Chapter XXVII: Preface (13)

Cleo. It certainly would, and does. But what is to be admired is, that the larger the numbers are in a society, the more extensive they have rendered the variety of their desires, and the more operose the gratification of them is become among them by custom; the less mischievous is the consequence of that evil, where they have the use of money: whereas, without it, the smaller the number was of a society, and the more strictly the members of it, in supplying their wants, would confine themselves to those only that were necessary for their subsistence, the more easy it would be for them to agree about the reciprocal services I spoke of. But to procure all the comforts of life, and what is called temporal happiness, in a large polite nation, would be every whit as practicable without speech, as it would be without money, or an equivalent to be used instead of it. Where this is not wanting, and due care is taken of it by the legislature, it will always be the standard, which the worth of every thing will be weighed by. There are great blessings that arise from necessity; and that every body is obliged to eat and drink, is the cement of civil society. Let men set what high value they please upon themselves, that labour which most people are capable of doing, will ever be the cheapest. Nothing can be dear of which there is great plenty, how beneficial soever it may be to man; and scarcity enhances the price of things much oftener than the usefulness of them. Hence it is evident why those arts and sciences will always be the most lucrative, that cannot be attained to, but in great length of time, by tedious study and close application; or else require a particular genius, not often to be met with. It is likewise evident, to whose lot, in all societies, the hard and dirty labour, which nobody would meddle with, if he could help it, will ever fall: but you have seen enough of this in the Fable of the Bees.

Hor. I have so, and one remarkable saying I have read there on this subject, which I shall never forget. "The poor," says the author, "have nothing to stir them up to labour, but their wants, which it is wisdom to relieve, but folly to cure."

Cleo. I believe the maxim to be just, and that it is not less calculated for the real advantage of the poor, than it appears to be for the benefit of the rich. For, among the labouring people, those will ever be the least wretched as to themselves, as well as most useful to the public, that being meanly born and bred, submit to the station they are in with cheerfulness; and contented, that their children should succeed them in the same low condition, inure them from their infancy to labour and submission, as well as the cheapest diet and apparel; when, on the contrary, that sort of them will always be the least serviceable to others, and themselves the most unhappy, who, dissatisfied with their labour, are always grumbling and repining at the meanness of their condition; and, under pretence of having a great regard for the welfare of their children, recommend the education of them to the charity of others; and you shall always find, that of this latter class of poor, the greatest part are idle sottish people, that, leading dissolute lives themselves, are neglectful to their families, and only want, as far as it is in their power, to shake off that burden of providing for their brats from their own shoulders.

Hor. I am no advocate for charity schools; yet I think it is barbarous, that the children of the labouring poor, should be for ever pinned down, they, and all their posterity, to that slavish condition; and that those who are meanly born, what parts or genius soever they might be of, should be hindered and debarred from raising themselves higher.

Cleo. So should I think it barbarous, if what you speak of was done any where, or proposed to be done. But there is no degree of men in Christendom that are pinned down, they and their posterity, to slavery for ever. Among the very lowest sort, there are fortunate men in every country; and we daily see persons, that without education, or friends, by their own industry and application, raise themselves from nothing to mediocrity, and sometimes above it, if once they come rightly to love money and take delight in saving it: and this happens more often to people of common and mean capacities, than it does to those of brighter parts. But there is a prodigious difference between debarring the children of the poor from ever rising higher in the world, and refusing to force education upon thousands of them promiscuously, when they should be more usefully employed. As some of the rich must come to be poor, so some of the poor will come to be rich in the common course of things. But that universal benevolence, that should every where industriously lift up the indigent labourer from his meanness, would not be less injurious to the whole kingdom than a tyrannical power, that should, without a cause, cast down the wealthy from their ease and affluence. Let us suppose, that the hard and dirty labour throughout the nation requires three millions of hands, and that every branch of it is performed by the children of the poor. Illiterate, and such as had little or no education themselves; it is evident, that if a tenth part of these children, by force and design, were to be exempt from the lowest drudgery, either there must be so much work left undone, as would demand three hundred thousand people; or the defect, occasioned by the numbers taken off, must be supplied by the children of others, that had been better bred.

Hor. So that what is done at first out of charity to some, may, at long run, prove to be cruelty to others.

Cleo. And will depend upon it. In the compound of all nations, the different degrees of men ought to bear a certain proportion to each other, as to numbers, in order to render the whole a well proportioned mixture. And as this due proportion is the result and natural consequence of the difference there is in the qualifications of men, and the vicissitudes that happen among them, so it is never better attained to, or preserved, than when nobody meddles with it. Hence we may learn, how the short-sighted wisdom of perhaps well-meaning people, may rob us of a felicity that would flow spontaneously from the nature of every large society, if none were to divert or interrupt the stream.

Hor. I do not care to enter into these abstruse matters; what have you further to say in praise of money?

Cleo. I have no design to speak either for or against it; but be it good or bad, the power and dominion of it are both of vast extent, and the influence of it upon mankind has never been stronger or more general in any empire, state, or kingdom, than in the most knowing and politest ages, when they were in their greatest grandeur and prosperity; and when arts and sciences were the most flourishing in them: Therefore, the invention of money seems to me to be a thing more skilfully adapted to the whole bent of our nature, than any other or human contrivance. There is no greater remedy against sloth or stubbornness; and with astonishment I have beheld the readiness and alacrity with which it often makes the proudest men pay homage to their inferiors: It purchases all services, and cancels all debts; nay, it does more, for when a person is employed in his occupation, and he who sets him to work, a good paymaster, how laborious, how difficult or irksome soever the service be, the obligation is always reckoned to lie upon him who performs it.

Hor. Do not you think, that many eminent men in the learned professions would dissent from you in this?

Cleo. I know very well, that none ought to do it, if ever they courted business, or hunted after employment.

Hor. All you have said is true among mercenary people; but upon noble minds that despise lucre, honour has far greater efficacy than money.

Cleo. The highest titles, and the most illustrious births, are no security against covetousness; and persons of the first quality, that are actually generous and munificent are often as greedy after gain, when it is worth their while, as the most sordid mechanics are for trifles: The year twenty has taught us, how difficult it is to find out those noble minds that despise lucre, when there is a prospect of getting vastly. Besides, nothing is more universally charming than money; it suits with every station, the high, the low, the wealthy, and the poor: whereas, honour has little influence on the mean, slaving people, and rarely affects any of the vulgar; but if it does, money will almost every where purchase honour; nay, riches of themselves are an honour to all those who know how to use them fashionably. Honour, on the contrary, wants riches for its support; without them it is a dead weight that oppresses its owner; and titles of honour, joined to a necessitous condition, are a greater burden together than the same degree of poverty is alone: for the higher a man's quality is, the more considerable are his wants in life; but the more money he has, the better he is able to supply the greatest extravagancy of them. Lucre is the best restorative in the world, in a literal sense, and works upon the spirits mechanically; for it is not only a spur that excites men to labour, and makes them in love with it, but it likewise gives relief in weariness, and actually supports men in all fatigues and difficulties. A labourer of any sort, who is paid in proportion to his diligence, can do more work than another who is paid by the day or the week, and has standing wages.

Hor. Do not you think, then, that there are men in laborious offices, who, for a fixed salary, discharge their duties with diligence and assiduity?

Cleo. Yes, many; but there is no place or employment in which there are required or expected, that continual attendance and uncommon severity of application, that some men harass and punish themselves with by choice, when every fresh trouble meets with a new recompence; and you never saw men so entirely devote themselves to their calling, and pursue business with that eagerness, dispatch, and perseverance in any office of preferment, in which the yearly income is certain and unalterable, as they often do in those professions where the reward continually accompanies the labour, and the fee immediately either precedes the service they do to others, as it is with the lawyers, or follows it, as it is with the physicians. I am sure you have hinted at this in our first conversation yourself.

Hor. Here is the castle before us.

Cleo. Which I suppose you are not sorry for.

Hor. Indeed I am, and would have been glad to have heard you speak of kings and other sovereigns with the same candour, as well as freedom, with which you have treated prime ministers, and their envious adversaries. When I see a man entirely impartial, I shall always do him that justice, as to think, that if he is not in the right in what he says, at least he aims at truth. The more I examine your sentiments, by what I see in the world, the more I am obliged to come into them; and all this morning I have said nothing in opposition to you, but to be better informed, and to give you an opportunity to explain yourself more amply. I am your convert, and shall henceforth look upon the Fable of the Bees very differently from what I did; for though, in the Characteristics, the language and the diction are better, the system of man's sociableness is more lovely and more plausible, and things are set off with more art and learning; yet in the other there is certainly more truth, and nature is more faithfully copied in it almost every where.

Cleo. I wish you would read them both once more, and, after that, I believe you will say that you never saw two authors who seem to have wrote with more different views. My friend, the author of the Fable, to engage and keep his readers in good humour, seems to be very merry, and to do something else, whilst he detects the corruption of our nature; and having shown man to himself in various lights, he points indirectly at the necessity, not only of revelation and believing, but likewise of the practice of Christianity manifestly to be seen in mens lives.

Hor. I have not observed that: Which way has he done it indirectly?

Cleo. By exposing, on the one hand, the vanity of the world, and the most polite enjoyments of it; and, on the other, the insufficiency of human reason and heathen virtue to procure real felicity: for I cannot see what other meaning a man could have by doing this in a Christian country, and among people that all pretend to seek after happiness.

Hor. And what say you of Lord Shaftsbury?

Cleo. First, I agree with you that he was a man of erudition, and a very polite writer; he has displayed a copious imagination, and a fine turn of thinking, in courtly language and nervous expressions: But, as on the one hand, it must be confessed, that his sentiments on liberty and humanity are noble and sublime, and that there is nothing trite or vulgar in the Characteristics; so, on the other, it cannot be denied, that the ideas he had formed of the goodness and excellency of our nature, were as romantic and chimerical as they are beautiful and amiable; that he laboured hard to unite two contraries that can never be reconciled together, innocence of manners, and worldly greatness; that to compass this end, he favoured deism, and, under pretence of lashing priestcraft and superstition, attacked the Bible itself; and, lastly, that by ridiculing many passages of Holy Writ, he seems to have endeavoured to sap the foundation of all revealed religion, with design of establishing Heathen virtue on the ruins of Christianity.

FINIS.

NOTES

[1] This was wrote in 1714.

[2] This was wrote in 1714.

[3] P. 212, 213. First Edit. 175, 176.

[4] P. 215. First Edit. 178.

[5] P. 106. First Edit. 77.

[6] P. 116. First Edit. 87.

[7] P. 115, 116. First Edit. 86, 87.

[8] Quis est tam vecors qui non intelligat, numine hoc tantum imperium esse natum, actum, et retentum? Cic. Orat. de Harush. Resp.