The Crown of Wild Olive
and every law that He has made. Are we to think that the earth was only
shaped to be a globe of torture; and that there cannot be one spot of it
where peace can rest, or justice reign? Where are men ever to be happy,
if not in England? by whom shall they ever be taught to do right, if not
by you? Are we not of a race first among the strong ones of the earth;
the blood in us incapable of weariness, unconquerable by grief? Have we
not a history of which we can hardly think without becoming insolent in
our just pride of it? Can we dare, without passing every limit of
courtesy to other nations, to say how much more we have to be proud of
in our ancestors than they? Among our ancient monarchs, great crimes
stand out as monstrous and strange. But their valor, and, according to
their understanding, their benevolence, are constant. The Wars of the
Roses, which are as a fearful crimson shadow on our land, represent the
normal condition of other nations; while from the days of the Heptarchy
downwards we have had examples given us, in all ranks, of the most
varied and exalted virtue; a heap of treasure that no moth can corrupt,
and which even our traitorship, if we are to become traitors to it,
cannot sully.
And this is the race, then, that we know not any more how to govern! and
this the history which we are to behold broken off by sedition! and this
is the country, of all others, where life is to become difficult to the
honest, and ridiculous to the wise! And the catastrophe, forsooth, is to
come just when we have been making swiftest progress beyond the wisdom
and wealth of the past. Our cities are a wilderness of spinning wheels
instead of palaces; yet the people have not clothes. We have blackened
every leaf of English greenwood with ashes, and the people die of cold;
our harbors are a forest of merchant ships, and the people die of
hunger.
Whose fault is it? Yours, gentlemen; yours only. You alone can feed
them, and clothe, and bring into their right minds, for you only can
govern--that is to say, you only can educate them.
Educate, or govern, they are one and the same word. Education does not
mean teaching people to know what they do not know. It means teaching
them to behave as they do not behave. And the true "compulsory
education" which the people now ask of you is not catechism, but drill.
It is not teaching the youth of England the shapes of letters and the
tricks of numbers; and then leaving them to turn their arithmetic to
roguery, and their literature to lust. It is, on the contrary, training
them into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of their bodies and
souls. It is a painful, continual, and difficult work; to be done by
kindness, by watching, by warning, by precept, and by praise,--but above
all--by example.
Compulsory! Yes, by all means! "Go ye out into the highways and hedges,
and _compel_ them to come in." Compulsory! Yes, and gratis also. _Dei
Gratia_, they must be taught, as, _Dei Gratia_, you are set to teach
them. I hear strange talk continually, "how difficult it is to make
people pay for being educated!" Why, I should think so! Do you make your
children pay for their education, or do you give it them compulsorily,
and gratis? You do not expect _them_ to pay you for their teaching,
except by becoming good children. Why should you expect a peasant to pay
for his, except by becoming a good man?--payment enough, I think, if we
knew it. Payment enough to himself, as to us. For that is another of our
grand popular mistakes--people are always thinking of education as a
means of livelihood. Education is not a profitable business, but a
costly one; nay, even the best attainments of it are always
unprofitable, in any terms of coin. No nation ever made its bread either
by its great arts, or its great wisdoms. By its minor arts or
manufactures, by its practical knowledges, yes: but its noble
scholarship, its noble philosophy, and its noble art, are always to be
bought as a treasure, not sold for a livelihood. You do not learn that
you may live--you live that you may learn. You are to spend on National
Education, and to be spent for it, and to make by it, not more money,
but better men;--to get into this British Island the greatest possible
number of good and brave Englishmen. _They_ are to be your "money's
worth."
But where is the money to come from? Yes, that is to be asked. Let us,
as quite the first business in this our national crisis, look not only
into our affairs, but into our accounts, and obtain some general notion
how we annually spend our money, and what we are getting for it.
Observe, I do not mean to inquire into the public revenue only; of that
some account is rendered already. But let us do the best we can to set
down the items of the national _private_ expenditure; and know what we
spend altogether, and how.
To begin with this matter of education. You probably have nearly all
seen the admirable lecture lately given by Captain Maxse, at
Southampton. It contains a clear statement of the facts at present
ascertained as to our expenditure in that respect. It appears that of
our public moneys, for every pound that we spend on education we spend
twelve either in charity or punishment;--ten millions a year in
pauperism and crime, and eight hundred thousand in instruction. Now
Captain Maxse adds to this estimate of ten millions public money spent
on crime and want, a more or less conjectural sum of eight millions for
private charities. My impression is that this is much beneath the truth,
but at all events it leaves out of consideration much the heaviest and
saddest form of charity--the maintenance, by the working members of
families, of the unfortunate or ill-conducted persons whom the general
course of misrule now leaves helpless to be the burden of the rest.
Now I want to get first at some, I do not say approximate, but at all
events some suggestive, estimate of the quantity of real distress and
misguided life in this country. Then next, I want some fairly
representative estimate of our private expenditure in luxuries. We won't
spend more, publicly, it appears, than eight hundred thousand a year, on
educating men gratis. I want to know, as nearly as possible, what we
spend privately a year, in educating horses gratis. Let us, at least,
quit ourselves in this from the taunt of Rabshakeh, and see that for
every horse we train also a horseman; and that the rider be at least as
high-bred as the horse, not jockey, but chevalier. Again, we spend eight
hundred thousand, which is certainly a great deal of money, in making
rough _minds_ bright. I want to know how much we spend annually in
making rough _stones_ bright; that is to say, what may be the united
annual sum, or near it, of our jewellers' bills. So much we pay for
educating children gratis;--how much for educating diamonds gratis? and
which pays best for brightening, the spirit or the charcoal? Let us get
those two items set down with some sincerity, and a few more of the same
kind. _Publicly_ set down. We must not be ashamed of the way we spend
our money. If our right hand is not to know what our left does, it must
not be because it would be ashamed if it did.
That is, therefore, quite the first practical thing to be done. Let
every man who wishes well to his country, render it yearly an account of
his income, and of the main heads of his expenditure; or, if he is
ashamed to do so, let him no more impute to the poor their poverty as a
crime, nor set them to break stones in order to frighten them from
committing it. To lose money ill is indeed often a crime; but to get it
ill is a worse one, and to spend it ill, worst of all. You object, Lords
of England, to increase, to the poor, the wages you give them, because
they spend them, you say, unadvisedly. Render them, therefore, an
account of the wages which _they_ give _you_; and show them, by your
example, how to spend theirs, to the last farthing advisedly.
It is indeed time to make this an acknowledged subject of instruction,
to the workingman,--how to spend his wages. For, gentlemen, we _must_
give that instruction, whether we will or no, one way or the other. We
have given it in years gone by; and now we find fault with our peasantry
for having been too docile, and profited too shrewdly by our tuition.
Only a few days since I had a letter from the wife of a village rector,
a man of common sense and kindness, who was greatly troubled in his
mind because it was precisely the men who got highest wages in summer
that came destitute to his door in the winter. Destitute, and of riotous
temper--for their method of spending wages in their period of prosperity
was by sitting two days a week in the tavern parlor, ladling port wine,
not out of bowls, but out of buckets. Well, gentlemen, who taught them
that method of festivity? Thirty years ago, I, a most inexperienced
freshman, went to my first college supper; at the head of the table sat
a nobleman of high promise and of admirable powers, since dead of palsy;
there also we had in the midst of us, not buckets, indeed, but bowls as
large as buckets; there also, we helped ourselves with ladles. There
(for this beginning of college education was compulsory), I choosing
ladlefuls of punch instead of claret, because I was then able,
unperceived to pour them into my waistcoat instead of down my throat,
stood it out to the end, and helped to carry four of my fellow-students,
one of them the son of the head of a college, head foremost, down stairs
and home.
Such things are no more; but the fruit of them remains, and will for
many a day to come. The laborers whom you cannot now shut out of the
ale-house are only the too faithful disciples of the gentlemen who were
wont to shut themselves into the dining-room. The gentlemen have not
thought it necessary, in order to correct their own habits, to diminish
their incomes; and, believe me, the way to deal with your drunken
workman is not to lower his wages,--but to mend his wits.[140]
And if indeed we do not yet see quite clearly how to deal with the sins
of our poor brother, it is possible that our dimness of sight may still
have other causes that can be cast out. There are two opposite cries of
the great liberal and conservative parties, which are both most right,
and worthy to be rallying cries. On their side "let every man have his
chance;" on yours "let every man stand in his place." Yes, indeed, let
that be so, every man in his place, and every man fit for it. See that
he holds that place from Heaven's Providence; and not from his family's
Providence. Let the Lords Spiritual quit themselves of simony, we laymen
will look after the heretics for them. Let the Lords Temporal quit
themselves of nepotism, and we will take care of their authority for
them. Publish for us, you soldiers, an army gazette, in which the one
subject of daily intelligence shall be the grounds of promotion; a
gazette which shall simply tell us, what there certainly can be no
detriment to the service in our knowing, when any officer is appointed
to a new command,--what his former services and successes have
been,--whom he has superseded,--and on what ground. It will be always a
satisfaction to us; it may sometimes be an advantage to you: and then,
when there is really necessary debate respecting reduction of wages, let
us always begin not with the wages of the industrious classes, but with
those of the idle ones. Let there be honorary titles, if people like
them; but let there be no honorary incomes.
So much for the master's motto, "Every man in his place." Next for the
laborer's motto, "Every man his chance." Let us mend that for them a
little, and say, "Every man his certainty"--certainty, that if he does
well, he will be honored, and aided, and advanced in such degree as may