making it translucent, of seeing it in all its relations, and of
punishing it. But what happens? The society fails to rise to the
occasion; on the whole, it contrives to make the opacity more opaque,
does not see the crime in any human sense; is unable to punish it. Now
this, you will admit, whenever it occurs, is a woful failure: woful I
mean, not very in itself, but very in its significance: and there must
be a precise cause for it. That cause is the lack of something not
merely, or specially, in the investigators of the wrong, but in the
world at large--shall we not boldly call it the lack of culture? Do
not, however, misunderstand me: by the term I mean not so much
attainment in general, as _mood_ in particular. Whether or when such
mood may become universal may be to you a matter of doubt. As for me, I
often think that when the era of civilisation begins--as assuredly it
shall some day begin--when the races of the world cease to be
credulous, ovine mobs and become critical, human nations, then will be
the ushering in of the ten thousand years of a _clairvoyant_ culture.
But nowhere, and at no time during the very few hundreds of years that
man has occupied the earth, has there been one single sign of its
presence. In individuals, yes--in the Greek Plato, and I think in your
English Milton and Bishop Berkeley--but in humanity, never; and hardly
in any individual outside those two nations. The reason, I fancy, is
not so much that man is a hopeless fool, as that Time, so far as he is
concerned, has, as we know, only just begun: it being, of course,
conceivable that the creation of a perfect society of men, as the first
requisite to a _régime_ of culture, must nick to itself a longer loop
of time than the making of, say, a stratum of coal. A loquacious
person--he is one of your cherished "novel"-writers, by the way, if
that be indeed a Novel in which there is nowhere any pretence at
novelty--once assured me that he could never reflect without swelling
on the greatness of the age in which he lived, an age the mighty