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Title: Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work
Author: Ruskin, John, 1819-1900
Language: English
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*** Start of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne - Twenty-five Letters to a Working Man of Sunderland on the Laws of Work" ***
[Illustration: CONISTON
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH]
Library Edition
THE COMPLETE WORKS
OF
JOHN RUSKIN
CROWN OF WILD OLIVE
TIME AND TIDE
QUEEN OF THE AIR
LECTURES ON ART AND LANDSCAPE
ARATRA PENTELICI
NATIONAL LIBRARY ASSOCIATION
NEW YORK CHICAGO
TIME AND TIDE
BY
WEARE AND TYNE
TWENTY-FIVE LETTERS
TO
A WORKING MAN OF SUNDERLAND
ON
THE LAWS OF WORK.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
PREFACE ix
LETTER
I. CO-OPERATION 1
The two kinds of Co-operation.--In its highest
sense it is not yet thought of.
II. CONTENTMENT 4
Co-operation, as hitherto understood, is perhaps
not expedient.
III. LEGISLATION 7
Of True Legislation.--That every Man may be a Law
to himself.
IV. EXPENDITURE 11
The Expenses for Art and for War.
V. ENTERTAINMENT 13
The Corruption of Modern Pleasure.--(Covent Garden
Pantomime.)
VI. DEXTERITY 18
The Corruption of Modern Pleasure.--(The Japanese
Jugglers.)
VII. FESTIVITY 20
Of the Various Expressions of National Festivity.
VIII. THINGS WRITTEN 22
The Four Possible Theories respecting the
Authority of the Bible.
IX. THANKSGIVING 27
The Use of Music and Dancing under the Jewish
Theocracy, compared with their Use by the Modern
French.
X. WHEAT-SIFTING 32
The Meaning, and Actual Operation, of Satanic or
Demoniacal Influence.
XI. THE GOLDEN BOUGH 38
The Satanic Power is mainly Twofold: the Power of
causing Falsehood and the Power of causing Pain.
The Resistance is by Law of Honor and Law of
Delight.
XII. DICTATORSHIP 41
The Necessity of Imperative Law to the Prosperity
of States.
XIII. EPISCOPACY AND DUKEDOM 45
The Proper Offices of the Bishop and Duke; or,
"Overseer" and "Leader."
XIV. TRADE-WARRANT 51
The First Group of Essential Laws.--Against Theft
by False Work, and by Bankruptcy.--Necessary
Publicity of Accounts.
XV. PER-CENTAGE 54
The Nature of Theft by Unjust Profits.--Crime can
finally be arrested only by Education.
XVI. EDUCATION 59
Of Public Education irrespective of Class
distinction. It consists essentially in giving
Habits of Mercy, and Habits of Truth. (_Gentleness
and Justice._)
XVII. DIFFICULTIES 66
The Relations of Education to Position in Life.
XVIII. HUMILITY 68
The harmful Effects of Servile Employments. The
possible Practice and Exhibition of sincere
Humility by Religious Persons.
XIX. BROKEN REEDS 73
The General Pressure of Excessive and Improper
Work, in English Life.
XX. ROSE-GARDENS 78
Of Improvidence in Marriage in the Middle Classes;
and of the advisable Restrictions of it.
XXI. GENTILLESSE 83
Of the Dignity of the Four Fine Arts; and of the
Proper System of Retail Trade.
XXII. THE MASTER 88
Of the Normal Position and Duties of the Upper
Classes. General Statement of the Land Question.
XXIII. LANDMARKS 93
Of the Just Tenure of Lands; and the Proper
Functions of high Public Officers.
XXIV. THE ROD AND HONEYCOMB 101
The Office of the Soldier.
XXV. HYSSOP 108
Of inevitable Distinction of Rank, and necessary
Submission to Authority. The Meaning of
Pure-Heartedness. Conclusion.
APPENDICES.
APPENDIX PAGE
I. Expenditure on Science and Art 119
II. Legislation of Frederick the Great 120
III. Effect of Modern Entertainments on the Mind of Youth 124
IV. Drunkenness as the Cause of Crime 124
V. Abuse of Food 126
VI. Regulations of Trade 128
VII. Letter to the Editor of the _Pall Mall Gazette_ 130
PREFACE.
The following Letters were written to Mr. Thomas Dixon, a working
cork-cutter of Sunderland, during the agitation for Reform in the
spring of the present year. They contain, in the plainest terms I
could use, the substance of what I then desired to say to our English
workmen, which was briefly this:--"The reform you desire may give you
more influence in Parliament; but your influence there will of course
be useless to you,--perhaps worse than useless, until you have wisely
made up your minds what you wish Parliament to do for you; and when
you _have_ made up your minds about that, you will find, not only that
you can do it for yourselves, without the intervention of Parliament;
but that eventually nobody _but_ yourselves can do it. And to help
you, as far as one of your old friends may, in so making up your
minds, such and such things are what it seems to me you should ask
for, and, moreover, strive for with your heart and might."
The letters now published relate only to one division of the laws
which I desired to recommend to the consideration of our
operatives,--those, namely, bearing upon honesty of work, and honesty
of exchange. I hope in the course of next year that I may be able to
complete the second part of the series, [I could not; but 'Fors
Clavigera' is now (1872) answering the same end:] which will relate to
the possible comforts and wholesome laws, of familiar household life,
and the share which a laboring nation may attain in the skill, and the
treasures, of the higher arts.
The letters are republished as they were written, with, here and
there, correction of a phrase, and omission of one or two passages of
merely personal or temporary interest; the headings only are added, in
order to give the reader some clue to the general aim of necessarily
desultory discussion; and the portions of Mr. Dixon's letters in
reply, referred to in the text, are added in the Appendix, and will be
found well deserving of attention.
DENMARK HILL,
_December 14, 1867._
TIME AND TIDE,
BY
WEARE AND TYNE.
LETTER I.
THE TWO KINDS OF CO-OPERATION.--IN ITS HIGHEST SENSE IT IS NOT YET
THOUGHT OF.
DENMARK HILL, _February 4, 1867._
MY DEAR FRIEND,
1. You have now everything I have yet published on political economy;
but there are several points in these books of mine which I intended
to add notes to, and it seems little likely I shall get that soon
done. So I think the best way of making up for the want of these is to
write you a few simple letters, which you can read to other people, or
send to be printed, if you like, in any of your journals where you
think they may be useful.
I especially want you, for one thing, to understand the sense in which
the word "co-operation" is used in my books. You will find I am always
pleading for it; and yet I don't at all mean the co-operation of
partnership (as opposed to the system of wages) which is now so
gradually extending itself among our great firms. I am glad to see it
doing so, yet not altogether glad: for none of you who are engaged in
the immediate struggle between the system of co-operation and the
system of mastership know how much the dispute involves; and none of
us know the results to which it may finally lead. For the alternative
is not, in reality, only between two modes of conducting business--it
is between two different states of society. It is not the question
whether an amount of wages, no greater in the end than that at present
received by the men, may be paid to them in a way which shall give
them share in the risks and interest in the prosperity of the
business. The question is, really, whether the profits which are at
present taken, as his own right, by the person whose capital, or
energy, or ingenuity, has made him head of the firm, are not in some
proportion to be divided among the subordinates of it.
2. I do not wish, for the moment, to enter into any inquiry as to the
just claims of capital, or as to the proportions in which profits
ought to be, or are in actually existing firms, divided. I merely take
the one assured and essential condition, that a somewhat larger income
will be in co-operative firms secured to the subordinates, by the
diminution of the income of the chief. And the general tendency of
such a system is to increase the facilities of advancement among the
subordinates; to stimulate their ambition; to enable them to lay by,
if they are provident, more ample and more early provision for
declining years; and to form in the end a vast class of persons wholly
different from the existing operative:--members of society, possessing
each a moderate competence; able to procure, therefore, not indeed
many of the luxuries, but all the comforts of life; and to devote some
leisure to the attainments of liberal education, and to the other
objects of free life. On the other hand, by the exact sum which is
divided among them, more than their present wages, the fortune of the
man who, under the present system, takes all the profits of the
business, will be diminished; and the acquirement of large private
fortune by regular means, and all the conditions of life belonging to
such fortune, will be rendered impossible in the mercantile community.
3. Now, the magnitude of the social change hereby involved, and the
consequent differences in the moral relations between individuals,
have not as yet been thought of,--much less estimated,--by any of your
writers on commercial subjects; and it is because I do not yet feel
able to grapple with them that I have left untouched, in the books I
send you, the question of co-operative labor. When I use the word
"co-operation," it is not meant to refer to these new constitutions of
firms at all. I use the word in a far wider sense, as opposed, not to
masterhood, but to _competition_. I do not mean, for instance, by
co-operation, that all the master bakers in a town are to give a share
of their profits to the men who go out with the bread; but that the
masters are not to try to undersell each other, nor seek each to get
the other's business, but are all to form one society, selling to the
public under a common law of severe penalty for unjust dealing, and at
an established price. I do not mean that all bankers' clerks should be
partners in the bank; but I do mean that all bankers should be members
of a great national body, answerable as a society for all deposits;
and that the private business of speculating with other people's money
should take another name than that of "banking." And, for final
instance, I mean by "co-operation" not only fellowships between
trading _firms_, but between trading _nations_; so that it shall no
more be thought (as it is now, with ludicrous and vain selfishness) an
advantage for one nation to undersell another; and take its occupation
away from it; but that the primal and eternal law of vital commerce
shall be of all men understood--namely, that every nation is fitted by
its character, and the nature of its territories, for some particular
employments or manufactures; and that it is the true interest of every
other nation to encourage it in such speciality, and by no means to
interfere with, but in all ways forward and protect, its efforts,
ceasing all rivalship with it, so soon as it is strong enough to
occupy its proper place. You see, therefore, that the idea of
co-operation, in the sense in which I employ it, has hardly yet
entered into the minds of political inquirers; and I will not pursue
it at present; but return to that system which is beginning to obtain
credence and practice among us. This, however, must be in a following
letter.
LETTER II.
CO-OPERATION, AS HITHERTO UNDERSTOOD, IS PERHAPS NOT EXPEDIENT.
_February 4, 1867._
4. Limiting the inquiry, then, for the present, as proposed in the
close of my last letter, to the form of co-operation which is now upon
its trial in practice, I would beg of you to observe that the points
at issue, in the comparison of this system with that of mastership,
are by no means hitherto frankly stated; still less can they as yet be
fairly brought to test. For all mastership is not alike in principle;
there are just and unjust masterships; and while, on the one hand,
there can be no question but that co-operation is better than unjust
and tyrannous mastership, there is very great room for doubt whether
it be better than a just and benignant mastership.
5. At present you--every one of you--speak, and act, as if there were
only one alternative; namely, between a system in which profits shall
be divided in due proportion among all; and the present one, in which
the workman is paid the least wages he will take, under the pressure
of competition in the labor-market. But an intermediate method is
conceivable; a method which appears to me more prudent, and in its
ultimate results more just, than the co-operative one. An arrangement
may be supposed, and I have good hope also may one day be effected, by
which every subordinate shall be paid sufficient and regular wages,
according to his rank; by which due provision shall be made out of the
profits of the business for sick and superannuated workers; and by
which the master, _being held responsible, as a minor king or
governor, for the conduct as well as the comfort of all those under
his rule_, shall, on that condition, be permitted to retain to his own
use the surplus profits of the business which the fact of his being
its master may be assumed to prove that he has organized by superior
intellect and energy. And I think this principle of regular
wage-paying, whether it be in the abstract more just, or not, is at
all events the more prudent; for this reason mainly, that in spite of
all the cant which is continually talked by cruel, foolish, or
designing persons about "the duty of remaining content in the position
in which Providence has placed you," there is a root of the very
deepest and holiest truth in the saying, which gives to it such power
as it still retains, even uttered by unkind and unwise lips, and
received into doubtful and embittered hearts.
6. If, indeed, no effort be made to discover, in the course of their
early training, for what services the youths of a nation are
individually qualified; nor any care taken to place those who have
unquestionably proved their fitness for certain functions, in the
offices they could best fulfil,--then, to call the confused wreck of
social order and life brought about by malicious collision and
competition, an arrangement of Providence, is quite one of the most
insolent and wicked ways in which it is possible to take the name of
God in vain. But if, at the proper time, some earnest effort be made
to place youths, according to their capacities, in the occupations for
which they are fitted, I think the system of organization will be
finally found the best, which gives the least encouragement to
thoughts of any great future advance in social life.
7. The healthy sense of progress, which is necessary to the strength
and happiness of men, does not consist in the anxiety of a struggle to
attain higher place, or rank, but in gradually perfecting the manner,
and accomplishing the ends, of the life which we have chosen, or which
circumstances have determined for us. Thus, I think the object of a
workman's ambition should not be to become a master; but to attain
daily more subtle and exemplary skill in his own craft, to save from
his wages enough to enrich and complete his home gradually with more
delicate and substantial comforts; and to lay by such store as shall
be sufficient for the happy maintenance of his old age (rendering him
independent of the help provided for the sick and indigent by the
arrangement pre-supposed), and sufficient also for the starting of his
children in a rank of life equal to his own. If his wages are not
enough to enable him to do this, they are unjustly low; if they are
once raised to this adequate standard, I do not think that by the
possible increase of his gains under contingencies of trade, or by
divisions of profits with his master, he should be enticed into
feverish hope of an entire change of condition; and as an almost
necessary consequence, pass his days in an anxious discontent with
immediate circumstances, and a comfortless scorn of his daily life,
for which no subsequent success could indemnify him. And I am the more
confident in this belief, because, even supposing a gradual rise in
social rank possible for all well-conducted persons, my experience
does not lead me to think the elevation itself, when attained, would
be conducive to their happiness.
8. The grounds of this opinion I will give you in a future letter; in
the present one, I must pass to a more important point--namely, that
if this stability of condition be indeed desirable for those in whom
existing circumstances might seem to justify discontent, much more
must it be good and desirable for those who already possess everything
which can be conceived necessary to happiness. It is the merest
insolence of selfishness to preach contentment to a laborer who gets
thirty shillings a week, while we suppose an active and plotting
covetousness to be meritorious in a man who has three thousand a year.
In this, as in all other points of mental discipline, it is the duty
of the upper classes to set an example to the lower; and to recommend
and justify the restraint of the ambition of their inferiors, chiefly
by severe and timely limitation of their own. And, without at present
inquiring into the greater or less convenience of the possible methods
of accomplishing such an object, (every detail in suggestions of this
kind necessarily furnishing separate matter of dispute,) I will merely
state my long-fixed conviction, that one of the most important
conditions of a healthful system of social economy, would be the
restraint of the properties and incomes of the upper classes within
certain fixed limits. The temptation to use every energy in the
accumulation of wealth being thus removed, another, and a higher ideal
of the duties of advanced life would be necessarily created in the
national mind; by withdrawal of those who had attained the prescribed
limits of wealth from commercial competition, earlier worldly success,
and earlier marriage, with all its beneficent moral results, would
become possible to the young; while the older men of active intellect,
whose sagacity is now lost or warped in the furtherance of their own
meanest interests, would be induced unselfishly to occupy themselves
in the superintendence of public institutions, or furtherance of
public advantage. And out of this class it would be found natural and
prudent always to choose the members of the legislative body of the
Commons; and to attach to the order also some peculiar honors, in the
possession of which such complacency would be felt as would more than
replace the unworthy satisfaction of being supposed richer than
others, which to many men is the principal charm of their wealth. And
although no law of this purport would ever be imposed on themselves by
the actual upper classes, there is no hindrance to its being gradually
brought into force from beneath, without any violent or impatient
proceedings; and this I will endeavor to show you in my next letter.
LETTER III.
OF TRUE LEGISLATION. THAT EVERY MAN MAY BE A LAW TO HIMSELF.
_February 17, 1867._
9. No, I have not been much worse in health; but I was asked by a
friend to look over some work in which you will all be deeply
interested one day, so that I could not write again till now. I was
the more sorry, because there were several things I wished to note in
your last letter; one especially leads me directly to what I in any
case was desirous of urging upon you. You say, "In vol. 6th of
'Frederick the Great' I find a great deal that I feel quite certain,
if our Queen or Government could make law, thousands of our English
workmen would hail with a shout of joy and gladness." I do not
remember to what you especially allude, but whatever the rules you
speak of may be, unless there be anything in them contrary to the
rights of present English property, why should you care whether the
Government makes them law or not? Can you not, you thousands of
English workmen, simply make them a law to yourselves, by practising
them?
It is now some five or six years since I first had occasion to speak
to the members of the London Working Men's College on the subject of
Reform, and the substance of what I said to them was this: "You are
all agape, my friends, for this mighty privilege of having your
opinions represented in Parliament. The concession might be
desirable,--at all events courteous,--if only it were quite certain
you had got any opinions to represent. But have you? Are you agreed on
any single thing you systematically want? Less work and more wages, of
course; but how much lessening of work do you suppose is possible? Do
you think the time will ever come for everybody to have _no_ work and
_all_ wages? Or have you yet taken the trouble so much as to think out
the nature of the true connection between wages and work, and to
determine, even approximately, the real quantity of the one, that can,
according to the laws of God and nature, be given for the other; for,
rely on it, make what laws you like, that quantity only can you at
last get.
10. "Do you know how many mouths can be fed on an acre of land, or how
fast those mouths multiply? and have you considered what is to be done
finally with unfeedable mouths? 'Send them to be fed elsewhere,' do
you say? Have you, then, formed any opinion as to the time at which
emigration should begin, or the countries to which it should
preferably take place, or the kind of population which should be left
at home? Have you planned the permanent state which you would wish
England to hold, emigrating over her edges, like a full well,
constantly? How full would you have her be of people, first? and of
what sort of people? Do you want her to be nothing but a large
workshop and forge, so that the name of 'Englishman' shall be
synonymous with 'ironmonger,' all over the world? or would you like to
keep some of your lords and landed gentry still, and a few green
fields and trees?
11. "You know well enough that there is not one of these questions, I
do not say which you can answer, but which you have ever _thought_ of
answering; and yet you want to have voices in Parliament! Your voices
are not worth a rat's squeak, either in Parliament or out of it, till
you have some ideas to utter with them; and when you have the
thoughts, you will not want to utter them, for you will see that your
way to the fulfilling of them does not lie through speech. You think
such matters need debating about? By all means debate about them; but
debate among yourselves, and with such honest helpers of your thoughts
as you can find; if by that way you cannot get at the truth, do you
suppose you could get at it sooner in the House of Commons, where the
only aim of many of the members would be to refute every word uttered
in your favor; and where the settlement of any question whatever
depends merely on the perturbations of the balance of conflicting
interests?"
12. That was, in main particulars, what I then said to the men of the
Working Men's College; and in this recurrent agitation about Reform,
that is what I would steadfastly say again. Do you think it is only
under the lacquered splendors of Westminster,--you working men of
England,--that your affairs can be rationally talked over? You have
perfect liberty and power to talk over, and establish for yourselves,
whatever laws you please; so long as you do not interfere with other
people's liberties or properties. Elect a parliament of your own.
Choose the best men among you, the best at least you can find, by
whatever system of election you think likeliest to secure such
desirable result. Invite trustworthy persons of other classes to join
your council; appoint time and place for its stated sittings, and let
this parliament, chosen after your own hearts, deliberate upon the
possible modes of the regulation of industry, and advisablest schemes
for helpful discipline of life; and so lay before you the best laws
they can devise, which such of you as were wise might submit to, and
teach their children to obey. And if any of the laws thus determined
appear to be inconsistent with the present circumstances or customs of
trade, do not make a noise about them, nor try to enforce them
suddenly on others, nor embroider them on flags, nor call meetings in
parks about them, in spite of railings and police; but keep them in
your thoughts and sight, as objects of patient purpose and future
achievement by peaceful strength.
13. For you need not think that even if you obtained a majority of
representatives in the existing parliament, you could immediately
compel any system of business, broadly contrary to that now
established by custom. If you could pass laws to-morrow, wholly
favorable to yourselves, as you might think, because unfavorable to
your masters, and to the upper classes of society,--the only result
would be that the riches of the country would at once leave it, and
you would perish in riot and famine. Be assured that no great change
for the better can ever be easily accomplished, or quickly; nor by
impulsive, ill-regulated effort, nor by bad men; nor even by good men,
without much suffering. The suffering must, indeed, come, one way or
another, in all greatly critical periods; the only question, for us,
is whether we will reach our ends (if we ever reach them) through a
chain of involuntary miseries, many of them useless, and all ignoble;
or whether we will know the worst at once, and deal with it by the
wisely sharp methods of Godsped courage.
14. This, I repeat to you, it is wholly in your own power to do, but
it is in your power on one condition only, that of steadfast truth to
yourselves, and to all men. If there is not, in the sum of it, honesty
enough among you to teach you to frame, and strengthen you to obey,
_just_ laws of trade, there is no hope left for you. No political
constitution can ennoble knaves; no privileges can assist them; no
possessions enrich them. Their gains are occult curses; comfortless
loss their truest blessing; failure and pain Nature's only mercy to
them. Look to it, therefore, first that you get some wholesome honesty
for the foundation of all things. Without the resolution in your
hearts to do good work, so long as your right hands have motion in
them; and to do it whether the issue be that you die or live, no life
worthy the name will ever be possible to you, while, in once forming
the resolution that your work is to be well done, life is really won,
here and for ever. And to make your children capable of such
resolution, is the beginning of all true education, of which I have
more to say in a future letter.
LETTER IV.
THE EXPENSES FOR ART AND FOR WAR.
_February 19, 1867._
15. In the 'Pall Mall Gazette' of yesterday, second column of second
page, you will find, close to each other, two sentences which bear
closely on matters in hand. The first of these is the statement, that
in the debate on the grant for the Blacas collection, "Mr. Bernal
Osborne got an assenting cheer, when he said that 'whenever science
and art were mentioned it was a sign to look after the national
pockets.'" I want you to notice this fact, _i. e._, (the debate in
question being on a _total_ grant of 164,000_l._, of which 48,000_l._
only were truly for art's sake, and the rest for shop's sake,) in
illustration of a passage in my 'Sesame and Lilies' (pp. 69, 70 of the
small edition, and pp. 46, 47 of Vol. I. of the Revised Series of the
Entire Works),[A] to which I shall have again to refer you, with some
further comments, in the sequel of these letters. The second passage
is to the effect that "The Trades' Union Bill was read a second time,
after a claim from Mr. Hadfield, Mr. Osborne, and Mr. Samuelson, to
admit working men into the commission; to which Mr. Watkin answered
'that the working men's friend was too conspicuous in the body;' and
Mr. Roebuck, 'that when a butcher was tried for murder it was not
necessary to have butchers on the jury.'"
[A] Appendix I.
16. Note this second passage with respect to what I said in my last
letter, as to the impossibility of the laws of work being investigated
in the House of Commons. What admixture of elements, think you, would
avail to obtain so much as decent hearing (how should we then speak of
impartial judgment?) of the cause of working men, in an assembly which
permits to one of its principal members this insolent discourtesy of
language, in dealing with a preliminary question of the highest
importance; and permits it as so far expressive of the whole color and
tone of its own thoughts, that the sentence is quoted by one of the
most temperate and accurate of our daily journals, as representing the
total answer of the opposite side in the debate? No! be assured you
can do nothing yet at Westminster. You must have your own parliament,
and if you cannot detect enough honesty among you to constitute a
justly minded one, for the present matters must take their course, and
that will be, yet awhile, to the worse.
17. I meant to have continued this subject, but I see two other
statements in the 'Pall Mall Gazette' of to-day, with which, and a
single remark upon them, I think it will be well to close my present
letter.
(1) "The total sum asked for in the army estimates, published this
morning, is 14,752,200_l._, being an increase of 412,000_l._ over the
previous year."
(2) "Yesterday the annual account of the navy receipts and expenditure
for the year ending 31st March, 1866, was issued from the Admiralty.
The expenditure was 10,268,115_l._ 7_s._"
Omitting the seven shillings, and even the odd hundred-thousands of
pounds, the net annual expenditure for army and navy appears to be
twenty-four millions.
The "grant in science and art," two-thirds of which was not in reality
for either, but for amusement and shop interests in the Paris
Exhibition--the grant which the House of Commons feels to be
indicative of general danger to the national pockets--is, as above
stated, 164,000_l._ Now, I believe the three additional ciphers which
turn thousands into millions produce on the intelligent English mind
usually the effect of--three ciphers. But calculate the proportion of
these two sums, and then imagine to yourself the beautiful state of
rationality of any private gentleman, who, having regretfully spent
164_l._ on pictures for his walls, paid willingly 24,000_l._ annually
to the policeman who looked after his shutters! You practical
English!--will you ever unbar the shutters of your brains, and hang
a picture or two in those state-chambers?
LETTER V.
THE CORRUPTION OF MODERN PLEASURE.--(COVENT GARDEN PANTOMIME.)
_February 25, 1867._
18. There is this great advantage in the writing real letters, that
the direct correspondence is a sufficient reason for saying, in or out
of order, everything that the chances of the day bring into one's
head, in connection with the matter in hand; and as such things very
usually go out of one's head again, after they get tired of their
lodging, they would otherwise never get said at all. And thus to-day,
quite out of order, but in very close connection with another part of
our subject, I am going to tell you what I was thinking on Friday
evening last, in Covent Garden Theater, as I was looking, and not
laughing, at the pantomime of 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.'
When you begin seriously to consider the question referred to in my
second letter, of the essential, and in the outcome inviolable,
connection between quantity of wages, and quantity of work, you will
see that "wages" in the full sense don't mean "pay" merely, but the
reward, whatever it may be, of pleasure as well as profit, and of
various other advantages, which a man is meant by Providence to get
during life, for work well done. Even limiting the idea to "pay," the
question is not so much what quantity of coin you get, as--what you
can get for it when you have it. Whether a shilling a day be good pay
or not, depends wholly on what a "shilling's worth" is; that is to
say, what quantity of the things you want may be had for a shilling.
And that again depends, and a great deal more than that depends, on
what you _do_ want. If only drink, and foul clothes, such and such pay
may be enough for you; if you want good meat and good clothes, you
must have larger wage; if clean rooms and fresh air, larger still, and
so on. You say, perhaps, "every one wants these better things." So far
from that, a wholesome taste for cleanliness and fresh air is one of
the final attainments of humanity. There are now not many European
gentlemen, even in the highest classes, who have a pure and right love
of fresh air. They would put the filth of tobacco even into the first
breeze of a May morning.
19. But there are better things even than these, which one may want.
Grant that one has good food, clothes, lodging, and breathing, is that
all the pay one ought to have for one's work? Wholesome means of
existence and nothing more? Enough, perhaps, you think, if everybody
could get these. It may be so; I will not, at this moment, dispute it;
nevertheless, I will boldly say that you should sometimes want more
than these; and for one of many things more, you should want
occasionally to be amused!
You know, the upper classes, most of them, want to be amused all day
long. They think
"One moment _un_amused a misery
Not made for feeble men."
Perhaps you have been in the habit of despising them for this; and
thinking how much worthier and nobler it was to work all day, and care
at night only for food and rest, than to do no useful thing all day,
eat unearned food, and spend the evening, as the morning, in "change
of follies and relays of joy." No, my good friend, that is one of the
fatalest deceptions. It is not a noble thing, in sum and issue of it,
not to care to be amused. It is indeed a far higher _moral_ state, but
is a much lower _creature_ state, than that of the upper classes.
20. Yonder poor horse, calm slave in daily chains at the railroad
siding, who drags the detached rear of the train to the front again,
and slips aside so deftly as the buffers meet; and, within eighteen
inches of death every ten minutes, fulfils his changeless duty all day
long, content, for eternal reward, with his night's rest, and his
champed mouthful of hay;--anything more earnestly moral and beautiful
one cannot image--I never see the creature without a kind of worship.
And yonder musician, who used the greatest power which (in the art he
knew) the Father of spirits ever yet breathed into the clay of this
world;--who used it, I say, to follow and fit with perfect sound the
words of the 'Zauberflöte' and of 'Don Giovanni'--foolishest and most
monstrous of conceivable human words and subjects of thought--for the
future "amusement" of his race!--No such spectacle of unconscious (and
in that unconsciousness all the more fearful) moral degradation of the
highest faculty to the lowest purpose can be found in history. But
Mozart is nevertheless a nobler creature than the horse at the siding;
nor would it be the least nearer the purpose of his Maker that he, and
all his frivolous audiences, should evade the degradation of the
profitless piping, only by living, like horses, in daily physical
labor for daily bread.
21. There are three things to which man is born[A]--labor, and sorrow,
and joy. Each of these three things has its baseness and its
nobleness. There is base labor, and noble labor. There is base sorrow,
and noble sorrow. There is base joy, and noble joy. But you must not
think to avoid the corruption of these things by doing without the
things themselves. Nor can any life be right that has not all three.
Labor without joy is base. Labor without sorrow is base. Sorrow
without labor is base. Joy without labor is base.
[A] I ask the reader's thoughtful attention to this
paragraph, on which much of what else I have to say depends.
22. I dare say you think I am a long time in coming to the pantomime;
I am not ready to come to it yet in due course, for we ought to go and
see the Japanese jugglers first, in order to let me fully explain to
you what I mean. But I can't write much more to-day; so I shall merely
tell you what part of the play set me thinking of all this, and leave
you to consider of it yourself, till I can send you another letter.
The pantomime was, as I said, 'Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves.' The
forty thieves were girls. The forty thieves had forty companions, who
were girls. The forty thieves and their forty companions were in some
way mixed up with about four hundred and forty fairies, who were
girls. There was an Oxford and Cambridge boat-race, in which the
Oxford and Cambridge men were girls. There was a transformation scene,
with a forest, in which the flowers were girls, and a chandelier, in
which the lamps were girls, and a great rainbow which was all of
girls.
23. Mingled incongruously with these seraphic, and, as far as my
boyish experience extends, novel, elements of pantomime, there were
yet some of its old and fast-expiring elements. There were, in
speciality, two thoroughly good pantomime actors--Mr. W. H. Payne and
Mr. Frederick Payne. All that these two did, was done admirably. There
were two subordinate actors, who played, subordinately well, the fore
and hind legs of a donkey. And there was a little actress of whom I
have chiefly to speak, who played exquisitely the little part she had
to play. The scene in which she appeared was the only one in the whole
pantomime in which there was any dramatic effort, or, with a few rare
exceptions, any dramatic possibility. It was the home scene, in which
Ali Baba's wife, on washing day, is called upon by butcher, baker,
and milkman, with unpaid bills; and in the extremity of her distress
hears her husband's knock at the door, and opens it for him to drive
in his donkey, laden with gold. The children who have been beaten
instead of getting breakfast, presently share in the raptures of their
father and mother; and the little lady I spoke of, eight or nine years
old,--dances a _pas-de-deux_ with the donkey.
24. She did it beautifully and simply, as a child ought to dance. She
was not an infant prodigy; there was no evidence, in the finish or
strength of her motion, that she had been put to continual torture
through half her eight or nine years. She did nothing more than any
child well taught, but painlessly, might easily do. She caricatured no
older person,--attempted no curious or fantastic skill. She was
dressed decently,--she moved decently,--she looked and behaved
innocently,--and she danced her joyful dance with perfect grace,
spirit, sweetness, and self-forgetfulness. And through all the vast
theater, full of English fathers and mothers and children, there was
not one hand lifted to give her sign of praise but mine.
Presently after this, came on the forty thieves, who, as I told you,
were girls; and, there being no thieving to be presently done, and
time hanging heavy on their hands, arms, and legs, the forty
thief-girls proceeded to light forty cigars. Whereupon the British
public gave them a round of applause. Whereupon I fell a thinking; and
saw little more of the piece, except as an ugly and disturbing dream.
LETTER VI.
THE CORRUPTION OF MODERN PLEASURE.--(THE JAPANESE JUGGLERS.)
_February 28, 1867._
25. I have your pleasant letter with references to Frederick. I will
look at them carefully.[A] Mr. Carlyle himself will be pleased to hear
this letter when he comes home. I heard from him last week at Mentone.
He is well, and glad of the light and calm of Italy. I must get back
to the evil light and uncalm, of the places I was taking you through.
[A] Appendix 2.
(Parenthetically, did you see the article in the 'Times' of yesterday
on bribery, and the conclusion of the commission--"No one sold any
opinions, for no one had any opinions to sell"?)
Both on Thursday and Friday last I had been tormented by many things,
and wanted to disturb my course of thought any way I could. I have
told you what entertainment I got on Friday, first, for it was then
that I began meditating over these letters; let me tell you now what
entertainment I found on Thursday.
26. You may have heard that a company of Japanese jugglers has come
over to exhibit in London. There has long been an increasing interest
in Japanese art, which has been very harmful to many of our own
painters, and I greatly desired to see what these people were, and
what they did. Well, I have seen Blondin, and various English and
French circus work, but never yet anything that surprised me so much
as one of these men's exercises on a suspended pole. Its special
character was a close approximation to the action and power of the
monkey; even to the prehensile power in the foot; so that I asked a
sculptor-friend who sat in front of me, whether he thought such a
grasp could be acquired by practice, or indicated difference in race.
He said he thought it might be got by practice. There was also much
inconceivably dexterous work in spinning of tops,--making them pass in
balanced motion along the edge of a sword, and along a level string,
and the like;--the father performing in the presence of his two
children, who encouraged him continually with short, sharp cries, like
those of animals. Then there was some fairly good sleight-of-hand
juggling of little interest; ending with a dance by the juggler, first
as an animal, and then as a goblin, Now, there was this great
difference between the Japanese masks used in this dance and our
common pantomime masks for beasts and demons,--that our English masks
are only stupidly and loathsomely ugly, by exaggeration of feature, or
of defect of feature. But the Japanese masks (like the frequent
monsters of Japanese art) were inventively frightful, like fearful
dreams; and whatever power it is that acts on human minds, enabling
them to invent such, appears to me not only to deserve the term
"demoniacal," as the only word expressive of its character; but to be
logically capable of no other definition.
27. The impression, therefore, produced upon me by the whole scene,
was that of being in the presence of human creatures of a partially
inferior race, but not without great human gentleness, domestic
affection, and ingenious intellect; who were, nevertheless, as a
nation, afflicted by an evil spirit, and driven by it to recreate
themselves in achieving, or beholding the achievement, through years
of patience, of a certain correspondence with the nature of the lower
animals.
28. These, then, were the two forms of diversion or recreation of my
mind possible to me, in two days, when I needed such help, in this
metropolis of England. I might, as a rich man, have had better music,
if I had so chosen, though, even so, not rational or helpful; but a
poor man could only have these, or worse than these, if he cared for
any manner of spectacle. (I am not at present, observe, speaking of
pure acting, which is a study, and recreative only as a noble book is;
but of means of _mere_ amusement.)
Now, lastly, in illustration of the effect of these and other such
"amusements," and of the desire to obtain them, on the minds of our
youth, read the 'Times' correspondent's letter from Paris, in the
tenth page of the paper, to-day;[A] and that will be quite enough for
you to read, for the present, I believe.
[A] Appendix 3.
LETTER VII.
OF THE VARIOUS EXPRESSIONS OF NATIONAL FESTIVITY.
_March 4, 1867._
29. The subject which I want to bring before you is now branched, and
worse than branched, reticulated, in so many directions, that I hardly
know which shoot of it to trace, or which knot to lay hold of first.
I had intended to return to those Japanese jugglers, after a visit to
a theater in Paris; but I had better, perhaps, at once tell you the
piece of the performance which, in connection with the scene in the
English pantomime, bears most on matters in hand.
It was also a dance by a little girl--though one older than Ali Baba's
daughter, (I suppose a girl of twelve or fourteen). A dance, so
called, which consisted only in a series of short, sharp contractions
and jerks of the body and limbs, resulting in attitudes of distorted
and quaint ugliness, such as might be produced in a puppet by sharp
twitching of strings at its joints: these movements being made to the
sound of two instruments, which between them accomplished only a quick
vibratory beating and strumming, in nearly the time of a
hearth-cricket's song, but much harsher, and of course louder, and
without any sweetness; only in the monotony and unintended aimless
construction of it, reminding one of various other insect and reptile
cries or warnings: partly of the cicala's hiss; partly of the little
melancholy German frog which says "Mu, mu, mu," all summer-day long,
with its nose out of the pools by Dresden and Leipsic; and partly of
the deadened quivering and intense continuousness of the alarm of the
rattlesnake.
While this was going on, there was a Bible text repeating itself over
and over again in my head, whether I would or no:--"And Miriam the
prophetess, the sister of Aaron, took a timbrel in her hand, and all
the women went out after her with timbrels and with dances." To which
text and some others, I shall ask your attention presently; but I must
go to Paris first.
30. Not at once, however, to the theater, but to a bookseller's shop,
No. 4, Rue Voltaire, where, in the year 1858, was published the fifth
edition of Balzac's 'Contes Drôlatiques,' illustrated by 425 designs
by Gustave Doré.
Both text and illustrations are as powerful as it is ever in the
nature of evil things to be (there is no _final_ strength but in
rightness). Nothing more witty, nor more inventively horrible, has yet
been produced in the evil literature, or by the evil art, of man: nor
can I conceive it possible to go beyond either in their specialities
of corruption. The text is full of blasphemies, subtle, tremendous,
hideous in shamelessness, some put into the mouths of priests; the
illustrations are, in a word, one continuous revelry in the most
loathsome and monstrous aspects of death and sin, enlarged into
fantastic ghastliness of caricature, as if seen through the distortion
and trembling of the hot smoke of the mouth of hell. Take this
following for a general type of what they seek in death: one of the
most labored designs is of a man cut in two, downwards, by the sweep
of a sword--one half of him falls toward the spectator; the other half
is elaborately drawn in its section--giving the profile of the divided
nose and lips; cleft jaw--breast--and entrails; and this is done with
farther pollution and horror of intent in the circumstances, which I
do not choose to describe--still less some other of the designs which
seek for fantastic extreme of sin, as this for the utmost horror of
death. But of all the 425, there is not one, which does not violate
every instinct of decency and law of virtue or life, written in the
human soul.
31. Now, my friend, among the many "Signs of the Times" the production
of a book like this is a significant one: but it becomes more
significant still when connected with the farther fact, that M.
Gustave Doré, the designer of this series of plates, has just been
received with loud acclaim by the British Evangelical Public, as the
fittest and most able person whom they could at present find to
illustrate, to their minds, and recommend with grace of sacred art,
their hitherto unadorned Bible for them.
Of which Bible, and of the use we at present make of it in England,
having a grave word or two to say in my next letter (preparatory to
the examination of that verse which haunted me through the Japanese
juggling, and of some others also), I leave you first this sign of the
public esteem of it to consider at your leisure.
LETTER VIII.
THE FOUR POSSIBLE THEORIES RESPECTING THE AUTHORITY OF THE BIBLE.
_March 7, 1867._
32. I have your yesterday's letter, but must not allow myself to be
diverted from the business in hand for this once, for it is the most
important of which I have to write to you.
You must have seen long ago that the essential difference between the
political economy I am trying to teach, and the popular science, is,
that mine is based on _presumably attainable honesty_ in men, and
conceivable respect in them for the interests of others, while the
popular science founds itself wholly on their supposed constant regard
for their own, and on their honesty only so far as thereby likely to
be secured.
It becomes, therefore, for me, and for all who believe anything I say,
a great primal question on what this presumably attainable honesty is
to be based.
33. "Is it to be based on religion?" you may ask. "Are we to be
honest for fear of losing heaven if we are dishonest, or (to put it as
generously as we may) for fear of displeasing God? Or, are we to be
honest on speculation, because honesty is the best policy; and to
invest in virtue as in an undepreciable stock?"
And my answer is--not in any hesitating or diffident way (and you
know, my friend, that whatever people may say of me, I often do speak
diffidently; though, when I am diffident of things, I like to avoid
speaking of them, if it may be; but here I say with no shadow of
doubt)--your honesty is _not_ to be based either on religion or
policy. Both your religion and policy must be based on _it_. Your
honesty must be based, as the sun is, in vacant heaven; poised, as the
lights in the firmament, which have rule over the day and over the
night. If you ask why you are to be honest--you are, in the question
itself, dishonored. "Because you are a man," is the only answer; and
therefore I said in a former letter that to make your children
_capable of honesty_ is the beginning of education. Make them men
first, and religious men afterwards, and all will be sound; but a
knave's religion is always the rottenest thing about him.
34. It is not, therefore, because I am endeavoring to lay down a
foundation of religious concrete, on which to build piers of policy,
that you so often find me quoting Bible texts in defense of this or
that principle or assertion. But the fact that such references are an
offense, as I know them to be, to many of the readers of these
political essays, is one among many others, which I would desire you
to reflect upon (whether you are yourself one of the offended or not),
as expressive of the singular position which the mind of the British
public has at present taken with respect to its worshiped Book. The
positions, honestly tenable, before I use any more of its texts, I
must try to define for you.
35. All the theories possible to theological disputants respecting the
Bible are resolvable into four, and four only.
(1.) The first is that of the illiterate modern religious world, that
every word of the book known to them as "The Bible" was dictated by
the Supreme Being, and is in every syllable of it His "Word."
This theory is of course tenable by no ordinarily well-educated
person.
(2.) The second theory is, that, although admitting verbal error, the
substance of the whole collection of books called the Bible is
absolutely true, and furnished to man by Divine inspiration of the
speakers and writers of it; and that every one who honestly and
prayerfully seeks for such truth in it as is necessary for his
salvation, will infallibly find it there.
This theory is that held by most of our good and upright clergymen,
and the better class of the professedly religious laity.
(3.) The third theory is that the group of books which we call the
Bible were neither written nor collected under any Divine guidance,
securing them from substantial error; and that they contain, like all
other human writings, false statements mixed with true, and erring
thoughts mixed with just thoughts; but that they nevertheless relate,
on the whole, faithfully, the dealings of the one God with the first
races of man, and His dealings with them in aftertime through Christ:
that they record true miracles, and bear true witness to the
resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come.
This is a theory held by many of the active leaders of modern thought.
(4.) The fourth, and last possible, theory is that the mass of
religious Scripture contains merely the best efforts which we hitherto
know to have been made by any of the races of men towards the
discovery of some relations with the spiritual world; that they are
only trustworthy as expressions of the enthusiastic visions or beliefs
of earnest men oppressed by the world's darkness, and have no more
authoritative claim on our faith than the religious speculations and
histories of the Egyptians, Greeks, Persians, and Indians; but are, in
common with all these, to be reverently studied, as containing a
portion, divinely appointed, of the best wisdom which human
intellect, earnestly seeking for help from God, has hitherto been able
to gather between birth and death.
This has been, for the last half-century, the theory of the soundest
scholars and thinkers of Europe.
36. There is yet indeed one farther condition of incredulity
attainable, and sorrowfully attained, by many men of powerful
intellect--the incredulity, namely, of inspiration in any sense, or of
help given by any Divine power to the thoughts of men. But this form
of infidelity merely indicates a natural incapacity for receiving
certain emotions; though many honest and good men belong to this
insentient class.
37. The educated men, therefore, who may be seriously appealed to, in
these days, on questions of moral responsibility, as modified by
Scripture, are broadly divisible into three classes, severally holding
the last three theories above stated.
Now, whatever power a passage from the statedly authoritative portions
of the Bible may have over the mind of a person holding the fourth
theory, it will have a proportionately greater over that of persons
holding the third or the second. I, therefore, always imagine myself
speaking to the fourth class of theorists. If I can persuade or
influence _them_, I am logically sure of the others. I say
"logically," for the actual fact, strange as it may seem, is that no
persons are so little likely to submit to a passage of Scripture not
to their fancy, as those who are most positive on the subject of its
general inspiration.
38. Addressing, then, this fourth class of thinkers, I would say to
them, when asking them to enter on any subject of importance to
national morals, or conduct, "This book, which has been the accepted
guide of the moral intelligence of Europe for some fifteen hundred
years, enforces certain simple laws of human conduct which you know
have also been agreed upon, in every main point, by all the religious,
and by all the greatest profane writers, of every age and country.
This book primarily forbids pride, lasciviousness, and covetousness;
and you know that all great thinkers, in every nation of mankind,
have similarly forbidden these mortal vices. This book enjoins truth,
temperance, charity, and equity; and you know that every great
Egyptian, Greek, and Indian, enjoins these also. You know besides,
that through all the mysteries of human fate and history, this one
great law of fate is written on the walls of cities, or in their dust;
written in letters of light, and letters of blood,--that where truth,
temperance, and equity have been preserved, all strength, and peace,
and joy have been preserved also;--that where lying, lasciviousness,
and covetousness have been practised, there has followed an
infallible, and, for centuries, irrecoverable ruin. And you know,
lastly, that the observance of this common law of righteousness,
commending itself to all the pure instincts of men, and fruitful in
their temporal good, is by the religious writers of every nation, and
chiefly in this venerated Scripture of ours, connected with some
distinct hope of better life, and righteousness, to come.
39. "Let it not then offend you if, deducing principles of action
first from the laws and facts of nature, I nevertheless fortify them
also by appliance of the precepts, or suggestive and probable
teachings of this Book, of which the authority is over many around
you, more distinctly than over you, and which, confessing to be
divine, _they_, at least, can only disobey at their moral peril."
On these grounds, and in this temper, I am in the habit of appealing
to passages of Scripture in my writings on political economy; and in
this temper I will ask you to consider with me some conclusions which
appear to me derivable from that text about Miriam, which haunted me
through the jugglery; and from certain others.
LETTER IX.
THE USE OF MUSIC AND DANCING UNDER THE JEWISH THEOCRACY, COMPARED WITH
THEIR USE BY THE MODERN FRENCH.
_March 10, 1867._
40. Having, I hope, made you now clearly understand with what feeling
I would use the authority of the book which the British public,
professing to consider sacred, have lately adorned for themselves with
the work of the boldest violator of the instincts of human honor and
decency known yet in art-history, I will pursue by the help of that
verse about Miriam, and some others, the subject which occupied my
mind at both theaters, and to which, though in so apparently desultory
manner, I have been nevertheless very earnestly endeavoring to lead
you.
41. The going forth of the women of Israel after Miriam with timbrels
and with dances, was, as you doubtless remember, their expression of
passionate triumph and thankfulness, after the full accomplishment of
their deliverance from the Egyptians. That deliverance had been by the
utter death of their enemies, and accompanied by stupendous miracle;
no human creatures could in an hour of triumph be surrounded by
circumstances more solemn. I am not going to try to excite your
feelings about them. Consider only for yourself what that seeing of
the Egyptians "dead upon the sea-shore" meant to every soul that saw
it. And then reflect that these intense emotions of mingled horror,
triumph, and gratitude were expressed, in the visible presence of the
Deity, by music and dancing. If you answer that you do not believe the
Egyptians so perished, or that God ever appeared in a pillar of cloud,
I reply, "Be it so--believe or disbelieve, as you choose;--This is yet
assuredly the fact, that the author of the poem or fable of the Exodus
supposed that, under such circumstances of Divine interposition as he
had invented, the triumph of the Israelitish women would have been,
and ought to have been, under the direction of a prophetess,
expressed by music and dancing."
42. Nor was it possible that he should think otherwise, at whatever
period he wrote; both music and dancing being, among all great ancient
nations, an appointed and very principal part of the worship of the
gods.
And that very theatrical entertainment at which I sate thinking over
these things for you--that pantomime, which depended throughout for
its success on an appeal to the vices of the lower London populace,
was, in itself, nothing but a corrupt remnant of the religious
ceremonies which guided the most serious faiths of the Greek mind, and
laid the foundation of their gravest moral and didactic--more forcibly
so because at the same time dramatic--literature.
43. Returning to the Jewish history, you find soon afterwards this
enthusiastic religious dance and song employed, in their more common
and habitual manner, in the idolatries under Sinai; but beautifully
again and tenderly, after the triumph of Jephthah, "And behold his
daughter came out to meet him with timbrels and with dances." Again,
still more notably, at the triumph of David with Saul, "the women came
out of all the cities of Israel singing and dancing to meet King Saul
with tabrets, with joy, and with instruments of music." And you have
this joyful song and dance of the virgins of Israel not only
incidentally alluded to in the most solemn passages of Hebrew
religious poetry (as in Psalm lxviii. 24, 25, and Psalm cxlix. 2, 3),
but approved, and the restoration of it promised as a sign of God's
perfect blessing, most earnestly by the saddest of the Hebrew
prophets, and in one of the most beautiful of all his sayings.
"The Lord hath appeared of old unto me, saying, 'Yea, I have loved
thee with an everlasting love. Therefore, with loving-kindness have I
drawn thee.--I will build thee, and thou shalt be built, O Virgin of
Israel; thou shalt again be adorned with thy tabrets, and thou shalt
go forth in dances with them that make merry,'" (Jer. xxxi. 3, 4; and
compare v. 13). And finally, you have in two of quite the most
important passages in the whole series of Scripture (one in the Old
Testament, one in the New), the rejoicing in the repentance from, and
remission of, sins, expressed by means of music and dancing, namely,
in the rapturous dancing of David before the returning ark; and in the
joy of the father's household at the repentance of the prodigal son.
44. I could put all this much better, and more convincingly, before
you, if I were able to take any pains in writing at present; but I am
not, as I told you; being weary and ill; neither do I much care now to
use what, in the very truth, are but tricks of literary art, in
dealing with this so grave subject. You see I write you my letter
straightforward, and let you see all my scratchings out and puttings
in; and if the way I say things shocks you, or any other reader of
these letters, I cannot help it; this only I know, that what I tell
you is true, and written more earnestly than anything I ever wrote
with my best literary care; and that you will find it useful to think
upon, however it be said. Now, therefore, to draw towards our
conclusion. Supposing the Bible inspired, in any of the senses above
defined, you have in these passages a positively Divine authority for
the use of song and dance, as a means of religious service, and
expression of national thanksgiving. Supposing it not inspired, you
have (taking the passages for as slightly authoritative as you choose)
record in them, nevertheless, of a state of mind in a great nation,
producing the most beautiful religious poetry and perfect moral law
hitherto known to us, yet only expressible by them, to the fulfilment
of their joyful passion, by means of professional dance and choral
song.
45. Now I want you to contrast this state of religious rapture with
some of our modern phases of mind in parallel circumstances. You see
that the promise of Jeremiah's, "Thou shalt go forth in the dances of
them that make merry," is immediately followed by this, "Thou shalt
yet _plant vines_ upon the mountains of Samaria." And again, at the
yearly feast to the Lord in Shiloh, the dancing of the virgins was in
the midst of the vineyards (Judges xxi. 21), the feast of the vintage
being in the south, as our harvest home in the north, a peculiar
occasion of joy and thanksgiving. I happened to pass the autumn of
1863 in one of the great vine districts of Switzerland, under the
slopes of the outlying branch of the Jura which limits the arable
plain of the Canton Zurich, some fifteen miles north of Zurich itself.
That city has always been a renowned, stronghold of Swiss
Protestantism, next in importance only to Geneva; and its evangelical
zeal for the conversion of the Catholics of Uri, and endeavors to
bring about that spiritual result by stopping the supplies of salt
they needed to make their cheeses with, brought on (the Uri men
reading their Matt. v. 13, in a different sense) the battle of Keppel,
and the death of the reformer Zwinglius. The town itself shows the
most gratifying signs of progress in all the modern arts and sciences
of life. It is nearly as black as Newcastle--has a railroad station
larger than the London terminus of the Chatham and Dover--fouls the
stream of the Limmat as soon as it issues from the lake, so that you
might even venture to compare the formerly simple and innocent Swiss
river (I remember it thirty years ago--a current of pale green
crystal) with the highly educated English streams of Weare or Tyne;
and, finally, has as many French prints of dissolute tendency in its
principal shop windows as if they had the privilege of opening on the
Parisian Boulevards.
46. I was somewhat anxious to see what species of thanksgiving or
exultation would be expressed at _their_ vintage, by the peasantry in
the neighborhood of this much enlightened, evangelical, and commercial
society. It consisted in two ceremonies only. During the day, the
servants of the farms where the grapes had been gathered, collected in
knots about the vineyards, and slowly fired horse-pistols, from
morning to evening. At night they got drunk, and staggered up and down
the hill paths, uttering, at short intervals, yells and shrieks,
differing only from the howling of wild animals by a certain intended
and insolent discordance, only attainable by the malignity of debased
human creatures.
47. I must not do the injustice to the Zurich peasantry of implying
that this manner of festivity is peculiar to them. A year before, in
1862, I had formed the intention of living some years in the
neighborhood of Geneva, and had established myself experimentally on
the eastern slope of the Mont Salève; but I was forced to abandon my
purpose at last, because I could not endure the rabid howling, on
Sunday evenings, of the holiday-makers who came out from Geneva to get
drunk in the mountain village. By the way, your last letter, with its
extracts about our traffic in gin, is very valuable. I will come to
that part of the business in a little while. Meantime, my friend, note
this, respecting what I have told you, that in the very center of
Europe, in a country which is visited for their chief pleasure by the
most refined and thoughtful persons among all Christian nations--a
country made by God's hand the most beautiful in the temperate regions
of the earth, and inhabited by a race once capable of the sternest
patriotism and simplest purity of life, your modern religion, in the
very stronghold of it, has reduced the song and dance of ancient
virginal thanksgiving to the howlings and staggerings of men
betraying, in intoxication, a nature sunk more than half-way towards
the beasts; and you will begin to understand why the Bible should have
been "illustrated" by Gustave Doré.
48. One word more is needful, though this letter is long already. The
peculiar ghastliness of this Swiss mode of festivity is in its utter
failure of joy; the paralysis and helplessness of a vice in which
there is neither pleasure, nor art. But we are not, throughout Europe,
wholly thus. There is such a thing, yet, as rapturous song and dance
among us, though not indicative, by any means, of joy over repentant
sinners. You must come back to Paris with me again. I had an evening
to spare there, last summer, for investigation of theaters; and as
there was nothing at any of them that I cared much about seeing, I
asked a valet-de-place at Meurice's what people were generally going
to. He said, "All the English went to see the _Lanterne Magique_." I
do not care to tell you what general entertainment I received in
following, for once, the lead of my countrymen; but it closed with
the representation of the characteristic dancing of all ages of the
world; and the dance given as characteristic of modern time was the
Cancan, which you will see alluded to in the extract given in the note
at page 80 of 'Sesame and Lilies' (the small edition; and page 54 of
Vol. I. of the Revised Series of the Entire Works). "The ball
terminated with a Devilish Chain and a Cancan of Hell, at seven in the
morning." It was led by four principal dancers (who have since
appeared in London in the _Huguenot Captain_), and it is many years
since I have seen such perfect dancing, as far as finish and accuracy
of art and fulness of animal power and fire are concerned. Nothing
could be better done, in its own evil way, the object of the dance
throughout being to express, in every gesture, the wildest fury of
insolence and vicious passions possible to human creatures. So that
you see, though, for the present, we find ourselves utterly incapable
of a rapture of gladness or thanksgiving, the dance which is presented
as characteristic of modern civilization is still rapturous
enough--but it is with rapture of blasphemy.
LETTER X.
THE MEANING AND ACTUAL OPERATION OF SATANIC OR DEMONIACAL INFLUENCE.
_March 16, 1867._
49. You may gather from the facts given you in my last letter that, as
the expression of true and holy gladness was in old time statedly
offered up by men for a part of worship to God their Father, so the
expression of false and unholy gladness is in modern times, with as
much distinctness and plainness, asserted by them openly to be offered
to another spirit: "Chain of the Devil," and "Cancan of Hell" being
the names assigned to these modern forms of joyous procession.
Now, you know that, among the best and wisest of our present
religious teachers, there is a gradual tendency to disbelieve, and to
preach their disbelief, in the commonly received ideas of the Devil,
and of his place, and his work. While, among some of our equally
well-meaning, but far less wise, religious teachers, there is, in
consequence, a panic spreading in anticipation of the moral dangers
which must follow on the loss of the help of the Devil. One of the
last appearances in public of the author of the 'Christian Year' was
at a conclave of clergymen assembled in defense of faith in
damnation.[A] The sense of the meeting generally was, that there
_must_ be such a place as hell, because no one would ever behave
decently upon earth unless they were kept in wholesome fear of the
fires beneath it: and Mr. Keble, especially insisting on this view,
related a story of an old woman who had a wicked son, and who, having
lately heard with horror of the teaching of Mr. Maurice and others,
exclaimed pathetically, "My son is bad enough as it is, and if he were
not afraid of hell, what would become of him!" (I write from memory,
and cannot answer for the words, but I can for their purport.)
[A] _Physical_ damnation, I should have said. It is strange
how seldom pain of heart is spoken of as a possible element
of future, or as the worst of present pain.
50. Now, my friend, I am afraid that I must incur the charge of such
presumption as may be involved in variance from _both_ these systems
of teaching.
I do not merely _believe_ there is such a place as hell. I _know_
there is such a place; and I know also that when men have got to the
point of believing virtue impossible but through dread of it, they
have got _into_ it.
I mean, that according to the distinctness with which they hold such a
creed, the stain of nether fire has passed upon them. In the depth of
his heart Mr. Keble could not have entertained the thought for an
instant; and I believe it was only as a conspicuous sign to the
religious world of the state into which they were sinking, that this
creed, possible in its sincerity only to the basest of them, was
nevertheless appointed to be uttered by the lips of the most tender,
gracious, and beloved of their teachers.
51. "Virtue impossible but for fear of hell"--a lofty creed for your
English youth--and a holy one! And yet, my friend, there was something
of right in the terrors of this clerical conclave. For, though you
should assuredly be able to hold your own in the straight ways of God,
without always believing that the Devil is at your side, it is a state
of mind much to be dreaded, that you should not _know_ the Devil when
you _see_ him there. For the probability is that when you do see him,
the way you are walking in is not one of God's ways at all, but is
leading you quite into other neighborhoods than His. On His way,
indeed, you may often, like Albert Dürer's Knight, see the Fiend
behind you, but you will find that he drops always farther and farther
behind; whereas, if he jogs with you at your side, it is probably one
of his own bypaths you are got on. And, in any case, it is a highly
desirable matter that you should know him when you set eyes on him,
which we are very far from doing in these days, having convinced
ourselves that the graminivorous form of him, with horn and tail, is
extant no longer. But in fearful truth, the Presence and Power of Him
_is_ here; in the world, with us, and within us, mock as you may; and
the fight with him, for the time, sore, and widely unprosperous.
Do not think I am speaking metaphorically or rhetorically, or with any
other than literal and earnest meaning of words. Hear me, I pray you,
therefore, for a little while, as earnestly as I speak.
52. Every faculty of man's soul, and every instinct of it by which he
is meant to live, is exposed to its own special form of corruption:
and whether within Man, or in the external world, there is a power or
condition of temptation which is perpetually endeavoring to reduce
every glory of his soul, and every power of his life, to such
corruption as is possible to them. And the more beautiful they are,
the more fearful is the death which is attached as a penalty to their
degradation.
53. Take, for instance, that which, in its purity, is the source of
the highest and purest mortal happiness--Love. Think of it first at
its highest--as it may exist in the disciplined spirit of a perfect
human creature; as it has so existed again and again, and does always,
wherever it truly exists at all, as the _purifying_ passion of the
soul. I will not speak of the transcendental and imaginative intensity
in which it may reign in noble hearts, as when it inspired the
greatest religious poem yet given to men; but take it in its true and
quiet purity in any simple lover's heart,--as you have it expressed,
for instance, thus, exquisitely, in the 'Angel in the House':--
"And there, with many a blissful tear,
I vowed to love and prayed to wed
The maiden who had grown so dear;--
Thanked God, who had set her in my path;
And promised, as I hoped to win,
I never would sully my faith
By the least selfishness or sin;
Whatever in her sight I'd seem
I'd really be; I ne'er would blend,
With my delight in her, a dream
'Twould change her cheek to comprehend;
And, if she wished it, would prefer
Another's to my own success;
And always seek the best for her
With unofficious tenderness."
Take this for the pure type of it in its simplicity; and then think of
what corruption this passion is capable. I will give you a type of
that also, and at your very doors. I cannot refer you to the time when
the crime happened; but it was some four or five years ago, near
Newcastle, and it has remained always as a ghastly landmark in my
mind, owing to the horror of the external circumstances. The body of
the murdered woman was found naked, rolled into a heap of ashes, at
the mouth of one of your pits.
54. You have thus two limiting examples, of the Pure Passion, and of
its corruption. Now, whatever influence it is, without or within us,
which has a tendency to degrade the one towards the other, is
literally and accurately "Satanic." And this treacherous or deceiving
spirit is perpetually at work, so that all the worst evil among us is
a betrayed or corrupted good. Take religion itself: the desire of
finding out God, and placing one's self in some true son's or
servant's relation to Him. The Devil, that is to say, the deceiving
spirit within us, or outside of us, mixes up our own vanity with this
desire; makes us think that in our love to God we have established
some connection with Him which separates us from our fellow-men, and
renders us superior to them. Then it takes but one wave of the Devil's
hand; and we are burning them alive for taking the liberty of
contradicting us.
55. Take the desire of teaching--the entirely unselfish and noble
instinct for telling to those who are ignorant, the truth we know, and
guarding them from the errors we see them in danger of;--there is no
nobler, no more constant instinct in honorable breasts; but let the
Devil formalize it, and mix the pride of a profession with it--get
foolish people entrusted with the business of instruction, and make
their giddy heads giddier by putting them up in pulpits above a
submissive crowd--and you have it instantly corrupted into its own
reverse; you have an alliance _against_ the light, shrieking at the
sun, and the moon, and stars, as profane spectra:--a company of the
blind, beseeching those they lead to remain blind also. "The heavens
and the lights that rule them are untrue; the laws of creation are
treacherous; the poles of the earth are out of poise. But _we_ are
true. Light is in us only. Shut your eyes close and fast, and we will
lead you."
56. Take the desire and faith of mutual help; the virtue of vowed
brotherhood for the accomplishment of common purpose, (without which
nothing great can be wrought by multitudinous bands of men); let the
Devil put pride of caste into it, and you have a military organization
applied for a thousand years to maintain that higher caste in idleness
by robbing the laboring poor; let the Devil put a few small personal
interests into it, and you have all faithful deliberation on national
law rendered impossible in the parliaments of Europe, by the
antagonism of parties.
57. Take the instinct for justice, and the natural sense of
indignation against crime; let the Devil color it with personal
passion, and you have a mighty race of true and tender-hearted men
living for centuries in such bloody feud that every note and word of
their national songs is a dirge, and every rock of their hills is a
gravestone. Take the love of beauty, and power of imagination, which
are the source of every true achievement in art; let the Devil touch
them with sensuality, and they are stronger than the sword or the
flame to blast the cities where they were born, into ruin without
hope. Take the instinct of industry and ardor of commerce, which are
meant to be the support and mutual maintenance of man; let the Devil
touch them with avarice, and you shall see the avenues of the exchange
choked with corpses that have died of famine.
58. Now observe--I leave you to call this deceiving spirit what you
like--or to theorize about it as you like. All that I desire you to
recognize is the fact of its being here, and the need of its being
fought with. If you take the Bible's account of it, or Dante's, or
Milton's, you will receive the image of it as a mighty spiritual
creature, commanding others, and resisted by others: if you take
Æschylus's or Hesiod's account of it, you will hold it for a partly
elementary and unconscious adversity of fate, and partly for a group
of monstrous spiritual agencies connected with death, and begotten out
of the dust; if you take a modern rationalist's, you will accept it
for a mere treachery and want of vitality in our own moral nature
exposing it to loathsomeness or moral disease, as the body is capable
of mortification or leprosy. I do not care what you call it,--whose
history you believe of it,--nor what you yourself can imagine about
it; the origin, or nature, or name may be as you will, but the
deadly reality of the thing is with us, and warring against us,
and on our true war with it depends whatever life we can win. Deadly
reality, I say. The puff-adder or horned asp is not more real.
Unbelievable,--_those_,--unless you had seen them; no fable could have
been coined out of any human brain so dreadful, within its own poor
material sphere, as that blue-lipped serpent--working its way sidelong
in the sand. As real, but with sting of eternal death--this worm that
dies not, and fire that is not quenched, within our souls or around
them. Eternal death, I say--sure, that, whatever creed you hold;--if
the old Scriptural one, Death of perpetual banishment from before
God's face; if the modern rationalist one, Death Eternal for _us_,
instant and unredeemable ending of lives wasted in misery.
This is what this unquestionably present--this, according to his
power, _omni_-present--fiend, brings us towards, daily. He is the
person to be "voted" against, my working friend; it is worth
something, having a vote against _him_, if you can get it! Which you
can, indeed; but not by gift from Cabinet Ministers; you must work
warily with your own hands, and drop sweat of heart's blood, before
you can record that vote effectually.
Of which more in next letter.
LETTER XI.
THE SATANIC POWER IS MAINLY TWOFOLD: THE POWER OF CAUSING FALSEHOOD
AND THE POWER OF CAUSING PAIN. THE RESISTANCE IS BY LAW OF HONOR AND
LAW OF DELIGHT.
_March 19, 1857._
59. You may perhaps have thought my last three or four letters mere
rhapsodies. They are nothing of the kind; they are accurate accounts
of literal facts, which we have to deal with daily. This thing, or
power, opposed to God's power, and specifically called "Mammon" in the
Sermon on the Mount, is, in deed and in truth, a continually present
and active enemy, properly called "_Arch_-enemy," that is to say,
"Beginning and Prince of Enemies," and daily we have to record our
vote for, or against him. Of the manner of which record we were next
to consider.
60. This enemy is always recognizable, briefly in two functions. He is
pre-eminently the Lord of _Lies_ and the Lord of _Pain_. Wherever Lies
are, he is; wherever Pain is, he has been--so that of the Spirit of
Wisdom (who is called God's Helper, as Satan His Adversary) it is
written, not only that by her Kings reign, and Princes decree justice,
but also that her ways are ways of Pleasantness, and all her paths
Peace.
Therefore, you will succeed, you working men, in recording your votes
against this arch-enemy, precisely in the degree in which you can do
away with falsehood and pain in your work and lives; and bring truth
into the one, and pleasure into the other; all education being
directed to make yourselves and your children _capable of Honesty_ and
_capable of Delight_; and to rescue yourselves from iniquity and
agony. And this is what I meant by saying in the preface to 'Unto this
Last' that the central requirement of education consisted in giving
habits of gentleness and justice; "gentleness" (as I will show you
presently) being the best single word I could have used to express the
capacity for giving and receiving true pleasure; and "justice" being
similarly the most comprehensive word for all kind of honest dealing.
61. Now, I began these letters with the purpose of explaining the
nature of the requirements of justice first, and then those of
gentleness, but I allowed myself to be led into that talk about the
theaters, not only because the thoughts could be more easily written
as they came, but also because I was able thus to illustrate for you
more directly the nature of the enemy we have to deal with. You do not
perhaps know, though I say this diffidently (for I often find working
men know many things which one would have thought were out of their
way), that music was, among the Greeks, quite the first means of
education; and that it was so connected with their system of ethics
and of intellectual training, that the God of Music is with them also
the God of Righteousness;--the God who purges and avenges iniquity,
and contends with their Satan as represented under the form of Python,
"the corrupter." And the Greeks were incontrovertibly right in this.
Music is the nearest at hand, the most orderly, the most delicate, and
the most perfect, of all bodily pleasures; it is also the only one
which is equally helpful to all the ages of man,--helpful from the
nurse's song to her infant, to the music, unheard of others, which so
often haunts the deathbed of pure and innocent spirits. And the action
of the deceiving or devilish power is in _nothing_ shown quite so
distinctly among us at this day,--not even in our commercial
dishonesties, nor in our social cruelties,--as in its having been able
to take away music, as an instrument of education, altogether; and to
enlist it almost wholly in the service of superstition on the one
hand, and of sensuality on the other.
62. This power of the Muses, then, and its proper influence over you
workmen, I shall eventually have much to insist upon with you; and in
doing so I shall take that beautiful parable of the Prodigal Son
(which I have already referred to), and explain, as far as I know, the
significance of it, and then I will take the three means of festivity,
or wholesome human joy, therein stated,--fine dress, rich food, and
music;--("bring forth the fairest robe for him,"--"bring forth the
fatted calf, and kill it;" "as he drew nigh, he heard music and
dancing"); and I will show you how all these three things, fine dress,
rich food, and music (including ultimately all the other arts) are
meant to be sources of life, and means of moral discipline, to all
men; and how they have all three been made, by the Devil, the means of
guilt, dissoluteness, and death.[A] But first I must return to my
original plan of these letters, and endeavor to set down for you some
of the laws which, in a true Working Men's Parliament, must be
ordained in defense of Honesty.
[A] See 'Fors Clavigera,' Letter XXIV.
Of which laws (preliminary to all others, and necessary above all
others), having now somewhat got my raveled threads together again,
I will begin talk in my next letter.
LETTER XII.
THE NECESSITY OF IMPERATIVE LAW TO THE PROSPERITY OF STATES.
_March 20, 1867._
63. I have your most interesting letter,[A] which I keep for
reference, when I come to the consideration of its subject in its
proper place, under the head of the abuse of Food. I do not wonder
that your life should be rendered unhappy by the scenes of drunkenness
which you are so often compelled to witness; nor that this so gigantic
and infectious evil should seem to you the root of the greater part of
the misery of our lower orders. I do not wonder that George Cruikshank
has warped the entire current of his thoughts and life, at once to my
admiration and my sorrow, from their natural field of work, that he
might spend them, in struggle with this fiend, for the poor lowest
people whom he knows so well. I wholly sympathize with you in
indignation at the methods of temptation employed, and at the use of
the fortunes made by the vendors of death; and whatever immediately
applicable legal means there might be of restricting the causes of
drunkenness, I should without hesitation desire to bring into
operation. But all such appliance I consider temporary and
provisionary; nor, while there is record of the miracle at Cana (not
to speak of the sacrament) can I conceive it possible, without
(logically) the denial of the entire truth of the New Testament, to
reprobate the use of wine as a stimulus to the powers of life.
Supposing we did deny the words and deeds of the Founder of
Christianity, the authority of the wisest heathens, especially that of
Plato in the 'Laws,' is wholly against abstinence from wine; and much
as I can believe, and as I have been endeavoring to make you believe
also, of the subtlety of the Devil, I do not suppose the vine to have
been one of his inventions. Of this, however, more in another place.
By the way, was it not curious that in the 'Manchester Examiner,' in
which that letter of mine on the abuse of dancing appeared, there
chanced to be, in the next column, a paragraph giving an account of a
girl stabbing her betrayer in a ball-room; and another paragraph
describing a Parisian character, which gives exactly the extreme type
I wanted, for example of the abuse of Food?[B]
[A] Appendix 4.
[B] Appendix 5.
64. I return, however, now to the examination of possible means for
the enforcement of justice, in temper and in act, as the first of
political requirements. And as, in stating my conviction of the
necessity of certain stringent laws on this matter, I shall be in
direct opposition to Mr. Stuart Mill; and, more or less, in opposition
to other professors of modern political economy, as well as to many
honest and active promoters of the privileges of working men (as if
privilege only were wanted and never restraint!), I will give you, as
briefly as I can, the grounds on which I am prepared to justify such
opposition.
65. When the crew of a wrecked ship escape in an open boat, and the
boat is crowded, the provisions scanty, and the prospect of making
land distant, laws are instantly established and enforced which no one
thinks of disobeying. An entire equality of claim to the provisions is
acknowledged without dispute; and an equal liability to necessary
labor. No man who can row is allowed to refuse his oar; no man,
however much money he may have saved in his pocket, is allowed so much
as half a biscuit beyond his proper ration. Any riotous person who
endangered the safety of the rest would be bound, and laid in the
bottom of the boat, without the smallest compunction, for such
violation of the principles of individual liberty; and, on the other
hand, any child, or woman, or aged person, who was helpless, and
exposed to great danger and suffering by their weakness, would receive
more than ordinary care and indulgence, not unaccompanied with
unanimous self-sacrifice on the part of the laboring crew.
There is never any question under circumstances like these, of what is
right and wrong, worthy and unworthy, wise or foolish. If there _be_
any question, there is little hope for boat or crew. The right man is
put at the helm; every available hand is set to the oars; the sick are
tended, and the vicious restrained, at once, and decisively; or if
not, the end is near.
66. Now, the circumstances of every associated group of human society,
contending bravely for national honors and felicity of life, differ
only from those thus supposed, in the greater, instead of less,
necessity for the establishment of restraining law. There is no point
of difference in the difficulties to be met, nor in the rights
reciprocally to be exercised. Vice and indolence are not less, but
more, injurious in a nation than in a boat's company; the modes in
which they affect the interests of worthy persons being far more
complex, and more easily concealed. The right of restraint, vested in
those who labor, over those who would impede their labor, is as
absolute in the large as in the small society; the equal claim to
share in whatever is necessary to the common life (or commonwealth) is
as indefeasible; the claim of the sick and helpless to be cared for by
the strong with earnest self-sacrifice, is as pitiful and as
imperative; the necessity that the governing authority should be in
the hands of a true and trained pilot is as clear and as constant. In
none of these conditions is there any difference between a nation and
a boat's company. The only difference is in this, that the
impossibility of discerning the effects of individual error and crime,
or of counteracting them by individual effort, in the affairs of a
great nation renders it tenfold more necessary than in a small society
that direction by law should be sternly established. Assume that your
boat's crew is disorderly and licentious, and will, by agreement,
submit to no order;--the most troublesome of them will yet be easily
discerned; and the chance is that the best man among them knocks him
down. Common instinct of self-preservation will make the rioters put a
good sailor at the helm, and impulsive pity and occasional help will
be, by heart and hand, here and there given to visible distress. Not
so in the ship of the realm. The most troublesome persons in _it_ are
usually the least recognized for such, and the most active in its
management; the best men mind their own business patiently, and are
never thought of; the good helmsman never touches the tiller but in
the last extremity; and the worst forms of misery are hidden, not only
from every eye, but from every thought. On the deck, the aspect is of
Cleopatra's galley--under hatches there is a slave hospital; while,
finally (and this is the most fatal difference of all), even the few
persons who care to interfere energetically, with purpose of doing
good, can, in a large society, discern so little of the real state of
evil to be dealt with, and judge so little of the best means of
dealing with it, that half of their best efforts will be misdirected,
and some may even do more harm than good. Whereas it is the sorrowful
law of this universe, that evil, even unconscious and unintended,
never fails of _its_ effect; and in a state where the evil and the
good, under conditions of individual "liberty," are allowed to contend
together, not only every _stroke_ on the Devil's side tells--but every
_slip_, (the mistakes of wicked men being as mischievous as their
successes); while on the side of right, there will be much direct and
fatal defeat, and, even of its measure of victory, half will be
fruitless.
67. It is true, of course, that, in the end of ends, nothing but the
right conquers; the prevalent thorns of wrong, at last, crackle away
in indiscriminate flame: and of the good seed sown, one grain in a
thousand some day comes up--and somebody lives by it; but most of our
great teachers, not excepting Carlyle and Emerson themselves, are a
little too encouraging in their proclamation of this comfort, not, to
my mind, very sufficient, when for the present our fields are full of
nothing but darnel instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley; and
none of them seem to me yet to have enough insisted on the inevitable
power and infectiousness of all evil, and the easy and utter
extinguishableness of good. Medicine often fails of its effect--but
poison never: and while, in summing the observation of past life, not
unwatchfully spent, I can truly say that I have a thousand times seen
patience disappointed of her hope, and wisdom of her aim, I have never
yet seen folly fruitless of mischief, nor vice conclude but in
calamity.
68. There is, however, one important condition in national economy, in
which the analogy of that of a ship's company is incomplete: namely,
that while labor at oar or sail is necessarily united, and can attain
no independent good, or personal profit, the labor properly undertaken
by the several members of a political community is necessarily, and
justly, within certain limits, independent; and obtains for them
independent advantage, of which, if you will glance at the last
paragraph of the first chapter of 'Munera Pulveris,' you will see I
should be the last person to propose depriving them. This great
difference in final condition involves necessarily much complexity in
the system and application of general laws; but it in no wise
abrogates,--on the contrary, it renders yet more imperative,--the
necessity for the firm ordinance of such laws, which, marking the due
limits of independent agency, may enable it to exist in full energy,
not only without becoming injurious, but so as more variously and
perfectly to promote the entire interests of the commonwealth.
I will address myself therefore in my next letter to the statement of
some of these necessary laws.
LETTER XIII.
THE PROPER OFFICES OF THE BISHOP AND DUKE; OR, "OVERSEER" AND
"LEADER."
_March 21, 1867._
69. I see, by your last letter, for which I heartily thank you, that
you would not sympathize with me in my sorrow for the desertion of his
own work by George Cruikshank, that he may fight in the front of the
temperance ranks. But you do not know what work he has left undone,
nor how much richer inheritance you might have received from his hand.
It was no more _his_ business to etch diagrams of drunkenness than it
is mine at this moment to be writing these letters against anarchy. It
is "the first mild day of March" (high time, I think, that it should
be!), and by rights I ought to be out among the budding banks and
hedges, outlining sprays of hawthorn and clusters of primrose. That is
_my_ right work; and it is not, in the inner gist and truth of it,
right nor good, for you, or for anybody else, that Cruikshank with his
great gift, and I with my weak, but yet thoroughly clear and definite
one, should both of us be tormented by agony of indignation and
compassion, till we are forced to give up our peace, and pleasure, and
power; and rush down into the streets and lanes of the city, to do the
little that is in the strength of our single hands against their
uncleanliness and iniquity. But, as in a sorely besieged town, every
man must to the ramparts, whatsoever business he leaves, so neither he
nor I have had any choice but to leave our household stuff, and go on
crusade, such as we are called to; not that I mean, if Fate may be
anywise resisted, to give up the strength of my life, as he has given
his; for I think he was wrong in doing so; and that he should only
have carried the fiery cross his appointed leagues, and then given it
to another hand; and, for my own part, I mean these very letters to
close my political work for many a day; and I write them, not in any
hope of their being at present listened to, but to disburthen my heart
of the witness I have to bear, that I may be free to go back to my
garden lawns, and paint birds and flowers there.
70. For these same statutes which we are to consider to-day, have
indeed been in my mind now these fourteen years, ever since I wrote
the last volume of the 'Stones of Venice,' in which you will find, in
the long note on Modern Education, most of what I have been now in
detail writing to you, hinted in abstract; and, at the close of it,
this sentence, of which I solemnly now avouch (in thankfulness that I
was permitted to write it), every word: "Finally, I hold it for
indisputable, that the first duty of a State is to see that every
child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated,
till it attain years of discretion. But in order to the effecting this
the Government must have an authority over the people of which we now
do not so much as dream."
That authority I did not then endeavor to define, for I knew all such
assertions would be useless, and that the necessarily resultant outcry
would merely diminish my influence in other directions. But now I do
not care about influence any more, it being only my concern to say
truly that which I know, and, if it may be, get some quiet life, yet,
among the fields in the evening shadow.
71. There is, I suppose, no word which men are prouder of the right to
attach to their names, or more envious of others who bear it, when
they themselves may not, than the word "noble." Do you know what it
originally meant, and always, in the right use of it, means? It means
a "known" person; one who has risen far enough above others to draw
men's eyes to him, and to be known (honorably) for such and such an
one. "Ignoble," on the other hand, is derived from the same root as
the word "ignorance." It means an unknown, inglorious person. And no
more singular follies have been committed by weak human creatures than
those which have been caused by the instinct, pure and simple, of
escaping from this obscurity. Instinct, which, corrupted, will
hesitate at no means, good or evil, of satisfying itself with
notoriety--instinct, nevertheless, which, like all other natural ones,
has a true and pure purpose, and ought always in a worthy way to be
satisfied.
All men ought to be in this sense "noble"; known of each other, and
desiring to be known. And the first law which a nation, desiring to
conquer all the devices of the Father of Lies, should establish among
its people, is that they _shall_ be so known.
72. Will you please now read § 22 of 'Sesame and Lilies'? The
reviewers in the ecclesiastical journals laughed at it, as a rhapsody,
when the book came out; none having the slightest notion of what I
meant: (nor, indeed, do I well see how it could be otherwise!).
Nevertheless, I meant precisely and literally what is there said,
namely, that a bishop's duty being to watch over the souls of his
people, and _give_ account of every one of them, it becomes
practically necessary for him first to _get_ some account of their
bodies. Which he was wont to do in the early days of Christianity by
help of a person called "deacon" or "ministering servant," whose name
is still retained among preliminary ecclesiastical dignities, vainly
enough! Putting, however, all questions of forms and names aside, the
thing actually needing to be done is this--that over every hundred
(more or less) of the families composing a Christian State, there
should be appointed an overseer, or bishop, to render account, to the
State, of the life of every individual in those families; and to have
care both of their interest and conduct to such an extent as they may
be willing to admit, or as their faults may justify: so that it may be
impossible for any person, however humble, to suffer from unknown
want, or live in unrecognized crime;--such help and observance being
rendered without officiousness either of interference or inquisition
(the limits of both being determined by national law), but with the
patient and gentle watchfulness which true Christian pastors now
exercise over their flocks; only with a higher legal authority
presently to be defined, of interference on due occasion.
And with this farther function, that such overseers shall be not only
the pastors, but the biographers, of their people; a written statement
of the principal events in the life of each family being annually
required to be rendered by them to a superior State Officer. These
records, laid up in public offices, would soon furnish indications of
the families whom it would be advantageous to the nation to advance in
position, or distinguish with honor, and aid by such reward as it
should be the object of every Government to distribute no less
punctually, and far more frankly, than it distributes punishment:
(compare 'Munera Pulveris,' Essay IV., in paragraph on Critic Law),
while the mere fact of permanent record being kept of every event of
importance, whether disgraceful or worthy of praise, in each family,
would of itself be a deterrent from crime, and a stimulant to
well-deserving conduct, far beyond mere punishment or reward.
73. Nor need you think that there would be anything in such a system
un-English, or tending to espionage. No uninvited visits should ever
be made in any house, unless law had been violated; nothing recorded,
against its will, of any family, but what was inevitably known of its
publicly visible conduct, and the results of that conduct. What else
was written should be only by the desire, and from the communications,
of its head. And in a little while it would come to be felt that the
true history of a nation was indeed not of its wars, but of its
households; and the desire of men would rather be to obtain some
conspicuous place in these honorable annals, than to shrink behind
closed shutters from public sight. Until at last, George Herbert's
grand word of command would hold not only on the conscience, but the
actual system and outer economy of life,
"Think the King sees thee still, for _his_ King does."
74. Secondly, above these bishops or pastors, who are only to be
occupied in offices of familiar supervision and help, should be
appointed higher officers of State, having executive authority over as
large districts as might be conveniently (according to the number and
circumstances of their inhabitants) committed to their care; officers
who, according to the reports of the pastors, should enforce or
mitigate the operation of too rigid general law, and determine
measures exceptionally necessary for public advantage. For instance,
the general law being that all children of the operative classes, at a
certain age, should be sent to public schools, these superior officers
should have power, on the report of the pastors, to dispense with the
attendance of children who had sick parents to take charge of, or
whose home-life seemed to be one of better advantage for them than
that of the common schools; or who, for any other like cause, might
justifiably claim remission. And it being the general law that the
entire body of the public should contribute to the cost, and divide
the profits, of all necessary public works and undertakings, as roads,
mines, harbor protections, and the like, and that nothing of this kind
should be permitted to be in the hands of private speculators, it
should be the duty of the district officer to collect whatever
information was accessible respecting such sources of public profit;
and to represent the circumstances in Parliament: and then, with
Parliamentary authority, but on his own sole personal responsibility,
to see that such enterprises were conducted honestly and with due
energy and order.
The appointment to both these offices should be by election, and for
life; by what forms of election shall be matter of inquiry, after we
have determined some others of the necessary constitutional laws.
75. I do not doubt but that you are already beginning to think it was
with good reason I held my peace these fourteen years,--and that, for
any good likely to be done by speaking, I might as well have held it
altogether!
It may be so: but merely to complete and explain my own work, it is
necessary that I should say these things finally; and I believe that
the imminent danger to which we are now in England exposed by the
gradually accelerated fall of our aristocracy (wholly their own
fault), and the substitution of money-power for their martial one; and
by the correspondingly imminent prevalence of mob violence here, as in
America; together with the continually increasing chances of insane
war, founded on popular passion, whether of pride, fear, or
acquisitiveness,--all these dangers being further darkened and
degraded by the monstrous forms of vice and selfishness which the
appliances of recent wealth, and of vulgar mechanical art, make
possible to the million,--will soon bring us into a condition in which
men will be glad to listen to almost any words but those of a
demagogue, and to seek any means of safety rather than those in which
they have lately trusted. So, with your good leave, I will say my say
to the end, mock at it who may.
P.S.--I take due note of the regulations of trade proposed in your
letter just received[A]--all excellent. I shall come to them
presently, "Cash payment" above all. You may write that on your
trade-banners in letters of gold, wherever you would have them raised
victoriously.
[A] Appendix 6.
LETTER XIV.
THE FIRST GROUP OF ESSENTIAL LAWS--AGAINST THEFT BY FALSE WORK, AND BY
BANKRUPTCY.--NECESSARY PUBLICITY OF ACCOUNTS.
_March 26, 1867._
76. I feel much inclined to pause at this point, to answer the kind of
questions and objections which I know must be rising in your mind,
respecting the authority supposed to be lodged in the persons of the
officers just specified. But I can neither define, nor justify to you,
the powers I would desire to see given to them, till I state to you
the kind of laws they would have to enforce: of which the first group
should be directed to the prevention of all kinds of thieving; but
chiefly of the occult and polite methods of it; and, of all occult
methods, chiefly, the making and selling of bad goods. No form of
theft is so criminal as this--none so deadly to the State. If you
break into a man's house and steal a hundred pounds' worth of plate,
he knows his loss, and there is an end (besides that you take your
risk of punishment for your gain, like a man). And if you do it
bravely and openly, and habitually live by such inroad, you may retain
nearly every moral and manly virtue, and become a heroic rider and
reiver, and hero of song. But if you swindle me out of twenty
shillings' worth of quality on each of a hundred bargains, I lose my
hundred pounds all the same, and I get a hundred untrustworthy
articles besides, which will fail me and injure me in all manner of
ways, when I least expect it; and you, having done your thieving
basely, are corrupted by the guilt of it to the very heart's core.
77. This is the first thing, therefore, which your general laws must
be set to punish, fiercely, immitigably, to the utter prevention and
extinction of it, or there is no hope for you. No religion that ever
was preached on this earth of God's rounding ever proclaimed any
salvation to sellers of bad goods. If the Ghost that is in you,
whatever the essence of it, leaves your hand a juggler's, and your
heart a cheat's, it is not a Holy Ghost, be assured of that. And for
the rest, all political economy, as well as all higher virtue, depends
_first on sound work_.
Let your laws, then, I say, in the beginning, be set to secure this.
You cannot make punishment too stern for subtle knavery. Keep no truce
with this enemy, whatever pardon you extend to more generous ones. For
light weights and false measures, or for proved adulteration or
dishonest manufacture of article, the penalty should be simply
confiscation of goods and sending out of the country. The kind of
person who desires prosperity by such practices could not be made to
"emigrate" too speedily. What to do with him in the place you appoint
to be blessed by his presence, we will in time consider.
78. Under such penalty, however, and yet more under the pressure of
such a right public opinion as could pronounce and enforce such
penalty, I imagine that sham articles would become speedily as rare as
sound ones are now. The chief difficulty in the matter would be to fix
your standard. This would have to be done by the guild of every trade
in its own manner, and within certain easily recognizable limits, and
this fixing of standard would necessitate much simplicity in the forms
and kinds of articles sold. You could only warrant a certain kind of
glazing or painting in china, a certain quality of leather or cloth,
bricks of a certain clay, loaves of a defined mixture of meal.
Advisable improvements or varieties in manufacture would have to be
examined and accepted by the trade guild: when so accepted, they
would be announced in public reports; and all puffery and
self-proclamation, on the part of tradesmen, absolutely forbidden, as
much as the making of any other kind of noise or disturbance.
79. But observe, this law is only to have force over tradesmen whom I
suppose to have joined voluntarily in carrying out a better system of
commerce. Outside of their guild, they would have to leave the rogue
to puff and cheat as he chose, and the public to be gulled as they
chose. All that is necessary is that the said public should clearly
know the shops in which they could get warranted articles; and, as
clearly, those in which they bought at their own risk.
And the above-named penalty of confiscation of goods should of course
be enforced only against dishonest members of the trade guild. If
people chose to buy of those who had openly refused to join an honest
society, they should be permitted to do so, at their pleasure, and
peril: and this for two reasons,--the first, that it is always
necessary, in enacting strict law, to leave some safety valve for
outlet of irrepressible vice (nearly all the stern lawgivers of old
time erred by oversight in this; so that the morbid elements of the
State, which it should be allowed to get rid of in a cutaneous and
openly curable manner, were thrown inwards, and corrupted its
constitution, and broke all down);--the second, that operations of
trade and manufacture conducted under, and guarded by, severe law,
ought always to be subject to the stimulus of such erratic external
ingenuity as cannot be tested by law, or would be hindered from its
full exercise by the dread of it; not to speak of the farther need of
extending all possible indulgence to foreign traders who might wish to
exercise their industries here without liability to the surveillance
of our trade guilds.
80. Farther, while for all articles warranted by the guild (as above
supposed) the prices should be annually fixed for the trade throughout
the kingdom; and the producing workman's wages fixed, so as to define
the master's profits within limits admitting only such variation as
the nature of the given article of sale rendered inevitable;--yet, in
the production of other classes of articles, whether by skill of
applied handicraft, or fineness of material above the standard of the
guild, attaining, necessarily, values above its assigned prices, every
firm should be left free to make its own independent efforts and
arrangements with its workmen, subject always to the same penalty, if
it could be proved to have consistently described, or offered,
anything to the public for what it was not: and finally, the state of
the affairs of every firm should be annually reported to the guild,
and its books laid open to inspection, for guidance in the regulation
of prices in the subsequent year; and any firm whose liabilities
exceeded its assets by a hundred pounds should be forthwith declared
bankrupt. And I will anticipate what I have to say in succeeding
letters so far as to tell you that I would have this condition extend
to every firm in the country, large or small, and of whatever rank in
business. And thus you perceive, my friend, I shall not have to
trouble you or myself much with deliberations respecting commercial
"panics," nor to propose legislative cures for _them_, by any
laxatives or purgatives of paper currency, or any other change of
pecuniary diet.
LETTER XV.
THE NATURE OF THEFT BY UNJUST PROFITS.--CRIME CAN FINALLY BE ARRESTED
ONLY BY EDUCATION.
_29th March._
81. The first methods of polite robbery, by dishonest manufacture and
by debt, of which we have been hitherto speaking, are easily enough to
be dealt with and ended, when once men have a mind to end them. But
the third method of polite robbery, by dishonest _acquisition_, has
many branches, and is involved among honest arts of acquisition, so
that it is difficult to repress the one without restraining the other.
Observe, first, large fortunes cannot honestly be made by the work of
any _one_ man's hands, or head. If his work benefits multitudes, and
involves position of high trust, it may be (I do not say that it _is_)
expedient to reward him with great wealth or estate; but fortune of
this kind is freely given in gratitude for benefit, not as repayment
for labor. Also, men of peculiar genius in any art, if the public can
enjoy the product of their genius, may set it at almost any price they
choose; but this, I will show you when I come to speak of art, is
unlawful on their part and ruinous to their own powers. Genius must
not be sold; the sale of it involves, in a transcendental, but
perfectly true, sense, the guilt both of simony and prostitution. Your
labor only may be sold; your soul must not.
82. Now, by fair pay for fair labor, according to the rank of it, a
man can obtain means of comfortable, or if he needs it, refined life.
But he cannot obtain large fortune. Such fortunes as are now the
prizes of commerce can be made only in one of three ways:--
(1.) By obtaining command over the labor of multitudes of other men
and taxing it for our own profit.
(2.) By treasure-trove,--as of mines, useful vegetable products, and
the like,--in circumstances putting them under our own exclusive
control.
(3.) By speculation, (commercial gambling).
The first two of these means of obtaining riches are, in some forms
and within certain limits, lawful, and advantageous to the State. The
third is entirely detrimental to it; for in all cases of profit
derived from speculation, at best, what one man gains another loses;
and the net results to the State is zero, (pecuniarily,) with the loss
of the time and ingenuity spent in the transaction; besides the
disadvantage involved in the discouragement of the losing party, and
the corrupted moral natures of both. This is the result of speculation
at its best. At its worst, not only B loses what A gains (having taken
his fair risk of such loss for his fair chance of gain), but C and D,
who never had any chance at all, are drawn in by B's fall, and the
final result is that A sets up his carriage on the collected sum
which was once the means of living to a dozen families.
83. Nor is this all. For while real commerce is founded on real
necessities or uses, and limited by these, speculation, of which the
object is merely gain, seeks to excite imaginary necessities and
popular desires, in order to gather its temporary profit from the
supply of them. So that not only the persons who lend their money to
it will be finally robbed, but the work done with their money will be,
for the most part, useless, and thus the entire body of the public
injured as well as the persons concerned in the transaction. Take, for
instance, the architectural decorations of railways throughout the
kingdom,--representing many millions of money for which no farthing of
dividend can ever be forthcoming. The public will not be induced to
pay the smallest fraction of higher fare to Rochester or Dover because
the ironwork of the bridge which carries them over the Thames is
covered with floral cockades, and the piers of it edged with
ornamental cornices. All that work is simply put there by the builders
that they may put the percentage upon it into their own pockets; and,
the rest of the money being thrown into that floral form, there is an
end of it, as far as the shareholders are concerned. Millions upon
millions have thus been spent, within the last twenty years, on
ornamental arrangements of zigzag bricks, black and blue tiles,
cast-iron foliage, and the like; of which millions, as I said, not a
penny can ever return into the shareholders' pockets, nor contribute
to public speed or safety on the line. It is all sunk forever in
ornamental architecture, and (trust me for this!) _all that
architecture is bad_. As such, it had incomparably better not have
been built. Its only result will be to corrupt what capacity of taste
or right pleasure in such work we have yet left to us! And consider a
little, what other kind of result than that might have been attained
if all those millions had been spent usefully: say, in buying land for
the people, or building good houses for them, or (if it had been
imperatively required to be spent decoratively) in laying out gardens
and parks for them,--or buying noble works of art for their permanent
possession,--or, best of all, establishing frequent public schools and
libraries. Count what those lost millions would have so accomplished
for you! But you left the affair to "supply and demand," and the
British public had not brains enough to "demand" land, or lodging, or
books. It "demanded" cast-iron cockades and zigzag cornices, and is
"supplied" with them, to its beatitude for evermore.
84. Now, the theft we first spoke of, by falsity of workmanship or
material, is, indeed, so far worse than these thefts by dishonest
acquisition, that there is no possible excuse for it on the ground of
self-deception; while many speculative thefts are committed by persons
who really mean to do no harm, but think the system on the whole a
fair one, and do the best they can in it for themselves. But in the
real fact of the crime, when consciously committed, in the numbers
reached by its injury, in the degree of suffering it causes to those
whom it ruins, in the baseness of its calculated betrayal of implicit
trust, in the yet more perfect vileness of the obtaining such trust
by misrepresentation, only that it may be betrayed, and in the
impossibility that the crime should be at all committed, except by
persons of good position and large knowledge of the world--what manner
of theft is so wholly unpardonable, so inhuman, so contrary to every
law and instinct which binds or animates society?
And then consider farther, how many of the carriages that glitter in
our streets are driven, and how many of the stately houses that gleam
among our English fields are inhabited, by this kind of thief!
85. I happened to be reading this morning (29th March) some portions
of the Lent services, and I came to a pause over the familiar words,
"And with Him they crucified two thieves." Have you ever considered
(I speak to you now as a professing Christian), why, in the
accomplishment of the "numbering among transgressors," the
transgressors chosen should have been especially thieves--not
murderers, nor, as far as we know, sinners by any gross violence? Do
you observe how the sin of theft is again and again indicated as the
chiefly antagonistic one to the law of Christ? "This he said, not that
he cared for the poor, but because he was a thief, and had the bag"
(of Judas). And again, though Barabbas was a leader of sedition, and a
murderer besides,--(that the popular election might be in all respects
perfect)--yet St. John, in curt and conclusive account of him, fastens
again on the theft. "Then cried they all again saying, Not this man,
but Barabbas. Now Barabbas was a robber." I believe myself the reason
to be that theft is indeed, in its subtle forms, the most complete and
excuseless of human crimes. Sins of violence usually are committed
under sudden or oppressive temptation: they may be the madness of
moments; or they may be apparently the only means of extrication from
calamity. In other cases, they are the diseased acts or habits of
lower and brutified natures.[A] But theft involving deliberative
intellect, and absence of passion, is the purest type of wilful
iniquity, in persons capable of doing right. Which being so, it seems
to be fast becoming the practice of modern society to crucify its
Christ indeed, as willingly as ever, in the persons of His poor; but
by no means now to crucify its thieves beside Him! It elevates its
thieves after another fashion; sets them upon a hill, that their light
may shine before men and that all may see their good works, and
glorify their Father, in--the Opposite of Heaven.
[A] See the analysis of the moral system of Dante, respecting
punishment, given in 'Fors Clavigera,' Letter XXIII.
86. I think your trade parliament will have to put an end to this kind
of business somehow! But it cannot be done by laws merely, where the
interests and circumstances are so extended and complex. Nay, even as
regards lower and more defined crimes, the assigned punishment is not
to be thought of as a preventive means; but only as the seal of
opinion set by society on the fact. Crime cannot be hindered by
punishment; it will always find some shape and outlet, unpunishable or
unclosed. Crime can only be truly hindered by letting no man grow up a
criminal--by taking away the _will_ to commit sin; not by mere
punishment of its commission. Crime, small and great, can only be
truly stayed by education--not the education of the intellect only,
which is, on some men, wasted, and for others mischievous; but
education of the heart, which is alike good and necessary for all. So,
on this matter, I will try in my next letter to say one or two things
of which the silence has kept my own heart heavy this many a day.
LETTER XVI.
OF PUBLIC EDUCATION IRRESPECTIVE OF CLASS-DISTINCTION. IT CONSISTS
ESSENTIALLY IN GIVING HABITS OF MERCY, AND HABITS OF TRUTH.
(GENTLENESS[A] AND JUSTICE.)
_March 30th, 1867._
87. Thank you for sending me the pamphlet containing the account of
the meeting of clergy and workmen, and of the reasonings which there
took place. I cannot promise you that I shall read much of them, for
the question to my mind most requiring discussion and explanation is
not, why workmen don't go to church, but--why other people do.
However, this I know, that if among our many spiritual teachers, there
are indeed any who heartily and literally believe that the wisdom they
have to teach "is more precious than rubies, and all the things thou
canst desire are not to be compared unto her," and if, so believing,
they will further dare to affront their congregations by the
assertion; and plainly tell them they are not to hunt for rubies or
gold any more, at their peril, till they have gained that which cannot
be gotten for gold, nor silver weighed for the price thereof,--such
believers, so preaching, and refusing to preach otherwise till they
are in that attended to, will never want congregations, both of
working men, and every other kind of men.
[A] "Mercy," in its full sense, means delight in perceiving
nobleness, or in doing kindness. Compare § 50.
88. Did you ever hear of anything else so ill-named as the phantom
called the "Philosopher's Stone"? A talisman that shall turn base
metal into precious metal, nature acknowledges not; nor would any but
fools seek after it. But a talisman to turn base souls into noble
souls, nature has given us! and that is a "Philosopher's Stone"
indeed, but it is a stone which the builders refuse.
89. If there were two valleys in California or Australia, with two
different kinds of gravel in the bottom of them; and in the one stream
bed you could dig up, occasionally and by good fortune, nuggets of
gold; and in the other stream bed, certainly and without hazard, you
could dig up little caskets, containing talismans which gave length of
days and peace; and alabaster vases of precious balms, which were
better than the Arabian Dervish's ointment, and made not only the eyes
to see, but the mind to know, whatever it would--I wonder in which of
the stream beds there would be most diggers?
90. "Time is money"--so say your practised merchants and economists.
None of them, however, I fancy, as they draw towards death, find that
the reverse is true, and that "money is time"? Perhaps it might be
better for them, in the end, if they did not turn so much of their
time into money, lest, perchance, they also turn Eternity into it!
There are other things, however, which in the same sense are money, or
can be changed into it, as well as time. Health is money, wit is
money, knowledge is money; and all your health, and wit, and knowledge
may be changed for gold; and the happy goal so reached, of a sick,
insane, and blind, auriferous old age; but the gold cannot be changed
in its turn back into health and wit.
91. "Time is money;" the words tingle in my ears so that I can't go on
writing. Is it nothing better, then? If we could thoroughly understand
that time was--_itself_,--would it not be more to the purpose? A thing
of which loss or gain was absolute loss, and perfect gain. And that it
was expedient also to buy health and knowledge with money, if so
purchasable; but not to buy money with _them_?
And purchasable they are at the beginning of life, though not at its
close. Purchasable, always, for others, if not for ourselves. You can
buy, and cheaply, life, endless life, according to your Christian's
creed--(there's a bargain for you!) but--long years of knowledge, and
peace, and power, and happiness of love--these assuredly and
irrespectively of any creed or question,--for all those desolate and
haggard children about your streets.
92. "That is not political economy, however." Pardon me; the
all-comfortable saying, "What he layeth out, it shall be paid him
again," is quite literally true in matters of education; no money seed
can be sown with so sure and large return at harvest-time as that;
only of this money-seed, more than of flesh-seed, it is utterly true,
"That which thou sowest is not quickened except it _die_." You must
forget your money, and every other material interest, and educate for
education's sake only! or the very good you try to bestow will become
venomous, and that and your money will be lost together.
93. And this has been the real cause of failure in our efforts for
education hitherto--whether from above or below. There is no honest
desire for the thing itself. The cry for it among the lower orders is
because they think that, when once they have got it, they must become
upper orders. There is a strange notion in the mob's mind now-a-days
(including all our popular economists and educators, as we most justly
may, under that brief term "mob"), that _everybody_ can be uppermost;
or at least, that a state of general scramble, in which everybody in
his turn should come to the top, is a proper Utopian constitution; and
that, once give every lad a good education, and he cannot but come to
ride in his carriage (the methods of supply of coachmen and footmen
not being contemplated). And very sternly I say to you--and say from
sure knowledge--that a man had better not know how to read and write,
than receive education on such terms.
94. The first condition under which it can be given usefully is, that
it should be clearly understood to be no means of getting on in the
world, but a means of staying pleasantly in your place there. And the
first elements of State education should be calculated equally for the
advantage of every order of person composing the State. From the
lowest to the highest class, every child born in this island should be
required by law to receive these general elements of human discipline,
and to be baptized--not with a drop of water on its forehead--but in
the cloud and sea of heavenly wisdom and of earthly power.
And the elements of this general State education should be briefly
these:
95. First--The body must be made as beautiful and perfect in its youth
as it can be, wholly irrespective of ulterior purpose. If you mean
afterwards to set the creature to business which will degrade its body
and shorten its life, first, I should say, simply,--you had better let
such business alone;--but if you must have it done, somehow, yet let
the living creature, whom you mean to kill, get the full strength of
its body first, and taste the joy, and bear the beauty of youth. After
that, poison it, if you will. Economically, the arrangement is a wiser
one, for it will take longer in the killing than if you began with it
younger; and you will get an excess of work out of it which will more
than pay for its training.
Therefore, first teach--as I have said in the preface to 'Unto this
Last'--"The Laws of Health, and exercises enjoined by them;" and, to
this end, your schools must be in fresh country, and amidst fresh air,
and have great extents of land attached to them in permanent estate.
Riding, running, all the honest, personal exercises of offense and
defense, and music, should be the primal heads of this bodily
education.
96. Next to these bodily accomplishments, the two great mental graces
should be taught, Reverence and Compassion: not that these are in a
literal sense to be "taught," for they are innate in every well-born
human creature, but they have to be developed exactly as the strength
of the body must be, by deliberate and constant exercise. I never
understood why Goethe (in the plan of education in 'Wilhelm Meister')
says that reverence is not innate, but must be taught from without; it
seems to me so fixedly a function of the human spirit, that if men can
get nothing else to reverence they will worship a fool, or a stone, or
a vegetable.[A] But to teach reverence rightly is to attach it to the
right persons and things; first, by setting over your youth masters
whom they cannot but love and respect; next, by gathering for them,
out of past history, whatever has been most worthy in human deeds and
human passion; and leading them continually to dwell upon such
instances, making this the principal element of emotional excitement
to them; and, lastly, by letting them justly feel, as far as may be,
the smallness of their own powers and knowledge, as compared with the
attainments of others.
[A] By steady preaching against it, one may quench reverence,
and bring insolence to its height; but the instinct cannot be
wholly uprooted.
97. Compassion, on the other hand, is to be taught chiefly by making
it a point of honor, collaterally with courage, and in the same rank
(as indeed the complement and evidence of courage), so that, in the
code of unwritten school law, it shall be held as shameful to have
done a cruel thing as a cowardly one. All infliction of pain on weaker
creatures is to be stigmatized as unmanly crime; and every possible
opportunity taken to exercise the youths in offices of some practical
help, and to acquaint them with the realities of the distress which,
in the joyfulness of entering into life, it is so difficult, for those
who have not seen home suffering, to conceive.
98. Reverence, then, and compassion, we are to teach primarily, and
with these, as the bond and guardian of them, truth of spirit and
word, of thought and sight. Truth, earnest and passionate, sought for
like a treasure, and kept like a crown.
This teaching of truth as a habit will be the chief work the master
has to do; and it will enter into all parts of education. First, you
must accustom the children to close accuracy of statement; this both
as a principle of honor, and as an accomplishment of language, making
them try always who shall speak truest, both as regards the fact he
has to relate or express (not concealing or exaggerating), and as
regards the precision of the words he expresses it in, thus making
truth (which, indeed, it is) the test of perfect language, and giving
the intensity of a moral purpose to the study and art of words: then
carrying this accuracy into all habits of thought and observation
also, so as always to _think_ of things as they truly are, and to see
them as they truly are, as far as in us rests. And it does rest much
in our power, for all false thoughts and seeings come mainly of our
thinking of what we have no business with, and looking for things we
want to see, instead of things that ought to be seen.
99. "Do not talk but of what you know; do not think but of what you
have materials to think justly upon; and do not look for things only
that you like, when there are others to be seen"--this is the lesson
to be taught to our youth, and inbred in them; and that mainly by our
own example and continence. Never teach a child anything of which you
are not yourself sure; and, above all, if you feel anxious to force
anything into its mind in tender years, that the virtue of youth and
early association may fasten it there, be sure it is no lie which you
thus sanctify. There is always more to be taught of absolute,
incontrovertible knowledge, open to its capacity, than any child can
learn; there is no need to teach it anything doubtful. Better that it
should be ignorant of a thousand truths, than have consecrated in its
heart a single lie.
100. And for this, as well as for many other reasons, the principal
subjects of education, after history, ought to be natural science and
mathematics; but with respect to these studies, your schools will
require to be divided into three groups: one for children who will
probably have to live in cities, one for those who will live in the
country, and one for those who will live at sea; the schools for these
last, of course, being always placed on the coast. And for children
whose life is to be in cities, the subjects of study should be, as
far as their disposition will allow of it, mathematics and the arts;
for children who are to live in the country, natural history of birds,
insects, and plants, together with agriculture taught practically; and
for children who are to be seamen, physical geography, astronomy, and
the natural history of sea-fish and sea-birds.
101. This, then, being the general course and material of education
for all children, observe farther, that in the preface to 'Unto this
Last' I said that every child, besides passing through this course,
was at school to learn "the calling by which it was to live." And it
may perhaps appear to you that after, or even in the early stages of
education such as this above described, there are many callings which,
however much called to them, the children might not willingly
determine to learn or live by. "Probably," you may say, "after they
have learned to ride, and fence, and sing, and know birds and flowers,
it will be little to their liking to make themselves into tailors,
carpenters, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and the like." And I cannot but
agree with you as to the exceeding probability of some such reluctance
on their part, which will be a very awkward state of things indeed,
(since we can by no means get on without tailoring and shoemaking,)
and one to be meditated upon very seriously in next letter.
102. P.S.--Thank you for sending me your friend's letter about Gustave
Doré; he is wrong, however, in thinking there is any good in those
illustrations of 'Elaine.' I had intended to speak of them afterwards,
for it is to my mind quite as significant--almost as awful--a sign of
what is going on in the midst of us, that our great English poet
should have suffered his work to be thus contaminated, as that the
lower Evangelicals, never notable for sense in the arts, should have
got their Bibles dishonored. Those 'Elaine' illustrations are just as
impure as anything else that Doré has done; but they are also vapid,
and without any one merit whatever in point of art. The illustrations
to the 'Contes Drôlatiques' are full of power and invention; but those
to 'Elaine' are merely and simply stupid; theatrical bêtises, with
the taint of the charnel-house on them besides.
LETTER XVII.
THE RELATIONS OF EDUCATION TO POSITION IN LIFE.
_April 3, 1867._
103. I am not quite sure that you will feel the awkwardness of the
dilemma I got into at the end of last letter, as much as I do myself.
You working men have been crowing and peacocking at such a rate
lately; and setting yourselves forth so confidently for the cream of
society, and the top of the world, that perhaps you will not
anticipate any of the difficulties which suggest themselves to a
thoroughbred Tory and Conservative, like me. Perhaps you will expect a
youth properly educated--a good rider--musician--and well-grounded
scholar in natural philosophy, to think it a step of promotion when he
has to go and be made a tailor of, or a coalheaver? If you do, I
should very willingly admit that you might be right, and go on to the
farther development of my notions without pausing at this
stumbling-block, were it not that, unluckily, all the wisest men whose
sayings I ever heard or read, agree in expressing (one way or another)
just such contempt for those useful occupations, as I dread on the
part of my foolishly refined scholars. Shakespeare and Chaucer,--Dante
and Virgil,--Horace and Pindar,--Homer, Æschylus, and Plato,--all the
men of any age or country who seem to have had Heaven's music on their
lips, agree in their scorn of mechanic life. And I imagine that the
feeling of prudent Englishmen, and sensible as well as sensitive
Englishwomen, on reading my last letter, would mostly be--"Is the man
mad, or laughing at us, to propose educating the working classes this
way? He could not, if his wild scheme were possible, find a better
method of making them acutely wretched."
104. It may be so, my sensible and polite friends; and I am heartily
willing, as well as curious, to hear you develop your own scheme of
operative education, so only that it be universal, orderly, and
careful. I do not say that I shall be prepared to advocate my
athletics and philosophies instead. Only, observe what you admit, or
imply, in bringing forward your possibly wiser system. You imply that
a certain portion of mankind must be employed in degrading work; and
that, to fit them for this work, it is necessary to limit their
knowledge, their active powers, and their enjoyments, from childhood
upwards, so that they may not be able to conceive of any state better
than the one they were born in, nor possess any knowledge or
acquirements inconsistent with the coarseness, or disturbing the
monotony, of their vulgar occupation. And by their labor in this
contracted state of mind, we superior beings are to be maintained; and
always to be curtseyed to by the properly ignorant little girls, and
capped by the properly ignorant little boys, whenever we pass by.
105. Mind, I do not say that this is _not_ the right state of things.
Only, if it be, you need not be so over-particular about the
slave-trade, it seems to me. What is the use of arguing so
pertinaciously that a black's skull will hold as much as a white's,
when you are declaring in the same breath that a white's skull must
not hold as much as it can, or it will be the worse for him? It does
not appear to me at all a profound state of slavery to be whipped into
doing a piece of low work that I don't like; but it is a very profound
state of slavery to be kept, myself, low in the forehead, that I may
not dislike low work.
106. You see, my friend, the dilemma is really an awkward one,
whichever way you look at it. But, what is still worse, I am not
puzzled only, at this part of my scheme, about the boys I shall have
to make _workmen_ of; I am just as much puzzled about the boys I
shall have to make _nothing_ of! Grant, that by hook or crook, by
reason or rattan, I persuade a certain number of the roughest ones
into some serviceable business, and get coats and shoes made for the
rest,--what is the business of "the rest" to be? Naturally, according
to the existing state of things, one supposes they are to belong to
some of the gentlemanly professions; to be soldiers, lawyers, doctors,
or clergymen. But alas, I shall not want any soldiers of special skill
or pugnacity. _All_ my boys will be soldiers. So far from wanting any
lawyers, of the kind that live by talking, I shall have the strongest
possible objection to their appearance in the country. For doctors, I
shall always entertain a profound respect; but when I get my athletic
education fairly established, of what help to them will my respect be?
They will all starve! And for clergymen, it is true, I shall have a
large number of episcopates--one over every hundred families--(and
many positions of civil authority also, for civil officers, above them
and below), but all these places will involve much hard work, and be
anything but covetable; while, of clergymen's usual work, admonition,
theological demonstration, and the like, I shall want very little done
indeed, and that little done for nothing! for I will allow no man to
admonish anybody, until he has previously earned his own dinner by
more productive work than admonition.
Well, I wish, my friend, you would write me a word or two in answer to
this, telling me your own ideas as to the proper issue out of these
difficulties. I should like to know what you think, and what you
suppose others will think, before I tell you my own notions about the
matter.
LETTER XVIII.
THE HARMFUL EFFECTS OF SERVILE EMPLOYMENTS. THE POSSIBLE PRACTICE AND
EXHIBITION OF SINCERE HUMILITY BY RELIGIOUS PERSONS.
_April 7, 1867._
107. I have been waiting these three days to know what you would say
to my last questions; and now you send me two pamphlets of Combe's to
read! I never read anything in spring-time (except the Ai, Ai, on the
"sanguine flower inscribed with woe"); and, besides, if, as I gather
from your letter, Combe thinks that among well-educated boys there
would be a percentage constitutionally inclined to be cobblers, or
looking forward with unction to establishment in the oil and tallow
line, or fretting themselves for a flunkey's uniform, nothing that he
could say would make me agree with him. I know, as well as he does,
the unconquerable differences in the clay of the human creature: and I
know that, in the outset, whatever system of education you adopted, a
large number of children could be made nothing of, and would
necessarily fall out of the ranks, and supply candidates enough for
degradation to common mechanical business: but this enormous
difference in bodily and mental capacity has been mainly brought about
by difference in occupation, and by direct maltreatment; and in a few
generations, if the poor were cared for, their marriages looked after,
and sanitary law enforced, a beautiful type of face and form, and a
high intelligence, would become all but universal, in a climate like
this of England. Even as it is, the marvel is always to me, how the
race resists, at least in its childhood, influences of ill-regulated
birth, poisoned food, poisoned air, and soul neglect. I often see
faces of children, as I walk through the black district of St. Giles's
(lying, as it does, just between my own house and the British Museum),
which, through all their pale and corrupt misery, recall the old "Non
Angli," and recall it, not by their beauty, but by their sweetness of
expression, even though signed already with trace and cloud of the
coming life,--a life so bitter that it would make the curse of the
137th Psalm true upon our modern Babylon, though we were to read it
thus, "Happy shall _thy children_ be, if one taketh and dasheth them
against the stones."
108. Yes, very solemnly I repeat to you that in those worst treated
children of the English race, I yet see the making of gentlemen and
gentlewomen--not the making of dog-stealers and gin-drinkers, such as
their parents were; and the child of the average English tradesman or
peasant, even at this day, well schooled, will show no innate
disposition such as must fetter him forever to the clod or the
counter. You say that many a boy runs away, or would run away if he
could, from good positions to go to sea. Of course he does. I never
said I should have any difficulty in finding sailors, but I shall in
finding fishmongers. I am at no loss for gardeners either, but what
am I to do for greengrocers?
109. The fact is, a great number of quite necessary employments are,
in the accuratest sense, "Servile;" that is, they sink a man to the
condition of a serf, or unthinking worker, the proper state of an
animal, but more or less unworthy of men; nay, unholy in some sense,
so that a day is made "holy" by the fact of its being commanded, "Thou
shalt do no _servile_ work therein." And yet, if undertaken in a
certain spirit, such work might be the holiest of all. If there were
but a thread or two of sound fiber here and there left in our modern
religion, so that the stuff of it would bear a real strain, one might
address our two opposite groups of evangelicals and ritualists
somewhat after this fashion:--"Good friends, these differences of
opinion between you cannot but be painful to your Christian charity,
and they are unseemly to us, the profane; and prevent us from learning
from you what, perhaps, we ought. But, as we read your Book, we, for
our part, gather from it that you might, without danger to your own
souls, set an undivided example to us, for the benefit of ours. You,
both of you, as far as we understand, agree in the necessity of
humility to the perfection of your character. We often hear you, of
Calvinistic persuasion, speaking of yourselves as 'sinful dust and
ashes,'--would it then be inconsistent with your feelings to make
yourselves into 'serviceable' dust and ashes? We observe that of late
many of our roads have been hardened and mended with cinders; now, if,
in a higher sense, you could allow us to mend the roads of the world
with _you_ a little, it would be a great proof to us of your
sincerity. Suppose, only for a little while, in the present difficulty
and distress, you were to make it a test of conversion that a man
should regularly give Zaccheus's portion, half his goods, to the
poor, and at once adopt some disagreeable and despised, but thoroughly
useful, trade? You cannot think that this would finally be to your
disadvantage; you doubtless believe the texts, 'He that giveth to the
poor lendeth to the Lord,' and 'He that would be chief among you, let
him be your servant.' The more you parted with, and the lower you
stooped, the greater would be your final reward, and final exaltation.
You profess to despise human learning and worldly riches; leave both
of these to _us_; undertake for us the illiterate and ill-paid
employments which must deprive you of the privileges of society and
the pleasures of luxury. You cannot possibly preach your faith so
forcibly to the world by any quantity of the finest words, as by a few
such simple and painful acts; and over your counters, in honest retail
business, you might preach a gospel that would sound in more ears than
any that was ever proclaimed over pulpit cushions or tabernacle rails.
And, whatever may be your gifts of utterance, you cannot but feel
(studying St. Paul's Epistles as carefully as you do) that you might
more easily and modestly emulate the practical teaching of the silent
Apostle of the Gentiles than the speech or writing of his companion.
Amidst the present discomforts of your brethren you may surely, with
greater prospect of good to them, seek the title of Sons of
Consolation, than of Sons of Thunder, and be satisfied with Barnabas's
confession of faith, (if you can reach no farther,) who, 'having land,
sold it, and brought the money and laid it at the Apostles' feet.'
110. "To you, on the other hand, gentlemen of the embroidered robe,
who neither despise learning nor the arts, we know that sacrifices
such as these would be truly painful, and might at first appear
inexpedient. But the doctrine of self-mortification is not a new one
to you; and we should be sorry to think--we would not, indeed, for a
moment dishonor you by thinking--that these melodious chants, and
prismatic brightnesses of vitreous pictures, and floral graces of
deep-wrought stone, were in any wise intended for your own poor
pleasures, whatever profane attraction they may exercise on more
fleshly-minded persons. And as you have certainly received no definite
order for the painting, carving, or lighting up of churches, while the
temple of the body of so many poor living Christians is so pale, so
mis-shapen, and so ill-lighted; but have, on the contrary, received
very definite orders for the feeding and clothing of such sad
humanity, we may surely ask you, not unreasonably, to humiliate
yourselves in the most complete way--not with a voluntary, but a
sternly _in_voluntary humility--not with a show of wisdom in
will-worship, but with practical wisdom, in all honor, to the
satisfying of the flesh; and to associate yourselves in monasteries
and convents for the better practice of useful and humble trades. Do
not burn any more candles, but mould some; do not paint any more
windows, but mend a few where the wind comes in, in winter time, with
substantial clear glass and putty. Do not vault any more high roofs,
but thatch some low ones; and embroider rather on backs which are
turned to the cold, than only on those which are turned to
congregations. And you will have your reward afterwards, and attain,
with all your flocks thus tended, to a place where you may have as
much gold, and painted glass, and singing, as you like."
Thus much, it seems to me, one might say with some hope of acceptance,
to any very earnest member of either of our two great religious
parties, if, as I say, their faith could stand a strain. I have not,
however, based any of my imaginary political arrangements on the
probability of its doing so; and I trust only to such general good
nature and willingness to help each other, as I presume may be found
among men of the world; to whom I should have to make quite another
sort of speech, which I will endeavor to set down the heads of, for
you, in next letter.
LETTER XIX.
THE GENERAL PRESSURE OF EXCESSIVE AND IMPROPER WORK, IN ENGLISH LIFE.
_April 10, 1867._
111. I cannot go on to-day with the part of my subject I had proposed,
for I was disturbed by receiving a letter last night, which I herewith
enclose to you, and of which I wish you to print, here following, the
parts I have not underlined--
1, Phene Street, Chelsea, April 8, 1867.
MY DEAR R----,--
It is long since you have heard of me, and now I ask your
patience with me for a little. I have but just returned from
the funeral of my dear, dear friend ----, the first artist
friend I made in London--a loved and prized one. For years
past he had lived in the very humblest way, fighting his
battle of life against mean appreciation of his talents, the
wants of a rising family, and frequent attacks of illness,
crippling him for months at a time, the wolf at the door
meanwhile.
But about two years since his prospects brightened * * * and
he had but a few weeks since ventured on removal to a larger
house. His eldest boy of seventeen years, a very intelligent
youth, so strongly desired to be a civil engineer that Mr.
----, not being able to pay the large premium required for
his apprenticeship, had been made very glad by the consent
of Mr. Penn, of Millwall, to receive him without a premium
after the boy should have spent some time at King's College
in the study of mechanics. The rest is a sad story. About a
fortnight ago Mr. ---- was taken ill, and died last week,
the doctors say, of sheer physical exhaustion, not
thirty-nine years old, leaving eight young children, and his
poor widow expecting her confinement, and so weak and ill as
to be incapable of effort. This youth is the eldest, and the
other children range downwards to a babe of eighteen months.
There is not one who knew him, I believe, that will not give
cheerfully, to their ability, for his widow and children;
but such aid will go but a little way in this painful case;
and it would be a real boon to this poor widow if some of
her children could be got into an Orphan Asylum. * * *
If you are able to do anything I would send particulars of
the age and sex of the children.
I remain, dear Sir, ever obediently yours,
FRED. J. SHIELDS.
P.S.--I ought to say that poor ---- has been quite unable to
save, with his large family; and that they would be utterly
destitute now, but for the kindness of some with whom he was
professionally connected.
112. Now this case, of which you see the entire authenticity, is, out
of the many of which I hear continually, a _notably_ sad one only in
so far as the artist in question has died of distress while he was
catering for the public amusement. Hardly a week now passes without
some such misery coming to my knowledge; and the quantity of pain, and
anxiety of daily effort, through the best part of life, ending all at
last in utter grief, which the lower middle classes in England are now
suffering, is so great that I feel constantly as if I were living in
one great churchyard, with people all round me clinging feebly to the
edges of the open graves, and calling for help, as they fall back into
them, out of sight.
113. Now I want you to observe here, in a definite case, the working
of your beautiful modern political economy of "supply and demand."
Here is a man who could have "supplied" you with good and entertaining
art,--say for fifty good years,--if you had paid him enough for his
day's work to find him and his children peacefully in bread. But you
like having your prints as cheap as possible--you triumph in the
little that your laugh costs--you take all you can get from the man,
give the least you can give to him,--and you accordingly kill him at
thirty-nine; and thereafter have his children to take care of, or to
kill also, whichever you choose; but, now, observe, you must take care
of _them_ for nothing, or not at all; and what you might have had good
value for, if you had given it when it would have cheered the father's
heart, you now can have no return for at all, to yourselves; and what
you give to the orphans, if it does not degrade them, at least
afflicts, coming, not through their father's hand, its honest
earnings, but from strangers.
Observe, farther, whatever help the orphans may receive, will not be
from the public at all. It will not be from those who profited by
their father's labors; it will be chiefly from his fellow-laborers; or
from persons whose money would have been beneficially spent in other
directions, from whence it is drawn away to this need, which ought
never to have occurred,--while those who waste their money without
doing any service to the public will never contribute one farthing to
this distress.
114. Now it is this double fault in the help--that it comes too late,
and that the burden of it falls wholly on those who ought least to be
charged with it--which would be corrected by that institution of
overseers of which I spoke to you in the twelfth of these letters,
saying, you remember, that they were to have farther legal powers,
which I did not then specify, but which would belong to them chiefly
in the capacity of public almoners, or help-givers, aided by their
deacons, the reception of such help, in time of true need, being not
held disgraceful, but honorable; since the fact of its reception would
be so entirely public that no impostor or idle person could ever
obtain it surreptitiously.
115. (11th April.) I was interrupted yesterday, and I am glad of it,
for here happens just an instance of the way in which the unjust
distribution of the burden of charity is reflected on general
interests; I cannot help what taint of ungracefulness you or other
readers of these letters may feel that I incur, in speaking, in this
instance, of myself. If I could speak with the same accurate knowledge
of any one else, most gladly I would; but I also think it right that,
whether people accuse me of boasting or not, they should know that I
practise what I preach. I had not intended to say what I now shall,
but the coming of this letter last night just turns the balance of the
decision with me. I enclose it with the other; you see it is one from
my bookseller, Mr. Quaritch, offering me Fischer's work on the _Flora
of Java_, and Latour's on _Indian Orchidaceæ_, bound together, for
twenty guineas. Now, I am writing a book on botany just now, for young
people, chiefly on wild flowers, and I want these two books very much;
but I simply cannot afford to buy them, because I sent my last spare
twenty guineas to Mr. Shields yesterday for this widow. And though you
may think it not the affair of the public that I have not this book on
Indian flowers, it is their affair finally, that what I write for them
should be founded on as broad knowledge as possible; whatever value my
own book may or may not have, it will just be in a given degree worth
_less_ to them, because of my want of this knowledge.
116. So again--for having begun to speak of myself I will do so yet
more frankly--I suppose that when people see my name down for a
hundred pounds to the Cruikshank Memorial, and for another hundred to
the Eyre Defense Fund, they think only that I have more money than I
know what to do with. Well, the giving of those subscriptions simply
decides the question whether or no I shall be able to afford a journey
to Switzerland this year, in the negative; and I wanted to go, not
only for health's sake, but to examine the junctions of the molasse
sandstones and nagelfluh with the Alpine limestone, in order to
complete some notes I meant to publish next spring on the geology of
the great northern Swiss valley; notes which must now lie by me at
least for another year; and I believe this delay (though I say it)
will be really something of a loss to the traveling public, for the
little essay was intended to explain to them, in a familiar way, the
real wonderfulness of their favorite mountain, the Righi; and to give
them some amusement in trying to find out where the many-colored
pebbles of it had come from. But it is more important that I should,
with some stoutness, assert my respect for the genius and earnest
patriotism of Cruikshank, and my much more than disrespect for the
Jamaica Committee, than that I should see the Alps this year, or get
my essay finished next spring; but I tell you the fact, because I want
you to feel how, in thus leaving their men of worth to be assisted or
defended only by those who deeply care for them, the public more or
less cripple, to their own ultimate disadvantage, just the people
who could serve them in other ways; while the speculators and
money-seekers, who are only making their profit out of the said
public, of course take no part in the help of anybody. And even if
the willing bearers could sustain the burden anywise adequately, none
of us would complain; but I am certain there is no man, whatever
his fortune, who is now engaged in any earnest offices of kindness
to these sufferers, especially of the middle class, among his
acquaintance, who will not bear me witness that for one we can
relieve, we must leave three to perish. I have left three, myself, in
the first three months of this year. One was the artist Paul Gray, for
whom an appeal was made to me for funds to assist him in going abroad
out of the bitter English winter. I had not the means by me, and he
died a week afterwards. Another case was that of a widow whose husband
had committed suicide, for whom application was made to me at the same
time; and the third was a personal friend, to whom I refused a sum
which he said would have saved him from bankruptcy. I believe six
times as much would not have saved him; however, I refused, and he is
ruined.
117. And observe, also, it is not the mere crippling of my means that
I regret. It is the crippling of my temper, and waste of my time. The
knowledge of all this distress, even when I can assist it,--much more
when I cannot,--and the various thoughts of what I can and cannot, or
ought and ought not, to do, are a far greater burden to me than the
mere loss of the money. It is peremptorily not my business--it is not
my gift, bodily or mentally, to look after other people's sorrow. I
have enough of my own; and even if I had not, the sight of pain is not
good for me. I don't want to be a bishop. In a most literal and
sincere sense, "_nolo episcopari_." I don't want to be an almoner, nor
a counselor, nor a Member of Parliament, nor a voter for Members of
Parliament. (What would Mr. Holyoake say to me if he knew that I have
never voted for anybody in my life, and never mean to do so!) I am
essentially a painter and a leaf dissector; and my powers of thought
are all purely mathematical, seizing ultimate principles only--never
accidents; a line is always, to me, length without breadth; it is not
a cable or a crowbar; and though I can almost infallibly reason out
the final law of anything, if within reach of my industry, I neither
care for, nor can trace, the minor exigencies of its daily appliance.
So, in every way, I like a quiet life; and I don't like seeing people
cry, or die; and should rejoice, more than I can tell you, in giving
up the full half of my fortune for the poor, provided I knew that the
public would make Lord Overstone also give the half of his, and other
people who were independent give the half of theirs; and then set men
who were really fit for such office to administer the fund, and answer
to us for nobody's perishing innocently; and so leave us all to do
what we chose with the rest, and with our days, in peace.
Thus far of the public's fault in the matter. Next, I have a word or
two to say of the sufferers' own fault--for much as I pity them, I
conceive that none of them _do_ perish altogether innocently. But this
must be for next letter.
LETTER XX.
OF IMPROVIDENCE IN MARRIAGE IN THE MIDDLE CLASSES; AND OF THE
ADVISABLE RESTRICTIONS OF IT.
_April 12, 1867._
118. It is quite as well, whatever irregularity it may introduce in
the arrangement of the general subject, that yonder sad letter warped
me away from the broad inquiry, to this speciality, respecting the
present distress of the middle classes. For the immediate cause of
that distress, in their own imprudence, of which I have to speak to
you to-day, is only to be finally vanquished by strict laws, which,
though they have been many a year in my mind, I was glad to have a
quiet hour of sunshine for the thinking over again, this morning.
Sunshine which happily rose cloudless; and allowed me to meditate my
tyrannies before breakfast, under the just opened blossoms of my
orchard, and assisted by much melodious advice from the birds; who (my
gardener having positive orders never to trouble any of them in
anything, or object to their eating even my best peas if they like
their flavor) rather now get _into_ my way, than out of it, when they
see me about the walks; and take me into most of their counsels in
nest-building.
119. The letter from Mr. Shields, which interrupted us, reached me,
as you see, on the evening of the 9th instant. On the morning of the
10th, I received another, which I herewith forward to you, for
verification. It is--characteristically enough--dateless, so you must
take the time of its arrival on my word. And substituting M. N. for
the name of the boy referred to, and withholding only the address and
name of the writer, you see that it may be printed word for word--as
follows:--
SIR,--
May I beg for the favor of your presentation to Christ's
Hospital for my youngest son, M. N.? I have nine children,
and no means to educate them. I ventured to address you,
believing that my husband's name is not unknown to you as
an artist.
Believe me to remain faithfully yours,
* * *
120. Now this letter is only a typical example of the entire class of
those which, being a governor of Christ's Hospital, I receive, in
common with all the other governors, at the rate of about three a day,
for a month or six weeks from the date of our names appearing in the
printed list of the governors who have presentations for the current
year. Having been a governor now some twenty-five years, I have
documentary evidence enough to found some general statistics upon;
from which there have resulted two impressions on my mind, which I
wish here specially to note to you, and I do not doubt but that all
the other governors, if you could ask them, would at once confirm what
I say. My first impression is, a heavy and sorrowful sense of the
general feebleness of intellect of that portion of the British public
which stands in need of presentations to Christ's Hospital. This
feebleness of intellect is mainly shown in the nearly total
unconsciousness of the writers that anybody else may want a
presentation, besides themselves. With the exception here and there
of a soldier's or a sailor's widow, hardly one of them seems to have
perceived the existence of any distress in the world but their own:
none know what they are asking for, or imagine, unless as a remote
contingency, the possibility of its having been promised at a prior
date. The second most distinct impression on my mind, is that the
portion of the British public which is in need of presentations to
Christ's Hospital considers it a merit to have large families, with or
without the means of supporting them!
121. Now it happened also (and remember, all this is strictly true,
nor in the slightest particular represented otherwise than as it
chanced; though the said chance brought thus together exactly the
evidence I wanted for my letter to you)--it happened, I say, that on
this same morning of the 10th April, I became accidentally acquainted
with a case of quite a different kind: that of a noble girl, who,
engaged at sixteen, and having received several advantageous offers
since, has remained for ten years faithful to her equally faithful
lover; while, their circumstances rendering it, as they rightly
considered, unjustifiable in them to think of marriage, each of them
simply and happily, aided and cheered by the other's love, discharged
the duties of their own separate positions in life.
122. In the nature of things, instances of this kind of noble life
remain more or less concealed, (while imprudence and error proclaim
themselves by misfortune,) but they are assuredly not unfrequent in
our English homes. Let us next observe the political and national
result of these arrangements. You leave your marriages to be settled
by "supply and demand," instead of wholesome law. And thus, among your
youths and maidens, the improvident, incontinent, selfish, and foolish
ones marry, whether you will or not; and beget families of children
necessarily inheritors in a great degree of these parental
dispositions; and for whom, supposing they had the best dispositions
in the world, you have thus provided, by way of educators, the
foolishest fathers and mothers you could find; (the only rational
sentence in their letters, usually, is the invariable one, in which
they declare themselves "incapable of providing for their children's
education"). On the other hand, whosoever is wise, patient, unselfish,
and pure among your youth, you keep maid or bachelor; wasting their
best days of natural life in painful sacrifice, forbidding them their
best help and best reward, and carefully excluding their prudence and
tenderness from any offices of parental duty.
Is not this a beatific and beautifully sagacious system for a
Celestial Empire, such as that of these British Isles?
123. I will not here enter into any statement of the physical laws
which it is the province of our physicians to explain; and which are
indeed at last so far beginning to be understood, that there is hope
of the nation's giving some of the attention to the conditions
affecting the race of man, which it has hitherto bestowed only on
those which may better its races of cattle.
It is enough, I think, to say here that the beginning of all sanitary
and moral law is in the regulation of marriage, and that, ugly and
fatal as is every form and agency of license, no licentiousness is so
mortal as licentiousness in marriage.
124. Briefly, then, and in main points, subject in minor ones to such
modifications in detail as local circumstances and characters would
render expedient, those following are laws such as a prudent nation
would institute respecting its marriages. Permission to marry should
be the reward held in sight of its youth during the entire latter part
of the course of their education; and it should be granted as the
national attestation that the first portion of their lives had been
rightly fulfilled. It should not be attainable without earnest and
consistent effort, though put within the reach of all who were willing
to make such effort; and the granting of it should be a public
testimony to the fact, that the youth or maid to whom it was given
had lived, within their proper sphere, a modest and virtuous life, and
had attained such skill in their proper handicraft, and in arts of
household economy, as might give well-founded expectations of their
being able honorably to maintain and teach their children.
125. No girl should receive her permission to marry before her
seventeenth birthday, nor any youth before his twenty-first; and it
should be a point of somewhat distinguished honor with both sexes to
gain their permission of marriage in the eighteenth and twenty-second
years; and a recognized disgrace not to have gained it at least before
the close of their twenty-first and twenty-fourth. I do not mean that
they should in any wise hasten actual marriage; but only that they
should hold it a point of honor to have the right to marry. In every
year there should be two festivals, one on the first of May, and one
at the feast of harvest home in each district, at which festivals
their permissions to marry should be given publicly to the maidens and
youths who had won them in that half-year; and they should be crowned,
the maids by the old French title of Rosières, and the youths, perhaps
by some name rightly derived from one supposed signification of the
word "bachelor," "laurel fruit," and so led in joyful procession, with
music and singing, through the city street or village lane, and the
day ended with feasting of the poor.
126. And every bachelor and rosière should be entitled to claim, if
they needed it, according to their position in life, a fixed income
from the State, for seven years from the day of their marriage, for
the setting up of their homes; and, however rich they might be by
inheritance, their income should not be permitted to exceed a given
sum, proportioned to their rank, for the seven years following that in
which they had obtained their permission to marry, but should
accumulate in the trust of the State until that seventh year, in which
they should be put (on certain conditions) finally in possession of
their property; and the men, thus necessarily not before their
twenty-eighth, nor usually later than their thirty-first year, become
eligible to offices of State. So that the rich and poor should not be
sharply separated in the beginning of the war of life; but the one
supported against the first stress of it long enough to enable them,
by proper forethought and economy, to secure their footing; and the
other trained somewhat in the use of moderate means, before they were
permitted to have the command of abundant ones. And of the sources
from which these State incomes for the married poor should be
supplied, or of the treatment of those of our youth whose conduct
rendered it advisable to refuse them permission to marry, I defer what
I have to say till we come to the general subjects of taxation and
criminal discipline; leaving the proposals made in this letter to
bear, for the present, whatever aspect of mere romance and
unrealizable vision they probably may, and to most readers, such as
they assuredly will. Nor shall I make the slightest effort to redeem
them from these imputations; for though there is nothing in all their
purport which would not be approved, as in the deepest sense
"practical"--by the Spirit of Paradise--
"Which gives to all the self-same bent,
Whose lives are wise and innocent,"
and though I know that national justice in conduct, and peace in
heart, could by no other laws be so swiftly secured, I confess with
much _dis_peace of heart, that both justice and happiness have at this
day become, in England, "romantic impossibilities."
LETTER XXI.
OF THE DIGNITY OF THE FOUR FINE ARTS; AND OF THE PROPER SYSTEM OF
RETAIL TRADE.
_April 15, 1867._
127. I return now to the part of the subject at which I was
interrupted--the inquiry as to the proper means of finding persons
willing to maintain themselves and others by degrading occupations.
That, on the whole, simply manual occupations _are_ degrading, I
suppose I may assume you to admit; at all events, the fact is so,
and I suppose few general readers will have any doubt of it.[A]
[A] Many of my working readers have disputed this statement
eagerly, feeling the good effect of work in themselves; but
observe, I only say, _simply_ or _totally_ manual work; and
that, alone, _is_ degrading, though often in measure,
refreshing, wholesome, and necessary. So it is highly
necessary and wholesome to eat sometimes; but degrading to
eat all day, as to labor with the hands all day. But it is
not degrading to think all day--if you can. A highly-bred
court lady, rightly interested in politics and literature,
is a much finer type of the human creature than a servant of
all work, however clever and honest.
Granting this, it follows as a direct consequence that it is the duty
of all persons in higher stations of life, by every means in their
power to diminish their demand for work of such kind, _and to live
with as little aid from the lower trades_, as they can possibly
contrive.
128. I suppose you see that this conclusion is not a little at
variance with received notions on political economy? It is popularly
supposed that it benefits a nation to invent a want. But the fact is,
that the true benefit is in extinguishing a want--in living with as
few wants as possible.
I cannot tell you the contempt I feel for the common writers on
political economy, in their stupefied missing of this first principle
of all human economy--individual or political--to live, namely, with
as few wants as possible, and to waste nothing of what is given you to
supply them.
129. This ought to be the first lesson of every rich man's political
code. "Sir," his tutor should early say to him, "you are so placed in
society,--it may be for your misfortune, it _must_ be for your
trial--that you are likely to be maintained all your life by the labor
of other men. You will have to make shoes for nobody, but some one
will have to make a great many for you. You will have to dig ground
for nobody, but some one will have to dig through every summer's hot
day for you. You will build houses and make clothes for no one, but
many a rough hand must knead clay, and many an elbow be crooked to the
stitch, to keep that body of yours warm and fine. Now remember,
whatever you and your work may be worth, the less your keep costs, the
better. It does not cost money only. It costs degradation. You do not
merely employ these people. You also tread upon them. It cannot be
helped;--you have your place, and they have theirs; but see that you
tread as lightly as possible, and on as few as possible. What food,
and clothes, and lodging, you honestly need, for your health and
peace, you may righteously take. See that you take the plainest you
can serve yourself with--that you waste or wear nothing vainly--and
that you employ no man in furnishing you with any useless luxury."
130. That is the first lesson of Christian--or human--economy; and
depend upon it, my friend, it is a sound one, and has every voice and
vote of the spirits of Heaven and earth to back it, whatever views the
Manchester men, or any other manner of men, may take respecting
"demand and supply." Demand what you deserve, and you shall be
supplied with it, for your good. Demand what you do _not_ deserve, and
you shall be supplied with something which you have not demanded, and
which Nature perceives that you deserve, quite to the contrary of your
good. That is the law of your existence, and if you do not make it the
law of your resolved acts, so much, precisely, the worse for you and
all connected with you.
131. Yet observe, though it is out of its proper place said here, this
law forbids no luxury which men are not degraded in providing. You may
have Paul Veronese to paint your ceiling, if you like, or Benvenuto
Cellini to make cups for you. But you must not employ a hundred divers
to find beads to stitch over your sleeve. (Did you see the account of
the sales of the Esterhazy jewels the other day?)
And the degree in which you recognize the difference between these two
kinds of services, is precisely what makes the difference between your
being a civilized person or a barbarian. If you keep slaves to furnish
forth your dress--to glut your stomach--sustain your indolence--or
deck your pride, you are a barbarian. If you keep servants, properly
cared for, to furnish you with what you verily want, and no more than
that--you are a "civil" person--a person capable of the qualities of
citizenship.[A]
[A] Compare 'The Crown of Wild Olive,' §§ 79, 118, and 122.
132. Now, farther, observe that in a truly civilized and disciplined
state, no man would be allowed to meddle with any material who did not
know how to make the best of it. In other words, the arts of working
in wood, clay, stone, and metal, would all be _fine_ arts (working in
iron for machinery becoming an entirely distinct business). There
would be no joiner's work, no smith's, no pottery nor stone-cutting,
so debased in character as to be entirely unconnected with the finer
branches of the same art; and to at least one of these finer branches
(generally in metal-work) every painter and sculptor would be
necessarily apprenticed during some years of his education. There
would be room, in these four trades alone, for nearly every grade of
practical intelligence and productive imagination.
133. But it should not be artists alone who are exercised early in
these crafts. It would be part of my scheme of physical education that
every youth in the state--from the King's son downwards,--should learn
to do something finely and thoroughly with his hand, so as to let him
know what _touch_ meant; and what stout craftsmanship meant; and to
inform him of many things besides, which no man can learn but by some
severely accurate discipline in doing. Let him once learn to take a
straight shaving off a plank, or draw a fine curve without faltering,
or lay a brick level in its mortar; and he has learned a multitude of
other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him. He might
choose his craft, but whatever it was, he should learn it to some
sufficient degree of true dexterity: and the result would be, in after
life, that among the middle classes a good deal of their house
furniture would be made, and a good deal of rough work, more or less
clumsily, but not ineffectively, got through, by the master himself
and his sons, with much furtherance of their general health and peace
of mind, and increase of innocent domestic pride and pleasure, and to
the extinction of a great deal of vulgar upholstery and other mean
handicraft.
134. Farther. A great deal of the vulgarity, and nearly all the vice,
of retail commerce, involving the degradation of persons occupied in
it, depends simply on the fact that their minds are always occupied by
the vital (or rather mortal) question of profits. I should at once put
an end to this source of baseness by making all retail dealers merely
salaried officers in the employ of the trade guilds; the stewards,
that is to say, of the salable properties of those guilds, and
purveyors of such and such articles to a given number of families. A
perfectly well-educated person might, without the least degradation,
hold such an office as this, however poorly paid; and it would be
precisely the fact of his being well educated which would enable him
to fulfil his duties to the public without the stimulus of direct
profit. Of course the current objection to such a system would be that
no man, for a regularly paid salary, would take pains to please his
customers; and the answer to that objection is, that if you can train
a man to so much unselfishness as to offer himself fearlessly to the
chance of being shot, in the course of his daily duty, you can most
assuredly, if you make it also a point of honor with him, train him to
the amount of self-denial involved in looking you out with care such a
piece of cheese or bacon as you have asked for.
135. You see that I have already much diminished the number of
employments involving degradation; and raised the character of many of
those that are left. There remain to be considered the necessarily
painful or mechanical works of mining, forging, and the like: the
unclean, noisome, or paltry manufactures--the various kinds of
transport--(by merchant shipping, etc.) and the conditions of menial
service.
It will facilitate the examination of these if we put them for the
moment aside, and pass to the other division of our dilemma, the
question, namely, what kind of lives our gentlemen and ladies are to
live, for whom all this hard work is to be done.
LETTER XXII.
OF THE NORMAL POSITION AND DUTIES OF THE UPPER CLASSES. GENERAL
STATEMENT OF THE LAND QUESTION.
_April 17, 1867._
136. In passing now to the statement of conditions affecting the
interests of the upper classes, I would rather have addressed these
closing letters to one of themselves than to you, for it is with their
own faults and needs that each class is primarily concerned. As,
however, unless I kept the letters private, this change of their
address would be but a matter of courtesy and form, not of any
true prudential use; and as besides I am now no more inclined to
reticence--prudent or otherwise; but desire only to state the facts
of our national economy as clearly and completely as may be, I pursue
the subject without respect of persons.
137. Before examining what the occupation and estate of the upper
classes ought, as far as may reasonably be conjectured, finally to
become, it will be well to set down in brief terms what they actually
have been in past ages: for this, in many respects, they must also
always be. The upper classes, broadly speaking, are originally
composed of the best-bred (in the mere animal sense of the term), the
most energetic, and most thoughtful, of the population, who either by
strength of arm seize the land from the rest, and make slaves of them,
or bring desert land into cultivation, over which they have therefore,
within certain limits, true personal right; or, by industry,
accumulate other property, or by choice devote themselves to
intellectual pursuits, and, though poor, obtain an acknowledged
superiority of position, shown by benefits conferred in discovery, or
in teaching, or in gifts of art. This is all in the simple course of
the law of nature; and the proper offices of the upper classes, thus
distinguished from the rest, become, therefore, in the main
threefold:--
138. (A) Those who are strongest of arm have for their proper
function the restraint and punishment of vice, and the general
maintenance of law and order; releasing only from its original
subjection to their power that which truly deserves to be emancipated.
(B) Those who are superior by forethought and industry, have for their
function to be the providences of the foolish, the weak, and the idle;
and to establish such systems of trade and distribution of goods as
shall preserve the lower orders from perishing by famine, or any other
consequence of their carelessness or folly, and to bring them all,
according to each man's capacity, at last into some harmonious
industry.
(C) The third class, of scholars and artists, of course, have for
function the teaching and delighting of the inferior multitude.
The office of the upper classes, then, as a body, is to keep order
among their inferiors, and raise them always to the nearest level with
themselves of which those inferiors are capable. So far as they are
thus occupied, they are invariably loved and reverenced intensely by
all beneath them, and reach, themselves, the highest types of human
power and beauty.
139. This, then, being the natural ordinance and function of
aristocracy, its corruption, like that of all other beautiful things
under the Devil's touch, is a very fearful one. Its corruption is,
that those who ought to be the rulers and guides of the people,
forsake their task of painful honorableness; seek their own pleasure
and pre-eminence only; and use their power, subtlety, conceded
influence, prestige of ancestry, and mechanical instrumentality of
martial power, to make the lower orders toil for them, and feed and
clothe them for nothing, and become in various ways their living
property, goods, and chattels, even to the point of utter
regardlessness of whatever misery these serfs may suffer through such
insolent domination, or they themselves, their masters, commit of
crime to enforce it.
140. And this is especially likely to be the case when means of
various and tempting pleasures are put within the reach of the upper
classes by advanced conditions of national commerce and knowledge: and
it is _certain_ to be the case as soon as position among those upper
classes becomes any way purchasable with money, instead of being the
assured measure of some kind of worth, (either strength of hand, or
true wisdom of conduct, or imaginative gift). It has been becoming
more and more the condition of the aristocracy of Europe, ever since
the fifteenth century; and is gradually bringing about its ruin, and
in that ruin, checked only by the power which here and there a good
soldier or true statesman achieves over the putrid chaos of its vain
policy, the ruin of all beneath it; which can be arrested only, either
by the repentance of that old aristocracy, (hardly to be hoped,) or by
the stern substitution of other aristocracy worthier than it.
141. Corrupt as it may be, it and its laws together, I would at this
moment, if I could, fasten every one of its institutions down with
bands of iron, and trust for all progress and help against its tyranny
simply to the patience and strength of private conduct. And if I had
to choose, I would tenfold rather see the tyranny of old Austria
triumphant in the old and new worlds, and trust to the chance (or
rather the distant certainty) of some day seeing a true Emperor born
to its throne, than, with every privilege of thought and act, run the
most distant risk of seeing the thoughts of the people of Germany and
England become like the thoughts of the people of America.
My American friends, of whom one, Charles Eliot Norton, of Cambridge,
is the dearest I have in the world, tell me I know nothing about
America. It may be so, and they must do me the justice to observe that
I, therefore, usually _say_ nothing about America. But this much I
have said, because the Americans, as a nation, set their trust in
liberty and in equality, of which I detest the one, and deny the
possibility of the other; and because, also, as a nation, they are
wholly undesirous of Rest, and incapable of it; irreverent of
themselves, both in the present and in the future; discontented with
what they are, yet having no ideal of anything which they desire to
become.[A]
[A] Some following passages in this letter, containing
personal references which might, in permanence, have given
pain or offense, are now omitted--the substance of them being
also irrelevant to my main purpose. These few words about the
American war, with which they concluded, are, I think, worth
retaining:--"All methods of right government are to be
communicated to foreign nations by perfectness of example and
gentleness of patiently expanded power, not suddenly, nor at
the bayonet's point. And though it is the duty of every
nation to interfere, at bayonet point, if they have the
strength to do so, to save any oppressed multitude, or even
individual, from manifest violence, it is wholly unlawful to
interfere in such matter, except with sacredly pledged
limitation of the objects to be accomplished in the oppressed
person's favor, and with absolute refusal of all selfish
advantage and _increase of territory or of political power_
which might otherwise accrue from the victory."
142. But, however corrupted, the aristocracy of any nation may thus be
always divided into three great classes. First, the landed proprietors
and soldiers, essentially one political body (for the possession of
land can only be maintained by military power); secondly, the moneyed
men and leaders of commerce; thirdly, the professional men and masters
in science, art, and literature.
And we were to consider the proper duties of all these, and the laws
probably expedient respecting them. Whereupon, in the outset, we are
at once brought face to face with the great land question.
143. Great as it may be, it is wholly subordinate to those we have
hitherto been considering. The laws you make regarding methods of
labor, or to secure the genuineness of the things produced by it,
affect the entire moral state of the nation, and all possibility of
human happiness for them. The mode of distribution of the land only
affects their numbers. By this or that law respecting land you decide
whether the nation shall consist of fifty or of a hundred millions.
But by this or that law respecting work, you decide whether the given
number of millions shall be rogues, or honest men;--shall be wretches,
or happy men. And the question of numbers is wholly immaterial,
compared with that of character; or rather, its own materialness
depends on the prior determination of character. Make your nation
consist of knaves, and, as Emerson said long ago, it is but the case
of any other vermin--"the more, the worse." Or, to put the matter in
narrower limits, it is a matter of no final concern to any parent
whether he shall have two children, or four; but matter of quite final
concern whether those he has shall, or shall not, deserve to be
hanged. The great difficulty in dealing with the land question at all
arises from the false, though very natural, notion on the part of many
reformers, and of large bodies of the poor, that the division of the
land among the said poor would be an immediate and everlasting relief
to them. An _immediate_ relief it would be to the extent of a small
annual sum (you may easily calculate how little, if you choose) to
each of them; on the strength of which accession to their finances,
they would multiply into as much extra personality as the extra pence
would sustain, and at that point be checked by starvation, exactly as
they are now.
144. Any other form of pillage would benefit them only in like manner;
and, in reality, the difficult part of the question respecting
numbers, is, not where they shall be arrested, but what shall be the
method of their arrest.
An island of a certain size has standing room only for so many people;
feeding ground for a great many fewer than could stand on it. Reach
the limits of your feeding ground, and you must cease to multiply,
must emigrate or starve. The modes in which the pressure is gradually
brought to bear on the population depend on the justice of your laws;
but the pressure itself must come at last, whatever the distribution
of the land. And arithmeticians seem to me a little slow to remark the
importance of the old child's puzzle about the nails in the
horseshoe--when it is populations that are doubling themselves,
instead of farthings.
145. The essential land question, then, is to be treated quite
separately from that of the methods of restriction of population. The
land question is--At what point will you resolve to stop? It is
separate matter of discussion how you are to stop at it.
And this essential land question--"At what point will you stop?"--is
itself two-fold. You have to consider first, by what methods of land
distribution you can maintain the greatest number of healthy persons;
and secondly, whether, if, by any other mode of distribution and
relative ethical laws, you can raise their character, while you
diminish their numbers, such sacrifice should be made, and to what
extent? I think it will be better, for clearness' sake, to end this
letter with the putting of these two queries in their decisive form,
and to reserve suggestions of answer for my next.
LETTER XXIII.
OF THE JUST TENURE OF LANDS: AND THE PROPER FUNCTIONS OF HIGH PUBLIC
OFFICERS.
_20th April, 1867._
146. I must repeat to you, once more, before I proceed, that I only
enter on this part of our inquiry to complete the sequence of its
system, and explain fully the bearing of former conclusions, and not
for any immediately practicable good to be got out of the
investigation. Whatever I have hitherto urged upon you, it is in the
power of all men quietly to promote, and finally to secure, by the
patient resolution of personal conduct; but no action could be taken
in re-distribution of land or in limitation of the incomes of the
upper classes, without grave and prolonged civil disturbance.
Such disturbance, however, is only too likely to take place, if the
existing theories of political economy are allowed credence much
longer. In the writings of the vulgar economists, nothing more excites
my indignation than the subterfuges by which they endeavor to
accommodate their pseudoscience to the existing abuses of wealth, by
disguising the true nature of rent. I will not waste time in exposing
their fallacies, but will put the truth for you into as clear a shape
as I can.
147. Rent, of whatever kind, is, briefly, the price continuously paid
for the loan of the property of another person. It may be too little,
or it may be just or exorbitant or altogether unjustifiable, according
to circumstances. Exorbitant rents can only be exacted from ignorant
or necessitous rent-payers: and it is one of the most necessary
conditions of state economy that there should be clear laws to prevent
such exaction.
148. I may interrupt myself for a moment to give you an instance of
what I mean. The most wretched houses of the poor in London often pay
ten or fifteen per cent. to the landlord; and I have known an instance
of sanitary legislation being hindered, to the loss of many hundreds
of lives, in order that the rents of a nobleman, derived from the
necessities of the poor, might not be diminished. And it is a curious
thing to me to see Mr. J. S. Mill foaming at the mouth, and really
afflicted conscientiously, because he supposes one man to have been
unjustly hanged, while by his own failure, (I believe, _wilful_
failure)[A] in stating clearly to the public one of the first
elementary truths of the science he professes, he is aiding and
abetting the commission of the cruelest possible form of murder on
many thousands of persons yearly, for the sake simply of putting money
into the pockets of the landlords. I felt this evil so strongly that I
bought, in the worst part of London, one freehold and one leasehold
property, consisting of houses inhabited by the lowest poor; in order
to try what change in their comfort and habits I could effect by
taking only a just rent, but that firmly. The houses of the leasehold
pay me five per cent.; the families that used to have one room in them
have now two; and are more orderly and hopeful besides; and there is a
surplus still on the rents they pay after I have taken my five per
cent., with which, if all goes well, they will eventually be able to
buy twelve years of the lease from me. The freehold pays three per
cent., with similar results in the comfort of the tenant. This is
merely an example of what might be done by firm State action in such
matters.
[A] See § 156.
149. Next, of wholly unjustifiable rents. These are for things which
are not, and which it is criminal to consider as, personal or
exchangeable property. Bodies of men, land, water, and air, are the
principal of these things.
Parenthetically, may I ask you to observe, that though a fearless
defender of some forms of slavery, I am no defender of the slave
_trade_. It is by a blundering confusion of ideas between _governing_
men, and _trading in_ men, and by consequent interference with the
restraint, instead of only with the sale, that most of the great
errors in action have been caused among the emancipation men. I am
prepared, if the need be clear to my own mind, and if the power is in
my hands, to throw men into prison, or any other captivity--to bind
them or to beat them--and force them, for such periods as I may judge
necessary, to any kind of irksome labor: and on occasion of desperate
resistance, to hang or shoot them. But I will not _sell_ them.
150. Bodies of men, or women, then (and much more, as I said before,
their souls), must not be bought or sold. Neither must land, nor
water, nor air, these being the necessary sustenance of men's bodies
and souls.
Yet all these may, on certain terms, be bound, or secured in
possession, to particular persons under certain conditions. For
instance, it may be proper, at a certain time, to give a man
permission to possess land, as you give him permission to marry; and
farther, if he wishes it and works for it, to secure to him the land
needful for his life; as you secure his wife to him; and make both
utterly his own, without in the least admitting his right to buy other
people's wives, or fields, or to sell his own.
151. And the right action of a State respecting its land is, indeed,
to secure it in various portions to those of its citizens who deserve
to be trusted with it, according to their respective desires and
proved capacities; and after having so secured it to each, to exercise
only such vigilance over his treatment of it as the State must give
also to his treatment of his wife and servants; for the most part
leaving him free, but interfering in cases of gross mismanagement or
abuse of power. And in the case of great old families, which always
ought to be, and in some measure, however decadent, still truly are,
the noblest monumental architecture of the kingdom, living temples of
sacred tradition and hero's religion, so much land ought to be granted
to them in perpetuity as may enable them to live thereon with all
circumstances of state and outward nobleness; _but their income must
in no wise be derived from the rents of it_, nor must they be occupied
(even in the most distant or subordinately administered methods), in
the exaction of rents. That is not noblemen's work. Their income must
be fixed, and paid them by the State, as the King's is.
152. So far from their land being to them a source of income, it
should be, on the whole, costly to them, great part of it being kept
in conditions of natural grace, which return no rent but their
loveliness; and the rest made, at whatever cost, exemplary in
perfection of such agriculture as develops the happiest peasant
life;[A] agriculture which, as I will show you hereafter, must reject
the aid of all mechanism except that of instruments guided solely by
the human hand, or by animal, or directly natural forces; and which,
therefore, cannot compete for profitableness with agriculture carried
on by aid of machinery.
[A] Compare 'Fors Clavigera,' Letter XXI., page 22.
And now for the occupation of this body of men, maintained at fixed
perennial cost of the State.
153. You know I said I should want no soldiers of special skill or
pugnacity, for all my boys would be soldiers. But I assuredly want
_captains_ of soldiers, of special skill and pugnacity. And also, I
said I should strongly object to the appearance of any lawyers in my
territory; meaning, however, by lawyers, people who live by arguing
about law,--not people appointed to administer law; and people who
live by eloquently misrepresenting facts--not people appointed to
discover and plainly represent them.
Therefore, the youth of this landed aristocracy would be trained, in
my schools, to these two great callings, not _by_ which, but _in_
which, they are to live.
They would be trained, all of them, in perfect science of war, and in
perfect science of essential law. And from their body should be chosen
the captains and the judges of England, its advocates, and generally
its State officers, all such functions being held for fixed pay (as
already our officers of the Church and army are paid), and no function
connected with the administration of law ever paid by casual fee. And
the head of such family should, in his own right, having passed due
(and high) examination in the science of law, and not otherwise, be a
judge, law-ward or Lord, having jurisdiction both in civil and
criminal cases, such as our present judges have, after such case shall
have been fully represented before, and received verdict from, a jury,
composed exclusively of the middle or lower orders, and in which no
member of the aristocracy should sit. But from the decision of these
juries, or from the Lord's sentence, there should be a final appeal to
a tribunal, the highest in the land, held solely in the King's name,
and over which, in the capital, the King himself should preside, and
therein give judgment on a fixed number of days in each year;--and, in
other places and at other times, judges appointed by election (under
certain conditions) out of any order of men in the State (the election
being national, not provincial): and all causes brought before these
judges should be decided, without appeal, by their own authority; not
by juries. This, then, recasting it for you into brief view, would be
the entire scheme of state authorities:--
154. (1) The King: exercising, as part both of his prerogative and his
duty, the office of a supreme judge at stated times in the central
court of appeal of his kingdom.
(2) Supreme judges appointed by national election; exercising sole
authority in courts of final appeal.
(3) Ordinary judges, holding the office hereditarily under conditions;
and with power to add to their number (and liable to have it increased
if necessary by the King's appointment); the office of such judges
being to administer the national laws under the decision of juries.
(4) State officers charged with the direction of public agency in
matters of public utility.
(5) Bishops, charged with offices of supervision and aid, to family by
family, and person by person.
(6) The officers of war, of various ranks.
(7) The officers of public instruction, of various ranks.
I have sketched out this scheme for you somewhat prematurely, for I
would rather have conducted you to it step by step, and as I brought
forward the reasons for the several parts of it; but it is, on other
grounds, desirable that you should have it to refer to, as I go on.
155. Without depending anywise upon nomenclature, yet holding it
important as a sign and record of the meanings of things, I may tell
you further that I should call the elected supreme judges, "Princes";
the hereditary judges, "Lords"; and the officers of public guidance,
"Dukes"; and that the social rank of these persons would be very
closely correspondent to that implied by such titles under our present
constitution; only much more real and useful. And in conclusion of
this letter, I will but add, that if you, or other readers, think it
idle of me to write or dream of such things; as if any of them were in
our power, or within possibility of any near realization, and above
all, vain to write of them to a workman at Sunderland: you are to
remember what I told you at the beginning, that I go on with this part
of my subject in some fulfilment of my long-conceived plan, too large
to receive at present any deliberate execution from my failing
strength; (being the body of the work to which 'Munera Pulveris' was
intended merely as an introduction;) and that I address it to you
because I know that the working men of England must, for some time,
be the only body to which we can look for resistance to the deadly
influence of moneyed power.
I intend, however, to write to you at this moment one more letter,
partly explanatory of minor details necessarily omitted in this, and
chiefly of the proper office of the soldier; and then I must delay the
completion of even this poor task until after the days have turned,
for I have quite other work to do in the brightness of the full-opened
spring.
156. P.S.--As I have used somewhat strong language, both here and
elsewhere, of the equivocations of the economists on the subject of
rent, I had better refer you to one characteristic example. You will
find in paragraph 5th and 6th of Book II., chap. 2, of Mr. Mill's
'Principles,' that the right to tenure of land is based, by his
admission, only on the proprietor's being its improver.
Without pausing to dwell on the objection that land cannot be improved
beyond a certain point, and that, at the reaching of that point,
farther claim to tenure would cease, on Mr. Mill's principle--take
even this admission, with its proper subsequent conclusion, that "in
no sound theory of private property was it ever contemplated that the
proprietor of land should be merely a sinecurist quartered on it."
Now, had that conclusion been farther followed, it would have
compelled the admission that all rent was unjustifiable which normally
maintained any person in idleness; which is indeed the whole truth of
the matter. But Mr. Mill instantly retreats from this perilous
admission; and after three or four pages of discussion (quite accurate
for _its_ part) of the limits of power in management of the land
itself (which apply just as strictly to the peasant proprietor as to
the cottier's landlord), he begs the whole question at issue in one
brief sentence, slipped cunningly into the middle of a long one which
appears to be telling all the other way, and in which the fatal
assertion (of the right to rent) nestles itself, as if it had been
already proved,--thus--I italicize the unproved assertion in which the
venom of the entire falsehood is concentrated.
"Even in the case of cultivated land, a man whom, though only one
among millions, the law permits to hold thousands of acres as his
single share, is not entitled to think that all is given to him to use
and abuse, and deal with it as if it concerned nobody but himself.
_The rents or profits which he can obtain from it are his, and his
only_; but with regard to the land, in everything which he abstains
from doing, he is morally bound, and should, whenever the case admits,
be legally compelled to make his interest and pleasure consistent with
the public good."
157. I say, this sentence in italics is slipped _cunningly_ into the
long sentence, as if it were of no great consequence; and above I have
expressed my belief that Mr. Mill's equivocations on this subject are
wilful. It is a grave accusation; but I cannot, by any stretch of
charity, attribute these misrepresentations to absolute dulness and
bluntness of brain, either in Mr. Mill or his follower, Mr. Fawcett.
Mr. Mill is capable of immense involuntary error; but his involuntary
errors are usually owing to his seeing only one or two of the many
sides of a thing; not to obscure sight of the side he _does_ see. Thus
his 'Essay on Liberty' only takes cognizance of facts that make for
liberty, and of none that make for restraint. But in its statement of
all that can be said for liberty, it is so clear and keen, that I have
myself quoted it before now as the best authority on that side. And,
if arguing in favor of Rent, absolutely, and with clear explanation of
what it was, he had then defended it with all his might, I should have
attributed to him only the honest shortsightedness of partisanship;
but when I find his defining sentences full of subtle entanglement and
reserve--and that reserve held throughout his treatment of this
particular subject,--I cannot, whether I utter the suspicion or not,
keep the sense of wilfulness in the misrepresentation from remaining
in my mind. And if there be indeed ground for this blame, and Mr.
Mill, for fear of fostering political agitation,[A] _has_ disguised
what he knows to be the facts about rent, I would ask him as one of
the leading members of the Jamaica Committee, which is the greater
crime, boldly to sign warrant for the sudden death of one man, known
to be an agitator, in the immediate outbreak of such agitation, or, by
equivocation in a scientific work, to sign warrants for the deaths of
thousands of men in slow misery, for _fear_ of an agitation which has
not begun; and if begun, would be carried on by debate, not by the
sword?
[A] With at last the natural consequences of
cowardice,--nitro-glycerine and fire-balls! Let the upper
classes speak the truth about themselves boldly, and they
will know how to defend themselves fearlessly. It is
equivocation in principle, and dereliction from duty, which
melt at last into tears in a mob's presence.--(Dec. 16th,
1867.)
LETTER XXIV.
THE OFFICE OF THE SOLDIER.
_April 22, 1867._
158. I must once more deprecate your probable supposition that I bring
forward this ideal plan of State government, either with any idea of
its appearing, to our present public mind, practicable even at a
remote period, or with any positive and obstinate adherence to the
particular form suggested. There are no wiser words among the many
wise ones of the most rational and keen-sighted of old English men of
the world, than these:--
"For forms of government let fools contest;
That which is best administered is best."
For, indeed, no form of government is of any use among bad men; and
any form will work in the hands of the good; but the essence of all
government among good men is this, that it is mainly occupied in the
_production and recognition of human worth_, and in the detection and
extinction of human unworthiness; and every Government which produces
and recognizes worth, will also inevitably use the worth it has found
to govern with; and therefore fall into some approximation to such a
system as I have described. And, as I told you, I do not contend for
names, nor particular powers--though I state those which seem to me
most advisable; on the contrary, I know that the precise extent of
authorities must be different in every nation at different times, and
ought to be so, according to their circumstances and character; and
all that I assert with confidence is the necessity, within afterwards
definable limits, of _some such_ authorities as these; that is to say,
159. I. An _observant_ one:--by which all men shall be looked after
and taken note of.
II. A _helpful_ one, from which those who need help may get it.
III. A _prudential_ one, which shall not let people dig in wrong
places for coal, nor make railroads where they are not wanted; and
which shall also, with true providence, insist on their digging in
right places for coal, in a safe manner, and making railroads where
they _are_ wanted.
IV. A _martial_ one, which will punish knaves and make idle persons
work.
V. An _instructive_ one, which shall tell everybody what it is their
duty to know, and be ready pleasantly to answer questions if anybody
asks them.
VI. A _deliberate_ and _decisive_ one, which shall judge by law, and
amend or make law;
VII. An _exemplary_ one, which shall show what is loveliest in the art
of life.
You may divide or name those several offices as you will, or they may
be divided in practice as expediency may recommend; the plan I have
stated merely puts them all into the simplest forms and relations.
160. You see I have just defined the martial power as that "which
punishes knaves and makes idle persons work." For that is indeed the
ultimate and perennial soldiership; that is the essential warrior's
office to the end of time. "There is no discharge in that war." To the
compelling of sloth, and the scourging of sin, the strong hand will
have to address itself as long as this wretched little dusty and
volcanic world breeds nettles, and spits fire. The soldier's office at
present is indeed supposed to be the defense of his country against
other countries; but that is an office which--Utopian as you may think
the saying--will soon now be extinct. I say so fearlessly, though I
say it with wide war threatened, at this moment, in the East and West.
For observe what the standing of nations on their defense really
means. It means that, but for such armed attitude, each of them would
go and rob the other; that is to say, that the majority of active
persons in every nation are at present--thieves. I am very sorry that
this should still be so; but it will not be so long. National
exhibitions, indeed, will not bring peace; but national education
will, and that is soon coming. I can judge of this by my own mind, for
I am myself naturally as covetous a person as lives in this world, and
am as eagerly-minded to go and steal some things the French have got,
as any housebreaker could be, having clue to attractive spoons. If I
could by military incursion carry off Paul Veronese's "Marriage in
Cana," and the "Venus Victrix," and the "Hours of St. Louis," it
would give me the profoundest satisfaction to accomplish the foray
successfully; nevertheless, being a comparatively educated person, I
should most assuredly not give myself that satisfaction, though there
were not an ounce of gunpowder, nor a bayonet, in all France. I have
not the least mind to rob anybody, however much I may covet what they
have got; and I know that the French and British public may and will,
with many other publics, be at last brought to be of this mind also;
and to see farther that a nation's real strength and happiness do not
depend on properties and territories, nor on machinery for their
defense; but on their getting such territory as they _have_, well
filled with none but respectable persons. Which is a way of
_infinitely_ enlarging one's territory, feasible to every potentate;
and dependent no wise on getting Trent turned, or Rhine-edge reached.
161. Not but that, in the present state of things, it may often be
soldiers' duty to seize territory, and hold it strongly; but only from
banditti, or savage and idle persons.
Thus, both Calabria and Greece ought to have been irresistibly
occupied long ago. Instead of quarreling with Austria about Venice,
the Italians ought to have made a truce with her for ten years, on
condition only of her destroying no monuments, and not taxing Italians
more than Germans; and then thrown the whole force of their army on
Calabria, shot down every bandit in it in a week, and forced the
peasantry of it into honest work on every hill-side, with stout and
immediate help from the soldiers in embanking streams, building walls,
and the like; and Italian finance would have been a much pleasanter
matter for the King to take account of by this time; and a fleet might
have been floating under Garganus strong enough to sweep every hostile
sail out of the Adriatic, instead of a disgraced and useless remnant
of one, about to be put up to auction.
And similarly, _we_ ought to have occupied Greece instantly, when they
asked us, whether Russia liked it or not; given them an English king,
made good roads for them, and stout laws; and kept them, and their
hills and seas, with righteous shepherding of Arcadian fields, and
righteous ruling of Salaminian wave, until they could have given
themselves a Greek king of men again; and obeyed him, like men.
_April 24._
162. It is strange that just before I finish work for this time, there
comes the first real and notable sign of the victory of the principles
I have been fighting for, these seven years. It is only a newspaper
paragraph, but it means much. Look at the second column of the 11th
page of yesterday's 'Pall Mall Gazette,' The paper has taken a
wonderful fit of misprinting lately (unless my friend John Simon has
been knighted on his way to Weimar, which would be much too right and
good a thing to be a likely one); but its straws of talk mark which
way the wind blows perhaps more early than those of any other
journal--and look at the question it puts in that page, "Whether
political economy be the sordid and materialistic science some
account it, or almost the noblest on which thought can be employed?"
Might not you as well have determined that question a little while
ago, friend Public? and known what political economy _was_, before you
talked so much about it?
But, hark, again--"Ostentation, parental pride and a host of moral"
(immoral?) "qualities must be recognized as among the springs of
industry; political economy should not ignore these, but, to discuss
them, _it must abandon its pretensions to the precision of a pure
science_."
163. Well done the 'Pall Mall'! Had it written "Prudence and parental
affection," instead of "Ostentation and parental pride," "must be
recognized among the springs of industry," it would have been still
better; and it would then have achieved the expression of a part of
the truth, which I put into clear terms in the first sentence of 'Unto
this Last,' in the year 1862--which it has thus taken five years to
get half way into the public's head.
"Among the delusions which at different periods have possessed
themselves of the minds of large masses of the human race, perhaps the
most curious--certainly the least creditable--is the modern
_soi-disant_ science of political economy, based on the idea that an
advantageous code of social action may be determined, irrespectively
of the influence of social affection."
Look also at the definition of skill, p. 87.
"Under the term 'skill' I mean to include the united force of
experience, intellect, and passion, in their operation on manual
labor, and under the term 'passion' to include the entire range of the
moral feelings."
164. I say half way into the public's head, because you see, a few
lines further on, the 'Pall Mall' hopes for a pause "half way between
the rigidity of Ricardo and the sentimentality of Ruskin."
With one hand on their pocket, and the other on their heart! Be it so
for the present; we shall see how long this statuesque attitude can be
maintained; meantime, it chances strangely--as several other things
have chanced while I was writing these notes to you--that they should
have put in that sneer (two lines before) at my note on the meaning of
the Homeric and Platonic Sirens, at the very moment when I was
doubting whether I would or would not tell you the significance of the
last song of Ariel in 'The Tempest.'
I had half determined not, but now I shall. And this was what brought
me to think of it:--
165. Yesterday afternoon I called on Mr. H. C. Sorby, to see some of
the results of an inquiry he has been following all last year, into
the nature of the coloring matter of leaves and flowers.
You most probably have heard (at all events, may with little trouble
hear) of the marvelous power which chemical analysis has received in
recent discoveries respecting the laws of light.
My friend showed me the rainbow of the rose, and the rainbow of the
violet, and the rainbow of the hyacinth, and the rainbow of forest
leaves being born, and the rainbow of forest leaves dying.
And, last, he showed me the rainbow of blood. It was but the
three-hundredth part of a grain, dissolved in a drop of water; and it
cast its measured bars, for ever recognizable now to human sight, on
the chord of the seven colors. And no drop of that red rain can now be
shed, so small as that the stain of it cannot be known, and the voice
of it heard out of the ground.
166. But the seeing these flower colors, and the iris of blood
together with them, just while I was trying to gather into brief space
the right laws of war, brought vividly back to me my dreaming fancy of
long ago, that even the trees of the earth were "capable of a kind of
sorrow, as they opened their innocent leaves in vain for men; and
along the dells of England her beeches cast their dappled shades only
where the outlaw drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase;
amidst the fair defiles of the Apennines, the twisted olive-trunks hid
the ambushes of treachery, and on their meadows, day by day, the
lilies, which were white at the dawn, were washed with crimson at
sunset."
And so also now this chance word of the daily journal, about the
Sirens, brought to my mind the divine passage in the Cratylus of
Plato, about the place of the dead.
"And none of those who dwell there desire to depart thence,--no, not
even the Sirens; but even they, the seducers, are there themselves
beguiled, and they who lulled all men, themselves laid to rest--they,
and all others--such sweet songs doth death know how to sing to them."
So also the Hebrew.
"And desire shall fail, because man goeth to his long home." For you
know I told you the Sirens were not pleasures, but desires; being
always represented in old Greek art as having human faces, with birds'
wings and feet; and sometimes with eyes upon their wings; and there
are not two more important passages in all literature, respecting the
laws of labor and of life, than those two great descriptions of the
Sirens in Homer and Plato,--the Sirens of death, and Sirens of eternal
life, representing severally the earthly and heavenly desires of men;
the heavenly desires singing to the motion of circles of the spheres,
and the earthly on the rocks of fatalest shipwreck. A fact which may
indeed be regarded "sentimentally," but it is also a profoundly
important politico-economical one.
And now for Shakespeare's song.
167. You will find, if you look back to the analysis of it, given in
'Munera Pulveris,' § 134, that the whole play of 'The Tempest' is an
allegorical representation of the powers of true, and therefore
spiritual, Liberty, as opposed to true, and therefore carnal and
brutal Slavery. There is not a sentence nor a rhyme, sung or uttered
by Ariel or Caliban, throughout the play, which has not this
under-meaning.
168. Now the fulfilment of all human liberty is in the peaceful
inheritance of the earth, with its "herb yielding seed, and fruit tree
yielding fruit" after his kind; the pasture, or arable, land, and the
blossoming, or wooded and fruited, land uniting the final elements of
life and peace, for body and soul. Therefore, we have the two great
Hebrew forms of benediction, "His eyes shall be red with wine, and his
teeth white with milk," and again, "Butter and honey shall he eat,
that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good." And as the
work of war and sin has always been the devastation of this blossoming
earth, whether by spoil or idleness, so the work of peace and virtue
is also that of the first day of Paradise, to "Dress it and to keep
it." And that will always be the song of perfectly accomplished
Liberty, in her industry, and rest, and shelter from troubled thoughts
in the calm of the fields, and gaining, by migration, the long
summer's day from the shortening twilight:--
"Where the bee sucks, there lurk I;
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily:
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."
And the security of this treasure to all the poor, and not the ravage
of it down the valleys of the Shenandoah, is indeed the true warrior's
work. But, that they may be able to restrain vice rightly, soldiers
must themselves be first in virtue; and that they may be able to
compel labor sternly, they must themselves be first in toil, and their
spears, like Jonathan's at Bethaven, enlighteners of the eyes.
LETTER XXV.
OF INEVITABLE DISTINCTION OF RANK, AND NECESSARY SUBMISSION TO
AUTHORITY. THE MEANING OF PURE-HEARTEDNESS. CONCLUSION.
169. I was interrupted yesterday, just as I was going to set my
soldiers to work; and to-day, here comes the pamphlet you promised me,
containing the Debates about Church-going, in which I find so
interesting a text for my concluding letter that I must still let my
soldiers stand at ease for a little while. Look at its twenty-fifth
page, and you will find, in the speech of Mr. Thomas, (carpenter,)
this beautiful explanation of the admitted change in the general
public mind, of which Mr. Thomas, for his part, highly approves, (the
getting out of the unreasonable habit of paying respect to anybody.)
There were many reasons to Mr. Thomas's mind why the working classes
did not attend places of worship: one was, that "the parson was
regarded as an object of reverence. In the little town he came from,
if a poor man did not make a bow to the parson he was a marked man.
This was no doubt wearing away to a great extent" (the base habit of
making bows), "because, the poor man was beginning to get education,
and to think for himself. It was only while the priest kept the press
from him that he was kept ignorant, and was compelled to bow, as it
were, to the parson.... It was the case all over England. The
clergyman seemed to think himself something superior. Now he (Mr.
Thomas) did not admit there was any inferiority" (laughter, audience
throughout course of meeting mainly in the right), "except, perhaps,
on the score of his having received a classical education, which the
poor man could not get."
Now, my dear friend, here is the element which is the veriest devil of
all that have got into modern flesh; this infidelity of the nineteenth
century St. Thomas in there being anything better than himself
alive;[A] coupled, as it always is, with the farther resolution--if
unwillingly convinced of the fact,--to seal the Better living thing
down again out of his way, under the first stone handy. I had not
intended, till we entered on the second section of our inquiry,
namely, into the influence of gentleness (having hitherto, you see,
been wholly concerned with that of justice), to give you the clue out
of our dilemma about equalities produced by education; but by the
speech of our superior carpenter, I am driven into it at once, and it
is perhaps as well.
[A] Compare 'Crown of Wild Olive,' § 136.
170. The speech is not, observe, without its own root of truth at the
bottom of it, nor at all, as I think, ill intended by the speaker; but
you have in it a clear instance of what I was saying in the sixteenth
of these letters,--that education _was desired by the lower orders
because they thought it would make them upper orders_, and be a
leveler and effacer of distinctions. They will be mightily astonished,
when they really get it, to find that it is, on the contrary, the
fatalest of all discerners and enforcers of distinctions; piercing,
even to the division of the joints and marrow, to find out wherein
your body and soul are less, or greater, than other bodies and souls,
and to sign deed of separation with unequivocal seal.
171. Education is, indeed, of all differences not divinely appointed,
an instant effacer and reconciler. Whatever is undivinely poor, it
will make rich; whatever is undivinely maimed, and halt, and blind, it
will make whole, and equal, and seeing. The blind and the lame are to
it as to David at the siege of the Tower of the Kings, "hated of
David's soul." But there are other divinely-appointed differences,
eternal as the ranks of the everlasting hills, and as the strength of
their ceaseless waters. And these, education does _not_ do away with;
but measures, manifests, and employs.
In the handful of shingle which you gather from the sea-beach, which
the indiscriminate sea, with equality of fraternal foam, has only
educated to be, every one, round, you will see little difference
between the noble and mean stones. But the jeweler's trenchant
education of them will tell you another story. Even the meanest will
be better for it, but the noblest so much better that you can class
the two together no more. The fair veins and colors are all clear now,
and so stern is nature's intent regarding this, that not only will the
polish show which is best, but the best will take most polish. You
shall not merely see they have more virtue than the others, but see
that more of virtue more clearly; and the less virtue there is, the
more dimly you shall see what there is of it.
172. And the law about education, which is sorrowfulest to vulgar
pride, is this--that all its gains are at compound interest; so that,
as our work proceeds, every hour throws us farther behind the greater
men with whom we began on equal terms. Two children go to school hand
in hand, and spell for half an hour over the same page. Through all
their lives, never shall they spell from the same page more. One is
presently a page ahead,--two pages, ten pages,--and evermore, though
each toils equally, the interval enlarges--at birth nothing, at death,
infinite.
173. And by this you may recognize true education from false. False
education is a delightful thing, and warms you, and makes you every
day think more of yourself. And true education is a deadly cold thing
with a Gorgon's head on her shield, and makes you every day think
worse of yourself.
Worse in two ways, also, more's the pity. It is perpetually increasing
the personal sense of ignorance and the personal sense of fault. And
this last is the truth which is at the bottom of the common
evangelical notion about conversion, and which the Devil has got hold
of, and hidden, until, instead of seeing and confessing personal
ignorance and fault, as compared with the sense and virtue of others,
people see nothing but corruption in human nature, and shelter their
own sins under accusation of their race (the worst of all assertions
of equality and fraternity). And so they avoid the blessed and
strengthening pain of finding out wherein they are fools, as compared
with other men, by calling everybody else a fool too; and avoid the
pain of discerning their own faults, by vociferously claiming their
share in the great capital of original sin.
I must also, therefore, tell you here what properly ought to have
begun the next following section of our subject--the point usually
unnoticed in the parable of the Prodigal Son.
174. First, have you ever observed that all Christ's main teachings,
by direct order, by earnest parable, and by His own permanent emotion,
regard the use and misuse of _money_? We might have thought, if we had
been asked what a divine teacher was most likely to teach, that he
would have left inferior persons to give directions about money; and
himself spoken only concerning faith and love, and the discipline of
the passions, and the guilt of the crimes of soul against soul. But
not so. He speaks in general terms of these. But He does not speak
parables about them for all men's memory, nor permit Himself fierce
indignation against them, in all men's sight. The Pharisees bring Him
an adulteress. He writes her forgiveness on the dust of which He had
formed her. Another, despised of all for known sin, He recognized as a
giver of unknown love. But He acknowledges no love in buyers and
sellers in His house. One should have thought there were people in
that house twenty times worse than they;--Caiaphas and his like--false
priests, false prayer-makers, false leaders of the people--who needed
putting to silence, or to flight, with darkest wrath. But the scourge
is only against the _traffickers and thieves_. The two most intense of
all the parables: the two which lead the rest in love and terror (this
of the Prodigal, and of Dives), relate, both of them, to management of
riches. The practical order given to the only seeker of advice, of
whom it is recorded that Christ "loved him," is briefly about his
property. "Sell that thou hast."
And the arbitrament of the day of the Last Judgment is made to rest
wholly, neither on belief in God, nor in any spiritual virtue in man,
nor on freedom from stress of stormy crime, but on this only, "I was
an hungered and ye gave me drink; naked, and ye clothed me; sick, and
ye came unto me."
175. Well, then, the first thing I want you to notice in the parable
of the Prodigal Son (and the last thing which people usually _do_
notice in it), is--that it is about a Prodigal! He begins by asking
for his share of his father's goods; he gets it, carries it off, and
wastes it. It is true that he wastes it in riotous living, but you are
not asked to notice in what kind of riot; he spends it with
harlots--but it is not the harlotry which his elder brother accuses
him of mainly, but of having devoured his father's living. Nay, it is
not the sensual life which he accuses himself of--or which the manner
of his punishment accuses him of. But the _wasteful_ life. It is not
said that he had become debauched in soul, or diseased in body, by his
vice; but that at last he would fain have filled his belly with husks,
and could not. It is not said that he was struck with remorse for the
consequences of his evil passions, but only that he remembered there
was bread enough and to spare, even for the servants, at home.
Now, my friend, do not think I want to extenuate sins of passion
(though, in very truth, the sin of Magdalene is a light one compared
to that of Judas); but observe, sins of passion, if of _real_ passion,
are often the errors and backfalls of noble souls; but prodigality is
mere and pure selfishness, and essentially the sin of an ignoble or
undeveloped creature; and I would rather, ten times rather, hear of a
youth that (certain degrees of temptation and conditions of resistance
being understood) he had fallen into any sin you chose to name, of all
the mortal ones, than that he was in the habit of running bills which
he could not pay.
Farther, though I hold that the two crowning and most accursed sins of
the society of this present day are the carelessness with which it
regards the betrayal of women, and the brutality with which it suffers
the neglect of children, both these head and chief crimes, and all
others, are rooted first in abuse of the laws, and neglect of the
duties concerning wealth. And thus the love of money, with the
parallel (and, observe, _mathematically commensurate_ looseness in
management of it), the "mal tener," followed necessarily by the "mal
dare," is, indeed, the root of all evil.
176. Then, secondly, I want you to note that when the prodigal comes
to his senses, he complains of nobody but himself, and speaks of no
unworthiness but his own. He says nothing against any of the women
who tempted him--nothing against the citizen who left him to feed on
husks--nothing of the false friends of whom "no man gave unto
him"--above all, nothing of the "corruption of human nature," or the
corruption of things in general. He says that _he himself_ is
unworthy, as distinguished from honorable persons, and that _he
himself_ has sinned, as distinguished from righteous persons. And
_that_ is the hard lesson to learn, and the beginning of faithful
lessons. All right and fruitful humility, and purging of heart, and
seeing of God, is in that. It is easy to call yourself the chief of
sinners, expecting every sinner round you to decline--or return--the
compliment; but learn to measure the real degrees of your own relative
baseness, and to be ashamed, not in heaven's sight, but in man's
sight; and redemption is indeed begun. Observe the phrase, I have
sinned "_against_ heaven," against the great law of that, and _before_
thee, visibly degraded before my human sire and guide, unworthy any
more of being esteemed of his blood, and desirous only of taking the
place I deserve among his servants.
177. Now, I do not doubt but that I shall set many a reader's teeth on
edge by what he will think my carnal and material rendering of this
"beautiful" parable. But I am just as ready to spiritualize it as he
is, provided I am sure first that we understand it. If we want to
understand the parable of the sower, we must first think of it as of
literal husbandry; if we want to understand the parable of the
prodigal, we must first understand it as of literal prodigality. And
the story has also for us a precious lesson in this literal sense of
it, namely this, which I have been urging upon you throughout these
letters, that all redemption must begin in subjection and in the
recovery of the sense of Fatherhood and authority, as all ruin and
desolation begin in the loss of that sense. The lost son began by
claiming his rights. He is found when he resigns them. He is lost by
flying from his father, when his father's authority was only paternal.
He is found by returning to his father, and desiring that his
authority may be absolute, as over a hired stranger.
And this is the practical lesson I want to leave with you, and all
other working men.
178. You are on the eve of a great political crisis; and every rascal
with a tongue in his head will try to make his own stock out of you.
Now this is the test you must try them with. Those that say to you,
"Stand up for your rights--get your division of living--be sure that
you are as well off as others, and have what they have!--don't let any
man dictate to you--have not you all a right to your opinion?--are you
not all as good as everybody else?--let us have no governors, or
fathers--let us all be free and alike." Those, I say, who speak thus
to you, take Nelson's rough order for--and hate them as you do the
Devil, for they _are_ his ambassadors. But those, the few, who have
the courage to say to you, "My friends, you and I, and all of us, have
somehow got very wrong; we've been hardly treated, certainly; but here
we are in a piggery, mainly by our own fault, hungry enough, and for
ourselves, anything but respectable: we _must_ get out of this; there
are certainly laws we may learn to live by, and there are wiser people
than we are in the world, and kindly ones, if we can find our way to
them; and an infinitely wise and kind Father, above all of them and
us, if we can but find our way to _Him_, and ask Him to take us for
servants, and put us to any work He will, so that we may never leave
Him more." The people who will say that to you, and (for by _no_
saying, but by their fruits, only, you shall finally know them) who
are themselves orderly and kindly, and do their own business
well,--take _those_ for your guides, and trust them; on ice and rock
alike, tie yourselves well together with them, and with much scrutiny,
and cautious walking (perhaps nearly as much back as forward, at
first), you will verily get off the glacier, and into meadow land, in
God's time.
179. I meant to have written much to you respecting the meaning of
that word "hired servants," and to have gone on to the duties of
soldiers, for you know "Soldier" means a person who is paid to fight
with regular pay--literally with "soldi" or "sous"--the "penny a day"
of the vineyard laborers; but I can't now: only just this much, that
our whole system of work must be based on the nobleness of
soldiership--so that we shall all be soldiers of either plowshare or
sword; and literally all our actual and professed soldiers, whether
professed for a time only, or for life, must be kept to hard work of
hand, when not in actual war; their honor consisting in being set to
service of more pain and danger than others; to life-boat service; to
redeeming of ground from furious rivers or sea--or mountain ruin; to
subduing wild and unhealthy land, and extending the confines of
colonies in the front of miasm and famine, and savage races.
And much of our harder home work must be done in a kind of
soldiership, by bands of trained workers sent from place to place and
town to town; doing, with strong and sudden hand, what is needed for
help, and setting all things in more prosperous courses for the
future.
Of all which I hope to speak in its proper place after we know what
offices the higher arts of gentleness have among the lower ones of
force, and how their prevalence may gradually change spear to
pruning-hook, over the face of all the earth.
180. And now--but one word more--either for you, or any other readers
who may be startled at what I have been saying, as to the peculiar
stress laid by the Founder of our religion on right dealing with
wealth. Let them be assured that it is with no fortuitous choice among
the attributes or powers of evil, that "Mammon" is assigned for the
direct adversary of the Master whom they are bound to serve. You
cannot, by any artifice of reconciliation, be God's soldier, and his.
Nor while the desire of gain is within your heart, can any true
knowledge of the Kingdom of God come there. No one shall enter its
stronghold,--no one receive its blessing, except, "he that hath clean
hands and a pure heart;" clean hands that have done no cruel
deed,--pure heart, that knows no base desire. And, therefore, in the
highest spiritual sense that can be given to words, be assured, not
respecting the literal temple of stone and gold, but of the living
temple of your body and soul, that no redemption, nor teaching, nor
hallowing, will be anywise possible for it, until these two verses
have been, for it also, fulfilled:--
"And He went into the temple, and began to cast out them that sold
therein, and them that bought. And He taught daily in the temple."
APPENDICES.
APPENDIX I.
Page 21.--_Expenditure on Science and Art._
The following is the passage referred to. The fact it relates is so
curious, and so illustrative of our national interest in science, that
I do not apologize for the repetition:--
"Two years ago there was a collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to
be sold in Bavaria; the best in existence, containing many specimens
unique for perfectness, and one, unique as an example of a species (a
whole kingdom of unknown living creatures being announced by that
fossil). This collection, of which the mere market worth, among
private buyers, would probably have been some thousand or twelve
hundred pounds, was offered to the English nation for seven hundred:
but we would not give seven hundred, and the whole series would have
been in the Munich museum at this moment, if Professor Owen[A] had
not, with loss of his own time, and patient tormenting of the British
public in the person of its representatives, got leave to give four
hundred pounds at once, and himself become answerable for the other
three!--which the said public will doubtless pay him eventually, but
sulkily, and caring nothing about the matter all the while; only
always ready to cackle if any credit comes of it. Consider, I beg of
you, arithmetically, what this fact means. Your annual expenditure for
public purposes (a third of it for military apparatus) is at least
fifty millions. Now seven hundred pounds is to fifty million pounds,
roughly, as seven pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose, then, a
gentleman of unknown income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured
from the fact that he spent two thousand a year on his park walls and
footmen only, professes himself fond of science; and that one of his
servants comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection of
fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be had for the
sum of sevenpence sterling; and that the gentleman who is fond of
science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, answers, after
keeping his servant waiting several months, 'Well, I'll give you
fourpence for them, if you will be answerable for the extra threepence
yourself till next year.'"
[A] I originally stated this fact without Professor Owen's
permission; which, of course, he could not with propriety
have granted, had I asked it; but I considered it so
important that the public should be aware of the fact, that I
did what seemed to me right, though rude.
APPENDIX II.
Page 33.--_Legislation of Frederick the Great._
The following are the portions of Mr. Dixon's letters referred to:--
"Well, I am now busy with Frederick the Great; I am not now astonished
that Carlyle calls him Great, neither that this work of his should
have had such a sad effect upon him in producing it, when I see the
number of volumes he must have had to wade through to produce such a
clear terse set of utterances; and yet I do not feel the work as a
book likely to do a reader of it the good that some of his other books
will do. It is truly awful to read these battles after battles, lies
after lies, called Diplomacy; it's fearful to read all this, and one
wonders how he that set himself to this--He, of all men--could have
the rare patience to produce such a labored, heart-rending piece of
work. Again, when one reads of the stupidity, the shameful waste of
our moneys by our forefathers, to see our National Debt (the curse to
our labor now, the millstone to our commerce, to our fair chance of
competition in our day) thus created, and for what? Even Carlyle
cannot tell; then how are we to tell? Now, who will deliver us? that
is the question; who will help us in these days of _idle or no work_,
while our foreign neighbors have plenty and are actually selling their
produce to our men of capital cheaper than we can make it? House-rent
getting dearer, taxes getting dearer, rates, clothing, food, etc. Sad
times, my master, do seem to have fallen upon us. And the cause of
nearly all this lies embedded in that Frederick; and yet, so far as I
know of it, no critic has yet given an exposition of such laying
there. For our behoof, is there no one that will take this, that there
lies so woven in with much other stuff so sad to read, to any man that
does not believe man was made to fight alone, to be a butcher of his
fellow-man? Who will do this work, or piece of work, so that all who
care may know how it is that our debt grew so large, and a great deal
more that we ought to know?--that clearly is one great reason why the
book was written and was printed. Well, I hope some day all this will
be clear to our people, and some man or men will arise and sweep us
clear of these hindrances, these sad drawbacks to the vitality of our
work in this world."
"57, Nile Street, Sunderland, Feb. 7, 1867.
"DEAR SIR,--
"I beg to acknowledge the receipt of two letters as additions to your
books, which I have read with deep interest, and shall take care of
them, and read them over again, so that I may thoroughly comprehend
them, and be able to think of them for future use. I myself am not
fully satisfied with our co-operation, and never have been; it is too
much tinged with the very elements that they complain of in our
present systems of trade--selfishness. I have for years been trying to
direct the attention of the editor of the _Co-operator_ to such evils
that I see in it. Now further, I may state that I find you and Carlyle
seem to agree quite on the idea of the _Masterhood_ qualification.
There again I find you both feel and write as all working men consider
just. I can assure you there is not an honest, noble working man that
would not by far serve under such _master_-hood, than be the employé
or workman of a co-operative store. Working men do not as a rule make
good masters; neither do they treat each other with that courtesy as a
noble master treats his working man. George Fox shadows forth some
such treatment that Friends ought to make law and guidance for their
working men and slaves, such as you speak of in your letters. I will
look the passage up, as it is quite to the point, so far as I now
remember it. In Vol. VI. of _Frederick the Great_, I find a great deal
there that I feel quite certain, if our Queen or Government could make
law, thousands of English working men would hail it with such a shout
of joy and gladness as would astonish the Continental world. These
changes suggested by Carlyle and placed before the thinkers of
England, are the noblest, the truest utterances on real kinghood, that
I have ever read; the more I think over them, the more I feel the
truth, the justness, and also the fitness of them, to our nation's
present dire necessities; yet this is the man, and these are the
thoughts of his, that our critics seem never to see, or if seen, don't
think worth printing or in any way wisely directing the attention of
the public thereto, alas! All this and much more fills me with such
sadness that I am driven almost to despair. I see from the newspapers,
Yorkshire, Lancashire, and other places are sternly endeavoring to
carry out the short time movement until such times as trade revives,
and I find the masters and men seem to adopt it with a good grace and
friendly spirit. I also beg to inform you I see a Mr. Morley, a large
manufacturer at Nottingham, has been giving pensions to all his old
workmen. I hope such a noble example will be followed by other wealthy
masters. It would do more to make a master loved, honored, and cared
for, than thousands of pounds expended in other ways. The Government
Savings Banks is one of the wisest acts of late years done by our
Government. I, myself, often wish the Government held all our banks
instead of private men; that would put an end to false speculations,
such as we too often in the provinces suffer so severely by, so I hail
with pleasure and delight the shadowing forth by you of these noble
plans for the future: I feel glad and uplifted to think of the good
that such teaching will do for us all.
"Yours truly,
"THOMAS DIXON."
"57, Nile Street, Sunderland, Feb. 24, 1867.
"DEAR SIR,--
"I now give you the references to _Frederick the Great_. Vol. VI.:
Land Question, 365 page, where he increases the number of small
farmers to 4,000 (202, 204). English soldiers and T. C.'s remarks on
our system of purchase, etc. His law, (620, 623, 624). State of Poland
and how he repaired it, (487, 488, 489, 490). I especially value the
way he introduced all kinds of industries therein, and so soon changed
the chaos into order. Again, the school-masters also are given (not
yet in England, says T. C.). Again the use he made of 15,000_l._
surplus in Brandenburg; how it was applied to better his staff of
masters. To me, the Vol. VI. is one of the wisest pieces of modern
thought in our language. I only wish I had either your power, C.
Kingsley, Maurice, or some such able pen-generalship, to illustrate
and show forth all the wise teaching on law, government, and social
life I see in it, and shining like a star through all its pages.[A] I
feel also the truth of all you have written, and will do all I can to
make such men or women that care for such thoughts, see it, or read
it. I am copying the letters as fast and as well as I can, and will
use my utmost endeavor to have them done that justice to they merit.
"Yours truly,
"THOMAS DIXON."
[A] I have endeavored to arrange some of the passages to
which Mr. Dixon here refers, in a form enabling the reader to
see their bearing on each other more distinctly, as a sequel
to the essay on War in the 'Crown of Wild Olive.'
APPENDIX III.
Page 33.--_Effect of Modern Entertainments on the Mind of Youth._
The letter of the _Times'_ correspondent referred to contained an
account of one of the most singular cases of depravity ever brought
before a criminal court; but it is unnecessary to bring any of its
details under the reader's attention, for nearly every other number of
our journals has of late contained some instances of atrocities before
unthought of, and, it might have seemed, impossible to humanity.
The connection of these with the modern love of excitement in the
sensational novel and drama may not be generally understood, but it is
direct and constant; all furious pursuit of pleasure ending in actual
desire of horror and delight in death. I entered into some fuller
particulars on this subject in a lecture given in the spring at the
Royal Institution.
[Any part of the Lecture referred to likely to be of permanent
interest will be printed, somewhere, in this series.]
APPENDIX IV.
Page 76.--_Drunkenness as the Cause of Crime._
The following portions of Mr. Dixon's letter referred to, will be
found interesting:--
"DEAR SIR,--
"Your last letter, I think, will arouse the attention of thinkers more
than any of the series, it being on topics they in general feel more
interested in than the others, especially as in these you do not
assail their pockets so much as in the former ones. Since you seem
interested with the notes or rough sketches on gin, G * * * of Dublin
was the man I alluded to as making his money by drink, and then giving
the results of such traffic to repair the Cathedral of Dublin. It was
thousands of pounds. I call such charity robbing Peter to pay Paul!
Immense fortunes are made in the _Liquor Traffic_, and I will tell you
why; it is all paid for in cash, at least such as the poor people buy;
they get credit for clothes, butchers' meat, groceries, etc., while
they give the gin-palace keeper _cash_; they never begrudge the price
of a glass of gin or beer, they never haggle over _its_ price, never
once think of doing that; but in the purchase of almost every other
article they haggle and begrudge its price. To give you an idea of its
profits--there are houses here whose average weekly takings in cash at
their bars is 50_l._, 60_l._, 70_l._, 80_l._, 90l_._, to 150_l._, per
week. Nearly all the men of intelligence in it, say it is the curse of
the working classes. Men whose earnings are, say 20_s._ to 30_s._ per
week, spend on the average 3_s._ to 6_s._ per week (some even 10_s._).
It's my mode of living to supply these houses with corks that makes me
see so much of the drunkenness; and that is the cause why I never
really cared for _my trade_, seeing the misery that was entailed on my
fellow men and women by the use of this stuff. Again, a house with a
license to sell spirits, wine, and ale, to be consumed on the
premises, is worth two to three times more money than any other class
of property. One house here worth nominally 140_l._ sold the other day
for 520_l._; another one worth 200_l._ sold for 800_l._ I know
premises with a license that were sold for 1,300_l._, and then sold
again two years after for 1,800_l._; another place was rented for
50_l._, now rents at 100_l._--this last is a house used by working men
and laborers chiefly! No, I honor men like _Sir W. Trevelyan_, that
are teetotalers, or total abstainers, as an example to poor men, and,
to prevent his work-people being tempted, will not allow any
public-house on his estate. If our land had a few such men it would
help the cause. We possess one such a man here, a banker. I feel sorry
to say the progress of temperance is not so great as I would like to
see it. The only religious body that approaches to your ideas of
political economy is Quakerism as taught by George Fox. Carlyle seems
deeply tinged with their teachings. _Silence_ to them is as valuable
to him. Again, why should people howl and shriek over the law that the
Alliance is now trying to carry out in our land called the Permissive
Bill? If we had just laws we then would not be so miserable or so much
annoyed now and then with cries of Reform and cries of Distress. I
send you two pamphlets;--one gives the working man's reasons why he
don't go to church; in it you will see a few opinions expressed very
much akin to those you have written to me. The other gives an account
how it is the poor Indians have died of _Famine_, simply because they
have destroyed the very system of Political Economy, or one having
some approach to it, that you are now endeavoring to direct the
attention of thinkers to in our country. The _Sesame and Lilies_ I
have read as you requested. I feel now fully the aim and object you
have in view in the Letters, but I cannot help directing your
attention to that portion where you mention or rather exclaim against
the Florentines pulling down their _Ancient Walls_ to build a
_Boulevard_. That passage is one that would gladden the hearts of all
true _Italians_, especially men that love _Italy and Dante_!"
APPENDIX V.
Page 78.--_Abuse of Food._
Paragraphs cut from 'Manchester Examiner' of March 16, 1867:--
"A PARISIAN CHARACTER.--A celebrated character has disappeared from
the Palais Royal. René Lartique was a Swiss, and a man of about sixty.
He actually spent the last fifteen years in the Palais Royal--that is
to say, he spent the third of his life at dinner. Every morning at ten
o'clock he was to be seen going into a restaurant (usually Tissat's),
and in a few moments was installed in a corner, which he only quitted
about three o'clock in the afternoon, after having drunk at least six
or seven bottles of different kinds of wine. He then walked up and
down the garden till the clock struck five, when he made his
appearance again at the same restaurant, and always at the same place.
His second meal, at which he drank quite as much as at the first,
invariably lasted till half-past nine. Therefore, he devoted nine
hours a day to eating and drinking. His dress was most wretched--his
shoes broken, his trousers torn, his paletôt without any lining and
patched, his waistcoat without buttons, his hat a rusty red from old
age, and the whole surmounted by a dirty white beard. One day he went
up to the _comptoir_, and asked the presiding divinity there to allow
him to run in debt for one day's dinner. He perceived some hesitation
in complying with the request, and immediately called one of the
waiters, and desired him to follow him. He went into the office,
unbuttoned a certain indispensable garment, and, taking off a broad
leather belt, somewhat startled the waiter by displaying two hundred
gold pieces, each worth one hundred francs. Taking up one of them, he
tossed it to the waiter, and desired him to pay whatever he owed. He
never again appeared at that restaurant, and died a few days ago of
indigestion."
"REVENGE IN A BALL-ROOM.--A distressing event lately took place at
Castellaz, a little commune of the Alpes-Maritimes, near Mentone. All
the young people of the place being assembled in a dancing-room, one
of the young men was seen to fall suddenly to the ground, whilst a
young woman, his partner, brandished a poniard, and was preparing to
inflict a second blow on him, having already desperately wounded him
in the stomach. The author of the crime was at once arrested. She
declared her name to be Marie P----, twenty-one years of age, and
added that she had acted from a motive of revenge, the young man
having led her astray formerly with a promise of marriage, which he
had never fulfilled. In the morning of that day she had summoned him
to keep his word, and, upon his refusal, had determined on making the
dancing-room the scene of her revenge. She was at first locked up in
the prison of Mentone, and afterwards sent on to Nice. The young man
continues in an alarming state."
APPENDIX VI.
Page 94.--_Regulations of Trade._
I print portions of two letters of Mr. Dixon's in this place; one
referring to our former discussion respecting the sale of votes:--
"57, Nile Street, Sunderland, March 21, 1867.
"I only wish I could write in some tolerable good style, so that I
could idealize, or rather realize to folks, the life and love, and
marriage of a working man and his wife. It is in my opinion a working
man that really does know what a true wife is, for his every want, his
every comfort in life depends on her; and his children's home, their
daily lives and future lives, are shaped by her. Napoleon wisely said,
'France needs good mothers more than brave men. Good mothers are the
makers or shapers of good and brave men.' I cannot say that these are
the words, but it is the import of his speech on the topic. We have a
saying amongst us: 'The man may spend and money lend, if his wife be
_ought_,'--_i. e._ good wife;--'but he may work and try to save, but
will have _nought_, if his wife be nought,'--_i. e._ bad or thriftless
wife.
"Now, since you are intending to treat of the working man's parliament
and its duties, I will just throw out a few suggestions of what I
consider should be the questions or measures that demand an early
inquiry into and debate on. That guilds be established in every town,
where masters and men may meet, so as to avoid the temptations of the
public-house and _drink_. And then, let it be made law that every lad
should serve an apprenticeship of not less than seven years to a trade
or art, before he is allowed to be a member of such guild; also, that
all wages be based on a rate of so much _per hour_, and not day, as at
present; and let every man prove his workmanship before such a guild,
and then allow to him such payment per hour as his craft merits. Let
there be three grades, and then let there be trials of skill in
workmanship every year; and then, if the workman of the third grade
prove that he has made progress in his craft, reward him accordingly.
Then, before a lad is put to any trade, why not see what he is
naturally fitted for? Combe's book, entitled _The Constitution of
Man_, throws a good deal of truth on to these matters. Now, here are
two branches of the science of life that, so far, have never once been
given trial of in this way. We certainly use them after a _crime_ has
been committed, but not till then.
"Next to that, cash, payment for all and everything needed in life.
_Credit is a curse_ to him that gives it, and that takes it. He that
lives by credit lives in general carelessly. If there was no credit,
people then would have to live on what they earned! Then, after that,
the Statute of Limitations of Fortune you propose. By the hour system,
not a single man _need be idle_; it would give employment to all, and
even two hours per day would realize more to a man than _breaking
stones_. Thus you would make every one self-dependent--also no fear of
being out of work altogether. Then let there be a Government fund for
all the savings of the working man. I am afraid you will think this a
wild, discursive sort of a letter.
"Yours truly,
"THOMAS DIXON."
"I have read your references to the _Times_ on 'Bribery.' Well, that
has long been my own opinion; they simply have a vote to sell, and
sell it the same way as they sell potatoes, or a coat, or any other
salable article. Voters generally say, 'What does this gentleman want
in Parliament? Why, to help himself and his family or friends; he does
not spend all the money he spends over his election for pure good of
his country! No: it's to benefit his pocket, to be sure. Why should I
not make a penny with my vote, as well as he does with his in
Parliament?' I think that if the system of canvassing or election
agents were done away with, and all personal canvassing for votes
entirely abolished, it would help to put down bribery. Let each
gentleman send to the electors his political opinions in a circular,
and then let papers be sent, or cards, to each elector, and then let
them go and record their votes in the same way they do for a
councillor in the Corporation. It would save a great deal of expense,
and prevent those scenes of drunkenness so common in our towns during
elections. _Bewick's opinions_ of these matters are quite to the
purpose, I think (_see page 201 of Memoir_). Again, respecting the
Paris matter referred to in your last letter, I have read it. Does it
not manifest plainly enough that Europeans are also in a measure
possessed with that same _demoniacal spirit like the Japanese_?"
APPENDIX VII.
The following letter did not form part of the series written to Mr.
Dixon; but is perhaps worth reprinting. I have not the date of the
number of the _Gazette_ in which it appeared, but it was during the
tailors' strike in London.
"TO THE EDITOR OF THE _Pall Mall Gazette_.
"Sir,--
"In your yesterday's article on strikes you have very neatly and
tersely expressed the primal fallacy of modern political economy--to
wit, that 'the value of any piece of labor cannot be defined'--and
that 'all that can be ascertained is simply whether any man can be got
to do it for a certain sum.' Now, sir, the 'value' of any piece of
labor, that is to say, the quantity of food and air which will enable
a man to perform it without losing actually any of his flesh or his
nervous energy, is as absolutely fixed a quantity as the weight of
powder necessary to carry a given ball a given distance. And within
limits varying by exceedingly minor and unimportant circumstances, it
is an ascertainable quantity. I told the public this five years
ago--and under pardon of your politico-economical contributors--it is
not a 'sentimental,' but a chemical fact.
"Let any half-dozen of recognized London physicians state in precise
terms the quantity and kind of food, and space of lodging, they
consider approximately necessary for the healthy life of a laborer in
any given manufacture, and the number of hours he may, without
shortening his life, work at such business daily, if so sustained.
"And let all masters be bound to give their men a choice between an
order for that quantity of food and lodging, or such wages as the
market may offer for that number of hours' work.
"Proper laws for the maintenance of families would require further
concession--but, in the outset, let but _this_ law of wages be
established, and if then we have any more strikes you may denounce
them without one word of remonstrance either from sense or
sensibility.
"I am, Sir,
"Your obedient servant,
"JOHN RUSKIN."
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