Je croyais voir le president Fairs bailler--en repondant Que l'on vient de perdre un grand homme; Que moi je le vaux, Dieu sait comme. Mais ce president sans facon[6] Ne perore ici qu'en chanson: Toujours trop tot sa harangue est finie. Non, non, ce n'est point comme a l'Academia; Ce n'est point comme a l'Academie.
Admis enfin, aurai-jo alors, Pour tout esprit, l'esprit de corps? Il rend le bon sens, quoi qu'on dise, Solidaire de la sottise; Mais, dans votes societe, L'esprit de corps, c'est la gaite. Cet esprit la regne sans tyrannie. Non, non, ce n'est point comme a l'Academie; Ce n'est point comme a l'Acadenie.
Asylums of common-place, he hints, academies must ever be. But that sentence is too harsh; the true one is--the academies are asylums of the ideas and the tastes of the last age. 'By the time,' I have heard a most eminent man of science observe, 'by the time a man of science attains eminence on any subject, he becomes a nuisance upon it, because he is sure to retain errors which were in vogue when he was young, but which the new race have refuted.' These are the sort of ideas which find their home in academies, and out of their dignified windows pooh-pooh new things. I may seem to have wandered far from early society, but I have not wandered. The true scientific method is to explain the past by the present--what we see by what we do not see. We can only comprehend why so many nations have not varied, when we see how hateful variation is; how everybody turns against it; how not only the conservatives of speculation try to root it out, but the very innovators invent most rigid machines for crushing the 'monstrosities and anomalies'--the new forms, out of which, by competition and trial, the best is to be selected for the future. The point I am bringing out is simple:--one most important pre-requisite of a prevailing nation is that it should have passed out of the first stage of civilisation into the second stage--out of the stage where permanence is most wanted into that where variability is most wanted; and you cannot comprehend why progress is so slow till you see how hard the most obstinate tendencies of human nature make that step to mankind.
Of course the nation we are supposing must keep the virtues of its first stage as it passes into the after stage, else it will be trodden out; it will have lost the savage virtues in getting the beginning of the civilised virtues; and the savage virtues which tend to war are the daily bread of human nature. Carlyle said, in his graphic way, 'The ultimate question between every two human beings is, "Can I kill thee, or canst thou kill me?"' History is strewn with the wrecks of nations which have gained a little progressiveness at the cost of a great deal of hard manliness, and have thus prepared themselves for destruction as soon as the movements of the world gave a chance for it. But these nations have come out of the 'pre-economic stage' too soon; they have been put to learn while yet only too apt to unlearn. Such cases do not vitiate, they confirm, the principle--that a nation which has just gained variability without losing legality has a singular likelihood to be a prevalent nation.