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The

Crown

of

Wild Olive

JOHN RUSKIN

tin CALDWELL
COMPANY

Stack
Annex

STACK
ANNEX

PR

A I

l?S|
CONTENTS.

LECTURE L

FAG&

Work. 27

LECTURE II.
Traffic 81

LECTURE III.
War 125

LECTURE IV.
The Future of England 181

Appendix... • 317

PREFACE.

Twenty years ago, there was no lovelier
piece of lowland scenery in South England,
nor any more pathetic in the world, by its ex-
pression of sweet human character and life,
than that immediately bordering on the sources
of the Wandle, and including the lower moors
of Addington, and the villages of Beddington
and Carshalton, with all their pools and
streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever
sang with constant lips of the hand which
" giveth rain from heaven ; " no pastures ever
lightened in springtime with more passionate
blossoming ; no sweeter homes ever hallowed
the heart of the passer-by with their pride of
peaceful gladness — fain-hidden — yet full-con-
fessed. The place remains, or, until a few
months ago, remained, nearly unchanged in its
larger features ; but, with deliberate mind I
say, that I have never seen anything so ghastly

6 PREFACE.

in its inner tragic meaning, — not in Pisan
Maremma, — not by Campagna tomb, — not by
the sand-isles of the Torcellan shore, — as the
slow stealing of aspects of reckless, indolent,
animal neglect, over the delicate sweetness of
that English scene : nor is any blasphemy or
impiety — any frantic saying or godless thought
— more appalling to me, using the best power
of judgment I have to discern its sense and
scope, than the insolent defilings of those
springs by the human herds that drink of
them. Just where the welling of stainless
water, trembling and pure, like a body of light,
enters the pool of Carshalton, cutting itself a
radiant channel down to the gravel, through
warp of feathery weeds, all waving, which it
traverses with its deep threads of clearness,
like the chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here
and there with white grenouillette ; just in the
very rush and murmur of the first spreading
currents, the human wretches of the place cast
their street and house foulness ; heaps of dust
and slime, and broken shreds of old metal,
and rags of putrid clothes ; they having
neither energy to cart it away, nor decency
enough to dig it into the ground, thus shed
into the stream, to diffuse what venom of it

PREFACE. 1

will float and melt, far away, in all places
where God meant those waters to bring joy
and health. And, in a little pool, behind
some houses farther in the village, where
another spring rises, the shattered stones of
the well, and of the little fretted channel
which was long ago built and traced for it by
gentler hands, lie scattered, each from each,
under a ragged bank of mortar, and scoria,
and bricklayers' refuse, on one side, which the
clean water nevertheless chastises to purity ;
but it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond ;
and there, circled and coiled under festering
scum, the stagnant edge of the pool effaces
itself into a slope of black slime, the accumu-
lation of indolent years. Half a dozen men,
with one day's work, could cleanse those pools,
and trim the flowers about their banks, and
make every breath of summer air above them
rich with cool balm ; and every glittering wave
medicinal, as if it ran, troubled of angels,
from the porch of Bethesda. But that day's
work is never given, nor will be ; nor will any
joy be possible to heart of man, for evermore,
about those wells of English waters.

When I last left them, I walked up slowly
through the back streets of Croydon, from the

8 PREFACE.

old church to the hospital ; and, just on the
left, before coming up to the crossing of the
High Street, there was a new public-house
built. And the front of it was built in so wise
manner, that a recess cf two feet was left
below its front windows, between them and
the street-pavement — a recess too narrow for
any possible use (for even if it had been occu-
pied by a seat, as in old time it might have
been, everybody walking along the street
would have fallen over the legs of the reposing
wayfarers). But, by way of making this two
feet depth of freehold land more expressive of
the dignity of an establishment for the sale of
spirituous liquors, it was fenced from the
pavement by an imposing iron railing, having
four or five spearheads to the yard of it, and
six feet high ; containing as much iron and
iron-work, indeed, as could well be put into
the space ; and by this stately arrangement,
the little piece of dead ground within, between
wall and street, became a protective receptacle
of refuse ; cigar ends, and oyster shells, and
the like, such as an open-handed English
street-populace habitually scatters from its
presence, and was thus left, unsweepable by
any ordinary methods, Now the iron bars

PREFACE. 9

which, uselessly (or in great degree worse than
uselessly), enclosed this bit of ground, and
made it pestilent, represented a quantity of
work which would have cleansed the Carshal-
ton pools three times over ; — of work, partly
cramped and deadly, in the mine ; partly
fierce * and exhaustive, at the furnace, partly

* " A fearful occurrence took place a few days since,
near Wolverhampton. Thomas Snape, aged nineteen,
was on duty as the ' keeper ' of a blast furnace at
Deepfield, assisted by John Gardner, aged eighteen,
and Joseph Swift, aged thirty-seven. The furnace con-
tained four tons of molten iron, and an equal amount
of cinders, and ought to have been run out at 7.30
P. M. But Snape and his mates, engaged in talking
and drinking, neglected their duty, and, in the mean
time, the iron rose in the furnace until it reached a pipe
wherein water was contained. Just as the men had
stripped, and were proceeding to tap the furnace, the
water in the pipe, converted into steam, burst down its
front and let loose on them the molten metal, which
instantaneously consumed Gardner; Snape, terribly
burnt, and mad with pain, leaped into the canal and
then ran home and fell dead on the threshold ; Swift
survived to reach the hospital, where he died too."

In further illustration of this matter, I beg the
reader to look at the article on the " Decay of the
English Race," in the Pall Mall Gazette of April 17, of
this year; and at the articles on the " Report of the
Thames Commission," hi any journals of the same
date.

XO PREFACE.

foolish and sedentary, of ill-taught students
making bad designs : work from the beginning
to the last fruits of it, and in all the branches
of it, venomous, deathful, and miserable.
Now, how did it come to pass that this work
was done instead of the other ; that the
strength and life of the English operative were
spent in defiling ground, instead of redeeming
it ; and in producing an entirely (in that place)
valueless piece of metal, which can neither be
eaten nor breathed, instead of medicinal fresh
air, and pure water ?

There is but one reason for it, and at pres-
ent a conclusive one, — that the capitalist can
charge percentage on the work in the one
case, and cannot in the other. If, having
certain funds for supporting labor at my dis-
posal, I pay men merely to keep my ground
in order, my money is, in that function, spent
once for all ; but if I pay them to dig iron out
of my ground, and work it, and sell it, I can
charge rent for the ground, and percentage
both on the manufacture and the sale, and
make my capital profitable in these three by-
ways. The greater part of the profitable in-
vestment of capital in the present day, is in
operations of this kind, in which the public is

PREFACE. H

persuaded to buy something of no use to it,
on production, cr sale, of which, the capitalist
may charge percentage; the said public re-
maining all the while under the persuasion
that the percentage thus obtained are real
national gains, whereas, they are merely filch-
ings out of partially light pockets, to swell
heavy ones.

Thus, the Croydon publican buys the iron
railing, to make himself more conspicuous to-
drunkards. The public-house keeper on the
other side cf the way presently buys another
railing, to out-rail him with. Both are, as ta
their relative attractiveness to customers of
taste, just where they were before ; but they
have lost the price of the railings ; which
they must either themselves finally lose, or
make their aforesaid customers of taste pay,
by raising the price of their V>eer, or adulterat-
ing it. Either the publicans, or their cus-
tomers, are thus poorer by precisely what the
capitalist has gained ; and the value of the
work itself, meantime, has been lost, to the
nation ; the iron bars in that form and place
being wholly useless. It is this mode of tax-
ation of the poor by the rich which is referred
to in the text (page ), in comparing the

12 PREFACE.

modern acquisitive power of capital with thai
of the lance and sword ; the only difference
being that the levy of black-mail in old times
was by force, and is now by cozening. The
old rider and reiver frankly quartered himself
on the publican for the night ; the modern one
merely makes his lance into an iron spike,
and persuades his host to buy it. One comes
as an open robber, the other as a cheating ped-
dler ; but the result, to the injured person's
pocket, is absolutely the same. Of course
many useful industries mingle with, and dis-
guise the useless ones ; and in the habits of
energy aroused by the struggle, there is a
certain direct good. It is far better to spend
four thousand pounds in making a good gun,
and then to blow it to pieces, than to pass
life in idleness. Only do not let it be called
" political economy." There is also a confused
notion in the minds of many persons, that the
gathering of the property of the poor into the
hands of the rich does no ultimate harm ;
since in whosesoever hands it may be, it must
be spent at last, and thus, they think, return
to the poor again. This fallacy has been
again and again exposed ; but grant the plea
true, and the same apology may, of course, be

PREFACE. 13

made for black-mail, or any other form of
robbery. It might be (though practically it
never is) as advantageous for the nation that
the robber should have the spending of the
money he extorts, as that the person robbed
should have spent it. But this is no excuse
for the theft. If I were to put a turnpike on
the road where it passes my own gate, and en-
deavor to exact a shilling from every passenger,
the public would soon do away with my gate,
without listening to any plea on my part that
" it was as advantageous to them, in the end,
that I should spend their shillings, as that
they themselves should." But if, instead of
out-facing them with a turnpike, I can only
persuade them to come in and buy stones, or
old iron, or any other useless thing, out of my
ground, I may rob them to the same extent,
and be, moreover, thanked as a public bene-
factor, and promoter of commercial prosperity*
And this main question for the poor of Eng-
land— for the poor of all countries — is wholly
omitted in every common treatise on the sub-
ject of wealth. Even by the laborers them-
selves, the operation of capital is regarded
only in its effect on their immediate interests;
never in the far more terrific power of its aj>

14 PREFACE.

pointment of the kind and the object of labor.
It matters little, ultimately, how much a la-
borer is paid for making anything; but it
matters fearfully what the thing is, which he
is compelled to make. If his labor is so
ordered as to produce food, and fresh air, and
fresh water, no matter that his wages are low ;
— the food and fresh air and water will be at
last there ; and he will at last get them. But
if he is paid to destroy food and fresh air or
to produce iron bars instead of them, — the
food and air will finally not be there, and he
will not get them, to his great and final incon-
venience. So that, conclusively, in political
as in household economy, the great question
is, not so much what money you have in your
pocket, as what you will buy with it, and do
with it.

I have been long accustomed, as all men
engaged in work of investigation must be, to
hear my statements laughed at for years, before
they are examined or believed ; and I am
generally content to wait the public's time.
But it has not been without displeased sur-
prise that I have found myself totally unable,
as yet, by any repetition, or illustration, to
force this plain thought into my readers' heads,

PREFACE. 15.

—that the wealth of nations, as of men, con-
sists in substance, not in ciphers ; and that
the real good of all work, and of all commerce,
depends on the final worth cf the thing you
make, or get by it. This is a practical enough
statement, one would think : but the English
public has been so possessed by its modern
school of economists with the notion that
Business is always good, whether it be busy
in mischief or in benefit ; and that buying and
selling are always salutary, whatever the in-
trinsic worth of what you buy or sell, — that it
seems impossible to gain so much as a pa-
tient hearing for any inquiry respecting the
substantial result of our eager modern labors.
I have never felt more checked by the sense
of this impossibility than in arranging the
heads of the following three lectures, which,
though delivered at considerable intervals of
time, and in different places, were nci pre-
pared without reference to each other. Their
connection would, however, have been made
far more distinct, if I had not been prevented,
by what I feel to be another great difficulty in
addressing English audiences, from enforcing,
with any decision, the common, and to me
the most important, part of their subjects.

l6 PREFACE.

I chiefly desired (as I have just said) to ques«
tion my hearers — operatives, merchants, and
soldiers, as to the ultimate meaning of the
business they had in hand ; and to know from
them what they expected or intended their
manufacture to come to, their selling to come
to, and their killing to come to. That ap-
peared the first point needing determination
before I could speak to them with any real
utility or effect. " You craftsmen — salesmen
• — swordsmen, — do but tell me clearly what
you want ; then if I can say anything to help
you, I will ; and if not, I will account to you
as I best may for my inability." But in
order to put this question into any terms, one
had first of all to face the difficulty just spoken
of — to me for the present insuperable, — the
difficulty of knowing whether to address one's
audience as believing, or not believing, in any
other world than this. For if you address
any average modern English company as
believing in an Eternal life, and endeavor to
draw any conclusions, from this assumed
belief, as to their present business, they will
forthwith tell you that what you say is very
beautiful, but it is not practical. If, on the
contrary, you frankly address them as un-

PREFACE. if

believers of Eternal life, and try to draw any
consequences from that unbelief, — they im-
mediately hold you for an accursed person,
and shake off the dust from their feet at you.
And the more I thought over what I had got
to say, the less I found I could say it, without
some reference to this intangible or intractable
part of the subject. It made all the difference,
in asserting any principle of war, whether one
assumed that a discharge of artillery would
merely knead down a certain quantity of red
clay into a level line, as in a brickfield ; or
whether, out of every separately Christian-
named portion of the ruinous heap, there went
out, into the smoke and dead-fallen air of
battle, some astonished condition of soul, un-
willingly released. It made all the difference,
in speaking of the possible range of commerce,
whether one assumed that all bargains related
only to visible property — or whether property,
for the present invisible, but nevertheless real,
was elsewhere purchasable on other terms. It
made all the difference, in addressing a body of
men subject to considerable hardship, and
having to find some way out of it — whether one
could confidently say to them, " My friends, —
you have only to die, and all will be right ; " or

xS PREFACE.

whether one had any secret misgiving that
such advice was more blessed to him that
gave, than to him that took it. And there-
fore the deliberate reader will find, throughout
these lectures, a hesitation in driving points
home, and a pausing short of conclusions
•which he will feel I would fain have come to ;
hesitation which arises wholly from this un-
certainty of my hearers' temper. For I do
not now speak, nor have I ever spoken, since
the time of first forward youth, in any prose-
lyting temper, as desiring to persuade any one
of what, in such matters, I thought myself;
but, whomsoever I venture to address, I take
for the time his creed as I find it ; and en-
deavor to push it into such vital fruit as it
seems capable of. Thus, it is a creed with a
great part of the existing English people, that
they are in possession of a book which tells
them, straight from the lips of God, all they
ought to do, and need to know. I have read
that book, with as much care as most of them,
for some forty years ; and am thankful that,
on those who trust it, I can press its pleadings.
My endeavor has been uniformly to make
them trust it more deeply than they do ; trust
it, not in their own favorite verses only, but in

PREFACE. 19

the sum of all ; trust it not as a fetish or talis*
man, which they are to be saved by daily
repetitions of ; but as a Captain's order, to be
heard and obeyed at their peril. I was
always encouraged by supposing my hearers to
hold such belief. To these, if to any, I once
had hope of addressing, with acceptance,
words which insisted on the guilt of pride,
and the futility of avarice ; from these, if from
any, I once expected ratification of a political
economy, which asserted that the life was
more than the meat, and the body than rai-
ment ; and these, it once seemed to me, I
might ask, without accusation of fanaticism,
not merely in doctrine of the lips, but in the
bestowal of their heart's treasure, to separate
themselves from the crowd of whom it is
written, " After all these things do the Gentiles
seek."

It cannot, however, be assumed, with any
semblance of reason, that a general audience
is now wholly, or even in majority, composed
of these religious persons. A large portion
must always consist of men who admit no such
creed ; or who, at least, are inaccessible to
appeals founded on it. And as, with the so-
called Christian, I desired to plead for honest

10 PREFACE.

declaration and fulfilment of his belief in
life, — with the so-called infidel, I desired to-
plead for an honest declaration and fulfilmen*
of his belief in death. The dilemma is inevi-
table. Men must either hereafter live, or hers*
after die ; fate may be bravely met, and covc-
duct wisely ordered, on either expectation ; but
never in hesitation between ungrasped hope,
and unconfronted fear. We usually believe in
immortality, so far as to avoid preparation for
death ; and in mortality, so far as to avoid prep-
paration for anything after death. Whereas
a wise man will at least hold himself prepared
for one or other of two events, of which one
or other is inevitable ; and will have all thiflg*
in order, for his sleep, or in readiness, for hig
awakening.

Nor have we any right to call it an ignoble
judgment, if he determine to put them inordei,
as for sleep. A brave belief in life is indeed
an enviable state of mind, but, as far as I can
discern, an unusual one. I know few Chris-
tians so convinced of the splendor of the rooms
in their Father's house, as to be happier when
their friends are called to those mansions, than
they would have been if the Queen had sent
for them to live at court : nor has the Church's

PREFACE. 31

most ardent "desire to depart, and be with
Christ," ever cured it of the singular habit of
putting on mourning for every person sum-
moned to such departure. On the contrary, a
brave belief in death has been assuredly held
by many not ignoble persons, and it is a sign
of the last depravity in the Church itself, when
it assumes that such a belief is inconsistent
with either purity of character, or energy of
hand. The shortness of life is not, to any
rational person, a conclusive reason for wast-
ing the space of it which may be granted him ;
nor does the anticipation of -death to-morrow
suggest, to any one but a drunkard, the ex-
pediency of drunkenness to-day. To teach
that there is no device in the grave, may indeed
make the deviceless person more contented in
his dulness ; but it will make the deviser only
more earnest in devising : nor is human con-
duct likely, in every case, to be purer, under
the conviction that all its evil may in a moment
be pardoned, and all its wrong-doing in a
moment redeemed ; and that the sigh of re-
pentance, which purges the guilt of the past,
will waft the soul into a felicity which forgets
its pain, — than it may be under the sterner,
and to many not unwise minds, more probable,

22 PREFACE.

apprehension, that " what a man soweth that
shall he also reap," — or others reap, — when he,
the living seed of pestilence, walketh no more
in darkness, but lies down therein.

But to men whose feebleness of sight, or
bitterness of soul, or the offence given by the
conduct of those who claim higher hope, may
have rendered this painful creed the only pos-
sible one, there is an appeal to be made, more
secure in its ground than any which can be
addressed to happier persons. I would fain,
if I might ofxencelessly, have spoken to them
as if none others heard ; and have said thus :
Hear me, you dying men, who will soon be
deaf forever. Tor these others, at your right
hand and your left, who look forward to a state
of infant existence, in which all their errors
will be overruled, and all their faults forgiven ;
for these, who, stained and blackened in the
battle-smoke of mortality, have but to dip them-
selves for an» instant in the font of death, and
to rise renewed of plumage, as a dove that is
covered with silver, and her feathers like gold ;
for these, indeed, it may be permissible to
waste their numbered moments, through faith
in a future of innumerable hours ; to these, in
their weakness, it may be conceded that they

PREFACE. 23

should tamper with sin which can only bring
forth fruit of righteousness, and profit by the
iniquity which, one day, will be remembered
no more. In them, it may be no sign of hard-
ness of heart to neglect the poor, over whom
they know their Master is watching ; and to
leave those to perish temporarily, who cannot
perish eternally. But, for you, there is no such
hope, and therefore no such excuse. This fate
which you ordain for the wretched, you believe
to be all their inheritance ; you may crush,
them, before the moth, and they will never
rise to rebuke you ; — their breath, which fails
for lack of food, once expiring, will never be
recalled to whisper against you a word of
accusing ; — they and you, as you think, shall
lie down together in the dust, and the worms
cover you; — and for them there shall be no
consolation, and on you no vengeance, — only
the question murmured above your grave :
" Who shall repay him what he hath done ? "
Is it therefore easier for you in your heart to
inflict the sorrow for which there is no remedy ?
Will you take, wantonly, this little all of his life
from your poor brother, and make his brief hours
long to him with pain ? Will you be readier
to the injustice which can never be redressed ;

24 PREFACE.

and niggardly of mercy which you can bestow
but once, and which, refusing, you refuse for-
ever ? I think better of you, even of the most
selfish, than that you would do this, well under-
stood. And for yourselves, it seems to me,
the question becomes not less grave, in these
curt limits. If your life were but a fever
fit, — the madness of a night, whose follies were
all to be forgotten in the dawn, it might mat-
ter little how you fretted away the sickly hours,
— what toys you snatched at, or let fall, — what
visions you followed wistfully with the deceived
eyes of sleepless phrenzy. Is the eardi only art
hospital ? Play, if you care to play, on the floor
of the hospital dens. Knit its straw into what
crowns please you ; gather the dust of it for
treasure, and die rich in that, clutching at the
black motes in the air with your dying hands ; —
and yet, it may be well with you. But if this life
be no dream, and the world no hospital ; if all
the peace and power and joy you can ever win,
must be won now; and all fruit of victory
gathered here, or never ; — will you still,
throughout the puny totality of youi life, weary
yourselves in the fire for vanity ? If there is
no rest which remaineth for you, is there none
you might presently take ? was this grass of

PREFAGE. 25

the earth made green for your shroud only,
not for your bed ? and can you never lie down
upon it, but only wider it ? The heathen, to
whose creed you have returned, thought not
so. They knew that life brought its contest,
but they expected from it also the crown of all
contest : No proud one ! no jewelled circlet
flaming through Heaven above the height of
the unmerited throne ; only some few leaves
of wild olive, cool to the tired brow, through
a few years of peace. It should have been of
gold, they thought; but Jupiter was poor; this
was the best the god could give them. Seek-
ing a greater than this, they had known it a
mockery. Not in war, not in wealth, not in
tyranny, was there any happiness to be found
for them — only in kindly peace, fruitful and
free. The wreath was to be of wild olive, mark
you : — the tree that grows carelessly, tufting
the rocks with no vivid bloom, no verdure of
branch ; only with soft snow of blossom, and
scarcely fulfilled fruit, mixed with gray leaf
and thorn-set stem ; no fastening of diadem for
you but with such sharp embroidery ! But
this, such as it is, you may win while yet you
live; type of great honor and sweet rest.*

*/ue\tr6c<r<ra iiffhuv y ere/ccy.

26 PREFACE.

Fi^-heartedness, and graciousness, and undis-
turbed trust, and requited love, and the sight
of the peace of others, and the ministry to
their pain ; — these, and the blue sky above
you, and the sweet waters and flowers of the
earth beneath ; and mysteries and presences,
innumerable, of living things, — these may yet
be here your riches ; untormenting and divine :
serviceable for the life that now is ; nor, it may
be, without promise of that which is to come.

LECTURE I.

WORK,

THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE

LECTURE I.

WORK.

ifieHtnreditfa^ the Working Men's Institute, at CamSermZ?.')

My Friends, — I have not come among you
to-night to endeavor to give you an entertain-
ing lecture ; but to tell you a few plain facts,
and ask you some plain, but necessary ques-
tions. I have seen and known too much of
the struggle for life among our laboring pop-
ulation, to feel at ease, even under any circum-
stances, in inviting them to dwell on the trivi-
alities of my own studies ; but, much more,
as I meet to-night, for the first time, the mem-
bers of a working Institute established in the
district in which I have passed the greater
part of my life, I am desirous that we should
at once understand each other, on graver mat-
ters. I would fain tell you, with what feelings,
and with what hope, I regard this Institution,

29

3<> THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE,

as one of many such, now happily established
throughout England, as well as in other coun-
tries ; — Institutions which are preparing the
way for a great change in all the circumstances
of industrial life ; but of which the success
must wholly depend upon our clearly under-
standing the circumstances and necessary
limits of this change. No teacher can truly
promote the cause of education, until he knows
the conditions of the life for which that edu-
cation is to prepare his pupil. And the fact
that he is called upon to address you, nomi-
nally, as a " Working Class," must compel him,
if he is in any wise earnest or thoughtful, to
inquire in the outset, on what you yourselves
suppose this class distinction has been founded
in the past, and must be founded in the future.
The manner of the amusement, and the matter
of the teaching, which any of us can offer you,
must depend wholly on our first understand-
ing from you, whether you think the distinc-
tion heretofore drawn between working men
and others, is truly or falsely founded. Do
you accept it as it stands ? do you wish it to
be modified ? or do you think the object of
education is to efface it, and make us forget it
forever?

WORK. 31

Let me make myself more distinctly under-
stood. We call this — you and I — a " Work-
ing Men's " Institute, and our college in Lon-
don, a " Working Men's " College. Now, how
do you consider that these several institutes
differ, or ought to differ, from " idle men's "
institutes and " idle men's " colleges ? Or by
what other word than " idle " shall I distin-
guish those whom the happiest and wisest of
working men do not object to call the " Upper
Classes " ? Are there really upper classes, —
are there lower? How much should they
always be elevated, how much always de-
pressed ? And, gentlemen and ladies — I pray
those of you who are here to forgive me the
offence there may be in what I am going to
say. It is not / who wish to say it. Bitter
voices say it : voices of battle and of famine
through all the world, which must be heard
some day, whoever keeps silence. Neither is
it to you specially that I say it. I am sure
that most now present know their duties of
kindness, and fulfil them, better perhaps than
I do mine. But I speak to you as represent-
ing your whole class, which errs, I know,
chiefly by thoughtlessness, but not therefore
the less terribly, Wilful error is limited by

32 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

the will, but what limit is there to that of
which we are unconscious?

Bear with me, therefore, while I turn to
these workmen, and ask them, also as repre-
senting a great multitude, what they think the
" upper classes " are, and ought to be, in rela-
tion to them. Answer, you workmen who are
here, as you would among yourselves, frankly ;
and tell me how you would have me call those
classes. Am I to call them — would you think
me right in calling them — the idle classes ? I
think you would feel somewhat uneasy, and as
if I were not treating my subject honestly, or
speaking from my heart, if I went on under
the supposition that all rich people were idle.
You would be both unjust and unwise if you
allowed me to say that ; — not less unjust than
the rich people who say that all the poor are
idle, and will never work if they can help it, or
more than they can help.

For indeed the fact is, that there are idle
poor and idle rich ; and there are busy poor
and busy rich. Many a beggar is as lazy as
if he had ten thousand a year ; and many a
many of large fortune is busier than his er
rand-boy, and never would think of stopping in
the street to play marbles, go that, in a largo

WORK. 33

view, the distinction between workers and
idlers, as between knaves and and honest men,
runs through the very heart and innermost
economies of men of all ranks and in all posi
tions. There is a working class — strong and
happy — among both rich and poor; there is
an idle class — weak, wicked, and miserable —
among both rich and poor. And the worst of
the misunderstandings arising between the two
orders come of the unlucky fact that th« wise
of one class habitually contemplate the foolish
of the other. If the busy rich people watched
and rebuked the idle rich people, all would be
right ; and if the busy poor people watched
and rebuked the idle poor people, all would
be right. But each class has a tendency to
look for the faults of the other. A hard-work-
ing man of property is particularly offended
by an idle beggar ; and an orderly, but poor,
workman is naturally intolerant of the licen-
tious luxury of the rich. And what is severe
judgment in the minds of the just men of either
class, becomes fierce enmity in the unjust —
but among the unjust only. None but the
dissolute among the poor look upon the rich
as their natural enemies, or desire to pillage
their house and divide their property. None

34 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE,

but the dissolute among the rich speak in op»
probrious terms of the vices and follies of the
poor.

There is, then, no class distinction between
idle and industrious people ; and I am going
to-night to speak only of the industrious.
The idle people we will put out of our thoughts
at once — they are mere nuisances — what ought
to be done with them, we'll talk of at another
time. But there are class distinctions among
the industrious themselves ; — tremendous dis-
tinctions, which rise and fall to every degree in
the infinite thermometer of human pain and of
human power — distinctions of high and low,
of lost and won, to the whole reach of man's
soul and body.

These separations we will study, and the
laws of them, among energetic men only, who,
whether they work or whether they play, put
their strength into the work, and their strength
into the game ; being in the full sense of the
word "industrious," one way or another — with
a purpose, or without. And these distinctions
are mainly four :

I. Between those who work, and those who
play.

WORK.

35

II. Between those who produce the means
of life, and those who consume them.

III. Between those who work with the head,
and those who work with the hand.

IV. Between those who work wisely, and
who work foolishly.

For easier memory, let us say we are going
to oppose, in our examination, —
I. Work to play ;
II. Production to consumption ;
III. Head to hand; and,
IV. Sense to nonsense.

I. First, then, of the distinction between the
classes who work and the classes who play. Of
course we must agree upon a definition of these
terms, — work and play, — before going farther.
Now, roughly, not with vain subtlety of defini-
tion, but for plain use of the words, "play " is
an exertion of body or mind, made to please
ourselves, and with no determined end ; and
work is a thing done because it ought to
be done, and with a determined end. You
play, as you call it, at cricket, for instance.
That is as hard work as anything else ; but it
amuses you, and it has no result but the
amusement. If it were done as an ordered
form of exercise, for health's sake, it would

36 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

become work directly. So, in like manner,
whatever we do to please ourselves, and only
for the sake of the pleasure, not for an ultimate
object, is "play," the " pleasing thing," not the
useful thing. Play may be useful in a second-
ary sense (nothing is indeed more useful or
necessary) ; but the use of it depends on its
being spontaneous.

Let us, then, inquire together what sort of
games the playing class in England spend
their lives in playing at.

The first of all English games is making
money. That is an all-absorbing game ; and
we knock each other down oftener in playing
at that than at foot-ball, or any other roughest
sport; and it is absolutely without purpose;
no one who engages heartily in that game
ever knows why. Ask a great money-maker
what he wants to do with his money — he never
knows. He doesn't make it to do anything
with it. He gets it only that he may get it.
" What will you make of what you have got ? "
you ask. " Well, I'll get more," he says. Just
as, at cricket, you get more runs. There's
no use in the runs, but to get more of them
than other people is the game. And there's
no use in the money, but to have more of it

WORK. 3?

than other people is the game. So all that
great foul city of London there, — rattling,
growling, smoking, stinking, — a ghastly heap
of fermenting brickwork, pouring out poison
at every pore, — you fancy it is a city of
work ? Not a street of it ! It is a great city
of play ; very nasty play, and very hard play,
but still play. It is only Lord's cricket ground
without the turf, — a huge billiard table without
the cloth, and with pockets as deep as the
bottomless pit ; but mainly a billiard table,,
after all.

Well, the first great English game is this
playing at counters. It differs from the rest
in that it appears always to be producing
money, while every other game is expensive.
But it does not always produce money.
There's a great difference between " winning n
money and " making " it ; a great difference
between getting it out of another man's pocket
into ours, or filling both. Collecting money is
by no means the same thing as making it ; the
tax-gatherer's house is not the Mint; and
much of the apparent gain (so called), in com-
merce, is only a form of taxation on carriage
or exchange.

Our next great English game, however,

38 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

hunting and shooting, is costly altogether;
and how much we are fined for it annually in
land, horses, gamekeepers, and game laws,
and all else that accompanies that beautiful
and special English game, I will not endeavor
to count now : but note only that, except for
exercise, this is not merely a useless game,
but a deadly one, to all connected with it.
For through horse-racing, you get every form
of what the higher classes everywhere call
" Play," in distinction from all other plays ;
that is — gambling ; by no means a beneficial
or recreative game : and, through game-preserv-
ing, you get also some curious laying out of
ground ; that beautiful arrangement of dwell-
ing-house for man and beast, by which we
have grouse and blackcock — so many brace to
the acre, and men and women — so many brace
to the garret. I often wonder what the an-
gelic builders and surveyors — the angelic
builders who build the " many mansions " up
above there ; and the angelic surveyors, who
measured that four-square city with their
measuring reeds — I wonder what they think,
or are supposed to think, of the laying out of
ground by this nation, which has set itself, as
it seems, literally to accomplish, word for

WORK.

.1*

word, or rather fact for word, in the persons
of those poor whom its Master left to rep-
resent him, what that Master said of himself —
that foxes and birds had homes, but He
none.

Then, next to the gentlemen's game of
hunting, we must put the ladies' game of dress-
ing. It is not the cheapest of games. I saw
a brooch at a jeweller's in Bond Street a fort-
night ago, not an inch wide, and without any
singular jewel in it, yet worth 3,000/. And I
wish I could tell you what this " play " costs,
altogether, in England, France, and Russia
annually. But it is a pretty game, and on cer-
tain terms, I like it ; nay, I don't see it played
quite as much as I would fain have it. You
ladies like to lead the fashion : — by all means
lead it — lead it thoroughly, lead it far enough.
Dress yourselves nicely, and dress everybody
else nicely. Lead the fashions for the poor first ;
make them look well, and you yourselves will
look, in ways of which you have now no con-
ception, all the better. The fashions you have
set for some time among your peasantry are
not pretty ones ; their doublets are too irregu-
larly slashed, and the wind blows too frankly
through them.

40 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

Then there are other games, wild enough,
as I could show you if I had time.

There's playing at literature, and playing at
art — very different, both, from working at
literature, or working at art, but I've no time
to speak of these. I pass to the greatest of
all— the play of plays, the great gentlemen's
game, which ladies like them best to play at,
— the game of War. It is entrancingly pleas-
ant to the imagination; the facts of it, not
always so pleasant. We dress for it, however,
more finely than for any other sport ; and go
out to it, not merely in scarlet, as to hunt,
but in scarlet and gold, and all manner of line
colors : of course we could fight better in
gray, and without feathers ; but all nations
have agreed that it is good to be well dressed
at this play. Then the bats and balls are
very costly; our English and French bats,
with the balls and wickets, even those which
we don't make any use of, costing, I suppose,
now about fifteen millions of money annually
to each nation ; all of which you know is paid
for by hard laborer's work in the furrow and
furnace. A costly game ! — not to speak of
its consequences ; I will say at present noth-
ing of these. The mere immediate cost of all

WORK. 41

these plays is what I want you to consider ;
they all cost deadly work somewhere, as many
of us know too well. The jewel-cutter, whose
sight fails over the diamonds ; the weaver,
whose arm fails over the web ; the iron-forger,
whose breath fails before the furnace — they
know what work is — they, who have all the
work, and none of the play, except a kind
they have named for themselves down in the
black north country, where "play" means
being laid up by sickness. It is a pretty
example for philologists, of varying dialect,
this change in the sense of the word "play," as
used in the black country of Birmingham, and
the red and black country of Baden Baden.
Yes, gentlemen, and gentlewomen, of England,
who think " one moment unamused a misery,
not made for feeble man," this is what you
have brought the word " play " to mean, in the
heart of merry England ! You may have
your fluting and piping ; but there are sad
children sitting in the market-place, who
indeed cannot say to you, " We have piped
unto you, and ye have not danced : " but eter-
nally shall say to you, " We have mourned
unto you, and ye have not lamented."

This, then, is the first distinction between

42 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

the " upper and lower " classes. And this is
,one which is by no means necessary ; which
indeed must, in process of good time, be by
all honest men's consent abolished. Men will
be taught that an existence of play, sustained
by the blood of other creatures, is a good
existence for gnats and sucking fish ; but not
for men : that neither days, nor lives, can be
made holy by doing nothing in them : that
the best prayer at the beginning of a day is
that we may not lose its moments ; and the
best grace before meat, the consciousness that
we have justly earned our dinner. And when
we have this much of plain Christianity
preached to us again, and enough respect what
we regard as inspiration, as not to think that
u Son, go work to-day in my vineyard," means
" Fool, go play to-day in my vineyard," we shall
all be workers, in one way or another; and
this much at least of the distinction between
" upper " and " lower " forgotten.

II. I pass then to our second distinction;
between the rich and poor, between Dives
and Lazarus, — distinction which exists more
sternly, I suppose, in this day, than ever in
the world, Pagan or Christian, till now. I will
put it sharply before you, to begin with, merely

WORK.

43

by reading two paragraphs which I cut from
two papers that lay on my breakfast table on
the same morning, the 25th of November,
1864. The piece about the rich Russian at
Paris is commonplace enough, and stupid
besides (for fifteen francs, — \zs. 6d., — is noth-
ing for a rich man to give for a couple of
peaches, out of season). Still, the two para-
graphs printed on the same day are worth
putting side by side.

" Such a man is now here. He is a Russian,
and, with your permission, we will call him
Count Teufelskine. In dress he is sublime ;
art is considered in that toilet, the harmony of
color respected, the chiar' oscuro evident in
well-selected contrast. In manners he is dig-
nified— nay, perhaps apathetic ; nothing dis-
turbs the placid serenity of that calm exterior.
One day our friend breakfasted chez Bignon.
When the bill came he read, ' Two peaches,
15!' He paid. ' Peaches scarce, I presume ? '
was his sole remark. ' No, sir,' replied the
waiter, ' but Teufelskines are.' " — Telegraphy
November 15, 1864.

" Yesterday morning, at eight o'clock, a
woman, passing a dung heap in the stone
yard near the recently-erected almshouses in

44 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

Shadwell Gap, High Street, Shadwell, called
the attention of a Thames police-constable to
a man in a sitting position on the dung heap,
and said she was afraid he was dead. Her
fears proved to be true. The wretched creat-
ure appeared to have been dead several hours.
He had perished of cold and wet, and the rain
had been beating down on him all night. The
deceased was a bone-picker. He was in the
lowest stage of poverty, poorly clad, and half-
starved. The police had frequently driven
him away from the stone yard, between sunset
and sunrise, and told him to go home. He
selected a most desolate spot for his wretched
death. A penny and some bones were found
in his pockets. The deceased was between
fifty and sixty years of age. Inspector Ro-
berts, of the K division, has given directions for
inquiries to be made at the lodging-houses
respecting the deceased, to ascertain his iden-
tity if possible." — Morning Post, November 25,
1864.

You have the separation thus in brief com-
pass; and I want you to take notice of the
" a penny and some bones were found in his
pockets," and to compare it with this third

WORK. 45

Statement, from the Telegraph of January 16th
of this year : —

" Again, the dietary scale for adult and
juvenile paupers was drawn up by the most
conspicuous political economists in England.
It is low in quantity, but it is sufficient to sup-
port nature ; yet within ten years of the pass-
ing of the Poor Law Act, we heard of the pau-
pers in the Andover Union gnawing the scraps
of putrid flesh and sucking the marrow from
the bones cf horses which they were employed
to crush."

You see my reason for thinking that our
Lazarus cf Christianity has some advantage
over the Jewish one. Jewish Lazarus expected,
or at least prayed, to be fed with crumbs from
the rich man's table ; but our Lazarus is fed
with crumbs from the dog's table.

Now this distinction between rich and poor
rests on two bases. Within its proper limits,
on a basis which is lawful and everlastingly-
necessary ; beyond them, on a basis unlawful,
and everlastingly corrupting the frame-work of
society. The lawful basis of wealth is, that a
man who works should be paid the fair value
of his work ; and if he does not choose to
spend it to-day, he should have free leave to

46 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

keep it, and spend it to-morrow. Thus, an
industrious man working daily, and laying by
daily, attains at last the possession of an ac-
cumulated sum of wealth, to which he has ab-
solute right. The idle person who will not
work, and the wasteful person who lays nothing
by, at the end of the same time will be doubly
poor — poor in possession, and dissolute in
moral habit ; and he will then naturally covet
the money which the other has saved. And
if he is then allowed to attack the other, and
rob him of his well-earned wealth, there is no
more any motive for saving, or any reward for
good conduct ; and all society is thereupon
dissolved, or exists only in systems of rapine.
Therefore the first necessity of social life is
the clearness of national conscience in en-
forcing the law — that he should keep who has

JUSTLY EARNED.

That law, I say, is the proper basis of dis-
tinction between rich and poor. But there is
also a false basis of distinction ; namely, the
power held over those who earn wealth by
those who levy or exact it. There will be always
a number of men who would fain set them-
selves to the accumulation of wealth as the
sole object of their lives. Necessarily, that

WORK. 47

class of men is an uneducated class, inferior in
intellect, and more or less cowardly. It is
physically impossible for a well-educated, in-
tellectual, or brave man to make money the
chief object of his thoughts ; as physically im-
possible as it is for him to make his dinner
the principal object of them. All healthy
people like their dinners, but their dinner is
not the main object of their lives. So all
healthily minded people like making money —
ought to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of
winning it ; but the main object of their life is
not money ; it is something better than money.
A good soldier, for instance, mainly wishes to
do his fighting well. He is glad of his pay —
very properly so, and justly grumbles when
you keep him ten years without it — still, his
main notion of life is to win battles, not to be
paid for winning them. So of clergymen.
They like pew-rents, and baptismal fees, of
course; but yet, if they are brave and well
educated, the pew-rent is not the sole object of
their lives, and the baptismal fee is not the sole
purpose of the baptism ; the clergyman's object
is essentially to baptize and preach, not to be
paid for preaching. So of doctors. They like
fees no doubt, — ought to like them ; yet if they

48 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

are brave and well educated, the entire object
of their lives is not fees. They, on the whole,
desire to cure the sick ; and, — if they are
good doctors, and the choice were fairly put
to them, — would rather cure their patient, and
lose their fee, than kill him, and get it. And
so with all other brave and rightly trained
men ; their work is first, their fee second —
very important always, but still second. But
in every nation, as I said, there are a vast
class who are ill-educated, cowardly, and mere
or less stupid. And with these people, just
as certainly the fee is first, and the vrcrk
second, as with brave people the work is first
and the fee second. And .this is no small
distinction. It is the whole distinction in
man ; distinction between liTc and death in
him, between heaven and hell f — him. You
cannot serve two masters ; — you i:::::t serve
one or other. If your work is first with
you, and your fee second, work is your
master, and the lord of work, who is God.
But if your fee is first with you, and your
work second, fee is your master, and the lord
of fee, who is the Devil ; and not only the
Devil, but the lowest of devils — the " least
erected fiend that fell." So there you have it

WORK. 49

in the briefest terms ; Work first — you are
God's servants ; Fee first — you are the
Fiend's. And it makes a difference, now
and ever, believe me, whether you serve Him
who has on His vesture and thigh written,
" King of Kings," and whose service is perfect
freedom ; or him on whose vesture and thigh
the name is written, " Slave of Slaves," and
whose service is perfect slavery.

However, in every nation there are, and
must always be a certain number of these
Fiend's servants, who have it principally for
the object of their lives to make money.
They are always, as I said, more or less
stupid, and cannot conceive of anything else
so nice as money. Stupidity is always the
basis of the Judas bargain. We do great in-
justice to Iscariot, in thinking him wicked above
all common wickedness. He was only a com-
mon money-lover, and, like all money-lovers,
didn't understand Christ ; — couldn't make out
the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. He was
horror-struck when he found that Christ would
be killed; threw his money away instantly,
and hanged himself. How many of our pres-
ent money-seekers, think you, would have the
grace to hang themselves, whoever was killed ?
4

50 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

But Judas was a common, selfish, muddle*
headed, pilfering fellow ; his hand always in
the bag of the poor, not caring for them. He
didn't understand Christ; — yet believed in
Him, much more than most of us do ; had
seen Him do miracles, thought He was quite
strong enough to shift for Himself, and he,
Judas, might as well make his own little by-
perquisites out of the affair. Christ would
come out of it well enough, and he have his
thirty pieces. Now, that is the money-seeker's
idea, all over the world. He doesn't hate
Christ, but can't understand Him — doesn't
care for Him — sees no good in that benevo-
lent business ; makes his own little job out of
it at all events, come what will. And thus,
out of every mass of men, you have a certain
number of bag-men — your " fee first " men,
whose main object is to make money. And
they do make it — make it in all sorts of unfair
ways, chiefly by the weight and force of money
itself, or what is called the power of capital ;
that is to say, the power which money, once
obtained, has over the labor of the poor, so
that the capitalist can take all its produce to
himself, except the laborer's food. That is

WORK.

51

the modern Judas's way of " carrying the bag,"

and bearing what is put therein.

Nay, but (it is asked) how is that an unfair
advantage ? Has not the man who has
worked for the money a right to use it as he
best can ? No ; in this respect, money is now
exactly what mountain promontories over
public roads were in old times. The barons
fought for then fairly : — the strongest and
cunningest got them; then fortified them;
and made every one who passed below pay
"toll. Well, capital now is exactly what crags
were then. Men fight fairly (we will, at least,
grant so much, though it is more than we
ought) for their money ; but, once having got
it, the fortified millionaire can make every-
body who passes below pay toll to his million,
and build another tower of his money castle.
And I can tell you, the poor vagrants by the
roadside suffer now quite as much from the bag-
baron, as ever they did from the crag-baron.
Bags and crags have just the same result on
rags. I have not time, however, to-night to
show you in how many ways the power of
capital is unjust ; but this one great principle I
have to assert — you will find it quite indispu-
tably true — that whenever money is the prin-

52 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

cipal object of life with either man or nation,
it is both got ill, and spent ill ; and does harm
both in the getting and spending ; but when
it is not the principal object, it and all other
things will be well got, and well spent. And
here is the test, with every man, of whether
money is the principal object with him, or
not. If in mid-life he could pause and say,
" Now I have enough to live upon, I'll
live upon it; and having well earned it,
I will also well spend it, and go out of
the world poor, as I came into it," then
money is not principal with him ; but if,
having enough to live upon in the manner be-
fitting his character and rank, he still wants
to make more, and to die rich, then money is
the principal object with him, and it becomes
a curse to himself, and generally to those
who spend it after him. For you know it
must be spent some day ; the only question is
whether the man who makes it shall spend it,
or some one else. And generally it is better
for the maker to spend it, for he will know
best its value and use. This is the true law
of life. And if a man does not choose thus to
spend his money, he must either hoard it or
lend it, and the worst thing he can generally

WORK

53

do is to lend it ; for borrowers are nearly
always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money
that all evil is mainly done and all unjust war
protracted.

For observe what the real fact is, respecting
loans to foreign military governments, and
how strange it is. If your little boy came to
you to ask for money to spend in squibs and
crackers, you would think twice before you
gave it him ; and you would have some idea that
it was wasted, when you saw it fly off in fire-
works, even though he did no mischief with it.
But the Russian children, and Austrian chil-
dren, come to you, borrowing money, not to
spend in innocent squibs, but in cartridges
and bayonets to attack you in India with,
and to keep down all noble life in Italy with,
and to murder Polish women and children
with ; and that you will give at once, because
they pay you interest for it. Now, in order
to pay you that interest, they must tax every
working peasant in their dominions ; and on
that work you live. You therefore at once
rob the Austrian peasant, assassinate or
banish the Polish peasant, and you live on the
produce of the theft, and the bribe for the
assassination ! That is the broad fact — that

54 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

is the practical meaning of your foreign loans,
and of most large interest of money ; and then
you quarrel with Bishop Colenso, forsooth,
as if he denied the Bible, and you believed it !
though, wretches as you are, every deliberate
act of your lives is a new defiance of its
primary orders ; and as if, for most of the rich
men of England at this moment, it were not
indeed to be desired, as the best thing at
least for them, that the Bible should not be
true, since against them these words are
written in it : " The rust of your gold and
silver shall be a witness against you,, and
shall eat your flesh, as it were fire."

III. I pass now to our third condition of
separation, between the men who work with
the hand, and those who work with the head.

And here we have at last an inevitable dis-
tinction. There must be work done by the
arms, or none of us could live. There must
be work done by the brains, or the life we get
would not be worth having. And the same
men cannot do both. There is rough work to
be done, and rough men must do it ; there is
gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must
do it ; and it is physically impossible that one
class should do, or divide, the work of the

WORK.

55

other. And it is of no use to try to conceal
this sorrowful fact by fine words, and to talk
to the workman about the honorableness of
manual labor, and the dignity of humanity.
That is a grand old proverb of Sancho
Panza's, " Fine words butter no parsnips ; "
and I can tell you that, all over England just
now, you workmen are buying a great deal too
much butter at that dairy. Rough work, hon-
orable or not, takes the life out of us; and
the man who has been heaving clay out of a
ditch all day, or driving an express train
against the north wind all night, or holding a
collier's helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirl-
ing white-hot iron at a furnace mouth, that
man is not the same at the end of his day, or
night, as one who has been sitting in a quiet
room, with everything comfortable about him,
reading books, or classing butterflies, or paint-
ing pictures. If it is any comfort to you to
be told that the rough work is the more honor-
able of the two, I should be sorry to take that
much of consolation from you ; and in some
sense I need not. The rough work is at all
events real, honest, and, generally, though not
always, useful ; while the fine work is, a great
deal of it, foolish and false as well as fine, and

56 FIIE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

therefore dishonorable : but when both kinds
are equally well and worthily done, the head's
is the noble work, and the hand's the ignoble :
and of all hand work whatsoever, necessary
for- the maintenance of life, those old words,
" In the sweat of thy face thou shaltcat bread,"
indicate that the inherent nature of it is one of
calamity ; and that the ground, cursed for our
sake, casts also some shadow of degradation
into our contest with its thorn and its thistle ;
so that all nations have held their days honor-
able, or " holy," and constituted them " holy-
days," " or holidays," by making them days of
rest ; and the promise, which, among all our
distant hopes, seems to cast the chief bright-
ness over death, is that blessing of the dead
who die in the Lord, that " they rest from
their labors, and their works do follow
them."

And thus the perpetual question and con-
test must arise, who is to do this rough work ?
and how is the worker of it to be comforted,
redeemed, and rewarded ? and what kind of
play should he have, and what rest, in this
world, sometimes, as well as in the next?
Well, my good working friends, these ques*
tions will take a little time to answer yet

WORK. 57

They must be answered : all good men are
occupied with them, and all honest thinkers.
There's grand head work doing about them ;
but much must be discovered, and much at-
tempted in vain, before anything decisive can
be told you. Only note these few particulars,
which are already sure.

As to the distribution of the hard work. None
of us, or very few of us, do either hard or soft
work because we think we ought ; but because
we have chanced to fall into the way of it,
and cannot help ourselves. Now, nobody
does anything well that they cannot help
doing : work is only done well when it is done
with a will ; and no man has a thoroughly
sound will unless he knows he is doing what
he should, and is in his place. And, depend
upon it, all work must be done at last, not in
a disorderly, scrambling, doggish way, but in
an ordered, soldierly, human way — a lawful
way. Men are enlisted for the labor that
kills — the labor of war : they are counted,
trained, fed, dressed, and praised for that.
Let them be enlisted also for the labor that
feeds : let them be counted, trained, fed,
dressed, praised for that. Teach the plough
exercise as carefully as you do the sword e*

58 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

ercise, and let the officers of troops of life be
held as much gentlemen as the officers of
troops of death ; and all is done : but neither
this, nor any other right thing, can be accom-
plished— you can't even see your way to it—
unless, first of all, both servant and master
are resolved that, come what will of it, they
will do each other justice. People are per-
petually squabbling about what will be best to'
do, or easiest to do, or adviseablest to do, or
profitablest to do ; but they never, so far as I
hear them talk, ever ask what it isyW/to do.
And it is the law of heaven that you shall not
be able to judge what is wise or easy, unless
you are first resolved to judge what is just,
and to do it. This is the one thing constantly
reiterated by our Master — the order of all
others that is given oftenest — " Do justice and
judgment." That's your Bible order; that's
the " Service of God," not praying nor psalm-
singing. You are told, indeed, to sing psalms
when you are merry, and to pray when you
need anything ; and, by the perversion of the
Evil Spirit, we get to think that praying and
psalm-singing are "service." If a child finds
itself in want of anything, it runs in and asks
its father for it — does it call that, doing its

WORK.

59

father a service ? If, it begs for a toy or a
piece of cake — does it call that serving its
father ? That, with God, is prayer, and He
likes to hear it : He likes you to ask Him for
cake when you want it ; but He doesn't call that
"serving Him." Begging is not serving:
God likes mere beggars as little as you do —
He likes honest servants, not beggars. So
when a child loves its father very much, and
is very happy, it may sing little songs about
him ; but it doesn't call that serving its
father ; neither is singing songs about God,
serving God. It is enjoying ourselves, if it's
anything ; most probably it is nothing ; but if
it's anything, it is serving ourselves, not God.
And yet we are impudent enough to call our
beggings and chauntings " Divine Service : " we
say "Divine service will be 'performed'
(that's our word — the form of it gone through)
"at eleven o'clock." Alas! — unless we per-
form Divine service in every willing act of our
life, we never perform it at all. The one
Divine work — the one ordered sacrifice — is to
do justice ; and it is the last we are ever in-
clined to do. Anything rather than that !
As much charity as you choose, but no justice.
** Nay," you will say, " charity is greater than

60 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

justice." Yes, it is greater ; it is the summit
of justice — it is the temple of which justice is
the foundation. But you can't have the top
without the bottom; you cannot build upon
charity. You must build upon justice, for this
main reason, that you have not, at first, charity
to build with. It is the last reward of good
work. Do justice to your brother (you can do
that whether you love him or not), and you
will come to love him. But do injustice to
him, because you don't love him ; and you will
come to hate him. It is all very fine to think
you can build upon charity to begin with ;
but you will find all you have got to begin
with, begins at home, and is essentially love
of yourself. You well-to-do people, for in-
stance, who are here to-night, will go to
" Divine service " next Sunday, all nice and
tidy, and your little children wilj have their
tight little Sunday boots on, and lovely little
Sunday feathers in their hats; and you'll
think, complacently and piously, how lovely
they look ! So they do : and you love them
heartily, and you like sticking feathers in their
hats. That's all right : that is charity ; but it
is charity beginning at home. Then you will
come to the poor little crossing-sweeper, got

WORK. 6l

up also, — it, in its Sunday dress, — the dirtiest
rags it has, — that it may beg the better : we
shall give it a penny, and think how good we
are. That's charity going abroad. But what
does Justice say, walking and watching near
us ? Christian Justice has been strangely
mute, and seemingly blind ; and, if not blind,
decrepit, this many a day : she keeps her ac-
counts still, however — quite steadily — doing
them at nights, carefully, with her bandage off,
and through acutest spectacles (the only
modern scientific invention she cares about).
You must put your ear down ever so close to
her lips to hear her speak ; and then you will
start at what she first whispers, for it will cer-
tainly be, " Why shouldn't that little cross-
ing-sweeper have a feather on its head, as well
as your own child ? " Then you may ask Jus-
tice in an amazed manner, " How she can pos-
sibly be so foolish as to think children could
sweep crossings with feathers on their heads ? "
Then you stoop again, and Justice says — still
in her dull, stupid way — " Then, why don't
you, every other Sunday, leave your child to
sweep the crossing, and take the little sweeper
to church in a hat and feather ? " Mercy on
us (you think), what will she say next ? And

62 THE CROWN1 OF WILD OLIVE.

you answer, of course, that " you don't, because
everybody ought to remain content in the
position in which Providence has placed them."
Ah, my friends, that's the gist of the whole
question. Did Providence put them in that
position, cr did you ? You knock a man
into a ditch, and then you tell him to remain
content in the " position in which Providence
has placed him." That's modern Christianity
You say — " We did not knock him into the
ditch." How do you know what you have
done, or are doing ? That's just what we
have all got to know, and what we shall never
know until the question with us every morning,
is, not how to do the gainful thing, but how to
do the just thing ; nor until we are at least so
far on the way to being Christian, as to have
understood that maxim of the poor half-way
Mahometan, " One hour in the execution of
justice is worth seventy years of prayer."

Supposing, then, we have it determined with
appropriate justice, who is to do the hand
work, the next questions must be how the
hand-workers are to be paid, and how they are
to be refreshed, and what play they are to
have. Now, the possible quantity of play
depends on the possible quantity of pay ; and

WORK. 63

the quantity of pay is not a matter for con-
sideration to hand-workers only, but to all
workers. Generally, good, useful work,
whether of the hand or head, is either ill-paid,
or not paid at all. I don't say it should be so,
but it always is so. People, as a rule, only
pay for being amused or being cheated, not for
being served. Five thousand a year to your
talker, and a shilling a day to your fighter,
digger, and thinker, is the rule. None of the
best head work in art, literature, or science, is
ever paid for. How much do you think Homer
got for his Iliad ? or Dante for his Paradise ?
only bitter bread and salt, and going up and
down other people's stairs. In science, the
man who discovered the telescope, and first saw
heaven, was paid with a dungeon ; the man
who invented the microscope, and first saw
earth, died of starvation, driven from his
home : it is indeed very clear that God means
all thoroughly good work and talk to be done
for nothing. Baruch, the scribe, did not get
a penny a line for writing Jeremiah's second
roll for him, I fancy ; and St. Stephen did not
get bishop's pay for that long sermon of his to
the Pharisees ; nothing but stones. For indeed
that is the world-father's proper payment. So

64 THE CROW A' OF WILD OLIVE.

surely as any of the world's children work for
the world's good, honestly, with head and
heart ; and come to it, saying, " Give us a little
bread, just to keep the life in us," the world-
father answers them, " No, my children, not
bread ; a stone, if you like, or as many as you
need, to keep you quiet." But the hand-work-
ers are not so ill off as all this comes to. The
worst that can happen to you is to break
stones ; not be broken by them. And for you
there will come a time for better payment ;
some day, assuredly, more pence will be paid
to Peter the Fisherman, and fewer to Peter the
Pope ; we shall pay people not quite so much
for talking in Parliament and doing nothing,
as for holding their tongues out of it and doing
something ; we shall pay our ploughman a little
more and our lawyer a little less, and so on :
but, at least, we may even now take care that
whatever work is done shall be fully paid for ;
and the man who does it paid for it, not some-
body else ; and that it shall be done in an
orderly, soldierly, well-guided, wholesome
way, under good captains and lieutenants of
labor; and that it shall have its appointed
times of rest, and enough of them ; and that
in those times the play shall be wholesome

WORK. 65

play, not in theatrical gardens, with tin flowers
and gas sunshine, and girls dancing because
of their misery ; but in true gardens, with real
flowers, and real sunshine, and children dancing
because of their gladness ; so that truly the
streets shall be full (the " streets," mind you,
not the gutters) of children, playing in the midst
thereof. We may take care that working-men
shall have at least as good books to read as
anybody else, when they've time to read them ;
and as comfortable firesides to sit at as anybody
else when they've time to sit at them. This, I
think, can be managed for you, my working
friends, in the good time.

IV. I must go on, however, to our last head,
concerning ourselves all, as workers. What
is wise work, and what is foolish work ? What
the difference between sense and nonsense, in
daily occupation ?

Well, wise work is, briefly, work with God.
Foolish work is work against God. And work
done with God, which He will help, may be
briefly described as " Putting in Order " — that
is, enforcing God's law of order, spiritual and
material, over men and things. The first thing
you have to do, essentially; the real "good
Work " is, with respect to men, to enforce jus-
5

66 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

tice, and with respect to things, to enforce tidi
ness, and f ruitf ulness. And against these two
great human deeds, justice and order, there
are perpetually two great demons contending,
— the devil cf iniquity, or inequity, and the
devil of disorder, or of death ; for death is only
consummation of disorder. You have to fight
these two fiends daily. So far as you don't
fight against the fiend -of iniquity, you work
for him. You " work iniquity," and the judg*
ment upon you, for all your " Lord, Lord's," will
be " Depart from me, ye that work iniquity."
And so far as you do not resist the fiend of dis-
order, you work disorder, and you yourself do
the work of Death, which is sin, and has for its
wages, Death himself.

Observe then, all wise work is mainly three-
fold in character. It is honest, useful, and
cheerful.

I. It is honest. I hardly know anything
more strange than that you recognize honesty
in play, and you do not in work. In your
lightest games, you have always some one to
see what you call " fair-play." In boxing, you
must hit fair ; in racing, start fair. Your Eng-
lish watchword is fair-play, your English
hatred, foul-play, Did it ever strike you that

WORK. 67

you wanie<J another watchword also, fair-work,
and another hatred also, foul-work ? Your
prize-fighter has some honor in him yet ; and
so have the men in the ring round him : they
will judge him to lose the match, by foul hit-
ting. But your prize-merchant gains his match
by foul selling, and no one cries out against
that. You drive a gambler out of the gam-
bling-room who loads dice, but you leave a
tradesman in flourishing business who loads
scales ! For observe, all dishonest dealing /r
loading scales. What does it matter whether
I get short weight, adulterate substance, or
dishonest fabric ? The fault in the fabric is
incomparably the worst of the two. Give me
short measure cf food, and I only lose by you ;
but give me adulterate food, and I die by you.
Here, then, is your chief duty, you workmen
and tradesmen — to be true to yourselves, and
to us who would help you. We can do nothing
for you, nor you for yourselves, without
honesty. Get that, you get all ; without that,
your suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade
measures, your institutions of science, are all
in vain. It is useless to put your heads to-
gether, if you can't put your hearts together.
Shoulder to shoulder, right hand to right hand,

68 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

among yourselves, and no wrong hand to any*
body else, and you'll win the world yet.

II. Then, secondly, wise work is useful.
No man minds, or ought to mind, its being
hard, if only it comes to something ; but when
it is hard, and comes to nothing ; when all
our bees' business turns to spiders' ; and for
honey-comb we have only resultant cobweb,
blown away by the next breeze — that is the
cruel thing for the worker. Yet do we ever
ask ourselves, personally, or even nationally,
whether our work is coming to anything or
not ? We don't care to keep what has been
nobly done ; still less do we care to do nobly
what others would keep ; and, least of all, to
make the work itself useful instead of deadly
to the doer, so as to use his life indeed, but
not to waste it. Of all wastes, the greatest
waste that you can commit is the waste of
labor. If you went down in the morning into
your dairy, and you found that your youngest
child had got d wn before you ; and that he
and the cat were at play together, and that he
had poured out all the cream on the floor for
the cat to lap up, you would scold the child,
and be sorry the milk was wasted. But if,
instead of wooden buuio with milk in tliem^

WORK. 69

there are golden bowls with human life in-
them, and instead of the cat to play with — the
devil to play with ; and you yourself the
player; and instead of leaving that golden
bowl to be broken by God at the fountain, you
break it in the dust yourself, and pour the
human blood out on the ground for the fiend
to lick up — that is no waste ! What ! you
perhaps think, " to waste the labor of men is
not to kill them." Is it not ? I should like to
know how you could kill them more utterly —
kill them with second deaths? It is the
slightest way of killing to stop a man's breath.
Nay, the hunger, and the cold, and the little
whistling bullets — our love-messengers be-
tween nation and nation — have brought
pleasant messages from us to many a man
before now ; orders of sweet release, and
leave at last to go where he will be most
welcome and most happy. At the worst you
do but shorten his life, you do not corrupt
his life. But if you put him to base labor, if
you bind his thoughts, if you blind his eyes, if
you blunt his hopes, if you steal his joys, if
you stunt his body, and blast his soul, and at
last leave him not so much as to reap the
poor fruit of his degradation, but gather that

yo CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

for yourself, and dismiss him to the grave,
when you have done with him, having, so far
as in you lay, made the walls of that grave
everlasting (though, indeed, I fancy the goodly
bricks of some of our family vaults will hold
closer in the resurrection day than the sod
over the laborer's head), this you think is no
waste, and no sin !

III. Then, lastly, wise work is cheerful,
as a child's work is. And now I want you to
take one thought home with you, and let it
Stay with you.

Everybody in this room has been taught to
pray daily, " Thy kingdom come." Now, if we
liear a man swear in the streets, we think it
very wrong, and say he " takes God's name in
vain." But there's a twenty times worse way
of taking His name in vain than that. It is to
•ask God for what we dorit want. He doesn't
like that sort of prayer. If you don't want a
thing, don't ask for it: such asking is the
worst mockery of your King you can mock
Him with ; the soldiers striking Him on the
head with the reed was nothing to that. If
you do not wish for His kingdom, don't pray
for it. But if you do, you must do more than
pray for it ; you must work for it. And, to

work. yr

work for it, you must know what it is: we
have all prayed for it many a day without
thinking. Observe, it is a kingdom that is to
come to us ; we are not to go to it. Also, it is
not to be a kingdom of the dead, but of the
living. Also, it is not to come all at once, but
quietly ; nobody knows how " The kingdom of
God cometh not with observation." Also,
it is not to come outside cf us, but in the
hearts of us : " the kingdom of God is within
you." And being within us, it is not a thing
to be seen, but to be felt; and though it
brings all substance of good with it, it does
not consist in that : " the kingdom of God is
not meat and drink, but righteousness, peace,
and joy in the Holy Ghost : " joy, that is to
say, in the holy, healthful, and helpful Spirit.
Now, if we want to work for this kingdom,
and to bring it, and enter into it, there's just
one condition to be first accepted. You must
enter it as children, or not at all ; " Whosoever
will not receive it as a little child shall not
enter therein." And again, " Suffer little
children to come unto me, and forbid them
not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven."

Of such, observe. Not of children them-
selves, but of such as children- I believe

12 THE CROWN- OF WILD OLIVE.

most mothers who read that text think that all
heaven is to be full of babies. But that's not
so. There will be children there, but the
hoary head is the crown. " Length of days,
and long life and peace," that is the blessing,
not to die in babyhood. Children die but for
their parent's sins ; God means them to live,
but He can't let them always ; then they have
their earlier place in heaven : and the little
child of David, vainly prayed for ; — the little
child of Jeroboam, killed by its mother's step
on its own threshold, — they will be there. But
weary old David, and weary old Barzillai, hav-
ing learned children's lessons at last, will be
there too : and the one question for us all,
young cr old, i3, have we learned our child's
lesson ? it is the character of children we want,
and must gain at our peril ; let us see, briefly,
in what it consists.

The first character of right childhood is that
it is Modest. A well-bred child does not
think it can teach its parents, or that it knows
everything. It may think its father and
mother know everything, — perhaps that all
grown-up people know everything; very cer-
tainly it is sure that it does not. And it is
always asking questions, and wanting to know

work. 73

more. Well, that is the first character of a
good and wise man at his work. To know
that he knows very little ; — to perceive that
there are many above him wiser than he ; and
to be always asking questions, wanting to
learn, not to teach. No one ever teaches well
who wants to teach, or governs well who wants
to govern ; it is an old saying (Plato's, but I
know not if his, first), and as wise as old.

Then, the second character of right child-
hood is to be faithful. Perceiving that its
father knows best what is good for it, and
having found always, when it has tried its
own way against his, that he was right and it
was wrong, a noble child trusts him at last
wholly, gives him its hand, and will walk
blindfold with him, if he bids it. And that is
the true character of all good men also, as
obedient workers, or soldiers under captains.
They must trust their captains ; — they are
bound for their lives to choose none but those
whom they can trust. Then, they are not
always to be thinking that what seems strange
to them, or wrong in what they are desired to
do, is strange or wrong. They know their
captain : where he leads they must follow,
what he bids, they must do ; and without this

74 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

trust and faith, without this captainship and
soldiership, no great deed, no great salvation,
is possible to man. Among all the nations it
is only when this faith is attained by them
that they become great : the Jew, the Greek,
and the Mahometan, agree at least in testify-
ing to this. It was a deed of this absolute
trust which made Abraham the father of the
faithful ; it was the declaration of the power of
God as captain over all men, and the accept-
ance of a leader appointed by Kim as com-
mander of the faithful, which laid the founda-
tion of whatever national power yet exists in
the East ; and the deed of the Greeks, which
has become the type of unselfish and noble
soldiership to all lands, and to all times, was
commemorated, on the tomb of those who
gave their lives to do it, in the most pathetic,
so far as I know, or can feel, of all human
utterances : " Oh, stranger, go and tell our
people that we are lying here, having obeyed
their words."

Then the third character of right childhood
is to be Loving and Generous. Give a little
iove to a child, and you get a great deal back.
It loves everything near it, when it is a right
kind of child — would hurt nothing, would

WORK.

IS

give the best it has away, always, if you need,
it — does not lay plans for getting everything
in the house for itself, and delights in helping
people ; you cannot please it so much as by
giving it a chance of being useful, in ever so»
little a way.

And because of all these characters, lastly,
it is Cheerful. Putting its trust in its father,
it is careful for nothing — being full of love to^
every creature, it is happy always, whether in
its play or in its duty. Well, that's the great-
worker's character also. Taking no thought
for the morrow ; taking thought only for the-
duty of the day ; trusting somebody else to take-
care of to-morrow ; knowing indeed what labor
is, but not what sorrow is ; and always ready
for play, — beautiful play, — for lovely human
play is like the play of the Sun. There's a
worker for you. He, steady to his time, is set
as a strong man to run his course, but also,
he rejoiceth as a strong man to run his course.
See how he plays in the morning, with the
mists below, and the clouds above, with a ray
here and a flash there, and a shower of jewels,
everywhere ; — that's the Sun's play ; and great
human play is like his — all various — all full>
of light and life, and tender, as the dew of the-
morning.

76 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

So then, you have the child's character in
these four things — Humility, Faith, Charity,
and Cheerfulness. That's what you have got
to be converted to. " Except ye be converted
and become as little children " — You hear
much of conversion nowadays; but people
always seem to think you have got to be made
wretched by conversion, — to be converted to
long faces. No, friends, you have got to be
converted to short ones ; you have to repent
into childhood, to repent into delight, and de-
lightsomeness. You can't go into a convent-
icle but you'll hear plenty of talk of back-
sliding. Backsliding, indeed ! I can tell you,
on the ways most of us go, the faster we slide
back the better. Slide back into the cradle,
if going on is into the grave — back, I tell you ;
back — out of your long faces, and into your
long clothes. It is among children only, and
as children only, that you will find medicine
for your healing and true wisdom for your
teaching. There is poison in the counsels of
the man of this world ; the words they speak
are all bitterness, " the poison of asps is under
their lips," but " the sucking child shall play
by the hole of the asp." There is death in the
looks o£ meo. "Their eyes are privily set

WORK. ft

against the poor ; " they are as the uncharm-
able serpent, the cockatrice, which slew by-
seeing. But " the weaned child shall lay his
hand on the cockatrice den." There is death
in the steps of men : " their feet are swift to
shed blood ; they have compassed us in our
steps like the lion that is greedy of his prey,
and the young lion lurking in secret places,"
but, in that kingdom, the wolf shall lie down
with the lamb, and the fatling with the lion,
and " a little child shall lead them." There
is death in the thoughts of men ; the world is
one wide riddle to them, darker and darker as
it dxaws to a close ; but the secret of it is
known to the child, and the Lord of heaven
and earth is most to be thanked in that " He
has hidden these things from the wise and
prudent, and has revealed them unto babes."
Yes, and there is death — infinitude of death
in the principalities and powers of men. As
far as the east is from the west, so far our sins
are — not set from us, but multiplied around
us : the Sun himself, think you he now " re-
joices " to run his course, when he plunges
westward to the horizon, so widely red, not
with clouds, but blood ? And it will be red
more widely yet. Whatever drought of the

^8 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

early and latter rain may be, there will be none
of that red rain. You fortify yourselves against
it in vain ; the enemy and avenger will be
upon you also, unless you learn that it is not
out of the mouths of the knitted gun, or the
smoothed rifle, but "out of the mouths of
babes and sucklings " that the strength is or-
dained, which shall "still the enemy and
avenger."

LECTURE II.

TRAFFIC.

LECTURE IL>

TRAFFIC.
(Delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford!)

My good Yorkshire friends, you have asked
me down here among your hills that I might
talk to you about this Exchange you are going
to build ; but earnestly and seriously asking
you to pardon me, I am going to do nothing
of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can say
very little, about this same Exchange. I must
talk of quite other things, though not un-
willingly ; — I could not deserve your pardon,
if when you invited me to speak on one sub-
ject, I wilfully spoke on another. But I can-
not speak, to purpose, of anything about
which I do not care ; and most simply and
Sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset,
that I do not care about this Exchange of
yours.

If, however, when you sent me your invita-
tion, I had answered, " I won't come, I don't
6 8x

'82 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

care about the Exchange of Bradford," you
would have been justly offended with me, not
knowing the reason of so blunt a carelessness.
So I have come down, hoping that you will
patiently let me tell you why, on this, and
many other such occasions, I now remain
silent, when formerly I should have caught at
the opportunity of speaking to a gracious au-
dience.

In a word, then, I do not care about this
Exchange, — because you don't; and because
you know perfectly well I cannot make you. '
Look at the essential circumstances of the
case, which you, as business men, know per-
fectly well, though perhaps you think I forget
them. You are going to spend 30,000/.,
which to you, collectively, is nothing ; the buy-
ing a new coat is, as to the cost of it, a much
more important matter of consideration to me
than building a new Exchange is to you. But
you think you may as well have the right
thing for your money. You know there are a
great many odd styles of architecture about ;
you don't want to do anything ridiculous ;
you hear of me, among others, as a respectable
architectural man-milliner : and you send for
me, that I may tell you the leading fashion;

TRAFFIC. 83

and what is, in our shops, for the moment, the
newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles.

Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you
cannot have good architecture merely by
asking people's advice on occasion. All good
architecture is the expression of national life
and character, and it is produced by a pre-
valent and eager national taste, or desire for
beauty. And I want you to think a little of
the deep significance of this word " taste ; " for
no statement of mine has been more earnestly
or oftener controverted than that good taste is
essentially a moral quality. " No," say many
of my antagonists, " taste is one thing, morality
is another. Tell us what is pretty ; we shall
be glad to know that ; but preach no sermons
to us."

Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old
dogma of mine somewhat. Taste is not only
a part and an index of morality — it is the only
morality. The first, and last, and closest trial
question to any living creature is, " What do
you like ? " Tell me what you like, and I'll tell
you what you are. Go out into the street, and
ask the first man or woman you meet, what
their "taste " is, and if they answer candidly,
you know them, body and soul. u You, my

84 THE CROWN OF WILD OZTVE.

friend in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what
do you like ? " " A pipe and a quartern of gin."
I know you. " You, my good woman, with the
quick step and tidy bonnet, what do you like ? "
" A swept hearth and a clean tea-table, and my
husband opposite me, and a baby at my breast."
Good, I know you also. " You, little girl with
the golden hair and soft eyes, what do you
like ? " " My canary, and a run among the
wood hyacinths." "You, little boy with the
dirty hands and the low forehead, what do you
like ? " "A shy at the sparrows, and a game
at pitch-farthing." Good ; we know them all
now. What more need we ask?

" Nay," perhaps you answer : " we need
rather to ask what these people and children
do, than what they like. If they do right, it is
no matter that they like what is wrong ; and if
they do wrong, it is no matter that they like
what is right. Doing is the great thing ; and
it does not matter that the man likes drinking,
so that he does not drink ; nor that the little
girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will
not learn her lessons ; nor that the little boy
likes throwing stones at the sparrows, if he
goes to the Sunday school." Indeed, for a
short time, and in a provisional sense, this is

TRAFFIC. 85

true. For if, resolutely, people do what is
right, in time they come to like doing it. But
they only are in a right moral stage when they
have come to like doing it ; and as long as they
don't like it, they are still in a vicious state.
The man is not in health of body who is always
thirsting for the bottle in the cupboard, though
he bravely bears his thirst ; but the man who
heartily enjoys water in the morning and wine
in the evening, each in its proper quantity and
time. And the entire object of true education
is to make people not merely do the right
things, but enjoy the right things — not merely
industrious, but to love industry — not merely
learned, but to love knowledge — not merely
pure, but to love purity — not merely just, but
to hunger and thirst after justice.

But you may answer or think, " Is the liking
for outside ornaments, — for pictures, for stat-
ues, or furniture, or architecture, — a moral
quality ? " Yes, most surely, if a rightly set
liking. Taste for any pictures or statues is
not a moral quality, but taste for good ones is.
Only here again we have to define the word
" good." I don't mean by " good," clever — or
learned — or difficult in the doing. Take a
picture by Teniers, of sots quarrelling over

86 THE CROWN- OF WILD OLIVE.

their dice : it i3 an entirely clever picture ; SO
clever that nothing in its kind has ever been
done equal to it ; but it is also an entirely base
and evil picture. It is an expression of delight
in the prolonged contemplation of a vile thing,
and delight in that is an " unmannered," or
" immoral " quality. It is "bad taste " in the
profoundest sense — it is the taste of the devils.
On the other hand, a picture of Titian's, or a
Greek statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner
landscape, expresses delight in the perpetual
contemplation of a good and perfect thing.
That is an entirely moral quality — it is the
taste of the angels. And all delight in art, and
all love cf it, resolve themselves into simple
love of that which deserves love. That de-
serving is thequality which we call " loveliness "
— (we ought to have an opposite word, hate-
liness, to be said of the things which deserve
to be hated) ; and it is not an indifferent nor
optional thing whether we love this or that ;
but it is just the vital function of all our being.
What we like determines what we are, and is
the sign of what we are ; and to teach taste is
inevitably to form character. As I was thinking
over this, in walking up Fleet Street the other
day, my eye caught the title of a book standing

TRAFFIC. 87

open in a bookseller's window. It was — " On
the necessity of the diffusion of taste among
all classes." " Ah," I thought to myself, " my
classifying friend, when you have diffused your
taste, where will your classes be ? The man
who likes what you like, belongs to the same
class with you, I think. Inevitably so. You
may put him to other work if you choose ; but,
by the condition you have brought him into,
he will dislike the other work as much as you
would yourself. You get hokl of a scavenger,
or a costermonger, who enjoyed the Newgate
Calendar for literature, and ' Pop goes the
Weasel ! ' for music. You think you can make
him like Dante or Beethoven ? I wish you joy
of your lessons ; but if you do, you have made
a gentleman of him : — he won't like to go back
to his costermongering."

And as completely and unexceptionally is
this so, that, if I had time to-night, I could
show you that a nation cannot be affected by
any vice, or weakness, without expressing it,
legibly, and forever, either in bad art, or by
want of art ; and that there is no national
virtue, small or great, which is not manifestly
expressed in all the art which circumstances
enable the people possessing that virtue to

88 THE CROWN OF WILD OLTVE.

produce. Take, for instance, your great Eng-
lish virtue of enduring and patient courage.
You have at present in England only one art
of any consequence — that is, iron-working.
You know thoroughly well how to cast and
hammer iron. Now, do you think in those
masses of lava which you build volcanic
cones to melt, and which you forge at the
mouths of the Infernos you have created ; do
you think, on those iron plates, your courage
and endurance are not written forever — not
merely with an iron pen, but on iron parch-
ment ? And take also your great English vice
— European vice — vice cf all the world — vice
of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven,
bearing with them yet the atmosphere of hell
— the vice of jealousy, which brings competi-
tion into commerce, treachery into your coun-
cils, and dishonor into your wars — that vice
which has rendered for you, and for your next
neighboring nation, the daily occupations of
existence no longer possible, but with the mail
upon your breasts and the sword loose in its
sheath ; so that, at last, you have realized for
all the multitudes of the two great peoples
who lead the so-called civilization of the earth,
—you have realized for them all, I say, in

TRAFFIC. 89

person and in policy, what was once true only
of the rough Border riders of your Cheviot
hills—

They carved at the meal
With gloves of steel,
And they drank the red wine through the helmet
barr'd; —

do you think that this national shame and
dastardliness of heart are not written as legibly
on every rivet of your iron armor as the
strength of the right hands that forged it ?
Friends, I know not whether this thing be the
more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is
quite unspeakably both. Suppose, instead of
being now sent for by you, I had been sent
for by some private gentleman, living in a
suburban house, with his garden separated
only by a fruit-wall from his next-door neigh-
bor's ; and he had called me to consult with
him on the furnishing of his drawing-room. I
begin looking about me, and find the walls
rather bare ; I think such and such a paper
might be desirable — perhaps a little fresco
here and there on the ceiling — a damask cur-
tain or so at the windows. " Ah," says my
employer, " damask curtains, indeed ! That's
all very fine, but you know I can't afford that

9°

THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

kind of thing just now!" "Yet the world
credits you with a splendid income ! " " Ah,
yes," says my friend, " but do you know, at
present, I am obliged to spend it nearly all
in steel-traps ? " " Steel-traps ! for whom ? "
"Why, for that fellow on the other side the
wall, you know : we're very good friends, cap-
ital friends \ but we are obliged to keep our
traps set on both sides of the wall ; we could
not possibly keep on friendly terms without
them, and our spring-guns. The worst of it
is, we are both clever fellows enough ; and
there's never a day passes that we don't find
out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or some-
thing ; we spend about fifteen millions a year
each in our traps, take it all together ; and I
don't see how we're to do with less. " A highly
comic state of life for two private gentlemen !
but for two nations, it seems to me, not wholly
comic ! Bedlam would be comic, perhaps, if
there were only one madman in it; and your
Christmas pantomime is comic, when there is
only one clown in it ; but when the whole
world turns clown, and paints itself red with
its own heart's blood instead of vermilion, it
is something else than comic, I think.

Mind, I know a great deal of this is play,

TRAFFIC. 91

and willingly allow for that. You don't know
what to do with yourselves for a sensation :
fox-hunting and cricketing will not carry you
through the whole of this unendurably long
mortal life ; you liked pop-guns when you
were schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs
are only the same things better made: but
then the worst of it is, that what was play to
you when boys, was not play to the sparrows ;
and what is play to you now, is not play to
the small birds of State neither ; and for the
black eagles, you are somewhat shy of taking
shots at them, if I mistake not.

I must get back to the matter in hand, how-
ever. Believe me, without farther instance, I
could show you, in all time, that every nation's
vice, or virtue, was written in its art: the
soldiership of early Greece ; the sensuality of
late Italy ; the visionary religion of Tuscany ;
the splendid human energy and beauty of
Venice. I have no time to do this to-night
(I have done it elsewhere before now) ; but I
proceed to apply the principle to ourselves in
a more searching manner.

I notice that among all the new buildings
that cover your once wild hills, churches and
schools are mixed in due, that is to say, io

92 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

large proportion, with your mills and man-
sions ; and I notice also that the churches and
schools are almost always Gothic, and the
mansions and mills are never Gothic Will
you allow me to ask precisely the meaning of
this ? For remember, it is peculiarly a mod-
ern phenomenon. When Gothic was invented,
houses were Gothic as well as churches ; and
when the Italian style superseded the Gothic,
churches were Italian as well as houses. If
there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Ant-
werp, if there is a Gothic belfry to the Hotel de
Ville at Brussels ; if Inigo Jones builds an Ital-
ian Whitehall, Sir Christopher Wren builds an
Italian St. Paul's. But now you live under
one school of architecture, and worship under
another. What do you mean by doing this ?
Am I to understand that you are thinking of
changing your architecture back to Gothic ;
and that you treat your churches experiment-
ally, because it does not matter what mis-
takes you make in a church ? Or am I to un-
derstand that you consider Gothic a pre-emi-
nently sacred and beautiful mode of building,
which you think, like the fine frankincense,
should be mixed for the tabernacle only,, and
reserved for your religious services ? For if

TRAFFIC. 93

this be the feeling, though it may seem at first
as if it were graceful and reverent, you will
find that, at the root of the matter, it signifies
neither more nor less than that you have
separated your religion from your life.

For consider what a wide significance this
fact has ; and remember that it is not you only,
but all the people of England, who are behav-
ing thus just now.

You have all got into the habit of calling the
church " the house of God." I have seen, over
the doors of many churches, the legend act-
ually carved, " This is the house of God, and
this is the gate of heaven." Now, note where
that legend comes from, and of what place it
was first spoken. A boy leaves his father's
house to go on a long journey on foot, to visit
his uncle ; he has to cross a wild hill-desert ;
just as if one of your own boys had to cros3
the wolds of Westmoreland, to visit an uncle
at Carlisle. The second or third day your boy
finds himself somewhere between Hawes and
Brough, in the midst of the moors, at sunset.
It is stony ground, and boggy ; he cannot go
one foot farther that night. Down he lies, to
sleep, on Wharnside, where best he may,
gathering a few of the stones together to

94 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE

put under his head ; — so wild the place is, he
cannot get anything but stones. And there,
lying under the broad night, he has a
dream ; and he sees a ladder set up on the
earth, and the top of it reaches to heaven, and
the angels of God are ascending and descend-
ing upon it. And when he wakes out of his
sleep, he says, " How dreadful is this place ;
surely, this is none other than the house of
God, and this is the gate of heaven." This
place, observe ; not this church ; not this
city ; not this stone, even, which he puts up
for a memorial — the piece of flint on which his
head has lain. But this place; this windy
slope of Wharnside ; this moorland hollow,
torrent-bitten, snow-blighted ; this any » place
where God lets down the ladder. And how
are you to know where that will be ? or how
are you to determine where it may be, but by
being ready for it always ? Do you know
where the lightning is to fall next ? You do
know that, partly ; you can guide the lightning ;
but you cannot guide the going forth of the
Spirit, which is that lightning when it shines
from the east to the west.

But the perpetual and insolent warping of
that strong verse to serve a merely ecclesiastic

TRAFFIC.

95

Cai purpose, is only one of the thousand in-
stances in which we sink back into gross
Judaism. We call our churches " temples."
Now, you know, or ought to know, they are
not temples. They have never had, never can
have, anything whatever to do with temples.
They are "synagogues" — "gathering places"
—where you gather yourselves together as an
assembly; and by not calling them so, you
again miss the force of another mighty text—
" Thou, when thou prayest, shalt not be as the
hypocrites are ; for they love to pray standing
in the churches" [we should translate it], "that
they may be seen of men. But thou, when
thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when
thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father," —
which is, not in chancel nor in aisle, but " in
secret."

Now, you feel, as I say this to you — I know
you feci — as if I were trying to take away the
honor of your churches. Not so ; I am trying
to prove to you the honor of your houses and
your hills ; I am trying to show you — not that
the Church is not sacred — but that the whole
Earth is. I would have you feel, what care-
less, what constant, what infectious sin there
is in all modes of thought, whereby, in calling

96 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

your churches only "holy, "you call your hearths
and homes profane ; and have separated
yourselves from the heathen by casting all
your household gods to the ground, instead of
recognizing, in the place of their many and
feeble Lares, the presence of your One and
Mighty Lord and Lor.

" But what has all this to do with our Ex-
change ? " you ask me, impatiently. My dear
friends, it has just everything to do with it ;
on these inner and great questions depend all
the outer and little ones ; and if you have
asked me down here to speak to you be-
cause you had before been interested in any-
thing I have written, you must know that all
I have yet said about architecture was to show
this. The book I called " The Seven Lamps "
was to show that certain right states of temper
and moral feeling were the magic powers by
which all good architecture, without exception,
had been produced. " The Stones of Venice "
had, from beginning to end, no other aim than
to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice
had arisen out of, and indicated in all its
features, a state of pure national faith, and of
domestic virtue ; and that its Renaissance
architecture had arisen out of, and in all its

TRAFFIC. 97

features indicated, a state of concealed national
infidelity, and of domestic corruption. And
now, you ask me what style is best to build
in ; and how can I answer, knowing the mean-
ing of the two styles, but by another question —
do you mean to build as Christians or as In-
fidels ? And still more — do you mean to build
as honest Christians or as honest Infidels ? as
thoroughly and confessedly either one or the
other ? You don't like to be asked such rude
questions. I cannot help it ; they are of much
more importance then this Exchange business j
and if they can be at once answered, the Ex-
change business settles itself in a moment.
But, before I press them farther, I must ask
leave to explain one point clearly. In all my
past work, my endeavor has been to show that
good architecture is essentially religious — the
production of a faithful and virtuous, not of an
infidel and corrupted people. But in the course
of doing this, I have had also to show that
good architecture is not ecclesiastical. People
are so apt to look upon religion as the busi-
ness of the clergy, not their own, that the
moment they hear of anything depending on
" religion," they think it must also have de-
pended on the priesthood ; and I have had to
7

98 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

take what place was to be occupied between
these two errors, and fight both, often with
seeming contradiction. Good architecture is
the work of good and believing men ; there-
fore, you say, at least some people say, " Good
architecture must essentially have been the
work of the clergy, not of the laity." No — a
thousand times no ; good architecture has
always been the work of the commonatly, not of
the clergy. What, you say, those glorious
cathedrals — the pride of Europe — did their
builders not form Gothic architecture ? No ;
they corrupted Gothic architecture. Gothic
was formed in the baron's castle, and the
burgher's street. It was formed by the
thoughts, and hands, and powers of free citizens
and soldier kings. By the monk it was used
as an instrument for the aid of his superstition ;
when that superstition became a beautiful mad-
ness, and the best hearts of Europe vainly
dreamed and pined in the cloister, and vainly
raged and perished in the crusade — through
that fury of perverted faith and wasted war,
the Gothic rose also to its loveliest, most fan-
tastic, and, finally most foolish dreams ; and,
in those dreams, was lost.

I hope, now, that there is no risk of your

TRAFFIC. 99

misunderstanding me when I come to the gist
of what I want to say to-night — when I repeat,
that every great national architecture has been
the result and exponent of a great national re-
ligion. You can't have bits of it here, bits
there — you must have it everywhere, or no-
where. It is not the monopoly of a clerical
company — it is not the exponent of a theological
dogma — it is not the hieroglyphic writing of an
initated priesthood ; it is the manly language
of a people inspired by resolute and common
purpose, and rendering resolute and common
fidelity to the legible laws of an undoubted God.
Now, there have as yet been three distinct
schools of European architecture. I say,
European, because Asiatic and African archi-
tectures belong so entirely to other races and
climates, that there is no question of them
here ; only, in passing, I will simply assure
you that whatever is good or great in Egypt,
and Syria, and India, is just good or great for
the same reasons as the buildings on our side
of the Bosphorus. We Europeans, then, have
had three great religions ; the Greek, which
was the worship of the God of Wisdom and
Power ; the Mediaeval, which was the Worship
of the God of Judgment and Consolation : the

IOO THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

Renaissance, which was the worship of the
God of Pride and Beauty ; these three we have
had — they are past, — and now, at last, we
English have got a fourth; religion, and a God
of our own, about which I want to ask you.
But I must explain these three old ones first.

I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially wor-
shipped the God of Wisdom ; so that what-
ever contended against their religion, — to the
Jews a stumbling-block, — was, to the Greeks
— Foolishness.

The first Greek idea of Deity was that ex-
pressed in the word, of which we keep the
remnant in our words, " Z?/-urnal " and " Di-
vine " — the god of Day, Jupiter the revealer.
Athena is his daughter, but especially daughter
of the Intellect, springing armed from the
head. We are only with the help of recent
investigation beginning to penetrate the depth
of meaning couched under the Athenaic sym-
bols ; but I may note rapidly, that her aegis
the mantle with the serpent fringes, in which
she often, in the best statues, is represented
as folding up her left hand for better guard,
and the Gorgon on her shield, are both repre-
sentative mainly of the chilling horror and
sadness (turning men to stone, as it were), of

TRAFFIC. IOI

the outmost and superficial spheres of knowl-
edge— that knowledge which separates, in
bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, the heart of
the full-grown man from the heart of the
child. For out of imperfect knowledge spring
terror, dissension, danger, and disdain ; but
from perfect knowledge, given by the full-
revealed Athena, strength and peace, in sign
of which she is crowned with the olive spray*
and bears the resistless spear.

This, then, was the Greek conception of
purest Deity, and every habit of life, and every
form of his art developed themselves from the
seeking this bright, serene, resistless wisdom \
and setting himself, as a man, to do things
evermore rightly and strongly ; * not with any

* It is an error to suppose that the Greek worship*
or seeking, was chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of
Rightness and Strength founded on Forethought ; the
principal character of Greek art is not Beauty, but de-
sign ; and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian
Virgin- worship are both expressions of adoration of
divine Wisdom and Purity. Next to these great
deities rank, in power over the national mind, Diony-
sus and Ceres, the givers of human strength and life j
then, for heroic example, Hercules. There is no Venue*
worship among the Greeks in the great times ; and the
Muses are essentially teachers of Truth, and of its har»
denies.

J02 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

ardent affection or ultimate hope ; but with a
resolute and contingent energy of will, as know-
ing that for failure there was no consolation,
and for sin there was no remission. And the
Greek architecture rose unerring, bright,
clearly defined, and self-contained.

Next followed in Europe the great Christian
faith, which was essentially the religion cf
Comfort. Its great doctrine is the remission
of sins ; for which cause it happens, too often,
in certain phases of Christianity, that sin and
sickness themselves are partly glorified, as if,
the more you have to be healed of, the
more divine was the healing. The practi-
cal result of this doctrine, in art, is a continual
contemplation of sin and disease, and of
imaginary states of purification from them ;
thus we have an architecture conceived in a
mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspira-
tion, partly severe, partly luxuriant, which will
bend itself to every one of our needs, and
every one of our fancies, and be strong or
weak with us, as we are strong or weak our-
selves. It is, of all architecture, the basest,
when base people build it — of all, the noblest,
When built by the noble.

And now note that both these religions—*

TRAFFIC.

103

Greek and Mediaeval — perished by falsehood in
their own main purpose. The Greek religion of
Wisdom perished in a false philosophy — " Op-
positions of science, falsely so called." The
Mediaeval religion of Consolation perished in
false comfort ; in remission of sins given ly-
ingly. It was the selling of absolution that
ended the Mediaeval faith ; and I can tell you
more, it is the selling of absolution which, to
the end of time, will mark false Christianity.
Pure Christianity gives her remission of sins
only by ending them ; but false Christianity
gets her remission of sins by compounding for
them. And there are many ways of compound-
ing for them. We English have beautiful
little quiet ways of buying absolution, whether
in low Church or high, far more cunning than
any of Tetzel's trading.

Then, thirdly, there followed the religion of
Pleasure, in which all Europe gave itself to
luxury, ending in death. First, bals masques
in every saloon, and then guillotines in every
square. And all these three worships issue in
vast temple building. Your Greek worshipped
Wisdom, and built you the Parthenon — the
Virgin's temple. The Mediaeval worshipped
Consolation, and built you Virgin temples also

io4 THE CROWH OF WILD OLIVE".

—but to our Lady of Salvation. Then the
Revivalist worshipped beauty, of a sort, and
built you Versailles, and the Vatican. Now,
lastly, will you tell me what ive worship, and
what we build ?

You know we are speaking always of the
real, active, continual, national worship ; that
by which men act while they live ; not that
which they talk of when they die. Now, we
have, indeed, a nominal religion, to which we
pay tithes of property and sevenths of time ;
but we have also a practical and earnest
religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of our
property and sixth-sevenths of our time. And
we dispute a great deal about the nominal
religion ; but we are all unanimous about this
practical one, of which I think you will admit
that the ruling goddess may be best generally
described as the " Goddess of Getting-on," or
" Britannia of the Market." The Athenians
had an '* Athena Agoraia," or Minerva of the
Market ; but she was a subordinate type of
their goddess, while our Britannia Agoraia is
the principal type of ours. And all your great
architectural works, are, of course, built to her.
It is long since you built a great cathedral ;
and how you would laugh at me, if I proposed

TRAFFIC. 10$

building a cathedral on the top of one of these
hills of yours, taking it for an Acropolis ! But
your railroad mounds, prolonged masses of
Acropolis ; your railroad stations, vaster than
the Parthenon, and innumerable ; your chim-
neys, how much more mighty and costly than
cathedral spires ! your harbor-piers ; your ware-
houses ; your exchanges ! — all these are built
to your great Goddess of " Getting-on ; " and
she has formed, and will continue to form, your
architecture, as long as you worship her ; and
it is quite vain to ask me to tell you how to
build to her; you know far better than I.

There might indeed, on some theories, be a
conceivably good architecture for Exchanges
— that is to say if there were any heroism in
the fact or deed of exchange, which might be
typically carved on the outside of your build-
ing. For, you know, all beautiful architecture
must be adorned with sculpture or painting ;
and for sculpture or painting, you must have a
subject. And hitherto it has been a received
opinion among the nations of the world that the
only right subjects for either, were heroisms of
some sort. Even on his pots and his flagons,
the Greek put a Hercules slaying lions, or an
Apollo slaying serpents, or Bacchus slaying

Io6 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

melancholy giants, and earth-borne despond-
encies. On his temples, the Greek put con-
tests of great warriors in founding states, or of
gods with evil spirits. On his houses and
temples alike, the Christian put carvings of
angels conquering devils ; or of hero-martyrs
exchanging this world for another ; subject
inappropriate, I think, to our manner of ex-
change here. And the Master of Christians
not only left his followers without any orders
as to the sculpture of affairs of exchange on
the outside of buildings, but gave some strong
evidence of his dislike of affairs of exchange
within them. And yet there might surely be a
heroism in such affairs ; and all commerce
become a kind of selling of doves, not im-
pious. The wonder has always been great
to me, that heroism has never been supposed
to be in anywise consistent with the practice
of supplying people with food, or clothes;
but rather with that of quartering oneself
upon them for food, and stripping them of
their clothes. Spoiling of armor is an heroic
-deed in all ages ; but the selling of clothes,
old or new, has never taken any color of mag-
nanimity. Yet one does not see why feeding
the hungry and clothing the naked should

TRAFFIC. 107

ever become base businesses, even when en-
gaged in on a large scale. If one could con-
trive to attach the notion of conquest to them
anyhow? so that, supposing there were any-
where an obstinate race, who refused to be
comforted, one might take some pride in giv-
ing them compulsory comfort ; and as it were,
" occupying a country " with one's gifts, in-
stead of one's armies ? If one could only con-
sider it as much a victory to get a barren field
sown, as to get an eared field stripped ; and
contend who should build villages, instead of
who should " carry " them. Are not all forms
of heroism conceivable in doing these service-
able deeds ? You doubt who is strongest ?
It might be ascertained by push of spade, as
well as push of sword. Who is wisest?
There are witty things to be thought of in
planning other business than campaigns.
Who is bravest? There are always the
elements to fight with, stronger than men;
and nearly as merciless. The only absolutely
and unapproachably heroic element in the
soldier's work seems to be — that he is paid
little for it — and regularly : while you traffick-
ers, and exchangers, and others occupied in
presumably benevolent business, like to be

Io8 THE CROWN OF WILD OLTVS.

paid much for it — and by chance. I never
can make out how it is that a knight-errant
does not expect to be paid for his trouble, but
a pedler-errant always does ; — that people are
willing to take hard knocks for nothing, but
never to sell ribbons cheap ; — that they are
ready to go on fervent crusades to recover the
tomb of a buried God, never on any travels to
fulfil the orders of a living God ; — that they
will go anywhere barefoot to preach their
faith, but must be well bribed to practise it,
and are perfectly ready to give the Gospel
gratis, but never the loaves and fishes. If
you choose to take the matter up on any such
soldierly principle, to do your commerce, and
your feeding of nations, for fixed salaries ; and
to be as particular about giving people the
best food, and the best cloth, as soldiers are
about giving them the best gunpowder, I could
carve something for you on your exchange
worth looking at. But I can only at present
suggest decorating its frieze with pendant
purses ; and making its pillars broad at the
base, for the sticking of bills. And in the
innermost chambers of it there might be a
statue of Britannia of the Market, who may
have, perhaps advisably, a partridge for hex

TRAFFIC. 109

crest, typical at once of her courage in fighting
for noble ideas ; and of her interest in game ;
and round its neck the inscription in golden
letters, " Perdix fovit quae non peperit." *
Then, for her spear, she might have a weaver's
beam ; and on her shield, instead of her Cross,
the Milanese boar, semi-fleeced, with the
town of Gennesaret proper, in the field and
the legend " In the best market," and her
corselet, of leather, folded over her heart in the
shape of a purse, with thirty slits in it for a
piece of money to go in at, on each day of the
month. And I doubt not but that people
would come to see your exchange, and its god-
dess, with applause.

Nevertheless, I want to point out to you
certain strange characters in this goddess o£
yours. She differs from the great Greek and
Mediaeval deities essentially in two things — •
first, as to the continuance of her presumed
power ; secondly, as to the extent of it.

1st, as to the Continuance.

* Jerem. xvii. (best in Septuagint and Vulgate).
"As the partridge, fostering what she brought not
forth, so he that getteth riches not by right, shall leave
them in the midst of his days, and at his end shall be a
fuui."

HO THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

The Greek Goddess of Wisdom gave con«
tinual increase of wisdom, as the Christian
Spirit of Comfort (or Comforter) continual in-
crease of comfort. There was no question,
with these, of any limit or cessation of func-
tion. But with your Agora Goddess, that is
just the most important question. Getting on
— but where to ? Gathering together — but
how much ? Do you mean to gather always
— never to spend ? If so, I wish you joy of
your goddess, for I am just as well off as you,
without the trouble of worshipping her at all.
But if you do not spend, somebody else will —
somebody else must. And it is because of
this (among many other such errors) that I
have fearlessly declared your so-called science
of Political Economy to be no science;
because, namely, it has omitted the study of
exactly the most important branch of the busi-
ness— the study of spending. For spend you
must, and as much as you make, ultimately.
You gather corn : — will you bury England
under a heap of grain ; or will you, when you
have gathered, finally eat ? You gather gold :
— will you make your house-roofs of it, or
pave your streets with it ? That is still one
way of spending it. But if you keep it, you

TRAFFIC. Iir

may get more, I'll give you more ; I'll give
you all the gold you want — all you can imagine
— if you can tell me what you'll do with it.
You shall have thousands of gold pieces ;— »
thousands of thousands — millions — mountains,
of gold : where will you keep them ? Will you
put an Olympus of silver upon a golden Pelion
— make Ossa like a wart ? Do you think the
rain and dew would then come down to you,
in the streams from such mountains, more
blessedly than they will down the mountains
which God has made for you, of moss and
whinstone ? But it is not gold that you want
to gather! What is it? greenbacks? No;
not those neither. What is it then — is it
ciphers after a capital I ? Cannot you prac-
tise writing ciphers, and write as many as you
want ? Write ciphers for an hour every morn-
ing, in a big book, and say every evening, I
am worth all those noughts more than I was
yesterday. Won't that do ? Well, what in
the name of Plutus is it you want ? Not gold,
not greenbacks, not ciphers after a capital I ?
You will have to answer, after all, " No ; we
want, somehow or other, money's worth."
Well, what is that? Let your Goddess oi

1 12 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

Getting-on discover it, and let her learn to
Stay therein.

II. But there is another question to be
asked respecting this Goddess of Getting-on.
The first was of the continuance of her power ;
the second is of its extent.

Pallas and the Madonna were supposed to
be all the world's Pallas, and all the world's
Madonna. They could teach all men, and
they could comfort all men. But, look strictly
into the nature of the power of your God-
dess of Getting-on ; and you will find she is
the Goddess — not of everybody's getting on —
but only of somebody's getting on. This is
a vital, or rather deathful, distinction. Ex-
amine it in your own ideal of the state of
national life which this Goddess is to evoke
and maintain. I asked you what it was, when
I was last here ; * — you have never told me.
Now, shall I try to tell you ?

Your ideal of human life then is, I think,
that it should be passed in a pleasant undulat-
ing world, with iron and coal everywhere un-
derneath it. On each pleasant bank of this
world is to be a beautiful mansion, with two

• Two Paths, p. 98.

TRAFFIC. 113

wings ; and stables, and coach-houses ; a mod-
erately sized park ; a large garden and hot-
houses ; and pleasant carriage drives through
the shrubberies. In this mansion are to live
the favored votaries of the Goddess ; the
English gentleman, with his gracious wife,
and his beautiful family ; always able to have
the boudoir and the jewels for the wife, and
the beautiful ball-dresses for the daughters,
and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in
the Highlands for himself. At the bottom of
the bank, is to be the mill ; not less than a
quarter of a mile long, with a steam engine at
each end, and two in the middle, and a chim-
ney three hundred feet high. In this mill are
to be in constant employment from eight hun-
dred to a thousand workers, who never drink,
never strike, always go to church on Sunday,
and always express themselves in respectful
language.

Is not that, broadly, and in the main feat-
ures, the kind of thing you propose to your-
selves ? It is very pretty indeed seen from
above ; not at all so pretty, seen from below.
For, observe, while to one family this deity is
indeed the Goddess of Getting-on, to a thou-
sand families she is the Goddess of not Get*
8

1 14 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

ting-on. " Nay," you say, " they have all their
chance." Yes, so has every one in a lottery,
but there must always be the same number of
blanks. " Ah ! but in a lottery it is not skill
and intelligence which take the lead, but
blind chance." What then ! do you think the
old practice, that " they. should take who have
the power, and they should keep who can," is
less iniquitous, when the power has become
power of brains instead of fist? and that,
though we may not take advantage of a child's
or a woman's weakness, we may of a man's
foolishness ? " Nay, but finally, work must
be done, and some one must be at the top,
some one at the bottom." Granted, my
friends. Work must always be ; and captains
of work must always be ; and if you in the
least remember the tone of any of my writings,
you must know that they are thought unfit for
this age, because they are insisting on need of
government, and speaking with scorn of liberty.
But I beg you to observe that there is a wide
difference between being captains or governors
of work, and taking the profits of it. It does
not follow, because you are general of an
army, that )'ou are to take all the treasure, or
land, it wins (if it fight for treasure or land) \

TRAFFIC. 115

neither, because you are king of a nation, that
you are to consume all the profits of the
nation's work. Real kings, on the contrary,
are known invariably by their doing quite the
reverse of this, — by their taking the least pos-
sible quantity of the nation's work for them-
selves. There is no test of real knighthood
so infallible as that. Does the crowned creat-
ure live simply, bravely, unostentatiously?
probably he is a King. Does he cover his
body with jewels, and his table with delicates ?
in all probability he is not a King. It is pos-
sible he may be, as Solomon was ; but that is
"when the nation shares his splendor with him.
Solomon made gold, not only to be in his own
palace as stones, but to be in Jerusalem as
stones. But even so, for the most part, these
splendid kinghoods expire in ruin, and only
the true kinghoods live, which are of royal
laborers ; who, both leading rough lives, estab-
lish the true dynasties. Conclusively you will
find that because you are king of a nation, it
does not follow that you are to gather for
yourself all the wealth of that nation ; neither,
because you are king of a small part of the
nation, and lord over the means of its main-
tenance—over field, or mill, or mine, are you

Il6 THE CROWN OF WILD* OLIVE.

to take all the produce of that piece of the
foundation of national existence for yourself.

You will tell me I need not preach against
these things, for I cannot mend them. No,
good friends, I cannot ; but you can, and you
will ; or something else can and will. Do you
think these phenomena are to stay always in
their present power or aspect? All history
shows, on the contrary, that to be the exact
thing they never can do. Change must come ;
but it is ours to determine whether change of
growth, or change of death. Shall the Parthe-
non be in ruins on its rock, and Bolton priory
in its meadow, but these mills of yours be the
consummation of the buildings of the earth,
and their wheels be as the wheels of eternity ?
Think you that " men may come, and men
may go," but — mills — go on forever ? Not so;
out of these, better or worse shall come ; and
it is for you to choose which.

I know that none of this wrong is done with
deliberate purpose. I know, on the contrary,
that you wish your workmen well ; that you do
much for them, and that you desire to do more
for them, if you saw your way to it safely. I
know that many of you have done, and are
every day doing, whatever you feel to be in

TRAFFIC. 117

your power ; and that even all this wrong and
misery are brought about by a warped sense of
duty, each of you striving to do his best, with-
out noticing that this best is essentially and
centrally the best for himself, not for others.
And all this has come of the spreading of that
thrice accursed, thrice impious doctrine of the
modern economist, that " To do the best for
yourself, is finally to do the best for others."
Friends, our great Master said not so ; and
most absolutely we shall find this world is not
made so. Indeed, to do the best for others,
is finally to do the best for ourselves ; but it
will not do to have our eyes fixed on that issue.
The Pagans had got beyond that. Hear what
a Pagan says of this matter ; hear what were,
perhaps, the last written words of Plato, — if
not the last actually written (for this we can-
not know), yet assuredly in fact and power his
parting words — in which, endeavoring to give
full crowning and harmonious close to all his
thoughts, and to speak the sum of them by
the imagined sentence of the Great Spirit, his
strength and his heart fail him, and the words
cease, broken off forever. It is the close of
the dialogue called "Critias," in which he
describes, partly from real tradition, partly in

Il8 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

ideal dream, the early state of Athens ; and
the genesis, and order, and religion, of the
fabled isle of Atlantis ; in which genesis he
conceives the same first perfection and final
degeneracy of man, which in our own Scrip-
tural tradition is expressed by saying that the
Sons of God intermarried with the daughters
of men, for he supposes the earliest race to
have been indeed the children of God , and to
have corrupted themselves, until " their spot
was not the spot of his children." And this,
he says, was the end ; that indeed " through
many generations, so long as the God's nature
in them yet was full, they were submissive to
the sacred laws, and carried themselves lov-
ingly to all that had kindred with them in
divineness : for their uttermost spirit was faith-
ful and true, and in every wise great ; so that,
in all meekness of wisdom, they dealt with
each other, and took all the chances of life ;
and despising all things except virtue, they
cared little what happened day by day, and
bore lightly the burden of gold and of posses-
sions ; for they saw that, if only their common
lov» and virtue increased, all these things
would be increased together with them ; but
to set their esteem and ardent pursuit upon

TRAFFIC. 119

material possession would be to lose that first,
and their virtue and affection together with it.
And by such reasoning, and what of the divine
nature remained in them, they gained all this
greatness of which we have already told ; but
when the God's part of them faded and became
extinct, being mixed again and again, and
effaced by the prevalent mortality; and the
human nature at last exceeded, they then be-
came unable to endure the courses of fortune ;
and fell into shapelessness of life, and base-
ness in the sight of him who could see, having
lost everything that was fairest of their honor;
while to the blind hearts which could not dis-
cern the true life, tending to happiness, it
seemed that they were then chiefly noble and
happy, being filled with all iniquity of inordi-
nate possession and power. Whereupon, the
God of Gods, whose Kingdom is in laws, be-
holding a once just nation thus cast into mis-
ery, and desiring to lay such punishment upon
them as might make them repent into restrain-
ing, gathered together all the gods into his
dwelling-place, which from heaven's centre
overlooks whatever has part in creation ; and

having assembled them, he said "

The rest is silence. So ended are the last

120 THE CROWN- OF WILD OLIVE.

words of the chief wisdom of the heathen,
spoken of this idol of riches ; this idol of
yours ; this golden image high by measureless
cubits, set up where your green fields of Eng-
land are furnace-burnt into the likeness of the
plain of Dura : this idol, forbidden to us, first
of all idols, by your own Master and faith ;
forbidden to us also by every human lip that
has ever, in any age or people, been accounted
of as able to speak according to the purposes
of God. Continue to make that forbidden
deity your principal one, and soon no more
art, no more science, no more pleasure will be
possible. Catastrophe will come ; or worse
than catastrophe, slow mouldering and wither-
ing into Hades. But if you can fix some con-
ception of a true human state of life to be
striven for — life for all men as for yourselves
— if you can determine some honest and sim-
ple order of existence ; following those trodden
ways of wisdom, which are pleasantness, and
seeking her quiet and withdrawn paths, which
are peace ; — then, and so sanctifying wealth
into " commonwealth," all your art, your lit-
erature, your daily labors, your domestic affec-
tion, and citizen's duty, will join and increase
into one magnificent harmony. You will know

TRAFFIC. 121

then how to build, well enough ; you will build
with stone well, but with flesh better ; temples
not made with hands, but riveted of hearts ;
and that kind of marble, crimson-veined, is in-
deed cieuud.

LECTURE III.

WAR.

LECTURE IIL

WAR.

(Delivered at the Royal Military Academy, Woohoieh)

Young soldiers, I do not doubt but that
many of you came unwillingly tc-night, and
many in merely contemptuous curiosity, to
hear what a writer on painting could possibly
say, or would venture to say, respecting your
great art of war. You may well think within
yourselves, that a painter might, perhaps with-
out immodesty, lecture younger painters upon
painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor
young physicians upon medicine — least of all,
it may seem to you, young warriors upon war.
And, indeed, when I was asked to address
you, I declined at first, and declined long ; for
I felt that you would not be interested in my
special business, and would certainly think
there was small need for me to come to teach
you yours. Nay, I knew that there ought to
be no such need, for the great veteran soldiers

is6 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

of England are now men everyway so thoughts
ful, so noble, and so good, that no other teach-
ing than their knightly example, and their few
words of grave and tried counsel should be
either necessary for you, or even, without as-
surance of due modesty in the offerer, endured
by you.

But being asked, not once nor twice, I have
not ventured persistently to refuse ; and I will
try, in very few words, to lay before you some
reason why you should accept my excuse and
hear me patiently. You may imagine that
your work is wholly foreign to, and separate
from mine. So far from that, all the pure and
noble arts of peace are founded on war ; no
great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a
nation of soldiers. There is no art among a
shepherd people, if it remains at peace. There
is no art among an agricultural people, if it re-
mains at peace. Commerce is barely consist-
ent with fine art; but cannot produce it.
Manufacture not only is unable to produce it.
but invariably destroys whatever seeds of it
exist. There is no great art possible to a
nation but that which is based on battle.

Now, though I hope you love fighting for
its own sake, you must, I imagine, be surprised

WAR. 127

at my assertion that there is any such good
fruit of fighting. You supposed, probably,
that your office was to defend the works of
peace, but certainly not to found them : nay,
the common course of war, you may have
thought, was only to destroy them. And truly,
I who tell you this of the use of war, should
have been the last of men to tell you so, had I
trusted my own experience only. Hear why :
I have given a considerable part of my life to
the investigation of Venetian painting ; and
the result of that inquiry was my fixing upon
one man as the greatest of all Venetians, and
therefore, as I believed, of all painters whatso-
ever. I formed this faith (whether right or
wrong matters at present nothing), in the su-
premacy of the painter Tintoret, under a roof
covered with his pictures ; and of those pictures,
three of the noblest were then in the form of
ragged canvas, mixed up with the laths of the
roof, rent through by three Austrian shells.
Now it is not every lecturer who could tell you
that he had seen three of his favorite pictures
torn to rags by bombshells. And after such a
sight, it is not every lecturer who would tell you
that, nevertheless, war was the foundation o£
all great art.

ItS THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any
careful comparison of the states of great his-
toric races at different periods. Merely to
show you what I mean, I will sketch for you,
very briefly, the broad steps of the advance of
the best art of the world. The first dawn of it
is in Egypt ; and the power of it is founded on
the perpetual contemplation of death, and of
future judgment, by the mind of a nation of
which the ruling caste were priests, and the
second, soldiers. The greatest works produced
by them are sculptures of their kings going out
to battle, or receiving the homage of conquered
armies. And you must remember also, as one
of the great keys to the splendor of the Egyp-
tian nation, that the priests were not occupied
in theology only. Their theology was the basis
of practical government and law ; so that they
were not so much priests as religious judges :
the office of Samuel, among the Jews, being as
nearly as possible correspondent to theirs.

All the rudiments of art then, and much more
than the rudiments of all science, are laid first
by this great warrior-nation, which held in
contempt all mechanical trades, and in absolute
hatred the peaceful life of shepherds. From
Egypt art passes directly into Greece, where

WAR.

119

all poetry, and all painting, are nothing else
than the description, praise, or dramatic rep-
resentation of war or of the exercises which
prepare for it, in their connection with offices
of religion. All Greek institutions had first
respect to war ; and their conception of it, as
one necessary office of all human and divine
life, is expressed simply by the images of their
guiding gods. Apollo is the god of all wisdom
of the intellect ; he bears the arrow and the bow,
before he bears the lyre. Again, Athena is the
goddess of all wisdom in conduct. It is by
the helmet and the shield, oftener than by the
shuttle, that she is distinguished from other
deities.

There were, however, two great differences
in principle between the Greek and the Egyp-
tian theories of policy. In Greece there was
no soldier caste ; every citizen was necessarily
a soldier. And, again, while the Greeks rightly
despised mechanical arts as much as the Egyp-
tians, they did not make the fatal mistake of
despising agricultural and pastoral life; but
perfectly honored both. These two conditions
of truer thought raise them quite into the high-
est rank of wise manhood that has yet been
reached ; for all our great arts, and nearly all
9

130 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

our great thoughts, have been borrowed or
derived from them. Take away from us what
they have given ; and I hardly can imagine how
low the modern European would stand.

Now, you are to remember, in passing to the
next phase cf history, that though you must
have war to produce art — you must also hav#
much more than war ; namely, an art-instinct
or genius in the people ; and that, though all
the talent for painting in the world won't make
painters of you, unless you have a gift for
fighting, and none for painting. Now, in the
next great dynasty of soldiers, the art-instinct
is wholly wanting. I have not yet investigated
the Roman character enough to tell you the
causes of this ; but I believe, paradoxical as it
may seem to you, that, however truly the Roman
might say of himself that he was born of Mars,
and suckled by the wolf, he was nevertheless,
at heart, more of a farmer than a soldier. The
exercises of war were with him practical, not
poetical ; his poetry was in domestic life only,
and the object of battle, " pacis imponere
morem." And the arts are extinguished in his
hands, and do not rise again, until, with Gothic
chivalry, there comes back into the mind of
Europe a passionate delight in war itself, for

WAR. 131

the sake of war. And then, with the romantic
knighthood which can imagine no other noble
employment, — under the fighting kings of
France, England, and Spain ; and under the
fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy,
art is born again, and rises to her height in
the great valleys of Lombardy and Tuscany,
through which there flows not a single stream,
from all their Alps cr Apennines, that did not
once run dark red from battle : a:.d it reaches
its culminating glory in the city which gave to
history the most intense type of soldiership yet
seen among men ; — the city whose armies were
led in their assault by their king, led through
it to victory by their king, and so led, though
that king of theirs was blind, and in the extrem-
ity of his age.

And from this time forward, as peace is
established or extended in Europe, the arts
decline. They reach an unparalleled pitch of
costliness, but lose their life, enlist themselves
at last on the side of luxury and various cor-
ruption, and, among wholly tranquil nations,
wither utterly away ; remaining only in partial
practice among races who, like the French
and us, have still the minds, though we cannot
all live the lives, of soldiers.

13* THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

" It may be so," I can suppose that a
philanthropist might exclaim. " Perish then
the arts, if they can flourish only at such a cost.
What worth is there in toys of canvas and
stone, if compared to the joy and peace of
artless domestic life ? " And the answer is —
truly, in themselves, none. But as expressions
of the highest state of the human spirit, their
worth is infinite. As results they may be
worthless, but, as signs, they are above price.
For it is an assured truth that, whenever the
faculties of men are at their fulness, they must
express themselves by art ; and to say that a
state is without such expression, is to say that
it is sunk from its proper level of manly nature.
So that, when I tell you that war is the founda-
tion of all the arts, I mean also that it is the
foundation of all the high virtues and faculties
of men.

It was very strange to me to discover this ;
and very dreadful — but I saw it to be quite an
undeniable fact. The common notion that
peace and the virtues of civil life flourished to-
gether, I found to be wholly untenable. Peace
and the vices of civil life only flourish together.
We talk of peace and learning, and of peace
and plenty, and of peace and civilization ; but

WAR. 133

I found that those were not the words whicfc
the Muse of History coupled together ; that on
her lips, the words were — peace and sensuality,
peace and selfishness, peace and corruption,
peace and death. I found, in brief, that all
great nations learned their truth of word, and,
strength of thought, in war ; that they were
nourished in war, and wasted by peace ; taught
by war, and deceived by peace ; trained by war
and betrayed by peace ; — in a word, that they
were born in war and expired in peace.

Yet now note carefully, in the second place,
it is not all war of which this can be said — nor
all dragon's teeth, which, sown, will start up
into men. It is not the ravage of a barbarian
wolf-flock, as under Genseric or Suwarrow;
nor the habitual restlessness and rapine of
mountaineers, as on the old borders of Scot-
land ; nor the occasional struggle of a strong
peaceful nation for its life, as in the wars of
the Swiss with Austria; nor the contest of
merely ambitious nations for extent of power,
as in the wars of France under Napoleon, or
the just terminated war in America. None of
these forms of war build anything but tombs~
But the creative or foundational war is that in
which the natural restlessness and love of con*

134 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

test among men are disciplined, by consent,
into modes of beautiful — though it may be
fatal — play : in which the natural ambition and
love of power of men are disciplined into the
aggressive conquest of surrounding evil : and
in which the natural instincts of self-defence
are sanctified by the nobleness of the institu-
tions, and purity of the households, which they
are appointed to defend. To such war as
this all men are born ; in such war as this any
man may happily die; and forth from such
war as this have arisen throughout the extent
of past ages, all the highest sanctities and
virtues of humanity.

I shall therefore divide the war of which I
would speak to you into three heads. War for
exercise or play ; war for dominion ; and war
for defence.

I. And first, of war for exercise or play. I
speak of it primarily in this light, because,
through all past history, manly war has been
more an exercise than anything else, among
the classes who cause, and proclaim it. It is
not a game to the conscript, or the pressed
sailor ; but neither of these are the causers of
it. To the governor who determines that war
shall be, and to the youths who voluntarily

WAR. 13$

adopt it as their profession, it has always been
a grand pastime ; and chiefly pursued because
they had nothing else to do. And this is true
without any exception. No king whose mind
was fully occupied with the development of
the inner resources of his kingdom, or with
any other sufficing subject of thought, ever
entered into war but on compulsion. No youth
who was earnestly busy with any peaceful sub-
ject of study, or set on any serviceable course
of action, ever voluntarily became a soldier.
Occupy him early, and wisely, in agriculture
or business, in science or in literature, and he
will never think cf war otherwise than as a
calamity. But leave him idle ; and, the more
brave and active and capable he is by nature,
the more he will thirst for some appointed field
for action ; and find, in the passion and peril
of battle, the only satisfying fulfilment of his
unoccupied being. And from the earliest in-
cipient civilization until now, the population
of the earth divides itself, when you look at it
widely, into two races ; one of workers, and
the other of players — one tilling the ground,
manufacturing, building, and otherwise pro-
viding for the necessities of life ; — the other
part proudly idle, and continually therefore

136 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

needing recreation, in which they use the pro
ductive and laborious orders partly as their
cattle, and partly as their puppets or pieces in
the game of death.

Now, remember, whatever virtue or good-
liness there may be in this game of war, rightly
played, there is none when you thus play it
with a multitude of small human pawns.

If you, the gentlemen of this or any other
kingdom, choose to make your pastime of con-
test, do so, and welcome ; but set not up these
unhappy peasant-pieces upon the green fielded
board. If the wager is to be of death, lay it
on your own heads, not theirs. A goodly
struggle in the Olympic dust, though it be the
dust of the grave, the gods will look upon, and
be with you in ; but they will not be with you,
if you sit on the sides of the amphitheatre,
whose steps are the mountains of earth, whose
arena its valleys, to urge your peasant millions
into gladiatorial war. You also, you tender
and delicate women, for whom, and by whose
command, all true battle has been, and must
ever be ; you would perhaps shrink now, though,
you need not, from the thought of sitting as
queens above set lists where the jousting game
might be mortal. How much more, then,

WAR. 137

ought you to shrink from the thought of sitting
above a theatre pit in which even a few con-
demned slaves were slaying each other only
for your delight. And do you not shrink from
the fact of sitting above a theatre pit, where,
— not condemned slaves, — but the best and
bravest of the poor sons of your people, slay
each other, — not man to man, — as the coupled
gladiators ; but race to race, in duel of gener-
ations ? You would tell me, perhaps, that you
do not sit to see this ; and it is indeed true,
that the women of Europe — those who have no
heart-interest of their own at peril in the con-
test— draw the curtains of their boxes, and
muffle the openings ; so that from the pit of
the circus of slaughter there may reach them
only at intervals a half-heard cry and a mur-
mur -as of the wind's sighing, when myriads of
souis expire. They shut out the death-cries ;
and are happy, and talk wittily among them-
Cslves. That is the utter literal fact of what
€ut ladies do in their pleasant lives.

Nay, you might answer, speaking for them —
" We do not let these wars come to pass for
our play, nor by our carelessness ; we cannot
help them. How can any final quarrel of
nations be settled otherwise than by war ? "

138 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

I cannot now delay, to tell you how political
quarrels might be otherwise settled. But grant
that they cannot. Grant that no law of reason
can be understood by nations ; no law of
justice submitted to by them : and that, while
questions of a few acres, and of petty cash,
can be determined by truth and equity, the
questions which are to issue in the perishing
or saving of kingdoms can be determined
only by the truth of the sword, and the equity
of the rifle. Grant this, and even then, judge
if it will always be necessary for you to put
your quarrel into the hearts of your poor, and
sign your treaties with peasants' blood. You
would be ashamed to do this in your own
private position and power. Why should you
not be ashamed also to do it in public place and
power ? If you quarrel with your neighbor,
and the quarrel be indeterminable by law, and
mortal, you and he do not send your footmen
to Battersea fields to fight it out , nor do you
set fire to his tenants' cottages, nor spoil their
goods. You fight out your quarrel yourselves,
and at your own danger, if at all. And you do
not think it materially affects the arbitrament
that one of you has a larger household than
the other \ so that, if the servants or tenants

WAR. 13$,

were brought into the field with their masters,
the issue of the contest could not be doubtful ?
You either refuse the private duel, or you
practise it under laws of honor, not of physical
force; that so it may be, in a manner, justly
concluded. Now the just or unjust conclusion
of the private feud is of little moment, while
the just or unjust conclusion of the public feud
is of eternal moment : and yet, in this public
quarrel, you take your servants' sons from their
arms to fight for it, and your servants' food
from their lips to support it ; and the black
seals on the parchment of your treaties of peace
are the deserted hearth and the fruitless field.
There is a ghastly ludicrousness in this, as
there is mostly in these wide and universal
crimes. Hear the statement of the very fact
of it in the most literal words of the greatest
of our English thinkers : —

" What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the
net-purport and upshot of war ? To my own knowl-
edge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British
village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred souls.
From these, by certain ' natural enemies ' of the
French, there are successively selected, during the
French war, say thirty able-bodied men. Dumdrudge,
at her own expense, has suckled and nursed them; she
fcas, iot without difficulty and sorrow, fed them up t*

140 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

manhood, and ever trained them to crafts, so that one
can weave, another build, another hammer, and the
weakest can stand under thirty stone avoirdupois.
Nevertheless, amid much weeping and swearing, they
are selected ; all dressed in red ; and shipped away, at
the public charges, some two thousand miles, or say
only to the south of Spain ; and fed there till wanted.

" And now to that same spot in the south of Spain
are thirty similar French artisans, from a French Dum-
drudge, in like manner wending ; till at length, after in-
finite effort, the two parties come into actual juxtaposi-
tion ; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each with a
gun in his hand.

" Straightway the word ' Fire ! ' is given, and they
blow the souls out of one another, and in place of sixty
brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead carcases,
which it must bury, and anon shed tears for. Had
these men any quarrel ? Busy as the devil is, not the
smallest ! They lived far enough apart ; were the en-
tirest strangers ; nay, in so wide a universe, there was
even unconsciously, by commerce, some mutual help-
fulness between them. How then ? Simpleton ! their
governors had fallen out; and instead of shooting one
another, had the cunning to make these poor block-
heads shoot." (Sartor Resartus.)

Positively, then, gentlemen, the game of bat-
tle must not, and shall not, ultimately be
played this way. But should it be played any
way ? Should it, if not by your servants, be
practised by yourselves ? I think, yes. Both

WAR. X4»

history and human instinct seem alike to say,
yes. All healthy men like fighting, and like
the sense of danger ; all brave women like to
hear of their fighting, and of their facing dan-
ger. This is a fixed instinct in the fine race
of them ; and I cannot help fancying that fair
fight is the best play for them ; and that a tour-
nament was a better game than a steeple-chase.
The time may perhaps come in France as well
as here, for universal hurdle-races and cricket-
ing : but I do not think universal " crickets "
will bring out the best qualities of the nobles
of either country. I use, in such question, the
test which I have adopted, of the connection
of war with other arts ; and I reflect how, as
a sculptor, I should feel, if I were asked to de-
sign a monument for a dead knight, in West-
minster Abbey, with a carving of a bat at one
end, and a ball at the other. It may be the
remains in me only of savage Gothic preju-
dice ; but I had rather carve it with a shield
at one end, and a sword at the other. And
this, observe, with no reference whatever to
any story of duty done, or cause defended.
Assume the knight merely to have ridden out
occasionally to fight his neighbor for exercise ;
assume him even a soldier of fortune, and to

142 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

have gained his bread, and filled his purse, at
the sword's point. Still, I feel as if it were,
somehow, grander and worthier in him to have
made his bread by sword play than any other
play ; I had rather he had made it by thrust-
ing than batting ; — much more, than by bet-
ting. ?.Iuch rather that he should ride war
horses, than back race horses ; and — I say it
sternly and deliberately — much rather would
I have hira slay his neighbor, than cheat him.

But remember, so far as this may be true,
the game of war is only that in which the
full personal power of the human creature is
brought out in management of its weapons.
And this for three reasons : —

First, the great justification of this game is
that it truly, when well played, determines
■who is the best man ; — who is the highest bred,
the most self-denying, the most fearless, the
coolest of nerve, the swiftest of eye and hand.
You cannot test these qualities wholly, unless
there is a clear possibility of the struggle's
ending in death. It is only in the fronting
of that condition that the full trial of the man,
soul and body, comes out. You may go to
your game of wickets, or of hurdles, or of cards,
and any knavery that is in you may stay unr

WAR. 143

challenged all the while. But if the play may
be ended at any moment by a lance-thrust, a
man will probably make up his accounts a
little before he enters it. Whatever is rotten,
and evil in him will weaken his hand more in
holding a sword hilt, than in balancing a.
billiard cue ; and on the whole, the habit cf
living lightly hearted, in daily presence cf
death, always has had, and must have, a ten-
dency both to the making and testing of honest
men. But for the final testing, observe, you
must make the issue cf battle strictly depend-
ent on fineness cf frame, and firmness of
hand. You must not make it the question,
which of the combatants has the longest gun,
or which has got behind the biggest tree, or
which has the wind in his face, or which has
gunpowder made by best chemists, cr iron,
smelted with the best coal, or the angriest
mob at his back. Decide your battle, whether
of nations, or individuals, on those terms ; —
and you have only multiplied confusion, and
added slaughter to iniquity. But decide your
battle by pure trial which has the strongest
arm, and steadiest heart, — and you have gone
far to decide a great many matters besides^
and to decide them lightly.

144 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

And the other reasons for this mode of
decision of cause, are the diminution both of
the material destructiveness, or cost, and of
the physical distress of war. For you must
not think that in speaking to you in this (as
you may imagine) fantastic praise of battle, I
have overlooked the conditions weighing
against me. I pray all of you, who have not
read, to read with the most earnest attention,
Mr. Helps' two essays on War and Government,
in the first volume of the last series of " Friends
in Counsel." Everything that can be urged'
against war is there simply, exhaustively, and
most graphically stated. And all, there urged,
is true. But the two great counts of evil
alleged against war by this most thoughtful
writer, hold only against modern war. If you
have to take away masses of men from all in-
dustrial employment, — to feed them by the
labor of others, — to move them and provide
them with destructive machines, varied daily
in national rivalship of inventive cost ; if you
have to ravage the country which you attack,
— to destroy for a score of future years, its
roads, its woods, its cities, and its harbors ; —
and if, finally, having brought masses of men,
counted by hundreds of thousands, face to face,

WAR. 145

you tear those masses to pieces with jagged
shot, and leave the fragments of living creat-
ures, countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to
starve and parch, through days of torture,
down into clots of clay — what book of accounts
shall record the cost of your work ; — What
book of judgment sentence the guilt of it ?

That, I say, is modern war, — scientific war, —
chemical and mechanic war, worse even than
the savage's poisoned arrow. And yet you
will tell me, perhaps, that any other war than
this is impossible now. It may be so ; the
progress of science cannot, perhaps, be other-
wise registered than by new facilities of de-
struction ; and the brotherly love of our enlarg-
ing Christianity be only proved by multiplica-
tion of murder. Yet hear, for a moment,
what war was, in Pagan and ignorant days ; —
what war might yet be, if we could extinguish
our science in darkness, and join the heathen's
practice to the Christian's theory. I read you
this from a book which probably most of you
know well, and all ought to know — Miiller's
"Dorians"; — but 1 have put the points I
wish you to remember in closer connection
than in his text.

" The chief characteristic of the warriors of
10

146 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

Sparta was great composure and subdued
strength; the violence (\tW-a) of Aristode-
mus and Isadas being considered as deserv-
ing rather of blame than praise; and these
qualities in general distinguished the Greeks
from the northern Barbarians, whose boldness
always consisted in noise and tumult. For
the same reason the Spartans sacrificed to the
.Muses before an action ; these goddesses
being expected to produce regularity and
order in battle ; as they sacrificed on the same
occasion in Crete to the god of love, as the con-
firmer of mutual esteem and shame. Every
man put on a crown, when the band of flute-
players gave the signal for attack; all the
shields of the line glittered with their high
polish, and mingled their splendor with the
dark red of the purple mantles, which were
meant both to adorn the combatant, and to
conceal the blood of the wounded ; to fall
well and decorously being an incentive the
more to the most heroic valor. The conduct
of the Spartans in battle denotes a high and
noble disposition, which rejected all the ex-
tremes of brutal rage. The pursuit of the
enemy ceased when the victory was com-
pleted; and after the signal for retreat had

WAR. 147

been given, all hostilities ceased. The spoil-
ing of arms, at least during the battle, was
also interdicted ; and the consecration cf the
spoils of slain enemies to the gods, as, in
general, all rejoicings for victor}', were con-
sidered as ill-omened."

Such was the war of the greatest soldiers
who prayed to heathen gods. What Christian
■war is, preached by Christian ministers, let
any one tell you who saw the sacred crowning,
and heard the sacred flute-playing, and was
inspired and sanctified by the divinely-
measured and musical language, of any North
American regiment preparing for its charge.
And what is the relative cost of life in Pagan
and Christian wars, let this one fact tell you :
— the Spartans won the decisive battle of
Corinth with the loss of eight men ; the
victors at indecisive Gettysburg confess to
the I033 of 30,000.

II. I pass now to our second order of war,
the commonest among men, that undertaken
in desire of dominion. And let me ask you
to think for a few moments what the real
meaning of this desire of dominion is — first in
the minds of kings — then in that of nations.

Now, mind you this first, — that I speak

148 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

either about kings, or masses of men, with a
fixed conviction that human nature is a noble
and beautiful thing ; not a foul nor a base
thing. All the sin of men I esteem as their
disease, not their nature; as a folly which
may be prevented, not a necessity which must
be accepted. And my wonder, even when
things are at their worst, is always at the
height which this human nature can attain.
Thinking it high, I find it always a higher
thing than I thought it ; while those who think
it low, find it, and will find it, always lower
than they thought it : the fact being, that it is
infinite, and capable of infinite height and in-
finite fall ; but the nature of it — and here it
the faith which I would have you hold witli
me — the nature of it is in the nobleness, not
in the catastrophe.

Take the faith in its utmost terms. When
the captain of the " London " shook hands
with his mate saying " God speed you ! I will
go down with my passengers," that I believe
to be " human nature." He does not do it
from any religious motive — from any hope of
reward, or any fear of punishment ; he does it
because he is a man. But when a mother,
living among the fair fields of merry England,

WAR. 149

gives her two-year-old child to be suffocated
under a mattress in her inner room, while the
said mother waits and talks outside; that I
believe to be not human nature. You have
the two extremes there, shortly. And you,
men, and mothers, who are here face to face
with me to-night, I call upon you to say which
of these is human, and which inhuman — which
" natural," and which "unnatural? " Choose
your creed at once, I beseech you : — choose it
with unshaken choice — choose it forever.
Will you take, for foundation of act and hope,
the faith that this man was such as God made
him, or that this woman was such as God
made her? Which of them has failed from
their nature — from their present,, possible,
actual nature ; — not their nature of long ago,
but their nature of now ? Which has betrayed
it — falsified it ? Did the guardian who died in
his trust die inhumanly, and as a fool ; and
did the murderess of her child fulfil the law of
her being ? Choose, I say ; infinitude of
choices hang upon this. You have had false
prophets among you — for centuries you have
had them — solemnly warned against them
though you were ; false prophets, who have
told you that all men are nothing but fiends or

150 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

wolves, half beast, half devil. Believe that^
and indeed you may sink to that. But refuse
that, and have faith that God " made you up-
right," though you have sought out many in-
ventions ; so you will strive daily to become
more what your Maker meant and means you
to be, and daily gives you also the power to
be — and you will cling more and more to the
nobleness and virtue that is in you, saying,
" My righteousness I hold fast, and will not
let it go."

I have put this to you as a choice, as if you
might hold either of these creeds you liked
best. But there is in reality no choice for
you; the facts being quite easily ascertain-
able. You have no business to think about
this matter, or to choose in it. The broad
fact is, that a human creature of the highest
race, and most perfect as a human thing, is
invariably both kind and true ; and that as
you lower the race, you get cruelty and false-
ness, as you get deformity : and this so steadily
and assuredly, that the two great words which,
ia their first use, meant only perfection of race,
have come, by consequence of the invariable
connection of virtue with the fine human
nature, both to signify benevolence of disposir

WAR. 151

tion. The -word generous, and the word gen-
tle, both, in their origin, meant only " of pure
race," but because charity and tenderness are
inseparable from this purity of blood, the
words which once stood only for pride, now
Stand as synonyms for virtue.

Now, this being the true power of our in-
herent humanity, and seeing that all the aim
of education should be to develop this ; — and
seeing also what magnificent self-sacrifice the
higher classes of men are capable of, for any
cause that they understand or feel, — it is
wholly inconceivable to me how well-educated
princes, who ought to be of all gentlemen the
gentlest, and of all nobles the most generous,
and whose title of royalty means only their
function of doing every man "n^/" — how
these, I say, throughout history, should so
rarely pronounce themselves on the side of
the poor and of justice, but continually maintain
themselves and their own interests by oppres-
sion of the poor, and by wresting of justice ;
and how this should be accepted as so natural,
that the word loyalty, which means faithful-
ness to law, is used as if it were only the duty
of a people to be loyal to their king, and not
the duty of a king to be infinitely more loyal

*5-

THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

to his people. How comes it to pass that 4
captain will die with his passengers, and lean
over the gunwale to give the parting boat its
course ; but that a king will not usually die
with, much lessor, his passengers, — thinks it
rather incumbent on his passengers, in any
number, to die for him ? Think, I beseech
you, of the wonder of this. The sea captain,
not captain by divine right, but only by com-
pany's appointment ; — not a man cf royal de-
scent, but only a plebeian who can steer ;—
not with the eyes cf the world upon him, but
■with feeble chance, depending on one poor
boat, of his name being ever heard above the
wash of the fatal waves ; — not with the cause
of a nation resting on his act, but helpless to
save so much as a child from among the lost
crowd with whom he resolves to be lost, — yet
goes down quietly to his grave, rather than
break his faith to these few emigrants. But
your captain by divine right, — your captain
with the hues of a hundred shields of kings
upon his breast, — your captain whose every
deed, brave or base, will be illuminated or
branded forever before unescapable eyes of
men, — your captain whose every thought and
act are beneficent, or fatal, from sunrising to

war. 153

setting, blessing as the sunshine, or shadow-
ing as the night, — this captain, as you find
him in history, for the most part thinks only
how he may tax his passengers, and sit at
most ease in his state cabin !

For observe, if there had been indeed in
the hearts of the rulers of great multitudes of
men any such conception of work for the
good of those under their command, as there
is in the good and thoughtful masters of any
small company cf men, not only wars for the
sake of mere increase of power could never
take place, but our idea of power itself would
be entirely altered. Do you suppose that to
think and act even for a million ©f men, to
hear their complaint, watch their weaknesses,
restrain their vices, make laws for them, lead
them, day by day, to purer life, is not enough
for one man's work ? If any of us were abso-
lute lord only of a district cf a hundred miles
square, and were resolved on doing our utmost
for it ; making it feed as large a number of
people as possible; making every clod pro-
ductive, and every rock defensive, and every
human being happy; should we not have
enough on our hands think you ? But if the
ruler has any other aim than this ; if, careless

154 THE CROV/N OF WILD OLIVE.

of the result of his interference, he desir*
only the authority to interfere ; and, regard-
less of what is ill-done or well-done, cares
only that it shall be done at his bidding ; — if
he would rather do two hundred miles' space
of mischief, than one hundred miles' space of
good, of course he will try to add to his ter-
ritory ; and to add inimitably. But does he
add to his power ? Do you call it power in a
child, if he is allowed to play with the wheels
and bands of some vast engine, pleased with
their murmur and whirl, till his unwise touch,
wandering where it ou^ht not, scatters beam
and wheel into ruin ? Yet what machine is so
vast, so incognizable, as the working of the
mind of a nation ; what child's touch so wan-
ton, as the word of a selfish king? And yet,
how long have we allowed the historian to speak
of the extent of the calamity a man causes, as a
just ground for his pride ; and to extol him as
the greatest prince, who is only the centre of
the widest error. Follow out this thought by
yourselves ; and you will find that all power,
properly so called, is wise and benevolent.
There may be capacity in a drifting fire-ship
to destroy a fleet ; there may be venom enough
in a dead body to infect a nation ; — but whicb

WAR. 155

of you, the most ambitious, would desire a
drifting kinghood, robed in consuming fire, or
a poison-dipped sceptre whose touch was mor-
tal ? There is no true potency, remember,
but that of help ; nor true ambition, but ambi-
tion to save.

And then, observe farther, this true power,
the power cf saving, depends neither on mul-
titude of men, nor on extent cf territory. We
are continually assuming that nations become
strong according to their numbers. They in-
deed become so, if those numbers can be
made of one mind ; but how are you sure you
can stay them in one mind, and keep them
from having north and south minds ? Grant
them unanimous, how know you they will be
unanimous in right ? If they are unanimous
in wrong, the more they are, essentially the
weaker they are. Or, suppose that they can
neither be of one mind, nor of two minds, but
can only be of no mind ? Suppose they are a
mere helpless mob ; tottering into precipitant
catastrophe, like a wagon load of stones when
the wheel comes off. Dangerous enough for
their neighbors, certainly, but not " powerful."

Neither does strength depend on extent of
territory, any more than upon number of

156 THE CROWjV OF WILD OLIVE.

population. Take up your maps when you go
home this evening, — put the cluster of British
Isles beside the mass of South America ; and
then consider whether any race of men need
care how much ground they stand upon. The
strength is in the men, and in their unity and
virtue, not in their standing room : a little
group of wise hearts is better than a wilderness
full of fools ; and only that nation gains true
territory, which gains itself.

And now for the brief practical outcome of
all this. Remember, no government is ulti-
mately strong, but in proportion to its kindness
and justice ; and that a nation does not
strengthen, by merely multiplying and diffusing
itself. We have not strengthened as yet, by
multiplying i:.to America. Nay, even when it
has not to encounter the separating conditions
of emigration, a nation need not boast itself of
multiplying on its own ground, if it multiplies
only as flies or locusts do, with the god of flies
for its god. It multiplies its strength only by
increasing as one great family, in perfect fel-
lowship and brotherhood. And lastly, it does
not strengthen itself by seizing dominion over
.faces whom U cannot benefit A. stria is not

WAR. 15 jr

Strengthened, but weakened, by her grasp of
Lombardy ; and whatever apparent increase
of majesty and of wealth may have accrued to
us from the possession of India, whether these
prove to us ultimately power or weakness, de-
pends wholly on the degree in which our in-
fluence on the native race shall be benevolent
and exalting. But, as it is at their own peril
that any race extends their dominion in mere
desire of power, so it is at their own still
greater peril that they refuse to undertake
aggressive war, according to their force, when-
ever they are assured that their authority would
be helpful and protective. Nor need you listen
to any sophistical objection of the impossibility
of knowing when a people's help is needed, or
when not. Make your national conscience
clean, and your national eyes will soon be
clear. No man who is truly ready to take
part in a noble quarrel will ever stand long in
doubt by whom, or in what cause, his aid is
needed. I hold it my duty to make no polit-
ical statement of any special bearing in this
presence ; but I tell you broadly and boldly,
that, within these last ten years, we English
have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs : we
have fought where we should not have fought,

150 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

for gain ; and we have been passive where we
should not have been passive, for fear. I tell
you that the principle of non-intervention, as
now preached among us, is as selfish and
cruel as the worst frenzy cf conquest, and dif-
fers from it only by being not only malignant,
but dastardly.

I know, however, that my opinions on this
subject differ too widely from those ordinarily
held, to be any farther intruded upon you ; and
therefore I pass lastly to examine the conditions
of the third kind of noble war ; — war waged
simply for the defence of the country in which
we were born, and for the maintenance and
execution cf her laws, by whomsoever threat-
ened or defied. It is to this duty that I sup-
pose most men entering the army consider
themselves in reality to be bound, and I want
you now to reflect what the laws of mere de-
fence are ; and what the soldier's duty, as now
understood, or supposed to be understood.
You have solemnly devoted yourselves to be
English soldiers, for the guardianship of Eng-
land. I want you to feel what this vow of
yours indeed means, or is gradually coming to
mean. You take it upon you, first, while you
are sentimental schoolboys ; you go into your

WAR. 159

military convent, or barracks, just as a girl
goes into her convent while she is a sentimen-
tal schoolgirl ; neither of you then know what
you are about, though both the good soldiers
and good nuns make the best of it afterwards.
You don't understand perhaps why I call you
"sentimental" schoolboys, when you go into
the army ? Because, on the whole, it is love
of adventure, of excitement, of fine dress and
of the pride of fame, all which are sentimental
motives, which chiefly make a boy like going
into the Guards better than into a counting-
.house. You fancy, perhaps, that there is a
severe sense of duty mixed with these pcacocky
motives ? And in the best of you, there is ;
but do not think that it is principal. If you
cared to do your duty to your country in a
prosaic and unsentimental way, depend upon
it, there is now truer duty to be done in rais-
ing harvests, than in burning them ; more in
building houses, than in selling them — more
in winning money by your own work, where-
with to help men, than in taxing other people's
work, for money wherewith to slay men ; more
duty, finally, in honest and unselfish living than
in honest and unselfish dying, though that seems
to your boys' eyes the bravest. So far then,

160 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

as for your own honor and the honor of your
families, you choose brave death in a red coat
before brave life in a black one, you are senti-
mental ; and now see what this passionate
vow of yours comes to. For a little while you
ride, and you hunt tigers or savages, you shoot,
and are shot; you are happy, and proud, always,
and honored and wept if you die ; and you are
satisfied with your life, and with the end of it ;
believing, on the whole, that good rather than
harm of it comes to others, and much pleasure
to you. But as the sense of duty enters into
your forming minds, the vow takes another
aspect. You find that you have put yourselves
into the hand of your country as a weapon.
You have vowed to strike, when she bids you,
and to stay scabbarded when she bids you ;
all that you need answer for is, that you fail
not in her grasp. And there is goodness in
this, and greatness, if you can trust the hand
and heart of the Britomart who has braced you
to her side, and are assured that when she
leaves you sheathed in darkness, there is no
need for your flash to the sun. But remember,
good and noble as this state may be, it is a
state of slavery. There are different kinds of
slaves and different masters. Some slaves are

WAR. l6x

scourged to their work by whips, others are
scourged to it by restlessness or ambition. It
does not matter what the whip is ; it is none the
less a whip, because you have cut thongs for
it out of your own souls : the fact, so far, of
slavey, is in being driven to your work with-
out thought, at another's bidding. Again,
some slaves are bought with money, and others
with praise. It matters not what the purchase-
money is. The distinguishing sign of slavery
is to have a price, and be bought for it. Again,
it matters not what kind of work you are set
on ; some slaves are set to forced diggings,
Others to forced marches ; some dig furrows,
others field-work, and others graves. Some
press the juice of reeds, and some the juice of
vines, and some the blood of men. The fact
of the captivity is the same whatever work we
are set upon, though the fruits of the toil may
be different. But, remember, in thus vowing
ourselves to be the slaves cf any master, it
ought to be some subject of forethought with
us, what work he is likely to put us upon, You
may think that the whole duty of a soldier is to
be passive, that it is the country you have left
behind who is to command, and you have only to
obey. But are you sure that you have left all
I*

1 62 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

your country behind, or that the part of it you
have so left is indeed the best part of it?
Suppose — and, remember, it is quite conceiv-
able— that you yourselves are indeed the best
part of England ; that you, who have become
the slaves, ought to have been the masters ;
and that those who are the masters, ought to
have been the slaves ! If it is a noble and
whole-hearted England, whose bidding you are
bound to do, it is well ; but if you are your-
selves the best of her heart, and the England
you have left be but a half-hearted England,
how say you of your obedience ? You were too
proud to become shopkeepers : are you satis-
fied then to become servants of shopkeepers?
You were too proud to become merchants or
farmers yourselves : will you have merchants
or farmers then for your field marshals ? You
had no gifts of special grace for Exeter Hall :
will you have some gifted person thereat for
your commander-in-chief, to judge of your
work, and reward ? You imagine yourselves
to be the army of England : how if you should
find yourselves, at last, only the police of her
manufacturing towns, and the beadles of her
little Bethels ?

It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, for

WAR. 163

ever ; but what I want you to see,4and to be
assured of, is, that the ideal of soldiership is
not mere passive obedience and bravery ; that,
so far from this, no country is in a healthy
state which has separated, even in a small
degree, her civil from her military power. All
states of the world, however great, fall at once
when they use mercenary armies; and although
it is a less instant form of error (because in-
volving no national taint of cowardice), it is
yet an error no less ultimately fatal — it is the
error especially of modern times, of which we
cannot yet know all the calamitous conse-
quences— to take away the best blood and
strength of the nation, all the soul-substance
of it that is brave, and careless of reward, and
scornful of pain, and faithful in trust ; and to
cast that into steel, and make a mere sword of
it; taking away its voice and will; but to keep
the worst part of the nation — whatever is cow-
ardly, avaricious, sensual, and faithless — and
to give to this the voice, to this the authority,
to this the chief privilege, where there is least
capacity, of thought. The fulfilment of your
vow for the defence of England will by no
means consist in carrying out such a system.
You are not true soldiers, if you only mean to

164 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

stand at a shop door, to protect shop-boys
■who are cheating inside. A soldier's vow to
his country is that he will die for the guardian-
ship of her domestic virtue, of her righteous
laws, and of her anyway challenged or endan-
gered honor. A state without virtue, without
laws, and without honor, he is bound not to
defend ; nay, bound to redress by his own
right hand that which he sees to be base in
her. So sternly is the law of Nature and life,
that a nation once utterly corrupt can only be
redeemed by a military despotism — never by
talking, nor by its free effort. And the health
of any state consists simply in this : that in it,
those who are wisest shall also be strongest ;
its rulers should be also its soldiers ; or, rather,
by force of intellect more than of sword, its
soldiers its rulers. Whatever the hold which
the aristocracy of England has on the heart of
England, in that they are still always in front
of her battles, this hold will not be enough,
unless they are also in front of her thoughts.
And truly her thoughts need good captain's
reading now, if ever ! Do you know what, by
this beautiful division of labor (her brave men
fighting, and her cowards thinking), she has
come at last to think ? Here is a bit of paper

WAR. 165

in my hand,* a good one too, and an honest
one ; quite representative of the best common
public thought of England at this moment ;
and it is holding forth in one of its leaders
upon our "social welfare" — upon our "vivid
life " — upon the " political supremacy of Great
Britain." And what do you think all these are
owing to ? To what our English' sires have
done for us, and taught us, age after age ? No:
not to that. To our honesty of heart, or cool-
ness of head, or steadiness of will ? No: not

* I do not care to refer to the journal quoted, because
the article was unworthy of its general tone, though in
order to enable the audience to verify the quoted sen-
tence, I left the number containing it on the table, when
I delivered this lecture. But a saying of Baron Liebig's,
quoted at the head of a leader on the same subject in
the Daily Telegraph of January II, 1866, summarily
digests and presents the maximum folly of modern
thought in this respect. " Civilization," says the Baron,
" is the economy of power, and English power is coal."
Not altogether so, my chemical friend. Civilization is
the making of civil persons, which is a kind of distilla-
tion of which alembics are incapable, and does not at
all imply the turning of a small company of gentlemen
into a large company of ironmongers. And English
power (what little of it may be left) is by no means
coal, but, indeed, of that which, " when the whole world
turns to coal, then chiefly lives."

1 66 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

to these. To our thinkers, or our statesmen,
or our poets, or our captains, or our martyrs,
or the patient labor of our poor ? No: not to
these ; or at least not to these in any chief
measure. Nay, says the journal, " more than
any agency, it is the cheapness and abundance
of our coal which have made us what we are."
If it be so, then "ashes to ashes" be our
epitaph ! and the sooner the better. I tell
you, gentlemen of England, if ever you would
have your country breathe the pure breath of
heaven again, and receive again a soul into
her body, instead of rotting into a carcase,
blown up in the belly with carbonic acid (and
great that way), you must think, and feel, for
your England, as well as fight for her: you
must teach her that all the true greatness she
ever had, or ever can have, she won while her
fields were green and her faces ruddy — that
greatness is still possible for Englishmen, even
though the ground be not hollow under their
feet, nor the sky black over their heads ; — and
that, when the day comes for their country to
lay her honors in the dust, her crest will not
rise from it more loftily because it is dust of
coal. Gentlemen, I tell you solemnly, that
the day is coming when the soldiers of England

WAR. 167

must be her tutors ; and the captains of her
army, captains also of her mind.

And now, remember, you soldier youths,
who are thus in all ways the hope of your
country ; or must be, if she have any hope:
remember that your fitness for all future trust
depends upon what you are now. No good
soldier in his old age was ever careless or indo-
lent in his youth. Many a giddy and thought-
less boy has become a good bishop, or a good
lawyer, or a good merchant ; but no such an
one ever became a good general. I challenge
you, in all history, to find a record of a good
soldier who was not grave and earnest in his
youth. And, in general, I have no patience
with people who talk about " the thoughtless-
ness of youth " indulgently. I had infinitely
rather hear of thoughtless old age, and the
indulgence due to that. When a man has done
his work, and nothing can any way be materi-
ally altered in his fate, let him forget his toil,
and jest with his fate, if he will ; but what ex-
cuse can you find for wilfulness of thought, at
the very time when every crisis of future
fortune hangs on your decisions? A youth
thoughtless! when all the happiness of his home
forever depends on the chances, or the pas-

1 68 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

sions, of an hour ! A youth thoughtless ! when
the career of all his days depends on the op-
portunity of a moment ! A youth thoughtless!
•when his every act is a foundation-stone of
future conduct, and every imagination a fount-
ain of life or death ! Be thoughtless in any
after years, rather than now — though, indeed,
there is only one place where a man may be
nobly thoughtless, — his death-bed. No think-
ing should ever be left to be done there.

Having, then, resolved that you will not
waste recklessly, but earnestly use, these early
days of yours, remember that all the duties of
her children to England may be summed in
two words — industry, and honor. I say first,
industry, for it is in this that soldier youth
are especially tempted to fail. Yet, surely,
there is no reason, because your life may
possibly or probably be shorter than other
men's, that you should therefore waste more
recklessly the portion of it that is granted you ;
neither do the duties of your profession, which
require you to keep your bodies strong, in any
wise involve the keeping of your minds weak.
So far from that, the experience, the hardship,
and the activity of a soldier's life render his
powers of thought more accurate than those of

WAR. 1 60

other men ; and while, for others, all knowl-
edge is often little more than a means of
amusement, there is no form of science
which a soldier may not at some time or
other find bearing on business of life and
death. A young mathematician may be ex-
cused for languor in studying curves to be
described only with a pencil ; but not in trac-
ing those which are to be described with a
rocket. Your knowledge of a wholesome herb
may involve the feeding of an army ; and ac-
quaintance with an obscure pointof geography,
the success of a campaign. Never waste an
instant's time, therefore ; the sin of idleness
is a thousand-fold greater in you than in other
youths ; for the fates of those who will one
day be under your command hang upon your
knowledge ; lost moments now will be lost
lives then, and every instant which you care-
lessly take for play, you buy ..»* oiuod
But there is one way of wasting time, of a.
the vilest, because it wastes, not irne only, bu.:
the interest and energy of your minds. Q2 ai
the ungentlemanly habits into which you caii
fall, the vilest is betting, or interesting yoiB."
selves in the issues of betting, it unites """iariv
every condition of folly and ;.c ' w)r ^»«

170 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

centrate your interest upon a matter of chance,
instead of upon a subject of true knowledge ;
and you back opinions which you have no
grounds for forming, merely because they are
your own. All the insolence of egotism is in
this ; and so far as the love of excitement is
complicated with the hope of winning money,
you turn yourselves into the basest sort of
tradesmen — those who live by speculation.
Were there no other ground for industry, this
would be a sufficient one ; that it protected
you from the temptation to so scandalous a
vice. Work faithfully, and you will put your-
selves in possession of a glorious and enlarg-
ing happiness ; not such as can be won by the
speed of a horse, or marred by the obliquity
of a ball.

First, then, by industry you must fulfil your
vow to your country; but all industry and
earnestness will be useless unless they are
consecrated by your resolution to be in all
things men of honor ; not honor in the com-
mon sense only, but in the highest. Rest on
the force of the two main words in the great
verse, integer vitas, scelerisque punts. You
have vowed your life to England ; give it her
wholly — a bright, stainless, perfect life— a

WAR.

171

knightly life. Because you have to fight with
machines instead of lances, there may be a
necessity for more ghastly danger, but there is
none for less worthiness of character, than in
olden time. You may be true knights yet,
though perhaps not equites ; you may have to
call yourselves " cannonry " instead of " chiv-
alry," but that is no reason why you should
not call yourselves true men. So the first
thing you have to see to in becoming soldiers
is that you make yourselves wholly true.
Courage is a mere matter of course among any
ordinarily well-born youths ; but neither truth,
nor gentleness is matter of course. Vou must
bind them like shields about your necks ; you
must write them on the tables of your hearts.
Though it be not exacted of you yet exact it
of yourselves, this vow of stainless truth*
Your hearts are, if you leave them unstirred,
as tombs in which a god lies- buried. Vow
yourselves crusaders to redeem that sacred
sepulchre. And remember, oefore all things
— for no other memory will oe so protective of
you — that the highest law of this knightly
truth is that under which it is vowed to women,
Whomsoever else you deceive, whomsoever
you injure, whomsoever you leave unaided,

172 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

you must not deceive, nor injure, nor leave
unaided, according to your power, any woman
of whatever rank. Believe me, every virtue of
the higher phases of manly character begins
in this ; — in truth and modesty before the face
of all maidens ; in truth and pity, or truth and
reverence, to all womanhood.

And now let me turn for a moment to you,
— wives and maidens, who are the souls of
soldiers ; to you, — mothers, who have devoted
your children to the great hierarchy of war.
Let me ask you to consider what part you
have to take for the aid of those who love
you ; for if you fail in your part they cannot
fulfil theirs ; such absolute helpmates you are
that no man can stand without that help, nor
labor in his own strength.

I know your hearts, and that the truth of
them never fails when an hour of trial comes
which you recognize for such. But you know
not when the hour of trial first finds you, nor
when it verily finds you. You imagine that
you are only called upon to wait and suffer ;
to surrender and to mourn. You know that
you must not weaken the hearts of your hus-
bands and lovers, even by the one fear of
which those hearts are capable, — the fear of

WAR. 173

parting from you, or of causing you grief.
Through weary years of separation ; through
fearful expectancies of unknown fate ; through
the tenfold bitterness of the sorrow which
might so easily have been joy, and the tenfold
yearning for glorious life struck down in its
prime — through all these agonies you fail not,
and never will fail. But your trial is not in
these. To be heroic in danger is little ; — you
are Englishwomen. To be heroic in change
and sway of fortune is little ; — for do you not
love ? To be patient through the great chasm
and pause of loss is little ; for do you not still
love in heaven ? But to be heroic in happi-
ness ; to bear yourselves gravely and right-
eously in the dazzling of the sunshine of
morning ; not to forget the God in whom you
trust, when He gives you most; not to fail
those who trust you, when they seem to need
you least ; this is the difficult fortitude. It is
not in the pining of absence, not in the peril
of battle, not in the wasting of sickness, that
your prayer should be most passionate, or
your guardianship most tender. Pray, mothers
and maidens, for your young soldiers in the
bloom of their pride ; pray for them, while the
only dangers round them are in their own.

174 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

wayward wills ; watch you, and pray, when
they have to face, not death, but temptation.
But it is this fortitude also for which there is
the crowning reward. Believe me, the whole
course and character of your lovers' lives is in
your hands ; what you would have them be,
they shall be, if you not only desire to have
them so, but deserve to have them so ; for
they are but mirrors in which you will see
yourselves imaged. If you are frivolous, they
will be so also ; if you have no understanding
of the scope of their duty, they also will for-
get it ; they will listen, — they can listen, — to
no other interpretation of it than that uttered
from your lips. Bid them be brave ; — they
will be brave for you ; bid them be cowards ;
and how noble soever they be, they will quail
for you. Bid them be wise, and they will be
wise for you ; mock at their counsel, and they
will be fools for you : such and so absolute
is your rule over them. You fancy, perhaps,
as you have been told so often, that a wife's
rule should only be over her husband's house,
not over his mind. Ah, no ! the true rule is
just the reverse of that ; a true wife, in her
husband's house, is his servant ; it is in his
heart that she is queen. Whatever of the best

WAR. 175

he can conceive, it is her part to be ; whatever
of highest he can hope, it is hers to promise ;
all that is dark in him she must purge into-
purity ; all that is failing in him she must
strengthen into truth : from her, through all
the world's clamor, he must win his praise ;
in her, through all the world's warfare, he
must find his peace.

And, now, but one word more. You may
wonder, perhaps, that I have spoken all this
night in praise of war. Yet, truly, if it might
be, I, for one, would fain join in the cadence
of hammer-strokes that should beat swords
into ploughshares ; and that this cannot be, is
not the fault of us men. It is your fault.
Wholly yours. Only by your command, or by
your permission, can any contest take place
among us. And the real, final reason for all
the poverty, misery, and rage of battle,
throughout Europe, is simply that you women,
however good, however religious, however self-
sacrificing for those whom you love, are too
selfish and too thoughtless to take pains for
any creature out of your own immediate cir-
cles. You fancy that you are sorry for the
pain of others. Now I just tell you this, that
if the usual course of war, instead of unroof-

176 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

ing peasants' houses, and ravaging peasants'
fields, merely broke the china upon your own
drawing-room tables, no war in civilized coun-
tries would last a week. I tell you more, that
at whatever moment you chose to put a
period to war, you could do it with less
trouble than you take any day to go out to
dinner. You know, or at least you might
know if you would think, that every battle you
hear of has made many widows and orphans.
We have, none of us, heart enough truly to
mourn with these. But at least we might put
on the outer symbols of mourning with them.
Let but every Christian lady who has con-
science towards God, vow that she will mourn,
at least outwardly, for His killed creatures.
Your praying is useless, and your church-
going mere mockery of God, if you have not
plain obedience in you enough for this. Let
every lady in the upper classes of civilized
Europe simply vow, that, while any cruel war
proceeds, she will wear black ; — a mute's black,
— with no jewel, no ornament, no excuse for,
or evasion into, prettiness. — I tell you again,
no war would last a week.

And lastly. You women of England are all
jaow shrieking with one voice. — you and yoin

WAR. 177

clergymen together, — because you hear of your
Bibles being attacked. If you choose to
obey your Bibles, you will never care who
attacks them. It is just because you never
fulfil a single downright precept of the Book,
that you are so careful for its credit : and just
because you don't care tc obey its whole words,
that you are so particular about the letters of
them. The Bible tells you to dress plainly, —
and you are mad for finery ; the Bible tells
you to have pity on the poor, — and you crush
them under your carriage-wheels ; the Bible
tells you to do judgment and justice, — and
you do not know, nor care to know, so much
as what the Bible word " justice " means.
Do but learn so much of God's truth as that
comes to ; know what He means when He
tells you to be just: and teach your sons,
that their bravery is but a fool's boast, and
their deeds but a firebrand's tossing, unless
they are indeed Just men, and Perfect in the
fear of God ; and you will soon have no more
war, unless it be indeed such as is willed by
Him, of whom, though Prince of Peace, it is
also written, "In Righteousness He doth
judge, and make war."

12

LECTURE IV.

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND.

LECTURE IV.

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND-

{Delivered at the R. A. Institution, Woolwich, December
14, 1869.)

I would fain have left to the frank ex-
pression of the moment, but fear I could
not have found clear words — I cannot easily
find them, even deliberately, — to tell you how
glad I am, and yet how ashamed, to accept
your permission to speak to you. Ashamed
of appearing to think that I can tell you any
truth which you have not more deeply felt
than I ; but glad in the thought that my less
experience, and way of life sheltered from the
trials, and free from the responsibilities of
yours, may have left me with something of a
child's power of help to you ; a sureness of
hope, which may perhaps be the one thing
that can be helpful to men who have done too
much not to have often failed in doing all
that they desired. And indeed, even the most
hopeful of us cannot but now be in many

iSx

182 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

things apprehensive. For this at least we all
know too well, that we are on the eve of a
great political crisis, if not of political change.
That a struggle is approaching between the
newly-risen power of democracy and the ap-
parently departing power of feudalism; and
another struggle, no less imminent, and far
more dangerous, between wealth and pau-
perism. These two quarrels are constantly
thought of as the same. They are being
fought together, and an apparently common
interest unites for the most part the million-
aire with the noble, in resistance to a multi-
tude, crying, part of it for bread and part of it
for liberty.

And yet no two quarrels can be more
distinct. Riches — so far from being necessary
to noblesse — are adverse to it. So utterly
adverse, that the first character of all the
Nobilities which have founded great dynasties
in the world is to be poor ; — often poor by
oath — always poor by generosity. And of
every true knight in the chivalric ages, the first
thing history tells you is, that he never kept
treasure for himself.

Thus the causes of wealth and noblesse
are not the samt. ; but opposite. On the

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 183

other hand, the causes of anarchy and of the
poor are not the same, but opposite. Side by
side, in the same rank, are now indeed set the
pride that revolts against authority, and the
misery that appeals against avarice. But, so
far from being a common cause, all anarchy
is the forerunner of poverty, and all
prosperity begins in obedience. So that,
thus, it has become impossible to give due
support to the cause of order, without seem-
ing to countenance injury; and impossible to
plead justly the claims of sorrow, without
seeming to plead also for those of licence.

Let me try, then, to put in very brief terms
the real plan of this various quarrel, and the
truth of the cause on each side. Let us face
that full truth, whatever it may be, and decide
■what part, according to our power, we should
take in the quarrel.

First. For eleven hundred years, all
but five, since Charlemagne set on his head
the Lombard crown, the body of European
people have submitted patiently to be gov-
erned generally by kings — always by single
leaders of some kind. But for the last fifty
years they have begun to suspect, and of late
they have many of them concluded,, that they

184 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

have been on the whole ill-governed, or misgov-
erned, by their kings. Whereupon they say,
more and more widely, "Let us henceforth
have no kings ; and no government at all."

Now we said, we must face the full truth of
the matter, in order to see what we are to do.
And the truth is that the people have been
misgoverned ; — that very little is to be said,
hitherto, for most of their masters — and that
certainly in many places they will try their
new system of " no masters : " — and as that
arrangement will be delightful to all foolish
persons, and, at first, profitable to all wicked
ones, — and as these classes are not wanting
or unimportant in any human society, — the ex-
periment is likely to be tried extensively.
And the world may be quite content to endure
much suffering with this fresh hope, and re-
tain its faith in anarchy, whatever comes of it,
till it can endure no more.

Then, secondly. The people have be-
gun to suspect that one particular form of
this past misgovernment has been, that their
masters have set them to do all the work,
and have themselves taken all the wages. In
a word, that what was called governing them,
meant only wearing fine clothes, and living on

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 185

good fare at their expense. And I am sorry
to say, the people are quite right in this opin-
ion also. If you inquire into the vital fact of
the matter, this you will find to be the con-
stant structure of European society for the
thousand years of the feudal system ; it was
divided into peasants who lived by working ;
priests who lived by begging ; and knights
who lived by pillaging ; and as the luminous
public mind becomes gradually cognizant of
these facts, it will assuredly not suffer things
to be altogether arranged that way any more ;
and the devising of other ways will be an
agitating business ; especially because the
first impression of the intelligent populace is,
that whereas, in the dark ages, half the nation
lived idle, in the bright ages to come, the
•whole of it may.

Now, thirdly — and here is much the
worst phase of the crisis. This past system
of misgovernment, especially during the last
three hundred years, has prepared, by its
neglect, a class among the lower orders which
it is now peculiarly difficult to govern. It
deservedly lost their respect — but that was
the least part of mischief. The deadly part of
it was, that the lower orders lost their habit,

l86 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

and at last their faculty, of respect ; — lost th«
very capability of reverence, which is the most
precious part of the human soul. Exactly in
the degree in which you can find creatures,
greater than yourself, to look up to, in that
degree, you are ennobled yourself, and, in
that degree, happy. If you could live always
in the presence of archangels, you would be
happier than in that of men ; but even if only
in the company of admirable knights and
beautiful ladies, the more noble and Dright
they were, and the more you could reverence
their virtue, the happier you would be. On
the contrary, if you were condemned to live
among a multitude of idiots, dumb, distorted,
and malicious, you would not be happy in the
constant sense of your own superiority. Thus
all real joy and power of progress in humanity
depend on finding something to reverence,
and all the baseness and misery of humanity
begin in a habit of disdain. Now, by general
misgovernment, I repeat, we have created in
Europe a vast populace, and out of Europe a
still vaster one, which has lost even the power
and conception of reverence ;* — which exists

» Compare Time and Tide, § 169, and Fors Clavigera
tatter XIV. page 9,

FHE FUTURE OF ENGLAND, 187

only in the worship of itself — which can
neither see anything beautiful around it, nor
conceive anything virtuous above it ; which
has, towards all goodness and greatness, no
other feelings than those of the lowest creat-
ures— fear, hatred, or hunger ; a populace
which has sunk below your appeal in their
nature, as it has risen beyond your power in
their multitude ; — whom you can now no
more charm than you can the adder, nor dis-
cipline, than you can the summer fly.

It is a crisis, gentlemen ; and time to think
of it. I have roughly and broadly put it be-
fore you in its darkness. Let us look what
we may find of light.

Only the other day, in a journal which
is a fairly representative exponent of the Con-
servatism of our day, and for the most part
not at all in favor of strikes or other popular
proceedings ; only about three weeks since,
there was a leader, with this, or a similar, title
— " What is to become of the House of
Lords ? " It startled me, for it seemed as if
we were going even faster than I had thought,
when such a question was put as a subject of
quite open debate, in a journal meant chiefly
for the reading of the middle and upper classes.

188 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

Open or not — the debate is near. What it
to become of them ? And the answer to such
question depends first on their being able to
answer another question — " What is the use
of them ? " For some time back, I think the
theory of the nation has been, that they are
useful as impediments to business, so as to
give time for second thoughts. But the na-
tion is getting impatient of impediments to
business ; and certainly, sooner or later, will
think it needless to maintain these expensive
obstacles to its humors. And I have not
heard, either in public, or from any of them-
selves, a clear expression of their own concep-
tion of their use. So that it seems thus to be-
come needful for all men to tell them, as our
one quite clear-sighted teacher, Carlyle, has
been telling us for many a year, that the use
of the Lords of a country is to govern the coun-
try. If they answer that use, the country will
rejoice in keeping them ; if not, that will be-
come of them which must of all things found
to have lost their serviceableness.

Here, therefore, is the one question, at
this crisis, for them, and for us. Will they be
lords indeed, and give us laws — dukes indeed,
and give us guiding — princes indeed, and give

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 189

US beginning, cf truer dynasty, which shall not
be soiled by covetousness, nor disordered by
iniquity ? Have they themselves sunk so far
as not to hope this ? Are there yet any among
them who can stand forward with open Eng-
lish brows, and say, — So far as in me lies, I
will govern with my might, not for Dieu et mon
Droit, but for the first grand reading of the
war cry from which that was corrupted, " Dieu
et Droit"? Among them I know there are
some — among you, soldiers of England, I know
there are many, who can do this ; and in you
is our trust. I, one of the lower people of
your country, ask of you in their name, — you
whom I will not any more call soldiers, but by
the truer name of Knights ; — Equites of Eng-
land,— how many yet of you are there, knights
errant now beyond all former fields of danger
— knights patient now beyond all former endur-
ance ; who still retain the ancient and eternal
purpose of knighthood, to subdue the wicked,
and aid the weak ? To them, be they few or
many, we English people call for help to the
wretchedness, and for rule over the baseness,
of multitudes desolate and deceived, shrieking
to one another, this new gospel of their new
religion. " Let the weak do as they can, and
the wicked as they will."

190

THE CROWN OF V/ILD OLIVE.

I can hear you saying in your hearts,
even the bravest of you, " The time is past
for all that." Gentlemen, it is not so. The
time has come for more than all that. Hither-
to, soldiers have given their lives for false
fame, and for cruel power. The day is now
when they must give their lives for true fame,
and fcr beneficent power : and the work is
near every one of you — close beside you — the
means of it even thrust into your hands.
The people are crying to you for command,
and you stand there at pause, and silent.
You think they don't want to be commanded ;
try them ; determine what is needful for them
— honorable for them ; show it them, promise
to bring them to it, and they will follow you
through fire. " Govern us," they cry with one
heart, though many minds. They can be
governed still, these English ; they are men
still ; nor gnats, nor serpents. They love
their old ways yet, and their old masters, and
their old land. They would fain live in it, as
many as may stay there, if you will show them
how, there, to live ; — or show them even, how,
there, like Englishmen, to die.

" To live in it, as many as may ! " How
many do you think may ? How many

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 191

tan 1 How many do you want to live there ?
As masters, your first object must be to in-
crease your power ; and in what does the
power of a country consist ? Will you have
dominion over its stones, or over its clouds,
or over its souls ? What do you mean by a
great nation, but a great multitude of men
who are true to each other, and strong, and of
worth ? Now you can increase the multitude
only definitely — your island has only so much
standing room — but you can increase the
worth /^definitely. It is but a little island ; —
suppose, little as it is, you were to fill it with
friends? You may, and that easily. You
must, and that speedily ; or there will be an
end to this England of ours, and to all its
loves and enmities.

To fill this little island with true friends
— men brave, wise and happy ! Is it so
impossible, think you, after the world's
eighteen hundred years of Christianity, and
our own thousand years of toil, to fill only
this little white gleaming crag with happy
creatures, helpful to each other ? Africa, and
India, and the Brazilian wide- watered plain,
are these not wide enough for the ignorance
of our race ? have they not space enough for

192 THE CROWN- OF WILD OLIVE.

its pain ? Must we remain hereto savage,—
herevX enmity with each other, — here f oodless,
houseless, in rags, in dust, and without hope,
as thousands and tens of thousands of us are
lying ? Do not think it, gentlemen. The
thought that it is inevitable is the last in-
fidelity ; infidelity not to God only, but to
eveiy creature and every law that He has
made. Are we to think that the earth was
only shaped to be a globe of torture ; and
that there cannot be one spot of it where
peace can rest, or justice reign ? Where are
men ever to be happy, if not in England ? by
whom shall they ever be taught to do right, if
not by you ? Are we not of a race first among
the strong ones of the earth ; the blood in us
incapable of weariness, unconquerable by
grief? Have we not a history of which we
can hardly think without becoming insolent in
our just pride of it ? Can we dare, without
passing every limit of courtesy to other nations,
to say how much more we have to be proud
of in our ancestors than they ? Among our
ancient monarchs, great crimes stand out as
monstrous and strange. But their valor, and,
according to their understanding, their be-
nevolence, are constant. The Wars of the

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND.

193

Roses, which are as a fearful crimson shadow
on our land, represent the normal condition
of other nations ; while from the days of the
Heptarchy downwards we have had examples
given us, in all ranks, of the most varied and
exalted virtue ; a heap of treasure that no
moth can corrupt, and which even our
traitorship, if we are to become traitors to it,
cannot sully.

And this is the race, then, that we
know not any more how to govern ! and this
the history which we are to behold broken off
by sedition ! and this is the country, of all
others, where life is to become difficult to the
honest, and ridiculous to the wise ! And the
catastrophe, forsooth, is to come just when we
have been making swiftest progress beyond
the v/isdom and wealth of the past. Our
cities are a wilderness of spinning wheels
instead of palaces ; yet the people have not
clothes. We have blackened every leaf of
English greenwood with ashes, and the
people die of cold ; our harbors are a forest
of merchant ships, and the people die of
hunger.

Whose fault is it ? Yours, gentlemen ;
yours only. You alone can feed them, and
l3

194 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

clothe, and bring into their right minds, fof
you only can govern — that is to say, you only
can educate them.

Educate, or govern, they are one and
the same word. Education docs not mean
teaching people to know what they do not
know. It means teaching them to behave as
they do not behave. And the true " com-
pulsory education " which the people now ask
of you is not catechism, but drill. It is not
teaching the youth of England the shapes of
letters and the tricks of numbers ; and then
leaving them to turn their arithmetic to rogu-
ery, and their literature to lust. It is, on the
contrary, training them into the perfect ex-
ercise and kingly continence of their bodies
and souls. It is a painful, continual, and
difficult work ; to be done by kindness, by
watching, by warning, by precept, and by
praise, — but above all — by example.

Compulsory ! Yes, by all means ! " Go
ye out into the highways and hedges,
and compel them to come in." Compulsory !
Yes, and gratis also. Dei Gratia, they must
be taught, as, Dei Gratia, you are set to teach
them. I hear strange talk continually, " how
difficult it is to make people pay for being edu-

THE FUTMRE OF ENGLAND. 195

eated ! " Why, I should think so ! Do you
make your children pay for their education, or
do you give it them compulsorily, and gratis 1
You do not expect them to pay you for their
teaching, except by becoming good children.
Why should you expect a peasant to pay for
his, except by becoming a good man ? — pay-
ment enough, I think, if we knew it. Pay-
ment enough to himself, as to us. For that
is another of our grand popular mistakes —
people are always thinking of education as a
means of livelihood. Education is not a profit-
able business, but a costly one ; nay, even
the best attainments of it are always unprofit-
able, in any terms of coin. No nation ever
made its bread either by its great arts, or its
great wisdoms. By its minor arts or manu-
factures, by its practical knowledges, yes : but
its noble scholarship, its noble philosophy,
and its noble art, are always to be bought as
a treasure, not sold for a livelihood. You
do not learn that you may live — you live that
you may learn. You are to spend on Na-
tional Education, and to be spent for it, and
to make by it, not more money, but better
men; — to get into this British Island the
greatest possible number of good and brave

l$6 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

Englishmen. TJiey are to be your " money's
worth."

But where is the money to come from?
Yes, that is to be asked. Let us, as quite the
first business in this our national crisis, look not
only into our affairs, but into our accounts,
and obtain some general notion how we an-
nually spend our money, and what we are get-
ting for it. Observe, I do not mean to inquire
into the public revenue only ; of that some
account is rendered already. But let us do
the best we can to set down the items of the
national private expenditure; and know what
we spend altogether, and how.

To begin with this matter of education.
You probably have nearly all seen the
admirable lecture lately given by Captain
Maxse, at Southampton. It contains a clear
statement of the facts at present ascertained
as to our expenditure in that respect. It ap-
pears that of our public moneys, for every
pound that we spend on education we spend
twelve either in charity or punishment ; — ten
millions a year in pauperism and crime, and
eight hundred thousand in instruction. Now
Captain Maxse adds to this estimate of ten
millions public money spent on crime and

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 197

want, a more or less conjectural sum of eight
millions for private 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 educat-
ing 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 Rab-
shakeh, 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 hun-
dred thousand, which is certainly a great deal

19S THE CROWN OF IVILD OLIVE.

of money, in making rough minds bright. 1
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 se*- 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

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 199

them, because they spend them, you say, un-
advisedly. Render them, therefore, an ac-
count 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 ac-
knowledged subject of instruction, to the
working-man, — 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, gentle-
men, who taught them that method of festivity ?
Thirty years ago, I, a most inexperienced
freshman, went to my first college supper j at

200 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

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 ladle-
fuls 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 downstairs
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 dimh>
ish their incomes ; and, believe me, the way
to deal with your drunken workman is not to
lower his wages, — but to mend his wits.*

* Compare § 70 of Time and Tide.

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 201

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 Provi-
dence. Let the Lords Spiritual quit them-
selves of simony, we laymen will look after
the heretics for them. Let the Lords Tem-
poral 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 dairy 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 know-
ing, when any officer is appointed to a new
command, — what his former services and suc-
cesses have been, — whom he has superseded, —
and on what ground. It will be always a sat-

*02 THE CROWN OF WILD OLTVE.

isfaction to us ; it may sometimes be an ad-
vantage 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 hon-
orary 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 ad-
vanced 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 punish-
ment 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 prob-
lem of national education, or, in other words,
of national employment. For all education
begins in work. What we think, or what we

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 203

know, or what we believe, is in the end of
little consequence. The only thing of conse-
quence is what we do : and for manv 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 ? Gc*
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 educa-
tion of the whole people, and for their future
happiness, they must have such consistent

204 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

employment, as shall develop all the powers of
the fingers, and the limbs, and the brain : and
that development in 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 cf 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 shep-
herd's pipe, and pastoral symphony. Do
you know that lately, in Cumberland, in the
chief pastoral district of England, — in Words-
worth's own home, — a procession of villagers
on their festa day provided for themselves, by

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. ■ 205

way cf music, a steam-plough whistling at the
head of them !

Give me patience while I put the prin-
ciple of machine labor before you, as clearly
and in as short compass as possible ; it is
one that should be known at this junct-
ure. Suppose a farming proprietor needs to-
employ a hundred men on his estate, and that
the labor cf 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, un-
der such circumstances, to maintain all the
men i:i 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 mart
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 cf his
estate, which formerly went to feed them, all to
himself. That is the essential and constant
operation of machinery among us at this mo-
ment.

Nay, it is at first answered ; no man can

2o6 THE CROWN OF V/ILD OLIVE.

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 can-
dles during the winter, as would comfort the old
eyes, or spare the young ones, of a whole
rushlighted country village. Still, it is mainly
true that it is not by their personal waste that
rich people prevent the lives of the poor. This
is the way they do it. Let me go back to my
farmer. He has got his machine made, which
goes creaking, screaming, and occasionally ex-
ploding, about modern Arcadia. He has turned
off his fifty men to starve. Now, at some
distance from his own farm, there is another
on which the laborers were working for their
bread in the same way, by tilling the land.
The machinist sends over to these, saying — " I
have got food enough for you without your

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 2 Of

digging or ploughing any more. I can main-
tain you in other occupations instead of plough-
ing that land ; if you rake in its gravel you will
find some hard stones — you shall grind those
on mills till they glitter ; then, my wife shall
wear a necklace of them. Also, if you turn up
the meadows below you will find some fine white
clay, of which you shall make a porcelain service
for me : and the rest of the farm I want for
pasture for horses for my carriage — and you.
shall groom them, and some of you ride behind
the carriage with staves in your hands, and I
will keep you much fatter for doing that than
you can keep yourselves by digging."

Well — but it is answered, are we to have
no diamonds, nor china, nor pictures, nor
footmen, then — but all to be farmers ? I
am not saying what we ought to do, I want
only to show you with perfect clearness first
what we are doing ; and that, I repeat, is the
upshot of machine-contriving in this country.
And observe its effect on the national strength.
Without machines, you have a hundred and
fifty yeomen ready to join fc defence of
the land. You get your machu 2, starve fifty
of them, make diamond-cutters or footmen of
as many more, and for your national defence

ato8 THE CROWN OF V/ILD OLIVE.

against an enemy, you have now, and can have,
only fifty men, instead of a hundred and fifty ;
these also now with minds much alienated
from you as their chief,* and the rest, lapidaries
or footmen ; — and a steam plough.

That is the one effect of machinery ; but
at all events, if we have thus lost in men, we
have gained in riches ; instead of happy human
souls, we have at least got pictures, china,
horses, and are ourselves better off than we
were before. But very often, and in much of
our machine-contriving, even that result does
not follow. We are not one whit the richer
for the machine, we only employ it for our
amusement. For observe, our gaining in riches
depends on the men who are out of employment
consenting to be starved, or sent out of the
country. But suppose they do not consent
passively to be starved, but some of them be-
come criminals, and have to be taken charge
of and fed at a much greater cost than if they
were at work, and others, paupers, rioters, and
the like, thei you attain the real outcome of
modern wisd m and ingenuity. You had your
hundred meii honestly at country work ; but

* [They were deserting, I am informed, in the early
part of this year, 1873, at ^e rate °f a regiment a week.]

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 209

you don't like the sight of human beings in
your fields ; you like better to see a smoking
kettle. You pay, as an amateur, for that
pleasure, and you employ your fifty men in
picking oakum, cr begging, rioting, and thiev-
ing.

By hand-labor, therefore, and that alone,
we are to till the ground. By hand-labor
also to plough the sea ; both for food,
and in commerce, and in war ; not with float-
ing kettles there neither, but with hempen
bridle, and the winds of heaven in harness.
That is the way the power of Greece rose on
her Egean, the power of Venice on her Adria,
of Amalfl in her blue bay, of the Norman sea-
riders from the North Cape to Sicily : — so,
your own dominion also of the past. Of the
past, mind you. On the Baltic and the Nile,
your power is already departed. By ma-
chinery you would advance to discovery ; by
machinery you would carry your commerce ; —
you would be engineers instead of sailors ;
and instantly in the North seas you are beaten
among the ice, and before the very Gods of
Nile, beaten among the sand. Agriculture,
then, by the hand or by the plough drawn
only by animals ; and shepherd and pastoral
14

■aio THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE,

husbandry, are to be the chief schools of
Englishmen. And this most royal academy of
all academies you have to open over all the
land, purifying your heaths and hills, and
waters, and keeping them full of every kind of
lovely natural organism, in tree, herb, and living
creature. All land that is waste and ugly, you
must redeem into ordered fruitfulness ; all ruin,
desolateness, imperfectness of hut or habita-
tion, you must do away with ; and throughout
every village and city of your English dominion,
there must not be a hand that cannot find a
helper, nor a heart that cannot find a com-
forter.

" How impossible ! " I know, you are
thinking. Ah ! So far from impossible, it is
easy, it is natural, it is necessary, and I de-
clare to you that, sooner or later, it must be
done, at our peril. If now our English lords
of land will fix this idea steadily before
them ; take the people to their hearts, trust
to their loyalty, lead their labor ; — then
indeed there will be princes again in the
midst of us, worthy of the island throne,

* This royal throne of kings — this sceptred isle— ■
This fortress built by nature for herself
Against infection, and the hard of war ;

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 21*

This precious stone set in the silver sea;
This happy breed of men — this little world;
This other Eden — Demi-Paradise."

But if they refuse to do this, and hesitate and
equivocate, clutching through the confused
catastrophe of all things only at what they can
still keep stealthily for themselves, — their
doom is nearer than even their adversaries
hope, and it will be deeper than even their
despisers dream.

That, believe me, is the work you have to
do in England ; and out of England you have
room for everything else you care to do. Are
her dominions in the world so narrow that
she can find no place to spin cotton in but
Yorkshire ? We may organize emigration into
an infinite power. We may assemble troops
of the more adventurous and ambitious of our
youth; we may send them on truest foreign
service, founding new seats of authority, and
centres of thought, in uncultivated and un-
conquered lands ; retaining the full affection
to the native country no less in our colonists
than in our armies, teaching them to maintain
allegiance to their fatherland in labor no less
than in battle ; aiding them with free hand in
the prosecution of discovery, and the victory

212 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

over adverse natural powers ; establishing
seats of every manufacture in the climates and
places best fitted for it, and bringing ourselves
into due alliance and harmony of skill with
the dexterities of every race, and the wisdoms
of every tradition and every tongue.

And then you may make England itself the
centre of the learning, of the arts, of the court-
esies and felicities of the world. You may cover
her mountains with pasture ; her plains with
corn, her valleys with the lily, and her gardens
with the rose. You may bring together there
in peace the wise and the pure, and the gentle
of the earth, and by their word, command
through its farthest darkness the birth of
" God's first creature, which was Light." You
know whose words those are ; the words of
the wisest of Englishmen. He, and with him
the wisest of all other great nations, have
spoken always to men of this hope, and they
would not hear. Plato, in the dialogue of
Critias, his last, broken off at his death,—
Pindar, in passionate singing of the fortunate
islands, — Virgil, in the prophetic tenth eclogue,
— Bacon, in his fable of the New Atlantis, —
More, in the book which, too impatiently wise,
became the bye-word of fools — these, all, have

THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 213

told us with one voice what we should strive
to attain ; they not hopeless of it, but for our
follies forced, as it seems, by heaven, to tell us
only partly and in parables, lest we should hear
them and obey.

Shall we never listen to the words of these
wisest of men ? Then listen at least to the
words of your children — let us in the lips of
babes and sucklings find our strength ; and
see that we do not make them mock instead
of pray, when we teach them, night and morn-
ing, to ask for what we believe never can be
granted ; — that the will of the Father, — which
is, that His creatures may be righteous and
happy, — should be done, on earth, as it is in
Heaven.

APPENDIX.

APPENDIX.

KOTES ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OP PRUSSIA.

I am often accused of inconsistency ; but
believe myself defensible against the charge
with respect to what I have said on nearly
every subject except that of war. It is impos-
sible for me to write consistently of war, for
the groups of facts I have gathered about it
lead me to two precisely opposite conclusions.

When I find this the case, in other matters,
I am silent, till I can choose my conclusion :
but, with respect to war, I am forced to speak,
by the necessities of time ; and forced to act,
one way or another. The conviction on which
I act is that it causes an incalculable amount
of avoidable human suffering, and that it
ought to cease among Christian nations ; and
if therefore any of my boy-friends desire to be
soldiers, I try my utmost to bring them into
what I conceive to be a better mind. But, on
the other hand, I know certainly that the most
beautiful characters yet developed among
men have been formed in war ; — that all great
nations have been warrior nations, and that

217

2l8 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

the only kinds of peace which we are likely to
get in the present age are ruinous alike to the
intellect, and the heart.

The third lecture, in this volume, addressed
to young soldiers, had for its subject to
strengthen their trust in the virtue of their
profession. It is inconsistent with itself, in
its closing appeal to women, praying them to
use their influence to bring wars to an end.
And I have been hindered from completing
my long intended notes on the economy of
the Kings of Prussia by continually increas-
ing doubt how far the machinery and disci-
pline of war, under which they learned the art
of government, was essential for such lesson ;
and what the honesty and sagacity of the
Friedrich who so nobly repaired his ruined
Prussia might have done for the happiness of
his Prussia, unruined.

In war, however, or in peace, the character
which Carlyle chiefly loves him for, and in
which Carlyle has shown him to differ from
all kings up to this time succeeding him, is
his constant purpose to use every power in-
trusted to him for the good of his people ; and
be, not in name only, but in heart and hand,
their king.

Not in ambition, but in natural instinct of
duty. Friedrich, born to govern, determines
to govern to the best of his faculty. That
" best " may sometimes be unwise ; and self-
will, or love of glory, may have their oblique
hold on his mind, and warp it this way or that;

APPENDIX. 219

but they are never principal with him. He
believes that war is necessary, and maintains
it ; sees that peace is necessary, and calmly
persists in the work of it to the day of his
death, not claiming therein more praise than
the head of any ordinary household, who rules
it simply because it is his place, and he must
not yield the mastery of it to another.

How far, in the future, it may be possible
for men to gain the strength necessary for
kingship without either fronting death, or in-
flicting it, seems to me not at present deter-
minable. The historical facts are that, broadly
speaking, none but soldiers, or persons with a
soldierly faculty, have ever yet shown them-
selves fit to be kings ; and that no other men
are so gentle, so just, or so clear-sighted.
Wordsworth's character of the happy warrior
cannot be reached in the height of it but by a
warrior ; nay, so much is it beyond common
strength that I had supposed the entire mean-
ing of it to be metaphorical, until one of the
best soldiers of England himself read me the
poem,* and taught me, what I might have
known, had I enough watched his own life,
that it was entirely literal. There is nothing
of so high reach distinctly demonstrable in
Friedrich : but I see more and more, as I grow
older, that the things which are the most
worth, encumbered among the errors and
faults of every man's nature, are never clearly

* The late Sir Herbert Edwardes.

220 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

demonstrable ; and are often most forcible
when they are scarcely distinct to his own
conscience, — how much less, clamorous for
recognition by others !

Nothing can be more beautiful than Carlyle's
showing of this, to any careful reader of Fried-
rich. But careful readers are but one in the
thousand ; and by the careless, the masses of
detail with which the historian must deal are
insurmountable.

My own notes, made for the special purpose
of hunting down the one point of economy,
though they cruelly spoil Carlyle's own cur-
rent and method of thought, may yet be use-
ful in enabling readers, unaccustomed to
books involving so vast a range of conception,
to discern what, on this one subject only, may
be gathered from that history. On any other
subject of importance, similar gatherings
might be made of other passages. The his-
torian has to deal with all at once.

I therefore have determined to print here,
as a sequel to the Essay on War, my notes
from the first volume of Friedrich, on the
economies of Brandenburg, up to the date of
the establishment of the Prussian monarchy.
The economies of the first three Kings of
Prussia I shall then take up in Fors Clavigera,
finding them fitter for examination in connec-
tion with the subject of that book than of
this.

I assume, that the reader will take down his
first volume of Carlyle, and read attentively

APPENDIX. 221

the passages to which I refer him. I give the
reference first to the largest edition, in six
volumes (1858-1865) ; then, in parenthesis, to
the smallest or "people's edition" (1872-
1873). The pieces which I have quoted in
my own text are for the use of readers who
may not have ready access to the book ; and
are enough for the explanation of the points
to which I wish them to direct their thoughts
in reading such histories of soldiers or soldier-
kingdoms.

I.

Year 928 to 936. — Dawn of Order in Christian Ger-
many.

Book II. Chap. i. p. 67 (47).

Henry the Fowler, " the beginning of
German kings," is a mighty soldier in the
cause of peace ; his essential work the building
and organization of fortified towns for the pro-
tection of men.

Read page 72 with utmost care (51), " He
fortified towns " to end of small print. I have
added some notes on the matter in my lecture
on Giovanni* Pisano ; but whether you can
glance at them or not, fix in your mind this
institution of truly civil or civic building in
Germany, as distinct from the building of
baronial castles for the security of robbers:
and of a standing army consisting of every
ninth man, called a " burgher " (" townsman ")

222 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

— a soldier appointed to learn that profession
that he may guard the walls — the exact reverse
of our notion of a burgher.

Frederick's final idea of his army is, indeed,
only this.

Brannibor, a chief fortress of the Wends,
is thus taken, and further strengthened by
Henry the Fowler ; wardens appointed for it ;
and thus the history of Brandenburg begins.
On all frontiers, also, this "beginning of
German kings " has his " Markgraf," " Ancient
of the marked place." Read page 73,
measuredly, learning it by heart, if it may be.

(51-2).

II.

936 — 1000.— History of Nascent Brandenburg.

The passage I last desired you to read ends
with this sentence : " The sea-wall you build,
and what main floodgates you establish in it,
will depend on the state of the outer sea."

From this time forward you have to keep
clearly separate in your minds, (a) the history
of that outer sea, Pagan Scandinavia, Russia,
and Bor-Russia, or Prussia proper; (b) the
history of Henry the Fowler's Eastern and
Western Marches; asserting themselves grad-
ually as Austria and the Netherlands ; and
(c) the history of this inconsiderable fortress
of Brandenburg, gradually becoming consider-
able, and the capital city of increasing district
between them. That last history, howev«%

AFi ^NDI;.. 223

Carlyle is obliged to leave vague and gray
for two hundred years after Henry's death.
Absolutely dim for the first century, in which
nothing is evident but that its wardens or
Markgraves had no peaceable possession of
the place. Read the second paragraph in
page 74 (52-3), "in old books " to "reader,"
and the first in page 83 (59), " meanwhile " to
" substantial," consecutively. They bring the
story of Brandenburg itself down, at any rate,
from 936 to 1000.

III.

936 — 1000. — State of the Outer Sea.

Read now Chapter II. beginning at page
76 (54), wherein you will get account of the
beginning of vigorous missionary work on the
outer sea, in Prussia proper ; of the death of
St. Adalbert, and of the purchase of his dead
body by the Duke of Poland.

You will not easily understand Carlyle's
laugh in this chapter, unless you have learned
yourself to laugh in sadness, and to laugh in
love.

" No Czech blows his pipe in the woodlands
without certain precautions and preliminary
fuglings of a devotional nature." (Imagine
St. Adalbert, in spirit, at the railway station
in Birmingham !)

My own main point for notice in the chapter
is the purchase of his body for its " weight in
gold." Swindling angels held it up in the

224 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

scales ; it did not weigh so much as a web of
gossamer. " Had such excellent odor, too,
and came for a mere nothing of gold," says
Carlyle. It is one of the first commercial
transactions of Germany, but I regret the con-
duct .of the angels on the occasion. Evangeli-
calism has been proud of ceasing to invest in
relics, its swindling angels helping it to better
things, as it supposes. For my own part, I
believe Christian Germany could not have
bought at this time any treasure more pre-
cious ; nevertheless, the missionary work it-
self you find is wholly vain. The difference
of opinion between St. Adalbert and the
Wends, on Divine matters, does not signify to
the Fates. They will not have it disputed
about ; and end the dispute adversely, to St.
Adalbert, — adversely, even, to Brandenburg
and its civilizing power, as you will imme-
diately see,

IV.

IOOO — 1030. — History of Brandenburg in Trouble.
Book II. Chap. iii. p. 83 (59).

The adventures of Brandenburg in contest
with Pagan Prussia, irritated, rather than
amended, by St, Adalbert. In 1023, roughly,
a hundred years after Henry the Fowler's
death, Brandenburg is taken by the Wends,
and its first line of Markgraves ended ; its
population mostly butchered, especially the

APPENDIX.

225

priests ; and the Wends' God, Triglaph,
" something like three whales' cubs combined
by boiling," set up on the top of St. Mary's
Hill.

Here is an adverse " Doctrine of the
Trinity " which has its supporters ! It is
wonderful, — this Tripod and Triglyph, — three-
footed, three-cut faith of the North and South,
the leaf of the oxalis, and strawberry, and
clover, fostering the same in their simple
manner. I suppose it to be the most savage
and natural of notions about Deity ; a prismatic
idol-shape of Him, rude as a triangular log, as
a trefoil grass. I do not find how long
Triglaph held his state on St. Mary's Hill.
" For a time," says Carlyle, " the priests all
slain or fled, — shadowy Markgraves the like
— church and state lay in ashes, and Triglaph,
like a triple porpoise under the influence of
laudanum, stood, I know not whether on his
head or his tail, aloft on the Harlungsberg, as
the Supreme of this Universe for the time
being."

V.

1030 — 1 1 30. — Brandenburg under the Dit~
marsch Markgraves, or Ditmarsch-Stade
Markgraves.

Book II. Chap. iii. p. 85 (60).

Of Anglish, or Saxon breed. They attack
Brandenburg, under its Triglyphic protector,
*5

226 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

take it — dethrone him, and hold the town for
a hundred years, their history " stamped bene-
ficially on the face of things, Markgraf after
Markgraf getting killed in the business.
' Erschlagen,' ' slain,' fighting with the Hea-.
then — say the old books, and pass on to
another." If we allow seven years to Triglaph
— we get a clear century for these — as above
indicated. They die out in 1130.

VI.

I130— 1170. — Brandenburg under Albert the
Bear.

Book II. Chap. iv. p. 91 (64).

He is the first of the Ascanien Markgraves,
whose castle of Ascanica is on the northern
slope of the Hartz Mountains, "ruins still
dimly traceable."

There had been no soldier or king of note
among the Ditmarsch Markgraves, so that
you will do well to fix in your mind succes-
sively the three men, Henry the Fowler, St.
Adalbert, and Albert the Bear. A soldier
again, and a strong one. Named the Bear
only from the device on his shield, first wholly
definite Markgraf of Brandenburg that there
is, " and that the luckiest of events for Brand-
enburg." Read page 93 (66) carefully, and
note this of his economies.

APPENDIX. 22f

rt Nothing better is known to me of Albert
the Bear than his introducing large numbers
of Dutch Netherlanders into those countries ;
men thrown out of work, who already knew
how to deal with bog and sand, by mixing and
delving, and who first taught Brandenburg
what greenness and cow-pasture was. The
Wends, in presence of such things, could not
but consent more and more to efface them-
selves— either to become German, and grow
milk and cheese in the Dutch manner, or to
disappear from the world.

" After two hundred and fifty years of bark-
ing and worrying, the Wends are now finally-
reduced to silence ; their anarchy well buried
and wholesome Dutch cabbage planted over
it ; Albert did several great things in the world ;
but this, for posterity, remains his memorable
feat. Not done quite easily, but done: big
destinies of nations or of persons are not
founded gratis in this world. He had a sore,
toilsome time of it, coercing, warring, manag-
ing among his fellow-creatures, while his day's-
work lasted — fifty years or so, for it began,
early. He died in his Castle of Ballenstadt,
peaceably among the Hartz Mountains at last^.
in the year 1170, age about sixty-five."

Now, note in all this the steady gain of
soldiership enforcing order and agriculture,
with St. Adalbert giving higher strain to the
imagination. Henry the Fowler establishes

228 THE CROWN OF WILD OLft'R

-walled towns, fighting for mere peace. Albert
the Bear plants the country with cabbages,
fighting for his cabbage-fields. And the dis'
ciples of St. Adalbert, generally, have sue
ceeded in substituting some idea of Christ foi
the idea of Triglaph. Some idea only ; other"
ideas than of Christ haunt even to this day
those Hartz Mountains among which Albert
the Bear died so peacefully. Mephistopheles,
and all his ministers, inhabit there, command1
ing mepbitic clouds and earth-born dreams.

VII.

1 1 70— 1320. — Brandenburg ijo years undei%
the Ascanien Markgraves.

Vol. I. Book II. Chap. viii. p. 135 (96).

" Wholesome Dutch cabbages continued to
he more and more planted by them in the
waste sand : intrusive chaos, and Triglaph
held at bay by them," till at last in 1240,
seventy years after the great Bear's death, they
fortify a new Burg, a " little rampart," Wehrlin,
diminutive of Wehr (or vallum), gradually
smoothing itself, with a little echo of the Bear
in it too, into Ber-lin, the oily river Spree flow-
ing by, " in which you catch various fish ; "
while trade over the flats and by the dull
streams, is widely possible. Of the Ascanien
race, the notablest is Otto with the Arrow,

APPENDIX. 229

whose story see, pp. 138-141 (98-109), noting
that Otto is one of the first Minnesingers^
that, being a prisoner to the Archbishop of
Magdeburg, his wife rescues him, selling her
jewels to bribe the canons ; and that the
Knight, set free on parole and promise of fur-
ther ransom, rides back with his own price in
his hand ; holding himself thereat cheaply
bought, though no angelic legerdemain hap-
pens to the scales now. His own estimate of
his price — " Rain gold ducats on my war-horse
and me, till you cannot see the point of my
spear atop."

Emptiness of utter pride, you think ?

Not so. Consider with yourself, reader,
how much you dare to say, aloud, you are
worth. If you have no courage to name any
price whatsoever for yourself, believe me, the
cause is not your modesty, but that in very
truth you feel in your heart there would be no
bid for you at Lucian's sale of lives, were that
again possible, at Christie and Manson's.

Finally (13 19 exactly ; say 1320, for memory),
the Ascanien line expired in Brandenburg, and
the little town and its electorate lapsed to the
Kaiser : meantime other economical arrange-
ments had been in progress ; but observe first
how far we have got.

The Fowler, St. Adalbert, and the Bear have
established order, and some sort of Chris-
tianity ; but the established persons begin to
think somewhat too well of themselves. On
quite honest terms, a dead saint or a living

230 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

knight ought to be worth their true " weight
in gold." But a pyramid, with only the point
of the spear seen at top, would be many times
over one's weight in gold. And although men
were yet far enough from the notion of modern
days, that the gold is better than the flesh,
and from buying it with the clay of one's body,
and even the fire of one's soul, instead of soul
and body with it, they were beginning to fight
for their own supremacy, or for their own
religious fancies, and not at all to any useful
end, until an entirely unexpected movement is
made in the old useful direction forsooth, only
by some kind ship-captains of Lubeck !

VIII.

1210 — 1320. — Civil work, aiding military \
during the Ascanien period

Vol. I. Book II. Chap. vi. p. 109 (77).

In the year 1190, Acre not yet taken, and
the crusading army wasting by murrain on the
shore, the German soldiers especially having
none to look after them, certain compassionate
ship-captains of Lubeck, one Walpot von Bas-
senheim taking the lead, formed themselves
into an union for succor of the sick and the
dying, set up canvas tents from the Lubeck
ship stores, and did what utmost was in them

APPENDIX. jjt

silently in the name of mercy and heaven.
Finding its work prosper, the little medicinal
and weather-fending company took vows on it-
self, strict chivalry forms, and decided to be-
come permanent " Knights Hospitallers of our
dear Lady of Mount Zion," separate from the
former Knights Hospitallers, as being entirely
German : yet soon, as the German Order of St.
Mary, eclipsing in importance Templars, Hos-
pitallers, and every other chivalric order then
extant ; no purpose of battle in them, but much
strength for it ; their purpose only the helping
of German pilgrims. To this only they are
bound by their vow, " gelbiide," and become
one of ,the usefullest of clubs in all the PalL
Mall of Europe.

Finding pilgrimage in Palestine falling slack,,
and more need for them on the homeward side
of the sea, their Hochmeister, Hermann of the
Salza, goes over to Venice in 12 10. There,
the titular bishop of still unconverted Preussen.
advises him of that field of work for his idle
knights. Hermann thinks well of it : sets his
St. Mary's riders at Triglaph, with the sword
in one hand and a missal in the other.

Not your modern way of effecting conversion !
Too illiberal, you think ; and what would Mr.
J. S. Mill say ?

But if Triglaph had been verily " three
whales' cubs combined by boiling," you would
yourself have promoted attack on him for the
sake of his. oil, would not you? The Teutsch

232 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

Hitters, fighting him for charity, are they so
much inferior to you ?

" They built, and burnt, innumerable stock-
ades for and against ; built wooden forts which
are now stone towns. They fought much and
prevalently ; galloped desperately to and fro,
ever on the alert. In peaceabler ulterior times,
they fenced in the Nogat and the Weichsel
with dams, whereby unlimited quagmire might
become grassy meadow — as it continues to this
day. Marienburg (Mary's Burg), with its grand
stone Schloss still visible and even habitable :
this was at length their headquarter. But how
many Burgs of wood and stone they built, in
different parts ; what revolts, surprisals, furious
fights in woody, boggy places they had, no
man has counted.

" But always some preaching by zealous
monks, accompanied the chivalrous fighting.
And colonists came in from Germany ; trick-
ling in, or at times streaming. Victorious Rit-
terdom offers terms to the beaten heathen:
terms not of tolerant nature, but which will be
punctually kept by Ritterdom. When the flame
of revolt or general conspiracy burnt up again
too extensively, high personages came on cru-
sade to them. Ottocar, King of Bohemia,
with his extensive far-shining chivalry, ' con-
quered Samland in a month ; ' tore up the
Romova where Adalbert had been massacred,
and burnt it from the face of the earth. A
certain fortress was founded at that time,

APPENDIX. 233

in Ottocar's presence ; and in honor of him
they named it King's Fortress, ' Konigsberg/
Among King Ottocar's esquires, or subaltern
junior officials, on this occasion, is one Rudolf,
heir of a poor Swiss lordship and gray hill
castle, called Hapsburg, rather in reduced
circumstances, whom Ottocar likes for his
prudent, hardy ways ; a stout, modest, wise
young man, who may chance to redeem Haps-
burg a little, if he lives.

" Conversion, and complete conquest once
come, there was a happy time for Prussia ;
ploughshare instead of sword : busy sea-havens,
German towns, getting built; churches every-
where rising ; grass growing, and peaceable
cows, where formerly had been quagmire and
snakes, and for the Order a happy time. On
the whole, this Teutsch Ritterdom, for the first
century and more, was a grand phenomenon,
and flamed like a bright blessed beacon through
the night of things, in those Northern countries.
For above a century, we perceive, it was the
rallying place of all brave men who had a
career to seek on terms other than vulgar.
The noble soul, aiming beyond money, and
sensible to more than hunger in this world, had
a beacon burning (as we say), if the night
chanced to overtake it, and the earth to grow
too intricate, as is not uncommon. Better than
the career of stump-oratory, I should fancy,
and its Hesperides apples, golden, and of gilt
horse-dung. Better than puddling away one's
poor spiritual gift of God (loan, not gift), such.

234 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

as it may be, in building the lofty rhyme, the
lofty review article, for a discerning public that
has sixpence to spare ! Times alter greatly." *

We must pause here again for a moment to
think where we are, and who is with us. The
Teutsch Ritters have been fighting, independ-
ently of all states, for their own hand, or St.
Adalbert's ; — partly for mere love of fight,
partly for love of order, partly for love of God.
Meantime, other Riders have been fighting
wholly for what they could get by it ; and other
persons, not Riders, have not been fighting at
all, but in their own towns peacefully manu-
facturing and selling.

Of Henry the Fowler's Marches, Austria has
become a military power, Flanders a mercantile
one, pious only in the degree consistent with
their several occupations. Prussia is now a
practical and farming country, more Christian
than its longer-converted neighbors.

" Towns are built. Konigsberg (King Otto-
car's town), Thoren (Thorn, City of the
Gates), with many others; so that the wild
population and the tame now lived tolerably
together, under Gospel and Ltibeck law; and
all was ploughing and trading."

But Brandenburg itself, what of it ?

* I would much rather print these passages of Car-
lyle in large golden letters than small black ones ; but
they are only here at all for unlucky people who can't
read them with the context.

APPENDIX.

235

The Ascanien Markgraves rule it on the
■whole prosperously down to 1320, when their
line expires, and it falls into the power of Im-
perial Austria.

IX.

1320 — 1415. — Brandenburg under the Aus~
trians.

A century — the fourteenth — of miserable
anarchy and decline for Brandenburg, its
Kurfiirsts, in deadly succession, making what
they can out of it for their own pockets. The
city itself and its territory utterly helpless.
Read pp. 180, 181 (129, 130). "The towns
suffered much, any trade they might have had
going to wreck. Robber castles flourished,
all else decayed, no highway safe. What are
Hamburg peddlers made for but to be
robbed ? "

X.

1415 — 1440. — Brandenburg under Friedrickof
Nuremberg.

This is the fourth of the men whom you are
to remember as creators of the Prussian mon-
archy, Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, Albert
the Bear, of Ascanien, and Friedrich of
Nuremberg; (of Hohenzollern by name, and

236 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

by country of the Black Forest, north of the
Lake of Constance).

Brandenburg is sold to him at Constance,
durmg the great Council, for about .£200,000 of
our money, worth perhaps a million in that
day ; still, with its capabilities, " dog cheap."
Admitting, what no one at the time denied, the
general marketableness of states as private
property, this is the one practical result, thinks
Carlyle (not likely to think wrong), of that
oecumenical deliberation, four years long, of
the " elixir of the intellect and dignity of
Europe. And that one thing was not its
doing ; but a pawnbroking job, intercalated,"
putting, however, at last, Brandenburg again
under the will of one strong man. On St.
John's Day, 1412, he first set foot in his town,
" and Brandenburg, under its wise Kurfiirst,
begins to be cosmic again." The story of
Heavy Peg, pages 195-198 (138, 140), is one
of the most brilliant and important passages
of the first volume ; page 199, specially to our
purpose, must be given entire : —

" The offer to be Kaiser was made him in
his old days ; but he wisely declined that too.
It was in Brandenburg, by what he silently
founded there, that he did his chief benefit to
Germany and mankind. He understood the
noble art of governing men ; had in him the
justness, clearness, valor, and patience needed
for that. A man of sterling probity, for one
thing. Which indeed is the first requisite in

APPENDIX. 237

said art .« — if you will have your laws obeyed
without mutiny, see well that they be pieces
of God Almighty's law ; otherwise all the
artillery in the world will not keep down
mutiny.

" Friedrich ' travelled much over Branden-
burg ; ' looking into everything with his own
eyes ; making, I can well fancy, innumerable
crooked things straight ; reducing more and
more that famishing dog-kennel of a Branden-
burg into a fruitful arable field. His portraits
represent a square-headed, mild-looking, solid
gentleman, with a certain twinkle of mirth in
the serious eyes of him. Except in those
Hussite wars for Kaiser Sigismund and the
Reich, in which no man could prosper, he may
be defined as constantly prosperous. To
Brandenburg he was, very literally, the bless-
ing of blessings ; redemption out of death
into life. In the ruins of that old Friesack
Castle, battered down by Heavy Peg, anti-
quarian science (if it had any eyes) might look
for the tap-root of the Prussian nation, and the
beginning of all that Brandenburg has since
grown to under the sun."

Which growth is now traced by Carlyle in
its various budding and withering, under the
succession of the twelve Electors, of whom
Friedrich, with his Heavy Peg, is first, and
Friedrich, first King of Prussia, grandfather of
Friedrich the Great, the twelfth.

238 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

XI.

1415 — 1701. — Brandenburg under the Hohen-
zollern Kurfiirsts

Book III.

Who the Hohenzollerns were, and how they
came to power in Nuremberg, is told in Chap,
v. of Book II.

Their succession in Brandenburg is given in
brief at page 377 (269). I copy it, in absolute
barrenness of enumeration, for our momen-
tary convenience, here : —

Friedrich 1st of Brandenburg (6th of

Nuremberg) 14.12-u.40

Friedrich II., called "Iron Teeth" 1440-1472

Albert 1472-1486

Johann ...... 1486-1499

Joachim 1 1499-1535

Joachim II I535"IS71

Johann George 1571-1598

Joachim Friedrich .... 1598- 1608

Johann Sigismund .... 1608-1619

George Wilhelm 1619-1640

Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elec-
tor) 1640-1688

Friedrich, first King ; crowned 18th

January .... 1701

Of this line of princes we have to say they
followed generally in their ancestor's steps,

APPENDIX. 239

and had success of the like kind more or less ;
Hohenzollerns all of them, by character and
behavior as well as by descent. No lack of
quiet energy, of thrift, sound sense. There
was likewise solid fair play in general, no
founding of yourself on ground that will not
carry, and there was instant, gentle, but inexor-
able crushing of mutiny, if it showed itself,
.which, after the Second Elector, or at most
the Third, it had altogether ceased to do.

This is the general account of them ; of
special matters note the following : —

II. Friedrich, called " Iron-teeth," from his
firmness, proves a notable manager and gov-
ernor. Builds the palace at Berlin in its first
form, and makes it his chief residence. Buys
Neumark from the fallen Teutsch Ritters, and
generally establishes things on securer footing.

III. Albert, " a fiery, tough old Gentleman,"
called the Achilles of Germany in his day ; has
half-a-century of fighting with his own Nurem-
bergers, with Bavaria, France, Burgundy and its
fiery Charles, besides being head constable to
the Kaiser among any disorderly persons in the
East. His skull, long shown on his tomb,
" marvellous for strength and with no visible
sutures."

IV. John, the orator of his race ; (but the
orations unrecorded). His second son, Arch-
bishop of Maintz, for whose piece of memo-
rable work see page 223 (143), and read in con-
nection with that the history of Markgraf

240 THE CROWN OF V/ILD OLIVE.

George, pp. 237 — 241 (152 — 154), and the 8th
chapter of the third book.

V. Joachim I, of little note ; thinks there has
been enough Reformation, and checks proceed-
ings in a dull stubbornness, causing him at
least grave domestic difficulties. — Page 271

(i73).

VI. Joachim II. Again active in the Re-
formation, and staunch,

"though generally in a cautious, weighty,
never in a rash, swift way, to the great cause
of Protestantism and to all good causes. He
was himself a solemnly devout man ; deep,
awe-stricken reverence dwelling in his view of
this universe. Most serious, though with a
jocose dialect, commonly having a cheerful
wit in speaking to men. Luther's books he
called his Seelenschatz (soul's treasure);
Luther and the Bible were his chief reading.
Fond of profane learning, too, and of the use-
ful or ornamental arts ; given to music, and
' would himself sing aloud ' when he had a
melodious leisure hour."

VII. Johann George, a prudent thrifty Herr ;
no mistresses, no luxuries allowed ; at the sight
of a new-fashioned coat he would fly out on
an unhappy youth and pack him from his
presence. Very strict in point of justice^; a
peasant once appealing to him in one of his
inspection journeys through the country —

APPENDIX. 241

"'Grant me justice, Durchlaucht, against so
and so ; I am your Highness's born subject.'
— ' Thou shouldst have it, man, wert thou a
born Turk ! ' answered Johann George."

Thus, generally, we find this line of Electors
representing in Europe the Puritan mind of
England in a somewhat duller, but less
dangerous, form ; receiving what Protestantism
could teach of honesty and common sense, but
not its anti-Catholic fury, or its selfish spiritual
anxiety. Pardon of sins is not to be had from
Tetzel ; neither, the Hohenzollern mind
advises with itself, from even Tetzel's master,
for either the buying or the asking. On the
whole, we had better commit as few as possible,
and live just lives and plain ones.

"A conspicuous thrift, veracity, modest
solidity, looks through the conduct of this
Herr ; a determined Protestant he too, as in-
deed all the following were and are."

VIII. Joachim Friedrich. Gets hold of
Prussia, which hitherto, you observe, has always
been spoken of as a separate country from
Brandenburg. March n, 1605 — "Squeezed
his way into the actual guardianship of
Preussen and its imbecile Duke, which was
his by right."

For my own part, I do not trouble myself

much about these rights, never being able to

make out any single one, to begin with, except

the right to keep everything and every place

16

«42 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

about you in as good order as you can-
Prussia, Poland, or what else. I should much
like, for instance, just now, to hear of any
honest Cornish gentleman of the old Drake
breed taking a fancy to land in Spain, and
trying what he could make of his rights as far
round Gibraltar as he could enforce them. At
all events, Master Joachim has somehow got
hold of Prussia ; and means to keep it.

IX. Johann Sigismund. Only notable for
our economical purposes, as getting the
" guardianship " of Prussia confirmed to him.
The story at page 317 (226), "a strong flame
of choler," indicates a new order of things
among the knights of Europe — " princely eti-
quettes melting all into smoke." Too literally
so, that being one of the calamitous functions
of the plain lives we are living, and of the busy
life our country is living. In the Duchy of
Cleve, especially, concerning which legal dis-
pute begins in Sigismund's time. And it is
well worth the lawyers' trouble, it seems.

" It amounted, perhaps, to two Yorkshires in
extent. A naturally opulent country of fertile
meadows, shipping capabilities, metalliferous
hills, and at this time, in consequence of the
Dutch-Spanish war, and the multitude of Prot-
estant refugees, it was getting filled with in-
genious industries, and rising to be what it
still is, the busiest quarter of Germany. A
country lowing with kine ; the hum of the flax-
spindle heard in its cottages in those old days

APPENDIX. 243

— ' much of the linen called Hollands is made
in Jiilich, and only bleached, stamped, and sold
by the Dutch,' says Biisching. A country in
our days which is shrouded at short intervals
with the due canopy of coal-smoke, and loud
with sounds of the anvil and the loom."

The lawyers took two hundred and six years to
settle the question concerning this Duchy, and
the thing Johann Sigismund had claimed
legally in 1609 was actually handed over to
Johann Sigismund's descendant in the seventh
generation. " These litigated duchies are now
the Prussian provinces, Jiilich, Berg, Cleve,
and the nucleus of Prussia's possessions in the
Rhine country."

X. George Wilhelm. Read pp. 325 to 327
{231, 333) on this Elector and German Prot-
estantism, now fallen old, and somewhat too
little dangerous. But George Wilhelm is the
only weak prince of all the twelve, For another
example how the heart and life of a country
depend upon its prince, not on its council, read
this, Gustavus Adolphus, demanding the
cession of Spandau and Kustrin :

" Which cession Kiirfurst George Wilhelm,
though giving all his prayers to the good cause,
could by no means grant. Gustav had to in-
sist, with more and more emphasis, advancing
at last with military menace upon Berlin itself.
He was met by George Wilhelm and his Coun-
cil, ' in the woods of Copenick,' short way to the

244 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

east of that city ; there George Wilhelm and his
Council wandered about, sending messages,
hopelessly consulting, saying among each other,
' Que faire ? ils ont des canons.' For many
hours so, round the inflexible Gustav, who was
there like a fixed milestone, and to all ques-
tions and comers had only one answer."

On our special question of war and its conse-
quences, read this of the Thirty Years' one :

" But on the whole, the grand weapon in it,
and towards the latter times the exclusive one,
was hunger. The opposing armies tried to
starve one another ; at lowest, tried each not to
starve. Each trying to eat the country or, at
any rate, to leave nothing eatable in it ; what
that will mean for the country we may con-
sider. As the armies too frequently, and the
Kaiser's armies habitually, lived without com-
missariat, often enough without pay, all hor-
rors of war and of being a seat of war, that
have been since heard of, are poor to those
then practised, the detail of which is still horri-
ble to read. Germany, in all eatable quarters
of it, had to undergo the process ; tortured, torn
to pieces, wrecked, and brayed as in mortar,
under the iron mace of war. Brandenburg
saw its towns seized and sacked, its country
populations driven to despair by the one party
and the other. Three times — first in the
Wallenstein-Mecklenburg times, while fire and
sword were the weapons, and again, twice over,

APPENDIX.

245

in the ultimate stages of the struggle, when
starvation had become the method — Branden-
burg fell to be the principal theatre of conflict,
where all forms of the dismal were at their
height. In 1638, three years after that precious
* Peace of Prag,' . . . the ravages of the
starving Gallas and his Imperialists excelled
all precedent, . . . men ate human flesh, nay,
human creatures ate their own children.' ' Que
faire ? ils ont des canons ! ' "

" We have now arrived at the lowest nadir
point " (says Carlyle) " of the history of
Brandenburg under the Hohenzollerns." Is
this then all that Heavy Peg and our nine
Kiirfursts have done for us ?

Carlyle does not mean that : but even he,
greatest of historians since Tacitus, is not
enough careful to mark for us the growth of
national character, as distinct from the pros-
perity of dynasties.

A republican historian would think of this
development only, and suppose it to be possi-
ble without any dynasties.

Which is indeed in a measure so, and the
work now chiefly needed in moral philosophy,
as well as history, is an analysis of the constant
and prevalent, yet unthought of, influences,
which, without any external help from kings,
and in a silent and entirely necessary manner,
form, in Sweden, in Bavaria, in the Tyrol, in
the Scottish border, and on the French sea-
coast, races of noble peasants ; pacific, poetic,

346 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

heroic, Christian-hearted in the deepest sense,
who may indeed perish by sword or famine in
any cruel thirty years ' war, or ignoble thirty
years' peace, and yet leave such strength to
their children that the country, apparently
ravaged into hopeless ruin, revives, under any
prudent king, as the cultivated fields do under
the spring rain. How the rock to which no
seed can cling, and which no rain can soften,
is subdued into the good ground which can
bring forth its hundredfold, we forget to watch,
while we follow the footsteps of the sower, or
mourn the catastrophes of storm. All this
while, the Prussian earth, — the Prussian soul,
— has been thus dealt upon by successive fate ;
and now, though laid, as it seems, utterly
desolate, it can be revived by a few years of
wisdom and of peace.

Vol. I. Book III. Chap, xviii.— The Great
Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm. Eleventh of the
dynasty : —

" There hardly ever came to sovereign power
a young man of twenty under more distressing,
hopeless-looking circumstances. Political sig-
nificance Brandenburg had none ; a mere Prot-
estant appendage, dragged about by a Papist
Kaiser, his father's Prime Minister, as we have
seen, was in the interest of his enemies ; not
Brandenburg's servant, but Austria's. The
very commandants of his fortresses, Com-
mandant of Spandau more especially, refused
to obey Friedrich Wilhelm on his accession |

APPENDIX. 247

•were bound to obey the Kaiser in the first
place. '

" For twenty years past Brandenburg had
been scoured by hostile armies, which, espe-
cially the Kaiser's part of which, committed out-
rages new in human history. In a year or two
hence, Brandenburg became again the theatre
of business. Austrian Gallas advancing thither
again (1644) with intent 'to shut up Torsten-
son and his Swedes in Jutland.' Gallas could
by no means do what he intended ; on the
contrary, he had to run from Torstenson — what
feet could do ; was hunted, he and his Merode
Bruder (beautiful inventors of the 'maraud-
ing' art), till they pretty much all died
(crepirten) says Kohler. No great loss to
society, the death of these artists, but we can
fancy what their life, and especially what the
process of their dying, may have cost poor
Brandenburg again !

" Friedrich Wilhelm's aim, in this as in other
emergencies, was sun-clear to himself, but for
most part dim to everybody else. He had to
walk very warily, Sweden on one hand of
him, suspicious Kaiser on the other : he had
to wear semblances, to be ready with evasive
words, and advance noiselessly by many cir-
cuits. More delicate operation could not be
imagined. But advance he did ; advance and
arrive. With extraordinary talent, diligence,
and felicity the young man wound himself out
of this first fatal position, got those foreign
armies pushed out of his country, and kept

248 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

them out. His first concern had been to find
some vestige of revenue, to put that upon a
clear footing, and by loans or otherwise to
scrape a little ready-money together. On the
strength of which a small body of soldiers could
be collected about him, and drilled into real ability
to fight and obey. This as a basis : on this
followed all manner of things, freedom from
Swedish-Austrian invasions, as the first thing.
He was himself, as appeared by-and-by, a
fighter of the first quality, when it came to that \
but never was willing to fight if he could help
it. Preferred rather to shift, manoeuvre, and
negotiate, which he did in most vigilant, adroit,
and masterly manner. But by degrees he had
grown to have, and could maintain it, an army
of 24,000 men, among the best troops then
in being."

To wear semblances, to be ready with eva-
sive words, how is this, Mr. Carlyle ? thinks
perhaps, the rightly thoughtful reader.

Yes, such things have to be. There are lies
and lies, and there are truths and truths.
Ulysses cannot ride on the ram's back, like
Phryxus ; but must ride under his belly. Read
also this, presently following :

" Shortly after which, Friedrich Wilhelm who
had shone much in the battle of Warsaw, into
which he was dragged against his will, changed
sides. An inconsistent, treacherous man?
Perhaps not, O reader ! perhaps a man advano*

APPENDIX.

249

ing * in circuits,' the only way he has ; spirally,
face now to east, now to west, with his own
reasonable private aim sun-clear to him all the
while ? "

The battle of Warsaw, three days long, fought
with Gustavus, the grandfather of Charles XII.,
against the Poles, virtually ends the Polish
power :

" Old Johann Casimir, not long after that
peace of Oliva, getting tired of his unruly Pol-
ish chivalry and their ways, abdicated — retired
to Paris, and 'lived much with Ninon de
l'Enclos and her circle,' for the rest of his life.
He used to complain of his Polish chivalry, that
there was no solidity in them ; nothing but out-
side glitter, with tumult and anarchic noise;
fatal want of one essential talent, the talent of
obeying; and has been heard to prophesy that
a glorious Republic, persisting in such courses
would arrive at results which would surprise it.

" Onward from this time, Friedrich Wilhelm
figures in the world ; public men watching his
procedure ; kings anxious to secure him — Dutch
print-sellers sticking up his portraits for a hero-
worshipping public. Fighting hero, had the
public known it, was not his essential charac-
ter, though he had to fight a great deal. He
was essentially an industrial man; great in
organizing, regulating, in constraining chaotic
heaps to become cosmic for him. He drains
bogs, settles colonies in the waste places cf his
dominions, cuts canals • unweariedly encour-

250 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

ages trade and work. The Friedrich Wilhelm's
Canal, which still carries tonnage from the Oder
to the Spree, is a monument of his zeal in this
way ; creditable with the means he had. To
the poor French Protestants in the Edict-of-
Nantes affair, he was like an express benefit of
Heaven ; one helper appointed to whom the
help itself was profitable. He munificently wel-
comed them to Brandenburg ; showed really a.
noble piety and human pity, as well as judg-
ment ; nor did Brandenburg and he want their
reward. Some 20,000 nimble French souls,
evidently of the best French quality, found a
home there ; made 'waste sands about Berlin
into potherb gardens ; ' and in spiritual Bran-
denburg, too, did something of horticulture
which is still noticeable."

Now read carefully the description of the
man, p. 352 (224-5); the story of the battle of
Fehrbellin, "the Marathon of Brandenburg,"
p. 354 (225) ; and of the winter campaign of
1679, p. 356 (227), beginning with its week's
marches at sixty miles a day ; his wife, as
always, being with him :

" Louisa, honest and loving Dutch girl, aunt
to our William of Orange, who trimmed up her
own 'Orange-burg' (country-house), twenty
miles north of Berlin, into a little jewel of the
Dutch type, potherb gardens, training-schools
for young girls, and the like, a favorite abode
of hers when she was at liberty for recreation.
But her life was busy and earnest ; she waa

APPENDIX. 25 Z

helpmate, not in name only, to an ever busy
man. They were married young ; a marriage
of love withal. Young Friedrich Wilhelm's
courtship; wedding in Holland; the honest,
trustful walk and conversation of the two sov-
ereign spouses, their journeyings together,
their mutual hopes, fears, and manifold vicissi-
tudes, till death, with stern beauty, shut it in ;
all is human, true, and wholesome in it, inter-
esting to look upon, and rare among sovereign
persons."

Louisa died in 1667, twenty-one years before
her husband, who married again — (little to his
contentment) — died in 1688 ; and Louisa's
second son, Friedrich, ten years old at his
mother's death, and now therefore thirty-one,
succeeds, becoming afterwards Friedrich I. of
Prussia.

And here we pause on two great questions.
Prussia is assuredly at this point a happier and
better country than it was when inhabited by
Wends. But is Friedrich I. a happier and
better man than Henry the Fowler ? Have
all these kings thus improved their country,
but never themselves ? Is this somewhat ex-
pensive and ambitious Herr, Friedrich I., but-
toned in diamonds, indeed the best that Prot-
estantism can produce, as against Fowlers,
Bears, and Red Beards ? Much more, Fried-
rich Wilhelm, orthodox on predestination ;
most of all, his less orthodox son ; — have we,
in these, the highest results which Dr. Martin

252 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE.

Luther can produce for the present, in the first
circles of society ? And if not, how is it that
the country, having gained so much in intelli-
gence and strength, lies more passively in their
power than the baser country did under that
of nobler men ?

These, and collateral questions, I mean to
work out as I can, with Carlyle's good help ;
— but must pause for this time ; in doubt, as
heretofore. Only of this one thing I doubt
not, that the name of all great kings, set over
Christian nations, must at last be, in fulfilment,
the hereditary one of these German princes,
" Rich in Peace ; " and that their coronation
■will be with Wild olive, not with gold,

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