The Crown of Wild Olive
[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.
APPENDIX I.--(p. 22.)
The greatest of all economists are those most opposed to the doctrine of
"laissez faire," namely, the fortifying virtues, which the wisest men of
all time have arranged under the general heads of Prudence, or
Discretion (the spirit which discerns and adopts rightly); Justice (the
spirit which rules and divides rightly); Fortitude (the spirit which
persists and endures rightly); and Temperance (the spirit which stops
and refuses rightly). These cardinal and sentinel virtues are not only
the means of protecting and prolonging life itself, but they are the
chief guards, or sources, of the material means of life, and the
governing powers and princes of economy. Thus, precisely according to
the number of just men in a nation, is their power of avoiding either
intestine or foreign war. All disputes may be peaceably settled, if a
sufficient number of persons have been trained to submit to the
principles of justice, while the necessity for war is in direct ratio to
the number of unjust persons who are incapable of determining a quarrel
but by violence. Whether the injustice take the form of the desire of
dominion, or of refusal to submit to it, or of lust of territory, or
lust of money, or of mere irregular passion and wanton will, the result
is economically the same;--loss of the quantity of power and life
consumed in repressing the injustice, added to the material and moral
destruction caused by the fact of war. The early civil wars of England,
and the existing[95] war in America, are curious examples--these under
monarchical, this under republican, institutions--of the results on
large masses of nations of the want of education in principles of
justice. But the mere dread or distrust resulting from the want of the
inner virtues of Faith and Charity prove often no less costly than war
itself. The fear which France and England have of each other costs each
nation about fifteen millions sterling annually, besides various
paralyses of commerce; that sum being spent in the manufacture of means
of destruction instead of means of production. There is no more reason
in the nature of things that France and England should be hostile to
each other than that England and Scotland should be, or Lancashire and
Yorkshire; and the reciprocal terrors of the opposite sides of the
English Channel are neither more necessary, more economical, nor more
virtuous, than the old riding and reiving on the opposite flanks of the
Cheviots, or than England's own weaving for herself of crowns of thorn,
from the stems of her Red and White roses.
APPENDIX II.--(p. 34.)
Few passages of the book which at least some part of the nations at
present most advanced in civilization accept as an expression of final
truth, have been more distorted than those bearing on Idolatry. For the
idolatry there denounced is neither sculpture, nor veneration of
sculpture. It is simply the substitution of an "Eidolon," phantasm, or
imagination of Good, for that which is real and enduring; from the
Highest Living Good, which gives life, to the lowest material good
which ministers to it. The Creator, and the things created, which He is
said to have "seen good" in creating, are in this their eternal goodness
appointed always to be "worshipped,"--_i. e._, to have goodness and
worth ascribed to them from the heart; and the sweep and range of
idolatry extend to the rejection of any or all of these, "calling evil
good, and good evil,--putting bitter for sweet, and sweet for
bitter."[96] For in that rejection and substitution we betray the first
of all Loyalties, to the fixed Law of life, and with resolute opposite
loyalty serve our own imagination of good, which is the law, not of the
House, but of the Grave, (otherwise called the law of "mark missing,"
which we translate "law of Sin"); these "two masters," between whose
services we have to choose, being otherwise distinguished as God and
Mammon, which Mammon, though we narrowly take it as the power of
money only, is in truth the great evil Spirit of false and
fond desire, or "Covetousness, which is Idolatry." So that
Iconoclasm--_image_-breaking--is easy; but an Idol cannot be broken--it
must be forsaken; and this is not so easy, either to do, or persuade to
doing. For men may readily be convinced of the weakness of an image; but
not of the emptiness of an imagination.
APPENDIX III.--(p. 36.)
I have not attempted to support, by the authority of other writers, any
of the statements made in these papers; indeed, if such authorities were
rightly collected, there would be no occasion for my writing at all.
Even in the scattered passages referring to this subject in three books
of Carlyle's--Sartor Resartus, Past and Present, and the Latter Day
Pamphlets,--all has been said that needs to be said, and far better than
I shall ever say it again. But the habit of the public mind at present
is to require everything to be uttered diffusely, loudly, and a hundred
times over, before it will listen; and it has revolted against these
papers of mine as if they contained things daring and new, when there
is not one assertion in them of which the truth has not been for ages
known to the wisest, and proclaimed by the most eloquent of men. It
would be [I had written _will_ be; but have now reached a time of life
for which there is but one mood--the conditional,] a far greater
pleasure to me hereafter, to collect their words than to add to mine;
Horace's clear rendering of the substance of the passages in the text
may be found room for at once,
Si quis emat citharas, emptas comportet in unum
Nec studio citharae, nec Musae deditus ulli;
Si scalpra et formas non sutor, nautica vela
Aversus mercaturis, delirus et amens
Undique dicatur merito. Qui discrepat istis
Qui nummos aurumque recondit, nescius uti
Compositis; metuensque velut contingere sacrum?
[Which may be roughly thus translated:--
"Were anybody to buy fiddles, and collect a number, being in
no wise given to fiddling, nor fond of music: or if, being
no cobbler, he collected awls and lasts, or, having no mind
for sea-adventure, bought sails, every one would call him a
madman, and deservedly. But what difference is there between
such a man and one who lays by coins and gold, and does not
know how to use, when he has got them?"]
With which it is perhaps desirable also to give Xenophon's statement, it
being clearer than any English one can be, owing to the power of the
general Greek term for wealth, "useable things."
[I have cut out the Greek because I can't be troubled to correct the
accents, and am always nervous about them; here it is in English, as
well as I can do it:--
"This being so, it follows that things are only property to the man who
knows how to use them; as flutes, for instance, are property to the man
who can pipe upon them respectably; but to one who knows not how to
pipe, they are no property, unless he can get rid of them
advantageously.... For if they are not sold, the flutes are no property
(being serviceable for nothing); but, sold, they become property. To
which Socrates made answer,--'and only then if he knows how to sell
them, for if he sell them to another man who cannot play on them, still
they are no property.'"]
APPENDIX IV.--(p. 39.)
The reader is to include here in the idea of "Government," any branch of
the Executive, or even any body of private persons, entrusted with the
practical management of public interests unconnected directly with their
own personal ones. In theoretical discussions of legislative
interference with political economy, it is usually, and of course
unnecessarily, assumed that Government must be always of that form and
force in which we have been accustomed to see it;--that its abuses can
never be less, nor its wisdom greater, nor its powers more numerous.
But, practically, the custom in most civilized countries is, for every
man to deprecate the interference of Government as long as things tell
for his personal advantage, and to call for it when they cease to do so.
The request of the Manchester Economists to be supplied with cotton by
Government (the system of supply and demand having, for the time, fallen
sorrowfully short of the expectations of scientific persons from it), is
an interesting case in point. It were to be wished that less wide and
bitter suffering, suffering, too, of the innocent, had been needed to
force the nation, or some part of it, to ask itself why a body of men,
already confessedly capable of managing matters both military and
divine, should not be permitted, or even requested, at need, to provide
in some wise for sustenance as well as for defence; and secure, if it
might be,--(and it might, I think, even the _rather_ be),--purity of
bodily, as well as of spiritual, aliment? Why, having made many roads
for the passage of armies, may they not make a few for the conveyance of
food; and after organizing, with applause, various schemes of
theological instruction for the Public, organize, moreover, some
methods of bodily nourishment for them? Or is the soul so much less
trustworthy in its instincts than the stomach, that legislation is
necessary for the one, but inapplicable to the other.
APPENDIX V.--(p. 70.)
I debated with myself whether to make the note on Homer longer by
examining the typical meaning of the shipwreck of Ulysses, and his
escape from Charybdis by help of her fig-tree; but as I should have had
to go on to the lovely myth of Leucothea's veil, and did not care to
spoil this by a hurried account of it, I left it for future examination;
and, three days after the paper was published, observed that the
reviewers, with their customary helpfulness, were endeavouring to throw
the whole subject back into confusion by dwelling on this single (as
they imagined) oversight. I omitted also a note on the sense of the word
[Greek: lygron], with respect to the pharmacy of Circe, and herb-fields
of Helen, (compare its use in Odyssey, xvii., 473, &c.), which would
farther have illustrated the nature of the Circean power. But, not to be
led too far into the subtleties of these myths, observe respecting them
all, that even in very simple parables, it is not always easy to attach
indisputable meaning to every part of them. I recollect some years ago,
throwing an assembly of learned persons who had met to delight
themselves with interpretations of the parable of the prodigal son,
(interpretations which had up to that moment gone very smoothly,) into
mute indignation, by inadvertently asking who the _un_prodigal son was,
and what was to be learned by _his_ example. The leading divine of the
company, Mr. Molyneux, at last explained to me that the unprodigal son
was a lay figure, put in for dramatic effect, to make the story
prettier, and that no note was to be taken of him. Without, however,
admitting that Homer put in the last escape of Ulysses merely to make
his story prettier, this is nevertheless true of all Greek myths, that
they have many opposite lights and shades; they are as changeful as
opal, and like opal, usually have one colour by reflected, and another
by transmitted light. But they are true jewels for all that, and full of