Chapter XX: Section III: Riches (5)

There are, therefore, let me finally enforce and leave with the reader this broad conclusion,--three things to be considered in employing any poor person. It is not enough to give him employment. You must employ him first to produce useful things; secondly, of the several (suppose equally useful) things he can equally well produce, you must set him to make that which will cause him to lead the healthiest life; lastly, of the things produced, it remains a question of wisdom and conscience how much you are to take yourself, and how much to leave to others. A large quantity, remember, unless you destroy it, must always be so left at one time or another; the only questions you have to decide are, not what you will give, and what you will keep, but when, and how, and to whom, you will give. The natural law of human life is, of course, that in youth a man shall labour and lay by store for his old age, and when age comes, should use what he has laid by, gradually slackening his toil, and allowing himself more frank use of his store, taking care always to leave himself as much as will surely suffice for him beyond any possible length of life. What he has gained, or by tranquil and unanxious toil, continues to gain, more than is enough for his own need, he ought so to administer, while he yet lives, as to see the good of it again beginning in other hands; for thus he has himself the greatest sum of pleasure from it, and faithfully uses his sagacity in its control. Whereas most men, it appears, dislike the sight of their fortunes going out into service again, and say to themselves,--"I can indeed nowise prevent this money from falling at last into the hands of others, nor hinder the good of it, such as it is, from becoming theirs, not mine; but at least let a merciful death save me from being a witness of their satisfaction; and may God so far be gracious to me as to let no good come of any of this money of mine before my eyes." Supposing this feeling unconquerable, the safest way of rationally indulging it would be for the capitalist at once to spend all his fortune on himself, which might actually, in many cases, be quite the rightest as well as the pleasantest thing to do, if he had just tastes and worthy passions. But, whether for himself only, or through the hands and for the sake of others also, the law of wise life is, that the maker of the money should also be the spender of it, and spend it, approximately, all, before he dies; so that his true ambition as an economist should be, to die, not as rich, but as poor, as possible, calculating the ebb tide of possession in true and calm proportion to the ebb tide of life. Which law, checking the wing of accumulative desire in the mid-volley,[120] and leading to peace of possession and fulness of fruition in old age, is also wholesome in that by the freedom of gift, together with present help and counsel, it at once endears and dignifies age in the sight of youth, which then no longer strips the bodies of the dead, but receives the grace of the living. Its chief use would (or will be, for men are indeed capable of attaining to this much use for their reason), that some temperance and measure will be put to the acquisitiveness of commerce.[121] For as things stand, a man holds it his duty to be temperate in his food, and of his body, but for no duty to be temperate in his riches, and of his mind. He sees that he ought not to waste his youth and his flesh for luxury; but he will waste his age, and his soul, for money, and think it no wrong, nor the delirium tremens of the intellect any evil. But the law of life is, that a man should fix the sum he desires to make annually, as the food he desires to eat daily; and stay when he has reached the limit, refusing increase of business, and leaving it to others, so obtaining due freedom of time for better thoughts. How the gluttony of business is punished, a bill of health for the principals of the richest city houses, issued annually, would show in a sufficiently impressive manner.

[120] [Greek: kai penian hegoumenous heinai me to ten ousian
elatto poiein, alla to ten aplestian pleio.]--"Laws," v. 8.

Read the context and compare. "He who spends for all that is
noble, and gains by nothing but what is just, will hardly be
notably wealthy, or distressfully poor."--"Laws," v. 42.

[121] The fury of modern trade arises chiefly out of the
possibility of making sudden fortune by largeness of
transaction, and accident of discovery or contrivance.
I have no doubt that the final interest of every nation
is to check the action of these commercial lotteries. But
speculation absolute, unconnected with commercial effort, is
an unmitigated evil in a state, and the root of countless
evils beside.

I know, of course, that these statements will be received by the modern merchant, as an active Border rider of the sixteenth century would have heard of its being proper for men of the Marches to get their living by the spade instead of the spur. But my business is only to state veracities and necessities; I neither look for the acceptance of the one, nor promise anything for the nearness of the other. Near or distant, the day will assuredly come when the merchants of a state shall be its true "ministers of exchange," its porters, in the double sense of carriers and gate-keepers, bringing all lands into frank and faithful communication, and knowing for their master of guild, Hermes the herald, instead of Mercury the gain-guarder.

And now, finally, for immediate rule to whom it concerns.

The distress of any population means that they need food, houseroom, clothes, and fuel. You can never, therefore, be wrong in employing any labourer to produce food, houseroom, clothes, or fuel: but you are always wrong if you employ him to produce nothing (for then some other labourer must be worked double time to feed him); and you are generally wrong, at present, if you employ him (unless he can do nothing else) to produce works of art, or luxuries; because modern art is mostly on a false basis, and modern luxury is criminally great.[122]

[122] It is especially necessary that the reader should keep his
mind fixed on the methods of consumption and destruction, as
the true sources of national poverty. Men are apt to watch
rather the exchanges in a state than its damages; but the
exchanges are only of importance so far as they bring about
these last. A large number of the purchases made by the
richer classes are mere forms of interchange of unused
property, wholly without effect on national prosperity. It
matters nothing to the state, whether if a china pipkin be
rated as worth a hundred pounds, A has the pipkin, and B the
pounds, or A the pounds and B the pipkin. But if the pipkin
is pretty, and A or B breaks it, there is national loss; not
otherwise. So again, when the loss has really taken place,
no shifting of the shoulders that bear it will do away with
the fact of it. There is an intensely ludicrous notion in
the public mind respecting the abolishment of debt by
denying it. When a debt is denied, the lender loses instead
of the borrower, that is all; the loss is precisely,
accurately, everlastingly the same. The Americans borrow
money to spend in blowing up their own houses. They deny
their debt; by one third already, gold being at fifty
premium; and will probably deny it wholly. That merely means
that the holders of the notes are to be the losers instead
of the issuers. The quantity of loss is precisely equal, and
irrevocable; it is the quantity of human industry spent in
explosion, plus the quantity of goods exploded. Honour only
decides who shall pay the sum lost, not whether it is to be
paid or not. Paid it must be and to the uttermost farthing.

The way to produce more food is mainly to bring in fresh ground, and increase facilities of carriage;--to break rock, exchange earth, drain the moist, and water the dry, to mend roads, and build harbours of refuge. Taxation thus spent will annihilate taxation, but spent in war, it annihilates revenue.

The way to produce houseroom is to apply your force first to the humbler dwellings. When your bricklayers are out of employ, do not build splendid new streets, but better the old ones: send your paviours and slaters to the poorest villages, and see that your poor are healthily lodged before you try your hand on stately architecture. You will find its stateliness rise better under the trowel afterwards; and we do not yet build so well as that we need hasten to display our skill to future ages. Had the labour which has decorated the Houses of Parliament filled, instead, rents in walls and roofs throughout the county of Middlesex; and our deputies met to talk within massive walls that would have needed no stucco for five hundred years,--the decoration might have been better afterwards, and the talk now. And touching even our highly conscientious church building, it may be well to remember that in the best days of church plans, their masons called themselves "logeurs du bon Dieu;" and that since, according to the most trusted reports, God spends a good deal of His time in cottages as well as in churches, He might perhaps like to be a little better lodged there also.

The way to get more clothes is,--not necessarily, to get more cotton. There were words written twenty years ago which would have saved many of us some shivering had they been minded in time. Shall we read them?

"The Continental people, it would seem, are 'importing our machinery, beginning to spin cotton and manufacture for themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that!' Sad news indeed; but irremediable;--by no means. The saddest news is, that we should find our National Existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other People. A most narrow stand for a great Nation to base itself on! A stand which, with all the Corn-Law Abrogations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.

"My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came honestly down from it and said: 'This is our minimum cotton-prices. We care not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper. Do you, if it seem so blessed to you, make cotton cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton-fuzz, your hearts with copperas-fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!' I admire a Nation which fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other Nations, to the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to _under_sell them; we will be content to _equal_-sell them; to be happy selling equally with them! I do not see the use of underselling them. Cotton-cloth is already two-pence a yard or lower; and yet bare backs were never more numerous among us. Let inventive men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving how cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent, a little, how cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier divided among us. Let inventive men consider, Whether the Secret of this Universe, and of Man's Life there, does, after all, as we rashly fancy it, consist in making money?... With a Hell which means--'Failing to make money,' I do not think there is any Heaven possible that would suit one well; nor so much as an Earth that can be habitable long! In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost" (foremost, is it not, rather, Mr. Carlyle?) "begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached." (In the matter of clothes, decidedly.) The way to produce more fuel is first to make your coal mines safer, by sinking more shafts; then set all your convicts to work in them, and if, as is to be hoped, you succeed in diminishing the supply of that sort of labourer, consider what means there may be, first of growing forest where its growth will improve climate; then of splintering the forests which now make continents of fruitful land pathless and poisonous, into faggots for fire;--so gaining at once dominion sunwards and icewards. Your steam power has been given you (you will find eventually) for work such as that; and not for excursion trains, to give the labourer a moment's breath, at the peril of his breath for ever, from amidst the cities which you have crushed into masses of corruption. When you know how to build cities, and how to rule them, you will be able to breathe in their streets, and the "excursion" will be the afternoon's walk or game in the fields round them. Long ago, Claudian's peasant of Verona knew, and we must yet learn, in his fashion, the difference between via and vita. But nothing of this work will pay.

No; no more than it pays to dust your rooms or wash your doorsteps. It will pay; not at first in currency, but in that which is the end and the source of currency,--in life (and in currency richly afterwards). It will pay in that which is more than life,--in "God's first creature, which was light," whose true price has not yet been reckoned in any currency, and yet into the image of which all wealth, one way or other, must be cast. For your riches must either as the lightning, which,

"begot but in a cloud,
Though shining bright, and speaking loud,
Whilst it begins, concludes its violent race,
And, where it gilds, it wounds the place;"

or else as the lightning of the sacred sign, which shines from one part of the heaven to the other. There is no other choice; you must either take dust for deity, spectre for possession, fettered dream for life, and for epitaph, this reversed verse of the great Hebrew hymn of economy (Psalm cxii.):--"He hath gathered together, he hath stripped the poor, his iniquity remaineth for ever." Or else, having the sun for justice to shine on you, and the sincere substance of good in your possession, and the pure law and liberty of life within you, leave men to write this better legend over your grave: "He hath dispersed abroad. He hath given to the poor. His righteousness remaineth for ever."

* * * * *

The present paper completes the definitions necessary for
future service. The next in order will be the first chapter
of the body of the work.

These introductory essays are as yet in imperfect form; I
suffer them to appear, though they were not intended for
immediate publication, for the sake of such chance service
as may be found in them.

[Here the author indicated certain corrections, which have
been carried out in this edition. He then went on to say
that the note on Charis (p. 274) required a word or two in
further illustration, as follows:--]

The derivation of words is like that of rivers: there is one
real source, usually small, unlikely, and difficult to find,
far up among the hills; then, as the word flows on and comes
into service, it takes in the force of other words from
other sources, and becomes itself quite another word--even
more than one word, after the junction--a word as it were of
many waters, sometimes both sweet and bitter. Thus the whole
force of our English "charity" depends on the guttural in
"Charis" getting confused with the "c" of the Latin "carus;"
thenceforward throughout the middle ages, the two ideas
ran on together, and both got confused with St. Paul's
[Greek: agape], which expresses a different idea in all
sorts of ways; our "charity," having not only brought in the
entirely foreign sense of almsgiving, but lost the essential
sense of contentment, and lost much more in getting too far
away from the "charis," of the final Gospel benedictions.
For truly it is fine Christianity we have come to, which
professing to expect the perpetual grace of its Founder,
has not itself grace enough to save it from overreaching
its friends in sixpenny bargains; and which, supplicating
evening and morning the forgiveness of its own debts, goes
forth in the daytime to take its fellow-servants by the
throat, saying--not "Pay me that thou owest," but "Pay me
that thou owest me not."

Not but that we sometimes wear Ophelia's rue with a
difference, and call it, "Herb o' grace o' Sundays," taking
consolation out of the offertory with--"Look, what he layeth
out, it shall be paid him again." Comfortable words, indeed,
and good to set against the old royalty of Largesse--

"Whose moste joie was, I wis,
When that she gave, and said, 'Have this.'"

Again: the first root of the word faith being far away
in----(compare my note on this force of it in "Modern
Painters," vol. v., p. 255), the Latins, as proved by
Cicero's derivation of the word, got their "facio," also
involved in the idea; and so the word, and the world with
it, gradually lose themselves in an arachnoid web of
disputation concerning faith and works, no one ever taking
the pains to limit the meaning of the term: which in
earliest Scriptural use is as nearly as possible our English
"obedience." Then the Latin "fides," a quite different word,
alternately active and passive in different uses, runs into
"foi;" "facere," through "ficare," into "fier," at the end
of words; and "fidere," into "fier" absolute; and out of
this endless reticulation of thought and word rise still
more finely reticulated theories concerning salvation by
faith--the things which the populace expected to be saved
from, being indeed carved for them in a very graphic manner
in their cathedral porches, but the things they were
expected to believe being carved for them not so clearly.

Lastly 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 usual useful
ingenuity, were endeavouring to throw the whole subject back
into confusion by dwelling on the 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,
etc.), which would further have illustrated the nature of
the Circean power. But, not to be led too far into the
subtleness of these myths, respecting them all I have but
this to say: 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 high indignation, by inadvertently asking who
the prodigal son was, and what was to be learned by his
example. The leading divine of the company (still one of our
great popular preachers) 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 noble enchantment for those who
can use them; for those who cannot, I am content to repeat
the words I wrote four years ago, in the appendix to the
"Two Paths"--

"The entire purpose of a great thinker may be difficult to
fathom, and we may be over and over again more or less
mistaken in guessing at his meaning; but the real, profound,
nay, quite bottomless and unredeemable mistake, is the
fool's thought, that he had no meaning."

LONDON: WARD, LOCK & CO., LIMITED.

* * * * *

Transcriber's note:

1. Text in italics is enclosed by underscores (_italics_).

2. Footnotes have been renumbered and moved from the middle of the paragraph to the closest paragraph break.

3. The original text includes Greek characters. For this text version these letters have been replaced with transliterations. For example, [Greek: b] represents greek letter beta.

4. Certain words use an oe ligature in the original.

5. Mixed fractions are indicated with a hyphen and forward slash. For example, 3-1/2 indicates three and a half.

6. Obvious misprints and punctuation errors have been silently corrected in this text version.

7. Other than the changes listed above, printer's inconsistencies in hyphenation and ligature usage have been retained.

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