The Crown of Wild Olive
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