CHAPTER I.

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Illustrated Library Edition

THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE

Also

MUNERA PULVERIS

PRE-RAPHAELITISM--ARATRA PENTELICI

THE ETHICS OF THE DUST

FICTION, FAIR AND FOUL

THE ELEMENTS OF DRAWING

by

JOHN RUSKIN, M.A.

[Illustration: _Portrait of Carlyle_

Etched by E. A. Fowle--From Painting by Samuel Lawrence]

[Illustration]

Boston and New York

Colonial Press Company

Publishers

CONTENTS.

THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

PAGE

LECTURE I.

WORK, 17

LECTURE II.

TRAFFIC, 44

LECTURE III.

WAR, 66

MUNERA PULVERIS.

PREFACE, 97

CHAP.

I. DEFINITIONS, 111

II. STORE-KEEPING, 125

III. COIN-KEEPING, 151

IV. COMMERCE, 170

V. GOVERNMENT, 181

VI. MASTERSHIP, 204

APPENDICES, 222

PRE-RAPHAELITISM.

PREFACE, 235

PRE-RAPHAELITISM, 237

ARATRA PENTELICI.

PREFACE, 283

LECTURE

I. OF THE DIVISION OF ARTS, 287

II. IDOLATRY, 304

III. IMAGINATION, 322

IV. LIKENESS, 350

V. STRUCTURE, 372

VI. THE SCHOOL OF ATHENS, 395

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND, 415

NOTES ON POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA, 435

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.

ARATRA PENTELICI.

PLATES FACING PAGE

I. PORCH OF SAN ZENONE. VERONA, 300

II. THE ARETHUSA OF SYRACUSE, 302

III. THE WARNING TO THE KINGS, 302

IV. THE NATIVITY OF ATHENA, 308

V. TOMB OF THE DOGES JACOPO AND LORENZO TIEPOLO, 333

VI. ARCHAIC ATHENA OF ATHENS AND CORINTH, 334

VII. ARCHAIC, CENTRAL AND DECLINING ART OF GREECE, 355

VIII. THE APOLLO OF SYRACUSE AND THE SELF-MADE MAN, 366

IX. APOLLO CHRYSOCOMES OF CLAZOMENAE, 368

X. MARBLE MASONRY IN THE DUOMO OF VERONA, 381

XI. THE FIRST ELEMENTS OF SCULPTURE, 382

XII. BRANCH OF PHILLYREA. DARK PURPLE, 390

XIII. GREEK FLAT RELIEF AND SCULPTURE BY EDGED INCISION, 392

XIV. APOLLO AND THE PYTHON. HERACLES AND THE NEMEAN LION, 400

XV. HERA OF ARGOS. ZEUS OF SYRACUSE, 401

XVI. DEMETER OF MESSENE. HERA OF CROSSUS, 402

XVII. ATHENA OF THURIUM. SEREIE LIGEIA OF TERINA, 402

XVIII. ARTEMIS OF SYRACUSE. HERA OF LACINIAN CAPE, 404

XIX. ZEUS OF MESSENE. AJAX OF OPUS, 405

XX. GREEK AND BARBARIAN SCULPTURE, 407

XXI. THE BEGINNINGS OF CHIVALRY, 409

FIGURE PAGE

1. SPECIMEN OF PLATE, 293

2. WOODCUT, 323

3. FIGURE ON GREEK TYPE OF VASES, 326

4. EARLY DRAWING OF THE MYTH 330

5. CUT, "GIVE IT TO ME," 332

6. ENGRAVING ON COIN, 335

7. DRAWING OF FISH. BY TURNER, 362

8. IRON BAR, 379

9. DIAGRAM OF LEAF, 391

THE

CROWN OF WILD OLIVE

THREE LECTURES ON

WORK, TRAFFIC AND WAR

PREFACE.

Twenty years ago, there was no lovelier piece of lowland scenery in

South England, nor any more pathetic in the world, by its expression of

sweet human character and life, than that immediately bordering on the

sources of the Wandle, and including the lower moors of Addington, and

the villages of Beddington and Carshalton, with all their pools and

streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sang with constant lips of

the hand which 'giveth rain from heaven;' no pastures ever lightened in

spring time with more passionate blossoming; no sweeter homes ever

hallowed the heart of the passer-by with their pride of peaceful

gladness--fain-hidden--yet full-confessed. The place remains, or, until

a few months ago, remained, nearly unchanged in its larger features;

but, with deliberate mind I say, that I have never seen anything so

ghastly in its inner tragic meaning,--not in Pisan Maremma--not by

Campagna tomb,--not by the sand-isles of the Torcellan shore,--as the

slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent, animal neglect, over the

delicate sweetness of that English scene: nor is any blasphemy or

impiety--any frantic saying or godless thought--more appalling to me,

using the best power of judgment I have to discern its sense and scope,

than the insolent defilings of those springs by the human herds that

drink of them. Just where the welling of stainless water, trembling and

pure, like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting

itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, through warp of feathery

weeds, all waving, which it traverses with its deep threads of

clearness, like the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there

with white grenouillette; just in the very rush and murmur of the first

spreading currents, the human wretches of the place cast their street

and house foulness; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds of old

metal, and rags of putrid clothes; they having neither energy to cart it

away, nor decency enough to dig it into the ground, thus shed into the

stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and melt, far away, in

all places where God meant those waters to bring joy and health. And, in

a little pool, behind some houses farther in the village, where another

spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, and of the little

fretted channel which was long ago built and traced for it by gentler

hands, lie scattered, each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and

scoria; and brick-layers' refuse, on one side, which the clean water

nevertheless chastises to purity; but it cannot conquer the dead earth

beyond; and there, circled and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant

edge of the pool effaces itself into a slope of black slime, the

accumulation of indolent years. Half-a-dozen men, with one day's work,

could cleanse those pools, and trim the flowers about their banks, and

make every breath of summer air above them rich with cool balm; and

every glittering wave medicinal, as if it ran, troubled of angels, from

the porch of Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, nor will be;

nor will any joy be possible to heart of man, for evermore, about those

wells of English waters.

When I last left them, I walked up slowly through the back streets of

Croydon, from the old church to the hospital; and, just on the left,

before coming up to the crossing of the High Street, there was a new

public-house built. And the front of it was built in so wise manner,

that a recess of two feet was left below its front windows, between them

and the street-pavement--a recess too narrow for any possible use (for

even if it had been occupied by a seat, as in old time it might have

been, everybody walking along the street would have fallen over the legs

of the reposing wayfarers). But, by way of making this two feet depth of

freehold land more expressive of the dignity of an establishment for the

sale of spirituous liquors, it was fenced from the pavement by an

imposing iron railing, having four or five spearheads to the yard of it,

and six feet high; containing as much iron and iron-work, indeed as

could well be put into the space; and by this stately arrangement, the

little piece of dead ground within, between wall and street, became a

protective receptacle of refuse; cigar ends, and oyster shells, and the

like, such as an open-handed English street-populace habitually scatters

from its presence, and was thus left, unsweepable by any ordinary

methods. Now the iron bars which, uselessly (or in great degree worse

than uselessly), enclosed this bit of ground, and made it pestilent,

represented a quantity of work which would have cleansed the Carshalton

pools three times over;--of work, partly cramped and deadly, in the

mine; partly fierce[1] and exhaustive, at the furnace; partly foolish

and sedentary, of ill-taught students making bad designs: work from the

beginning to the last fruits of it, and in all the branches of it,

venomous, deathful, and miserable. Now, how did it come to pass that

this work was done instead of the other; that the strength and life of

the English operative were spent in defiling ground, instead of

redeeming it; and in producing an entirely (in that place) valueless

piece of metal, which can neither be eaten nor breathed, instead of

medicinal fresh air, and pure water?

There is but one reason for it, and at present a conclusive one,--that

the capitalist can charge per-centage on the work in the one case, and

cannot in the other. If, having certain funds for supporting labour at

my disposal, I pay men merely to keep my ground in order, my money is,

in that function, spent once for all; but if I pay them to dig iron out

of my ground, and work it, and sell it, I can charge rent for the

ground, and per-centage both on the manufacture and the sale, and make

my capital profitable in these three bye-ways. The greater part of the

profitable investment of capital, in the present day, is in operations

of this kind, in which the public is persuaded to buy something of no

use to it, on production, or sale, of which, the capitalist may charge

per-centage; the said public remaining all the while under the

persuasion that the per-centages thus obtained are real national gains,

whereas, they are merely filchings out of partially light pockets, to

swell heavy ones.

Thus, the Croydon publican buys the iron railing, to make himself more

conspicuous to drunkards. The public-housekeeper on the other side of

the way presently buys another railing, to out-rail him with. Both are,

as to their _relative_ attractiveness to customers of taste, just where

they were before; but they have lost the price of the railings; which

they must either themselves finally lose, or make their aforesaid

customers of taste pay, by raising the price of their beer, or

adulterating it. Either the publicans, or their customers, are thus

poorer by precisely what the capitalist has gained; and the value of the

work itself, meantime, has been lost to the nation; the iron bars in

that form and place being wholly useless. It is this mode of taxation of

the poor by the rich which is referred to in the text (page 31), in

comparing the modern acquisitive power of capital with that of the lance

and sword; the only difference being that the levy of black mail in old

times was by force, and is now by cozening. The old rider and reiver

frankly quartered himself on the publican for the night; the modern one

merely makes his lance into an iron spike, and persuades his host to buy

it. One comes as an open robber, the other as a cheating pedlar; but the

result, to the injured person's pocket, is absolutely the same. Of

course many useful industries mingle with, and disguise the useless

ones; and in the habits of energy aroused by the struggle, there is a

certain direct good. It is far better to spend four thousand pounds in

making a good gun, and then to blow it to pieces, than to pass life in

idleness. Only do not let it be called 'political economy.' There is

also a confused notion in the minds of many persons, that the gathering

of the property of the poor into the hands of the rich does no ultimate

harm; since, in whosesoever hands it may be, it must be spent at last,

and thus, they think, return to the poor again. This fallacy has been

again and again exposed; but grant the plea true, and the same apology

may, of course, be made for black mail, or any other form of robbery. It

might be (though practically it never is) as advantageous for the nation

that the robber should have the spending of the money he extorts, as

that the person robbed should have spent it. But this is no excuse for

the theft. If I were to put a turnpike on the road where it passes my

own gate, and endeavour to exact a shilling from every passenger, the

public would soon do away with my gate, without listening to any plea on

my part that 'it was as advantageous to them, in the end, that I should

spend their shillings, as that they themselves should.' But if, instead

of out-facing them with a turnpike, I can only persuade them to come in

and buy stones, or old iron, or any other useless thing, out of my

ground, I may rob them to the same extent, and be, moreover, thanked as

a public benefactor, and promoter of commercial prosperity. And this

main question for the poor of England--for the poor of all countries--is

wholly omitted in every common treatise on the subject of wealth. Even

by the labourers themselves, the operation of capital is regarded only

in its effect on their immediate interests; never in the far more

terrific power of its appointment of the kind and the object of labour.

It matters little, ultimately, how much a labourer is paid for making

anything; but it matters fearfully what the thing is, which he is

compelled to make. If his labour is so ordered as to produce food, and

fresh air, and fresh water, no matter that his wages are low;--the food

and fresh air and water will be at last there; and he will at last get

them. But if he is paid to destroy food and fresh air or to produce

iron bars instead of them,--the food and air will finally _not_ be

there, and he will _not_ get them, to his great and final inconvenience.

So that, conclusively, in political as in household economy, the great

question is, not so much what money you have in your pocket, as what you

will buy with it, and do with it.

I have been long accustomed, as all men engaged in work of investigation

must be, to hear my statements laughed at for years, before they are

examined or believed; and I am generally content to wait the public's

time. But it has not been without displeased surprise that I have found

myself totally unable, as yet, by any repetition, or illustration, to

force this plain thought into my readers' heads,--that the wealth of

nations, as of men, consists in substance, not in ciphers; and that the

real good of all work, and of all commerce, depends on the final worth

of the thing you make, or get by it. This is a practical enough

statement, one would think: but the English public has been so possessed

by its modern school of economists with the notion that Business is

always good, whether it be busy in mischief or in benefit; and that

buying and selling are always salutary, whatever the intrinsic worth of

what you buy or sell,--that it seems impossible to gain so much as a

patient hearing for any inquiry respecting the substantial result of our

eager modern labours. I have never felt more checked by the sense of

this impossibility than in arranging the heads of the following three

lectures, which, though delivered at considerable intervals of time, and

in different places, were not prepared without reference to each other.

Their connection would, however, have been made far more distinct, if I

had not been prevented, by what I feel to be another great difficulty in

addressing English audiences, from enforcing, with any decision, the

common, and to me the most important, part of their subjects. I chiefly

desired (as I have just said) to question my hearers--operatives,

merchants, and soldiers, as to the ultimate meaning of the _business_

they had in hand; and to know from them what they expected or intended

their manufacture to come to, their selling to come to, and their

killing to come to. That appeared the first point needing determination

before I could speak to them with any real utility or effect. 'You

craftsmen--salesmen--swordsmen,--do but tell me clearly what you want,

then, if I can say anything to help you, I will; and if not, I will

account to you as I best may for my inability.' But in order to put this

question into any terms, one had first of all to face the difficulty

just spoken of--to me for the present insuperable,--the difficulty of

knowing whether to address one's audience as believing, or not

believing, in any other world than this. For if you address any average

modern English company as believing in an Eternal life, and endeavour to

draw any conclusions, from this assumed belief, as to their present

business, they will forthwith tell you that what you say is very

beautiful, but it is not practical. If, on the contrary, you frankly

address them as unbelievers in Eternal life, and try to draw any

consequences from that unbelief,--they immediately hold you for an

accursed person, and shake off the dust from their feet at you. And the

more I thought over what I had got to say, the less I found I could say

it, without some reference to this intangible or intractable part of the

subject. It made all the difference, in asserting any principle of war,

whether one assumed that a discharge of artillery would merely knead

down a certain quantity of red clay into a level line, as in a brick

field; or whether, out of every separately Christian-named portion of

the ruinous heap, there went out, into the smoke and dead-fallen air of

battle, some astonished condition of soul, unwillingly released. It made

all the difference, in speaking of the possible range of commerce,

whether one assumed that all bargains related only to visible

property--or whether property, for the present invisible, but

nevertheless real, was elsewhere purchasable on other terms. It made all

the difference, in addressing a body of men subject to considerable

hardship, and having to find some way out of it--whether one could

confidentially say to them, 'My friends,--you have only to die, and all

will be right;' or whether one had any secret misgiving that such advice

was more blessed to him that gave, than to him that took it. And

therefore the deliberate reader will find, throughout these lectures, a

hesitation in driving points home, and a pausing short of conclusions

which he will feel I would fain have come to; hesitation which arises

wholly from this uncertainty of my hearers' temper. For I do not now

speak, nor have I ever spoken, since the time of my first forward youth,

in any proselyting temper, as desiring to persuade any one of what, in

such matters, I thought myself; but, whomsoever I venture to address, I

take for the time his creed as I find it; and endeavour to push it into

such vital fruit as it seems capable of. Thus, it is a creed with a

great part of the existing English people, that they are in possession

of a book which tells them, straight from the lips of God all they ought

to do, and need to know. I have read that book, with as much care as

most of them, for some forty years; and am thankful that, on those who

trust it, I can press its pleadings. My endeavour has been uniformly to

make them trust it more deeply than they do; trust it, not in their own

favourite verses only, but in the sum of all; trust it not as a fetish

or talisman, which they are to be saved by daily repetitions of; but as

a Captain's order, to be heard and obeyed at their peril. I was always

encouraged by supposing my hearers to hold such belief. To these, if to

any, I once had hope of addressing, with acceptance, words which

insisted on the guilt of pride, and the futility of avarice; from these,

if from any, I once expected ratification of a political economy, which

asserted that the life was more than the meat, and the body than

raiment; and these, it once seemed to me, I might ask without accusation

or fanaticism, not merely in doctrine of the lips, but in the bestowal

of their heart's treasure, to separate themselves from the crowd of whom

it is written, 'After all these things do the Gentiles seek.'

It cannot, however, be assumed, with any semblance of reason, that a

general audience is now wholly, or even in majority, composed of these

religious persons. A large portion must always consist of men who admit

no such creed; or who, at least, are inaccessible to appeals founded on

it. And as, with the so-called Christian, I desired to plead for honest

declaration and fulfilment of his belief in life,--with the so-called

Infidel, I desired to plead for an honest declaration and fulfilment of

his belief in death. The dilemma is inevitable. Men must either

hereafter live, or hereafter die; fate may be bravely met, and conduct

wisely ordered, on either expectation; but never in hesitation between

ungrasped hope, and unconfronted fear. We usually believe in

immortality, so far as to avoid preparation for death; and in mortality,

so far as to avoid preparation for anything after death. Whereas, a wise

man will at least hold himself prepared for one or other of two events,

of which one or other is inevitable; and will have all things in order,

for his sleep, or in readiness, for his awakening.

Nor have we any right to call it an ignoble judgment, if he determine to

put them in order, as for sleep. A brave belief in life is indeed an

enviable state of mind, but, as far as I can discern, an unusual one. I

know few Christians so convinced of the splendour of the rooms in their

Father's house, as to be happier when their friends are called to those

mansions, than they would have been if the Queen had sent for them to

live at Court: nor has the Church's most ardent 'desire to depart, and

be with Christ,' ever cured it of the singular habit of putting on

mourning for every person summoned to such departure. On the contrary, a

brave belief in death has been assuredly held by many not ignoble

persons, and it is a sign of the last depravity in the Church itself,

when it assumes that such a belief is inconsistent with either purity of

character, or energy of hand. The shortness of life is not, to any

rational person, a conclusive reason for wasting the space of it which

may be granted him; nor does the anticipation of death to-morrow

suggest, to any one but a drunkard, the expediency of drunkenness

to-day. To teach that there is no device in the grave, may indeed make

the deviceless person more contented in his dulness; but it will make

the deviser only more earnest in devising, nor is human conduct likely,

in every case, to be purer under the conviction that all its evil may in

a moment be pardoned, and all its wrong-doing in a moment redeemed; and

that the sigh of repentance, which purges the guilt of the past, will

waft the soul into a felicity which forgets its pain,--than it may be

under the sterner, and to many not unwise minds, more probable,

apprehension, that 'what a man soweth that shall he also reap'--or

others reap,--when he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no more in

darkness, but lies down therein.

But to men whose feebleness of sight, or bitterness of soul, or the

offence given by the conduct of those who claim higher hope, may have

rendered this painful creed the only possible one, there is an appeal to

be made, more secure in its ground than any which can be addressed to

happier persons. I would fain, if I might offencelessly, have spoken to

them as if none others heard; and have said thus: Hear me, you dying

men, who will soon be deaf for ever. For these others, at your right

hand and your left, who look forward to a state of infinite existence,

in which all their errors will be overruled, and all their faults

forgiven; for these, who, stained and blackened in the battle smoke of

mortality, have but to dip themselves for an instant in the font of

death, and to rise renewed of plumage, as a dove that is covered with

silver, and her feathers like gold; for these, indeed, it may be

permissible to waste their numbered moments, through faith in a future

of innumerable hours; to these, in their weakness, it may be conceded

that they should tamper with sin which can only bring forth fruit of

righteousness, and profit by the iniquity which, one day, will be

remembered no more. In them, it may be no sign of hardness of heart to

neglect the poor, over whom they know their Master is watching; and to

leave those to perish temporarily, who cannot perish eternally. But, for

you, there is no such hope, and therefore no such excuse. This fate,

which you ordain for the wretched, you believe to be all their

inheritance; you may crush them, before the moth, and they will never

rise to rebuke you;--their breath, which fails for lack of food, once

expiring, will never be recalled to whisper against you a word of

accusing;--they and you, as you think, shall lie down together in the

dust, and the worms cover you;--and for them there shall be no

consolation, and on you no vengeance,--only the question murmured above

your grave: 'Who shall repay him what he hath done?' Is it therefore

easier for you in your heart to inflict the sorrow for which there is no

remedy? Will you take, wantonly, this little all of his life from your

poor brother, and make his brief hours long to him with pain? Will you

be readier to the injustice which can never be redressed; and niggardly

of mercy which you _can_ bestow but once, and which, refusing, you

refuse for ever? I think better of you, even of the most selfish, than

that you would do this, well understood. And for yourselves, it seems to

me, the question becomes not less grave, in these curt limits. If your

life were but a fever fit,--the madness of a night, whose follies were

all to be forgotten in the dawn, it might matter little how you fretted

away the sickly hours,--what toys you snatched at, or let fall,--what

visions you followed wistfully with the deceived eyes of sleepless

phrenzy. Is the earth only an hospital? Play, if you care to play, on

the floor of the hospital dens. Knit its straw into what crowns please

you; gather the dust of it for treasure, and die rich in that, clutching

at the black motes in the air with your dying hands;--and yet, it may be

well with you. But if this life be no dream, and the world no hospital;

if all the peace and power and joy you can ever win, must be won now;

and all fruit of victory gathered here, or never;--will you still,

throughout the puny totality of your life, weary yourselves in the fire

for vanity? If there is no rest which remaineth for you, is there none

you might presently take? was this grass of the earth made green for

your shroud only, not for your bed? and can you never lie down _upon_

it, but only _under_ it? The heathen, to whose creed you have returned,

thought not so. They knew that life brought its contest, but they

expected from it also the crown of all contest: No proud one! no

jewelled circlet flaming through Heaven above the height of the

unmerited throne; only some few leaves of wild olive, cool to the tired

brow, through a few years of peace. It should have been of gold, they

thought; but Jupiter was poor; this was the best the god could give

them. Seeking a greater than this, they had known it a mockery. Not in

war, not in wealth, not in tyranny, was there any happiness to be found

for them--only in kindly peace, fruitful and free. The wreath was to be

of _wild_ olive, mark you:--the tree that grows carelessly, tufting the

rocks with no vivid bloom, no verdure of branch; only with soft snow of

blossom, and scarcely fulfilled fruit, mixed with grey leaf and thornset

stem; no fastening of diadem for you but with such sharp embroidery! But

this, such as it is, you may win while yet you live; type of grey honour

and sweet rest.[2] Free-heartedness, and graciousness, and undisturbed

trust, and requited love, and the sight of the peace of others, and the

ministry to their pain;--these, and the blue sky above you, and the

sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath; and mysteries and

presences, innumerable, of living things,--these may yet be here your

riches; untormenting and divine: serviceable for the life that now is

nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to come.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] 'A fearful occurrence took place a few days since, near

Wolverhampton. Thomas Snape, aged nineteen, was on duty as the "keeper"

of a blast furnace at Deepfield, assisted by John Gardner, aged

eighteen, and Joseph Swift, aged thirty-seven. The furnace contained

four tons of molten iron, and an equal amount of cinders, and ought to

have been run out at 7.30 P.M. But Snape and his mates, engaged in

talking and drinking, neglected their duty, and in the meantime, the

iron rose in the furnace until it reached a pipe wherein water was

contained. Just as the men had stripped, and were proceeding to tap the

furnace, the water in the pipe, converted into steam, burst down its

front and let loose on them the molten metal, which instantaneously

consumed Gardner; Snape, terribly burnt, and mad with pain, leaped into

the canal and then ran home and fell dead on the threshold, Swift

survived to reach the hospital, where he died too.

In further illustration of this matter, I beg the reader to look at the

article on the 'Decay of the English Race,' in the '_Pall-Mall Gazette_'

of April 17, of this year; and at the articles on the 'Report of the

Thames Commission,' in any journals of the same date.

[2] [Greek: melitoessa, aethlon g' eneken].

THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

LECTURE I.

_WORK._

(_Delivered before the Working Men's Institute, at Camberwell._)

My Friends,--I have not come among you to-night to endeavour to give you

an entertaining lecture; but to tell you a few plain facts, and ask you

some plain, but necessary questions. I have seen and known too much of

the struggle for life among our labouring population, to feel at ease,

even under any circumstances, in inviting them to dwell on the

trivialities of my own studies; but, much more, as I meet to-night, for

the first time, the members of a working Institute established in the

district in which I have passed the greater part of my life, I am

desirous that we should at once understand each other, on graver

matters. I would fain tell you, with what feelings, and with what hope,

I regard this Institution, as one of many such, now happily established

throughout England, as well as in other countries;--Institutions which

are preparing the way for a great change in all the circumstances of

industrial life; but of which the success must wholly depend upon our

clearly understanding the circumstances and necessary _limits_ of this

change. No teacher can truly promote the cause of education, until he

knows the conditions of the life for which that education is to prepare

his pupil. And the fact that he is called upon to address you nominally,

as a 'Working Class,' must compel him, if he is in any wise earnest or

thoughtful, to inquire in the outset, on what you yourselves suppose

this class distinction has been founded in the past, and must be founded

in the future. The manner of the amusement, and the matter of the

teaching, which any of us can offer you, must depend wholly on our first

understanding from you, whether you think the distinction heretofore

drawn between working men and others, is truly or falsely founded. Do

you accept it as it stands? do you wish it to be modified? or do you

think the object of education is to efface it, and make us forget it for

ever?

Let me make myself more distinctly understood. We call this--you and

I--a 'Working Men's' Institute, and our college in London, a 'Working

Men's' College. Now, how do you consider that these several institutes

differ, or ought to differ, from 'idle men's' institutes and 'idle

men's' colleges? Or by what other word than 'idle' shall I distinguish

those whom the happiest and wisest of working men do not object to call

the 'Upper Classes?' Are there really upper classes,--are there lower?

How much should they always be elevated, how much always depressed? And,

gentlemen and ladies--I pray those of you who are here to forgive me the

offence there may be in what I am going to say. It is not _I_ who wish

to say it. Bitter voices say it; voices of battle and of famine through

all the world, which must be heard some day, whoever keeps silence.

Neither is it to _you_ specially that I say it. I am sure that most now

present know their duties of kindness, and fulfil them, better perhaps

than I do mine. But I speak to you as representing your whole class,

which errs, I know, chiefly by thoughtlessness, but not therefore the

less terribly. Wilful error is limited by the will, but what limit is

there to that of which we are unconscious?

Bear with me, therefore, while I turn to these workmen, and ask them,

also as representing a great multitude, what they think the 'upper

classes' are, and ought to be, in relation to them. Answer, you workmen

who are here, as you would among yourselves, frankly; and tell me how

you would have me call those classes. Am I to call them--would _you_

think me right in calling them--the idle classes? I think you would feel

somewhat uneasy, and as if I were not treating my subject honestly, or

speaking from my heart, if I went on under the supposition that all rich

people were idle. You would be both unjust and unwise if you allowed me

to say that;--not less unjust than the rich people who say that all the

poor are idle, and will never work if they can help it, or more than

they can help.

For indeed the fact is, that there are idle poor and idle rich; and

there are busy poor and busy rich. Many a beggar is as lazy as if he had

ten thousand a year; and many a man of large fortune is busier than his

errand-boy, and never would think of stopping in the street to play

marbles. So that, in a large view, the distinction between workers and

idlers, as between knaves and honest men, runs through the very heart

and innermost economies of men of all ranks and in all positions. There

is a working class--strong and happy--among both rich and poor; there is

an idle class--weak, wicked, and miserable--among both rich and poor.

And the worst of the misunderstandings arising between the two orders

come of the unlucky fact that the wise of one class habitually

contemplate the foolish of the other. If the busy rich people watched

and rebuked the idle rich people, all would be right; and if the busy

poor people watched and rebuked the idle poor people, all would be

right. But each class has a tendency to look for the faults of the

other. A hard-working man of property is particularly offended by an

idle beggar; and an orderly, but poor, workman is naturally intolerant

of the licentious luxury of the rich. And what is severe judgment in the

minds of the just men of either class, becomes fierce enmity in the

unjust--but among the unjust _only_. None but the dissolute among the

poor look upon the rich as their natural enemies, or desire to pillage

their houses and divide their property. None but the dissolute among the

rich speak in opprobrious terms of the vices and follies of the poor.

There is, then, no class distinction between idle and industrious

people; and I am going to-night to speak only of the industrious. The

idle people we will put out of our thoughts at once--they are mere

nuisances--what ought to be done with _them_, we'll talk of at another

time. But there are class distinctions, among the industrious

themselves; tremendous distinctions, which rise and fall to every

degree in the infinite thermometer of human pain and of human

power--distinctions of high and low, of lost and won, to the whole reach

of man's soul and body.

These separations we will study, and the laws of them, among energetic

men only, who, whether they work or whether they play, put their

strength into the work, and their strength into the game; being in the

full sense of the word 'industrious,' one way or another--with a

purpose, or without. And these distinctions are mainly four:

I. Between those who work, and those who play.

II. Between those who produce the means of life, and those who consume

them.

III. Between those who work with the head, and those who work with the

hand.

IV. Between those who work wisely, and who work foolishly.

For easier memory, let us say we are going to oppose, in our

examination.--

I. Work to play;

II. Production to consumption;

III. Head to Hand; and,

IV. Sense to nonsense.

I. First, then, of the distinction between the classes who work and the

classes who play. Of course we must agree upon a definition of these

terms,--work and play,--before going farther. Now, roughly, not with

vain subtlety of definition, but for plain use of the words, 'play' is

an exertion of body or mind, made to please ourselves, and with no

determined end; and work is a thing done because it ought to be done,

and with a determined end. You play, as you call it, at cricket, for

instance. That is as hard work as anything else; but it amuses you, and

it has no result but the amusement. If it were done as an ordered form

of exercise, for health's sake, it would become work directly. So, in

like manner, whatever we do to please ourselves, and only for the sake

of the pleasure, not for an ultimate object, is 'play,' the 'pleasing

thing,' not the useful thing. Play may be useful in a secondary sense

(nothing is indeed more useful or necessary); but the use of it depends

on its being spontaneous.

Let us, then, enquire together what sort of games the playing class in

England spend their lives in playing at.

The first of all English games is making money. That is an all-absorbing

game; and we knock each other down oftener in playing at that than at

foot-ball, or any other roughest sport; and it is absolutely without

purpose; no one who engages heartily in that game ever knows why. Ask a

great money-maker what he wants to do with his money--he never knows. He

doesn't make it to do anything with it. He gets it only that he _may_

get it. 'What will you make of what you have got?' you ask. 'Well, I'll

get more,' he says. Just as, at cricket, you get more runs. There's no

use in the runs, but to get more of them than other people is the game.

And there's no use in the money, but to have more of it than other

people is the game. So all that great foul city of London

there,--rattling, growling, smoking, stinking,--a ghastly heap of

fermenting brick-work, pouring out poison at every pore,--you fancy it

is a city of work? Not a street of it! It is a great city of play; very

nasty play, and very hard play, but still play. It is only Lord's

cricket ground without the turf,--a huge billiard table without the

cloth, and with pockets as deep as the bottomless pit; but mainly a

billiard table, after all.

Well, the first great English game is this playing at counters. It

differs from the rest in that it appears always to be producing money,

while every other game is expensive. But it does not always produce

money. There's a great difference between 'winning' money and 'making'

it; a great difference between getting it out of another man's pocket

into ours, or filling both. Collecting money is by no means the same

thing as making it; the tax-gatherer's house is not the Mint; and much

of the apparent gain (so called), in commerce, is only a form of

taxation on carriage or exchange.

Our next great English game, however, hunting and shooting, is costly

altogether; and how much we are fined for it annually in land, horses,

gamekeepers, and game laws, and all else that accompanies that

beautiful and special English game, I will not endeavour to count now:

but note only that, except for exercise, this is not merely a useless

game, but a deadly one, to all connected with it. For through

horse-racing, you get every form of what the higher classes everywhere

call 'Play,' in distinction from all other plays; that is--gambling; by

no means a beneficial or recreative game: and, through game-preserving,

you get also some curious laying out of ground; that beautiful

arrangement of dwelling-house for man and beast, by which we have grouse

and black-cock--so many brace to the acre, and men and women--so many

brace to the garret. I often wonder what the angelic builders and

surveyors--the angelic builders who build the 'many mansions' up above

there; and the angelic surveyors, who measured that four-square city

with their measuring reeds--I wonder what they think, or are supposed to

think, of the laying out of ground by this nation, which has set itself,

as it seems, literally to accomplish, word for word, or rather fact for

word, in the persons of those poor whom its Master left to represent

him, what that Master said of himself--that foxes and birds had homes,

but He none.

Then, next to the gentlemen's game of hunting, we must put the ladies'

game of dressing. It is not the cheapest of games. I saw a brooch at a

jeweller's in Bond Street a fortnight ago, not an inch wide, and without

any singular jewel in it, yet worth 3,000_l._ And I wish I could tell

you what this 'play' costs, altogether, in England, France, and Russia

annually. But it is a pretty game, and on certain terms, I like it; nay,

I don't see it played quite as much as I would fain have it. You ladies

like to lead the fashion:--by all means lead it--lead it thoroughly,

lead it far enough. Dress yourselves nicely, and dress everybody else

nicely. Lead the _fashions for the poor_ first; make _them_ look well,

and you yourselves will look, in ways of which you have now no

conception, all the better. The fashions you have set for some time

among your peasantry are not pretty ones; their doublets are too

irregularly slashed, and the wind blows too frankly through them.

Then there are other games, wild enough, as I could show you if I had

time.

There's playing at literature, and playing at art--very different, both,

from working at literature, or working at art, but I've no time to speak

of these. I pass to the greatest of all--the play of plays, the great

gentlemen's game, which ladies like them best to play at,--the game of

War. It is entrancingly pleasant to the imagination; the facts of it,

not always so pleasant. We dress for it, however, more finely than for

any other sport; and go out to it, not merely in scarlet, as to hunt,

but in scarlet and gold, and all manner of fine colours: of course we

could fight better in grey, and without feathers; but all nations have

agreed that it is good to be well dressed at this play. Then the bats

and balls are very costly; our English and French bats, with the balls

and wickets, even those which we don't make any use of, costing, I

suppose, now about fifteen millions of money annually to each nation;

all of which, you know is paid for by hard labourer's work in the furrow

and furnace. A costly game!--not to speak of its consequences; I will

say at present nothing of these. The mere immediate cost of all these

plays is what I want you to consider; they all cost deadly work

somewhere, as many of us know too well. The jewel-cutter, whose sight

fails over the diamonds; the weaver, whose arm fails over the web; the

iron-forger, whose breath fails before the furnace--_they_ know what

work is--they, who have all the work, and none of the play, except a

kind they have named for themselves down in the black north country,

where 'play' means being laid up by sickness. It is a pretty example for

philologists, of varying dialect, this change in the sense of the word

'play,' as used in the black country of Birmingham, and the red and

black country of Baden Baden. Yes, gentlemen, and gentlewomen, of

England, who think 'one moment unamused a misery, not made for feeble

man,' this is what you have brought the word 'play' to mean, in the

heart of merry England! You may have your fluting and piping; but there

are sad children sitting in the market-place, who indeed cannot say to

you, 'We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced:' but eternally

shall say to you, 'We have mourned unto you, and ye have not lamented.'

This, then, is the first distinction between the 'upper and lower'

classes. And this is one which is by no means necessary; which indeed

must, in process of good time, be by all honest men's consent abolished.

Men will be taught that an existence of play, sustained by the blood of

other creatures, is a good existence for gnats and sucking fish; but not

for men: that neither days, nor lives, can be made holy by doing nothing

in them: that the best prayer at the beginning of a day is that we may

not lose its moments; and the best grace before meat, the consciousness

that we have justly earned our dinner. And when we have this much of

plain Christianity preached to us again, and enough respect for what we

regard as inspiration, as not to think that 'Son, go work to-day in my

vineyard,' means 'Fool, go play to-day in my vineyard,' we shall all be

workers, in one way or another; and this much at least of the

distinction between 'upper' and 'lower' forgotten.

II. I pass then to our second distinction; between the rich and poor,

between Dives and Lazarus,--distinction which exists more sternly, I

suppose, in this day, than ever in the world, Pagan or Christian, till

now. I will put it sharply before you, to begin with, merely by reading

two paragraphs which I cut from two papers that lay on my breakfast

table on the same morning, the 25th of November, 1864. The piece about

the rich Russian at Paris is commonplace enough, and stupid besides (for

fifteen francs,--12_s._ 6_d._,--is nothing for a rich man to give for a

couple of peaches, out of season). Still, the two paragraphs printed on

the same day are worth putting side by side.

'Such a man is now here. He is a Russian, and, with your permission, we

will call him Count Teufelskine. In dress he is sublime; art is

considered in that toilet, the harmony of colour respected, the _chiar'

oscuro_ evident in well-selected contrast. In manners he is

dignified--nay, perhaps apathetic; nothing disturbs the placid serenity

of that calm exterior. One day our friend breakfasted _chez_ Bignon.

When the bill came he read, "Two peaches, 15f." He paid. "Peaches

scarce, I presume?" was his sole remark. "No, sir," replied the waiter,

"but Teufelskines are."' _Telegraph_, November 25, 1864.

'Yesterday morning, at eight o'clock, a woman, passing a dung heap in

the stone yard near the recently-erected alms-houses in Shadwell Gap,

High Street, Shadwell, called the attention of a Thames police-constable

to a man in a sitting position on the dung heap, and said she was afraid

he was dead. Her fears proved to be true. The wretched creature appeared

to have been dead several hours. He had perished of cold and wet, and

the rain had been beating down on him all night. The deceased was a

bone-picker. He was in the lowest stage of poverty, poorly clad, and

half-starved. The police had frequently driven him away from the stone

yard, between sunset and sunrise, and told him to go home. He selected a

most desolate spot for his wretched death. A penny and some bones were

found in his pockets. The deceased was between fifty and sixty years of

age. Inspector Roberts, of the K division, has given directions for

inquiries to be made at the lodging-houses respecting the deceased, to

ascertain his identity if possible.'--_Morning Post_, November 25, 1864.

You have the separation thus in brief compass; and I want you to take

notice of the 'a penny and some bones were found in his pockets,' and to

compare it with this third statement, from the _Telegraph_ of January

16th of this year:--

'Again, the dietary scale for adult and juvenile paupers was drawn up by

the most conspicuous political economists in England. It is low in

quantity, but it is sufficient to support nature; yet within ten years

of the passing of the Poor Law Act, we heard of the paupers in the

Andover Union gnawing the scraps of putrid flesh and sucking the marrow

from the bones of horses which they were employed to crush.'

You see my reason for thinking that our Lazarus of Christianity has some

advantage over the Jewish one. Jewish Lazarus expected, or at least

prayed, to be fed with crumbs from the rich man's table; but _our_

Lazarus is fed with crumbs from the dog's table.

Now this distinction between rich and poor rests on two bases. Within

its proper limits, on a basis which is lawful and everlastingly

necessary; beyond them, on a basis unlawful, and everlastingly

corrupting the framework of society. The lawful basis of wealth is, that

a man who works should be paid the fair value of his work; and that if

he does not choose to spend it to-day, he should have free leave to keep

it, and spend it to-morrow. Thus, an industrious man working daily, and

laying by daily, attains at last the possession of an accumulated sum of

wealth, to which he has absolute right. The idle person who will not

work, and the wasteful person who lays nothing by, at the end of the

same time will be doubly poor--poor in possession, and dissolute in

moral habit; and he will then naturally covet the money which the other

has saved. And if he is then allowed to attack the other, and rob him of

his well-earned wealth, there is no more any motive for saving, or any

reward for good conduct; and all society is thereupon dissolved, or

exists only in systems of rapine. Therefore the first necessity of

social life is the clearness of national conscience in enforcing the

law--that he should keep who has JUSTLY EARNED.

That law, I say, is the proper basis of distinction between rich and

poor. But there is also a false basis of distinction; namely, the power

held over those who earn wealth by those who levy or exact it. There

will be always a number of men who would fain set themselves to the

accumulation of wealth as the sole object of their lives. Necessarily,

that class of men is an uneducated class, inferior in intellect, and

more or less cowardly. It is physically impossible for a well-educated,

intellectual, or brave man to make money the chief object of his

thoughts; as physically impossible as it is for him to make his dinner

the principal object of them. All healthy people like their dinners, but

their dinner is not the main object of their lives. So all healthily

minded people like making money--ought to like it, and to enjoy the

sensation of winning it; but the main object of their life is not money;

it is something better than money. A good soldier, for instance, mainly

wishes to do his fighting well. He is glad of his pay--very properly

so, and justly grumbles when you keep him ten years without it--still,

his main notion of life is to win battles, not to be paid for winning

them. So of clergymen. They like pew-rents, and baptismal fees, of

course; but yet, if they are brave and well educated, the pew-rent is

not the sole object of their lives, and the baptismal fee is not the

sole purpose of the baptism; the clergyman's object is essentially to

baptize and preach, not to be paid for preaching. So of doctors. They

like fees no doubt,--ought to like them; yet if they are brave and well

educated, the entire object of their lives is not fees. They, on the

whole, desire to cure the sick; and,--if they are good doctors, and the

choice were fairly put to them,--would rather cure their patient, and

lose their fee, than kill him, and get it. And so with all other brave

and rightly trained men; their work is first, their fee second--very

important always, but still _second_. But in every nation, as I said,

there are a vast class who are ill-educated, cowardly, and more or less

stupid. And with these people, just as certainly the fee is first, and

the work second, as with brave people the work is first and the fee

second. And this is no small distinction. It is the whole distinction in

a man; distinction between life and death _in_ him, between heaven and

hell _for_ him. You cannot serve two masters;--you _must_ serve one or

other. If your work is first with you, and your fee second, work is your

master, and the lord of work, who is God. But if your fee is first with

you, and your work second, fee is your master, and the lord of fee, who

is the Devil; and not only the Devil, but the lowest of devils--the

'least erected fiend that fell.' So there you have it in brief terms;

Work first--you are God's servants; Fee first--you are the Fiend's. And

it makes a difference, now and ever, believe me, whether you serve Him

who has on His vesture and thigh written, 'King of Kings,' and whose

service is perfect freedom; or him on whose vesture and thigh the name

is written, 'Slave of Slaves,' and whose service is perfect slavery.

However, in every nation there are, and must always be, a certain number

of these Fiend's servants, who have it principally for the object of

their lives to make money. They are always, as I said, more or less

stupid, and cannot conceive of anything else so nice as money. Stupidity

is always the basis of the Judas bargain. We do great injustice to

Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above all common wickedness. He was

only a common money-lover, and, like all money-lovers, didn't understand

Christ;--couldn't make out the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. He

didn't want Him to be killed. He was horror-struck when he found that

Christ would be killed; threw his money away instantly, and hanged

himself. How many of our present money-seekers, think you, would have

the grace to hang themselves, whoever was killed? But Judas was a

common, selfish, muddle-headed, pilfering fellow; his hand always in the

bag of the poor, not caring for them. He didn't understand Christ;--yet

believed in Him, much more than most of us do; had seen Him do miracles,

thought He was quite strong enough to shift for Himself, and he, Judas,

might as well make his own little bye-perquisites out of the affair.

Christ would come out of it well enough, and he have his thirty pieces.

Now, that is the money-seeker's idea, all over the world. He doesn't

hate Christ, but can't understand Him--doesn't care for him--sees no

good in that benevolent business; makes his own little job out of it at

all events, come what will. And thus, out of every mass of men, you have

a certain number of bag-men--your 'fee-first' men, whose main object is

to make money. And they do make it--make it in all sorts of unfair ways,

chiefly by the weight and force of money itself, or what is called the

power of capital; that is to say, the power which money, once obtained,

has over the labour of the poor, so that the capitalist can take all its

produce to himself, except the labourer's food. That is the modern

Judas's way of 'carrying the bag,' and 'bearing what is put therein.'

Nay, but (it is asked) how is that an unfair advantage? Has not the man

who has worked for the money a right to use it as he best can? No; in

this respect, money is now exactly what mountain promontories over

public roads were in old times. The barons fought for them fairly:--the

strongest and cunningest got them; then fortified them, and made

everyone who passed below pay toll. Well, capital now is exactly what

crags were then. Men fight fairly (we will, at least, grant so much,

though it is more than we ought) for their money; but, once having got

it, the fortified millionaire can make everybody who passes below pay

toll to his million, and build another tower of his money castle. And I

can tell you, the poor vagrants by the roadside suffer now quite as much

from the bag-baron, as ever they did from the crag-baron. Bags and crags

have just the same result on rags. I have not time, however, to-night to

show you in how many ways the power of capital is unjust; but this one

great principle I have to assert--you will find it quite indisputably

true--that whenever money is the principal object of life with either

man or nation, it is both got ill, and spent ill; and does harm both in

the getting and spending; but when it is not the principal object, it

and all other things will be well got, and well spent. And here is the

test, with every man, of whether money is the principal object with him,

or not. If in mid-life he could pause and say, "Now I have enough to

live upon, I'll live upon it; and having well earned it, I will also

well spend it, and go out of the world poor, as I came into it," then

money is not principal with him; but if, having enough to live upon in

the manner befitting his character and rank, he still wants to make

more, and to _die_ rich, then money is the principal object with him,

and it becomes a curse to himself, and generally to those who spend it

after him. For you know it _must_ be spent some day; the only question

is whether the man who makes it shall spend it, or some one else. And

generally it is better for the maker to spend it, for he will know best

its value and use. This is the true law of life. And if a man does not

choose thus to spend his money, he must either hoard it or lend it, and

the worst thing he can generally do is to lend it; for borrowers are

nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money that all evil is

mainly done, and all unjust war protracted.

For observe what the real fact is, respecting loans to foreign military

governments, and how strange it is. If your little boy came to you to

ask for money to spend in squibs and crackers, you would think twice

before you gave it him; and you would have some idea that it was wasted,

when you saw it fly off in fireworks, even though he did no mischief

with it. But the Russian children, and Austrian children, come to you,

borrowing money, not to spend in innocent squibs, but in cartridges and

bayonets to attack you in India with, and to keep down all noble life in

Italy with, and to murder Polish women and children with; and _that_ you

will give at once, because they pay you interest for it. Now, in order

to pay you that interest, they must tax every working peasant in their

dominions; and on that work you live. You therefore at once rob the

Austrian peasant, assassinate or banish the Polish peasant, and you live

on the produce of the theft, and the bribe for the assassination! That

is the broad fact--that is the practical meaning of your foreign loans,

and of most large interest of money; and then you quarrel with Bishop

Colenso, forsooth, as if _he_ denied the Bible, and you believed it!

though, wretches as you are, every deliberate act of your lives is a new

defiance of its primary orders; and as if, for most of the rich men of

England at this moment, it were not indeed to be desired, as the best

thing at least for _them_, that the Bible should _not_ be true, since

against them these words are written in it: 'The rust of your gold and

silver shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh, as it

were fire.'

III. I pass now to our third condition of separation, between the men

who work with the hand, and those who work with the head.

And here we have at last an inevitable distinction. There _must_ be work

done by the arms, or none of us could live. There _must_ be work done by

the brains, or the life we get would not be worth having. And the same

men cannot do both. There is rough work to be done, and rough men must

do it; there is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it; and it

is physically impossible that one class should do, or divide, the work

of the other. And it is of no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact

by fine words, and to talk to the workman about the honourableness of

manual labour and the dignity of humanity. That is a grand old proverb

of Sancho Panza's, 'Fine words butter no parsnips;' and I can tell you

that, all over England just now, you workmen are buying a great deal too

much butter at that dairy. Rough work, honourable or not, takes the life

out of us; and the man who has been heaving clay out of a ditch all day,

or driving an express train against the north wind all night, or holding

a collier's helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirling white hot iron at

a furnace mouth, that man is not the same at the end of his day, or

night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything

comfortable about him, reading books, or classing butterflies, or

painting pictures. If it is any comfort to you to be told that the rough

work is the more honourable of the two, I should be sorry to take that

much of consolation from you; and in some sense I need not. The rough

work is at all events real, honest, and, generally, though not always,

useful; while the fine work is, a great deal of it, foolish and false as

well as fine, and therefore dishonourable; but when both kinds are

equally well and worthily done, the head's is the noble work, and the

hand's the ignoble; and of all hand work whatsoever, necessary for the

maintenance of life, those old words, 'In the sweat of thy face thou

shalt eat bread,' indicate that the inherent nature of it is one of

calamity; and that the ground, cursed for our sake, casts also some

shadow of degradation into our contest with its thorn and its thistle;

so that all nations have held their days honourable, or 'holy,' and

constituted them 'holydays' or 'holidays,' by making them days of rest;

and the promise, which, among all our distant hopes, seems to cast the

chief brightness over death, is that blessing of the dead who die in the

Lord, that 'they rest from their labours, and their works do follow

them.'

And thus the perpetual question and contest must arise, who is to do

this rough work? and how is the worker of it to be comforted, redeemed,

and rewarded? and what kind of play should he have, and what rest, in

this world, sometimes, as well as in the next? Well, my good working

friends, these questions will take a little time to answer yet. They

must be answered: all good men are occupied with them, and all honest

thinkers. There's grand head work doing about them; but much must be

discovered, and much attempted in vain, before anything decisive can be

told you. Only note these few particulars, which are already sure.

As to the distribution of the hard work. None of us, or very few of us,

do either hard or soft work because we think we ought; but because we

have chanced to fall into the way of it, and cannot help ourselves. Now,

nobody does anything well that they cannot help doing: work is only done

well when it is done with a will; and no man has a thoroughly sound will

unless he knows he is doing what he should, and is in his place. And,

depend upon it, all work must be done at last, not in a disorderly,

scrambling, doggish way, but in an ordered, soldierly, human way--a

lawful way. Men are enlisted for the labour that kills--the labour of

war: they are counted, trained, fed, dressed, and praised for that. Let

them be enlisted also for the labour that feeds: let them be counted,

trained, fed, dressed, praised for that. Teach the plough exercise as

carefully as you do the sword exercise, and let the officers of troops

of life be held as much gentlemen as the officers of troops of death;

and all is done: but neither this, nor any other right thing, can be

accomplished--you can't even see your way to it--unless, first of all,

both servant and master are resolved that, come what will of it, they

will do each other justice. People are perpetually squabbling about what

will be best to do, or easiest to do, or adviseablest to do, or

profitablest to do; but they never, so far as I hear them talk, ever ask

what it is _just_ to do. And it is the law of heaven that you shall not

be able to judge what is wise or easy, unless you are first resolved to

judge what is just, and to do it. That is the one thing constantly

reiterated by our Master--the order of all others that is given

oftenest--'Do justice and judgment.' That's your Bible order; that's the

'Service of God,' not praying nor psalm-singing. You are told, indeed,

to sing psalms when you are merry, and to pray when you need anything;

and, by the perversion of the Evil Spirit, we get to think that praying

and psalm-singing are 'service.' If a child finds itself in want of

anything, it runs in and asks its father for it--does it call that,

doing its father a service? If it begs for a toy or a piece of

cake--does it call that serving its father? That, with God, is prayer,

and He likes to hear it: He likes you to ask Him for cake when you want

it; but He doesn't call that 'serving Him.' Begging is not serving: God

likes mere beggars as little as you do--He likes honest servants, not

beggars. So when a child loves its father very much, and is very happy,

it may sing little songs about him; but it doesn't call that serving its

father; neither is singing songs about God, serving God. It is enjoying

ourselves, if it's anything; most probably it is nothing; but if it's

anything, it is serving ourselves, not God. And yet we are impudent

enough to call our beggings and chauntings 'Divine Service:' we say

'Divine service will be "performed"' (that's our word--the form of it

gone through) 'at eleven o'clock.' Alas!--unless we perform Divine

service in every willing act of our life, we never perform it at all.

The one Divine work--the one ordered sacrifice--is to do justice; and it

is the last we are ever inclined to do. Anything rather than that! As

much charity as you choose, but no justice. 'Nay,' you will say,

'charity is greater than justice.' Yes, it is greater; it is the summit

of justice--it is the temple of which justice is the foundation. But you

can't have the top without the bottom; you cannot build upon charity.

You must build upon justice, for this main reason, that you have not, at

first, charity to build with. It is the last reward of good work. Do

justice to your brother (you can do that, whether you love him or not),

and you will come to love him. But do injustice to him, because you

don't love him; and you will come to hate him. It is all very fine to

think you can build upon charity to begin with; but you will find all

you have got to begin with, begins at home, and is essentially love of

yourself. You well-to-do people, for instance, who are here to-night,

will go to 'Divine service' next Sunday, all nice and tidy, and your

little children will have their tight little Sunday boots on, and lovely

little Sunday feathers in their hats; and you'll think, complacently and

piously, how lovely they look! So they do: and you love them heartily

and you like sticking feathers in their hats. That's all right: that

_is_ charity; but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will come to

the poor little crossing-sweeper, got up also,--it, in its Sunday

dress,--the dirtiest rags it has,--that it may beg the better: we shall

give it a penny, and think how good we are. That's charity going abroad.

But what does Justice say, walking and watching near us? Christian

Justice has been strangely mute, and seemingly blind; and, if not blind,

decrepit, this many a day: she keeps her accounts still, however--quite

steadily--doing them at nights, carefully, with her bandage off, and

through acutest spectacles (the only modern scientific invention she

cares about). You must put your ear down ever so close to her lips to

hear her speak; and then you will start at what she first whispers, for

it will certainly be, 'Why shouldn't that little crossing-sweeper have a

feather on its head, as well as your own child?' Then you may ask

Justice, in an amazed manner, 'How she can possibly be so foolish as to

think children could sweep crossings with feathers on their heads?' Then

you stoop again, and Justice says--still in her dull, stupid way--'Then,

why don't you, every other Sunday, leave your child to sweep the

crossing, and take the little sweeper to church in a hat and feather?'

Mercy on us (you think), what will she say next? And you answer, of

course, that 'you don't, because every body ought to remain content in

the position in which Providence has placed them.' Ah, my friends,

that's the gist of the whole question. _Did_ Providence put them in that

position, or did _you_? You knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell

him to remain content in the 'position in which Providence has placed

him.' That's modern Christianity. You say--'_We_ did not knock him into

the ditch.' How do you know what you have done, or are doing? That's

just what we have all got to know, and what we shall never know, until

the question with us every morning, is, not how to do the gainful thing,

but how to do the just thing; nor until we are at least so far on the

way to being Christian, as to have understood that maxim of the poor

half-way Mahometan, 'One hour in the execution of justice is worth

seventy years of prayer.'

Supposing, then, we have it determined with appropriate justice, _who_

is to do the hand work, the next questions must be how the hand-workers

are to be paid, and how they are to be refreshed, and what play they are

to have. Now, the possible quantity of play depends on the possible

quantity of pay; and the quantity of pay is not a matter for

consideration to hand-workers only, but to all workers. Generally, good,

useful work, whether of the hand or head, is either ill-paid, or not

paid at all. I don't say it should be so, but it always is so. People,

as a rule, only pay for being amused or being cheated, not for being

served. Five thousand a year to your talker, and a shilling a day to

your fighter, digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head

work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. How much do you

think Homer got for his Iliad? or Dante for his Paradise? only bitter

bread and salt, and going up and down other people's stairs. In science,

the man who discovered the telescope, and first saw heaven, was paid

with a dungeon; the man who invented the microscope, and first saw

earth, died of starvation, driven from his home: it is indeed very clear

that God means all thoroughly good work and talk to be done for nothing.

Baruch, the scribe, did not get a penny a line for writing Jeremiah's

second roll for him, I fancy; and St. Stephen did not get bishop's pay

for that long sermon of his to the Pharisees; nothing but stones. For

indeed that is the world-father's proper payment. So surely as any of

the world's children work for the world's good, honestly, with head and

heart; and come to it, saying, 'Give us a little bread, just to keep the

life in us,' the world-father answers them, 'No, my children, not bread;

a stone, if you like, or as many as you need, to keep you quiet.' But

the hand-workers are not so ill off as all this comes to. The worst that

can happen to _you_ is to break stones; not be broken by them. And for

you there will come a time for better payment; some day, assuredly, more

pence will be paid to Peter the Fisherman, and fewer to Peter the Pope;

we shall pay people not quite so much for talking in Parliament and

doing nothing, as for holding their tongues out of it and doing

something; we shall pay our ploughman a little more and our lawyer a

little less, and so on: but, at least, we may even now take care that

whatever work is done shall be fully paid for; and the man who does it

paid for it, not somebody else; and that it shall be done in an orderly,

soldierly, well-guided, wholesome way, under good captains and

lieutenants of labour; and that it shall have its appointed times of

rest, and enough of them; and that in those times the play shall be

wholesome play, not in theatrical gardens, with tin flowers and gas

sunshine, and girls dancing because of their misery; but in true

gardens, with real flowers, and real sunshine, and children dancing

because of their gladness; so that truly the streets shall be full (the

'streets,' mind you, not the gutters) of children, playing in the midst

thereof. We may take care that working-men shall have at least as good

books to read as anybody else, when they've time to read them; and as

comfortable fire-sides to sit at as anybody else, when they've time to

sit at them. This, I think, can be managed for you, my working friends,

in the good time.

IV. I must go on, however, to our last head, concerning ourselves all,

as workers. What is wise work, and what is foolish work? What the

difference between sense and nonsense, in daily occupation?

Well, wise work is, briefly, work _with_ God. Foolish work is work

_against_ God. And work done with God, which He will help, may be

briefly described as 'Putting in Order'--that is, enforcing God's law of

order, spiritual and material, over men and things. The first thing you

have to do, essentially; the real 'good work' is, with respect to men,

to enforce justice, and with respect to things, to enforce tidiness, and

fruitfulness. And against these two great human deeds, justice and

order, there are perpetually two great demons contending,--the devil of

iniquity, or inequity, and the devil of disorder, or of death; for death

is only consummation of disorder. You have to fight these two fiends

daily. So far as you don't fight against the fiend of iniquity, you work

for him. You 'work iniquity,' and the judgment upon you, for all your

'Lord, Lord's,' will be 'Depart from me, ye that work iniquity.' And so

far as you do not resist the fiend of disorder, you work disorder, and

you yourself do the work of Death, which is sin, and has for its wages,

Death himself.

Observe then, all wise work is mainly threefold in character. It is

honest, useful, and cheerful.

I. It is HONEST. I hardly know anything more strange than that you

recognise honesty in play, and you do not in work. In your lightest

games, you have always some one to see what you call 'fair-play.' In

boxing, you must hit fair; in racing, start fair. Your English watchword

is fair-play, your English hatred, foul-play. Did it ever strike you

that you wanted another watchword also, fair-work, and another hatred

also, foul-work? Your prize-fighter has some honour in him yet; and so

have the men in the ring round him: they will judge him to lose the

match, by foul hitting. But your prize-merchant gains his match by foul

selling, and no one cries out against that. You drive a gambler out of

the gambling-room who loads dice, but you leave a tradesman in

flourishing business, who loads scales! For observe, all dishonest

dealing _is_ loading scales. What does it matter whether I get short

weight, adulterate substance, or dishonest fabric? The fault in the

fabric is incomparably the worst of the two. Give me short measure of

food, and I only lose by you; but give me adulterate food, and I die by

you. Here, then, is your chief duty, you workmen and tradesmen--to be

true to yourselves, and to us who would help you. We can do nothing for

you, nor you for yourselves, without honesty. Get that, you get all;

without that, your suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade measures,

your institutions of science, are all in vain. It is useless to put your

heads together, if you can't put your hearts together. Shoulder to

shoulder, right hand to right hand, among yourselves, and no wrong hand

to anybody else, and you'll win the world yet.

II. Then, secondly, wise work is USEFUL. No man minds, or ought to mind,

its being hard, if only it comes to something; but when it is hard, and

comes to nothing; when all our bees' business turns to spiders'; and

for honeycomb we have only resultant cobweb, blown away by the next

breeze--that is the cruel thing for the worker. Yet do we ever ask

ourselves, personally, or even nationally, whether our work is coming to

anything or not? We don't care to keep what has been nobly done; still

less do we care to do nobly what others would keep; and, least of all,

to make the work itself useful instead of deadly to the doer, so as to

use his life indeed, but not to waste it. Of all wastes, the greatest

waste that you can commit is the waste of labour. If you went down in

the morning into your dairy, and you found that your youngest child had

got down before you; and that he and the cat were at play together, and

that he had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat to lap up,

you would scold the child, and be sorry the milk was wasted. But if,

instead of wooden bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with

human life in them, and instead of the cat to play with--the devil to

play with; and you yourself the player; and instead of leaving that

golden bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the

dust yourself, and pour the human blood out on the ground for the fiend

to lick up--that is no waste! What! you perhaps think, 'to waste the

labour of men is not to kill them.' Is it not? I should like to know how

you could kill them more utterly--kill them with second deaths, seventh

deaths, hundredfold deaths? It is the slightest way of killing to stop a

man's breath. Nay, the hunger, and the cold, and the little whistling

bullets--our love-messengers between nation and nation--have brought

pleasant messages from us to many a man before now; orders of sweet

release, and leave at last to go where he will be most welcome and most

happy. At the worst you do but shorten his life, you do not corrupt his

life. But if you put him to base labour, if you bind his thoughts, if

you blind his eyes, if you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if

you stunt his body, and blast his soul, and at last leave him not so

much as to reap the poor fruit of his degradation, but gather that for

yourself, and dismiss him to the grave, when you have done with him,

having, so far as in you lay, made the walls of that grave everlasting

(though, indeed, I fancy the goodly bricks of some of our family vaults

will hold closer in the resurrection day than the sod over the

labourer's head), this you think is no waste, and no sin!

III. Then, lastly, wise work is CHEERFUL, as a child's work is. And now

I want you to take one thought home with you, and let it stay with you.

Everybody in this room has been taught to pray daily, 'Thy kingdom

come.' Now, if we hear a man swear in the streets, we think it very

wrong, and say he 'takes God's name in vain.' But there's a twenty times

worse way of taking His name in vain, than that. It is to _ask God for

what we don't want_. He doesn't like that sort of prayer. If you don't

want a thing, don't ask for it: such asking is the worst mockery of your

King you can mock Him with; the soldiers striking Him on the head with

the reed was nothing to that. If you do not wish for His kingdom, don't

pray for it. But if you do, you must do more than pray for it; you must

work for it. And, to work for it, you must know what it is: we have all

prayed for it many a day without thinking. Observe, it is a kingdom that

is to come to us; we are not to go to it. Also, it is not to be a

kingdom of the dead, but of the living. Also, it is not to come all at

once, but quietly; nobody knows how. 'The kingdom of God cometh not with

observation.' Also, it is not to come outside of us, but in the hearts

of us: 'the kingdom of God is within you.' And, being within us, it is

not a thing to be seen, but to be felt; and though it brings all

substance of good with it, it does not consist in that: 'the kingdom of

God is not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy

Ghost:' joy, that is to say, in the holy, healthful, and helpful Spirit.

Now, if we want to work for this kingdom, and to bring it, and enter

into it, there's just one condition to be first accepted. You must enter

it as children, or not at all; 'Whosoever will not receive it as a

little child shall not enter therein.' And again, 'Suffer little

children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the

kingdom of heaven.'

_Of such_, observe. Not of children themselves, but of such as

children. I believe most mothers who read that text think that all

heaven is to be full of babies. But that's not so. There will be

children there, but the hoary head is the crown. 'Length of days, and

long life and peace,' that is the blessing, not to die in babyhood.

Children die but for their parents sins; God means them to live, but He

can't let them always; then they have their earlier place in heaven: and

the little child of David, vainly prayed for;--the little child of

Jeroboam, killed by its mother's step on its own threshold,--they will

be there. But weary old David, and weary old Barzillai, having learned

children's lessons at last, will be there too: and the one question for

us all, young or old, is, have we learned our child's lesson? it is the

_character_ of children we want, and must gain at our peril; let us see,

briefly, in what it consists.

The first character of right childhood is that it is Modest. A well-bred

child does not think it can teach its parents, or that it knows

everything. It may think its father and mother know everything,--perhaps

that all grown-up people know everything; very certainly it is sure that

_it_ does not. And it is always asking questions, and wanting to know

more. Well, that is the first character of a good and wise man at his

work. To know that he knows very little;--to perceive that there are

many above him wiser than he; and to be always asking questions, wanting

to learn, not to teach. No one ever teaches well who wants to teach, or

governs well who wants to govern; it is an old saying (Plato's, but I

know not if his, first), and as wise as old.

Then, the second character of right childhood is to be Faithful.

Perceiving that its father knows best what is good for it, and having

found always, when it has tried its own way against his, that he was

right and it was wrong, a noble child trusts him at last wholly, gives

him its hand, and will walk blindfold with him, if he bids it. And that

is the true character of all good men also, as obedient workers, or

soldiers under captains. They must trust their captains;--they are bound

for their lives to choose none but those whom they _can_ trust. Then,

they are not always to be thinking that what seems strange to them, or

wrong in what they are desired to do, _is_ strange or wrong. They know

their captain: where he leads they must follow, what he bids, they must

do; and without this trust and faith, without this captainship and

soldiership, no great deed, no great salvation, is possible to man.

Among all the nations it is only when this faith is attained by them

that they become great: the Jew, the Greek, and the Mahometan, agree at

least in testifying to this. It was a deed of this absolute trust which

made Abraham the father of the faithful; it was the declaration of the

power of God as captain over all men, and the acceptance of a leader

appointed by Him as commander of the faithful, which laid the foundation

of whatever national power yet exists in the East; and the deed of the

Greeks, which has become the type of unselfish and noble soldiership to

all lands, and to all times, was commemorated, on the tomb of those who

gave their lives to do it, in the most pathetic, so far as I know, or

can feel, of all human utterances: 'Oh, stranger, go and tell our people

that we are lying here, having _obeyed_ their words.'

Then the third character of right childhood is to be Loving and

Generous. Give a little love to a child, and you get a great deal back.

It loves everything near it, when it is a right kind of child--would

hurt nothing, would give the best it has away, always, if you need

it--does not lay plans for getting everything in the house for itself,

and delights in helping people; you cannot please it so much as by

giving it a chance of being useful, in ever so little a way.

And because of all these characters, lastly, it is Cheerful. Putting its

trust in its father, it is careful for nothing--being full of love to

every creature, it is happy always, whether in its play or in its duty.

Well, that's the great worker's character also. Taking no thought for

the morrow; taking thought only for the duty of the day; trusting

somebody else to take care of to-morrow; knowing indeed what labour is,

but not what sorrow is; and always ready for play--beautiful play,--for

lovely human play is like the play of the Sun. There's a worker for you.

He, steady to his time, is set as a strong man to run his course, but

also, he _rejoiceth_ as a strong man to run his course. See how he

plays in the morning, with the mists below, and the clouds above, with a

ray here and a flash there, and a shower of jewels everywhere; that's

the Sun's play; and great human play is like his--all various--all full

of light and life, and tender, as the dew of the morning.

So then, you have the child's character in these four things--Humility,

Faith, Charity, and Cheerfulness. That's what you have got to be

converted to. 'Except ye be converted and become as little

children'--You hear much of conversion now-a-days; but people always

seem to think they have got to be made wretched by conversion,--to be

converted to long faces. No, friends, you have got to be converted to

short ones; you have to repent into childhood, to repent into delight,

and delightsomeness. You can't go into a conventicle but you'll hear

plenty of talk of backsliding. Backsliding, indeed! I can tell you, on

the ways most of us go, the faster we slide back the better. Slide back

into the cradle, if going on is into the grave--back, I tell you;

back--out of your long faces, and into your long clothes. It is among

children only, and as children only, that you will find medicine for

your healing and true wisdom for your teaching. There is poison in the

counsels of the _men_ of this world; the words they speak are all

bitterness, 'the poison of asps is under their lips,' but, 'the sucking

child shall play by the hole of the asp.' There is death in the looks of

men. 'Their eyes are privily set against the poor;' they are as the

uncharmable serpent, the cockatrice, which slew by seeing. But 'the

weaned child shall lay his hand on the cockatrice den.' There is death

in the steps of men: 'their feet are swift to shed blood; they have

compassed us in our steps like the lion that is greedy of his prey, and

the young lion lurking in secret places,' but, in that kingdom, the wolf

shall lie down with the lamb, and the fatling with the lion, and 'a

little child shall lead them.' There is death in the thoughts of men:

the world is one wide riddle to them, darker and darker as it draws to a

close; but the secret of it is known to the child, and the Lord of

heaven and earth is most to be thanked in that 'He has hidden these

things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto babes.'

Yes, and there is death--infinitude of death in the principalities and

powers of men. As far as the east is from the west, so far our sins

are--_not_ set from us, but multiplied around us: the Sun himself, think

you he _now_ 'rejoices' to run his course, when he plunges westward to

the horizon, so widely red, not with clouds, but blood? And it will be

red more widely yet. Whatever drought of the early and latter rain may

be, there will be none of that red rain. You fortify yourselves, you arm

yourselves against it in vain; the enemy and avenger will be upon you

also, unless you learn that it is not out of the mouths of the knitted

gun, or the smoothed rifle, but 'out of the mouths of babes and

sucklings' that the strength is ordained which shall 'still the enemy

and avenger.'

LECTURE II.

_TRAFFIC._

(_Delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford._)

My good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down here among your hills that

I might talk to you about this Exchange you are going to build: but

earnestly and seriously asking you to pardon me, I am going to do

nothing of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say very little,

about this same Exchange. I must talk of quite other things, though not

willingly;--I could not deserve your pardon, if when you invited me to

speak on one subject, I wilfully spoke on another. But I cannot speak,

to purpose, of anything about which I do not care; and most simply and

sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset, that I do _not_ care

about this Exchange of yours.

If, however, when you sent me your invitation, I had answered, 'I won't

come, I don't care about the Exchange of Bradford,' you would have been

justly offended with me, not knowing the reasons of so blunt a

carelessness. So I have come down, hoping that you will patiently let me

tell you why, on this, and many other such occasions, I now remain

silent, when formerly I should have caught at the opportunity of

speaking to a gracious audience.

In a word, then, I do not care about this Exchange,--because _you_

don't; and because you know perfectly well I cannot make you. Look at

the essential circumstances of the case, which you, as business men,

know perfectly well, though perhaps you think I forget them. You are

going to spend 30,000_l._, which to you, collectively, is nothing; the

buying a new coat is, as to the cost of it, a much more important matter

of consideration to me than building a new Exchange is to you. But you

think you may as well have the right thing for your money. You know

there are a great many odd styles of architecture about; you don't want

to do anything ridiculous; you hear of me, among others, as a

respectable architectural man-milliner: and you send for me, that I may

tell you the leading fashion; and what is, in our shops, for the moment,

the newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles.

Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you cannot have good

architecture merely by asking people's advice on occasion. All good

architecture is the expression of national life and character; and it is

produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, or desire for beauty.

And I want you to think a little of the deep significance of this word

'taste;' for no statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener

controverted than that good taste is essentially a moral quality. 'No,'

say many of my antagonists, 'taste is one thing, morality is another.

Tell us what is pretty; we shall be glad to know that; but preach no

sermons to us.'

Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of mine somewhat. Taste

is not only a part and an index of morality--it is the ONLY morality.

The first, and last, and closest trial question to any living creature

is, 'What do you like?' Tell me what you like, and I'll tell you what

you are. Go out into the street, and ask the first man or woman you

meet, what their 'taste' is, and if they answer candidly, you know them,

body and soul. 'You, my friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what

do _you_ like?' 'A pipe and a quartern of gin.' I know you. 'You, good

woman, with the quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you like?' 'A swept

hearth and a clean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, and a baby at

my breast.' Good, I know you also. 'You, little girl with the golden

hair and the soft eyes, what do you like?' 'My canary, and a run among

the wood hyacinths.' 'You, little boy with the dirty hands and the low

forehead, what do you like?' 'A shy at the sparrows, and a game at

pitch-farthing.' Good; we know them all now. What more need we ask?

'Nay,' perhaps you answer: 'we need rather to ask what these people and

children do, than what they like. If they _do_ right, it is no matter

that they like what is wrong; and if they _do_ wrong, it is no matter

that they like what is right. Doing is the great thing; and it does not

matter that the man likes drinking, so that he does not drink; nor that

the little girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will not learn

her lessons; nor that the little boy likes throwing stones at the

sparrows, if he goes to the Sunday school.' Indeed, for a short time,

and in a provisional sense, this is true. For if, resolutely, people do

what is right, in time they come to like doing it. But they only are in

a right moral state when they _have_ come to like doing it; and as long

as they don't like it, they are still in a vicious state. The man is not

in health of body who is always thirsting for the bottle in the

cupboard, though he bravely bears his thirst; but the man who heartily

enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, each in its proper

quantity and time. And the entire object of true education is to make

people not merely _do_ the right things, but _enjoy_ the right

things--not merely industrious, but to love industry--not merely

learned, but to love knowledge--not merely pure, but to love purity--not

merely just, but to hunger and thirst after justice.

But you may answer or think, 'Is the liking for outside ornaments,--for

pictures, or statues, or furniture, or architecture,--a moral quality?'

Yes, most surely, if a rightly set liking. Taste for _any_ pictures or

statues is not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is. Only here

again we have to define the word 'good.' I don't mean by 'good,'

clever--or learned--or difficult in the doing. Take a picture by

Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice: it is an entirely clever

picture; so clever that nothing in its kind has ever been done equal to

it; but it is also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an

expression of delight in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing,

and delight in that is an 'unmannered,' or 'immoral' quality. It is 'bad

taste' in the profoundest sense--it is the taste of the devils. On the

other hand, a picture of Titian's, or a Greek statue, or a Greek coin,

or a Turner landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual contemplation

of a good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral quality--it is

the taste of the angels. And all delight in art, and all love of it,

resolve themselves into simple love of that which deserves love. That

deserving is the quality which we call 'loveliness'--(we ought to have

an opposite word, hateliness, to be said of the things which deserve to

be hated); and it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we

love this or that; but it is just the vital function of all our being.

What we _like_ determines what we _are_, and is the sign of what we are;

and to teach taste is inevitably to form character. As I was thinking

over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the

title of a book standing open in a bookseller's window. It was--'On the

necessity of the diffusion of taste among all classes.' 'Ah,' I thought

to myself, 'my classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste,

where will your classes be? The man who likes what you like, belongs to

the same class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You may put him to

other work if you choose; but, by the condition you have brought him

into, he will dislike the other work as much as you would yourself. You

get hold of a scavenger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate

Calendar for literature, and "Pop goes the Weasel" for music. You think

you can make him like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your

lessons; but if you do, you have made a gentleman of him:--he won't like

to go back to his costermongering.'

And so completely and unexceptionally is this so, that, if I had time

to-night, I could show you that a nation cannot be affected by any vice,

or weakness, without expressing it, legibly, and for ever, either in bad

art, or by want of art; and that there is no national virtue, small or

great, which is not manifestly expressed in all the art which

circumstances enable the people possessing that virtue to produce. Take,

for instance, your great English virtue of enduring and patient courage.

You have at present in England only one art of any consequence--that is,

iron-working. You know thoroughly well how to cast and hammer iron. Now,

do you think in those masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to

melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the Infernos you have

created; do you think, on those iron plates, your courage and endurance

are not written for ever--not merely with an iron pen, but on iron

parchment? And take also your great English vice--European vice--vice of

all the world--vice of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven,

bearing with them yet the atmosphere of hell--the vice of jealousy,

which brings competition into your commerce, treachery into your

councils, and dishonour into your wars--that vice which has rendered for

you, and for your next neighbouring nation, the daily occupations of

existence no longer possible, but with the mail upon your breasts and

the sword loose in its sheath; so that, at last, you have realised for

all the multitudes of the two great peoples who lead the so-called

civilisation of the earth,--you have realised for them all, I say, in

person and in policy, what was once true only of the rough Border riders

of your Cheviot hills--

'They carved at the meal

With gloves of steel,

And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd;--

do you think that this national shame and dastardliness of heart are not

written as legibly on every rivet of your iron armour as the strength of

the right hands that forged it? Friends, I know not whether this thing

be the more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is quite unspeakably

both. Suppose, instead of being now sent for by you, I had been sent for

by some private gentleman, living in a suburban house, with his garden

separated only by a fruit-wall from his next door neighbour's; and he

had called me to consult with him on the furnishing of his drawing room.

I begin looking about me, and find the walls rather bare; I think such

and such a paper might be desirable--perhaps a little fresco here and

there on the ceiling--a damask curtain or so at the windows. 'Ah,' says

my employer, 'damask curtains, indeed! That's all very fine, but you

know I can't afford that kind of thing just now!' 'Yet the world credits

you with a splendid income!' 'Ah, yes,' says my friend, 'but do you

know, at present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all in steel-traps?'

'Steel-traps! for whom?' 'Why, for that fellow on the other side the

wall, you know: we're very good friends, capital friends; but we are

obliged to keep our traps set on both sides of the wall; we could not

possibly keep on friendly terms without them, and our spring guns. The

worst of it is, we are both clever fellows enough; and there's never a

day passes that we don't find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or

something; we spend about fifteen millions a year each in our traps,

take it all together; and I don't see how we're to do with less.' A

highly comic state of life for two private gentlemen! but for two

nations, it seems to me, not wholly comic? Bedlam would be comic,

perhaps, if there were only one madman in it; and your Christmas

pantomime is comic, when there is only one clown in it; but when the

whole world turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's

blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than comic, I think.

Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and willingly allow for that.

You don't know what to do with yourselves for a sensation: fox-hunting

and cricketing will not carry you through the whole of this unendurably

long mortal life: you liked pop-guns when you were schoolboys, and

rifles and Armstrongs are only the same things better made: but then the

worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, was not play to the

sparrows; and what is play to you now, is not play to the small birds of

State neither; and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking

shots at them, if I mistake not.

I must get back to the matter in hand, however. Believe me, without

farther instance, I could show you, in all time, that every nation's

vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the soldiership of early

Greece; the sensuality of late Italy; the visionary religion of Tuscany;

the splendid human energy and beauty of Venice. I have no time to do

this to-night (I have done it elsewhere before now); but I proceed to

apply the principle to ourselves in a more searching manner.

I notice that among all the new buildings that cover your once wild

hills, churches and schools are mixed in due, that is to say, in large

proportion, with your mills and mansions and I notice also that the

churches and schools are almost always Gothic, and the mansions and

mills are never Gothic. Will you allow me to ask precisely the meaning

of this? For, remember, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. When

Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as churches; and when

the Italian style superseded the Gothic, churches were Italian as well

as houses. If there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, there

is a Gothic belfry to the Hotel de Ville at Brussels; if Inigo Jones

builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an Italian St.

Paul's. But now you live under one school of architecture, and worship

under another. What do you mean by doing this? Am I to understand that

you are thinking of changing your architecture back to Gothic; and that

you treat your churches experimentally, because it does not matter what

mistakes you make in a church? Or am I to understand that you consider

Gothic a pre-eminently sacred and beautiful mode of building, which you

think, like the fine frankincense, should be mixed for the tabernacle

only, and reserved for your religious services? For if this be the

feeling, though it may seem at first as if it were graceful and

reverent, you will find that, at the root of the matter, it signifies

neither more nor less than that you have separated your religion from

your life.

For consider what a wide significance this fact has; and remember that

it is not you only, but all the people of England, who are behaving thus

just now.

You have all got into the habit of calling the church 'the house of

God.' I have seen, over the doors of many churches, the legend actually

carved, '_This_ is the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.'

Now, note where that legend comes from, and of what place it was first

spoken. A boy leaves his father's house to go on a long journey on foot,

to visit his uncle; he has to cross a wild hill-desert; just as if one

of your own boys had to cross the wolds of Westmoreland, to visit an

uncle at Carlisle. The second or third day your boy finds himself

somewhere between Hawes and Brough, in the midst of the moors, at

sunset. It is stony ground, and boggy; he cannot go one foot farther

that night. Down he lies, to sleep, on Wharnside, where best he may,

gathering a few of the stones together to put under his head;--so wild

the place is, he cannot get anything but stones. And there, lying under

the broad night, he has a dream; and he sees a ladder set up on the

earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven, and the angels of God are

ascending and descending upon it. And when he wakes out of his sleep, he

says, 'How dreadful is this place; surely, this is none other than the

house of God, and this is the gate of heaven.' This PLACE, observe; not

this church; not this city; not this stone, even, which he puts up for a

memorial--the piece of flint on which his head has lain. But this

_place_; this windy slope of Wharnside; this moorland hollow,

torrent-bitten, snow-blighted; this _any_ place where God lets down the

ladder. And how are you to know where that will be? or how are you to

determine where it may be, but by being ready for it always? Do you know

where the lightning is to fall next? You _do_ know that, partly; you can

guide the lightning; but you cannot guide the going forth of the Spirit,

which is that lightning when it shines from the east to the west.

But the perpetual and insolent warping of that strong verse to serve a

merely ecclesiastical purpose, is only one of the thousand instances in

which we sink back into gross Judaism. We call our churches 'temples.'

Now, you know, or ought to know, they are _not_ temples. They have never

had, never can have, anything whatever to do with temples. They are

'synagogues'--'gathering places'--where you gather yourselves together

as an assembly; and by not calling them so, you again miss the force of

another mighty text--'Thou, when thou prayest, shalt not be as the

hypocrites are; for they love to pray standing in the _churches_' [we

should translate it], 'that they may be seen of men. But thou, when thou

prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray

to thy Father,'--which is, not in chancel nor in aisle, but 'in

secret.'

Now, you feel, as I say this to you--I know you feel--as if I were

trying to take away the honour of your churches. Not so; I am trying to

prove to you the honour of your houses and your hills; I am trying to

show you--not that the Church is not sacred--but that the whole Earth

is. I would have you feel, what careless, what constant, what infectious

sin there is in all modes of thought, whereby, in calling your churches

only 'holy,' you call your hearths and homes profane; and have separated

yourselves from the heathen by casting all your household gods to the

ground, instead of recognising, in the place of their many and feeble

Lares, the presence of your One and Mighty Lord and Lar.

'But what has all this to do with our Exchange?' you ask me,

impatiently. My dear friends, it has just everything to do with it; on

these inner and great questions depend all the outer and little ones;

and if you have asked me down here to speak to you, because you had

before been interested in anything I have written, you must know that

all I have yet said about architecture was to show this. The book I

called 'The Seven Lamps' was to show that certain right states of temper

and moral feeling were the magic powers by which all good architecture,

without exception, had been produced. 'The Stones of Venice,' had, from

beginning to end, no other aim than to show that the Gothic architecture

of Venice had arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a state

of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue; and that its Renaissance

architecture had arisen out of, and in all its features indicated, a

state of concealed national infidelity, and of domestic corruption. And

now, you ask me what style is best to build in; and how can I answer,

knowing the meaning of the two styles, but by another question--do you

mean to build as Christians or as Infidels? And still more--do you mean

to build as honest Christians or as honest Infidels? as thoroughly and

confessedly either one or the other? You don't like to be asked such

rude questions. I cannot help it; they are of much more importance than

this Exchange business; and if they can be at once answered, the

Exchange business settles itself in a moment. But, before I press them

farther, I must ask leave to explain one point clearly. In all my past

work, my endeavour has been to show that good architecture is

essentially religious--the production of a faithful and virtuous, not of

an infidel and corrupted people. But in the course of doing this, I have

had also to show that good architecture is not _ecclesiastical_. People

are so apt to look upon religion as the business of the clergy, not

their own, that the moment they hear of anything depending on

'religion,' they think it must also have depended on the priesthood; and

I have had to take what place was to be occupied between these two

errors, and fight both, often with seeming contradiction. Good

architecture is the work of good and believing men; therefore, you say,

at least some people say, 'Good architecture must essentially have been

the work of the clergy, not of the laity.' No--a thousand times no; good

architecture has always been the work of the commonalty, _not_ of the

clergy. What, you say, those glorious cathedrals--the pride of

Europe--did their builders not form Gothic architecture? No; they

corrupted Gothic architecture. Gothic was formed in the baron's castle,

and the burgher's street. It was formed by the thoughts, and hands, and

powers of free citizens and soldier kings. By the monk it was used as an

instrument for the aid of his superstition; when that superstition

became a beautiful madness, and the best hearts of Europe vainly dreamed

and pined in the cloister, and vainly raged and perished in the

crusade--through that fury of perverted faith and wasted war, the Gothic

rose also to its loveliest, most fantastic, and, finally, most foolish

dreams; and, in those dreams, was lost.

I hope, now, that there is no risk of your misunderstanding me when I

come to the gist of what I want to say to-night--when I repeat, that

every great national architecture has been the result and exponent of a

great national religion. You can't have bits of it here, bits there--you

must have it everywhere, or nowhere. It is not the monopoly of a

clerical company--it is not the exponent of a theological dogma--it is

not the hieroglyphic writing of an initiated priesthood; it is the manly

language of a people inspired by resolute and common purpose, and

rendering resolute and common fidelity to the legible laws of an

undoubted God.

Now, there have as yet been three distinct schools of European

architecture. I say, European, because Asiatic and African architectures

belong so entirely to other races and climates, that there is no

question of them here; only, in passing, I will simply assure you that

whatever is good or great in Egypt, and Syria, and India, is just good

or great for the same reasons as the buildings on our side of the

Bosphorus. We Europeans, then, have had three great religions: the

Greek, which was the worship of the God of Wisdom and Power; the

Mediaeval, which was the Worship of the God of Judgment and Consolation;

the Renaissance, which was the worship of the God of Pride and Beauty;

these three we have had--they are past,--and now, at last, we English

have got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, about which I want to

ask you. But I must explain these three old ones first.

I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially worshipped the God of Wisdom; so

that whatever contended against their religion,--to the Jews a stumbling

block,--was, to the Greeks--_Foolishness_.

The first Greek idea of Deity was that expressed in the word, of which

we keep the remnant in our words '_Di_-urnal' and '_Di_-vine'--the god

of _Day_, Jupiter the revealer. Athena is his daughter, but especially

daughter of the Intellect, springing armed from the head. We are only

with the help of recent investigation beginning to penetrate the depth

of meaning couched under the Athenaic symbols: but I may note rapidly,

that her aegis, the mantle with the serpent fringes, in which she often,

in the best statues, is represented as folding up her left hand for

better guard, and the Gorgon on her shield, are both representative

mainly of the chilling horror and sadness (turning men to stone, as it

were,) of the outmost and superficial spheres of knowledge--that

knowledge which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the

heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the child. For out of

imperfect knowledge spring terror, dissension, danger, and disdain; but

from perfect knowledge, given by the full-revealed Athena, strength and

peace, in sign of which she is crowned with the olive spray, and bears

the resistless spear.

This, then, was the Greek conception of purest Deity, and every habit of

life, and every form of his art developed themselves from the seeking

this bright, serene, resistless wisdom; and setting himself, as a man,

to do things evermore rightly and strongly;[3] not with any ardent

affection or ultimate hope; but with a resolute and continent energy of

will, as knowing that for failure there was no consolation, and for sin

there was no remission. And the Greek architecture rose unerring,

bright, clearly defined, and self-contained.

Next followed in Europe the great Christian faith, which was essentially

the religion of Comfort. Its great doctrine is the remission of sins;

for which cause it happens, too often, in certain phases of

Christianity, that sin and sickness themselves are partly glorified, as

if, the more you had to be healed of, the more divine was the healing.

The practical result of this doctrine, in art, is a continual

contemplation of sin and disease, and of imaginary states of

purification from them; thus we have an architecture conceived in a

mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration, partly severe, partly

luxuriant, which will bend itself to every one of our needs, and every

one of our fancies, and be strong or weak with us, as we are strong or

weak ourselves. It is, of all architecture, the basest, when base people

build it--of all, the noblest, when built by the noble.

And now note that both these religions--Greek and Mediaeval--perished by

falsehood in their own main purpose. The Greek religion of Wisdom

perished in a false philosophy--'Oppositions of science, falsely so

called.' The Mediaeval religion of Consolation perished in false comfort;

in remission of sins given lyingly. It was the selling of absolution

that ended the Mediaeval faith; and I can tell you more, it is the

selling of absolution which, to the end of time, will mark false

Christianity. Pure Christianity gives her remission of sins only by

_ending_ them; but false Christianity gets her remission of sins by

_compounding for_ them. And there are many ways of compounding for them.

We English have beautiful little quiet ways of buying absolution,

whether in low Church or high, far more cunning than any of Tetzel's

trading.

Then, thirdly, there followed the religion of Pleasure, in which all

Europe gave itself to luxury, ending in death. First, _bals masques_ in

every saloon, and then guillotines in every square. And all these three

worships issue in vast temple building. Your Greek worshipped Wisdom,

and built you the Parthenon--the Virgin's temple. The Mediaeval

worshipped Consolation, and built you Virgin temples also--but to our

Lady of Salvation. Then the Revivalist worshipped beauty, of a sort, and

built you Versailles, and the Vatican. Now, lastly, will you tell me

what _we_ worship, and what _we_ build?

You know we are speaking always of the real, active, continual, national

worship; that by which men act while they live; not that which they talk

of when they die. Now, we have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we

pay tithes of property, and sevenths of time; but we have also a

practical and earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our

property and six-sevenths of our time. And we dispute a great deal about

the nominal religion; but we are all unanimous about this practical one,

of which I think you will admit that the ruling goddess may be best

generally described as the 'Goddess of Getting-on,' or 'Britannia of the

Market.' The Athenians had an 'Athena Agoraia,' or Minerva of the

Market: but she was a subordinate type of their goddess, while our

Britannia Agoraia is the principal type of ours. And all your great

architectural works, are, of course, built to her. It is long since you

built a great cathedral; and how you would laugh at me, if I proposed

building a cathedral on the top of one of these hills of yours, taking

it for an Acropolis! But your railroad mounds, prolonged masses of

Acropolis; your railroad stations, vaster than the Parthenon, and

innumerable; your chimneys, how much more mighty and costly than

cathedral spires! your harbour-piers; your warehouses; your

exchanges!--all these are built to your great Goddess of 'Getting-on;'

and she has formed, and will continue to form, your architecture, as

long as you worship her; and it is quite vain to ask me to tell you how

to build to _her_; you know far better than I.

There might indeed, on some theories, be a conceivably good architecture

for Exchanges--that is to say if there were any heroism in the fact or

deed of exchange, which might be typically carved on the outside of your

building. For, you know, all beautiful architecture must be adorned with

sculpture or painting; and for sculpture or painting, you must have a

subject. And hitherto it has been a received opinion among the nations

of the world that the only right subjects for either, were _heroisms_ of

some sort. Even on his pots and his flagons, the Greek put a Hercules

slaying lions, or an Apollo slaying serpents, or Bacchus slaying

melancholy giants, and earth-born despondencies. On his temples, the

Greek put contests of great warriors in founding states, or of gods with

evil spirits. On his houses and temples alike, the Christian put

carvings of angels conquering devils; or of hero-martyrs exchanging this

world for another; subject inappropriate, I think, to our manner of

exchange here. And the Master of Christians not only left his followers

without any orders as to the sculpture of affairs of exchange on the

outside of buildings, but gave some strong evidence of his dislike of

affairs of exchange within them. And yet there might surely be a heroism

in such affairs; and all commerce become a kind of selling of doves, not

impious. The wonder has always been great to me, that heroism has never

been supposed to be in anywise consistent with the practice of

supplying people with food, or clothes; but rather with that of

quartering oneself upon them for food, and stripping them of their

clothes. Spoiling of armour is an heroic deed in all ages; but the

selling of clothes, old, or new, has never taken any colour of

magnanimity. Yet one does not see why feeding the hungry and clothing

the naked should ever become base businesses, even when engaged in on a

large scale. If one could contrive to attach the notion of conquest to

them anyhow? so that, supposing there were anywhere an obstinate race,

who refused to be comforted, one might take some pride in giving them

compulsory comfort; and as it were, 'occupying a country' with one's

gifts, instead of one's armies? If one could only consider it as much a

victory to get a barren field sown, as to get an eared field stripped;

and contend who should build villages, instead of who should 'carry'

them. Are not all forms of heroism, conceivable in doing these

serviceable deeds? You doubt who is strongest? It might be ascertained

by push of spade, as well as push of sword. Who is wisest? There are

witty things to be thought of in planning other business than campaigns.

Who is bravest? There are always the elements to fight with, stronger

than men; and nearly as merciless. The only absolutely and

unapproachably heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be--that he

is paid little for it--and regularly: while you traffickers, and

exchangers, and others occupied in presumably benevolent business, like

to be paid much for it--and by chance. I never can make out how it is

that a knight-errant does not expect to be paid for his trouble, but a

pedlar-errant always does;--that people are willing to take hard knocks

for nothing, but never to sell ribands cheap;--that they are ready to go

on fervent crusades to recover the tomb of a buried God, never on any

travels to fulfil the orders of a living God;--that they will go

anywhere barefoot to preach their faith, but must be well bribed to

practise it, and are perfectly ready to give the Gospel gratis, but

never the loaves and fishes. If you chose to take the matter up on any

such soldierly principle, to do your commerce, and your feeding of

nations, for fixed salaries; and to be as particular about giving people

the best food, and the best cloth, as soldiers are about giving them the

best gunpowder, I could carve something for you on your exchange worth

looking at. But I can only at present suggest decorating its frieze with

pendant purses; and making its pillars broad at the base for the

sticking of bills. And in the innermost chambers of it there might be a

statue of Britannia of the Market, who may have, perhaps advisably, a

partridge for her crest, typical at once of her courage in fighting for

noble ideas; and of her interest in game; and round its neck the

inscription in golden letters, 'Perdix fovit quae non peperit.'[4] Then,

for her spear, she might have a weaver's beam; and on her shield,

instead of her Cross, the Milanese boar, semi-fleeced, with the town of

Gennesaret proper, in the field and the legend 'In the best market,' and

her corslet, of leather, folded over her heart in the shape of a purse,

with thirty slits in it for a piece of money to go in at, on each day of

the month. And I doubt not but that people would come to see your

exchange, and its goddess, with applause.

Nevertheless, I want to point out to you certain strange characters in

this goddess of yours. She differs from the great Greek and Mediaeval

deities essentially in two things--first, as to the continuance of her

presumed power; secondly, as to the extent of it.

1st, as to the Continuance.

The Greek Goddess of Wisdom gave continual increase of wisdom, as the

Christian Spirit of Comfort (or Comforter) continual increase of

comfort. There was no question, with these, of any limit or cessation of

function. But with your Agora Goddess, that is just the most important

question. Getting on--but where to? Gathering together--but how much? Do

you mean to gather always--never to spend? If so, I wish you joy of your

goddess, for I am just as well off as you, without the trouble of

worshipping her at all. But if you do not spend, somebody else

will--somebody else must. And it is because of this (among many other

such errors) that I have fearlessly declared your so-called science of

Political Economy to be no science; because, namely, it has omitted the

study of exactly the most important branch of the business--the study of

_spending_. For spend you must, and as much as you make, ultimately. You

gather corn:--will you bury England under a heap of grain; or will you,

when you have gathered, finally eat? You gather gold:--will you make

your house-roofs of it, or pave your streets with it? That is still one

way of spending it. But if you keep it, that you may get more, I'll give

you more; I'll give you all the gold you want--all you can imagine--if

you can tell me what you'll do with it. You shall have thousands of gold

pieces;--thousands of thousands--millions--mountains, of gold: where

will you keep them? Will you put an Olympus of silver upon a golden

Pelion--make Ossa like a wart? Do you think the rain and dew would then

come down to you, in the streams from such mountains, more blessedly

than they will down the mountains which God has made for you, of moss

and whinstone? But it is not gold that you want to gather! What is it?

greenbacks? No; not those neither. What is it then--is it ciphers after

a capital I? Cannot you practise writing ciphers, and write as many as

you want? Write ciphers for an hour every morning, in a big book, and

say every evening, I am worth all those noughts more than I was

yesterday. Won't that do? Well, what in the name of Plutus is it you

want? Not gold, not greenbacks, not ciphers after a capital I? You will

have to answer, after all, 'No; we want, somehow or other, money's

_worth_.' Well, what is that? Let your Goddess of Getting-on discover

it, and let her learn to stay therein.

II. But there is yet another question to be asked respecting this

Goddess of Getting-on. The first was of the continuance of her power;

the second is of its extent.

Pallas and the Madonna were supposed to be all the world's Pallas, and

all the world's Madonna. They could teach all men, and they could

comfort all men. But, look strictly into the nature of the power of your

Goddess of Getting-on; and you will find she is the Goddess--not of

everybody's getting on--but only of somebody's getting on. This is a

vital, or rather deathful, distinction. Examine it in your own ideal of

the state of national life which this Goddess is to evoke and maintain.

I asked you what it was, when I was last here;[5]--you have never told

me. Now, shall I try to tell you?

Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that it should be passed in a

pleasant undulating world, with iron and coal everywhere underneath it.

On each pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful mansion, with

two wings; and stables, and coach-houses; a moderately sized park; a

large garden and hot houses; and pleasant carriage drives through the

shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favoured votaries of the

Goddess; the English gentleman, with his gracious wife, and his

beautiful family; always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for the

wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daughters, and hunters for

the sons, and a shooting in the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of

the bank, is to be the mill; not less than a quarter of a mile long,

with a steam engine at each end, and two in the middle, and a chimney

three hundred feet high. In this mill are to be in constant employment

from eight hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, never strike,

always go to church on Sunday, and always express themselves in

respectful language.

Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, the kind of thing you

propose to yourselves? It is very pretty indeed seen from above; not at

all so pretty, seen from below. For, observe, while to one family this

deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting on, to a thousand families she is

the Goddess of _not_ Getting on. 'Nay,' you say, 'they have all their

chance.' Yes, so has every one in a lottery, but there must always be

the same number of blanks. 'Ah! but in a lottery it is not skill and

intelligence which take the lead, but blind chance.' What then! do you

think the old practice, that 'they should take who have the power, and

they should keep who can,' is less iniquitous, when the power has become

power of brains instead of fist? and that, though we may not take

advantage of a child's or a woman's weakness, we may of a man's

foolishness? 'Nay, but finally, work must be done, and some one must be

at the top, some one at the bottom.' Granted, my friends. Work must

always be, and captains of work must always be; and if you in the least

remember the tone of any of my writings, you must know that they are

thought unfit for this age, because they are always insisting on need of

government, and speaking with scorn of liberty. But I beg you to observe

that there is a wide difference between being captains or governors of

work, and taking the profits of it. It does not follow, because you are

general of an army, that you are to take all the treasure, or land, it

wins (if it fight for treasure or land); neither, because you are king

of a nation, that you are to consume all the profits of the nation's

work. Real kings, on the contrary, are known invariably by their doing

quite the reverse of this,--by their taking the least possible quantity

of the nation's work for themselves. There is no test of real kinghood

so infallible as that. Does the crowned creature live simply, bravely,

unostentatiously? probably he _is_ a King. Does he cover his body with

jewels, and his table with delicates? in all probability he is _not_ a

King. It is possible he may be, as Solomon was; but that is when the

nation shares his splendour with him. Solomon made gold, not only to be

in his own palace as stones, but to be in Jerusalem as stones. But even

so, for the most part, these splendid kinghoods expire in ruin, and only

the true kinghoods live, which are of royal labourers governing loyal

labourers; who, both leading rough lives, establish the true dynasties.

Conclusively you will find that because you are king of a nation, it

does not follow that you are to gather for yourself all the wealth of

that nation; neither, because you are king of a small part of the

nation, and lord over the means of its maintenance--over field, or mill,

or mine, are you to take all the produce of that piece of the foundation

of national existence for yourself.

You will tell me I need not preach against these things, for I cannot

mend them. No, good friends, I cannot; but you can, and you will; or

something else can and will. Do you think these phenomena are to stay

always in their present power or aspect? All history shows, on the

contrary, that to be the exact thing they never can do. Change _must_

come; but it is ours to determine whether change of growth, or change of

death. Shall the Parthenon be in ruins on its rock, and Bolton priory in

its meadow, but these mills of yours be the consummation of the

buildings of the earth, and their wheels be as the wheels of eternity?

Think you that 'men may come, and men may go,' but--mills--go on

forever? Not so; out of these, better or worse shall come; and it is for

you to choose which.

I know that none of this wrong is done with deliberate purpose. I know,

on the contrary, that you wish your workmen well; that you do much for

them, and that you desire to do more for them, if you saw your way to it

safely. I know that many of you have done, and are every day doing,

whatever you feel to be in your power; and that even all this wrong and

misery are brought about by a warped sense of duty, each of you striving

to do his best, without noticing that this best is essentially and

centrally the best for himself, not for others. And all this has come of

the spreading of that thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the

modern economist, that 'To do the best for yourself, is finally to do

the best for others.' Friends, our great Master said not so; and most

absolutely we shall find this world is not made so. Indeed, to do the

best for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves; but it will

not do to have our eyes fixed on that issue. The Pagans had got beyond

that. Hear what a Pagan says of this matter; hear what were, perhaps,

the last written words of Plato,--if not the last actually written (for

this we cannot know), yet assuredly in fact and power his parting

words--in which, endeavouring to give full crowning and harmonious close

to all his thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by the imagined

sentence of the Great Spirit, his strength and his heart fail him, and

the words cease, broken off for ever. It is the close of the dialogue

called 'Critias,' in which he describes, partly from real tradition,

partly in ideal dream, the early state of Athens; and the genesis, and

order, and religion, of the fabled isle of Atlantis; in which genesis he

conceives the same first perfection and final degeneracy of man, which

in our own Scriptural tradition is expressed by saying that the Sons of

God intermarried with the daughters of men, for he supposes the earliest

race to have been indeed the children of God; and to have corrupted

themselves, until 'their spot was not the spot of his children.' And

this, he says, was the end; that indeed 'through many generations, so

long as the God's nature in them yet was full, they were submissive to

the sacred laws, and carried themselves lovingly to all that had kindred

with them in divineness; for their uttermost spirit was faithful and

true, and in every wise great; so that, in all meekness of wisdom, they

dealt with each other, and took all the chances of life; and despising

all things except virtue, they cared little what happened day by day,

and _bore lightly the burden_ of gold and of possessions; for they saw

that, if only their common love and virtue increased, all these things

would be increased together with them; but to set their esteem and

ardent pursuit upon material possession would be to lose that first, and

their virtue and affection together with it. And by such reasoning, and

what of the divine nature remained in them, they gained all this

greatness of which we have already told, but when the God's part of them

faded and became extinct, being mixed again and again, and effaced by

the prevalent mortality; and the human nature at last exceeded, they

then became unable to endure the courses of fortune; and fell into

shapelessness of life, and baseness in the sight of him who could see,

having lost everything that was fairest of their honour; while to the

blind hearts which could not discern the true life, tending to

happiness, it seemed that they were then chiefly noble and happy, being

filled with all iniquity of inordinate possession and power. Whereupon,

the God of God's, whose Kinghood is in laws, beholding a once just

nation thus cast into misery, and desiring to lay such punishment upon

them as might make them repent into restraining, gathered together all

the gods into his dwelling-place, which from heaven's centre overlooks

whatever has part in creation; and having assembled them, he said'----

The rest is silence. So ended are the last words of the chief wisdom of

the heathen, spoken of this idol of riches; this idol of yours; this

golden image high by measureless cubits, set up where your green fields

of England are furnace-burnt into the likeness of the plain of Dura:

this idol, forbidden to us, first of all idols, by our own Master and

faith; forbidden to us also by every human lip that has ever, in any age

or people, been accounted of as able to speak according to the purposes

of God. Continue to make that forbidden deity your principal one, and

soon no more art, no more science, no more pleasure will be possible.

Catastrophe will come; or worse than catastrophe, slow mouldering and

withering into Hades. But if you can fix some conception of a true human

state of life to be striven for--life for all men as for yourselves--if

you can determine some honest and simple order of existence; following

those trodden ways of wisdom, which are pleasantness, and seeking her

quiet and withdrawn paths, which are peace;--then, and so sanctifying

wealth into 'commonwealth,' all your art, your literature, your daily

labours, your domestic affection, and citizen's duty, will join and

increase into one magnificent harmony. You will know then how to build,

well enough; you will build with stone well, but with flesh better;

temples not made with hands, but riveted of hearts; and that kind of

marble, crimson-veined, is indeed eternal.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] It is an error to suppose that the Greek worship, or seeking, was

chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, founded

on Forethought: the principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but

Design: and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian Virgin-worship are

both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom and Purity. Next to these

great deities rank, in power over the national mind, Dionysus and Ceres,

the givers of human strength and life: then, for heroic example,

Hercules. There is no Venus-worship among the Greek in the great times:

and the Muses are essentially teachers of Truth, and of its harmonies.

[4] Jerem. xvii. 11 (best in Septuagint and Vulgate). 'As the partridge,

fostering what she brought not forth, so he that getteth riches, not by

right shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be

a fool.'

[5] Two Paths, p. 98.

LECTURE III.

_WAR._

(_Delivered at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich._)

Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that many of you came unwillingly

to-night, and many in merely contemptuous curiosity, to hear what a

writer on painting could possibly say, or would venture to say,

respecting your great art of war. You may well think within yourselves,

that a painter might, perhaps without immodesty, lecture younger

painters upon painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor young

physicians upon medicine--least of all, it may seem to you, young

warriors upon war. And, indeed, when I was asked to address you, I

declined at first, and declined long; for I felt that you would not be

interested in my special business, and would certainly think there was

small need for me to come to teach you yours. Nay, I knew that there

ought to be _no_ such need, for the great veteran soldiers of England

are now men every way so thoughtful, so noble, and so good, that no

other teaching than their knightly example, and their few words of grave

and tried counsel should be either necessary for you, or even, without

assurance of due modesty in the offerer, endured by you.

But being asked, not once nor twice, I have not ventured persistently to

refuse; and I will try, in very few words, to lay before you some reason

why you should accept my excuse, and hear me patiently. You may imagine

that your work is wholly foreign to, and separate from mine. So far from

that, all the pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war; no great

art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation of soldiers. There is no

art among a shepherd people, if it remains at peace. There is no art

among an agricultural people, if it remains at peace. Commerce is barely

consistent with fine art; but cannot produce it. Manufacture not only is

unable to produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it

exist. There is no great art possible to a nation but that which is

based on battle.

Now, though I hope you love fighting for its own sake, you must, I

imagine, be surprised at my assertion that there is any such good fruit

of fighting. You supposed, probably, that your office was to defend the

works of peace, but certainly not to found them: nay, the common course

of war, you may have thought, was only to destroy them. And truly, I who

tell you this of the use of war, should have been the last of men to

tell you so, had I trusted my own experience only. Hear why: I have

given a considerable part of my life to the investigation of Venetian

painting and the result of that enquiry was my fixing upon one man as

the greatest of all Venetians, and therefore, as I believed, of all

painters whatsoever. I formed this faith, (whether right or wrong

matters at present nothing,) in the supremacy of the painter Tintoret,

under a roof covered with his pictures; and of those pictures, three of

the noblest were then in the form of shreds of ragged canvas, mixed up

with the laths of the roof, rent through by three Austrian shells. Now

it is not every lecturer who _could_ tell you that he had seen three of

his favourite pictures torn to rags by bombshells. And after such a

sight, it is not every lecturer who _would_ tell you that, nevertheless,

war was the foundation of all great art.

Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any careful comparison of the

states of great historic races at different periods. Merely to show you

what I mean, I will sketch for you, very briefly, the broad steps of the

advance of the best art of the world. The first dawn of it is in Egypt;

and the power of it is founded on the perpetual contemplation of death,

and of future judgment, by the mind of a nation of which the ruling

caste were priests, and the second, soldiers. The greatest works

produced by them are sculptures of their kings going out to battle, or

receiving the homage of conquered armies. And you must remember also,

as one of the great keys to the splendour of the Egyptian nation, that

the priests were not occupied in theology only. Their theology was the

basis of practical government and law, so that they were not so much

priests as religious judges, the office of Samuel, among the Jews, being

as nearly as possible correspondent to theirs.

All the rudiments of art then, and much more than the rudiments of all

science, are laid first by this great warrior-nation, which held in

contempt all mechanical trades, and in absolute hatred the peaceful life

of shepherds. From Egypt art passes directly into Greece, where all

poetry, and all painting, are nothing else than the description, praise,

or dramatic representation of war, or of the exercises which prepare for

it, in their connection with offices of religion. All Greek institutions

had first respect to war; and their conception of it, as one necessary

office of all human and divine life, is expressed simply by the images

of their guiding gods. Apollo is the god of all wisdom of the intellect;

he bears the arrow and the bow, before he bears the lyre. Again, Athena

is the goddess of all wisdom in conduct. It is by the helmet and the

shield, oftener than by the shuttle, that she is distinguished from

other deities.

There were, however, two great differences in principle between the

Greek and the Egyptian theories of policy. In Greece there was no

soldier caste; every citizen was necessarily a soldier. And, again,

while the Greeks rightly despised mechanical arts as much as the

Egyptians, they did not make the fatal mistake of despising agricultural

and pastoral life; but perfectly honoured both. These two conditions of

truer thought raise them quite into the highest rank of wise manhood

that has yet been reached; for all our great arts, and nearly all our

great thoughts, have been borrowed or derived from them. Take away from

us what they have given; and I hardly can imagine how low the modern

European would stand.

Now, you are to remember, in passing to the next phase of history, that

though you _must_ have war to produce art--you must also have much more

than war; namely, an art-instinct or genius in the people; and that,

though all the talent for painting in the world won't make painters of

you, unless you have a gift for fighting as well, you may have the gift

for fighting, and none for painting. Now, in the next great dynasty of

soldiers, the art-instinct is wholly wanting. I have not yet

investigated the Roman character enough to tell you the causes of this;

but I believe, paradoxical as it may seem to you, that, however truly

the Roman might say of himself that he was born of Mars, and suckled by

the wolf, he was nevertheless, at heart, more of a farmer than a

soldier. The exercises of war were with him practical, not poetical; his

poetry was in domestic life only, and the object of battle, 'pacis

imponere morem.' And the arts are extinguished in his hands, and do not

rise again, until, with Gothic chivalry, there comes back into the mind

of Europe a passionate delight in war itself, for the sake of war. And

then, with the romantic knighthood which can imagine no other noble

employment,--under the fighting kings of France, England, and Spain; and

under the fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy, art is born

again, and rises to her height in the great valleys of Lombardy and

Tuscany, through which there flows not a single stream, from all their

Alps or Apennines, that did not once run dark red from battle: and it

reaches its culminating glory in the city which gave to history the most

intense type of soldiership yet seen among men;--the city whose armies

were led in their assault by their king, led through it to victory by

their king, and so led, though that king of theirs was blind, and in the

extremity of his age.

And from this time forward, as peace is established or extended in

Europe, the arts decline. They reach an unparalleled pitch of

costliness, but lose their life, enlist themselves at last on the side

of luxury and various corruption, and, among wholly tranquil nations,

wither utterly away; remaining only in partial practice among races who,

like the French and us, have still the minds, though we cannot all live

the lives, of soldiers.

'It may be so,' I can suppose that a philanthropist might exclaim.

'Perish then the arts, if they can flourish only at such a cost. What

worth is there in toys of canvas and stone if compared to the joy and

peace of artless domestic life?' And the answer is--truly, in

themselves, none. But as expressions of the highest state of the human

spirit, their worth is infinite. As results they may be worthless, but,

as signs, they are above price. For it is an assured truth that,

whenever the faculties of men are at their fulness, they _must_ express

themselves by art; and to say that a state is without such expression,

is to say that it is sunk from its proper level of manly nature. So

that, when I tell you that war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean

also that it is the foundation of all the high virtues and faculties of

men.

It was very strange to me to discover this; and very dreadful--but I saw

it to be quite an undeniable fact. The common notion that peace and the

virtues of civil life flourished together, I found, to be wholly

untenable. Peace and the _vices_ of civil life only flourish together.

We talk of peace and learning, and of peace and plenty, and of peace and

civilisation; but I found that those were not the words which the Muse

of History coupled together: that on her lips, the words were--peace and

sensuality, peace and selfishness, peace and corruption, peace and

death. I found, in brief, that all great nations learned their truth of

word, and strength of thought, in war; that they were nourished in war,

and wasted by peace; taught by war, and deceived by peace; trained by

war, and betrayed by peace;--in a word, that they were born in war, and

expired in peace.

Yet now note carefully, in the second place, it is not _all_ war of

which this can be said--nor all dragon's teeth, which, sown, will start

up into men. It is not the ravage of a barbarian wolf-flock, as under

Genseric or Suwarrow; nor the habitual restlessness and rapine of

mountaineers, as on the old borders of Scotland; nor the occasional

struggle of a strong peaceful nation for its life, as in the wars of the

Swiss with Austria; nor the contest of merely ambitious nations for

extent of power, as in the wars of France under Napoleon, or the just

terminated war in America. None of these forms of war build anything but

tombs. But the creative or foundational war is that in which the

natural restlessness and love of contest among men are disciplined, by

consent, into modes of beautiful--though it may be fatal--play: in which

the natural ambition and love of power of men are disciplined into the

aggressive conquest of surrounding evil: and in which the natural

instincts of self-defence are sanctified by the nobleness of the

institutions, and purity of the households, which they are appointed to

defend. To such war as this all men are born; in such war as this any

man may happily die; and forth from such war as this have arisen

throughout the extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and

virtues of humanity.

I shall therefore divide the war of which I would speak to you into

three heads. War for exercise or play; war for dominion; and, war for

defence.

I. And first, of war for exercise or play. I speak of it primarily in

this light, because, through all past history, manly war has been more

an exercise than anything else, among the classes who cause, and

proclaim it. It is not a game to the conscript, or the pressed sailor;

but neither of these are the causers of it. To the governor who

determines that war shall be, and to the youths who voluntarily adopt it

as their profession, it has always been a grand pastime; and chiefly

pursued because they had nothing else to do. And this is true without

any exception. No king whose mind was fully occupied with the

development of the inner resources of his kingdom, or with any other

sufficing subject of thought, ever entered into war but on compulsion.

No youth who was earnestly busy with any peaceful subject of study, or

set on any serviceable course of action, ever voluntarily became a

soldier. Occupy him early, and wisely, in agriculture or business, in

science or in literature, and he will never think of war otherwise than

as a calamity. But leave him idle; and, the more brave and active and

capable he is by nature, the more he will thirst for some appointed

field for action; and find, in the passion and peril of battle, the only

satisfying fulfilment of his unoccupied being. And from the earliest

incipient civilisation until now, the population of the earth divides

itself, when you look at it widely, into two races; one of workers, and

the other of players--one tilling the ground, manufacturing, building,

and otherwise providing for the necessities of life;--the other part

proudly idle, and continually therefore needing recreation, in which

they use the productive and laborious orders partly as their cattle, and

partly as their puppets or pieces in the game of death.

Now, remember, whatever virtue or goodliness there may be in this game

of war, rightly played, there is none when you thus play it with a

multitude of small human pawns.

If you, the gentlemen of this or any other kingdom, choose to make your

pastime of contest, do so, and welcome; but set not up these unhappy

peasant-pieces upon the green fielded board. If the wager is to be of

death, lay it on your own heads, not theirs. A goodly struggle in the

Olympic dust, though it be the dust of the grave, the gods will look

upon, and be with you in; but they will not be with you, if you sit on

the sides of the amphitheatre, whose steps are the mountains of earth,

whose arena its valleys, to urge your peasant millions into gladiatorial

war. You also, you tender and delicate women, for whom, and by whose

command, all true battle has been, and must ever be; you would perhaps

shrink now, though you need not, from the thought of sitting as queens

above set lists where the jousting game might be mortal. How much more,

then, ought you to shrink from the thought of sitting above a theatre

pit in which even a few condemned slaves were slaying each other only

for your delight! And do you _not_ shrink from the _fact_ of sitting

above a theatre pit, where,--not condemned slaves,--but the best and

bravest of the poor sons of your people, slay each other,--not man to

man,--as the coupled gladiators; but race to race, in duel of

generations? You would tell me, perhaps, that you do not sit to see

this; and it is indeed true, that the women of Europe--those who have no

heart-interests of their own at peril in the contest--draw the curtains

of their boxes, and muffle the openings; so that from the pit of the

circus of slaughter there may reach them only at intervals a half-heard

cry and a murmur as of the wind's sighing, when myriads of souls expire.

They shut out the death-cries; and are happy, and talk wittily among

themselves. That is the utter literal fact of what our ladies do in

their pleasant lives.

Nay, you might answer, speaking for them--'We do not let these wars come

to pass for our play, nor by our carelessness; we cannot help them. How

can any final quarrel of nations be settled otherwise than by war?' I

cannot now delay, to tell you how political quarrels might be otherwise

settled. But grant that they cannot. Grant that no law of reason can be

understood by nations; no law of justice submitted to by them: and that,

while questions of a few acres, and of petty cash, can be determined by

truth and equity, the questions which are to issue in the perishing or

saving of kingdoms can be determined only by the truth of the sword, and

the equity of the rifle. Grant this, and even then, judge if it will

always be necessary for you to put your quarrel into the hearts of your

poor, and sign your treaties with peasants' blood. You would be ashamed

to do this in your own private position and power. Why should you not be

ashamed also to do it in public place and power? If you quarrel with

your neighbour, and the quarrel be indeterminable by law, and mortal,

you and he do not send your footmen to Battersea fields to fight it out;

nor do you set fire to his tenants' cottages, nor spoil their goods. You

fight out your quarrel yourselves, and at your own danger, if at all.

And you do not think it materially affects the arbitrement that one of

you has a larger household than the other; so that, if the servants or

tenants were brought into the field with their masters, the issue of the

contest could not be doubtful? You either refuse the private duel, or

you practise it under laws of honour, not of physical force; that so it

may be, in a manner, justly concluded. Now the just or unjust conclusion

of the private feud is of little moment, while the just or unjust

conclusion of the public feud is of eternal moment: and yet, in this

public quarrel, you take your servants' sons from their arms to fight

for it, and your servants' food from their lips to support it; and the

black seals on the parchment of your treaties of peace are the deserted

hearth and the fruitless field. There is a ghastly ludicrousness in

this, as there is mostly in these wide and universal crimes. Hear the

statement of the very fact of it in the most literal words of the

greatest of our English thinkers:--

'What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the

net-purport and upshot of war? To my own knowledge, for

example, there dwell and toil, in the British village of

Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls. From these, by

certain "natural enemies" of the French, there are

successively selected, during the French war, say thirty

able-bodied men. Dumdrudge, at her own expense, has suckled

and nursed them; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow,

fed them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, so

that one can weave, another build, another hammer, and the

weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois.

Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they are

selected; all dressed in red; and shipped away, at the

public charges, some two thousand miles, or say only to the

south of Spain; and fed there till wanted.

'And now to that same spot in the south of Spain are thirty

similar French artisans, from a French Dumdrudge, in like

manner wending; till at length, after infinite effort, the

two parties come into actual juxtaposition; and Thirty

stands fronting Thirty, each with a gun in his hand.

'Straightway the word "Fire!" is given, and they blow the

souls out of one another, and in place of sixty brisk useful

craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcases, which it must

bury, and anon shed tears for. Had these men any quarrel?

Busy as the devil is, not the smallest! They lived far

enough apart; were the entirest strangers; nay, in so wide a

universe, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, some

mutual helpfulness between them. How then? Simpleton! their

governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one

another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads

shoot.' (Sartor Resartus.)

Positively, then, gentlemen, the game of battle must not, and shall not,

ultimately be played this way. But should it be played any way? Should

it, if not by your servants, be practised by yourselves? I think, yes.

Both history and human instinct seem alike to say, yes. All healthy men

like fighting, and like the sense of danger; all brave women like to

hear of their fighting, and of their facing danger. This is a fixed

instinct in the fine race of them; and I cannot help fancying that fair

fight is the best play for them, and that a tournament was a better game

than a steeple-chase. The time may perhaps come in France as well as

here, for universal hurdle-races and cricketing: but I do not think

universal 'crickets' will bring out the best qualities of the nobles of

either country. I use, in such question, the test which I have adopted,

of the connection of war with other arts; and I reflect how, as a

sculptor, I should feel, if I were asked to design a monument for a dead

knight, in Westminster abbey, with a carving of a bat at one end, and a

ball at the other. It may be the remains in me only of savage Gothic

prejudice; but I had rather carve it with a shield at one end, and a

sword at the other. And this, observe, with no reference whatever to any

story of duty done, or cause defended. Assume the knight merely to have

ridden out occasionally to fight his neighbour for exercise; assume him

even a soldier of fortune, and to have gained his bread, and filled his

purse, at the sword's point. Still, I feel as if it were, somehow,

grander and worthier in him to have made his bread by sword play than

any other play; had rather he had made it by thrusting than by

batting;--much more, than by betting. Much rather that he should ride

war horses, than back race horses; and--I say it sternly and

deliberately--much rather would I have him slay his neighbour, than

cheat him.

But remember, so far as this may be true, the game of war is only that

in which the _full personal power of the human creature_ is brought out

in management of its weapons. And this for three reasons:--

First, the great justification of this game is that it truly, when well

played, determines _who is the best man_;--who is the highest bred, the

most self-denying, the most fearless, the coolest of nerve, the swiftest

of eye and hand. You cannot test these qualities wholly, unless there is

a clear possibility of the struggle's ending in death. It is only in the

fronting of that condition that the full trial of the man, soul and

body, comes out. You may go to your game of wickets, or of hurdles, or

of cards, and any knavery that is in you may stay unchallenged all the

while. But if the play may be ended at any moment by a lance-thrust, a

man will probably make up his accounts a little before he enters it.

Whatever is rotten and evil in him will weaken his hand more in holding

a sword hilt, than in balancing a billiard cue; and on the whole, the

habit of living lightly hearted, in daily presence of death, always has

had, and must have, a tendency both to the making and testing of honest

men. But for the final testing, observe, you must make the issue of

battle strictly dependent on fineness of frame, and firmness of hand.

You must not make it the question, which of the combatants has the

longest gun, or which has got behind the biggest tree, or which has the

wind in his face, or which has gunpowder made by the best chemist, or

iron smelted with the best coal, or the angriest mob at his back. Decide

your battle, whether of nations, or individuals, on _those_ terms;--and

you have only multiplied confusion, and added slaughter to iniquity. But

decide your battle by pure trial which has the strongest arm, and

steadiest heart,--and you have gone far to decide a great many matters

besides, and to decide them rightly.

And the other reasons for this mode of decision of cause, are the

diminution both of the material destructiveness, or cost, and of the

physical distress of war. For you must not think that in speaking to you

in this (as you may imagine), fantastic praise of battle, I have

overlooked the conditions weighing against me. I pray all of you, who

have not read, to read with the most earnest attention, Mr. Helps's two

essays on War and Government, in the first volume of the last series of

'Friends in Council.' Everything that can be urged against war is there

simply, exhaustively, and most graphically stated. And all, there urged,

is true. But the two great counts of evil alleged against war by that

most thoughtful writer, hold only against modern war. If you have to

take away masses of men from all industrial employment,--to feed them by

the labour of others,--to move them and provide them with destructive

machines, varied daily in national rivalship of inventive cost; if you

have to ravage the country which you attack,--to destroy for a score of

future years, its roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbours;--and

if, finally, having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds of

thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to pieces with jagged

shot, and leave the fragments of living creatures countlessly beyond all

help of surgery, to starve and parch, through days of torture, down into

clots of clay--what book of accounts shall record the cost of your

work;--What book of judgment sentence the guilt of it?

That, I say, is _modern_ war,--scientific war,--chemical and mechanic

war, worse even than the savage's poisoned arrow. And yet you will tell

me, perhaps, that any other war than this is impossible now. It may be

so; the progress of science cannot, perhaps, be otherwise registered

than by new facilities of destruction; and the brotherly love of our

enlarging Christianity be only proved by multiplication of murder. Yet

hear, for a moment, what war was, in Pagan and ignorant days;--what war

might yet be, if we could extinguish our science in darkness, and join

the heathen's practice to the Christian's theory. I read you this from a

book which probably most of you know well, and all ought to

know--Muller's 'Dorians;'--but I have put the points I wish you to

remember in closer connection than in his text.

'The chief characteristic of the warriors of Sparta was great composure

and subdued strength; the violence [Greek: lyssa] of Aristodemus and

Isadas being considered as deserving rather of blame than praise; and

these qualities in general distinguished the Greeks from the northern

Barbarians, whose boldness always consisted in noise and tumult. For the

same reason the Spartans _sacrificed to the Muses_ before an action;

these goddesses being expected to produce regularity and order in

battle; as they _sacrificed on the same occasion in Crete to the god of

love_, as the confirmer of mutual esteem and shame. Every man put on a

crown, when the band of flute-players gave the signal for attack; all

the shields of the line glittered with their high polish, and mingled

their splendour with the dark red of the purple mantles, which were

meant both to adorn the combatant, and to conceal the blood of the

wounded; to fall well and decorously being an incentive the more to the

most heroic valour. The conduct of the Spartans in battle denotes a high

and noble disposition, which rejected all the extremes of brutal rage.

The pursuit of the enemy ceased when the victory was completed; and

after the signal for retreat had been given, all hostilities ceased. The

spoiling of arms, at least during the battle, was also interdicted; and

the consecration of the spoils of slain enemies to the gods, as, in

general, all rejoicings for victory, were considered as ill-omened.

Such was the war of the greatest soldiers who prayed to heathen gods.

What Christian war is, preached by Christian ministers, let any one tell

you, who saw the sacred crowning, and heard the sacred flute-playing,

and was inspired and sanctified by the divinely-measured and musical

language, of any North American regiment preparing for its charge. And

what is the relative cost of life in pagan and Christian wars, let this

one fact tell you:--the Spartans won the decisive battle of Corinth with

the loss of eight men; the victors at indecisive Gettysburg confess to

the loss of 30,000.

II. I pass now to our second order of war, the commonest among men, that

undertaken in desire of dominion. And let me ask you to think for a few

moments what the real meaning of this desire of dominion is--first in

the minds of kings--then in that of nations.

Now, mind you this first,--that I speak either about kings, or masses of

men, with a fixed conviction that human nature is a noble and beautiful

thing; not a foul nor a base thing. All the sin of men I esteem as their

disease, not their nature; as a folly which may be prevented, not a

necessity which must be accepted. And my wonder, even when things are at

their worst, is always at the height which this human nature can attain.

Thinking it high, I find it always a higher thing than I thought it;

while those who think it low, find it, and will find it, always lower

than they thought it: the fact being, that it is infinite, and capable

of infinite height and infinite fall; but the nature of it--and here is

the faith which I would have you hold with me--the _nature_ of it is in

the nobleness, not in the catastrophe.

Take the faith in its utmost terms. When the captain of the 'London'

shook hands with his mate, saying 'God speed you! I will go down with my

passengers,' _that_ I believe to be 'human nature.' He does not do it

from any religious motive--from any hope of reward, or any fear of

punishment; he does it because he is a man. But when a mother, living

among the fair fields of merry England, gives her two-year-old child to

be suffocated under a mattress in her inner room, while the said mother

waits and talks outside; _that_ I believe to be _not_ human nature. You

have the two extremes there, shortly. And you, men, and mothers, who are

here face to face with me to-night, I call upon you to say which of

these is human, and which inhuman--which 'natural' and which

'unnatural?' Choose your creed at once, I beseech you:--choose it with

unshaken choice--choose it forever. Will you take, for foundation of act

and hope, the faith that this man was such as God made him, or that this

woman was such as God made her? Which of them has failed from their

nature--from their present, possible, actual nature;--not their nature

of long ago, but their nature of now? Which has betrayed it--falsified

it? Did the guardian who died in his trust, die inhumanly, and as a

fool; and did the murderess of her child fulfil the law of her being?

Choose, I say; infinitude of choices hang upon this. You have had false

prophets among you--for centuries you have had them--solemnly warned

against them though you were; false prophets, who have told you that all

men are nothing but fiends or wolves, half beast, half devil. Believe

that and indeed you may sink to that. But refuse that, and have faith

that God 'made you upright,' though _you_ have sought out many

inventions; so, you will strive daily to become more what your Maker

meant and means you to be, and daily gives you also the power to be--and

you will cling more and more to the nobleness and virtue that is in you,

saying, 'My righteousness I hold fast, and will not let it go.'

I have put this to you as a choice, as if you might hold either of these

creeds you liked best. But there is in reality no choice for you; the

facts being quite easily ascertainable. You have no business to _think_

about this matter, or to choose in it. The broad fact is, that a human

creature of the highest race, and most perfect as a human thing, is

invariably both kind and true; and that as you lower the race, you get

cruelty and falseness, as you get deformity: and this so steadily and

assuredly, that the two great words which, in their first use, meant

only perfection of race, have come, by consequence of the invariable

connection of virtue with the fine human nature, both to signify

benevolence of disposition. The word generous, and the word gentle,

both, in their origin, meant only 'of pure race,' but because charity

and tenderness are inseparable from this purity of blood, the words

which once stood only for pride, now stand as synonyms for virtue.

Now, this being the true power of our inherent humanity, and seeing that

all the aim of education should be to develop this;--and seeing also

what magnificent self sacrifice the higher classes of men are capable

of, for any cause that they understand or feel,--it is wholly

inconceivable to me how well-educated princes, who ought to be of all

gentlemen the gentlest, and of all nobles the most generous, and whose

title of royalty means only their function of doing every man

'_right_'--how these, I say, throughout history, should so rarely

pronounce themselves on the side of the poor and of justice, but

continually maintain themselves and their own interests by oppression of

the poor, and by wresting of justice; and how this should be accepted as

so natural, that the word loyalty, which means faithfulness to law, is

used as if it were only the duty of a people to be loyal to their king,

and not the duty of a king to be infinitely more loyal to his people.

How comes it to pass that a captain will die with his passengers, and

lean over the gunwale to give the parting boat its course; but that a

king will not usually die with, much less _for_, his passengers,--thinks

it rather incumbent on his passengers, in any number, to die for _him_?

Think, I beseech you, of the wonder of this. The sea captain, not

captain by divine right, but only by company's appointment;--not a man

of royal descent, but only a plebeian who can steer;--not with the eyes

of the world upon him, but with feeble chance, depending on one poor

boat, of his name being ever heard above the wash of the fatal

waves;--not with the cause of a nation resting on his act, but helpless

to save so much as a child from among the lost crowd with whom he

resolves to be lost,--yet goes down quietly to his grave, rather than

break his faith to these few emigrants. But your captain by divine

right,--your captain with the hues of a hundred shields of kings upon

his breast,--your captain whose every deed, brave or base, will be

illuminated or branded for ever before unescapable eyes of men,--your

captain whose every thought and act are beneficent, or fatal, from

sunrising to setting, blessing as the sunshine, or shadowing as the

night,--this captain, as you find him in history, for the most part

thinks only how he may tax his passengers, and sit at most ease in his

state cabin!

For observe, if there had been indeed in the hearts of the rulers of

great multitudes of men any such conception of work for the good of

those under their command, as there is in the good and thoughtful

masters of any small company of men, not only wars for the sake of mere

increase of power could never take place, but our idea of power itself

would be entirely altered. Do you suppose that to think and act even for

a million of men, to hear their complaints, watch their weaknesses,

restrain their vices, make laws for them, lead them, day by day, to

purer life, is not enough for one man's work? If any of us were absolute

lord only of a district of a hundred miles square, and were resolved on

doing our utmost for it; making it feed as large a number of people as

possible; making every clod productive, and every rock defensive, and

every human being happy; should we not have enough on our hands think

you? But if the ruler has any other aim than this; if, careless of the

result of his interference, he desire only the authority to interfere;

and, regardless of what is ill-done or well-done, cares only that it

shall be done at his bidding,--if he would rather do two hundred miles'

space of mischief, than one hundred miles' space of good, of course he

will try to add to his territory; and to add inimitably. But does he add

to his power? Do you call it power in a child, if he is allowed to play

with the wheels and bands of some vast engine, pleased with their murmur

and whirl, till his unwise touch, wandering where it ought not, scatters

beam and wheel into ruin? Yet what machine is so vast, so incognisable,

as the working of the mind of a nation what child's touch so wanton, as

the word of a selfish king? And yet, how long have we allowed the

historian to speak of the extent of the calamity a man causes, as a just

ground for his pride; and to extol him as the greatest prince, who is

only the centre of the widest error. Follow out this thought by

yourselves; and you will find that all power, properly so called, is

wise and benevolent. There may be capacity in a drifting fire-ship to

destroy a fleet; there may be venom enough in a dead body to infect a

nation:--but which of you, the most ambitious, would desire a drifting

kinghood, robed in consuming fire, or a poison-dipped sceptre whose

touch was mortal? There is no true potency, remember, but that of help;

nor true ambition, but ambition to save.

And then, observe farther, this true power, the power of saving, depends

neither on multitude of men, nor on extent of territory. We are

continually assuming that nations become strong according to their

numbers. They indeed become so, if those numbers can be made of one

mind; but how are you sure you can stay them in one mind, and keep them

from having north and south minds? Grant them unanimous, how know you

they will be unanimous in right? If they are unanimous in wrong, the

more they are, essentially the weaker they are. Or, suppose that they

can neither be of one mind, nor of two minds, but can only be of _no_

mind? Suppose they are a more helpless mob; tottering into precipitant

catastrophe, like a waggon load of stones when the wheel comes off.

Dangerous enough for their neighbours, certainly, but not 'powerful.'

Neither does strength depend on extent of territory, any more than upon

number of population. Take up your maps when you go home this

evening,--put the cluster of British Isles beside the mass of South

America; and then consider whether any race of men need care how much

ground they stand upon. The strength is in the men, and in their unity

and virtue, not in their standing room: a little group of wise hearts is

better than a wilderness full of fools; and only that nation gains true

territory, which gains itself.

And now for the brief practical outcome of all this. Remember, no

government is ultimately strong, but in proportion to its kindness and

justice; and that a nation does not strengthen, by merely multiplying

and diffusing itself. We have not strengthened as yet, by multiplying

into America. Nay, even when it has not to encounter the separating

conditions of emigration, a nation need not boast itself of multiplying

on its own ground, if it multiplies only as flies or locusts do, with

the god of flies for its god. It multiplies its strength only by

increasing as one great family, in perfect fellowship and brotherhood.

And lastly, it does not strengthen itself by seizing dominion over races

whom it cannot benefit. Austria is not strengthened, but weakened, by

her grasp of Lombardy; and whatever apparent increase of majesty and of

wealth may have accrued to us from the possession of India, whether

these prove to us ultimately power or weakness, depends wholly on the

degree in which our influence on the native race shall be benevolent and

exalting. But, as it is at their own peril that any race extends their

dominion in mere desire of power, so it is at their own still greater

peril, that they refuse to undertake aggressive war, according to their

force, whenever they are assured that their authority would be helpful

and protective. Nor need you listen to any sophistical objection of the

impossibility of knowing when a people's help is needed, or when not.

Make your national conscience clean, and your national eyes will soon be

clear. No man who is truly ready to take part in a noble quarrel will

ever stand long in doubt by whom, or in what cause, his aid is needed. I

hold it my duty to make no political statement of any special bearing in

this presence; but I tell you broadly and boldly, that, within these

last ten years, we English have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs:

we have fought where we should not have fought, for gain; and we have

been passive where we should not have been passive, for fear. I tell you

that the principle of non-intervention, as now preached among us, is as

selfish and cruel as the worst frenzy of conquest, and differs from it

only by being not only malignant, but dastardly.

I know, however, that my opinions on this subject differ too widely from

those ordinarily held, to be any farther intruded upon you; and

therefore I pass lastly to examine the conditions of the third kind of

noble war;--war waged simply for defence of the country in which we were

born, and for the maintenance and execution of her laws, by whomsoever

threatened or defied. It is to this duty that I suppose most men

entering the army consider themselves in reality to be bound, and I want

you now to reflect what the laws of mere defence are; and what the

soldier's duty, as now understood, or supposed to be understood. You

have solemnly devoted yourselves to be English soldiers, for the

guardianship of England. I want you to feel what this vow of yours

indeed means, or is gradually coming to mean. You take it upon you,

first, while you are sentimental schoolboys; you go into your military

convent, or barracks, just as a girl goes into her convent while she is

a sentimental schoolgirl; neither of you then know what you are about,

though both the good soldiers and good nuns make the best of it

afterwards. You don't understand perhaps why I call you 'sentimental'

schoolboys, when you go into the army? Because, on the whole, it is love

of adventure, of excitement, of fine dress and of the pride of fame, all

which are sentimental motives, which chiefly make a boy like going into

the Guards better than into a counting-house. You fancy, perhaps, that

there is a severe sense of duty mixed with these peacocky motives? And

in the best of you, there is; but do not think that it is principal. If

you cared to do your duty to your country in a prosaic and unsentimental

way, depend upon it, there is now truer duty to be done in raising

harvests than in burning them; more in building houses, than in shelling

them--more in winning money by your own work, wherewith to help men,

than in taxing other people's work, for money wherewith to slay men;

more duty finally, in honest and unselfish living than in honest and

unselfish dying, though that seems to your boys' eyes the bravest. So

far then, as for your own honour, and the honour of your families, you

choose brave death in a red coat before brave life in a black one, you

are sentimental; and now see what this passionate vow of yours comes

to. For a little while you ride, and you hunt tigers or savages, you

shoot, and are shot; you are happy, and proud, always, and honoured and

wept if you die; and you are satisfied with your life, and with the end

of it; believing, on the whole, that good rather than harm of it comes

to others, and much pleasure to you. But as the sense of duty enters

into your forming minds, the vow takes another aspect. You find that you

have put yourselves into the hand of your country as a weapon. You have

vowed to strike, when she bids you, and to stay scabbarded when she bids

you; all that you need answer for is, that you fail not in her grasp.

And there is goodness in this, and greatness, if you can trust the hand

and heart of the Britomart who has braced you to her side, and are

assured that when she leaves you sheathed in darkness, there is no need

for your flash to the sun. But remember, good and noble as this state

may be, it is a state of slavery. There are different kinds of slaves

and different masters. Some slaves are scourged to their work by whips,

others are scourged to it by restlessness or ambition. It does not

matter what the whip is; it is none the less a whip, because you have

cut thongs for it out of your own souls: the fact, so far, of slavery,

is in being driven to your work without thought, at another's bidding.

Again, some slaves are bought with money, and others with praise. It

matters not what the purchase-money is. The distinguishing sign of

slavery is to have a price, and be bought for it. Again, it matters not

what kind of work you are set on; some slaves are set to forced

diggings, others to forced marches; some dig furrows, others

field-works, and others graves. Some press the juice of reeds, and some

the juice of vines, and some the blood of men. The fact of the captivity

is the same whatever work we are set upon, though the fruits of the toil

may be different. But, remember, in thus vowing ourselves to be the

slaves of any master, it ought to be some subject of forethought with

us, what work he is likely to put us upon. You may think that the whole

duty of a soldier is to be passive, that it is the country you have left

behind who is to command, and you have only to obey. But are you sure

that you have left _all_ your country behind, or that the part of it you

have so left is indeed the best part of it? Suppose--and, remember, it

is quite conceivable--that you yourselves are indeed the best part of

England; that you who have become the slaves, ought to have been the

masters; and that those who are the masters, ought to have been the

slaves! If it is a noble and whole-hearted England, whose bidding you

are bound to do, it is well; but if you are yourselves the best of her

heart, and the England you have left be but a half-hearted England, how

say you of your obedience? You were too proud to become shopkeepers: are

you satisfied then to become the servants of shopkeepers? You were too

proud to become merchants or farmers yourselves: will you have merchants

or farmers then for your field marshals? You had no gifts of special

grace for Exeter Hall: will you have some gifted person thereat for your

commander-in-chief, to judge of your work, and reward it? You imagine

yourselves to be the army of England: how if you should find yourselves,

at last, only the police of her manufacturing towns, and the beadles of

her little Bethels?

It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, for ever; but what I want you

to see, and to be assured of, is, that the ideal of soldiership is not

mere passive obedience and bravery; that, so far from this, no country

is in a healthy state which has separated, even in a small degree, her

civil from her military power. All states of the world, however great,

fall at once when they use mercenary armies; and although it is a less

instant form of error (because involving no national taint of

cowardice), it is yet an error no less ultimately fatal--it is the error

especially of modern times, of which we cannot yet know all the

calamitous consequences--to take away the best blood and strength of the

nation, all the soul-substance of it that is brave, and careless of

reward, and scornful of pain, and faithful in trust; and to cast that

into steel, and make a mere sword of it; taking away its voice and will;

but to keep the worst part of the nation--whatever is cowardly,

avaricious, sensual, and faithless--and to give to this the voice, to

this the authority, to this the chief privilege, where there is least

capacity, of thought. The fulfilment of your vow for the defence of

England will by no means consist in carrying out such a system. You are

not true soldiers, if you only mean to stand at a shop door, to protect

shop-boys who are cheating inside. A soldier's vow to his country is

that he will die for the guardianship of her domestic virtue, of her

righteous laws, and of her anyway challenged or endangered honour. A

state without virtue, without laws, and without honour, he is bound

_not_ to defend; nay, bound to redress by his own right hand that which

he sees to be base in her. So sternly is this the law of Nature and

life, that a nation once utterly corrupt can only be redeemed by a

military despotism--never by talking, nor by its free effort. And the

health of any state consists simply in this: that in it, those who are

wisest shall also be strongest; its rulers should be also its soldiers;

or, rather, by force of intellect more than of sword, its soldiers its

rulers. Whatever the hold which the aristocracy of England has on the

heart of England, in that they are still always in front of her battles,

this hold will not be enough, unless they are also in front of her

thoughts. And truly her thoughts need good captain's leading now, if

ever! Do you know what, by this beautiful division of labour (her brave

men fighting, and her cowards thinking), she has come at last to think?

Here is a bit of paper in my hand,[6] a good one too, and an honest one;

quite representative of the best common public thought of England at

this moment; and it is holding forth in one of its leaders upon our

'social welfare,'--upon our 'vivid life'--upon the 'political supremacy

of Great Britain.' And what do you think all these are owing to? To what

our English sires have done for us, and taught us, age after age? No:

not to that. To our honesty of heart, or coolness of head, or steadiness

of will? No: not to these. To our thinkers, or our statesmen, or our

poets, or our captains, or our martyrs, or the patient labour of our

poor? No: not to these; or at least not to these in any chief measure.

Nay, says the journal, 'more than any agency, it is the cheapness and

abundance of our coal which have made us what we are.' If it be so, then

'ashes to ashes' be our epitaph! and the sooner the better. I tell you,

gentlemen of England, if ever you would have your country breathe the

pure breath of heaven again, and receive again a soul into her body,

instead of rotting into a carcase, blown up in the belly with carbonic

acid (and great _that_ way), you must think, and feel, for your England,

as well as fight for her: you must teach her that all the true greatness

she ever had, or ever can have, she won while her fields were green and

her faces ruddy;--that greatness is still possible for Englishmen, even

though the ground be not hollow under their feet, nor the sky black over

their heads;--and that, when the day comes for their country to lay her

honours in the dust, her crest will not rise from it more loftily

because it is dust of coal. Gentlemen, I tell you, solemnly, that the

day is coming when the soldiers of England must be her tutors and the

captains of her army, captains also of her mind.

And now, remember, you soldier youths, who are thus in all ways the hope

of your country; or must be, if she have any hope: remember that your

fitness for all future trust depends upon what you are now. No good

soldier in his old age was ever careless or indolent in his youth. Many

a giddy and thoughtless boy has become a good bishop, or a good lawyer,

or a good merchant; but no such an one ever became a good general. I

challenge you, in all history, to find a record of a good soldier who

was not grave and earnest in his youth. And, in general, I have no

patience with people who talk about 'the thoughtlessness of youth'

indulgently, I had infinitely rather hear of thoughtless old age, and

the indulgence due to _that_. When a man has done his work, and nothing

can any way be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil,

and jest with his fate, if he will; but what excuse can you find for

wilfulness of thought, at the very time when every crisis of future

fortune hangs on your decisions? A youth thoughtless! when all the

happiness of his home for ever depends on the chances, or the passions,

of an hour! A youth thoughtless! when the career of all his days depends

on the opportunity of a moment! A youth thoughtless! when his every act

is a foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a

fountain of life or death! Be thoughtless in _any_ after years, rather

than now--though, indeed, there is only one place where a man may be

nobly thoughtless,--his deathbed. No thinking should ever be left to be

done there.

Having, then, resolved that you will not waste recklessly, but earnestly

use, these early days of yours, remember that all the duties of her

children to England may be summed in two words--industry, and honour. I

say first, industry, for it is in this that soldier youth are especially

tempted to fail. Yet surely, there is no reason because your life may

possibly or probably be shorter than other men's, that you should

therefore waste more recklessly the portion of it that is granted you;

neither do the duties of your profession, which require you to keep your

bodies strong, in any wise involve the keeping of your minds weak. So

far from that, the experience, the hardship, and the activity of a

soldier's life render his powers of thought more accurate than those of

other men; and while, for others, all knowledge is often little more

than a means of amusement, there is no form of science which a soldier

may not at some time or other find bearing on business of life and

death. A young mathematician may be excused for langour in studying

curves to be described only with a pencil; but not in tracing those

which are to be described with a rocket. Your knowledge of a wholesome

herb may involve the feeding of an army; and acquaintance with an

obscure point of geography, the success of a campaign. Never waste an

instant's time, therefore; the sin of idleness is a thousandfold greater

in you than in other youths; for the fates of those who will one day be

under your command hang upon your knowledge; lost moments now will be

lost lives then, and every instant which you carelessly take for play,

you buy with blood. But there is one way of wasting time, of all the

vilest, because it wastes, not time only, but the interest and energy of

your minds. Of all the ungentlemanly habits into which you can fall, the

vilest is betting, or interesting yourselves in the issues of betting.

It unites nearly every condition of folly and vice; you concentrate your

interest upon a matter of chance, instead of upon a subject of true

knowledge; and you back opinions which you have no grounds for forming,

merely because they are your own. All the insolence of egotism is in

this; and so far as the love of excitement is complicated with the hope

of winning money, you turn yourselves into the basest sort of

tradesmen--those who live by speculation. Were there no other ground for

industry, this would be a sufficient one; that it protected you from the

temptation to so scandalous a vice. Work faithfully, and you will put

yourselves in possession of a glorious and enlarging happiness: not such

as can be won by the speed of a horse, or marred by the obliquity of a

ball.

First, then, by industry you must fulfil your vow to your country; but

all industry and earnestness will be useless unless they are consecrated

by your resolution to be in all things men of honour; not honour in the

common sense only, but in the highest. Rest on the force of the two main

words in the great verse, _integer_ vitae, scelerisque _purus_. You have

vowed your life to England; give it her wholly--a bright, stainless,

perfect life--a knightly life. Because you have to fight with machines

instead of lances, there may be a necessity for more ghastly danger, but

there is none for less worthiness of character, than in olden time. You

may be true knights yet, though perhaps not _equites_; you may have to

call yourselves 'cannonry' instead of 'chivalry,' but that is no reason

why you should not call yourselves true men. So the first thing you have

to see to in becoming soldiers is that you make yourselves wholly true.

Courage is a mere matter of course among any ordinarily well-born

youths; but neither truth nor gentleness is matter of course. You must

bind them like shields about your necks; you must write them on the

tables of your hearts. Though it be not exacted of you, yet exact it of

yourselves, this vow of stainless truth. Your hearts are, if you leave

them unstirred, as tombs in which a god lies buried. Vow yourselves

crusaders to redeem that sacred sepulchre. And remember, before all

things--for no other memory will be so protective of you--that the

highest law of this knightly truth is that under which it is vowed to

women. Whomsoever else you deceive, whomsoever you injure, whomsoever

you leave unaided, you must not deceive, nor injure, nor leave unaided

according to your power, any woman of whatever rank. Believe me, every

virtue of the higher phases of manly character begins in this;--in truth

and modesty before the face of all maidens; in truth and pity, or truth

and reverence, to all womanhood.

And now let me turn for a moment to you,--wives and maidens, who are the

souls of soldiers; to you,--mothers, who have devoted your children to

the great hierarchy of war. Let me ask you to consider what part you

have to take for the aid of those who love you; for if you fail in your

part they cannot fulfil theirs; such absolute helpmates you are that mo

man can stand without that help, nor labour in his own strength.

I know your hearts, and that the truth of them never fails when an hour

of trial comes which you recognise for such. But you know not when the

hour of trial first finds you, nor when it verily finds you. You imagine

that you are only called upon to wait and to suffer; to surrender and to

mourn. You know that you must not weaken the hearts of your husbands and

lovers, even by the one fear of which those hearts are capable,--the

fear of parting from you, or of causing you grief. Through weary years

of separation, through fearful expectancies of unknown fate; through the

tenfold bitterness of the sorrow which might so easily have been joy,

and the tenfold yearning for glorious life struck down in its

prime--through all these agonies you fail not, and never will fail. But

your trial is not in these. To be heroic in danger is little;--you are

Englishwomen. To be heroic in change and sway of fortune is little;--for

do you not love? To be patient through the great chasm and pause of loss

is little;--for do you not still love in heaven? But to be heroic in

happiness; to bear yourselves gravely and righteously in the dazzling of

the sunshine of morning; not to forget the God in whom you trust, when

He gives you most; not to fail those who trust you, when they seem to

need you least; this is the difficult fortitude. It is not in the pining

of absence, not in the peril of battle, not in the wasting of sickness,

that your prayer should be most passionate, or your guardianship most

tender. Pray, mothers and maidens, for your young soldiers in the bloom

of their pride; pray for them, while the only dangers round them are in

their own wayward wills; watch you, and pray, when they have to face,

not death, but temptation. But it is this fortitude also for which there

is the crowning reward. Believe me, the whole course and character of

your lovers' lives is in your hands; what you would have them be, they

shall be, if you not only desire to have them so, but deserve to have

them so; for they are but mirrors in which you will see yourselves

imaged. If you are frivolous, they will be so also; if you have no

understanding of the scope of their duty, they also will forget it; they

will listen,--they _can_ listen,--to no other interpretation of it than

that uttered from your lips. Bid them be brave;--they will be brave for

you; bid them be cowards; and how noble soever they be;--they will quail

for you. Bid them be wise, and they will be wise for you; mock at their

counsel, they will be fools for you: such and so absolute is your rule

over them. You fancy, perhaps, as you have been told so often, that a

wife's rule should only be over her husband's house, not over his mind.

Ah, no! the true rule is just the reverse of that; a true wife, in her

husband's house, is his servant; it is in his heart that she is queen.

Whatever of the best he can conceive, it is her part to be; whatever of

highest he can hope, it is hers to promise; all that is dark in him she

must purge into purity; all that is failing in him she must strengthen

into truth: from her, through all the world's clamour, he must win his

praise; in her, through all the world's warfare, he must find his peace.

And, now, but one word more. You may wonder, perhaps, that I have spoken

all this night in praise of war. Yet, truly, if it might be, I, for one,

would fain join in the cadence of hammer-strokes that should beat swords

into ploughshares: and that this cannot be, is not the fault of us men.

It is _your_ fault. Wholly yours. Only by your command, or by your

permission, can any contest take place among us. And the real, final,

reason for all the poverty, misery, and rage of battle, throughout

Europe, is simply that you women, however good, however religious,

however self-sacrificing for those whom you love, are too selfish and

too thoughtless to take pains for any creature out of your own immediate

circles. You fancy that you are sorry for the pain of others. Now I just

tell you this, that if the usual course of war, instead of unroofing

peasants' houses, and ravaging peasants' fields, merely broke the china

upon your own drawing-room tables, no war in civilised countries would

last a week. I tell you more, that at whatever moment you chose to put a

period to war, you could do it with less trouble than you take any day

to go out to dinner. You know, or at least you might know if you would

think, that every battle you hear of has made many widows and orphans.

We have, none of us, heart enough truly to mourn with these. But at

least we might put on the outer symbols of mourning with them. Let but

every Christian lady who has conscience toward God, vow that she will

mourn, at least outwardly, for His killed creatures. Your praying is

useless, and your churchgoing mere mockery of God, if you have not plain

obedience in you enough for this. Let every lady in the upper classes of

civilised Europe simply vow that, while any cruel war proceeds, she will

wear _black_;--a mute's black,--with no jewel, no ornament, no excuse

for, or evasion into, prettiness.--I tell you again, no war would last a

week.

And lastly. You women of England are all now shrieking with one

voice,--you and your clergymen together,--because you hear of your

Bibles being attacked. If you choose to obey your Bibles, you will never

care who attacks them. It is just because you never fulfil a single

downright precept of the Book, that you are so careful for its credit:

and just because you don't care to obey its whole words, that you are so

particular about the letters of them. The Bible tells you to dress

plainly,--and you are mad for finery; the Bible tells you to have pity

on the poor,--and you crush them under your carriage-wheels; the Bible

tells you to do judgment and justice,--and you do not know, nor care to

know, so much as what the Bible word 'justice means.' Do but learn so

much of God's truth as that comes to; know what He means when He tells

you to be just: and teach your sons, that their bravery is but a fool's

boast, and their deeds but a firebrand's tossing, unless they are indeed

Just men, and Perfect in the Fear of God;--and you will soon have no

more war, unless it be indeed such as is willed by Him, of whom, though

Prince of Peace, it is also written, 'In Righteousness He doth judge,

and make war.'

FOOTNOTES:

[6] I do not care to refer to the journal quoted, because the article

was unworthy of its general tone, though in order to enable the audience

to verify the quoted sentence, I left the number containing it on the

table, when I delivered this lecture. But a saying of Baron Liebig's,

quoted at the head of a leader on the same subject in the 'Daily

Telegraph' of January 11, 1866, summarily digests and presents the

maximum folly of modern thought in this respect. 'Civilization,' says

the Baron, 'is the economy of power, and English power is coal.' Not

altogether so, my chemical friend. Civilization is the making of civil

persons, which is a kind of distillation of which alembics are

incapable, and does not at all imply the turning of a small company of

gentlemen into a large company of ironmongers. And English power (what

little of it may be left), is by no means coal, but, indeed, of that

which, 'when the whole world turns to coal, then chiefly lives.'

MUNERA PULVERIS

SIX ESSAYS

ON THE ELEMENTS OF

POLITICAL ECONOMY

PREFACE.

The following pages contain, I believe, the first accurate analysis of

the laws of Political Economy which has been published in England. Many

treatises, within their scope, correct, have appeared in contradiction

of the views popularly received; but no exhaustive examination of the

subject was possible to any person unacquainted with the value of the

products of the highest industries, commonly called the "Fine Arts;" and

no one acquainted with the nature of those industries has, so far as I

know, attempted, or even approached, the task.

So that, to the date (1863) when these Essays were published, not only

the chief conditions of the production of wealth had remained unstated,

but the nature of wealth itself had never been defined. "Every one has a

notion, sufficiently correct for common purposes, of what is meant by

wealth," wrote Mr. Mill, in the outset of his treatise; and contentedly

proceeded, as if a chemist should proceed to investigate the laws of

chemistry without endeavouring to ascertain the nature of fire or water,

because every one had a notion of them, "sufficiently correct for common

purposes."

But even that apparently indisputable statement was untrue. There is not

one person in ten thousand who has a notion sufficiently correct, even

for the commonest purposes, of "what is meant" by wealth; still less of

what wealth everlastingly _is_, whether we mean it or not; which it is

the business of every student of economy to ascertain. We, indeed, know

(either by experience or in imagination) what it is to be able to

provide ourselves with luxurious food, and handsome clothes; and if Mr.

Mill had thought that wealth consisted only in these, or in the means

of obtaining these, it would have been easy for him to have so defined

it with perfect scientific accuracy. But he knew better: he knew that

some kinds of wealth consisted in the possession, or power of obtaining,

other things than these; but, having, in the studies of his life, no

clue to the principles of essential value, he was compelled to take

public opinion as the ground of his science; and the public, of course,

willingly accepted the notion of a science founded on their opinions.

I had, on the contrary, a singular advantage, not only in the greater

extent of the field of investigation opened to me by my daily pursuits,

but in the severity of some lessons I accidentally received in the

course of them.

When, in the winter of 1851, I was collecting materials for my work on

Venetian architecture, three of the pictures of Tintoret on the roof of

the School of St. Roch were hanging down in ragged fragments, mixed with

lath and plaster, round the apertures made by the fall of three Austrian

heavy shot. The city of Venice was not, it appeared, rich enough to

repair the damage that winter; and buckets were set on the floor of the

upper room of the school to catch the rain, which not only fell directly

through the shot holes, but found its way, owing to the generally

pervious state of the roof, through many of the canvases of Tintoret's

in other parts of the ceiling.

It was a lesson to me, as I have just said, no less direct than severe;

for I knew already at that time (though I have not ventured to assert,

until recently at Oxford,) that the pictures of Tintoret in Venice were

accurately the most precious articles of wealth in Europe, being the

best existing productions of human industry. Now at the time that three

of them were thus fluttering in moist rags from the roof they had

adorned, the shops of the Rue Rivoli at Paris were, in obedience

to a steadily-increasing public Demand, beginning to show a

steadily-increasing Supply of elaborately-finished and coloured

lithographs, representing the modern dances of delight, among which the

cancan has since taken a distinguished place.

The labour employed on the stone of one of these lithographs is very

much more than Tintoret was in the habit of giving to a picture of

average size. Considering labour as the origin of value, therefore, the

stone so highly wrought would be of greater value than the picture; and

since also it is capable of producing a large number of immediately

saleable or exchangeable impressions, for which the "demand" is

constant, the city of Paris naturally supposed itself, and on all

hitherto believed or stated principles of political economy, was,

infinitely richer in the possession of a large number of these

lithographic stones, (not to speak of countless oil pictures and marble

carvings of similar character), than Venice in the possession of those

rags of mildewed canvas, flaunting in the south wind and its salt rain.

And, accordingly, Paris provided (without thought of the expense) lofty

arcades of shops, and rich recesses of innumerable private apartments,

for the protection of these better treasures of hers from the weather.

Yet, all the while, Paris was not the richer for these possessions.

Intrinsically, the delightful lithographs were not wealth, but polar

contraries of wealth. She was, by the exact quantity of labour she had

given to produce these, sunk below, instead of above, absolute Poverty.

They not only were false Riches--they were true _Debt_, which had to be

paid at last--and the present aspect of the Rue Rivoli shows in what

manner.

And the faded stains of the Venetian ceiling, all the while, were

absolute and inestimable wealth. Useless to their possessors as

forgotten treasure in a buried city, they had in them, nevertheless, the

intrinsic and eternal nature of wealth; and Venice, still possessing the

ruins of them, was a rich city; only, the Venetians had _not_ a notion

sufficiently correct even for the very common purpose of inducing them

to put slates on a roof, of what was "meant by wealth."

The vulgar economist would reply that his science had nothing to do with

the qualities of pictures, but with their exchange-value only; and that

his business was, exclusively, to consider whether the remains of

Tintoret were worth as many ten-and-sixpences as the impressions which

might be taken from the lithographic stones.

But he would not venture, without reserve, to make such an answer, if

the example be taken in horses, instead of pictures. The most dull

economist would perceive, and admit, that a gentleman who had a fine

stud of horses was absolutely richer than one who had only ill-bred and

broken-winded ones. He would instinctively feel, though his

pseudo-science had never taught him, that the price paid for the

animals, in either case, did not alter the fact of their worth: that the

good horse, though it might have been bought by chance for a few

guineas, was not therefore less valuable, nor the owner of the galled

jade any the richer, because he had given a hundred for it.

So that the economist, in saying that his science takes no account of

the qualities of pictures, merely signifies that he cannot conceive of

any quality of essential badness or goodness existing in pictures; and

that he is incapable of investigating the laws of wealth in such

articles. Which is the fact. But, being incapable of defining intrinsic

value in pictures, it follows that he must be equally helpless to define

the nature of intrinsic value in painted glass, or in painted pottery,

or in patterned stuffs, or in any other national produce requiring true

human ingenuity. Nay, though capable of conceiving the idea of intrinsic

value with respect to beasts of burden, no economist has endeavoured to

state the general principles of National Economy, even with regard to

the horse or the ass. And, in fine, _the modern political economists

have been, without exception, incapable of apprehending the nature of

intrinsic value at all_.

And the first specialty of the following treatise consists in its giving

at the outset, and maintaining as the foundation of all subsequent

reasoning, a definition of Intrinsic Value, and Intrinsic

Contrary-of-Value; the negative power having been left by former writers

entirely out of account, and the positive power left entirely undefined.

But, secondly: the modern economist, ignoring intrinsic value, and

accepting the popular estimate of things as the only ground of his

science, has imagined himself to have ascertained the constant laws

regulating the relation of this popular demand to its supply; or, at

least, to have proved that demand and supply were connected by heavenly

balance, over which human foresight had no power. I chanced, by singular

coincidence, lately to see this theory of the law of demand and supply

brought to as sharp practical issue in another great siege, as I had

seen the theories of intrinsic value brought, in the siege of Venice.

I had the honour of being on the committee under the presidentship of

the Lord Mayor of London, for the victualling of Paris after her

surrender. It became, at one period of our sittings, a question of vital

importance at what moment the law of demand and supply would come into

operation, and what the operation of it would exactly be: the demand, on

this occasion, being very urgent indeed; that of several millions of

people within a few hours of utter starvation, for any kind of food

whatsoever. Nevertheless, it was admitted, in the course of debate, to

be probable that the divine principle of demand and supply might find

itself at the eleventh hour, and some minutes over, in want of carts and

horses; and we ventured so far to interfere with the divine principle as

to provide carts and horses, with haste which proved, happily, in time

for the need; but not a moment in advance of it. It was farther

recognized by the committee that the divine principle of demand and

supply would commence its operations by charging the poor of Paris

twelve-pence for a penny's worth of whatever they wanted; and would end

its operations by offering them twelve-pence worth for a penny, of

whatever they didn't want. Whereupon it was concluded by the committee

that the tiny knot, on this special occasion, was scarcely "_dignus

vindice_," by the divine principle of demand and supply: and that we

would venture, for once, in a profane manner, to provide for the poor of

Paris what they wanted, when they wanted it. Which, to the value of the

sums entrusted to us, it will be remembered we succeeded in doing.

But the fact is that the so-called "law," which was felt to be false in

this case of extreme exigence, is alike false in cases of less

exigence. It is false always, and everywhere. Nay to such an extent is

its existence imaginary, that the vulgar economists are not even agreed

in their account of it; for some of them mean by it, only that prices

are regulated by the relation between demand and supply, which is partly

true; and others mean that the relation itself is one with the process

of which it is unwise to interfere; a statement which is not only, as in

the above instance, untrue; but accurately the reverse of the truth: for

all wise economy, political or domestic, consists in the resolved

maintenance of a given relation between supply and demand, other than

the instinctive, or (directly) natural, one.

Similarly, vulgar political economy asserts for a "law" that wages are

determined by competition.

Now I pay my servants exactly what wages I think necessary to make them

comfortable. The sum is not determined at all by competition; but

sometimes by my notions of their comfort and deserving, and sometimes by

theirs. If I were to become penniless to-morrow, several of them would

certainly still serve me for nothing.

In both the real and supposed cases the so-called "law" of vulgar

political economy is absolutely set at defiance. But I cannot set the

law of gravitation at defiance, nor determine that in my house I will

not allow ice to melt, when the temperature is above thirty-two degrees.

A true law outside of my house, will remain a true one inside of it. It

is not, therefore, a law of Nature that wages are determined by

competition. Still less is it a law of State, or we should not now be

disputing about it publicly, to the loss of many millions of pounds to

the country. The fact which vulgar economists have been weak enough to

imagine a law, is only that, for the last twenty years a number of very

senseless persons have attempted to determine wages in that manner; and

have, in a measure, succeeded in occasionally doing so.

Both in definition of the elements of wealth, and in statement of the

laws which govern its distribution, modern political economy has been

thus absolutely incompetent, or absolutely false. And the following

treatise is not, as it has been asserted with dull pertinacity, an

endeavour to put sentiment in the place of science; but it contains the

exposure of what insolently pretended to be a science; and the

definition, hitherto unassailed--and I do not fear to assert,

unassailable--of the material elements with which political economy has

to deal, and the moral principles in which it consists; being not itself

a science, but "a system of conduct founded on the sciences, and

impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture." Which is

only to say, that industry, frugality, and discretion, the three

foundations of economy, are moral qualities, and cannot be attained

without moral discipline: a flat truism, the reader may think, thus

stated, yet a truism which is denied both vociferously, and in all

endeavour, by the entire populace of Europe; who are at present hopeful

of obtaining wealth by tricks of trade, without industry; who,

possessing wealth, have lost in the use of it even the conception,--how

much more the habit?--of frugality; and who, in the choice of the

elements of wealth, cannot so much as lose--since they have never

hitherto at any time possessed,--the faculty of discretion.

Now if the teachers of the pseudo-science of economy had ventured to

state distinctly even the poor conclusions they had reached on the

subjects respecting which it is most dangerous for a populace to be

indiscreet, they would have soon found, by the use made of them, which

were true, and which false.

But on main and vital questions, no political economist has hitherto

ventured to state one guiding principle. I will instance three subjects

of universal importance. National Dress. National Rent. National Debt.

Now if we are to look in any quarter for a systematic and exhaustive

statement of the principles of a given science, it must certainly be

from its Professor at Cambridge.

Take the last edition of Professor Fawcett's _Manual of Political

Economy_, and forming, first clearly in your mind these three following

questions, see if you can find an answer to them.

I. Does expenditure of capital on the production of luxurious dress and

furniture tend to make a nation rich or poor?

II. Does the payment, by the nation, of a tax on its land, or on the

produce of it, to a certain number of private persons, to be expended by

them as they please, tend to make the nation rich or poor?

III. Does the payment, by the nation, for an indefinite period, of

interest on money borrowed from private persons, tend to make the nation

rich or poor?

These three questions are, all of them, perfectly simple, and primarily

vital. Determine these, and you have at once a basis for national

conduct in all important particulars. Leave them undetermined, and there

is no limit to the distress which may be brought upon the people by the

cunning of its knaves, and the folly of its multitudes.

I will take the three in their order.

I. Dress. The general impression on the public mind at this day is, that

the luxury of the rich in dress and furniture is a benefit to the poor.

Probably not even the blindest of our political economists would venture

to assert this in so many words. But where do they assert the contrary?

During the entire period of the reign of the late Emperor it was assumed

in France, as the first principle of fiscal government, that a large

portion of the funds received as rent from the provincial labourer

should be expended in the manufacture of ladies' dresses in Paris. Where

is the political economist in France, or England, who ventured to assert

the conclusions of his science as adverse to this system? As early as

the year 1857 I had done my best to show the nature of the error, and to

give warning of its danger;[7] but not one of the men who had the

foolish ears of the people intent on their words, dared to follow me in

speaking what would have been an offence to the powers of trade; and the

powers of trade in Paris had their full way for fourteen years

more,--with this result, to-day,--as told us in precise and curt terms

by the Minister of Public Instruction,--[8]

"We have replaced glory by gold, work by speculation, faith

and honour by scepticism. To absolve or glorify immorality;

to make much of loose women; to gratify our eyes with

luxury, our ears with the tales of orgies; to aid in the

manoeuvres of public robbers, or to applaud them; to laugh

at morality, and only believe in success; to love nothing

but pleasure, adore nothing but force; to replace work with

a fecundity of fancies; to speak without thinking; to prefer

noise to glory; to erect sneering into a system, and lying

into an institution--is this the spectacle that we have

seen?--is this the society that we have been?"

Of course, other causes, besides the desire of luxury in furniture and

dress, have been at work to produce such consequences; but the most

active cause of all has been the passion for these; passion unrebuked by

the clergy, and, for the most part, provoked by economists, as

advantageous to commerce; nor need we think that such results have been

arrived at in France only; we are ourselves following rapidly on the

same road. France, in her old wars with us, never was so fatally our

enemy as she has been in the fellowship of fashion, and the freedom of

trade: nor, to my mind, is any fact recorded of Assyrian or Roman luxury

more ominous, or ghastly, than one which came to my knowledge a few

weeks ago, in England; a respectable and well-to-do father and mother,

in a quiet north country town, being turned into the streets in their

old age, at the suit of their only daughter's milliner.

II. Rent. The following account of the real nature of rent is given,

quite accurately, by Professor Fawcett, at page 112 of the last edition

of his _Political Economy_:--

"Every country has probably been subjugated, and grants of

vanquished territory were the ordinary rewards which the

conquering chief bestowed upon his more distinguished

followers. Lands obtained by force had to be defended by

force; and before law had asserted her supremacy, and

property was made secure, no baron was able to retain his

possessions, unless those who lived on his estates were

prepared to defend them....[9] As property became secure,

and landlords felt that the power of the State would protect

them in all the rights of property, every vestige of these

feudal tenures was abolished, and the relation between

landlord and tenant has thus become purely commercial. A

landlord offers his land to any one who is willing to take

it; he is anxious to receive the highest rent he can obtain.

What are the principles which regulate the rent which may

thus be paid?"

These principles the Professor goes on contentedly to investigate, never

appearing to contemplate for an instant the possibility of the first

principle in the whole business--the maintenance, by force, of the

possession of land obtained by force, being ever called in question by

any human mind. It is, nevertheless, the nearest task of our day to

discover how far original theft may be justly encountered by reactionary

theft, or whether reactionary theft be indeed theft at all; and farther,

what, excluding either original or corrective theft, are the just

conditions of the possession of land.

III. Debt. Long since, when, a mere boy, I used to sit silently

listening to the conversation of the London merchants who, all of them

good and sound men of business, were wont occasionally to meet round my

father's dining-table; nothing used to surprise me more than the

conviction openly expressed by some of the soundest and most cautious of

them, that "if there were no National debt they would not know what to

do with their money, or where to place it safely." At the 399th page of

his Manual, you will find Professor Fawcett giving exactly the same

statement.

"In our own country, this certainty against risk of loss is

provided by the public funds;"

and again, as on the question of rent, the Professor proceeds, without

appearing for an instant to be troubled by any misgiving that there may

be an essential difference between the effects on national prosperity of

a Government paying interest on money which it spent in fire works

fifty years ago, and of a Government paying interest on money to be

employed to-day on productive labour.

That difference, which the reader will find stated and examined at

length, in Secs. 127-129 of this volume, it is the business of economists,

before approaching any other question relating to government, fully to

explain. And the paragraphs to which I refer, contain, I believe, the

only definite statement of it hitherto made.

The practical result of the absence of any such statement is, that

capitalists, when they do not know what to do with their money, persuade

the peasants, in various countries, that the said peasants want guns to

shoot each other with. The peasants accordingly borrow guns, out of the

manufacture of which the capitalists get a per-centage, and men of

science much amusement and credit. Then the peasants shoot a certain

number of each other, until they get tired; and burn each other's homes

down in various places. Then they put the guns back into towers,

arsenals, &c., in ornamental patterns; (and the victorious party put

also some ragged flags in churches). And then the capitalists tax both,

annually, ever afterwards, to pay interest on the loan of the guns and

gunpowder. And that is what capitalists call "knowing what to do with

their money;" and what commercial men in general call "practical" as

opposed to "sentimental" Political Economy.

Eleven years ago, in the summer of 1860, perceiving then fully, (as

Carlyle had done long before), what distress was about to come on the

said populace of Europe through these errors of their teachers, I began

to do the best I might, to combat them, in the series of papers for the

_Cornhill Magazine_, since published under the title of _Unto this

Last_. The editor of the Magazine was my friend, and ventured the

insertion of the three first essays; but the outcry against them became

then too strong for any editor to endure, and he wrote to me, with great

discomfort to himself, and many apologies to me, that the Magazine must

only admit one Economical Essay more.

I made, with his permission, the last one longer than the rest, and gave

it blunt conclusion as well as I could--and so the book now stands; but,

as I had taken not a little pains with the Essays, and knew that they

contained better work than most of my former writings, and more

important truths than all of them put together, this violent reprobation

of them by the _Cornhill_ public set me still more gravely thinking;

and, after turning the matter hither and thither in my mind for two

years more, I resolved to make it the central work of my life to write

an exhaustive treatise on Political Economy. It would not have been

begun, at that time, however, had not the editor of _Fraser's Magazine_

written to me, saying that he believed there was something in my

theories, and would risk the admission of what I chose to write on this

dangerous subject; whereupon, cautiously, and at intervals, during the

winter of 1862-63, I sent him, and he ventured to print, the preface of

the intended work, divided into four chapters. Then, though the Editor

had not wholly lost courage, the Publisher indignantly interfered; and

the readers of _Fraser_, as those of the _Cornhill_, were protected, for

that time, from farther disturbance on my part. Subsequently, loss of

health, family distress, and various untoward chances, prevented my

proceeding with the body of the book;--seven years have passed

ineffectually; and I am now fain to reprint the Preface by itself, under

the title which I intended for the whole.

Not discontentedly; being, at this time of life, resigned to the sense

of failure; and also, because the preface is complete in itself as a

body of definitions, which I now require for reference in the course of

my _Letters to Workmen_; by which also, in time, I trust less formally

to accomplish the chief purpose of _Munera Pulveris_, practically summed

in the two paragraphs 27 and 28: namely, to examine the moral results

and possible rectifications of the laws of distribution of wealth, which

have prevailed hitherto without debate among men. Laws which ordinary

economists assume to be inviolable, and which ordinary socialists

imagine to be on the eve of total abrogation. But they are both alike

deceived. The laws which at present regulate the possession of wealth

are unjust, because the motives which provoke to its attainment are

impure; but no socialism can effect their abrogation, unless it can

abrogate also covetousness and pride, which it is by no means yet in the

way of doing. Nor can the change be, in any case, to the extent that has

been imagined. Extremes of luxury may be forbidden, and agony of penury

relieved; but nature intends, and the utmost efforts of socialism will

not hinder the fulfilment of her intention, that a provident person

shall always be richer than a spendthrift; and an ingenious one more

comfortable than a fool. But, indeed, the adjustment of the possession

of the products of industry depends more on their nature than their

quantity, and on wise determination therefore of the aims of industry.

A nation which desires true wealth, desires it moderately, and can

therefore distribute it with kindness, and possess it with pleasure; but

one which desires false wealth, desires it immoderately, and can neither

dispense it with justice, nor enjoy it in peace.

Therefore, needing, constantly in my present work, to refer to the

definitions of true and false wealth given in the following Essays, I

republish them with careful revisal. They were written abroad; partly at

Milan, partly during a winter residence on the south-eastern slope of

the Mont Saleve, near Geneva; and sent to London in as legible MS. as I

could write; but I never revised the press sheets, and have been

obliged, accordingly, now to amend the text here and there, or correct

it in unimportant particulars. Wherever any modification has involved

change in the sense, it is enclosed in square brackets; and what few

explanatory comments I have felt it necessary to add, have been

indicated in the same manner. No explanatory comments, I regret to

perceive, will suffice to remedy the mischief of my affected

concentration of language, into the habit of which I fell by thinking

too long over particular passages, in many and many a solitary walk

towards the mountains of Bonneville or Annecy. But I never intended the

book for anything else than a dictionary of reference, and that for

earnest readers; who will, I have good hope, if they find what they

want in it, forgive the affectedly curt expressions.

The Essays, as originally published, were, as I have just stated, four

in number. I have now, more conveniently, divided the whole into six

chapters; and (as I purpose throughout this edition of my works)

numbered the paragraphs.

I inscribed the first volume of this series to the friend who aided me

in chief sorrow. Let me inscribe the second to the friend and guide who

has urged me to all chief labour, THOMAS CARLYLE.

* * * * *

I would that some better means were in my power of showing reverence to

the man who alone, of all our masters of literature, has written,

without thought of himself, what he knew it to be needful for the people

of his time to hear, if the will to hear were in them: whom, therefore,

as the time draws near when his task must be ended, Republican and

Free-thoughted England assaults with impatient reproach; and out of the

abyss of her cowardice in policy and dishonour in trade, sets the hacks

of her literature to speak evil, grateful to her ears, of the Solitary

Teacher who has asked her to be brave for the help of Man, and just, for

the love of God.

_Denmark Hill,_

_25th November, 1871._

FOOTNOTES:

[7] _Political Economy of Art._ (Smith and Elder, 1857, pp. 65-76.)

[8] See report of speech of M. Jules Simon, in _Pall Mall Gazette_ of

October 27, 1871.

[9] The omitted sentences merely amplify the statement; they in no wise

modify it.

MUNERA PULVERIS.

"Te maris et terrae numeroque carentis arenae

Mensorem cohibent, Archyta,

Pulveris exigui prope litus parva Matinum

Munera."

CHAPTER I.

DEFINITIONS.

1. As domestic economy regulates the acts and habits of a household,

Political economy regulates those of a society or State, with reference

to the means of its maintenance.

Political economy is neither an art nor a science; but a system of

conduct and legislature, founded on the sciences, directing the arts,

and impossible, except under certain conditions of moral culture.

2. The study which lately in England has been called Political Economy

is in reality nothing more than the investigation of some accidental

phenomena of modern commercial operations, nor has it been true in its

investigation even of these. It has no connection whatever with

political economy, as understood and treated of by the great thinkers of

past ages; and as long as its unscholarly and undefined statements are

allowed to pass under the same name, every word written on the subject

by those thinkers--and chiefly the words of Plato, Xenophon, Cicero and

Bacon--must be nearly useless to mankind. The reader must not,

therefore, be surprised at the care and insistance with which I have

retained the literal and earliest sense of all important terms used in

these papers; for a word is usually well made at the time it is first

wanted; its youngest meaning has in it the full strength of its youth:

subsequent senses are commonly warped or weakened; and as all careful

thinkers are sure to have used their words accurately, the first

condition, in order to be able to avail our selves of their sayings at

all, is firm definition of terms.

3. By the "maintenance" of a State is to be understood the support of

its population in healthy and happy life; and the increase of their

numbers, so far as that increase is consistent with their happiness. It

is not the object of political economy to increase the numbers of a

nation at the cost of common health or comfort; nor to increase

indefinitely the comfort of individuals, by sacrifice of surrounding

lives, or possibilities of life.

4. The assumption which lies at the root of nearly all erroneous

reasoning on political economy,--namely, that its object is to

accumulate money or exchangeable property,--may be shown in a few words

to be without foundation. For no economist would admit national economy

to be legitimate which proposed to itself only the building of a pyramid

of gold. He would declare the gold to be wasted, were it to remain in

the monumental form, and would say it ought to be employed. But to what

end? Either it must be used only to gain more gold, and build a larger

pyramid, or for some purpose other than the gaining of gold. And this

other purpose, however at first apprehended, will be found to resolve

itself finally into the service of man;--that is to say, the extension,

defence, or comfort of his life. The golden pyramid may perhaps be

providently built, perhaps improvidently; but the wisdom or folly of the

accumulation can only be determined by our having first clearly stated

the aim of all economy, namely, the extension of life.

If the accumulation of money, or of exchangeable property, were a

certain means of extending existence, it would be useless, in discussing

economical questions, to fix our attention upon the more distant

object--life--instead of the immediate one--money. But it is not so.

Money may sometimes be accumulated at the cost of life, or by

limitations of it; that is to say, either by hastening the deaths of

men, or preventing their births. It is therefore necessary to keep

clearly in view the ultimate object of economy; and to determine the

expediency of minor operations with reference to that ulterior end.

5. It has been just stated that the object of political economy is the

continuance not only of life, but of healthy and happy life. But all

true happiness is both a consequence and cause of life: it is a sign of

its vigor, and source of its continuance. All true suffering is in like

manner a consequence and cause of death. I shall therefore, in future,

use the word "Life" singly: but let it be understood to include in its

signification the happiness and power of the entire human nature, body

and soul.

6. That human nature, as its Creator made it, and maintains it wherever

His laws are observed, is entirely harmonious. No physical error can be

more profound, no moral error more dangerous, than that involved in the

monkish doctrine of the opposition of body to soul. No soul can be

perfect in an imperfect body: no body perfect without perfect soul.

Every right action and true thought sets the seal of its beauty on

person and face; every wrong action and foul thought its seal of

distortion; and the various aspects of humanity might be read as plainly

as a printed history, were it not that the impressions are so complex

that it must always in some cases (and, in the present state of our

knowledge, in all cases) be impossible to decipher them completely.

Nevertheless, the face of a consistently just, and of a consistently

unjust person, may always be rightly distinguished at a glance; and if

the qualities are continued by descent through a generation or two,

there arises a complete distinction of race. Both moral and physical

qualities are communicated by descent, far more than they can be

developed by education; (though both may be destroyed by want of

education), and there is as yet no ascertained limit to the nobleness of

person and mind which the human creature may attain, by persevering

observance of the laws of God respecting its birth and training.

7. We must therefore yet farther define the aim of political economy to

be "The multiplication of human life at the highest standard." It might

at first seem questionable whether we should endeavour to maintain a

small number of persons of the highest type of beauty and intelligence,

or a larger number of an inferior class. But I shall be able to show in

the sequel, that the way to maintain the largest number is first to aim

at the highest standard. Determine the noblest type of man, and aim

simply at maintaining the largest possible number of persons of that

class, and it will be found that the largest possible number of every

healthy subordinate class must necessarily be produced also.

8. The perfect type of manhood, as just stated, involves the perfections

(whatever we may hereafter determine these to be) of his body,

affections, and intelligence. The material things, therefore, which it

is the object of political economy to produce and use, (or accumulate

for use,) are things which serve either to sustain and comfort the body,

or exercise rightly the affections and form the intelligence.[10]

Whatever truly serves either of these purposes is "useful" to man,

wholesome, healthful, helpful, or holy. By seeking such things, man

prolongs and increases his life upon the earth.

On the other hand, whatever does not serve either of these

purposes,--much more whatever counteracts them,--is in like manner

useless to man, unwholesome, unhelpful, or unholy; and by seeking such

things man shortens and diminishes his life upon the earth.

9. And neither with respect to things useful or useless can man's

estimate of them alter their nature. Certain substances being good for

his food, and others noxious to him, what he thinks or wishes respecting

them can neither change, nor prevent, their power. If he eats corn, he

will live; if nightshade, he will die. If he produce or make good and

beautiful things, they will _Re-Create_ him; (note the solemnity and

weight of the word); if bad and ugly things, they will "corrupt" or

"break in pieces"--that is, in the exact degree of their power, Kill

him. For every hour of labour, however enthusiastic or well intended,

which he spends for that which is not bread, so much possibility of life

is lost to him. His fancies, likings, beliefs, however brilliant,

eager, or obstinate, are of no avail if they are set on a false object.

Of all that he has laboured for, the eternal law of heaven and earth

measures out to him for reward, to the utmost atom, that part which he

ought to have laboured for, and withdraws from him (or enforces on him,

it may be) inexorably, that part which he ought not to have laboured for

until, on his summer threshing-floor, stands his heap of corn; little or

much, not according to his labour, but to his discretion. No "commercial

arrangements," no painting of surfaces, nor alloying of substances, will

avail him a pennyweight. Nature asks of him calmly and inevitably, What

have you found, or formed--the right thing or the wrong? By the right

thing you shall live; by the wrong you shall die.

10. To thoughtless persons it seems otherwise. The world looks to them

as if they could cozen it out of some ways and means of life. But they

cannot cozen IT: they can only cozen their neighbours. The world is not

to be cheated of a grain; not so much as a breath of its air can be

drawn surreptitiously. For every piece of wise work done, so much life

is granted; for every piece of foolish work, nothing; for every piece of

wicked work, so much death is allotted. This is as sure as the courses

of day and night. But when the means of life are once produced, men, by

their various struggles and industries of accumulation or exchange, may

variously gather, waste, restrain, or distribute them; necessitating, in

proportion to the waste or restraint, accurately, so much more death.

The rate and range of additional death are measured by the rate and

range of waste; and are inevitable;--the only question (determined

mostly by fraud in peace, and force in war) is, Who is to die, and how?

11. Such being the everlasting law of human existence, the essential

work of the political economist is to determine what are in reality

useful or life-giving things, and by what degrees and kinds of labour

they are attainable and distributable. This investigation divides itself

under three great heads;--the studies, namely, of the phenomena, first,

of WEALTH; secondly, of MONEY; and thirdly, of RICHES.

These terms are often used as synonymous, but they signify entirely

different things. "Wealth" consists of things in themselves valuable;

"Money," of documentary claims to the possession of such things; and

"Riches" is a relative term, expressing the magnitude of the possessions

of one person or society as compared with those of other persons or

societies.

The study of Wealth is a province of natural science:--it deals with the

essential properties of things.

The study of Money is a province of commercial science:--it deals with

conditions of engagement and exchange.

The study of Riches is a province of moral science:--it deals with the

due relations of men to each other in regard of material possessions;

and with the just laws of their association for purposes of labour.

I shall in this first chapter shortly sketch out the range of subjects

which will come before us as we follow these three branches of inquiry.

12. And first of WEALTH, which, it has been said, consists of things

essentially valuable. We now, therefore, need a definition of "value."

"Value" signifies the strength, or "availing" of anything towards the

sustaining of life, and is always twofold; that is to say, primarily,

INTRINSIC, and secondarily, EFFECTUAL.

The reader must, by anticipation, be warned against confusing value with

cost, or with price. _Value is the life-giving power of anything; cost,

the quantity of labour required to produce it; price, the quantity of

labour which its possessor will take in exchange for it._[11] Cost and

price are commercial conditions, to be studied under the head of money.

13. Intrinsic value is the absolute power of anything to support life. A

sheaf of wheat of given quality and weight has in it a measurable power

of sustaining the substance of the body; a cubic foot of pure air, a

fixed power of sustaining its warmth; and a cluster of flowers of given

beauty a fixed power of enlivening or animating the senses and heart.

It does not in the least affect the intrinsic value of the wheat, the

air, or the flowers, that men refuse or despise them. Used or not, their

own power is in them, and that particular power is in nothing else.

14. But in order that this value of theirs may become effectual, a

certain state is necessary in the recipient of it. The digesting,

breathing, and perceiving functions must be perfect in the human

creature before the food, air, or flowers can become of their full value

to it. _The production of effectual value, therefore, always involves

two needs: first, the production of a thing essentially useful; then the

production of the capacity to use it._ Where the intrinsic value and

acceptant capacity come together there is Effectual value, or wealth;

where there is either no intrinsic value, or no acceptant capacity,

there is no effectual value; that is to say, no wealth. A horse is no

wealth to us if we cannot ride, nor a picture if we cannot see, _nor can

any noble thing be wealth, except to a noble person_. As the aptness of

the user increases, the effectual value of the thing used increases; and

in its entirety can co-exist only with perfect skill of use, and fitness

of nature.

15. Valuable material things may be conveniently referred to five heads:

(i.) Land, with its associated air, water, and organisms.

(ii.) Houses, furniture, and instruments.

(iii.) Stored or prepared food, medicine, and articles of bodily luxury,

including clothing.

(iv.) Books.

(v.) Works of art.

The conditions of value in these things are briefly as follows:--

16. (i.) Land. Its value is twofold; first, as producing food and

mechanical power; secondly, as an object of sight and thought, producing

intellectual power.

Its value, as a means of producing food and mechanical power, varies

with its form (as mountain or plain), with its substance (in soil or

mineral contents), and with its climate. All these conditions of

intrinsic value must be known and complied with by the men who have to

deal with it, in order to give effectual value; but at any given time

and place, the intrinsic value is fixed: such and such a piece of land,

with its associated lakes and seas, rightly treated in surface and

substance, can produce precisely so much food and power, and no more.

The second element of value in land being its beauty, united with such

conditions of space and form as are necessary for exercise, and for

fullness of animal life, land of the highest value in these respects

will be that lying in temperate climates, and boldly varied in form;

removed from unhealthy or dangerous influences (as of miasm or volcano);

and capable of sustaining a rich fauna and flora. Such land, carefully

tended by the hand of man, so far as to remove from it unsightlinesses

and evidences of decay, guarded from violence, and inhabited, under

man's affectionate protection, by every kind of living creature that can

occupy it in peace, is the most precious "property" that human beings

can possess.

17. (ii.) Buildings, furniture, and instruments.

The value of buildings consists, first, in permanent strength, with

convenience of form, of size, and of position; so as to render

employment peaceful, social intercourse easy, temperature and air

healthy. The advisable or possible magnitude of cities and mode of their

distribution in squares, streets, courts, &c.; the relative value of

sites of land, and the modes of structure which are healthiest and most

permanent, have to be studied under this head.

The value of buildings consists secondly in historical association, and

architectural beauty, of which we have to examine the influence on

manners and life.

The value of instruments consists, first, in their power of shortening

labour, or otherwise accomplishing what human strength unaided could

not. The kinds of work which are severally best accomplished by hand or

by machine;--the effect of machinery in gathering and multiplying

population, and its influence on the minds and bodies of such

population; together with the conceivable uses of machinery on a

colossal scale in accomplishing mighty and useful works, hitherto

unthought of, such as the deepening of large river channels;--changing

the surface of mountainous districts;--irrigating tracts of desert in

the torrid zone;--breaking up, and thus rendering capable of quicker

fusion, edges of ice in the northern and southern Arctic seas, &c., so

rendering parts of the earth habitable which hitherto have been

lifeless, are to be studied under this head.

The value of instruments is, secondarily, in their aid to abstract

sciences. The degree in which the multiplication of such instruments

should be encouraged, so as to make them, if large, easy of access to

numbers (as costly telescopes), or so cheap as that they might, in a

serviceable form, become a common part of the furniture of households,

is to be considered under this head.[12]

18. (iii.) Food, medicine, and articles of luxury. Under this head we

shall have to examine the possible methods of obtaining pure food in

such security and equality of supply as to avoid both waste and famine:

then the economy of medicine and just range of sanitary law: finally the

economy of luxury, partly an aesthetic and partly an ethical question.

19. (iv.) Books. The value of these consists,

First, in their power of preserving and communicating the knowledge of

facts.

Secondly, in their power of exciting vital or noble emotion and

intellectual action. They have also their corresponding negative powers

of disguising and effacing the memory of facts, and killing the noble

emotions, or exciting base ones. Under these two heads we have to

consider the economical and educational value, positive and negative, of

literature;--the means of producing and educating good authors, and the

means and advisability of rendering good books generally accessible, and

directing the reader's choice to them.

20. (v.) Works of art. The value of these is of the same nature as that

of books; but the laws of their production and possible modes of

distribution are very different, and require separate examination.

21. II.--MONEY. Under this head, we shall have to examine the laws of

currency and exchange; of which I will note here the first principles.

Money has been inaccurately spoken of as merely a means of exchange. But

it is far more than this. It is a documentary expression of legal claim.

It is not wealth, but a documentary claim to wealth, being the sign of

the relative quantities of it, or of the labour producing it, to which,

at a given time, persons, or societies, are entitled.

If all the money in the world, notes and gold, were destroyed in an

instant, it would leave the world neither richer nor poorer than it was.

But it would leave the individual inhabitants of it in different

relations.

Money is, therefore, correspondent in its nature to the title-deed of an

estate. Though the deed be burned, the estate still exists, but the

right to it has become disputable.

22. The real worth of money remains unchanged, as long as the proportion

of the quantity of existing money to the quantity of existing wealth or

available labour remains unchanged.

If the wealth increases, but not the money, the worth of the money

increases; if the money increases, but not the wealth, the worth of the

money diminishes.

23. Money, therefore, cannot be arbitrarily multiplied, any more than

title-deeds can. So long as the existing wealth or available labour is

not fully represented by the currency, the currency may be increased

without diminution of the assigned worth of its pieces. But when the

existing wealth, or available labour is once fully represented, every

piece of money thrown into circulation diminishes the worth of every

other existing piece, in the proportion it bears to the number of them,

provided the new piece be received with equal credit; if not, the

depreciation of worth takes place, according to the degree of its

credit.

24. When, however, new money, composed of some substance of supposed

intrinsic value (as of gold), is brought into the market, or when new

notes are issued which are supposed to be deserving of credit, the

desire to obtain the money will, under certain circumstances, stimulate

industry: an additional quantity of wealth is immediately produced, and

if this be in proportion to the new claims advanced, the value of the

existing currency is undepreciated. If the stimulus given be so great as

to produce more goods than are proportioned to the additional coinage,

the worth of the existing currency will be raised.

Arbitrary control and issues of currency affect the production of

wealth, by acting on the hopes and fears of men, and are, under certain

circumstances, wise. But the issue of additional currency to meet the

exigencies of immediate expense, is merely one of the disguised forms of

borrowing or taxing. It is, however, in the present low state of

economical knowledge, often possible for governments to venture on an

issue of currency, when they could not venture on an additional loan or

tax, because the real operation of such issue is not understood by the

people, and the pressure of it is irregularly distributed, and with an

unperceived gradation.

25. The use of substances of intrinsic value as the materials of a

currency, is a barbarism;--a remnant of the conditions of barter, which

alone render commerce possible among savage nations. It is, however,

still necessary, partly as a mechanical check on arbitrary issues;

partly as a means of exchanges with foreign nations. In proportion to

the extension of civilization, and increase of trustworthiness in

Governments, it will cease. So long as it exists, the phenomena of the

cost and price of the articles used for currency are mingled with those

proper to currency itself, in an almost inextricable manner: and the

market worth of bullion is affected by multitudinous accidental

circumstances, which have been traced, with more or less success, by

writers on commercial operations: but with these variations the true

political economist has no more to do than an engineer, fortifying a

harbour of refuge against Atlantic tide, has to concern himself with the

cries or quarrels of children who dig pools with their fingers for its

streams among the sand.

26. III.--RICHES. According to the various industry, capacity, good

fortune, and desires of men, they obtain greater or smaller share of,

and claim upon, the wealth of the world.

The inequalities between these shares, always in some degree just and

necessary, may be either restrained by law or circumstance within

certain limits; or may increase indefinitely.

Where no moral or legal restraint is put upon the exercise of the will

and intellect of the stronger, shrewder, or more covetous men, these

differences become ultimately enormous. But as soon as they become so

distinct in their extremes as that, on one side, there shall be manifest

redundance of possession, and on the other manifest pressure of

need,--the terms "riches" and "poverty" are used to express the opposite

states; being contrary only as the terms "warmth" and "cold" are

contraries, of which neither implies an actual degree, but only a

relation to other degrees, of temperature.

27. Respecting riches, the economist has to inquire, first, into the

advisable modes of their collection; secondly, into the advisable modes

of their administration.

Respecting the collection of national riches, he has to inquire, first,

whether he is justified in calling the nation rich, if the quantity of

wealth it possesses relatively to the wealth of other nations, be large;

irrespectively of the manner of its distribution. Or does the mode of

distribution in any wise affect the nature of the riches? Thus, if the

king alone be rich--suppose Croesus or Mausolus--are the Lydians or

Carians therefore a rich nation? Or if a few slave-masters are rich, and

the nation is otherwise composed of slaves, is it to be called a rich

nation? For if not, and the ideas of a certain mode of distribution or

operation in the riches, and of a certain degree of freedom in the

people, enter into our idea of riches as attributed to a people, we

shall have to define the degree of fluency, or circulative character

which is essential to the nature of common wealth; and the degree of

independence of action required in its possessors. Questions which look

as if they would take time in answering.[13]

28. And farther. Since the inequality, which is the condition of riches,

may be established in two opposite modes--namely, by increase of

possession on the one side, and by decrease of it on the other--we have

to inquire, with respect to any given state of riches, precisely in what

manner the correlative poverty was produced: that is to say, whether by

being surpassed only, or being depressed also; and if by being

depressed, what are the advantages, or the contrary, conceivable in the

depression. For instance, it being one of the commonest advantages of

being rich to entertain a number of servants, we have to inquire, on the

one side, what economical process produced the riches of the master; and

on the other, what economical process produced the poverty of the

persons who serve him; and what advantages each, on his own side,

derives from the result.

29. These being the main questions touching the collection of riches,

the next, or last, part of the inquiry is into their administration.

Their possession involves three great economical powers which require

separate examination: namely, the powers of selection, direction, and

provision.

The power of SELECTION relates to things of which the supply is limited

(as the supply of best things is always). When it becomes matter of

question to whom such things are to belong, the richest person has

necessarily the first choice, unless some arbitrary mode of distribution

be otherwise determined upon. The business of the economist is to show

how this choice may be a wise one.

The power of DIRECTION arises out of the necessary relation of rich men

to poor, which ultimately, in one way or another, involves the

direction of, or authority over, the labour of the poor; and this nearly

as much over their mental as their bodily labour. The business of the

economist is to show how this direction may be a Just one.

The power of PROVISION is dependent upon the redundance of wealth, which

may of course by active persons be made available in preparation for

future work or future profit; in which function riches have generally

received the name of capital; that is to say, of head-, or

source-material. The business of the economist is to show how this

provision may be a Distant one.

30. The examination of these three functions of riches will embrace

every final problem of political economy;--and, above, or before all,

this curious and vital problem,--whether, since the wholesome action of

riches in these three functions will depend (it appears), on the Wisdom,

Justice, and Farsightedness of the holders; and it is by no means to be

assumed that persons primarily rich, must therefore be just and

wise,--it may not be ultimately possible so, or somewhat so, to arrange

matters, as that persons primarily just and wise, should therefore be

rich?

Such being the general plan of the inquiry before us, I shall not limit

myself to any consecutive following of it, having hardly any good hope

of being able to complete so laborious a work as it must prove to me;

but from time to time, as I have leisure, shall endeavour to carry

forward this part or that, as may be immediately possible; indicating

always with accuracy the place which the particular essay will or should

take in the completed system.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] _See_ Appendix I.

[11] Observe these definitions,--they are of much importance,--and

connect with them the sentences in italics on this and the next page.

[12] [I cannot now recast these sentences, pedantic in their

generalization, and intended more for index than statement, but I must

guard the reader from thinking that I ever wish for cheapness by bad

quality. A poor boy need not always learn mathematics; but, if you set

him to do so, have the farther kindness to give him good compasses, not

cheap ones, whose points bend like lead.]

[13] [I regret the ironical manner in which this passage, one of great

importance in the matter of it, was written. The gist of it is, that the

first of all inquiries respecting the wealth of any nation is not, how

much it has; but whether it is in a form that can be used, and in the

possession of persons who can use it.]