The Crown of Wild Olive by John Ruskin (audio ebook reader txt) 📖

charities. My impression is that this is much beneath the truth, but at all events it leaves out of consideration much the heaviest and saddest form of charity—the maintenance, by the working members of families, of the unfortunate or ill-conducted persons whom the general course of misrule now leaves helpless to be the burden of the rest.

Now I want to get first at some, I do not say approximate, but at all events some suggestive, estimate of the quantity of real distress and misguided life in this country. Then next, I want some fairly representative estimate of our private expenditure in luxuries. We won't spend more, publicly, it appears, than eight hundred thousand a year, on educating men gratis. I want to know, as nearly as possible, what we spend privately a year, in educating horses gratis. Let us, at least, quit ourselves in this from the taunt of Rabshakeh, and see that for every horse we train also a horseman; and that the rider be at least as high-bred as the horse, not jockey, but chevalier. Again, we spend eight hundred thousand, which is certainly a great deal of money, in making rough minds bright. I want to know how much we spend annually in making rough stones bright; that is to say, what may be the united annual sum, or near it, of our jewellers' bills. So much we pay for educating children gratis;—how much for educating diamonds gratis? and which pays best for brightening, the spirit or the charcoal? Let us get those two items set down with some sincerity, and a few more of the same kind. Publicly set down. We must not be ashamed of the way we spend our money. If our right hand is not to know what our left does, it must not be because it would be ashamed if it did.

That is, therefore, quite the first practical thing to be done. Let every man who wishes well to his country, render it yearly an account of his income, and of the main heads of his expenditure; or, if he is ashamed to do so, let him no more impute to the poor their poverty as a crime, nor set them to break stones in order to frighten them from committing it. To lose money ill is indeed often a crime; but to get it ill is a worse one, and to spend it ill, worst of all. You object, Lords of England, to increase, to the poor, the wages you give them, because they spend them, you say, unadvisedly. Render them, therefore, an account of the wages which they give you; and show them, by your example, how to spend theirs, to the last farthing advisedly.

It is indeed time to make this an acknowledged subject of instruction, to the workingman,—how to spend his wages. For, gentlemen, we must give that instruction, whether we will or no, one way or the other. We have given it in years gone by; and now we find fault with our peasantry for having been too docile, and profited too shrewdly by our tuition. Only a few days since I had a letter from the wife of a village rector, a man of common sense and kindness, who was greatly troubled in his mind because it was precisely the men who got highest wages in summer that came destitute to his door in the winter. Destitute, and of riotous temper—for their method of spending wages in their period of prosperity was by sitting two days a week in the tavern parlor, ladling port wine, not out of bowls, but out of buckets. Well, gentlemen, who taught them that method of festivity? Thirty years ago, I, a most inexperienced freshman, went to my first college supper; at the head of the table sat a nobleman of high promise and of admirable powers, since dead of palsy; there also we had in the midst of us, not buckets, indeed, but bowls as large as buckets; there also, we helped ourselves with ladles. There (for this beginning of college education was compulsory), I choosing ladlefuls of punch instead of claret, because I was then able, unperceived to pour them into my waistcoat instead of down my throat, stood it out to the end, and helped to carry four of my fellow-students, one of them the son of the head of a college, head foremost, down stairs and home.

Such things are no more; but the fruit of them remains, and will for many a day to come. The laborers whom you cannot now shut out of the ale-house are only the too faithful disciples of the gentlemen who were wont to shut themselves into the dining-room. The gentlemen have not thought it necessary, in order to correct their own habits, to diminish their incomes; and, believe me, the way to deal with your drunken workman is not to lower his wages,—but to mend his wits.[140]

And if indeed we do not yet see quite clearly how to deal with the sins of our poor brother, it is possible that our dimness of sight may still have other causes that can be cast out. There are two opposite cries of the great liberal and conservative parties, which are both most right, and worthy to be rallying cries. On their side "let every man have his chance;" on yours "let every man stand in his place." Yes, indeed, let that be so, every man in his place, and every man fit for it. See that he holds that place from Heaven's Providence; and not from his family's Providence. Let the Lords Spiritual quit themselves of simony, we laymen will look after the heretics for them. Let the Lords Temporal quit themselves of nepotism, and we will take care of their authority for them. Publish for us, you soldiers, an army gazette, in which the one subject of daily intelligence shall be the grounds of promotion; a gazette which shall simply tell us, what there certainly can be no detriment to the service in our knowing, when any officer is appointed to a new command,—what his former services and successes have been,—whom he has superseded,—and on what ground. It will be always a satisfaction to us; it may sometimes be an advantage to you: and then, when there is really necessary debate respecting reduction of wages, let us always begin not with the wages of the industrious classes, but with those of the idle ones. Let there be honorary titles, if people like them; but let there be no honorary incomes.

So much for the master's motto, "Every man in his place." Next for the laborer's motto, "Every man his chance." Let us mend that for them a little, and say, "Every man his certainty"—certainty, that if he does well, he will be honored, and aided, and advanced in such degree as may be fitting for his faculty and consistent with his peace; and equal certainty that if he does ill, he will by sure justice be judged, and by sure punishment be chastised; if it may be, corrected; and if that may not be, condemned. That is the right reading of the Republican motto, "Every man his chance." And then, with such a system of government, pure, watchful and just, you may approach your great problem of national education, or in other words, of national employment. For all education begins in work. What we think, or what we know; or what we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The only thing of consequence is what we do; and for man, woman, or child, the first point of education is to make them do their best. It is the law of good economy to make the best of everything. How much more to make the best of every creature! Therefore, when your pauper comes to you and asks for bread, ask of him instantly—What faculty have you? What can you do best? Can you drive a nail into wood? Go and mend the parish fences. Can you lay a brick? Mend the walls of the cottages where the wind comes in. Can you lift a spadeful of earth? Turn this field up three feet deep all over. Can you only drag a weight with your shoulders? Stand at the bottom of this hill and help up the overladen horses. Can you weld iron and chisel stone? Fortify this wreck-strewn coast into a harbor; and change these shifting sands into fruitful ground. Wherever death was, bring life; that is to be your work; that your parish refuge; that your education. So and no otherwise can we meet existent distress. But for the continual education of the whole people, and for their future happiness, they must have such consistent employment as shall develop all the powers of the fingers, and the limbs, and the brain: and that development is only to be obtained by hand-labor, of which you have these four great divisions—hand-labor on the earth, hand-labor on the sea, hand-labor in art, hand-labor in war. Of the last two of these I cannot speak to-night, and of the first two only with extreme brevity.

I. Hand-labor on the earth, the work of the husbandman and of the shepherd;—to dress the earth and to keep the flocks of it—the first task of man, and the final one—the education always of noblest lawgivers, kings and teachers; the education of Hesiod, of Moses, of David, of all the true strength of Rome; and all its tenderness: the pride of Cincinnatus, and the inspiration of Virgil. Hand-labor on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with singing:—not steam-piston labor on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with steam-whistling. You will have no prophet's voice accompanied by that shepherd's pipe, and pastoral symphony. Do you know that lately, in Cumberland, in the chief pastoral district of England—in Wordsworth's own home—a procession of villagers on their festa day provided for themselves, by way of music, a steam-plough whistling at the head of them.

Give me patience while I put the principle of machine labor before you, as clearly and in as short compass as possible; it is one that should be known at this juncture. Suppose a farming proprietor needs to employ a hundred men on his estate, and that the labor of these hundred men is enough, but not more than enough, to till all his land, and to raise from it food for his own family, and for the hundred laborers. He is obliged, under such circumstances, to maintain all the men in moderate comfort, and can only by economy accumulate much for himself. But, suppose he contrive a machine that will easily do the work of fifty men, with only one man to watch it. This sounds like a great advance in civilization. The farmer of course gets his machine made, turns off the fifty men, who may starve or emigrate at their choice, and now he can keep half of the produce of his estate, which formerly went to feed them, all to himself. That is the essential and constant operation of machinery among us at this moment.

Nay, it is at first answered; no man can in reality keep half the produce of an estate to himself, nor can he in the end keep more than his own human share of anything; his riches must diffuse themselves at some time; he must maintain somebody else with them, however he spends them. That is mainly true (not altogether so), for food and fuel are in ordinary circumstances personally wasted by rich people, in quantities which would save many lives. One of my own great luxuries, for instance, is candlelight—and I probably burn, for myself alone, as many candles during the winter, as would comfort the