Fellow-Workmen: I am not going to take up your time by complimenting you.
It has been the fashion to compliment kings and other authorities when
they have come into power, and to tell them that, under their wise and
beneficent rule, happiness would certainly overflow the land. But the
end has not always corresponded to that beginning. If it were true that
we who work for wages had more of the wisdom and virtue necessary to the
right use of power than has been shown by the aristocratic and mercantile
classes, we should not glory much in that fact, or consider that it
carried with it any near approach to infallibility.
In my opinion, there has been too much complimenting of that sort; and
whenever a speaker, whether he is one of ourselves or not, wastes our
time in boasting or flattery, I say, let us hiss him. If we have the
beginning of wisdom, which is, to know a little truth about ourselves, we
know that as a body we are neither very wise nor very virtuous. And to
prove this, I will not point specially to our own habits and doings, but
to the general state of the country. Any nation that had within it a
majority of men—and we are the majority—possessed of much wisdom and
virtue, would not tolerate the bad practices, the commercial lying and
swindling, the poisonous adulteration of goods, the retail cheating, and
the political bribery which are carried on boldly in the midst of us. A
majority has the power of creating a public opinion. We could groan and
hiss before we had the franchise: if we had groaned and hissed in the
right place, if we had discerned better between good and evil, if the
multitude of us artisans, and factory hands, and miners, and laborers of
all sorts, had been skilful, faithful, well-judging, industrious,
sober—and I don’t see how there can be wisdom and virtue anywhere without
these qualities—we should have made an audience that would have shamed
the other classes out of their share in the national vices. We should
have had better members of Parliament, better religious teachers,
honester tradesmen, fewer foolish demagogues, less impudence in infamous
and brutal men; and we should not have had among us the abomination of
men calling themselves religious while living in splendor on ill-gotten
gains. I say, it is not possible for any society in which there is a
very large body of wise and virtuous men to be as vicious as our society
is—to have as low a standard of right and wrong, to have so much belief
in falsehood, or to have so degrading, barbarous a notion of what
pleasure is, or of what justly raises a man above his fellows.
Therefore, let us have none with this nonsense about our being much
better than the rest of our countrymen, or the pretence that that was a
reason why we ought to have such an extension of the franchise as has
been given to us. The reason for our having the franchise, as I want
presently to show, lies somewhere else than in our personal good
qualities, and does not in the least lie in any high betting chance that
a delegate is a better man than a duke, or that a Sheffield grinder is a
better man than any one of the firm he works for.
However, we have got our franchise now. We have been sarcastically
called in the House of Commons the future masters of the country; and if
that sarcasm contains any truth, it seems to me that the first thing we
had better think of is, our heavy responsibility; that is to say, the
terrible risk we run of working mischief and missing good, as others have
done before us. Suppose certain men, discontented with the irrigation of
a country which depended for all its prosperity on the right direction
being given to the waters of a great river, had got the management of the
irrigation before they were quite sure how exactly it could be altered
for the better, or whether they could command the necessary agency for
such on alteration. Those men would have a difficult and dangerous
business on their hands; and the more sense, feeling, and knowledge they
had, the more they would be likely to tremble rather than to triumph.
Our situation is not altogether unlike theirs. For general prosperity
and well-being is a vast crop, that like the corn in Egypt can be come
at, not at all by hurried snatching, but only by a well-judged patient
process; and whether our political power will be any good to us now we
have got it, must depend entirely on the means and materials—the
knowledge, ability, and honesty we have at command. These three things
are the only conditions on which we can get any lasting benefit, as every
clever workman among us knows: he knows that for an article to be worth
much there must be a good invention or plan to go upon, there must be a
well-prepared material, and there must be skilful and honest work in
carrying out the plan. And by this test we may try those who want to be
our leaders. Have they anything to offer us besides indignant talk?
When they tell us we ought to have this, that, or the other thing, can
they explain to us any reasonable, fair, safe way of getting it? Can
they argue in favor of a particular change by showing us pretty closely
how the change is likely to work? I don’t want to decry a just
indignation; on the contrary, I should like it to be more thorough and
general. A wise man, more than two thousand years ago, when he was asked
what would most tend to lessen injustice in the world, said, “If every
bystander felt as indignant at a wrong as if he himself were the
sufferer.” Let us cherish such indignation. But the long-growing evils
of a great nation are a tangled business, asking for a good deal more
than indignation in order to be got rid of. Indignation is a fine
war-horse, but the war-horse must be ridden by a man: it must be ridden
by rationality, skill, courage, armed with the right weapons, and taking
definite aim.
We have reason to be discontented with many things, and, looking back
either through the history of England to much earlier generations or to
the legislation and administrations of later times, we are justified in
saying that many of the evils under which our country now suffers are the
consequences of folly, ignorance, neglect, or self-seeking in those who,
at different times have wielded the powers of rank, office, and money.
But the more bitterly we feel this, the more loudly we utter it, the
stronger is the obligation we lay on ourselves to beware, lest we also,
by a too hasty wresting of measures which seem to promise an immediate
partial relief, make a worse time of it for our own generation, and leave
a bad inheritance to our children. The deepest curse of wrong-doing,
whether of the foolish or wicked sort, is that its effects are difficult
to be undone. I suppose there is hardly anything more to be shuddered at
than that part of the history of disease which shows how, when a man
injures his constitution by a life of vicious excess, his children and
grandchildren inherit diseased bodies and minds, and how the effects of
that unhappy inheritance continue to spread beyond our calculation. This
is only one example of the law by which human lives are linked together;
another example of what we complain of when we point to our pauperism, to
the brutal ignorance of multitudes among our fellow countrymen, to the
weight of taxation laid on us by blamable wars, to the wasteful channels
made for the public money, to the expense and trouble of getting justice,
and call these the effects of bad rule. This is the law that we all bear
the yoke of, the law of no man’s making, and which no man can undo.
Everybody now sees an example of it in the case of Ireland. We who are
living now are sufferers by the wrong-doing of those who lived before us;
we are the sufferers by each other’s wrong-doing; and the children who
come after us are and will be sufferers from the same causes. Will any
man say he doesn’t care for that law—it is nothing to him—what he wants
is to better himself? With what face then will he complain of any
injury? If he says that in politics or in any sort of social action he
will not care to know what are likely to be the consequences to others
besides himself, he is defending the very worst doings that have brought
about his discontent. He might as well say that there is no better rule
needful for men than that each should tug and drive for what will please
him, without caring how that tugging will act on the fine widespread
network of society in which he is fast meshed. If any man taught that as
a doctrine, we should know him for a fool. But there are men who act
upon it; every scoundrel, for example, whether he is a rich religious
scoundrel who lies and cheats on a large scale, and will perhaps come and
ask you to send him to Parliament, or a poor pocket-picking scoundrel,
who will steal your loose pence while you are listening round the
platform. None of us are so ignorant as not to know that a society, a
nation is held together by just the opposite doctrine and action—by the
dependence of men on each other and the sense they have of a common
interest in preventing injury. And we working men are, I think, of all
classes the last that can afford to forget this; for if we did we should
be much like sailors cutting away the timbers of our own ship to warm our
grog with. For what else is the meaning of our trades-unions? What else
is the meaning of every flag we carry, every procession we make, every
crowd we collect for the sake of making some protest on behalf of our
body as receivers of wages, if not this: that it is our interest to stand
by each other, and that this being the common interest, no one of us will
try to make a good bargain for himself without considering what will be
good for his fellows? And every member of a union believes that the
wider he can spread his union, the stronger and surer will be the effect
of it. So I think I shall be borne out in saying that a working man who
can put two and two together, or take three from four and see what will
be the remainder, can understand that a society, to be well off, must be
made up chiefly of men who consider the general good as well as their
own.
Well, but taking the world as it is—and this is one way we must take it
when we want to find out how it can be improved—no society is made up of
a single class: society stands before us like that wonderful piece of
life, the human body, with all its various parts depending on one
another, and with a terrible liability to get wrong because of that
delicate dependence. We all know how many diseases the human body is apt
to suffer from, and how difficult it is even for the doctors to find out
exactly where the seat or beginning of the disorder is. That is because
the body is made up of so many various parts, all related to each other,
or likely all to feel the effect if any one of them goes wrong. It is
somewhat the same with our old nations or societies. No society ever
stood long in the world without getting to be composed of different
classes. Now, it is all pretence to say that there is no such thing as
class interest. It is clear that if any particular number of men get a
particular benefit from any existing institution, they are likely to band
together, in order to keep up that benefit and increase it, until it is
perceived to be unfair and injurious to another large number, who get
knowledge and strength enough to set up a resistance. And this, again,
has been part of the history of every great society since history began.
But the simple reason for this being, that any large body of men is
likely to have more of stupidity, narrowness, and greed than of
farsightedness and generosity, it is plain that the number who resist
unfairness and injury are in danger of becoming injurious in their turn.
And in this way a justifiable resistance has become a damaging
convulsion, making everything worse instead of better. This has been
seen so often that we ought to profit a little by the experience. So
long as there is selfishness in men; so long as they have not found out
for themselves institutions which express and carry into practice the
truth, that the highest interest of mankind must at last be a common and
not a divided interest; so long as the gradual operation of steady causes
has not made that truth a part of every man’s knowledge and feeling, just
as we now not only know that it is good for our health to be cleanly, but
feel that cleanliness is only another word for comfort, which is the
under-side or lining of all pleasure; so long, I say as men wink at their
own knowingness, or hold their heads high because they have got an
advantage over their fellows; so long class interest will be in danger of
making itself felt injuriously. No set of men will get any sort of power
without being in danger of wanting more than their right share. But, on
the other hand, it is just as certain that no set of men will get angry
at having less than their right share, and set up a claim on that ground,
without falling into just the same danger of exacting too much, and
exacting it in wrong ways. It’s human nature we have got to work with
all round, and nothing else. That seems like saying something very
commonplace—nay, obvious; as if one should say that where there are hands
there are mouths. Yet, to hear a good deal of the speechifying and to
see a good deal of the action that go forward, one might suppose it was
forgotten.
But I come back to this: that, in our old society, there are old
institutions, and among them the various distinctions and inherited
advantages of classes, which have shaped themselves along with all the
wonderful slow-growing system of things made up of our laws, our
commerce, and our stores of all sorts, whether in material objects, such
as buildings and machinery, or in knowledge, such as scientific thought
and professional skill. Just as in that case I spoke of before, the
irrigation of a country, which must absolutely have its water distributed
or it will bear no crop; there are the old channels, the old banks, and
the old pumps, which must be used as they are until new and better have
been prepared, or the structure of the old has been gradually altered.
But it would be fool’s work to batter down a pump only because a better
might be made, when you had no machinery ready for a new one: it would be
wicked work, if villages lost their crops by it. Now the only safe way
by which society can be steadily improved and our worst evils reduced, is
not by any attempt to do away directly with the actually existing class
distinctions and advantages, as if everybody could have the same sort of
work, or lead the same sort of life (which none of my hearers are stupid
enough to suppose), but by the turning of class interests into class
functions or duties. What I mean is, that each class should be urged by
the surrounding conditions to perform its particular work under the
strong pressure of responsibility to the nation at large; that our public
affairs should be got into a state in which there should be no impunity
for foolish or faithless conduct. In this way the public judgment would
sift out incapability and dishonesty from posts of high charge, and even
personal ambition would necessarily become of a worthier sort, since the
desires of the most selfish men must be a good deal shaped by the
opinions of those around them; and for one person to put on a cap and
bells, or to go about dishonest or paltry ways of getting rich that he
may spend a vast sum of money in having more finery than his neighbors,
he must be pretty sure of a crowd who will applaud him. Now, changes can
only be good in proportion as they help to bring about this sort of
result: in proportion as they put knowledge in the place of ignorance,
and fellow-feeling in the place of selfishness. In the course of that
substitution class distinctions must inevitably change their character,
and represent the varying duties of men, not their varying interests.
But this end will not come by impatience. “Day will not break the sooner
because we get up before the twilight.” Still less will it come by mere
undoing, or change merely as change. And moreover, if we believed that
it would be unconditionally hastened by our getting the franchise, we
should be what I call superstitious men, believing in magic, or the
production of a result by hocus-pocus. Our getting the franchise will
greatly hasten that good end in proportion only as every one of us has
the knowledge, the foresight, the conscience, that will make him
well-judging and scrupulous in the use of it. The nature of things in
this world has been determined for us beforehand, and in such a way that
no ship can be expected to sail well on a difficult voyage, and reach the
right port, unless it is well manned: the nature of the winds and the
waves, of the timbers, the sails, and the cordage, will not accommodate
itself to drunken, mutinous sailors.
You will not suspect me of wanting to preach any cant to you, or of
joining in the pretence that everything is in a fine way, and need not be
made better. What I am striving to keep in our minds is the care, the
precaution, with which we should go about making things better, so that
the public order may not be destroyed, so that no fatal shock may be
given to this society of ours, this living body in which our lives are
bound up. After the Reform Bill of 1832 I was in an election riot, which
showed me clearly, on a small scale, what public disorder must always be;
and I have never forgotten that the riot was brought about chiefly by the
agency of dishonest men who professed to be on the people’s side. Now,
the danger hanging over change is great, just in proportion as it tends
to produce such disorder by giving any large number of ignorant men,
whose notions of what is good are of a low and brutal sort, the belief
that they have got power into their hands, and may do pretty much as they
like. If any one can look round us and say that he sees no signs of any
such danger now, and that our national condition is running along like a
clear broadening stream, safe not to get choked with mud, I call him a
cheerful man: perhaps he does his own gardening, and seldom taken
exercise far away from home. To us who have no gardens, and often walk
abroad, it is plain that we can never get into a bit of a crowd but we
must rub clothes with a set of roughs, who have the worst vices of the
worst rich—who are gamblers, sots, libertines, knaves, or else mere
sensual simpletons and victims. They are the ugly crop that has sprung
up while the stewards have been sleeping; they are the multiplying brood
begotten by parents who have been left without all teaching save that of
a too craving body, without all well-being save the fading delusions of
drugged beer and gin. They are the hideous margin of society, at one
edge drawing toward it the undesigning ignorant poor, at the other
darkening imperceptibly into the lowest criminal class. Here is one of
the evils which cannot be got rid of quickly, and against which any of us
who have got sense, decency, and instruction have need to watch. That
these degraded fellow-men could really get the mastery in a persistent
disobedience to the laws and in a struggle to subvert order, I do not
believe; but wretched calamities must come from the very beginning of
such a struggle, and the continuance of it would be a civil war, in which
the inspiration on both sides might soon cease to be even a false notion
of good, and might become the direct savage impulse of ferocity. We have
all to see to it that we do not help to rouse what I may call the savage
beast in the breasts of our generation—that we do not help to poison the
nation’s blood, and make richer provision for bestiality to come. We
know well enough that oppressors have sinned in this way—that oppression
has notoriously made men mad; and we are determined to resist oppression.
But let us, if possible, show that we can keep sane in our resistance,
and shape our means more and more reasonably toward the least harmful,
and therefore the speediest, attainment of our end. Let us, I say, show
that our spirits are too strong to be driven mad, but can keep that sober
determination which alone gives mastery over the adaptation of means.
And a first guarantee of this sanity will be to act as if we understood
that the fundamental duty of a government is to preserve order, to
enforce obedience of the laws. It has been held hitherto that a man can
be depended on as a guardian of order only when he has much money and
comfort to lose. But a better state of things would be, that men who had
little money and not much comfort should still be guardians of order,
because they had sense to see that disorder would do no good, and had a
heart of justice, pity, and fortitude, to keep them from making more
misery only because they felt some misery themselves. There are
thousands of artisans who have already shown this fine spirit, and have
endured much with patient heroism. If such a spirit spread, and
penetrated us all, we should soon become the masters of the country in
the best sense and to the best ends. For, the public order being
preserved, there can be no government in future that will not be
determined by our insistance on our fair and practicable demands. It is
only by disorder that our demands will be choked, that we shall find
ourselves lost among a brutal rabble, with all the intelligence of the
country opposed to us, and see government in the shape of guns that will
sweep us down in the ignoble martyrdom of fools.
It has been a too common notion that to insist much on the preservation
of order is the part of a selfish aristocracy and a selfish commercial
class, because among these, in the nature of things, have been found the
opponents of change. I am a Radical; and, what is more, I am not a
Radical with a title, or a French cook, or even an entrance into fine
society. I expect great changes, and I desire them. But I don’t expect
them to come in a hurry, by mere inconsiderate sweeping. A Hercules with
a big besom is a fine thing for a filthy stable, but not for weeding a
seed-bed, where his besom would soon make a barren floor.
That is old-fashioned talk, some one may say. We know all that.
Yes, when things are put in an extreme way, most people think they know
them; but, after all, they are comparatively few who see the small
degrees by which those extremes are arrived at, or have the resolution
and self-control to resist the little impulses by which they creep on
surely toward a fatal end. Does anybody set out meaning to ruin himself,
or to drink himself to death, or to waste his life so that he becomes a
despicable old man, a superannuated nuisance, like a fly in winter. Yet
there are plenty, of whose lot this is the pitiable story. Well now,
supposing us all to have the best intentions, we working men, as a body,
run some risk of bringing evil on the nation in that unconscious
manner—half hurrying, half pushed in a jostling march toward an end we
are not thinking of. For just as there are many things which we know
better and feel much more strongly than the richer, softer-handed classes
can know or feel them; so there are many things—many precious
benefits—which we, by the very fact of our privations, our lack of
leisure and instruction, are not so likely to be aware of and take into
our account. Those precious benefits form a chief part of what I may
call the common estate of society: a wealth over and above buildings,
machinery, produce, shipping, and so on, though closely connected with
these; a wealth of a more delicate kind, that we may more unconsciously
bring into danger, doing harm and not knowing that we do it. I mean that
treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling,
and manners, great memories and the interpretation of great records,
which is carried on from the minds of one generation to the minds of
another. This is something distinct from the indulgences of luxury and
the pursuit of vain finery; and one of the hardships in the lot of
working men is that they have been for the most part shut out from
sharing in this treasure. It can make a man’s life very great, very full
of delight, though he has no smart furniture and no horses: it also
yields a great deal of discovery that corrects error, and of invention
that lessens bodily pain, and must at least make life easier for all.
Now the security of this treasure demands, not only the preservation of
order, but a certain patience on our part with many institutions and
facts of various kinds, especially touching the accumulation of wealth,
which from the light we stand in, we are more likely to discern the evil
than the good of. It is constantly the task of practical wisdom not to
say, “This is good, and I will have it,” but to say, “This is the less of
two unavoidable evils, and I will bear it.” And this treasure of
knowledge, which consists in the fine activity, the exalted vision of
many minds, is bound up at present with conditions which have much evil
in them. Just as in the case of material wealth and its distribution we
are obliged to take the selfishness and weaknesses of human nature into
account, and however we insist that men might act better, are forced,
unless we are fanatical simpletons, to consider how they are likely to
act; so in this matter of the wealth that is carried in men’s minds, we
have to reflect that the too absolute predominance of a class whose wants
have been of a common sort, who are chiefly struggling to get better and
more food, clothing, shelter, and bodily recreation, may lead to hasty
measures for the sake of having things more fairly shared, which, even if
they did not fail of their object, would at last debase the life of the
nation. Do anything which will throw the classes who hold the treasures
of knowledge—nay, I may say, the treasure of refined needs—into the
background, cause them to withdraw from public affairs, stop too suddenly
any of the sources by which their leisure and ease are furnished, rob
them of the chances by which they may be influential and pre-eminent, and
you do something as short-sighted as the acts of France and Spain when in
jealousy and wrath, not altogether unprovoked, they drove from among them
races and classes that held the traditions of handicraft and agriculture.
You injure your own inheritance and the inheritance of your children.
You may truly say that this which I call the common estate of society has
been anything but common to you; but the same may be said, by many of us,
of the sunlight and the air, of the sky and the fields, of parks and
holiday games. Nevertheless that these blessings exist makes life
worthier to us, and urges us the more to energetic, likely means of
getting our share in them; and I say, let us watch carefully, lest we do
anything to lessen this treasure which is held in the minds of men, while
we exert ourselves, first of all, and to the very utmost, that we and our
children may share in all its benefits. Yes; exert ourselves to the
utmost, to break the yoke of ignorance. If we demand more leisure, more
ease in our lives, let us show that we don’t deserve the reproach of
wanting to shirk that industry which, in some form or other, every man,
whether rich or poor, should feel himself as much bound to as he is bound
to decency. Let us show that we want to have some time and strength left
to us, that we may use it, not for brutal indulgence, but for the
rational exercise of the faculties which make us men. Without this no
political measures can benefit us. No political institution will alter
the nature of Ignorance, or hinder it from producing vice and misery.
Let Ignorance start how it will, it must run the same round of low
appetites, poverty, slavery, and superstition. Some of us know this
well—nay, I will say, feel it; for knowledge of this kind cuts deep; and
to us it is one of the most painful facts belonging to our condition that
there are numbers of our fellow-workmen who are so far from feeling in
the same way, that they never use the imperfect opportunities already
offered them for giving their children some schooling, but turn their
little ones of tender age into bread-winners, often at cruel tasks,
exposed to the horrible infection of childish vice. Of course, the
causes of these hideous things go a long way back. Parents’ misery has
made parents’ wickedness. But we, who are still blessed with the hearts
of fathers and the consciences of men—we who have some knowledge of the
curse entailed on broods of creatures in human shape, whose enfeebled
bodies and dull perverted minds are mere centres of uneasiness in whom
even appetite is feeble and joy impossible—I say we are bound to use all
the means at our command to help in putting a stop to this horror. Here,
it seems to me, is a way in which we may use extended co-operation among
us to the most momentous of all purposes, and make conditions of
enrolment that would strengthen all educational measures. It is true
enough that there is a low sense of parental duties in the nation at
large, and that numbers who have no excuse in bodily hardship seem to
think it a light thing to beget children, to bring human beings with all
their tremendous possibilities into this difficult world, and then take
little heed how they are disciplined and furnished for the perilous
journey they are sent on without any asking of their own. This is a sin
shared in more or less by all classes; but there are sins which, like
taxation, fall the heaviest on the poorest, and none have such galling
reasons as we working men to try and rouse to the utmost the feeling of
responsibility in fathers and mothers. We have been urged into
co-operation by the pressure of common demands. In war men need each
other more; and where a given point has to be defended, fighters
inevitably find themselves shoulder to shoulder. So fellowship grows, so
grow the rules of fellowship, which gradually shape themselves to
thoroughness as the idea of a common good becomes more complete. We feel
a right to say, If you will be one of us, you must make such and such a
contribution—you must renounce such and such a separate advantage—you
must set your face against such and such an infringement. If we have any
false ideas about our common good, our rules will be wrong, and we shall
be co-operating to damage each other. But, now, here is a part of our
good, without which everything else we strive for will be worthless—I
mean the rescue of our children. Let us demand from the members of our
unions that they fulfil their duty as parents in this definite matter,
which rules can reach. Let us demand that they send their children to
school, so as not to go on recklessly, breeding a moral pestilence among
us, just as strictly as we demand that they pay their contributions to a
common fund, understood to be for a common benefit. While we watch our
public men, let us watch one another as to this duty, which is also
public, and more momentous even than obedience to sanitary regulations.
While we resolutely declare against the wickedness in high places, let us
set ourselves also against the wickedness in low places, not quarrelling
which came first, or which is the worse of the two—not trying to settle
the miserable precedence of plague or famine, but insisting unflinchingly
on remedies once ascertained, and summoning those who hold the treasure
of knowledge to remember that they hold it in trust, and that with them
lies the task of searching for new remedies, and finding the right
methods of applying them.
To find right remedies and right methods. Here is the great function of
knowledge: here the life of one man may make a fresh era straight away,
in which a sort of suffering that has existed shall exist no more. For
the thousands of years down to the middle of the sixteenth century that
human limbs had been hacked and amputated, nobody knew how to stop the
bleeding except by searing the ends of the vessels with red-hot iron.
But then came a man named Ambrose Paré, and said, “Tie up the arteries!”
That was a fine word to utter. It contained the statement of a method—a
plan by which a particular evil was forever assuaged. Let us try to
discern the men whose words carry that sort of kernel, and choose such
men to be our guides and representatives—not choose platform swaggerers,
who bring us nothing but the ocean to make our broth with.
To get the chief power into the hands of the wisest, which means to get
our life regulated according to the truest principles mankind is in
possession of, is a problem as old as the very notion of wisdom. The
solution comes slowly, because men collectively can only be made to
embrace principles, and to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching
of the world’s events. Men will go on planting potatoes, and nothing
else but potatoes, till a potato disease comes and forces them to find
out the advantage of a varied crop. Selfishness, stupidity, sloth,
persist in trying to adapt the world to their desires, till a time comes
when the world manifests itself as too decidedly inconvenient to them.
Wisdom stands outside of man and urges itself upon him, like the marks of
the changing seasons, before it finds a home within him, directs his
actions, and from the precious effects of obedience begets a
corresponding love.
But while still outside of us, wisdom often looks terrible, and wears
strange forms, wrapped in the changing conditions of a struggling world.
It wears now the form of wants and just demands in a great multitude of
British men: wants and demands urged into existence by the forces of a
maturing world. And it is in virtue of this—in virtue of this presence
of wisdom on our side as a mighty fact, physical and moral, which must
enter into and shape the thoughts and actions of mankind—that we working
men have obtained the suffrage. Not because we are an excellent
multitude, but because we are a needy multitude.
But now, for our own part, we have seriously to consider this outside
wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable nature of things, and watch
to give it a home within us and obey it. If the claims of the unendowed
multitude of working men hold within them principles which must shape the
future, it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their
inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without which no
worthy, noble future can be moulded. Many of the highest uses of life
are in their keeping; and if privilege has often been abused, it has also
been the nurse of excellence. Here again we have to submit ourselves to
the great law of inheritance. If we quarrel with the way in which the
labors and earnings of the past have been preserved and handed down, we
are just as bigoted, just as narrow, just as wanting in that religion
which keeps an open ear and an obedient mind to the teachings of fact, as
we accuse those of being, who quarrel with the new truths and new needs
which are disclosed in the present. The deeper insight we get into the
causes of human trouble, and the ways by which men are made better and
happier, the less we shall be inclined to the unprofitable spirit and
practice of reproaching classes as such in a wholesale fashion. Not all
the evils of our condition are such as we can justly blame others for;
and, I repeat, many of them are such as no changes of institutions can
quickly remedy. To discern between the evils that energy can remove and
the evils that patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness
and childishness, between good sense and folly. And more than that,
without such discernment, seeing that we have grave duties toward our own
body and the country at large, we can hardly escape acts of fatal
rashness and injustice.
I am addressing a mixed assembly of workmen, and some of you may be as
well or better fitted than I am to take up this office. But they will
not think it amiss in me that I have tried to bring together the
considerations most likely to be of service to us in preparing ourselves
for the use of our new opportunities. I have avoided touching on special
questions. The best help toward judging well on these is to approach
them in the right temper without vain expectation, and with a resolution
which is mixed with temperance.
Footnotes:
{31} 1. “Madame de Sablé. Etudes sur les Femmes illustres et la
Société du XVIIe siècle.” Par M. Victor Cousin. Paris: Didier. 2.
“Portraits de Femmes.” Par C. A. Sainte-Beuve. Paris: Didier. 3. “Les
Femmes de la Revolutions.” Par J. Michelet.
{33} Queen Christina, when Mme. Dacier (then Mlle. Le Fèvre) sent her a
copy of her edition of “Callimachus,” wrote in reply: “Mais vous, de qui
on m’assure que vous êtes une belle et agréable fille, n’avez vous pas
honte d’être si savante?”
{53} The letter to which we allude has this charming little touch: “Je
hais comme la mort que les gens de son age puissent croire que j’ai des
galanteries. Il semble qu’on leur parait cent ans des qu’on est plus
vieille qu’eux, et ils sont tout propre à s’étonner qu’il y ait encore
question des gens.”
{64} 1. “The Church before the Flood.” By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D.
2. “Occasional Discourses.” By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D. In two
vols. 3. “Signs of the Times; or, Present, Past, and Future.” By the
Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 4. “The Finger of God.” By the Rev. John
Cumming, D.D. 5. “Is Christianity from God? or, a Manual of Christian
Evidence, for Scripture-Readers, City Missionaries, Sunday-School
Teachers, etc.” By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 6. “Apocalyptic
Sketches; or, Lectures on the Book of Revelation.” First Series. By the
Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 7. “Apocalyptic Sketches.” Second Series. By
the Rev. John Cumming, D.D. 8 “Prophetic Studies; or, Lectures on the
Book of Daniel.” By the Rev. John Cumming, D.D.
{74} “Lect. on Daniel,” p. 6.
{76} “Man of Ev.” p. 81.
{86a} “Signs of the Times,” p. 38.
{86b} “Apoc. Sketches,” p. 243.
{90} “Man. of Christ. Ev.” p. 184.
{99} 1. “Heinrich Heine’s Sämmtliche Werke.” Philadelphia: John Weik.
1855. 2. “Vermischte Schriften von Heinrich Heine.” Hamburg: Hoffman
und Campe. 1854.
{134} At first I was almost in despair, and I thought I could never bear
it, and yet I have borne it—only do not ask me _how_?
{135} It is not fair to the English reader to indulge in German
quotations, but in our opinion poetical translations are usually worse
than valueless. For those who think differently, however, we may mention
that Mr. Stores Smith has published a modest little book, containing
“Selections from the Poetry of Heinrich Heine,” and that a meritorious
(American) translation of Heine’s complete works, by Charles Leland, is
now appearing in shilling numbers.
{141} 1. “Die Bürgerliche Gesellschaft.” Von W. H. Riehl. Dritte
Auflage. 1855. 2. “Land und Leute.” Von W. H. Riehl. Dritte Auflage.
1856.
{164} Throughout this article in our statement of Riehl’s opinions we
must be understood not as quoting Riehl, but as interpreting and
illustrating him.
{205} 1. “Young’s Works.” 1767. 2. “Johnson’s Lives of the Poets.”
Edited by Peter Cunningham Murray: 1854. 3. “Life of Edward Young,
LL.D.” By Dr. Doran. Prefixed to “Night Thoughts.” Routledge: 1853.
4. _Gentleman’s Magazine_, 1782. 5. “Nichols’s Literary Anecdotes.”
Vol. I. 6. “Spence’s Anecdotes.”
{257} “History of the Rise and Influence of the Spirit of Rationalism in
Europe.” By W. E. H. Lecky, M.A. Longman & Co., London.
{272} “The Grammar of Ornament.” By Owen Jones, Architect. Illustrated
by Examples from various Styles of Ornament. Onto hundred and twelve
plates. Day & Son, London.