Part 7 (1/2)
124. Briefly, then, and in main points, subject in minor ones to such modifications in detail as local circ.u.mstances and characters would render expedient, those following are laws such as a prudent nation would inst.i.tute respecting its marriages. Permission to marry should be the reward held in sight of its youth during the entire latter part of the course of their education; and it should be granted as the national attestation that the first portion of their lives had been rightly fulfilled. It should not be attainable without earnest and consistent effort, though put within the reach of all who were willing to make such effort; and the granting of it should be a public testimony to the fact, that the youth or maid to whom it was given had lived, within their proper sphere, a modest and virtuous life, and had attained such skill in their proper handicraft, and in arts of household economy, as might give well-founded expectations of their being able honorably to maintain and teach their children.
125. No girl should receive her permission to marry before her seventeenth birthday, nor any youth before his twenty-first; and it should be a point of somewhat distinguished honor with both s.e.xes to gain their permission of marriage in the eighteenth and twenty-second years; and a recognized disgrace not to have gained it at least before the close of their twenty-first and twenty-fourth. I do not mean that they should in any wise hasten actual marriage; but only that they should hold it a point of honor to have the right to marry. In every year there should be two festivals, one on the first of May, and one at the feast of harvest home in each district, at which festivals their permissions to marry should be given publicly to the maidens and youths who had won them in that half-year; and they should be crowned, the maids by the old French t.i.tle of Rosieres, and the youths, perhaps by some name rightly derived from one supposed signification of the word ”bachelor,” ”laurel fruit,” and so led in joyful procession, with music and singing, through the city street or village lane, and the day ended with feasting of the poor.
126. And every bachelor and rosiere should be ent.i.tled to claim, if they needed it, according to their position in life, a fixed income from the State, for seven years from the day of their marriage, for the setting up of their homes; and, however rich they might be by inheritance, their income should not be permitted to exceed a given sum, proportioned to their rank, for the seven years following that in which they had obtained their permission to marry, but should acc.u.mulate in the trust of the State until that seventh year, in which they should be put (on certain conditions) finally in possession of their property; and the men, thus necessarily not before their twenty-eighth, nor usually later than their thirty-first year, become eligible to offices of State. So that the rich and poor should not be sharply separated in the beginning of the war of life; but the one supported against the first stress of it long enough to enable them, by proper forethought and economy, to secure their footing; and the other trained somewhat in the use of moderate means, before they were permitted to have the command of abundant ones. And of the sources from which these State incomes for the married poor should be supplied, or of the treatment of those of our youth whose conduct rendered it advisable to refuse them permission to marry, I defer what I have to say till we come to the general subjects of taxation and criminal discipline; leaving the proposals made in this letter to bear, for the present, whatever aspect of mere romance and unrealizable vision they probably may, and to most readers, such as they a.s.suredly will. Nor shall I make the slightest effort to redeem them from these imputations; for though there is nothing in all their purport which would not be approved, as in the deepest sense ”practical”--by the Spirit of Paradise--
”Which gives to all the self-same bent, Whose lives are wise and innocent,”
and though I know that national justice in conduct, and peace in heart, could by no other laws be so swiftly secured, I confess with much _dis_peace of heart, that both justice and happiness have at this day become, in England, ”romantic impossibilities.”
LETTER XXI.
OF THE DIGNITY OF THE FOUR FINE ARTS; AND OF THE PROPER SYSTEM OF RETAIL TRADE.
_April 15, 1867._
127. I return now to the part of the subject at which I was interrupted--the inquiry as to the proper means of finding persons willing to maintain themselves and others by degrading occupations.
That, on the whole, simply manual occupations _are_ degrading, I suppose I may a.s.sume you to admit; at all events, the fact is so, and I suppose few general readers will have any doubt of it.[A]
[A] Many of my working readers have disputed this statement eagerly, feeling the good effect of work in themselves; but observe, I only say, _simply_ or _totally_ manual work; and that, alone, _is_ degrading, though often in measure, refres.h.i.+ng, wholesome, and necessary. So it is highly necessary and wholesome to eat sometimes; but degrading to eat all day, as to labor with the hands all day. But it is not degrading to think all day--if you can. A highly-bred court lady, rightly interested in politics and literature, is a much finer type of the human creature than a servant of all work, however clever and honest.
Granting this, it follows as a direct consequence that it is the duty of all persons in higher stations of life, by every means in their power to diminish their demand for work of such kind, _and to live with as little aid from the lower trades_, as they can possibly contrive.
128. I suppose you see that this conclusion is not a little at variance with received notions on political economy? It is popularly supposed that it benefits a nation to invent a want. But the fact is, that the true benefit is in extinguis.h.i.+ng a want--in living with as few wants as possible.
I cannot tell you the contempt I feel for the common writers on political economy, in their stupefied missing of this first principle of all human economy--individual or political--to live, namely, with as few wants as possible, and to waste nothing of what is given you to supply them.
129. This ought to be the first lesson of every rich man's political code. ”Sir,” his tutor should early say to him, ”you are so placed in society,--it may be for your misfortune, it _must_ be for your trial--that you are likely to be maintained all your life by the labor of other men. You will have to make shoes for n.o.body, but some one will have to make a great many for you. You will have to dig ground for n.o.body, but some one will have to dig through every summer's hot day for you. You will build houses and make clothes for no one, but many a rough hand must knead clay, and many an elbow be crooked to the st.i.tch, to keep that body of yours warm and fine. Now remember, whatever you and your work may be worth, the less your keep costs, the better. It does not cost money only. It costs degradation. You do not merely employ these people. You also tread upon them. It cannot be helped;--you have your place, and they have theirs; but see that you tread as lightly as possible, and on as few as possible. What food, and clothes, and lodging, you honestly need, for your health and peace, you may righteously take. See that you take the plainest you can serve yourself with--that you waste or wear nothing vainly--and that you employ no man in furnis.h.i.+ng you with any useless luxury.”
130. That is the first lesson of Christian--or human--economy; and depend upon it, my friend, it is a sound one, and has every voice and vote of the spirits of Heaven and earth to back it, whatever views the Manchester men, or any other manner of men, may take respecting ”demand and supply.” Demand what you deserve, and you shall be supplied with it, for your good. Demand what you do _not_ deserve, and you shall be supplied with something which you have not demanded, and which Nature perceives that you deserve, quite to the contrary of your good. That is the law of your existence, and if you do not make it the law of your resolved acts, so much, precisely, the worse for you and all connected with you.
131. Yet observe, though it is out of its proper place said here, this law forbids no luxury which men are not degraded in providing. You may have Paul Veronese to paint your ceiling, if you like, or Benvenuto Cellini to make cups for you. But you must not employ a hundred divers to find beads to st.i.tch over your sleeve. (Did you see the account of the sales of the Esterhazy jewels the other day?)
And the degree in which you recognize the difference between these two kinds of services, is precisely what makes the difference between your being a civilized person or a barbarian. If you keep slaves to furnish forth your dress--to glut your stomach--sustain your indolence--or deck your pride, you are a barbarian. If you keep servants, properly cared for, to furnish you with what you verily want, and no more than that--you are a ”civil” person--a person capable of the qualities of citizens.h.i.+p.[A]
[A] Compare 'The Crown of Wild Olive,' ---- 79, 118, and 122.
132. Now, farther, observe that in a truly civilized and disciplined state, no man would be allowed to meddle with any material who did not know how to make the best of it. In other words, the arts of working in wood, clay, stone, and metal, would all be _fine_ arts (working in iron for machinery becoming an entirely distinct business). There would be no joiner's work, no smith's, no pottery nor stone-cutting, so debased in character as to be entirely unconnected with the finer branches of the same art; and to at least one of these finer branches (generally in metal-work) every painter and sculptor would be necessarily apprenticed during some years of his education. There would be room, in these four trades alone, for nearly every grade of practical intelligence and productive imagination.
133. But it should not be artists alone who are exercised early in these crafts. It would be part of my scheme of physical education that every youth in the state--from the King's son downwards,--should learn to do something finely and thoroughly with his hand, so as to let him know what _touch_ meant; and what stout craftsmans.h.i.+p meant; and to inform him of many things besides, which no man can learn but by some severely accurate discipline in doing. Let him once learn to take a straight shaving off a plank, or draw a fine curve without faltering, or lay a brick level in its mortar; and he has learned a mult.i.tude of other matters which no lips of man could ever teach him. He might choose his craft, but whatever it was, he should learn it to some sufficient degree of true dexterity: and the result would be, in after life, that among the middle cla.s.ses a good deal of their house furniture would be made, and a good deal of rough work, more or less clumsily, but not ineffectively, got through, by the master himself and his sons, with much furtherance of their general health and peace of mind, and increase of innocent domestic pride and pleasure, and to the extinction of a great deal of vulgar upholstery and other mean handicraft.
134. Farther. A great deal of the vulgarity, and nearly all the vice, of retail commerce, involving the degradation of persons occupied in it, depends simply on the fact that their minds are always occupied by the vital (or rather mortal) question of profits. I should at once put an end to this source of baseness by making all retail dealers merely salaried officers in the employ of the trade guilds; the stewards, that is to say, of the salable properties of those guilds, and purveyors of such and such articles to a given number of families. A perfectly well-educated person might, without the least degradation, hold such an office as this, however poorly paid; and it would be precisely the fact of his being well educated which would enable him to fulfil his duties to the public without the stimulus of direct profit. Of course the current objection to such a system would be that no man, for a regularly paid salary, would take pains to please his customers; and the answer to that objection is, that if you can train a man to so much unselfishness as to offer himself fearlessly to the chance of being shot, in the course of his daily duty, you can most a.s.suredly, if you make it also a point of honor with him, train him to the amount of self-denial involved in looking you out with care such a piece of cheese or bacon as you have asked for.
135. You see that I have already much diminished the number of employments involving degradation; and raised the character of many of those that are left. There remain to be considered the necessarily painful or mechanical works of mining, forging, and the like: the unclean, noisome, or paltry manufactures--the various kinds of transport--(by merchant s.h.i.+pping, etc.) and the conditions of menial service.
It will facilitate the examination of these if we put them for the moment aside, and pa.s.s to the other division of our dilemma, the question, namely, what kind of lives our gentlemen and ladies are to live, for whom all this hard work is to be done.