The Crown of Wild Olive
be fitting for his faculty and consistent with his peace; and equal
certainty that if he does ill, he will by sure justice be judged, and by
sure punishment be chastised; if it may be, corrected; and if that may
not be, condemned. That is the right reading of the Republican motto,
"Every man his chance." And then, with such a system of government,
pure, watchful and just, you may approach your great problem of national
education, or in other words, of national employment. For all education
begins in work. What we think, or what we know; or what we believe, is
in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what
we _do;_ and for man, woman, or child, the first point of education is
to make them do their best. It is the law of good economy to make the
best of everything. How much more to make the best of every creature!
Therefore, when your pauper comes to you and asks for bread, ask of him
instantly--What faculty have you? What can you do best? Can you drive a
nail into wood? Go and mend the parish fences. Can you lay a brick? Mend
the walls of the cottages where the wind comes in. Can you lift a
spadeful of earth? Turn this field up three feet deep all over. Can you
only drag a weight with your shoulders? Stand at the bottom of this hill
and help up the overladen horses. Can you weld iron and chisel stone?
Fortify this wreck-strewn coast into a harbor; and change these shifting
sands into fruitful ground. Wherever death was, bring life; that is to
be your work; that your parish refuge; that your education. So and no
otherwise can we meet existent distress. But for the continual education
of the whole people, and for their future happiness, they must have such
consistent employment as shall develop all the powers of the fingers,
and the limbs, and the brain: and that development is only to be
obtained by hand-labor, of which you have these four great
divisions--hand-labor on the earth, hand-labor on the sea, hand-labor in
art, hand-labor in war. Of the last two of these I cannot speak
to-night, and of the first two only with extreme brevity.
I. Hand-labor on the earth, the work of the husbandman and of the
shepherd;--to dress the earth and to keep the flocks of it--the first
task of man, and the final one--the education always of noblest
lawgivers, kings and teachers; the education of Hesiod, of Moses, of
David, of all the true strength of Rome; and all its tenderness: the
pride of Cincinnatus, and the inspiration of Virgil. Hand-labor on the
earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with singing:--not
steam-piston labor on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth
with steam-whistling. You will have no prophet's voice accompanied by
that shepherd's pipe, and pastoral symphony. Do you know that lately, in
Cumberland, in the chief pastoral district of England--in Wordsworth's
own home--a procession of villagers on their festa day provided for
themselves, by way of music, a steam-plough whistling at the head of
them.
Give me patience while I put the principle of machine labor before you,
as clearly and in as short compass as possible; it is one that should be
known at this juncture. Suppose a farming proprietor needs to employ a
hundred men on his estate, and that the labor of these hundred men is
enough, but not more than enough, to till all his land, and to raise
from it food for his own family, and for the hundred laborers. He is
obliged, under such circumstances, to maintain all the men in moderate
comfort, and can only by economy accumulate much for himself. But,
suppose he contrive a machine that will easily do the work of fifty men,
with only one man to watch it. This sounds like a great advance in
civilization. The farmer of course gets his machine made, turns off the
fifty men, who may starve or emigrate at their choice, and now he can
keep half of the produce of his estate, which formerly went to feed
them, all to himself. That is the essential and constant operation of
machinery among us at this moment.
Nay, it is at first answered; no man can in reality keep half the
produce of an estate to himself, nor can he in the end keep more than
his own human share of anything; his riches must diffuse themselves at
some time; he must maintain somebody else with them, however he spends
them. That is mainly true (not altogether so), for food and fuel are in
ordinary circumstances personally wasted by rich people, in quantities
which would save many lives. One of my own great luxuries, for instance,
is candlelight--and I probably burn, for myself alone, as many candles
during the winter, as would comfort the old eyes, or spare the young
ones, of a whole rushlighted country village. Still, it is mainly true,
that it is not by their personal waste that rich people prevent the
lives of the poor. This is the way they do it. Let me go back to my
farmer. He has got his machine made, which goes creaking, screaming, and
occasionally exploding, about modern Arcadia. He has turned off his
fifty men to starve. Now, at some distance from his own farm, there is
another on which the laborers were working for their bread in the same
way, by tilling the land. The machinist sends over to these, saying--"I
have got food enough for you without your digging or ploughing any more.
I can maintain you in other occupations instead of ploughing that land;
if you rake in its gravel you will find some hard stones--you shall
grind those on mills till they glitter; then, my wife shall wear a
necklace of them. Also, if you turn up the meadows below you will find
some fine white clay, of which you shall make a porcelain service for
me: and the rest of the farm I want for pasture for horses for my
carriage--and you shall groom them, and some of you ride behind the
carriage with staves in your hands, and I will keep you much fatter for
doing that than you can keep yourselves by digging."
Well--but it is answered, are we to have no diamonds, nor china, nor
pictures, nor footmen, then--but all to be farmers? I am not saying what
we ought to do, I want only to show you with perfect clearness first
what we _are doing_; and that, I repeat, is the upshot of
machine-contriving in this country. And observe its effect on the
national strength. Without machines, you have a hundred and fifty yeomen
ready to join for defence of the land. You get your machine, starve
fifty of them, make diamond-cutters or footmen of as many more, and for
your national defence against an enemy, you have now, and _can_ have,
only fifty men, instead of a hundred and fifty; these also now with
minds much alienated from you as their chief,[141] and the rest,
lapidaries or footmen; and a steam plough.
That is one effect of machinery; but at all events, if we have thus lost
in men, we have gained in riches; instead of happy human souls, we have
at least got pictures, china, horses, and are ourselves better off than
we were before. But very often, and in much of our machine-contriving,
even _that_ result does not follow. We are not one whit the richer for
the machine, we only employ it for our amusement. For observe, our
gaining in riches depends on the men who are out of employment
consenting to be starved, or sent out of the country. But suppose they
do not consent passively to be starved, but some of them become
criminals, and have to be taken charge of and fed at a much greater cost
than if they were at work, and, others, paupers, rioters, and the like,
then you attain the real outcome of modern wisdom and ingenuity. You
have your hundred men honestly at country work; but you don't like the
sight of human beings in your fields; you like better to see a smoking
kettle. You pay, as an amateur, for that pleasure, and you employ your
fifty men in picking oakum, or begging, rioting, and thieving.
By hand-labor, therefore, and that alone, we are to till the ground. By
hand-labor also to plough the sea; both for food, and in commerce, and
in war: not with floating kettles there neither, but with hempen bridle,
and the winds of heaven in harness. That is the way the power of Greece
rose on her Egean, the power of Venice on her Adria, of Amalfi in her
blue bay, of the Norman sea-riders from the North Cape to Sicily:--so,
your own dominion also of the past. Of the past mind you. On the Baltic
and the Nile, your power is already departed. By machinery you would
advance to discovery; by machinery you would carry your commerce;--you
would be engineers instead of sailors; and instantly in the North seas
you are beaten among the ice, and before the very Gods of Nile, beaten
among the sand. Agriculture, then, by the hand or by the plough drawn
only by animals; and shepherd and pastoral husbandry, are to be the
chief schools of Englishmen. And this most royal academy of all
academies you have to open over all the land, purifying your heaths and
hills, and waters, and keeping them full of every kind of lovely natural
organism, in tree, herb, and living creature. All land that is waste and
ugly, you must redeem into ordered fruitfulness; all ruin, desolateness,
imperfectness of hut or habitation, you must do away with; and
throughout every village and city of your English dominion there must
not be a hand that cannot find a helper, nor a heart that cannot find a
comforter.
"How impossible!" I know, you are thinking. Ah! So far from impossible,
it is easy, it is natural, it is necessary, and I declare to you that,
sooner or later, it _must be done_, at our peril. If now our English
lords of land will fix this idea steadily before them; take the people
to their hearts, trust to their loyalty, lead their labor;--then indeed
there will be princes again in the midst of us, worthy of the island
throne,
"This royal throne of kings--this sceptred isle--
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection, and the hand of war;
This precious stone set in the silver sea;
This happy breed of men--this little world:
This other Eden--Demi-Paradise."
But if they refuse to do this, and hesitate and equivocate, clutching
through the confused catastrophe of all things only at what they can
still keep stealthily for themselves--their doom is nearer than even
their adversaries hope, and it will be deeper than even their despisers
dream.
That, believe me, is the work you have to do in England; and out of
England you have room for everything else you care to do. Are her
dominions in the world so narrow that she can find no place to spin
cotton in but Yorkshire? We may organize emigration into an infinite
power. We may assemble troops of the more adventurous and ambitious of
our youth; we may send them on truest foreign service, founding new
seats of authority, and centres of thought, in uncultivated and
unconquered lands; retaining the full affection to the native country no
less in our colonists than in our armies, teaching them to maintain
allegiance to their fatherland in labor no less than in battle; aiding
them with free hand in the prosecution of discovery, and the victory
over adverse natural powers; establishing seats of every manufacture in
the climates and places best fitted for it, and bringing ourselves into
due alliance and harmony of skill with the dexterities of every race,
and the wisdoms of every tradition and every tongue.
And then you may make England itself the centre of the learning, of the
arts, of the courtesies and felicities of the world. Yon may cover her
mountains with pasture; her plains with corn, her valleys with the lily,
and her gardens with the rose. You may bring together there in peace
the wise and the pure, and the gentle of the earth, and by their word,
command through its farthest darkness the birth of "God's first
creature, which was Light." You know whose words those are; the words of