Hester was now made rich. Her doting father settled on her not only
the Yorkshire farms, but also other revenues, that she might be
provided with capital to carry into execution her philanthropic plans.
Hester was endowed with many brilliant qualities. She was, as it were,
"born to reign." She perfectly understood her own dignity, perfectly
realized her own power of intellect, was well aware that both her
father and his man of business were her tools, and she managed
accordingly with intuitive prudence, not permitting Mr. Godfrey to
perceive how entirely he obeyed her bidding. Under these circumstances
she might fairly hope for success. Large iron factories on the one
hand, and large cotton factories on the other, were erected on a scale
calculated to employ many hundred hands, and to bring into extensive
operation the new steam-power that then absorbed scientific attention.
Mr. Godfrey was delighted, for it brought him into frequent contact
with the most scientific men of the day. The operations necessarily
attracted public attention, and Mr. Godfrey as director of the
scientific operations, with Hester as deviser of a new scheme for
rendering the "populations" happy and progressive, were continually
besieged by a concourse of visitors, eager to understand the new
"idea."
Hester's arrangements were on a magnificent scale. She started on the
principle of mutual co-operation united to division of labor. Instead
of separate dwellings for her employés, she had large boarding-houses
built. These were provided with halls, refectories, baths,
lecture-rooms, reading-rooms, libraries, and, lastly, schools, which
in those days were rare for the laboring population. For since the
suppression of the monasteries and convents, the schools in which the
good religious had taught the children of England to love God and
their neighbor had been shut up, education had fallen to a fearfully
low standard in this sect-divided kingdom.
Hester was a severe disciplinarian, with little compassion for the
weakness of human nature. She intended her people should become
intellectual; and when she shortened the hours of labor, expressly to
give time to cultivate the mind, when she hired lecturers and bought
books, she felt herself aggrieved that these were not responded to.
Her people were well fed at a common table; they were well sheltered
and accommodated; why should they not be intellectualized? How
discouraged she felt when she found she was speaking in an unknown
tongue to {602} the adults among her operatives. They hardly
considered short hours a benefit when they were compelled to sit and
listen to subjects in which they took no interest. "A glass of ale
and, a pipe of 'backy would do a poor body far more good than all this
preaching, and 'tain't to save our souls either." There were other
difficulties in this commonwealth; the young men and women were on
different sides of the building, and certain rules were laid down to
secure good conduct, but these rules were very difficult to enforce,
and the dismissals for disorder became frequent. The operatives began
to call the place a jail. Hester would not yield, but she turned more
strenuously to the children. Here she had better success, and she
spent days and weeks in providing for the better education of these
little ones. "The elder ones are already formed," she argued, "but we
will give these young ones better tastes, better habits, and they will
become intelligent and happy."
M. de Villeneuve was a frequent visitor at these institutions, for the
character of Hester interested him greatly, and he was constantly
endeavoring to draw her attention to the motives that actuated her
people, and to the probabilities of their producing lasting results.
"Tell me," said he, "how is a knowledge of the material law to produce
happiness? We know that a steel knife cuts flesh; will that knowledge
reconcile one to the loss of his arm when the sturgeon has cut it off
in the most masterly manner?"
"No," said Hester, "but perhaps a knowledge of the material law might
have prevented the necessity of cutting off the arm at all. Much of
disease is caused by ignorance. To banish pain needs a wide
acquaintance with the whole range of laws which govern our being. To
know and practise one law and neglect another would but result in
pain."
"You will require a life of scientific research. I see; and after all,
as we all begin with ignorance and helplessness, we must suffer some
pain during our apprenticeship. For instance, you cannot teach an
infant to cut its teeth painlessly."
"But because we cannot do everything, shall we do nothing?"
"That were a sweeping conclusion; it is not necessary to go so far as
that. But might it not be wise to examine the principle of actions
when we attempt to regulate for others on a new system? Your exterior
arrangements our splendid; your laws rigidly moral; but will you
ensure their being kept? What motive do you propose?"
"I have expelled those who, after suitable remonstrance, would not
conform," said Hester.
"A very effective proceeding, my kind hostess, but it is just possible
that eventually such a practice might create a desert. The motive
power of perseverance comes from within. The desire must be in the
heart, the understanding must approve, the will must accept, the deed
must co-operate, and until you have secured this motive power, your
arrangements rest on an insecure basis. You cannot force men to choose
good; you cannot make them studious by providing a library, or moral
by denouncing the penalties of immorality. You must subdue passions,
excite tastes. Can mere knowledge of physics do this?"
"There is other knowledge besides mere physics--classical knowledge."
"And will classical knowledge do it? Will reading Virgil and Horace
tend to evolve moral power?"
"Why not? Knowledge is power!"
"Then why are so many of the educated sickly, unhappy and immoral?"
"Because they do not act upon their knowledge; they are idle and
dissipated and worthless. The frivolities of the young men 'de bon
ton' were always disgusting to me. But then they are not really
educated; they may have been to school, but they have learned nothing
useful, nothing of the material world."
{603}
"But" said M. de Villeneuve, "how does the knowledge of the material
world affect man's existence as a moral agent? The laws which regulate
materiality leave and impress of invariability upon them--a want of
power to change themselves, at any rate. They are obedient to a will
to which they appear insentient. This is true not only of inert,
stolid matter, not only of vegetable life, but of animals, even of
those wondrous developments of instinct which approach so near to
reason that they are scarcely distinguishable from it. The highest
mere animals are creatures of circumstance--circumstance ruled,
indeed, by appetite and instinct, but not by recognition of a higher
law, not by any consciousness of affinity to a higher state of
existence. Therefore, you can tame them by an appeal to their
appetites; you can rule them by providing for their animal natures;
you can subdue them if you bring to bear on them a force stronger than
their own. But, surely, we may assume that man is more than a mere
animal. He has inborn affinities to higher natures which force cannot
subdue, and which rise superior to animal temptations. These
affinities may be starved out, it is true, by not providing them with
their own fitting nutriment, which is not the food of the body. They
may be crushed or restrained in their development by overloading the
soul with extraneous objects; but in proportion as these powers are
starved out or crushed out, the man sinks, the animal rises. And the
_animal_ man is, I assure you, a very ferocious kind of beast, and
nonetheless so for having intelligence developed; rather is he
dangerous in proportion."
"You would not, then, developed intelligence?"
"On the contrary, I think it the highest and holiest task in which a
human being can be employed. I rejoice in all the plans that tend to
raise the race; I applaud your benevolence in forming these
establishments, although I feel that you are preparing for yourself a
disappointment."
"But why?"
"Because you have begun on the wrong principle. It is good that you
have begun at all to see the principle acknowledged that man is man,
and not a mere machine to win riches for the few; that principle
emanated from selfishness in the beginning, but selfishness will not
root out selfishness. I admire your idea principally because it proves
your own zeal, your own earnestness, your own capability of
sacrificing yourself for others; even the disappointment impending
will be fraught with good if it do not discourage you from seeking the
true principle, which I hope it will not do. Faith in man is easily
overset, because man can fall of himself, but of himself he cannot
rise."
"You believe, then, as I do, that a new era is dawning on mankind, and
that the laborer must be protected and enlightened?" said Hester.
"I do!" said M. de Villeneuve.
"Yet you do not believe that my schools and arrangements will make him
happier?"
"Will you forgive me if I say I do not?"
"You are an enigma; I cannot make you out," said Hester.
"How did man fall into the degraded state in which the masses are?"
said M. de Villeneuve. "We have proof of intelligence enough in the
founders of Babylon, of Nineveh, of Thebes, and of Egypt."
"Some men must have known something, I think," said Hester, "but they
seem to have kept their knowledge very carefully to themselves, and
made slaves of those to whom they did not impart it. Knowledge was
very much an affair of class or rank. The populace was brutish, if
accounts are true, and kept in order by sheer force."
"And when that force pressed too hardly, they fled and became the
founders of the savage life. Such is the probable course. And what
power, think you, elevated the mass, even to the extent in which we
see them now? for, debased as they may be, they are {604} far above
the races that did the same work in ancient times; nay, the laborers
of Europe are far above the slaves of Asia. What has caused the
difference?"
"The march of intellect," said Hester proudly.
"Supposing that granted for the sake of the argument, what caused 'the
march of intellect?' what gave the impetus to raise the 'toiler for
bread' in the scale of humanity?"
Hester could not answer. The comte continued:
"I believe it to be that very influence which 'the age' is seeking so
earnestly to destroy. Man's selfishness oppressed his fellows,
overpowered his faculties, laid them to sleep so effectually that the
rich and great were acknowledged by the crowd to be of another order,
of another scale of being, to be judged of by another standard, to be
weighed by another measure. The gospel came: to the poor it was
preached _par excellence_; it was a call of the Father to his
downtrodden children, an appeal to their hearts, their affections, a
loving invitation to them to come, as children of the most High God,
to claim their inheritance of lofty faculty, of high intuitions, of
exalted aspiration. The understanding enlightened through the heart
changed by slow degree's the face of nations; the slave disappeared
from the christianized lands, the leaven worked from the interior to
the exterior, life became protected, the rich and the poor, equal
before God, became equal before the law also; civilization of heart
produced civilization of manners among the masses. The greater
involved the lesser. Men's intellects were awakened, roused to action,
and then followed the old story over again; they forget how they had
obtained these gifts, and from whom, and they are applying them to
selfish purposes, to animal gratification. But liberty is the gift of
the gospel, liberty emanating from emancipation of the understanding
by means of the soul. If we would preserve the gift, we must observe
the conditions."
"Do you really think 'liberty' a good?" asked Hester.
"True liberty is one of the greatest of blessings," said the comte;
"but you will find it difficult to give 'true liberty' on earthly
grounds alone, it would so easily degenerate into license. Now the
repression of license by force is a restraint to which men unwillingly
submit, and easily engenders tyranny, so that, unless license is
restrained by the spiritual sense, liberty is in continual jeopardy;
it is difficult to believe it can be lasting."
"And you think the spiritual sense necessary to liberty?"
"I do; how else can lawlessness be restrained without force?"
"Surely intellectual enlightenment ought to suffice. Common-sense even
tells us that some restraint is necessary, that the moral law must be
observed."
"It may tell us so, but does it give the power to execute its
bidding?"
"It should do so."
"It should, and would, if man's being were in harmony. All laws,
physical, mental, and spiritual teach in different forms the same
truth; the material is a manifestation of the spiritual, of which the
intellect demonstrates the beauty and the necessity; but power to
develop the spiritual facility does not reside either in the intellect
or in matter, it belongs to a higher source, and without the will is
powerless. Therefore is it, I prophesy disappointment for you; for I
see no provision made to destroy selfishness, and promote a higher
life."
"There is none needed," interposed Mr. Godfrey somewhat abruptly; "we
teach what we know. As for mysticism and matters we guess at but do
not know, we leave the people free. If they need religion let them
choose one, or make one for themselves."
The asperity with which this was said closed the conversation for that
time.
{605}
Hester continued her plans, though less firm than before in the
conviction that the spread of intelligence would annihilate evil. She
watched the results with an anxiety intent on discovering the exact
truth. She tried more and more to enforce morality. She studied the
influences by which children are won to good behavior. She thought
love was the governing principle of the little folks, and that her
indulgence would excite love. Rewards were profusely given, and a
system of excitement acted upon. This produced certain effects in
calling forth intelligence, but the children became selfish and fond
of ease and dissipation in a manner she had not looked for.
With her young people she had scarcely better success. There was no
religious restraint, and their morals soon betokened that some
restraint was called for. Then, again, Mr. Godfrey's opinions were
pretty well known, and itinerant lecturers held forth on the
unreasonableness of the marriage tie, on the necessity of easy
divorce, and other topics of like nature that placed Hester in great
perplexity. It was not a subject in which she as a woman could
properly interfere, and her father shrugged his shoulders, and passed
them by with the remark, "These are not matters that can be interfered
with, they are altogether conventional."
What could Hester do? She was in great perplexity.