The Sun.
London, England, 1865-12-20 00:00:00

THE DEATH OP GREAT MEN•

The death of the Bing of the Belgians adds an-
other item to a year's list, in which were already
included the names of the two foremost men of two
of the greatest nations of the -world. Mr. Lincoln
was assassinated at the very moment when his pre-
sence seemed to be most essential in the councils of
his country. Lord Palmerston died when his name
represented to foreigners the soul of English politics.
England, however, has moved on so far without any
perceptible change. The United States have con-
tinued the perplexing work of re-construction under
their new ruler as well as they could have prospered
under their old. And it is not certain that the loss
of ging Leopold will greatly alter the course of
events in Europe, orperhaps even in Belgium. Three
of the men who, at the beginning of the year, were
the most prominent in the world, have dropped out,
and the political machinery continues to work much
as before. If we listened to the ordinary common-
places, to say nothing of the formal compliments due
to such events, we might have expected our whole
system to be thrown out of gear. Whenever a pro-
minent man falls, and still more whenthere is a pros-
pect of his falling, we are told with every variety of
emphasis, that his importance cannot be over-esti-
mated, that his loss will mark the commencement of
a new era, and that a kind of moral earthquake will
be propagated to the end of the world. Somehow
or other the change is usually smaller than we
expected, or professed to expect ; we get up the
next morning, and find that our breakfast
tastes very much as it did the day before ;
and after a week or two the loss of the great man
becomes an old story, and the new state of things
is undistinguishable from the old. There is a very
sensitive barometer by -which the effect of any great
event upon men's genuine opinions, as distinguishad
from their expressed sentiments, may be tested. It
must be a remarkable death which produces any
effect whatever upon the funds. The men may be
counted on the fingers whose loss would send the
Three per Cents down by one-eighth ; and there is
not more than one man, if there is one, whose loss
would make them fall by a whole unit. If we mea-
sure a man's worth by the fluctations of Consols,
we should find that scarcely any man can be esti-
mated at even the faint rumour of a war, to say
nothing of a war itself. The subject is so far a
trite one that moralists have often dilated upon the
comparative insignificance of great men. But it
may be worth while asking whether the cases we
have mentioned are exceptional, or whether they
are not rather instances of a rule which tends every
day to become more generally true.
A certain school of writers has been very much
attacked for maintaining that the progress of
the world is very little affected by any indivi-
dual, however conspicuous his position. The
assertion is supposed to belong to the philo-
sophy which considers human history to be de-
veloped by " inexorable laws," and not by the
action of free -will. The metaphysical question
thus raised is in reality quite irrelevant. The
most positive of positive philosophers must ad-
mit that a man might produce an indefinite I
effect upon a society, if only the society was
small enough. If England were inhabited by a
hundred families, instead of twenty millions of peo-
ple, we might be all dependant upon one man. The
loss of a single battle might ensure our complete
extirpation, and such a very minute army would be
dependent upon its leader. On the other hand,
every one must admit that there are are same limits
to the influence of the most powerful of men. Louis
Napoleon, with all his horses and all his men, could
not materialy change the religion of his subjects,
nor teach them all to write, nor even alter to any
vital degree their laws of property and succession.
There are limits to the power of every man ; the
question of what those limits are is simply one of
degree, to be decided by experience. The question
of free-will and necessity has no more to do with it
than it has to do with settling whether a man can
walk a thousand miles in a thousand hours. The
extent of the influence of a man upon his fellows is
a problem of social dynamics, upon the solution of
which, as upon the solution of most other practical
problems, metaphysical disputes have little or no
bearing. It is, however, true that as men have come
to look into history more closely, and to criticise it
more scientifically, there has been a tendency to
diminish the value attached to individuals. It was
inevitable that it should be so, from the way in which
history was formerly written. Every great event was
labelled with the name of the man who happened to
be uppermost, because it is always convenient to
assume that the ringleader of a mob is the sole cause
of its existence ; it saves all trouble of investigat-
ing deeper causes, and gives a summary expla-
nation. On the same principles, every change was
supposed to be far more abrupt than it really was,.
till the transitory intermediate phases which had led
up to it had been thoroughly examined. Thus, for
example, it was first assumed that the French Revo-
lution was a sharp line of division between two
totally different periods, till people took the trouble
to discover that many of the changes attributed to it,
such as the sub-division of landed property, had
existed to a great extent before the outbreak. It was
next assumed that the French Revolution was en-
tirely dae to Robespierre, or Danton, or Mirabeau,
or some one of its most conspicuous leaders ; whence
followed, logically, the conclusion that there would
have been no revolution if there had been no Robes-
pierre ; and if Robespierre was originally irritated by
an aristocrat splashing his stockings, we might say
that if Robespierre's stockings had not been splashed
there would have been no peasant proprietors in
France. The disasters of the nobility, at the end of
the fifteenth century, says Michelet, caused land to
pass into the hands of the people. This happy event
was called, in the monarchical stage, the good King
Louis XI. The religious wars caused a similar re-
sult a century later. This time the era, christened
by another royal name, was called the good King
Henry IV. This opinion, doubtless accepted in good
faith, has found its latest explosion in the theory of
providential saviours of a people, as explained in the
preface to the " Life of Caesar."
The doctrine that the great bulk of the human
race is a passive bulk of clay, which is patted and
poked into shape at rare intervals by a series
of heaven-sent moulders, had the merit of being pic-
turesque. But it has already fallen in some depart-
ments of thought. A great scientific discoverer is no
longer a man who tells us a secret which, without
him, we should never have known ; he is one who is
a year, or perhaps a month, in advance of his neigh-
bours. When a man invents something new, it al-
ways appears some one else had invented it, inde-
pendently, though he had not published it so soon,
and that half a dozen other men had been on the
very verge of the discovery. The lucky originator
has the pleasure of thinking he has snapped it out
of the mouths of a dozen hungry competitors,
but he cannot flatter himself that his services
were at all indispensable to the world at large. At
least they have saved time. We are like travellers
crossing an unexplored desert. It requires great
qualities now for a man to precede his neighbours
sufficiently to discover the sources of rivers ; in a
short time it will become a common feat, and before
many years there will be railroads running to take
every one who chooses. There was a time when a
man might, like Columbus,
discover entirely new
continents ; but even Columbus would have been
anticipated if he had waited a year or two longer.
There would probably be as many people in Ame-
rica at the present moment if Columbus had been
lost in his first voyage ; and, if Newton had never
lived, we should have known as much about the
solar system as we do, or at least we should have but
little leeway to make up. This truth, which would
be generally acknowledged in scientific matters,
does not meet with equal acceptance in the
i
domain of politics. Such a man as Louis Napoleon
or or as Count Cavour, upon whom the limits of em-
pires seem Ito depend, certainly appears to occupy a
much more important position. So do great generals.
If this or that or the other battle had had a different
result, as historians are so fond of saying, the fate
of the world would have been different. If Charles
Martel had not beaten the Moors, we should all
have been Mahometans ; if William had lost the
battle of Hastings, we should have been beer-swill-
ing Anglo-Saxons instead of Englishmen ; if Napo-
leon had not been defeated at Leipsic, we should all

have been subjects of the French empire. It is
quite true that, if something had happened which
did not happen, a result would have folicwed of
which nobody can trace the consequences. But,
whatever may have been the case formerly, it is evi-
dent that these possibilities are becoming gradually
confined within narrower limits. The extent to
which any man can move the world is diminishing,
because, somehow or other, the vis inertia of the
world has increased. There was perhaps a time
when the fate of a war depended a good deal upon
the personal prowess of Achilles or the ability of
Alexander. Now we can prophesy with tolerable
certainty that the richest and most numerous people
will get the best of it. The end of a contest is gene-
rally pretty clear from the beginning, if we know
the forces that are to be employed. The Danes
might be as brave as they chose, but, in the absence
of intervention, they were certain to lose Schleswig-
Holstein, because one man nowadays is always, in the
long run, beaten by two. If it could havebeen fore-
seen that North and South would fight it out to
the end, there could have been no doubt which
would be crushed, because it was plain which had
the overwhelming superiority in numbers, wealth,
and material. In other words, the victory does not
now depend upon any particular man, but upon
general conditions which it is possible to calculate
beforehand. A General Lee may delay, but he
cannot finally avert, the inevitable effect of the
strongest battalions and the longest purse.
The same causes which lead to this comparative
insignificance of individuals in warfare seem to
operate in political affairs generally. The masses
of mankind have been so systematically organised
that their weight must tell. It tells as much upon
their leaders as upon their adversaries. The most
absolute of monarchs cannot act without constant
reference to the will of his subjects ; he is, to some
extent, confined by the completeness of the machi-
nery at the head of which he is placed. He is com-
pelled to set it working in the accustomed grooves.
If he attempts to turn it off the rails of the regular
track, he finds that it will not run. He cannot
alter the conditions, any more than the commander
of a civilised army can turn his men, at a word, into
a horde of Tartars or Arabs. He has unlimited
power, so long as he does just what is wanted.
The Emperor of the French is absolute on con-
dition of being always popular. So long as he
carefully watches the general desire, or keeps just
in advance of it, he can do what he chooses ; but
if he refused to be bound by the conditions of a
Hobson's choice, he would soon find his power
limited. He is fettered by the completeness of
his own authority. And if one will not accept
the position of being apparently the master and
really the servant, it is not difficult to find another
who will. When the science of governing is re-
duced to registering popular edicts, it does not so
much matter who is the registrar. And that is the
position to which governors, whatever the external
form of government may be, are being more and
more reduced.

In one respect this may be melancholy. If any
man cherishes the ambition of altering the whole
future of the human race, or even of one nation, he
will most likely be disappointed. He will find out
that the human race is very obstinate and stiff-
necked, and has a strong tendency to jog on steadily
on its own path as it chooses. But a moderate man
may be satisfied with what is still within the reach
of many—affecting the fate of thousands, or even
millions. A general may still throw away or save
thousands of lives ; a governor may execute or par-
don a very fair number of rebels; and a chancellor
of the exchequer may lower or raise the price of the
tea of a million of families. No one must be disap-
pointed if, notwithstanding this liberty of action,
there is an enormously preponderating number of
thingswhickwill settle themselves without reference
to him. And it is no small satisfaction to the mass
of mankind to think that their happiness and pro-
gress depend upon something more certain than the
chance of finding a great man to secure it for them.
There is some pleasure in the thought that nearly
everybody would continue, after a time, to get
richer, and wiser, and better, without interruption,
even if some new Guy Faux were to succeed in
blazing up the House of Lords and Commons next
session—lamentable as such an event would be.—
Saturday Review.