"The righteous Lord loveth righteousness.
"The Lord requireth Justice, Mercy, and Sobriety of thought, notceremony or creed.
"Accept for all of you my warm wishes."Your Vegetarian friend of old,
"F. W. Newman."
[No date. Probably1st March, 1888.]
"My dear Friend,
"What a violent winter it has been in very many places! Nor is it all over. After the awful 'blizzard' in New York, and its minor horrors elsewhere, and the many fatal avalanches, I see this morning fresh inundations in Hungary from sudden melting of snow. The sudden chill which smote your husband was but a mild type, it seems, of the death fatal to so many. Other deaths from cold, reported to us, have reminded us of your great and sudden loss; yet what had I to say to you? I have thought that the echo from your son in Calcutta may have made your grief break out afresh…. I trust that time, which has not yet at all had softening powers, has not added any fresh bitterness on a fuller realization….
"Affectionately yours,
"F. W. Newman."
"Alas! my dear friend, that your generous son Leonard had not more experience how vain is a man's swimming power against the current of anordinaryriver. I have known this in the Tigris, in the Nile, and even in the Thames, though the bathing men in several places called me a first- rate swimmer. Longfellow in 'Hiawatha' has touching and powerful lines ondisasters never coming singly, but as vultures accumulating round a huge carcass.
"Wisdom comes too late for the individual; yet it is not useless forothersto inquire after causes. Did your husband pride himself on not wearing a specially thick coat in winter androughingit as do some vegetarians?… I rather believe that man is a tropical animal, hairless, made for a climate warmer than ours, and needing much aid from clothing.
"Ever yours,
"F. W. Newman. "Herewith I return your interesting scraps. "21st March, 1888."
Extract from a letter, 7th Jan., 1889.
"More and more I believe, that as our clearest DUTY is inthisworld, it is wholesome that our most eager interest (if unselfish) should be in this world and not (with Count Tolstoi) so full of eagerness for immortality, that it is an effort with him to refrain from suicide! Iaccept with gratefulsubmission whatever of after-life the Supreme Lord gives—or does not give. My desire cannot affect His actions, and in fact Ineverhave been able to work myself intoanydesire for a future so undefined and unimaginable. This will show how ill I deserve a little of (shall I say) praise or compliment in your last.
"With kind salutes to your daughters,"I am, your sincere friend,
"F. W. Newman."
"The Firs, West Cliff Gardens, "Bournemouth, "17th Aug., 1889.
"My dear Friend,
"How extraordinary you must have thought my silence, after your kind letter from this place. Perhaps you imputed it to illness. That is not true. Yet it may be called half true: for illness of my wife is one topic, and increasedweaknessmakes me slower in the smallest matters—such as handling a book, or duly buttoning a shirt or coat: while I have been dealing with proof-sheets from always two printers, sometimes four. My day is cut short at each end—for in the colder months I cannot sit at my desk until my fire is lighted, and my eyes are wearied before evening candlelight. Meanwhile my unwilling correspondence has rather increased than lessened….
"I am achieving a long hoped for work, in which of course I have to pay the printers—i.e. to leave in some connective available form whatever miscellaneous important printing I have ever published, ethico-political, theological, economical, historical, aesthetic, critical, mathematical: indeed, the mathematical is all new, not reprint.
"I take as vivid an interest in all that concerns public welfare, of England, Ireland, and foreign countries, and hope I ever shall. More than ever I see that our best work for God is to work for God's creatures, not excluding gentle brutes.
"Is it possible that you are even nowhere? That would be very good news.
"Your lazy friend, with much apology,
"F. W. Newman."
"Northam, near Bideford, "19th May, 1890.
"My dear Friend,
"Your two letters were indeed doubly welcome, and brought me virtual pardon for two neglects, of which the worst was, the keeping locked up (and still in prison!) the letters which you bade me to return…
"Thechiefwant of Cornwall, I was told by an old resident, issoil; the rock is too near the surface. Herein art will do much in a few generations. Attica and Palestine—stony soils—bore plentiful pine fruit. Our Channel Islands utter the same thing. In England thelandlordis the effectual starver of the soil. Bishop Stubbs, a first-rate authority on agriculture, explains the immense excess of crops raised acre by acre underpeasantculture, 'because the farmers' land is labour-starved.'"
* * * * *
"15th July, 1891.
"… The state of Ireland under existing factions would much have discomposed your patriotic husband. As for me, who cannot pretend Irish patriotism, things now look better…. But the aspect on the whole is to me far more encouraging than alarming. The reign of false aristocracy is fast declining; the rising powers everywhere ask forjusticebetween orders and (as never before) between the two sexes, and the power of women is about to signalize itself in most valuable directions—for the benefit ofbothsexes, and for the first time to claim nationally that moral and Christian Right shall be the aim of Law.
"But I confess if we wish to attract ancient nations to Christianity, we have first to reconsider our creed fundamentally, a terrible summons to Protestants as well as Catholics….
"I have not with meyour last, and I hope I do not evade any question.
"With best wishes to you and all yours,"I am, your earnest friend,
"F. W. Newman."
"27th Nov., 1891.
"My dear Mrs. Kingsley,
"So many of my juniors die, that my friends when they do not hear of me may well fancy that I am decrepit and declining. That is not true; only my muscular strength is less. I cannot walk so far nor work so much, but no vital organ seems to fail; nor can I write so much or so long….
"The longer I live, the more hopeful and more interesting I find the whole world. In spite of crime, folly, and misery, the massive nations seem to improve. The good—i.e. our sounder party—become wiser and stronger, as well as in proportion more numerous. Our worst misrule has been in Ireland and in India. The crisis in Ireland seems to me turned for the better. Misrule in India is met not by insurrection, but by constitutional and loyal, widely demanded Reform, such as, I feel convinced, the enlarged franchise in England will support too warmly for the old routine to resist. All the churches are seekingmoralreform…. Reforms lately too great to think of, we now calmly contemplate as certainties of a near future. Lord Herschell, an ex-Chancellor, pronounces that the legislative power of the House of Lords is an evil unbearable. Scotland and Wales are ready to demand abolition of the State Church. The English party called Liberal (I think miscalled) desire the same, and within the last ten years I come to think, rightly. Other reforms, too numerous to detail, cannot be trifled with or the nation be blinded. While I wonder at all this, I see that Scandinavia and Germany, even Belgium and France, are moving formoralobjects, and also against war.
"Is there not plenty in all this to draw forth hope, joy, and thankfulness, and in every conviction, that amidst all our tumult the Lord reigneth? I rejoice that I have lived to see this day, and expect to rejoice more while I live.
"How you have fared this year I seem not to know, but believe that you have my earnest good wishes for you and yours.
"I am, yours most truly,
"F. W. Newman."
"Bournemouth (undated).
"My dear Friend,
"Your letter of July 12th from Margate has reached me here, to which place I came because my wife five years ago gained such health here, and all the year and past autumn she has never felt sure of health at home. I cannot think she manages herself rightly, yet she believes, with no small reason, that I am not a safe traveller without her; yet of the twoIseem the stronger. She is better here, perhaps, because she is more in the outer air. I must add, I too have recovered from my fall, and am fairly well, though I do not pretend to be strong yet (as the French would say),Que voulez vous?when I am past 88…. I am glad to learn about your children. I have good hope concerning the coming future, though the foes of progress call us faddists because we thinknational moralityparamount to vicious routine. May but the Good prevail!
"… I now argueforFish-food as not to be forbidden or frowned on, but do not lessen my esteem of our Manchester V. E. M. Society, nor lessen my contribution to it, though they can only receive me as an outsider.
"I turn a vegetarian argument against them on the Fish question, but I have no time now for it.
"I am bringing out another volume on Paul of Tarsus, which, when complete,I hope to send you.
"With warm salutes, I am yours,
"Francis Wm. Newman."My wife desires her kind thought to be named."
"1st Nov., 1892.
"My dear Madam,
"I have not time nor strength to search out your last kind letter, which perhaps informed me when your two sons from India were expected and when they were to leave you….
"I do fairly well, if I potter on in my old solid routine. My 88th year makes pretension tostrength; but when so many moans are heard aboutneuralgia, not to say influenza, I feel myself much favoured by the total absence of pain, except merely what is incidental to a thin body with some sharp bones. In rising from bed I am aware of small discomforts, which I shake off on standing upright, and similarly after sitting in one posture. I have not enough suffering to claim pity. I can wish the same to all my friends, especially to my wife.
"To my judgment the world … is in an entirely novel state, which forebodes a wholly new future, and requires new thoughts, new policy in our rulers,with much higherMORALITY if grave overthrow is to be averted.
"The United States of Americaoughtto be our leader in chief, but mainly through … the dreadful colour war that is year by year waxing worse. The only thing clear to me is, that theirhomecalamity must for a long while hinder their giving aid to the world. The policy in Russia is so fatal, and its result presages an overturn of the scale of the France of 1793. This makes all foresight impossible, except that every State is safest which least violates the laws of universal morality. That England can avoid great retribution seems to me scarcely probable. But as soon as morality is allowed to speak loud in high places, I believe our main dangers will quickly disappear. The prospect cannot be defined, but is to me of intense interest. Britain seems to me immensely superior to its own ruling classes in goodness, and the good is sureat length to prevail, to the benefit also of your Ireland.
"With kindest best wishes, I am,"Most truly yours,
"F. W. Newman."
[Presumably written in 1886, when Newman was Vice-President of the "Land Nationalization Society." It was kindly sent me by Mr. William Jamieson, who was Hon. Sec. to the above Society at the time. I wish to express here my sense of gratitude to him for much help and information regarding his own work with Newman in 1886.]
The tendency of English industry for a long time back has been to exalt the land_lord_, or chief man in any locality, into landowner(a phrase implying that no one but he has legal right in the land), and to convert a larger and larger fraction of the nation into wage receivers, liable to be cast out of work either at the simple will, or by the imprudence or misfortune of their paymaster. In order to analyse the natural results of this juncture, we must follow the method received in Political Economy, of taking an imaginary case, far simpler than any which is actually met in human life, so as to make all the conditions of the problem known to us by hypotheses. Let us suppose an island, secluded commercially from the rest of the world, and peopled by a vast working lower class under three small ruling castes. The island is physically divisible into three parts:first, marshy coast land, abounding with shrubs, canes, rushes of many kinds, from which human garments of various sorts can be made;secondlyrolling land, eminently suitable for the cultivation of grain, and of certain fruit trees and roots on which the whole population live;thirdly, the mountain land, on which are timber trees and copses affording firewood; also quarries of stone, gravel pits, lime rocks, and mines of copper and iron. Of the marshy coast land, thesecondlordly caste is acknowledged to be absolute owner; the first or highest caste owns the rolling land, which is the arable and cultivated portion; and thethirdcaste owns the mountain land and its products. From the first comes the food of the native, from the second comes the clothing, from the third the houses. It is possible that gravel, lime, and stone can be found in rolling land, and that fruit trees either exist or if planted would bear fruit in the marsh land, some even in the mountains; but the ruling castes follow ancient custom, and the working caste has no right to innovate. They workunderandfortheir masters, and receive wagesin kind—that is, as an equivalent for their work, a definite but liberal supply of the three necessary articles—food, clothes, and house accommodation. Money does not exist, nor tame animals in our island. To add sharpness to our imaginary case, and to make argument intelligible, we must assign definite numbers to the working population; but from whatever numbers we start, the argument and the practical result will be the same. Let us suppose the first caste to employten thousandcultivators; the second caste to employthree thousandknitters and plaiters; the third casteone thousandmasons, miners, and carpenters. Each of these castes furnishes to the workman such rude tools as are necessary, but these remain the property of the masters, not of the workmen.
The soil and climate being favourable, and the habits of the people simple, a few hours of work suffice; and like many barbarians, they have been accustomed to much idle time, which they employ in sport; moreover, by the connivance or good of the superior caste, they have been accustomed to pick or steal largely the leaves of an intoxicating grass, and the masters to whom the whole produce of their labour belongs, have large superfluity after paying their wages; hereby the lordlings easily feed domestic servants and exhibit themselves in gay clothing with superior dwellings.
But the tendency of the workers to drunkenness shocks a certain religious preacher, who traces the vice to idleness and sport. He goes about the island urging upon them a higher morality. They widely receive him as a divine messenger, and under his exhortation they become more industrious and more conscientious in their work; not only working more hours, and curtailing their sport, but in every hour using more diligence. In consequence, the masters are enriched by stores somewhat embarrassing. Grain comes in, more than they want: their barns begin to overflow. Garments are too many for the warehouses. Huge piles of timber block up the yards, besides masses of stones, and heaps of other superfluous material. Before long, the masters conclude that their simplest course for checking supply is by lessening the number of the workmen. The increased diligence of the people (we may suppose) has made the work of three men on an average as efficient in all tasks as werefivemen previously. Thus sixty do the work of a hundred; and the masters discover that what had been the normal average produce will be maintained, if they dismiss forty out of every hundred dependents. Not only so; but retaining their usual surplus, which we may call their rent, at the old level, they will be able to raise the wages to these workmen whom they still keep, since instead of a hundred they will have only sixty now to feed and clothe; and only for these do they feel morally responsible. Forthwith they actually dismiss forty out of every hundred. Each landowner cares for his own workmen as by a sort of social duty; but for those who are discharged he feels no responsibility. In the average result the landowners who had had a hundred workmen, but now only sixty, take as increased rent the food and clothes of ten, and use it to add ten servants to their domestic retinue, but add to the wage of the sixty whom they keep at work, the food and clothes previously received by thirty of the forty whom they have dismissed. Thus they raise wages by one half—that is, they pay in the proportion of one hundred and fifty instead of one hundred.
The labourers, clothworkers, and builders who are dismissed (the remaining thirty out of every hundred) being without work and without houses, are at once in a state of beggary. Only by betaking themselves to somenew industrywill they be able to get a livelihood, and it rests with them to devise their new industries. Meanwhile they can only subsist on charity, which is doled out to them chiefly by the fellow feeling of those of their class who are still in work. The increased wages of these enable them to be liberal; in fact, the increase has on an average been just what the discarded men previously earned.
A parliament of the higher classes is in due course assembled, and a member came (?) to the distress of so many men out of work. But a distinguished literary writer, member of a Politico-Economical Club … eases the consciences of the higher castes by pointing out that in fact the island is much increased in prosperity. Rents had, no doubt, risen, but only as one mark of prosperity, for their increase was in a much smaller percentage than that of the rise of wages. These had increased by the very remarkable ratio of 50 per cent. It was true that many men were out of work. That was to be regretted; but it was apassing phenomenon. They would before long find work somewhere or somehow.
The discarded workmen hitherto had had no great variety in their tasks, and were always set to work by others without exercise of their own inventive powers. Yet out of a large number of men there are always many of good talents, some of original genius. The idea of many new forms of industry springs up. Oil for food has been hitherto raised from the olive tree; now an ingenious man would extract oil from several shrubs or trees, and make candles, or else oil for lamps. A second wishes to plait carpet socks, sandals, and umbrellas. A third would make boats, with ropes, and oars, and sails. A fourth would add wheelbarrows and casks to the baskets already in use. A fifth has noticed wild ponies on the mountains, and desires to catch them and make needful harness. A sixth would plant fruit trees in gardens, and not take the chance of wild fruit. But on every such plan they are at once checkmated: first, because all these natural products are accounted the absolute property of the upper castes, and must be bought; next, most of their new schemes need a yard or a garden and right of access by a road, and workshops, beside a dwelling-house. But the land, as well as the raw produce, is inaccessible to them; yet on them, hungry and destitute, is laid the task of originating the new trades. Can this seizure of the land and its natural products as the private property of a limited number of families be morally justified? In its origin was it attained by violence and robbery? Else, has it grown up by gradual and cunning perversion of law? These three questions point at the principle of landowning. Another question rises: Is it good for a nation forthe great majorityto retain life only on condition that there is someone ready to pay wages for their work and able to discard them? In the imaginary case thus drawn the increased industry of the workers which produced superfluity is the beginning (to them) of change for the worse. Their spontaneous industry causes overproduction, and leads to the dismissal of many workmen. Our economists treat every increase of productiveness as an unalloyed good. It is good, provided that men are not kept idle by it. Evidently there is no national gain from sixty men doing the work of a hundred, if thereby forty men are tossed into unwilling idleness, and must live on charity, some of the forty losing all habits of industry, and perhaps becoming criminal. This is a national loss.
Further, our hypothesis that the men voluntarily become more industrious may be called an extreme and unlikely case. For that very reason it has been here adopted. The ordinary causes give usa fortioriargument, because they are ever in action.Skillnaturally increases among men employed continuously on any work. In a settled, industrious nation small improvements accumulate. In modern Europe the cultivation of mechanics and chemistry conduces to a steady improvement in tools, a cheapening also of tools, and introduction of such more complex tools as we call "machines," by dint of all which human work constantly becomes more effective, so that fewer and fewer workmen are needed forthe same amountof produce. Thus the normal and natural order of things, whereverthe wage-system existstends to dispense with some, or many, of the workmen. This is a clear gain if the men thus displacedare instantly taken up for some other service. But this seldom can happen; often their old skill is made useless, and before they can learn a new trade they become demoralized, and many perish. The loss of their industrial position is a grievance and a national mischief which our "Economists" are prone to undervalue, and pass unnoticed.
Let us contrast the case of men who work not for a master, not for wages, but for themselves; holding their own little homestead, from which they cannot be driven out. Such is the case of back-settlers in the Far West of the United States. Each perhaps carries out with him a box of stout clothes, some agricultural tools and important seeds, and eithersquatson a bit of wild land, or by a very easy payment buys possession of the Federal Government. This bit of land the settler countshis own. With the aid of friendly neighbours he builds the rude log-hut. The felling of the trees needed to construct it makes an opening for small culture. In a very few years he raises more food than his family needs. If the season and the roads favour, he sends his superfluous barrels of corn and fruit eastward, and recovers an equivalent. But what happens if wide distance part him from civilized towns, if the roads are swampy and not made by art, and the conveyance of food be too onerous to remunerate him? All his neighbours being in like case, there is a local Overproduction of food; yet not one of the little community is thereby made a pauper. No one is able to expel them from their rude homes, or forbid their cultivation. They are not made outcasts or idlers. Simply they are kept poorer, than with access to a market they would have been; but they lessen their production of food, and either with the females of the family work at clothing, or execute carpentering. In many ways they can use their time to produce articles which they could have bought in a better finished state had the market of the East been open to them. The present writer was informed by an Englishman who in the American Civil War had penetrated very far West, that he had seen with his own eyes a colonistburning wheat as fuel, because he had it in so great excess. Probably he had plenty of green maize for his horses and pigs.
Whenever a man retains a house of his own, and has neither rent to pay nor any excessive taxation, if only he have a moderate plot of land for workshop and garden, he is not made destitute, though he do not directly raise food for his household, but works at some domestic manufacture. Our "Spitalfields" poor who fought a long battle with the hand-loom against the loom driven by steam power, might not have been at length utterly ruined if they had had freehold houses and some small garden in a healthy country. If the system of huge factories had had to compete with domestic manufacture conducted by private families living in small freeholds, it is possible that the battle might simply have driven the independent workers either to buy small steam engines for their aid, or what now is more obvious, to hire power from some company, as from a Gas Company or Water Company, which had it in superfluity. Such, in the opinion of some far- sighted men, may very possibly be even now the solution of our difficulty.
At present the Trade Unions gravely mistake the end for which they ought to strive. They mischievously unite two objects. First, they are Benefit Societies. The funds of a Benefit Society ought to be forbidden by law to be spent in warring against capitalists; this enables the directors, or a majority of them, to confiscate the whole contributions of any member who disapproves of the war.
Next, the main effort to raise the status of the workmen is ill-directed towards raising or sustaining therateof wages, else towards dictating concerning the management. This effort is ill-directed, first, because it is liable to aim at an impossibility—i.e. to extort from a master a wage so high that he prefers not to light his engine fires; next, because to raise therateof wages does not secure continuous work, and idle days neither tend to sobriety nor give pay. Strikes which inflict vast loss upon the workers cause loss to the masters also, and make them less able to pay high wages. But beyond all these, if the Unions were wise, they would struggle against the system of wage-earning, wherever it is new and needless; that is, as far as possible, strive to recover the system of domestic manufacture. For certain new and peculiar industries undoubtedly combine, and large capital is essential; even in them the effort ought to be towards uniting,as far as possible, the interests of each workman, and of the company, the opposite of which is in general the Union policy. But for every old trade independent work is physically possible, under the condition that the workman have a fixed homestead. To effect this ought to be the main effort of the Unions.
In the thirty-two years between the battle of Waterloo and the Irish famine, the farmers and manufacturers were like two buckets of a well; when one was up, the other was down. But now, both at once are down. The causes are clearly separate.
Our manufacturers when allowed to accept payments from abroad In wheat and sugar and foods and all raw produce, Immensely increased their foreign sales; and during the Cotton Famine, capital was largely invested in building new cotton mills, as if we were to supply all the world.
But the European Continent more and more chooses to compete with us, and from more causes than one deprive our merchants of their customers. Between us and our rivals more of thesame sortis produced than the existing markets can take: this is again Overproduction. Hence stagnation in our manufacturing districts. Meanwhile, in near thirty years of manufacturing prosperity after 1847, the increased riches of these towns enriched the farmers and enabled the landlords to raise rents in England, and in consequence, by dint of landlord power, rent rose in the whole United Kingdom. At the same time, Englishmen found too little encouragement to invest their savings on English soil, and preferred to invest many millions on foreign railways and on foreign loans; and the payment of their dividends is made largely by imported foreign food. Their investments at first were an advantage to our manufacturers, while they sent out railway plant and carriages and locomotives. Now foreigners compete with us even as to these, and the imported food competes with the farmers. Thus a double failure convulses us.
How much better, if instead of quarrelling for distant markets (andit is saidconquering Burmah in the hope of advantage to our merchants) we hada native population of small cultivators, prosperous enough to be valuable as well as steady customers to our manufacturing towns, and gradually (in the course of several generations) another population of country folk, substituting domestic manufactures for those of factories with wage earners!
No human community can be so small as not to involve duties from each member to the rest; duties to which a sound human mind is requisite. Neither an idiot nor a madman can be a normal citizen. The former ranks as in permanent childhood; the latter, being generally dangerous, must be classed with criminals. A dehumanized brain impairs a citizen's rights because it unmans him,—disabling him from duty, even making him dangerous. In India, such a one now and then runs amuck, stabbing every one whom he meets: in England, he beats and tramples down those nearest to him,—those whom he is most bound to protect. A human community cannot be constituted out of men and brutes, nor ought civilized men to be forced to carry arms or armour for self-defence. For all these reasons, to be drunk is in itself an offence against the community, prior to any statute forbidding it, prior to any misdemeanour superinduced by it. In the State it is both a right and a duty to enforce (as far as its means reach) sobriety on every citizen, rich or poor, in private or in public; and with a view to this, to use such methods as will best prevent, discourage, or deter from intoxication.
When a national religion totally forbids the use of intoxicating drugs, vigilance in the State is less needful: public opinion, or even public show of disgust and violence, effectively stifles the evil. But if the national religion does not forbid the use, but solely enjoins moderation (a word which everyone interprets for himself), a far heavier task falls on the State, whose right and duty nevertheless in this matter several causes have concurred to obscure, not least in England and Scotland. Out of the teachings of Rome, our forefathers very ill learned the rights of the State or the distinction of Morals from Religion. Although even men not highly educated must have known that Moral truth is far older than any special system of Religious beliefs, yet in the popular idea morals have no other basis than religion. Hence, the demand for freedom of conscience against any oppressive State policy (besides the vices of Courts and Courtiers) led to a vehement jealousy of State power even in moral concerns. Many generous minds feared, that to concede to the State a right of enforcing morality, covertly allowed religious persecution.Whofirst uttered the formula—"The only duty of the State is, to protect persons and property"—is unknown to the present writer; but certainly fifty, forty, even thirty years ago, this principle was widely accepted by radical politicians and active-minded dissenters. The late Dr. Arnold of Rugby regarded this denial of the State's moral character as a widespread, untractable and mischievous delusion.
After long torpor the prohibition of Lotteries showed that Parliament was waking to its moral duties. Little by little, the mass of the middle- classes and the gentry imbibed nobler views of human life, and have discovered, that of all the powers which make a nation immoral the State is the most influential. One day of licensed debauch undoes the work of the Clergy on fifty-two Sundays. No wonder that in the past the State collectively has been our worst corrupter: but to open this whole question space does not here allow. A long struggle has gone on, to implore public men not to connive at drunkenness—a national pest which for more than a century was greeted with merriment though politically avowed to be criminal. None dare now to laugh at it, except the depraved men who laugh at bribery, and use drunkenness as a trump-card at elections, and, if in office, rejoice on the vast revenue sucked by the Exchequer out of the vice and misery of the people. Earnest religionists of every creed have happily rallied to a common conviction, that the State has grievously failed of its duty and must now turn over a new leaf. Our worst opponents are men who cannot be reckoned in any religious body, men who find nothing so sacred as Liberty to buy and sell and indulge appetite; generally eccentric "Liberals," who are in many respects too good not to esteem, and too intellectual to despise.
One of these some years ago opened attack on me in a private letter, which summed up the arguments decisive with this class of "advanced Liberals"; in whose hatred ofOver LegislationI heartily share. He taunted me for thinking that the State ought to concern itself about the drinks of citizens more than about their dress; saying that I could not hold the State to have a control of public morals without, in logical consistency, admitting the right of Parliament to forbid dancing and card-playing; or to command my attendance at any Church worship, or to fine and imprison me for heresy. The double confusion here involved is wonderful from an educated man, and lowers his reputation for good sense. Religion is a topic on which eminent persons and foremost nations widely differ: concerning Moral Duty there is more agreement in mankind than perhaps on anything that is beyond the five senses. To argue that in claiming of the State an enforcement of duties cardinal to citizenship, we admit its right to dictate in religion, is a pestilent anachronism; it confounds Morals with Religion just as did the ancient world, Pagan and Hebrew. Again, the test of soundness in Morals is found in the agreement of the human race. There is no nation, no elementary tribe of men, so ignorant or so besotted, as not to condemn drunkenness as immoral and utterly evil. In justifying penalties against a vice condemned by all mankind, we justify (forsooth!) the punishing of amusements thought harmless by a great majority everywhere. Such an assertion is not the less silly, even in the mouth of a disciple of John Stuart Mill. Of course we all know that Law cannot be made against every misuse of time, or of energy, or of money. There is certainly no danger whatever that a modern Parliament, elected from very different circles and representing widely different elements, will ever adopt as its measure of sound morals the special opinions of any historical sect, however virtuous and wise.
Neither of an individual nor of a community doesthe highest interestconsist in Liberty, but in soundness of morals; without which Liberty only means licence to be vicious; licence to ruin oneself, and diffuse misery to others. To a man not proof against the omnipresent drinkshop, high wages are a curse; days called holy and short hours of work do but more quickly engulf him in ruin. But he pulls others too down in his fall. That nearly every Vice tends to waste, and preeminently intoxication by liquors or drugs, certain Economists are strangely slow to learn. Moreover, nearly every widespread vice makes wealth and life less enjoyable to the whole community. Confining remark to the vice of drunkards, it suffices to point in brief to the enormous extension which it gives to Violent Crime, to Orphanhood, to Pauperism, to Prostitution, to disease in Children, and to Insanity. Hence comes an enormous expense for Police and Criminal Courts, for Jails and Jail-officers, for Magistrates and Judges, for Insane Asylums, and Poor Rates. Hence also endless suffering to the victims of crime and to the families of criminals, and a grave lessening of happiness to innocent persons by the ribaldry of drunkards planted at their side, with fear lest their children be corrupted; fear also of personal outrage. Our daily comfort largely depends on homely virtue in our neighbours. In every great organization of industry the drunkenness of workmen is a first-rate mischief to others, crippling enterprise by increased expense and risk. From sailors fond of grog and tobacco, proceed fire in ships out at sea; and on foreign coasts, broils that disgrace England and Christendom, and lay a train which sometimes explodes in war. The drunkenness of a captain has before now stranded a noble ship. On a railroad, access of the engine driver to drink is a prime danger; and shall we say that there is no danger in Parliament legislating when half asleep with wine, and hereby open to the intrigue of any scheming clique, who may wish to fasten suddenly on the nation fraudulent or wicked law? Wisely does the American Congress forbid to its members wine in its own dining-room, because those who have to make sacred law are bound to deliberate and vote with clear heads. Evil law is of all tyrannies the most hateful, and makes a State contemptible to its own citizens—thus preparing Revolution.
English Statesmen have yet to learn Yankee wisdom; but no one who is, or hopes to be, in high office dares to speak lightly of drunkenness. The celebrated Committee of 1834 advised Parliament to reverse its course, with a view to the ultimateextinctionof the trade in ardent spirits. The advice was disgracefully spurned; yet neither the legislature nor the executive has ever dared to deny that drunkenness is a civil offence. Our opponents plead only for theuse, not for theabuseof intoxicating drink.
No doubt, teetotallers maintain that all use of such liquors for drink is an abuse. The avowals of Dr. William Gull, who calls our view extreme, beside those of Sir Henry Thompson and Dr. Benjamin Richardson, seem to justify the extreme view: so do the Parisian experiments of 1860-1. Yet it is not necessary to go so farin a political argument. I desire to obtain common ground with such men as my friend Mr. P. A. Taylor, M.P. for Leicester, and waive our difference with him as tomoderate use. Let us admit (that is, temporarily) that as Prussic Acid is fatal in ever so small a draught, yet is safe as well as delicious in extract of almonds and in custard flavoured by bay-leaf, so alcohol is harmless, not only in Plum Pudding and Tipsy Cake, but also in one tumbler of Table Beer and one wineglass of pure Claret. Let us further concede that the propensity of very many to excess makes out no case for State-interference against the man whose use of the dangerous drink is so sparing, that no one can discover any ill effect of it onhim. Nevertheless, irrefutable reasons remain, why we should claim new legislation, and a transference of control over the trade from the magistrates who do not suffer from it to the local public who do.
First of all, let me speak of undeniable excess. At one time perhaps it was punished by exposure in the pillory or stocks; but for a long time past, the penalty (when not aggravated by other offences) has been at most a pecuniary fine: five shillings used often to be inflicted. A "gentleman" who could pay, was let off: a more destitute man might fare worse. Inevitably, the vices of the eighteenth century affected national opinion. The wealthier classes were so addicted to wine, that to be "as drunk as a lord" became a current phrase. From highest to lowest the drunkard was an object more of merriment than of pity, and scarcely at all of censure, unless he were a soldier or sailor on duty. When a host intoxicated his guests, it was called hospitality; to refuse the proffered glass was in many a club an offence to good company. Peers and Members of Parliament, officers of Army and Navy, Clergymen and Fellows of Colleges—nay, some Royal Princes—loved wine, often too much. Who then could be earnest and eager to punish poorer men for love of strong beer? The preaching of Whitefield and Wesley began the awakening of the nation. A very able Spaniard despondingly said of his country: "A profligate individual may be converted, but a debased nation never"; and the recovery no doubt is arduous, when the national taste has been depraved and vicious customs have fixed themselves in society. Even now, few indeed are able to rejoice in the punishment of mere drunkenness; for, the only penalty imagined is a pecuniary fine, which never can prevent repetition nor deter others; when most severe, it does but aggravate suffering to an innocent wife and children. To be "drunkand disorderly" is now the general imputation before a magistrate. Unless molestation of others can be charged, the drunkard is very seldom made to feel the hand of the law. Hereby many persons seem to believe (as apparently does one bishop) that, as a part of Englishliberty, every one has arightto be drunk. While we complain that authorities are negligent and connive at vice, after accepting and assuming the duty to prevent it; thesellersof the drink are open to a severer charge. A man too poor to keep a servant is glad to get a wife to serve him. She is to him housemaid and cook and nurse of his children. For all these functions she has a clear right to full wages, besides careful nurture during motherly weakness. The husband manifestly is bound to supply to his wifemorethan all she might have earned in serving others, before he spends a sixpence on his own needless indulgences: and the publican knows it; knows, sometimes in definite certainty, always in broad suspicion, that he is receiving money which does not in right belong to his customer. Of course he cannot be convicted by law; but in a moral estimate he is comparable to a lottery-keeper who accepts from shopmen money which he suspects is taken from their master's till, or to a receiver of goods which he ought to suspect to be stolen. Such is the immoral aspect of traders, who now claim "compensation," if the twelve- month licences granted to them as privilege, for no merit of their own, be,in the interest of public morality, terminated at the end of the twelve months.In the interest and at the will of landlord magistratessuch traders have borne extinction meekly, over a very wide rural area. What made themthenso meek and unpretending? Apparently because against powerful Peers and Squires impudence was not elicited in them by the encouragement of a John Bright and a Gladstone.
How then ought the State to deal with a drunkard? Obviously by the most merciful, kind, and effective of all punishments—by forbidding to him the fatal liquor. How much better than asylums for drunkards! asylums which make a job for medical men, take the drunkard away from his family and business, without anything to guarantee that on his release from prison he will have a Will strong enough to resist the old temptation. Such asylums please medical philanthropy; nor is any animosity displayed against them in Parliament. How can we account for the fact, that M.P.'s who strongly oppose interference with the existing shops, and avow as much distress and grief at drunkenness as is possible to any teetotaller, have never proposed to withhold the baneful drink from a convicted drunkard? Did it never come into their heads? Had they never heard of it? This would convict them of ignorance disgraceful in an M.P., still more so in a Minister. Perhaps someone charitably suggests: "They think the prohibition never could be enforced." To this pretence General Neal Dow makes reply: "What we Yankees have done, you English certainly can do, WHENEVER YOU HAVE THE WILL." Nothing is easier, when anyone has been convicted of drunkenness, than to send official notice to all licensed shops (say, within five miles) forbidding them to supply him, under penalty of forfeiting their licences. At the same time it should be a misdemeanour in anyone else to supply him gratuitously. (It would be pedantic here to suggest after how long probation, and under what conditions, this stigma should be effaceable.)
The misery which husband can inflict on wife, or wife on husband, by drunkenness, has led many Yankees further, and—to our shame—we have as yet refused to learn from them. If a wife (with certain legal formalities) forbid the drinkshops to supply her husband, this should be of the same avail, as if the husband were convicted of drunkenness before a magistrate. Of course a husband ought to have the same right against a wife, and either parent against a son or daughter under age. Such an enactment, as it seems to me, ought to beat oncepassed, as a law for all the Queen's realms, not as matter for local option. Passed over the heads of existing magistrates, it would remain valid over whatever authority may succeed them.
This is no place to dwell on any details of horrors inflicted on the country by the present imbecile control. Of course, it is far better than thefree tradein drink, towards which Liverpool twenty years back took a long stride, with results most wretched and justly repented of. How deadly is now the propensity of the country, will sufficiently appear from an experience of the late Sir Titus Salt in his little kingdom of Saltaire.
For a single year he made trial of granting to four select shops a licence to supplytable beerin bottles, delivered at the houses in quantity proportioned to the number of inmates;—a more severe limitation than any previously heard of. Yet in the course of some months evil grew up and multiplied. Something stronger than table beer (apparently) had been substituted. The liquor was smuggled into the works. Disobedience and disorders arose; and at length a deputation of his own men complained to him that theirwomenat home were getting too much of the drink. At the year's end he cancelled the licences, and to the general content and benefit restored absolute prohibition. Nothing short of this extinguishes the unnatural taste. Female drunkenness is a new vice, at least in any but the most debased of the sex: yet alas! courtly physicians now tell us that it has invaded the boudoirs of great ladies. Such has been the mischief of Confectioners' and Grocers' Licences.
Unsatisfactory as has been the control of the drink trade by the magistrates, their neglect has never been resented in higher quarters, ever since, by gift of the Excise, Parliament made the Exchequer a sleeping partner in the gains of the Drink Trade. The Queen's Exchequer has hence a revenue of about thirty-three millions a year, of which probably two-thirds, say twenty-two millions, is from excess: a formidable sum as hush-money. No earnest reformer expects the leopard to change his spots. A transference of power is claimed, chiefly under the title of Local Option. To give the power to town councils has been proved wholly insufficient in Scotland; though the Right Hon. John Bright seems obstinately to shut eyes and ears to the fact.
Again and again in crowded meetings the Resolution has been affirmed: "The people who suffer by the trade ought to have a veto against it."—Those who seem resolved to oppose every scheme which seeks to break down and restrict this horrible vice, tauntingly reply, that this measure would ensure its continuance in its worst centres. They do but show their own unwisdom herein. The Publicans know far better, and they avow, there is nothing they so much dread as local option. In Maine itself, a State frightfully drunken in the first half of the century, the opponents of Neal Dow in the State Legislature scornfully allowed him to carry a Bill which gave to each parishPermissionto accept his measure as law. They expected that the drunkards would outvote it: but to their discomfiture found that the drunkards were glad of his law, and nailed it firm. Let all sound-hearted Englishmen trust our suffering population to use their own remedy. Under Local Option we now embrace two systems which have been already discussed in Parliament—that of Sir Wilfrid Lawson, and that upon the outlines of Mr. Joseph Cowen's Bill.
Personally I yield to Sir Wilfrid Lawson the highest honour. Beyond all other men he is the hero in this long battle. If I account his Bill defective, he will not blame me: for in its original form, which he would be glad to carry, it closely resembled the Maine Law, and superseded the Magistrates. He has simplified it by making it only a half-measure. After Parliament has been teazed by the drink question for more than twenty-five years (one might almost say, ever since 1834), after candidates at every election have been made anxious by it, we must calculate that all public men will desire to make afinalsettlement and get rid of the topic in Parliament. But Sir Wilfrid's Bill, whatever its other merits (and I think them great), will not set Parliament free. For so soon as any district adopts his permission to stop the Drink Trade, an outcry must arise from local medical men and chemists and varnishers, demanding new shops for their needs: and intense jealousy will follow, lest the new sellers, though called chemists or grocers or oilmen, presently become purveyors of drink; hence a fresh struggle must continue in our overworked Legislature concerning the new and necessary regulations. Sir Wilfrid's half-measure supersedes neither the Magistrates nor the Parliament, though for two hundred years the Nation has suffered through the laxity of both. Surely we chiefly need real Provincial Legislatures, and, until we getthem, Local Folk Motes andLocal Elective Boardsare our best substitutes.
This is the other and the complete measure: yet something remains to be said on it. The great evil is, that by reason of competition, a trade cannot live, except by pushing its sales. The Americans have wisely seen that the necessarysalesmust be effected by Agents publicly appointed, with a fixed salary and nothing to gain by an increase of sales. Such Agents must receive public instructions. This was, in fact, Sir Wilfrid's original scheme, only that it forbad absolutely the selling wine or beer for drink,unless by medical order; and the last condition would involve in Parliament endless contention. It is simpler, and I think far better, to give to an Elective Board a general free discretion. Parliamentmightindeed dictate that sales should go on through a public officer only.
I, for one, should rejoice in this. But the most eager teetotaller will not hope that in the present generation any English Parliament will bemoresevere against a wine-loving gentry, and more dictatorial to medical men, than is the law of Maine. If therefore it did command that sales should bewithout gain, it certainly would not allow an entire prohibition of selling alcohol as beverage to be imposed on the Agent for sale. It is not so in Maine; and this fact occasioned Mr. Plimsoll's stupendous blunder, who declared in Parliament that the Maine Law was a dead letter in Maine itself. The fact on which he built this outrageously false assertion was that when Mr. Plimsoll asked for Whiskey, the Agent instantly sold it to him without a moment's hesitation. But why? "Because he knew that Mr. Plimsoll was an English M.P. and a teetotaller."