that the first and most literal application is just as necessary a one
as any other--that the story does very specially mean what it
says--plain money; and that the reason we don't at once believe it does
so, is a sort of tacit idea that while thought, wit, and intellect, and
all power of birth and position, are indeed _given_ to us, and,
therefore, to be laid out for the Giver--our wealth has not been given
to us; but we have worked for it, and have a right to spend it as we
choose. I think you will find that is the real substance of our
understanding in this matter. Beauty, we say, is given by God--it is a
talent; strength is given by God--it is a talent; position is given by
God--it is a talent; but money is proper wages for our day's work--it is
not a talent, it is a due. We may justly spend it on ourselves, if we
have worked for it.
117. And there would be some shadow of excuse for this, were it not that
the very power of making the money is itself only one of the
applications of that intellect or strength which we confess to be
talents. Why is one man richer than another? Because he is more
industrious, more persevering, and more sagacious. Well, who made him
more persevering or more sagacious than others? That power of endurance,
that quickness of apprehension, that calmness of judgment, which enable
him to seize the opportunities that others lose, and persist in the
lines of conduct in which others fail--are these not talents?--are they
not, in the present state of the world, among the most distinguished and
influential of mental gifts? And is it not wonderful, that while we
should be utterly ashamed to use a superiority of body, in order to
thrust our weaker companions aside from some place of advantage, we
unhesitatingly use our superiorities of mind to thrust them back from
whatever good that strength of mind can attain? You would be indignant
if you saw a strong man walk into a theatre or a lecture-room, and,
calmly choosing the best place, take his feeble neighbour by the
shoulder, and turn him out of it into the back seats, or the street. You
would be equally indignant if you saw a stout fellow thrust himself up
to a table where some hungry children were being fed, and reach his arm
over their heads and take their bread from them. But you are not the
least indignant if, when a man has stoutness of thought and swiftness of
capacity, and, instead of being long-armed only, has the much greater
gift of being long-headed--you think it perfectly just that he should
use his intellect to take the bread out of the mouths of all the other
men in the town who are of the same trade with him; or use his breadth
and sweep of sight to gather some branch of the commerce of the country
into one great cobweb, of which he is himself to be the central spider,
making every thread vibrate with the points of his claws, and commanding
every avenue with the facets of his eyes. You see no injustice in this.
118. But there is injustice; and, let us trust, one of which honourable
men will at no very distant period disdain to be guilty. In some degree,
however, it is indeed not unjust; in some degree, it is necessary and
intended. It is assuredly just that idleness should be surpassed by
energy; that the widest influence should be possessed by those who are
best able to wield it; and that a wise man, at the end of his career,
should be better off than a fool. But for that reason, is the fool to be
wretched, utterly crushed down, and left in all the suffering which his
conduct and capacity naturally inflict?--Not so. What do you suppose
fools were made for? That you might tread upon them, and starve them,
and get the better of them in every possible way? By no means. They were
made that wise people might take care of them. That is the true and
plain fact concerning the relations of every strong and wise man to the
world about him. He has his strength given him, not that he may crush
the weak, but that he may support and guide them. In his own household
he is to be the guide and the support of his children; out of his
household he is still to be the father--that is, the guide and
support--of the weak and the poor; not merely of the meritoriously weak
and the innocently poor, but of the guiltily and punishably poor; of the
men who ought to have known better--of the poor who ought to be ashamed
of themselves. It is nothing to give pension and cottage to the widow
who has lost her son; it is nothing to give food and medicine to the
workman who has broken his arm, or the decrepit woman wasting in
sickness. But it is something to use your time and strength to war with
the waywardness and thoughtlessness of mankind; to keep the erring
workman in your service till you have made him an unerring one; and to
direct your fellow-merchant to the opportunity which his dulness would
have lost. This is much; but it is yet more, when you have fully
achieved the superiority which is due to you, and acquired the wealth
which is the fitting reward of your sagacity, if you solemnly accept the
responsibility of it, as it is the helm and guide of labour far and
near.
119. For you who have it in your hands are in reality the pilots of the
power and effort of the State. It is entrusted to you as an authority to
be used for good or evil, just as completely as kingly authority was
ever given to a prince, or military command to a captain. And, according
to the quantity of it that you have in your hands, you are the arbiters
of the will and work of England; and the whole issue, whether the work
of the State shall suffice for the State or not, depends upon you. You
may stretch out your sceptre over the heads of the English labourers,
and say to them, as they stoop to its waving, "Subdue this obstacle that
has baffled our fathers, put away this plague that consumes our
children; water these dry places, plough these desert ones, carry this
food to those who are in hunger; carry this light to those who are in
darkness; carry this life to those who are in death;" or on the other
side you may say to her labourers: "Here am I; this power is in my hand;
come, build a mound here for me to be throned upon, high and wide; come,
make crowns for my head, that men may see them shine from far away;
come, weave tapestries for my feet, that I may tread softly on the silk
and purple; come, dance before me, that I may be gay; and sing sweetly
to me, that I may slumber; so shall I live in joy, and die in honour."
And better than such an honourable death it were that the day had
perished wherein we were born, and the night in which it was said there
is a child conceived.
120. I trust that in a little while there will be few of our rich men
who, through carelessness or covetousness, thus forfeit the glorious
office which is intended for their hands. I said, just now, that wealth
ill-used was as the net of the spider, entangling and destroying: but
wealth well used is as the net of the sacred fisher who gathers souls of
men out of the deep. A time will come--I do not think even now it is
far from us--when this golden net of the world's wealth will be spread
abroad as the flaming meshes of morning cloud are over the sky; bearing
with them the joy of light and the dew of the morning, as well as the
summons to honourable and peaceful toil. What less can we hope from your
wealth than this, rich men of England, when once you feel fully how, by
the strength of your possessions--not, observe, by the exhaustion, but
by the administration of them and the power,--you can direct the
acts--command the energies--inform the ignorance--prolong the existence,
of the whole human race; and how, even of worldly wisdom, which man
employs faithfully, it is true, not only that her ways are pleasantness,
but that her paths are peace; and that, for all the children of men, as
well as for those to whom she is given, Length of days is in her right
hand, as in her left hand Riches and Honour?
ADDENDA
Note, p. 18.--"_Fatherly authority._"
121. This statement could not, of course, be heard without displeasure
by a certain class of politicians; and in one of the notices of these
lectures given in the Manchester journals at the time, endeavour was
made to get quit of it by referring to the Divine authority, as the only
Paternal power with respect to which men were truly styled "brethren."
Of course it is so, and, equally of course, all human government is
nothing else than the executive expression of this Divine authority. The
moment government ceases to be the practical enforcement of Divine law,
it is tyranny; and the meaning which I attach to the words "paternal
government," is, in more extended terms, simply this--"The executive
fulfilment, by formal human methods, of the will of the Father of
mankind respecting His children." I could not give such a definition of
Government as this in a popular lecture; and even in written form, it
will necessarily suggest many objections, of which I must notice and
answer the most probable.
Only, in order to avoid the recurrence of such tiresome phrases as "it
may be answered in the second place," and "it will be objected in the
third place," etc., I will ask the reader's leave to arrange the
discussion in the form of simple dialogue, letting _O._ stand for
objector, and _R._ for response.
122. _O._--You define your paternal government to be the executive
fulfilment, by formal human methods, of the Divine will. But, assuredly,
that will cannot stand in need of aid or expression from human laws. It
cannot fail of its fulfilment.
_R._ 122. In the final sense it cannot; and in that sense, men who are
committing murder and stealing are fulfilling the will of God as much as
the best and kindest people in the world. But in the limited and present
sense, the only sense with which _we_ have anything to do, God's will
concerning man is fulfilled by some men, and thwarted by others. And
those men who either persuade or enforce the doing of it, stand towards
those who are rebellious against it exactly in the position of faithful
children in a family, who, when the father is out of sight, either
compel or persuade the rest to do as their father would have them, were
he present; and in so far as they are expressing and maintaining, for
the time, the paternal authority, they exercise, in the exact sense in
which I mean the phrase to be understood, paternal government over the
rest.
_O._--But, if Providence has left a liberty to man in many things in
order to prove him, why should human law abridge that liberty, and take
upon itself to compel what the great Lawgiver does not compel?
123. _R._--It is confessed, in the enactment of any law whatsoever, that
human lawgivers have a right to do this. For, if you have no right to
abridge any of the liberty which Providence has left to man, you have no
right to punish any one for committing murder or robbery. You ought to
leave them to the punishment of God and Nature. But if you think
yourself under obligation to punish, as far as human laws can, the
violation of the will of God by these great sins, you are certainly
under the same obligation to punish, with proportionately less
punishment, the violation of His will in less sins.
_O._--No; you must not attempt to punish less sins by law, because you
cannot properly define nor ascertain them. Everybody can determine
whether murder has been committed or not, but you cannot determine how
far people have been unjust or cruel in minor matters, and therefore
cannot make or execute laws concerning minor matters.
_R._--If I propose to you to punish faults which cannot be defined, or
to execute laws which cannot be made equitable, reject the laws I
propose. But do not generally object to the principle of law.
_O._--Yes; I generally object to the principle of law as applied to
minor things; because, if you could succeed (which you cannot) in
regulating the entire conduct of men by law in little things as well as
great, you would take away from human life all its probationary
character, and render many virtues and pleasures impossible. You would
reduce virtue to the movement of a machine, instead of the act of a
spirit.
124. _R._--You have just said, parenthetically, and I fully and
willingly admit it, that it is impossible to regulate all minor matters
by law. Is it not probable, therefore, that the degree in which it is
_possible_ to regulate them by it, is also the degree in which it is
_right_ to regulate them by it? Or what other means of judgment will you
employ, to separate the things which ought to be formally regulated from
the things which ought not? You admit that great sins should be legally
repressed; but you say that small sins should not be legally repressed.
How do you distinguish between great and small sins? and how do you
intend to determine, or do you in practice of daily life determine, on
what occasions you should compel people to do right, and on what
occasions you should leave them the option of doing wrong?
_O._--I think you cannot make any accurate or logical distinction in
such matters; but that common sense and instinct have, in all civilised
nations, indicated certain crimes of great social harmfulness, such as
murder, theft, adultery, slander, and such like, which it is proper to
repress legally; and that common sense and instinct indicate also the
kind of crimes which it is proper for laws to let alone, such as
miserliness, ill-natured speaking, and many of those commercial
dishonesties which I have a notion you want your paternal government to
interfere with.
_R._--Pray do not alarm yourself about what my paternal government is
likely to interfere with, but keep to the matter in hand. You say that
"common sense and instinct" have, in all civilised nations,
distinguished between the sins that ought to be legally dealt with and
that ought not. Do you mean that the laws of all civilised nations are
perfect?
_O._--No; certainly not.
_R._--Or that they are perfect at least in their discrimination of what
crimes they should deal with, and what crimes they should let alone?
_O._--No; not exactly.
_R._--What _do_ you mean, then?
125. _O._--I mean that the general tendency is right in the laws of
civilised nations; and that, in due course of time, natural sense and
instinct point out the matters they should be brought to bear upon. And
each question of legislation must be made a separate subject of inquiry
as it presents itself: you cannot fix any general principles about what
should be dealt with legally, and what should not.
_R._--Supposing it to be so, do you think there are any points in which
our English legislation is capable of amendment, as it bears on
commercial and economical matters, in this present time?
_O._--Of course I do.
_R._--Well, then, let us discuss these together quietly; and if the
points that I want amended seem to you incapable of amendment, or not in
need of amendment, say so: but don't object, at starting, to the mere
proposition of applying law to things which have not had law applied to
them before. You have admitted the fitness of my expression, "paternal
government": it only has been, and remains, a question between us, how
far such government should extend. Perhaps you would like it only to
regulate, among the children, the length of their lessons; and perhaps I
should like it also to regulate the hardness of their cricket-balls: but
cannot you wait quietly till you know what I want it to do, before
quarrelling with the thing itself?
_O._--No; I cannot wait quietly; in fact, I don't see any use in
beginning such a discussion at all, because I am quite sure from the
first, that you want to meddle with things that you have no business
with, and to interfere with healthy liberty of action in all sorts of
ways; and I know that you can't propose any laws that would be of real
use.[15]
[Note 15: If the reader is displeased with me for putting this
foolish speech into his mouth, I entreat his pardon; but he may be
assured that it is a speech which would be made by many people, and the
substance of which would be tacitly felt by many more, at this point of
the discussion. I have really tried, up to this point, to make the
objector as intelligent a person as it is possible for an author to
imagine anybody to be who differs with him.]
126. _R._--If you indeed know that, you would be wrong to hear me any
farther. But if you are only in painful doubt about me, which makes you
unwilling to run the risk of wasting your time, I will tell you
beforehand what I really do think about this same liberty of action,
namely, that whenever we can make a perfectly equitable law about any
matter, or even a law securing, on the whole, more just conduct than
unjust, we ought to make that law; and that there will yet, on these
conditions, always remain a number of matters respecting which legalism
and formalism are impossible; enough, and more than enough, to exercise
all human powers of individual judgment, and afford all kinds of scope
to individual character. I think this; but of course it can only be
proved by separate examination of the possibilities of formal restraint
in each given field of action; and these two lectures are nothing more
than a sketch of such a detailed examination in one field, namely, that
of art. You will find, however, one or two other remarks on such
possibilities in the next note.
* * * * *
Note 2nd, p. 21.--"_Right to public support._"
127. It did not appear to me desirable, in the course of the spoken
lecture, to enter into details or offer suggestions on the questions of
the regulation of labour and distribution of relief, as it would have
been impossible to do so without touching on many disputed or disputable
points, not easily handled before a general audience. But I must now
supply what is wanting to make my general statement clear.
I believe, in the first place, that no Christian nation has any business
to see one of its members in distress without helping him, though,
perhaps, at the same time punishing him: help, of course--in nine cases
out of ten--meaning guidance, much more than gift, and, therefore,
interference with liberty. When a peasant mother sees one of her
careless children fall into a ditch, her first proceeding is to pull him
out; her second, to box his ears; her third, ordinarily, to lead him
carefully a little way by the hand, or send him home for the rest of the
day. The child usually cries, and very often would clearly prefer
remaining in the ditch; and if he understood any of the terms of
politics, would certainly express resentment at the interference with
his individual liberty: but the mother has done her duty. Whereas the
usual call of the mother nation to any of her children, under such
circumstances, has lately been nothing more than the foxhunter's,--"Stay
still there; I shall clear you." And if we always _could_ clear them,
their requests to be left in muddy independence might be sometimes
allowed by kind people, or their cries for help disdained by unkind
ones. But we can't clear them. The whole nation is, in fact, bound
together, as men are by ropes on a glacier--if one falls, the rest must
either lift him or drag him along with them[16] as dead weight, not
without much increase of danger to themselves. And the law of right
being manifestly in this--as, whether manifestly or not, it is always,
the law of prudence--the only question is, how this wholesome help and
interference are to be administered.
[Note 16: It is very curious to watch the efforts of two
shop-keepers to ruin each other, neither having the least idea that his
ruined neighbour must eventually be supported at his own expense, with
an increase of poor rates; and that the contest between them is not in
reality which shall get everything for himself, but which shall first
take upon himself and his customers the gratuitous maintenance of the
other's family.]
128. The first interference should be in education. In order that men
may be able to support themselves when they are grown, their strength
must be properly developed while they are young; and the State should
always see to this--not allowing their health to be broken by too early
labour, nor their powers to be wasted for want of knowledge. Some
questions connected with this matter are noticed farther on under the
head "trial schools": one point I must notice here, that I believe all
youths, of whatever rank, ought to learn some manual trade thoroughly;
for it is quite wonderful how much a man's views of life are cleared by
the attainment of the capacity of doing any one thing well with his
hands and arms. For a long time, what right life there was in the upper
classes of Europe depended in no small degree on the necessity which
each man was under of being able to fence; at this day, the most useful
things which boys learn at public schools are, I believe, riding,
rowing, and cricketing. But it would be far better that members of
Parliament should be able to plough straight, and make a horseshoe, than
only to feather oars neatly or point their toes prettily in stirrups.
Then, in literary and scientific teaching, the great point of economy is
to give the discipline of it through knowledge which will immediately
bear on practical life. Our literary work has long been economically
useless to us because too much concerned with dead languages; and our
scientific work will yet, for some time, be a good deal lost, because
scientific men are too fond or too vain of their systems, and waste the
student's time in endeavouring to give him large views, and make him
perceive interesting connections of facts; when there is not one
student, no, nor one man, in a thousand, who can feel the beauty of a
system, or even take it clearly into his head; but nearly all men can
understand, and most will be interested in, the facts which bear on
daily life. Botanists have discovered some wonderful connection between
nettles and figs, which a cowboy who will never see a ripe fig in his
life need not be at all troubled about; but it will be interesting to
him to know what effect nettles have on hay, and what taste they will
give to porridge; and it will give him nearly a new life if he can be
got but once, in a spring time, to look well at the beautiful circlet of
white nettle blossom, and work out with his schoolmaster the curves of
its petals, and the way it is set on its central mast. So, the principle
of chemical equivalents, beautiful as it is, matters far less to a
peasant boy, and even to most sons of gentlemen, than their knowing how
to find whether the water is wholesome in the back-kitchen cistern, or
whether the seven-acre field wants sand or chalk.