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THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

537

great blessing to mankind, the ally of virtue, the harbinger of freedom. But such knowledge must be profound. A crowd of people who have a smattering of mathematics, a smattering of astronomy, a smattering of chemistry, who have read a little poetry and a little history, is dangerous to the commonwealth. Such half knowledge is worse than ignorance. And then the authority of Pope is vouched: "Drink deep or taste not;" shallow drafts intoxicate; drink largely and that will sober you. I must confess that the danger which alarms these gentlemen never seemed to me very serious; and my reason is this, that I never could prevail upon any person who pronounced superficial knowledge a curse and profound knowledge a blessing to tell me what was his standard of profundity. The argument proceeds on the supposition that there is some line between profound and superficial knowledge similar to that which separates truth from falsehood. I know of no such line. When we talk of men of deep science, do we mean that they have got to the bottom or near the bottom of science? Do we mean that they know all that is capable of being known? Do we mean even that they know, in their own special department, all that the smatterers of the next generation will know? Why, if we compare the little truth that we know with the infinite mass of truth which we do not know, we are all shallow together, and the greatest philosophers that ever lived would be the first to confess their shallowness. If we could call up the first of human beings, if we could call up Newton and ask him whether, even in those sciences in which he had no rival, he considered himself as profoundly knowing, he would have told us that he was but a smatterer like ourselves and that the difference between his knowledge and ours vanished when compared with the quantity of truth still undiscovered, just as the distance between a person at the foot of Ben Lomond and one at the top of Ben Lomond vanishes when compared with the distance of the fixed stars.

It is evident, then, that those who are afraid of superficial knowledge, do not mean by superficial knowledge knowledge which is superficial when compared with the whole quantity of truth capable of being known. For, in that sense, all human knowledge is, and always has been, and always must be, superficial. What, then, is the standard? Is it the same two years together in any country? Is it the same, at the same moment, in any two countries? Is it not notorious that the profundity of one nation is the shallowness of a neighboring nation? Ramohun Roy passed, among Hindoos, for a man of profound Western learning; but he would have been but a very superficial member of this institute. Strabo was justly entitled to be called a profound geographer eighteen hundred years ago; but a teacher of geography who had never heard of

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THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

America would now be laughed at by the girls of a boarding school. What would now be thought of the greatest chemist of 1746 or of the greatest geologist of 1746? The truth is that, in all experimental science, mankind is, of necessity, constantly advancing. Every generation, of course, has its front rank and its rear rank; but the rear rank of a later generation occupies the ground which was occupied by the front rank of a former generation.

You remember Gulliver's adventures. First he is shipwrecked in a country of little men, and he is a Colossus among them. He strides over the walls of their capital; he stands higher than the cupola of their great temple; he tugs after him a royal fleet; he stretches his legs, and a royal army, with drums beating and colors flying, marches through the gigantic arch; he devours a whole granary for breakfast, eats a herd of cattle for dinner, and washes down his meal with all the hogsheads of a cellar. In his next voyage he is among men sixty feet high. He who in Lilliput used to take people up in his hand in order that he might be able to hear them, is himself taken up in the hands and held to the ears of his masters. It is all that he can do to defend himself with his hanger against the rats and mice. The court ladies amuse themselves with seeing him fight wasps and frogs; the monkey runs off with him to the chimney top; the dwarf drops him into the cream jug and leaves him to swim for his life. Now, was Gulliver a tall or a short man? Why, in his own house at Rotherhithe, he was thought a man of the ordinary stature. put, and he is Quinbus Flestrin, the Man Mountain. dingnag, and he is Grildig, the little Manikin. It is the same in science. The pigmies of one society would have passed for giants in another.

Take him to Lilli

Take him to Brob

It might be amusing to institute a comparison between one of the profoundly learned men of the thirteenth century and one of the superficial students who will frequent our library. Take the great philosopher of the time of Henry III. of England, or Alexander III. of Scotland, the man renowned all over the island, and even as far as Italy and Spain, as the first of astronomers and chemists. What is his astronomy? He is a firm believer in the Ptolemaic system. He never heard of the law of gravitation. Tell him that the succession of day and night is caused by the turning of the earth on its axis. Tell him that in consequence of this motion, the polar diameter of the earth is shorter than the equatorial diameter. Tell him that the succession of summer and winter is caused by the revolution of the earth round the sun. If he does not set you down for an idiot, he lays an information against you before the Bishop and has you burned for a heretic. To do him justice, however, if he is ill-informed on these points, there are other points on which Newton and Laplace

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY

539

were mere children when compared with him. He can cast your nativity. He knows what will happen when Saturn is in the House of Life, and what will happen when Mars is in conjunction with the Dragon's Tail. He can read in the stars whether an expedition will be successful; whether the next harvest will be plentiful; which of your children will be fortunate in marriage, and which will be lost at sea. Happy the State, happy the family, which is guided by the counsels of so profound a man! And what but mischief, public and private, can we expect from the temerity and conceit of sciolists who know no more about the heavenly bodies than what they have learned from Sir John Herschel's beautiful little volume? But, to speak seriously, is not a little truth better than a great deal of falsehood? Is not the man who, in the evenings of a fortnight, has acquired a correct notion of the solar system, a more profound astronomer than the man who has passed thirty years in reading lectures about the primum mobile, in drawing schemes of horoscopes ?

As it has been in science, so it has been in literature. Compare the literary acquirements of the thirteenth century with those which will be within the reach of many who will frequent our reading room. As to Greek learning, the profound man of the thirteenth century was absolutely on a par with the superficial man of the nineteenth. In the modern languages, there was not, six hundred years ago, a single volume which is now read. The library of our profound scholar must have consisted entirely of Latin books. We will suppose him to have had both a large and a choice collection. We will allow him thirty, nay forty manuscripts, and among them a Virgil, a Terence, a Lucan, an Ovid, a Statius, a great deal of Livy, a great deal of Cicero. In allowing him all this, we are dealing most liberally with him; for it is much more likely that his shelves were filled with treatises on school divinity and canon law, composed by writers whose names the world has very wisely forgotten. But even if we suppose him to have possessed all that is most valuable in the literature of Rome, I say with perfect confidence that, both in respect of intellectual improvement and in respect of intellectual pleasures, he was far less favorably situated than a man who now, knowing only the English language, has a bookcase filled with the best English works. Our great men of the Middle Ages could not form a conception of any tragedy approaching "Macbeth" or "Lear," or of any comedy equal to "Henry IV." or "Twelfth Night." The best epic poem that he had read was far inferior to the "Paradise Lost:" and all the tomes of his philosophers were not worth a page of the "Novum Organum."

RICHARD COBDEN (1804-1865)

THE ORATOR OF FREE TRADE

I

T was the contest against the Corn Laws-which, by imposing a high duty on imported grain, greatly increased the cost of food

in England, favoring the land-holding gentry at the expense of the poor-that made Richard Cobden famous. Conservatism, and the political influence of the gentry, preserved these laws with little change, and Cobden was the first to make a determined assault upon them. In 1839 the Anti-Corn Law League was formed, with him for its principal champion and orator. Elected to Parliament in 1841, he kept up the fight actively and earnestly in the House and before the people, with the result that the obnoxious laws were repealed in 1846. An able orator and a born reformer, Mr. Cobden was a powerful ally of Bright and Gladstone in their Liberal campaign. He favored electoral reform, vote by ballot, and a pacific foreign policy, and was the author, in 1860, of an important commercial treaty with France, which greatly increased the trade between the two countries.

THE GENTRY AND THE PROTECTIVE SYSTEM

[From Cobden's many eloquent speeches on the subject of his great free-corn conflict, we select the following example, in which he clearly points out to the landholders of England the selfish character of their course, and the perils they ran in opposing the demand for cheap food from the great industrial population.]

I tell you that this "Protection," as it has been called, is a failure. It was so when you had the prohibition up to 80s. You know the state of your farming tenantry in 1821. It was a failure when you had a protection price of 60s.; for you know what was the condition of your farm tenantry in 1835. It is a failure now with your last amendment, for you have admitted and proclaimed it to us; and what is the condition of your agricultural population at this time? I ask, what is your plan? I hope

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it is not a pretense; a mere political game that has been played throughout the last election, and that you have not all come up here as mere politicians. There are politicians in the House; men who look with an ambition-probably a justifiable one-to the honors of office. There may be men who, with thirty years of continuous service, -having been pressed into a groove from which they can neither escape nor retreat,—may be holding office, high office, maintained there, probably, at the expense of their present convictions, which do not harmonize very well with their early opinions. I make allowances for them; but the great body of the honorable gentlemen opposite came up to this House, not as politicians, but as the farmers' friends, and protectors of the agricultural interests. Well, what do you propose to do? You have heard the Prime Minister declare that, if he could restore all the protection which you have had, that protection would not benefit agriculturists. Is that your belief? If so, why not proclaim it? and if it is not your conviction, you will have falsified your mission in this House, by following the right honorable baronet out into the lobby, and opposing inquiry into the condition of the very men who sent you here.

With mere politicians I have no right to expect to succeed in this motion. But I have no hesitation in telling you that, if you give me a committee of this House, I will explode the delusion of agricultural protection. I will bring forward such a mass of evidence, and give you such a preponderance of talent and of authority, that when the Blue-Book is published and sent forth to the world, as we can now send it, by our vehicles of information, your system of protection shall not live in public opinion for two years afterward. Politicians do not want that. This cry of protection has been a very convenient handle for politicians. The cry of protection carried the counties at the last election, and politicians gained honors, emoluments, and place by it. But is that old tattered flag of protection, tarnished and torn as it is already, to be kept hoisted still in the counties for the benefit of politicians; or will you come forward honestly and fairly to inquire into this question? I cannot believe that the gentry of England will be made mere drumheads to be sounded upon by a Prime Minister to give forth unmeaning and empty sounds, and to have no articulate voice of their own. No! You are the gentry of England, who represent the counties. You are the aristocracy of England. Your fathers led our fathers; you may lead us if you will go the right way. But, although you have retained your influence with this country longer than any other aristocracy, it has not been by opposing popular opinion, or by setting yourselves against the spirit of the age.

In other days, when the battle and the hunting-fields were the tests

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