B. It must be a good thing, honestly got. Nothing that you have stolen
or taken by force, nor anything that your fathers stole or took by
force, is your property. Nevertheless, the benignant law of Nature
concerning any such holding, has always been quite manifestly that you
may keep it—if you can,—so only that you acknowledge that and none
other to be the condition of tenure. [81]
Can you understand that much more, my practical friend?
C. It must be not only something good, and not only something honestly
got, but also something you can skilfully use.
For, as the old proverb, “You can’t eat your pudding and have it,” is
utterly true in its bearing against Usury,—so also this reverse of it
is true in confirmation of property—that you can’t ‘have’ your pudding
unless you can eat it. It may be composed for you of the finest plums,
and paid for wholly out of your own pocket; but if you can’t stomach
it—the pudding is not for you. Buy the finest horse on four legs, he is
not ‘proper’ to you if you can’t ride him. Buy the best book between
boards,—Horace, or Homer, or Dante,—and if you don’t know Latin, nor
Greek, nor Christianity, the paper and boards are yours indeed, but the
books—by no means.
You doubt this, my practical friend?
Try a child with a stick of barley-sugar;—tell him it is his, but he
mustn’t eat it; his face will express to you the fallaciousness of that
principle of property in an unmistakable manner. But by the time he
grows as old and stupid as you, perhaps he will buy barley-sugar that
he can’t taste, to please the public.
“I’ve no pleasure in that picture of Holman Hunt’s,” said a highly
practical man of business to a friend of mine the other day, “nor my
wife neither, for that matter; but I always buy under good advice as to
market value; and one’s collection isn’t complete without one.”
I am very doubtful, my stupid practical friend, whether you have wit
enough to understand a word more of what I have got to say this month.
However, I must say it on the chance. And don’t think I am talking
sentiment or metaphysics to you. This is the practicallest piece of
lessoning you ever had in your days, if you can but make it out;—that
you can only possess wealth according to your own capacity of it. An
ape can only have wealth of nuts, and a dog of bones, [82] an
earth-worm of earth, a charnel-worm of flesh, a west-end harlot of silk
and champagne, an east-end harlot of gauze and gin, a modern average
fine lady of such meat and drink, dress, jewels, and furniture, as the
vile tradesmen of the day can provide, being limited even in the
enjoyment of these,—for the greater part of what she calls ‘hers,’ she
wears or keeps, either for the pleasure of others, if she is good, or
for their mortification, if she is wicked,—but assuredly not for
herself. When I buy a missal, or a picture, I buy it for myself, and
expect everybody to say to me, What a selfish brute you are. But when a
lady walks about town with three or four yards of silk tied in a bundle
behind her, she doesn’t see it herself, or benefit by it herself. She
carries it for the benefit of beholders. When she has put all her
diamonds on in the evening, tell her to stay at home and enjoy them in
radiant solitude; and the child, with his forbidden barley-sugar, will
not look more blank. She carries her caparison either for the pleasure
or for the mortification of society; and can no more enjoy its
brilliancy by herself than a chandelier can enjoy having its gas
lighted.
We must leave out of the question, for the moment, the element of
benevolence which may be latent in toilette [83]; for the main
economical result of the action of the great law that we can only have
wealth according to our capacity, in modern Europe at this hour, is
that the greater part of its so-called wealth is composed of things
suited to the capacity of harlots and their keepers,—(including in the
general term harlot, or daughter of Babylon, both the unmarried ones,
and the married ones who have sold themselves for money,)—as of
watches, timepieces, tapestries, china, and any kind of pictures or
toys good for bedrooms and boudoirs; but that, of any wealth which
harlots and keepers of harlots have no mind to, Europe at present takes
no cognizance whatsoever.
Now what the difference may be in the quality of property which honest
and dishonest women like is—for you, my practical friend—quite an
unfathomable question; but you can at least understand that all the
china, timepieces, and lewd pictures, which form the main ‘property’ of
Paris and her imitators, are verily, in the commercial sense of the
word, property; and would be estimated as such by any Jew in any
bankruptcy court; yet the harlots don’t lend their china, or
timepieces, on usury, nor make an income out of their bed-hangings,—do
they? So that you see it is perfectly possible to have property, and a
very costly quantity of it, without making any profit of such capital?
But the harlots have another kind of capital which you, my blind
practical friend, don’t call ‘Property’; but which I, having the use of
my eyes as well as of my hands, do. They have beauty of body;—many of
them, also, wit of mind. And on these two articles of property, you
observe, my friend, being much more their own, and much more valuable
things, if they knew it, than china and timepieces—on these they do
make an annual income, and turn them over, as you call it, several
times perhaps in the year.
Now if beauty of body and wit of tongue can be thus made sources of
income, you will rank them perhaps, even as I do, among articles of
wealth.
But, in old usury, there was yet another kind of treasure held account
of, namely—Beauty of Heart, and Wit of Brains;—or what was shortly
called by the Greek usurers, Psyche—(you may have heard the word
before, my practical friend; but I do not expect you to follow me
further). And this Psyche, or Soul, was held by the two great old
masters of economy—that is to say, by Plato and David—the best property
of all that a man had; except only one thing, which the soul itself
must be starved without, yet which you would never guess, my practical
friend, if you guessed yourself into your grave, to be an article of
property at all! The Law of God, of which David says, “My soul fainteth
for the longing that it hath unto thy judgments,” or in terms which you
can perhaps better understand, “The law of thy mouth is dearer unto me
than thousands of gold and silver.”
But indeed the market value of this commodity has greatly fallen in
these times. “Damn the Laws of God,” answered a City merchant of
standing to a personal friend of mine, who was advising him the other
day to take a little of that capital into his business.
Then, finally, there is just one article of property more to be
catalogued, and I have done. The Lawgiver Himself, namely; the Master
of masters, whom, when, as human dogs, we discover, and can call our
own Master, we are thenceforth ready to die for, if need be. Which Mr.
Harrison and the other English gentlemen who are at present discussing,
in various magazines, the meaning of the word ‘religion’ [84]
(appearing never to have heard in the course of their education, of
either the word ‘lictor’ or ‘ligature’) will find, is, was, and will
be, among all educated scholars, the perfectly simple meaning of that
ancient word; and that there can be no such thing, even for sentimental
Mr. Harrison, as a religion of Manity, nor for the most orthodox
hunting parson, as a religion of Dogity; nor for modern European
civilization as a religion of Bitchity, without such submission of
spirit to the worshipped Power as shall in the most literal sense
‘bind’ and chain us to it for ever.
And now, to make all matters as clear as may be, I will put down in the
manner of a Dutch auction—proceeding to the lower valuation,—the
articles of property, rightly so called, which belong to any human
creature.
I. The Master, or Father, in the old Latin phrase, ‘Pater Noster;’ of
whom David wrote, “Whom have I in heaven but thee, and there is none
upon earth that I desire beside thee;” but this possession, includes in
Plato’s catalogue, the attendant spirits, “θεοὺς, ὄντας δεσπότας, καὶ
τοὺς τούτοις ἑπομένους”—“the Gods, being Masters, and those next to
them,” specially signified in another place as “the Gods, and the
Angels, and the Heroes, and the Spirits of our Home, and our
Ancestors.”
II. The Law or Word of God, which the Bible Society professes to
furnish for eighteenpence. But which, indeed, as often heretofore
stated in Fors Clavigera, is by no means to be had at that low figure;
the whole long hundred and nineteenth Psalm being little more than one
agonizing prayer for the gift of it: and a man’s life well spent if he
has truly received and learned to read ever so little a part of it.
III. The Psyche, in its sanity, and beauty (of which, when I have
finished my inventory, I will give Plato’s estimate in his own words).
Some curious practical results have followed from the denial of its
existence by modern philosophers; for the true and divine distinction
between ‘genera’ of animals, and quite the principal ‘origin of
species’ in them, is in their Psyche: but modern naturalists, not being
able to vivisect the Psyche, have on the whole resolved that animals
are to be classed by their bones; and whereas, for instance, by divine
distinction of Psyche, the Dog and Wolf are precisely opposite
creatures in their function to the sheepfold; and, spiritually, the
Dominican, or Dog of the Lord, is for ever in like manner opposed to
the Wolf of the Devil, modern science, finding Dog and Wolf
indistinguishable in their Bones, declares them to be virtually one and
the same animal. [85]
IV. The Body, in its sanity and beauty: strength of it being the first
simple meaning of what the Greeks called virtue: and the eternity of it
being the special doctrine of the form of religion professed in
Christendom under the name of Christianity.
V. The things good and pleasing to the Psyche; as the visible things of
creation,—sky, water, flowers, and the like; and the treasured-up words
or feats of other Spirits.
VI. The things good and pleasing to the Body; summed under the two
heads of Bread and Wine, brought forth by the Amorite King of Salem.
VII. The documents giving claim to the possession of these things, when
not in actual possession; or ‘money.’
This catalogue will be found virtually to include all the articles of
wealth which men can either possess or lend, (for the fourth, fully
understood, means the entire treasure of domestic and social
affection;) and the law of their tenure is that a man shall neither
sell nor lend that which is indeed his own; neither his God, his
conscience, his soul, his body, or his wife’s; his country, his house,
nor his tools. But that things which are not ‘his own,’ but over which
he has charge or authority, (as of more land than he can plough, or
more books than he can read,) these he is bound to lend or give, as he
sees they may be made serviceable to others; and not for farther gain
to himself. Thus his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury is, under
penalties, bound to make his very excellent library at Lambeth
serviceable to other scholars; but it is not at all permitted to his
Grace, by the laws of God, to use any part of the income derived from
his pretty estate on the slope of the Addington Hills, for the purchase
of books, by the loan of which, in the manner of Mr. Mudie, to the
ignorant inhabitants of the village of Croydon, his Grace may at once
add to his income (not more than) five per cent. on the capital thus
laid out in literature; and to his dignity as a Christian pastor. I
know, as it happens, more about the heather than the rents of his
Grace’s estate at Addington; my father and I having taken much pleasure
in its bloom, and the gleaming of bluebells amongst it—when he, in
broken health, sought any English ground that Scottish flowers grew on,
and I was but a child;—so that I thought it would please him to be laid
in his last rest at the feet of those brown hills. And thus, as I say,
I know somewhat of their flowers, but never inquired into their rents;
and perhaps, as I rather hope, the sweet wood and garden ground serve
only for his Grace’s entertainment—not emolument: but even if only so,
in these hard times his Grace must permit me to observe that he has
quite as much earthly ground and lodging as any angel of the Lord can
be supposed to require; and is under no necessity of adding to his
possessions by the practice of usury. I do not know if the Archbishop
has in his library the works of Mr. Thackeray; but he probably has
sometimes relieved his studies of the Christian Fathers with modern
literature, and may remember a figure of an amiable and economical
little school-boy who begins life by lending three halfpence, early in
the week, to the boys who had outrun their income, for four halfpence
at the week’s end. The figure of the same little boy grown into an
Archbishop, and making a few pence extra on his episcopal income by the
loan of his old school books, did not, it appears, suggest itself to
the lamented author; but here it is, in relief, for us:—