than agricultural occupations. His bodily powers were his lord's, and the priest took charge of those of his soul. His imagination might be stirred by the pictures of saints and angels in his church, or by the sight of nobles, knights, and ladies belonging to a sphere almost as much above his own, or even by deep draughts of holiday ale; but these temporary emotions excepted, his life must have been nearly as monotonous and thoughtless as that of a beast of burden. If indeed he lived close to a monastery, and had an uncommon aptitude for learning Latin, he might be admitted into a spiritual corporation, which regulated his minutest actions and his inmost thoughts, and regarded any display of what is now called individuality as rebellion or heresy. Or if he lived near a city, he might, after a year's concealment, defy the suit of his lord to recover him as a fugitive serf. But he was by no means sure of a welcome within the city walls; and the regulations of the old municipal guilds were far from being nursing mothers of originality. The industry of towns was then in a constant state of siege, and their inhabitants formed a sort of garrison, which had to be kept in order by stringent discipline. Had the towns, however, favoured individual liberty more than we are justified in supposing, the vast majority of the medieval population lived in the country, and to this day we find that rural life, until broken in upon by innovations emanating from towns, is a perpetual servitude to custom. In a small island like ours, studded with populous cities, and intersected with railways, rustic usages have long ceased to exist in their purity; but on the Continent we still find the peasantry in many places mere stereotyped copies of their ancestors, with little even of physical diversity between individuals. The true German peasant, for example, is an individual only in a numerical sense. He is merely a common specimen of his race and class; so much so that his immobility has been panegyrised as the grand security against revolution, by a writer whose descriptions of his countrymen are always faithful and instructive, although they will appear to most English minds suggestive of a different moral. The following passage is from his pages:*

* Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft. Von W. H. Riehl. Dritte Auflage, pp. 43-4.

C

'Among the townspeople of Germany, the original form of body, as well as of mind and manners, is lost in a type of individuality. The peasantry, on the contrary, vary, even in bodily appearance, only by groups, according to locality and class of life. In one rural district you find a tall, long-boned frame general, in another, a squat, broad-shouldered figure, transmitted for centuries by an unadulterated race. So in Hesse, at this day, you will meet those lengthy visages with broad, high foreheads, small eyes, arched eyebrows, long, straight noses, and big lips, just as they are painted by Jacob Becker in his village tales. Comparing these rustic faces with the sculptures of the thirteenth century in the Church of Elizabeth at Marburg, you perceive that the old Hessian cast of countenance has remained unaltered for six hundred years; with, however, this distinction, that while on those monuments the heads of princes and nobles are carved, showing in their lineaments the genuine stamp of the race, that is now to be found among the peasantry alone. Whoever would portray medieval forms with historical fidelity, must look to the peasants for his models. This affords a natural explanation of the fact that the old German artists, of an age when it was far less the custom than in our time to draw from a model, have so generally given one uniform cast to their heads. The human figure had at that time reached no greater individuality. And the fact that this uniformity is still preserved among the peasantry, suggests the following observation. In the so-called educated world, the human being lives and works, for the most part, as an individual; the peasant, on the other hand, lives and works as one of a group, as a unit of an aggregate class. Hans drives the plough, and lives and thinks just like Karl; but that amongst so many thousands, one lives, thinks, and ploughs like another, is a fact of no light weight in the political and social scale. In the educated world, the individual has his style, and style is the index to the man. With the peasantry it is the race, the locality, the province, that have their style, that is to say, their peculiar dialect, idioms, phrases, and songs; and this style is the index to whole communities. It is an historical heir-loom to which the peasant clings with tenacity. There are districts

in Hungary where the rustic descendants of German colonists of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries continue to sing the old Saxon songs and tunes, while the educated German immigrant in a very short time forgets the language of his home, and takes to the Hungarian. In America, too, it is seen how long the peasant emigrant preserves the inheritance of his own provincial dialect, while the townsman has the sorry ambition to adapt himself to his new abode by forgetting his mother tongue.'

Such are the effects of rural life even now that the peasants of Germany are emancipated from feudal bondage, and are brought near the ferment and progress of the towns of Western Europe. But in the middle ages, the restrictions of villenage combined with many other causes to suppress originality and the development of individual powers. 'Slaves,' says Adam Smith, are very seldom inventive, and all the most important improvements have been the discoveries of free men.' But invention is simply a phase of individuality; and the majority of mankind were formerly a kind of slaves.

Every great social and economical change in modern Europe has helped to clear a passage through the crowd, and through the world, for the humblest man with any real individuality. Information is easily got, travelling is safe and cheap, people may go almost where they like, the choice of occupations is considerable. Every man may be said to be born with a more active brain, a swifter foot, a less vulnerable body, than his ancestors, and with many more modes of turning to account his superior powers. The roads to eminence are more numerous; there is a lane off them to every cottage; and an ingenious boy of humble birth may aspire to become as remarkable an individual as Watt, Stephenson, or Faraday. Freedom and a variety of situations,' says Mr. J. S. Mill,* adopting the language of Baron W. von Humboldt, are the two requisites from the union of which arise individual vigour and manifold diversity.' But practical freedom involves much more than the absence of legal and social restraint; every limitation of power is an abridgment of positive liberty. A man is not free to go from

* Essay on Liberty, F. 103.

Shropshire to London, or from Liverpool to New York, if the journey is too long and expensive for him; nor is he actually free to develop a powerful intellect if education lies beyond his reach. The present multiplicity of occupations, pursuits, and paths of thought, affords the requisite variety of situations; and a nominal freedom has arisen from the abolition of many feudal, municipal, and religious disabilities; but it is the facility of information and locomotion, the accessibility of books, newspapers, and places, that give real freedom to the poor.

Hence a vast addition to the stock of individuality in the market of the world. A hundred thousand men, it has been very justly said, can never produce as many energetic characters as ten millions. And this country, at least, now draws its energetic characters from the millions, instead of as formerly only from the thousands. Nor is the latitude of scope for individuality confined to the world of business; it is almost as wide in the world of thought, so great are the facilities which every man enjoys for making up his mind for himself on all important subjects, and for the avowal of his opinions. He may read Bishop Butler or Mr. Holyoake; and he may get a Sunday audience in Hyde Park either for a loyal and orthodox discourse, or for a sermon against Christianity and the British Constitution.

This view of the enlargement of the sphere of individuality in modern times is quite consistent with Mr. Mill's observation, that the characteristic of a bygone state of society was 'the utmost excess of poverty and impotence in the masses; the most enormous importance and uncontrollable power of a small number of individuals;'* but it is only in a sense to which attention will be drawn in the second part of this Essay, that it is fully reconcileable with another observation of the same distinguished philosopher, namely, that the most remarkable of those consequences of advancing civilization which the state of the world is now forcing upon the attention of thinking minds, is this: that power passes more and more from individuals to masses; that the importance of the masses becomes constantly greater, that of individuals less.'t

* Dissertations and Discussions, vol. i. p. 164. † Ib. vol. i. p. 163.

Doubtless over most of Europe the noble classes have lost some exclusive powers and means of gratifying their natural impulses, and of displaying their personal strength and ability. Yet, not to mention that this sphere of liberty or licence was due to the force of conventionality, rather than of individuality, the opportunities which even a nobleman formerly had of making himself felt in his generation, were comparatively few. He had perhaps an open career for his passions; but of employment for his talents, and of pursuit, he had but little choice. A courtier, a gallant knight, a dignitary of the Church, he might be; or he might be a petty tyrant, a freebooter, and a libertine. But an accomplished scholar, a poet, a historian, an improver of his estates, he could not be. Hence, while the masses had no scope for originality, the nobility and gentry had but little; and one nobleman or gentleman was very much like another in his pursuits, tastes, education, and opinions, taking his character simply from his birth and station in society. Lord Derby, Lord Palmerston, Lord John Russell, and Lord Dufferin, had they lived in the twelfth century, would have differed chiefly in the size of their armour, and the force of their lances; and the third named nobleman, notwithstanding his personal courage, could never have overthrown his rivals.

It is true that when government and military command were the only occupations of distinction open to the laity, and the sovereign was by natural position at the head of both, if he happened to possess considerable abilities, he enjoyed a range for their display which few men, even monarchs, now possess. One great and conspicuous individual was thus developed, but he shone almost alone; as we may judge from the fact that from the arrival of the Saxons in Britain to the accession of Edward III., a period of nearly nine centuries, the only very remarkable names in English history are those of Alfred, William the Conqueror, Anselm, Henry II., Becket, Roger Bacon, and Edward I.-four kings, two priests, and one philosopher. In the last sixty years alone, how many new sciences, new arts, new directions of scholarship and art, new roads to prodigious wealth and influence, have been created, each affording to many individuals a place above the crowd.