Time and Tide by Weare and Tyne

LETTER XI.

THE SATANIC POWER IS MAINLY TWOFOLD: THE POWER OF CAUSING FALSEHOOD AND THE POWER OF CAUSING PAIN. THE RESISTANCE IS BY LAW OF HONOR AND LAW OF DELIGHT

59. You may perhaps have thought my last three or four letters mere rhapsodies. They are nothing of the kind; they are accurate accounts of literal facts, which we have to deal with daily. This thing, or power, opposed to God's power, and specifically called "Mammon" in the Sermon on the Mount, is, in deed and in truth, a continually present and active enemy, properly called "Arch-enemy," that is to say, "Beginning and Prince of Enemies," and daily we have to record our vote for, or against him. Of the manner of which record we were next to consider.

60. This enemy is always recognizable, briefly in two functions. He is pre-eminently the Lord of Lies and the Lord of Pain. Wherever Lies are, he is; wherever Pain is, he has been—so that of the Spirit of Wisdom (who is called God's Helper, as Satan His Adversary) it is written, not only that by her Kings reign, and Princes decree justice, but also that her ways are ways of Pleasantness, and all her paths Peace.

Therefore, you will succeed, you working men, in recording your votes against this arch-enemy, precisely in the degree in which you can do away with falsehood and pain in your work and lives; and bring truth into the one, and pleasure into the other; all education being directed to make yourselves and your children capable of Honesty and capable of Delight; and to rescue yourselves from iniquity and agony. And this is what I meant by saying in the preface to 'Unto this Last' that the central requirement of education consisted in giving habits of gentleness and justice; "gentleness" (as I will show you presently) being the best single word I could have used to express the capacity for giving and receiving true pleasure; and "justice" being similarly the most comprehensive word for all kind of honest dealing.

61. Now, I began these letters with the purpose of explaining the nature of the requirements of justice first, and then those of gentleness, but I allowed myself to be led into that talk about the theaters, not only because the thoughts could be more easily written as they came, but also because I was able thus to illustrate for you more directly the nature of the enemy we have to deal with. You do not perhaps know, though I say this diffidently (for I often find working men know many things which one would have thought were out of their way), that music was, among the Greeks, quite the first means of education; and that it was so connected with their system of ethics and of intellectual training, that the God of Music is with them also the God of Righteousness;—the God who purges and avenges iniquity, and contends with their Satan as represented under the form of Python, "the corrupter." And the Greeks were incontrovertibly right in this. Music is the nearest at hand, the most orderly, the most delicate, and the most perfect, of all bodily pleasures; it is also the only one which is equally helpful to all the ages of man,—helpful from the nurse's song to her infant, to the music, unheard of others, which so often haunts the deathbed of pure and innocent spirits. And the action of the deceiving or devilish power is in nothing shown quite so distinctly among us at this day,—not even in our commercial dishonesties, nor in our social cruelties,—as in its having been able to take away music, as an instrument of education, altogether; and to enlist it almost wholly in the service of superstition on the one hand, and of sensuality on the other.

62. This power of the Muses, then, and its proper influence over you workmen, I shall eventually have much to insist upon with you; and in doing so I shall take that beautiful parable of the Prodigal Son (which I have already referred to), and explain, as far as I know, the significance of it, and then I will take the three means of festivity, or wholesome human joy, therein stated,—fine dress, rich food, and music;—("bring forth the fairest robe for him,"—"bring forth the fatted calf, and kill it;" "as he drew nigh, he heard music and dancing"); and I will show you how all these three things, fine dress, rich food, and music (including ultimately all the other arts) are meant to be sources of life, and means of moral discipline, to all men; and how they have all three been made, by the Devil, the means of guilt, dissoluteness, and death.3 But first I must return to my original plan of these letters, and endeavor to set down for you some of the laws which, in a true Working Men's Parliament, must be ordained in defense of Honesty.

Of which laws (preliminary to all others, and necessary above all others), having now somewhat got my raveled threads together again, I will begin talk in my next letter.

LETTER XII.

THE NECESSITY OF IMPERATIVE LAW TO THE PROSPERITY OF STATES

63. I have your most interesting letter,[IV] which I keep for reference, when I come to the consideration of its subject in its proper place, under the head of the abuse of Food. I do not wonder that your life should be rendered unhappy by the scenes of drunkenness which you are so often compelled to witness; nor that this so gigantic and infectious evil should seem to you the root of the greater part of the misery of our lower orders. I do not wonder that George Cruikshank has warped the entire current of his thoughts and life, at once to my admiration and my sorrow, from their natural field of work, that he might spend them, in struggle with this fiend, for the poor lowest people whom he knows so well. I wholly sympathize with you in indignation at the methods of temptation employed, and at the use of the fortunes made by the vendors of death; and whatever immediately applicable legal means there might be of restricting the causes of drunkenness, I should without hesitation desire to bring into operation. But all such appliance I consider temporary and provisionary; nor, while there is record of the miracle at Cana (not to speak of the sacrament) can I conceive it possible, without (logically) the denial of the entire truth of the New Testament, to reprobate the use of wine as a stimulus to the powers of life. Supposing we did deny the words and deeds of the Founder of Christianity, the authority of the wisest heathens, especially that of Plato in the 'Laws,' is wholly against abstinence from wine; and much as I can believe, and as I have been endeavoring to make you believe also, of the subtlety of the Devil, I do not suppose the vine to have been one of his inventions. Of this, however, more in another place. By the way, was it not curious that in the 'Manchester Examiner,' in which that letter of mine on the abuse of dancing appeared, there chanced to be, in the next column, a paragraph giving an account of a girl stabbing her betrayer in a ball-room; and another paragraph describing a Parisian character, which gives exactly the extreme type I wanted, for example of the abuse of Food?[V]

64. I return, however, now to the examination of possible means for the enforcement of justice, in temper and in act, as the first of political requirements. And as, in stating my conviction of the necessity of certain stringent laws on this matter, I shall be in direct opposition to Mr. Stuart Mill; and, more or less, in opposition to other professors of modern political economy, as well as to many honest and active promoters of the privileges of working men (as if privilege only were wanted and never restraint!), I will give you, as briefly as I can, the grounds on which I am prepared to justify such opposition.

65. When the crew of a wrecked ship escape in an open boat, and the boat is crowded, the provisions scanty, and the prospect of making land distant, laws are instantly established and enforced which no one thinks of disobeying. An entire equality of claim to the provisions is acknowledged without dispute; and an equal liability to necessary labor. No man who can row is allowed to refuse his oar; no man, however much money he may have saved in his pocket, is allowed so much as half a biscuit beyond his proper ration. Any riotous person who endangered the safety of the rest would be bound, and laid in the bottom of the boat, without the smallest compunction, for such violation of the principles of individual liberty; and, on the other hand, any child, or woman, or aged person, who was helpless, and exposed to great danger and suffering by their weakness, would receive more than ordinary care and indulgence, not unaccompanied with unanimous self-sacrifice on the part of the laboring crew.

There is never any question under circumstances like these, of what is right and wrong, worthy and unworthy, wise or foolish. If there be any question, there is little hope for boat or crew. The right man is put at the helm; every available hand is set to the oars; the sick are tended, and the vicious restrained, at once, and decisively; or if not, the end is near.

66. Now, the circumstances of every associated group of human society, contending bravely for national honors and felicity of life, differ only from those thus supposed, in the greater, instead of less, necessity for the establishment of restraining law. There is no point of difference in the difficulties to be met, nor in the rights reciprocally to be exercised. Vice and indolence are not less, but more, injurious in a nation than in a boat's company; the modes in which they affect the interests of worthy persons being far more complex, and more easily concealed. The right of restraint, vested in those who labor, over those who would impede their labor, is as absolute in the large as in the small society; the equal claim to share in whatever is necessary to the common life (or commonwealth) is as indefeasible; the claim of the sick and helpless to be cared for by the strong with earnest self-sacrifice, is as pitiful and as imperative; the necessity that the governing authority should be in the hands of a true and trained pilot is as clear and as constant. In none of these conditions is there any difference between a nation and a boat's company. The only difference is in this, that the impossibility of discerning the effects of individual error and crime, or of counteracting them by individual effort, in the affairs of a great nation renders it tenfold more necessary than in a small society that direction by law should be sternly established. Assume that your boat's crew is disorderly and licentious, and will, by agreement, submit to no order;—the most troublesome of them will yet be easily discerned; and the chance is that the best man among them knocks him down. Common instinct of self-preservation will make the rioters put a good sailor at the helm, and impulsive pity and occasional help will be, by heart and hand, here and there given to visible distress. Not so in the ship of the realm. The most troublesome persons in it are usually the least recognized for such, and the most active in its management; the best men mind their own business patiently, and are never thought of; the good helmsman never touches the tiller but in the last extremity; and the worst forms of misery are hidden, not only from every eye, but from every thought. On the deck, the aspect is of Cleopatra's galley—under hatches there is a slave hospital; while, finally (and this is the most fatal difference of all), even the few persons who care to interfere energetically, with purpose of doing good, can, in a large society, discern so little of the real state of evil to be dealt with, and judge so little of the best means of dealing with it, that half of their best efforts will be misdirected, and some may even do more harm than good. Whereas it is the sorrowful law of this universe, that evil, even unconscious and unintended, never fails of its effect; and in a state where the evil and the good, under conditions of individual "liberty," are allowed to contend together, not only every stroke on the Devil's side tells—but every slip, (the mistakes of wicked men being as mischievous as their successes); while on the side of right, there will be much direct and fatal defeat, and, even of its measure of victory, half will be fruitless.

67. It is true, of course, that, in the end of ends, nothing but the right conquers; the prevalent thorns of wrong, at last, crackle away in indiscriminate flame: and of the good seed sown, one grain in a thousand some day comes up—and somebody lives by it; but most of our great teachers, not excepting Carlyle and Emerson themselves, are a little too encouraging in their proclamation of this comfort, not, to my mind, very sufficient, when for the present our fields are full of nothing but darnel instead of wheat, and cockle instead of barley; and none of them seem to me yet to have enough insisted on the inevitable power and infectiousness of all evil, and the easy and utter extinguishableness of good. Medicine often fails of its effect—but poison never: and while, in summing the observation of past life, not unwatchfully spent, I can truly say that I have a thousand times seen patience disappointed of her hope, and wisdom of her aim, I have never yet seen folly fruitless of mischief, nor vice conclude but in calamity.

68. There is, however, one important condition in national economy, in which the analogy of that of a ship's company is incomplete: namely, that while labor at oar or sail is necessarily united, and can attain no independent good, or personal profit, the labor properly undertaken by the several members of a political community is necessarily, and justly, within certain limits, independent; and obtains for them independent advantage, of which, if you will glance at the last paragraph of the first chapter of 'Munera Pulveris,' you will see I should be the last person to propose depriving them. This great difference in final condition involves necessarily much complexity in the system and application of general laws; but it in no wise abrogates,—on the contrary, it renders yet more imperative,—the necessity for the firm ordinance of such laws, which, marking the due limits of independent agency, may enable it to exist in full energy, not only without becoming injurious, but so as more variously and perfectly to promote the entire interests of the commonwealth.

I will address myself therefore in my next letter to the statement of some of these necessary laws.

LETTER XIII.

THE PROPER OFFICES OF THE BISHOP AND DUKE; OR, "OVERSEER" AND "LEADER."

69. I see, by your last letter, for which I heartily thank you, that you would not sympathize with me in my sorrow for the desertion of his own work by George Cruikshank, that he may fight in the front of the temperance ranks. But you do not know what work he has left undone, nor how much richer inheritance you might have received from his hand. It was no more his business to etch diagrams of drunkenness than it is mine at this moment to be writing these letters against anarchy. It is "the first mild day of March" (high time, I think, that it should be!), and by rights I ought to be out among the budding banks and hedges, outlining sprays of hawthorn and clusters of primrose. That is my right work; and it is not, in the inner gist and truth of it, right nor good, for you, or for anybody else, that Cruikshank with his great gift, and I with my weak, but yet thoroughly clear and definite one, should both of us be tormented by agony of indignation and compassion, till we are forced to give up our peace, and pleasure, and power; and rush down into the streets and lanes of the city, to do the little that is in the strength of our single hands against their uncleanliness and iniquity. But, as in a sorely besieged town, every man must to the ramparts, whatsoever business he leaves, so neither he nor I have had any choice but to leave our household stuff, and go on crusade, such as we are called to; not that I mean, if Fate may be anywise resisted, to give up the strength of my life, as he has given his; for I think he was wrong in doing so; and that he should only have carried the fiery cross his appointed leagues, and then given it to another hand; and, for my own part, I mean these very letters to close my political work for many a day; and I write them, not in any hope of their being at present listened to, but to disburthen my heart of the witness I have to bear, that I may be free to go back to my garden lawns, and paint birds and flowers there.

70. For these same statutes which we are to consider to-day, have indeed been in my mind now these fourteen years, ever since I wrote the last volume of the 'Stones of Venice,' in which you will find, in the long note on Modern Education, most of what I have been now in detail writing to you, hinted in abstract; and, at the close of it, this sentence, of which I solemnly now avouch (in thankfulness that I was permitted to write it), every word: "Finally, I hold it for indisputable, that the first duty of a State is to see that every child born therein shall be well housed, clothed, fed, and educated, till it attain years of discretion. But in order to the effecting this the Government must have an authority over the people of which we now do not so much as dream."

That authority I did not then endeavor to define, for I knew all such assertions would be useless, and that the necessarily resultant outcry would merely diminish my influence in other directions. But now I do not care about influence any more, it being only my concern to say truly that which I know, and, if it may be, get some quiet life, yet, among the fields in the evening shadow.

71. There is, I suppose, no word which men are prouder of the right to attach to their names, or more envious of others who bear it, when they themselves may not, than the word "noble." Do you know what it originally meant, and always, in the right use of it, means? It means a "known" person; one who has risen far enough above others to draw men's eyes to him, and to be known (honorably) for such and such an one. "Ignoble," on the other hand, is derived from the same root as the word "ignorance." It means an unknown, inglorious person. And no more singular follies have been committed by weak human creatures than those which have been caused by the instinct, pure and simple, of escaping from this obscurity. Instinct, which, corrupted, will hesitate at no means, good or evil, of satisfying itself with notoriety—instinct, nevertheless, which, like all other natural ones, has a true and pure purpose, and ought always in a worthy way to be satisfied.

All men ought to be in this sense "noble"; known of each other, and desiring to be known. And the first law which a nation, desiring to conquer all the devices of the Father of Lies, should establish among its people, is that they shall be so known.

72. Will you please now read § 22 of 'Sesame and Lilies'? The reviewers in the ecclesiastical journals laughed at it, as a rhapsody, when the book came out; none having the slightest notion of what I meant: (nor, indeed, do I well see how it could be otherwise!). Nevertheless, I meant precisely and literally what is there said, namely, that a bishop's duty being to watch over the souls of his people, and give account of every one of them, it becomes practically necessary for him first to get some account of their bodies. Which he was wont to do in the early days of Christianity by help of a person called "deacon" or "ministering servant," whose name is still retained among preliminary ecclesiastical dignities, vainly enough! Putting, however, all questions of forms and names aside, the thing actually needing to be done is this—that over every hundred (more or less) of the families composing a Christian State, there should be appointed an overseer, or bishop, to render account, to the State, of the life of every individual in those families; and to have care both of their interest and conduct to such an extent as they may be willing to admit, or as their faults may justify: so that it may be impossible for any person, however humble, to suffer from unknown want, or live in unrecognized crime;—such help and observance being rendered without officiousness either of interference or inquisition (the limits of both being determined by national law), but with the patient and gentle watchfulness which true Christian pastors now exercise over their flocks; only with a higher legal authority presently to be defined, of interference on due occasion.

And with this farther function, that such overseers shall be not only the pastors, but the biographers, of their people; a written statement of the principal events in the life of each family being annually required to be rendered by them to a superior State Officer. These records, laid up in public offices, would soon furnish indications of the families whom it would be advantageous to the nation to advance in position, or distinguish with honor, and aid by such reward as it should be the object of every Government to distribute no less punctually, and far more frankly, than it distributes punishment: (compare 'Munera Pulveris,' Essay IV., in paragraph on Critic Law), while the mere fact of permanent record being kept of every event of importance, whether disgraceful or worthy of praise, in each family, would of itself be a deterrent from crime, and a stimulant to well-deserving conduct, far beyond mere punishment or reward.

73. Nor need you think that there would be anything in such a system un-English, or tending to espionage. No uninvited visits should ever be made in any house, unless law had been violated; nothing recorded, against its will, of any family, but what was inevitably known of its publicly visible conduct, and the results of that conduct. What else was written should be only by the desire, and from the communications, of its head. And in a little while it would come to be felt that the true history of a nation was indeed not of its wars, but of its households; and the desire of men would rather be to obtain some conspicuous place in these honorable annals, than to shrink behind closed shutters from public sight. Until at last, George Herbert's grand word of command would hold not only on the conscience, but the actual system and outer economy of life,

74. Secondly, above these bishops or pastors, who are only to be occupied in offices of familiar supervision and help, should be appointed higher officers of State, having executive authority over as large districts as might be conveniently (according to the number and circumstances of their inhabitants) committed to their care; officers who, according to the reports of the pastors, should enforce or mitigate the operation of too rigid general law, and determine measures exceptionally necessary for public advantage. For instance, the general law being that all children of the operative classes, at a certain age, should be sent to public schools, these superior officers should have power, on the report of the pastors, to dispense with the attendance of children who had sick parents to take charge of, or whose home-life seemed to be one of better advantage for them than that of the common schools; or who, for any other like cause, might justifiably claim remission. And it being the general law that the entire body of the public should contribute to the cost, and divide the profits, of all necessary public works and undertakings, as roads, mines, harbor protections, and the like, and that nothing of this kind should be permitted to be in the hands of private speculators, it should be the duty of the district officer to collect whatever information was accessible respecting such sources of public profit; and to represent the circumstances in Parliament: and then, with Parliamentary authority, but on his own sole personal responsibility, to see that such enterprises were conducted honestly and with due energy and order.