Part 10 (1/2)

There is the impulsive, uninquiring charity that makes the trade of the skilful begging-letter writer a lucrative profession, and makes men and women who are rich, benevolent and weak, the habitual prey of greedy impostors. There is the old-established charity for ministering to simple poverty which draws to its centre all the pauperism of the neighbouring districts, depresses wages, and impoverishes the very district or cla.s.s it was intended to benefit. There are charities which not only largely diminish the sufferings that are the natural consequence and punishment of vice; but even make the lot of the criminal and the vicious a better one than that of the hard-working poor. There are overlapping charities dealing with the same department, but kept up with lavish waste through the rivalry of different religious denominations, or in the interests of the officials connected with them; belated or superannuated charities formed to deal with circ.u.mstances or sufferings that have in a large degree pa.s.sed away--useless, or almost useless, charities established to carry out some silly fad or to gratify some silly vanity; sectarian charities intended to further ends which, in the eyes of all but the members of one sect, are not only useless but mischievous; charities that encourage thriftless marriages, or make it easy for men to neglect obvious duties, or keep a semi-pauper population stationary in employments and on a soil where they can never prosper, or in other ways handicap, impede or divert the natural and healthy course of industry. Ill.u.s.trations of all these evils will occur to every careful student of the subject. Unintelligent, thoughtless, purely impulsive charity, and charity which is inspired by some other motive than a real desire to relieve suffering, will constantly go wrong, but every intelligent man can find without difficulty vast fields on which the largest generosity may be expended with abundant fruit.

Hospitals and kindred inst.i.tutions for alleviating great unavoidable calamities, and giving the sick poor something of the same chances of recovery as the rich, for the most part fall under this head. Money will seldom be wasted which is spent in promoting kinds of knowledge, enterprise or research that bring no certain remuneration proportioned to their value; in a.s.sisting poor young men of ability and industry to develop their special talents; in encouraging in their many different forms thrift, self-help and co-operation; in alleviating the inevitable suffering that follows some great catastrophe on land or sea, or great transitions of industry, or great fluctuations and depressions in cla.s.s prosperity; in giving the means of healthy recreation or enn.o.bling pleasures to the denizens of a crowded town. The vast sphere of education opens endless fields for generous expenditure, and every religious man will find objects which, in the opinion not only of men of his own persuasion, but also of many others, are transcendently important. Nor is it a right principle that charity should be denied to all calamities which are in some degree due to the fault of the sufferer, or which might have been averted by exceptional forethought or self-denial. Some economists write as if a far higher standard of will and morals should be expected among the poor and the uneducated than can be found among the rich. Good sense and right feeling will here easily draw the line, abstaining from charities that have a real influence in encouraging improvidence or vice, yet making due allowance for the normal weaknesses of our nature.

In all these ways the very rich can find ample opportunities for useful benevolence. It is the prerogative of great wealth that it can often cure what others can only palliate, and can establish permanent sources of good which will continue long after the donors have pa.s.sed away. In dealing with individual cases of distress, rich men who have neither the time nor the inclination to investigate the special circ.u.mstances will do well to rely largely on the recommendation of others. If they choose trustworthy, competent and sensible advisers with as much judgment as they commonly show in the management of their private affairs, they are not likely to go astray. There never was a period when a larger amount of intelligent and disinterested labour was employed in careful and detailed examination of the circ.u.mstances and needs of the poor. The parish clergyman, the district visitor, the agents of the Charity Organization Society which annually selects its special cases of well-ascertained need, will abundantly furnish them with the knowledge they require.

The advantage or disadvantage of the presence in a country of a large cla.s.s of men possessing fortunes far exceeding anything that can really administer to their enjoyment is a question which has greatly divided both political economists and moralists. The former were long accustomed to maintain somewhat exclusively that laws and inst.i.tutions should be established with the object of furthering the greatest possible acc.u.mulation of wealth, and that a system of unrestricted compet.i.tion, coupled with equal laws, giving each man the most complete security in the possession and disposal of his property, was the best means of attaining this end. They urged with great truth that, although under such a system the inequalities of fortune will be enormous, most of the wealth of the very rich will inevitably be distributed in the form of wages, purchases, and industrial enterprises through the community at large, and that, other things being equal, the richest country will on the whole be the happiest. They clearly saw the complete delusion of the common a.s.sertions that the more millionaires there are in a country the more paupers will multiply, and that society is dividing between the enormously rich and the abjectly poor. The great industrial communities, in which there are the largest number of very wealthy men, are also the centres in which we find the most prosperous middle cla.s.s, and the highest and most progressive rates of wages and standards of comfort among the poor. Great corruption in many forms no doubt exists in them, but it can scarcely be maintained with confidence that the standard of integrity is on the whole lower in these than in other countries, and they at least escape what in many poor countries is one of the most fruitful causes of corruption in all branches of administration--the inadequate pay of the servants of the Crown. The path of liberty in the eyes of economists of this school is the path of wisdom, and they were profoundly distrustful of all legislative attempts to restrict or interfere with the course of industrial progress.

In our own generation a somewhat different tendency has manifestly strengthened. It has been said that past political economists paid too much attention to the acc.u.mulation and too little to the distribution of wealth. Men have become more sensible to the high level of happiness and moral well-being that has been attained in some of the smaller and somewhat stagnant countries of Europe, where wealth is more generally attained by thrift and steady industry than by great industrial or commercial enterprise, in which there are few large fortunes but little acute poverty, a low standard of luxury, but a high standard of real comfort. The enormous evils that have grown up in wealthy countries, in the form of company-mongering, excessive compet.i.tion, extravagant and often vicious luxury, and dishonest administration of public funds, are more and more felt, and it is only too true that in these countries there are large and influential circles of society in which all considerations of character, intellect, or manners seem lost in an intense thirst for wealth and for the things that it can give.

Sometimes we find vast fortunes in countries where there is but little enterprise and a very low standard of comfort among the people, and where this is the case it is usually due to unequal laws or corrupt administration. In the free, democratic, and industrial communities great fluctuations and disparities of wealth are inevitable, and some of the most colossal fortunes have, no doubt, been made by the evil methods I have described. They are, however, only a minority, and not a very large one. Like all the great successes of life, abnormal acc.u.mulation of wealth is usually due to the combination in different proportions of ability, character, and chance, and is not tainted with dishonesty. On the whole, the question that should be asked is not what a man has, but how he obtained it and how he uses it. When wealth is honestly acquired and wisely and generously used, the more rich men there are in a country the better.

There has probably never been a period in the history of the world when the conditions of industry, a.s.sisted by the great gold discoveries in several parts of the globe, were so favourable to the formation of enormous fortunes as at present, and when the race of millionaires was so large. The majority belong to the English-speaking race; probably most of their gigantic fortunes have been rapidly acc.u.mulated, and bring with them none of the necessary, hereditary, and clearly defined obligations of a great landowner, while a considerable proportion of them have fallen to the lot of men who, through their education or early habits, have not many cultivated or naturally expensive tastes. In England many of the new millionaires become great landowners and set up great establishments. In America, where country tastes are less marked and where the difficulties of domestic service are very great, this is less common. In both countries the number of men with immense fortunes, absolutely at their own disposal, has enormously increased, and the character of their expenditure has become a matter of real national importance.

Much of it, no doubt, goes in simple luxury and ostentation, or in mere speculation, or in restoring old and dilapidated fortunes through the marriages of rank with money which are so characteristic of our time; but much also is devoted to charitable or philanthropic purposes. In this, as in most things, motives are often very blended. To men of such fortunes, such expenditure, even on a large scale, means no real self-sacrifice, and the inducements to it are not always of the highest kind. To some men it is a matter of ambition--a legitimate and useful ambition--to obtain the enduring and honourable fame which attaches to the founder of a great philanthropic or educational establishment.

Others find that, in England at least, large philanthropic expenditure is one of the easiest and shortest paths to social success, bringing men and women of low extraction and bad manners into close and frequent connection with the recognised leaders of society; while others again have discovered that it is the quickest way of effacing the stigma which still in some degree attaches to wealth which has been acquired by dishonourable or dubious means. Fas.h.i.+on, social ambition, and social rivalries are by no means unknown in the fields of charity. There are many, however, in whose philanthropy the element of self has no place, and whose sole desire is to expend their money in forms that can be of most real and permanent benefit to others.

Such men have great power, and, if their philanthropic expenditure is wisely guided, it may be of incalculable benefit. I have already indicated many of the channels in which it may safely flow, but one or two additional hints on the subject may not be useless. Perhaps as a general rule these men will find that they can act most wisely by strengthening and enlarging old charities which are really good, rather than by founding new ones. Compet.i.tion is the soul of industry, but certainly not of charity, and there is in England a deplorable waste of money and machinery through the excessive multiplication of inst.i.tutions intended for the same objects. The kind of ambition to which I have just referred tends to make men prefer new charities which can be identified with their names; the paid officials connected with charities have become a large and powerful profession, and their influence is naturally used in the same direction; the many different religious bodies in the country often refuse to combine, and each desires to have its own inst.i.tutions; and there are fas.h.i.+ons in charity which, while they greatly stimulate generosity, have too often the effect of diverting it from the older and more un.o.btrusive forms. On the other hand, one of the most important facts in our present economical condition is that an extraordinary and almost unparalleled development of industrial prosperity has been accompanied by extreme and long-continued agricultural depression and by a great fall in the rate of interest.

Wealth in many forms is acc.u.mulating with wonderful rapidity, and the increased rate of wages is diffusing prosperity among the working cla.s.ses; but those who depend directly or indirectly on agricultural rents or on interest of money invested in trust securities have been suffering severely, and they comprise some of the most useful, blameless, and meritorious cla.s.ses in the community. The same causes that have injured them have fallen with crus.h.i.+ng severity on old-established inst.i.tutions which usually derive their income largely or entirely from the rent of land or from money invested in the public funds. The bitter cry of distress that is rising from the hospitals and many other ancient charities, from the universities, from the clergy of the Established Church, abundantly proves it.

The preference, however, to be given to old charities rather than to new ones is subject to very many exceptions. It does not apply to new countries or to the many cases in which changes and developments of industry have planted vast agglomerations of population in districts which were once but thinly populated, and therefore but little provided with charitable or educational inst.i.tutions. Nor does it apply to the many cases in which the circ.u.mstances of modern life have called into existence new forms of charity, new wants, new dangers and evils to be combated, new departments of knowledge to be cultivated. One of the greatest difficulties of the older universities is that of providing, out of their shrinking endowments, for the teaching of branches of science and knowledge which have only come into existence, or at least into prominence, long after these universities were established, and some of which require not only trained teachers but costly apparatus and laboratories. Increasing international compet.i.tion and enlarged scientific knowledge have rendered necessary an amount of technical and agricultural education never dreamed of by our ancestors; and the rise of the great provincial towns and the greater intensity of provincial life and provincial patriotism, as well as the changes that have pa.s.sed over the position both of the working and middle cla.s.ses, have created a genuine demand for educational establishments of a different type from the older universities. The higher education of women is essentially a nineteenth-century work, and it has been carried on without the a.s.sistance of old endowments and with very little help from modern Parliaments. In the distribution of public funds a cla.s.s which is wholly unrepresented in Parliament seldom gets its fair share; and higher education, like most forms of science, like most of the higher forms of literature, and like many valuable forms of research, never can be self-supporting. There are great branches of knowledge which without established endowments must remain uncultivated, or be cultivated only by men of considerable private means. Some invaluable curative agencies, such as convalescent homes in different countries and climates and for different diseases, have grown up in our own generation, as well as some of the most fruitful forms of medical research and some of the most efficacious methods of giving healthy change and brightness to the lives that are most monotonous and overstrained. Every great revolution in industry, in population, and even in knowledge, brings with it new and special wants, and there are cases in which a.s.sisted emigration is one of the best forms of charity.

These are but a few ill.u.s.trations of the directions in which the large surplus funds which many of the very rich are prepared to expend on philanthropic purposes may profitably go. There is a marked and increasing tendency in our age to meet all the various exigencies of Society, as they arise, by State aid resting on compulsory taxation. In countries where the levels of fortune are such that few men have incomes greatly in excess of their real or fact.i.tious wants, this method will probably be necessary; but many of the wants I have described can be better met by the old English method of intelligent private generosity, and in a country in which the number of the very rich is so great and so increasing, this generosity should not be wanting.

FOOTNOTE:

[67] _Notes on Life._

CHAPTER XIV

MARRIAGE

The beautiful saying of Newton, that he felt like a child who had been picking up a few pebbles on the sh.o.r.e of the great ocean of undiscovered truth, may well occur to any writer who attempts to say something on the vast subject of marriage. The infinite variety of circ.u.mstances and characters affects it in infinitely various ways, and all that can here be done is to collect a few somewhat isolated and miscellaneous remarks upon it. Yet it is a subject which cannot be omitted in a book like this. In numerous cases it is the great turning-point of a life, and in all cases when it takes place it is one of the most important of its events. Whatever else marriage may do or fail to do, it never leaves a man unchanged. His intellect, his character, his happiness, his way of looking on the world, will all be influenced by it. If it does not raise or strengthen him it will lower or weaken. If it does not deepen happiness it will impair it. It brings with it duties, interests, habits, hopes, cares, sorrows, and joys that will penetrate into every fissure of his nature and modify the whole course of his life.

It is strange to think with how much levity and how little knowledge a contract which is so indissoluble and at the same time so momentous is constantly a.s.sumed; sometimes under the influence of a blinding pa.s.sion and at an age when life is still looked upon as a romance or an idyll; sometimes as a matter of mere ambition and calculation, through a desire for wealth or t.i.tle or position. Men and women rely on the force of habit and necessity to accommodate themselves to conditions they have never really understood or realised.

In most cases different motives combine, though in different degrees.

Sometimes an overpowering affection for the person is the strongest motive and eclipses all others. Sometimes the main motive to marriage is a desire to be married. It is to obtain a settled household and position; to be relieved from the 'unchartered freedom' and the 'vague desires' of a lonely life; to find some object of affection; to acquire the steady habits and the exemption from household cares which are essential to a career; to perpetuate a race; perhaps to escape from family discomforts, or to introduce a new and happy influence into a family. With these motives a real affection for a particular person is united, but it is not of such a character as to preclude choice, judgment, comparison, and a consideration of worldly advantages.

It is a wise saying of Swift that there would be fewer unhappy marriages in the world if women thought less of making nets and more of making cages. The qualities that attract, fascinate, and dazzle are often widely different from those which are essential to a happy marriage.

Sometimes they are distinctly hostile to it. More frequently they conduce to it, but only in an inferior or subsidiary degree. The turn of mind and character that makes the accomplished flirt is certainly not that which promises best for the happiness of a married life; and distinguished beauty, brilliant talents, and the heroic qualities that play a great part in the affairs of life, and s.h.i.+ne conspicuously in the social sphere, sink into a minor place among the elements of married happiness. In marriage the identification of two lives is so complete that it brings every faculty and gift into play, but in degrees and proportions very different from public life or casual intercourse and relations. The most essential are often wanting in a brilliant life, and are largely developed in lives and characters that rise little, if at all, above the commonplace. In the words of a very shrewd man of the world: 'Before marriage the shape, the figure, the complexion carry all before them; after marriage the mind and character unexpectedly claim their share, and that the largest, of importance.'[68]

The relation is one of the closest intimacy and confidence, and if the ident.i.ty of interest between the two partners is not complete, each has an almost immeasurable power of injuring the other. A moral basis of sterling qualities is of capital importance. A true, honest, and trustworthy nature, capable of self-sacrifice and self-restraint, should rank in the first line, and after that a kindly, equable, and contented temper, a power of sympathy, a habit of looking at the better and brighter side of men and things. Of intellectual qualities, judgment, tact, and order are perhaps the most valuable. Above almost all things, men should seek in marriage perfect sanity, and dread everything like hysteria. Beauty will continue to be a delight, though with much diminished power, but grace and the charm of manner will retain their full attraction to the last. They brighten in innumerable ways the little things of life, and life is mainly made up of little things, exposed to petty frictions, and requiring small decisions and small sacrifices. Wide interests and large appreciations are, in the marriage relation, more important than any great constructive or creative talent, and the power to soothe, to sympathise, to counsel, and to endure, than the highest qualities of the hero or the saint. It is by these alone that the married life attains its full measure of perfection.

'Tu mihi curarum requies, tu nocte vel atra Lumen, et in solis tu mihi turba locis.'[69]

But while this is true of all marriages, it is obvious that different professions and circ.u.mstances of life will demand different qualities. A hard-working labouring man, or a man who, though not labouring with his hands, is living a life of poverty and struggle, will not seek in marriage a type of character exactly the same as a man who is born to a great position, and who has large social and administrative duties to discharge. The wife of a clergyman immersed in the many interests of a parish; the wife of a soldier or a merchant, who may have to live in many lands, with long periods of separation from her husband, and perhaps amid many hards.h.i.+ps; the wife of an active and ambitious politician; the wife of a busy professional man incessantly occupied outside his home; the wife of a man whose health or business or habits keep him constantly in his house, will each need some special qualities.

There are few things in which both men and women naturally differ more than in the elasticity and adaptiveness of their natures, in their power of bearing monotony, in the place which habit, routine, and variety hold in their happiness; and in different kinds of life these things have very different degrees of importance. Special family circ.u.mstances, such as children by a former marriage, or difficult and delicate relations with members of the family of one partner, will require the exercise of special qualities. Such relations, indeed, are often one of the most searching and severe tests of the sterling qualities of female character.

Probably, on the whole, the best presumption of a successful choice in marriage will be found where the wife has not been educated in circ.u.mstances or ideas absolutely dissimilar from those of her married life. Marriages of different races or colours are rarely happy, and the same thing is true of marriages between persons of social levels that are so different as to entail great differences of manners and habits.