it should be necessary for a voice once more to be raised
'On Libet·ty'? But men like Mill, you kno\\;, cannot \'Hite out of satisfaction: his whole book is imbued with a profound sadness, not fretful but virile, censorious, Tacitean. He has spoken u p because evil has become worse. Milton defended freedom o f speech against the attacks o f authority, against violence, and all that was noble and vigorous was on his side. Mill's enemy is quite different: he is standing up for liberty not against an educated government but against society, against custom, against the deadening force of indifference, against petty intolerance, against 'mediocrity.'