Now it is quite clear--though you have perhaps never thought of
it--that if the next generation of Englishmen consisted wholly of
Julius Caesars, all our political, ecclesiastical, and moral
institutions would vanish, and the less perishable of their
appurtenances be classed with Stonehenge and the cromlechs and
round towers as inexplicable relics of a bygone social order.
Julius Caesars would no more trouble themselves about such
contrivances as our codes and churches than a fellow of the Royal
Society will touch his hat to the squire and listen to the
village curate's sermons. This is precisely what must happen some
day if life continues thrusting towards higher and higher
organization as it has hitherto done. As most of our English
professional men are to Australian bushmen, so, we must suppose,
will the average man of some future day be to Julius Caesar. Let
any man of middle age, pondering this prospect consider what has
happened within a single generation to the articles of faith his
father regarded as eternal nay, to the very scepticisms and
blasphemies of his youth (Bishop Colenso's criticism of the
Pentateuch, for example!); and he will begin to realize how much
of our barbarous Theology and Law the man of the future will do
without. Bakoonin, the Dresden revolutionary leader with whom
Wagner went out in 1849, put forward later on a program, often
quoted with foolish horror, for the abolition of all
institutions, religious, political, juridical, financial, legal,
academic, and so on, so as to leave the will of man free to find
its own way. All the loftiest spirits of that time were burning
to raise Man up, to give him self-respect, to shake him out of
his habit of grovelling before the ideals created by his own
imagination, of attributing the good that sprang from the
ceaseless energy of the life within himself to some superior