The Crown of Wild Olive Part 15

150. Going back to the matter in hand, we will press the example closer.

On a green knoll above that plain of the Arve, between Cluse and Bonneville, there was, in the year 1860, a cottage, inhabited by a well-doing family--man and wife, three children, and the grandmother. I call it a cottage, but in truth, it was a large chimney on the ground, wide at the bottom, so that the family might live round the fire; lighted by one small broken window, and entered by an unclosing door.

The family, I say, was "well-doing;" at least it was hopeful and cheerful; the wife healthy, the children, for Savoyards, pretty and active, but the husband threatened with decline, from exposure under the cliffs of the Mont Vergi by day, and to draughts between every plank of his chimney in the frosty nights.

"Why could he not plaster the c.h.i.n.ks?" asks the practical reader. For the same reason that your child cannot wash its face and hands till you have washed them many a day for it, and will not wash them when it can, till you force it.

151. I pa.s.sed this cottage often in my walks, had its window and door mended; sometimes mended also a little the meal of sour bread and broth, and generally got kind greeting and smile from the face of young or old; which greeting this year, narrowed itself into the half-recognizing stare of the elder child, and the old woman's tears; for the father and mother were both dead,--one of sickness, the other of sorrow. It happened that I pa.s.sed not alone, but with a companion, a practised English joiner, who, while these people were dying of cold, had been employed from six in the morning to six in the evening, for two months, in fitting, without nails, the panels of a single door in a large house in London. Three days of his work taken, at the right time from fastening the oak panels with useless precision, and applied to fasten the larch timbers with decent strength, would have saved these Savoyards' lives. _He_ would have been maintained equally; (I suppose him equally paid for his work by the owner of the greater house, only the work not consumed selfishly on his own walls;) and the two peasants, and eventually, probably their children, saved.

152. There are, therefore,--let me finally enforce, and leave with the reader, this broad conclusion,--three things to be considered in employing any poor person. It is not enough to give him employment. You must employ him first to produce useful things; secondly, of the several (suppose equally useful) things he can equally well produce, you must set him to make that which will cause him to lead the healthiest life; lastly, of the things produced, it remains a question of wisdom and conscience how much you are to take yourself, and how much to leave to others. A large quant.i.ty, remember, unless you destroy it, _must_ always be so left at one time or another; the only questions you have to decide are, not _what_ you will give, but _when_, and _how_, and _to whom_, you will give. The natural law of human life is, of course, that in youth a man shall labour and lay by store for his old age, and when age comes, shall use what he has laid by, gradually slackening his toil, and allowing himself more frank use of his store; taking care always to leave himself as much as will surely suffice for him beyond any possible length of life. What he has gained, or by tranquil and unanxious toil continues to gain, more than is enough for his own need, he ought so to administer, while he yet lives, as to see the good of it again beginning, in other hands; for thus he has himself the greatest sum of pleasure from it, and faithfully uses his sagacity in its control.

Whereas most men, it appears, dislike the sight of their fortunes going out into service again, and say to themselves,--"I can indeed nowise prevent this money from falling at last into the hands of others, nor hinder the good of it from becoming theirs, not mine; but at least let a merciful death save me from being a witness of their satisfaction; and may G.o.d so far be gracious to me as to let no good come of any of this money of mine before my eyes."

153. Supposing this feeling unconquerable, the safest way of rationally indulging it would be for the capitalist at once to spend all his fortune on himself, which might actually, in many cases, be quite the rightest as well as the pleasantest thing to do, if he had just tastes and worthy pa.s.sions. But, whether for himself only, or through the hands, and for the sake, of others also, the law of wise life is, that the maker of the money shall also be the spender of it, and spend it, approximately, all, before he dies; so that his true ambition as an economist should be, to die, not as rich, but as poor, as possible,[88]

calculating the ebb tide of possession in true and calm proportion to the ebb tide of life. Which law, checking the wing of acc.u.mulative desire in the mid-volley,[89] and leading to peace of possession and fulness of fruition in old age, is also wholesome, in that by the freedom of gift, together with present help and counsel, it at once endears and dignifies age in the sight of youth, which then no longer strips the bodies of the dead, but receives the grace of the living. Its chief use would (or will be, for men are indeed capable of attaining to this much use of their reason), that some temperance and measure will be put to the acquisitiveness of commerce.[90] For as things stand, a man holds it his duty to be temperate in his food, and of his body, but for no duty to be temperate in his riches, and of his mind. He sees that he ought not to waste his youth and his flesh for luxury; but he will waste his age, and his soul, for money, and think he does no wrong, nor know the _delirium tremens_ of the intellect for disease. But the law of life is, that a man should fix the sum he desires to make annually, as the food he desires to eat daily; and stay when he has reached the limit, refusing increase of business, and leaving it to others, so obtaining due freedom of time for better thoughts.[91] How the gluttony of business is punished, a bill of health for the princ.i.p.als of the richest city houses, issued annually, would show in a sufficiently impressive manner.

154. I know, of course, that these statements will be received by the modern merchant as an active border rider of the sixteenth century would have heard of its being proper for men of the Marches to get their living by the spade, instead of the spur. But my business is only to state veracities and necessities; I neither look for the acceptance of the one, nor hope for the nearness of the other. Near or distant, the day _will_ a.s.suredly come when the merchants of a state shall be its true ministers of exchange, its porters, in the double sense of carriers and gate-keepers, bringing all lands into frank and faithful communication, and knowing for their master of guild, Hermes the herald, instead of Mercury the gain-guarder.

155. And now, finally, for immediate rule to all who will accept it.

The distress of any population means that they need food, house-room, clothes, and fuel. You can never, therefore, be wrong in employing any labourer to produce food, house-room, clothes, or fuel; but you are _always_ wrong if you employ him to produce nothing, (for then some other labourer must be worked double time to feed him); and you are generally wrong, at present, if you employ him (unless he can do nothing else) to produce works of art or luxuries; because modern art is mostly on a false basis, and modern luxury is criminally great.[92]

156. The way to produce more food is mainly to bring in fresh ground, and increase facilities of carriage;--to break rock, exchange earth, drain the moist, and water the dry, to mend roads, and build harbours of refuge. Taxation thus spent will annihilate taxation, but spent in war, it annihilates revenue.

157. The way to produce house-room is to apply your force first to the humblest dwellings. When your brick-layers are out of employ, do not build splendid new streets, but better the old ones; send your paviours and slaters to the poorest villages, and see that your poor are healthily lodged, before you try your hand on stately architecture. You will find its stateliness rise better under the trowel afterwards; and we do do not yet build so well that we need hasten to display our skill to future ages. Had the labour which has decorated the Houses of Parliament filled, instead, rents in walls and roofs throughout the county of Middles.e.x; and our deputies met to talk within ma.s.sive walls that would have needed no stucco for five hundred years,--the decoration might have been afterwards, and the talk now. And touching even our highly conscientious church building, it may be well to remember that in the best days of church plans, their masons called themselves "logeurs du bon Dieu;" and that since, according to the most trusted reports, G.o.d spends a good deal of His time in cottages as well as in churches, He might perhaps like to be a little better lodged there also.

158. The way to get more clothes is--not, necessarily, to get more cotton. There were words written twenty years ago[93] which would have saved many of us some shivering, had they been minded in time. Shall we read them again?

"The Continental people, it would seem, are importing our machinery, beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for themselves; to cut us out of this market, and then out of that! Sad news, indeed; but irremediable. By no means the saddest news--the saddest news, is that we should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other people. A most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself on!

A stand which, with all the Corn-law abrogations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.

"My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came honestly down from it and said--'This is our minimum of cotton prices; we care not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper. Do you, if it seem so blessed to you, make cotton cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton fur, your heart with copperas fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!' I admire a nation which fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other nations to the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to undersell them; we will be content to equal-sell them; to be happy selling equally with them! I do not see the use of underselling them: cotton-cloth is already twopence a yard, or lower; and yet bare backs were never more numerous among us.

Let inventive men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving how cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent a little how cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier divided among us.

"Let inventive men consider--whether the secret of this universe does after all consist in making money. With a h.e.l.l which means--'failing to make money,' I do not think there is any heaven possible that would suit one well. In brief, all this Mammon gospel of supply-and-demand, compet.i.tion _laissez faire_, and devil take the hindmost (foremost, is it not, rather, Mr. Carlyle?), 'begins to be one of the shabbiest gospels ever preached.'"

159. The way to produce more fuel[94] is first to make your coal mines safer, by sinking more shafts; then set all your convicts to work in them, and if, as is to be hoped, you succeed in diminishing the supply of that sort of labourer, consider what means there may be, first, of growing forest where its growth will improve climate; secondly, of splintering the forests which now make continents of fruitful land pathless and poisonous, into f.a.gots for fire;--so gaining at once dominion icewards and sunwards. Your steam power has been given (you will find eventually) for work such as that: and not for excursion trains, to give the labourer a moment's breath, at the peril of his breath for ever, from amidst the cities which it has crushed into ma.s.ses of corruption. When you know how to build cities, and how to rule them, you will be able to breathe in their streets, and the "excursion" will be the afternoon's walk or game in the fields round them.

160. "But nothing of this work will pay?"

No; no more than it pays to dust your rooms, or wash your doorsteps. It will pay; not at first in currency, but in that which is the end and the source of currency,--in life; (and in currency richly afterwards). It will pay in that which is more than life,--in light, whose true price has not yet been reckoned in any currency, and yet into the image of which, all wealth, one way or other, must be cast. For your riches must either be as the lightning, which,

Begot but in a cloud, Though shining bright, and speaking loud, Whilst it begins, concludes its violent race; And, where it gilds, it wounds the place;--

or else, as the lightning of the sacred sign, which shines from one part of the heaven to the other. There is no other choice; you must either take dust for deity, spectre for possession, fettered dream for life, and for epitaph, this reversed verse of the great Hebrew hymn of economy (Psalm cxii.):--"He hath gathered together, he hath stripped the poor, his iniquity remaineth for ever:"--or else, having the sun of justice to shine on you, and the sincere substance of good in your possession, and the pure law and liberty of life within you, leave men to write this better legend over your grave:--

"He hath dispersed abroad. He hath given to the poor. His righteousness remaineth for ever."

FOOTNOTES:

[78] In the present general examination, I concede so much to ordinary economists as to ignore all _innocent_ poverty. I adapt my reasoning, for once, to the modern English practical mind, by a.s.suming poverty to be always criminal; the conceivable exceptions we will examine afterwards.

[79] [I have no terms of English, and can find none in Greek nor Latin, nor in any other strong language known to me, contemptuous enough to attach to the b.e.s.t.i.a.l idiotism of the modern theory that wages are to be measured by compet.i.tion.]

[80] I say nothing yet of the quality of the servants, which, nevertheless, is the gist of the business. Will you have Paul Veronese to paint your ceiling, or the plumber from over the way? Both will work for the same money; Paul, if anything, a little the cheaper of the two, if you keep him in good humour; only you have to discern him first, which will need eyes.

[81] [I have not altered a syllable in these three paragraphs, 137, 138, 139, on revision; but have much italicised: the principles stated being as vital, as they are little known.]

[82] By his art he may; but only when its produce, or the sight or hearing of it, becomes a subject of dispute, so as to enable the artist to tax the labour of mult.i.tudes highly, in exchange for his own.

[83] [Observe this; the legal right to keep what you have worked for, and use it as you please, is the corner-stone of all economy: compare the end of Chap. II.]

[84] [I should now put the time of necessary labour rather under than over the third of the day.]

[85] [See Preface to _Unto this Last_.]

[86] I have not hitherto touched on the subject of interest of money; it is too complex, and must be reserved for its proper place in the body of the work. The definition of interest (apart from compensation for risk) is, "the exponent of the comfort of accomplished labour, separated from its power;" the power being what is lent: and the French economists who have maintained the entire illegality of interest are wrong; yet by no means so curiously or wildly wrong as the English and French ones opposed to them, whose opinions have been collected by Dr. Whewell at page 41 of his _Lectures_; it never seeming to occur to the mind of the compiler, any more than to the writers whom he quotes, that it is quite possible, and even (according to Jewish proverb) prudent, for men to h.o.a.rd as ants and mice do, for use, not usury; and lay by something for winter nights, in the expectation of rather sharing than lending the sc.r.a.pings. My Savoyard squirrels would pa.s.s a pleasant time of it under the snow-laden pine branches, if they always declined to economize because no one would pay them interest on nuts.

[I leave this note as it stood: but, as I have above stated, should now side wholly with the French economists spoken of, in a.s.serting the absolute illegality of interest.]

[87] Compare Chaucer's feeling respecting birds (from Canace's falcon, to the nightingale, singing, "Domine, l.a.b.i.a--" to the Lord of Love), with the usual modern British sentiments on this subject. Or even Cowley's:--

"What prince's choir of music can excel That which within this shade does dwell, To which we nothing pay, or give, They, like all other poets, live Without reward, or thanks for their obliging pains!

'Tis well if they become not prey."

Yes; it Is better than well; particularly since the seed sown by the wayside has been protected by the peculiar appropriation of part of the church-rates in our country parishes. See the remonstrance from a "Country parson," in _The Times_ of June 4th (or 5th; the letter is dated June 3rd,) 1862:--"I have heard at a vestry meeting a good deal of higgling over a few shillings' outlay in cleaning the church; but I have never heard any dissatisfaction expressed on account of that part of the rate which is invested in 50 or 100 dozens of birds' heads."

[If we could trace the innermost of all causes of modern war, I believe it would be found, not in the avarice nor ambition of nations, but in the mere idleness of the upper cla.s.ses. They have nothing to do but to teach the peasantry to kill each other.]

[88] [See the _Life of Fenelon_. "The labouring peasantry were at all times the objects of his tenderest care; his palace at Cambray, with all his books and writings, being consumed by fire, he bore the misfortune with unruffled calmness, and said it was better his palace should be burnt than the cottage of a poor peasant." (These thoroughly good men always go too far, and lose their power over the ma.s.s.) He died exemplifying the mean he had always observed between prodigality and avarice, leaving neither debts nor money.]

[89] [Greek: kai penian hegoumenous einai me to ten ousian elatto poiein alla to tei aplestian pleio]. "And thinking (wisely) that poverty consists not in making one's possessions less, but one's avarice more."--_Laws_, v. 8. Read the context, and compare. "He who spends for all that is n.o.ble, and gains by nothing but what is just, will hardly be notably wealthy, or distressfully poor."--_Laws_, v. 42.

[90] The fury of modern trade arises chiefly out of the possibility of making sudden fortunes by largeness of transaction, and accident of discovery or contrivance. I have no doubt that the final interest of every nation is to check the action of these commercial lotteries; and that all great accidental gains or losses should be national,--not individual. But speculation absolute, unconnected with commercial effort, is an unmitigated evil in a state, and the root of countless evils beside.

[91] [I desire in the strongest terms to reinforce all that is contained in this paragraph.]

[92] It is especially necessary that the reader should keep his mind fixed on the methods of consumption and destruction, as the true sources of national poverty. Men are apt to call every exchange "expenditure,"

but it is only consumption which is expenditure. A large number of the purchases made by the richer cla.s.ses are mere forms of interchange of unused property, wholly without effect on national prosperity. It matters nothing to the state whether, if a china pipkin be rated as worth a hundred pounds, A has the pipkin and B the pounds, or A the pounds and B the pipkin. But if the pipkin is pretty, and A or B breaks it, there is national loss, not otherwise. So again, when the loss has really taken place, no shifting of the shoulders that bear it will do away with the reality of it. There is an intensely ludicrous notion in the public mind respecting the abolishment of debt by denying it. When a debt is denied, the lender loses instead of the borrower, that is all; the loss is precisely, accurately, everlastingly the same. The Americans borrow money to spend in blowing up their own houses. They deny their debt, by one-third already [1863], gold being at fifty premium; and they will probably deny it wholly. That merely means that the holders of the notes are to be the losers instead of the issuers. The quant.i.ty of loss is precisely equal, and irrevocable; it is the quant.i.ty of human industry spent in effecting the explosion, plus the quant.i.ty of goods exploded. Honour only decides _who_ shall pay the sum lost not whether it is to be paid or not. Paid it must be, and to the uttermost farthing.

[93] [(_Past and Present._ Chap. IX. of Third Section.) To think that for these twenty--now twenty-six--years, this one voice of Carlyle's has been the only faithful and useful utterance in all England, and has sounded through all these years in vain! See _Fors Clavigera_, Letter X.]

[94] [We don't want to produce more fuel just now, but much less; and to use what we get for cooking and warming ourselves, instead of for running from place to place.]

APPENDICES.

I have brought together in these last pages a few notes, which were not properly to be incorporated with the text, and which, at the bottom of pages, checked the reader's attention to the main argument. They contain, however, several statements to which I wish to be able to refer, or have already referred, in other of my books, so that I think right to preserve them.