reasoned, carrying not so much conviction as demonstration along
with it. Granting the premises, the conclusion was inevitable. It
was as good as Bishop Blougram. The scheme was this: Property--even
in the funds--is a fact. There is no denying that. Therefore face
the facts first, and deal with them as such. Timid reformers go
only halfway towards building up the ideal social fabric. They say
meekly, nationalize the land. The true reformer says, abolish all
permanent financial obligations. But hardships would ensue upon any
sudden and violent extinction of _private_ debts. Prudence suggests
that you should begin by a gradual extinction of _public_ debts--in
other words, the National Debt. The living holders of stock shall be
fairly dealt with, and during their lifetime they shall enjoy their
abominable dividends wrenched from the pockets of the people. As they
drop off--and the sooner they go the better--their several claims upon
the tax-payer shall perish with them. None shall succeed to their
privileges of robbing the teeming millions. All stock standing in
the name of trustees shall be transferred to the names of the present
beneficiaries, and shall be extinguished by the death of the several
holders. All powers of bequest in regard of such stock shall be taken
away. In the case of infants--and there are 147,623 of such cases--who
are only prospective owners of stock--being _only_ prospective owners,
and therefore having never actually tasted the joys of unrighteous
possession--they shall continue to be prospective owners, and never be
allowed to become anything else. They will have nothing to complain of;
you take from them nothing that they ever had. All that will happen to
them will be that they will be saved from cherishing delusive hopes,
such as should never have been aroused in them. The scales will drop
from their eyes; they will no longer be the victims of treacherous
phantasms. The sooner they learn their glorious lesson the better. They
will speedily rise to a true conception of the dignity of citizenship,
and grow to the stature of a loftier humanity, whose destiny who shall
foreshadow? “Now, my dear Doctor,” said Polus, pausing for a moment
in his harangue, “I ask you as a Christian and a philosopher, is not
ours a magnificent League, and is not the vision that opens before us
sublime?”
“Place aux dames! Place aux dames!” I answered. “Ask the Lady
Shepherd. Let her speak.”
* * * * *
It is a curious physiological fact that I have been puzzled by for
several years past, and which I am only half able to explain or account
for, that _flashing_ eyes have almost disappeared from off the face of
the earth. You may see many sorts of eyes--eyes of various shades of
colour and various shapes--eyes that glitter, that gleam, that sparkle,
that shine, that stare, that blink; even eyes that are guilty of the
vulgarity of winking; but eyes that flash with the fire and flame of
wrath, and scorn, and scorching indignation--such as once or twice
I have cowered and trembled under when I was young--such eyes have
passed away; the passion in them has been absorbed in something, it may
be better or it may be worse--absorbed in utter tenderness. The last
time I saw eyes flash was when a certain college don came to pay his
respects to a certain little lady--she _was_ a little lady then--a week
after she was married. The old blunderer boasted that he had been on
Lord Powis’s committee on a certain memorable occasion. “Ah, my dear
madam, you are too young to know anything about that, and your husband
of course was an undergraduate. But----” The man almost jumped from
his chair; he turned pale as an oyster. The little lady sprang up a
pillar of flame. “Do you mean, sir, that you voted against the Prince
Consort? You will oblige me by not referring to the subject.” I rang
the bell again and again; I called for buckets of water--the whole room
seemed to be, the whole house seemed likely to be on fire.
Ah! there were real live Tories (spelt with a capital T) then. We
were blue _or_ yellow, not a pale green made up by smudging the two
together. We didn’t stand upon legs that were not a pair. None of
your Conservative Liberals or Liberal Conservatives going about hat
in hand and timidly asking, “What will you be good enough to wish to
have conserved?” It was “Church and Queen, sir, or salt and water. No
shilly-shallying.” Hesitate, and nothing remained for you but pistols
for two in the back yard. Argument? Nay! We dealt with that as Uncle
Sammy’s second wife did, and everyone knows that
She with the heel of assertion
Stampt all his arguments down!
If I could have looked forward in those days, what a monster would my
future self have appeared!
_Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis._
* * * * *
Something in the look of the Lady Shepherd’s, eyes this snowy morning
reminded me of the old terrible flash; but it all passed, and only
merriment shone out. “Sublime, my good Polus? How can a vision be
sublime? A visionary is at best a dreamer, and a vision is a sham. A
sublime sham is a contradiction in terms. Why don’t you try and talk
sense sometimes?” “You’re not a bit better than that chit of a girl
with a mop on her head that came gabbling here last week. But it’s like
you men--you’ve no more common sense than this trowel! Visions indeed!
I gladly live amid the real,
And I seek a worthier ideal.
Courage, brothers; God is overhead!
Ah! you may laugh. But it’s all on my side.”
Away she swept, basket and trowel and all. Stop to listen to that
gibberish--not she!
When her Royal Highness came back to us [in these moods she is the
Princess, in her gentler and more pastoral moods she is the Lady
Shepherd] she found us deep in another part of the discussion. The
business of the Great International League having extinguished the
National Debt by a very simple process, the next stall in the Augean
stable of existing abomination, as he expressed it, must be dealt
with. “Suppose we change the metaphor, my dear Polus, and say the
next plank in your platform must be pulled up.” “Pulled up? Quite the
contrary. Fixed, firmly fixed, nailed down!” “Be it so! Let us look at
the plank. A stall in the stable of abominations suggests dirty work,
you know!”
The next great problem which the Great International League sets before
itself to solve is this: the National Debt being annihilated, how is
the accumulation of property to be prevented in the future? I observed
that at this point Polus was not so inclined for the monologue form of
discussion as before. It was not the Socratic speaking _ex cathedrâ_,
as in the _Laws_; there was a quite unusual glad-of-a-hint attitude, as
in the _Lysis_ or the _Meno_.
“Come,” I said, “I see through you; you haven’t thought it out, and
you want me to give you a hint. Which is it to be? Am I to serve as
whetstone, or do you come in trouble and pain crying out for τὴν
μαιείαν?” He threw up his hands: “Speak, and I will listen.” Then said
I, “O Polus, you’re just the man I want. Everybody knows I am a dull
old dog, slow of thought and slow of speech as a country bumpkin must
be; feeling after my words, and as often as not choosing the wrong
ones. But I have been excogitating of late a theory which will supply
your next plank to perfection, and in fact would make your fortune
as a politician, if indeed the Great League will allow you to have
any property, even in your brains. Forty years ago--for there were
_thinkers_, my dear Polus, in the waste places of the earth even before
you were born--I came across quite a “sublime” scheme of some French
financier, propounded, I think, during the Great Revolution, for which
the world was not yet ready. The man was before his age, and his own
generation pooh-poohed him. I quite forget his name. I quite forget
the title of his book if he ever wrote one; and I shall be very much
obliged to you if you can find out something about the great man, for
a great man he was. When I heard of this scheme I was little more than
a lad, and now, after much cogitation, I cannot honestly tell you how
much of the plan is his and how much my own. But I’ll give him all the
credit for it.”
The scheme was a scheme for automatically adjusting all incomes and
reducing them to something like equilibrium--that is, the operation of
the process set in motion would tend in that direction. All incomes,
no matter from what sources derived, were to be fixed according to an
algebraic formula, and the formula was this:
·0001 (x - m)² = The income tax levied upon each citizen.
Here x=the actual income earned by the citizen;
m=1,000 pounds sterling, or an equivalent in francs or dollars, if
you prefer it.
When x=m, then of course there could be nothing to pay; which is only
another way of saying that a man with £1,000 a year was free from all
taxation.
When x was greater than m, then taxation upon the income in excess of
£1,000 came into operation with rather alarming rapidity: until when
a man was convicted of having in any single year made £10,000 his
taxation amounted to £8,100 for that year, and if he were ever found
guilty of having made an income of £12,000 the State claimed the whole
in obedience to this great and beneficent law.
But what happens in the case of those who have an income below the
£1,000 a year--that is, when x is less than m?
In this case the grandeur and sagacity, not to speak of the paternal
character of the scheme, become apparent. The moment a man begins to
earn more than the normal £1,000 a year, that moment he begins to pay
his beautifully adjusted quota of taxation to the State; but the moment
that his income falls below the £1,000, that moment the State begins to
pay him. Of course you will not forget that _minus_ into _minus_ gives
_plus_, therefore the square of the _minus_ quantity represented by
x-m, where m is greater than x, offers no difficulty. The two poles
of this perfect sphere, if I may so speak, this financial orb--_teres
atque rotundus_--are reached, first when x=0, last when x = £11,000.
In the first case the State comes to the help of the pauper who has
earned or can earn nothing, and gives him a ten-thousandth part of a
hypothetical million, which amounts to exactly £100 a year; in the
other case the State deprives the bloated plutocrat of a ten-thousandth
part of the same million, and relieves the dangerous citizen of ten
thousand out of the eleven, saying to him, “Citizen, be grateful that
you still have your thousand, and beware how you persist in piling up
riches, for the State knows how to gather them.”
“Now, my dear Polus, next time you come, do bring me tidings of my
Frenchman, and do work the thing out on paper, for I never was much
of a mathematician, and now my decimals are scandalously vague!” So
Polus went his way with a dainty rosebud in a dainty paper box for Mrs.
Polus, and a saucy message from the Lady Shepherd. “Tell her, with
my love, I’m very sorry her husband’s such a goose!” We watched him
floundering through the snowdrifts; and I verily believe he was working
out my problem with his stick, ·0001 (x-m)².
I don’t think that man went away much impressed with the darkness
and desolation of our Arcadian life. Nay, I’m inclined to think the
other side had something to say, and I’m afraid this is what it said:
“Oh yes, it’s all very fine--intellectual intercourse, and so on.
Freshens you up? Glad to see people? Of course I am. But I _did_ hope
we were going to have a long day together, and there! it’s all broken
into. It’s always the way. How was I to do my autographs with him
extinguishing my £1,000 in the funds all the while?”
* * * * *
Here I may as well explain that the Shepherd and his lady are the
objects of some wonder and perplexity to their great friends on the one
hand and their little friends on the other. The first pronounce them to
be poor as rats; the second declare that they are rolling in riches.
This conflict of opinion is easily accounted for. When the great and
noble Asnapper comes to smile at us he has to take pot-luck. Come when
he may, there is all due provision--
Ne turpe toral, ne sordida mappa
Corruget nares, ne non et cantharus et lanx
Ostendat tibi te.
But the forks are all electro-plate, and the dishes are all of the
willow pattern. When meek little Mr. Crumb brings Mrs. Crumb and two of
the eight daughters to enjoy one hearty meal at afternoon tea, he is
awe-struck by the sight of the books and the splendour of half a dozen
good engravings hanging upon the walls. As the old grey pony trots home
in high spirits--for Jabez has a standing order always to give that
poor little beast a double feed of corn--Mr. Crumb remarks to Mrs.
Crumb, “Those people must be extremely affluent. I wonder he does not
restore his church!”
The great and noble Asnapper, on the contrary, observes, “All the
signs of deep poverty, my dear. Keeps his pluck up, though. Quite out
of character with the general appearance of the establishment to have
those books and collections and what not. I suppose some uncle left him
the things. Cooking? I forgot to notice that; but the point of one’s
knife went all sorts of ways, and the earthenware was most irritating.
Eccentric people. The Lady Shepherd, as they call her, has actually
got near a thousand autographs. Why in the world doesn’t she send
them up to Sotheby’s and buy some new stair carpets?” Ah! why indeed?
Because such as she and the Shepherd have a way of their own which is
not exactly your way, my noble Asnapper; because they have made their
choice, and they do not repent it. Some things they have, and take
delight in them; some things they have not, and they do without them.
But not even in Arcady is it all cakes and ale. Thank God we have our
duties as well as our enjoyments; pursuits and tastes we have, and the
serious blessed duties which call us from excess in self-indulgence.
When the roads are blocked for man and beast we chuckle because there
can be no obligation to trudge down to the school a mile and a half
off, or to go and pay that wedding call upon the little bride who was
married last week, or to inquire about the health of Mrs. Thingoe on
the common, whose twins are ten days old.
But snow or no snow, as long as old Biddy lives, one of us positively
must go and look after “the old lady.” Every man, woman, and
child in the parish calls her “the old lady,” and a real old lady
she is. Biddy was ninety-three last November. She persists she’s
ninety-four--“leastways _in_ my ninety-four. That Register only said
when I was christened, you know, and who’s a-going to say how long I
was born before I was christened?”
Biddy has been married three times, and she avers that she wouldn’t
mind marrying again if she could get another partner equal to her
second. Every one of her husbands had had one or more wives before he
wedded Biddy. We make out that Biddy and her three spouses committed
an aggregate of twelve acts of matrimony. If you think that old Biddy
is a feeble old dotard, drivelling and maundering, you never made a
greater mistake in your life. She is as bright as a star of the first
magnitude, and as shrewd as the canniest Scotchman that ever carried a
pack. She is almost the only genuine child of Arcady I ever knew who
has a keen sense of humour, and is always on the look-out for a joke.
She is quite the only one in whom I have noticed any tender pity for
the fallen, not because of the consequences that followed the lapse,
but simply and only because it was a fall. Biddy lives by herself in a
house very little bigger than an enlarged dog-kennel, and much smaller
than an average cow-house. Till she was eighty-three she went about the
country with a donkey and cart, hawking; since then she has managed to
exist, and pay her rent too, on eighteen pence a week and a stone of
flour. She is always neat and clean, and more than cheerful. She has
been knitting socks for me for eight years past, and I am provided with
sufficient hosiery now to last me even to the age of the patriarchs.
Of course we demoralise old Biddy; her little home is hardly 100 yards
off the parsonage, and every now and then the old lady comes to tea
in the kitchen. One of the servants goes to fetch her, and another
takes her home; and, as I have said, most days one of us goes to sit
with her, and I make it a rule never to leave her without making her
laugh. You may think what you like, but I hold that innocent merriment
keeps people healthy in mind and body, improves the digestion, clears
the intellect, brightens the conscience, prepares the soul for
adoration--for is not gaiety the anticipation of that which in the
spiritual world will be known as fulness of joy?
On this day of snow I found Biddy sitting before the fire, half
expecting me and half doubting whether I could get there. “‘Cause, you
know, you ain’t as young as you was when you came here first.” “Is
any one, Biddy?” She looked up in her sly way. “Dash it, I ain’t!”
By her side on the little table was a Book of Common Prayer in very
large print, and her spectacles on it. “I’ve begun to read that book
through,” she said, “and I’ve got as far as where it’s turned down,
but there’s some on it as I’ve got to be very particular with. That
there slanting print, that’s hard, that is; that ain’t so easy as the
rest on it. But I’m going to read it all through for all that. You see
I’ve _done_ it all before, and some of it comes easy.” “Well, Biddy,
you ought to know the marriage service by this time.” “And so I do,”
said Biddy, grinning. “But I never had no churchings, and I don’t
hold wi’ that there _Combination_. Dash it! I never did like cussing
and swearing!”[7] It turned out that Biddy had set herself the task of
reading the Prayer Book through, _rubrics and all_. Very funny, wasn’t
it? Pray, my reverend brethren of the clergy, have you all of you set
yourselves the same task and carried it out?
A little later the Lady Shepherd dropped in to look at Biddy. She found
the old woman chuckling over some very mild pleasantry of mine, which
she repeated in her own odd way. Suddenly she stopped. “Our doctor
won’t live to ninety-four!” “Oh, Biddy, that’s more than you can tell.
One thing is quite certain; if he does, you won’t be here to see him.”
“Why sha’n’t I?” answers Biddy. “He’s nigh upon threescore, ain’t he?
and I’m in my ninety-four. You can’t tell, neither, as I shan’t be
here. The Lord knows.”
* * * * *
Dear old Biddy! Who _does_ know anything? It seems to me that we can
none of us know anything about anything but the past. I hardly know
whether we are most ignorant of the things that shall be or the things
that are. Old Biddy is the last of the old-world folk that fascinated
me so much with their legends and traditions and reminiscences when
first I settled among them--it seems but yesterday. Old Biddy has told
me all she has to tell, the gossip and the experiences of days that
were not as our days. With her will pass away all that is left of a
generation that was the generation of our fathers. If I leave her with
a smile upon the wrinkled old face there is more often a shade of
sadness that passes over my own. Other faces rise up before me; other
voices seem to sound; the touch of the vanished hand--gone--gone! As
I turn homeward with bowed head in the grey twilight, and muse upon
those ten years that have rushed by so peacefully, and yet which have
remorselessly levied their tribute and left me beggared of some who
were dearer than all the jewels of the mine--
The farm-smokes, sweetest sight on earth,
Slow through the winter air a-shrinking,
Seem kind o’ sad, and round the hearth
Of empty places set me thinking.
That, however, is not because Arcady is Arcady, but because life is
life.
Such as we have long ago found the secret of contentment, and something
more. Shall I tell you what that secret is? Will you promise to take
it as the rule of your own life if I do? Here it is, then, wrapped
up in a very short and pithy aphorism--“The man who does not like the
place he _has to live in_ is a fool.” Ponder it well, you people who
are never tired of prescribing “a change” as absolutely necessary to
endurable existence. Banished to the sweetest village in England, how
dazed and forlorn you’d be! _We_ could accommodate ourselves to your
life as easily as we could put on a new suit of clothes. _You_ could
never accommodate yourselves to ours. You would mope and pine. Your
only solace would be in droning forth a new version of the _Tristia_,
which would not be half as melodious as Ovid’s.
This poor Shepherd and his Lady Shepherd will never see the Alps
again--never take a boat on Lugano’s lake in the summer evening, never
see Rome or Florence, never again stand before the Sistine Madonna,
hearing their hearts beat. Ravenna will remain for them unvisited, and
Munich will be welcome to keep its acres of splashes, which Britain’s
young men and maidens are told with some insistence are genuine works
of Rubens, every one of them. These are joys of the past. But if you
assume that two old fogies like us _must_ be longing for a change,
fidgeting and hankering after it, and that we _must_ be getting rusty,
dull, and morose for lack of it, that we are eating our hearts out with
a querulous whimpering, instead of brimming over with thankfulness all
day and every day--then you do us grievous wrong. What, sir! Do you
take us for a couple of babies floundering in a tub, and puling for a
cake of Pears’ Soap? Arcady or Athens is much the same to us. Where our
home must be, there are our hearts.
NOTE.
THE AUTOMATIC ADJUSTMENT OF INCOMES.
This--the great financial measure of the future--can hardly be expected
to commend itself to the philosophic economists of the present day.
It is the penalty which every man who is before his time must expect
to pay for his excessive sagacity, that his contemporaries neglect
or deride him. Accordingly the very name of the French thinker who
suggested this beautiful scheme for ensuring Liberty, Equality, and
Fraternity has been forgotten and--will it be believed?--the number of
those who have ever taken the trouble to work out his formula is quite
disgracefully small.
The _Formula_ of the great unknown stands thus:--
·0001 (x - m)² = The amount which the state deals with in all incomes
above £100 a year.[8]
Here x = the income. m = £1,000.
In working out this Formula, the _Rule_ may be stated as follows:--
1. From the number of pounds of income (x) deduct 1,000.
2. Multiply the remainder into itself, _i.e._, _square_ it.
3. Divide the product by 10,000.
The result will give--
(i) The amount paid _by_ the State to the owners of income _under_
£1,000 a year.
(ii) The amount paid _to_ the State by owners of income _above_
£1,000 a year.
Examples:--
(_a_) Income of £200 a year; _i.e._, x = 200.
200 - 1,000 = -800.
-800 squared; [_i.e._,-800 multiplied by -800] = 640,000.
Result of 640,000/10,000 = 64.
Consolation income to all possessors of £200 a year ... £64.
(_b_) Income of £500 a year; _i.e._, x = 500.
500 - 1,000 = -500.
-500 squared; [_i.e._,-500 multiplied by -500] = 250,000.
Result of 250,000/10,000 = 25.
Consolation income to all possessors of £500 a year ... £25.
(_c_) Income of £900 a year; _i.e._, x = 900.
900 - 1,000 = -100.
-100 squared; [_i.e._, -100 multiplied by -100] = 10,000.
Result of 10,000/10,000 = 1.
Consolation income to all possessors of £900 a year ... £1.
(_d_) Income of £1,000 a year; _i.e._, x = 1,000.
1,000 - 1,000 = 0.
0 multiplied by 0 = 0.
Consolation income to all possessors of £1,000 a year ... 0.
(_e_) Income of £2,000 a year; _i.e._, x = 2,000.
2,000 - 1,000 = 1,000.
1,000 squared [_i.e._, 1,000 multiplied by 1,000] = 1,000,000.
Result of 1,000,000/10,000 = 100.
_Income tax paid by_ all possessors of £2,000 a year ... £100.
Reduced to a tabulated form it becomes evident that the consolation
paid by the State to all owners of income below £1,000 will decrease
as the incomes increase; until, when a prosperous gentleman attains
to £1,000 a year, the consolation will disappear, and instead of
_receiving_ anything he will begin to _pay_ tax upon his income, such
tax becoming greater and greater as his income grows--until, if he be
so rash as to attain an income of £11,000 a year, he will pay £10,000
a year income tax, and if he does not take this warning and rises to
£12,000 a year the State will not only claim all his £12,000 but demand
£100 a year more.
That is to say,
A.
Incomes of
£200 will receive from the State the Consolation of £64
300 ” ” ” 49
400 ” ” ” 36
500 ” ” ” 25
600 ” ” ” 16
700 ” ” ” 9
800 ” ” ” 4
900 ” ” ” 1
1,000 ” ” ” Nil
B.
Incomes of
£2,000 will pay to the State a Tax of £100
3,000 ” ” ” 400
4,000 ” ” ” 900
5,000 ” ” ” 1,600
6,000 ” ” ” 2,500
7,000 ” ” ” 3,600
8,000 ” ” ” 4,900
9,000 ” ” ” 6,400
10,000 ” ” ” 8,100
11,000 ” ” ” 10,000
12,000 ” ” ” 12,100
* * * * *
The richest man in the community will thus be he who has an income of
£6,000 a year; on this he will have to pay £2,500 income tax, leaving
him with an available balance of £3,500 a year to spend! Now was not
this anonymous Frenchman a man of real genius? And is he not a signal
example of the truth that
“The world knows nothing of its greatest men”?
* * * * *
The assumptions on which this lofty attempt to reconstruct the social
fabric are based are obvious. They are these:--