PO\Wr is rPquired: people occupy themselves with their own affairs, and now and again, by way of diversion, with some
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'philanthropic hobby,' and they remain respectable but commonplace.
To this mean belong po\ver and authority; the very government is powerful in proportion as it serves as the organ of the dominant mean and understands its instinct.
What sort of thing is this sovereign mean? 'In America all whites belong to it; in England the ruling stratum is composed of the middle class.'
Mill finds one difference between the lifeless inertia of Oriental peoples and the modern petit bourgeois state; and in this, I think, is the bitterest drop in the ,..,.hole goblet of wormwood that he offers. Instead of a sluggish, Asia tic quiescence, modem Europeans, he says, live in vain unrest, in senseless changes: 'In getting rid of singularities we do not get rid of changes, so long as they are performed each time by everyone. \\'e have cast a\vay our fathers' individual, personal way of dressing, and are ready to change the cut of our clothes two or three times a year, but only so long as everybody changes it; and this is done not with an eye to beauty or convenience but for the sake of change itself!'
If individuals cannot get free of this clogging slough, this befouling bog, then 'Europe, despite its noble antecedents and its Christianity, will become a China.'
So we have come back and are facing the same question. On what principle are we to wake the sleeper? In the name of what shall the flabby personality, magnetised by trifles, be inspired, be made discontented with its present life of railways, telegraphs, ne\vspapers and cheap goods?
Individuals do not step out of the ranks because there is not sufficient occasion. For \vhom, for what, or against whom are they to come forward? The absence of energetic men of a ction is not a cause but a consequence.
The point, the line, beyond which the struggle between the desire for something better and the conservation of what is finishes in favour of conservation, comes (it seems to us) when the dominant, active, historic part of a people approaches a form of life that suits it; this is a kind of repletion, saturation: everything reaches an equilibrium, settles down and eternally pursues one and the same course-until a cataclysm, renovation or destruction. Semper idem requires neither enormous efforts nor menacing warriors. Of whatever kind they may be, they will be superfluous: in the midst of peace there is no need of gpnerals.
Not to go as far as China, look close at hand, at the country in
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the West which has become the most sedentary-the country where Europe's hair is beginning to turn grey-Holland. Where are her great statesmen, her great artists, her subtle theologians, her bold mariners? But wha t would be the purpose of them? Is she unhappy because she chafes and blusters no longer, because these men are no more? She will show you her smiling villages on the drained marshes, her laundered towns, her ironed gardens, her comfort, her liberty, and will say: 'My great men obtained for me this freedom, my mariners bequeathed me this wealth, my great artists embellished my walls and churches: it i s well with me-what do you want me to do? Have a sharp struggle with the government? But is it oppressive? We have more liberty even now than there ever was in France.'
But what comes of a life like this?
What comes of it? Well, what comes of life at all? And then: are there no private romances in Holland ? no clashes or scandals? Do people not fall in love in Holland, weep, laugh, sing songs, drink Schiedam, dance till morning in every village?
'What is more, it should not be forgotten that, on the one hand, they enjoy all the fruits of education, science and art, and, on the other, they have a mass of business: the great patience-game of trade, interminable household puzzles, the education of their children in the form and semblance of their own. The Dutchman has not the time to look round him, to enjoy some leisure, before he is carried off to 'God's acre' in an elegant, lacquered coffin, while his son is already harnessed to the trade-\vheel, which must be turned incessantly or business will come to a stop.
Life may be lived like this for a thousand years if it is not interrupted by a second accession of the brother of a Bonaparte.
I hPg leave to digress from the elder brothers to thP younger.
We do not possess enough facts, but we may suppose that the races of animals, as they have established themselves, represent the ultimate result of the long, vacillating succession of different changes of species, of a series of consummations and a ttainments.
This history was performed at leisure by the bones and muscles, the convolutions of the brain and the ripples of the nerves.
The antediluvian beasts represent a kind of heroic age in this Book of Being: they are the Titans or paladins; they diminish in size, adapt themselves to a new environment and, as soon as they attain to a type that is sufficiently skilful and stable, they begin to repeat themselves in conformity with their type, to such a dPgree that the dog of Ulysses in the Odyssey is as like all our dogs as two drops of water. And that is not alclass="underline" has anyone said that political or social animals, not only living in a herd but
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possessing organisation of some sort, like ants and bees, established their ant-hills or nests out of hand? I do not think so at all. Millions of generations lay down and died before they built and stabilised their Chinese ant-hills.
I should like to explain from this that, if any people arrives at this condition, where its external social structure conforms to i ts requirements, then there is no internal need, before a change of requirements, for it to progress, make war, rebel or produce eccentric individuals.
An inactive absorption in the herd or the swarm is one of the prime conditions for the conservation of what has been achieved.
The world of which Mill speaks has not arrived at this state of complete repose. After all its revolutions and shocks it cannot precipitate its lees: there is a mass of muck at the top, and everything is turbid: there is not the cleanness of Chinese porcelain nor the whiteness of Dutch linen. There is much in it that is immature, misshapen, even sick, and in this connection there lies before it one more step forward on its own path. It must acquire not energetic personalities or eccentric passions, but the particular morality of its situation. For thE' Englishman to stop giving false weight, for the Frenchman to refuse to give assistance to every police-force, it is not only 'respectability' that is required, but a stable mode of living.