And now we turn from the many who are wealthy to the greater many who are poor, and are carrying on a painful struggle for bare existence, in this vast assemblage of humanity: and here, too, we find mingled with what there is of good much that is evil. Here, as with the wealthy, are aims that are unwise, springing from misleading instincts which society has, carelessly and ignorantly, allowed to be formed in its bosom, and which tend in the individual to unhappiness and degradation, and in society itself to disorder and subversion.
All this must be taken in by the mind in order that the scene before us may be rightly understood. We could not interpret the scenes of old Egypt till we had formed some conception of what old Egypt was, and we must endeavour to do the same for our corresponding English scene. It is in this way only that the study and understanding of old Egypt can be of any use to us. It is only when we understand both that we are in a position to ask the question whether old Egypt has anything to teach us.
It tells us that the aims of society must be moral; and that the morality required can, within certain limits, be created and shaped, and made instinctive, where society itself honestly wishes and intelligently endeavours to do it. But as we look upon old Egypt we see that the morality we need is not precisely what they imagined and established, and that we are precluded from attempting to establish what we want in the fashion of old Egypt. Theirs was a system of constraint, ours must be a system of freedom. Theirs was a system that concentrated its highest advantages on a few, ours must be a system that opens its advantages to all. We must present what we have to offer in such a form that men will voluntarily accept it for themselves and for their children, and allow it to shape them. If we see distinctly what we have to do, and the conditions under which we have to do it, this will be in itself the achievement of half our work. Their method was to devise a system, in strict conformity to the conditions of the problem as it then stood, and place it as a yoke upon society. They could do that: we cannot. Our method must be accepted freely by society, and by the individual. We, too, must devise a system in strict conformity to the conditions of the problem as it now stands; and it must be such as approves itself to the understanding and the conscience of the men of these times. The successful fulfilment of the first requirement will, probably, include the second.
Egypt, Israel, Greece, Rome, each did the work that had been allotted to it. What we have to do is not to repeat what any one of them did. That, indeed, we could not do; and, if we could, it would be of no use to us. Imitations at all times, but more particularly when circumstances differ, are worthless and disorganizing. And yet what each of them did was necessary for us. The work we have to do now is a great advance upon theirs, and is to be done under very different conditions from theirs, but is so connected with theirs that we cannot dispense with their foundations, or with the principles they worked with. We need them all, but we must use them in the way our work requires. When men came to build with stone, they did not abandon all the principles of construction they had worked out for themselves during the time they had built with wood. Those principles were right as far as they went. They were not all bad, and worthless, and inapplicable to the new material and its grander possibilities. What had to be done was to incorporate the new principles that were needed with those from among the old that would still be serviceable. The purpose and object of building, whatever the materials might be, continued one and the same. And so, now that we have come to use glass and iron largely in architecture, the same process is again repeated. Some new principles may be introduced, but we do not discard all the old ones. Just so is it with the social fabric.
The great and governing differences in our case are that what we have to do is to be done for all, and that this is accompanied with the condition of not partial, but universal freedom. It never was so with any of the old peoples. And though our work is new in some of its conditions, and such as, in its reach and variety, was never dreamt of by the four great teacher nations of antiquity, there is no more reason for our failing in it than there was for their failing in theirs. That it is to be done is, in some sort, proof that it may be done. Indeed, there is apparently more reason for our success than there was for theirs. We have their experience; and in the principles of universal freedom, and universal justice, we have more to commend what ought to be done now to men’s hearts and understandings then they had. Freedom, knowledge, truth, justice, goodness; these must be our aims, our means, our statecraft, our religion. We do not go off the old tracks. They all converge into our path. And so we find that we are advancing, having history for guide, through new conditions, into a richer and better life, placed within the reach of an ever increasing proportion of the community.
The greatest, perhaps, of the advantages that will be found in our wealth is that it will enable us to confer on every member of the community such knowledge and such training as shall have an hopeful, perhaps a preponderant, tendency towards making instinctive, at all events in the minds of the greater number, a rational use of the freedom they already possess, and the love and practice of truth, justice, and goodness. Though, indeed, when we look at the educational efforts of Saxony, of Switzerland, and of New England, we are almost brought to fear that this great and necessary work will be undertaken more readily and intelligently, and done sooner and better, among people, who have less of the material means for carrying it out than ourselves. In saying this, I do not at all mean that we should confine our efforts merely to what they have done, for they have, to a great extent, omitted that morality which I consider the main point of all; but that we should be much better than we are, if we had done as much as they, with their very inferior means, have already accomplished.
In Egypt submission and order; in Israel, though labouring under most cruel disadvantage, during its better days belief in and devotion to right, and during its latter days the determination to maintain at any cost its morality and religion; at Athens the appreciation of intellectual culture; in the Roman Empire, by the mere working of its system, the idea of the supremacy of the law, and the sentiment of the brotherhood of mankind—were made instinctive. Why should we despair of doing as much for what we need? Our task, indeed, though so much grander, and promising so much more fruit than theirs, does not appear as hard as theirs. If it be beyond our powers, then modern society is but a fermenting mass of disorder and corruption. It cannot be so, however; for if it were, then the long course of History would now have to be reversed. All the progress of the Past, and all its hard-won achievements, would prove without purpose; and there would remain for us only to despair of truth, of right, of religion, and of humanity itself.
FOOTNOTES
[1] This was written in 1871. It was in the following year, that is, in the interval between the first and the second edition of this work, that the Livingstone-search Commissioner of the ‘New York Herald’ found the great African explorer.
[2] Some, I am aware, are disposed to answer the question of this Chapter by ascribing to the Egyptians a Turanian origin. The following appear to be the steps in the process, by which they endeavour to reach this conclusion. There was, in remote times, on the banks of the Euphrates, a Priest Class, which, on the supposition that in its sacred and literary language, there are some traces of the early Turanian form of speech, might have had a Turanian origin. (Though, indeed, a Priest Class is rather an eastern Aryan, or even a Semitic, than a Turanian phenomenon.) This Priest Class, thus conceivably Turanian, might, conceivably, have had some ethnological connexion with the Priest Caste of Egypt. (There is, however, nothing to lead us to suppose that its antiquity was as great as that of the Priest Caste of Egypt.) Therefore the Egyptians might have had a Turanian origin. To put the argument abstractedly: We may imagine two presumable possibilities; the first of which possesses little probability, and the second still less; and then by the juxta-position of the two reach a desired conclusion. In other words, some degree of probability will be the product of the multiplication of the non-probability of a first assumption by the improbability of a second. This is the form of argument by which probability is inferred from the accumulation of improbabilities.
Of course, there is no saying what discoveries the future may have in store; but, in the present state of knowledge, it seems an unlikely supposition that Arts, Science, Law, Philosophy and Religion were, aboriginally, Turanian.
[3] It is a curious fact that the inhabitants of the Lake-villages of Switzerland cultivated, in the prehistoric period, as may be seen in the Zurich collection of objects from the sites of these villages, the same variety of wheat—that which we call Mummy, or hen-and-chickens wheat—as the old Egyptians. Did the first immigrants into Europe, of whom we may suppose that we have some historical traces, for the Etruscans may have been, and the Laps, Finns, and Basques may still be, surviving fragments of their settlements, bring with them this variety of wheat at the same time that another swarm from the same Central Asian hive were taking it with them to the Valley of the Nile.
[4] I am led to propound this conjecture from a desire to render intelligible what Herodotus says of their hair and skin; for we know, both from the old paintings and from the existing mummies, that the true Egyptian’s skin was not black, and that there was no kink in his hair. It is impossible then to take his statement as it stands; and I can imagine no other way of correcting it.
The difficulty here I conceive to be of just the reverse kind to that which meets us in his statement, that the circumference of Lake Mœris was 450 miles; and which, therefore, in the chapter on the Faioum, I endeavoured to render intelligible by just the reverse process, that is to say, by suggesting that, while we suppose he is speaking of the Lake only, he is really speaking of the whole of a vast system of artificial irrigation, of which the lake was the main part. Here he is speaking of a part of the Egyptian population, only he puts what he says in such a way that we suppose that he is speaking of the whole of it.
I will take the opportunity of this note to propound an explanation of Homer’s having sent Jupiter, and all the gods, to Oceanus, to feast, for twelve days, with the irreproachable Ethiopians. We immediately ask, Why with the Ethiopians? Why are they irreproachable? What have they got to do with Oceanus? Why to feast? Why for so long a period? Why all the gods? The light, in which things are viewed in this book enables us to see an answer to each of these questions.
Homer, we know, was acquainted with the magnificence of Thebes. In his time, and for many centuries before, the Phœnicians had, through commercial intercourse, been closely connected with the Greeks; having, during the whole of that time, been an autonomous dependency, or dependent ally, of the Egyptians, who, in going to and from their head-quarters on the Euphrates, had kept open a line of communication through Phœnicia. The Phœnicians, therefore, must have had a great deal to tell the Greeks about the marvellous greatness of Egypt, the chief ingredient in which was the magnificence of Thebes. There was plenty of time for all this to be thoroughly talked over. Sethos and Rameses, the great Theban builders, had preceded Homer’s day by four or five centuries. And, as such things never lose in telling, Homer’s contemporaries must have had no very inadequate—we now know that they could hardly have had exaggerated—conceptions of the temples and wealth of Thebes. He mentions the great amount of its military population; its hundred gates, which, as no traces of walls of fortification for the city have been found, meant, probably, the propylons of the temples; and its vast wealth. He knew probably that Egypt consisted of an Upper and of a Lower Egypt, and that the inhabitants of the Upper country were darker, and that in the extreme south, as then understood, the complexion became quite black; and so, to distinguish them from the maritime Egyptians, he calls them Ethiopians. He uses the same word as an epithet of dark objects, as of wine and bronze. And here among these Ethiopians was the wondrous Thebes. When the Phœnicians had told the inquisitive Greeks of its mighty temples, and of its incalculable wealth, they must have described its commerce, the source, to a very considerable extent, of its greatness. For centuries it had been the emporium of the trade of India, Arabia, and Africa. This, and its position in the supposed extreme south, to Homer’s mind, connected it with the outer, world-surrounding ocean. What was told to him, and to his contemporaries, of the tides and monsoons of the Indian Ocean, suggested to them, and most aptly, only the idea of a stream. They heard of tides on the Atlantic also; hence his mighty stream of circum-ambient ocean. As to the trade of Thebes, all international wholesale trade in those times, and in that part of the world, was carried on in the courts and sacred enclosures of temples. The greatness of the temples was, in some measure, an indication of the greatness of the trade. The great festivals were, in substance, only great fairs. Trade was then under the guardianship of Religion. Society was not yet sufficiently organized for the protection of trade: for such a purpose the civil power could hardly as yet be said to exist. Religion alone had either the wisdom, or the power, to enforce fair dealing, or to ward off violence. At the season, therefore, that the great annual caravans arrived from the interior, and the easterly monsoons wafted the merchandise and products of Arabia and India to Egypt, to be bartered for those of Africa (and the caravans were doubtless so arranged as that their arrival synchronized with that of the ocean-borne traffic), there were great processions and feasts at the temples. Religion then put on its most imposing aspect. We have now only to recall the number of temples in the sacred enclosure at Thebes (this enclosure itself meant order and protection), and then we shall have all the materials requisite for enabling us to understand every particular of Homer’s statement. Jupiter goes to the Ethiopians, because he was the chief god of Thebes. But there are temples enough for all the gods, and so they all accompany him. Here they meet, we see why, Oceanus. It is a great festival of many days. This is intelligible. We see why these Ethiopians are irreproachable. In an age of piracy and violence they enforce, with all the authority of Religion, the order, fair dealing, and abstinence from all kinds of violence, and ensure the security, necessary for trade; and which had made the trade they were protecting and fostering the greatest, at that time, in the world. Their singular irreproachableness might be measured by their unparalleled prosperity, and their unparalleled prosperity accounted for by their singular irreproachableness; and both might be explained by their profound and all-embracing piety. This made them irreproachable. This made them prosperous. This ensured the presence of all the gods at their twelve days’ Feast.
[5] Throughout this chapter I distinguish between the idea, and the doctrine, of a future life. There may be some traces of the idea in the Old Testament; though I believe that they are not so numerous, or so distinct, as many suppose. And what there may be of this kind is certainly counterbalanced by the general tenor of the documents with respect to this subject, and by some distinct statements in the opposite sense. What I affirm is, that there is no trace of a doctrine of a future life. A doctrine on such a subject is a categorical averment of it, unmistakably announced, and unmistakably used as a motive for shaping the whole life. Of such an averment, so used, I assert, and endeavour to account for, the absence.
[6] It has been pointed out to me by a reader of the first edition of this book, that there is a great similarity between the above paragraph and a passage in Bishop Butler’s Analogy. But as I have not seen that great work since my Oxford days, now thirty-two years ago, I think I may be allowed to leave it standing with an acknowledgment of unconscious reminiscence.
[7] Note.—After the foregoing Chapter was in type, it occurred to me to apply the light of the fact it accounts for to some prominent particulars of the Old Testament. Here are a few of the results: Moses gives as a reason for our first parents having been driven out of Paradise, that God desired to preclude the possibility of their eating of the fruit of a certain tree, whereof if they were to eat they would become immortal; and that He afterwards carefully guarded the tree from them by Cherubims, and a flaming sword that turned every way. This was to prevent their becoming immortal. Previously, too, God had threatened that, if they disobeyed a certain commandment, they should become incapable of immortality (for the context shows that this was the meaning intended); and, on their disobedience, God had passed on them the sentence that they should return to the dust out of which they had been made. There can be no reasonable doubt but that in this part of the introductory history a foundation is designedly laid for the absence of the doctrine of a future life from the dispensation; and objections to its absence answered by anticipation. Popular hermeneutics, however, are incapable of explaining these particulars, notwithstanding the significant prominency assigned them in the narrative.
Again, on the theory of the popular interpretation, we can see no reason why Isaiah should have placed the ultimate suppression of evil, and the complete triumph of good, on this earth. That would be of no advantage to the generation to which he had to address himself; and it would be an arrangement that would give nothing to those who had borne the heat and burden of the day, and everything to those who had done nothing. The difficulty, however, vanishes, when we remember that he had no doctrine of a future life, or of any other stage than this earth for man. Everything, therefore, that was to be brought about, must be brought about on this earth, and during this earthly life, which were all.
Our fact also accounts for the conspicuous, and otherwise inexplicable, want of proselytizing zeal in the old Israelites. They quite believed that the best thing for man was the knowledge of God; but they had no disposition to communicate this knowledge. The reason was that the advantages of this knowledge were temporal. Had, therefore, Jehovah been brought to give protection, wealth, and strength to their neighbours, with whom they were generally in a state of hostility, it would have been a hurt to themselves. So soon as the objects of religion became moral only, and not of this world, Israelites had abundance of zeal for making proselytes among their neighbours.
Doubtless other particulars will occur to the reader, which, like those I have just noted, are explicable only by the aid of the direct opposite to that which the popular interpretation assumes, this direct opposite being, in fact, the most prominent and distinctive of the peculiarities of the dispensation.
[8] Moses was learned in all the wisdom of the Egyptians.—Acts vii. 22.
[9] In ‘Land and Water,’ of February 3rd, 1872, may be found an interesting account of the way in which D. (Lord Ducic) stalked, killed, and ultimately secured the sunken carcass of one of the few stragglers that may now occasionally be seen to the north of the cataract. It was a full-grown specimen, and, as the evidence of its stomach proved, a child-eater. Jure occisus est. The scene was 3° 32´ north of the cataract.
[10] M. de Lesseps has lately raised these charges 50 per cent., having made the discovery that the chargeable tonnage of a steamship includes the space required for engines and fuel. As well might he, after having charged a sailing vessel for its cargo-space, assess at so much more the scantling of its spars, and the spread of its canvas. At all events this method of charging is not after the fashion in which he himself originally interpreted those terms of the concession, which fix the rate at which ships using the Canal may be charged.