Chapter 17

There is one more point which must be touched with tenderness but which cannot be honestly passed over in silence. It could nowhere be mentioned less invidiously than under the roof of an institution which is at once an effort to create high tastes in working men and a proof that such tastes can be created. The period of transition from high to low wages and from incessant toil to comparative leisure must be one of peril to masses whom no Mechanics Institute or Literary Society as yet counts among its members. It is the more so because there is abroad in all classes a passion for sensual enjoyment and excitement produced by the vast development of wealth and at the same time as I suspect by the temporary failure of those beliefs which combat the sensual appetites and sustain our spiritual life. Colliers drinking champagne. The world stands aghast. Well, I see no reason why a collier should not drink champagne if he can afford it as well as a Duke. The collier wants and perhaps deserves it more if he has been working all the week underground and at risk of his life. Hard labour naturally produces a craving for animal enjoyment and so does the monotony of the factory unrelieved by interest in the work. But what if the collier cannot afford the champagne or if the whole of his increase of wages is wasted on it while his habitation remains a hovel, everything about him is still as filthy, comfortless and barbarous as ever and (saddest of all) his wife and children are no better off, perhaps are worse off than before? What if his powers of work are being impaired by debauchery and he is thus surely losing the footing which he has won on the higher round of the industrial ladder and lapsing back into penury and despair? What if instead of gaining he is really losing in manhood and real independence? I see nothing shocking in the fact that a mechanic's wages are now equal to those of a clergyman, or an officer in the army who has spent perhaps thousands of dollars on his education. Every man has a right to whatever his labour will fetch. But I do see something shocking in the appearance of the highly paid mechanic, whenever hard times come, as a mendicant at the door of a man really poorer than himself. Not only that English poor-law, of which we spoke, but all poor-laws, formal or informal, must cease when the labourer has the means, with proper self-control and prudence, of providing for winter as well as summer, for hard times as well as good times, for his family as well as for himself. The tradition of a by-gone state of society must be broken. The nominally rich must no longer be expected to take care of the nominally poor. The labourer has ceased to be in any sense a slave. He must learn to be, in every sense, a man.

It is much easier to recommend our neighbours to change their habits than to change our own, yet we must never forget, in discussing the question between the working man and his employer, or the community, that a slight change in the habits of the working men, in England at least, would add more to their wealth, their happiness and their hopes, than has been added by all the strikes, or by conflicts of any kind. In the life of Mr. Brassey, we are told that the British workman in Australia has great advantages, but wastes them all in drink. He does this not in Australia alone. I hate legislative interference with private habits, and I have no fancies about diet. A citizen of Maine, who has eaten too much pork, is just as great a transgressor against medical rules, and probably just as unamiable, as if he had drunk too much whisky. But when I have seen the havoc--the ever increasing havoc-- which drink makes with the industry, the vigour, the character of the British workman, I have sometimes asked myself whether in that case extraordinary measures might not be justified by the extremity of its dangers.

The subject is boundless. I might touch upon perils distinct from Unionism, which threaten industry, especially that growing dislike of manual labour which prevails to an alarming extent in the United States, and which some eminent economists are inclined to attribute to errors in the system of education in the common schools. I might speak of the duties of government in relation to these disturbances, and of the necessity, for this as well as other purposes, of giving ourselves a government of all and for all, capable of arbitrating impartially between conflicting interests as the recognised organ of the common good. I might speak, too, of the expediency of introducing into popular education a more social element, of teaching less rivalry and discontent, more knowledge of the mutual duties of different members of the community and of the connection of those duties with our happiness. But I must conclude. If I have thrown no new light upon the subject, I trust that I have at least tried to speak the truth impartially, and that I have said nothing which can add to the bitterness of the industrial conflict, or lead any of my hearers to forget that above all Trade Unions, and above all combinations of every kind, there is the great union of Humanity.

"WHAT IS CULPABLE LUXURY?"

A phrase in a lecture on "The Labour Movement," published in the _Canadian Monthly_, has been the inconsiderable cause of a considerable controversy in the English press and notably of a paper by the eminent economist and moralist Mr. W.R. Greg, entitled "What is Culpable Luxury?" in the _Contemporary Review_.

The passage of the lecture in which the phrase occurred was: "Wealth, real wealth, has hardly as yet much reason to complain of any encroachment of the Labour Movement on its rights. When did it command such means and appliances of pleasure, such satisfaction for every appetite and every fancy, as it commands now? When did it rear such enchanted palaces of luxury as it is rearing in England at the present day? Well do I remember one of those palaces, the most conspicuous object for miles round. _Its lord was I dare say consuming the income of some six hundred of the poor labouring families round him_. The thought that you are spending on yourself annually the income of six hundred labouring families seems to me about as much as a man with a heart and a brain can bear. Whatever the rich man desires, the finest house, the biggest diamond, the reigning beauty for his wife, social homage, public honour, political power, is ready at his command" &c, &c.

The words in italics have been separated from the context and taken as an attack on wealth. But the whole passage is a defence of labour against the charge of encroachment brought against it by wealth. I argue that, if the labouring man gets rather more than he did, the inequalities of fortune and the privileges of the rich are still great enough. In the next paragraph I say that "wealth well made and well spent is as pure as the rill that runs from the mountain side." An invidious turn has also been given to the expression "the income of six hundred labouring families," as though it meant that the wealthy idler is robbing six hundred labouring families of their income. It means no more than that the income which he is spending on himself is as large as six hundred of their incomes put together.

Mr. Greg begins with what he calls a retort courteous. He says that if the man with L30 000 is doing this sad thing so is the man with L3000 or L300 and everyone who allows himself anything beyond the necessaries of life; nay, that the labouring man when he lights his pipe or drinks his dram is as well as the rest consuming the substance of one poorer than himself. This argument appears to its framer irrefutable and a retort to which there can be no rejoinder. I confess my difficulty is not so much in refuting it as in seeing any point in it at all. What parallel can there be between an enormous and a very moderate expenditure or between prodigious luxury and ordinary comfort? If a man taxes me with having squandered fifty dollars on a repast is it an irrefutable retort to tell him that he has spent fifty cents? The limited and rational expenditure of an industrious man produces no evils economical, social or moral. I contend in the lecture that the unlimited and irrational expenditure of idle millionaires does; that it wastes labour, breeds luxury, creates unhappiness by propagating factitious wants, too often engenders vice and is injurious for the most part to real civilization. I have observed and I think with truth that the most malignant feelings which enter into the present struggle between classes have been generated by the ostentation of idle wealth in contrast with surrounding poverty. It would of course be absurd to say this of a man living on a small income in a modest house and in a plain way.

If I had said that property or all property beyond a mere sustenance is theft there would be force in Mr. Greg's retort, but as I have said or implied nothing more than that extravagant luxury is waste and contrasted with surrounding poverty grates on the feelings, especially when those who waste are idle and those who want are the hardest working labourers in the world, I repeat that I can see no force in the retort at all.

Mr. Greg proceeds to analyse the expenditure of the millionaire and to maintain that its several items are laudable.

First he defends pleasure grounds, gardens, shrubberies and deer parks. But he defends them on the ground that they are good things for the community and thereby admits my principle. It is only against wasteful self indulgence that I have anything to say. No doubt, says Mr. Greg, if the land of a country is all occupied and cultivated, and if no more land is easily accessible, and if the produce of other lands is not procurable in return for manufactured articles of exchange, then a proprietor who shall employ a hundred acres in growing wine for his own drinking, which might or would otherwise be employed in growing wheat or other food for twenty poor families who can find no other field for their labour, may fairly be said to be consuming, spending on himself, the sustenance of those families. If, again, he, in the midst of a swarming population unable to find productive or remunerative occupation, insists upon keeping a considerable extent of ground in merely ornamental walks and gardens, and, therefore, useless as far as the support of human life is concerned, he may be held liable to the same imputation--even though the wages he pays to the gardeners in the one case, and the vine-dressers in the other, be pleaded in mitigation of the charge. Let the writer of this only allow, as he must, that the moral, social and political consequences of expenditure are to be taken into account as well as the economical consequences, and he will be entirely at one with the writer whom he supposes himself to be confuting. I have never said, or imagined, that "all land ought to be producing food." I hold that no land in England is better employed than that of the London parks and the gardens of the Crystal Palace, though I could not speak so confidently with regard to a vast park from which all are excluded but its owner. Mr. Greg here again takes up what seems to me the strange position that to condemn excess is to condemn moderation. He says that whatever is said against the great parks and gardens of the most luxurious millionaire may equally be said against a tradesman's little flower-garden, or the plot of ornamental ground before the cottage windows of a peasant. I must again say that, so far from regarding this argument as irrefutable, I altogether fail to discover its cogency. The tradesman's little bit of green, the peasant's flower- bed, are real necessities of a human soul. Can the same thing be said of a pleasure-ground which consumes the labour of twenty men, and of which the object is not to refresh the weariness of labour but to distract the vacancy of idleness?

Mr. Greg specially undertakes the defence of deer-parks. But his ground is that the deer-forests which were denounced as unproductive have been proved to be the only mode of raising the condition and securing the well-being of the ill-fed population. If so, "humanitarians" are ready to hold up both hands in favour of deer-forests. Nay, we are ready to do the same if the pleasure yielded by the deer-forests bears any reasonable proportion to the expense and the agricultural sacrifice, especially if the sportsman is a worker recruiting his exhausted brain, not a sybarite killing time.

From parks and pleasure-grounds Mr. Greg goes on to horses; and here it is the same thing over again. The apologist first sneers at those who object to the millionaire's stud, then lets in the interest of the community as a limiting principle, and ends by saying: "We may then allow frankly and without demur, that if he (the millionaire) maintains more horses than he needs or can use, his expenditure thereon is strictly pernicious and indefensible, precisely in the same way as it would be if he burnt so much hay and threw so many bushels of oats into the fire. He is destroying human food." Now Mr. Greg has only to determine whether a man who is keeping a score or more of carriage and saddle horses, is "using" them or not. If he is, "humanitarians" are perfectly satisfied.

Finally Mr. Greg comes to the case of large establishments of servants. And here, having set out with intentions most adverse to my theory, he "blesses it altogether." "Perhaps," he says, "of all the branches of a wealthy nobleman's expenditure, that which will be condemned with most unanimity, and defended with most difficulty, is the number of ostentatious and unnecessary servants it is customary to maintain. For this practice I have not a word to say. It is directly and indirectly bad. It is bad for all parties. Its reflex action on the masters themselves is noxious; it is mischievous to the flunkies who are maintained in idleness, and in enervating and demoralizing luxury; it is pernicious to the community at large, and especially to the middle and upper middle classes, whose inevitable expenditure in procuring fit domestic service--already burdensomely great--is thereby oppressively enhanced, till it has become difficult not only to find good household servants at moderate wages, but to find servants who will work diligently and faithfully for any wages at all."

How will Mr. Greg keep up the palaces, parks, and studs, when he has taken away the retinues of servants? If he does not take care, he will find himself wielding the bosom of sumptuary reform in the most sweeping manner before he is aware of it. But let me respectfully ask him, who can he suppose objects to any expenditure except on the ground that it is directly and indirectly bad; bad for all parties, noxious to the voluptuary himself, noxious to all about him, and noxious to the community? So long as a man does no harm to himself or to anyone else, I for one see no objection to his supping like a Roman Emperor, on pheasants' tongues, or making shirt-studs of Koh-i-noors.

"It is charity," says Mr. Greg, hurling at the system of great establishments his last and bitterest anathema--"It is charity, and charity of the bastard sort--charity disguised as ostentation. It feeds, clothes, and houses a number of people in strenuous and pretentious laziness. If almshouses are noxious and offensive to the economic mind, then, by parity of reasoning, superfluous domestics are noxious also." And so it would seem, by parity of reasoning, or rather _a fortiori_, as being fed, clothed, and housed far more expensively, and in far more strenuous and pretentious laziness, are the superfluous masters of flunkeys. The flunkey does some work, at all events enough to prevent him from becoming a mere fattened animal. If he is required to grease and powder his head, he does work, as it seems to me, for which he may fairly claim a high remuneration.

As I have said already, let Mr. Greg take in the moral, political, and social evils of luxury, as well as the material waste, and I flatter myself that there will be no real difference between his general view of the responsibilities of wealth and mine. He seems to be as convinced as I am that there is no happiness in living in strenuous and pretentious laziness by the sweat of other men's brows.

Nor do I believe that even the particular phrase which has been deemed so fraught with treason to plutocracy would, if my critic examined it closely, seem to him so very objectionable. His own doctrine, it is true, sounds severely economical. He holds that "the natural man and the Christian" who should be moved by his natural folly and Christianity to forego a bottle of champagne in order to relieve a neighbour in want of actual food, would do a thing "distinctly criminal and pernicious." Still I presume he would allow, theoretically, as I am very sure he would practically, a place to natural sympathy. He would not applaud a banquet given in the midst of a famine, although it might be clearly proved that the money spent by the banqueters was their own, that those who were perishing of famine had not been robbed of it, that their bellies were none the emptier because those of the banqueters were full, and that the cookery gave a stimulus to gastronomic art. He would not, even, think it wholly irrational that the gloom of the work-house should cast a momentary shadow on the enjoyments of the palace. I should also expect him to understand the impression that a man of "brain," even one free from any excessive tenderness of "heart," would not like to see a vast apparatus of luxury, and a great train of flunkeys devoted to his own material enjoyment--that he would feel it as a slur on his good sense, as an impeachment of his mental resources, and of his command of nobler elements of happiness, and even as a degradation of his manhood. There was surely something respectable in the sentiment which made Mr. Brassey refuse, however much his riches might increase, to add to his establishment. There is surely something natural in the tendency, which we generally find coupled with greatness, to simplicity of life. A person whom I knew had dined with a millionaire _tete-a-tete_, with six flunkeys standing round the table. I suspect that a man of Mr. Greg's intellect and character, in spite of his half-ascetic hatred of plush, would rather have been one of the six than one of the two.

While, however, I hope that my view of these matters coincides practically with that of Mr. Greg far more than he supposes, I must admit that there may be a certain difference of sentiment behind. Mr. Greg describes the impressions to which I have given currency as a confused compound of natural sympathy, vague Christianity, and dim economic science. Of the confusion, vagueness and dimness of our views, of course we cannot be expected to be conscious; but I own that I defer, in these matters, not only to natural feeling, but to the ethics of rational Christianity. I still adhere to the Christian code for want of a better, the Utilitarian system of morality being, so far as I can see, no morality at all, in the ordinary sense of the term, as it makes no appeal to our moral nature, our conscience, or whatever philosophers choose to call the deepest part of humanity. Of course, therefore, I accept as the fundamental principle of human relations, and of all science concerning them, the great Christian doctrine that "we are every one members one of another" As a consequence of this doctrine I hold that the wealth of mankind is morally a common store; that we are morally bound to increase it as much, and to waste it as little, as we can, that of the two it is happier to be underpaid than to be overpaid; and that we shall all find it so in the sum of things. There is nothing in such a view in the least degree subversive of the legal rights of property, which the founders of Christianity distinctly recognised in their teaching, and strengthened practically by raising the standard of integrity; nothing adverse to active industry or good business habits; nothing opposed to economic science as the study of the laws regulating the production and distribution of wealth; nothing condemnatory of pleasure, provided it be pleasure which opens the heart, as I suppose was the case with the marriage feast at Cana, not the pleasure which closes the heart, as I fear was the case with the "refined luxury" of the Marquis of Steyne.

If this is superstition, all that I can say is that I have read Strauss, Renan, Mr. Greg on the "Creed of Christendom," and all the eminent writers I could hear of on that side, and that I am not conscious of any bias to the side of orthodoxy, at least I have not given satisfaction to the orthodox classes.

Christianity, of course, in common with other systems, craves a reasonable construction. Plato cannot afford to have his apologues treated as histories. In "Joshua Davidson," a good man is made to turn away from Christianity because he finds that his faith will not literally remove a mountain and cast it into the sea. But he had omitted an indispensable preliminary. He ought first to have exactly compared the bulk of his faith with that of a grain of Palestinian mustard seed. Mr. Greg makes sport of the text "He that hath two coats let him impart to him that hath none," which he says he heard in his youth, but without ever considering its present applicability. Yet in the next paragraph but one he gives it a precise and a very important application by pronouncing that a man is not at liberty to grow wine for himself on land which other people need for food. I fail to see how the principle involved in this passage, and others of a similar tendency which I have quoted from Mr. Greg's paper, differ from that involved in Gospel texts which, if I were to quote them would grate strangely upon his ear. The texts comprise a moral sanction; but Mr. Greg must have some moral sanction when he forbids a man to do that which he is permitted to do by law. Christianity, whatever its source and authority, was addressed at first to childlike minds, and what its antagonists have to prove is not that its forms of expression or even of thought are adapted to such minds, but that its principles, when rationally applied to a more advanced state of society, are unsound. Rightly understood it does not seem to me to enjoin anything eccentric or spasmodic, to bid you enact primitive Orientalism in the streets of London, thrust fraternity upon writers in the _Pall Mall Gazette_, or behave generally as if the "Kingdom of God" were already come. Your duty as a Christian is done if you help its coming according to the circumstances of your place in society and the age in which you live.

Of course, in subscribing to the Christian code of ethics, one lays oneself open to "retorts corteous" without limit. But so one does in subscribing to any code, or accepting any standard, whether moral or of any other kind.

I do not see on what principle Mr. Greg would justify, if he does justify, any sort of charitable benefactions. Did not Mr. Peabody give his glass of champagne to a man in need? He might have spent all his money on himself if he had been driven to building Chatsworths, and hanging their walls with Raffaelles. How will he escape the reproach of having done what was criminal and pernicious? And what are we to say of the conduct of London plutocrats who abetted his proceedings by their applause though they abstained from following his example? Is there any apology for them at all but one essentially Christian? Not that Christianity makes any great fuss over munificence, or gives political economy reasonable ground for apprehension on that score. Plutocracy deifies Mr. Peabody; Christianity measures him and pronounces his millions worth less than the widow's mite.