Rome, 6th June, 1874.
The poor Campagna herdsman, whose seeking for St. Paul’s statue the
Professor of Fine Art in the University of Oxford so disgracefully
failed to assist him in, had been kneeling nearer the line of
procession of the Corpus Domini than I;—in fact, quite among the
rose-leaves which had been strewed for a carpet round the aisles of the
Basilica. I grieve to say that I was shy of the rose-bestrewn path,
myself; for the crowd waiting at the side of it had mixed up the
rose-leaves with spittle so richly as to make quite a pink pomatum of
them. And, indeed, the living temples of the Holy Ghost which in any
manner bestir themselves here among the temples,—whether of Roman gods
or Christian saints,—have merely and simply the two great operations
upon them of filling their innermost adyta with dung, and making their
pavements slippery with spittle: the Pope’s new tobacco manufactory
under the Palatine,—an infinitely more important object now, in all
views of Rome from the west, than either the Palatine or the
Capitol,—greatly aiding and encouraging this especial form of
lustration: while the still more ancient documents of Egyptian
religion—the obelisks of the Piazza del Popolo, and of the portico of
St. Peter’s—are entirely eclipsed by the obelisks of our English
religion, lately elevated, in full view from the Pincian and the
Montorio, with smoke coming out of the top of them. And farther, the
entire eastern district of Rome, between the two Basilicas of the
Lateran and St. Lorenzo, is now one mass of volcanic ruin;—a desert of
dust and ashes, the lust of wealth exploding there, out of a crater
deeper than Etna’s, and raging, as far as it can reach, in one frantic
desolation of whatever is lovely, or holy, or memorable, in the central
city of the world.
For there is one fixed idea in the mind of every European progressive
politician, at this time; namely, that by a certain application of
Financial Art, and by the erection of a certain quantity of new
buildings on a colossal scale, it will be possible for society
hereafter to pass its entire life in eating, smoking, harlotry, and
talk; without doing anything whatever with its hands or feet of a
laborious character. And as these new buildings, whose edification is a
main article of this modern political faith and hope,—(being required
for gambling and dining in on a large scale),—cannot be raised without
severely increased taxation of the poorer classes, (here in Italy
direct, and in all countries consisting in the rise of price in all
articles of food—wine alone in Italy costing just ten times what it did
ten years ago,) and this increased taxation and distress are beginning
to be felt too grievously to be denied; nor only so, but—which is still
less agreeable to modern politicians—with slowly dawning perception of
their true causes,—one finds also the popular journalists, for some
time back addressing themselves to the defence of Taxation, and Theft
in general, after this fashion.
“The wealth in the world may practically be regarded as infinitely
great. It is not true that what one man appropriates becomes thereupon
useless to others, and it is also untrue that force or fraud, direct or
indirect, are the principal, or, indeed, that they are at all common or
important, modes of acquiring wealth.”—Pall Mall Gazette, Jan. 14th,
1869. [44]
The philosophical journalist, after some further contemptuous statement
of the vulgar views on this subject, conveniently dispenses (as will be
seen by reference to the end of the clause in the note) with the
defence of his own. I will undertake the explanation of what was,
perhaps, even to himself, not altogether clear in his impressions. If a
burglar ever carries off the Editor’s plate-basket, the bereaved Editor
will console himself by reflecting that “it is not true that what one
man appropriates becomes thereupon useless to others:”—for truly, (he
will thus proceed to finer investigation,) this plate of mine, melted
down, after being transitionally serviceable to the burglar, will enter
again into the same functions among the silver of the world which it
had in my own possession; so that the intermediate benefit to the
burglar may be regarded as entirely a form of trade profit, and a kind
of turning over of capital. And “it is also untrue that force or fraud,
direct or indirect, are the principal, or indeed that they are at all
common or important, modes of acquiring wealth,”—for this poor thief,
with his crowbar and jemmy, does but disfurnish my table for a day;
while I, with my fluent pen, can replenish it any number of times over,
by the beautiful expression of my opinions for the public benefit. But
what manner of fraud, or force, there may be in living by the sale of
one’s opinions, instead of knowledges; and what quantity of true
knowledge on any subject whatsoever—moral, political, scientific, or
artistic—forms at present the total stock in trade of the Editors of
the European Press, our Pall Mall Editor has very certainly not
considered.
“The wealth in the world practically infinite,”—is it? Then it seems to
me, the poor may ask, with more reason than ever before, Why have we
not our share of Infinity? We thought, poor ignorants, that we were
only the last in the scramble; we submitted, believing that somebody
must be last, and somebody first. But if the mass of good things be
inexhaustible, and there are horses for everybody,—why is not every
beggar on horseback? And, for my own part, why should the question be
put to me so often,—which I am sick of answering and answering
again,—“How, with our increasing population, are we to live without
Machinery?” For if the wealth be already infinite, what need of
machinery to make more? Alas, if it could make more, what a different
world this might be. Arkwright and Stephenson would deserve statues
indeed,—as much as St. Paul. If all the steam engines in England, and
all the coal in it, with all their horse and ass power put together,
could produce—so much as one grain of corn! The last time this
perpetually recurring question about machinery was asked me, it was
very earnestly and candidly pressed, by a master manufacturer, who
honestly desired to do in his place what was serviceable to England,
and honourable to himself. I answered at some length, in private
letters, of which I asked and obtained his leave to print some parts in
Fors. They may as well find their place in this number; and for preface
to them, here is a piece, long kept by me, concerning railroads, which
may advisably now be read.
Of modern machinery for locomotion, my readers, I suppose, thought me
writing in ill-temper, when I said in one of the letters on the
childhood of Scott, “infernal means of locomotion”? Indeed, I am always
compelled to write, as always compelled to live, in ill-temper. But I
never set down a single word but with the serenest purpose. I meant
“infernal” in the most perfect sense the word will bear.
For instance. The town of Ulverstone is twelve miles from me, by four
miles of mountain road beside Coniston lake, three through a pastoral
valley, five by the seaside. A healthier or lovelier walk would be
difficult to find.
In old times, if a Coniston peasant had any business at Ulverstone, he
walked to Ulverstone; spent nothing but shoe-leather on the road, drank
at the streams, and if he spent a couple of batz when he got to
Ulverstone, “it was the end of the world.” But now, he would never
think of doing such a thing! He first walks three miles in a contrary
direction, to a railroad station, and then travels by railroad
twenty-four miles to Ulverstone, paying two shillings fare. During the
twenty-four miles transit, he is idle, dusty, stupid; and either more
hot or cold than is pleasant to him. In either case he drinks beer at
two or three of the stations, passes his time, between them, with
anybody he can find, in talking without having anything to talk of; and
such talk always becomes vicious. He arrives at Ulverstone, jaded, half
drunk, and otherwise demoralized, and three shillings, at least, poorer
than in the morning. Of that sum, a shilling has gone for beer,
threepence to a railway shareholder, threepence in coals, and
eighteenpence has been spent in employing strong men in the vile
mechanical work of making and driving a machine, instead of his own
legs, to carry the drunken lout. The results, absolute loss and
demoralization to the poor, on all sides, and iniquitous gain to the
rich. Fancy, if you saw the railway officials actually employed in
carrying the countryman bodily on their backs to Ulverstone, what you
would think of the business! And because they waste ever so much iron
and fuel besides to do it, you think it a profitable one!
And for comparison of the advantages of old times and new, for
travellers of higher order, hear how Scott’s excursions used to be
made.
“Accordingly, during seven successive years, Scott made a raid, as he
called it, into Liddesdale with Mr. Shortreed for his guide, exploring
every rivulet to its source, and every ruined peel from foundation to
battlement. At this time no wheeled carriage had ever been seen in the
district; the first, indeed, that ever appeared there was a gig, driven
by Scott himself for a part of his way, when on the last of these seven
excursions. There was no inn nor public-house of any kind in the whole
valley; the travellers passed from the shepherd’s hut to the minister’s
manse, and again from the cheerful hospitality of the manse to the
rough and jolly welcome of the homestead; gathering, wherever they
went, songs and tunes, and occasionally more tangible relics of
antiquity—even such ‘a rowth of auld nicknackets’ as Burns ascribes to
Captain Grose. To these rambles Scott owed much of the materials of his
‘Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border’; and not less of that intimate
acquaintance with the living manners of these unsophisticated regions,
which constitutes the chief charm of the most charming of his prose
works. But how soon he had any definite object before him in his
researches seems very doubtful. ‘He was makin’ himsel’ a’ the time,’
said Mr. Shortreed; ‘but he didna ken maybe what he was about, till
years had passed. At first he thought o’ little, I dare say, but the
queerness and the fun.’
‘It was that same season, I think,’ says Mr. Shortreed, ‘that Sir
Walter got from Dr. Elliot the large old border war horn, which ye may
still see hanging in the armoury at Abbotsford. How great he was when
he was made master o’ that! I believe it had been found in Hermitage
Castle—and one of the doctor’s servants had used it many a day as a
grease-horn for his scythe before they had discovered its history. When
cleaned out, it was never a hair the worse; the original chain, hoop,
and mouthpiece of steel were all entire, just as you now see them. Sir
Walter carried it home all the way from Liddesdale to Jedburgh slung
about his neck like Johnny Gilpin’s bottle, while I was entrusted with
an ancient bridle-bit, which we had likewise picked up.
“‘The feint o’ pride—nae pride had he, ...
A lang kail-gully hung down by his side,
And a great meikle nowt-horn to rout on had he.’
And meikle and sair we routed on’t, and ’hotched and blew wi’ micht and
main.’ O what pleasant days! and then a’ the nonsense we had cost us
nothing. We never put hand in pocket for a week on end. Toll-bars there
were none, and indeed I think our haill charges were a feed o’ corn to
our horses in the gangin’ and comin’ at Riccartoun mill.’”
This absolute economy, [45] of course, could only exist when travelling
was so rare that patriarchal hospitality could still be trusted for its
lodging. But the hospitality of the inn need not be less considerate or
true because the inn’s master lives in his occupation. Even in these
days, I have had no more true or kind friend than the now dead Mrs.
Eisenkraemer of the old Union Inn at Chamouni; and an innkeeper’s
daughter in the Oberland taught me that it was still possible for a
Swiss girl to be refined, imaginative, and pure-hearted, though she
waited on her father’s guests, and though these guests were often
vulgar and insolent English travellers. For she had been bred in the
rural districts of happy olden days,—to which, as it chances, my
thoughts first turned, in the following answer to my English
manufacturing friend.
On any given farm in Switzerland or Bavaria, fifty years ago, the
master and his servants lived, in abundance, on the produce of their
ground, without machinery, and exchanged some of its surplus produce
for Lyons velvet and Hartz silver, (produced by the unhappy mechanists
and miners of those localities,) whereof the happy peasant made jackets
and bodices, and richly adorned the same with precious chain-work. It
is not more than ten years since I saw in a farm-shed near Thun, three
handsome youths and three comely girls, all in well-fitting, pretty,
and snow-white shirt and chemisette, threshing corn with a steady
shower of timed blows, as skilful in their—cadence, shall we,
literally, say?—as the most exquisitely performed music, and as rapid
as its swiftest notes. There was no question for any of them, whether
they should have their dinner when they had earned it, nor the
slightest chance of any of them going in rags through the winter.
That is entirely healthy, happy, and wise human life. Not a theoretical
or Utopian state at all; but one which over large districts of the
world has long existed, and must, thank God, in spite of British
commerce and its consequences, for ever, somewhere, exist.
But the farm, we will say, gets over-populous, (it always does, of
course, under ordinary circumstances;) that is to say, the ground no
longer affords corn and milk enough for the people on it. Do you
suppose you will make more of the corn, because you now thresh it with
a machine? So far from needing to do so, you have more hands to employ
than you had—can have twelve flails going instead of six. You make your
twelve human creatures stand aside, and thresh your corn with a steam
engine. You gain time, do you? What’s the use of time to you? did it
not hang heavy enough on your hands before? You thresh your entire farm
produce, let us say, in twelve minutes. Will that make it one grain
more, to feed the twelve mouths? Most assuredly, the soot and stench of
your steam engine will make your crop less next year, but not one grain
more can you have, to-day. [46] But you don’t mean to use your engines
to thresh with or plough with? Well, that is one point of common sense
gained. What will you do with them, then?—spin and weave cotton, sell
the articles you manufacture, and buy food? Very good; then somewhere
there must be people still living as you once did,—that is to say,
producing more corn and milk than they want, and able to give it to you
in exchange for your cotton, or velvet, or what not, which you weave
with your steam. Well, those people, wherever they are, and whoever
they may be, are your lords and masters thenceforth. They are living
happy and wise human lives, and are served by you, their mechanics and
slaves. Day after day your souls will become more mechanical, more
servile: also you will go on multiplying, wanting more food, and more;
you will have to sell cheaper and cheaper, work longer and longer, to
buy your food. At last, do what you can, you can make no more, or the
people who have the corn will not want any more; and your increasing
population will necessarily come to a quite imperative stop—by
starvation, preceded necessarily by revolution and massacre.
And now examine the facts about England in this broad light.
She has a vast quantity of ground still food-producing, in corn, grass,
cattle, or game. With that territory she educates her squire, or
typical gentleman, and his tenantry, to whom, together, she owes all
her power in the world. With another large portion of territory,—now
continually on the increase,—she educates a mercenary population, ready
to produce any quantity of bad articles to anybody’s order; population
which every hour that passes over them makes acceleratingly avaricious,
immoral, and insane. In the increase of that kind of territory and its
people, her ruin is just as certain as if she were deliberately
exchanging her corn-growing land; and her heaven above it, for a soil
of arsenic, and rain of nitric acid.
“Have the Arkwrights and Stephensons, then, done nothing but harm?”
Nothing; but the root of all the mischief is not in Arkwrights or
Stephensons; nor in rogues or mechanics. The real root of it is the
crime of the squire himself. And the method of that crime is thus. A
certain quantity of the food produced by the country is paid annually
by it into the squire’s hand, in the form of rent, privately, and
taxes, publicly. If he uses this food to support a food-producing
population, he increases daily the strength of the country and his own;
but if he uses it to support an idle population, or one producing
merely trinkets in iron, or gold, or other rubbish he steadily weakens
the country, and debases himself.
Now the action of the squire for the last fifty years has been,
broadly, to take the food from the ground of his estate, and carry it
to London, where he feeds with it [47] a vast number of builders,
upholsterers, (one of them charged me five pounds for a footstool the
other day,) carriage and harness makers, dress-makers, grooms, footmen,
bad musicians, bad painters, gamblers, and harlots, and in supply of
the wants of these main classes, a vast number of shopkeepers of minor
useless articles. The muscles and the time of this enormous population
being wholly unproductive—(for of course time spent in the mere process
of sale is unproductive, and much more that of the footman and groom,
while that of the vulgar upholsterer, jeweller, fiddler, and painter,
etc., etc., is not only unproductive, but mischievous,)—the entire mass
of this London population do nothing whatever either to feed or clothe
themselves; and their vile life preventing them from all rational
entertainment, they are compelled to seek some pastime in a vile
literature, the demand for which again occupies another enormous class,
who do nothing to feed or dress themselves; finally, the vain disputes
of this vicious population give employment to the vast industry of the
lawyers and their clerks, [48] who similarly do nothing to feed or
dress themselves.
Now the peasants might still be able to supply this enormous town
population with food, (in the form of the squire’s rent,) but it
cannot, without machinery, supply the flimsy dresses, toys, metal work,
and other rubbish, belonging to their accursed life. Hence over the
whole country the sky is blackened and the air made pestilent, to
supply London and other such towns [49] with their iron railings,
vulgar upholstery, jewels, toys, liveries, lace, and other means of
dissipation and dishonour of life. Gradually the country people cannot
even supply food to the voracity of the vicious centre; and it is
necessary to import food from other countries, giving in exchange any
kind of commodity we can attract their itching desires for, and produce
by machinery. The tendency of the entire national energy is therefore
to approximate more and more to the state of a squirrel in a cage, or a
turnspit in a wheel, fed by foreign masters with nuts and dog’s-meat.
And indeed, when we rightly conceive the relation of London to the
country, the sight of it becomes more fantastic and wonderful than any
dream. Hyde Park, in the season, is the great rotatory form of the vast
squirrel-cage; round and round it go the idle company, in their
reversed streams, urging themselves to their necessary exercise. They
cannot with safety even eat their nuts, without so much ‘revolution’ as
shall, in Venetian language ‘comply with the demands of hygiene.’ Then
they retire into their boxes, with due quantity of straw; the
Belgravian and Piccadillian streets outside the railings being, when
one sees clearly, nothing but the squirrel’s box at the side of his
wires. And then think of all the rest of the metropolis as the creation
and ordinance of these squirrels, that they may squeak and whirl to
their satisfaction, and yet be fed. Measure the space of its entirely
miserable life. Begin with that diagonal which I struck from Regent
Circus to Drury Lane; examine it, house by house; then go up from Drury
Lane to St. Giles’ Church, look into Church Lane there, and explore
your Seven Dials and Warwick Street; and remember this is the very
centre of the mother city,—precisely between its Parks, its great
Library and Museum, its principal Theatres, and its Bank. Then conceive
the East-end; and the melancholy Islington and Pentonville districts;
then the ghastly spaces of southern suburb—Vauxhall, Lambeth, the
Borough, Wapping, and Bermondsey. All this is the nidification of those
Park Squirrels. This is the thing they have produced round themselves;
this their work in the world. When they rest from their squirrellian
revolutions, and die in the Lord, and their works do follow them, these
are what will follow them. Lugubrious march of the Waterloo Road, and
the Borough, and St. Giles’s; the shadows of all the Seven Dials having
fetched their last compass. New Jerusalem, prepared as a bride, of
course, opening her gates to them;—but, pertinaciously attendant, Old
Jewry outside. “Their works do follow them.”
For these streets are indeed what they have built; their inhabitants
the people they have chosen to educate. They took the bread and milk
and meat from the people of their fields; they gave it to feed, and
retain here in their service, this fermenting mass of unhappy human
beings,—news-mongers, novel-mongers, picture-mongers,
poison-drink-mongers, lust and death-mongers; the whole smoking mass of
it one vast dead-marine storeshop,—accumulation of wreck of the Dead
Sea, with every activity in it, a form of putrefaction.
Some personal matters were touched upon in my friend’s reply to this
letter, and I find nothing more printable of the correspondence but
this following fragment or two.
“But what are you to do, having got into this mechanical line of life?”
You must persevere in it, and do the best you can for the present, but
resolve to get out of it as soon as may be. The one essential point is
to know thoroughly that it is wrong; how to get out of it, you can
decide afterwards, at your leisure.
“But somebody must weave by machinery, and dig in mines: else how could
one have one’s velvet and silver chains?”
Whatever machinery is needful for human purposes can be driven by wind
or water; the Thames alone could drive mills enough to weave velvet and
silk for all England. But even mechanical occupation not involving
pollution of the atmosphere must be as limited as possible; for it
invariably degrades. You may use your slave in your silver mine, or at
your loom, to avoid such labour yourself, if you honestly believe you
have brains to be better employed;—or you may yourself, for the service
of others, honourably become their slave; and, in benevolent
degradation, dig silver or weave silk, making yourself semi-spade, or
semi-worm. But you must eventually, for no purpose or motive
whatsoever, live amidst smoke and filth, nor allow others to do so; you
must see that your slaves are as comfortable and safe as their
employment permits, and that they are paid wages high enough to allow
them to leave it often for redemption and rest.
Eventually, I say; how fast events may move, none of us know; in our
compliance with them, let us at least be intelligently patient—if at
all; not blindly patient.
For instance, there is nothing really more monstrous in any recorded
savagery or absurdity of mankind, than that governments should be able
to get money for any folly they choose to commit, by selling to
capitalists the right of taxing future generations to the end of time.
All the cruellest wars inflicted, all the basest luxuries grasped by
the idle classes, are thus paid for by the poor a hundred times over.
And yet I am obliged to keep my money in the funds or the bank, because
I know no other mode of keeping it safe; and if I refused to take the
interest, I should only throw it into the hands of the very people who
would use it for these evil purposes, or, at all events, for less good
than I can. Nevertheless it is daily becoming a more grave question
with me what it may presently be right to do. It may be better to
diminish private charities, and much more, my own luxury of life, than
to comply in any sort with a national sin. But I am not agitated or
anxious in the matter: content to know my principle, and to work
steadily towards better fulfilment of it.
And this is all that I would ask of my correspondent, or of any other
man,—that he should know what he is about, and be steady in his line of
advance or retreat. I know myself to be an usurer as long as I take
interest on any money whatsoever. I confess myself such, and abide
whatever shame or penalty may attach to usury, until I can withdraw
myself from the system. So my correspondent says he must abide by his
post. I think so too. A naval captain, though I should succeed in
persuading him of the wickedness of war, would in like manner, if he
were wise, abide at his post; nay, would be entirely traitorous and
criminal if he at once deserted it. Only let us all be sure what our
positions are; and if, as it is said, the not living by interest and
the resolutely making everything as good as can be, are incompatible
with the present state of society, let us, though compelled to remain
usurers and makers of bad things, at least not deceive ourselves as to
the nature of our acts and life.
Leaving thus the personal question, how the great courses of life are
to be checked or changed, to each man’s conscience and discretion,—this
following answer I would make in all cases to the inquiry, ‘What can I
do?’
If the present state of this so-called rich England is so essentially
miserable and poverty-stricken that honest men must always live from
hand to mouth, while speculators make fortunes by cheating them out of
their labour, and if, therefore, no sum can be set aside for
charity,—the paralyzed honest men can certainly do little for the
present. But, with what can be spared for charity, if anything, do
this; buy ever so small a bit of ground, in the midst of the worst back
deserts of our manufacturing towns; six feet square, if no more can be
had,—nay, the size of a grave, if you will, but buy it freehold, and
make a garden of it, by hand-labour; a garden visible to all men, and
cultivated for all men of that place. If absolutely nothing will grow
in it, then have herbs carried there in pots. Force the bit of ground
into order, cleanliness, green or coloured aspect. What difficulties
you have in doing this are your best subjects of thought; the good you
will do in doing this, the best in your present power.
What the best in your ultimate power may be, will depend on the action
of the English landlord; for observe, we have only to separate the
facts of the Swiss farm to ascertain what they are with respect to any
state. We have only to ask what quantity of food it produces, how much
it exports in exchange for other articles, and how much it imports in
exchange for other articles. The food-producing countries have the
power of educating gentlemen and gentlewomen if they please,—they are
the lordly and masterful countries. Those which exchange mechanical or
artistic productions for food are servile, and necessarily in process
of time will be ruined. Next Fors, therefore, will be written for any
Landlords who wish to be true Workmen in their vocation; and, according
to the first law of the St. George’s Company, ‘to do good work, whether
they die or live.’