The Crown of Wild Olive
gaily, without thinking twice; but if you ask them, for their country's
sake, to spend a hundred pounds without security of getting back a
hundred-and-five,[86] they will laugh in your face.
149. Not but that also this game of life-giving and taking is, in the
end, somewhat more costly than other forms of play might be. Rifle
practice is, indeed, a not unhealthy pastime, and a feather on the top
of the head is a pleasing appendage; but while learning the stops and
fingering of the sweet instrument, does no one ever calculate the cost
of an overture? What melody does Tityrus meditate on his tenderly spiral
pipe? The leaden seed of it, broadcast, true conical "Dents de Lion"
seed--needing less allowance for the wind than is usual with that kind
of herb--what crop are you likely to have of it? Suppose, instead of
this volunteer marching and countermarching, you were to do a little
volunteer ploughing and counter-ploughing? It is more difficult to do it
straight: the dust of the earth, so disturbed, is more grateful than for
merely rhythmic footsteps. Golden cups, also, given for good ploughing,
would be more suitable in colour: (ruby glass, for the wine which
"giveth his colour" on the ground, might be fitter for the rifle prize
in ladies' hands). Or, conceive a little volunteer exercise with the
spade, other than such as is needed for moat and breastwork, or even
for the burial of the fruit of the leaden avena-seed, subject to the
shrill Lemures' criticism--
Wer hat das Haus so schlecht gebauet?
If you were to embank Lincolnshire more stoutly against the sea? or
strip the peat of Solway, or plant Plinlimmon moors with larch--then, in
due season, some amateur reaping and threshing?
"Nay, we reap and thresh by steam, in these advanced days."
I know it, my wise and economical friends. The stout arms God gave you
to win your bread by, you would fain shoot your neighbours, and God's
sweet singers with;[87] then you invoke the fiends to your farm-service;
and--
When young and old come forth to play
On a sulphurous holiday,
Tell how the darkling goblin sweat
(His feast of cinders duly set),
And, belching night, where breathed the morn,
His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn
That ten day-labourers could not end.
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 chinks?" 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 passed 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 passed 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 quantity, 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 God 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 passions. 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 accumulative
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 principals 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_ assuredly 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 Middlesex; and our deputies met to talk within massive 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, God
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