Chapter 18

In my lecture I have applied my principles, or tried to apply them, fairly to the mechanic as well as to the millionaire. I have deprecated, as immoral, a resort to strikes solely in the interest of the strikers, without regard to the general interests of industry and of the community at large. What has my critic to say, from the moral point of view, to the gas stokers who leave London in the dark, or the colliers who, in struggling to raise their own wages, condemn the ironworkers to "clamm" for want of coal?

I would venture to suggest that Mr. Greg somewhat overrates in his paper the beneficence of luxury as an agent in the advancement of civilization. "Artificial wants," he says, "what may be termed extravagant wants, the wish to possess something beyond the bare necessaries of existence; the taste for superfluities and luxuries first, the desire for refinements and embellishments next; the craving for the higher enjoyments of intellect and art as the final stage--these are the sources and stimulants of advancing civilization. It is these desires, these needs, which raise mankind above mere animal existence, which, in time and gradually, transform the savage into the cultured citizen of intelligence and leisure. Ample food once obtained, he begins to long for better, more varied, more succulent food; the richer nutriment leads on to the well-stored larder and the well-filled cellar, and culminates in the French cook." The love of truth, the love of beauty, the effort to realize a high type of individual character, and a high social ideal, surely these are elements of progress distinct from gastronomy, and from that special chain of gradual improvement which culminates in the French cook. It may be doubted whether French cookery does always denote the acme of civilization. Perhaps in the case of the typical London Alderman, it denotes something like the acme of barbarism, for the barbarism of the elaborate and expensive glutton surely exceeds that of the child of nature who gorges himself on the flesh which he has taken in hunting: not to mention that the child of nature costs humanity nothing, whereas the gourmand devours the labour of the French cook and probably that of a good many assistants and purveyors.

The greatest service is obviously rendered by any one who can improve human food. "The man is what he eats," is a truth though somewhat too broadly stated. But then the improvement must be one ultimately if not immediately accessible to mankind in general. That which requires a French cook is accessible only to a few.

Again, in setting forth the civilizing effects of expenditure, Mr. Greg, I think, rather leaves out of sight those of frugality. The Florentines, certainly the leaders of civilization in their day, were frugal in their personal habits, and by that frugality accumulated the public wealth which produced Florentine art, and sustained a national policy eminently generous and beneficent for its time.

Moreover, in estimating the general influence of great fortunes, Mr. Greg seems to take a rather sanguine view of the probable character and conduct of their possessors. He admits that a broad-acred peer or opulent commoner "may spend his L30,000 a year in such a manner as to be a curse, a reproach, and an object of contempt to the community, demoralizing and disgusting all around him, doing no good to others, and bringing no real enjoyment to himself." But he appears to think that the normal case, and the one which should govern our general views and policy upon the subject, is that of a man "of refined taste and intellect expanded to the requirements of his position, managing his property with care and judgment, so as to set a feasible example to less wealthy neighbours; prompt to discern and to aid useful undertakings, to succour striving merit, unearned suffering, and overmatched energy." "Such a man," he says, in a concluding burst of eloquence, "if his establishment in horses and servants is not immoderate, although he surrounds himself with all that art can offer to render life beautiful and elegant though he gathers round him the best productions of the intellect of all countries and ages, though his gardens and his park are models of curiosity and beauty, though he lets his ancestral trees rot in their picturesque mutility instead of converting them into profitable timber, and disregards the fact that his park would be more productive if cut up into potato plots though, in fine he lives in the very height of elegant, refined and tasteful luxury--I should hesitate to denounce as consuming on himself the incomes of countless labouring families, and I should imagine that he might lead his life of temperate and thoughtful joy quietly conscious that his liberal expenditure enabled scores of these families as well as artists and others to exist in comfort and without either brain or heart giving way under the burdensome reflection."

It must be by a slip of the pen such as naturally occurs amidst the glow of an enthusiastic description that the writer speaks of people as enabling others to subsist by their expenditure. It is clear that people can furnish subsistence to themselves or others only by production. A rich idler may appear to give bread to an artist or opera girl but the bread really comes not from the idler but from the workers who pay his rents; the idler is at most the channel of distribution. The munificence of monarchs who generously lavish the money of the taxpayer is a familiar case of the same fallacy. This is the illusion of the Irish peasant whose respect for the spendthrift "gentleman" and contempt for the frugal "sneak" Mr. Greg honours with a place among the serious elements of an economical and social problem.

But not to dwell on what is so obvious how many let me ask, of the possessors of inherited wealth in England or in any other country, fulfil or approach Mr. Greg's ideal? I confess that, as regards the mass of the English squires the passage seems to me almost satire. Refined taste and expanded intellect, promptness to discern and aid striving merit and unearned suffering, life surrounded with all that art can do to render it beautiful and elegant, the best productions of intellect gathered from all intellects and ages--I do not deny that Mr. Greg has seen all this, but I can hardly believe that he has seen it often, and I suspect that there are probably people not unfamiliar with the abodes of great landowners who have never seen it at all. Not to speak of artists and art, what does landed wealth do for popular education? It appears from the Popular Education Report of 1861 (p. 77) that in a district taken as a fair specimen, the sum of L4,518, contributed by voluntary subscription towards the support of 168 schools, was derived from the following sources:

169 clergymen contributed L1,782 or L10 10 0 each 399 landowners " 2,127 " 5 6 0 " 2l7 occupiers " 200 " 18 6 " 102 householders " 181 " 1 15 6 " 141 other persons " 228 " 1 12 4 "

The rental of the 399 landowners was estimated at, L650,000 a year. Judging from the result of my own observations, I should not have been at all surprised if a further analysis of the return had shown that not only the contributions of the clergy but those of retired professional men and others with limited incomes were, in proportion, far greater than those of the leviathans of wealth.

To play the part of Mr. Greg's ideal millionaire, a man must have not only a large heart but a cultivated mind; and how often are educators successful in getting work out of boys or youths who know that they have not to make their own bread?

In my lecture I have drawn a strong distinction, though Mr. Greg has not observed it, between hereditary wealth and that which, however great, and even, compared with the wages of subordinate producers, excessive, is earned by industry. Wealth earned by industry is, for obvious reasons, generally much more wisely and beneficially spent than hereditary wealth. The self-made millionaire must at all events, have an active mind. The late Mr. Brassey was probably one man in a hundred even among self-made millionaires; among hereditary millionaires he would have been one in a thousand. Surely we always bestow especial praise on one who resists the evil influences of hereditary wealth, and surely our praise is deserved.

The good which private wealth has done in the way of patronizing literature and art is, I am convinced, greatly overrated. The beneficent patronage of Lorenzo di Medici is, like that of Louis XIV., a chronological and moral fallacy. What Lorenzo did was, in effect, to make literature and art servile and in some cases to taint them with the propensities of a magnificent debauchee. It was not Lorenzo, nor any number of Lorenzos, that made Florence, with her intellect and beauty, but the public spirit, the love of the community, the intensity of civic life, in which the interest of Florentine history lies. The decree of the Commune for the building of the Cathedral directs the architect to make a design "of such noble and extreme magnificence that the industry and skill of men shall be able to invent nothing grander or more beautiful," since it had been decided in Council that no plan should be accepted "unless the conception was such as to render the work worthy of an ambition which had become very great, inasmuch as it resulted from the continued desires of a great number of citizens united in one sole will."

I believe, too, that the munificence of a community is generally wiser and better directed than that of private benefactors. Nothing can be more admirable than the munificence of rich men in the United States. But the drawback in the way of personal fancies and crochets is so great that I sometimes doubt whether future generations will have reason to thank the present, especially as the reverence of the Americans for property is so intense that they would let a dead founder breed any pestilence rather than touch the letter of his will.

Politically, no one can have lived in the New World without knowing that a society in which wealth is distributed rests on an incomparably safer foundation than one in which it is concentrated in the hands of a few. British plutocracy has its cannoneer; but if the cannoneer happens to take fancies into his head the "whiff of grapeshot" goes the wrong way.

Socially, I do not know whether Mr. Greg has been led to consider the extent to which artificial desires, expensive fashions, and conventional necessities created by wealth, interfere with freedom of intercourse and general happiness. The _Saturday Review_ says:

"All classes of Her Majesty's respectable subjects are always doing their best to keep up appearances, and a very hard struggle many of us make of it. Thus a mansion in Belgrave Square ought to mean a corpulent hall-porter, a couple of gigantic footmen, a butler and an under-butler at the very least, if the owner professes to live op to his social dignities. If our house is in Baker or Wimpole street, we must certainly have a manservant in sombre raiment to open our door, with a hobbledehoy or a buttons to run his superior's messages. In the smart, although somewhat dismal, small squares in South Kensington and the Western suburbs, the parlourmaid must wear the freshest of ribbons and trimmest of bows, and be resplendent in starch and clean coloured muslins. So it goes on, as we run down the gamut of the social scale; our ostentatious expenditure must be in harmony throughout with the stuccoed facade behind which we live, or the staff of domestics we parade. We are aware, of course, as our incomes for the most part are limited, and as we are all of us upon our mettle in the battle of life that we must pinch somewhere if appearances are to be kept up. We do what we can in secret towards balancing the budget. We retrench on our charities, save on our coals, screw on our cabs, drink the sourest of Bordeaux instead of more generous vintages, dispense with the cream which makes tea palatable, and systematically sacrifice substantial comforts that we may swagger successfully in the face of a critical and carping society. But with the most of us if our position is an anxious one; it is of our own making and if we dared to be eccentrically rational it might be very tolerable."

Nor is this the worst. The worst is the exclusion from society of the people who do not choose to torture and degrade themselves in order to keep up appearances and who are probably the best people of all. The interference of wealth and its exigencies with social enjoyment is I suspect a heavy set off against squirearchical patronage of intellect and art.

Those who believe that the distribution of wealth is more favourable to happiness and more civilizing than its concentration will of course vote against laws which tend to artificial concentration of wealth such as those of primogeniture and entail. This they may do without advocating public plunder though it suits plutocratic writers to confound the two. For my own part I do not feel bound to pay to British plutocracy a respect which British plutocracy does not pay to humanity. Some of its organs are beginning to preach doctrines revolting to a Christian and to any man who has not banished from his heart the love of his kind and we have seen it when its class passions were excited show a temper as cruel as that of any Maratist or Petroleuse. But so far from attacking the institution of property [Footnote: The _Saturday Review_ some time ago charged me with proposing to confiscate the increase in the value of land. I never said anything of the kind nor anything I believe that could easily be mistaken for it.] I have as great a respect for it as any millionaire can have and as sincerely accept and uphold it as the condition of our civilization. There is nothing inconsistent with this in the belief that among the better part of the race property is being gradually modified by duty or in the surmise that before humanity reaches its distant goal property and duty will alike be merged in affection.

A TRUE CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY.

The vast works of the railway and steamboat age called into existence, besides the race of great engineers, a race of great organizers and directors of industry, who may be generally termed Contractor. Among these no figure was more conspicuous than that of Mr. Brassey, a life of whom has just been published by Messrs. Bell and Daldy. Its author is Mr. Helps, whose name is a guarantee for the worthy execution of the work. And worthily executed it is, in spite of a little Privy Council solemnity in the reflections, and a little "State Paper" in the style. The materials were collected in an unusual way--by examining the persons who had acted under Mr. Brassey, or knew him well, and taking down their evidence in shorthand. The examination was conducted by Mr. Brassey, jun., who prudently declined to write the biography himself, feeling that a son could not speak impartially of his father. The result is that we have materials for a portrait, which not only is very interesting in itself but, by presenting the image of beneficence in an employer, may help to mediate between capital and labour in a time of industrial war.

Mr. Helps had been acquainted with Mr. Brassey, and had once received a visit from him on official business of difficulty and importance. He expected, he says, to see a hard, stern, soldierly sort of person, accustomed to sway armies of working-men in an imperious fashion. Instead of this he saw an elderly gentleman of very dignified appearance and singularly graceful manners--"a gentleman of the old school." "He stated his case, no, I express myself wrongly; he did _not_ state his case, he _understated_ it; and there are few things more attractive in a man than that he should be inclined to understate rather than overstate his own case." Mr. Brassey was also very brief, and when he went away, Mr. Helps, knowing well the matter in respect to which his visitor had a grievance, thought that, if it had been his own case, he should hardly have been able to restrain himself so well, and speak with so little regard to self-interest, as Mr. Brassey had done. Of all the persons whom Mr. Helps had known, he thought Mr. Brassey most resembled that perfect gentleman and excellent public man, Lord Herbert of Lea.

Mr. Helps commences his work with a general portrait. According to this portrait, the most striking feature in Mr. Brassey's character was trustfulness, which he carried to what might appear an extreme. He chose his agents with care, but, having chosen them, placed implicit confidence in them, trusting them for all details, and judging by results. He was very liberal in the conduct of business. His temperament was singularly calm and equable, not to be discomposed by success or failure, easily throwing off the burden of care, and, when all had been done that could be done, awaiting the result with perfect equanimity. He was very delicate in blaming, his censure being always of the gentlest kind, evidently reluctant, and on that account going more to the heart. His generosity made him exceedingly popular with his subordinates and work-men, who looked forward to his coming among them as a festive event; and, when any disaster occurred in the works, the usual parts of employer and employed were reversed--the employer it was who framed the excuses and comforted the employed. He was singularly courteous, and listened to everybody with respect; so that it was a marked thing when he went so far as to say of a voluble and empty chatterer, that "the peas were overgrowing the stick." His presence of mind was great; he had in an eminent degree, as his biographer remarks, what Napoleon called "two o'clock in the morning courage," being always ready, if called up in the middle of the night, to meet any urgent peril; and his faculties were stimulated, not overcome, by danger. He had a perfect hatred of contention, and would not only refuse to take any questionable advantage, but would rather even submit to be taken advantage of--a generosity which turned to his account. In the execution of any undertaking, his anxiety was that the work should be done quickly and done well. Minor questions, unprovided for by specific contract, he left to be settled afterwards. In his life he had only one regular law-suit. It was in Spain, about the Mataro line, and into this he was drawn by his partner against his will. He declared that he would never have another, "for in nineteen cases out of twenty you either gain nothing at all, or what you do gain does not compensate you for the worry and anxiety the lawsuit occasions you." In case of disputes between his agents and the engineers, he quietly settled the question by reference to the "gangers."

In order to find the key to Mr. Brassey's character, his biographer took care to ascertain what was his "ruling passion." He had none of the ordinary ambitions for rank, title, or social position. "His great ambition--his ruling passion--was to win a high reputation for skill, integrity, and success in the difficult vocation of a contractor for public works; to give large employment to his fellow-countrymen; by means of British labour and British skill to knit together foreign countries; and to promote civilization, according to his view of it, throughout the world." "Mr. Brassey," continues Mr. Helps, "was, in brief, a singularly trustful, generous, large-hearted, dexterous, ruling kind of personage; blessed with a felicitous temperament for bearing the responsibility of great affairs." In the military age he might have been a great soldier, a Turenne or a Marlborough, if he could have broken through the aristocratic barrier which confined high command to the privileged few; in the industrial age he found a more beneficent road to distinction, and one not limited to the members of a caste.

Mr. Brassey's family is stated by his biographer to have come over with the Conqueror. If Mr. Brassey attached any importance to his pedigree (of which there is no appearance) it is to be hoped that he was able to make it out more clearly than most of those who claim descent from companions of the Conqueror. Long after the Conquest--so long, indeed, as England and Normandy remained united under one crown--there was a constant flow of Norman immigration into England, and England swarms with people bearing Norman or French names, whose ancestors were perfectly guiltless of the bloodshed of Hastings, and made their entrance into the country as peaceful traders, and, perhaps, in even humbler capacities. What is certain is that the great contractor sprang from a line of those small landed proprietors, once the pillars of England's strength, virtue and freedom, who, in the old country have been "improved off the face of the earth" by the great landowners, while they live again on the happier side of the Atlantic. A sound morality, freedom from luxury, and a moderate degree of culture, are the heritage of the scion of such a stock. Mr. Brassey was brought up at home till he was twelve years old, when he was sent to school at Chester. At sixteen he was articled to a surveyor, and as an initiation into great works, he helped, as a pupil, to make the surveys for the then famous Holyhead road. His master, Mr. Lawton, saw his worth, and ultimately took him into partnership. The firm set up at Birkenhead, then a very small place, but destined to a greatness which, it seems, Mr. Lawton had the shrewdness to discern. At Birkenhead Mr. Brassey did well, of course; and there, after a time, he was brought into contact with George Stephenson, and by him at once appreciated and induced to engage in railways. The first contract which he obtained was for the Pembridge Viaduct, between Stafford and Wolverhampton, and for this he was enabled to tender by the liberality of his bankers, whose confidence, like that of all with whom he came into contact, he had won. Railway-making was at that time a new business, and a contractor was required to meet great demands upon his organizing power; the system of sub-contracts, which so much facilitates the work, being then only in its infancy. From George Stephenson Mr. Brassey passed to Mr. Locke, whose great coadjutor he speedily became. And now the question arose whether he should venture to leave his moorings at Birkenhead and launch upon the wide sea of railroad enterprise. His wife is said, by a happy inspiration, to have decided him in favour of the more important and ambitious sphere. She did so at the sacrifice of her domestic comfort; for in the prosecution of her husband's multifarious enterprises they changed their residence eleven times in the next thirteen years, several times to places abroad; and little during those years did his wife and family see of Mr. Brassey.

A high place in Mr. Brassey's calling had now been won, and it had been won not by going into rings or making corners, but by treading steadily the steep path of honour. Mr. Locke was accused of unduly favouring Mr. Brassey. Mr. Helps replies that the partiality of a man like Mr. Locke must have been based on business grounds. It was found that when Mr. Brassey had undertaken a contract, the engineer-in-chief had little to do in the way of supervision. Mr. Locke felt assured that the bargain would be not only exactly but handsomely fulfilled, and that no excuse would be pleaded for alteration or delay. After the fall of a great viaduct it was suggested to Mr. Brassey that, by representing his case, he might obtain a reduction of his loss. "No," was his reply, "I have contracted to make and maintain the road, and nothing shall prevent Thomas Brassey from being as good as his word."