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STRAUSS AS A POLITICIAN.

DR. STRAUSS will hardly have any honour in his own country as a politician, and perhaps he ought not to be so considered elsewhere. It is true he represented his native town of Ludwigsburg for a short period in the Wurtemberg Diet, compelled at length to resign because of his Conservative views; but he has never pretended, up to the present time, to be anything more than the leader of the chivalry of doubt, in which capacity, should future generations clothe him with the clouds of mysticism he has rent asunder from other names, he may become a veritable Arthurian hero. But no apology is needed for taking a man at his own estimate, where he is so fully entitled to be measured by it, and if the process should seem ungracious, it is, at least, not unprovoked. A portion of his recent Confession, if not addressed to politicians, deals with politics in a very free and brusque fashion. Philosophically, the Confession would have been complete without it, as it is curiously incomplete with it, presenting us with a strong illustration of the mental oddities observable in one-sided and vigorous minds, whether their virility be logical or romantic. The natural limit of variation, of healthy excursus, is not definitely fixed, but it exists for great minds as well as for little ones, and for the special faculties of all. The rigid logician will dream when he passes its boundary, and the coy mystic will become shrewd and commonplace. Destructive critics hesitate and become feebly conservative; constructive minds leave their glory behind them, but carry their method into mild romance. Swedenborg, Comte, and Mill, each in their own way and degree, serve to show us the two sides of the boundary.

Strauss is a more novel example. A theologian by training, disposition, and profession, the temptation to touch poNo. 168.-VOL. XXVIII.

litics was irresistible. It moved him in 1848, but it mastered him when he sat down to write about the old faith and the new. Having unsettled everything else, a twinge of conscience impelled him to leave us a sphere where rigorous logic might pause, and events might be regarded with half-shut eyes. This sense of uneasiness, this desire to leave us the tortoise if he takes away the elephant, begins to be manifest in the introduction. When a critic who makes a clean sweep of religious fact and belief declares, "We wish for the present no change whatever in the world at large," we more than half suspect that some surprise is in store for us, and we prepare for arrested method, for some sop for our moral infirmity, or for some Comtean recipe for hygiène cérébrale. It becomes apparent that it is a good thing to go to church, though we do not believe in the sermon ; and if we have, with characteristic Pantheism, elevated man into the condition of the only perfect being, we must leave him, politically, where he is, amidst the general inequality and degradation of his lot, to find room for his perfection according to "the idea of his kind," whatever that might mean when rendered into profaner language. No new Church is yet possible, the Babe is not yet even in the Manger; but a new political State, in accordance with the idea of a life restricted to threescore years and ten, concentrating all the misplaced energy directed to other-worldliness, is also impossible, is not even to be desired, is perhaps as illusory as "the old faith" which has vanished in a puff of dust, like a hazel-nut beneath the blow of a steam-hammer. We have hitherto built upwards; in future, we must not build at all. That way, Babel lies. The destruction of religion is complete. Comte thought out a sorry substitute-the worship of the Grand Etre.

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Strauss does not stoop to be so weak. The substitute exists, quite independently of anything he can say or do. For him, as "a simple citizen," it is the German Constitution, rendered a little less Liberal than it is now. Nature exists for the philosophic, stripped of all mystery, as far as he can strip it. For the common herd, there is Monarchy, exactly suited to their wants for all time. "There is," he says, "something enigmatic-nay, seemingly absurd—in monarchy; but just in this consists the mystery of its superiority. Every mystery appears absurd, and yet nothing in life, in the arts, or in the State, is devoid of mystery." Here, surely, the boundary was passed, and the logician lost his cunning. Substitute the word Christianity for Monarchy in the quotation, and what a reflection we have on his own elaborate destruction of mystery! In becoming political, he slips under his thought the old false bottom-if false it be he has laboured for years to destroy. The function of mystery in religion is to hood-wink the intelligence, and so it is to be discarded; in politics, its function is to preserve an absurd enigma from the touch of unwashed hands, to deftly hide the springs of action until we may not discover the difference between a noble reality and a gaudy sham, and so it is to be preserved. We have nothing to say against Monarchy, as such; but this is a remarkable defence of it. The critic who rushes fearlessly in with scalpel and microscope, where others gaze apart with awe, waves them off with haughty hands where they have a clearer right to carry observation and logic into whatsoever lengths they may lead, without any fear of the unknown and the unresolvable.

Even here, however, Strauss has parted with his penetrating acumen. Mystery being invaluable, politically, for some inexplicable reason-though chiefly, we suppose, because it is only in this province of action and belief the unscientific boor or voter can realize and feel it when he has accepted, at secondhand, the destruction of "the old faith" -Monarchy should be the best form of

government, ideally, as all men cannot belong to the intellectual caste wherein excogitation is everything, without some immense revolutionary change. Practically, it may be best, but not ideally. We have renounced ideals in the universal relativity. As if uttering a profound truth, ab ovo, Strauss checks this levity. He assures us "there cannot be an absolutely best form of government." To ask the question is to put the matter wrongly; "it is equivalent to asking what is the best form of clothing." But even this question does not seem unanswerable. The best form of government has been frequently discussed, and by logicians as rigorous as Strauss. Mill discusses the question, and answers it. "The ideally best form of government, it is scarcely necessary to say," he writes, "does not mean one which is practicable or eligible in all states of civilization; but the one which, in the circumstances in which it is practicable and eligible, is attended with the greatest amount of beneficial consequences, immediate and prospective. A completely popular government is the only polity which can make out any claim to this character. It is pre-eminent in both the departments between which the excellence of a political Constitution is divided. It is both more favourable to present good government, and promotes a better and higher form of national character, than any other polity whatsoever" ("Representative Government," p. 54). This answer is satisfactory enough for most politicians, and it makes no appeal to any element of mystery, which contributes nothing to the goodness of a form of government, though frequently much to its badness. A free press is the sworn foe of mystery, besides being one of the conditions of good government. Recently, an attempt has been made to add mystery to the German Government by a new Press Bill, of which even Prince Bismarck, the reputed author, appears to have been half-ashamed. What "we" of the Confession thought is unknown, but we know what the Reichstag was ready to say, and what German journal

ists thought about it. The weakness which has to compel silence is worse than the faith which closes its eyes in order to see better.

As already evident, Strauss is no democrat, though he democratizes Nature. His formula for the multitude appears to be" There is a Providence in your political circumstances accept it, and desire no other." Manhood suffrage, he says, was Prince Bismarck's trump-card, "to be played against the middle-class which had plagued him so sorely during the years of struggle in the Prussian Chamber, elected under a property-qualification;" and he played it accordingly. Evil consequences have not yet arisen, but they may come. Mystery-making priests and ignorant peasants may unite. The change was neither politic nor just. Political rights and State service should run parallel. The bearing of arms is insufficient of itself to warrant the bestowal of a vote; it should be coupled with taxation, but whether direct or indirect, Strauss does not say. With class and trade taxes, as in Prussia, few voters can escape even direct taxation. Strauss wants a capable voter, like everybody else; yet he sees the impossibility of an exact gradation. of rights and capacities. His ideal should be an educational franchise, but it is a property one, with payment of members thrown in as a small compensation for the withdrawal of manhood suffrage! Germany is so much more liberal than England, that it needs to be reminded of our safer historical instinct. "No English statesman dreams of abolishing" property qualifications. Perhaps not, though, strictly speaking, they have ceased to exist as sole qualifications; but let universal military service be enacted, and a new argument will have been fashioned in favour of manhood suffrage, the might of which will be almost irresistible. If a man is called upon to die for his country, he should at least be allowed to live for it. If he is to make war, he should also help to make law. His totality, as a citizen, is otherwise incomplete. He is in the nation, but not of it—a mercenary, not

a patriot-and so much power, rough and uncultivated as it may be, is abstracted from the State. Strauss starts with the idea that German unity is the result of a "politico-military movement," and he might, we think, have detected the intimate correspondence of the two forces.

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Dread of socialism is at the bottom of his aversion to democracy. It leads him into contradictions. His definition of morality when he is warring against Christianity, differs from his account of it when he is upholding political petrifactions. Here is the first:-"Ever remember that thou art human, not merely a natural production; ever remember that all others are human also, and, with all individual differences, the same as thou, having the same needs and claims as thyself: this is the sum and substance of morality." We do not object to this paraphrase of Kant. It is the essence of socialism, in a formula; the dogma of equality and fraternity; the gospel of revolution, in its most unobjectionable shape. But a wilder touch of transcendental socialism startles us anon. is a new formula,—that " property is the indispensable basis of morality, as well as of culture." How, then, is morality possible to those who have no property? How, then, can we condemn the effort to share in the indispensable basis, all "having the same needs and claims?" One must be moral to acquire property by labour, one is moral in holding it by law; but one is immoral in seeking to acquire it by vast political and legal changes. Seizure is immoral, we admit; forfeiture is another matter. But was Mr. Mill immoral, as we believe he was impracticable, in wishing to tax the "unearned increment" of land, individually held, for the benefit of all? Are those persons wicked and debased, who, bringing nice ethical tests to bear on the processes whereby large properties have become individual, through the lapse or transformation of State rights, through the jugglery of manorial courts, recognize the supreme existing right of the State over all the available territory in a given

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country? Communism is the practical expression of the doctrine that property and morality are interdependent. We can neither accept nor defend it. the doctrine is just as capable of becoming a revolutionary generator as any maxim of Proudhon or Fourrier. Innocent enough, it may be, with limited interpretation, so limited as to whittle away its meaning; but, as the utterance of one who is beginning the framework of a new faith," it cannot be too severely condemned. It may become the text of a new social movement in Germany.

Modern society is in a ferment. The labouring classes desire to share more largely in the gains of their labour. Trade-Unionism is an expression of one form of this desire. It is a fatal form, according to Strauss. The effort to benefit themselves brings on the labouring classes a new curse-the curse of high prices. If they get more wages, they are able to purchase less with their gains. This is true of all classes, since the Vicar of Wakefield was passing rich on forty pounds a year.

The relative

share of Trade-Guilds and Trade-Unions in producing this decay of money-power, is an interesting inquiry for which Strauss has no patience. Other factors in the calculation are not even mentioned, such as the increase of population and luxurious display. The Unions have done everything; though house-rent, one of the things he cites, has gone up in Berlin since it became the capital of the German Empire, and, apparently, for no other reason. His positive statements are vexing; as when he styles the Internationale another form of Jesuitism, and connects the right of coalition for trade-purposes with bad Liberalism and culpable executive weakness. He is right, however, in resenting all regulations restricting individual capacity, but they are no necessary part, in our opinion, of true trade amalgamation. His fault is, that he has no sympathy with the popular constructive movement, and fails to see behind it the spirit of a progress to which as yet we can assign no positive form. With combination at one end,

and co-operation at the other, with a mild socialism in the air, and lying perdu in our political phrases and Christian teaching, he must indeed be hopelessly dull and Conservative who does not see that transforming influences are at work, as great as when lordly barons made treaties of peace with neighbouring towns, which became their charters of freedom and trade, or won liberty for the people in contending for their own rights against domineering kings. Industrialism has run through many phases, in common with religious belief; and if Strauss desires to assist in the further evolution of the latter, yet hopes to arrest the process in the former, because he cannot see the end thereof, or likes it not, he has not yet mastered his own darling principle, and others must disclose his imperfection, if they do not care to complete his work.

Where history might have aided him, Strauss either blunders or is unjust, tripping lightly over broken ground, or plunging into extravagant assertion. Disliking cosmopolitanism, though refining it away as manifest in Goethe and Schiller-and connecting it with Ultramontanism, most unjustly, as the feeling is older, both in its Pagan and Christian forms-he makes his dislike the basis of a theory. "Patriotism is the sole ascent to humanitarianism." Cosmopolitanism is weakness. Then, by a spring of logic, we are invited to compare the New and the Old World on the question of national character. The people of the United States are suffering from many ills, but "one of the deepest is want of national character." Is this the result of cosmopolitanism, springing from an uncertain base, or of patriotism weakened by a too wide humanism? The citation is made, in part, to show the latter, but it shows nothing of the kind. The unwillingness of the United States to join the Geneva Convention, is one of many proofs of the absence of humanitarianism, as the heroism of the Civil War was of patriotism. We will assume the converse as intended by the reference to mixed races. But is it fair to compare

a young nation with older ones, like the German and the English? Was not Great Britain once to Europe what North America is now-the outlet for adventurous colonists? Assimilation is a work of time, and it is premature to say that the nationalities of the United States "cannot combine into a living whole." The Irish-Americans are already beginning to assimilate, and the same will ere long be true of the Irish-Germans, perhaps of the Asiatic protégés of Koupmanchap. The negro, we confess, presents more obstacles. But is it true that America has no "national character"? Many of us could wish it were less distinct than it is. However, it improves, war having done as much for it as for Germany, and rather more, as it did not hurl back rival elements into more compact organization. It is Federal Republicanism which is so intolerable to Strauss's historic conscience. He fails to remember that the German Empire is a similar congeries of Statesthat Prussia, Saxony, and Bavaria are as separate, in one sense, as Massachusetts, Pennsylvania, or Ohio-and that no form of government is able to destroy all the outlines and inlines of human types. A Yorkshireman differs from a Cornishman, a Londoner from a Lincolnshireman, dialects and features are still preserved and traceable; and yet it is admitted there is no "want of national character," though Defoe's description is still exact,

"A true-born Englishman's a contradiction, In speech an irony, in fact a fiction." In short, separatism is not patriotism, any more than federalism is cosmopolitanism. Perhaps national character is most marked where there is least racial ferment, as in China; but it is not the highest we can find. It may be innocent of fraternal enthusiasm, but it is not therefore most marked by intellectual energy and "deep feeling."

"The separation of mankind into feebly organized and loosely connected federal republics" has other evils, in the judgment of Strauss. In Switzerland, as in the United States, he misses

"that flourishing condition of the higher intellectual interests" observable in Germany, and, "in some respects, in England." Here, also, sufficient allowance is not made for age-a grave sin in a disciple of developmentand no account is taken of the agencies which have favoured the intellectual progress of Germany. "We Germans are struck by something plebeian, something coarsely realistic and soberly prosaic in the culture of these republics." It will not always be so. Bread-and

butter sciences come first; the higher ones afterwards. It was Goethe who said, "Do not imagine all is vanity, if it is not abstract thought and idea." German unity is a thing of to-day, and it has had no influence, as yet, upon culture. Whether its influence will be good or bad, is a problem we do not undertake to discuss. How German culture assumed its present form is the real question, and much of it, perhaps its special character, is undoubtedly due to "feebly organized" and "loosely connected" States. Of political life, as we understand it in England, as it is understood in America, there was, until recently, none whatever. There was not even patriotism, in any large sense. Prince Bismarck used to say of the Army, that it was inspired "not by German but by Prussian enthusiasm." Minute divisions stimulated intellectual abandonment, necessitated independent educational machinery; and men who had no noble political life to employ their energies became so much the more imaginative, metaphysical, and critical. This was intellectual home-sickness, as Novalis expressed it-"the wish to be everywhere at home." To dislike cosmopolitanism, when it is the description of German genius for the last century; to dislike small and loosely-connected States when they are united under a Republican, instead of a quasi Republican or Imperial form of government; to compare the bloom of a young nationality with the ripe fruition of older ones, rich with the chemistry of ages; to reason from the realized results of to-day in order to connect politics and

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