In the Royal Academy's Exhibition which opened May 2, 1890, I remarked a fine picture of the Lord Mayor's Show. That Show is the monument of a mercantile evolution by which poor men,—one, 'tis said, with only a cat for capital,—clubbed together in guilds, largely socialistic, and, so increasing means, accumulated the wealth which controlled kings, and inaugurated the epoch of peace, so necessary for commerce.

But the Academy picture was not so striking as one I had seen the day before (May-day) in Hyde Park. There, amid a motley crowd with red and black flags inscribed 'Anarchy,' stood William Morris,—artist, scholar, and poet,—announcing to the workmen that they are slaves, rich men their owners, their natural enemies, and existing society a war.

The Guild-Socialism of London is past. Its gorgeous ghost may presently masquerade for the last time through November fog and London squalor. But the Hyde Park scene has its career yet to run. What its orators demanded was a new privilege. It was not the equal rights of labor, but privilege. This new lordship is to dictate my limits of education, my mode of production, my hours of work, my wages. The poet leader told the toilers that they alone did what was useful, all others were doing what was useless; the man who wrote "The Earthly Paradise" declared himself one of the mere "parasitic class," climbing and flourishing on the manual laborers. I did not see how his remorseless logic could have spared Shakespeare himself, and it appears certain that under this levelling scheme no dreamer, no poet, could ever have the culture, or the leisure, necessary to bear his literary fruit. When the distribution of work and wages is left to a majority of the millions, will they agree that writing "The Earthly Paradise" is as productive as the mining of coal? Among these millions, how many fools, how many sots! Shakespeare drew, in Christopher Sly, a character familiar to us as to him. Christopher is taken, while in a drunken sleep, into a nobleman's mansion, and, on waking, is treated as a lord who has been wandering in his mind, fancying himself a boor. He is surrounded by liveried servants; his lady comes to welcome his recovery; he is feasted; a beautiful drama is performed before him. In the height of his glory Christopher calls for a tankard of beer; he drinks deep; and just as his players are entering on the poetic drama, Christopher rolls from his cushioned throne and lies snoring on the floor. Had it been left to Christopher Sly's vote to determine whether higher wages should be paid Shakespeare or the brewer, the bard might have come off badly. And were the wages of actors and actresses dependent on a government chosen by the masses, not only the Slys throughout England, but the millions remote from theatres, and the Methodists, Salvationists, Presbyterians, would certainly unite to close all theatres. Even Edward Bellamy "looking backward" finds no provision for a theatre. Little by little we should find ourselves in a prosaic world. Men and women would be born; they might eat, and sleep; they would die. But our little life might bid farewell to the beautiful dreams that clothe its dry bones with beauty.

Such is my impression of every constructive scheme of Socialism. I recognise the evils that give rise to such schemes; I feel their urgency. Their strong appeal to our humanity might silence criticism of their crudity, were their method evolutionary. We could then feel certain that every practical step would be traceable if not confirmed by experience. But when a theory adopts the revolutionary method, when it proposes a complete, irreversible overthrow of existing institutions; it is necessary to ask whether its own system would be any improvement on the old.

It may be said that English Socialism does not advocate violence. But violence is only an incident of revolution. There never was a revolution in which the fighting did not come as a surprise. Those who inflame the masses with aims that cannot be gained but by bloodshed, are really advocating violence. Reforms of a political or a social system are secured peacefully, but a revolutionary subversion of the foundations in a whole nation can only come by war. It is a declaration of war to deal with the whole existing order with hostility, with acrimony and hatred, as wholly bad. Such order is thereby sentenced to death; its execution is merely a question of power.

Even supposing a revolution not attended by bloodshed, assuming it extorted from authority by fear of violence, what can be gained? What new materials, with which to make the earthly paradise? None. We see what men are, what motives now rule; such and such parties, politicians, official people, "400" people; a vast population of working people who have no definite principle of social equality, much less of fraternity. The mass, in the distance, may appear in solidarity, like the distant ocean; but, seen closely, it is made up of distinct waves. The bootblack looks down on the sweep, as the millionaire looks down on the tradesman. There is as much social inequality in Washington as in London. Revolutions pass and leave you the same old human nature. Whence is socialism to get a cabinet of angels who will administer the new order,—run the farms, public works, railways, and so on,—without selfishness, jobbery, personal ends, or corruption? And shall our schools train intelligence downward, so that it shall not rise above mediocrity? "The snow may fall level one day, the next it is piled into drifts." Property might be equally distributed this year; the next it would be in the hands of the cleverest. You seize a man by the throat and say "You've got to be fraternal." He may gasp out "I will"; but when his throat is free he will love you no better.

But we are told that the selfish forces of human nature, its tendency to social inequality, can themselves be revolutionised. It was so with the early Christians. Jesus was not a socialist, he advised tribute to CÆsar, and respect for those who sat in Moses's seat; but, some two centuries after his death, the Christians did give up their private possessions, and had all things in common. The avowed cause of this, however, was that the world was just coming to an end. Why labor and accumulate in a world about to be consumed? No sooner did that superstitious expectation fade away than socialism ceased. The forces of human nature resumed their sway. Those forces,—the love of property, of luxury, competition, enterprise,—have since been dissolved, here and there, but only by similar superstitions. A hundred communities were formed for secular interests, about Robert Owen's time. They all failed. The only ones existing are those founded in the belief that this world is a wilderness of woe, destined to destruction, and heaven the only true investment. Such are the Oneida, Shaker, and Mormon communities. The modern socialists can appeal to no such superstition. And yet, though many of them believe themselves "infidels," their movement is the afterglow of Christianity. Their method is millennial. They look for the destruction of the old political world in much the same way as the early Christians looked for the destruction of the physical world. There is to be a grand transformation scene. Some Bellamy is to sound a trumpet, a lucifer match is to be scratched, and, puff! away go the pomp and glories of this world. The high are to be laid low, the low raised high, and a new social kingdom to be established.

All this, though uttered by some atheists, is supernaturalism. It is a survival from the millennial superstition. It is secular second-adventism. It will pass away like its forerunners, though it may like them cause revolutions. The socialistic fathers and their children will fall asleep, and the old world roll on much the same as before, diurnally, but on its moral orbit somewhat slower. For revolutionary changes invariably retard human progress. Because, while they cannot alter the inherited habitudes of a people,—their motives, prejudices, superstitions,—they give these unreformed feelings a new habitation, swept and garnished, so that the last state of that nation is worse than the first. So long as outgrown notions remain only in antiquated institutions, their error is demonstrated by their folly; their tumbling walls instruct them in new needs; and when at last the old institution falls, as it must, the experience induces adaptation of the new one to the forces that laid low the old. When the outer embodies an inner reform, there is no reaction. The progress is permanent. Such is not the case when decrepit sentiments are suddenly given the sinews of youth.

This view is not speculative. It is derived from the study of revolutions. Near 250 years ago the English people began a revolution which presently beheaded the king, and disestablished the church. But monarchal superstition was not beheaded; religious superstition was not disestablished. In place of Charles I. was set up a monarch of unlimited power, whose little finger was heavier than Charles's whole body,—that same Cromwell whose massacres of people in Ireland is represented to-day in the one-sided feud that makes the curse of England. The disestablishment of a church, at least scholarly and picturesque, was followed by the inauguration of a primitive God of wrath, whose prophet was Calvin, and Cromwell his destroying angel. Bonfires were made of the most beautiful works of art in England. The finest statues and monuments were destroyed because a barbarian said, "Thou shalt not make a graven image." The revolution provided a fresh stronghold for the grossest prejudices and superstitions; and, despite the weakness of Charles I. and the faults of the clergy, the last state of England was so much worse than the first, that the revolution was reversed, the old monarchy restored, the church re-established, and the future of that country given to the forces of evolution.

The French revolution beheaded a weak king, and raised a monster in his place. Robespierre concentrated in his year or two all crimes spread through the history of tyranny. The masses threw down the Virgin Mary, and raised on her chief altar a goddess of Reason. Much pious horror has been expressed about that worship of a beautiful Woman instead of an image; but the real evil was the superstition, which, as it had beheaded a helpless king now shattered a helpless image, but without beheading itself—that is, superstition itself. The worship of the goddess Reason was entirely too reasonable; so she was set aside, and the revolution established a ceremonial worship of Nature, which consecrated all that was natural,—the passions, the revolutionary wrath, the natural desire to guillotine a Count, take possession of his house, drink his wine, and imitate his revelries. Robespierre presently turned to butchering revolutionists too, if not submissive to him, so he was put out of the way. But the whole revolution naturally led to the destructive imperialism of the first Napoleon,—the enemy of mankind. He so paralysed the forces of progress that, even in 1848, the French had not learned the lesson of their first revolution. They tried another, and history repeated itself. They formed a revolutionary democracy,—that is, a disguised imperialism,—as they were soon shown. Their president proved to be an emperor, who destroyed liberty in France and Italy for twenty years, and nearly destroyed his country.

But what of America? It was from the romantic success of the American revolution,—a handful of colonists throwing off the yoke of England,—that France caught fire; and the revolutionary spirit in Europe has been kept alive by the magnificent material development of America. All these fruits of the century of independence are ascribed to our revolution; although the more astonishing growth of Australia, which had no white settler fifty years ago, might as justly be ascribed to the English throne. It is due to a false patriotism that Americans competent to do so have not exposed the superstitions about their country. To love one's native land more than humanity, is no better than to love a king more than our country. There appears to me nothing more important than that the world should be undeceived about America, whose political history is, really, the great warning against revolution,—a handwriting on the walls of the world, the misunderstanding of which is a peril to mankind.

The independence of America was a necessary thing, but it came in the worst way possible. The colonies resisted taxation, imposed by a parliament 3000 miles away,—in those days fifteen times that distance in time,—in which parliament they had no voice. The quarrel came to blows; but the colonists had no idea of separation from England, until Thomas Paine persuaded them that independence alone could end such quarrels. That was true, but it was a heavy misfortune, from which we still suffer, that independence was secured by war. The colonies had exhausted their resources in their success; but they had not exhausted England. The British government, sore and humiliated, still held the north and northwest of America, commanded the force of the great aboriginal tribes, controlled the whole American coast with its ships. The Colonies, still confronted by the powerful enemy they had made, were compelled to unite for common defence. These colonies had radical differences, political, religious, commercial; some were free, some held slaves. But in presence of the common foe they had to unite at once, and sink their differences. When they met to frame a constitution for their union the majority had no notion of any constitution save that of England, and little accurate knowledge of that. What they framed was a crude imitation of the undeveloped English constitution of a hundred years ago. They made two legislatures because England seemed to have two; but made them equal, not knowing that in England the two were not equal. They supposed England was really governed by the king; so, having knocked down George III. they set up a monarch much more powerful, who to-day under the name of president possesses more power than any throne on earth. They formed a Senate, able to defeat the popular House.

The Senate is a peerage of states, in which New York has no more power than states hardly larger than some of its counties. This anomaly was advocated on the ground that in England boroughs of a few hundred voters had equal representation with others of many thousands. The old monstrosity, now the extinct "rotten borough" system, was here actually raised into a constitutional principle. Command of the Army and Navy, there nominally lodged in the crown, was really lodged with the American monarch, so that he may slip from his civil to his military throne, and rule by martial law. This powerful monarch is not elected by the people of the United States, but of the states separately, through electors proportioned to their members of Congress. Consequently, as New York has the greatest number of electors, the monarch in nine cases out of ten, is chosen by one state. The present President got a trifling majority in New York, and was elected. Mr. Cleveland received some 100,000 majority of votes in the nation, and was defeated. A popular superstition calls that the Great Republic. Since the electors ceased to be real electors, as the constitution intended, and became mere messenger-boys carrying votes they never cast, this government is not so republican as is now that its revolution overthrew a hundred years ago. Even at its best our hasty constitution gave new lease to an England discredited at home, and a new lease to slavery, which had been decaying. Slavery entered its new stronghold, and ruled America for generations; had it not lost its head and assailed its own stronghold, it might be ruling still. Our much eulogised constitution, by its compromise with slavery, cost America a million lives, and a billion of money. And all of those evils, involving a steady degradation of our politics, are due to the fact that America got its independence not by evolution,—which would have surely secured it, leaving England its friend,—but by revolution, which made England its enemy; necessitating a premature, crude, military union; preventing the mature discussion and development which could have made the constitution an advance in political civilisation instead of a retrogression. When our fathers had swept English authority out of the country, they had not swept political superstitions, monarchal notions, out of it; so they re-enthroned in their garnished habitation the defects of the system they had fought. When Washington was presently both reigning and governing in America, when he was the idol of monarchs, with a petted courtier representing him in every European Court, poor Thomas Paine, who made the revolution, was a prisoner in Paris for trying to moderate the gory giant he had evoked; and pleading for something like the ministerial government of England, which was steadily adopting his principles of toleration, and the rights of man, by sure forces of evolution. By such forces,—by argument, petition, parliamentary influence,—England has secured something like republican government under its mask of monarchy.

When people are suffering, it is natural for them to attribute their sufferings to this or that institution which has an appearance of anachronism and injustice. But it is precisely when institutions are thus antiquated and anomalous that evolution is able to utilise them for an advance. The United States monarch is able to transfer office from his opponents to his supporters. He is powerful because he is removed every four years. He can claim that the nation has freshly given him all that power. The English sovereign has no political power at all. The nation is governed by responsible ministers. The president may snap his fingers at a parliamentary majority; the English executive may be dismissed in a night. Why has the English monarch been thus deprived of power? The cause is traceable to its hereditary character,—that same hereditary character which seems so anomalous. It was found of old that the throne, because it was hereditary, sometimes fell to a baby, who could not rule. Grown up people had to act for the child. To escape interruptions of government, when the monarch might be incapable, ministers became essential; and thus ministerial government and responsibility were developed out of the antiquated hereditary anomaly. Popular government, in its development, was able to act through this elected ministry, and the monarch, though an adult, could not claim that he had the national authority behind him, except by accordance with an elected ministry. Moreover in a monarchy all classes are interested to reduce a power which only one family can enjoy; but under a presidency all are anxious to enhance the power of an office to which all may aspire,—especially where it is renewed every four years by an electoral revolution.

In England other antiquated things have subserved progress. For the very reason that hereditary legislation is anomalous, antiquated, the peers became weak; the "upper" house became "under," by an evolution that had been impossible had it been elective. But in this very irresponsibility to the popular vote lay that independence of popularity which gives their House weight as a debating and revising body. A further step in evolution, which should determine the exact number of times that the Lords might reject a measure, after which its passage through the Commons would make it law, might make the peers a useful body in checking popular passion and haste. Their independence causes the Lords to pass bills for opening Museums and Art Galleries on Sunday, which are killed by the Commoners for fear of the Sabbatarians among their constituents. This independence of the popular breath makes the House of Lords the source of a Supreme Court whose justice was lately shown by the redress it gave Bradlaugh at the very moment when the Commons were inflicting wrongs on him, in fear of their sectarian constituents. The like may be said of another antiquated institution in England—the Church. By reason of its anomalous establishment in a nation of various creeds and a hundred and fifty sects, that Church is theologically disestablished. Subjected to the forces of political and ethical evolution, it is now preserving the vast property bequeathed by England's superstitious Past to its free-thinking Future, keeping it from being divided up among the sects, before the religious thought of the country has come of age to claim its endowment. The Church cannot spend this wealth for sectarian ends, precisely because that Church is antiquated, and without authority to represent spiritually the nation of to-day.

We might thus go through one after another anachronistic institution and show each subservient to agencies of evolution, whereas, if destroyed by revolution, they could only be succeeded by new institutions embodying, in stronger forms, the snobbery, the superstition, the sectarianism, still remaining in the country. It being certain, at the same time, that no revolution can possibly reach the troubles which alone could cause one. In England the troubles of labor are due to the fact that the birth rate is double the death rate. So long as paupers are multiplied twice as fast as they are removed, pauperism must increase. The more charity and medical care lower the death rate, the more they intensify the struggle for existence. In other swarming countries of Europe overpopulation once led to brigandage, but they are now largely relieved by emigration. This involves a steady flood of paupers to America, in addition to those spawned by native animalism. That evil may be checked when in welcoming the sound world, we shall quarantine the unsound world,—the diseased, the criminal, the ignorant. An immigrant without a dollar may be more safely admitted than one who cannot write his name.

We have a right to evolutionary legislation. We should prevent the congestion of our cities with paupers while millions of our fields are waiting to be tilled. New York will not be comforted, weeping for her children because they are not counted in the census. Rather should she weep for a multitude of those that are counted,—immigrants from its own slums as well as from the slums of Europe. Evolutionary legislation would prevent early marriage, and forbid marriage where there is no means of supporting offspring. Such unions are just as illicit as if there were no ceremony at all, and the children more cruelly illegitimate.

Until there is a high moral standard which shall restrain such cruelty to the unborn, Pauperism, prolific parent of both vices and crimes, can only be mitigated by a development of communal life. A hundred people, dining at a common table, can get the same dinner for ten cents each, that, separately would cost each twenty-five cents. That is, so far as food is concerned, communal life more than doubles every man's wages. There is no more reason why a poor family should support a kitchen of its own than that it should support a carriage of its own, instead of going in the omnibus. Gentlemen in their clubs get the advantage of wholesale prices, while the poor do not. The principle of combination is more largely applicable to lodgings also than is now the case. It costs far less to procure and keep clean one large tenement than a number of separate houses, to say nothing of the humanising influence, on manners and morals, of communal interests, and the social spirit so engendered. The home brute would be checked, the drunkard sobered, by amenability to the larger social censorship, and to a standard of communal conduct. When the working people have learned to utilise in normal life such combination as they occasionally use for strikes, they will find their means increasing enough even to strike, when necessary, with less recoil on themselves. They will also find that where institutions of that kind once take root, endowments and bequests seek them out, and make them centres of happiness and culture.

Political and social evolution must not be confused with natural selection: it is human selection. Some years ago a cotton-planter in Georgia observed that the leaves on one of his plants was unlike the usual leaf; it was divided as if into fingers. So far nature had gone. The planter added his intelligence. He concluded that such a divided leaf would let in more sunshine on the cotton. Also such a leaf would not be comfortable for caterpillars. So he searched out one or two of these peculiar plants, transplanted them to a field by themselves; as they propagated, he plucked up those with the old leaf, cultivated those with the new,—and now these new cotton plants, finer than the old, free from caterpillars, are spread through many regions. That is human selection, based on natural selection, securing the fruits of evolution. It is just as applicable to man as to vegetation. A better man may be bred as well as a better kind of cotton. Already many old forms of crime have been largely bred out of society, by the substitution of imprisonment for thefts instead of the capital punishments which juries refused to inflict. Crime being largely hereditary, the offenders used to get free, and multiplied their bad species. But when punishments were assigned which juries were ready to inflict, the criminals were isolated for years, or transported, and their race diminished. The crime that now flourishes most is murder; because its death penalty survives. It was recently shown in Parliament that about three fourths of English murderers escape, mainly through aversion of juries, and merciful people, to inflict a savage and irrevocable penalty. Were capital punishment abolished the three fourths would be isolated for life. They would be kindly treated, but must have no offspring. No such survival of autocracy as a pardoning power could exist; no individual would be able to alter decrees of courts and juries. Instead of aiming at the murderer evolution aims at the murder. It will secure a survival of the peaceful, and breed ferocity out of man as it has bred the wolf out of dogs.

But that implies breeding the wolf out of our law. The eye for eye, blood for blood, spirit is wolfish. So is the whole revolutionary spirit, whether shown in armed violence, or in arbitrary laws. It can be acted upon, controlled, shamed out of society, only by pure moral and intellectual forces. There is no greater power than instructed thought, animated by love to man, enforced by honor and character.

There is as yet no civilised nation; civilisation exists in oases, which gradually encroach on the deserts. They have largely encroached on some of these already, but civilisation can only extend as it is real. The European nations are slicing up Africa among them. This we are told is Christian civilisation: they are taking their neighbor's property only because they love him like themselves. What is the civilisation going out there? You can see it in the dens of European cities. The Africans have got to be dragged through all that. What kind of religion will go there? A Bible recording divinely ordered massacres will be put in every savage hand. Stanley says that when in sore trouble, in the African forest, he made a vow that if God would only help him, he would acknowledge his aid among men. His troubles began to clear next day. God was indifferent, it seems, so long as man and beast were suffering, but when this great temptation was held out to Jehovah—this promise of distinguished patronage—he at once interfered. There is nothing new about that God. In the Bible, his providence is always purchasable by glory. There are thousands of such gods in Africa. But Europeans are going there as representatives of civilisation, and will say to them in the name of German and English Science, in the name of Berlin, Oxford, and Cambridge,—"These be thy gods, O Africa! Only agree to call their name Jehovah, who helped Jephtha, when he vowed a sacrifice which proved to be his daughter, and who helped Stanley on condition that the service would be reported in the press."

The intellect of Europe knows better than that; but it has very few organs of its protest against surviving barbarisms that devour the world under pretence of civilising it. And it forms few such organs because itself needs humanising. Just there America may lend a hand. Our science, our literature, and art, still lack moral earnestness, and human sympathy. The value of our every liberal moral movement and organ is therefore incalculable. It was a hopeful sign to see lately on the platform of the Ethical Congress in New York leaders in various denominations,—Heber Newton, President Andrews, Lyman Abbott, Rabbi Isaacs, Felix Adler,—uniting to establish a College for Moral Culture; all admitting that the theological seminaries, public schools, and universities, had left them uninstructed in the great social, economic, ethical, and political problems which have now come urgently to the front. The prophets of Jehovah once said of Baal, "Peradventure he sleepeth." The prophets of Jehovah now admit the same concerning their ancient Syrian deity. But the divine humanity is awaking. It will rise above prejudice and party. It will inspire no man to lay an axe at the root of his neighbor's holy tree because it is not his own, but to plant beside it one which they both agree is good, and agree to nourish, and which shall prove so fruitful, so sweet, that strength shall be drawn away from the roots of evil institutions, and they shall wither away. That which, assailed by revolution, is sure to be defended, and, if felled, to be reared again, evolution may gently wither by production of the more fit. The sacred groves of the Past may still cherish their traditional names, but, if not shattered by revolutionary lightnings, they will turn themselves to fences around the garden where fruits of knowledge and the happier life are growing.

MONCURE D. CONWAY.