FLORRIE (after peeping in, disappointed). There's only a great
ugly brown stone!
L. Not much more than that, certainly, Florrie, if people were
wise. But look, it is not a single stone; but a knot of pebbles
fastened together by gravel: and in the gravel, or compressed
sand, if you look close, you will see grains of gold glittering
everywhere, all through; and then, do you see these two white
beads, which shine, as if they had been covered with grease?
FLORRIE. May I touch them?
L. Yes; you will find they are not greasy, only very smooth. Well,
those are the fatal jewels; native here in their dust with gold,
so that you may see, cradled here together, the two great enemies
of mankind,--the strongest of all malignant physical powers that
have tormented our race.
SIBYL. Is that really so? I know they do great harm; but do they
not also do great good?
L. My dear child, what good? Was any woman, do you suppose, ever
the better for possessing diamonds? but how many have been made
base, frivolous, and miserable by desiring them? Was ever man the
better for having coffers full of gold? But who shall measure the
guilt that is incurred to fill them? Look into the history of any
civilized nations; analyze, with reference to this one cause of
crime and misery, the lives and thoughts of their nobles, priests,
merchants, and men of luxurious life. Every other temptation is at
last concentrated into this: pride, and lust, and envy, and anger
all give up their strength to avarice. The sin of the whole world
is essentially the sin of Judas. Men do not disbelieve their
Christ; but they sell Him.
SIBYL. But surely that is the fault of human nature? it is not
caused by the accident, as it were, of there being a pretty metal,
like gold, to be found by digging. If people could not find that,
would they not find something else, and quarrel for it instead?
L. No. Wherever legislators have succeeded in excluding, for a
time, jewels and precious metals from among national possessions,
the national spirit has remained healthy. Covetousness is not
natural to man--generosity is; but covetousness must be excited by
a special cause, as a given disease by a given miasma; and the
essential nature of a material for the excitement of covetousness
is, that it shall be a beautiful thing which can be retained
without a use. The moment we can use our possessions to any good
purpose ourselves, the instinct of communicating that use to
others rises side by side with our power. If you can read a book
rightly, you will want others to hear it; if you can enjoy a
picture rightly, you will want others to see it: learn how to
manage a horse, a plough, or a ship, and you will desire to make
your subordinates good horsemen, ploughmen, or sailors; you will
never be able to see the fine instrument you are master of,
abused; but, once fix your desire on anything useless, and all the
purest pride and folly in your heart will mix with the desire, and
make you at last wholly inhuman, a mere ugly lump of stomach and
suckers, like a cuttle-fish.
SIBYL. But surely, these two beautiful things, gold and diamonds,
must have been appointed to some good purpose?
L. Quite conceivably so, my dear: as also earthquakes and
pestilences; but of such ultimate purposes we can have no sight.
The practical, immediate office of the earthquake and pestilence
is to slay us, like moths; and, as moths, we shall be wise to live
out of their way. So, the practical, immediate office of gold and
diamonds is the multiplied destruction of souls (in whatever sense
you have been taught to understand that phrase); and the paralysis
of wholesome human effort and thought on the face of God's earth:
and a wise nation will live out of the way of them. The money
which the English habitually spend in cutting diamonds would, in
ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks instead, leave no
dangerous reef nor difficult harbor round the whole island coast.
Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a true
piece of regalia. (Leaves this to their thoughts for a little
while.) Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes have the
chance of seeing a fine crystal of diamond unhacked by the
jeweler.
SIBYL. Would it be more beautiful uncut?
L. No; but of infinite interest. We might even come to know
something about the making of diamonds.
SIBYL. I thought the chemists could make them already?
L. In very small black crystals, yes; but no one knows how they
are formed where they are found; or if indeed they are formed
there at all. These, in my hand, look as if they had been swept
down with the gravel and gold; only we can trace the gravel and
gold to their native rocks, but not the diamonds. Read the account
given of the diamond in any good work on mineralogy;--you will
find nothing but lists of localities of gravel, or conglomerate
rock (which is only an old indurated gravel). Some say it was once
a vegetable gum; but it may have been charred wood; but what one
would like to know is, mainly, why charcoal should make itself
into diamonds in India, and only into black lead in Borrowdale.
SIBYL. Are they wholly the same, then?
L. There is a little iron mixed with our black lead; but nothing
to hinder its crystallization. Your pencils in fact are all
pointed with formless diamond, though they would be H H H pencils
to purpose, if it crystallized.
SIBYL. But what IS crystallization?
L. A pleasant question, when one's half asleep, and it has been
tea-time these two hours. What thoughtless things girls are!
SYBIL. Yes, we are; but we want to know, for all that.