constituent of the summum bonum, as the utilitarian doctrine asserts. Moral progress may be taken to mean an improvement either in men's knowledge and ideas of duty, or in their dispositions and practice. Taken in either sense, it has been often denied. The reasons given by Sir James Mackintosh for denying it in the former sense, and for asserting that morality, in fact, admits of no discoveries, deserve attention. More than 3,000 years have elapsed since the composition of the Pentateuch; and let any man, if he is able, tell me in what important respects the rule of life has varied since that distant period. Let the books of false religions be opened, and it will be found that their moral system is, in all its grand features, the same. Such as the rule was at the first dawn of history, such it continues till the present day. Ages roll over mankind; mighty nations pass like a shadow; virtue alone remains the same, immortal and unchangeable. The reasons of this fact it is not difficult to discover. It will be very plain, on the least consideration, that mankind must so completely have formed their rule of life in the most early times that no subsequent improvements could change it. This is the distinction between morality and all other sciences. The facts which lead to the formation of moral rules are as accessible, and must be as obvious to the simplest barbarian as to the most enlightened philosopher. The motive which leads him to consider them is the most powerful that can be imagined. It is the care of his own existence. The case of the physical and speculative sciences is directly opposite. There the facts are remote, and the motive that induces us to explore them is comparatively weak. It is only curiosity or, at most, a desire to multiply the conveniences and ornaments of life. From the endless variety of the facts with which these sciences are concerned, it is impossible to prescribe any bounds to their future improvement. It is otherwise with morals. They have hitherto been stationary, and, in my opinion, are likely to remain so."* A later reasoner has not only acquiesced in this view of the stationary character of speculative morality, but has denied that any improvement has taken place upon the

Life of Mackintosh.

whole in the disposition or practical virtue of mankind, and has attempted to construct a philosophy of civilization by reference to the merely intellectual progress of the race. It is particularly remarkable that this writer should have argued forcibly that mental philosophy can be successfully studied only by historical methods, and yet should have overlooked the application of historical investigation to moral philosophy, and the contradiction which it gives to the doctrine of the unchangeable nature of human morals, either speculative or practical. The absence in the records of very ancient society of anything resembling our standard of right and wrong, and the entirely different direction given to the sentiments of approbation and disapprobation from what we deem just and reasonable, can hardly fail to strike any reader of Homer. An individual, in heroic Greece, was good or bad in reference not to his personal character and conduct, but to his birth and station in society. The chief was estimable because, however cruel, licentious, and treacherous, he possessed the esteemed qualities of rank and power; the common man was base, vile, and bad because the class to which he belonged was despised.* To this day the moral ideas of barbarous communities have the same peculiar aspect which Mr. Maine discovers in the vestiges of primitive society. There is hardly a conception of individual responsibility, merit, or demerit. The moral elevation and abasement of the individual appears to be confounded with or postponed to the merits and offences of the group to which the individual belongs.' The offence of a Red Indian is the offence of his

*The general epithets of good, just, &c., signify (in legendary Greece) the man of birth, wealth, influence, and daring, whatever may be the turn of his moral sentiments, while the opposite epithet bad designates the poor, lowly and weak.' . . . The reference of these words ȧyalds, éσeλds, kakds, to power and not to worth, is their primitive import in the Greek language descending from the Iliad downwards. The ethical meaning of the words hardly appears until the discussions raised by Socrates.' . "Throughout the long stream of legendary narrative to which the Greeks looked back as their past history, the larger social virtues hardly ever come into play. There is no sense of obligation there between man and man as such, and very little between each man and the entire community of which he is a member; such sentiments are neither operative in real life, nor present to the imagination of the poet.'— Grote's History of Greece.

+ Maine's Ancient Law, p. 127.

.

whole tribe, and to be visited upon the whole tribe.

And,

so far from the moral sentiments of mankind having been always and everywhere alike, there are living languages which lack names for the feelings essential to the rudiments even of a low morality. Affection, benevolence, gratitude, justice, and honour, are terms without equivalents in the speech of some savage societies, because they have no existence in their minds. The Englishman is so early taught that he should love his neighbour, that he is ready to think the knowledge of that duty comes to him by intuition. The African savage thinks that he, too, has intuitive knowledgebut it is of the art of rearing cattle and of making rain; and he cannot believe that God meant him to love any one but himself. Yet the nations of Africa can recognise the duty of hospitality; and among the Makololo, says Dr. Livingstone, so generally is it admitted, that one of the most cogent arguments for polygamy is, that a respectable man, with only one wife, could not entertain visitors as he ought.' The facts upon which the modern morality of Europe is based are not, in truth, as Sir James Mackintosh argued, before the eyes of the barbarian; nor, if they were, would they attract his observation. The structure of the society in which he lives is based upon radically different rules from those by which a civilized society is kept together, and his ideas are generated almost exclusively by his appetites, antipathies, and ceremonial customs. If he has treacherously murdered many men of another tribe in this world, the Fijian thinks he will be happy in the next world, for that is his idea of virtue. His wife or daughter will, he believes, be fearfully punished hereafter, if she has not been properly tattooed in this life, for that is his estimate of wickedness and sin.* The idea of consummate virtue entertained by

* God told us differently. He made black men first, and did not love us as he did the white men. He made you beautiful, and gave you many things about which we know nothing. He gave us nothing except the assegai, and cattle, and rainmaking, and He did not give us hearts like yours. We never love one another. God has given us one little thing about which you know nothing. He has given us the knowledge of certain medicines by which we can make rain. We do not despise those things which you possess, though we are ignorant of them. You ought not to despise our little knowledge, though you are ignorant of it.'-Livingstone's South Africa.

our own ancestors is described in the famous death-song of Lodbrog, the Scandinavian chief. Shut up in a dungeon filled with venomous serpents, he sings, as a viper tears his breast'From my youth I have shed blood, and desired an end like this. The goddesses sent by Odin to meet me call to me, and invite me. I go, seated among the foremost, to drink ale with the gods. The hours of my life are passing away. I shall die laughing.' How could the human mind, while carnage was the highest enjoyment and the noblest occupation, conceive or comprehend the moral creed of our time? The laws of this country show how slow the descendants of the fierce Northmen were to acquire the mild temper and humane spirit which characterize Englishmen now: and they fully refute the position of the historical writer referred to before, that although there may be an ebb and flow in the good and bad feelings and habits of mind of successive generations, the tide of good never gains ground in the end. Daines Barrington, commenting on our ancient statutes, observes, that they prove that the people of England were formerly more vindictive and irritable than they are now, and asks whether it can be supposed that, in the thirteenth century, any one would have thought of subscribing for the relief of the inhabitants of Lisbon after an earthquake, or to clothe the French prisoners? There is scarcely, again, a page of the history or literature of the seventeenth century, says Lord Macaulay, which does not prove that our ancestors were less humane than their posterity. The code of honour, in the eighteenth century, we may add, commanded a gentleman to commit murder; and drunkenness was then little short of a duty to male society.

It has been urged, however, as a decisive proof of the stationary character of moral principles, that the only two principles which moralists have ever been able to teach respecting war, are that defensive wars are just, and that offensive wars are unjust.'* But it is sufficiently obvious that the words defensive and offensive have no fixed and definite meaning, and may mean one thing in one age, and another thing in another.

* Buckle's History of Civilization.

The same verbal proposition does not always carry the same import. The law of Moses commanded the Israelite to love his neighbour as himself; but, fifteen hundred years after, the Jew asked who is my neighbour?' and learnt for the first time the length and breadth of the duty of humanity. By the justice of defensive wars, might be understood, wars like the Crusades, for the defence of the Christian faith; or, wars for the defence of one's country; or, again, wars for the defence of humanity, human liberty, and civilization. The fundamental doctrine of the present code of nations—that of the right of independence— as on the one hand, it had a purely technical origin, so, on the other, there is nothing in it of immutable expediency or justice. Men have talked, indeed, and still talk vaguely of the law of nature and nations; but so they have talked and talk of the natural rights of individuals to life, liberty, and property, although there has never been any fixed or general rule respecting the just limitations of human liberty, or the nature and degree of the sacrifices which society may, in the last resort, exact from its members. May a man be compelled to fight against his conscience, for his country? if so, where is the recognition of his right to life and liberty? if not so, where is the immutable line to be drawn between the domain of individual independence, and that of public authority? If there were a natural right to private property, how are taxes, poor-laws, and railway acts to be justified, or the communism of the first Christians? By analogy, it follows that nothing but the good of mankind at large, according to the estimation of the time, entitles the Government of any single nation to exclusive dominion within its territory. And it is surely conceivable that convictions of public policy and duty, different from those now entertained, and deeper sympathies between mankind, may lead civilized states to make territorial sovereignty conditional upon not making the territory over which it extends the scene of outrages sickening even to read of. As humane sentiments gain ground, as international jealousies and antipathies wear out, as the interests of countries are perceptibly reconciled, may we not reasonably suppose that a clearer and better code of international morality will commend itself to the