VOLUME XIV SLICE VI Inscriptions to Ireland, William Henry (continued 4)

If a brief definition of instinct, from the purely biological point of view be required, that given in the Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology may be accepted: “An inherited reaction of the sensori-motor type, relatively complex Definitions. and markedly adaptive in character, and common to a group of individuals.” Instinctive behaviour thus depends solely on how the nervous system has been built through heredity; while intelligent behaviour depends also on those characters of the nervous system which have been acquired under the modifying influence of individual relation to the environment.

Such definitions, however, are not universally accepted. Wasmann, for example, divides instinctive actions under two groups: (1) those which immediately spring from the inherited dispositions; (2) those which indeed proceed from the same inherited dispositions but through the medium of sense experience. The first group, which he regards as instinctive in the strict acceptance of the term, seem exactly to correspond to those which fall under the definition given above. The second group, which he regards as instinctive in the wider acceptance of the term, nearly, if not quite, correspond to those above spoken of as intelligent—though he regards this term as falsely applied (see Intelligence of Animals). By using the term instinctive in both its strict and its wider significance, Wasmann includes under it the whole range of animal behaviour.

It will be seen that from the biological standpoint there fall under the stricter definition those hereditary modes of behaviour which are analogous to hereditary forms of structure; and that a sharp line of distinction is drawn between the behaviour which is thus rendered definite through heredity, and the behaviour the distinguishing characteristics of which are acquired in the course of individual life. What in popular usage are spoken of as the instincts of animals, for example, the hunting of prey by foxes and wolves, or the procedure of ants in their nests, are generally joint products of hereditary and acquired factors. Wasmann’s comprehensive definition so far accords with popular usage. But it tends to minimize the importance of the distinction of that which is prior to individual experience and that which results therefrom. It is the business of scientific interpretation to disentangle the factors which contribute to the joint-products. It is indeed by no means easy to distinguish between what is dependent on individual experience, and what is not. Only the careful observation of organisms throughout the earlier phases of their life-history can the closely related factors be distinguished with any approach to scientific accuracy. By the patient study of the behaviour of precocious young birds, such as chicks, pheasants, ducklings and moorhens, it can be Examples from bird life. readily ascertained that such modes of activity as running, swimming, diving, preening the down, scratching the ground, pecking at small objects, with the characteristic attitudes expressive of fear and anger, are so far instinctive as to be definite on their first occurrence—they do not require to be learnt. No doubt they are subsequently guided to higher excellence and effectiveness with the experience gained in their oft-repeated performance. Indeed it may be said that only on the occasion of their initial performance are they purely instinctive; all subsequent performance being in some degree modified by the experience afforded, by previous behaviour of like nature and the results it affords. It should be remembered that such comparatively simple activities, though there is little about them to arrest popular attention, are just the raw material out of which the normal active life of such organisms is elaborated, and that for scientific treatment they are therefore not less important than those more conspicuous performances which seem at first sight to call for special treatment, or even to demand a supplementary explanation. The instincts of nest-building, incubation and the rearing of young, though they occur later in life than those concerned in locomotion and the obtaining of food, are none the less founded on a hereditary basis, and in some respects are less rather than more liable to modification by the experience gained by the carrying out of hereditarily definite modes of procedure. Here the instinctive factor probably predominates over that which is experiential. But in the “homing” of pigeons there is little question that the experiential factor predominates. The habit results mainly from the modification of the higher nerve-centres through individual and intelligent use. In the migration of birds we are still uncertain as to the exact nature and proportional value of the instinctive and intelligent factors. The impulse to migrate, that is to say, the calling forth of specific activities by climatal or other presentations, appears to be instinctive; whether the direction of migration is in like manner instinctive is a matter of uncertainty; and, if it be instinctive, the nature of the stimuli and the manner in which they are hereditarily linked with responsive acts is unexplained. To say that it is due to hereditary experience is generally regarded as inadmissible. For modern interpretation hereditary modes of behaviour afford experience; in no other sense can it be said that experience is inherited.

A good example of the methods of recent investigation is to be found in Dr G. W. and Mrs Peckham’s minute observations on the habits and instincts of the solitary wasps. They enumerate the following primary types of instinctive Examples from insect life. behaviour: the manner of attacking and capturing a particular kind of prey which alone affords the requisite presentation to sense; the manner of conveying the prey to the nest; the general style and locality of the nest; the method and order of procedure in stocking the nest with food for the unseen young. It is noteworthy, however, that although the manner in which the prey is stung (for example) is on the whole similar in the case of the members of any given species—that is to say, all the wasps of the species behave in very much the same manner—yet there are minor variations in detail. This outcome of prolonged and careful observation is of importance. It affords a point of departure for the interpretation of the genesis of existing instincts. Furthermore, the observations on American wasps render it probable that the earlier accounts of the instinctive behaviour of such wasps are exaggerated. Romanes thought that the manner of stinging and paralysing their prey might be justly deemed the most remarkable instinct in the world. Spiders, caterpillars and grasshoppers are, he said, stung in their chief nerve-centres, in consequence of which the victims are not killed outright, but rendered motionless and continue to live in this paralysed condition for several weeks, being thus available as food for the larvae when these are hatched. Of course, he adds, the extraordinary fact which stands to be explained is that of the precise anatomical, not to say the physiological, knowledge which appears to be displayed by the insect in stinging only the nerve-centres of its prey. But the Peckhams’ careful observations and experiments show that, with the American wasps, the victims stored in the nests are quite as often dead as alive; that those which are only paralysed live for a varying number of days, some more, some less; that wasp larvae thrive just as well on dead victims, sometimes dried up, sometimes undergoing decomposition, as on living and paralysed prey; that the nerve-centres are not stung with the supposed uniformity; and that in some cases paralysis, in others death, follows when the victims are stung in parts far removed from any nerve-centre. It would seem then that by the stinging of insects or spiders their powers of resistance are overcome and their escape prevented; that some are killed outright and some paralysed is merely an incidental result.

Granted that instinctive modes of behaviour are hereditary and definite within the limits of congenital variation, the question of their manner of genesis is narrowed to a clear issue. Do they originate through the natural selection of Mode of origin. those variations which are the more adaptive; or do they originate through the inheritance of those acquired modifications which are impressed on the nervous system in the course of individual and intelligent use? Romanes, taking up the inquiry where Darwin left it, came to the conclusion that some instinctive modes of behaviour which he termed “primary” are due to the operation of natural selection alone; that others, which he termed “secondary,” and of which he could give few examples, were due to the inheritance of acquired modifications from which, in the phrase of G. H. Lewes, the intelligence had lapsed; while others, which he termed “blended,” were partly due to natural selection and partly resulted from the inheritance of acquired habit. There has been a prolonged controversy between the school of interpretation, commonly spoken of as Lamarckian, which advocates a belief in the inheritance of acquired characters, and the school, with Weismann as their leader, which questions the evidence for, or the probability of, such inheritance. The trend of modern opinion appears to be in the direction of the Weismannian interpretation. And it must be regarded as questionable, if not improbable, that instinctive modes of behaviour are in any degree directly due to the inheritance of habits intelligently acquired. That intelligent habits may secure the survival of those organisms whose germ-plasm bears the seeds of favourable congenital variations is not improbable. But in that case intelligent procedure only contributes to the survival and not to the origin of hereditary variations.

To test the hypothesis that natural selection is an essential condition to the genesis of instinctive behaviour it should be the aim of investigation to find crucial cases. This is, however, no easy task. We ought to be able to adduce Crucial observations. cases in which, where the incidence of natural selection is excluded, acquired habits do not become instinctive. But it is difficult to do so. It seems, however, that in young chicks drinking from still water is a habit acquired through imitation of the acts of the hen-mother. The presentation of such water to sight does not evoke the appropriate instinctive response, while the presentation of water taken into the bill does at once evoke a characteristic response. Now it would seem that in the former case, since the hen “teaches” all her chicks to peck at the water, she shields them from the incidence of natural selection. But though the hen can lead her young to peck at the water, she cannot “teach” them how to perform the complex movements of mouth, throat and head required for actual drinking. In this matter they are not shielded from the incidence of natural selection. Thus it would seem that, where natural selection is excluded, the habit has not become congenitally linked with a visual stimulus; but where natural selection is in operation, the response has been thus linked with the stimulus of water in the bill.

If this interpretation be correct we have here an example of the manner in which imitation plays an important part in the formation of habits which though oft-repeated are not transmitted as hereditary instincts. But the Imitation. imitative act is itself instinctive. The characteristic feature of the imitative act, at the instinctive level, is that the presentation to sight or hearing calls forth a mode of behaviour of like nature to, or producing like results to, that which affords the stimulus. The nature of instinctive imitation needs working out in further detail. But it is probable that what we speak of as the imitative tendency is, in any given species, the expression of a considerable number of particular responses each of which is congenitally linked with a particular presentation or stimulus. The group of instincts which we class as imitative (and they afford only the foundations on which intelligent imitation is based) are of biological value chiefly, if not solely, in those species which form larger or smaller communities.

The study of instinct is in the genetic treatment of evolutionary science a study in heredity. The favouring bionomic conditions are those of a relatively constant environment under which relatively stereotyped responses are advantageous. Relation to heredity If the environment be complex, there is a corresponding complexity in instinctive behaviour. But adjustment to a complex environment may be reached in two ways; by instinctive adaptation through initially stereotyped behaviour; or by plastic accommodation by acquired modifications. The tendency of the evolution of intelligence is towards the disintegration of the stereotyped modes of response and the dissolution of instinct. Natural selection which, under a uniform and constant environment, leads to the survival of relatively fixed and definite modes of response, under an environment presenting a wider range of varying possibilities leads to the survival of plastic accommodation through intelligence. This plasticity is, however, itself hereditary. All intelligent procedure implies the inherited capacity of profiting by experience. Instinctive in the popular sense, it does not fall within the narrower definition of the term; it is more conveniently described as innate. It is important to grasp clearly the distinction thus drawn. A duckling only a few hours old if placed in water swims with orderly strokes. The stimulus of water on the breast may be regarded as a sensory presentation which is followed by a definite and adaptive application of behaviour. But this specific application is dependent upon a prolonged racial preparation of the organism to respond in this particular way. Such response is instinctive. It is wholly due, as such, to racial preparation. Compare the case of a boy who learns to ride a bicycle. This is not wholly due, as such, to racial preparation, but is also partly due to individual preparation. The boy no doubt inherits a capacity for riding a bicycle, otherwise he could never do so. But he has to learn to ride none the less. Individual experience is a condition which without the innate capacity cannot take effect. Instinct involves inherited adaptation; intelligence, an inherited power, embodied in the higher nerve-centres, of accommodation to varying circumstances.

See C. Lloyd Morgan, Habit and Instinct (1896), and Animal Behaviour (1900); G. J. Romanes, Mental Evolution in Animals (1883), and Natural History of Instinct (1886); Lord Avebury, On the Instincts of Animals (1889); Marshall, Instinct and Reason (1898); Mills, Nature of Animal Intelligence (1898); St George Mivart, Nature and Thought (1882), and Origin of Human Reason (1899); E. Wasmann, Zur Entwickelung der Instincte (1897), Instinct und Intelligenz im Tierreich (1899, Eng. trans. 1903); G. and C. Peckham, Instincts and Habits of Solitary Wasps (1898); see also the bibliography (section “Instinct and Impulse”) in Baldwin’s Dict. of Philosophy and Psychology.

(C. Ll. M.)

INSTITUTE (from Lat. instituere, to establish or set up), something established, an institution, particularly any society established for an artistic, educational, scientific or social purpose. The word seems to have been first applied in English to such institutions for the advancement of science or art as were modelled on the great French society, the Institut National (see Academies). It is thus the name of such societies as the Royal Institute of British Architects, the Imperial Institute and the like. It is extended to similar organizations, particularly to educational, on a smaller or local scale, such as Mechanics’ or Workmen’s Institutes, and is sometimes applied to charitable foundations. In the United States the word is, in a particular sense, applied to periodic classes giving instruction in the principles of education to the teachers of elementary and district schools. The term “institute” is often used to translate the Lat. institutio, in the sense of a treatise on the elements of any subject, and particularly of law or jurisprudence; thus the compilation of the principles of Roman law, made by order of the emperor Justinian, is known as Justinian’s Institutes, and hence Coke’s treatise on English law, of which the first part is better known as Coke upon Littleton, is called The Institute. The same title is borne by Calvin’s work on the elements of the Christian doctrine. In Scots law “institute” is the person named, in a settlement or testament to whom an estate is first limited; those who follow, failing him, are termed “substitutes.”

INSTITUTIONAL CHURCH, the name generally applied both in the British Isles and in America to a type of church which supplements its ordinary work by identifying itself in various ways with the secular interests of those whom it seeks to influence. The idea of such extension of function grew out of the recognition of the fact that the normal activities of church work entirely failed to retain the interest of a large class of the population to whom the ritual formality of ordinary services was unacceptable. Various attempts were made to overcome this deficiency, e.g. by modifying the form of service or of some services, by the addition to the ordinary services of more or less informal meetings (e.g. the Pleasant Sunday Afternoon services), by specially excusing persons from wearing the normal church-going attire in holiday resorts, and by holding services out of doors. The principle underlying all these changes is systematized in the Institutional Church which, in addition to its main building for specifically religious services, provides other rooms or buildings which during the week are open for the use of members and friends. Lectures, concerts, debates and social gatherings are organized; there are reading rooms, gymnasiums and other recreations rooms; various clubs (cycling, cricket, football) are formed. The organization of the whole is subdivided into special departments managed by committees. By these various means many persons are attracted into the atmosphere of the church’s work who could not be induced to attend the formal services.

This expansion of normal church work may be traced back in England to at least as early as 1840, but the full development of the Institutional Church belongs only to the latter years of the 19th century. The chief example in England is Whitefield’s Central Mission in Tottenham Court Road, London, a church which, in addition to an elaborate organization on the lines above described, has an official journal. In the United States the movement may be said to date from about 1880. The name “Institutional” was first applied to Berkeley Temple, Boston, by Dr William Jewett Tucker, then president of Dartmouth College. The obvious criticism that this epithet emphasizes the administrative and secular side to the exclusion of the spiritual led to the tentative adoption of other titles, e.g. the “Open Church,” the “Free Church,” the former of which is the more commonly used. In 1894 was formed the “Open and Institutional Church League” at New York, which held a number of conventions and served as a headquarters for the numerous separate churches. In connexion with this league was formed the “National Federation of Churches and Christian Workers,” which held a convention in 1905.

See C. Silvester Horne, The Institutional Church (London, 1906); G. W. Mead, Modern Methods in Church Work (New York, 1897); R. A. Woods, English Social Movements (New York, 1891).

INSTRUMENT (Lat. instrumentum, from instruere, to build up, furnish, arrange, prepare), that which can be used as a means to an end, hence a mechanical contrivance, implement or tool; the word is more particularly applied to the implements of applied science, in mathematics, surgery, surveying, &c., while those of the handicrafts are generally known as “tools.” A specific use of the term is for the various contrivances used to produce musical sounds, “musical instruments.”

In law an “instrument” is any formal or written document by which expression is given to a legal act or agreement. This is a classical use of the Lat. instrumentum, a document, record. The term may be used in a wide sense, as a mere writing, meant only to form a record, or in a particular sense with reference to certain statutes. For example, the Stamp Act 1891 defines an instrument as an expression including every written document; for the purposes of the Forgery Act 1861 a post-office telegram accepting a wager has been defined as an instrument. In expressions such as “deed, will, or other written instrument” the word means any written document under which a right or liability, legal or equitable, exists.

INSTRUMENTATION. “Instrumentation” is the best term that can be found for that aspect of musical art which is concerned with timbre. The narrower term “orchestration” is applied to the instrumentation of orchestral music. Since the most obvious differences of timbre are in those of various instruments, the art which blends and contrasts timbre is most easily discussed as the treatment of instruments; but we must use this term with philosophic breadth and allow it to include voices. Instrumentation is in all standard text-books treated as a technical subject, from the point of view of practical students desirous of writing for the modern orchestra. And as there is no branch of art in which mechanical improvements, and the consequent change in the nature of technical difficulties, bear so directly upon the possibilities and methods of external effect, it follows that an exclusive preponderance of this view is not without serious disadvantage from the standpoint of general musical culture. There is probably no other branch of art in which orthodox tradition is so entirely divorced from the historical sense, and the history, when studied at all, so little illuminated by the permanent artistic significance of its subjects. When improvements in the structure of an instrument remove from the modern composer’s memory an entire category of limitations which in classical music determined the very character of the instrument, the temptation is easy to regard the improvement as a kind of access of wisdom, in comparison with which not only the older form of the instrument, but the part that it plays in classical music, is crude and archaic. But we should do better justice to improvements in an instrument if we really understood how far they give it, not merely new resources, but a new nature. And, moreover, those composers who have done most to realize this new nature (as Wagner has done for the brass instruments) have also retained, to an extent unsuspected by their imitators, the definite character which the instrument had in its earlier form.

As it is with mechanical improvements, so is it to a still greater degree with changes in the function of timbre in art. Throughout the 19th century so fatal was the hold obtained on the popular mind by the technical expert’s view of instrumentation, that it was impossible to hear the works of Handel and Bach without “additional accompaniments” conceived in terms of art as irrelevant to those of 18th-century polyphonys as the terms of Turnerian landscape are irrelevant to the decoration of the outside walls of a cathedral. There is some reason to hope that the day of these misconceptions is passed; although there is also some reason to fear that on other grounds the present era may be known to posterity as an era of instrumentation comparable, in its gorgeous chaos of experiment and its lack of consistent ideas of harmony and form, only to the monodic period at the beginning of the 17th century, in which no one had ears for anything but experiments in harmonic colour. We do not propose to concern ourselves here with those technical subjects which are the chief concern of standard treatises on instrumentation. Our task is simply to furnish the general reader with an account of the types of instrumentation prevalent at various musical periods, and their relation to other branches of the art.

The Vocal Style of the 16th Century.—In the 16th century instrumentation was, in its normal modern sense, non-existent; but in a special sense it was at an unsurpassable stage of perfection, namely, in the treatment of pure vocal harmony. In every mature period of art it will be found that, however much the technical rules may be collected in one special category, every artistic category has a perfect interaction with all the others; and this is nowhere more perfectly shown than when the art is in its simplest possible form of maturity. Practically every law of harmony in 16th-century music may be equally well regarded as a law of vocal effect. Discords must not be taken unprepared, because a singer can only find his note by a mental judgment, and in attacking a discord he has to find a note of which the harmonic meaning is at variance with that of other notes sung at the same time. Melody must not make more than one wide skip in the same direction, because by so doing it would cause an awkward change of vocal register. Two parts must not move in consecutive octaves or fifths, because by so doing they unaccountably reinforce each other by an amount by which they impoverish the rest of the harmony. Thus we justify, on grounds of instrumentation, laws usually known as laws of harmony and counterpoint. Apart from such considerations, 16th-century vocal harmony shows in the hands of its greatest masters an inexhaustible variety of refinements of vocal colour. A volume might be written on Orlando di Lasso’s art of so crossing the voices as to render possible successions of chords which, on a keyed instrument where such crossing cannot be expressed, would be a horrible series of consecutive fifths; the beauty of the device consisting in the extreme simplicity of the chords, combined with the novelty due to the fact that these chords cannot be produced by any ordinary means without incorrectness.

Decorative Instrumentation.—In the 17th century the use of instruments became a necessity; but there were at first no organized ideas for their treatment except those which were grounded on their use as supporting and imitating the voice. The early 17th-century attempts at their independent use and characterization are historically interesting, but artistically almost barbarous. Sometimes they achieve rare beauty by accident. Heinrich Schütz’s Lamentatio Davidi is written for a bass voice accompanied by four trombones and organ. The trombone parts are on exactly the same material as the voice, which in fact forms with them a five-part fugue-texture. The effect is magnificent, and admirably suited to the dignity of the trombone. Moreover, the opening theme is formed of slow arpeggios; and the more modern harmonic elements, though technically chromatic, consist, from the modern point of view, rather in swift changes between nearly related keys than in chromatic blurring of the main key. All this, especially in a writer like Schütz, who is saturated with every progressive tendency of the time, seems to point to a deep sense of the appropriate style of trombone writing. Yet, so insensible is Schütz to the euphony of his own work, that he proposes, as an alternative for the first and second trombones, two violins an octave higher, the other parts remaining unaltered! Imagination boggles at the vileness of this effect.

The chief work done in instrumentation in the 17th century is undoubtedly that of the Italian writers for the violin, who developed the technique of that instrument until it proved not only more resourceful but more artistically organized than that of the solo voice, which by the time of Handel had become little better than an acrobatic monstrosity. In the art of Bach and Handel, instrumentation, as distinguished from choral writing, has attained a definite artistic coherence. Choral writing itself has become different from what it was in the 16th century. The free use of discords and of wider intervals, together with the influence of the florid elements of solo-singing, enlarged the bounds of choral expression almost beyond recognition, while they crowded into very narrow quarters the subtleties of 16th-century music. These, however, by no means disappeared; and such devices as the crossing of parts in the second Kyrie of Bach’s B Minor Mass (bars 7, 8, 14, 15, 22, 23, 50) abundantly show that in the hands of the great masters artistic truths are not things which a change of date can make false.

But the treatment of instruments in Bach and Handel has a radical difference from that of the art which was soon to succeed it. It has precisely the same limitation as the treatment of form and emotion; it cannot change as the work proceeds. Its contrasts are like those of an architectural scheme, not those of a landscape or a drama. It admits of the loveliest combinations of timbre, and it can alternate them in considerable variety. Modern composers have often produced their most characteristic orchestral effects with fewer contrasting elements than Bach uses in his Trauer-Ode, in the pastoral symphony in his Christmas Oratorio, in the first chorus of the cantata Liebster Gott, wann werd’ ich sterben, and in many other cases; but the modern instrumental effects are as far outside Bach’s scope as a long passage of preparation on the dominant leading to the return of a first subject is beyond the scope of a gigue in a suite. Bach’s conception of the function of an instrument is that it holds a regular part in a polyphonic scheme; and his blending of tones is like the blending of colours in a purely decorative design.

Those instruments of which the tones and compass are most suitable for polyphonic melody are for the most part high in pitch; a circumstance which, in conjunction with the practice (initiated by the monodists and ratified by science and common sense) of reckoning chords upwards from the bass, leads to the conclusion that the instruments which hold the main threads in the design shall be supported where necessary by a simple harmonic filling-out on some keyed instrument capable of forming an unobtrusive background. The chords necessary in this part, which with its supporting bass is called the continuo, were indicated by figures; and the evanescent and delicate tones of the harpsichord lent themselves admirably to this purpose where solo voices and instruments were concerned. For the support of the chorus the more powerful organ was necessary. It is in the attempt to supply the place of this continuo (or figured bass) by definite orchestral parts that modern performances, until the most recent times, have shown so radical an incapacity to grasp the nature of 18th-century instrumentation. The whole point of this filling-out is that, the polyphonic design of the main instruments being complete in itself, there is no room for any such additional inner parts as can attract attention. In the interest of euphony some harmonious sound is needed to bridge the great gap which almost always exists between the bass and the upper instruments, but this filling out must be of the softest and most atmospheric kind. Bach himself is known to have executed it in a very polyphonic style, and this for the excellent reason that plain chords would have contrasted so strongly with the real instrumental parts that they could not fail to attract attention even in the softest tones of the harpsichord or the organ, while light polyphony in these tones would elude the ear and at the same time perfectly bridge over the gap in the harmony. There seems no good reason why in modern performances the pianoforte should not be used for the purpose; if only accompanists can be trained to acquire the necessary delicacy of touch, and can be made to understand that, if they cannot extemporize the necessary polyphony, and so have to play something definitely written for them, it is not a mass of interesting detail which they are to bring to the public ear. A lamentable instance of the prevalent confusion of thought on this point is shown by the vocal scores of the Bach cantatas corresponding to the edition of the Bach Gesellschaft (which must not be held responsible for them). In these Bach’s polyphonic designs are often obliterated beneath a mass of editorial counterpoint (even where Bach has carefully written the words “tasto solo,” i.e. “no filling out”). The same comments apply to the attempts sometimes made to fill out the bare places in 18th-century clavier music. There is no doubt that such filling out was often done on a second harpsichord with stops of a very light tone; but, if it cannot be done on the modern pianoforte in a touch so light as to avoid confusion between it and the notes actually written as essential to the design, it certainly ought not to be done at all. The greater richness of tone of the modern pianoforte is a better compensation for any bareness that may be imputed to pure two-part or three-part writing than a filling out which deprives the listener of the power to follow the essential lines of the music. The same holds good, though in a lesser degree, of the resources of the harpsichord in respect of octave-strings. To sacrifice phrasing, and distinctness in real part-writing, to a crude imitation of the richness produced mechanically on the harpsichord by drawing 4-ft. and 8-ft. registers, is artistically suicidal. The genius of the modern pianoforte is to produce richness by depth and variety of tone; and players who cannot find scope for such genius in the real part-writing of the 18th century will not get any nearer to the 18th-century spirit by sacrificing the essentials of its art to an attempt to imitate its mechanical resources by a modern tour de force.

Symphonic Instrumentation.—The difference between decorative and symphonic instrumentation is admirably shown by Gluck. In the famous dedicatory letter of his Alceste he mentions among other conceptions on which his reform of opera was to be based, that the co-operation of the instruments ought to be regulated in proportion to the interest and the passion, a doctrine of which the true significance lies in its connexion with other conditions of opera which are incompatible with the polyphonic treatment of instruments as threads in a decorative scheme. The date of this famous letter was 1767, but after Alceste Gluck was still able to use material from earlier work; and the overture to Armide is adapted from that of Telemacco, written in the year of Bach’s death (1750).

To write an account of symphonic instrumentation in any detail would be like attempting a history of emotional expression; and all that we can do here is to point out that the problem which was, so to speak, shelved by the polyphonic device of the continuo, was for a long time solved only by methods which, in any hands but those of the greatest masters, were very inartistic conventions. In the new art the concentration of attention upon form, as a more important source of dramatic interest and climax than texture, resulted in a neglect of polyphony which seriously damaged even Gluck’s work, and which always had the grave inconvenience that while the new methods of blending and contrasting instruments stimulated an increase in the variety, if not in the size of orchestras, there was at the same time extreme difficulty in finding occupation for the members of the lower middle class of the orchestra in ordinary passages. On the other hand, it is significant how everything in the development of new instruments seems to suggest, and be suggested by, the new methods of expression. The invention of the damper-pedal in the pianoforte epitomizes the difference between polyphony and symphonic art, for it is the earliest device by which sounds are produced and prolonged in a way contrary to the spirit of “real” part-writing. It is possible to conceive of any number of notes struck and sustained by the fingers as consisting of so many quasi-vocal parts; but when a series of single sounds is played and each sound continues to vibrate by means of a pedal which prevents the dampers from falling on the strings, then we are conscious that the sounds have been produced as from one part, and that they nevertheless combine to form a chord; and this is as remote from the spirit of polyphonic part-writing as modern English is from classical Greek.

The pianoforte trios of Haydn are perhaps the only works of first-rate artistic importance in which there is no doubt that the earlier stages of the new art do not admit of sufficient polyphony to give the instruments fair play. Haydn finds the pianoforte so completely capable of expressing his meaning that he is at a loss to find independent material for any accompanying instruments; and the violoncello in his trios has, except perhaps in four passages in the whole collection of thirty-three works, not a note to play that is not already in the bass of the pianoforte; while the melodies of the violin are, more often than not, doubled in the treble. Yet there is a certain difference between this and the work of a poor artist whose designs are threadbare. It would be impossible to add a note to Haydn’s trio; the only question is how to account for the superfluity of much of the string parts and how to make the trios effective in performance. It is sometimes suggested that the ’cello part is best omitted and these works played as violin sonatas. But experiment shows that in this condition much of the violin part sounds incomplete; and the truth appears to be that Haydn is thinking, like any modern composer, of the opposition of two solid bodies of tone—the pianoforte and the stringed instruments. And it will be found that the method of performance which most nearly justifies the instrumental effect of these otherwise beautiful works is that in which the pianoforte player regards himself as frequently doubling the stringed instruments, and not vice versa. He should therefore in all such passages play extremely lightly, so as to give the violin and ’cello the function of drawing the main outline. In the time of Bach such writing was beautifully suited to enliven the dry glitter of the harpsichord, and Bach’s duets for clavier and violin seem to have been sometimes played as trios with a violoncello playing from the clavier bass. But this was ineffective with the pianoforte, and is only explicable in Haydn as a survival. His trios were, indeed, published under the title of “pianoforte sonatas with accompaniment of violin and violoncello”; but this in no way militates against the above remarks as to their proper method of performance nowadays, when we take into consideration the greater strength of tone of the modern pianoforte, especially in the bass, and the fact that in no case could a violinist consent to play as an accompaniment such melodies as that at the beginning of the G major trio known as No. 1.

For Mozart there never was any such embarras de richesse in any combination of instruments. His music is highly polyphonic, and modern in its instrumental treatment throughout. It was lucky for the development of instrumentation (as in all branches of music during the change from polyphonic to formal design) that whenever the texture is not polyphonic the natural place for melody is on the surface: in other words, when the accompaniment is simple the tune is generally on the top. Haydn, when he was not tempted by the resources of an instrument so complete in itself as the pianoforte, soon learnt to write artistically perfect string quartets in which the first violin, though overwhelmingly the most important part, is nevertheless in perfect balance with the other members of the scheme, inasmuch as they contribute exactly what their pitch and the little polyphonic elaboration admissible by the style will enable them to give. In the treatment of the orchestra volumes might be written about Haydn’s and Mozart’s sense of fitness, as shown in Haydn’s experiments and Mozart’s settled methods. Where they consent to any practical custom from practical necessity they also consent because it is artistically right for them, and if it had not been artistically right they would have soon swept it away. For example, it has often been said that the extent to which their orchestral viola parts double the basses is due, partly to bad traditions of Italian opera, and partly to the fact that viola players were, more often than not, simply persons who had failed to play the violin. This was in many cases true, and it is equally true that Mozart and Haydn often had no scruple in following the customs of very bad composers. But, when we look at the many passages in which the violas double the basses, we shall do well to consider whether there is room in the harmonic scheme for the violas to do anything else, and whether the effect would not be thin without them. As music becomes more polyphonic the inner parts of the orchestra become more and more emancipated. Already Mozart divides his violas into two parts quite as often as he makes them play with the basses. In Beethoven’s orchestration there is almost always room for an independent viola part. There is not room for one together with an independent violoncello part; the wonderful use of muted solo violoncellos in the slow movement of the Pastoral Symphony being a special effect, like the earlier instance in Haydn’s 12th Salomon Symphony. Otherwise, when Beethoven has anything special for the violoncellos to say, he invariably softens and deepens their singularly incisive cantabile tones by doubling them with the violas. In the orchestras of his day this was perhaps the only safe proceeding for players unaccustomed to such responsibilities, and that may have been one of Beethoven’s reasons for it. But it is equally certain that the pure violoncello tone in large masses belongs to a distinctly different region of orchestral effect. Haydn’s numerous examples of independent violoncello melodies are almost all either marked solo or written for such small orchestras that they would be played as solos.

Similar principles apply in infinite detail to the treatment of wind instruments, and we must never lose sight of them in speculating as to the reasons why the genius of Beethoven was able to carry instrumentation into worlds of which Haydn and Mozart never dreamt, or why, having gone so far, it left anything unexplored. A subject so vast and so incapable of classification cannot be discussed here, but its aesthetic principles may be illustrated by the extreme case of the trumpets and horns, which in classical times had no scale except that of the natural harmonic series. This could be fixed, within certain limits, at whatever pitch suited the composition; but on the horn it could be only very partially filled out by notes of a muffled quality produced by inserting the hand into the bell of the instrument, a device impossible on the trumpet. These instruments thus produced, in Haydn’s and Beethoven’s times, a very remarkable but closely limited series of effects, which, as Sir George Macfarren pointed out in the article “Music” in the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, gave them a peculiar character and function in strongly asserting the main notes of the key. An instance of this characteristic function, specially remarkable because the composer has taken exceptional measures for it, is Beethoven’s overture to Fidelio. It is in E major, while Beethoven chooses to use trumpets in C. The only note which these can play in E major is the tonic, to which they are accordingly confined until the recapitulation of the second subject. This is unexpectedly placed in C major, the remotest key reached in the overture, and one that had already appeared in an impressive passage in the introduction which foreshadows the reference in the first act to the hero in his dungeon (“Der kaum mehr lebt und wie ein Schatten schwebt”). In this key the trumpets blaze out with an effect which entirely depends upon their restricted part hitherto. On a sufficient acquaintance with the work this would probably have revealed the essential nature of the instrument to a hearer unacquainted with technicalities, and revealed it rather as a characteristic than as a limitation. A still more remarkable instance will be found in the third statement of the theme of the finale of the 9th symphony. When the trumpets take it up they make a remarkable change at its 11th bar, for no other reason than that one of the notes, though perfectly within their scale, and, indeed, already produced by them in the very same bar, is so harmonized as to suggest the freedom of an instrument with a complete scale. This passage shows that if Beethoven had had the modern trumpet at his disposal, while he would no doubt freely have used its resources, he would nevertheless have maintained its character as an instrument founded on the natural scale, and would have agreed with Brahms that the nobility and purity of its tone depends upon its faithful adherence, at least within symphonic limits, to types of melody suggestive of that scale.

This brings us to the latest radical change effected in instrumentation, the change from symphonic to dramatic principles. It will be convenient to take one supreme composer as the artist who has dealt so consistently with the essentials of the new style that he may be conveniently regarded as its creator. Even with this limitation the subject is too vast for us to enter into details.

Dramatic Instrumentation.—There is hardly one of Wagner’s orchestral innovations which is not inseparably connected with his adaptation of music to the requirements of drama; and modern conductors, in treating Wagner’s orchestration, as the normal standard by which all previous and contemporary music must be judged, are doing their best to found a tradition which in another fifty years will be exploded as thoroughly as the tradition of symphonic additional accompaniments is now exploded in the performances of Bach and Handel. The main difference between symphonic and modern dramatic orchestration depends on this: that in a symphony any important incident will probably be heard again within five minutes, in every circumstance of formal symmetry and preparation that can attract the attention. This being so, it is absurd in a symphony to use only such orchestral colours as would be fit for dramatic moments which are not likely to recur for an hour or two, if they recur at all. Such a passage as bars 5 to 8 in the first movement of Beethoven’s 8th symphony is as unintelligible from the point of view of Wagnerian opera as the opening of the Rheingold is unintelligible from the point of view of symphony. But both are quite right. The modern Wagnerian conductor is apt to complain that Beethoven, in his four-bar phrase, drowns a melody which lies in the weakest register of the clarinet by a crowd of superfluous notes in oboes, horns and flutes. The complainer entirely overlooks the fact that this is the kind of music in which such a phrase will certainly be heard again before we have time to forget it; and as a matter of fact the strings promptly repeat it fortissimo in a position which nothing can overpower. A crowd of instruments that seemed at first to overwhelm it in sympathetic comments is perfectly dramatic and appropriate on the symphonic scale. On the operatic scale established by Wagner such detail is simply lost. Far greater polyphonic detail of another kind is no doubt possible, but it requires far longer time for its expression. It cannot change so rapidly. It engages the ear more exclusively, and therefore it needs an accuracy and an elaboration of paraphernalia quite irrelevant to symphonic art. The accuracy and the paraphernalia are equally exemplified in all Wagner’s additions and alterations of the classical orchestral scheme, for these all consist in completing the families of instruments so that each timbre can be presented pure in complete harmony. But the greatness of Wagner is shown in the fact that with all the effect his additions have in revolutionizing the resources of orchestration, he never regards his novelties as substitutes for the natural principles of instrumental effect. His brass instruments have lost nothing of their ancient nobility. In his gigantic designs it inevitably happens that instrumental resources are strained to their utmost, and there is, perhaps, hardly anything which the makers and players of instruments can be trained to do which is too remote to be demanded by some extreme dramatic necessity in Wagner’s scheme. But it is always some such extreme necessity that demands it, and never an appetite too jaded for natural resources. The crucial example of this is what Richard Strauss has ingeniously called the “al fresco” treatment of instruments in large orchestral masses (Berlioz-Strauss, Instrumentationslehre, edition Peters). Experience shows that in the modern orchestra there is safety in numbers, and that passages may with impunity be written for thirty-two violins which no single player can execute clearly. Whether this justifies Wagner’s successors and imitators in showing a constant preference for passages of which not even the general outline is practicable; whether it justifies a state of things in which the normal compass of every instrument in an advanced 20th-century score would appear to be about a fifth higher than any player of that instrument will admit; whether it proves that it is artistically desirable that when there are eight horns in the orchestra their material should be indistinguishable from pianoforte writing, and that, in short, the part of every instrument should look exactly like the part of every other—such questions are for posterity to decide. At present we can only be certain that the criterion according to which Brahms, being a symphonic writer, has no mastery of orchestration whatever, is not a criterion compatible with any sense of symphonic style. It is therefore not a criterion which can do justice to the principles of Wagner’s non-symphonic art, for its appreciation thereof is inevitably one-sided. Least of all can it conduce to the formation of sound critical standards for the new instrumentation which is now in process of development for the future forms of instrumental music. These, we cannot doubt, will be as profoundly influenced by Wagner as the sonata style was influenced by Gluck.

Finally it must be remembered that musical euphony and emotional effect are inseparable from considerations of harmony and polyphony. Timbre itself is, as Helmholtz shows, a kind of harmony felt but not heard. Not even the imagination and skill of Berlioz could galvanize into permanent artistic life an instrumentation based exclusively upon instruments, however suggestive his wonderful orchestral effects may have been to contemporary and later artists, who realize that artistic effects must proceed from artistic causes.

Chamber-music—The instrumentation of solo combinations is one of the largest and most detailed subjects in the art of music. Something has been said above as to its earlier aspects in the time of Haydn. Before that time it was based exclusively on the use of the harpsichord either as a means of supporting the other instruments or its also contributing principal parts to the combination. Thus there were no string-quartets before Haydn—at least none that can be distinguished from symphonies for string-band.

Richard Strauss, in his edition of Berlioz’s works on Instrumentation, paradoxically characterizes the classical orchestral style as that which was derived from chamber-music. Now it is true that in Haydn’s early days orchestras were small and generally private; and that the styles of orchestral and chamber-music were not distinct; but surely nothing is clearer than that the whole history of the rise of classical chamber-music lies in its rapid differentiation from the coarse-grained orchestral style with which it began. Orchestral wind-parts have been discovered belonging to Haydn’s string-quartet Op. 1, No. 5; his quartet in D minor, Op. 9, No. 4, is already in a style which not even the most casual listener could mistake for anything orchestral. On this differentiation of styles rests the whole aesthetics of chamber-music; but the subject is very subtle, and there is much, as for example in Schubert’s quartets and his C major quintet, that is inspired by orchestral ideas without in the least vitiating the chamber-music style; though, judged by its appearance on paper, it seems as unorthodox as the notoriously orchestral beginnings of Mendelssohn’s quartet in D and quintet in B♭. The beginning of Mendelssohn’s F minor quartet is, again, a case usually, but perhaps wrongly, condemned for its orchestral appearance on paper. Such matters cannot be decided off-hand by the mere fact that tremolos are characteristic of orchestras: the question is whether in individual cases they have not a special character when played by single players. Where this is so there need be no confusion of style; but the danger of such confusion is great, and with the rise of modern dramatic instrumentation it may be doubted whether there are any standards of criticism in current use for chamber-music of other than the sonata style. The development of pianoforte technique since Beethoven has been in some ways even more revolutionizing than that of the brass instruments; and pianoforte instrumentation, both in solo and in chamber-music, is a study for a lifetime.

Orchestral Schemes Typical of Different Periods.

1. 16th Century.—We, with our stereotyped modern notions of the grouping of voices, may get some idea of the freedom of the 16th-century composers’ imagination by noting that the four-part movements for semi-chorus or solo voices in Palestrina’s Masses present us with no fewer than seventeen different combinations of voices, and that of these the familiar group of soprano, alto, tenor and bass is not the most common, though it is invariable as that used for entire four-part Masses. In three-part movements Palestrina presents us with twelve combinations of voices. In his five-part Masses and single movements we find eight combinations, and his six-part Masses and single movements show eleven. And when he writes in eight parts for a double chorus the two groups are seldom identical.

2. 18th Century.—17th-century instrumentation may be neglected here as having begun in chaos and ended in the schemes of the 18th-century decorative instrumentation. The following is Bach’s fullest orchestra: the string-band, consisting (as at the present day) of violins in two parts, violas, violoncellos, doubled (where the contrary is not indicated) by double basses; the wind instruments (generally one to each part, as the string-band was never large)—2 flutes, 2 or 3 oboes, or oboe d’ amore (a lower-pitched and gentler type), taille or oboe da caccia (some kind of alto oboe corresponding to the cor anglais), bassoon, generally doubling the string basses, 2 horns, with parts needing much greater practice in high notes than is customary to-day, 3 (occasionally 4) trumpets, of which at least the first 2 were played by players especially trained to produce much higher notes than are compatible with the power to produce the lower notes (the high players were called Clarin-Bläser; and the others Principal-Bläser); a pair of kettle-drums, tuned to the tonic and dominant of the piece.

Handel’s orchestra is less detailed. He does not seem to have found any English trumpeters capable of playing as high parts as those of the German Clarin-Bläser, and his plan seems generally to get as many oboes and bassoons as could be procured to double the top and bottom of his string-band. But his definite orchestral effects in certain places (e.g. “He led them forth like sheep,” in Israel in Egypt, and the music of the Witch of Endor, and the appearance of Samuel’s spirit in Saul) are as modern as Gluck’s.

3. Symphonic Orchestration.—Mozart’s full symphonic scheme requires the string-band, 1 flute (rarely 2), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets (whenever he could obtain them, he being the first composer who really appreciated them, instead of regarding them either as cheap substitutes for the clarino or high trumpet of Bach, or, like Gluck and, with rare and late exceptions, Haydn, as merely adding to the force of tutti passages). Further, 2 horns, 2 bassoons, 2 trumpets and a pair of kettle-drums.

Mozart imports from church music 3 trombones for special passages in his operas.

Beethoven almost always has 2 flutes, and invariably 2 clarinets. In his 5th symphony he introduced 3 trombones and extended both the upper and lower extremes of the wind-band by a piccolo and a double bassoon. “Turkish music,” i.e. the big drum, cymbals and triangle, was used by Haydn in his Military Symphony, and Mozart in his Entführung, for reasons of “local colour”; it appears as an extreme means of climax in the finale of Beethoven’s 9th symphony.

4. Wagner’s Orchestra: Tristan und Isolde.—(Families of instruments are connected by a brace.)

Strings: as usual, but subject to minutely complex grouping.

3 flutes (3rd to play piccolo when required).

2 oboes.

1 cor anglais.

3 bassoons.

2 clarinets.

1 bass clarinet.

4 horns. (The mechanical improvements by which horns and trumpets acquired a complete scale have revolutionized the nature of those instruments; and Wagner’s orchestration, more than that of any other composer, has profited by this. Yet, in the preface to the score Wagner speaks very strongly of the loss of the original character of the horn in the hands of ordinary players; and goes so far as to say that, if experience had not shown that they could be trained to play nearly as smoothly as the classical players, he would have renounced all the advantages of the new mechanism.)

3 trumpets.

3 trombones.

1 tuba.

2 or, for safety in tuning, 3 kettle-drums.

Triangle and cymbals.

1 harp (multiplied quant. suf.).

In Der Ring des Nibelungen Wagner specifies the proportions of the string-band as 16 first and 16 second violins, 12 violas, 12 violoncellos, 8 double basses. The rest of the orchestra consists of—

Piccolo and 3 flutes.

3 oboes and cor anglais, or 4th oboe.

3 bassoons, or 2 and contra-fagotto.

3 clarinets and 1 bass clarinet.

8 horns, 4 of whom are also required to play 4 specially constructed tenor and bass tubas.

1 ordinary (double-bass) tuba.

3 trumpets.

1 bass trumpet. (A project of Wagner’s which instrument-makers found impracticable, so that Wagner had to content himself with a kind of valve trombone shaped like a trumpet.)

3 trombones and 1 double-bass trombone.

2 pairs of kettle-drums.

Triangle.

Cymbals.

Big drum.

Gong.

6 harps.

5. Chamber-music.—Bach’s and his contemporaries’ combinations with the harpsichord show the natural fondness, in his day, for instruments of a tone too gentle for prominent use in large rooms, or indeed for survival in modern times. Thus there was quite as much important solo music for the flute as for the violin; and almost more music for the viola da gamba than for the violoncello. A frequent combination was flute, violin and harpsichord (very probably with a violoncello doubling the bass), and in more than one case the violin was partly tuned lower to soften its tone.

Classical and modern chamber-music in the sonata style consists mainly of string-quartets for 2 violins, viola and violoncello; string-trios (rare, because very difficult to write sonorously); pianoforte-trios (pianoforte, violin and violoncello); pianoforte-quartets (pianoforte with string-trio); pianoforte-quintets (pianoforte with string-quartet); string-quintets (with 2 violas, very rarely with 2 violoncellos), and (in two important cases by Brahms) string-sextets. Larger combinations, being semi-orchestral, especially where the double-bass and wind instruments are used, lend themselves to a somewhat lighter style; thus Beethoven’s septet and Schubert’s octet are both in the nature of a very large serenade.

Wind instruments produce very special effects in chamber-music, and need an exceedingly adroit technique on the part of the composer. Magnificent examples are Mozart’s trio for pianoforte, clarinet and viola, his quintet for pianoforte, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon (imitated by Beethoven), his quintet for clarinet and strings, Brahms’s clarinet-quintet for the same combination, and his trio for pianoforte, violin and horn.

(D. F. T.)

INSTRUMENT OF GOVERNMENT, the name given to the decree, or written constitution, under which Oliver Cromwell as “lord protector of the commonwealth” governed England, Scotland and Ireland from December 1653 to May 1657.

The Long Parliament was expelled in April 1653 and the council of state dissolved; the Little, or Nominated, parliament which followed ended its existence by abdication; and Cromwell, officially lord general of the army, with a new council of state, remained the only recognized authority in the country. It was in these circumstances that the Instrument of Government, drawn up by some officers in the army, prominent among whom was John Lambert, was brought forward. The document appears to have been under consideration since the middle of October 1653, but Ludlow says it was “in a clandestine manner carried on and huddled up by two or three persons,” a remark probably very near the truth. The nominated parliament abdicated on the 12th of December 1653, and after certain emendations the Instrument was accepted by Cromwell on the 16th. Consisting of forty-two articles, the Instrument placed the legislative power in the hands of “one person, and the people assembled in parliament”; the executive power was left to the lord protector, whose office was to be elective and not hereditary, and a council of state numbering from thirteen to twenty-one members. The councillors were appointed for life; fifteen were named in the Instrument itself; and Cromwell and the council were empowered to add six. To fill vacancies parliament must name six persons, of whom the council would select two, the choice between these two being left to the protector. A parliament was to meet on the 3rd of September 1654, and until that date the protector with the consent of the council could make ordinances which would have the force of laws. After the meeting of parliament, however, he had no power of legislation, nor had he any veto upon its acts, the utmost he could do being to delay new legislation for twenty days. A new parliament must be called “once in every third year,” elaborate arrangements being made to prevent any failure in this respect, and for five months it could not be dissolved save with its own consent. The parliament, composed of a single chamber, was to consist of 460 members—400 for England and Wales, and 30 each for Scotland and Ireland—and the representative system was entirely remodelled, growing towns sending members for the first time, and many small boroughs being disfranchised. A large majority of the English members, 265 out of 400, were to be elected by the counties, where voters must possess land or personal property of the value of £200, while in the boroughs the franchise remained unaltered. In Scotland and Ireland the arrangement of the representation was left to the protector and the council. Roman Catholics and all concerned in the Irish rebellion were permanently disfranchised and declared incapable of sitting in parliament, and those who had taken part in the war against the parliament were condemned to a similar disability during the first four parliaments. The protector was empowered to raise a revenue of £200,000 in addition to a sum sufficient to maintain the navy and an army of 30,000 men, and religious liberty was granted “provided this liberty be not extended to Popery or Prelacy.” The chief officers of state were to be chosen with the consent of parliament, and a parliament must be summoned at once in case of war. The practical effect of the Instrument was to entrust the government of the three countries to the parliament for five months out of every three years, and to the protector and the council for the remainder of the time. Although the Instrument bristled with possibilities of difference between parliament and protector, “it is impossible,” as Gardiner says, “not to be struck with the ability of its framers.”

Having issued many ordinances and governed in accordance with the terms of the Instrument, Cromwell duly met parliament on the 3rd of September, and on the following day he urged the members to give it the force of a parliamentary enactment. Many representatives objected to the provision placing the supreme power in the hands of a single person and of parliament, a discussion which was futile, as clause XII. of the Instrument declared that “the persons elected shall not have power to alter the government as it is hereby settled in one single person and a parliament.” The proceedings were soon stopped by Cromwell, who on the 12th of September explained that there was a difference between “fundamentals” which they might not, and “circumstantials” which they might, alter. He concluded by stating that they would be excluded unless they subscribed a recognition to be true to the protector and the commonwealth, and to respect the terms of clause XII. Over three hundred members took the required step; but they proceeded to alter the Instrument in other ways, and over the question of the control of the army they were soon in sharp conflict with the protector. At length, on the 22nd of January 1655, Cromwell, counting twenty weeks as five months, dissolved parliament.

Regarding the Instrument as still in force the protector sought for a time to rule in accordance with its provisions; but new difficulties and growing discontent forced him to govern in a more arbitrary fashion. However, in July 1656 he issued writs for a second parliament which met in the following September. Many members, men of advanced views, were excluded by the council of state, acting on the strength of clause XVII., which declared that those elected must be “persons of known integrity, fearing God, and of good conversation.” The remainder discussed the question of the future government of the country, and in May 1657 Cromwell assented to the Humble Petition and Advice, which supplanted the Instrument of Government. Gardiner says the Instrument was “the first of hundreds of written constitutions which have since spread over the world, of which the American is the most conspicuous example, in which a barrier is set up against the entire predominance of any one set of official persons, by attributing strictly limited functions to each.”

The text of the Instrument is printed in S. R. Gardiner’s Constitutional Documents of the Puritan Revolution (Oxford, 1899). See also S. R. Gardiner, History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, vols. ii. and iii. (London, 1897-1901); L. von Ranke, Englische Geschichte (1859-1868); and T. Carlyle, Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches (London, 1897-1901).

(A. W. H.*)

INSUBRES (Ἲσομβρες, Ἲνσουβροι), a Celtic people of upper Italy, the most powerful in Gallia Transpadana, inhabiting the country between the Adda, the Ticinus and the Alps. According to Livy (v. 34) they appear to have been a branch of the Aedui in Gallia Transalpina, though others assume that they were Umbrians, a view to some extent supported by the form Is-ombr-es. Livy states that Bellovesus and his Gauls, having crossed the Alps and defeated the Etruscans near the Ticinus, found themselves in the territory of the Insubres (also the name of a pagus of the Aedui). Here they built a city and called it Mediolanum (Milan), after the name of a village in their home in Gallia Transalpina. The name Insubres thus appears applied to the inhabitants (1) of the Aeduan pagus, (2) of the territory in Gallia Transpadana occupied by Bellovesus, (3) to the founders of Mediolanum. From 222 to 195 B.C. the Insubres were frequently at war with the Romans. In 222 they were defeated at Clastidium by M. Claudius Marcellus, who gained the spolia opima by slaying with his own hand their king Viridomarus (Virdumarus), and in 194 they were finally subdued by L. Valerius Flaccus.

See H. Nissen, Italische Landeskunde (1902) ii. 179; A. Holder, Altkeltischer Sprachschatz, ii. (1904).

INSURANCE, a term meaning generally “making oneself safe against” something, but specially used in connexion with making financial provision against certain risks in the business of life. The terms Assurance and Insurance are in ordinary usage synonymous, but in the profession “assurance” is confined to the “life” business, and “insurance” to fire, marine and other miscellaneous risks. Assurance was the earlier term, and was used of all forms of insurance indiscriminately till the end of the 16th century. Insurance—in its earlier form, “ensurance”—was first applied to fire risks (see note s.v. “Insurance” in the New English Dictionary).

I. General History

During the latter half of the 19th century the practice of insurance extended with unprecedented rapidity, partly in novel forms. While its several branches, such as life insurance, casualty insurance and others, have each had an independent and characteristic development, all these together form an institution peculiar to the modern world, the origin and growth of which attest a remarkable change in men’s ideas and habits of thought.

The simplest and most general conception of insurance is a provision made by a group of persons, each singly in danger of some loss, the incidence of which cannot be foreseen, that when such loss shall occur to any of them it shall be distributed over the whole group. Its essential elements, therefore, are foresight and co-operation; the former the special distinction of civilized man, the latter the means of social progress. But foresight is possible only in the degree in which the consequences of conduct are assured, i.e. it depends on an ascertained regularity in the forces of nature and the order of society. To the savage, life is a lottery. In hunting, rapine and war, all his interests are put at hazard. The hopes and fears of the gambler dominate his impulses. As nature is studied and subdued, and as society is developed, the element of chance is slowly eliminated from life. In a progressive society, education, science, invention, the arts of production, with regular government and civil order, steadily work together to narrow the realm of chance and extend that of foresight. But there remain certain events which may disturb all anticipations, and in spite of any man’s best wisdom and effort may deprive him of the fruits of his labour. These are mainly of two classes: (1) damage to property by the great forces of nature, such as lightning and hail, by the perils of the sea and by fire; (2) premature death. A useful life has an economical value. But no skill can make certain its continuance to its normal close. In the reasonable expectation that it will last until a competence is gained or the family ceases to be dependent, young men marry; but some will die too soon, and in the aggregate multitudes are left destitute. Both classes of loss are alike, in that they fall on individuals in the mass who are not known beforehand nor selected by any traceable law. But the sufferers are ruined, while the same pecuniary loss, if distributed over the whole number, would be little felt. Wherever the sense of community has existed this has been discerned, and some effort made to act upon it. Thus in feudal Europe it was customary for the houses of vassals to be restored after fire at the cost of the estate. In England in the 17th century the government practised a method of relief after accidental fires. When such a loss was proved to the king in council, the chancellor sent a king’s brief to churches, sheriffs and justices, asking contributions, and trustees for the sufferers administered the funds collected. But under the last two Stuarts gross frauds resulted, and the system fell into disrepute and disuse. At best, the voluntary relief provided by charity after losses are incurred is but sporadic and irregular. Insurance begins when the liability to loss is recognized as common, and provision is made beforehand to meet it from a common fund. The efficient organization of communities or groups for this purpose is an essentially modern achievement of social science. But the history of the conception in its formative stages is extremely obscure.

Its first appearance in business life is often sought in the marine loans of the ancient Greeks, fully described by Demosthenes. Money was advanced on a ship or cargo, to be repaid with large interest if the voyage prosper, but not repaid at all if the ship be lost, the rate of interest being made high enough to pay not only for the use of the capital, but for the risk of losing it. Loans of this character have ever since been common in maritime lands, under the name of bottomry and respondentia bonds. (See below, Marine Insurance.) But the direct insurance of sea-risks for a premium paid independently of loans began, as far as is known, in Belgium about A.D. 1300. During the next century the risks of insurance for the usual voyages between London and European ports were carefully considered, and customary rates became established. In his address in opening Elizabeth’s first parliament in 1559, Sir Nicholas Bacon said, “Doth not the wise merchant in every adventure of danger give part to have the rest assured?” In 1601 parliament created a commission to decide disputes under contracts for marine insurance, and the preamble of the act (43 Eliz. ch. 12) expresses the best thought of the British mind in that day upon the subject. Thus the business of marine insurance was intelligently and wisely practised three centuries ago. But the underwriters were private persons, acting independently, so that the insured lacked the benefit of large aggregations of capital to make his contract safe; while the insurer, who took one or a few risks, was without the security of large averages and might be crushed by an exceptional loss. A partial remedy was gradually reached in London. Men who had capital to employ in this hazardous business used to meet at fixed hours when shipowners and merchants could negotiate with them. The higgling of the open market, in view of all the circumstances of each risk—as the character and condition of the ship, its crew and cargo, the length and route of the voyage, the season, the current rate of interest and profits—determined the rate of premium; and when this obtained general assent, the written agreement was signed by each underwriter for that part of the risk which he assumed. Towards the end of the 17th century these meetings were held in Lloyd’s coffee-house, and their simple practice gradually grew into the complete and complicated system of marine insurance now general. The underwriters together evolved rules and improved methods, but continued for generations to insure severally, without corporate powers or common responsibility, so that the name Lloyd’s became throughout the commercial world the symbol of marine insurance. More recently the name has been adopted in the United States by associations of private or individual underwriters as distinguished from insurance corporations.

Although the underwriters at Lloyd’s often considered and assumed other than marine risks, and made contracts some of which were merely wagers on public or private events, there is no record of insurances by them against fire on land. But fire insurance, it is vaguely known, had previously been practised, in a crude form, in several European cities. In 1635, and again in 1638, citizens of London petitioned Charles I. for a patent of monopoly to insure houses at the rate of one shilling yearly for each £20 of rent, the association to repair or rebuild those burned, to maintain a perpetual fire-watch in the streets, and to pay £200 yearly towards rebuilding St Paul’s cathedral until finished. The attorney-general approved the project, but in the disorders of the kingdom it was forgotten. The Great Fire of 1666 revived interest in the subject, and led to practical measures. In May 1680 a private fire office was opened “at the back side of the Royal Exchange” to insure houses in London, by assuming the risk of loss to a fixed amount for a fixed premium, namely, 2½% of the yearly rent for brick houses and 5% for frame houses, the rent being always assumed to be one-tenth of the value of the fee. The estimates of the promoters are interesting. In the fourteen years since the Great Fire 750 houses had been burned in London, with an average loss of £200. A fund of £40,000 subscribed as guaranty was to be increased by £20,000 for every 10,000 houses insured, and the interest of the fund alone therefore might be expected to meet all losses and leave a surplus. Thus the security was perfect and the promise of profit great. Meagre as was the basis of facts for the calculations, and crude as was the statistical method employed, the insurance offered met a general want and the business grew rapidly. Within a year a strong demand was heard that the city of London should itself insure the houses of its citizens, and the common council voted to do so at lower rates than the fire office. But the courts put a speedy end to this movement, holding that the charter conferred on the city no power to transact such business. Thus the socialistic theory that insurance is properly a branch of government is almost as old as the business itself, though it has never found favour or been practically tested on a large scale in Great Britain or America.

The next notable step in the evolution of modern methods was the organization of mutual insurance associations. In 1684 the Friendly Society was organized. Each member paid a small entrance fee for expenses, made a cash deposit as a reserve for emergencies, to be returned at the end of his term, and agreed to meet equitable assessments for current losses. Payments were computed on the assumption that one house in 200 is burned every fifteen years. The rivalry between the proprietary and the mutual systems began at once, and has continued till now. In 1686 “the Fire Office at the back side of the Royal Exchange” petitioned for a patent of the fire insurance policy and a monopoly of its issue for thirty-one years. The Friendly Society opposed the grant. The most eminent lawyers for both were heard by the king in council, and on the 30th of January 1687 King James II. decided the case. No charter was granted, but the Fire Office might continue its business, having a monopoly for one year. Thereafter the Friendly Society might for three months sell policies, but must then suspend for three months, and so on for alternate quarters. But the Fire Office must pay the ordinance service for its work in extinguishing fires, the amount to be fixed for each fire by the king. This was the first appearance of the plan, so widely prevalent in after years, of imposing on insurance companies the support of fire departments; that is, of taxing the prudent who insure to protect the reckless who do not.

After 1688 the atmosphere of England was freer, and underwriting was soon practised without special licence. In 1704 the societies began to insure household goods and stocks in trade, and the insurance of personal property rapidly became as important as that of buildings. In 1706 the Sun Fire Office was founded, and began to issue policies on both real and personal property in all parts of England. Other associations arose in quick succession of which the Union Fire Office, dating from 1714, and the Westminster from 1717, still survive. Before 1720 both fire and marine insurance had become general in all great centres of trade. But life insurance was as yet hardly conceived. Sporadic evidences that it was needed, and that men were feeling after it, occur in very early records. It was a medieval custom to advance to a mariner goods or money, to be restored with large additions, but only in case of safe return; or to contract, for a sum in hand, to ransom him if captured by pirates, or to pay a fixed amount to his family if he were lost. To evade the usury laws life annuities were often sold at a low rate, redeemable for a stipulated sum. Life estates were sold upon some guess at their probable duration; and leases, especially of church lands, were made for one, two or three lives on rude and conventional estimates of the time they would run. Thus there was a commercial and social pressure for some intelligent method of valuing life contingencies. But the direct insurance of life, as a means of reducing the element of chance in human affairs, was hardly thought of. Indeed, such contracts were commonly regarded as mere forms of gambling, and were prohibited in France as against good morals.

The earliest known policy of life insurance was made in the Royal Exchange, London, on the 18th of June 1583, for £383 6s 8d. for twelve months, on the life of William Gibbons. Sixteen underwriters signed it, each severally for his own share, and the premium was 8%. The age of the insured is not referred to, nor was it then considered, except when far advanced, in fixing the premium. Gibbons died on the 29th of May 1584. The underwriters refused to pay, alleging that twelve months, in law, are twelve times twenty-eight days, and that Gibbons had survived the term. The court, of course, enforced payment. A few instances of similar contracts are found, mostly in judicial records, during the 17th century; but every such transaction was justly regarded as a mere wager, at least on the part of the insurer. It could not be otherwise until the principles of probability and the uniformity of large averages were understood and trusted. A few great thinkers were groping for principles which were profoundly to modify the practical reasoning of after-generations. But their work first obtained wide recognition upon the publication of the Ars Conjectandi, the posthumous treatise of Jacques Bernoulli, in 1713. Meanwhile the social need for insurance continued to express itself in empirical efforts, which at least helped to make clearer the problems to be solved. Thus in 1699 “The Society of Assurance for Widows and Orphans” was founded in London, a crude form of what is now called an assessment company. Each of 2000 healthy men under fifty-five years of age was to pay 5s. as entrance fee, 1s. quarterly for expenses, and 5s. at the death of another member; and at his own death his estate should receive £500, less 3%. On default in any payment his interest was forfeited. The society lasted about eleven years, and the accounts of its eighth year are preserved, showing the payment of £5200 upon twenty-four claims. The economic significance of this society lies in its distinct recognition of the principle of association for the distribution of losses. Together with the Friendly Society, it shows that this principle had now been so widely grasped by business men that, when embodied in a practical venture, it found substantial support.

The conception of a corporation as an artificial person to hold property and support obligations uninterrupted by the death of individuals was found in Roman law and custom. Its first use in modern business enterprise was perhaps the Bank of St George in Genoa, about A.D. 1200, a joint-stock company with transferable shares, whose owners were liable only to the amount of their shares. In England the crown, itself the chief and type of corporations sole, was the source of chartered rights, and from about 1600 the principle steadily gained recognition, the advantages of incorporation being attested by the successes of the great trading companies. Experience showed that the corporate form was the obvious remedy for the chief difficulties in the practice of insurance. Single risks were but speculative wagers; a great number must be taken together to obtain a trustworthy average. A larger capital than an average private fortune was demanded as a guaranty, and this capital must not be exposed to the dangers of trade, but set aside for the special purpose. Individual underwriters may die or fail; only a permanent institution can be trusted in long contracts. Several projects were devised on this basis. Early in the 18th century, indeed, the English government refused a charter for marine insurance, declaring that corporate insurance was an untried and needless experiment, while private underwriting was satisfactory and sufficient. But in 1720, when two sets of promoters offered £300,000 each for a charter, exclusive of other associations though not of individuals, to insure marine risks, parliament chartered the Royal Exchange and the London Assurance Company with a monopoly to this extent. The business disappointed its projectors at first, and the government accepted half the price rather than revoke the grant. In 1721 the companies extended their operations to fire insurance throughout England.

Thus the principle of insurance had now become a distinct part of the common stock of thought in enlightened nations, and gradually, by association with successive new ideas, plans and methods, was developed into a business or trade, which before the middle of the 18th century already formed an essential element of the social scheme. Most of the modern forms of insurance against the elements were known, and at least crudely practised. But there was no scientific basis for the business. Premiums were fixed, not by computation from known facts or reasonable assumptions, but by guess and the higgling of the market. Only the competition of capital checked the extortionate demands of underwriters. The first important steps towards a scientific valuation of hazards were taken in dealing with the class of risks hitherto so much neglected, those which depend upon human mortality. Marine and fire insurance had their origin in the pressure of need. The practice began before a theory existed. But life insurance had its origin in the scientific study of the facts of human mortality. Both marine and fire insurance became general before there was any intelligent study of the risks by statistical or mathematical methods, nor can it be said that much progress has since been made towards establishing a scientific basis for the valuation of risks in these classes. But life insurance may be said to have been impossible until the theory of probabilities had become a recognized part of the common stock of ideas.

The value of insurance as an institution cannot be measured by figures. No direct balance-sheet of profit and loss can exhibit its utility. The insurance contract produces no wealth. It represents only expenditure. If a thousand men insure themselves against any contingency, then, whether or not the dreaded event occurs to any, they will in the aggregate be poorer, as the direct result, by the exact cost of the machinery for effecting it. The distribution of property is changed, its sum is not increased. But the results in the social economy, the substitution of reasonable foresight and confidence for apprehension and the sense of hazard, the large elimination of chance from business and conduct, have a supreme value. The direct contribution of insurance to civilization is made, not in visible wealth, but in the intangible and immeasurable forces of character on which civilization itself is founded. It is pre-eminently a modern institution. Some two centuries ago it had begun to influence centres of trade, but the mass of civilized men had no conception of its meaning. Its general application and popular acceptance began within the first half of the 19th century, and its commercial and social importance have multiplied a hundred-fold within living memory. It has done more than all gifts of impulsive charity to foster a sense of human brotherhood and of common interests. It has done more than all repressive legislation to destroy the gambling spirit. It is impossible to conceive of our civilization in its full vigour and progressive power without this principle which unites the fundamental law of practical economy, that he best serves humanity who best serves himself, with the golden rule of religion, “Bear ye one another’s burdens.”

II. Casualty and Miscellaneous Insurance

Before proceeding with an account of the standard institutions of fire and life insurance, it is proper to glance at the modern vast extension of casualty insurance, and to notice certain novel applications of the insurance principle to other special classes of events. The novelty of these enterprises, however, is not in the general idea underlying each of them. In almost every instance in which insurance has been extended, so as successfully to cover new kinds of risks, it will be found that the suggestion is nearly as old as the practice of life insurance. Many more kinds of insurance than are even now found useful were attempted more than a century ago. But no statistical basis then existed for determining the probability of loss from various casualties, nor had the methods of canvassing, accounting, proving and checking losses, reached the perfection now recognized as necessary for efficiency and safety. The various branches of business which, in distinction from the great standard institutions of life, fire and marine insurance, are commonly treated as miscellaneous insurance, differ widely in their subjects and methods. The most general of them, and that most widely known, is insurance against personal injury by accidents of every kind. Much has already been done by the companies in collecting and analysing facts, so as to determine the average risk of injury and disablement among different classes of men. But there is as yet no such union of effort among them to combine their resources for such purposes as among the life companies, nor does the subject admit of treatment so exact as that of human mortality. Hence it is impossible to speak of a theory of accident insurance in a scientific sense; and in its practice premiums and necessary reserves are determined by the trained business judgment of individual managers rather than by the calculations of actuaries from statistical collections of facts.

The insurance of railway travellers against injury upon trains was the first form of accident insurance which proved widely acceptable. This is still practised as a special business by several companies, tickets, entitling the purchaser or his family to a fixed compensation in case of his injury or death, being offered for sale with the railway tickets. But the development of insurance against personal injuries, which is most characteristic of the times, is the wholesale insurance of the employer against liability to the employed for accidental injuries sustained in his service. This was first undertaken on a large scale by the “Employers’ Liability Assurance Corporation of London,” founded for the purpose in 1880, immediately after the passage of the Employers’ Liability Act by parliament, which made employers of labour liable for injuries sustained in their service to an extent unknown to the common law. The Workmen’s Compensation Act 1906 greatly extended the classes of employers liable for accidents to their servants, and the number of companies devoting themselves to accidents and workmen’s compensation has greatly increased, while practically every fire insurance office has taken up the business. The policies are issued to employers of labour, agreeing to indemnify them for any loss to which they may be subjected, at common law or by statute, in consequence of bodily injuries suffered by any employee while engaged in their service. In some cases the insurance company undertakes the investigation and settlement of each claim within the limits prescribed by the policy, and conducts any litigation which may result. The adjustment of damages can be made with more economy and skill by the companies than is usually possible for the employer, and the danger of fraudulent claims is largely reduced by methods experience has taught them. The price charged for such insurance is either a small percentage of the aggregate wages paid during the term, or a standard rate for each particular class of employment, or (in the case of large employers of labour) an “all-round” rate designed to cover every class of employee.

The most common form of accident insurance, however, is still represented by the policy which promises the assured a fixed sum in case of death by accident, and a weekly compensation during disability from such a cause. Many policies also specify a sum to be paid for the loss or permanent damage of a member, as an eye, a hand or foot. Another extension of the personal accident policy is the addition of some form of health insurance, especially the grant of a weekly sum to the insured during incapacity for work caused by certain named diseases. Besides the ordinary joint stock companies which carry on this class of business with fixed premiums, many associations organize for insurance against personal injury by accident, relying upon the assessment of members to pay claims as they mature. Many of these are local and ephemeral; but a number of them, formed by men engaged in common pursuits, for mutual protection, have attained importance. Such are especially some of the commercial travellers’ and the railway employees’ accident associations, and a few connected with the Masonic or similar beneficiary orders.

Another large class of casualty insurances applies to various forms of damage to property. The branch which seems most to have attracted promoters is the insurance of plate glass against fracture, which is carried on by a number of companies in Great Britain, and is the only business of several of them. In the United States there are five corporations which insure plate glass alone, while many other casualty companies issue also policies on glass. This business is not conducted in any other country upon so large a scale as in the United States, but is attracting more attention than heretofore in Europe, and especially in Great Britain.

There are several companies in the United Kingdom and in America which make the insurance against damage by the explosion of steam boilers a special feature of their work, but by far the greater part of the business is transacted by one company in each country. The service rendered is one of special skill and vigilance, extending far beyond the contract for indemnity. The company, in fact, employs inspectors of the highest scientific qualifications, who assume constant supervision of the machinery, and require its structure and conduct to be freed from elements of danger. It is prevention rather than compensation that is sought, and the outlay made by the companies is mainly for inspection and control, not for losses. It is usual to promise in a policy upon a steam boiler some compensation also for any personal injury which may result from an explosion.

There are some companies in England having insurance against burglary for their principal purpose, while several of the British and American accident companies issue policies of this kind. It is somewhat of an experiment, and the risks taken are for moderate sums, at premiums determined in each case by an estimate of the danger founded on a study of all the circumstances. There is no information published concerning this branch of insurance in other countries, but the aggregate premiums paid are not at present very large. It is believed by many that there is an important future for burglary insurance, in connexion with improved methods of protection, by safes, automatic alarms and constant inspection, for dwelling-houses, shops and offices, which are often unoccupied.

Insurance against damage to growing crops by hail is practised in several parts of Europe and America, commonly by small local associations on the mutual plan or as an incident to the business of fire insurance. No statistics can be obtained of these operations. The same is true of the insurance against the ravages of tornadoes, and against sickness and accident in domestic animals.

A wholly distinct business, commonly classed as a branch of insurance, has now grown to great importance, that of guaranteeing the fulfilment of contracts and of indemnifying employers against defalcations in their service. The bond of a corporation of large capital is widely taking the place which personal surety has filled in connexion with undertakings on contract, and with offices and occupations of trust, both in public and in private life. Fidelity insurance is carried on by a few of the general casualty companies, but as the practice of it extends it becomes more and more the work of special institutions organized for this purpose alone. In the United States there are many corporations of excellent standing, with aggregate paid-up capital of more than $15,000,000 and surplus funds of nearly $10,000,000 more, and collecting in premiums about $4,000,000 annually upon bonds and guaranties amounting to more than $1,250,000,000. The business practically only started at the close of the 19th century. It has had similar if not equal development in Great Britain and in several other countries, but it is only in the United States that the statistics of it are officially collected.