Spain and Turkey.

Perhaps the most striking and even frightful case of national decay is presented by Spain, and especially by the Spanish aristocracy, amongst whom the noble spirit of Christian chivalry survived longer than in any other part of Europe. The moral stature of the most eminent Spaniards of the sixteenth century was gigantic. The greatest commanders, whether by land or by sea, were of that nation, and the contemporaries of Ximenes, Gonsalvo, and the first American discoverers, were men whose capacity of great thought and heroic endurance might well make even England tremble. What a contrast between those and their effete descendants, whose imbecility, both in council and at the head of armies, a Wellington found harder to contend with than the valour of his foes, in those great achievements which delivered the Peninsula !

The Ottoman Empire never reached so high a pitch of moral attainment as Christian Spain, but its history affords a no less startling illustration of the rapidity with which the process of moral decomposition may sometimes proceed. In the fifteenth century, the enthusiasm and perfect discipline of the Turks rendered them so formidable-not to one country alone, but to the whole of Western Europe-as to impel many of the leading minds of Christendom to the project of a new crusade. At the commencement of the Lutheran Reformation the same people still held the undisputed naval ascendancy of the Mediterranean. Within about fifty years that ascendancy was totally and for ever destroyed at the Battle of Lepanto, and before the close of the sixteenth century, the Turkish Government had shrunk, from habits of self-indulgence and loss of discipline in those by whom its power was sustained, to that moral decrepitude which has gradually rendered its hold of one of the fairest portions of Europe dependent upon the policy or the forbearance of other nations.

Nature of Moral Decay.

National decay in all these cases is properly a corruption, and differs as much from mere barbarism as old age does from childhood. In a rude primitive people, there is observable a certain balance or harmony between their intellectual and moral powers. Their passions are coarse, but their intellectual perceptions are dull, and the outbreaks of appetite and anger alternate with flashes of generosity and compassion, which show the higher nature struggling to break the bonds which degrade it. But in the corruption of a civilized nation, there is presented the fearful spectacle of the ascendancy of the lower passions, with intellect and imagination employed in their service. They have looked upon the heavenly light, and have voluntarily turned back into darkness.

The disturbance of that rude harmony of the faculties which Nature gives to her least favoured children, and which often survives in a peasantry after a ruling class has become corrupt, is the result of new stimulants, arising from the possession of new means of gratification, being addressed to the senses. In this way the barbarous races in contact with civilized man are almost invariably corrupted, and whatever their previous barbarism might have been, the change is a real demoralization. National corruption, then, may be said to consist of two things— a disproportionate development of all the impulses leading to personal gratification, and a loosening or destruction of numerous traditional restraints, by which indulgence was more or less controlled, and individual wills held habitually in subjection. It is evident that such corruption may be for a long time accompanied by a high artistic, intellectual, and commercial development. The Roman virtue was gone when the greatest of Roman intellects destroyed the last trace of liberty, and both literature and luxurious indulgence were at their height in the age of Augustus. It is quite true that moral decay is certain to be ultimately followed by that of the intellectual faculties, but the latter may long survive the cor

ruption of the nobler powers, and, strictly speaking, it is only by the subservience of intellect and imagination that corruption. reaches its highest intensity.

It may be well to examine, though it must be in a very brief and imperfect manner, whether any of these appearances of decay are at present observable in the chief civilized nations of the world. With this view I shall make a few remarks upon appearances which may be noted in France, the United States, and England. Are there any signs in those countries of a tendency towards that state of things in which the ascendancy of the more ignoble impulses destroys all that is best in the life of a nation?

France.

It requires very little knowledge of the French people to see that the appetite for sensual enjoyments of all kinds has been whetted to a most dangerous sharpness within the last half century. The upper class is probably superior in moral character to the same class in the days of Louis XV.; but the great bulk of the nation has had its desires aroused by influences from which the misery and oppression of former days was a kind of protection. New wealth has been actually attained by a portion of the middle class, but the passion for new wealth has been universally excited. The popular reading shows the popular taste. What is to be inferred from the universal and greedy perusal of such works as the "Count of Monte Christo" and the "Wandering Jew" but this, that the images on which the mass of minds love to dwell are those of immense wealth, and the varied powers of luxurious enjoyment which it affords? Here, then, is evidence of a great development of the impulses to personal gratification in classes whose position must shut them out from it. Where are the corresponding moral restraints? Upon this point it would be rash to dogmatize, because the moral restraints operating upon the life of a people often escape the eye of a foreign observer; but

T

the evidence is too clear to leave a doubt in the mind of anybody, that the restraining principles of French society have been weakened or destroyed to an extent almost unexampled. In the army, indeed, but in the army alone, there is a stern and perfect discipline sustained by sentiments of the most powerful kind. Whatever may be the case in other respects, the military virtues of the French show no decay. The old valour is still there, and the subordination which gives it effect is only too complete. The work of M. de Vigny, "De la Servitude Militaire," describes the settled principle of self-abnegation, refined and beautiful even in its excess, which makes the French officer an instrument in the hands of his superior, and which, by the invariable laws of moral relation, confers social ascendancy on the body amongst whom it prevails. Let us study the spirit of the French army in the pages of De Vigny, and that of the French bourgeoisie, with reasonable allowance for caricature, in the Jérome Paturot of M. Reybaud, and we shall be at no loss to understand why France must, for a long time to come, obey a Military Government.

It is true, indeed, that in any comprehensive survey of the indications of moral character in France, much is met with which commands not only respect but admiration. The readiness with which the people are moved by appeals made to the more generous feelings, and the lofty self-denial and chivalrous delicacy of sentiment frequently displayed by common workmen, are signally characteristic of France. The revolutionary history, too, is as rich as that of any heroic age in examples of patriotic self-devotion; and even more honourable than those bursts of disinterested enthusiasm is the calm and inflexible adherence to principle shown by particular classes-by both republican artizans and royalist nobles, in their fidelity to their respective political standards; by members of the judicial body, in the honourable discharge of their high trust, without regard to the frowns of power; and still more by the many able journalists, who, in spite of the greatest temptations, have refused to

lend their sanction to the last violent change in the constitution. But, notwithstanding these favourable indications, the general fact, that the mass of society in France has undergone, and is undergoing, a moral change which is not improvement, is apparent throughout the whole of its moral and political controversies, and nowhere more clearly than in the pages of M. Comte himself. The great fact which is continually present to the mind of M. Comte is that of moral decomposition -progressive moral and intellectual anarchy-or a constant approach to that state of universal personal isolation in which all the ties between man and man are broken, and in which every restraint imposed by tradition and early education has been uprooted. This presence and influence of an atmosphere of social decay are felt throughout the Philosophie Positive, as in the Annals of Tacitus; and it must be added, that the stoical elevation of the writer, despite of some querulous outbreaks, is quite as conspicuous as that of the great Roman historian 1. M. Comte's view is, that a condition of pro

The extraordinary position of Tacitus, however, is seldom appreciated. It has been depicted by Mr. Torrens M'Cullagh, with great force, in his "Lectures on History," in the following passage:—

"In this respect, I am inclined to look upon this work of Tacitus as one of the most stupendous efforts of truly moral greatness that we know of. I allude especially to the triumph of self-sustaining energy it manifests. In most other biographies of nations, there are magnificent materials to work upon; Tacitus had worse than none. In all of them there is likewise the great ingredient of antagonist powers in action to be depicted; but resistance was dead in his time. Herodotus is the chronicle of Grecian chivalry-the narrative of the most brilliant struggle that the world has seen, of moral discipline and daring with gigantic brutal force. Thucydides is an antithesis from end to end. Livy tells how the bloodhound cub was born, and how it grew, amid every sort of danger, from its suckling time in the wolf's den, till its matured ferocity, when every leaf in the forests of Asia and of Gaul had learned to tremble at its imperial howl. Polybius, too, had the same canvas to tint, though his colouring is more uniform.

"But Tacitus had a civilized desert for his landscape-a moral grave-yard for his scene. The conflict of political principles and powers was over and past. The cataract had worn itself down. No man dreamed any more of a democracy; no man imagined the restoration of an aristocratic commonwealth was possible. The provinces had ceased to revolt; Numidia was become a domestic corn-field; and the Greeks had learned to dance gracefully in their chains. As far as the circumspective