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Lay Morals, and Other Papers

by Robert Louis Stevenson · English · Gutenberg #373 · 488,429 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Lay Morals, and Other Papers

Author: Robert Louis Stevenson

Author of introduction, etc.: Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson


        
Release date: December 1, 1995 [eBook #373]
                Most recently updated: October 20, 2010

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/373

Credits: Transcribed from the Chatto and Windus 1911 edition by David Price


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LAY MORALS, AND OTHER PAPERS ***


Transcribed from the Chatto and Windus 1911 edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org





                                LAY MORALS


                             And Other Papers

                                    BY
                          ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON



                            [Picture: Graphic]

                              A NEW EDITION
                            WITH A PREFACE BY
                              MRS. STEVENSON

                                * * * * *

                                  LONDON
                             CHATTO & WINDUS
                                   1911

                                * * * * *

                          _All rights reserved._




PREFACE
BY MRS. ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON {0}


In our long voyage on the yacht _Casco_, we visited many islands; I
believe on every one we found the scourge of leprosy.  In the Marquesas
there was a regular leper settlement, though the persons living there
seemed free to wander where they wished, fishing on the beach, or
visiting friends in the villages.  I remember one afternoon, at Anaho,
when my husband and I, tired after a long quest for shells, sat down on
the sand to rest awhile, a native man stepped out from under some
cocoanut trees, regarding us hesitatingly as though fearful of intruding.
My husband waved an invitation to the stranger to join us, offering his
cigarette to the man in the island fashion.  The cigarette was accepted
and, after a puff or two, courteously passed back again according to
native etiquette.  The hand that held it was the maimed hand of a leper.
To my consternation my husband took the cigarette and smoked it out.
Afterwards when we were alone and I spoke of my horror he said, ‘I could
not mortify the man.  And if you think I _liked_ doing it—that was
another reason; because I _didn’t_ want to.’

Another day, while we were still anchored in Anaho Bay, a messenger from
round a distant headland came in a whale-boat with an urgent request that
we go to see a young white girl who was ill with some mysterious malady.
We had supposed that, with the beach-comber ‘Charley the red,’ we were
the only white people on our side of the island.  Though there was much
wind that day and the sea ran high, we started at once, impelled partly
by curiosity and partly by the pathetic nature of the message.
Fortunately we took our luncheon with us, eating it on the beach before
we went up to the house where the sick girl lay.  Our hostess, the girl’s
mother, met us with regrets that we had already lunched, saying, ‘I have
a most excellent cook; here he is, now.’  She turned, as she spoke, to an
elderly Chinaman who was plainly in an advanced stage of leprosy.  When
the man was gone, my husband asked if she had no fear of contagion.  ‘I
don’t believe in contagion,’ was her reply.  But there was little doubt
as to what ailed her daughter.  She was certainly suffering from leprosy.
We could only advise that the girl be taken to the French post at Santa
Maria Bay where there was a doctor.

On our return to the _Casco_ we confessed to each other with what alarm
and repugnance we touched the miserable girl.  We talked long that
evening of Father Damien, his sublime heroism, and his martyrdom which
was already nearing its sad end.  Beyond all noble qualities my husband
placed courage.  The more he saw of leprosy, and he saw much in the
islands, the higher rose his admiration for the simple priest of Molokai.
‘I must see Molokai,’ he said many times.  ‘I must somehow manage to see
Molokai.’

In January 1889, we arrived in Honolulu, settling in a pleasant cottage
by the sea to rest until we were ready to return to England.  The _Casco_
we sent back to San Francisco with the captain.  But the knowledge that
every few days some vessel was leaving Honolulu to cruise among islands
we had not seen, and now should never see, was more than we could bear.
First we engaged passage on a missionary ship, but changed our minds—my
husband would not be allowed to smoke on board, for one reason—and
chartered the trading schooner _Equator_.  This was thought too rough a
voyage for my mother-in-law, as indeed it would have been; so she was
sent, somewhat protesting, back to Scotland.

My husband was still intent on seeing Molokai.  After the waste of much
time and red tape, he finally received an official permission to visit
the leper settlement.  It did not occur to him it would be necessary to
get a separate official permission to _leave_ Molokai; hence he was
nearly left behind when the vessel sailed out.  He only saved himself by
a prodigious leap which landed him on board the boat, whence nothing but
force could dislodge him.  By the doctor’s orders he took gloves to wear
as a precautionary measure against contagion, but they were never worn.
At first he avoided shaking hands, but when he played croquet with the
young leper girls he would not listen to the Mother Superior’s warning
that he must wear gloves.  He thought it might remind them of their
condition.  ‘What will you do if you find you have contracted leprosy?’ I
asked.  ‘Do?’ he replied; ‘why, you and I would spend the rest of our
lives in Molokai and become humble followers of Father Damien.’  As Mr.
Balfour says in the Life of Stevenson, he was as stern with his family as
he was with himself, and as exacting.

He talked very little to us of the tragedy of Molokai, though I could see
it lay heavy on his spirits; but of the great work begun by Father Damien
and carried on by his successors he spoke fully.  He had followed the
life of the priest like a detective until there seemed nothing more to
learn.  Mother Mary Ann, the Mother Superior, he could never mention
without deep emotion.  One of the first things he did on his return to
Honolulu was to send her a grand piano for the use of her girls—the girls
with whom he had played croquet.  He also sent toys, sewing materials,
small tools for the younger children, and other things that I have
forgotten.  After his death a letter was found among his papers, of which
I have only the last few lines.  ‘I cannot suppose you remember me, but I
won’t forget you, nor God won’t forget you for your kindness to the blind
white leper at Molokai.’

During my husband’s absence I had made every preparation for our voyage
on the _Equator_, so but little time was lost before we found ourselves
on board, our sails set for the south.  The _Equator_, which had easily
lived through the great Samoan hurricane, made no such phenomenal runs as
the _Casco_, but we could trust her, and she had no ‘tricks and ways’
that we did not understand.  We liked the sailors, we loved the ship and
her captain, so it was with heart-felt regret we said farewell in the
harbour of Apia after a long and perfect cruise.

After reading the letters that awaited us in Apia, we looked over the
newspapers.  Our indignation may be imagined when we read in one item
that, owing to the publication of a letter by a well-known Honolulu
missionary, depicting Father Damien as a dirty old peasant who had
contracted leprosy through his immoral habits, the project to erect a
monument to his memory would be abandoned.  ‘I’ll not believe it,’ said
my husband, ‘unless I see it with my own eyes; for it is too damnable for
belief!’

But see it he did, in spite of his incredulity, for in Sydney, a month or
two later, the very journal containing the letter condemnatory of Father
Damien was among the first we chanced to open.  I shall never forget my
husband’s ferocity of indignation, his leaping stride as he paced the
room holding the offending paper at arm’s-length before his eyes that
burned and sparkled with a peculiar flashing light.  His cousin Mr.
Balfour, in his _Life of Robert Louis Stevenson_, says: ‘his eyes . . .
when he was moved to anger or any fierce emotion seemed literally to
blaze and glow with a burning light.’  In another moment he disappeared
through the doorway, and I could hear him, in his own room, pulling his
chair to the table, and the sound of his inkstand being dragged towards
him.

That afternoon he called us together—my son, my daughter, and
myself—saying that he had something serious to lay before us.  He went
over the circumstances succinctly, and then we three had the incomparable
experience of hearing its author read aloud the defence of Father Damien
while it was still red-hot from his indignant soul.

As we sat, dazed and overcome by emotion, he pointed out to us that the
subject-matter was libellous in the highest degree, and the publication
of the article might cause the loss of his entire substance.  Without our
concurrence he would not take such a risk.  There was no dissenting
voice; how could there be?  The paper was published with almost no change
or revision, though afterwards my husband said he considered this a
mistake.  He thought he should have waited for his anger to cool, when he
might have been more impersonal and less egotistic.

The next day he consulted an eminent lawyer, more from curiosity than
from any other reason.  Mr. Moses—I think that was his name—was at first
inclined to be jocular.  I remember his smiling question: ‘Have you
called him a hell-hound or an atheist?  Otherwise there is no libel.’
But when he looked over the manuscript his countenance changed.  ‘This is
a serious affair,’ he said; ‘however, no one will publish it for you.’
In that Mr. Moses was right; no one dared publish the pamphlet.  But that
difficulty was soon overcome.  My husband hired a printer by the day, and
the work was rushed through.  We then, my daughter, my son, and myself,
were set to work helping address the pamphlets, which were scattered far
and wide.

Father Damien was vindicated by a stranger, a man of another country and
another religion from his own.

                                                            F. V. DE G. S.




Contents:


   Preface by Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson
   Lay Morals
   Father Damien
   The Pentland Rising
      I.  The Causes of the Revolt
      II.  The Beginning
      III.  The March of the Rebels
      IV.  Rullion Green
      V.  A Record of Blood
   The Day After To-morrow
   College Papers
      I.  Edinburgh Students in 1824
      II.  The Modern Student
      III.  Debating Societies
   Criticisms
      I.  Lord Lytton’s “Fables in Song”
      II.  Salvini’s Macbeth
      III.  Bagster’s “Pilgrim’s Progress”
   Sketches
      I.  The Satirist
      II.  Nuits Blanches
      III.  The Wreath of Immortelles
      IV.  Nurses
      V.  A Character
  The Great North Road
      I.  Nance at the “Green Dragon”
      II.  In which Mr. Archer is Installed
      III.  Jonathan Holdaway
      IV.  Mingling Threads
      V.  Life in the Castle
      IV.  The Bad Half-Crown
      VII.  The Bleaching-Green
      VIII.  The Mail Guard
   The Young Chevalier
      Prologue: The Wine-Seller’s Wife
      I.  The Prince
   Heathercat
      I.  Traqairs of Montroymont
      II.  Francie
      III.  The Hill-End of Drumlowe




LAY MORALS


_The following chapters of a projected treatise on Ethics were drafted at
Edinburgh in the spring of_ 1879.  _They are unrevised_, _and must not be
taken as representing_, _either as to matter or form_, _their author’s
final thoughts_; _but they contain much that is essentially
characteristic of his mind_.

                                * * * * *

               _Copyright in the United States of America_.



CHAPTER I


The problem of education is twofold: first to know, and then to utter.
Every one who lives any semblance of an inner life thinks more nobly and
profoundly than he speaks; and the best of teachers can impart only
broken images of the truth which they perceive.  Speech which goes from
one to another between two natures, and, what is worse, between two
experiences, is doubly relative.  The speaker buries his meaning; it is
for the hearer to dig it up again; and all speech, written or spoken, is
in a dead language until it finds a willing and prepared hearer.  Such,
moreover, is the complexity of life, that when we condescend upon details
in our advice, we may be sure we condescend on error; and the best of
education is to throw out some magnanimous hints.  No man was ever so
poor that he could express all he has in him by words, looks, or actions;
his true knowledge is eternally incommunicable, for it is a knowledge of
himself; and his best wisdom comes to him by no process of the mind, but
in a supreme self-dictation, which keeps varying from hour to hour in its
dictates with the variation of events and circumstances.

A few men of picked nature, full of faith, courage, and contempt for
others, try earnestly to set forth as much as they can grasp of this
inner law; but the vast majority, when they come to advise the young,
must be content to retail certain doctrines which have been already
retailed to them in their own youth.  Every generation has to educate
another which it has brought upon the stage.  People who readily accept
the responsibility of parentship, having very different matters in their
eye, are apt to feel rueful when that responsibility falls due.  What are
they to tell the child about life and conduct, subjects on which they
have themselves so few and such confused opinions?  Indeed, I do not
know; the least said, perhaps, the soonest mended; and yet the child
keeps asking, and the parent must find some words to say in his own
defence.  Where does he find them? and what are they when found?

As a matter of experience, and in nine hundred and ninety-nine cases out
of a thousand, he will instil into his wide-eyed brat three bad things:
the terror of public opinion, and, flowing from that as a fountain, the
desire of wealth and applause.  Besides these, or what might be deduced
as corollaries from these, he will teach not much else of any effective
value: some dim notions of divinity, perhaps, and book-keeping, and how
to walk through a quadrille.

But, you may tell me, the young people are taught to be Christians.  It
may be want of penetration, but I have not yet been able to perceive it.
As an honest man, whatever we teach, and be it good or evil, it is not
the doctrine of Christ.  What he taught (and in this he is like all other
teachers worthy of the name) was not a code of rules, but a ruling
spirit; not truths, but a spirit of truth; not views, but a view.  What
he showed us was an attitude of mind.  Towards the many considerations on
which conduct is built, each man stands in a certain relation.  He takes
life on a certain principle.  He has a compass in his spirit which points
in a certain direction.  It is the attitude, the relation, the point of
the compass, that is the whole body and gist of what he has to teach us;
in this, the details are comprehended; out of this the specific precepts
issue, and by this, and this only, can they be explained and applied.
And thus, to learn aright from any teacher, we must first of all, like a
historical artist, think ourselves into sympathy with his position and,
in the technical phrase, create his character.  A historian confronted
with some ambiguous politician, or an actor charged with a part, have but
one pre-occupation; they must search all round and upon every side, and
grope for some central conception which is to explain and justify the
most extreme details; until that is found, the politician is an enigma,
or perhaps a quack, and the part a tissue of fustian sentiment and big
words; but once that is found, all enters into a plan, a human nature
appears, the politician or the stage-king is understood from point to
point, from end to end.  This is a degree of trouble which will be gladly
taken by a very humble artist; but not even the terror of eternal fire
can teach a business man to bend his imagination to such athletic
efforts.  Yet without this, all is vain; until we understand the whole,
we shall understand none of the parts; and otherwise we have no more than
broken images and scattered words; the meaning remains buried; and the
language in which our prophet speaks to us is a dead language in our
ears.

Take a few of Christ’s sayings and compare them with our current
doctrines.

‘Ye cannot,’ he says, ‘_serve God and Mammon_.’  Cannot?  And our whole
system is to teach us how we can!

‘_The children of this world are wiser in their generation than the
children of light_.’  Are they?  I had been led to understand the
reverse: that the Christian merchant, for example, prospered exceedingly
in his affairs; that honesty was the best policy; that an author of
repute had written a conclusive treatise ‘How to make the best of both
worlds.’  Of both worlds indeed!  Which am I to believe then—Christ or
the author of repute?

‘_Take no thought for the morrow_.’  Ask the Successful Merchant;
interrogate your own heart; and you will have to admit that this is not
only a silly but an immoral position.  All we believe, all we hope, all
we honour in ourselves or our contemporaries, stands condemned in this
one sentence, or, if you take the other view, condemns the sentence as
unwise and inhumane.  We are not then of the ‘same mind that was in
Christ.’  We disagree with Christ.  Either Christ meant nothing, or else
he or we must be in the wrong.  Well says Thoreau, speaking of some texts
from the New Testament, and finding a strange echo of another style which
the reader may recognise: ‘Let but one of these sentences be rightly read
from any pulpit in the land, and there would not be left one stone of
that meeting-house upon another.’

It may be objected that these are what are called ‘hard sayings’; and
that a man, or an education, may be very sufficiently Christian although
it leave some of these sayings upon one side.  But this is a very gross
delusion.  Although truth is difficult to state, it is both easy and
agreeable to receive, and the mind runs out to meet it ere the phrase be
done.  The universe, in relation to what any man can say of it, is plain,
patent and staringly comprehensible.  In itself, it is a great and
travailing ocean, unsounded, unvoyageable, an eternal mystery to man; or,
let us say, it is a monstrous and impassable mountain, one side of which,
and a few near slopes and foothills, we can dimly study with these mortal
eyes.  But what any man can say of it, even in his highest utterance,
must have relation to this little and plain corner, which is no less
visible to us than to him.  We are looking on the same map; it will go
hard if we cannot follow the demonstration.  The longest and most
abstruse flight of a philosopher becomes clear and shallow, in the flash
of a moment, when we suddenly perceive the aspect and drift of his
intention.  The longest argument is but a finger pointed; once we get our
own finger rightly parallel, and we see what the man meant, whether it be
a new star or an old street-lamp.  And briefly, if a saying is hard to
understand, it is because we are thinking of something else.

But to be a true disciple is to think of the same things as our prophet,
and to think of different things in the same order.  To be of the same
mind with another is to see all things in the same perspective; it is not
to agree in a few indifferent matters near at hand and not much debated;
it is to follow him in his farthest flights, to see the force of his
hyperboles, to stand so exactly in the centre of his vision that whatever
he may express, your eyes will light at once on the original, that
whatever he may see to declare, your mind will at once accept.  You do
not belong to the school of any philosopher, because you agree with him
that theft is, on the whole, objectionable, or that the sun is overhead
at noon.  It is by the hard sayings that discipleship is tested.  We are
all agreed about the middling and indifferent parts of knowledge and
morality; even the most soaring spirits too often take them tamely upon
trust.  But the man, the philosopher or the moralist, does not stand upon
these chance adhesions; and the purpose of any system looks towards those
extreme points where it steps valiantly beyond tradition and returns with
some covert hint of things outside.  Then only can you be certain that
the words are not words of course, nor mere echoes of the past; then only
are you sure that if he be indicating anything at all, it is a star and
not a street-lamp; then only do you touch the heart of the mystery, since
it was for these that the author wrote his book.

Now, every now and then, and indeed surprisingly often, Christ finds a
word that transcends all common-place morality; every now and then he
quits the beaten track to pioneer the unexpressed, and throws out a
pregnant and magnanimous hyperbole; for it is only by some bold poetry of
thought that men can be strung up above the level of everyday conceptions
to take a broader look upon experience or accept some higher principle of
conduct.  To a man who is of the same mind that was in Christ, who stands
at some centre not too far from his, and looks at the world and conduct
from some not dissimilar or, at least, not opposing attitude—or, shortly,
to a man who is of Christ’s philosophy—every such saying should come home
with a thrill of joy and corroboration; he should feel each one below his
feet as another sure foundation in the flux of time and chance; each
should be another proof that in the torrent of the years and generations,
where doctrines and great armaments and empires are swept away and
swallowed, he stands immovable, holding by the eternal stars.  But alas!
at this juncture of the ages it is not so with us; on each and every such
occasion our whole fellowship of Christians falls back in disapproving
wonder and implicitly denies the saying.  Christians! the farce is
impudently broad.  Let us stand up in the sight of heaven and confess.
The ethics that we hold are those of Benjamin Franklin.  _Honesty is the
best policy_, is perhaps a hard saying; it is certainly one by which a
wise man of these days will not too curiously direct his steps; but I
think it shows a glimmer of meaning to even our most dimmed
intelligences; I think we perceive a principle behind it; I think,
without hyperbole, we are of the same mind that was in Benjamin Franklin.



CHAPTER II


But, I may be told, we teach the ten commandments, where a world of
morals lies condensed, the very pith and epitome of all ethics and
religion; and a young man with these precepts engraved upon his mind must
follow after profit with some conscience and Christianity of method.  A
man cannot go very far astray who neither dishonours his parents, nor
kills, nor commits adultery, nor steals, nor bears false witness; for
these things, rightly thought out, cover a vast field of duty.

Alas! what is a precept?  It is at best an illustration; it is case law
at the best which can be learned by precept.  The letter is not only
dead, but killing; the spirit which underlies, and cannot be uttered,
alone is true and helpful.  This is trite to sickness; but familiarity
has a cunning disenchantment; in a day or two she can steal all beauty
from the mountain tops; and the most startling words begin to fall dead
upon the ear after several repetitions.  If you see a thing too often,
you no longer see it; if you hear a thing too often, you no longer hear
it.  Our attention requires to be surprised; and to carry a fort by
assault, or to gain a thoughtful hearing from the ruck of mankind, are
feats of about an equal difficulty and must be tried by not dissimilar
means.  The whole Bible has thus lost its message for the common run of
hearers; it has become mere words of course; and the parson may bawl
himself scarlet and beat the pulpit like a thing possessed, but his
hearers will continue to nod; they are strangely at peace, they know all
he has to say; ring the old bell as you choose, it is still the old bell
and it cannot startle their composure.  And so with this byword about the
letter and the spirit.  It is quite true, no doubt; but it has no meaning
in the world to any man of us.  Alas! it has just this meaning, and
neither more nor less: that while the spirit is true, the letter is
eternally false.

The shadow of a great oak lies abroad upon the ground at noon, perfect,
clear, and stable like the earth.  But let a man set himself to mark out
the boundary with cords and pegs, and were he never so nimble and never
so exact, what with the multiplicity of the leaves and the progression of
the shadow as it flees before the travelling sun, long ere he has made
the circuit the whole figure will have changed.  Life may be compared,
not to a single tree, but to a great and complicated forest; circumstance
is more swiftly changing than a shadow, language much more inexact than
the tools of a surveyor; from day to day the trees fall and are renewed;
the very essences are fleeting as we look; and the whole world of leaves
is swinging tempest-tossed among the winds of time.  Look now for your
shadows.  O man of formulæ, is this a place for you?  Have you fitted the
spirit to a single case?  Alas, in the cycle of the ages when shall such
another be proposed for the judgment of man?  Now when the sun shines and
the winds blow, the wood is filled with an innumerable multitude of
shadows, tumultuously tossed and changing; and at every gust the whole
carpet leaps and becomes new.  Can you or your heart say more?

Look back now, for a moment, on your own brief experience of life; and
although you lived it feelingly in your own person, and had every step of
conduct burned in by pains and joys upon your memory, tell me what
definite lesson does experience hand on from youth to manhood, or from
both to age?  The settled tenor which first strikes the eye is but the
shadow of a delusion.  This is gone; that never truly was; and you
yourself are altered beyond recognition.  Times and men and circumstances
change about your changing character, with a speed of which no earthly
hurricane affords an image.  What was the best yesterday, is it still the
best in this changed theatre of a to-morrow?  Will your own Past truly
guide you in your own violent and unexpected Future?  And if this be
questionable, with what humble, with what hopeless eyes, should we not
watch other men driving beside us on their unknown careers, seeing with
unlike eyes, impelled by different gales, doing and suffering in another
sphere of things?

And as the authentic clue to such a labyrinth and change of scene, do you
offer me these two score words? these five bald prohibitions?  For the
moral precepts are no more than five; the first four deal rather with
matters of observance than of conduct; the tenth, _Thou shalt not covet_,
stands upon another basis, and shall be spoken of ere long.  The Jews, to
whom they were first given, in the course of years began to find these
precepts insufficient; and made an addition of no less than six hundred
and fifty others!  They hoped to make a pocket-book of reference on
morals, which should stand to life in some such relation, say, as Hoyle
stands in to the scientific game of whist.  The comparison is just, and
condemns the design; for those who play by rule will never be more than
tolerable players; and you and I would like to play our game in life to
the noblest and the most divine advantage.  Yet if the Jews took a petty
and huckstering view of conduct, what view do we take ourselves, who
callously leave youth to go forth into the enchanted forest, full of
spells and dire chimeras, with no guidance more complete than is afforded
by these five precepts?

_Honour thy father and thy mother_.  Yes, but does that mean to obey? and
if so, how long and how far?  _Thou shall not kill_.  Yet the very
intention and purport of the prohibition may be best fulfilled by
killing.  _Thou shall not commit adultery_.  But some of the ugliest
adulteries are committed in the bed of marriage and under the sanction of
religion and law.  _Thou shalt not bear false witness_.  How? by speech
or by silence also? or even by a smile?  _Thou shalt not steal_.  Ah,
that indeed!  But what is _to steal_?

To steal?  It is another word to be construed; and who is to be our
guide?  The police will give us one construction, leaving the word only
that least minimum of meaning without which society would fall in pieces;
but surely we must take some higher sense than this; surely we hope more
than a bare subsistence for mankind; surely we wish mankind to prosper
and go on from strength to strength, and ourselves to live rightly in the
eye of some more exacting potentate than a policeman.  The approval or
the disapproval of the police must be eternally indifferent to a man who
is both valorous and good.  There is extreme discomfort, but no shame, in
the condemnation of the law.  The law represents that modicum of morality
which can be squeezed out of the ruck of mankind; but what is that to me,
who aim higher and seek to be my own more stringent judge?  I observe
with pleasure that no brave man has ever given a rush for such
considerations.  The Japanese have a nobler and more sentimental feeling
for this social bond into which we all are born when we come into the
world, and whose comforts and protection we all indifferently share
throughout our lives:—but even to them, no more than to our Western
saints and heroes, does the law of the state supersede the higher law of
duty.  Without hesitation and without remorse, they transgress the
stiffest enactments rather than abstain from doing right.  But the
accidental superior duty being thus fulfilled, they at once return in
allegiance to the common duty of all citizens; and hasten to denounce
themselves; and value at an equal rate their just crime and their equally
just submission to its punishment.

The evading of the police will not long satisfy an active conscience or a
thoughtful head.  But to show you how one or the other may trouble a man,
and what a vast extent of frontier is left unridden by this invaluable
eighth commandment, let me tell you a few pages out of a young man’s
life.

He was a friend of mine; a young man like others; generous, flighty, as
variable as youth itself, but always with some high motions and on the
search for higher thoughts of life.  I should tell you at once that he
thoroughly agrees with the eighth commandment.  But he got hold of some
unsettling works, the New Testament among others, and this loosened his
views of life and led him into many perplexities.  As he was the son of a
man in a certain position, and well off, my friend had enjoyed from the
first the advantages of education, nay, he had been kept alive through a
sickly childhood by constant watchfulness, comforts, and change of air;
for all of which he was indebted to his father’s wealth.

At college he met other lads more diligent than himself, who followed the
plough in summer-time to pay their college fees in winter; and this
inequality struck him with some force.  He was at that age of a
conversible temper, and insatiably curious in the aspects of life; and he
spent much of his time scraping acquaintance with all classes of man- and
woman-kind.  In this way he came upon many depressed ambitions, and many
intelligences stunted for want of opportunity; and this also struck him.
He began to perceive that life was a handicap upon strange, wrong-sided
principles; and not, as he had been told, a fair and equal race.  He
began to tremble that he himself had been unjustly favoured, when he saw
all the avenues of wealth, and power, and comfort closed against so many
of his superiors and equals, and held unwearyingly open before so idle,
so desultory, and so dissolute a being as himself.  There sat a youth
beside him on the college benches, who had only one shirt to his back,
and, at intervals sufficiently far apart, must stay at home to have it
washed.  It was my friend’s principle to stay away as often as he dared;
for I fear he was no friend to learning.  But there was something that
came home to him sharply, in this fellow who had to give over study till
his shirt was washed, and the scores of others who had never an
opportunity at all.  _If one of these could take his place_, he thought;
and the thought tore away a bandage from his eyes.  He was eaten by the
shame of his discoveries, and despised himself as an unworthy favourite
and a creature of the back-stairs of Fortune.  He could no longer see
without confusion one of these brave young fellows battling up-hill
against adversity.  Had he not filched that fellow’s birthright?  At best
was he not coldly profiting by the injustice of society, and greedily
devouring stolen goods?  The money, indeed, belonged to his father, who
had worked, and thought, and given up his liberty to earn it; but by what
justice could the money belong to my friend, who had, as yet, done
nothing but help to squander it?  A more sturdy honesty, joined to a more
even and impartial temperament, would have drawn from these
considerations a new force of industry, that this equivocal position
might be brought as swiftly as possible to an end, and some good services
to mankind justify the appropriation of expense.  It was not so with my
friend, who was only unsettled and discouraged, and filled full of that
trumpeting anger with which young men regard injustices in the first
blush of youth; although in a few years they will tamely acquiesce in
their existence, and knowingly profit by their complications.  Yet all
this while he suffered many indignant pangs.  And once, when he put on
his boots, like any other unripe donkey, to run away from home, it was
his best consolation that he was now, at a single plunge, to free himself
from the responsibility of this wealth that was not his, and do battle
equally against his fellows in the warfare of life.

Some time after this, falling into ill-health, he was sent at great
expense to a more favourable climate; and then I think his perplexities
were thickest.  When he thought of all the other young men of singular
promise, upright, good, the prop of families, who must remain at home to
die, and with all their possibilities be lost to life and mankind; and
how he, by one more unmerited favour, was chosen out from all these
others to survive; he felt as if there were no life, no labour, no
devotion of soul and body, that could repay and justify these
partialities.  A religious lady, to whom he communicated these
reflections, could see no force in them whatever.  ‘It was God’s will,’
said she.  But he knew it was by God’s will that Joan of Arc was burnt at
Rouen, which cleared neither Bedford nor Bishop Cauchon; and again, by
God’s will that Christ was crucified outside Jerusalem, which excused
neither the rancour of the priests nor the timidity of Pilate.  He knew,
moreover, that although the possibility of this favour he was now
enjoying issued from his circumstances, its acceptance was the act of his
own will; and he had accepted it greedily, longing for rest and sunshine.
And hence this allegation of God’s providence did little to relieve his
scruples.  I promise you he had a very troubled mind.  And I would not
laugh if I were you, though while he was thus making mountains out of
what you think molehills, he were still (as perhaps he was) contentedly
practising many other things that to you seem black as hell.  Every man
is his own judge and mountain-guide through life.  There is an old story
of a mote and a beam, apparently not true, but worthy perhaps of some
consideration.  I should, if I were you, give some consideration to these
scruples of his, and if I were he, I should do the like by yours; for it
is not unlikely that there may be something under both.  In the meantime
you must hear how my friend acted.  Like many invalids, he supposed that
he would die.  Now, should he die, he saw no means of repaying this huge
loan which, by the hands of his father, mankind had advanced him for his
sickness.  In that case it would be lost money.  So he determined that
the advance should be as small as possible; and, so long as he continued
to doubt his recovery, lived in an upper room, and grudged himself all
but necessaries.  But so soon as he began to perceive a change for the
better, he felt justified in spending more freely, to speed and brighten
his return to health, and trusted in the future to lend a help to
mankind, as mankind, out of its treasury, had lent a help to him.

I do not say but that my friend was a little too curious and partial in
his view; nor thought too much of himself and too little of his parents;
but I do say that here are some scruples which tormented my friend in his
youth, and still, perhaps, at odd times give him a prick in the midst of
his enjoyments, and which after all have some foundation in justice, and
point, in their confused way, to some more honourable honesty within the
reach of man.  And at least, is not this an unusual gloss upon the eighth
commandment?  And what sort of comfort, guidance, or illumination did
that precept afford my friend throughout these contentions?  ‘Thou shalt
not steal.’  With all my heart!  But _am_ I stealing?

The truly quaint materialism of our view of life disables us from
pursuing any transaction to an end.  You can make no one understand that
his bargain is anything more than a bargain, whereas in point of fact it
is a link in the policy of mankind, and either a good or an evil to the
world.  We have a sort of blindness which prevents us from seeing
anything but sovereigns.  If one man agrees to give another so many
shillings for so many hours’ work, and then wilfully gives him a certain
proportion of the price in bad money and only the remainder in good, we
can see with half an eye that this man is a thief.  But if the other
spends a certain proportion of the hours in smoking a pipe of tobacco,
and a certain other proportion in looking at the sky, or the clock, or
trying to recall an air, or in meditation on his own past adventures, and
only the remainder in downright work such as he is paid to do, is he,
because the theft is one of time and not of money,—is he any the less a
thief?  The one gave a bad shilling, the other an imperfect hour; but
both broke the bargain, and each is a thief.  In piecework, which is what
most of us do, the case is none the less plain for being even less
material.  If you forge a bad knife, you have wasted some of mankind’s
iron, and then, with unrivalled cynicism, you pocket some of mankind’s
money for your trouble.  Is there any man so blind who cannot see that
this is theft?  Again, if you carelessly cultivate a farm, you have been
playing fast and loose with mankind’s resources against hunger; there
will be less bread in consequence, and for lack of that bread somebody
will die next winter: a grim consideration.  And you must not hope to
shuffle out of blame because you got less money for your less quantity of
bread; for although a theft be partly punished, it is none the less a
theft for that.  You took the farm against competitors; there were others
ready to shoulder the responsibility and be answerable for the tale of
loaves; but it was you who took it.  By the act you came under a tacit
bargain with mankind to cultivate that farm with your best endeavour; you
were under no superintendence, you were on parole; and you have broke
your bargain, and to all who look closely, and yourself among the rest if
you have moral eyesight, you are a thief.  Or take the case of men of
letters.  Every piece of work which is not as good as you can make it,
which you have palmed off imperfect, meagrely thought, niggardly in
execution, upon mankind who is your paymaster on parole and in a sense
your pupil, every hasty or slovenly or untrue performance, should rise up
against you in the court of your own heart and condemn you for a thief.
Have you a salary?  If you trifle with your health, and so render
yourself less capable for duty, and still touch, and still greedily
pocket the emolument—what are you but a thief?  Have you double accounts?
do you by any time-honoured juggle, deceit, or ambiguous process, gain
more from those who deal with you than it you were bargaining and dealing
face to face in front of God?—What are you but a thief?  Lastly, if you
fill an office, or produce an article, which, in your heart of hearts,
you think a delusion and a fraud upon mankind, and still draw your salary
and go through the sham manœuvres of this office, or still book your
profits and keep on flooding the world with these injurious goods?—though
you were old, and bald, and the first at church, and a baronet, what are
you but a thief?  These may seem hard words and mere curiosities of the
intellect, in an age when the spirit of honesty is so sparingly
cultivated that all business is conducted upon lies and so-called customs
of the trade, that not a man bestows two thoughts on the utility or
honourableness of his pursuit.  I would say less if I thought less.  But
looking to my own reason and the right of things, I can only avow that I
am a thief myself, and that I passionately suspect my neighbours of the
same guilt.

Where did you hear that it was easy to be honest?  Do you find that in
your Bible?  Easy!  It is easy to be an ass and follow the multitude like
a blind, besotted bull in a stampede; and that, I am well aware, is what
you and Mrs. Grundy mean by being honest.  But it will not bear the
stress of time nor the scrutiny of conscience.  Even before the lowest of
all tribunals,—before a court of law, whose business it is, not to keep
men right, or within a thousand miles of right, but to withhold them from
going so tragically wrong that they will pull down the whole jointed
fabric of society by their misdeeds—even before a court of law, as we
begin to see in these last days, our easy view of following at each
other’s tails, alike to good and evil, is beginning to be reproved and
punished, and declared no honesty at all, but open theft and swindling;
and simpletons who have gone on through life with a quiet conscience may
learn suddenly, from the lips of a judge, that the custom of the trade
may be a custom of the devil.  You thought it was easy to be honest.  Did
you think it was easy to be just and kind and truthful?  Did you think
the whole duty of aspiring man was as simple as a horn-pipe? and you
could walk through life like a gentleman and a hero, with no more concern
than it takes to go to church or to address a circular?  And yet all this
time you had the eighth commandment! and, what makes it richer, you would
not have broken it for the world!

The truth is, that these commandments by themselves are of little use in
private judgment.  If compression is what you want, you have their whole
spirit compressed into the golden rule; and yet there expressed with more
significance, since the law is there spiritually and not materially
stated.  And in truth, four out of these ten commands, from the sixth to
the ninth, are rather legal than ethical.  The police-court is their
proper home.  A magistrate cannot tell whether you love your neighbour as
yourself, but he can tell more or less whether you have murdered, or
stolen, or committed adultery, or held up your hand and testified to that
which was not; and these things, for rough practical tests, are as good
as can be found.  And perhaps, therefore, the best condensation of the
Jewish moral law is in the maxims of the priests, ‘neminem lædere’ and
‘suum cuique tribuere.’  But all this granted, it becomes only the more
plain that they are inadequate in the sphere of personal morality; that
while they tell the magistrate roughly when to punish, they can never
direct an anxious sinner what to do.

Only Polonius, or the like solemn sort of ass, can offer us a succinct
proverb by way of advice, and not burst out blushing in our faces.  We
grant them one and all and for all that they are worth; it is something
above and beyond that we desire.  Christ was in general a great enemy to
such a way of teaching; we rarely find him meddling with any of these
plump commands but it was to open them out, and lift his hearers from the
letter to the spirit.  For morals are a personal affair; in the war of
righteousness every man fights for his own hand; all the six hundred
precepts of the Mishna cannot shake my private judgment; my magistracy of
myself is an indefeasible charge, and my decisions absolute for the time
and case.  The moralist is not a judge of appeal, but an advocate who
pleads at my tribunal.  He has to show not the law, but that the law
applies.  Can he convince me? then he gains the cause.  And thus you find
Christ giving various counsels to varying people, and often jealously
careful to avoid definite precept.  Is he asked, for example, to divide a
heritage?  He refuses: and the best advice that he will offer is but a
paraphrase of that tenth commandment which figures so strangely among the
rest.  _Take heed, and beware of covetousness_.  If you complain that
this is vague, I have failed to carry you along with me in my argument.
For no definite precept can be more than an illustration, though its
truth were resplendent like the sun, and it was announced from heaven by
the voice of God.  And life is so intricate and changing, that perhaps
not twenty times, or perhaps not twice in the ages, shall we find that
nice consent of circumstances to which alone it can apply.



CHAPTER III


Although the world and life have in a sense become commonplace to our
experience, it is but in an external torpor; the true sentiment slumbers
within us; and we have but to reflect on ourselves or our surroundings to
rekindle our astonishment.  No length of habit can blunt our first
surprise.  Of the world I have but little to say in this connection; a
few strokes shall suffice.  We inhabit a dead ember swimming wide in the
blank of space, dizzily spinning as it swims, and lighted up from several
million miles away by a more horrible hell-fire than was ever conceived
by the theological imagination.  Yet the dead ember is a green,
commodious dwelling-place; and the reverberation of this hell-fire ripens
flower and fruit and mildly warms us on summer eves upon the lawn.  Far
off on all hands other dead embers, other flaming suns, wheel and race in
the apparent void; the nearest is out of call, the farthest so far that
the heart sickens in the effort to conceive the distance.  Shipwrecked
seamen on the deep, though they bestride but the truncheon of a boom, are
safe and near at home compared with mankind on its bullet.  Even to us
who have known no other, it seems a strange, if not an appalling, place
of residence.

But far stranger is the resident, man, a creature compact of wonders
that, after centuries of custom, is still wonderful to himself.  He
inhabits a body which he is continually outliving, discarding and
renewing.  Food and sleep, by an unknown alchemy, restore his spirits and
the freshness of his countenance.  Hair grows on him like grass; his
eyes, his brain, his sinews, thirst for action; he joys to see and touch
and hear, to partake the sun and wind, to sit down and intently ponder on
his astonishing attributes and situation, to rise up and run, to perform
the strange and revolting round of physical functions.  The sight of a
flower, the note of a bird, will often move him deeply; yet he looks
unconcerned on the impassable distances and portentous bonfires of the
universe.  He comprehends, he designs, he tames nature, rides the sea,
ploughs, climbs the air in a balloon, makes vast inquiries, begins
interminable labours, joins himself into federations and populous cities,
spends his days to deliver the ends of the earth or to benefit unborn
posterity; and yet knows himself for a piece of unsurpassed fragility and
the creature of a few days.  His sight, which conducts him, which takes
notice of the farthest stars, which is miraculous in every way and a
thing defying explanation or belief, is yet lodged in a piece of jelly,
and can be extinguished with a touch.  His heart, which all through life
so indomitably, so athletically labours, is but a capsule, and may be
stopped with a pin.  His whole body, for all its savage energies, its
leaping and its winged desires, may yet be tamed and conquered by a
draught of air or a sprinkling of cold dew.  What he calls death, which
is the seeming arrest of everything, and the ruin and hateful
transformation of the visible body, lies in wait for him outwardly in a
thousand accidents, and grows up in secret diseases from within.  He is
still learning to be a man when his faculties are already beginning to
decline; he has not yet understood himself or his position before he
inevitably dies.  And yet this mad, chimerical creature can take no
thought of his last end, lives as though he were eternal, plunges with
his vulnerable body into the shock of war, and daily affronts death with
unconcern.  He cannot take a step without pain or pleasure.  His life is
a tissue of sensations, which he distinguishes as they seem to come more
directly from himself or his surroundings.  He is conscious of himself as
a joyer or a sufferer, as that which craves, chooses, and is satisfied;
conscious of his surroundings as it were of an inexhaustible purveyor,
the source of aspects, inspirations, wonders, cruel knocks and
transporting caresses.  Thus he goes on his way, stumbling among delights
and agonies.

Matter is a far-fetched theory, and materialism is without a root in man.
To him everything is important in the degree to which it moves him.  The
telegraph wires and posts, the electricity speeding from clerk to clerk,
the clerks, the glad or sorrowful import of the message, and the paper on
which it is finally brought to him at home, are all equally facts, all
equally exist for man.  A word or a thought can wound him as acutely as a
knife of steel.  If he thinks he is loved, he will rise up and glory to
himself, although he be in a distant land and short of necessary bread.
Does he think he is not loved?—he may have the woman at his beck, and
there is not a joy for him in all the world.  Indeed, if we are to make
any account of this figment of reason, the distinction between material
and immaterial, we shall conclude that the life of each man as an
individual is immaterial, although the continuation and prospects of
mankind as a race turn upon material conditions.  The physical business
of each man’s body is transacted for him; like a sybarite, he has
attentive valets in his own viscera; he breathes, he sweats, he digests
without an effort, or so much as a consenting volition; for the most part
he even eats, not with a wakeful consciousness, but as it were between
two thoughts.  His life is centred among other and more important
considerations; touch him in his honour or his love, creatures of the
imagination which attach him to mankind or to an individual man or woman;
cross him in his piety which connects his soul with heaven; and he turns
from his food, he loathes his breath, and with a magnanimous emotion cuts
the knots of his existence and frees himself at a blow from the web of
pains and pleasures.

It follows that man is twofold at least; that he is not a rounded and
autonomous empire; but that in the same body with him there dwell other
powers tributary but independent.  If I now behold one walking in a
garden, curiously coloured and illuminated by the sun, digesting his food
with elaborate chemistry, breathing, circulating blood, directing himself
by the sight of his eyes, accommodating his body by a thousand delicate
balancings to the wind and the uneven surface of the path, and all the
time, perhaps, with his mind engaged about America, or the dog-star, or
the attributes of God—what am I to say, or how am I to describe the thing
I see?  Is that truly a man, in the rigorous meaning of the word? or is
it not a man and something else?  What, then, are we to count the
centre-bit and axle of a being so variously compounded?  It is a question
much debated.  Some read his history in a certain intricacy of nerve and
the success of successive digestions; others find him an exiled piece of
heaven blown upon and determined by the breath of God; and both schools
of theorists will scream like scalded children at a word of doubt.  Yet
either of these views, however plausible, is beside the question; either
may be right; and I care not; I ask a more particular answer, and to a
more immediate point.  What is the man?  There is Something that was
before hunger and that remains behind after a meal.  It may or may not be
engaged in any given act or passion, but when it is, it changes,
heightens, and sanctifies.  Thus it is not engaged in lust, where
satisfaction ends the chapter; and it is engaged in love, where no
satisfaction can blunt the edge of the desire, and where age, sickness,
or alienation may deface what was desirable without diminishing the
sentiment.  This something, which is the man, is a permanence which
abides through the vicissitudes of passion, now overwhelmed and now
triumphant, now unconscious of itself in the immediate distress of
appetite or pain, now rising unclouded above all.  So, to the man, his
own central self fades and grows clear again amid the tumult of the
senses, like a revolving Pharos in the night.  It is forgotten; it is
hid, it seems, for ever; and yet in the next calm hour he shall behold
himself once more, shining and unmoved among changes and storm.

Mankind, in the sense of the creeping mass that is born and eats, that
generates and dies, is but the aggregate of the outer and lower sides of
man.  This inner consciousness, this lantern alternately obscured and
shining, to and by which the individual exists and must order his
conduct, is something special to himself and not common to the race.  His
joys delight, his sorrows wound him, according as _this_ is interested or
indifferent in the affair; according as they arise in an imperial war or
in a broil conducted by the tributary chieftains of the mind.  He may
lose all, and _this_ not suffer; he may lose what is materially a trifle,
and _this_ leap in his bosom with a cruel pang.  I do not speak of it to
hardened theorists: the living man knows keenly what it is I mean.

‘Perceive at last that thou hast in thee something better and more divine
than the things which cause the various effects, and, as it were, pull
thee by the strings.  What is that now in thy mind? is it fear, or
suspicion, or desire, or anything of that kind?’  Thus far Marcus
Aurelius, in one of the most notable passages in any book.  Here is a
question worthy to be answered.  What is in thy mind?  What is the
utterance of your inmost self when, in a quiet hour, it can be heard
intelligibly?  It is something beyond the compass of your thinking,
inasmuch as it is yourself; but is it not of a higher spirit than you had
dreamed betweenwhiles, and erect above all base considerations?  This
soul seems hardly touched with our infirmities; we can find in it
certainly no fear, suspicion, or desire; we are only conscious—and that
as though we read it in the eyes of some one else—of a great and
unqualified readiness.  A readiness to what? to pass over and look beyond
the objects of desire and fear, for something else.  And this something
else? this something which is apart from desire and fear, to which all
the kingdoms of the world and the immediate death of the body are alike
indifferent and beside the point, and which yet regards conduct—by what
name are we to call it?  It may be the love of God; or it may be an
inherited (and certainly well concealed) instinct to preserve self and
propagate the race; I am not, for the moment, averse to either theory;
but it will save time to call it righteousness.  By so doing I intend no
subterfuge to beg a question; I am indeed ready, and more than willing,
to accept the rigid consequence, and lay aside, as far as the treachery
of the reason will permit, all former meanings attached to the word
righteousness.  What is right is that for which a man’s central self is
ever ready to sacrifice immediate or distant interests; what is wrong is
what the central self discards or rejects as incompatible with the fixed
design of righteousness.

To make this admission is to lay aside all hope of definition.  That
which is right upon this theory is intimately dictated to each man by
himself, but can never be rigorously set forth in language, and never,
above all, imposed upon another.  The conscience has, then, a vision like
that of the eyes, which is incommunicable, and for the most part
illuminates none but its possessor.  When many people perceive the same
or any cognate facts, they agree upon a word as symbol; and hence we have
such words as _tree_, _star_, _love_, _honour_, or _death_; hence also we
have this word _right_, which, like the others, we all understand, most
of us understand differently, and none can express succinctly otherwise.
Yet even on the straitest view, we can make some steps towards
comprehension of our own superior thoughts.  For it is an incredible and
most bewildering fact that a man, through life, is on variable terms with
himself; he is aware of tiffs and reconciliations; the intimacy is at
times almost suspended, at times it is renewed again with joy.  As we
said before, his inner self or soul appears to him by successive
revelations, and is frequently obscured.  It is from a study of these
alternations that we can alone hope to discover, even dimly, what seems
right and what seems wrong to this veiled prophet of ourself.

All that is in the man in the larger sense, what we call impression as
well as what we call intuition, so far as my argument looks, we must
accept.  It is not wrong to desire food, or exercise, or beautiful
surroundings, or the love of sex, or interest which is the food of the
mind.  All these are craved; all these should be craved; to none of these
in itself does the soul demur; where there comes an undeniable want, we
recognise a demand of nature.  Yet we know that these natural demands may
be superseded; for the demands which are common to mankind make but a
shadowy consideration in comparison to the demands of the individual
soul.  Food is almost the first prerequisite; and yet a high character
will go without food to the ruin and death of the body rather than gain
it in a manner which the spirit disavows.  Pascal laid aside mathematics;
Origen doctored his body with a knife; every day some one is thus
mortifying his dearest interests and desires, and, in Christ’s words,
entering maim into the Kingdom of Heaven.  This is to supersede the
lesser and less harmonious affections by renunciation; and though by this
ascetic path we may get to heaven, we cannot get thither a whole and
perfect man.  But there is another way, to supersede them by
reconciliation, in which the soul and all the faculties and senses pursue
a common route and share in one desire.  Thus, man is tormented by a very
imperious physical desire; it spoils his rest, it is not to be denied;
the doctors will tell you, not I, how it is a physical need, like the
want of food or slumber.  In the satisfaction of this desire, as it first
appears, the soul sparingly takes part; nay, it oft unsparingly regrets
and disapproves the satisfaction.  But let the man learn to love a woman
as far as he is capable of love; and for this random affection of the
body there is substituted a steady determination, a consent of all his
powers and faculties, which supersedes, adopts, and commands the other.
The desire survives, strengthened, perhaps, but taught obedience and
changed in scope and character.  Life is no longer a tale of betrayals
and regrets; for the man now lives as a whole; his consciousness now
moves on uninterrupted like a river; through all the extremes and ups and
downs of passion, he remains approvingly conscious of himself.

Now to me, this seems a type of that rightness which the soul demands.
It demands that we shall not live alternately with our opposing
tendencies in continual see-saw of passion and disgust, but seek some
path on which the tendencies shall no longer oppose, but serve each other
to a common end.  It demands that we shall not pursue broken ends, but
great and comprehensive purposes, in which soul and body may unite like
notes in a harmonious chord.  That were indeed a way of peace and
pleasure, that were indeed a heaven upon earth.  It does not demand,
however, or, to speak in measure, it does not demand of me, that I should
starve my appetites for no purpose under heaven but as a purpose in
itself; or, in a weak despair, pluck out the eye that I have not yet
learned to guide and enjoy with wisdom.  The soul demands unity of
purpose, not the dismemberment of man; it seeks to roll up all his
strength and sweetness, all his passion and wisdom, into one, and make of
him a perfect man exulting in perfection.  To conclude ascetically is to
give up, and not to solve, the problem.  The ascetic and the creeping
hog, although they are at different poles, have equally failed in life.
The one has sacrificed his crew; the other brings back his seamen in a
cock-boat, and has lost the ship.  I believe there are not many
sea-captains who would plume themselves on either result as a success.

But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive impulses
and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one thing more
unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is irretrievable
and draws on the rest.  And this is to lose consciousness of oneself.  In
the best of times, it is but by flashes, when our whole nature is clear,
strong and conscious, and events conspire to leave us free, that we enjoy
communion with our soul.  At the worst, we are so fallen and passive that
we may say shortly we have none.  An arctic torpor seizes upon men.
Although built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating world, they
develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness becomes engrossed
among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and soon loses both the
will and power to look higher considerations in the face.  This is ruin;
this is the last failure in life; this is temporal damnation, damnation
on the spot and without the form of judgment.  ‘What shall it profit a
man if he gain the whole world and _lose himself_?’

It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and its
fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral and
religious education is directed; not only that of words and doctors, but
the sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all God’s scholars till
we die.  If, as teachers, we are to say anything to the purpose, we must
say what will remind the pupil of his soul; we must speak that soul’s
dialect; we must talk of life and conduct as his soul would have him
think of them.  If, from some conformity between us and the pupil, or
perhaps among all men, we do in truth speak in such a dialect and express
such views, beyond question we shall touch in him a spring; beyond
question he will recognise the dialect as one that he himself has spoken
in his better hours; beyond question he will cry, ‘I had forgotten, but
now I remember; I too have eyes, and I had forgot to use them!  I too
have a soul of my own, arrogantly upright, and to that I will listen and
conform.’  In short, say to him anything that he has once thought, or
been upon the point of thinking, or show him any view of life that he has
once clearly seen, or been upon the point of clearly seeing; and you have
done your part and may leave him to complete the education for himself.

Now, the view taught at the present time seems to me to want greatness;
and the dialect in which alone it can be intelligibly uttered is not the
dialect of my soul.  It is a sort of postponement of life; nothing quite
is, but something different is to be; we are to keep our eyes upon the
indirect from the cradle to the grave.  We are to regulate our conduct
not by desire, but by a politic eye upon the future; and to value acts as
they will bring us money or good opinion; as they will bring us, in one
word, _profit_.  We must be what is called respectable, and offend no one
by our carriage; it will not do to make oneself conspicuous—who knows?
even in virtue? says the Christian parent!  And we must be what is called
prudent and make money; not only because it is pleasant to have money,
but because that also is a part of respectability, and we cannot hope to
be received in society without decent possessions.  Received in society!
as if that were the kingdom of heaven!  There is dear Mr. So-and-so;—look
at him!—so much respected—so much looked up to—quite the Christian
merchant!  And we must cut our conduct as strictly as possible after the
pattern of Mr. So-and-so; and lay our whole lives to make money and be
strictly decent.  Besides these holy injunctions, which form by far the
greater part of a youth’s training in our Christian homes, there are at
least two other doctrines.  We are to live just now as well as we can,
but scrape at last into heaven, where we shall be good.  We are to worry
through the week in a lay, disreputable way, but, to make matters square,
live a different life on Sunday.

The train of thought we have been following gives us a key to all these
positions, without stepping aside to justify them on their own ground.
It is because we have been disgusted fifty times with physical squalls,
and fifty times torn between conflicting impulses, that we teach people
this indirect and tactical procedure in life, and to judge by remote
consequences instead of the immediate face of things.  The very desire to
act as our own souls would have us, coupled with a pathetic disbelief in
ourselves, moves us to follow the example of others; perhaps, who knows?
they may be on the right track; and the more our patterns are in number,
the better seems the chance; until, if we be acting in concert with a
whole civilised nation, there are surely a majority of chances that we
must be acting right.  And again, how true it is that we can never behave
as we wish in this tormented sphere, and can only aspire to different and
more favourable circumstances, in order to stand out and be ourselves
wholly and rightly!  And yet once more, if in the hurry and pressure of
affairs and passions you tend to nod and become drowsy, here are
twenty-four hours of Sunday set apart for you to hold counsel with your
soul and look around you on the possibilities of life.

This is not, of course, all that is to be, or even should be, said for
these doctrines.  Only, in the course of this chapter, the reader and I
have agreed upon a few catchwords, and been looking at morals on a
certain system; it was a pity to lose an opportunity of testing the
catchwords, and seeing whether, by this system as well as by others,
current doctrines could show any probable justification.  If the
doctrines had come too badly out of the trial, it would have condemned
the system.  Our sight of the world is very narrow; the mind but a
pedestrian instrument; there’s nothing new under the sun, as Solomon
says, except the man himself; and though that changes the aspect of
everything else, yet he must see the same things as other people, only
from a different side.

And now, having admitted so much, let us turn to criticism.

If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him,
unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of the majority of
his contemporaries, you must discredit in his eyes the one authoritative
voice of his own soul.  He may be a docile citizen; he will never be a
man.  It is ours, on the other hand, to disregard this babble and
chattering of other men better and worse than we are, and to walk
straight before us by what light we have.  They may be right; but so,
before heaven, are we.  They may know; but we know also, and by that
knowledge we must stand or fall.  There is such a thing as loyalty to a
man’s own better self; and from those who have not that, God help me, how
am I to look for loyalty to others?  The most dull, the most imbecile, at
a certain moment turn round, at a certain point will hear no further
argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational sense of
right.  It is not only by steel or fire, but through contempt and blame,
that the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul.  Be glad if you are
not tried by such extremities.  But although all the world ranged
themselves in one line to tell you ‘This is wrong,’ be you your own
faithful vassal and the ambassador of God—throw down the glove and answer
‘This is right.’  Do you think you are only declaring yourself?  Perhaps
in some dim way, like a child who delivers a message not fully
understood, you are opening wider the straits of prejudice and preparing
mankind for some truer and more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you
stand forth for your own judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones
with your body; perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided the
guilt of false witness against humanity and the little ones unborn.  It
is good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to respect oneself
and utter the voice of God.  God, if there be any God, speaks daily in a
new language by the tongues of men; the thoughts and habits of each fresh
generation and each new-coined spirit throw another light upon the
universe and contain another commentary on the printed Bibles; every
scruple, every true dissent, every glimpse of something new, is a letter
of God’s alphabet; and though there is a grave responsibility for all who
speak, is there none for those who unrighteously keep silence and
conform?  Is not that also to conceal and cloak God’s counsel?  And how
should we regard the man of science who suppressed all facts that would
not tally with the orthodoxy of the hour?

Wrong?  You are as surely wrong as the sun rose this morning round the
revolving shoulder of the world.  Not truth, but truthfulness, is the
good of your endeavour.  For when will men receive that first part and
prerequisite of truth, that, by the order of things, by the greatness of
the universe, by the darkness and partiality of man’s experience, by the
inviolate secrecy of God, kept close in His most open revelations, every
man is, and to the end of the ages must be, wrong?  Wrong to the
universe; wrong to mankind; wrong to God.  And yet in another sense, and
that plainer and nearer, every man of men, who wishes truly, must be
right.  He is right to himself, and in the measure of his sagacity and
candour.  That let him do in all sincerity and zeal, not sparing a
thought for contrary opinions; that, for what it is worth, let him
proclaim.  Be not afraid; although he be wrong, so also is the dead,
stuffed Dagon he insults.  For the voice of God, whatever it is, is not
that stammering, inept tradition which the people holds.  These truths
survive in travesty, swamped in a world of spiritual darkness and
confusion; and what a few comprehend and faithfully hold, the many, in
their dead jargon, repeat, degrade, and misinterpret.

So far of Respectability; what the Covenanters used to call ‘rank
conformity’: the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on men.
And now of Profit.  And this doctrine is perhaps the more redoubtable,
because it harms all sorts of men; not only the heroic and self-reliant,
but the obedient, cowlike squadrons.  A man, by this doctrine, looks to
consequences at the second, or third, or fiftieth turn.  He chooses his
end, and for that, with wily turns and through a great sea of tedium,
steers this mortal bark.  There may be political wisdom in such a view;
but I am persuaded there can spring no great moral zeal.  To look thus
obliquely upon life is the very recipe for moral slumber.  Our intention
and endeavour should be directed, not on some vague end of money or
applause, which shall come to us by a ricochet in a month or a year, or
twenty years, but on the act itself; not on the approval of others, but
on the rightness of that act.  At every instant, at every step in life,
the point has to be decided, our soul has to be saved, heaven has to be
gained or lost.  At every step our spirits must applaud, at every step we
must set down the foot and sound the trumpet.  ‘This have I done,’ we
must say; ‘right or wrong, this have I done, in unfeigned honour of
intention, as to myself and God.’  The profit of every act should be
this, that it was right for us to do it.  Any other profit than that, if
it involved a kingdom or the woman I love, ought, if I were God’s upright
soldier, to leave me untempted.

It is the mark of what we call a righteous decision, that it is made
directly and for its own sake.  The whole man, mind and body, having come
to an agreement, tyrannically dictates conduct.  There are two
dispositions eternally opposed: that in which we recognise that one thing
is wrong and another right, and that in which, not seeing any clear
distinction, we fall back on the consideration of consequences.  The
truth is, by the scope of our present teaching, nothing is thought very
wrong and nothing very right, except a few actions which have the
disadvantage of being disrespectable when found out; the more serious
part of men inclining to think all things _rather wrong_, the more jovial
to suppose them _right enough for practical purposes_.  I will engage my
head, they do not find that view in their own hearts; they have taken it
up in a dark despair; they are but troubled sleepers talking in their
sleep.  The soul, or my soul at least, thinks very distinctly upon many
points of right and wrong, and often differs flatly with what is held out
as the thought of corporate humanity in the code of society or the code
of law.  Am I to suppose myself a monster?  I have only to read books,
the Christian Gospels for example, to think myself a monster no longer;
and instead I think the mass of people are merely speaking in their
sleep.

It is a commonplace, enshrined, if I mistake not, even in school
copy-books, that honour is to be sought and not fame.  I ask no other
admission; we are to seek honour, upright walking with our own conscience
every hour of the day, and not fame, the consequence, the far-off
reverberation of our footsteps.  The walk, not the rumour of the walk, is
what concerns righteousness.  Better disrespectable honour than
dishonourable fame.  Better useless or seemingly hurtful honour, than
dishonour ruling empires and filling the mouths of thousands.  For the
man must walk by what he sees, and leave the issue with God who made him
and taught him by the fortune of his life.  You would not dishonour
yourself for money; which is at least tangible; would you do it, then,
for a doubtful forecast in politics, or another person’s theory in
morals?

So intricate is the scheme of our affairs, that no man can calculate the
bearing of his own behaviour even on those immediately around him, how
much less upon the world at large or on succeeding generations!  To walk
by external prudence and the rule of consequences would require, not a
man, but God.  All that we know to guide us in this changing labyrinth is
our soul with its fixed design of righteousness, and a few old precepts
which commend themselves to that.  The precepts are vague when we
endeavour to apply them; consequences are more entangled than a wisp of
string, and their confusion is unrestingly in change; we must hold to
what we know and walk by it.  We must walk by faith, indeed, and not by
knowledge.

You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or eminently
respectable: you love him because you love him; that is love, and any
other only a derision and grimace.  It should be the same with all our
actions.  If we were to conceive a perfect man, it should be one who was
never torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on the absolute consent
of all his parts and faculties, submitted in every action of his life to
a self-dictation as absolute and unreasoned as that which bids him love
one woman and be true to her till death.  But we should not conceive him
as sagacious, ascetical, playing off his appetites against each other,
turning the wing of public respectable immorality instead of riding it
directly down, or advancing toward his end through a thousand sinister
compromises and considerations.  The one man might be wily, might be
adroit, might be wise, might be respectable, might be gloriously useful;
it is the other man who would be good.

The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be successful;
to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not outwardly,
respectable.  Does your soul ask profit?  Does it ask money?  Does it ask
the approval of the indifferent herd?  I believe not.  For my own part, I
want but little money, I hope; and I do not want to be decent at all, but
to be good.



CHAPTER IV


We have spoken of that supreme self-dictation which keeps varying from
hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and
circumstances.  Now, for us, that is ultimate.  It may be founded on some
reasonable process, but it is not a process which we can follow or
comprehend.  And moreover the dictation is not continuous, or not
continuous except in very lively and well-living natures; and
between-whiles we must brush along without it.  Practice is a more
intricate and desperate business than the toughest theorising; life is an
affair of cavalry, where rapid judgment and prompt action are alone
possible and right.  As a matter of fact, there is no one so upright but
he is influenced by the world’s chatter; and no one so headlong but he
requires to consider consequences and to keep an eye on profit.  For the
soul adopts all affections and appetites without exception, and cares
only to combine them for some common purpose which shall interest all.
Now, respect for the opinion of others, the study of consequences, and
the desire of power and comfort, are all undeniably factors in the nature
of man; and the more undeniably since we find that, in our current
doctrines, they have swallowed up the others and are thought to conclude
in themselves all the worthy parts of man.  These, then, must also be
suffered to affect conduct in the practical domain, much or little
according as they are forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.

Now, a man’s view of the universe is mostly a view of the civilised
society in which he lives.  Other men and women are so much more grossly
and so much more intimately palpable to his perceptions, that they stand
between him and all the rest; they are larger to his eye than the sun, he
hears them more plainly than thunder, with them, by them, and for them,
he must live and die.  And hence the laws that affect his intercourse
with his fellow-men, although merely customary and the creatures of a
generation, are more clearly and continually before his mind than those
which bind him into the eternal system of things, support him in his
upright progress on this whirling ball, or keep up the fire of his bodily
life.  And hence it is that money stands in the first rank of
considerations and so powerfully affects the choice.  For our society is
built with money for mortar; money is present in every joint of
circumstance; it might be named the social atmosphere, since, in society,
it is by that alone that men continue to live, and only through that or
chance that they can reach or affect one another.  Money gives us food,
shelter, and privacy; it permits us to be clean in person, opens for us
the doors of the theatre, gains us books for study or pleasure, enables
us to help the distresses of others, and puts us above necessity so that
we can choose the best in life.  If we love, it enables us to meet and
live with the loved one, or even to prolong her health and life; if we
have scruples, it gives us an opportunity to be honest; if we have any
bright designs, here is what will smooth the way to their accomplishment.
Penury is the worst slavery, and will soon lead to death.

But money is only a means; it presupposes a man to use it.  The rich can
go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere.  He can buy a
library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has neither patience to
read nor intelligence to see.  The table may be loaded and the appetite
wanting; the purse may be full, and the heart empty.  He may have gained
the world and lost himself; and with all his wealth around him, in a
great house and spacious and beautiful demesne, he may live as blank a
life as any tattered ditcher.  Without an appetite, without an
aspiration, void of appreciation, bankrupt of desire and hope, there, in
his great house, let him sit and look upon his fingers.  It is perhaps a
more fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be
born a millionaire.  Although neither is to be despised, it is always
better policy to learn an interest than to make a thousand pounds; for
the money will soon be spent, or perhaps you may feel no joy in spending
it; but the interest remains imperishable and ever new.  To become a
botanist, a geologist, a social philosopher, an antiquary, or an artist,
is to enlarge one’s possessions in the universe by an incalculably higher
degree, and by a far surer sort of property, than to purchase a farm of
many acres.  You had perhaps two thousand a year before the transaction;
perhaps you have two thousand five hundred after it.  That represents
your gain in the one case.  But in the other, you have thrown down a
barrier which concealed significance and beauty.  The blind man has
learned to see.  The prisoner has opened up a window in his cell and
beholds enchanting prospects; he will never again be a prisoner as he
was; he can watch clouds and changing seasons, ships on the river,
travellers on the road, and the stars at night; happy prisoner! his eyes
have broken jail!  And again he who has learned to love an art or science
has wisely laid up riches against the day of riches; if prosperity come,
he will not enter poor into his inheritance; he will not slumber and
forget himself in the lap of money, or spend his hours in counting idle
treasures, but be up and briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic
touch, which is not that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into
living delight and satisfaction.  _Être et pas avoir_—to be, not to
possess—that is the problem of life.  To be wealthy, a rich nature is the
first requisite and money but the second.  To be of a quick and healthy
blood, to share in all honourable curiosities, to be rich in admiration
and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of others, to love
with such generosity of heart that your love is still a dear possession
in absence or unkindness—these are the gifts of fortune which money
cannot buy and without which money can buy nothing.  For what can a man
possess, or what can he enjoy, except himself?  If he enlarge his nature,
it is then that he enlarges his estates.  If his nature be happy and
valiant, he will enjoy the universe as if it were his park and orchard.

But money is not only to be spent; it has also to be earned.  It is not
merely a convenience or a necessary in social life; but it is the coin in
which mankind pays his wages to the individual man.  And from this side,
the question of money has a very different scope and application.  For no
man can be honest who does not work.  Service for service.  If the farmer
buys corn, and the labourer ploughs and reaps, and the baker sweats in
his hot bakery, plainly you who eat must do something in your turn.  It
is not enough to take off your hat, or to thank God upon your knees for
the admirable constitution of society and your own convenient situation
in its upper and more ornamental stories.  Neither is it enough to buy
the loaf with a sixpence; for then you are only changing the point of the
inquiry; and you must first have _bought the sixpence_.  Service for
service: how have you bought your sixpences?  A man of spirit desires
certainty in a thing of such a nature; he must see to it that there is
some reciprocity between him and mankind; that he pays his expenditure in
service; that he has not a lion’s share in profit and a drone’s in
labour; and is not a sleeping partner and mere costly incubus on the
great mercantile concern of mankind.

Services differ so widely with different gifts, and some are so
inappreciable to external tests, that this is not only a matter for the
private conscience, but one which even there must be leniently and
trustfully considered.  For remember how many serve mankind who do no
more than meditate; and how many are precious to their friends for no
more than a sweet and joyous temper.  To perform the function of a man of
letters it is not necessary to write; nay, it is perhaps better to be a
living book.  So long as we love we serve; so long as we are loved by
others, I would almost say that we are indispensable; and no man is
useless while he has a friend.  The true services of life are inestimable
in money, and are never paid.  Kind words and caresses, high and wise
thoughts, humane designs, tender behaviour to the weak and suffering, and
all the charities of man’s existence, are neither bought nor sold.

Yet the dearest and readiest, if not the most just, criterion of a man’s
services, is the wage that mankind pays him or, briefly, what he earns.
There at least there can be no ambiguity.  St. Paul is fully and freely
entitled to his earnings as a tentmaker, and Socrates fully and freely
entitled to his earnings as a sculptor, although the true business of
each was not only something different, but something which remained
unpaid.  A man cannot forget that he is not superintended, and serves
mankind on parole.  He would like, when challenged by his own conscience,
to reply: ‘I have done so much work, and no less, with my own hands and
brain, and taken so much profit, and no more, for my own personal
delight.’  And though St. Paul, if he had possessed a private fortune,
would probably have scorned to waste his time in making tents, yet of all
sacrifices to public opinion none can be more easily pardoned than that
by which a man, already spiritually useful to the world, should restrict
the field of his chief usefulness to perform services more apparent, and
possess a livelihood that neither stupidity nor malice could call in
question.  Like all sacrifices to public opinion and mere external
decency, this would certainly be wrong; for the soul should rest
contented with its own approval and indissuadably pursue its own calling.
Yet, so grave and delicate is the question, that a man may well hesitate
before he decides it for himself; he may well fear that he sets too high
a valuation on his own endeavours after good; he may well condescend upon
a humbler duty, where others than himself shall judge the service and
proportion the wage.

And yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are born.  They
can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are their own paymasters on
parole; and must pay themselves fair wages and no more.  For I suppose
that in the course of ages, and through reform and civil war and
invasion, mankind was pursuing some other and more general design than to
set one or two Englishmen of the nineteenth century beyond the reach of
needs and duties.  Society was scarce put together, and defended with so
much eloquence and blood, for the convenience of two or three
millionaires and a few hundred other persons of wealth and position.  It
is plain that if mankind thus acted and suffered during all these
generations, they hoped some benefit, some ease, some wellbeing, for
themselves and their descendants; that if they supported law and order,
it was to secure fair-play for all; that if they denied themselves in the
present, they must have had some designs upon the future.  Now, a great
hereditary fortune is a miracle of man’s wisdom and mankind’s
forbearance; it has not only been amassed and handed down, it has been
suffered to be amassed and handed down; and surely in such a
consideration as this, its possessor should find only a new spur to
activity and honour, that with all this power of service he should not
prove unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure should return in
benefits upon the race.  If he had twenty, or thirty, or a hundred
thousand at his banker’s, or if all Yorkshire or all California were his
to manage or to sell, he would still be morally penniless, and have the
world to begin like Whittington, until he had found some way of serving
mankind.  His wage is physically in his own hand; but, in honour, that
wage must still be earned.  He is only steward on parole of what is
called his fortune.  He must honourably perform his stewardship.  He must
estimate his own services and allow himself a salary in proportion, for
that will be one among his functions.  And while he will then be free to
spend that salary, great or little, on his own private pleasures, the
rest of his fortune he but holds and disposes under trust for mankind; it
is not his, because he has not earned it; it cannot be his, because his
services have already been paid; but year by year it is his to
distribute, whether to help individuals whose birthright and outfit have
been swallowed up in his, or to further public works and institutions.

At this rate, short of inspiration, it seems hardly possible to be both
rich and honest; and the millionaire is under a far more continuous
temptation to thieve than the labourer who gets his shilling daily for
despicable toils.  Are you surprised?  It is even so.  And you repeat it
every Sunday in your churches.  ‘It is easier for a camel to pass through
the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.’  I
have heard this and similar texts ingeniously explained away and brushed
from the path of the aspiring Christian by the tender Great-heart of the
parish.  One excellent clergyman told us that the ‘eye of a needle’ meant
a low, Oriental postern through which camels could not pass till they
were unloaded—which is very likely just; and then went on, bravely
confounding the ‘kingdom of God’ with heaven, the future paradise, to
show that of course no rich person could expect to carry his riches
beyond the grave—which, of course, he could not and never did.  Various
greedy sinners of the congregation drank in the comfortable doctrine with
relief.  It was worth the while having come to church that Sunday
morning!  All was plain.  The Bible, as usual, meant nothing in
particular; it was merely an obscure and figurative school-copybook; and
if a man were only respectable, he was a man after God’s own heart.

Alas! I fear not.  And though this matter of a man’s services is one for
his own conscience, there are some cases in which it is difficult to
restrain the mind from judging.  Thus I shall be very easily persuaded
that a man has earned his daily bread; and if he has but a friend or two
to whom his company is delightful at heart, I am more than persuaded at
once.  But it will be very hard to persuade me that any one has earned an
income of a hundred thousand.  What he is to his friends, he still would
be if he were made penniless to-morrow; for as to the courtiers of luxury
and power, I will neither consider them friends, nor indeed consider them
at all.  What he does for mankind there are most likely hundreds who
would do the same, as effectually for the race and as pleasurably to
themselves, for the merest fraction of this monstrous wage.  Why it is
paid, I am, therefore, unable to conceive, and as the man pays it
himself, out of funds in his detention, I have a certain backwardness to
think him honest.

At least, we have gained a very obvious point: that _what a man spends
upon himself_, _he shall have earned by services to the race_.  Thence
flows a principle for the outset of life, which is a little different
from that taught in the present day.  I am addressing the middle and the
upper classes; those who have already been fostered and prepared for life
at some expense; those who have some choice before them, and can pick
professions; and above all, those who are what is called independent, and
need do nothing unless pushed by honour or ambition.  In this particular
the poor are happy; among them, when a lad comes to his strength, he must
take the work that offers, and can take it with an easy conscience.  But
in the richer classes the question is complicated by the number of
opportunities and a variety of considerations.  Here, then, this
principle of ours comes in helpfully.  The young man has to seek, not a
road to wealth, but an opportunity of service; not money, but honest
work.  If he has some strong propensity, some calling of nature, some
over-weening interest in any special field of industry, inquiry, or art,
he will do right to obey the impulse; and that for two reasons: the first
external, because there he will render the best services; the second
personal, because a demand of his own nature is to him without appeal
whenever it can be satisfied with the consent of his other faculties and
appetites.  If he has no such elective taste, by the very principle on
which he chooses any pursuit at all he must choose the most honest and
serviceable, and not the most highly remunerated.  We have here an
external problem, not from or to ourself, but flowing from the
constitution of society; and we have our own soul with its fixed design
of righteousness.  All that can be done is to present the problem in
proper terms, and leave it to the soul of the individual.  Now, the
problem to the poor is one of necessity: to earn wherewithal to live,
they must find remunerative labour.  But the problem to the rich is one
of honour: having the wherewithal, they must find serviceable labour.
Each has to earn his daily bread: the one, because he has not yet got it
to eat; the other, who has already eaten it, because he has not yet
earned it.

Of course, what is true of bread is true of luxuries and comforts,
whether for the body or the mind.  But the consideration of luxuries
leads us to a new aspect of the whole question, and to a second
proposition no less true, and maybe no less startling, than the last.

At the present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of surfeit
and disgrace after meat.  Plethora has filled us with indifference; and
we are covered from head to foot with the callosities of habitual
opulence.  Born into what is called a certain rank, we live, as the
saying is, up to our station.  We squander without enjoyment, because our
fathers squandered.  We eat of the best, not from delicacy, but from
brazen habit.  We do not keenly enjoy or eagerly desire the presence of a
luxury; we are unaccustomed to its absence.  And not only do we squander
money from habit, but still more pitifully waste it in ostentation.  I
can think of no more melancholy disgrace for a creature who professes
either reason or pleasure for his guide, than to spend the smallest
fraction of his income upon that which he does not desire; and to keep a
carriage in which you do not wish to drive, or a butler of whom you are
afraid, is a pathetic kind of folly.  Money, being a means of happiness,
should make both parties happy when it changes hands; rightly disposed,
it should be twice blessed in its employment; and buyer and seller should
alike have their twenty shillings worth of profit out of every pound.
Benjamin Franklin went through life an altered man, because he once paid
too dearly for a penny whistle.  My concern springs usually from a deeper
source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not want one.  I
find I regret this, or would regret it if I gave myself the time, not
only on personal but on moral and philanthropical considerations.  For,
first, in a world where money is wanting to buy books for eager students
and food and medicine for pining children, and where a large majority are
starved in their most immediate desires, it is surely base, stupid, and
cruel to squander money when I am pushed by no appetite and enjoy no
return of genuine satisfaction.  My philanthropy is wide enough in scope
to include myself; and when I have made myself happy, I have at least one
good argument that I have acted rightly; but where that is not so, and I
have bought and not enjoyed, my mouth is closed, and I conceive that I
have robbed the poor.  And, second, anything I buy or use which I do not
sincerely want or cannot vividly enjoy, disturbs the balance of supply
and demand, and contributes to remove industrious hands from the
production of what is useful or pleasurable and to keep them busy upon
ropes of sand and things that are a weariness to the flesh.  That
extravagance is truly sinful, and a very silly sin to boot, in which we
impoverish mankind and ourselves.  It is another question for each man’s
heart.  He knows if he can enjoy what he buys and uses; if he cannot, he
is a dog in the manger; nay, it he cannot, I contend he is a thief, for
nothing really belongs to a man which he cannot use.  Proprietor is
connected with propriety; and that only is the man’s which is proper to
his wants and faculties.

A youth, in choosing a career, must not be alarmed by poverty.  Want is a
sore thing, but poverty does not imply want.  It remains to be seen
whether with half his present income, or a third, he cannot, in the most
generous sense, live as fully as at present.  He is a fool who objects to
luxuries; but he is also a fool who does not protest against the waste of
luxuries on those who do not desire and cannot enjoy them.  It remains to
be seen, by each man who would live a true life to himself and not a
merely specious life to society, how many luxuries he truly wants and to
how many he merely submits as to a social propriety; and all these last
he will immediately forswear.  Let him do this, and he will be surprised
to find how little money it requires to keep him in complete contentment
and activity of mind and senses.  Life at any level among the easy
classes is conceived upon a principle of rivalry, where each man and each
household must ape the tastes and emulate the display of others.  One is
delicate in eating, another in wine, a third in furniture or works of art
or dress; and I, who care nothing for any of these refinements, who am
perhaps a plain athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer, flannel
shirts and a camp bed, am yet called upon to assimilate all these other
tastes and make these foreign occasions of expenditure my own.  It may be
cynical: I am sure I shall be told it is selfish; but I will spend my
money as I please and for my own intimate personal gratification, and
should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay out the colour of a
halfpenny on any fancied social decency or duty.  I shall not wear gloves
unless my hands are cold, or unless I am born with a delight in them.
Dress is my own affair, and that of one other in the world; that, in fact
and for an obvious reason, of any woman who shall chance to be in love
with me.  I shall lodge where I have a mind.  If I do not ask society to
live with me, they must be silent; and even if I do, they have no further
right but to refuse the invitation!  There is a kind of idea abroad that
a man must live up to his station, that his house, his table, and his
toilette, shall be in a ratio of equivalence, and equally imposing to the
world.  If this is in the Bible, the passage has eluded my inquiries.  If
it is not in the Bible, it is nowhere but in the heart of the fool.
Throw aside this fancy.  See what you want, and spend upon that;
distinguish what you do not care about, and spend nothing upon that.
There are not many people who can differentiate wines above a certain and
that not at all a high price.  Are you sure you are one of these?  Are
you sure you prefer cigars at sixpence each to pipes at some fraction of
a farthing?  Are you sure you wish to keep a gig?  Do you care about
where you sleep, or are you not as much at your ease in a cheap lodging
as in an Elizabethan manor-house?  Do you enjoy fine clothes?  It is not
possible to answer these questions without a trial; and there is nothing
more obvious to my mind, than that a man who has not experienced some ups
and downs, and been forced to live more cheaply than in his father’s
house, has still his education to begin.  Let the experiment be made, and
he will find to his surprise that he has been eating beyond his appetite
up to that hour; that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough
country clothes, the plain table, have not only no power to damp his
spirits, but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the
dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and waking, in his former callous
and somnambulous submission to wealth.

The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary Bohemians
of literature, is exactly described by such a principle of life.  The
Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good for him and prefers
anything to work, and wears strange clothes, is for the most part a
respectable Bohemian, respectable in disrespectability, living for the
outside, and an adventurer.  But the man I mean lives wholly to himself,
does what he wishes, and not what is thought proper, buys what he wants
for himself, and not what is thought proper, works at what he believes he
can do well and not what will bring him in money or favour.  You may be
the most respectable of men, and yet a true Bohemian.  And the test is
this: a Bohemian, for as poor as he may be, is always open-handed to his
friends; he knows what he can do with money and how he can do without it,
a far rarer and more useful knowledge; he has had less, and continued to
live in some contentment; and hence he cares not to keep more, and shares
his sovereign or his shilling with a friend.  The poor, if they are
generous, are Bohemian in virtue of their birth.  Do you know where
beggars go?  Not to the great houses where people sit dazed among their
thousands, but to the doors of poor men who have seen the world; and it
was the widow who had only two mites, who cast half her fortune into the
treasury.

But a young man who elects to save on dress or on lodging, or who in any
way falls out of the level of expenditure which is common to his level in
society, falls out of society altogether.  I suppose the young man to
have chosen his career on honourable principles; he finds his talents and
instincts can be best contented in a certain pursuit; in a certain
industry, he is sure that he is serving mankind with a healthy and
becoming service; and he is not sure that he would be doing so, or doing
so equally well, in any other industry within his reach.  Then that is
his true sphere in life; not the one in which he was born to his father,
but the one which is proper to his talents and instincts.  And suppose he
does fall out of society, is that a cause of sorrow?  Is your heart so
dead that you prefer the recognition of many to the love of a few?  Do
you think society loves you?  Put it to the proof.  Decline in material
expenditure, and you will find they care no more for you than for the
Khan of Tartary.  You will lose no friends.  If you had any, you will
keep them.  Only those who were friends to your coat and equipage will
disappear; the smiling faces will disappear as by enchantment; but the
kind hearts will remain steadfastly kind.  Are you so lost, are you so
dead, are you so little sure of your own soul and your own footing upon
solid fact, that you prefer before goodness and happiness the countenance
of sundry diners-out, who will flee from you at a report of ruin, who
will drop you with insult at a shadow of disgrace, who do not know you
and do not care to know you but by sight, and whom you in your turn
neither know nor care to know in a more human manner?  Is it not the
principle of society, openly avowed, that friendship must not interfere
with business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a consideration
of money goes before any consideration of affection known to this
cold-blooded gang, that they have not even the honour of thieves, and
will rook their nearest and dearest as readily as a stranger?  I hope I
would go as far as most to serve a friend; but I declare openly I would
not put on my hat to do a pleasure to society.  I may starve my appetites
and control my temper for the sake of those I love; but society shall
take me as I choose to be, or go without me.  Neither they nor I will
lose; for where there is no love, it is both laborious and unprofitable
to associate.

But it is obvious that if it is only right for a man to spend money on
that which he can truly and thoroughly enjoy, the doctrine applies with
equal force to the rich and to the poor, to the man who has amassed many
thousands as well as to the youth precariously beginning life.  And it
may be asked, Is not this merely preparing misers, who are not the best
of company?  But the principle was this: that which a man has not fairly
earned, and, further, that which he cannot fully enjoy, does not belong
to him, but is a part of mankind’s treasure which he holds as steward on
parole.  To mankind, then, it must be made profitable; and how this
should be done is, once more, a problem which each man must solve for
himself, and about which none has a right to judge him.  Yet there are a
few considerations which are very obvious and may here be stated.
Mankind is not only the whole in general, but every one in particular.
Every man or woman is one of mankind’s dear possessions; to his or her
just brain, and kind heart, and active hands, mankind intrusts some of
its hopes for the future; he or she is a possible well-spring of good
acts and source of blessings to the race.  This money which you do not
need, which, in a rigid sense, you do not want, may therefore be returned
not only in public benefactions to the race, but in private kindnesses.
Your wife, your children, your friends stand nearest to you, and should
be helped the first.  There at least there can be little imposture, for
you know their necessities of your own knowledge.  And consider, if all
the world did as you did, and according to their means extended help in
the circle of their affections, there would be no more crying want in
times of plenty and no more cold, mechanical charity given with a doubt
and received with confusion.  Would not this simple rule make a new world
out of the old and cruel one which we inhabit?

                                * * * * *

          [_After two more sentences the fragment breaks off_.]




FATHER DAMIEN
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND DR. HYDE OF HONOLULU


                                                                   SYDNEY,
                                                      _February_ 25, 1890.

Sir,—It may probably occur to you that we have met, and visited, and
conversed; on my side, with interest.  You may remember that you have
done me several courtesies, for which I was prepared to be grateful.  But
there are duties which come before gratitude, and offences which justly
divide friends, far more acquaintances.  Your letter to the Reverend H.
B. Gage is a document which, in my sight, if you had filled me with bread
when I was starving, if you had sat up to nurse my father when he lay
a-dying, would yet absolve me from the bonds of gratitude.  You know
enough, doubtless, of the process of canonisation to be aware that, a
hundred years after the death of Damien, there will appear a man charged
with the painful office of the _devil’s advocate_.  After that noble
brother of mine, and of all frail clay, shall have lain a century at
rest, one shall accuse, one defend him.  The circumstance is unusual that
the devil’s advocate should be a volunteer, should be a member of a sect
immediately rival, and should make haste to take upon himself his ugly
office ere the bones are cold; unusual, and of a taste which I shall
leave my readers free to qualify; unusual, and to me inspiring.  If I
have at all learned the trade of using words to convey truth and to
arouse emotion, you have at last furnished me with a subject.  For it is
in the interest of all mankind, and the cause of public decency in every
quarter of the world, not only that Damien should be righted, but that
you and your letter should be displayed at length, in their true colours,
to the public eye.

To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at large: I shall then
proceed to criticise your utterance from several points of view, divine
and human, in the course of which I shall attempt to draw again, and with
more specification, the character of the dead saint whom it has pleased
you to vilify: so much being done, I shall say farewell to you for ever.

                                                                ‘HONOLULU,
                                                        ‘_August_ 2, 1889.

    ‘Rev. H. B. GAGE.

    ‘Dear Brother,—In answer to your inquiries about Father Damien, I can
    only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the extravagant
    newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly philanthropist.
    The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man, head-strong and
    bigoted.  He was not sent to Molokai, but went there without orders;
    did not stay at the leper settlement (before he became one himself),
    but circulated freely over the whole island (less than half the
    island is devoted to the lepers), and he came often to Honolulu.  He
    had no hand in the reforms and improvements inaugurated, which were
    the work of our Board of Health, as occasion required and means were
    provided.  He was not a pure man in his relations with women, and the
    leprosy of which he died should be attributed to his vices and
    carelessness.  Others have done much for the lepers, our own
    ministers, the government physicians, and so forth, but never with
    the Catholic idea of meriting eternal life.—Yours, etc.,

                                                        ‘C. M. HYDE.’ {65}

To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must draw at the outset
on my private knowledge of the signatory and his sect.  It may offend
others; scarcely you, who have been so busy to collect, so bold to
publish, gossip on your rivals.  And this is perhaps the moment when I
may best explain to you the character of what you are to read: I conceive
you as a man quite beyond and below the reticences of civility: with what
measure you mete, with that shall it be measured you again; with you, at
last, I rejoice to feel the button off the foil and to plunge home.  And
if in aught that I shall say I should offend others, your colleagues,
whom I respect and remember with affection, I can but offer them my
regret; I am not free, I am inspired by the consideration of interests
far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted by anything from me
must be indeed trifling when compared with the pain with which they read
your letter.  It is not the hangman, but the criminal, that brings
dishonour on the house.

You belong, sir, to a sect—I believe my sect, and that in which my
ancestors laboured—which has enjoyed, and partly failed to utilise, an
exceptional advantage in the islands of Hawaii.  The first missionaries
came; they found the land already self-purged of its old and bloody
faith; they were embraced, almost on their arrival, with enthusiasm; what
troubles they supported came far more from whites than from Hawaiians;
and to these last they stood (in a rough figure) in the shoes of God.
This is not the place to enter into the degree or causes of their
failure, such as it is.  One element alone is pertinent, and must here be
plainly dealt with.  In the course of their evangelical calling, they—or
too many of them—grew rich.  It may be news to you that the houses of
missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets of Honolulu.  It will
at least be news to you, that when I returned your civil visit, the
driver of my cab commented on the size, the taste, and the comfort of
your home.  It would have been news certainly to myself, had any one told
me that afternoon that I should live to drag such matter into print.  But
you see, sir, how you degrade better men to your own level; and it is
needful that those who are to judge betwixt you and me, betwixt Damien
and the devil’s advocate, should understand your letter to have been
penned in a house which could raise, and that very justly, the envy and
the comments of the passers-by.  I think (to employ a phrase of yours
which I admire) it ‘should be attributed’ to you that you have never
visited the scene of Damien’s life and death.  If you had, and had
recalled it, and looked about your pleasant rooms, even your pen perhaps
would have been stayed.

Your sect (and remember, as far as any sect avows me, it is mine) has not
done ill in a worldly sense in the Hawaiian Kingdom.  When calamity
befell their innocent parishioners, when leprosy descended and took root
in the Eight Islands, a _quid pro quo_ was to be looked for.  To that
prosperous mission, and to you, as one of its adornments, God had sent at
last an opportunity.  I know I am touching here upon a nerve acutely
sensitive.  I know that others of your colleagues look back on the
inertia of your Church, and the intrusive and decisive heroism of Damien,
with something almost to be called remorse.  I am sure it is so with
yourself; I am persuaded your letter was inspired by a certain envy, not
essentially ignoble, and the one human trait to be espied in that
performance.  You were thinking of the lost chance, the past day; of that
which should have been conceived and was not; of the service due and not
rendered.  Time was, said the voice in your ear, in your pleasant room,
as you sat raging and writing; and if the words written were base beyond
parallel, the rage, I am happy to repeat—it is the only compliment I
shall pay you—the rage was almost virtuous.  But, sir, when we have
failed, and another has succeeded; when we have stood by, and another has
stepped in; when we sit and grow bulky in our charming mansions, and a
plain, uncouth peasant steps into the battle, under the eyes of God, and
succours the afflicted, and consoles the dying, and is himself afflicted
in his turn, and dies upon the field of honour—the battle cannot be
retrieved as your unhappy irritation has suggested.  It is a lost battle,
and lost for ever.  One thing remained to you in your defeat—some rags of
common honour; and these you have made haste to cast away.

Common honour; not the honour of having done anything right, but the
honour of not having done aught conspicuously foul; the honour of the
inert: that was what remained to you.  We are not all expected to be
Damiens; a man may conceive his duty more narrowly, he may love his
comforts better; and none will cast a stone at him for that.  But will a
gentleman of your reverend profession allow me an example from the fields
of gallantry?  When two gentlemen compete for the favour of a lady, and
the one succeeds and the other is rejected, and (as will sometimes
happen) matter damaging to the successful rival’s credit reaches the ear
of the defeated, it is held by plain men of no pretensions that his mouth
is, in the circumstance, almost necessarily closed.  Your Church and
Damien’s were in Hawaii upon a rivalry to do well: to help, to edify, to
set divine examples.  You having (in one huge instance) failed, and
Damien succeeded, I marvel it should not have occurred to you that you
were doomed to silence; that when you had been outstripped in that high
rivalry, and sat inglorious in the midst of your wellbeing, in your
pleasant room—and Damien, crowned with glories and horrors, toiled and
rotted in that pigsty of his under the cliffs of Kalawao—you, the elect
who would not, were the last man on earth to collect and propagate gossip
on the volunteer who would and did.

I think I see you—for I try to see you in the flesh as I write these
sentences—I think I see you leap at the word pigsty, a hyperbolical
expression at the best.  ‘He had no hand in the reforms,’ he was ‘a
coarse, dirty man’; these were your own words; and you may think it
possible that I am come to support you with fresh evidence.  In a sense,
it is even so.  Damien has been too much depicted with a conventional
halo and conventional features; so drawn by men who perhaps had not the
eye to remark or the pen to express the individual; or who perhaps were
only blinded and silenced by generous admiration, such as I partly envy
for myself—such as you, if your soul were enlightened, would envy on your
bended knees.  It is the least defect of such a method of portraiture
that it makes the path easy for the devil’s advocate, and leaves for the
misuse of the slanderer a considerable field of truth.  For the truth
that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy.  The
world, in your despite, may perhaps owe you something, if your letter be
the means of substituting once for all a credible likeness for a wax
abstraction.  For, if that world at all remember you, on the day when
Damien of Molokai shall be named Saint, it will be in virtue of one work:
your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage.

You may ask on what authority I speak.  It was my inclement destiny to
become acquainted, not with Damien, but with Dr. Hyde.  When I visited
the lazaretto, Damien was already in his resting grave.  But such
information as I have, I gathered on the spot in conversation with those
who knew him well and long: some indeed who revered his memory; but
others who had sparred and wrangled with him, who beheld him with no
halo, who perhaps regarded him with small respect, and through whose
unprepared and scarcely partial communications the plain, human features
of the man shone on me convincingly.  These gave me what knowledge I
possess; and I learnt it in that scene where it could be most completely
and sensitively understood—Kalawao, which you have never visited, about
which you have never so much as endeavoured to inform yourself; for,
brief as your letter is, you have found the means to stumble into that
confession.  ‘_Less than one-half_ of the island,’ you say, ‘is devoted
to the lepers.’  Molokai—‘_Molokai ahina_,’ the ‘grey,’ lofty, and most
desolate island—along all its northern side plunges a front of precipice
into a sea of unusual profundity.  This range of cliff is, from east to
west, the true end and frontier of the island.  Only in one spot there
projects into the ocean a certain triangular and rugged down, grassy,
stony, windy, and rising in the midst into a hill with a dead crater: the
whole bearing to the cliff that overhangs it somewhat the same relation
as a bracket to a wall.  With this hint you will now be able to pick out
the leper station on a map; you will be able to judge how much of Molokai
is thus cut off between the surf and precipice, whether less than a half,
or less than a quarter, or a fifth, or a tenth—or, say, a twentieth; and
the next time you burst into print you will be in a position to share
with us the issue of your calculations.

I imagine you to be one of those persons who talk with cheerfulness of
that place which oxen and wain-ropes could not drag you to behold.  You,
who do not even know its situation on the map, probably denounce
sensational descriptions, stretching your limbs the while in your
pleasant parlour on Beretania Street.  When I was pulled ashore there one
early morning, there sat with me in the boat two sisters, bidding
farewell (in humble imitation of Damien) to the lights and joys of human
life.  One of these wept silently; I could not withhold myself from
joining her.  Had you been there, it is my belief that nature would have
triumphed even in you; and as the boat drew but a little nearer, and you
beheld the stairs crowded with abominable deformations of our common
manhood, and saw yourself landing in the midst of such a population as
only now and then surrounds us in the horror of a nightmare—what a
haggard eye you would have rolled over your reluctant shoulder towards
the house on Beretania Street!  Had you gone on; had you found every
fourth face a blot upon the landscape; had you visited the hospital and
seen the butt-ends of human beings lying there almost unrecognisable, but
still breathing, still thinking, still remembering; you would have
understood that life in the lazaretto is an ordeal from which the nerves
of a man’s spirit shrink, even as his eye quails under the brightness of
the sun; you would have felt it was (even to-day) a pitiful place to
visit and a hell to dwell in.  It is not the fear of possible infection.
That seems a little thing when compared with the pain, the pity, and the
disgust of the visitor’s surroundings, and the atmosphere of affliction,
disease, and physical disgrace in which he breathes.  I do not think I am
a man more than usually timid; but I never recall the days and nights I
spent upon that island promontory (eight days and seven nights), without
heartfelt thankfulness that I am somewhere else.  I find in my diary that
I speak of my stay as a ‘grinding experience’: I have once jotted in the
margin, ‘_Harrowing_ is the word’; and when the _Mokolii_ bore me at last
towards the outer world, I kept repeating to myself, with a new
conception of their pregnancy, those simple words of the song—

    ‘’Tis the most distressful country that ever yet was seen.’

And observe: that which I saw and suffered from was a settlement purged,
bettered, beautified; the new village built, the hospital and the
Bishop-Home excellently arranged; the sisters, the doctor, and the
missionaries, all indefatigable in their noble tasks.  It was a different
place when Damien came there and made his great renunciation, and slept
that first night under a tree amidst his rotting brethren: alone with
pestilence; and looking forward (with what courage, with what pitiful
sinkings of dread, God only knows) to a lifetime of dressing sores and
stumps.

You will say, perhaps, I am too sensitive, that sights as painful abound
in cancer hospitals and are confronted daily by doctors and nurses.  I
have long learned to admire and envy the doctors and the nurses.  But
there is no cancer hospital so large and populous as Kalawao and
Kalaupapa; and in such a matter every fresh case, like every inch of
length in the pipe of an organ, deepens the note of the impression; for
what daunts the onlooker is that monstrous sum of human suffering by
which he stands surrounded.  Lastly, no doctor or nurse is called upon to
enter once for all the doors of that gehenna; they do not say farewell,
they need not abandon hope, on its sad threshold; they but go for a time
to their high calling, and can look forward as they go to relief, to
recreation, and to rest.  But Damien shut-to with his own hand the doors
of his own sepulchre.

I shall now extract three passages from my diary at Kalawao.

_A_.  ‘Damien is dead and already somewhat ungratefully remembered in the
field of his labours and sufferings.  “He was a good man, but very
officious,” says one.  Another tells me he had fallen (as other priests
so easily do) into something of the ways and habits of thought of a
Kanaka; but he had the wit to recognise the fact, and the good sense to
laugh at’ [over] ‘it.  A plain man it seems he was; I cannot find he was
a popular.’

_B_.  ‘After Ragsdale’s death’ [Ragsdale was a famous Luna, or overseer,
of the unruly settlement] ‘there followed a brief term of office by
Father Damien which served only to publish the weakness of that noble
man.  He was rough in his ways, and he had no control.  Authority was
relaxed; Damien’s life was threatened, and he was soon eager to resign.’

_C_.  ‘Of Damien I begin to have an idea.  He seems to have been a man of
the peasant class, certainly of the peasant type: shrewd, ignorant and
bigoted, yet with an open mind, and capable of receiving and digesting a
reproof if it were bluntly administered; superbly generous in the least
thing as well as in the greatest, and as ready to give his last shirt
(although not without human grumbling) as he had been to sacrifice his
life; essentially indiscreet and officious, which made him a troublesome
colleague; domineering in all his ways, which made him incurably
unpopular with the Kanakas, but yet destitute of real authority, so that
his boys laughed at him and he must carry out his wishes by the means of
bribes.  He learned to have a mania for doctoring; and set up the Kanakas
against the remedies of his regular rivals: perhaps (if anything matter
at all in the treatment of such a disease) the worst thing that he did,
and certainly the easiest.  The best and worst of the man appear very
plainly in his dealings with Mr. Chapman’s money; he had originally laid
it out’ [intended to lay it out] ‘entirely for the benefit of Catholics,
and even so not wisely; but after a long, plain talk, he admitted his
error fully and revised the list.  The sad state of the boys’ home is in
part the result of his lack of control; in part, of his own slovenly ways
and false ideas of hygiene.  Brother officials used to call it “Damien’s
Chinatown.”  “Well,” they would say, “your China-town keeps growing.”
And he would laugh with perfect good-nature, and adhere to his errors
with perfect obstinacy.  So much I have gathered of truth about this
plain, noble human brother and father of ours; his imperfections are the
traits of his face, by which we know him for our fellow; his martyrdom
and his example nothing can lessen or annul; and only a person here on
the spot can properly appreciate their greatness.’

I have set down these private passages, as you perceive, without
correction; thanks to you, the public has them in their bluntness.  They
are almost a list of the man’s faults, for it is rather these that I was
seeking: with his virtues, with the heroic profile of his life, I and the
world were already sufficiently acquainted.  I was besides a little
suspicious of Catholic testimony; in no ill sense, but merely because
Damien’s admirers and disciples were the least likely to be critical.  I
know you will be more suspicious still; and the facts set down above were
one and all collected from the lips of Protestants who had opposed the
father in his life.  Yet I am strangely deceived, or they build up the
image of a man, with all his weaknesses, essentially heroic, and alive
with rugged honesty, generosity, and mirth.

Take it for what it is, rough private jottings of the worst sides of
Damien’s character, collected from the lips of those who had laboured
with and (in your own phrase) ‘knew the man’;—though I question whether
Damien would have said that he knew you.  Take it, and observe with
wonder how well you were served by your gossips, how ill by your
intelligence and sympathy; in how many points of fact we are at one, and
how widely our appreciations vary.  There is something wrong here; either
with you or me.  It is possible, for instance, that you, who seem to have
so many ears in Kalawao, had heard of the affair of Mr. Chapman’s money,
and were singly struck by Damien’s intended wrong-doing.  I was struck
with that also, and set it fairly down; but I was struck much more by the
fact that he had the honesty of mind to be convinced.  I may here tell
you that it was a long business; that one of his colleagues sat with him
late into the night, multiplying arguments and accusations; that the
father listened as usual with ‘perfect good-nature and perfect
obstinacy’; but at the last, when he was persuaded—‘Yes,’ said he, ‘I am
very much obliged to you; you have done me a service; it would have been
a theft.’  There are many (not Catholics merely) who require their heroes
and saints to be infallible; to these the story will be painful; not to
the true lovers, patrons, and servants of mankind.

And I take it, this is a type of our division; that you are one of those
who have an eye for faults and failures; that you take a pleasure to find
and publish them; and that, having found them, you make haste to forget
the overvailing virtues and the real success which had alone introduced
them to your knowledge.  It is a dangerous frame of mind.  That you may
understand how dangerous, and into what a situation it has already
brought you, we will (if you please) go hand-in-hand through the
different phrases of your letter, and candidly examine each from the
point of view of its truth, its appositeness, and its charity.

Damien was _coarse_.

It is very possible.  You make us sorry for the lepers, who had only a
coarse old peasant for their friend and father.  But you, who were so
refined, why were you not there, to cheer them with the lights of
culture?  Or may I remind you that we have some reason to doubt if John
the Baptist were genteel; and in the case of Peter, on whose career you
doubtless dwell approvingly in the pulpit, no doubt at all he was a
‘coarse, headstrong’ fisherman!  Yet even in our Protestant Bibles Peter
is called Saint.

Damien was _dirty_.

He was.  Think of the poor lepers annoyed with this dirty comrade!  But
the clean Dr. Hyde was at his food in a fine house.

Damien was _headstrong_.

I believe you are right again; and I thank God for his strong head and
heart.

Damien was _bigoted_.

I am not fond of bigots myself, because they are not fond of me.  But
what is meant by bigotry, that we should regard it as a blemish in a
priest?  Damien believed his own religion with the simplicity of a
peasant or a child; as I would I could suppose that you do.  For this, I
wonder at him some way off; and had that been his only character, should
have avoided him in life.  But the point of interest in Damien, which has
caused him to be so much talked about and made him at last the subject of
your pen and mine, was that, in him, his bigotry, his intense and narrow
faith, wrought potently for good, and strengthened him to be one of the
world’s heroes and exemplars.

Damien _was not sent to Molokai_, _but went there without orders_.

Is this a misreading? or do you really mean the words for blame?  I have
heard Christ, in the pulpits of our Church, held up for imitation on the
ground that His sacrifice was voluntary.  Does Dr. Hyde think otherwise?

Damien _did not stay at the settlement_, _etc._

It is true he was allowed many indulgences.  Am I to understand that you
blame the father for profiting by these, or the officers for granting
them?  In either case, it is a mighty Spartan standard to issue from the
house on Beretania Street; and I am convinced you will find yourself with
few supporters.

Damien _had no hand in the reforms_, _etc._

I think even you will admit that I have already been frank in my
description of the man I am defending; but before I take you up upon this
head, I will be franker still, and tell you that perhaps nowhere in the
world can a man taste a more pleasurable sense of contrast than when he
passes from Damien’s ‘Chinatown’ at Kalawao to the beautiful Bishop-Home
at Kalaupapa.  At this point, in my desire to make all fair for you, I
will break my rule and adduce Catholic testimony.  Here is a passage from
my diary about my visit to the Chinatown, from which you will see how it
is (even now) regarded by its own officials: ‘We went round all the
dormitories, refectories, etc.—dark and dingy enough, with a superficial
cleanliness, which he’ [Mr. Dutton, the lay-brother] ‘did not seek to
defend.  “It is almost decent,” said he; “the sisters will make that all
right when we get them here.”’  And yet I gathered it was already better
since Damien was dead, and far better than when he was there alone and
had his own (not always excellent) way.  I have now come far enough to
meet you on a common ground of fact; and I tell you that, to a mind not
prejudiced by jealousy, all the reforms of the lazaretto, and even those
which he most vigorously opposed, are properly the work of Damien.  They
are the evidence of his success; they are what his heroism provoked from
the reluctant and the careless.  Many were before him in the field; Mr.
Meyer, for instance, of whose faithful work we hear too little: there
have been many since; and some had more worldly wisdom, though none had
more devotion, than our saint.  Before his day, even you will confess,
they had effected little.  It was his part, by one striking act of
martyrdom, to direct all men’s eyes on that distressful country.  At a
blow, and with the price of his life, he made the place illustrious and
public.  And that, if you will consider largely, was the one reform
needful; pregnant of all that should succeed.  It brought money; it
brought (best individual addition of them all) the sisters; it brought
supervision, for public opinion and public interest landed with the man
at Kalawao.  If ever any man brought reforms, and died to bring them, it
was he.  There is not a clean cup or towel in the Bishop-Home, but dirty
Damien washed it.

Damien _was not a pure man in his relations with women_, _etc._

How do you know that?  Is this the nature of the conversation in that
house on Beretania Street which the cabman envied, driving past?—racy
details of the misconduct of the poor peasant priest, toiling under the
cliffs of Molokai?

Many have visited the station before me; they seem not to have heard the
rumour.  When I was there I heard many shocking tales, for my informants
were men speaking with the plainness of the laity; and I heard plenty of
complaints of Damien.  Why was this never mentioned? and how came it to
you in the retirement of your clerical parlour?

But I must not even seem to deceive you.  This scandal, when I read it in
your letter, was not new to me.  I had heard it once before; and I must
tell you how.  There came to Samoa a man from Honolulu; he, in a
public-house on the beach, volunteered the statement that Damien had
‘contracted the disease from having connection with the female lepers’;
and I find a joy in telling you how the report was welcomed in a
public-house.  A man sprang to his feet; I am not at liberty to give his
name, but from what I heard I doubt if you would care to have him to
dinner in Beretania Street.  ‘You miserable little—’ (here is a word I
dare not print, it would so shock your ears).  ‘You miserable little—,’
he cried, ‘if the story were a thousand times true, can’t you see you are
a million times a lower—for daring to repeat it?’  I wish it could be
told of you that when the report reached you in your house, perhaps after
family worship, you had found in your soul enough holy anger to receive
it with the same expressions; ay, even with that one which I dare not
print; it would not need to have been blotted away, like Uncle Toby’s
oath, by the tears of the recording angel; it would have been counted to
you for your brightest righteousness.  But you have deliberately chosen
the part of the man from Honolulu, and you have played it with
improvements of your own.  The man from Honolulu—miserable, leering
creature—communicated the tale to a rude knot of beach-combing drinkers
in a public-house, where (I will so far agree with your temperance
opinions) man is not always at his noblest; and the man from Honolulu had
himself been drinking—drinking, we may charitably fancy, to excess.  It
was to your ‘Dear Brother, the Reverend H. B. Gage,’ that you chose to
communicate the sickening story; and the blue ribbon which adorns your
portly bosom forbids me to allow you the extenuating plea that you were
drunk when it was done.  Your ‘dear brother’—a brother indeed—made haste
to deliver up your letter (as a means of grace, perhaps) to the religious
papers; where, after many months, I found and read and wondered at it;
and whence I have now reproduced it for the wonder of others.  And you
and your dear brother have, by this cycle of operations, built up a
contrast very edifying to examine in detail.  The man whom you would not
care to have to dinner, on the one side; on the other, the Reverend Dr.
Hyde and the Reverend H. B. Gage: the Apia bar-room, the Honolulu manse.

But I fear you scarce appreciate how you appear to your fellow-men; and
to bring it home to you, I will suppose your story to be true.  I will
suppose—and God forgive me for supposing it—that Damien faltered and
stumbled in his narrow path of duty; I will suppose that, in the horror
of his isolation, perhaps in the fever of incipient disease, he, who was
doing so much more than he had sworn, failed in the letter of his
priestly oath—he, who was so much a better man than either you or me, who
did what we have never dreamed of daring—he too tasted of our common
frailty.  ‘O, Iago, the pity of it!’  The least tender should be moved to
tears; the most incredulous to prayer.  And all that you could do was to
pen your letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage!

Is it growing at all clear to you what a picture you have drawn of your
own heart?  I will try yet once again to make it clearer.  You had a
father: suppose this tale were about him, and some informant brought it
to you, proof in hand: I am not making too high an estimate of your
emotional nature when I suppose you would regret the circumstance? that
you would feel the tale of frailty the more keenly since it shamed the
author of your days? and that the last thing you would do would be to
publish it in the religious press?  Well, the man who tried to do what
Damien did, is my father, and the father of the man in the Apia bar, and
the father of all who love goodness; and he was your father too, if God
had given you grace to see it.




THE PENTLAND RISING
A PAGE OF HISTORY
1666


    ‘A cloud of witnesses lyes here,
    Who for Christ’s interest did appear.’

                            _Inscription on Battlefield at Rullion Green_.



CHAPTER I—THE CAUSES OF THE REVOLT


    ‘Halt, passenger; take heed what thou dost see,
    This tomb doth show for what some men did die.’

                        _Monument_, _Greyfriars’ Churchyard_,_ Edinburgh_,
                                                           1661–1668. {85}

Two hundred years ago a tragedy was enacted in Scotland, the memory
whereof has been in great measure lost or obscured by the deep tragedies
which followed it.  It is, as it were, the evening of the night of
persecution—a sort of twilight, dark indeed to us, but light as the
noonday when compared with the midnight gloom which followed.  This fact,
of its being the very threshold of persecution, lends it, however, an
additional interest.

The prejudices of the people against Episcopacy were ‘out of measure
increased,’ says Bishop Burnet, ‘by the new incumbents who were put in
the places of the ejected preachers, and were generally very mean and
despicable in all respects.  They were the worst preachers I ever heard;
they were ignorant to a reproach; and many of them were openly vicious.
They . . . were indeed the dreg and refuse of the northern parts.  Those
of them who arose above contempt or scandal were men of such violent
tempers that they were as much hated as the others were despised.’ {86}
It was little to be wondered at, from this account that the country-folk
refused to go to the parish church, and chose rather to listen to outed
ministers in the fields.  But this was not to be allowed, and their
persecutors at last fell on the method of calling a roll of the
parishioners’ names every Sabbath, and marking a fine of twenty shillings
Scots to the name of each absenter.  In this way very large debts were
incurred by persons altogether unable to pay.  Besides this, landlords
were fined for their tenants’ absences, tenants for their landlords’,
masters for their servants’, servants for their masters’, even though
they themselves were perfectly regular in their attendance.  And as the
curates were allowed to fine with the sanction of any common soldier, it
may be imagined that often the pretexts were neither very sufficient nor
well proven.

When the fines could not be paid at once, Bibles, clothes, and household
utensils were seized upon, or a number of soldiers, proportionate to his
wealth, were quartered on the offender.  The coarse and drunken privates
filled the houses with woe; snatched the bread from the children to feed
their dogs; shocked the principles, scorned the scruples, and blasphemed
the religion of their humble hosts; and when they had reduced them to
destitution, sold the furniture, and burned down the roof-tree which was
consecrated to the peasants by the name of Home.  For all this attention
each of these soldiers received from his unwilling landlord a certain sum
of money per day—three shillings sterling, according to _Naphtali_.  And
frequently they were forced to pay quartering money for more men than
were in reality ‘cessed on them.’  At that time it was no strange thing
to behold a strong man begging for money to pay his fines, and many
others who were deep in arrears, or who had attracted attention in some
other way, were forced to flee from their homes, and take refuge from
arrest and imprisonment among the wild mosses of the uplands. {87a}

One example in particular we may cite:

John Neilson, the Laird of Corsack, a worthy man, was, unfortunately for
himself, a Nonconformist.  First he was fined in four hundred pounds
Scots, and then through cessing he lost nineteen hundred and ninety-three
pounds Scots.  He was next obliged to leave his house and flee from place
to place, during which wanderings he lost his horse.  His wife and
children were turned out of doors, and then his tenants were fined till
they too were almost ruined.  As a final stroke, they drove away all his
cattle to Glasgow and sold them. {87b}  Surely it was time that something
were done to alleviate so much sorrow, to overthrow such tyranny.

About this time too there arrived in Galloway a person calling himself
Captain Andrew Gray, and advising the people to revolt.  He displayed
some documents purporting to be from the northern Covenanters, and
stating that they were prepared to join in any enterprise commenced by
their southern brethren.  The leader of the persecutors was Sir James
Turner, an officer afterwards degraded for his share in the matter.  ‘He
was naturally fierce, but was mad when he was drunk, and that was very
often,’ said Bishop Burnet.  ‘He was a learned man, but had always been
in armies, and knew no other rule but to obey orders.  He told me he had
no regard to any law, but acted, as he was commanded, in a military way.’
{88}

This was the state of matters, when an outrage was committed which gave
spirit and determination to the oppressed countrymen, lit the flame of
insubordination, and for the time at least recoiled on those who
perpetrated it with redoubled force.



CHAPTER II—THE BEGINNING


    I love no warres,
    I love no jarres,
    Nor strife’s fire.
    May discord cease,
    Let’s live in peace:
    This I desire.

    If it must be
    Warre we must see
    (So fates conspire),
    May we not feel
    The force of steel:
    This I desire.

                                                     T. JACKSON, 1651 {89}

Upon Tuesday, November 13th, 1666, Corporal George Deanes and three other
soldiers set upon an old man in the clachan of Dalry and demanded the
payment of his fines.  On the old man’s refusing to pay, they forced a
large party of his neighbours to go with them and thresh his corn.  The
field was a certain distance out of the clachan, and four persons,
disguised as countrymen, who had been out on the moors all night, met
this mournful drove of slaves, compelled by the four soldiers to work for
the ruin of their friend.  However, chided to the bone by their night on
the hills, and worn out by want of food, they proceeded to the village
inn to refresh themselves.  Suddenly some people rushed into the room
where they were sitting, and told them that the soldiers were about to
roast the old man, naked, on his own girdle.  This was too much for them
to stand, and they repaired immediately to the scene of this gross
outrage, and at first merely requested that the captive should be
released.  On the refusal of the two soldiers who were in the front room,
high words were given and taken on both sides, and the other two rushed
forth from an adjoining chamber and made at the countrymen with drawn
swords.  One of the latter, John M‘Lellan of Barscob, drew a pistol and
shot the corporal in the body.  The pieces of tobacco-pipe with which it
was loaded, to the number of ten at least, entered him, and he was so
much disturbed that he never appears to have recovered, for we find long
afterwards a petition to the Privy Council requesting a pension for him.
The other soldiers then laid down their arms, the old man was rescued,
and the rebellion was commenced. {90}

And now we must turn to Sir James Turner’s memoirs of himself; for,
strange to say, this extraordinary man was remarkably fond of literary
composition, and wrote, besides the amusing account of his own adventures
just mentioned, a large number of essays and short biographies, and a
work on war, entitled _Pallas Armata_.  The following are some of the
shorter pieces ‘Magick,’ ‘Friendship,’ ‘Imprisonment,’ ‘Anger,’
‘Revenge,’ ‘Duells,’ ‘Cruelty,’ ‘A Defence of some of the Ceremonies of
the English Liturgie—to wit—Bowing at the Name of Jesus, The frequent
repetition of the Lord’s Prayer and Good Lord deliver us, Of the
Doxologie, Of Surplesses, Rotchets, Canonnicall Coats,’ etc.  From what
we know of his character we should expect ‘Anger’ and ‘Cruelty’ to be
very full and instructive.  But what earthly right he had to meddle with
ecclesiastical subjects it is hard to see.

Upon the 12th of the month he had received some information concerning
Gray’s proceedings, but as it was excessively indefinite in its
character, he paid no attention to it.  On the evening of the 14th,
Corporal Deanes was brought into Dumfries, who affirmed stoutly that he
had been shot while refusing to sign the Covenant—a story rendered
singularly unlikely by the after conduct of the rebels.  Sir James
instantly dispatched orders to the cessed soldiers either to come to
Dumfries or meet him on the way to Dalry, and commanded the thirteen or
fourteen men in the town with him to come at nine next morning to his
lodging for supplies.

On the morning of Thursday the rebels arrived at Dumfries with 50 horse
and 150 foot.  Neilson of Corsack, and Gray, who commanded, with a
considerable troop, entered the town, and surrounded Sir James Turner’s
lodging.  Though it was between eight and nine o’clock, that worthy,
being unwell, was still in bed, but rose at once and went to the window.

Neilson and some others cried, ‘You may have fair quarter.’

‘I need no quarter,’ replied Sir James; ‘nor can I be a prisoner, seeing
there is no war declared.’  On being told, however, that he must either
be a prisoner or die, he came down, and went into the street in his
night-shirt.  Here Gray showed himself very desirous of killing him, but
he was overruled by Corsack.  However, he was taken away a prisoner,
Captain Gray mounting him on his own horse, though, as Turner naively
remarks, ‘there was good reason for it, for he mounted himself on a farre
better one of mine.’  A large coffer containing his clothes and money,
together with all his papers, were taken away by the rebels.  They robbed
Master Chalmers, the Episcopalian minister of Dumfries, of his horse,
drank the King’s health at the market cross, and then left Dumfries. {92}



CHAPTER III—THE MARCH OF THE REBELS


    ‘Stay, passenger, take notice what thou reads,
    At Edinburgh lie our bodies, here our heads;
    Our right hands stood at Lanark, these we want,
    Because with them we signed the Covenant.’

                                _Epitaph on a Tombstone at Hamilton_. {93}

On Friday the 16th, Bailie Irvine of Dumfries came to the Council at
Edinburgh, and gave information concerning this ‘horrid rebellion.’  In
the absence of Rothes, Sharpe presided—much to the wrath of some members;
and as he imagined his own safety endangered, his measures were most
energetic.  Dalzell was ordered away to the West, the guards round the
city were doubled, officers and soldiers were forced to take the oath of
allegiance, and all lodgers were commanded to give in their names.
Sharpe, surrounded with all these guards and precautions,
trembled—trembled as he trembled when the avengers of blood drew him from
his chariot on Magus Muir,—for he knew how he had sold his trust, how he
had betrayed his charge, and he felt that against him must their chiefest
hatred be directed, against him their direst thunder-bolts be forged.
But even in his fear the apostate Presbyterian was unrelenting,
unpityingly harsh; he published in his manifesto no promise of pardon, no
inducement to submission.  He said, ‘If you submit not you must die,’ but
never added, ‘If you submit you may live!’ {94a}

Meantime the insurgents proceeded on their way.  At Carsphairn they were
deserted by Captain Gray, who, doubtless in a fit of oblivion, neglected
to leave behind him the coffer containing Sir James’s money.  Who he was
is a mystery, unsolved by any historian; his papers were evidently
forgeries—that, and his final flight, appear to indicate that he was an
agent of the Royalists, for either the King or the Duke of York was heard
to say, ‘That, if he might have his wish, he would have them all turn
rebels and go to arms.’ {94b}

Upon the 18th day of the month they left Carsphairn and marched onwards.

Turner was always lodged by his captors at a good inn, frequently at the
best of which their halting-place could boast.  Here many visits were
paid to him by the ministers and officers of the insurgent force.  In his
description of these interviews he displays a vein of satiric severity,
admitting any kindness that was done to him with some qualifying souvenir
of former harshness, and gloating over any injury, mistake, or folly,
which it was his chance to suffer or to hear.  He appears,
notwithstanding all this, to have been on pretty good terms with his
cruel ‘phanaticks,’ as the following extract sufficiently proves:

‘Most of the foot were lodged about the church or churchyard, and order
given to ring bells next morning for a sermon to be preached by Mr.
Welch.  Maxwell of Morith, and Major M‘Cullough invited me to heare “that
phanatick sermon” (for soe they merrilie called it).  They said that
preaching might prove an effectual meane to turne me, which they
heartilie wished.  I answered to them that I was under guards, and that
if they intended to heare that sermon, it was probable I might likewise,
for it was not like my guards wold goe to church and leave me alone at my
lodgeings.  Bot to what they said of my conversion, I said it wold be
hard to turne a Turner.  Bot because I founde them in a merrie humour, I
said, if I did not come to heare Mr. Welch preach, then they might fine
me in fortie shillings Scots, which was double the suome of what I had
exacted from the phanatics.’ {95}

This took place at Ochiltree, on the 22nd day of the month.  The
following is recounted by this personage with malicious glee, and
certainly, if authentic, it is a sad proof of how chaff is mixed with
wheat, and how ignorant, almost impious, persons were engaged in this
movement; nevertheless we give it, for we wish to present with
impartiality all the alleged facts to the reader:

‘Towards the evening Mr. Robinsone and Mr. Crukshank gaue me a visite; I
called for some ale purposelie to heare one of them blesse it.  It fell
Mr. Robinsone to seeke the blessing, who said one of the most bombastick
graces that ever I heard in my life.  He summoned God Allmightie very
imperiouslie to be their secondarie (for that was his language).  “And
if,” said he, “thou wilt not be our Secondarie, we will not fight for
thee at all, for it is not our cause bot thy cause; and if thou wilt not
fight for our cause and thy oune cause, then we are not obliged to fight
for it.  They say,” said he, “that Dukes, Earles, and Lords are coming
with the King’s General against us, bot they shall be nothing bot a
threshing to us.”  This grace did more fullie satisfie me of the folly
and injustice of their cause, then the ale did quench my thirst.’ {96a}

Frequently the rebels made a halt near some roadside alehouse, or in some
convenient park, where Colonel Wallace, who had now taken the command,
would review the horse and foot, during which time Turner was sent either
into the alehouse or round the shoulder of the hill, to prevent him from
seeing the disorders which were likely to arise.  He was, at last, on the
25th day of the month, between Douglas and Lanark, permitted to behold
their evolutions.  ‘I found their horse did consist of four hundreth and
fortie, and the foot of five hundreth and upwards. . . . The horsemen
were armed for most part with suord and pistoll, some onlie with suord.
The foot with musket, pike, sith (scythe), forke, and suord; and some
with suords great and long.’  He admired much the proficiency of their
cavalry, and marvelled how they had attained to it in so short a time.
{96b}

At Douglas, which they had just left on the morning of this great
wapinshaw, they were charged—awful picture of depravity!—with the theft
of a silver spoon and a nightgown.  Could it be expected that while the
whole country swarmed with robbers of every description, such a rare
opportunity for plunder should be lost by rogues—that among a thousand
men, even though fighting for religion, there should not be one Achan in
the camp?  At Lanark a declaration was drawn up and signed by the chief
rebels.  In it occurs the following:

‘The just sense whereof ’—the sufferings of the country—‘made us choose,
rather to betake ourselves to the fields for self-defence, than to stay
at home, burdened daily with the calamities of others, and tortured with
the fears of our own approaching misery.’ {97}

The whole body, too, swore the Covenant, to which ceremony the epitaph at
the head of this chapter seems to refer.

A report that Dalzell was approaching drove them from Lanark to Bathgate,
where, on the evening of Monday the 26th, the wearied army stopped.  But
at twelve o’clock the cry, which served them for a trumpet, of ‘Horse!
horse!’ and ‘Mount the prisoner!’ resounded through the night-shrouded
town, and called the peasants from their well-earned rest to toil onwards
in their march.  The wind howled fiercely over the moorland; a close,
thick, wetting rain descended.  Chilled to the bone, worn out with long
fatigue, sinking to the knees in mire, onward they marched to
destruction.  One by one the weary peasants fell off from their ranks to
sleep, and die in the rain-soaked moor, or to seek some house by the
wayside wherein to hide till daybreak.  One by one at first, then in
gradually increasing numbers, at every shelter that was seen, whole
troops left the waning squadrons, and rushed to hide themselves from the
ferocity of the tempest.  To right and left nought could be descried but
the broad expanse of the moor, and the figures of their fellow-rebels,
seen dimly through the murky night, plodding onwards through the sinking
moss.  Those who kept together—a miserable few—often halted to rest
themselves, and to allow their lagging comrades to overtake them.  Then
onward they went again, still hoping for assistance, reinforcement, and
supplies; onward again, through the wind, and the rain, and the
darkness—onward to their defeat at Pentland, and their scaffold at
Edinburgh.  It was calculated that they lost one half of their army on
that disastrous night-march.

Next night they reached the village of Colinton, four miles from
Edinburgh, where they halted for the last time. {98}



CHAPTER IV—RULLION GREEN


    ‘From Covenanters with uplifted hands,
    From Remonstrators with associate bands,
             Good Lord, deliver us!’

                                        _Royalist Rhyme_, KIRKTON, p. 127.

Late on the fourth night of November, exactly twenty-four days before
Rullion Green, Richard and George Chaplain, merchants in Haddington,
beheld four men, clad like West-country Whigamores, standing round some
object on the ground.  It was at the two-mile cross, and within that
distance from their homes.  At last, to their horror, they discovered
that the recumbent figure was a livid corpse, swathed in a blood-stained
winding-sheet. {99}  Many thought that this apparition was a portent of
the deaths connected with the Pentland Rising.

On the morning of Wednesday, the 28th of November 1666, they left
Colinton and marched to Rullion Green.  There they arrived about sunset.
The position was a strong one.  On the summit of a bare, heathery spur of
the Pentlands are two hillocks, and between them lies a narrow band of
flat marshy ground.  On the highest of the two mounds—that nearest the
Pentlands, and on the left hand of the main body—was the greater part of
the cavalry, under Major Learmont; on the other Barscob and the Galloway
gentlemen; and in the centre Colonel Wallace and the weak, half-armed
infantry.  Their position was further strengthened by the depth of the
valley below, and the deep chasm-like course of the Rullion Burn.

The sun, going down behind the Pentlands, cast golden lights and blue
shadows on their snow-clad summits, slanted obliquely into the rich plain
before them, bathing with rosy splendour the leafless, snow-sprinkled
trees, and fading gradually into shadow in the distance.  To the south,
too, they beheld a deep-shaded amphitheatre of heather and bracken; the
course of the Esk, near Penicuik, winding about at the foot of its gorge;
the broad, brown expanse of Maw Moss; and, fading into blue
indistinctness in the south, the wild heath-clad Peeblesshire hills.  In
sooth, that scene was fair, and many a yearning glance was cast over that
peaceful evening scene from the spot where the rebels awaited their
defeat; and when the fight was over, many a noble fellow lifted his head
from the blood-stained heather to strive with darkening eyeballs to
behold that landscape, over which, as over his life and his cause, the
shadows of night and of gloom were falling and thickening.

It was while waiting on this spot that the fear-inspiring cry was raised:
‘The enemy!  Here come the enemy!’

Unwilling to believe their own doom—for our insurgents still hoped for
success in some negotiations for peace which had been carried on at
Colinton—they called out, ‘They are some of our own.’

‘They are too blacke’ (_i.e._ numerous), ‘fie! fie! for ground to draw up
on,’ cried Wallace, fully realising the want of space for his men, and
proving that it was not till after this time that his forces were finally
arranged. {101a}

First of all the battle was commenced by fifty Royalist horse sent
obliquely across the hill to attack the left wing of the rebels.  An
equal number of Learmont’s men met them, and, after a struggle, drove
them back.  The course of the Rullion Burn prevented almost all pursuit,
and Wallace, on perceiving it, dispatched a body of foot to occupy both
the burn and some ruined sheep-walls on the farther side.

Dalzell changed his position, and drew up his army at the foot of the
hill, on the top of which were his foes.  He then dispatched a mingled
body of infantry and cavalry to attack Wallace’s outpost, but they also
were driven back.  A third charge produced a still more disastrous
effect, for Dalzell had to check the pursuit of his men by a
reinforcement.

These repeated checks bred a panic in the Lieutenant-General’s ranks, for
several of his men flung down their arms.  Urged by such fatal symptoms,
and by the approaching night, he deployed his men, and closed in
overwhelming numbers on the centre and right flank of the insurgent army.
In the increasing twilight the burning matches of the firelocks,
shimmering on barrel, halbert, and cuirass, lent to the approaching army
a picturesque effect, like a huge, many-armed giant breathing flame into
the darkness.

Placed on an overhanging hill, Welch and Semple cried aloud, ‘The God of
Jacob! The God of Jacob!’ and prayed with uplifted hands for victory.
{101b}

But still the Royalist troops closed in.

Captain John Paton was observed by Dalzell, who determined to capture him
with his own hands.  Accordingly he charged forward, presenting his
pistols.  Paton fired, but the balls hopped off Dalzell’s buff coat and
fell into his boot.  With the superstition peculiar to his age, the
Nonconformist concluded that his adversary was rendered bullet-proof by
enchantment, and, pulling some small silver coins from his pocket,
charged his pistol therewith.  Dalzell, seeing this, and supposing, it is
likely, that Paton was putting in larger balls, hid behind his servant,
who was killed. {102}

Meantime the outposts were forced, and the army of Wallace was enveloped
in the embrace of a hideous boa-constrictor—tightening, closing, crushing
every semblance of life from the victim enclosed in his toils.  The
flanking parties of horse were forced in upon the centre, and though, as
even Turner grants, they fought with desperation, a general flight was
the result.

But when they fell there was none to sing their coronach or wail the
death-wail over them.  Those who sacrificed themselves for the peace, the
liberty, and the religion of their fellow-countrymen, lay bleaching in
the field of death for long, and when at last they were buried by
charity, the peasants dug up their bodies, desecrated their graves, and
cast them once more upon the open heath for the sorry value of their
winding-sheets!

_Inscription on stone at Rullion Green_:

                                     HERE
                                 AND NEAR TO
                             THIS PLACE LYES THE
                         REVEREND MR JOHN CROOKSHANK
                           AND MR ANDREW MCCORMICK
                         MINISTERS OF THE GOSPEL AND
                      ABOUT FIFTY OTHER TRUE COVENANTED
                            PRESBYTERIANS WHO WERE
                      KILLED IN THIS PLACE IN THEIR OWN
                      INOCENT SELF DEFENCE AND DEFFENCE
                              OF THE COVENANTED
                            WORK OF REFORMATION BY
                            THOMAS DALZEEL OF BINS
                           UPON THE 28 OF NOVEMBER
                         1666.  REV. 12. 11. ERECTED
                                SEPT. 28 1738.

                             _Back of stone_:

    A Cloud of Witnesses lyes here,
    Who for Christ’s Interest did appear,
    For to restore true Liberty,
    O’erturnèd then by tyranny.
    And by proud Prelats who did Rage
    Against the Lord’s Own heritage.
    They sacrificed were for the laws
    Of Christ their king, his noble cause.
    These heroes fought with great renown;
    By falling got the Martyr’s crown. {103}



CHAPTER V—A RECORD OF BLOOD


    ‘They cut his hands ere he was dead,
    And after that struck of his head.
    His blood under the altar cries
    For vengeance on Christ’s enemies.’

                         _Epitaph on Tomb at Longcross of Clermont_. {104}

Master Andrew Murray, an outed minister, residing in the Potterrow, on
the morning after the defeat, heard the sounds of cheering and the march
of many feet beneath his window.  He gazed out.  With colours flying, and
with music sounding, Dalzell, victorious, entered Edinburgh.  But his
banners were dyed in blood, and a band of prisoners were marched within
his ranks.  The old man knew it all.  That martial and triumphant strain
was the death-knell of his friends and of their cause, the rust-hued
spots upon the flags were the tokens of their courage and their death,
and the prisoners were the miserable remnant spared from death in battle
to die upon the scaffold.  Poor old man! he had outlived all joy.  Had he
lived longer he would have seen increasing torment and increasing woe; he
would have seen the clouds, then but gathering in mist, cast a more than
midnight darkness over his native hills, and have fallen a victim to
those bloody persecutions which, later, sent their red memorials to the
sea by many a burn.  By a merciful Providence all this was spared to
him—he fell beneath the first blow; and ere four days had passed since
Rullion Green, the aged minister of God was gathered to is fathers.
{105a}

When Sharpe first heard of the rebellion, he applied to Sir Alexander
Ramsay, the Provost, for soldiers to guard his house.  Disliking their
occupation, the soldiers gave him an ugly time of it.  All the night
through they kept up a continuous series of ‘alarms and incursions,’
‘cries of “Stand!” “Give fire!”’ etc., which forced the prelate to flee
to the Castle in the morning, hoping there to find the rest which was
denied him at home. {105b}  Now, however, when all danger to himself was
past, Sharpe came out in his true colours, and scant was the justice
likely to be shown to the foes of Scottish Episcopacy when the Primate
was by.  The prisoners were lodged in Haddo’s Hole, a part of St. Giles’
Cathedral, where, by the kindness of Bishop Wishart, to his credit be it
spoken, they were amply supplied with food. {105c}

Some people urged, in the Council, that the promise of quarter which had
been given on the field of battle should protect the lives of the
miserable men.  Sir John Gilmoure, the greatest lawyer, gave no
opinion—certainly a suggestive circumstance—but Lord Lee declared that
this would not interfere with their legal trial, ‘so to bloody executions
they went.’ {105d}  To the number of thirty they were condemned and
executed; while two of them, Hugh M‘Kail, a young minister, and Neilson
of Corsack, were tortured with the boots.

The goods of those who perished were confiscated, and their bodies were
dismembered and distributed to different parts of the country; ‘the heads
of Major M‘Culloch and the two Gordons,’ it was resolved, says Kirkton,
‘should be pitched on the gate of Kirkcudbright; the two Hamiltons and
Strong’s head should be affixed at Hamilton, and Captain Arnot’s sett on
the Watter Gate at Edinburgh.  The armes of all the ten, because they
hade with uplifted hands renewed the Covenant at Lanark, were sent to the
people of that town to expiate that crime, by placing these arms on the
top of the prison.’ {106}  Among these was John Neilson, the Laird of
Corsack, who saved Turner’s life at Dumfries; in return for which service
Sir James attempted, though without success, to get the poor man
reprieved.  One of the condemned died of his wounds between the day of
condemnation and the day of execution.  ‘None of them,’ says Kirkton,
‘would save their life by taking the declaration and renouncing the
Covenant, though it was offered to them. . . . But never men died in
Scotland so much lamented by the people, not only spectators, but those
in the country.  When Knockbreck and his brother were turned over, they
clasped each other in their armes, and so endured the pangs of death.
When Humphrey Colquhoun died, he spoke not like an ordinary citizen, but
like a heavenly minister, relating his comfortable Christian experiences,
and called for his Bible, and laid it on his wounded arm, and read John
iii. 8, and spoke upon it to the admiration of all.  But most of all,
when Mr. M‘Kail died, there was such a lamentation as was never known in
Scotland before; not one dry cheek upon all the street, or in all the
numberless windows in the mercate place.’ {107a}

The following passage from this speech speaks for itself and its author:

‘Hereafter I will not talk with flesh and blood, nor think on the world’s
consolations.  Farewell to all my friends, whose company hath been
refreshful to me in my pilgrimage.  I have done with the light of the sun
and the moon; welcome eternal light, eternal life, everlasting love,
everlasting praise, everlasting glory.  Praise to Him that sits upon the
throne, and to the Lamb for ever!  Bless the Lord, O my soul, that hath
pardoned all my iniquities in the blood of His Son, and healed all my
diseases.  Bless Him, O all ye His angels that excel in strength, ye
ministers of His that do His pleasure.  Bless the Lord, O my soul!’
{107b}

After having ascended the gallows ladder he again broke forth in the
following words of touching eloquence: ‘And now I leave off to speak any
more to creatures, and begin my intercourse with God, which shall never
be broken off.  Farewell father and mother, friends and relations!
Farewell the world and all delights!  Farewell meat and drink!  Farewell
sun, moon, and stars!—Welcome God and Father!  Welcome sweet Jesus
Christ, the Mediator of the new covenant!  Welcome blessed Spirit of
grace and God of all consolation!  Welcome glory!  Welcome eternal life!
Welcome Death!’ {107c}

At Glasgow, too, where some were executed, they caused the soldiers to
beat the drums and blow the trumpets on their closing ears.  Hideous
refinement of revenge!  Even the last words which drop from the lips of a
dying man—words surely the most sincere and the most unbiassed which
mortal mouth can utter—even these were looked upon as poisoned and as
poisonous.  ‘Drown their last accents,’ was the cry, ‘lest they should
lead the crowd to take their part, or at the least to mourn their doom!’
{108a}  But, after all, perhaps it was more merciful than one would
think—unintentionally so, of course; perhaps the storm of harsh and
fiercely jubilant noises, the clanging of trumpets, the rattling of
drums, and the hootings and jeerings of an unfeeling mob, which were the
last they heard on earth, might, when the mortal fight was over, when the
river of death was passed, add tenfold sweetness to the hymning of the
angels, tenfold peacefulness to the shores which they had reached.

Not content with the cruelty of these executions, some even of the
peasantry, though these were confined to the shire of Mid-Lothian,
pursued, captured, plundered, and murdered the miserable fugitives who
fell in their way.  One strange story have we of these times of blood and
persecution: Kirkton the historian and popular tradition tell us alike of
a flame which often would arise from the grave, in a moss near Carnwath,
of some of those poor rebels: of how it crept along the ground; of how it
covered the house of their murderer; and of how it scared him with its
lurid glare.

Hear Daniel Defoe: {108b}

    ‘If the poor people were by these insupportable violences made
    desperate, and driven to all the extremities of a wild despair, who
    can justly reflect on them when they read in the Word of God “That
    oppression makes a wise man mad”?  And therefore were there no other
    original of the insurrection known by the name of the Rising of
    Pentland, it was nothing but what the intolerable oppressions of
    those times might have justified to all the world, nature having
    dictated to all people a right of defence when illegally and
    arbitrarily attacked in a manner not justifiable either by laws of
    nature, the laws of God, or the laws of the country.’

Bear this remonstrance of Defoe’s in mind, and though it is the fashion
of the day to jeer and to mock, to execrate and to contemn, the noble
band of Covenanters—though the bitter laugh at their old-world religious
views, the curl of the lip at their merits, and the chilling silence on
their bravery and their determination, are but too rife through all
society—be charitable to what was evil and honest to what was good about
the Pentland insurgents, who fought for life and liberty, for country and
religion, on the 28th of November 1666, now just two hundred years ago.

                                * * * * *

EDINBURGH, 28_th November_ 1866.




THE DAY AFTER TO-MORROW


History is much decried; it is a tissue of errors, we are told, no doubt
correctly; and rival historians expose each other’s blunders with
gratification.  Yet the worst historian has a clearer view of the period
he studies than the best of us can hope to form of that in which we live.
The obscurest epoch is to-day; and that for a thousand reasons of
inchoate tendency, conflicting report, and sheer mass and multiplicity of
experience; but chiefly, perhaps, by reason of an insidious shifting of
landmarks.  Parties and ideas continually move, but not by measurable
marches on a stable course; the political soil itself steals forth by
imperceptible degrees, like a travelling glacier, carrying on its bosom
not only political parties but their flag-posts and cantonments; so that
what appears to be an eternal city founded on hills is but a flying
island of Laputa.  It is for this reason in particular that we are all
becoming Socialists without knowing it; by which I would not in the least
refer to the acute case of Mr. Hyndman and his horn-blowing supporters,
sounding their trumps of a Sunday within the walls of our individualist
Jericho—but to the stealthy change that has come over the spirit of
Englishmen and English legislation.  A little while ago, and we were
still for liberty; ‘crowd a few more thousands on the bench of
Government,’ we seemed to cry; ‘keep her head direct on liberty, and we
cannot help but come to port.’  This is over; _laisser faire_ declines in
favour; our legislation grows authoritative, grows philanthropical,
bristles with new duties and new penalties, and casts a spawn of
inspectors, who now begin, note-book in hand, to darken the face of
England.  It may be right or wrong, we are not trying that; but one thing
it is beyond doubt: it is Socialism in action, and the strange thing is
that we scarcely know it.

Liberty has served us a long while, and it may be time to seek new
altars.  Like all other principles, she has been proved to be
self-exclusive in the long run.  She has taken wages besides (like all
other virtues) and dutifully served Mammon; so that many things we were
accustomed to admire as the benefits of freedom and common to all were
truly benefits of wealth, and took their value from our neighbours’
poverty.  A few shocks of logic, a few disclosures (in the journalistic
phrase) of what the freedom of manufacturers, landlords, or shipowners
may imply for operatives, tenants, or seamen, and we not unnaturally
begin to turn to that other pole of hope, beneficent tyranny.  Freedom,
to be desirable, involves kindness, wisdom, and all the virtues of the
free; but the free man as we have seen him in action has been, as of
yore, only the master of many helots; and the slaves are still ill-fed,
ill-clad, ill-taught, ill-housed, insolently treated, and driven to their
mines and workshops by the lash of famine.  So much, in other men’s
affairs, we have begun to see clearly; we have begun to despair of virtue
in these other men, and from our seat in Parliament begin to discharge
upon them, thick as arrows, the host of our inspectors.  The landlord has
long shaken his head over the manufacturer; those who do business on land
have lost all trust in the virtues of the shipowner; the professions look
askance upon the retail traders and have even started their co-operative
stores to ruin them; and from out the smoke-wreaths of Birmingham a
finger has begun to write upon the wall the condemnation of the landlord.
Thus, piece by piece, do we condemn each other, and yet not perceive the
conclusion, that our whole estate is somewhat damnable.  Thus, piece by
piece, each acting against his neighbour, each sawing away the branch on
which some other interest is seated, do we apply in detail our
Socialistic remedies, and yet not perceive that we are all labouring
together to bring in Socialism at large.  A tendency so stupid and so
selfish is like to prove invincible; and if Socialism be at all a
practicable rule of life, there is every chance that our grand-children
will see the day and taste the pleasures of existence in something far
liker an ant-heap than any previous human polity.  And this not in the
least because of the voice of Mr. Hyndman or the horns of his followers;
but by the mere glacier movement of the political soil, bearing forward
on its bosom, apparently undisturbed, the proud camps of Whig and Tory.
If Mr. Hyndman were a man of keen humour, which is far from my conception
of his character, he might rest from his troubling and look on: the walls
of Jericho begin already to crumble and dissolve.  That great servile
war, the Armageddon of money and numbers, to which we looked forward when
young, becomes more and more unlikely; and we may rather look to see a
peaceable and blindfold evolution, the work of dull men immersed in
political tactics and dead to political results.

The principal scene of this comedy lies, of course, in the House of
Commons; it is there, besides, that the details of this new evolution (if
it proceed) will fall to be decided; so that the state of Parliament is
not only diagnostic of the present but fatefully prophetic of the future.
Well, we all know what Parliament is, and we are all ashamed of it.  We
may pardon it some faults, indeed, on the ground of Irish obstruction—a
bitter trial, which it supports with notable good humour.  But the excuse
is merely local; it cannot apply to similar bodies in America and France;
and what are we to say of these?  President Cleveland’s letter may serve
as a picture of the one; a glance at almost any paper will convince us of
the weakness of the other.  Decay appears to have seized on the organ of
popular government in every land; and this just at the moment when we
begin to bring to it, as to an oracle of justice, the whole skein of our
private affairs to be unravelled, and ask it, like a new Messiah, to take
upon itself our frailties and play for us the part that should be played
by our own virtues.  For that, in few words, is the case.  We cannot
trust ourselves to behave with decency; we cannot trust our consciences;
and the remedy proposed is to elect a round number of our neighbours,
pretty much at random, and say to these: ‘Be ye our conscience; make laws
so wise, and continue from year to year to administer them so wisely,
that they shall save us from ourselves and make us righteous and happy,
world without end.  Amen.’  And who can look twice at the British
Parliament and then seriously bring it such a task?  I am not advancing
this as an argument against Socialism: once again, nothing is further
from my mind.  There are great truths in Socialism, or no one, not even
Mr. Hyndman, would be found to hold it; and if it came, and did one-tenth
part of what it offers, I for one should make it welcome.  But if it is
to come, we may as well have some notion of what it will be like; and the
first thing to grasp is that our new polity will be designed and
administered (to put it courteously) with something short of inspiration.
It will be made, or will grow, in a human parliament; and the one thing
that will not very hugely change is human nature.  The Anarchists think
otherwise, from which it is only plain that they have not carried to the
study of history the lamp of human sympathy.

Given, then, our new polity, with its new waggon-load of laws, what
headmarks must we look for in the life?  We chafe a good deal at that
excellent thing, the income-tax, because it brings into our affairs the
prying fingers, and exposes us to the tart words, of the official.  The
official, in all degrees, is already something of a terror to many of us.
I would not willingly have to do with even a police-constable in any
other spirit than that of kindness.  I still remember in my dreams the
eye-glass of a certain _attaché_ at a certain embassy—an eyeglass that
was a standing indignity to all on whom it looked; and my next most
disagreeable remembrance is of a bracing, Republican postman in the city
of San Francisco.  I lived in that city among working folk, and what my
neighbours accepted at the postman’s hands—nay, what I took from him
myself—it is still distasteful to recall.  The bourgeois, residing in the
upper parts of society, has but few opportunities of tasting this
peculiar bowl; but about the income-tax, as I have said, or perhaps about
a patent, or in the halls of an embassy at the hands of my friend of the
eye-glass, he occasionally sets his lips to it; and he may thus imagine
(if he has that faculty of imagination, without which most faculties are
void) how it tastes to his poorer neighbours, who must drain it to the
dregs.  In every contact with authority, with their employer, with the
police, with the School Board officer, in the hospital, or in the
workhouse, they have equally the occasion to appreciate the light-hearted
civility of the man in office; and as an experimentalist in several
out-of-the-way provinces of life, I may say it has but to be felt to be
appreciated.  Well, this golden age of which we are speaking will be the
golden age of officials.  In all our concerns it will be their beloved
duty to meddle, with what tact, with what obliging words, analogy will
aid us to imagine.  It is likely these gentlemen will be periodically
elected; they will therefore have their turn of being underneath, which
does not always sweeten men’s conditions.  The laws they will have to
administer will be no clearer than those we know to-day, and the body
which is to regulate their administration no wiser than the British
Parliament.  So that upon all hands we may look for a form of servitude
most galling to the blood—servitude to many and changing masters, and for
all the slights that accompany the rule of jack-in-office.  And if the
Socialistic programme be carried out with the least fulness, we shall
have lost a thing, in most respects not much to be regretted, but as a
moderator of oppression, a thing nearly invaluable—the newspaper.  For
the independent journal is a creature of capital and competition; it
stands and falls with millionaires and railway bonds and all the abuses
and glories of to-day; and as soon as the State has fairly taken its bent
to authority and philanthropy, and laid the least touch on private
property, the days of the independent journal are numbered.  State
railways may be good things and so may State bakeries; but a State
newspaper will never be a very trenchant critic of the State officials.

But again, these officials would have no sinecure.  Crime would perhaps
be less, for some of the motives of crime we may suppose would pass away.
But if Socialism were carried out with any fulness, there would be more
contraventions.  We see already new sins ringing up like mustard—School
Board sins, factory sins, Merchant Shipping Act sins—none of which I
would be thought to except against in particular, but all of which, taken
together, show us that Socialism can be a hard master even in the
beginning.  If it go on to such heights as we hear proposed and lauded,
if it come actually to its ideal of the ant-heap, ruled with iron
justice, the number of new contraventions will be out of all proportion
multiplied.  Take the case of work alone.  Man is an idle animal.  He is
at least as intelligent as the ant; but generations of advisers have in
vain recommended him the ant’s example.  Of those who are found truly
indefatigable in business, some are misers; some are the practisers of
delightful industries, like gardening; some are students, artists,
inventors, or discoverers, men lured forward by successive hopes; and the
rest are those who live by games of skill or hazard—financiers,
billiard-players, gamblers, and the like.  But in unloved toils, even
under the prick of necessity, no man is continually sedulous.  Once
eliminate the fear of starvation, once eliminate or bound the hope of
riches, and we shall see plenty of skulking and malingering.  Society
will then be something not wholly unlike a cotton plantation in the old
days; with cheerful, careless, demoralised slaves, with elected
overseers, and, instead of the planter, a chaotic popular assembly.  If
the blood be purposeful and the soil strong, such a plantation may
succeed, and be, indeed, a busy ant-heap, with full granaries and long
hours of leisure.  But even then I think the whip will be in the
overseer’s hands, and not in vain.  For, when it comes to be a question
of each man doing his own share or the rest doing more, prettiness of
sentiment will be forgotten.  To dock the skulker’s food is not enough;
many will rather eat haws and starve on petty pilferings than put their
shoulder to the wheel for one hour daily.  For such as these, then, the
whip will be in the overseer’s hand; and his own sense of justice and the
superintendence of a chaotic popular assembly will be the only checks on
its employment.  Now, you may be an industrious man and a good citizen,
and yet not love, nor yet be loved by, Dr. Fell the inspector.  It is
admitted by private soldiers that the disfavour of a sergeant is an evil
not to be combated; offend the sergeant, they say, and in a brief while
you will either be disgraced or have deserted.  And the sergeant can no
longer appeal to the lash.  But if these things go on, we shall see, or
our sons shall see, what it is to have offended an inspector.

This for the unfortunate.  But with the fortunate also, even those whom
the inspector loves, it may not be altogether well.  It is concluded that
in such a state of society, supposing it to be financially sound, the
level of comfort will be high.  It does not follow: there are strange
depths of idleness in man, a too-easily-got sufficiency, as in the case
of the sago-eaters, often quenching the desire for all besides; and it is
possible that the men of the richest ant-heaps may sink even into
squalor.  But suppose they do not; suppose our tricksy instrument of
human nature, when we play upon it this new tune, should respond kindly;
suppose no one to be damped and none exasperated by the new conditions,
the whole enterprise to be financially sound—a vaulting supposition—and
all the inhabitants to dwell together in a golden mean of comfort: we
have yet to ask ourselves if this be what man desire, or if it be what
man will even deign to accept for a continuance.  It is certain that man
loves to eat, it is not certain that he loves that only or that best.  He
is supposed to love comfort; it is not a love, at least, that he is
faithful to.  He is supposed to love happiness; it is my contention that
he rather loves excitement.  Danger, enterprise, hope, the novel, the
aleatory, are dearer to man than regular meals.  He does not think so
when he is hungry, but he thinks so again as soon as he is fed; and on
the hypothesis of a successful ant-heap, he would never go hungry.  It
would be always after dinner in that society, as, in the land of the
Lotos-eaters, it was always afternoon; and food, which, when we have it
not, seems all-important, drops in our esteem, as soon as we have it, to
a mere prerequisite of living.

That for which man lives is not the same thing for all individuals nor in
all ages; yet it has a common base; what he seeks and what he must have
is that which will seize and hold his attention.  Regular meals and
weatherproof lodgings will not do this long.  Play in its wide sense, as
the artificial induction of sensation, including all games and all arts,
will, indeed, go far to keep him conscious of himself; but in the end he
wearies for realities.  Study or experiment, to some rare natures, is the
unbroken pastime of a life.  These are enviable natures; people shut in
the house by sickness often bitterly envy them; but the commoner man
cannot continue to exist upon such altitudes: his feet itch for physical
adventure; his blood boils for physical dangers, pleasures, and triumphs;
his fancy, the looker after new things, cannot continue to look for them
in books and crucibles, but must seek them on the breathing stage of
life.  Pinches, buffets, the glow of hope, the shock of disappointment,
furious contention with obstacles: these are the true elixir for all
vital spirits, these are what they seek alike in their romantic
enterprises and their unromantic dissipations.  When they are taken in
some pinch closer than the common, they cry, ‘Catch me here again!’ and
sure enough you catch them there again—perhaps before the week is out.
It is as old as _Robinson Crusoe_; as old as man.  Our race has not been
strained for all these ages through that sieve of dangers that we call
Natural Selection, to sit down with patience in the tedium of safety; the
voices of its fathers call it forth.  Already in our society as it
exists, the bourgeois is too much cottoned about for any zest in living;
he sits in his parlour out of reach of any danger, often out of reach of
any vicissitude but one of health; and there he yawns.  If the people in
the next villa took pot-shots at him, he might be killed indeed, but so
long as he escaped he would find his blood oxygenated and his views of
the world brighter.  If Mr. Mallock, on his way to the publishers, should
have his skirts pinned to a wall by a javelin, it would not occur to
him—at least for several hours—to ask if life were worth living; and if
such peril were a daily matter, he would ask it never more; he would have
other things to think about, he would be living indeed—not lying in a box
with cotton, safe, but immeasurably dull.  The aleatory, whether it touch
life, or fortune, or renown—whether we explore Africa or only toss for
halfpence—that is what I conceive men to love best, and that is what we
are seeking to exclude from men’s existences.  Of all forms of the
aleatory, that which most commonly attends our working men—the danger of
misery from want of work—is the least inspiriting: it does not whip the
blood, it does not evoke the glory of contest; it is tragic, but it is
passive; and yet, in so far as it is aleatory, and a peril sensibly
touching them, it does truly season the men’s lives.  Of those who fail,
I do not speak—despair should be sacred; but to those who even modestly
succeed, the changes of their life bring interest: a job found, a
shilling saved, a dainty earned, all these are wells of pleasure
springing afresh for the successful poor; and it is not from these but
from the villa-dweller that we hear complaints of the unworthiness of
life.  Much, then, as the average of the proletariat would gain in this
new state of life, they would also lose a certain something, which would
not be missed in the beginning, but would be missed progressively and
progressively lamented.  Soon there would be a looking back: there would
be tales of the old world humming in young men’s ears, tales of the tramp
and the pedlar, and the hopeful emigrant.  And in the stall-fed life of
the successful ant-heap—with its regular meals, regular duties, regular
pleasures, an even course of life, and fear excluded—the vicissitudes,
delights, and havens of to-day will seem of epic breadth.  This may seem
a shallow observation; but the springs by which men are moved lie much on
the surface.  Bread, I believe, has always been considered first, but the
circus comes close upon its heels.  Bread we suppose to be given amply;
the cry for circuses will be the louder, and if the life of our
descendants be such as we have conceived, there are two beloved pleasures
on which they will be likely to fall back: the pleasures of intrigue and
of sedition.

In all this I have supposed the ant-heap to be financially sound.  I am
no economist, only a writer of fiction; but even as such, I know one
thing that bears on the economic question—I know the imperfection of
man’s faculty for business.  The Anarchists, who count some rugged
elements of common sense among what seem to me their tragic errors, have
said upon this matter all that I could wish to say, and condemned
beforehand great economical polities.  So far it is obvious that they are
right; they may be right also in predicting a period of communal
independence, and they may even be right in thinking that desirable.  But
the rise of communes is none the less the end of economic equality, just
when we were told it was beginning.  Communes will not be all equal in
extent, nor in quality of soil, nor in growth of population; nor will the
surplus produce of all be equally marketable.  It will be the old story
of competing interests, only with a new unit; and, as it appears to me, a
new, inevitable danger.  For the merchant and the manufacturer, in this
new world, will be a sovereign commune; it is a sovereign power that will
see its crops undersold, and its manufactures worsted in the market.  And
all the more dangerous that the sovereign power should be small.  Great
powers are slow to stir; national affronts, even with the aid of
newspapers, filter slowly into popular consciousness; national losses are
so unequally shared, that one part of the population will be counting its
gains while another sits by a cold hearth.  But in the sovereign commune
all will be centralised and sensitive.  When jealousy springs up, when
(let us say) the commune of Poole has overreached the commune of
Dorchester, irritation will run like quicksilver throughout the body
politic; each man in Dorchester will have to suffer directly in his diet
and his dress; even the secretary, who drafts the official
correspondence, will sit down to his task embittered, as a man who has
dined ill and may expect to dine worse; and thus a business difference
between communes will take on much the same colour as a dispute between
diggers in the lawless West, and will lead as directly to the arbitrament
of blows.  So that the establishment of the communal system will not only
reintroduce all the injustices and heart-burnings of economic inequality,
but will, in all human likelihood, inaugurate a world of hedgerow
warfare.  Dorchester will march on Poole, Sherborne on Dorchester,
Wimborne on both; the waggons will be fired on as they follow the
highway, the trains wrecked on the lines, the ploughman will go armed
into the field of tillage; and if we have not a return of ballad
literature, the local press at least will celebrate in a high vein the
victory of Cerne Abbas or the reverse of Toller Porcorum.  At least this
will not be dull; when I was younger, I could have welcomed such a world
with relief; but it is the New-Old with a vengeance, and irresistibly
suggests the growth of military powers and the foundation of new empires.




COLLEGE PAPERS


CHAPTER I—EDINBURGH STUDENTS IN 1824


On the 2nd of January 1824 was issued the prospectus of the _Lapsus
Linguæ_; _or_, _the College Tatler_; and on the 7th the first number
appeared.  On Friday the 2nd of April ‘_Mr. Tatler_ became speechless.’
Its history was not all one success; for the editor (who applies to
himself the words of Iago, ‘I am nothing if I am not critical’)
overstepped the bounds of caution, and found himself seriously embroiled
with the powers that were.  There appeared in No. XVI. a most bitter
satire upon Sir John Leslie, in which he was compared to Falstaff,
charged with puffing himself, and very prettily censured for publishing
only the first volume of a class-book, and making all purchasers pay for
both.  Sir John Leslie took up the matter angrily, visited Carfrae the
publisher, and threatened him with an action, till he was forced to turn
the hapless _Lapsus_ out of doors.  The maltreated periodical found
shelter in the shop of Huie, Infirmary Street; and No. XVII. was duly
issued from the new office.  No. XVII. beheld _Mr. Tatler’s_ humiliation,
in which, with fulsome apology and not very credible assurances of
respect and admiration, he disclaims the article in question, and
advertises a new issue of No. XVI. with all objectionable matter omitted.
This, with pleasing euphemism, he terms in a later advertisement, ‘a new
and improved edition.’  This was the only remarkable adventure of _Mr.
Tatler’s_ brief existence; unless we consider as such a silly Chaldee
manuscript in imitation of _Blackwood_, and a letter of reproof from a
divinity student on the impiety of the same dull effusion.  He laments
the near approach of his end in pathetic terms.  ‘How shall we summon up
sufficient courage,’ says he, ‘to look for the last time on our beloved
little devil and his inestimable proof-sheet?  How shall we be able to
pass No. 14 Infirmary Street and feel that all its attractions are over?
How shall we bid farewell for ever to that excellent man, with the long
greatcoat, wooden leg and wooden board, who acts as our representative at
the gate of _Alma Mater_?’  But alas! he had no choice: _Mr. Tatler_,
whose career, he says himself, had been successful, passed peacefully
away, and has ever since dumbly implored ‘the bringing home of bell and
burial.’

_Alter et idem_.  A very different affair was the _Lapsus Linguæ_ from
the _Edinburgh University Magazine_.  The two prospectuses alone, laid
side by side, would indicate the march of luxury and the repeal of the
paper duty.  The penny bi-weekly broadside of session 1828–4 was almost
wholly dedicated to Momus.  Epigrams, pointless letters, amorous verses,
and University grievances are the continual burthen of the song.  But
_Mr. Tatler_ was not without a vein of hearty humour; and his pages
afford what is much better: to wit, a good picture of student life as it
then was.  The students of those polite days insisted on retaining their
hats in the class-room.  There was a cab-stance in front of the College;
and ‘Carriage Entrance’ was posted above the main arch, on what the
writer pleases to call ‘coarse, unclassic boards.’  The benches of the
‘Speculative’ then, as now, were red; but all other Societies (the
‘Dialectic’ is the only survivor) met downstairs, in some rooms of which
it is pointedly said that ‘nothing else could conveniently be made of
them.’  However horrible these dungeons may have been, it is certain that
they were paid for, and that far too heavily for the taste of session
1823–4, which found enough calls upon its purse for porter and toasted
cheese at Ambrose’s, or cranberry tarts and ginger-wine at Doull’s.
Duelling was still a possibility; so much so that when two medicals fell
to fisticuffs in Adam Square, it was seriously hinted that single combat
would be the result.  Last and most wonderful of all, Gall and Spurzheim
were in every one’s mouth; and the Law student, after having exhausted
Byron’s poetry and Scott’s novels, informed the ladies of his belief in
phrenology.  In the present day he would dilate on ‘Red as a rose is
she,’ and then mention that he attends Old Greyfriars’, as a tacit claim
to intelle

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