Chapter VIII: Part 8

A strike is a war, so is a lock out, which is a strike on the other side. They are warrantable, like other wars, when justice cannot be obtained, or injustice prevented by peaceful means, and in such cases only. Mediation ought always to be tried first and it will often be effectual, for the wars of carpenters and builders, as well as the wars of emperors, often arise from passion more than from interest, and passion may be calmed by mediation. Hence the magnitude of the unions, formidable as it seems, has really a pacific effect; passion is commonly personal or local, and does not affect the central government of a union extending over a whole nation. The governments of great unions have seldom recommended strikes. A strike or lock-out, I repeat, is an industrial war, and when the war is over there ought to be peace. Constant bad relations between the masters and the men, a constant attitude of mutual hostility and mistrust, constant threats of striking upon one side, and of locking out upon the other, are ruinous to the trade, especially if it depends at all upon foreign orders, as well as destructive of social comfort. If the state of feeling and the bearing of the men toward the masters, remain what they now are in some English trades, kind-hearted employers who would do their best to improve the condition of the workman, and to make him a partaker in their prosperity, will be driven from the trade, and their places will be taken by men with hearts of flint who will fight the workman by force and fraud, and very likely win. We have seen the full power of associated labour, the full power of associated capital has yet to be seen. We shall see it when instead of combinations of the employers in a single trade, which seldom hold together, employers in all trades learn to combine.

We must not forget that industrial wars, like other wars, however just and necessary, give birth to men whose trade is war, and who, for the purpose of their trade are always inflaming the passions which lead to war. Such men I have seen on both sides of the Atlantic, and most hateful pests of industry and society they are. Nor must we forget that Trade Unions, like other communities, whatever their legal constitutions may be, are apt practically to fall into the hands of a small minority of active spirits, or even into those of a single astute and ambitious man.

Murder, maiming and vitriol throwing are offences punishable by law. So are, or ought to be, rattening and intimidation. But there are ways less openly criminal of interfering with the liberty of non-union men. The liberty of non-union men, however, must be protected. Freedom of contract is the only security which the community has against systematic extortion; and extortion, practised on the community by a Trade Union, is just as bad as extortion practised by a feudal baron in his robber hold. If the unions are not voluntary they are tyrannies, and all tyrannies in the end will be overthrown.

The same doom awaits all monopolies and attempts to interfere with the free exercise of any lawful trade or calling, for the advantage of a ring of any kind, whether it be a great East India Company, shutting the gates of Eastern commerce on mankind, or a little Bricklayers' Union, limiting the number of bricks to be carried in a hod. All attempts to restrain or cripple production in the interest of a privileged set of producers; all trade rules preventing work from being done in the best, cheapest and most expeditious way; all interference with a man's free use of his strength and skill on pretence that he is beating his mates, or on any other pretence, all exclusions of people from lawful callings for which they are qualified; all apprenticeships not honestly intended for the instruction of the apprentice, are unjust and contrary to the manifest interests of the community, including the misguided monopolists themselves. All alike will, in the end, be resisted and put down. In feudal times the lord of the manor used to compel all the people to use his ferry, sell on his fair ground, and grind their corn at his mill. By long and costly effort humanity has broken the yoke of old Privilege, and it is not likely to bow its neck to the yoke of the new.

Those who in England demanded the suffrage for the working man, who urged, in the name of public safety, as well as in that of justice, that he should be brought within the pale of the constitution, have no reason to be ashamed of the result. Instead of voting for anarchy and public pillage, the working man has voted for economy, administrative reform, army reform, justice to Ireland, public education. But no body of men ever found political power in their hands without being tempted to make a selfish use of it. Feudal legislatures, as we have seen, passed laws compelling workmen to give more work, or work that was worth more, for the same wages. Working men's legislatures are now disposed to pass laws compelling employers, that is, the community, to give the same wages for less work. Some day, perhaps, the bakers will get power into their hands and make laws compelling us to give the same price for a smaller loaf. What would the Rochdale pioneers, or the owners of any other co- operative store, with a staff of servants say if a law were passed compelling them to give the same wages for less service? This is not right, and it cannot stand. Demagogues who want your votes will tell you that it can stand, but those who are not in that line must pay you the best homage in their power by speaking the truth. And if I may venture to offer advice never let the cause of labour be mixed up with the game of politicians. Before you allow a man to lead you in trade questions be sure that he has no eye to your votes. We have a pleasing variety of political rogues but perhaps, there is hardly a greater rogue among them than the working man's friend.

Perhaps you will say as much or more work is done with the short hours. There is reason to hope that it in some cases it may be so. But then the employer will see his own interest, free contract will produce the desired result, there will be no need of compulsory law.

I sympathize heartily with the general object of the nine hours movement, of the early closing movement, and all movements of that kind. Leisure well spent is a condition of civilization, and now we want all to be civilized, not only a few. But I do not believe it possible to regulate the hours of work by law with any approach to reason or justice. One kind of work is more exhausting than another, one is carried on in a hot room, another in a cool room, one amidst noise wearing to the nerves, another in stillness. Time is not a common measure of them all. The difficulty is increased if you attempt to make one rule for all nations disregarding differences of race and climate. Besides how in the name of justice, can we say that the man with a wife and children to support, shall not work more if he pleases than the unmarried man who chooses to be content with less pay and to have more time for enjoyment? Medical science pronounces, we are told, that it is not good for a man to work more than eight hours. But supposing this to be true and true of all kinds of work, this as has been said before is an imperfect world and it is to be feared that we cannot guarantee any man against having more to do than his doctor would recommend. The small tradesman, whose case receives no consideration because he forms no union, often perhaps generally has more than is good for him of anxiety, struggling and care as well as longer business hours, than medical science would prescribe. Pressure on the weary brain is, at least, as painful as pressure on the weary muscle; many a suicide proves it; yet brains must be pressed or the wheels of industry and society would stand still. Let us all, I repeat, get as much leisure as we fairly and honestly can; but with all due respect for those who hold the opposite opinion, I believe that the leisure must be obtained by free arrangement in each ease, as it has already in the case of early closing, not by general law.

I cannot help regarding industrial war in this new world, rather as an importation than as a native growth. The spirit of it is brought over by British workmen, who have been fighting the master class in their former home. In old England, the land of class distinctions, the masters are a class, economically as well as socially, and they are closely allied with a political class, which till lately engrossed power and made laws in the interest of the employer. Seldom does a man in England rise from the ranks, and when he does, his position in an aristocratic society is equivocal, and he never feels perfectly at home. Caste runs from the peerage all down the social scale. The bulk of the land has been engrossed by wealthy families, and the comfort and dignity of freehold proprietorship are rarely attainable by any but the rich. Everything down to the railway carriages, is regulated by aristocracy; street cars cannot run because they would interfere with carriages, a city cannot be drained because a park is in the way. The labourer has to bear a heavy load of taxation, laid on by the class wars of former days. In this new world of ours, the heel taps of old-world flunkeyism are sometimes poured upon us, no doubt; as, on the other hand, we feel the reaction from the old-world servility in a rudeness of self assertion on the part of the democracy which is sometimes rather discomposing, and which we should be glad to see exchanged for the courtesy of settled self- respect. But on the whole, class distinctions are very faint. Half, perhaps two-thirds, of the rich men you meet here have risen from the ranks, and they are socially quite on a level with the rest. Everything is really open to industry. Every man can at once invest his savings in a freehold. Everything is arranged for the convenience of the masses. Political power is completely in the hands of the people. There are no fiscal legacies of an oligarchic past. If I were one of our emigration agents, I should not dwell so much on wages, which in fact are being rapidly equalized, as on what wages will buy in Canada--the general improvement of condition, the brighter hopes, the better social position, the enlarged share of all the benefits which the community affords. I should show that we have made a step here at all events towards being a community indeed. In such a land I can see that there may still be need of occasional combinations among the working men to make better bargains with their employers, but I can see no need for the perpetual arraying of class against class or for a standing apparatus of industrial war.

There is one more point which must be touched with tenderness but which cannot be honestly passed over in silence. It could nowhere be mentioned less invidiously than under the roof of an institution which is at once an effort to create high tastes in working men and a proof that such tastes can be created. The period of transition from high to low wages and from incessant toil to comparative leisure must be one of peril to masses whom no Mechanics Institute or Literary Society as yet counts among its members. It is the more so because there is abroad in all classes a passion for sensual enjoyment and excitement produced by the vast development of wealth and at the same time as I suspect by the temporary failure of those beliefs which combat the sensual appetites and sustain our spiritual life. Colliers drinking champagne. The world stands aghast. Well, I see no reason why a collier should not drink champagne if he can afford it as well as a Duke. The collier wants and perhaps deserves it more if he has been working all the week underground and at risk of his life. Hard labour naturally produces a craving for animal enjoyment and so does the monotony of the factory unrelieved by interest in the work. But what if the collier cannot afford the champagne or if the whole of his increase of wages is wasted on it while his habitation remains a hovel, everything about him is still as filthy, comfortless and barbarous as ever and (saddest of all) his wife and children are no better off, perhaps are worse off than before? What if his powers of work are being impaired by debauchery and he is thus surely losing the footing which he has won on the higher round of the industrial ladder and lapsing back into penury and despair? What if instead of gaining he is really losing in manhood and real independence? I see nothing shocking in the fact that a mechanic's wages are now equal to those of a clergyman, or an officer in the army who has spent perhaps thousands of dollars on his education. Every man has a right to whatever his labour will fetch. But I do see something shocking in the appearance of the highly paid mechanic, whenever hard times come, as a mendicant at the door of a man really poorer than himself. Not only that English poor-law, of which we spoke, but all poor-laws, formal or informal, must cease when the labourer has the means, with proper self-control and prudence, of providing for winter as well as summer, for hard times as well as good times, for his family as well as for himself. The tradition of a by-gone state of society must be broken. The nominally rich must no longer be expected to take care of the nominally poor. The labourer has ceased to be in any sense a slave. He must learn to be, in every sense, a man.

It is much easier to recommend our neighbours to change their habits than to change our own, yet we must never forget, in discussing the question between the working man and his employer, or the community, that a slight change in the habits of the working men, in England at least, would add more to their wealth, their happiness and their hopes, than has been added by all the strikes, or by conflicts of any kind. In the life of Mr. Brassey, we are told that the British workman in Australia has great advantages, but wastes them all in drink. He does this not in Australia alone. I hate legislative interference with private habits, and I have no fancies about diet. A citizen of Maine, who has eaten too much pork, is just as great a transgressor against medical rules, and probably just as unamiable, as if he had drunk too much whisky. But when I have seen the havoc--the ever increasing havoc-- which drink makes with the industry, the vigour, the character of the British workman, I have sometimes asked myself whether in that case extraordinary measures might not be justified by the extremity of its dangers.

The subject is boundless. I might touch upon perils distinct from Unionism, which threaten industry, especially that growing dislike of manual labour which prevails to an alarming extent in the United States, and which some eminent economists are inclined to attribute to errors in the system of education in the common schools. I might speak of the duties of government in relation to these disturbances, and of the necessity, for this as well as other purposes, of giving ourselves a government of all and for all, capable of arbitrating impartially between conflicting interests as the recognised organ of the common good. I might speak, too, of the expediency of introducing into popular education a more social element, of teaching less rivalry and discontent, more knowledge of the mutual duties of different members of the community and of the connection of those duties with our happiness. But I must conclude. If I have thrown no new light upon the subject, I trust that I have at least tried to speak the truth impartially, and that I have said nothing which can add to the bitterness of the industrial conflict, or lead any of my hearers to forget that above all Trade Unions, and above all combinations of every kind, there is the great union of Humanity.

"WHAT IS CULPABLE LUXURY?"

A phrase in a lecture on "The Labour Movement," published in the _Canadian Monthly_, has been the inconsiderable cause of a considerable controversy in the English press and notably of a paper by the eminent economist and moralist Mr. W.R. Greg, entitled "What is Culpable Luxury?" in the _Contemporary Review_.

The passage of the lecture in which the phrase occurred was: "Wealth, real wealth, has hardly as yet much reason to complain of any encroachment of the Labour Movement on its rights. When did it command such means and appliances of pleasure, such satisfaction for every appetite and every fancy, as it commands now? When did it rear such enchanted palaces of luxury as it is rearing in England at the present day? Well do I remember one of those palaces, the most conspicuous object for miles round. _Its lord was I dare say consuming the income of some six hundred of the poor labouring families round him_. The thought that you are spending on yourself annually the income of six hundred labouring families seems to me about as much as a man with a heart and a brain can bear. Whatever the rich man desires, the finest house, the biggest diamond, the reigning beauty for his wife, social homage, public honour, political power, is ready at his command" &c, &c.

The words in italics have been separated from the context and taken as an attack on wealth. But the whole passage is a defence of labour against the charge of encroachment brought against it by wealth. I argue that, if the labouring man gets rather more than he did, the inequalities of fortune and the privileges of the rich are still great enough. In the next paragraph I say that "wealth well made and well spent is as pure as the rill that runs from the mountain side." An invidious turn has also been given to the expression "the income of six hundred labouring families," as though it meant that the wealthy idler is robbing six hundred labouring families of their income. It means no more than that the income which he is spending on himself is as large as six hundred of their incomes put together.

Mr. Greg begins with what he calls a retort courteous. He says that if the man with L30 000 is doing this sad thing so is the man with L3000 or L300 and everyone who allows himself anything beyond the necessaries of life; nay, that the labouring man when he lights his pipe or drinks his dram is as well as the rest consuming the substance of one poorer than himself. This argument appears to its framer irrefutable and a retort to which there can be no rejoinder. I confess my difficulty is not so much in refuting it as in seeing any point in it at all. What parallel can there be between an enormous and a very moderate expenditure or between prodigious luxury and ordinary comfort? If a man taxes me with having squandered fifty dollars on a repast is it an irrefutable retort to tell him that he has spent fifty cents? The limited and rational expenditure of an industrious man produces no evils economical, social or moral. I contend in the lecture that the unlimited and irrational expenditure of idle millionaires does; that it wastes labour, breeds luxury, creates unhappiness by propagating factitious wants, too often engenders vice and is injurious for the most part to real civilization. I have observed and I think with truth that the most malignant feelings which enter into the present struggle between classes have been generated by the ostentation of idle wealth in contrast with surrounding poverty. It would of course be absurd to say this of a man living on a small income in a modest house and in a plain way.

If I had said that property or all property beyond a mere sustenance is theft there would be force in Mr. Greg's retort, but as I have said or implied nothing more than that extravagant luxury is waste and contrasted with surrounding poverty grates on the feelings, especially when those who waste are idle and those who want are the hardest working labourers in the world, I repeat that I can see no force in the retort at all.

Mr. Greg proceeds to analyse the expenditure of the millionaire and to maintain that its several items are laudable.

First he defends pleasure grounds, gardens, shrubberies and deer parks. But he defends them on the ground that they are good things for the community and thereby admits my principle. It is only against wasteful self indulgence that I have anything to say. No doubt, says Mr. Greg, if the land of a country is all occupied and cultivated, and if no more land is easily accessible, and if the produce of other lands is not procurable in return for manufactured articles of exchange, then a proprietor who shall employ a hundred acres in growing wine for his own drinking, which might or would otherwise be employed in growing wheat or other food for twenty poor families who can find no other field for their labour, may fairly be said to be consuming, spending on himself, the sustenance of those families. If, again, he, in the midst of a swarming population unable to find productive or remunerative occupation, insists upon keeping a considerable extent of ground in merely ornamental walks and gardens, and, therefore, useless as far as the support of human life is concerned, he may be held liable to the same imputation--even though the wages he pays to the gardeners in the one case, and the vine-dressers in the other, be pleaded in mitigation of the charge. Let the writer of this only allow, as he must, that the moral, social and political consequences of expenditure are to be taken into account as well as the economical consequences, and he will be entirely at one with the writer whom he supposes himself to be confuting. I have never said, or imagined, that "all land ought to be producing food." I hold that no land in England is better employed than that of the London parks and the gardens of the Crystal Palace, though I could not speak so confidently with regard to a vast park from which all are excluded but its owner. Mr. Greg here again takes up what seems to me the strange position that to condemn excess is to condemn moderation. He says that whatever is said against the great parks and gardens of the most luxurious millionaire may equally be said against a tradesman's little flower-garden, or the plot of ornamental ground before the cottage windows of a peasant. I must again say that, so far from regarding this argument as irrefutable, I altogether fail to discover its cogency. The tradesman's little bit of green, the peasant's flower- bed, are real necessities of a human soul. Can the same thing be said of a pleasure-ground which consumes the labour of twenty men, and of which the object is not to refresh the weariness of labour but to distract the vacancy of idleness?

Mr. Greg specially undertakes the defence of deer-parks. But his ground is that the deer-forests which were denounced as unproductive have been proved to be the only mode of raising the condition and securing the well-being of the ill-fed population. If so, "humanitarians" are ready to hold up both hands in favour of deer-forests. Nay, we are ready to do the same if the pleasure yielded by the deer-forests bears any reasonable proportion to the expense and the agricultural sacrifice, especially if the sportsman is a worker recruiting his exhausted brain, not a sybarite killing time.

From parks and pleasure-grounds Mr. Greg goes on to horses; and here it is the same thing over again. The apologist first sneers at those who object to the millionaire's stud, then lets in the interest of the community as a limiting principle, and ends by saying: "We may then allow frankly and without demur, that if he (the millionaire) maintains more horses than he needs or can use, his expenditure thereon is strictly pernicious and indefensible, precisely in the same way as it would be if he burnt so much hay and threw so many bushels of oats into the fire. He is destroying human food." Now Mr. Greg has only to determine whether a man who is keeping a score or more of carriage and saddle horses, is "using" them or not. If he is, "humanitarians" are perfectly satisfied.

Finally Mr. Greg comes to the case of large establishments of servants. And here, having set out with intentions most adverse to my theory, he "blesses it altogether." "Perhaps," he says, "of all the branches of a wealthy nobleman's expenditure, that which will be condemned with most unanimity, and defended with most difficulty, is the number of ostentatious and unnecessary servants it is customary to maintain. For this practice I have not a word to say. It is directly and indirectly bad. It is bad for all parties. Its reflex action on the masters themselves is noxious; it is mischievous to the flunkies who are maintained in idleness, and in enervating and demoralizing luxury; it is pernicious to the community at large, and especially to the middle and upper middle classes, whose inevitable expenditure in procuring fit domestic service--already burdensomely great--is thereby oppressively enhanced, till it has become difficult not only to find good household servants at moderate wages, but to find servants who will work diligently and faithfully for any wages at all."

How will Mr. Greg keep up the palaces, parks, and studs, when he has taken away the retinues of servants? If he does not take care, he will find himself wielding the bosom of sumptuary reform in the most sweeping manner before he is aware of it. But let me respectfully ask him, who can he suppose objects to any expenditure except on the ground that it is directly and indirectly bad; bad for all parties, noxious to the voluptuary himself, noxious to all about him, and noxious to the community? So long as a man does no harm to himself or to anyone else, I for one see no objection to his supping like a Roman Emperor, on pheasants' tongues, or making shirt-studs of Koh-i-noors.

"It is charity," says Mr. Greg, hurling at the system of great establishments his last and bitterest anathema--"It is charity, and charity of the bastard sort--charity disguised as ostentation. It feeds, clothes, and houses a number of people in strenuous and pretentious laziness. If almshouses are noxious and offensive to the economic mind, then, by parity of reasoning, superfluous domestics are noxious also." And so it would seem, by parity of reasoning, or rather _a fortiori_, as being fed, clothed, and housed far more expensively, and in far more strenuous and pretentious laziness, are the superfluous masters of flunkeys. The flunkey does some work, at all events enough to prevent him from becoming a mere fattened animal. If he is required to grease and powder his head, he does work, as it seems to me, for which he may fairly claim a high remuneration.

As I have said already, let Mr. Greg take in the moral, political, and social evils of luxury, as well as the material waste, and I flatter myself that there will be no real difference between his general view of the responsibilities of wealth and mine. He seems to be as convinced as I am that there is no happiness in living in strenuous and pretentious laziness by the sweat of other men's brows.

Nor do I believe that even the particular phrase which has been deemed so fraught with treason to plutocracy would, if my critic examined it closely, seem to him so very objectionable. His own doctrine, it is true, sounds severely economical. He holds that "the natural man and the Christian" who should be moved by his natural folly and Christianity to forego a bottle of champagne in order to relieve a neighbour in want of actual food, would do a thing "distinctly criminal and pernicious." Still I presume he would allow, theoretically, as I am very sure he would practically, a place to natural sympathy. He would not applaud a banquet given in the midst of a famine, although it might be clearly proved that the money spent by the banqueters was their own, that those who were perishing of famine had not been robbed of it, that their bellies were none the emptier because those of the banqueters were full, and that the cookery gave a stimulus to gastronomic art. He would not, even, think it wholly irrational that the gloom of the work-house should cast a momentary shadow on the enjoyments of the palace. I should also expect him to understand the impression that a man of "brain," even one free from any excessive tenderness of "heart," would not like to see a vast apparatus of luxury, and a great train of flunkeys devoted to his own material enjoyment--that he would feel it as a slur on his good sense, as an impeachment of his mental resources, and of his command of nobler elements of happiness, and even as a degradation of his manhood. There was surely something respectable in the sentiment which made Mr. Brassey refuse, however much his riches might increase, to add to his establishment. There is surely something natural in the tendency, which we generally find coupled with greatness, to simplicity of life. A person whom I knew had dined with a millionaire _tete-a-tete_, with six flunkeys standing round the table. I suspect that a man of Mr. Greg's intellect and character, in spite of his half-ascetic hatred of plush, would rather have been one of the six than one of the two.

While, however, I hope that my view of these matters coincides practically with that of Mr. Greg far more than he supposes, I must admit that there may be a certain difference of sentiment behind. Mr. Greg describes the impressions to which I have given currency as a confused compound of natural sympathy, vague Christianity, and dim economic science. Of the confusion, vagueness and dimness of our views, of course we cannot be expected to be conscious; but I own that I defer, in these matters, not only to natural feeling, but to the ethics of rational Christianity. I still adhere to the Christian code for want of a better, the Utilitarian system of morality being, so far as I can see, no morality at all, in the ordinary sense of the term, as it makes no appeal to our moral nature, our conscience, or whatever philosophers choose to call the deepest part of humanity. Of course, therefore, I accept as the fundamental principle of human relations, and of all science concerning them, the great Christian doctrine that "we are every one members one of another" As a consequence of this doctrine I hold that the wealth of mankind is morally a common store; that we are morally bound to increase it as much, and to waste it as little, as we can, that of the two it is happier to be underpaid than to be overpaid; and that we shall all find it so in the sum of things. There is nothing in such a view in the least degree subversive of the legal rights of property, which the founders of Christianity distinctly recognised in their teaching, and strengthened practically by raising the standard of integrity; nothing adverse to active industry or good business habits; nothing opposed to economic science as the study of the laws regulating the production and distribution of wealth; nothing condemnatory of pleasure, provided it be pleasure which opens the heart, as I suppose was the case with the marriage feast at Cana, not the pleasure which closes the heart, as I fear was the case with the "refined luxury" of the Marquis of Steyne.

If this is superstition, all that I can say is that I have read Strauss, Renan, Mr. Greg on the "Creed of Christendom," and all the eminent writers I could hear of on that side, and that I am not conscious of any bias to the side of orthodoxy, at least I have not given satisfaction to the orthodox classes.

Christianity, of course, in common with other systems, craves a reasonable construction. Plato cannot afford to have his apologues treated as histories. In "Joshua Davidson," a good man is made to turn away from Christianity because he finds that his faith will not literally remove a mountain and cast it into the sea. But he had omitted an indispensable preliminary. He ought first to have exactly compared the bulk of his faith with that of a grain of Palestinian mustard seed. Mr. Greg makes sport of the text "He that hath two coats let him impart to him that hath none," which he says he heard in his youth, but without ever considering its present applicability. Yet in the next paragraph but one he gives it a precise and a very important application by pronouncing that a man is not at liberty to grow wine for himself on land which other people need for food. I fail to see how the principle involved in this passage, and others of a similar tendency which I have quoted from Mr. Greg's paper, differ from that involved in Gospel texts which, if I were to quote them would grate strangely upon his ear. The texts comprise a moral sanction; but Mr. Greg must have some moral sanction when he forbids a man to do that which he is permitted to do by law. Christianity, whatever its source and authority, was addressed at first to childlike minds, and what its antagonists have to prove is not that its forms of expression or even of thought are adapted to such minds, but that its principles, when rationally applied to a more advanced state of society, are unsound. Rightly understood it does not seem to me to enjoin anything eccentric or spasmodic, to bid you enact primitive Orientalism in the streets of London, thrust fraternity upon writers in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, or behave generally as if the "Kingdom of God" were already come. Your duty as a Christian is done if you help its coming according to the circumstances of your place in society and the age in which you live.

Of course, in subscribing to the Christian code of ethics, one lays oneself open to "retorts corteous" without limit. But so one does in subscribing to any code, or accepting any standard, whether moral or of any other kind.

I do not see on what principle Mr. Greg would justify, if he does justify, any sort of charitable benefactions. Did not Mr. Peabody give his glass of champagne to a man in need? He might have spent all his money on himself if he had been driven to building Chatsworths, and hanging their walls with Raffaelles. How will he escape the reproach of having done what was criminal and pernicious? And what are we to say of the conduct of London plutocrats who abetted his proceedings by their applause though they abstained from following his example? Is there any apology for them at all but one essentially Christian? Not that Christianity makes any great fuss over munificence, or gives political economy reasonable ground for apprehension on that score. Plutocracy deifies Mr. Peabody; Christianity measures him and pronounces his millions worth less than the widow's mite.

In my lecture I have applied my principles, or tried to apply them, fairly to the mechanic as well as to the millionaire. I have deprecated, as immoral, a resort to strikes solely in the interest of the strikers, without regard to the general interests of industry and of the community at large. What has my critic to say, from the moral point of view, to the gas stokers who leave London in the dark, or the colliers who, in struggling to raise their own wages, condemn the ironworkers to "clamm" for want of coal?

I would venture to suggest that Mr. Greg somewhat overrates in his paper the beneficence of luxury as an agent in the advancement of civilization. "Artificial wants," he says, "what may be termed extravagant wants, the wish to possess something beyond the bare necessaries of existence; the taste for superfluities and luxuries first, the desire for refinements and embellishments next; the craving for the higher enjoyments of intellect and art as the final stage--these are the sources and stimulants of advancing civilization. It is these desires, these needs, which raise mankind above mere animal existence, which, in time and gradually, transform the savage into the cultured citizen of intelligence and leisure. Ample food once obtained, he begins to long for better, more varied, more succulent food; the richer nutriment leads on to the well-stored larder and the well-filled cellar, and culminates in the French cook." The love of truth, the love of beauty, the effort to realize a high type of individual character, and a high social ideal, surely these are elements of progress distinct from gastronomy, and from that special chain of gradual improvement which culminates in the French cook. It may be doubted whether French cookery does always denote the acme of civilization. Perhaps in the case of the typical London Alderman, it denotes something like the acme of barbarism, for the barbarism of the elaborate and expensive glutton surely exceeds that of the child of nature who gorges himself on the flesh which he has taken in hunting: not to mention that the child of nature costs humanity nothing, whereas the gourmand devours the labour of the French cook and probably that of a good many assistants and purveyors.

The greatest service is obviously rendered by any one who can improve human food. "The man is what he eats," is a truth though somewhat too broadly stated. But then the improvement must be one ultimately if not immediately accessible to mankind in general. That which requires a French cook is accessible only to a few.

Again, in setting forth the civilizing effects of expenditure, Mr. Greg, I think, rather leaves out of sight those of frugality. The Florentines, certainly the leaders of civilization in their day, were frugal in their personal habits, and by that frugality accumulated the public wealth which produced Florentine art, and sustained a national policy eminently generous and beneficent for its time.

Moreover, in estimating the general influence of great fortunes, Mr. Greg seems to take a rather sanguine view of the probable character and conduct of their possessors. He admits that a broad-acred peer or opulent commoner "may spend his L30,000 a year in such a manner as to be a curse, a reproach, and an object of contempt to the community, demoralizing and disgusting all around him, doing no good to others, and bringing no real enjoyment to himself." But he appears to think that the normal case, and the one which should govern our general views and policy upon the subject, is that of a man "of refined taste and intellect expanded to the requirements of his position, managing his property with care and judgment, so as to set a feasible example to less wealthy neighbours; prompt to discern and to aid useful undertakings, to succour striving merit, unearned suffering, and overmatched energy." "Such a man," he says, in a concluding burst of eloquence, "if his establishment in horses and servants is not immoderate, although he surrounds himself with all that art can offer to render life beautiful and elegant though he gathers round him the best productions of the intellect of all countries and ages, though his gardens and his park are models of curiosity and beauty, though he lets his ancestral trees rot in their picturesque mutility instead of converting them into profitable timber, and disregards the fact that his park would be more productive if cut up into potato plots though, in fine he lives in the very height of elegant, refined and tasteful luxury--I should hesitate to denounce as consuming on himself the incomes of countless labouring families, and I should imagine that he might lead his life of temperate and thoughtful joy quietly conscious that his liberal expenditure enabled scores of these families as well as artists and others to exist in comfort and without either brain or heart giving way under the burdensome reflection."

It must be by a slip of the pen such as naturally occurs amidst the glow of an enthusiastic description that the writer speaks of people as enabling others to subsist by their expenditure. It is clear that people can furnish subsistence to themselves or others only by production. A rich idler may appear to give bread to an artist or opera girl but the bread really comes not from the idler but from the workers who pay his rents; the idler is at most the channel of distribution. The munificence of monarchs who generously lavish the money of the taxpayer is a familiar case of the same fallacy. This is the illusion of the Irish peasant whose respect for the spendthrift "gentleman" and contempt for the frugal "sneak" Mr. Greg honours with a place among the serious elements of an economical and social problem.

But not to dwell on what is so obvious how many let me ask, of the possessors of inherited wealth in England or in any other country, fulfil or approach Mr. Greg's ideal? I confess that, as regards the mass of the English squires the passage seems to me almost satire. Refined taste and expanded intellect, promptness to discern and aid striving merit and unearned suffering, life surrounded with all that art can do to render it beautiful and elegant, the best productions of intellect gathered from all intellects and ages--I do not deny that Mr. Greg has seen all this, but I can hardly believe that he has seen it often, and I suspect that there are probably people not unfamiliar with the abodes of great landowners who have never seen it at all. Not to speak of artists and art, what does landed wealth do for popular education? It appears from the Popular Education Report of 1861 (p. 77) that in a district taken as a fair specimen, the sum of L4,518, contributed by voluntary subscription towards the support of 168 schools, was derived from the following sources:

169 clergymen contributed L1,782 or L10 10 0 each 399 landowners " 2,127 " 5 6 0 " 2l7 occupiers " 200 " 18 6 " 102 householders " 181 " 1 15 6 " 141 other persons " 228 " 1 12 4 "

The rental of the 399 landowners was estimated at, L650,000 a year. Judging from the result of my own observations, I should not have been at all surprised if a further analysis of the return had shown that not only the contributions of the clergy but those of retired professional men and others with limited incomes were, in proportion, far greater than those of the leviathans of wealth.

To play the part of Mr. Greg's ideal millionaire, a man must have not only a large heart but a cultivated mind; and how often are educators successful in getting work out of boys or youths who know that they have not to make their own bread?

In my lecture I have drawn a strong distinction, though Mr. Greg has not observed it, between hereditary wealth and that which, however great, and even, compared with the wages of subordinate producers, excessive, is earned by industry. Wealth earned by industry is, for obvious reasons, generally much more wisely and beneficially spent than hereditary wealth. The self-made millionaire must at all events, have an active mind. The late Mr. Brassey was probably one man in a hundred even among self-made millionaires; among hereditary millionaires he would have been one in a thousand. Surely we always bestow especial praise on one who resists the evil influences of hereditary wealth, and surely our praise is deserved.

The good which private wealth has done in the way of patronizing literature and art is, I am convinced, greatly overrated. The beneficent patronage of Lorenzo di Medici is, like that of Louis XIV., a chronological and moral fallacy. What Lorenzo did was, in effect, to make literature and art servile and in some cases to taint them with the propensities of a magnificent debauchee. It was not Lorenzo, nor any number of Lorenzos, that made Florence, with her intellect and beauty, but the public spirit, the love of the community, the intensity of civic life, in which the interest of Florentine history lies. The decree of the Commune for the building of the Cathedral directs the architect to make a design "of such noble and extreme magnificence that the industry and skill of men shall be able to invent nothing grander or more beautiful," since it had been decided in Council that no plan should be accepted "unless the conception was such as to render the work worthy of an ambition which had become very great, inasmuch as it resulted from the continued desires of a great number of citizens united in one sole will."

I believe, too, that the munificence of a community is generally wiser and better directed than that of private benefactors. Nothing can be more admirable than the munificence of rich men in the United States. But the drawback in the way of personal fancies and crochets is so great that I sometimes doubt whether future generations will have reason to thank the present, especially as the reverence of the Americans for property is so intense that they would let a dead founder breed any pestilence rather than touch the letter of his will.

Politically, no one can have lived in the New World without knowing that a society in which wealth is distributed rests on an incomparably safer foundation than one in which it is concentrated in the hands of a few. British plutocracy has its cannoneer; but if the cannoneer happens to take fancies into his head the "whiff of grapeshot" goes the wrong way.

Socially, I do not know whether Mr. Greg has been led to consider the extent to which artificial desires, expensive fashions, and conventional necessities created by wealth, interfere with freedom of intercourse and general happiness. The _Saturday Review_ says:

"All classes of Her Majesty's respectable subjects are always doing their best to keep up appearances, and a very hard struggle many of us make of it. Thus a mansion in Belgrave Square ought to mean a corpulent hall-porter, a couple of gigantic footmen, a butler and an under-butler at the very least, if the owner professes to live op to his social dignities. If our house is in Baker or Wimpole street, we must certainly have a manservant in sombre raiment to open our door, with a hobbledehoy or a buttons to run his superior's messages. In the smart, although somewhat dismal, small squares in South Kensington and the Western suburbs, the parlourmaid must wear the freshest of ribbons and trimmest of bows, and be resplendent in starch and clean coloured muslins. So it goes on, as we run down the gamut of the social scale; our ostentatious expenditure must be in harmony throughout with the stuccoed facade behind which we live, or the staff of domestics we parade. We are aware, of course, as our incomes for the most part are limited, and as we are all of us upon our mettle in the battle of life that we must pinch somewhere if appearances are to be kept up. We do what we can in secret towards balancing the budget. We retrench on our charities, save on our coals, screw on our cabs, drink the sourest of Bordeaux instead of more generous vintages, dispense with the cream which makes tea palatable, and systematically sacrifice substantial comforts that we may swagger successfully in the face of a critical and carping society. But with the most of us if our position is an anxious one; it is of our own making and if we dared to be eccentrically rational it might be very tolerable."

Nor is this the worst. The worst is the exclusion from society of the people who do not choose to torture and degrade themselves in order to keep up appearances and who are probably the best people of all. The interference of wealth and its exigencies with social enjoyment is I suspect a heavy set off against squirearchical patronage of intellect and art.

Those who believe that the distribution of wealth is more favourable to happiness and more civilizing than its concentration will of course vote against laws which tend to artificial concentration of wealth such as those of primogeniture and entail. This they may do without advocating public plunder though it suits plutocratic writers to confound the two. For my own part I do not feel bound to pay to British plutocracy a respect which British plutocracy does not pay to humanity. Some of its organs are beginning to preach doctrines revolting to a Christian and to any man who has not banished from his heart the love of his kind and we have seen it when its class passions were excited show a temper as cruel as that of any Maratist or Petroleuse. But so far from attacking the institution of property [Footnote: The _Saturday Review_ some time ago charged me with proposing to confiscate the increase in the value of land. I never said anything of the kind nor anything I believe that could easily be mistaken for it.] I have as great a respect for it as any millionaire can have and as sincerely accept and uphold it as the condition of our civilization. There is nothing inconsistent with this in the belief that among the better part of the race property is being gradually modified by duty or in the surmise that before humanity reaches its distant goal property and duty will alike be merged in affection.

A TRUE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY.

The vast works of the railway and steamboat age called into existence, besides the race of great engineers, a race of great organizers and directors of industry, who may be generally termed Contractor. Among these no figure was more conspicuous than that of Mr. Brassey, a life of whom has just been published by Messrs. Bell and Daldy. Its author is Mr. Helps, whose name is a guarantee for the worthy execution of the work. And worthily executed it is, in spite of a little Privy Council solemnity in the reflections, and a little "State Paper" in the style. The materials were collected in an unusual way--by examining the persons who had acted under Mr. Brassey, or knew him well, and taking down their evidence in shorthand. The examination was conducted by Mr. Brassey, jun., who prudently declined to write the biography himself, feeling that a son could not speak impartially of his father. The result is that we have materials for a portrait, which not only is very interesting in itself but, by presenting the image of beneficence in an employer, may help to mediate between capital and labour in a time of industrial war.

Mr. Helps had been acquainted with Mr. Brassey, and had once received a visit from him on official business of difficulty and importance. He expected, he says, to see a hard, stern, soldierly sort of person, accustomed to sway armies of working-men in an imperious fashion. Instead of this he saw an elderly gentleman of very dignified appearance and singularly graceful manners--"a gentleman of the old school." "He stated his case, no, I express myself wrongly; he did _not_ state his case, he _understated_ it; and there are few things more attractive in a man than that he should be inclined to understate rather than overstate his own case." Mr. Brassey was also very brief, and when he went away, Mr. Helps, knowing well the matter in respect to which his visitor had a grievance, thought that, if it had been his own case, he should hardly have been able to restrain himself so well, and speak with so little regard to self-interest, as Mr. Brassey had done. Of all the persons whom Mr. Helps had known, he thought Mr. Brassey most resembled that perfect gentleman and excellent public man, Lord Herbert of Lea.