III. A _prudential_ one, which shall not let people dig in wrong
places for coal, nor make railroads where they are not wanted; and
which shall also, with true providence, insist on their digging in
right places for coal, in a safe manner, and making railroads where
they _are_ wanted.
IV. A _martial_ one, which will punish knaves and make idle persons
work.
V. An _instructive_ one, which shall tell everybody what it is their
duty to know, and be ready pleasantly to answer questions if anybody
asks them.
VI. A _deliberate_ and _decisive_ one, which shall judge by law, and
amend or make law;
VII. An _exemplary_ one, which shall show what is loveliest in the art
of life.
You may divide or name those several offices as you will, or they may
be divided in practice as expediency may recommend; the plan I have
stated merely puts them all into the simplest forms and relations.
160. You see I have just defined the martial power as that "which
punishes knaves and makes idle persons work." For that is indeed the
ultimate and perennial soldiership; that is the essential warrior's
office to the end of time. "There is no discharge in that war." To the
compelling of sloth, and the scourging of sin, the strong hand will
have to address itself as long as this wretched little dusty and
volcanic world breeds nettles, and spits fire. The soldier's office at
present is indeed supposed to be the defense of his country against
other countries; but that is an office which--Utopian as you may think
the saying--will soon now be extinct. I say so fearlessly, though I
say it with wide war threatened, at this moment, in the East and West.
For observe what the standing of nations on their defense really
means. It means that, but for such armed attitude, each of them would
go and rob the other; that is to say, that the majority of active
persons in every nation are at present--thieves. I am very sorry that
this should still be so; but it will not be so long. National
exhibitions, indeed, will not bring peace; but national education
will, and that is soon coming. I can judge of this by my own mind, for
I am myself naturally as covetous a person as lives in this world, and
am as eagerly-minded to go and steal some things the French have got,
as any housebreaker could be, having clue to attractive spoons. If I
could by military incursion carry off Paul Veronese's "Marriage in
Cana," and the "Venus Victrix," and the "Hours of St. Louis," it
would give me the profoundest satisfaction to accomplish the foray
successfully; nevertheless, being a comparatively educated person, I
should most assuredly not give myself that satisfaction, though there
were not an ounce of gunpowder, nor a bayonet, in all France. I have
not the least mind to rob anybody, however much I may covet what they
have got; and I know that the French and British public may and will,
with many other publics, be at last brought to be of this mind also;
and to see farther that a nation's real strength and happiness do not
depend on properties and territories, nor on machinery for their
defense; but on their getting such territory as they _have_, well
filled with none but respectable persons. Which is a way of
_infinitely_ enlarging one's territory, feasible to every potentate;
and dependent no wise on getting Trent turned, or Rhine-edge reached.
161. Not but that, in the present state of things, it may often be
soldiers' duty to seize territory, and hold it strongly; but only from
banditti, or savage and idle persons.
Thus, both Calabria and Greece ought to have been irresistibly
occupied long ago. Instead of quarreling with Austria about Venice,
the Italians ought to have made a truce with her for ten years, on
condition only of her destroying no monuments, and not taxing Italians
more than Germans; and then thrown the whole force of their army on
Calabria, shot down every bandit in it in a week, and forced the
peasantry of it into honest work on every hill-side, with stout and
immediate help from the soldiers in embanking streams, building walls,
and the like; and Italian finance would have been a much pleasanter
matter for the King to take account of by this time; and a fleet might
have been floating under Garganus strong enough to sweep every hostile
sail out of the Adriatic, instead of a disgraced and useless remnant
of one, about to be put up to auction.
And similarly, _we_ ought to have occupied Greece instantly, when they
asked us, whether Russia liked it or not; given them an English king,
made good roads for them, and stout laws; and kept them, and their
hills and seas, with righteous shepherding of Arcadian fields, and
righteous ruling of Salaminian wave, until they could have given
themselves a Greek king of men again; and obeyed him, like men.
_April 24._
162. It is strange that just before I finish work for this time, there
comes the first real and notable sign of the victory of the principles
I have been fighting for, these seven years. It is only a newspaper
paragraph, but it means much. Look at the second column of the 11th
page of yesterday's 'Pall Mall Gazette,' The paper has taken a
wonderful fit of misprinting lately (unless my friend John Simon has
been knighted on his way to Weimar, which would be much too right and
good a thing to be a likely one); but its straws of talk mark which
way the wind blows perhaps more early than those of any other
journal--and look at the question it puts in that page, "Whether
political economy be the sordid and materialistic science some
account it, or almost the noblest on which thought can be employed?"
Might not you as well have determined that question a little while
ago, friend Public? and known what political economy _was_, before you
talked so much about it?
But, hark, again--"Ostentation, parental pride and a host of moral"
(immoral?) "qualities must be recognized as among the springs of
industry; political economy should not ignore these, but, to discuss
them, _it must abandon its pretensions to the precision of a pure
science_."
163. Well done the 'Pall Mall'! Had it written "Prudence and parental
affection," instead of "Ostentation and parental pride," "must be
recognized among the springs of industry," it would have been still
better; and it would then have achieved the expression of a part of
the truth, which I put into clear terms in the first sentence of 'Unto
this Last,' in the year 1862--which it has thus taken five years to
get half way into the public's head.
"Among the delusions which at different periods have possessed
themselves of the minds of large masses of the human race, perhaps the
most curious--certainly the least creditable--is the modern
_soi-disant_ science of political economy, based on the idea that an
advantageous code of social action may be determined, irrespectively
of the influence of social affection."
Look also at the definition of skill, p. 87.
"Under the term 'skill' I mean to include the united force of
experience, intellect, and passion, in their operation on manual
labor, and under the term 'passion' to include the entire range of the
moral feelings."
164. I say half way into the public's head, because you see, a few
lines further on, the 'Pall Mall' hopes for a pause "half way between
the rigidity of Ricardo and the sentimentality of Ruskin."
With one hand on their pocket, and the other on their heart! Be it so
for the present; we shall see how long this statuesque attitude can be
maintained; meantime, it chances strangely--as several other things
have chanced while I was writing these notes to you--that they should
have put in that sneer (two lines before) at my note on the meaning of
the Homeric and Platonic Sirens, at the very moment when I was
doubting whether I would or would not tell you the significance of the
last song of Ariel in 'The Tempest.'
I had half determined not, but now I shall. And this was what brought
me to think of it:--
165. Yesterday afternoon I called on Mr. H. C. Sorby, to see some of
the results of an inquiry he has been following all last year, into
the nature of the coloring matter of leaves and flowers.
You most probably have heard (at all events, may with little trouble
hear) of the marvelous power which chemical analysis has received in
recent discoveries respecting the laws of light.
My friend showed me the rainbow of the rose, and the rainbow of the
violet, and the rainbow of the hyacinth, and the rainbow of forest
leaves being born, and the rainbow of forest leaves dying.
And, last, he showed me the rainbow of blood. It was but the
three-hundredth part of a grain, dissolved in a drop of water; and it
cast its measured bars, for ever recognizable now to human sight, on
the chord of the seven colors. And no drop of that red rain can now be
shed, so small as that the stain of it cannot be known, and the voice
of it heard out of the ground.
166. But the seeing these flower colors, and the iris of blood
together with them, just while I was trying to gather into brief space
the right laws of war, brought vividly back to me my dreaming fancy of
long ago, that even the trees of the earth were "capable of a kind of
sorrow, as they opened their innocent leaves in vain for men; and
along the dells of England her beeches cast their dappled shades only
where the outlaw drew his bow, and the king rode his careless chase;
amidst the fair defiles of the Apennines, the twisted olive-trunks hid
the ambushes of treachery, and on their meadows, day by day, the
lilies, which were white at the dawn, were washed with crimson at
sunset."
And so also now this chance word of the daily journal, about the
Sirens, brought to my mind the divine passage in the Cratylus of
Plato, about the place of the dead.
"And none of those who dwell there desire to depart thence,--no, not
even the Sirens; but even they, the seducers, are there themselves
beguiled, and they who lulled all men, themselves laid to rest--they,
and all others--such sweet songs doth death know how to sing to them."
So also the Hebrew.
"And desire shall fail, because man goeth to his long home." For you
know I told you the Sirens were not pleasures, but desires; being
always represented in old Greek art as having human faces, with birds'
wings and feet; and sometimes with eyes upon their wings; and there
are not two more important passages in all literature, respecting the
laws of labor and of life, than those two great descriptions of the
Sirens in Homer and Plato,--the Sirens of death, and Sirens of eternal
life, representing severally the earthly and heavenly desires of men;
the heavenly desires singing to the motion of circles of the spheres,
and the earthly on the rocks of fatalest shipwreck. A fact which may
indeed be regarded "sentimentally," but it is also a profoundly
important politico-economical one.
And now for Shakespeare's song.
167. You will find, if you look back to the analysis of it, given in
'Munera Pulveris,' Sec. 134, that the whole play of 'The Tempest' is an
allegorical representation of the powers of true, and therefore
spiritual, Liberty, as opposed to true, and therefore carnal and
brutal Slavery. There is not a sentence nor a rhyme, sung or uttered
by Ariel or Caliban, throughout the play, which has not this
under-meaning.
168. Now the fulfilment of all human liberty is in the peaceful
inheritance of the earth, with its "herb yielding seed, and fruit tree
yielding fruit" after his kind; the pasture, or arable, land, and the
blossoming, or wooded and fruited, land uniting the final elements of
life and peace, for body and soul. Therefore, we have the two great
Hebrew forms of benediction, "His eyes shall be red with wine, and his
teeth white with milk," and again, "Butter and honey shall he eat,
that he may know to refuse the evil and choose the good." And as the
work of war and sin has always been the devastation of this blossoming
earth, whether by spoil or idleness, so the work of peace and virtue
is also that of the first day of Paradise, to "Dress it and to keep
it." And that will always be the song of perfectly accomplished
Liberty, in her industry, and rest, and shelter from troubled thoughts
in the calm of the fields, and gaining, by migration, the long
summer's day from the shortening twilight:--
"Where the bee sucks, there lurk I;
In a cowslip's bell I lie;
There I couch when owls do cry.
On the bat's back I do fly
After summer merrily:
Merrily, merrily, shall I live now
Under the blossom that hangs on the bough."
And the security of this treasure to all the poor, and not the ravage
of it down the valleys of the Shenandoah, is indeed the true warrior's
work. But, that they may be able to restrain vice rightly, soldiers
must themselves be first in virtue; and that they may be able to
compel labor sternly, they must themselves be first in toil, and their
spears, like Jonathan's at Bethaven, enlighteners of the eyes.