features of this person's character are found back again in most other business-men belonging to this type. They are chiefly: a cold rationalist view of his place in society and his relation to its other classes, which is of a purely economic nature, somewhat like the "cash nexus" of which Carlyle repeatedly speaks in Past and Present; a greatly exaggerated feeling of independence in the management of his affairs, sometimes leading to a kind of unfounded pig-headedness that is not very convincing to the reader-Thornton has taken measures to abate the smoke nuisance of his own free will, but would have refused to do so under compulsion-; a strong and indomitable will, when he is opposed or thwarted; a strong and clear faculty for going straight to the core of a question in a logical manner; not so much unjust as unfeeling in his dealings with others, "reasoning as if commerce were everything, and humanity nothing;" possessing an innate hatred of scenes, and a great contempt for all people showing emotion, as in his eyes it betrayed a want of selfcontrol. John Thornton's mother is of the same stamp, and the usual talk between mother and son is "about facts, not opinions, far less feelings."

Such a character description tallies in a wonderful way with what we read of the leaders of the utilitarian and economic school of thought. Of Bentham Leslie Stephen tells us that "he was always dealing with concrete facts, and a great part of his writings may be considered as raw material for acts of parliament ... he had not that knowledge which we ascribe either to the poet or to the man of the world. He had neither the passion, nor the sympathetic imagination. The springs of active conduct which Byron knew from actual experience, were to Bentham nothing more than names in a careful classification ... at eighty he had not found out of what men are really made.” 1

Harriet Martineau, the author who used fiction as a medium for the diffusion of orthodox economic principles among the lower classes, tells us that at 11 she put a question to her brother about "the old difficulty of foreknowledge and freewill." At eigtheen she studied the Bible "incessantly and immensely" by getting hold of all commentaries and works of elucidation that she could lay hands.

1) Leslie Stephen, The English Utilitarians, vol. I, p. 233. London, 1900.

on, merely in order to furnish herself with arguments. She believes that "a little more of the cheerful tenderness which was in those days thought bad for children, would have saved (her) from (her) worst faults and from a world of suffering." Her religion "took the character of (her) mind, and it was harsh, severe, and mournful accordingly."

...

James Mill, the real leader of the Utilitarians, is described to us by his son as follows: "Temperance was with him the central point of educational precept. He thought human life a poor thing at best, after the freshness of youth and of unsatisfied curiosity had gone by He rated intellectual enjoyment above all others. For passionate emotions of all sorts he professed the greatest contempt, regarding them as a form of madness ... The great stress laid upon feeling was an abberration of modern times." As Stephen observes,2 he seemed to regard life as a series of arguments, in which people were to be constrained by logic, not persuaded by sympathy. The Spartan manner in which this Scotchman educated his son John Stuart is the exact counterpart in actual life of the domestic relations Mrs. Gaskell describes in the Thornton household, "where a stranger might have gone away, and thought that he had never seen such frigid indifference of demeanour between such near relations."

Mrs. Gaskell's friend Charlotte Brontë has likewise given us a full-length portrait of the Benthamite type of business-man in the person of the mill-owner Robert Moore, of whom we are told that he possessed "a hard spirit, a determined cast of mind, scorn of low enemies", and further that he "refused to truckle to the mob, and was of an inflexible nature, proud to his workmen, believing that he fulfilled his whole duty to them only be treating them justly." "Forward" was the device stamped upon his soul, and he pushed his interests to the exclusion of philanthropic consideration for general interests.

The third great female novelist of the Victorian era, George Elliot, has likewise tried her hand at this type of mercantile character in the person of Harold Transome in Felix Holt. Of this Smyrna merchant and banker we read that he possesses rapidity, decision, indifference

1) Autobiography, pp. 11, 95, 103. Biographical Sketches, London, 1876. 2) Op. cit., vol. II, p. 39.

3)

Autobiography by John Stuart Mill, pp. 4, 34, 52, 53. London, 1873. 4) North and South, p. 207.

to any impressions in others which do not further or impede his own purpose. On his return to England he sets about the management of the family estate in a manner which shows that he intends to run it on commercial lines, and next sets up as a Radical in the county, without consulting his mother, a proud Tory lady, in anything, and without caring greatly to know even what other people think of him. “He had the energetic will and muscle," the novelist says, "the self-confidence, the quick perception, and the narrow imagination which make what is admiringly called the practical mind." She further describes him as a clever, frank and agreeable person, a good-natured egoist, unsentimental, unsympathetic, unspeculative.1

As a last instance of the qualities of a utilitarian economist embodied in a literary portrait we may cite that of Lord Marney in Sybil. It is true that Lord Marney did not belong to the mercantile middle classes-factories are enterprises for the canaille according to this noble lord,2-but still he possesses the unmistakable qualities of Bentham's disciples: cynical, devoid of sentiment, arrogant and selfish, literal, harsh, anti-ecclesiastical, a rationalist, and an economist are the epithets bestowed upon him. That Disraeli drew such a character, not in the person of a mill-owner, but as a landed proprietor, is a curious fact which requires some elucidation. A French critic3 cites this portrait as one of the proofs that Utilitarianism had even permeated the aristocracy of the period, but this does not seem to be a very strong proof for such a highly improbable fact.

In our opinion there was a special inducement for the author of the political novel Sybil to draw this picture. His chief object in writing the book was to attack the stagnant, dormant, fox-hunting, do-nothing Tory nobility, as it was described by the scathing pen of Carlyle in Past and Present. He wished to arouse those pseudo Tories, as he called them, and to reform them for the purpose of carrying his Young-England ideals into practice. To show us how much this aristocracy needed to be reformed, and how great the evils were which it tolerated, or even produced, he attributed to it,

1) Felix Holt, the Radical, chapters I, VIII.

2) Sybil or the Two Nations, p. 154.

3)

L. Cazamian, op. cit.

4) Sybil, p. 49.

3

not only the agricultural misery on the estate of Lord Marney, but also the industrial degradation in the mushroom town on the estate of Lord Mowbray. Here his zeal for Young England reforms led him astray, however, for Lord Mowbray, the chief owner of the land on which this industrial conglomeration has sprung into existence, can hardly be considered accountable for the state of affairs there. His only fault is that the factories have "trebled the vast rental" of the landlord, but he is in no way connected with the mills and their hands. These are left to the tender mercies of masters like "those villains Shuffle and Screw." Yet it is not those rapacious mill-owners that figure in the novel, but a Mr. Trafford, a model employer and in every respect the opposite of the type who considered "cash nexus" as the sole relation between man and man. "He felt that between employer and employed there should be other ties than the payment and receipt of wages," Disraeli tells us, with a distinct echo of Carlyle's words.

From these facts it seems clear that it is the landed proprietary who are held responsible for all evils, agricultural and industrial alike, and not the new middle classes. This view of Disraeli's attitude is strikingly corroborated by the following passage in Sybil: "You-i.e., the English aristocracy-have of late years dexterously thrown some of the odium of your polity upon that middle class which you despise, and who are despicable only because they imitate you-i.e., in their treatment of their dependents-." 1

In accordance with this standpoint the author was of course to a certain extent under the necessity of endowing a nobleman-Lord Marney-with the usual literary attributes of a Benthamite: cynicism, lack of sentiment, arrogance, harshness, anti-ecclesiastical tendencies, protection of Dissent, a knowledge of the doctrines of the economists, etc.

One of the most prominent features of the Benthamite commercial classes we are discussing in this chapter is perhaps their selfish heartlessness and often cruelty, and their indifference to the great sufferings of their fellow-men. No doubt Early Victorian novelists could show some very good grounds for this general conception. In the first place we may point to the fact that there were a large number of self-made man among the rising middle classes, and it has 1) Sybil, or the Two Nations, p. 278.

been rightly observed that "many a self-made man worships his own maker." As at all other periods of a great social upheaval, many new men were borne upwards by the great economic waves produced by the French wars and the industrial revolution. These men were of course sturdy workers and daring adventurers, seeking their success in the accumulation of money, and such men frequently make hard masters. Having succeeded in life themselves by hard work and unrelenting exertion, they were equally exacting for their dependents, and despised their weaker brethren, who had been trampled upon and wiped out of existence in the general scramble for money. Such people were apt to reason like Thornton, who held that masters and men both had to run the risk of going under, and had no right to complain, if they did.

Further it may be observed that the success these self-made men had achieved in life, tended itself again to bring out their bad qualities with all the greater force, while it suffocated the better impulses that lay latent in their characters. As in the case of Mr. Hillary, the great merchant in Warren's Diary of a Late Physician, the instinctive propensities of a low and coarse mind often made such men as tyrannical and insolent in success, as in their struggles they had been mean and abject.

Finally we must keep in view the fact that as economists the business community took it as a law of nature that social misery was inevitable, being only due to the carelessness, improvidence, and a great many other vices of the lower classes. As Greg cynically puts it: “they have made for themselves the hard bed they lie on." 2 This was the generally received opinion of the orthodox economists, who had not progressed far enough in their social science to see that it was exactly their poverty and misery that prevented the poor from making another bed, and that it would be possible and necessary to raise their moral standard by improving their material conditions of life. The only panacea of the economists was to teach the labouring classes the economic laws as they had been formulated by Ricardo and Malthus, thereby showing them that resignation was the best cure for all evils. Hence the unceasing efforts of people

1) Advice to Young Men, by William Cobbett. Introduction, by Henry Morley, p. 5.

2) R. W. Greg, op. cit., p. 102.