Page:Mind (Old Series) Volume 11.djvu/251

250 A. W. BENN : by gaining credence ; the invention can only survive by gaining custom. No general council or supreme pontiff has made faith in the earth's motion binding on the popular conscience. No despot or aristocratic senate has given a monopoly to printing- presses arid steam-engines. These and all other products of creative originality could have been stifled at their first appear- ance by the simple process of ' boycotting ' them, had the people cherished that irrational suspicion of novelty attributed to them by Sir H. Maine. And one fails to see why the people acting in their corporate capacity as legislators should exhibit a stupid intolerance quite alien to their character as individual customers and consumers. The perpetuity of progress is a result suggested by history, in harmony with the dynamic law of nature and inevitably guaranteed by the survival of the fittest ; nor do any empirical observations on the mental constitution of man really lend countenance to an opposite conclusion. Nevertheless there are certain considerations very different from those indicated i;i Popular Government, leading us to suppose that the rate of progress is liable to retardations or disguises rendering it imper- ceptible through long periods of time. First of all, it must be remembered that, while the diffusion of the means of happiness over a wider surface is no less truly a mode of progress than their accumulation within a single class of the community, it is often a much less brilliant and interesting process, and consequently sometimes escapes the notice of political observers. Thus to make the whole population of Europe participators in the gains of GraBco-Eoman civilisation was a long and laborious operation, sufficient while it lasted to engross all the available energies of humanity. To treat the thousand years or so which elapsed between the age of the Antouines and the earliest Eenaissance as a period of decay and barbarism is to ignore this important fact. And it may be asked whether the so-called immobility of India and China is not conditioned by an analogous elevation of less advanced to an equality with more advanced races. For, although it would be rash to say that the two processes of accumulation and diffusion vary inversely as one another, there seems to be a more or less fluctuating balance of compensation between them. For example, the striking dearth of original production among ourselves, and indeed throughout western Eu- rope, at the present moment becomes explicable only when viewed in connexion with the efforts simultaneously made to raise the condition of the lower class and to improve the education of all classes. Now, supposing these benevolent efforts to be continued and eventually crowned with success to the extent, let us say, of establishing among our own labouring population such a degree of comfort as already prevails in our Australian colonies, with the prospect of no more rapid increase of its numbers than is observed in France ; then the general contentment might