The Crown of Wild Olive
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 hell 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,
competition _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 fagots 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 masses
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 assuming 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 bestial idiotism of the modern theory that wages are to be
measured by competition.]
[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 multitudes 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
hoard 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
scrapings. My Savoyard squirrels would pass 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 asserting the
absolute illegality of interest.]
[87] Compare Chaucer's feeling respecting birds (from Canace's falcon,
to the nightingale, singing, "Domine, labia--" 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 classes. 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 mass.) 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 noble, 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 classes 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 quantity of loss
is precisely equal, and irrevocable; it is the quantity of human
industry spent in effecting the explosion, plus the quantity 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.]