Upton Sinclair - "King Coal"

F. Morley Fletcher - "Wood Block Printing"

Charlotte Ouisconsin Van Cleve - "'Three Score Years and Ten'"

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Editorial
This paper argues that discourses of love in Ghanaian market literature for youth offer a view into complex negotiations of agency and empowerment. Drawing on Deborah Durham's notion of youth as "social `shifters'" and Francis Nyamnjoh's conception of the "interconnectedness" of agency, I take Ghanaian market literature as one specific case of how African literature for youth foregrounds questions of continuity and change as African societies enter into increasingly complex global relations. In this literature for youth, received notions of love, often constructed out of impressions from American pop and hip hop music, carry new notions of agency that compete with existing "domesticated" forms. Authors like Ike Tandoh and Evelyn Tay employ discourses of love to offer youth alternative avenues for empowerment in a context of socio-economic disenfranchizement. In a creative process of "straddling", this writing both reveals and reproduces the contradictions that obtain in youth configurations of agency.

The Eve of the French Revolution

E >> Edward J. Lowell >> The Eve of the French Revolution




Government influences alike, and necessarily, the physical and moral
welfare of nations. As its care produces labor, activity, abundance, and
health, its neglect and its injustice produce indolence, discouragement,
famine, contagion, vices, and crimes. It can bring to light, or can
smother talents, skill, and virtue. In fact the government, distributing
rank, wealth, rewards and punishments; master of the things in which men
have learned from childhood to place their happiness, acquires a
necessary influence on their conduct, inflames their passions, turns
them as it will, modifies and settles their manners and customs.
[Footnote: _Moeurs_, a word for which we have no exact equivalent.
It includes the idea of morals as well as that of customs.] These are,
in whole nations, as in individuals, but the conduct, or general system
of will and action which necessarily results from their education, their
government, their laws, their religious opinions, their wise or foolish
institutions. In short, manners and customs are the habits of nations;
good when they produce solid and true happiness for society, and
detestable in the eyes of reason, in spite of the sanction of laws,
usage, religion, public opinion or example, when they have the support
only of habit and prejudice, which seldom consult experience and good
sense. No action is so abominable that it is not, or has not been,
approved by some nation. Parricide, infanticide, theft, usurpation,
cruelty, intolerance, prostitution, have been allowed and even
considered meritorious by some of the peoples of the earth. Religion
especially has consecrated the most revolting and unreasonable customs.

The cause of the wickedness and corruption of men is that nowhere are
they governed according to their nature. Men are bad, not because they
are born bad, but because they are made so. The great and powerful
safely crush the poor and unfortunate, who try, at the risk of their
lives, to return the evil they have suffered. The poor attack openly, or
in secret, that unjust society which gives all to some of its children
and takes all from others.

The rights of a man over his fellows can be founded only on the
happiness which he procures for them, or for which he gives them cause
to hope. No mortal receives from nature the right to command. The
authority which the father exercises over his family is founded on the
advantages which he is supposed to bestow upon it. Ranks in political
society have their basis in real or imaginary utility. The rich man has
rights over the poor man solely by virtue of the well-being which he may
bestow upon him. Genius, talents, art, and skill have claims only on
account of the pleasant and useful things with which they furnish
society. To be virtuous is to make people happy.

A society enjoys all the happiness of which it is capable when the
greater number of its members is fed, clothed, and lodged; when most men
can, without excessive labor, satisfy the cravings of nature. Men's
imagination should be satisfied when they are sure that the fruits of
their labor cannot be taken from them, and that they are working for
themselves. Beyond this all is superfluity, and it is foolish that a
whole nation should sweat to give luxuries to a few persons who can
never be content because their imaginations have become boundless.

Religion is a delusion. The soul, born with the body, is childish in
children, adult in manhood, grows old with advancing years. It is vain
to suppose that the soul survives the body. To die is to think, to feel,
to enjoy, to suffer, no more. Let us reflect on death, not to encourage
fear and melancholy, but to accustom ourselves to look at it with
peaceful eyes, and to throw off the false terror with which the enemies
of our peace try to inspire us.

Utility is the touchstone of systems, opinions, and actions; it is the
measure of our very love of truth. The most useful truths are the most
admired; we call those truths great which most concern the human race;
those futile which concern only a few men whose ideas we do not share.

The doctrine of utility is combined with that of necessity. Most of the
French Philosophers were necessarians, but Holbach expressed the
doctrine in a more extreme form than the others. Will, according to him,
is a modification of the brain by which it is disposed, or prepared, to
set our other organs in motion. The will is necessarily determined by
the quality and pleasantness of the ideas which act upon it.
Deliberation is the oscillation of the will when moved in different
directions by opposing forces; determination is the final prevalence of
one force over the other. There is no difference between the man who
throws himself out of a window and the man who is thrown out, except
that the impulse on the latter comes from something outside of himself,
and that of the former from something within his own mechanism.
[Footnote: Chaudon, the Benedictine, probably the cleverest of the
clerical writers of the time, thus attacks the doctrine of necessity, as
set forth by Holbach. The author of the _System_ has certainly
given out very fine maxims of morality, very pathetic exhortations to
virtue; but with his principles this can be but a joke. It is an
absurdity, like that of a man who, recognizing that his watch was only a
machine, should not fail to exhort it every day to prevent its getting
out of order. Grosse, Diet. d'antiphilosophisme, 923. Holbach would
probably have replied that he was necessarily obliged to exhort, and
that Chaudon was fatally forced to answer.]

Nature has made men neither good nor bad; it has made them machines. Man
is virtuous only in obedience to the call of interest. Morals are
founded on our approbation of those actions which are advantageous to
the race. When good actions benefit others and not ourselves our
approbation of them is similar to the admiration we feel for a fine
picture belonging to some one else. The good man is he whose true ideas
have shown him that his happiness lies in a line of conduct which others
are forced by their own interests to like and approve. By virtue we
acquire the good will of our neighbors, and no man can be happy without
it. Our self-love becomes a hundred times more delightful when to it is
joined the love of others for us. Let us remember that the most
impracticable of all designs is that of being happy alone.

To this point in his argument Holbach had only repeated with strength,
clearness and consistency what the school of the Philosophers from
Voltaire to Helvetius had either affirmed or hinted. In his second
volume, however, he boldly cut loose from his predecessors and avowed
his disbelief in any God. Voltaire and Rousseau were theists, with
different sorts of faith, and the Philosophers, although treating all
churches, and especially all priests, with contempt, had retained, at
least in speech, some remnant of theism. But Holbach declared that God
was an illusion, devised by the fears and the ignorance of mankind. "The
idea of Divinity," he says, "always awakens afflicting ideas in our
minds. "By the word "God" men mean the most hidden or remote cause; they
use the word only when the chain of material and known causes ceases to
be visible to them. It is a vague name which they apply to a cause short
of which their indolence, or the limits of their knowledge, forces them
to stop. Men found nature deaf to their cries; they therefore imagined
an intelligent master over it, hoping that he would listen to them.

This theme is elaborated by Holbach throughout his second volume. Here
as elsewhere he writes with seriousness and conviction, although some of
his logical positions are assailable. Never before in France had
materialism, necessarianism and atheism been so clearly and forcibly
expounded. The very Philosophers were alarmed. Voltaire hastened to
write an article on God so unconvincing, that it can hardly have
convinced himself. It amounts to little more than an argument that God
is the most probable of hypotheses, and it admits that there may be two
or several gods as well as one. It is not unlikely that Voltaire thought
it necessary for his peace in the world to protest against so outspoken
a book as the "System of Nature."

The true answer to Holbach is to be found in a different order of ideas
from any that Voltaire was prepared to accept. Yet Locke might have
taught him that if there is no logical reason to believe in the
existence of mind, there is as little to believe in the existence of
matter. Experience might have shown him that men do not always seek the
thing which they believe most useful to themselves. The old and favorite
doctrine of utility labors under the disadvantage that it has never
shown, nor ever can show, an adequate reason why any man should care for
another or for the race. And as for the existence of God,--that can no
more be proved by argument than the existence of matter, mind, or the
_non-ego_.

Helvetius and Holbach had worked out the theories of the school to their
last philosophical conclusion. A younger writer in the last years of the
reign of Louis XV. was to furnish the complete application of them. The
Chevalier de Chastellux is well known in America by the book of travels
which he wrote when he accompanied the Marquis of Rochambeau in the
Revolutionary War. Chastellux was just then at the height of his
reputation. He had published in 1772 a book which, although now almost
forgotten, is still interesting as a link between the thought of the
last century and that of a large school of thinkers to-day. The title is
"Of Public Felicity, or considerations on the fate of men in the
different Epochs of History," and the motto is _Nil Desperandum_.
"So many people have written the history of men," says Chastellux; "will
not that of humanity be read with pleasure?" And again: "Several authors
have carefully examined if such a Nation were more religious, more
sober, more war-like than another; none has yet sought to discover which
was the happiest."

The object of inquiry being thus indicated, it becomes of the first
importance to consider what test of happiness Chastellux will propose.
He leaves us in no doubt on this point. "A happy nation is not one which
lives with little; the Goths and Vandals lived with little, and they
sought abundance in other regions. A happy nation is not one which is
hardened to trouble and labor; the Goths and Vandals were hardened to
labor, and they sought elsewhere for softness and rest. A happy nation
is not one which is strongest in battle; it fights only to obtain peace
and the commodities of life. A happy nation is one which enjoys ease and
liberty, which is attached to its possessions, and, above all things,
which does not desire to change its condition." And in another place he
asks, what are some of the indications, the symptoms of public felicity.
Two of them, he says, are naturally presented: agriculture and
population. "I name agriculture before population," he continues,
"because if it happens that a nation which is not numerous cultivates
carefully a great quantity of land, it will result that this nation
consumes much, and adds to the food necessary to life the ease and
commodity which make its happiness. If, on the other hand, the increase
of the people is in proportion to that of the agriculture, what can we
conclude except that this multiplication of the human race, as of all
other species, comes solely from its well-being. Agriculture is,
therefore, an indication of the happiness of the nations anterior and
preferable to population." The most certain indication of felicity is a
large proportional consumption of products; a high rate of living. The
marvelous and even the sublime are to be dreaded; but "all that
multiplies men in the nations, and harvests on the surface of the earth,
is good in itself, is good above all things, and preferable to all that
seems fine in the eyes of prejudice."[Footnote: Chastellux finds it
hard to stick quite close to his definition of felicity. Of the English
he says, "Such are the true advantages of this nation; which, joined to
the safety of its property and the inestimable privilege of depending
only on the law, would make it the happiest on earth, if its climate,
its ancient manners and customs, and its frequent revolutions had not
turned it toward discontent and melancholy. But these considerations do
not belong to our subject." ii. 144.]

And as material good is the only good, so it is in modern times and in
civilized countries that the highest point reached by humanity is to be
found. "If wisdom be the art of happy living; if philosophy be truly the
love of wisdom, as its name alone would give us to understand, the
Greeks were never philosophers."

To show that modern nations are increasing the ease and comfort of life
to a point unknown before is no difficult task. Chastellux enumerates
the discoveries of physical science, and touches on the achievements of
learning and the arts, then calls on his readers to look on all these
but as payments on account in the progress of our knowledge; as so much
of the road already passed in the vast course of the human mind. Here we
have the truly modern ideal of progress; the end of government the
greatest happiness of the greatest number, and happiness dependent
merely on material conditions. Morals under this system are but a branch
of medicine. Religion is an old-fashioned prejudice. Let us push on and
unite the world in one great, comfortable, well-fed family. Such is the
last practical advice of the French Philosophic school of the eighteenth
century and of its unconscious followers in this. If the conclusion does
not satisfy the highest aspirations of the human race, that is perhaps
because of some flaw in the premises.



CHAPTER XVIII.

ROUSSEAU'S POLITICAL WRITINGS.


In passing from the study of the Philosophers to that of Rousseau, we
turn from talent to genius, from system to impulse. The theories of the
great Genevan were drawn from his own strange nature, with little regard
for consistency. They belong together much as the features of a
distorted and changeful countenance may do; their unity is personal
rather than systematic. And while Rousseau was, from certain aspects and
chiefly in respect to his conduct, the most contemptible of the great
thinkers of his day, he surpassed most of the others in constant
literary sincerity, and in occasional elevation of thought and feeling.
Voltaire, although never swerving long from his own general
philosophical scheme, would lie without hesitation for any purpose.
Diderot would quote from non-existent books to establish his theories.
But no one can read Rousseau without being convinced that he believed
what he wrote, at least at the moment of writing it. Truthfulness of
this kind is quite consistent with inaccuracy, and it is probable that
some incidents in Rousseau's autobiographical writings have been wrongly
remembered, colored by prejudice, or embellished by vanity. Some of them
may even be completely fictitious; the author caring little for facts
except as the ornaments and illustrations of ideas. But what he thought
in the abstract Rousseau was quite ready to write down, caring little
for the feelings or the opinions of any sect or party; or even of that
great public whose thought was as law to the Philosophers. He deserved
to profit by his sincerity, and he has done so. His many and great
faults were well known to his contemporaries; they are told in his
posthumous "Confessions" in a way to show them more dark than any
contemporary could have imagined; yet such is the evident frankness of
those evil and repugnant volumes that many decent men have got from them
a sneaking kindness for Rousseau, and an inclination to take him at his
own estimate, as one no worse than other people.

This estimate of himself is never to be forgotten in reading his books.
"You see what I am," he seems to say at every turn; "now, I am a good
man." In the belief in his own comparative goodness he was firmly fixed.
His theories of life were largely founded on it. For Rousseau was an
introspective thinker, and thus in seeming opposition to the
intellectual tendency of his age. Voltaire and Diderot were interested
chiefly in the world around them. Locke had viewed his own mind
objectively; he had attempted the feat of getting outside of it, in
order to take a good look at it; and in so doing he had missed seeing
some important parts of it, because they were internal. Rousseau studied
himself and the world within himself. Thus while he was as immoral in
his actions as any of the Philosophers, he was more religious than any
of them. Voltaire's theism was little more than a remnant of early
habit, strengthened by a notion that some sort of religion was necessary
for purposes of police. To Rousseau, a world without a God would have
been truly empty. But as his religion was theistic, and not orthodox;
as, with characteristic meanness, he was ready to profess Catholicism or
Calvinism as he might find it convenient, he has been classed among
atheists by churchmen. In so far as this is mere vituperation it is
perhaps deserved, for Rousseau's life deserved almost any conceivable
vituperation; but as an historical fact, Rousseau's faith was quite as
living as that of many of his revilers.[Footnote: Rousseau looked on
Catholicism and Calvinism rather as civil systems than as ideas, and
accepted them in the same way in which a man may live under a foreign
government, of whose principles he does not approve.]

Every thinking human being has a philosophy and a theology,--a
metaphysical foundation for his beliefs, and an opinion concerning the
Deity. The only escape from having these is to think of nothing
outside of the daily routine of life. The attempt to be without them
on any other terms generally ends in having but crude and
contradictory opinions on the most important subjects of human
interest. The theology of Rousseau will be considered later.
Philosophical systems were his especial bugbear, and it is only
incidentally that he formulates his metaphysical ideas. His general
tendency of belief was toward intuition. Justice and virtue he
believed to be written in the hearts of men, disturbed rather than
elucidated by the observation of the learned and the reflection of the
ingenious. As to the ground of our actions he was less at one with
himself. Sometimes, in agreement with the prevalent philosophy of his
day, he assumed that men are moved only by their own interest. At
times, however, he recognized two principles of human action anterior
to reason; the first of which is care for our own well-being; the
second, a natural repugnance to see others suffer. In making this
distinction he separated from the school of thinkers to whom pity and
affection are but refined forms of self-love. This is characteristic
of Rousseau, who was free from that craving for system which is the
snare of those minds in which logic and pure reason prevail over
acuteness of self-observation.

The society of the eighteenth century had grown very rigid and
artificial. The struggle of the Philosophers was to bring men back in
one way and another to a life founded rationally on a few simple laws
derived from the nature of things. Of these laws the leaders themselves
had not always a true perception, nor did they always derive the right
rules from such laws as they perceived. But their struggle was ever for
reason, as they understood it, and generally for simplicity. In this
work Rousseau was a leader. He was constantly preaching the merits and
the charms of a simple life. In his denunciations of elaborateness, of
luxury, and even of civilization, he was often mistaken, sometimes
absurd. But his authority was great. He set a fashion of simplicity, and
he exerted an influence which went far beyond fashion, and has helped to
modify the world to this day.

There was another quality beside introspection in which Rousseau was the
precursor of the literary men of the nineteenth century, and that is the
love of nature. To say that he was the first great writer to enjoy and
describe natural scenery would be a gross exaggeration. But most of
Rousseau's predecessors valued the world out of doors principally for
its usefulness, and in proportion to its fertility. Rousseau is perhaps
the first great writer who fairly reveled in country life; for whom lake
and mountain, rock and cloud, tree and flower, had a constant joy and
meaning. The true enjoyment of natural scenery, generally affected
nowadays, is not given in a high degree to most people; in a very few it
may be as intense as the enjoyment of music is in many more; but most
people can get from scenery, as from other beautiful things, a
reasonable and modest enjoyment, if the object for their admiration be
well pointed out to them. Rousseau needed no such instruction. To some
extent he furnished it to the modern world. The genuineness of his love
of nature is partly shown by the fact that she was as dear to him in her
simpler as in her grander aspects. The grass filled him with delight as
truly as the mountain-peak; indeed, he felt contempt for those who look
afar for the beauty that is all about us, and his admiration was not
reserved for the unusual. Nor did he fill his pages with description. It
is in his autobiographical writings and in reference to its effect on
himself that he most often mentions natural scenery. Recognizing
instinctively that the principal subjects of language are thought and
action, as the chief interests of painting are form and color, this
writer so keenly alive to natural beauty is guiltless of word painting.

Jean Jacques Rousseau was born at Geneva on the 28th of June, 1712. His
mother, the daughter of a Protestant minister, died at his birth. His
father, a clockmaker by trade, a man of eccentric disposition, had
little real control over the boy, and, moreover, soon moved away from
the city on account of a quarrel with its government, leaving his son
behind him. Jean Jacques was first put under the care of a minister in a
neighboring village; then passed two or three years with an uncle in the
town. At the age of eleven he was sent to a notary's office, whence he
was dismissed for dullness and inaptitude. He was next apprenticed to an
engraver, a man of violent temper, who by his cruelty brought out the
meanness inherent in the boy's weak nature. Rousseau had not been
incapable of generosity; perhaps he never quite became so. But, with a
cowardly temperament, he especially needed firm kindness and judicious
reproof, and these he did not receive. He took to pilfering from his
master, who, in return, used to beat him. Rousseau's thefts were, in
fact, not very considerable,--apples from the larder, graving tools from
the closet. His worst offenses at this time were not such as would make
us condemn very harshly a lad of spirit. But Jean Jacques was not such a
lad. The last of his scrapes as an apprentice was important only from
its consequences. One afternoon he had gone with some comrades on an
expedition beyond the city gates. "Half a league from the town," say the
"Confessions," "I hear the retreat sounded, and hasten my steps; I hear
the drum beat, and run with all my might; I arrive out of breath, all in
a sweat; my heart beats; I see from a distance the soldiers at their
posts; I rush on; I cry with a failing voice. It was too late. When
twenty yards from the outpost I see the first drawbridge going up. I
tremble as I see in the air those terrible horns, sinister and fatal
augury of that terrible fate which was at that moment beginning for me.

"In the first violence of my grief I threw myself on the glacis and bit
the earth. My comrades laughed at their misfortune and made the best of
it at once. I also made up my mind, but in another way. On the very spot
I swore that I would never go back to my master, and on the morrow, when
the gates were opened and they returned to town, I bade them adieu
forever."

Thus did Rousseau become a wanderer at the age of sixteen. The duchy of
Savoy, into which he first passed, adjoined the republic of Geneva, and
was a country as fervently Catholic as the other was ardently
Calvinistic. The young runaway soon fell in with a proselytizing priest,
who gave him a good dinner and dispatched him, for the furtherance of
his conversion, to a singular lady, living not far off, at Annecy. This
lady, named Madame de Warens, about twelve years older than Rousseau,
was not long after to occupy a large place in his life. She belonged to
a Protestant family of Vevay, on the north side of the Lake of Geneva.
She, like him, had fled from her country, and apparently for no more
serious reason. In her flight she had left her husband and abjured her
religion. In morals she had a system of her own, and gave herself to
many men, without interested motives, but with little passion. She was a
sentimental, active-minded woman, of small judgment; pleasing rather
than beautiful, short of stature, thickset, but with a fine head and
arms. Madame de Warens received the boy kindly, and on this first
occasion of their meeting did little more than speed him on his way to
Turin, where he entered a monastery for the express purpose of being
converted to Catholicism. In nine days the farce was completed, and the
new Catholic turned out into the town, with about twenty francs of small
change in his pocket, charitably contributed by the witnesses of the
ceremony of his abjuration. It is needless to dwell on his adventures at
this time. He was a servant in two different families. After something
more than a year he left Turin on foot, and wandered back to Annecy and
to Madame de Warens.

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