But if it is righteousness thus to fuse together our divisive
impulses and march with one mind through life, there is plainly one
thing more unrighteous than all others, and one declension which is
irretrievable and draws on the rest.  And this is to lose
consciousness of oneself.  In the best of times, it is but by
flashes, when our whole nature is clear, strong and conscious, and
events conspire to leave us free, that we enjoy communion with our
soul.  At the worst, we are so fallen and passive that we may say
shortly we have none.  An arctic torpor seizes upon men.  Although
built of nerves, and set adrift in a stimulating world, they
develop a tendency to go bodily to sleep; consciousness becomes
engrossed among the reflex and mechanical parts of life; and soon
loses both the will and power to look higher considerations in the
face.  This is ruin; this is the last failure in life; this is
temporal damnation, damnation on the spot and without the form of
judgment.  'What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world
and LOSE HIMSELF?'

It is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and
its fixed design of righteousness, that the better part of moral
and religious education is directed; not only that of words and
doctors, but the sharp ferule of calamity under which we are all
God's scholars till we die.  If, as teachers, we are to say
anything to the purpose, we must say what will remind the pupil of
his soul; we must speak that soul's dialect; we must talk of life
and conduct as his soul would have him think of them.  If, from
some conformity between us and the pupil, or perhaps among all men,
we do in truth speak in such a dialect and express such views,
beyond question we shall touch in him a spring; beyond question he
will recognise the dialect as one that he himself has spoken in his
better hours; beyond question he will cry, 'I had forgotten, but
now I remember; I too have eyes, and I had forgot to use them!  I
too have a soul of my own, arrogantly upright, and to that I will
listen and conform.'  In short, say to him anything that he has
once thought, or been upon the point of thinking, or show him any
view of life that he has once clearly seen, or been upon the point
of clearly seeing; and you have done your part and may leave him to
complete the education for himself.

Now, the view taught at the present time seems to me to want
greatness; and the dialect in which alone it can be intelligibly
uttered is not the dialect of my soul.  It is a sort of
postponement of life; nothing quite is, but something different is
to be; we are to keep our eyes upon the indirect from the cradle to
the grave.  We are to regulate our conduct not by desire, but by a
politic eye upon the future; and to value acts as they will bring
us money or good opinion; as they will bring us, in one word,
PROFIT.  We must be what is called respectable, and offend no one
by our carriage; it will not do to make oneself conspicuous--who
knows? even in virtue? says the Christian parent!  And we must be
what is called prudent and make money; not only because it is
pleasant to have money, but because that also is a part of
respectability, and we cannot hope to be received in society
without decent possessions.  Received in society! as if that were
the kingdom of heaven!  There is dear Mr. So-and-so;--look at him!-
-so much respected--so much looked up to--quite the Christian
merchant!  And we must cut our conduct as strictly as possible
after the pattern of Mr. So-and-so; and lay our whole lives to make
money and be strictly decent.  Besides these holy injunctions,
which form by far the greater part of a youth's training in our
Christian homes, there are at least two other doctrines.  We are to
live just now as well as we can, but scrape at last into heaven,
where we shall be good.  We are to worry through the week in a lay,
disreputable way, but, to make matters square, live a different
life on Sunday.

The train of thought we have been following gives us a key to all
these positions, without stepping aside to justify them on their
own ground.  It is because we have been disgusted fifty times with
physical squalls, and fifty times torn between conflicting
impulses, that we teach people this indirect and tactical procedure
in life, and to judge by remote consequences instead of the
immediate face of things.  The very desire to act as our own souls
would have us, coupled with a pathetic disbelief in ourselves,
moves us to follow the example of others; perhaps, who knows? they
may be on the right track; and the more our patterns are in number,
the better seems the chance; until, if we be acting in concert with
a whole civilised nation, there are surely a majority of chances
that we must be acting right.  And again, how true it is that we
can never behave as we wish in this tormented sphere, and can only
aspire to different and more favourable circumstances, in order to
stand out and be ourselves wholly and rightly!  And yet once more,
if in the hurry and pressure of affairs and passions you tend to
nod and become drowsy, here are twenty-four hours of Sunday set
apart for you to hold counsel with your soul and look around you on
the possibilities of life.

This is not, of course, all that is to be, or even should be, said
for these doctrines.  Only, in the course of this chapter, the
reader and I have agreed upon a few catchwords, and been looking at
morals on a certain system; it was a pity to lose an opportunity of
testing the catchwords, and seeing whether, by this system as well
as by others, current doctrines could show any probable
justification.  If the doctrines had come too badly out of the
trial, it would have condemned the system.  Our sight of the world
is very narrow; the mind but a pedestrian instrument; there's
nothing new under the sun, as Solomon says, except the man himself;
and though that changes the aspect of everything else, yet he must
see the same things as other people, only from a different side.

And now, having admitted so much, let us turn to criticism.

If you teach a man to keep his eyes upon what others think of him,
unthinkingly to lead the life and hold the principles of the
majority of his contemporaries, you must discredit in his eyes the
one authoritative voice of his own soul.  He may be a docile
citizen; he will never be a man.  It is ours, on the other hand, to
disregard this babble and chattering of other men better and worse
than we are, and to walk straight before us by what light we have.
They may be right; but so, before heaven, are we.  They may know;
but we know also, and by that knowledge we must stand or fall.
There is such a thing as loyalty to a man's own better self; and
from those who have not that, God help me, how am I to look for
loyalty to others?  The most dull, the most imbecile, at a certain
moment turn round, at a certain point will hear no further
argument, but stand unflinching by their own dumb, irrational sense
of right.  It is not only by steel or fire, but through contempt
and blame, that the martyr fulfils the calling of his dear soul.
Be glad if you are not tried by such extremities.  But although all
the world ranged themselves in one line to tell you 'This is
wrong,' be you your own faithful vassal and the ambassador of God--
throw down the glove and answer 'This is right.'  Do you think you
are only declaring yourself?  Perhaps in some dim way, like a child
who delivers a message not fully understood, you are opening wider
the straits of prejudice and preparing mankind for some truer and
more spiritual grasp of truth; perhaps, as you stand forth for your
own judgment, you are covering a thousand weak ones with your body;
perhaps, by this declaration alone, you have avoided the guilt of
false witness against humanity and the little ones unborn.  It is
good, I believe, to be respectable, but much nobler to respect
oneself and utter the voice of God.  God, if there be any God,
speaks daily in a new language by the tongues of men; the thoughts
and habits of each fresh generation and each new-coined spirit
throw another light upon the universe and contain another
commentary on the printed Bibles; every scruple, every true
dissent, every glimpse of something new, is a letter of God's
alphabet; and though there is a grave responsibility for all who
speak, is there none for those who unrighteously keep silence and
conform?  Is not that also to conceal and cloak God's counsel?  And
how should we regard the man of science who suppressed all facts
that would not tally with the orthodoxy of the hour?

Wrong?  You are as surely wrong as the sun rose this morning round
the revolving shoulder of the world.  Not truth, but truthfulness,
is the good of your endeavour.  For when will men receive that
first part and prerequisite of truth, that, by the order of things,
by the greatness of the universe, by the darkness and partiality of
man's experience, by the inviolate secrecy of God, kept close in
His most open revelations, every man is, and to the end of the ages
must be, wrong?  Wrong to the universe; wrong to mankind; wrong to
God.  And yet in another sense, and that plainer and nearer, every
man of men, who wishes truly, must be right.  He is right to
himself, and in the measure of his sagacity and candour.  That let
him do in all sincerity and zeal, not sparing a thought for
contrary opinions; that, for what it is worth, let him proclaim.
Be not afraid; although he be wrong, so also is the dead, stuffed
Dagon he insults.  For the voice of God, whatever it is, is not
that stammering, inept tradition which the people holds.  These
truths survive in travesty, swamped in a world of spiritual
darkness and confusion; and what a few comprehend and faithfully
hold, the many, in their dead jargon, repeat, degrade, and
misinterpret.

So far of Respectability; what the Covenanters used to call 'rank
conformity':  the deadliest gag and wet blanket that can be laid on
men.  And now of Profit.  And this doctrine is perhaps the more
redoubtable, because it harms all sorts of men; not only the heroic
and self-reliant, but the obedient, cowlike squadrons.  A man, by
this doctrine, looks to consequences at the second, or third, or
fiftieth turn.  He chooses his end, and for that, with wily turns
and through a great sea of tedium, steers this mortal bark.  There
may be political wisdom in such a view; but I am persuaded there
can spring no great moral zeal.  To look thus obliquely upon life
is the very recipe for moral slumber.  Our intention and endeavour
should be directed, not on some vague end of money or applause,
which shall come to us by a ricochet in a month or a year, or
twenty years, but on the act itself; not on the approval of others,
but on the rightness of that act.  At every instant, at every step
in life, the point has to be decided, our soul has to be saved,
heaven has to be gained or lost.  At every step our spirits must
applaud, at every step we must set down the foot and sound the
trumpet.  'This have I done,' we must say; 'right or wrong, this
have I done, in unfeigned honour of intention, as to myself and
God.'  The profit of every act should be this, that it was right
for us to do it.  Any other profit than that, if it involved a
kingdom or the woman I love, ought, if I were God's upright
soldier, to leave me untempted.

It is the mark of what we call a righteous decision, that it is
made directly and for its own sake.  The whole man, mind and body,
having come to an agreement, tyrannically dictates conduct.  There
are two dispositions eternally opposed:  that in which we recognise
that one thing is wrong and another right, and that in which, not
seeing any clear distinction, we fall back on the consideration of
consequences.  The truth is, by the scope of our present teaching,
nothing is thought very wrong and nothing very right, except a few
actions which have the disadvantage of being disrespectable when
found out; the more serious part of men inclining to think all
things RATHER WRONG, the more jovial to suppose them RIGHT ENOUGH
FOR PRACTICAL PURPOSES.  I will engage my head, they do not find
that view in their own hearts; they have taken it up in a dark
despair; they are but troubled sleepers talking in their sleep.
The soul, or my soul at least, thinks very distinctly upon many
points of right and wrong, and often differs flatly with what is
held out as the thought of corporate humanity in the code of
society or the code of law.  Am I to suppose myself a monster?  I
have only to read books, the Christian Gospels for example, to
think myself a monster no longer; and instead I think the mass of
people are merely speaking in their sleep.

It is a commonplace, enshrined, if I mistake not, even in school
copy-books, that honour is to be sought and not fame.  I ask no
other admission; we are to seek honour, upright walking with our
own conscience every hour of the day, and not fame, the
consequence, the far-off reverberation of our footsteps.  The walk,
not the rumour of the walk, is what concerns righteousness.  Better
disrespectable honour than dishonourable fame.  Better useless or
seemingly hurtful honour, than dishonour ruling empires and filling
the mouths of thousands.  For the man must walk by what he sees,
and leave the issue with God who made him and taught him by the
fortune of his life.  You would not dishonour yourself for money;
which is at least tangible; would you do it, then, for a doubtful
forecast in politics, or another person's theory in morals?

So intricate is the scheme of our affairs, that no man can
calculate the bearing of his own behaviour even on those
immediately around him, how much less upon the world at large or on
succeeding generations!  To walk by external prudence and the rule
of consequences would require, not a man, but God.  All that we
know to guide us in this changing labyrinth is our soul with its
fixed design of righteousness, and a few old precepts which commend
themselves to that.  The precepts are vague when we endeavour to
apply them; consequences are more entangled than a wisp of string,
and their confusion is unrestingly in change; we must hold to what
we know and walk by it.  We must walk by faith, indeed, and not by
knowledge.

You do not love another because he is wealthy or wise or eminently
respectable:  you love him because you love him; that is love, and
any other only a derision and grimace.  It should be the same with
all our actions.  If we were to conceive a perfect man, it should
be one who was never torn between conflicting impulses, but who, on
the absolute consent of all his parts and faculties, submitted in
every action of his life to a self-dictation as absolute and
unreasoned as that which bids him love one woman and be true to her
till death.  But we should not conceive him as sagacious,
ascetical, playing off his appetites against each other, turning
the wing of public respectable immorality instead of riding it
directly down, or advancing toward his end through a thousand
sinister compromises and considerations.  The one man might be
wily, might be adroit, might be wise, might be respectable, might
be gloriously useful; it is the other man who would be good.

The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be
successful; to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not
outwardly, respectable.  Does your soul ask profit?  Does it ask
money?  Does it ask the approval of the indifferent herd?  I
believe not.  For my own part, I want but little money, I hope; and
I do not want to be decent at all, but to be good.



CHAPTER IV



We have spoken of that supreme self-dictation which keeps varying
from hour to hour in its dictates with the variation of events and
circumstances.  Now, for us, that is ultimate.  It may be founded
on some reasonable process, but it is not a process which we can
follow or comprehend.  And moreover the dictation is not
continuous, or not continuous except in very lively and well-living
natures; and between-whiles we must brush along without it.
Practice is a more intricate and desperate business than the
toughest theorising; life is an affair of cavalry, where rapid
judgment and prompt action are alone possible and right.  As a
matter of fact, there is no one so upright but he is influenced by
the world's chatter; and no one so headlong but he requires to
consider consequences and to keep an eye on profit.  For the soul
adopts all affections and appetites without exception, and cares
only to combine them for some common purpose which shall interest
all.  Now, respect for the opinion of others, the study of
consequences, and the desire of power and comfort, are all
undeniably factors in the nature of man; and the more undeniably
since we find that, in our current doctrines, they have swallowed
up the others and are thought to conclude in themselves all the
worthy parts of man.  These, then, must also be suffered to affect
conduct in the practical domain, much or little according as they
are forcibly or feebly present to the mind of each.

Now, a man's view of the universe is mostly a view of the civilised
society in which he lives.  Other men and women are so much more
grossly and so much more intimately palpable to his perceptions,
that they stand between him and all the rest; they are larger to
his eye than the sun, he hears them more plainly than thunder, with
them, by them, and for them, he must live and die.  And hence the
laws that affect his intercourse with his fellow-men, although
merely customary and the creatures of a generation, are more
clearly and continually before his mind than those which bind him
into the eternal system of things, support him in his upright
progress on this whirling ball, or keep up the fire of his bodily
life.  And hence it is that money stands in the first rank of
considerations and so powerfully affects the choice.  For our
society is built with money for mortar; money is present in every
joint of circumstance; it might be named the social atmosphere,
since, in society, it is by that alone that men continue to live,
and only through that or chance that they can reach or affect one
another.  Money gives us food, shelter, and privacy; it permits us
to be clean in person, opens for us the doors of the theatre, gains
us books for study or pleasure, enables us to help the distresses
of others, and puts us above necessity so that we can choose the
best in life.  If we love, it enables us to meet and live with the
loved one, or even to prolong her health and life; if we have
scruples, it gives us an opportunity to be honest; if we have any
bright designs, here is what will smooth the way to their
accomplishment.  Penury is the worst slavery, and will soon lead to
death.

But money is only a means; it presupposes a man to use it.  The
rich can go where he pleases, but perhaps please himself nowhere.
He can buy a library or visit the whole world, but perhaps has
neither patience to read nor intelligence to see.  The table may be
loaded and the appetite wanting; the purse may be full, and the
heart empty.  He may have gained the world and lost himself; and
with all his wealth around him, in a great house and spacious and
beautiful demesne, he may live as blank a life as any tattered
ditcher.  Without an appetite, without an aspiration, void of
appreciation, bankrupt of desire and hope, there, in his great
house, let him sit and look upon his fingers.  It is perhaps a more
fortunate destiny to have a taste for collecting shells than to be
born a millionaire.  Although neither is to be despised, it is
always better policy to learn an interest than to make a thousand
pounds; for the money will soon be spent, or perhaps you may feel
no joy in spending it; but the interest remains imperishable and
ever new.  To become a botanist, a geologist, a social philosopher,
an antiquary, or an artist, is to enlarge one's possessions in the
universe by an incalculably higher degree, and by a far surer sort
of property, than to purchase a farm of many acres.  You had
perhaps two thousand a year before the transaction; perhaps you
have two thousand five hundred after it.  That represents your gain
in the one case.  But in the other, you have thrown down a barrier
which concealed significance and beauty.  The blind man has learned
to see.  The prisoner has opened up a window in his cell and
beholds enchanting prospects; he will never again be a prisoner as
he was; he can watch clouds and changing seasons, ships on the
river, travellers on the road, and the stars at night; happy
prisoner! his eyes have broken jail!  And again he who has learned
to love an art or science has wisely laid up riches against the day
of riches; if prosperity come, he will not enter poor into his
inheritance; he will not slumber and forget himself in the lap of
money, or spend his hours in counting idle treasures, but be up and
briskly doing; he will have the true alchemic touch, which is not
that of Midas, but which transmutes dead money into living delight
and satisfaction.  Etre et pas avoir--to be, not to possess--that
is the problem of life.  To be wealthy, a rich nature is the first
requisite and money but the second.  To be of a quick and healthy
blood, to share in all honourable curiosities, to be rich in
admiration and free from envy, to rejoice greatly in the good of
others, to love with such generosity of heart that your love is
still a dear possession in absence or unkindness--these are the
gifts of fortune which money cannot buy and without which money can
buy nothing.  For what can a man possess, or what can he enjoy,
except himself?  If he enlarge his nature, it is then that he
enlarges his estates.  If his nature be happy and valiant, he will
enjoy the universe as if it were his park and orchard.

But money is not only to be spent; it has also to be earned.  It is
not merely a convenience or a necessary in social life; but it is
the coin in which mankind pays his wages to the individual man.
And from this side, the question of money has a very different
scope and application.  For no man can be honest who does not work.
Service for service.  If the farmer buys corn, and the labourer
ploughs and reaps, and the baker sweats in his hot bakery, plainly
you who eat must do something in your turn.  It is not enough to
take off your hat, or to thank God upon your knees for the
admirable constitution of society and your own convenient situation
in its upper and more ornamental stories.  Neither is it enough to
buy the loaf with a sixpence; for then you are only changing the
point of the inquiry; and you must first have BOUGHT THE SIXPENCE.
Service for service:  how have you bought your sixpences?  A man of
spirit desires certainty in a thing of such a nature; he must see
to it that there is some reciprocity between him and mankind; that
he pays his expenditure in service; that he has not a lion's share
in profit and a drone's in labour; and is not a sleeping partner
and mere costly incubus on the great mercantile concern of mankind.

Services differ so widely with different gifts, and some are so
inappreciable to external tests, that this is not only a matter for
the private conscience, but one which even there must be leniently
and trustfully considered.  For remember how many serve mankind who
do no more than meditate; and how many are precious to their
friends for no more than a sweet and joyous temper.  To perform the
function of a man of letters it is not necessary to write; nay, it
is perhaps better to be a living book.  So long as we love we
serve; so long as we are loved by others, I would almost say that
we are indispensable; and no man is useless while he has a friend.
The true services of life are inestimable in money, and are never
paid.  Kind words and caresses, high and wise thoughts, humane
designs, tender behaviour to the weak and suffering, and all the
charities of man's existence, are neither bought nor sold.

Yet the dearest and readiest, if not the most just, criterion of a
man's services, is the wage that mankind pays him or, briefly, what
he earns.  There at least there can be no ambiguity.  St. Paul is
fully and freely entitled to his earnings as a tentmaker, and
Socrates fully and freely entitled to his earnings as a sculptor,
although the true business of each was not only something
different, but something which remained unpaid.  A man cannot
forget that he is not superintended, and serves mankind on parole.
He would like, when challenged by his own conscience, to reply:  'I
have done so much work, and no less, with my own hands and brain,
and taken so much profit, and no more, for my own personal
delight.'  And though St. Paul, if he had possessed a private
fortune, would probably have scorned to waste his time in making
tents, yet of all sacrifices to public opinion none can be more
easily pardoned than that by which a man, already spiritually
useful to the world, should restrict the field of his chief
usefulness to perform services more apparent, and possess a
livelihood that neither stupidity nor malice could call in
question.  Like all sacrifices to public opinion and mere external
decency, this would certainly be wrong; for the soul should rest
contented with its own approval and indissuadably pursue its own
calling.  Yet, so grave and delicate is the question, that a man
may well hesitate before he decides it for himself; he may well
fear that he sets too high a valuation on his own endeavours after
good; he may well condescend upon a humbler duty, where others than
himself shall judge the service and proportion the wage.

And yet it is to this very responsibility that the rich are born.
They can shuffle off the duty on no other; they are their own
paymasters on parole; and must pay themselves fair wages and no
more.  For I suppose that in the course of ages, and through reform
and civil war and invasion, mankind was pursuing some other and
more general design than to set one or two Englishmen of the
nineteenth century beyond the reach of needs and duties.  Society
was scarce put together, and defended with so much eloquence and
blood, for the convenience of two or three millionaires and a few
hundred other persons of wealth and position.  It is plain that if
mankind thus acted and suffered during all these generations, they
hoped some benefit, some ease, some wellbeing, for themselves and
their descendants; that if they supported law and order, it was to
secure fair-play for all; that if they denied themselves in the
present, they must have had some designs upon the future.  Now, a
great hereditary fortune is a miracle of man's wisdom and mankind's
forbearance; it has not only been amassed and handed down, it has
been suffered to be amassed and handed down; and surely in such a
consideration as this, its possessor should find only a new spur to
activity and honour, that with all this power of service he should
not prove unserviceable, and that this mass of treasure should
return in benefits upon the race.  If he had twenty, or thirty, or
a hundred thousand at his banker's, or if all Yorkshire or all
California were his to manage or to sell, he would still be morally
penniless, and have the world to begin like Whittington, until he
had found some way of serving mankind.  His wage is physically in
his own hand; but, in honour, that wage must still be earned.  He
is only steward on parole of what is called his fortune.  He must
honourably perform his stewardship.  He must estimate his own
services and allow himself a salary in proportion, for that will be
one among his functions.  And while he will then be free to spend
that salary, great or little, on his own private pleasures, the
rest of his fortune he but holds and disposes under trust for
mankind; it is not his, because he has not earned it; it cannot be
his, because his services have already been paid; but year by year
it is his to distribute, whether to help individuals whose
birthright and outfit have been swallowed up in his, or to further
public works and institutions.

At this rate, short of inspiration, it seems hardly possible to be
both rich and honest; and the millionaire is under a far more
continuous temptation to thieve than the labourer who gets his
shilling daily for despicable toils.  Are you surprised?  It is
even so.  And you repeat it every Sunday in your churches.  'It is
easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a
rich man to enter the kingdom of God.'  I have heard this and
similar texts ingeniously explained away and brushed from the path
of the aspiring Christian by the tender Great-heart of the parish.
One excellent clergyman told us that the 'eye of a needle' meant a
low, Oriental postern through which camels could not pass till they
were unloaded--which is very likely just; and then went on, bravely
confounding the 'kingdom of God' with heaven, the future paradise,
to show that of course no rich person could expect to carry his
riches beyond the grave--which, of course, he could not and never
did.  Various greedy sinners of the congregation drank in the
comfortable doctrine with relief.  It was worth the while having
come to church that Sunday morning!  All was plain.  The Bible, as
usual, meant nothing in particular; it was merely an obscure and
figurative school-copybook; and if a man were only respectable, he
was a man after God's own heart.

Alas! I fear not.  And though this matter of a man's services is
one for his own conscience, there are some cases in which it is
difficult to restrain the mind from judging.  Thus I shall be very
easily persuaded that a man has earned his daily bread; and if he
has but a friend or two to whom his company is delightful at heart,
I am more than persuaded at once.  But it will be very hard to
persuade me that any one has earned an income of a hundred
thousand.  What he is to his friends, he still would be if he were
made penniless to-morrow; for as to the courtiers of luxury and
power, I will neither consider them friends, nor indeed consider
them at all.  What he does for mankind there are most likely
hundreds who would do the same, as effectually for the race and as
pleasurably to themselves, for the merest fraction of this
monstrous wage.  Why it is paid, I am, therefore, unable to
conceive, and as the man pays it himself, out of funds in his
detention, I have a certain backwardness to think him honest.

At least, we have gained a very obvious point:  that WHAT A MAN
SPENDS UPON HIMSELF, HE SHALL HAVE EARNED BY SERVICES TO THE RACE.
Thence flows a principle for the outset of life, which is a little
different from that taught in the present day.  I am addressing the
middle and the upper classes; those who have already been fostered
and prepared for life at some expense; those who have some choice
before them, and can pick professions; and above all, those who are
what is called independent, and need do nothing unless pushed by
honour or ambition.  In this particular the poor are happy; among
them, when a lad comes to his strength, he must take the work that
offers, and can take it with an easy conscience.  But in the richer
classes the question is complicated by the number of opportunities
and a variety of considerations.  Here, then, this principle of
ours comes in helpfully.  The young man has to seek, not a road to
wealth, but an opportunity of service; not money, but honest work.
If he has some strong propensity, some calling of nature, some
over-weening interest in any special field of industry, inquiry, or
art, he will do right to obey the impulse; and that for two
reasons:  the first external, because there he will render the best
services; the second personal, because a demand of his own nature
is to him without appeal whenever it can be satisfied with the
consent of his other faculties and appetites.  If he has no such
elective taste, by the very principle on which he chooses any
pursuit at all he must choose the most honest and serviceable, and
not the most highly remunerated.  We have here an external problem,
not from or to ourself, but flowing from the constitution of
society; and we have our own soul with its fixed design of
righteousness.  All that can be done is to present the problem in
proper terms, and leave it to the soul of the individual.  Now, the
problem to the poor is one of necessity:  to earn wherewithal to
live, they must find remunerative labour.  But the problem to the
rich is one of honour:  having the wherewithal, they must find
serviceable labour.  Each has to earn his daily bread:  the one,
because he has not yet got it to eat; the other, who has already
eaten it, because he has not yet earned it.

Of course, what is true of bread is true of luxuries and comforts,
whether for the body or the mind.  But the consideration of
luxuries leads us to a new aspect of the whole question, and to a
second proposition no less true, and maybe no less startling, than
the last.

At the present day, we, of the easier classes, are in a state of
surfeit and disgrace after meat.  Plethora has filled us with
indifference; and we are covered from head to foot with the
callosities of habitual opulence.  Born into what is called a
certain rank, we live, as the saying is, up to our station.  We
squander without enjoyment, because our fathers squandered.  We eat
of the best, not from delicacy, but from brazen habit.  We do not
keenly enjoy or eagerly desire the presence of a luxury; we are
unaccustomed to its absence.  And not only do we squander money
from habit, but still more pitifully waste it in ostentation.  I
can think of no more melancholy disgrace for a creature who
professes either reason or pleasure for his guide, than to spend
the smallest fraction of his income upon that which he does not
desire; and to keep a carriage in which you do not wish to drive,
or a butler of whom you are afraid, is a pathetic kind of folly.
Money, being a means of happiness, should make both parties happy
when it changes hands; rightly disposed, it should be twice blessed
in its employment; and buyer and seller should alike have their
twenty shillings worth of profit out of every pound.  Benjamin
Franklin went through life an altered man, because he once paid too
dearly for a penny whistle.  My concern springs usually from a
deeper source, to wit, from having bought a whistle when I did not
want one.  I find I regret this, or would regret it if I gave
myself the time, not only on personal but on moral and
philanthropical considerations.  For, first, in a world where money
is wanting to buy books for eager students and food and medicine
for pining children, and where a large majority are starved in
their most immediate desires, it is surely base, stupid, and cruel
to squander money when I am pushed by no appetite and enjoy no
return of genuine satisfaction.  My philanthropy is wide enough in
scope to include myself; and when I have made myself happy, I have
at least one good argument that I have acted rightly; but where
that is not so, and I have bought and not enjoyed, my mouth is
closed, and I conceive that I have robbed the poor.  And, second,
anything I buy or use which I do not sincerely want or cannot
vividly enjoy, disturbs the balance of supply and demand, and
contributes to remove industrious hands from the production of what
is useful or pleasurable and to keep them busy upon ropes of sand
and things that are a weariness to the flesh.  That extravagance is
truly sinful, and a very silly sin to boot, in which we impoverish
mankind and ourselves.  It is another question for each man's
heart.  He knows if he can enjoy what he buys and uses; if he
cannot, he is a dog in the manger; nay, it he cannot, I contend he
is a thief, for nothing really belongs to a man which he cannot
use.  Proprietor is connected with propriety; and that only is the
man's which is proper to his wants and faculties.

A youth, in choosing a career, must not be alarmed by poverty.
Want is a sore thing, but poverty does not imply want.  It remains
to be seen whether with half his present income, or a third, he
cannot, in the most generous sense, live as fully as at present.
He is a fool who objects to luxuries; but he is also a fool who
does not protest against the waste of luxuries on those who do not
desire and cannot enjoy them.  It remains to be seen, by each man
who would live a true life to himself and not a merely specious
life to society, how many luxuries he truly wants and to how many
he merely submits as to a social propriety; and all these last he
will immediately forswear.  Let him do this, and he will be
surprised to find how little money it requires to keep him in
complete contentment and activity of mind and senses.  Life at any
level among the easy classes is conceived upon a principle of
rivalry, where each man and each household must ape the tastes and
emulate the display of others.  One is delicate in eating, another
in wine, a third in furniture or works of art or dress; and I, who
care nothing for any of these refinements, who am perhaps a plain
athletic creature and love exercise, beef, beer, flannel shirts and
a camp bed, am yet called upon to assimilate all these other tastes
and make these foreign occasions of expenditure my own.  It may be
cynical:  I am sure I shall be told it is selfish; but I will spend
my money as I please and for my own intimate personal
gratification, and should count myself a nincompoop indeed to lay
out the colour of a halfpenny on any fancied social decency or
duty.  I shall not wear gloves unless my hands are cold, or unless
I am born with a delight in them.  Dress is my own affair, and that
of one other in the world; that, in fact and for an obvious reason,
of any woman who shall chance to be in love with me.  I shall lodge
where I have a mind.  If I do not ask society to live with me, they
must be silent; and even if I do, they have no further right but to
refuse the invitation!  There is a kind of idea abroad that a man
must live up to his station, that his house, his table, and his
toilette, shall be in a ratio of equivalence, and equally imposing
to the world.  If this is in the Bible, the passage has eluded my
inquiries.  If it is not in the Bible, it is nowhere but in the
heart of the fool.  Throw aside this fancy.  See what you want, and
spend upon that; distinguish what you do not care about, and spend
nothing upon that.  There are not many people who can differentiate
wines above a certain and that not at all a high price.  Are you
sure you are one of these?  Are you sure you prefer cigars at
sixpence each to pipes at some fraction of a farthing?  Are you
sure you wish to keep a gig?  Do you care about where you sleep, or
are you not as much at your ease in a cheap lodging as in an
Elizabethan manor-house?  Do you enjoy fine clothes?  It is not
possible to answer these questions without a trial; and there is
nothing more obvious to my mind, than that a man who has not
experienced some ups and downs, and been forced to live more
cheaply than in his father's house, has still his education to
begin.  Let the experiment be made, and he will find to his
surprise that he has been eating beyond his appetite up to that
hour; that the cheap lodging, the cheap tobacco, the rough country
clothes, the plain table, have not only no power to damp his
spirits, but perhaps give him as keen pleasure in the using as the
dainties that he took, betwixt sleep and waking, in his former
callous and somnambulous submission to wealth.

The true Bohemian, a creature lost to view under the imaginary
Bohemians of literature, is exactly described by such a principle
of life.  The Bohemian of the novel, who drinks more than is good
for him and prefers anything to work, and wears strange clothes, is
for the most part a respectable Bohemian, respectable in
disrespectability, living for the outside, and an adventurer.  But
the man I mean lives wholly to himself, does what he wishes, and
not what is thought proper, buys what he wants for himself, and not
what is thought proper, works at what he believes he can do well
and not what will bring him in money or favour.  You may be the
most respectable of men, and yet a true Bohemian.  And the test is
this:  a Bohemian, for as poor as he may be, is always open-handed
to his friends; he knows what he can do with money and how he can
do without it, a far rarer and more useful knowledge; he has had
less, and continued to live in some contentment; and hence he cares
not to keep more, and shares his sovereign or his shilling with a
friend.  The poor, if they are generous, are Bohemian in virtue of
their birth.  Do you know where beggars go?  Not to the great
houses where people sit dazed among their thousands, but to the
doors of poor men who have seen the world; and it was the widow who
had only two mites, who cast half her fortune into the treasury.

But a young man who elects to save on dress or on lodging, or who
in any way falls out of the level of expenditure which is common to
his level in society, falls out of society altogether.  I suppose
the young man to have chosen his career on honourable principles;
he finds his talents and instincts can be best contented in a
certain pursuit; in a certain industry, he is sure that he is
serving mankind with a healthy and becoming service; and he is not
sure that he would be doing so, or doing so equally well, in any
other industry within his reach.  Then that is his true sphere in
life; not the one in which he was born to his father, but the one
which is proper to his talents and instincts.  And suppose he does
fall out of society, is that a cause of sorrow?  Is your heart so
dead that you prefer the recognition of many to the love of a few?
Do you think society loves you?  Put it to the proof.  Decline in
material expenditure, and you will find they care no more for you
than for the Khan of Tartary.  You will lose no friends.  If you
had any, you will keep them.  Only those who were friends to your
coat and equipage will disappear; the smiling faces will disappear
as by enchantment; but the kind hearts will remain steadfastly
kind.  Are you so lost, are you so dead, are you so little sure of
your own soul and your own footing upon solid fact, that you prefer
before goodness and happiness the countenance of sundry diners-out,
who will flee from you at a report of ruin, who will drop you with
insult at a shadow of disgrace, who do not know you and do not care
to know you but by sight, and whom you in your turn neither know
nor care to know in a more human manner?  Is it not the principle
of society, openly avowed, that friendship must not interfere with
business; which being paraphrased, means simply that a
consideration of money goes before any consideration of affection
known to this cold-blooded gang, that they have not even the honour
of thieves, and will rook their nearest and dearest as readily as a
stranger?  I hope I would go as far as most to serve a friend; but
I declare openly I would not put on my hat to do a pleasure to
society.  I may starve my appetites and control my temper for the
sake of those I love; but society shall take me as I choose to be,
or go without me.  Neither they nor I will lose; for where there is
no love, it is both laborious and unprofitable to associate.

But it is obvious that if it is only right for a man to spend money
on that which he can truly and thoroughly enjoy, the doctrine
applies with equal force to the rich and to the poor, to the man
who has amassed many thousands as well as to the youth precariously
beginning life.  And it may be asked, Is not this merely preparing
misers, who are not the best of company?  But the principle was
this:  that which a man has not fairly earned, and, further, that
which he cannot fully enjoy, does not belong to him, but is a part
of mankind's treasure which he holds as steward on parole.  To
mankind, then, it must be made profitable; and how this should be
done is, once more, a problem which each man must solve for
himself, and about which none has a right to judge him.  Yet there
are a few considerations which are very obvious and may here be
stated.  Mankind is not only the whole in general, but every one in
particular.  Every man or woman is one of mankind's dear
possessions; to his or her just brain, and kind heart, and active
hands, mankind intrusts some of its hopes for the future; he or she
is a possible well-spring of good acts and source of blessings to
the race.  This money which you do not need, which, in a rigid
sense, you do not want, may therefore be returned not only in
public benefactions to the race, but in private kindnesses.  Your
wife, your children, your friends stand nearest to you, and should
be helped the first.  There at least there can be little imposture,
for you know their necessities of your own knowledge.  And
consider, if all the world did as you did, and according to their
means extended help in the circle of their affections, there would
be no more crying want in times of plenty and no more cold,
mechanical charity given with a doubt and received with confusion.
Would not this simple rule make a new world out of the old and
cruel one which we inhabit?


[After two more sentences the fragment breaks off.]




FATHER DAMIEN
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REVEREND
DR. HYDE OF HONOLULU




SYDNEY,
February 25, 1890.


Sir,--It may probably occur to you that we have met, and visited,
and conversed; on my side, with interest.  You may remember that
you have done me several courtesies, for which I was prepared to be
grateful.  But there are duties which come before gratitude, and
offences which justly divide friends, far more acquaintances.  Your
letter to the Reverend H. B. Gage is a document which, in my sight,
if you had filled me with bread when I was starving, if you had sat
up to nurse my father when he lay a-dying, would yet absolve me
from the bonds of gratitude.  You know enough, doubtless, of the
process of canonisation to be aware that, a hundred years after the
death of Damien, there will appear a man charged with the painful
office of the DEVIL'S ADVOCATE.  After that noble brother of mine,
and of all frail clay, shall have lain a century at rest, one shall
accuse, one defend him.  The circumstance is unusual that the
devil's advocate should be a volunteer, should be a member of a
sect immediately rival, and should make haste to take upon himself
his ugly office ere the bones are cold; unusual, and of a taste
which I shall leave my readers free to qualify; unusual, and to me
inspiring.  If I have at all learned the trade of using words to
convey truth and to arouse emotion, you have at last furnished me
with a subject.  For it is in the interest of all mankind, and the
cause of public decency in every quarter of the world, not only
that Damien should be righted, but that you and your letter should
be displayed at length, in their true colours, to the public eye.

To do this properly, I must begin by quoting you at large:  I shall
then proceed to criticise your utterance from several points of
view, divine and human, in the course of which I shall attempt to
draw again, and with more specification, the character of the dead
saint whom it has pleased you to vilify:  so much being done, I
shall say farewell to you for ever.


'HONOLULU,
'August 2, 1889.


'Rev. H. B. GAGE.

'Dear Brother,--In answer to your inquiries about Father Damien, I
can only reply that we who knew the man are surprised at the
extravagant newspaper laudations, as if he was a most saintly
philanthropist.  The simple truth is, he was a coarse, dirty man,
head-strong and bigoted.  He was not sent to Molokai, but went
there without orders; did not stay at the leper settlement (before
he became one himself), but circulated freely over the whole island
(less than half the island is devoted to the lepers), and he came
often to Honolulu.  He had no hand in the reforms and improvements
inaugurated, which were the work of our Board of Health, as
occasion required and means were provided.  He was not a pure man
in his relations with women, and the leprosy of which he died
should be attributed to his vices and carelessness.  Others have
done much for the lepers, our own ministers, the government
physicians, and so forth, but never with the Catholic idea of
meriting eternal life.--Yours, etc.,

'C. M. HYDE.' {1}


To deal fitly with a letter so extraordinary, I must draw at the
outset on my private knowledge of the signatory and his sect.  It
may offend others; scarcely you, who have been so busy to collect,
so bold to publish, gossip on your rivals.  And this is perhaps the
moment when I may best explain to you the character of what you are
to read:  I conceive you as a man quite beyond and below the
reticences of civility:  with what measure you mete, with that
shall it be measured you again; with you, at last, I rejoice to
feel the button off the foil and to plunge home.  And if in aught
that I shall say I should offend others, your colleagues, whom I
respect and remember with affection, I can but offer them my
regret; I am not free, I am inspired by the consideration of
interests far more large; and such pain as can be inflicted by
anything from me must be indeed trifling when compared with the
pain with which they read your letter.  It is not the hangman, but
the criminal, that brings dishonour on the house.

You belong, sir, to a sect--I believe my sect, and that in which my
ancestors laboured--which has enjoyed, and partly failed to
utilise, an exceptional advantage in the islands of Hawaii.  The
first missionaries came; they found the land already self-purged of
its old and bloody faith; they were embraced, almost on their
arrival, with enthusiasm; what troubles they supported came far
more from whites than from Hawaiians; and to these last they stood
(in a rough figure) in the shoes of God.  This is not the place to
enter into the degree or causes of their failure, such as it is.
One element alone is pertinent, and must here be plainly dealt
with.  In the course of their evangelical calling, they--or too
many of them--grew rich.  It may be news to you that the houses of
missionaries are a cause of mocking on the streets of Honolulu.  It
will at least be news to you, that when I returned your civil
visit, the driver of my cab commented on the size, the taste, and
the comfort of your home.  It would have been news certainly to
myself, had any one told me that afternoon that I should live to
drag such matter into print.  But you see, sir, how you degrade
better men to your own level; and it is needful that those who are
to judge betwixt you and me, betwixt Damien and the devil's
advocate, should understand your letter to have been penned in a
house which could raise, and that very justly, the envy and the
comments of the passers-by.  I think (to employ a phrase of yours
which I admire) it 'should be attributed' to you that you have
never visited the scene of Damien's life and death.  If you had,
and had recalled it, and looked about your pleasant rooms, even
your pen perhaps would have been stayed.