"But, swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw."
This is to meet the vulgar answer that "if the poor are not looked
after in their bodies, they are in their souls; they have spiritual
food."
And Milton says, "They have no such thing as spiritual food; they are
only swollen with wind." At first you may think that is a coarse type,
and an obscure one. But again, it is a quite literally accurate one.
Take up your Latin and Greek dictionaries, and find out the meaning of
"Spirit." It is only a contraction of the Latin word "breath," and an
indistinct translation of the Greek word for "wind." The same word is
used in writing, "The wind bloweth where it listeth"; and in writing,
"So is every one that is born of the Spirit"; born of the _breath_,
that is; for it means the breath of God, in soul and body. We have the
true sense of it in our words "inspiration" and "expire." Now, there
are two kinds of breath with which the flock may be filled; God's
breath, and man's. The breath of God is health, and life, and peace to
them, as the air of heaven is to the flocks on the hills; but man's
breath--the word which _he_ calls spiritual,--is disease and contagion
to them, as the fog of the fen. They rot inwardly with it; they are
puffed up by it, as a dead body by the vapors of its own decomposition.
This is literally true of all false religious teaching; the first and
last, and fatalest sign of it is that "puffing up." Your converted
children, who teach their parents; your converted convicts, who teach
honest men; your converted dunces, who, having lived in cretinous
stupefaction half their lives, suddenly awakening to the fact of there
being a God, fancy themselves therefore His peculiar people and
messengers; your sectarians of every species, small and great, Catholic
or Protestant, of high church or low, in so far as they think
themselves exclusively in the right and others wrong; and preëminently,
in every sect, those who hold that men can be saved by thinking rightly
instead of doing rightly, by word instead of act, and wish instead of
work:--these are the true fog children--clouds, these, without water;
bodies, these, of putrescent vapor and skin, without blood or flesh:
blown bag-pipes for the fiends to pipe with--corrupt, and
corrupting,--"Swollen with wind, and the rank mist they draw."
24. Lastly, let us return to the lines respecting the power of the
keys, for now we can understand them. Note the difference between
Milton and Dante in their interpretation of this power: for once, the
latter is weaker in thought; he supposes _both_ the keys to be of the
gate of heaven; one is of gold, the other of silver: they are given by
St. Peter to the sentinel angel; and it is not easy to determine the
meaning either of the substances of the three steps of the gate, or of
the two keys. But Milton makes one, of gold, the key of heaven; the
other, of iron, the key of the prison in which the wicked teachers are
to be bound who "have taken away the key of knowledge, yet entered not
in themselves."
We have seen that the duties of bishop and pastor are to see and feed;
and, of all who do so it is said, "He that watereth, shall be watered
also himself." But the reverse is truth also. He that watereth not,
shall be _withered_ himself, and he that seeth not, shall himself be
shut out of sight,--shut into the perpetual prison-house. And that
prison opens here, as well as hereafter: he who is to be bound in
heaven must first be bound on earth. That command to the strong
angels, of which the rock-apostle is the image, "Take him, and bind him
hand and foot, and cast him out," issues, in its measure, against the
teacher, for every help withheld, and for every truth refused, and for
every falsehood enforced; so that he is more strictly fettered the more
he fetters, and farther outcast, as he more and more misleads, till at
last the bars of the iron cage close upon him, and as "the golden opes,
the iron shuts amain."
25. We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much more is
yet to be found in them; but we have done enough by way of example of
the kind of word-by-word examination of your author which is rightly
called "reading"; watching every accent and expression, and putting
ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our own
personality, and seeking to enter into his, so as to be able assuredly
to say, "Thus Milton thought," not "Thus _I_ thought, in mis-reading
Milton." And by this process you will gradually come to attach less
weight to your own "Thus I thought" at other times. You will begin to
perceive that what you thought was a matter of no serious
importance;--that your thoughts on any subject are not perhaps the
clearest and wisest that could be arrived at thereupon:--in fact, that
unless you are a very singular person, you cannot be said to have any
"thoughts" at all; that you have no materials for them, in any serious
matters;[5]--no right to "think," but only to try to learn more of the
facts. Nay, most probably all your life (unless, as I said, you are a
singular person) you will have no legitimate right to an "opinion" on
any business, except that instantly under your hand. What must of
necessity be done, you can always find out, beyond question, how to do.
Have you a house to keep in order, a commodity to sell, a field to
plough, a ditch to cleanse. There need be no two opinions about these
proceedings; it is at your peril if you have not much more than an
"opinion" on the way to manage such matters. And also, outside of your
own business, there are one or two subjects on which you are bound to
have but one opinion. That roguery and lying are objectionable, and
are instantly to be flogged out of the way whenever discovered;--that
covetousness and love of quarreling are dangerous dispositions even in
children, and deadly dispositions in men and nations;--that in the end,
the God of heaven and earth loves active, modest, and kind people, and
hates idle, proud, greedy, and cruel ones;--on these general facts you
are bound to have but one and that a very strong, opinion. For the
rest, respecting religions, governments, sciences, arts, you will find
that, on the whole, you can know NOTHING,--judge nothing; that the best
you can do, even though you may be a well-educated person, is to be
silent, and strive to be wiser every day, and to understand a little
more of the thoughts of others, which so soon as you try to do
honestly, you will discover that the thoughts even of the wisest are
very little more than pertinent questions. To put the difficulty into
a clear shape, and exhibit to you the grounds for _in_decision, that is
all they can generally do for you!--and well for them and for us, if
indeed they are able "to mix the music with our thoughts, and sadden us
with heavenly doubts." This writer, from whom I have been reading to
you, is not among the first or wisest: he sees shrewdly as far as he
sees, and therefore it is easy to find out his full meaning; but with
the greater men, you cannot fathom their meaning; they do not even
wholly measure it themselves,--it is so wide. Suppose I had asked you,
for instance, to seek for Shakespeare's opinion, instead of Milton's,
on this matter of Church authority?--or for Dante's? Have any of you,
at this instant, the least idea what either thought about it? Have you
ever balanced the scene with the bishops in Richard III. against the
character of Cranmer? the description of St. Francis and St. Dominic
against that of him who made Virgil wonder to gaze upon him,--"disteso,
tanto vilmente, nell' eterno esilio"; or of him whom Dante stood
beside, "come 'l frate che confessa lo perfido assassin?" [6]
Shakespeare and Alighieri knew men better than most of us, I presume!
They were both in the midst of the main struggle between the temporal
and spiritual powers. They had an opinion, we may guess. But where is
it? Bring it into court! Put Shakespeare's or Dante's creed into
articles, and send it up for trial by the Ecclesiastical Courts!
26. You will not be able, I tell you again, for many and many a day,
to come at the real purposes and teaching of these great men; but a
very little honest study of them will enable you to perceive that what
you took for your own "judgment" was mere chance prejudice, and
drifted, helpless, entangled weed of castaway thought: nay, you will
see that most men's minds are indeed little better than rough heath
wilderness, neglected and stubborn, partly barren, partly overgrown
with pestilent brakes, and venomous, wind-sown herbage of evil surmise;
that the first thing you have to do for them, and yourself, is eagerly
and scornfully to set fire to _this_; burn all the jungle into
wholesome ash heaps, and then plough and sow. All the true literary
work before you, for life, must begin with obedience to that order,
"Break up your fallow ground, and _sow not among thorns_."
27. II.[7]--Having then faithfully listened to the great teachers,
that you may enter into their Thoughts, you have yet this higher
advance to make;--you have to enter into their Hearts. As you go to
them first for clear sight, so you must stay with them, that you may
share at last their just and mighty Passion. Passion, or "sensation."
I am not afraid of the word; still less of the thing. You have heard
many outcries against sensation lately; but, I can tell you, it is not
less sensation we want, but more. The ennobling difference between one
man and another,--between one animal and another,--is precisely in
this, that one feels more than another. If we were sponges, perhaps
sensation might not be easily got for us; if we were earth-worms,
liable at every instant to be cut in two by the spade, perhaps too much
sensation might not be good for us. But, being human creatures, _it
is_ good for us; nay, we are only human in so far as we are sensitive,
and our honor is precisely in proportion to our passion.
28. You know I said of that great and pure society of the dead, that
it would allow "no vain or vulgar person to enter there." What do you
think I meant by a "vulgar" person? What do you yourselves mean by
"vulgarity"? You will find it a fruitful subject of thought; but,
briefly, the essence of all vulgarity lies in want of sensation.
Simple and innocent vulgarity is merely an untrained and undeveloped
bluntness of body and mind; but in true inbred vulgarity, there is a
deathful callousness, which, in extremity, becomes capable of every
sort of bestial habit and crime, without fear, without pleasure,
without horror, and without pity. It is in the blunt hand and the dead
heart, in the diseased habit, in the hardened conscience, that men
become vulgar; they are forever vulgar, precisely in proportion as they
are incapable of sympathy,--of quick understanding,--of all that, in
deep insistence on the common, but most accurate term, may be called
the "tact" or "touch-faculty" of body and soul; that tact which the
Mimosa has in trees, which the pure woman has above all
creatures;--fineness and fullness of sensation beyond reason;--the
guide and sanctifier of reason itself. Reason can but determine what
is true:--it is the God-given passion of humanity which alone can
recognize what God has made good.
29. We come then to the great concourse of the Dead, not merely to
know from them what is True, but chiefly to feel with them what is
just. Now, to feel with them, we must be like them: and none of us can
become that without pains. As the true knowledge is disciplined and
tested knowledge,--not the first thought that comes,--so the true
passion is disciplined and tested passion,--not the first passion that
comes. The first that come are the vain, the false, the treacherous;
if you yield to them they will lead you wildly and far in vain pursuit,
in hollow enthusiasm, till you have no true purpose and no true passion
left. Not that any feeling possible to humanity is in itself wrong,
but only wrong when undisciplined. Its nobility is in its force and
justice; it is wrong when it is weak, and felt for paltry cause. There
is a mean wonder, as of a child who sees a juggler tossing golden
balls, and this is base, if you will. But do you think that the wonder
is ignoble, or the sensation less, with which every human soul is
called to watch the golden balls of heaven tossed through the night by
the Hand that made them? There is a mean curiosity, as of a child
opening a forbidden door, or a servant prying into her master's
business;--and a noble curiosity, questioning, in the front of danger,
the source of the great river beyond the sand,--the place of the great
continents beyond the sea;--a nobler curiosity still, which questions
of the source of the River of Life, and of the space of the Continent
of Heaven,--things which "the angels desire to look into." So the
anxiety is ignoble, with which you linger over the course and
catastrophe of an idle tale; but do you think the anxiety is less, or
greater, with which you watch, or _ought_ to watch, the dealings of
fate and destiny with the life of an agonized nation? Alas! it is the
narrowness, selfishness, minuteness, of your sensation that you have to
deplore in England at this day;--sensation which spends itself in
bouquets and speeches; in revelings and junketings; in sham fights and
gay puppet shows, while you can look on and see noble nations murdered,
man by man, without an effort or a tear.
30. I said "minuteness" and "selfishness" of sensation, but in a word,
I ought to have said "injustice" or "unrighteousness" of sensation.
For as in nothing is a gentleman better to be discerned from a vulgar
person, so in nothing is a gentle nation (such nations have been)
better to be discerned from a mob, than in this,--that their feelings
are constant and just, results of due contemplation, and of equal
thought. You can talk a mob into anything; its feelings may
be--usually are--on the whole, generous and right; but it has no
foundation for them, no hold of them; you may tease or tickle it into
any, at your pleasure; it thinks by infection, for the most part,
catching an opinion like a cold, and there is nothing so little that it
will not roar itself wild about, when the fit is on;--nothing so great
but it will forget in an hour, when the fit is past. But a gentleman's
or a gentle nation's, passions are just, measured and continuous. A
great nation, for instance, does not spend its entire national wits for
a couple of months in weighing evidence of a single ruffian's having
done a single murder; and for a couple of years see its own children
murder each other by their thousands or tens of thousands a day,
considering only what the effect is likely to be on the price of
cotton, and caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in the
wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor little boys to jail
for stealing six walnuts; and allow its bankrupts to steal their
hundreds or thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men's
savings, to close their doors "under circumstances over which they have
no control," with a "by your leave"; and large landed estates to be
bought by men who have made their money by going with armed steamers up
and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth, and
altering, for the benefit of the foreign nation, the common
highwayman's demand of "your money _or_ your life," into that of "your
money _and_ your life." Neither does a great nation allow the lives of
its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted
out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra
per week to its landlords;[8] and then debate, with driveling tears,
and diabolical sympathies, whether it ought not piously to save, and
nursingly cherish, the lives of its murderers. Also, a great nation
having made up its mind that hanging is quite the wholesomest process
for its homicides in general, can yet with mercy distinguish between
the degrees of guilt in homicides; and does not yelp like a pack of
frost-pinched wolf-cubs on the blood-track of an unhappy crazed boy, or
gray-haired clodpate Othello, "perplexed i' the extreme," at the very
moment that it is sending a Minister of the Crown to make polite
speeches to a man who is bayoneting young girls in their father's
sight, and killing noble youths in cool blood, faster than a country
butcher kills lambs in spring. And, lastly, a great nation does not
mock Heaven and its Powers, by pretending belief in a revelation whith
asserts the love of money to be the root of all evil, and declaring, at
the same time, that it is actuated, and intends to be actuated, in all
chief national deeds and measures, by no other love.
31. My friends, I do not know why any of us should talk about reading.
We want some sharper discipline than that of reading; but, at all
events, be assured, we cannot read. No reading is possible for a
people with its mind in this state. No sentence of any great writer is
intelligible to them. It is simply and sternly impossible for the
English public, at this moment, to understand any thoughtful
writing,--so incapable of thought has it become in its insanity of
avarice. Happily, our disease is, as yet, little worse than this
incapacity of thought; it is not corruption of the inner nature; we
ring true still, when anything strikes home to us; and though the idea
that everything should "pay" has infected our every purpose so deeply,
that even when we would play the good Samaritan, we never take out our
twopence and give them to the host without saying, "When I come again,
thou shalt give me fourpence," there is a capacity of noble passion
left in our hearts' core. We show it in our work,--in our war,--even
in those unjust domestic affections which make us furious at a small
private wrong, while we are polite to a boundless public one: we are
still industrious to the last hour of the day, though we add the
gambler's fury to the laborer's patience; we are still brave to the
death, though incapable of discerning true cause for battle; and are
still true in affection to our own flesh, to the death, as the
sea-monsters are, and the rock-eagles. And there is hope for a nation
while this can be still said of it. As long as it holds its life in
its hand, ready to give it for its honor (though a foolish honor), for
its love (though a selfish love), and for its business (though a base
business), there is hope for it. But hope only; for this instinctive,
reckless virtue cannot last. No nation can last, which has made a mob
of itself, however generous at heart. It must discipline its passions,
and direct them, or they will discipline _it_, one day, with scorpion
whips. Above all a nation cannot last as a money-making mob: it cannot
with impunity,--it cannot with existence,--go on despising literature,
despising science, despising art, despising nature, despising
compassion, and concentrating its soul on Pence. Do you think these
are harsh or wild words? Have patience with me but a little longer. I
will prove their truth to you, clause by clause.
32. I.--I say first we have despised literature. What do we, as a
nation, care about books? How much do you think we spend altogether on
our libraries, public or private, as compared with what we spend on our
horses? If a man spends lavishly on his library you call him mad--a
bibliomaniac. But you never call any one a horse-maniac, though men
ruin themselves every day by their horses, and you do not hear of
people ruining themselves by their books. Or, to go lower still, how
much do you think the contents of the book-shelves of the United
Kingdom, public and private, would fetch, as compared with the contents
of its wine-cellars? What position would its expenditure on literature
take, as compared with its expenditure on luxurious eating? We talk of
food for the mind, as of food for the body; now a good book contains
such food inexhaustibly; it is a provision for life, and for the best
part of us; yet how long most people would look at the best book before
they would give the price of a large turbot for it! though there have
been men who have pinched their stomachs and bared their backs, to buy
a book, whose libraries were cheaper to them, I think, in the end, than
most men's dinners are. We are few of us put to such trial, and more
the pity; for, indeed, a precious thing is all the more precious to us
if it has been won by work or economy; and if public libraries were
half as costly as public dinners, or books cost the tenth part of what
bracelets do, even foolish men and women might sometimes suspect there
was good in reading, as well as in munching and sparkling; whereas the
very cheapness of literature is making even wise people forget that if
a book is worth reading, it is worth buying. No book is worth anything
which is not worth _much_; nor is it serviceable, until it has been
read, and reread, and loved, and loved again; and marked, so that you
can refer to the passages you want in it as a soldier can seize the
weapon he needs in an armory, or a housewife bring the spice she needs
from her store. Bread of flour is good: but there is bread, sweet as
honey, if we would eat it, in a good book; and the family must be poor
indeed which, once in their lives, cannot, for such multipliable
barley-loaves, pay their baker's bill. We call ourselves a rich
nation, and we are filthy and foolish enough to thumb each other's
books out of circulating libraries!
33. II.--I say we have despised science. "What!" you exclaim, "are we
not foremost in all discovery,[9] and is not the whole world giddy by
reason, or unreason, of our inventions?" Yes; but do you suppose that
is national work? That work is all done _in spite of_ the nation; by
private people's zeal and money. We are glad enough, indeed, to make
our profit of science; we snap up anything in the way of a scientific
bone that has meat on it, eagerly enough; but if the scientific man
comes for a bone or a crust to us, that is another story. What have we
publicly done for science? We are obliged to know what o'clock it is,
for the safety of our ships, and therefore we pay for an observatory;
and we allow ourselves, in the person of our Parliament, to be annually
tormented into doing something, in a slovenly way, for the British
Museum; sullenly apprehending that to be a place for keeping stuffed
birds in, to amuse our children. If anybody will pay for his own
telescope, and resolve another nebula, we cackle over the discernment
as if it were our own; if one in ten thousand of our hunting squires
suddenly perceives that the earth was indeed made to be something else
than a portion for foxes, and burrows in it himself, and tells us where
the gold is, and where the coals, we understand that there is some use
in that; and very properly knight him; but is the accident of his
having found out how to employ himself usefully any credit to us? (The
negation of such discovery among his brother squires may perhaps be
some discredit to us, if we would consider of it.) But if you doubt
these generalities, here is one fact for us all to meditate upon,
illustrative of our love of science. Two years ago there was a
collection of the fossils of Solenhofen to be sold in Bavaria; the best
in existence, containing many specimens unique for perfectness, and
one, unique as an example of a species (a whole kingdom of unknown
living creatures being announced by that fossil). This collection, of
which the mere market worth, among private buyers, would probably have
been some thousand or twelve hundred pounds, was offered to the English
nation for seven hundred; but we would not give seven hundred, and the
whole series would have been in the Munich Museum at this moment, if
Professor Owen[10] had not with loss of his own time, and patient
tormenting of the British public in person of its representatives, got
leave to give four hundred pounds at once, and himself become
answerable for the other three! which the said public will doubtless
pay him eventually, but sulkily, and caring nothing about the matter
all the while; only always ready to cackle if any credit comes of it.
Consider, I beg of you, arithmetically, what this fact means. Your
annual expenditure for public purposes (a third of it for military
apparatus), is at least fifty millions. Now 700L. is to 50,000,000L.
roughly, as seven pence to two thousand pounds. Suppose then, a
gentleman of unknown income, but whose wealth was to be conjectured
from the fact that he spent two thousand a year on his park-walls and
footmen only, professes himself fond of science; and that one of his
servants comes eagerly to tell him that an unique collection of
fossils, giving clue to a new era of creation, is to be had for the sum
of seven pence sterling; and that the gentleman, who is fond of
science, and spends two thousand a year on his park, answers, after
keeping his servant waiting several months, "Well! I'll give you four
pence for them, if you will be answerable for the extra three pence
yourself, till next year!"
34. III.--I say you have despised Art! "What!" you again answer,
"have we not Art exhibitions, miles long? and do we not pay thousands
of pounds for single pictures? and have we not Art schools and
institutions, more than ever nation had before?" Yes, truly, but all
that is for the sake of the shop. You would fain sell canvas as well
as coals, and crockery as well as iron; you would take every other
nation's bread out of its mouth if you could;[11] not being able to do
that, your ideal of life is to stand in the thoroughfares of the world,
like Ludgate apprentices, screaming to every passer-by, "What d'ye
lack?" You know nothing of your own faculties or circumstances; you
fancy that, among your damp, flat fields of clay, you can have as quick
art-fancy as the Frenchman among his bronzed vines, or the Italian
under his volcanic cliffs;--that art may be learned as book-keeping is,
and when learned, will give you more books to keep. You care for
pictures, absolutely, no more than you do for the bills pasted on your
dead walls. There is always room on the walls for the bills to be
read,--never for the pictures to be seen. You do not know what
pictures you have (by repute) in the country, nor whether they are
false or true, nor whether they are taken care of or not; in foreign
countries, you calmly see the noblest existing pictures in the world
rotting in abandoned wreck--(in Venice you saw the Austrian guns
deliberately pointed at the palaces containing them), and if you heard
that all the fine pictures in Europe were made into sand-bags to-morrow
on the Austrian forts, it would not trouble you so much as the chance
of a brace or two of game less in your own bags, in a day's shooting.
That is your national love of Art.
35. IV.--You have despised Nature; that is to say, all the deep and
sacred sensations of natural scenery. The French revolutionists made
stables of the cathedrals of France; you have made race-courses of the
cathedrals of the earth. Your _one_ conception of pleasure is to drive
in railroad carriages round their aisles, and eat off their altars.[12]
You have put a railroad bridge over the fall of Schaffhausen. You have
tunneled the cliffs of Lucerne by Tell's chapel; you have destroyed the
Clarens shore of the Lake of Geneva; there is not a quiet valley in
England that you have not filled with bellowing fire; there is no
particle left of English land which you have not trampled coal ashes
into[13]--nor any foreign city in which the spread of your presence is
not marked among its fair old streets and happy gardens by a consuming
white leprosy of new hotels and perfumers' shops: the Alps themselves,
which your own poets used to love so reverently, you look upon as
soaped poles in a bear-garden, which you set yourselves to climb, and
slide down again with "shrieks of delight." When you are past
shrieking, having no human articulate voice to say you are glad with,
you fill the quietude of their valleys with gunpowder blasts, and rush
home, red with cutaneous eruption of conceit, and voluble with
convulsive hiccough of self-satisfaction. I think nearly the two
sorrowfullest spectacles I have ever seen in humanity, taking the deep
inner significance of them, are the English mobs in the valley of
Chamouni, amusing themselves with firing rusty howitzers; and the Swiss
vintagers of Zurich expressing their Christian thanks for the gift of
the vine, by assembling in knots in the "towers of the vineyards," and
slowly loading and firing horse-pistols from morning till evening. It
is pitiful to have dim conceptions of duty; more pitiful, it seems to
me, to have conceptions like these, of mirth.
36. Lastly. You despise compassion. There is no need of words of
mine for proof of this. I will merely print one of the newspaper
paragraphs which I am in the habit of cutting out and throwing into my
store-drawer; here is one from a _Daily Telegraph_ of an early date
this year (1867) (date which, though by me carelessly left unmarked, is
easily discoverable; for on the back of the slip, there is the
announcement that "yesterday the seventh of the special services of
this year was performed by the Bishop of Ripon in St. Paul's"); it
relates only one of such facts as happen now daily; this, by chance,
having taken a form in which it came before the coroner. I will print
the paragraph in red. Be sure, the facts themselves are written in
that color in a book which we shall all of us, literate or illiterate,
have to read our page of, some day.
"An inquiry was held on Friday by Mr. Richards, deputy coroner, at the
White Horse Tavern, Christ Church, Spitalfields, respecting the death
of Michael Collins, aged 58 years. Mary Collins, a miserable-looking
woman, said that she lived with the deceased and his son in a room at
2, Cobb's Court, Christ Church. Deceased was a 'translator' of boots.
Witness went out and bought old boots; deceased and his son made them
into good ones, and then witness sold them for what she could get at
the shops, which was very little indeed. Deceased and his son used to
work night and day to try and get a little bread and tea, and pay for
the room (2s. a week), so as to keep the home together. On Friday
night week, deceased got up from his bench and began to shiver. He
threw down the boots, saying, 'Somebody else must finish them when I am
gone, for I can do no more.' There was no fire, and he said, 'I would
be better if I was warm.' Witness therefore took two pairs of
translated boots[14] to sell at the shop, but she could only get 14d.
for the two pairs, for the people at the shop said, 'We must have our
profit.' Witness got 14 lbs. of coal and a little tea and bread. Her
son sat up the whole night to make the 'translations,' to get money,
but deceased died on Saturday morning. The family never had enough to
eat.--Coroner: 'It seems to me deplorable that you did not go into the
workhouse.' Witness: 'We wanted the comforts of our little home.' A
juror asked what the comforts were, for he only saw a little straw in
the corner of the room, the windows of which were broken. The witness
began to cry, and said that they had a quilt and other little things.
The deceased said he never would go into the workhouse. In summer,
when the season was good, they sometimes made as much as 10s. profit in
a week. They then always saved towards the next week, which was
generally a bad one. In winter they made not half so much. For three
years they had been getting from bad to worse.--Cornelius Collins said
that he had assisted his father since 1847. They used to work so far
into the night that both nearly lost their eyesight. Witness now had a
film over his eyes. Five years ago deceased applied to the parish for
aid. The relieving officer gave him a 4-lb. loaf, and told him if he
came again he should 'get the stones.'[15] That disgusted deceased,
and he would have nothing to do with them since. They got worse and
worse until last Friday week, when they had not even a halfpenny to buy
a candle. Deceased then lay down on the straw, and said he could not
live till morning.--A juror: 'You are dying of starvation yourself, and
you ought to go into the house until the summer.' Witness: 'If we went
in we should die. When we come out in the summer we should be like
people dropped from the sky. No one would know us, and we would not
have even a room. I could work now if I had food, for my sight would
get better.' Dr. G. P. Walker said deceased died from syncope, from
exhaustion, from want of food. The deceased had had no bed-clothes.
For four months he had had nothing but bread to eat. There was not a
particle of fat in the body. There was no disease, but if there had
been medical attendance, he might have survived the synope or fainting.
The coroner having remarked upon the painful nature of the case, the
jury returned the following verdict: 'That deceased died from
exhaustion, from want of food and the common necessaries of life; also
through want of medical aid.'"
37. "Why would witness not go into the workhouse?" you ask. Well, the
poor seem to have a prejudice against the workhouse which the rich have
not; for, of course, every one who takes a pension from Government goes
into the workhouse on a grand scale;[16] only the workhouses for the
rich do not involve the idea of work, and should be called play-houses.
But the poor like to die independently, it appears; perhaps if we made
the play-houses for them pretty and pleasant enough, or gave them their
pensions at home, and allowed them a little introductory peculation
with the public money, their minds might be reconciled to the
conditions. Meantime, here are the facts: we make our relief either so
insulting to them, or so painful, that they rather die than take it at
our hands; or, for third alternative, we leave them so untaught and
foolish that they starve like brute creatures, wild and dumb, not
knowing what to do, or what to ask. I say, you despise compassion; if
you did not, such a newspaper paragraph would be as impossible in a
Christian country as a deliberate assassination permitted in its public
streets.[17] "Christian" did I say? Alas, if we were but wholesomely
_un_-Christian, it would be impossible; it is our imaginary
Christianity that helps us to commit these crimes, for we revel and
luxuriate in our faith, for the lewd sensation of it; dressing it up,
like everything else, in fiction. The dramatic Christianity of the
organ and aisle, of dawn-service and twilight-revival--the Christianity
which we do not fear to mix the mockery of, pictorially, with our play
about the devil, in our Satanellas,--Roberts,--Fausts; chanting hymns
through traceried windows for back-ground effect, and artistically
modulating the "Dio" through variation on variation of mimicked prayer
(while we distribute tracts, next day, for the benefit of uncultivated
swearers, upon what we suppose to be the signification of the Third
Commandment);--this gas-lighted, and gas-inspired, Christianity, we are
triumphant in, and draw back the hem of our robes from the touch of the
heretics who dispute it. But to do a piece of common Christian
righteousness in a plain English word or deed; to make Christian law
any rule of life, and found one National act or hope thereon,--we know
too well what our faith comes to for that! You might sooner get
lightning out of incense smoke than true action or passion out of your
modern English religion. You had better get rid of the smoke, and the
organ-pipes, both; leave them, and the Gothic windows, and the painted
glass, to the property-man; give up your carburetted hydrogen ghost in
one healthy expiration, and look after Lazarus at the door-step. For
there is a true Church wherever one hand meets another helpfully, and
that is the only holy or Mother Church which ever was, or ever shall be.
38. All these pleasures, then, and all these virtues, I repeat, you
nationally despise. You have, indeed, men among you who do not; by
whose work, by whose strength, by whose life, by whose death, you live,
and never thank them. Your wealth, your amusement, your pride, would
all be alike impossible, but for those whom you scorn or forget. The
policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane all night to watch
the guilt you have created there, and may have his brains beaten out,
and be maimed for life, at any moment, and never be thanked; the sailor
wrestling with the sea's rage; the quiet student poring over his book
or his vial; the common worker, without praise, and nearly without
bread, fulfilling his task as your horses drag your carts, hopeless,
and spurned of all; these are the men by whom England lives; but they
are not the nation; they are only the body and nervous force of it,
acting still from old habit in a convulsive perseverance, while the
mind is gone. Our National wish and purpose are to be amused; our
National religion is the performance of church ceremonies, and
preaching of soporific truths (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at
work, while we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amusement is
fastening on us as a feverous disease of parched throat and wandering
eyes--senseless, dissolute, merciless. How literally that word
_Dis_-Ease; the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expresses the
entire moral state of our English Industry and its Amusements!
39. When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their
work, as the color-petals out of a fruitful flower;--when they are
faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady,
deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse of the
body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine
energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true
emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with,
not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly, as the
idolatrous Jews with their pictures on cavern walls, which men had to
dig to detect. The justice we do not execute, we mimic in the novel
and on the stage; for the beauty we destroy in nature, we substitute
the metamorphosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature of us
imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of some kind) for the noble grief
we should have borne with our fellows, and the pure tears we should
have wept with them, we gloat over the pathos of the police court, and
gather the night-dew of the grave.
40. It is difficult to estimate the true significance of these things;
the facts are frightful enough;--the measure of national fault involved
in them is, perhaps, not as great as it would at first seem. We
permit, or cause, thousands of deaths daily, but we mean no harm; we
set fire to houses, and ravage peasants' fields; yet we should be sorry
to find we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart; still
capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at the end of
his long life, having had much power with the public, being plagued in
some serious matter by a reference to "public opinion," uttered the
impatient exclamation, "The public is just a great baby!" And the
reason that I have allowed all these graver subjects of thought to mix
themselves up with an inquiry into methods of reading, is that, the
more I see of our national faults and miseries, the more they resolve
themselves into conditions of childish illiterateness, and want of
education in the most ordinary habits of thought. It is, I repeat, not
vice, not selfishness, not dullness of brain, which we have to lament;
but an unreachable schoolboy's recklessness, only differing from the
true schoolboy's in its incapacity of being helped, because it
acknowledges no master.
41. There is a curious type of us given in one of the lovely,
neglected works of the last of our great painters. It is a drawing of
Kirkby Lonsdale churchyard, and of its brook, and valley, and hills,
and folded morning sky beyond. And unmindful alike of these, and of
the dead who have left these for other valleys and for other skies, a
group of schoolboys have piled their little books upon a grave, to
strike them off with stones. So, also, we play with the words of the
dead that would teach us, and strike them far from us with our bitter,
reckless will; little thinking that those leaves which the wind
scatters had been piled, not only upon a gravestone, but upon the seal
of an enchanted vault--nay, the gate of a great city of sleeping kings,
who would awake for us, and walk with us, if we knew but how to call
them by their names. How often, even if we lift the marble entrance
gate, do we but wander among those old kings in their repose, and
finger the robes they lie in, and stir the crowns on their foreheads;
and still they are silent to us, and seem but a dusty imagery; because
we know not the incantation of the heart that would wake them;--which,
if they once heard, they would start up to meet us in their power of
long ago, narrowly to look upon us, and consider us; and, as the fallen
kings of Hades meet the newly fallen, saying, "Art thou also become
weak as we--art thou also become one of us?" so would these kings, with
their undimmed, unshaken diadems, meet us, saying, "Art thou also
become pure and mighty of heart as we? art thou also become one of us?"
42. Mighty of heart, mighty of mind--"magnanimous"--to be this, is,
indeed, to be great in life; to become this increasingly, is, indeed,
to "advance in life,"--in life itself--not in the trappings of it. My
friends, do you remember that old Scythian custom, when the head of a
house died? How he was dressed in his finest dress, and set in his
chariot, and carried about to his friends' houses; and each of them
placed him at his table's head, and all feasted in his presence?
Suppose it were offered to you, in plain words, as it is offered to you
in dire facts, that you should gain this Scythian honor, gradually,
while you yet thought yourself alive. Suppose the offer were this: You
shall die slowly; your blood shall daily grow cold, your flesh petrify,
your heart beat at last only as a rusted group of iron valves. Your
life shall fade from you, and sink through the earth into the ice of
Caina; but, day by day, your body shall be dressed more gaily, and set
in higher chariots, and have more orders on its breast--crowns on its
head, if you will. Men shall bow before it, stare and shout round it,
crowd after it up and down the streets; build palaces for it, feast
with it at their tables' heads all the night long; your soul shall stay
enough within it to know what they do, and feel the weight of the
golden dress on its shoulders, and the furrow of the crown-edge on the
skull;--no more. Would you take the offer, verbally made by the
death-angel? Would the meanest among us take it, think you? Yet
practically and verily we grasp at it, every one of us, in a measure;
many of us grasp at it in its fullness of horror. Every man accepts
it, who desires to advance in life without knowing what life is; who
means only that he is to get more horses, and more footmen, and more
fortune, and more public honor, and--not more personal soul. He only
is advancing in life, whose heart is getting softer, whose blood
warmer, whose brain quicker, whose spirit is entering into Living
peace. And the men who have this life in them are the true lords or
kings of the earth--they, and they only. All other kingships, so far
as they are true, are only the practical issue and expression of
theirs; if less than this, they are either dramatic royalties,--costly
shows, set off, indeed, with real jewels instead of tinsel,--but still
only the toys of nations; or else, they are no royalties at all, but
tyrannies, or the mere active and practical issue of national folly;
for which reason I have said of them elsewhere, "Visible governments
are the toys of some nations, the diseases of others, the harness of
some, the burdens of more."
43. But I have no words for the wonder with which I hear Kinghood
still spoken of, even among thoughtful men, as if governed nations were
a personal property, and might be bought and sold, or otherwise
acquired, as sheep, of whose flesh their king was to feed, and whose
fleece he was to gather; as if Achilles' indignant epithet of base
kings, "people-eating," were the constant and proper title of all
monarchs; and enlargement of a king's dominion meant the same thing as
the increase of a private man's estate! Kings who think so, however
powerful, can no more be the true kings of the nation than gad-flies
are the kings of a horse; they suck it, and may drive it wild, but do
not guide it. They, and their courts, and their armies are, if one
could see clearly, only a large species of marsh mosquito, with bayonet
proboscis and melodious, band-mastered, trumpeting in the summer air;
the twilight being, perhaps, sometimes fairer, but hardly more
wholesome, for its glittering mists of midge companies. The true
kings, meanwhile, rule quietly, if at all, and hate ruling; too many of
them make "il gran rifiúto" [18]; and if they do not, the mob, as soon
as they are likely to become useful to it, is pretty sure to make _its_
"gran rifiúto" of _them_.
44. Yet the visible king may also be a true one, some day, if ever day
comes when he will estimate his dominion by the _force_ of it,--not the
geographical boundaries. It matters very little whether Trent cuts you
a cantel out here, or Rhine rounds you a castle less there. But it
does matter to you, king of men, whether you can verily say to this
man, "Go," and he goeth; and to another, "Come," and he cometh.
Whether you can turn your people, as you can Trent--and where it is
that you bid them come, and where go. It matters to you, king of men,
whether your people hate you, and die by you, or love you, and live by
you. You may measure your dominion by multitudes better than by miles;
and count degrees of love latitude, not from, but to a wonderfully warm
and indefinite equator.
45. Measure! nay, you cannot measure. Who shall measure the
difference between the power of those who "do and teach," and who are
greatest in the kingdoms of earth, as of heaven--and the power of those
who undo, and consume--whose power, at the fullest, is only the power
of the moth and the rust? Strange! to think how the Moth-kings lay up
treasures for the moth; and the Rust-kings, who are to their peoples'
strength as rust to armor, lay up treasures for the rust; and the
Robber-kings, treasures for the robber; but how few kings have ever
laid up treasures that needed no guarding--treasures of which, the more
thieves there were, the better! Broidered robe, only to be rent; helm
and sword, only to be dimmed; jewel and gold, only to be
scattered;--there have been three kinds of kings who have gathered
these. Suppose there ever should arise a Fourth order of kings, who
had read, in some obscure writing of long ago, that there was a Fourth
kind of treasure, which the jewel and gold could not equal, neither
should it be valued with pure gold. A web made fair in the weaving, by
Athena's shuttle; an armor, forged in divine fire by Vulcanian force--a
gold to be mined in the sun's red heart, where he sets over the
Delphian cliffs;--deep-pictured tissue, impenetrable armor, potable
gold!--the three great Angels of Conduct, Toil, and Thought, still
calling to us, and waiting at the posts of our doors, to lead us, with
their winged power, and guide us, with their unerring eyes, by the path
which no fowl knoweth, and which the vulture's eye has not seen!
Suppose kings should ever arise, who heard and believed this word, and
at last gathered and brought forth treasures of--Wisdom--for their
people?
46. Think what an amazing business _that_ would be! How
inconceivable, in the state of our present national wisdom! That we
should bring up our peasants to a book exercise instead of a bayonet
exercise!--organize, drill, maintain with pay, and good generalship,
armies of thinkers, instead of armies of stabbers!--find national
amusement in reading-rooms as well as rifle-grounds; give prizes for a
fair shot at a fact, as well as for a leaden splash on a target. What
an absurd idea it seems, put fairly in words, that the wealth of the
capitalists of civilized nations should ever come to support literature
instead of war!
47. Have yet patience with me, while I read you a single sentence out
of the only book, properly to be called a book, that I have yet written
myself, the one that will stand (if anything stand) surest and longest
of all work of mine.
"It is one very awful form of the operation of wealth in Europe that it
is entirely capitalists' wealth that supports unjust wars. Just wars
do not need so much money to support them; for most of the men who wage
such, wage them gratis; but for an unjust war, men's bodies and souls
have both to be bought; and the best tools of war for them besides,
which makes such war costly to the maximum; not to speak of the cost of
base fear, and angry suspicion, between nations which have not grace
nor honesty enough in all their multitudes to buy an hour's peace of
mind with; as, at present, France and England, purchasing of each other
ten millions' sterling worth of consternation, annually (a remarkably
light crop, half thorns and half aspen leaves, sown, reaped, and
granaried by the 'science' of the modern political economist, teaching
covetousness instead of truth). And, all unjust war being supportable,
if not by pillage of the enemy, only by loans from capitalists, these
loans are repaid by subsequent taxation of the people, who appear to
have no will in the matter, the capitalists' will being the primary
root of the war; but its real root is the covetousness of the whole
nation, rendering it incapable of faith, frankness, or justice, and
bringing about, therefore, in due time, his own separate loss and
punishment to each person."
48. France and England literally, observe, buy _panic_ of each other;
they pay, each of them, for ten thousand thousand pounds' worth of
terror, a year. Now suppose, instead of buying these ten millions'
worth of panic annually, they made up their minds to be at peace with
each other, and buy ten millions' worth of knowledge annually; and that
each nation spent its ten thousand thousand pounds a year in founding
royal libraries, royal art galleries, royal museums, royal gardens, and
places of rest. Might it not be better somewhat for both French and
English?
49. It will be long, yet, before that comes to pass. Nevertheless, I
hope it will not be long before royal or national libraries will be
founded in every considerable city, with a royal series of books in
them; the same series in every one of them, chosen books, the best in
every kind, prepared for that national series in the most perfect way
possible; their text printed all on leaves of equal size, broad of
margin, and divided into pleasant volumes, light in the hand,
beautiful, and strong, and thorough as examples of binders' work; and
that these great libraries will be accessible to all clean and orderly
persons at all times of the day and evening; strict law being enforced
for this cleanliness and quietness.
I could shape for you other plans for art galleries, and for natural
history galleries, and for many precious--many, it seems to me,
needful--things; but this book plan is the easiest and needfullest, and
would prove a considerable tonic to what we call our British
constitution, which has fallen dropsical of late, and has an evil
thirst, and evil hunger, and wants healthier feeding. You have got its
corn laws repealed for it; try if you cannot get corn laws established
for it dealing in a better bread;--bread made of that old enchanted
Arabian grain, the Sesame, which opens doors;--doors not of robbers,
but of Kings' Treasuries.
50. Note to Paragraph 30.--Respecting the increase of rent by the
deaths of the poor, for evidence of which, see the preface to the
Medical officers' report to the Privy Council, just published, there
are suggestions in its preface which will make some stir among us, I
fancy, respecting which let me note these points following:--
There are two theories on the subject of land now abroad, and in
contention; both false.
The first is that, by Heavenly law, there have always existed, and must
continue to exist, a certain number of hereditarily sacred persons to
whom the earth, air, and water of the world belong, as personal
property; of which earth, air, and water, these persons may, at their
pleasure, permit, or forbid, the rest of the human race to eat,
breathe, or to drink. This theory is not for many years longer
tenable. The adverse theory is that a division of the land of the
world among the mob of the world would immediately elevate the said mob
into sacred personages; that houses would then build themselves, and
corn grow of itself; and that everybody would be able to live, without
doing any work for his living. This theory would also be found highly
untenable in practice.
It will, however, require some rough experiments, and rougher
catastrophes, before the generality of persons will be convinced that
no law concerning anything, least of all concerning land, for either
holding or dividing it, or renting it high, or renting it low--would be
of the smallest ultimate use to the people--so long as the general
contest for life, and for the means of life, remains one of mere brutal
competition. That contest, in an unprincipled nation, will take one
deadly form or another, whatever laws you make against it. For
instance, it would be an entirely wholesome law for England, if it
could be carried, that maximum limits should be assigned to incomes
according to classes; and that every nobleman's income should be paid
to him as a fixed salary or pension by the nation; and not squeezed by
him in variable sums, at discretion, out of the tenants of his land.
But if you could get such a law passed to-morrow, and if, which would
be farther necessary, you could fix the value of the assigned incomes
by making a given weight of pure bread for a given sum, a twelvemonth
would not pass before another currency would have been tacitly
established, and the power of accumulative wealth would have reasserted
itself in some other article, or some other imaginary sign. There is
only one cure for public distress--and that is public education,
directed to make men thoughtful, merciful, and just. There are,
indeed, many laws conceivable which would gradually better and
strengthen the national temper; but, for the most part, they are such
as the national temper must be much bettered before it would bear. A
nation in its youth may be helped by laws, as a weak child by
backboards, but when it is old it cannot that way straighten its
crooked spine.
And besides, the problem of land, at its worst, is a bye one;
distribute the earth as you will, the principal question remains
inexorable,--Who is to dig it? Which of us, in brief words, is to do
the hard and dirty work for the rest--and for what pay? Who is to do
the pleasant and clean work, and for what pay? Who is to do no work,
and for what pay? And there are curious moral and religious questions
connected with these. How far is it lawful to suck a portion of the
soul out of a great many persons, in order to put the abstracted
psychical quantities together and make one very beautiful or ideal
soul? If we had to deal with mere blood, instead of spirit (and the
thing might literally be done--as it has been done with infants before
now)--so that it were possible by taking a certain quantity of blood
from the arms of a given number of the mob, and putting it all into one
person, to make a more azure-blooded gentleman of him, the thing would
of course be managed; but secretly, I should conceive. But now,
because it is brain and soul that we abstract, not visible blood, it
can be done quite openly, and we live, we gentlemen, on delicatest
prey, after the manner of weasels; that is to say, we keep a certain
number of clowns digging and ditching, and generally stupefied, in
order that we, being fed gratis, may have all the thinking and feeling
to ourselves. Yet there is a great deal to be said for this. A
highly-bred and trained English, French, Austrian, or Italian gentleman
(much more a lady) is a great production,--a better production than
most statues; being beautifully colored as well as shaped, and plus all
the brains; a glorious thing to look at, a wonderful thing to talk to;
and you cannot have it, any more than a pyramid or a church, but by
sacrifice of much contributed life. And it is, perhaps, better to
build a beautiful human creature than a beautiful dome or steeple--and
more delightful to look up reverently to a creature far above us, than
to a wall; only the beautiful human creature will have some duties to
do in return--duties of living belfry and rampart--of which presently.
[1] This lecture was given December 6, 1864, at Rusholme Town Hall,
Manchester, in aid of a library fund for the Rusholme Institute.
[2] Note this sentence carefully, and compare the "Queen of the Air,"
section 106.
[3] 2 Peter, iii. 5-7.
[4] Compare the 13th Letter in "Time and Tide."
[5] Modern "education" for the most part signifies giving people the
faculty of thinking wrong on every conceivable subject of importance to
them.
[6] "Inferno," xxiii. 125, 126; xix. 49, 50.
[7] Compare section 13 above.
[8] See note at end of lecture. I have put it in large type, because
the course of matters since it was written has made it perhaps better
worth attention.
[9] Since this was written, the answer has become definitely--No; we
have surrendered the field of Arctic discovery to the Continental
nations, as being ourselves too poor to pay for ships.
[10] I state this fact without Professor Owen's permission: which of
course he could not with propriety have granted, had I asked it; but I
consider it so important that the public should be aware of the fact
that I do what seems to be right though rude.
[11] That was our real idea of "Free Trade"--"All the trade to myself."
You find now that by "competition" other people can manage to sell
something as well as you--and now we call for Protection again.
Wretches!
[12] I meant that the beautiful places of the world--Switzerland,
Italy, South Germany, and so on--are, indeed, the truest
cathedrals--places to be reverent in, and to worship in, and that we
only care to drive through them; and to eat and drink at their most
sacred places.
[13] I was singularly struck, some years ago, by finding all the river
shore at Richmond, in Yorkshire, black in its earth, from the mere
drift of soot-laden air from places many miles away.
[14] One of the things which we must very resolutely enforce, for the
good of all classes, in our future arrangements, must be that they wear
no "translated" articles of dress.
[15] This abbreviation of the penalty of useless labor is curiously
coincident in verbal form with a certain passage which some of us may
remember. It may, perhaps, be well to preserve beside this paragraph
another cutting out of my store-drawer, from the "Morning Post," of
about a parallel date, Friday, March 10th, 1865:--"The _salons_ of Mme.
C----, who did the honors with clever imitative grace and elegance,
were crowded with princes, dukes, marquises, and counts--in fact, with
the same _male_ company as one meets at the parties of the Princess
Metternich and Madame Drouyn de Lhuys. Some English peers and members
of Parliament were present, and appeared to enjoy the animated and
dazzlingly improper scene. On the second floor the supper-tables were
loaded with every delicacy of the season. That your readers may form
some idea of the dainty fare of the Parisian demi-monde, I copy the
menu of the supper, which was served to all the guests (about 200)
seated at four o'clock. Choice Yquem, Johannisberg, Lafitte, Tokay,
and Champagne of the finest vintages were served most lavishly
throughout the morning. After supper dancing was resumed with
increased animation, and the ball terminated with a _chaîne diabolique_
and a _cancan d'enfer_ at seven in the morning. (Morning-service--'Ere
the fresh lawns appeared under the opening eyelids of the Morn.--')
Here is the menu:--'Consommé de volaille à la Bagration; 16
hors-d'oeuvres variés. Bouchées à la Talleyrand. Saumons froids,
sauce Ravigote. Filets de boeuf en Bellevue, timbales milanaises
chaudfroid de gibier. Dindes truffées. Pâtés de foies gras, buissons
d'écrevisses, salades vénétiennes, gelées blanches aux fruits, gateaux
mancini, parisiens et parisiennes. Fromages glacés, Ananas. Dessert.'"
[16] Please observe this statement, and think of it, and consider how
it happens that a poor old woman will be ashamed to take a shilling a
week from the country--but no one is ashamed to take a pension of a
thousand a year.
[17] I am heartily glad to see such a paper as the "Pall Mall Gazette"
established; for the power of the press in the hands of highly educated
men, in independent position, and of honest purpose, may, indeed,
become all that it has been hitherto vainly vaunted to be. Its editor
will, therefore, I doubt not, pardon me, in that, by very reason of my
respect for the journal, I do not let pass unnoticed an article in its
third number, page 5, which was wrong in every word of it, with the
intense wrongness which only an honest man can achieve who has taken a
false turn of thought in the outset, and is following it, regardless of
consequences. It contained at the end this notable passage:--
"The bread of affliction, and the water of affliction--aye, and the
bedsteads and blankets of affliction, are the very utmost that the law
ought to give to _outcasts merely as outcasts_." I merely put beside
this expression of the gentlemanly mind of England in 1865, a part of
the message which Isaiah was ordered to "lift up his voice like a
trumpet" in declaring to the gentlemen of his day: "Ye fast for strife,
and to smite with the fist of wickedness. Is not this the fast that I
have chosen, to deal thy bread to the hungry, and that thou bring the
poor _that are cast out_ (margin 'afflicted') to _thy_ house." The
falsehood on which the writer had mentally founded himself, as
previously stated by him, was this: "To confound the functions of the
dispensers of the poor-rates with those of the dispensers of a
charitable institution is a great and pernicious error." This sentence
is so accurately and exquisitely wrong, that its substance must be thus
reversed in our minds before we can deal with any existing problem of
national distress. "To understand that the dispensers of the
poor-rates are the almoners of the nation, and should distribute its
alms with a gentleness and freedom of hand as much greater and franker
than that possible to individual charity, as the collective national
wisdom and power may be supposed greater than those of any single
person, is the foundation of all law respecting pauperism." (Since
this was written the "Pall Mall Gazette" has become a mere party
paper--like the rest; but it writes well, and does more good than
mischief on the whole.)
[18] The great renunciation.