importation than as a native growth. The spirit of it is brought over by
British workmen, who have been fighting the master class in their former
home. In old England, the land of class distinctions, the masters are a
class, economically as well as socially, and they are closely allied
with a political class, which till lately engrossed power and made laws
in the interest of the employer. Seldom does a man in England rise from
the ranks, and when he does, his position in an aristocratic society is
equivocal, and he never feels perfectly at home. Caste runs from the
peerage all down the social scale. The bulk of the land has been
engrossed by wealthy families, and the comfort and dignity of freehold
proprietorship are rarely attainable by any but the rich. Everything
down to the railway carriages, is regulated by aristocracy; street cars
cannot run because they would interfere with carriages, a city cannot be
drained because a park is in the way. The labourer has to bear a heavy
load of taxation, laid on by the class wars of former days. In this new
world of ours, the heel taps of old-world flunkeyism are sometimes
poured upon us, no doubt; as, on the other hand, we feel the reaction
from the old-world servility in a rudeness of self assertion on the part
of the democracy which is sometimes rather discomposing, and which we
should be glad to see exchanged for the courtesy of settled self-
respect. But on the whole, class distinctions are very faint. Half,
perhaps two-thirds, of the rich men you meet here have risen from the
ranks, and they are socially quite on a level with the rest. Everything
is really open to industry. Every man can at once invest his savings in
a freehold. Everything is arranged for the convenience of the masses.
Political power is completely in the hands of the people. There are no
fiscal legacies of an oligarchic past. If I were one of our emigration
agents, I should not dwell so much on wages, which in fact are being
rapidly equalized, as on what wages will buy in Canada--the general
improvement of condition, the brighter hopes, the better social
position, the enlarged share of all the benefits which the community
affords. I should show that we have made a step here at all events
towards being a community indeed. In such a land I can see that there
may still be need of occasional combinations among the working men to
make better bargains with their employers, but I can see no need for the
perpetual arraying of class against class or for a standing apparatus of
industrial war.
There is one more point which must be touched with tenderness but which
cannot be honestly passed over in silence. It could nowhere be mentioned
less invidiously than under the roof of an institution which is at once
an effort to create high tastes in working men and a proof that such
tastes can be created. The period of transition from high to low wages
and from incessant toil to comparative leisure must be one of peril to
masses whom no Mechanics Institute or Literary Society as yet counts
among its members. It is the more so because there is abroad in all
classes a passion for sensual enjoyment and excitement produced by the
vast development of wealth and at the same time as I suspect by the
temporary failure of those beliefs which combat the sensual appetites
and sustain our spiritual life. Colliers drinking champagne. The world
stands aghast. Well, I see no reason why a collier should not drink
champagne if he can afford it as well as a Duke. The collier wants and
perhaps deserves it more if he has been working all the week underground
and at risk of his life. Hard labour naturally produces a craving for
animal enjoyment and so does the monotony of the factory unrelieved by
interest in the work. But what if the collier cannot afford the
champagne or if the whole of his increase of wages is wasted on it while
his habitation remains a hovel, everything about him is still as filthy,
comfortless and barbarous as ever and (saddest of all) his wife and
children are no better off, perhaps are worse off than before? What if
his powers of work are being impaired by debauchery and he is thus
surely losing the footing which he has won on the higher round of the
industrial ladder and lapsing back into penury and despair? What if
instead of gaining he is really losing in manhood and real independence?
I see nothing shocking in the fact that a mechanic's wages are now equal
to those of a clergyman, or an officer in the army who has spent perhaps
thousands of dollars on his education. Every man has a right to whatever
his labour will fetch. But I do see something shocking in the appearance
of the highly paid mechanic, whenever hard times come, as a mendicant at
the door of a man really poorer than himself. Not only that English
poor-law, of which we spoke, but all poor-laws, formal or informal, must
cease when the labourer has the means, with proper self-control and
prudence, of providing for winter as well as summer, for hard times as
well as good times, for his family as well as for himself. The tradition
of a by-gone state of society must be broken. The nominally rich must no
longer be expected to take care of the nominally poor. The labourer has
ceased to be in any sense a slave. He must learn to be, in every sense,
a man.
It is much easier to recommend our neighbours to change their habits
than to change our own, yet we must never forget, in discussing the
question between the working man and his employer, or the community,
that a slight change in the habits of the working men, in England at
least, would add more to their wealth, their happiness and their hopes,
than has been added by all the strikes, or by conflicts of any kind. In
the life of Mr. Brassey, we are told that the British workman in
Australia has great advantages, but wastes them all in drink. He does
this not in Australia alone. I hate legislative interference with
private habits, and I have no fancies about diet. A citizen of Maine,
who has eaten too much pork, is just as great a transgressor against
medical rules, and probably just as unamiable, as if he had drunk too
much whisky. But when I have seen the havoc--the ever increasing havoc--
which drink makes with the industry, the vigour, the character of the
British workman, I have sometimes asked myself whether in that case
extraordinary measures might not be justified by the extremity of its
dangers.
The subject is boundless. I might touch upon perils distinct from
Unionism, which threaten industry, especially that growing dislike of
manual labour which prevails to an alarming extent in the United States,
and which some eminent economists are inclined to attribute to errors in
the system of education in the common schools. I might speak of the
duties of government in relation to these disturbances, and of the
necessity, for this as well as other purposes, of giving ourselves a
government of all and for all, capable of arbitrating impartially
between conflicting interests as the recognised organ of the common
good. I might speak, too, of the expediency of introducing into popular
education a more social element, of teaching less rivalry and
discontent, more knowledge of the mutual duties of different members of
the community and of the connection of those duties with our happiness.
But I must conclude. If I have thrown no new light upon the subject, I
trust that I have at least tried to speak the truth impartially, and
that I have said nothing which can add to the bitterness of the
industrial conflict, or lead any of my hearers to forget that above all
Trade Unions, and above all combinations of every kind, there is the
great union of Humanity.
"WHAT IS CULPABLE LUXURY?"
A phrase in a lecture on "The Labour Movement," published in the
_Canadian Monthly_, has been the inconsiderable cause of a
considerable controversy in the English press and notably of a paper by
the eminent economist and moralist Mr. W.R. Greg, entitled "What is
Culpable Luxury?" in the _Contemporary Review_.
The passage of the lecture in which the phrase occurred was: "Wealth,
real wealth, has hardly as yet much reason to complain of any
encroachment of the Labour Movement on its rights. When did it command
such means and appliances of pleasure, such satisfaction for every
appetite and every fancy, as it commands now? When did it rear such
enchanted palaces of luxury as it is rearing in England at the present
day? Well do I remember one of those palaces, the most conspicuous
object for miles round. _Its lord was I dare say consuming the income
of some six hundred of the poor labouring families round him_. The
thought that you are spending on yourself annually the income of six
hundred labouring families seems to me about as much as a man with a
heart and a brain can bear. Whatever the rich man desires, the finest
house, the biggest diamond, the reigning beauty for his wife, social
homage, public honour, political power, is ready at his command" &c, &c.
The words in italics have been separated from the context and taken as
an attack on wealth. But the whole passage is a defence of labour
against the charge of encroachment brought against it by wealth. I argue
that, if the labouring man gets rather more than he did, the
inequalities of fortune and the privileges of the rich are still great
enough. In the next paragraph I say that "wealth well made and well
spent is as pure as the rill that runs from the mountain side." An
invidious turn has also been given to the expression "the income of six
hundred labouring families," as though it meant that the wealthy idler
is robbing six hundred labouring families of their income. It means no
more than that the income which he is spending on himself is as large as
six hundred of their incomes put together.
Mr. Greg begins with what he calls a retort courteous. He says that if
the man with L30 000 is doing this sad thing so is the man with L3000 or
L300 and everyone who allows himself anything beyond the necessaries of
life; nay, that the labouring man when he lights his pipe or drinks his
dram is as well as the rest consuming the substance of one poorer than
himself. This argument appears to its framer irrefutable and a retort to
which there can be no rejoinder. I confess my difficulty is not so much
in refuting it as in seeing any point in it at all. What parallel can
there be between an enormous and a very moderate expenditure or between
prodigious luxury and ordinary comfort? If a man taxes me with having
squandered fifty dollars on a repast is it an irrefutable retort to tell
him that he has spent fifty cents? The limited and rational expenditure
of an industrious man produces no evils economical, social or moral. I
contend in the lecture that the unlimited and irrational expenditure of
idle millionaires does; that it wastes labour, breeds luxury, creates
unhappiness by propagating factitious wants, too often engenders vice
and is injurious for the most part to real civilization. I have
observed and I think with truth that the most malignant feelings which
enter into the present struggle between classes have been generated by
the ostentation of idle wealth in contrast with surrounding poverty. It
would of course be absurd to say this of a man living on a small income
in a modest house and in a plain way.
If I had said that property or all property beyond a mere sustenance is
theft there would be force in Mr. Greg's retort, but as I have said or
implied nothing more than that extravagant luxury is waste and
contrasted with surrounding poverty grates on the feelings, especially
when those who waste are idle and those who want are the hardest working
labourers in the world, I repeat that I can see no force in the retort
at all.
Mr. Greg proceeds to analyse the expenditure of the millionaire and to
maintain that its several items are laudable.
First he defends pleasure grounds, gardens, shrubberies and deer parks.
But he defends them on the ground that they are good things for the
community and thereby admits my principle. It is only against wasteful
self indulgence that I have anything to say. No doubt, says Mr. Greg,
if the land of a country is all occupied and cultivated, and if no more
land is easily accessible, and if the produce of other lands is not
procurable in return for manufactured articles of exchange, then a
proprietor who shall employ a hundred acres in growing wine for his own
drinking, which might or would otherwise be employed in growing wheat or
other food for twenty poor families who can find no other field for
their labour, may fairly be said to be consuming, spending on himself,
the sustenance of those families. If, again, he, in the midst of a
swarming population unable to find productive or remunerative
occupation, insists upon keeping a considerable extent of ground in
merely ornamental walks and gardens, and, therefore, useless as far as
the support of human life is concerned, he may be held liable to the
same imputation--even though the wages he pays to the gardeners in the
one case, and the vine-dressers in the other, be pleaded in mitigation
of the charge. Let the writer of this only allow, as he must, that the
moral, social and political consequences of expenditure are to be taken
into account as well as the economical consequences, and he will be
entirely at one with the writer whom he supposes himself to be
confuting. I have never said, or imagined, that "all land ought to be
producing food." I hold that no land in England is better employed than
that of the London parks and the gardens of the Crystal Palace, though I
could not speak so confidently with regard to a vast park from which all
are excluded but its owner. Mr. Greg here again takes up what seems to
me the strange position that to condemn excess is to condemn moderation.
He says that whatever is said against the great parks and gardens of the
most luxurious millionaire may equally be said against a tradesman's
little flower-garden, or the plot of ornamental ground before the
cottage windows of a peasant. I must again say that, so far from
regarding this argument as irrefutable, I altogether fail to discover
its cogency. The tradesman's little bit of green, the peasant's flower-
bed, are real necessities of a human soul. Can the same thing be said of
a pleasure-ground which consumes the labour of twenty men, and of which
the object is not to refresh the weariness of labour but to distract the
vacancy of idleness?
Mr. Greg specially undertakes the defence of deer-parks. But his ground
is that the deer-forests which were denounced as unproductive have been
proved to be the only mode of raising the condition and securing the
well-being of the ill-fed population. If so, "humanitarians" are ready
to hold up both hands in favour of deer-forests. Nay, we are ready to do
the same if the pleasure yielded by the deer-forests bears any
reasonable proportion to the expense and the agricultural sacrifice,
especially if the sportsman is a worker recruiting his exhausted brain,
not a sybarite killing time.
From parks and pleasure-grounds Mr. Greg goes on to horses; and here it
is the same thing over again. The apologist first sneers at those who
object to the millionaire's stud, then lets in the interest of the
community as a limiting principle, and ends by saying: "We may then
allow frankly and without demur, that if he (the millionaire) maintains
more horses than he needs or can use, his expenditure thereon is
strictly pernicious and indefensible, precisely in the same way as it
would be if he burnt so much hay and threw so many bushels of oats into
the fire. He is destroying human food." Now Mr. Greg has only to
determine whether a man who is keeping a score or more of carriage and
saddle horses, is "using" them or not. If he is, "humanitarians" are
perfectly satisfied.
Finally Mr. Greg comes to the case of large establishments of servants.
And here, having set out with intentions most adverse to my theory, he
"blesses it altogether." "Perhaps," he says, "of all the branches of a
wealthy nobleman's expenditure, that which will be condemned with most
unanimity, and defended with most difficulty, is the number of
ostentatious and unnecessary servants it is customary to maintain. For
this practice I have not a word to say. It is directly and indirectly
bad. It is bad for all parties. Its reflex action on the masters
themselves is noxious; it is mischievous to the flunkies who are
maintained in idleness, and in enervating and demoralizing luxury; it is
pernicious to the community at large, and especially to the middle and
upper middle classes, whose inevitable expenditure in procuring fit
domestic service--already burdensomely great--is thereby oppressively
enhanced, till it has become difficult not only to find good household
servants at moderate wages, but to find servants who will work
diligently and faithfully for any wages at all."
How will Mr. Greg keep up the palaces, parks, and studs, when he has
taken away the retinues of servants? If he does not take care, he will
find himself wielding the bosom of sumptuary reform in the most sweeping
manner before he is aware of it. But let me respectfully ask him, who
can he suppose objects to any expenditure except on the ground that it
is directly and indirectly bad; bad for all parties, noxious to the
voluptuary himself, noxious to all about him, and noxious to the
community? So long as a man does no harm to himself or to anyone else, I
for one see no objection to his supping like a Roman Emperor, on
pheasants' tongues, or making shirt-studs of Koh-i-noors.
"It is charity," says Mr. Greg, hurling at the system of great
establishments his last and bitterest anathema--"It is charity, and
charity of the bastard sort--charity disguised as ostentation. It feeds,
clothes, and houses a number of people in strenuous and pretentious
laziness. If almshouses are noxious and offensive to the economic mind,
then, by parity of reasoning, superfluous domestics are noxious also."
And so it would seem, by parity of reasoning, or rather _a
fortiori_, as being fed, clothed, and housed far more expensively,
and in far more strenuous and pretentious laziness, are the superfluous
masters of flunkeys. The flunkey does some work, at all events enough to
prevent him from becoming a mere fattened animal. If he is required to
grease and powder his head, he does work, as it seems to me, for which
he may fairly claim a high remuneration.
As I have said already, let Mr. Greg take in the moral, political, and
social evils of luxury, as well as the material waste, and I flatter
myself that there will be no real difference between his general view of
the responsibilities of wealth and mine. He seems to be as convinced as
I am that there is no happiness in living in strenuous and pretentious
laziness by the sweat of other men's brows.
Nor do I believe that even the particular phrase which has been deemed
so fraught with treason to plutocracy would, if my critic examined it
closely, seem to him so very objectionable. His own doctrine, it is
true, sounds severely economical. He holds that "the natural man and the
Christian" who should be moved by his natural folly and Christianity to
forego a bottle of champagne in order to relieve a neighbour in want of
actual food, would do a thing "distinctly criminal and pernicious."
Still I presume he would allow, theoretically, as I am very sure he
would practically, a place to natural sympathy. He would not applaud a
banquet given in the midst of a famine, although it might be clearly
proved that the money spent by the banqueters was their own, that those
who were perishing of famine had not been robbed of it, that their
bellies were none the emptier because those of the banqueters were full,
and that the cookery gave a stimulus to gastronomic art. He would not,
even, think it wholly irrational that the gloom of the work-house
should cast a momentary shadow on the enjoyments of the palace. I should
also expect him to understand the impression that a man of "brain," even
one free from any excessive tenderness of "heart," would not like to see
a vast apparatus of luxury, and a great train of flunkeys devoted to his
own material enjoyment--that he would feel it as a slur on his good
sense, as an impeachment of his mental resources, and of his command of
nobler elements of happiness, and even as a degradation of his manhood.
There was surely something respectable in the sentiment which made Mr.
Brassey refuse, however much his riches might increase, to add to his
establishment. There is surely something natural in the tendency, which
we generally find coupled with greatness, to simplicity of life. A
person whom I knew had dined with a millionaire _tete-a-tete_, with
six flunkeys standing round the table. I suspect that a man of Mr.
Greg's intellect and character, in spite of his half-ascetic hatred of
plush, would rather have been one of the six than one of the two.
While, however, I hope that my view of these matters coincides
practically with that of Mr. Greg far more than he supposes, I must
admit that there may be a certain difference of sentiment behind. Mr.
Greg describes the impressions to which I have given currency as a
confused compound of natural sympathy, vague Christianity, and dim
economic science. Of the confusion, vagueness and dimness of our views,
of course we cannot be expected to be conscious; but I own that I defer,
in these matters, not only to natural feeling, but to the ethics of
rational Christianity. I still adhere to the Christian code for want of
a better, the Utilitarian system of morality being, so far as I can see,
no morality at all, in the ordinary sense of the term, as it makes no
appeal to our moral nature, our conscience, or whatever philosophers
choose to call the deepest part of humanity. Of course, therefore, I
accept as the fundamental principle of human relations, and of all
science concerning them, the great Christian doctrine that "we are every
one members one of another" As a consequence of this doctrine I hold
that the wealth of mankind is morally a common store; that we are
morally bound to increase it as much, and to waste it as little, as we
can, that of the two it is happier to be underpaid than to be overpaid;
and that we shall all find it so in the sum of things. There is nothing
in such a view in the least degree subversive of the legal rights of
property, which the founders of Christianity distinctly recognised in
their teaching, and strengthened practically by raising the standard of
integrity; nothing adverse to active industry or good business habits;
nothing opposed to economic science as the study of the laws regulating
the production and distribution of wealth; nothing condemnatory of
pleasure, provided it be pleasure which opens the heart, as I suppose
was the case with the marriage feast at Cana, not the pleasure which
closes the heart, as I fear was the case with the "refined luxury" of
the Marquis of Steyne.
If this is superstition, all that I can say is that I have read Strauss,
Renan, Mr. Greg on the "Creed of Christendom," and all the eminent
writers I could hear of on that side, and that I am not conscious of any
bias to the side of orthodoxy, at least I have not given satisfaction to
the orthodox classes.
Christianity, of course, in common with other systems, craves a
reasonable construction. Plato cannot afford to have his apologues
treated as histories. In "Joshua Davidson," a good man is made to turn
away from Christianity because he finds that his faith will not
literally remove a mountain and cast it into the sea. But he had omitted
an indispensable preliminary. He ought first to have exactly compared
the bulk of his faith with that of a grain of Palestinian mustard seed.
Mr. Greg makes sport of the text "He that hath two coats let him impart
to him that hath none," which he says he heard in his youth, but without
ever considering its present applicability. Yet in the next paragraph
but one he gives it a precise and a very important application by
pronouncing that a man is not at liberty to grow wine for himself on
land which other people need for food. I fail to see how the principle
involved in this passage, and others of a similar tendency which I have
quoted from Mr. Greg's paper, differ from that involved in Gospel texts
which, if I were to quote them would grate strangely upon his ear. The
texts comprise a moral sanction; but Mr. Greg must have some moral
sanction when he forbids a man to do that which he is permitted to do by
law. Christianity, whatever its source and authority, was addressed at
first to childlike minds, and what its antagonists have to prove is not
that its forms of expression or even of thought are adapted to such
minds, but that its principles, when rationally applied to a more
advanced state of society, are unsound. Rightly understood it does not
seem to me to enjoin anything eccentric or spasmodic, to bid you enact
primitive Orientalism in the streets of London, thrust fraternity upon
writers in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, or behave generally as if the
"Kingdom of God" were already come. Your duty as a Christian is done if
you help its coming according to the circumstances of your place in
society and the age in which you live.
Of course, in subscribing to the Christian code of ethics, one lays
oneself open to "retorts corteous" without limit. But so one does in
subscribing to any code, or accepting any standard, whether moral or of
any other kind.