On Certain Present Phenomena of the Imagination [pp. 159-168]

ON CER TAIN PHENOMENA OF THE IMA GIA TION.
tries to sustain them in their old positions clamors
in the desert. It is not that any contradiction is
admitted-it is that the collective imagination is
directed in another channel. For the immediate
agents the taking of life becomes a duty-the
application of science to every form of destruction the best exercise of intelligence. Every noble nature, every unselfish instinct, is marshaled
in the cause, and the good soldier becomes the
ideal of humanity. His fortunes acquire an interest they would never have obtained in civil
life, and his death confers a certain dignity on all
who belong to him, which mitigates the sorrow of
his loss. For the spectator on either side there
is a totally different canon of sympathy than before existed. Even the miseries which fall so
especially and so undeservedly on the non-combatants are, as it were, lost in the contemplation
of victory or defeat. Within the last few months
we have ourselves witnessed the indifference
with which the multiplied horrors and abominations of the late war in Turkey have been regarded, in comparison with the compassionate
indignation aroused by one occasion of barbaric
violence that occurred in a time of peace, and on
which the popular imagination had been arbitrarily fixed by an accidental political conjuncture.
For one more illustration of my subject, I
will observe that the mere exchange of simplest
articles of subsistence in the earliest social state
implies a considerable mental act, and that the
transition from barter to an arbitrary standard of
value is an effort of the imagination more wonderful than any symbol that human ingenuity has
since adopted, from the African cowry to the
promissory note. The adoption of a metallic
standard is easily intelligible from the uniformity
and durability of the material, but the universal
attraction of gold is hardly to be deduced from
the pleasure excited by its brightness and color.
The human imagination, however, seems to have
fixed upon it with an especial energy, and its usefulness has been confirmed by the experience of
ages. It had much to do with the intercourse of
Oriental peoples, including those with which we
are familiar in Scripture. It had a prominent influence in the irresistible fascination that led to
the discovery of the other hemisphere, and in our
own days it has brought the Anglo-American nation to the golden gate of the Pacific Ocean, and
transformed uncultivated wastes into the granary
of the world. Upon our own colonies the effect
has not been as great, and certainly not as beneficial; indeed, if the labor expended on the goldmines of the antipodes had been employed on
almost any other object, it would have been productive of more wealth and happiness. Nevertheless, it has been a powerful agent in the immediate development of Australian prosperity.
However conventional the metallic standard of
value may be, it is limited in production, and has
a reality about it. Not so its paper representative, which is a purely arbitrary production, and
can mean nothing except as the convenient counterpart of the coin into which it can be converted
at the will of its possessor. And yet so forcibly
has this symbol of wealth worked on the imagination of mankind, that every civilized country
has been the scene of countless delusions on the
subject of currency. We have all of us not only
read the writings but heard the words of men
otherwise intelligent, practical, and self- commanding, absorbed by the notion that an inconvertible paper is the remedy for all financial embarrassments and fluctuations, that a nation was
only poor because it chose to be so, by limiting
to a fixed sum its available wealth. At this moment, opinion on this subject is the main division
of parties in the United States. Little wonder,
perhaps, that the believer in so simple an expedient for the diminution of human suffering
should be maddened at the stupidity of his fellow men who will not recognize it. And, indeed,
if their force of imagination was equal to his
own, it would go far, not, indeed, to justify an
impossible theory, but to authorize its temporary
application. For in times of violent excitement,
such as a revolution or a civil war, paper money
is all-sufficient for the dailywants of society, and
the day when the assignat or the greenback becomes worthless may be so long deferred that
the system seems to break down at last under
external pressure, and not from its essential unsoundness. The fabric of national credit is at
once the creature and the promoter of this aspect of wealth; and the column of your newspaper which is most under the dominion of imagination is not the record of fashionable folly,
or the occasional fiction, but the sober moneymarket article and the state of the funds. I remember hearing Sydney Smith say "the greatest fools he had known in life were the three per
cents," and any mature man of business would
be inclined to agree with him, when the nature
of the fears and hopes that affect their fluctuatiois is duly considered. As an historical application in connection with our national debt, it
is impossible to conceive a more complete arithmetical delusion than that of the sinking fund,
which, originated by Sir Robert Walpole in 1716,
and sanctioned by Mr. Pitt in x786, was continued by successive Chancellors of the Exchequer till 1824. As long as it meant only not spending a certain portion of a surplus, it was an
economical process; but when it was maintained
in face of a deficient Exchequer, the difference
between the rate of interest at which money was
borrowed, and at which purchases were made by
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