We have this past year also carried out another series of commemorations, long familiar to our friends in France, but which are a real creation of Positivist belief. I mean those Pilgrimages or religious visits to the scenes of the lives of our great men. This is a real revival of a noble mediæval and Oriental practice, but wholly without superstitious taint, and entirely in the current of modern scientific thought. We go in a body to some spot where one of our immortal countrymen lived or died, and there, full of the beauty of the scene on which he used to gaze, and of the genius loci by which he was inspired, we listen to a simple discourse on his life and work. In this way we visited the homes or the graves of Bacon, of Harvey, of Milton, of Penn, of Cromwell, and of our William of Orange. What may not the art of the future produce for us in this most fruitful mode, when in place of the idle picnics and holidays of vacant sightseers, in place of the formal celebration of some prayer-book saint, we shall gather in a spirit of real religion and honor round the birthplace, the home, it may be the grave, of some poet, thinker, or ruler; and amidst all the inspiration of Nature and of the sacred memories of the soil, shall fill our hearts with the joy in beauty and profound veneration of the mighty Dead?
IIIIn our Sunday meetings, which have been regularly continued excepting during the four summer months, we have continued our plan of dealing alike with the religious, the social, and the intellectual sides of the Positivist view of life and duty. The Housing of the Poor, Art, Biology, Socialism, our social Duties, the Memory of the Dead, the Positivist grounds of Morality, and our Practical Duties in Life, formed the subject of one series. Since our re-opening in the autumn, we have had courses on the Bible, on the religious value of the modern poets, and on the true basis of social equality. Amongst the features of special interest in these series of discourses is that one course was given by a former Unitarian minister who, after a life of successful preaching in the least dogmatic of all the Christian Churches, has been slowly reduced to the conviction that the reality of Humanity is a more substantial basis for religion to rest on than the hypothesis of God, and that the great scheme of human morality is a nobler Gospel to preach than the artificial ideal of a subjective Christ. I would in particular note the series of admirable lectures on the Bible, by Dr. Bridges, which combined the results of the latest learning on this intricate mass of ancient writings with the sympathetic and yet impartial judgment with which Positivists adopt into their sacred literature the most famous and most familiar of all the religious books of mankind. And again I would note that beautiful series of discourses by Mr. Vernon Lushington on the great religious poets of the modern world: Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron, Wordsworth and Shelley. When we have them side by side, we shall have before us a new measure of the sound, sympathetic, and universal spirit of Positivist belief. It is only those who are strangers to it and to us who can wonder how we come to put the Bible and the poets in equal places of honor as alike the great organs of true religious feeling.
The systematic teaching of science, which is an essential part of our conception of Positivism, has been maintained in this hall with unabated energy. In the beginning of the year Mr. Vernon Lushington commenced and carried through (with what an effort of personal self-devotion no one of us can duly measure) his class on the history and the elements of Astronomy. This winter, Mr. Lock has opened a similar class on the History and Elements of Mathematics. Positivism is essentially a scheme for reforming education, and it is only through a reformed education, universal to all classes alike, and concerned with the heart as much as the intellect, that the religious meaning of Humanity can ever be unfolded. The singing class, the expense of which was again assumed by Mr. Lushington, was steadily and successfully maintained during the first part of the year. We are still looking forward to the formation of a choir. The social meetings which we instituted last year have become a regular feature of our movement, and greatly contribute to our closer union and our better understanding of the social and sympathetic meaning of the faith we profess.
The publications of the year have been first and chiefly, The Testament and Letters of Auguste Comte, a work long looked for, the publication of which has been long delayed by various causes. In the next place I would call attention to the new and popular edition of International Policy, a work of combined essays which we put forward in 1866, nearly twenty years ago. Our object in that work was to state and apply to the leading international problems in turn the great principles of social morality on which it is the mission of Positivism to show that the politics of nations can only securely repose. In an epoch which is still tending, we are daily assured, to the old passion for national self-assertion, it is significant that the Positivist school alone can resolutely maintain and fearlessly repeat its dictates of morality and justice, whilst all the Churches, all the political parties, and all the so-called organs of opinion, which are really the creatures of parties and cliques, find various pretexts for abandoning them altogether. How few are the political schools around us who could venture to republish after twenty years, their political programmes of 1866, their political doctrines and practical solutions of the tangled international problems, and who could not find in 1885 a principle which they had discarded, or a proposal which to-day they are ashamed to have made twenty years ago.
Besides these books, the only separate publications of our body are the affecting address of Mr. Ellis On the due Commemoration of the Dead. The Positivist Society has met throughout the year for the discussion of the social and political questions of the day. The most public manifestation of its activity has been the part that it took in the third centenary of the great hero of national independence, William, Prince of Orange, called the Silent. The noble and weighty address in which Mr. Beesly expressed to the Dutch Committee at Delft the honor in which we held that immortal memory, has deeply touched, we are told, those to whom it was addressed. And it is significant that from this hall, dedicated to peace, to the Republic, to the people, and to Humanity, there was sent forth the one voice from the entire British race in honor to the great prince, the soldier, the diplomatist the secret, subtle, and haughty chief, who, three hundred years ago, created the Dutch nation. We have learned here to care little for a purely insular patriotism. The great creators of nations are our forefathers and our countrymen. Protestant or Catholic are nothing to us, so long as either prepared the way for a broader faith. In our abhorrence of war we have learned to honor the chief who fought desperately for the solid bases of peace. In our zeal for the people, for public opinion, for simplicity of life, and for truthfulness and openness in word as in conduct, we have not forgotten the relative duty of those who in darker, fiercer, ruder times than ours used the weapons of their age in the spirit of duty, and to the saving of those precious elements where-out the future of a better Humanity shall be formed.
IVTurning to the political field, I shall occupy but little of your time with the special questions of the year. We are as a body entirely dissevered from party politics. We seek to color political activity with certain moral general principles, but we have no interest in party politics as such. The idea that Positivists are, as a body, Radicals or Revolutionaries is an idle invention; and I am the more entitled to repudiate it, in that I have myself formally declined to enter on a Parliamentary career, on the express ground that I prefer to judge political questions without the trammels of any party obligation. On the one hand we are Republicans on principle, in that we demand a government in the interest of all and of no favored order, by the highest available capacity, without reference to birth, or wealth, or class. On the other hand, we are not Democrats, in that we acknowledge no abstract right to govern in a numerical majority. Whatever is best administered is best. We desire to see efficiency for the common welfare, responsible power intrusted to the most capable hand, with continuous responsibility to a real public opinion.
Turning to the political field, I shall occupy but little of your time with the special questions of the year. We are as a body entirely dissevered from party politics. We seek to color political activity with certain moral general principles, but we have no interest in party politics as such. The idea that Positivists are, as a body, Radicals or Revolutionaries is an idle invention; and I am the more entitled to repudiate it, in that I have myself formally declined to enter on a Parliamentary career, on the express ground that I prefer to judge political questions without the trammels of any party obligation. On the one hand we are Republicans on principle, in that we demand a government in the interest of all and of no favored order, by the highest available capacity, without reference to birth, or wealth, or class. On the other hand, we are not Democrats, in that we acknowledge no abstract right to govern in a numerical majority. Whatever is best administered is best. We desire to see efficiency for the common welfare, responsible power intrusted to the most capable hand, with continuous responsibility to a real public opinion.
I am far from pretending that general principles of this kind entitle us to pass a judgment on the complex questions of current politics, or that all Positivists who recognize these principles are bound to judge current politics in precisely the same way. There is in Positivism a deep vein of true Conservatism; as there is also an unquenchable yearning for a social revolution of a just and peaceful kind. But no one of these tendencies impel us, I think, to march under the banner either of Mr. Gladstone or Lord Salisbury. As Republicans on principle, we desire the end of all hereditary institutions. As believers in public opinion, we desire to see opinion represented in the most complete way, and without class distinctions. As men who favor efficiency and concentration in government, we support whatever may promise to relieve us of the scandalous deadlock to which Parliamentary government has long been reduced. It may be permitted to those who are wholly detached from party interests to express a lively satisfaction that the long electoral struggle is happily got out of the way, and that a great stride has been taken towards a government at once energetic and popular, without regarding the hobbies about the representation of women and the representation of inorganic minorities.
It is on a far wider field that our great political interests are absorbed. There is everywhere a revival of the spirit of national aggrandisement and imperial ambition. Under the now avowed lead of the great German dictator, the nations of Europe are running a race to extend their borders by conquest and annexation amongst the weak and uncivilised. There is to-day a scramble for Africa, as there was formerly a scramble for Asia; and the scramble in Asia, or in Polynesia, is only less urgent for the moment, in that the rivalry is just now keenest in Africa. But in Asia, in Africa, in Polynesia, the strong nations of Europe are struggling to found Empires by violence, fraud, or aggression. Three distinct wars are being waged in the East; and in Africa alone our soldiers and our Government are asserting the rule of the sword in the North, on the East, in the centre, on the South, and on the West at the same time. Five years ago, we were told that for England at least there was to be some lull in this career of blood and ambition. It was only, we see, a party cry, a device to upset a government. There has been no lull, no pause in the scramble for empire. The empire swells year by year; year by year fresh wars break out; year by year the burden of empire increases whether Disraeli or Gladstone, Liberal or Conservative, are the actual wielders of power. The agents of the aggression, the critics, have changed sides; the Jingoes of yesterday are the grumblers of to-day; and the peaceful patriots of yesterday are the Jingoes of to-day. The empire and its appendages are even vaster in 1885 than in 1880; its responsibilities are greater; its risks and perplexities deeper; its enemies stronger and more threatening. And in the midst of this crisis, those who condemn this policy are fewer; their protests come few and faint. The Christian sects can see nothing unrighteous in Mr. Gladstone; the Liberal caucuses stifle any murmur of discontent, and force those who spoke out against Zulu, Afghan, and Trans-Vaal wars to justify, by the tyrants plea of necessity, the massacre of Egyptian fellahs and the extermination of Arab patriots. They who mouthed most loudly about Jingoism are now the foremost in their appeals to national vanity. And the parasites of the parasites of our great Liberal statesman can make such hubbub, in his utter absence of a policy, that they drive him by sheer clamor from one adventure into another. For nearly four years now we have continuously protested against the policy pursued in Egypt. Year after year we have told Mr. Gladstone that it was blackening his whole career and covering our country with shame. There is a monotony about our protests. But, when there is a monotony in evil-doing, there must alike be monotony in remonstrance. We complain that the blood and treasure of this nation should be used in order to flay the peasantry of the Nile, in the interests of usurers and speculators. We complain that we practically annex a people whom we will not govern and cannot benefit. We are boldly for what in the slang of the day is called scuttling out of Egypt. We think the robber and the oppressor should scuttle as quickly as possible, that he is certain to scuttle some day. We complain of massacring an innocent people merely to give our traders and money-dealers larger or safer markets. We complain of all the campaigns and battles as wanton, useless, and unjust massacres. We especially condemn the war in the Soudan as wanton and unjust even in the avowal of the very ministers who are urging it. The defender of Khartoum is a man of heroic qualities and beautiful nature; but the cause of civilisation is not served by launching amongst savages a sort of Pentateuch knight errant. And we seriously complain that the policy of a great country in a great issue of right and wrong should be determined by schoolboy shouting over the feats of our English Garibaldi.
It is true that our Ministers, especially Mr. Gladstone, Lord Granville, and Lord Derby, are the public men who are now most conspicuously resisting the forward policy, and that the outcry of the hour is against them on that ground. But ambition should be made of sterner stuff. Those who aspire to guide nations should meet the folly of the day with more vigorous assertion of principle. And the men who are waging a wanton, bloody, and costly war in the sands of Africa have no principle left to assert.
It may well be that Mr. Gladstone, and most of those who follow him in office, are of all our public men those who have least liking for these wars, annexations, and oppressive dealings with the weak. They may have less liking for them it may be, but they are the men who do these things. They are responsible. The blood lies on their doorstep. The guilt hangs on their fame. The corruption of the national conscience is their doing. The page of history will write their names and their deeds in letters of gore and of flame. It is mockery, even in the most servile parliamentary drudge, to repeat to us that the wrong lies at the door of the Opposition, foreign intriguers, international engagements, untoward circumstances. Keep these threadbare pretexts to defend the next official blunder amidst the cheers of a party mob. The English people will have none of such stale equivocation. The ministers who massacred thousands at Tel-el-Kebir, at Alexandria, at Teb, at Tamasi, who are sinking millions of our peoples hard-won savings in the sands of Africa, in order to slaughter a brave race whom they themselves declare to be heroes and patriots fighting for freedom; and who after three years of this bloodshed, ruin, and waste, have nothing to show for it nothing, except the utter chaos of a fine country, the extreme misery of an innocent people, and all Europe glowering at us in menace and hate the men who have done this are responsible. When they fail to annex some trumpery bit of coast, the failure is naturally set down to blundering, not to conscience. History, their country, their own conscience will make them answer for it. The headlong plunge of our State, already over-burdened with the needs and dangers of a heterogeneous empire, the consuming rage for national extension, which the passion for money, markets, careers, breeds in a people where moral and religious principles are loosened and conflicting, this is the great evil of our time. It is to stem this that statesmen should address themselves. It is to fan this, or to do its bidding, that our actual statesmen contend. Mr. Gladstone in his heart may loathe the task to which he is set and the uses to which he lends his splendid powers. But there are some situations where weakness before powerful clamor works national ruin more readily even than ambition itself. How petty to our descendants will our squabbles in the parliamentary game appear, when history shall tell them that Gladstone waged far more wars than Disraeli; that he slaughtered more hecatombs of innocent people; that he oppressed more nations, embroiled us worse with foreign nations; left the empire of a far more unwieldy size, more exposed and on more rotten foundations; and that Mr. Gladstone did all this not because it seemed to him wise or just, but for the same reason (in truth) that his great rival acted, viz., that it gave him unquestioned ascendency in his party and with those whose opinion he sought.