MB 
 
 ' 
 
 
 

 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 John Rutkin
 
 THE 
 
 CROWN OF WILD OLIVE 
 
 dfour ^Lectures 
 
 ON 
 
 WORK, TRAFFIC, WAR, 
 
 AND 
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN RUSKIN, M.A. 
 
 And indeed it should have been of gold, had not Jupiter been so 
 poor. ARISTOTH ANES (Pluttts). 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THOMAS Y. CROWELL & CO. 
 PUBLISHERS
 
 Htro 
 
 INTRODUCTION.* 
 
 i . TWENTY years ago, there was no lovelier piece 
 of lowland scenery in South England, nor any more 
 pathetic in the world, by its expression of sweet 
 human character and life, than that immediately bor- 
 dering on the sources of the Wandel, and including 
 Ihe low moors of Addington, and the villages of 
 Beddington and Carshalton, with all their pools and 
 streams. No clearer or diviner waters ever sang with 
 constant lips of the hand which " giveth rain from 
 heaven ; " no pastures ever lightened in springtime 
 with more passionate blossoming ; no sweeter homes 
 ever hallowed the heart of the passer-by with their 
 pride of peaceful gladness fain-hidden yet full- 
 confessed. The place remains (1870) nearly un- 
 changed in its larger features; but with deliberate 
 mind I say, that I have never seen anything so 
 ghastly in its inner tragic meaning, not in Pisan 
 
 * Called the " preface" in former editions; it is one of my bad 
 habits to put half my books into preface. Of this one, the only prefa- 
 tory thing I have to say is that most of the contents are stated more 
 fully in my other volumes ; but here are put in what, at least, I meant 
 to be a more popular form, all but this introduction, which was 
 written very carefully to be read, not spoken, and the last lecture on 
 the Future of England, with which, and the following notes on it, 
 I have taken extreme pains.
 
 4 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 Maremma, not by Campagna tomb, not by the 
 sand-isles of the Torcellan shore, as the slow steal- 
 ing of aspects of reckless, indolent, animal neglect, 
 over the delicate sweetness of that English scene : 
 nor is any blasphemy or impiety, any frantic saying 
 or godless thought, more appalling to me, using the 
 best power of judgment I have to discern its sense 
 and scope, than the insolent defiling of those springs 
 by the human herds that drink of them. Just where 
 the welling of stainless water, trembling and pure 
 like a body of light, enters the pool of Carshalton, 
 cutting itself a radiant channel down to the gravel, 
 through warp of feathery weeds, all waving, which i 
 traverses with its deep threads of clearness, like th: 
 chalcedony in moss-agate, starred here and there 
 with white grenouillette ; just in the very rush and 
 murmur of the first spreading currents, the human 
 wretches of the place cast their street and house 
 foulness ; heaps of dust and slime, and broken shreds 
 of old metal, and rags of putrid clothes ; which, 
 having neither energy to cart away, nor decency 
 enough to dig into the ground, they thus shed into 
 the stream, to diffuse what venom of it will float and 
 melt, far away, in all places where God meant those 
 waters to bring joy and health. And, in a little 
 pool, behind some houses farther in the village, where 
 another spring rises, the shattered stones of the well, 
 and of the little fretted channel which was long ago 
 built and traced for it by gentler hands, lie scattered, 
 each from each, under a ragged bank of mortar, and 
 scoria, and bricklayer's refuse, on one side, which 
 the clean water nevertheless chastises to purity ; but
 
 INTRODUCTION. 5 
 
 it cannot conquer the dead earth beyond ; and there , 
 circled and coiled under festering scum, the stagnant 
 edge of the pool eifaces itself into a slope of black 
 slime, the accumulation of indolent years. Half-a- 
 dozen men, with one day's work, could cleanse those 
 pools, and trim the flowers about their banks, and 
 make every breath of summer air above them rich 
 with cool balm ; and every glittering wave medicinal, 
 as if it ran, troubled only of angels, from the porch 
 of Bethesda. But that day's work is never given, 
 nor, I suppose, will be; nor will any joy be possible 
 'o heart of man, for evermore, about those wells of 
 English waters. 
 
 2. When I last left them, I walked up slowly through 
 the back streets of Croydon, from the old church to 
 the hospital ; and, just on the left, before coming up 
 to the crossing of the High Street, there was a new 
 public-house built. And the front of it was built in 
 so wise manner, that a recess of two feet was left 
 below its front windows, between them and the street- 
 pavement ; a recess too narrow for any possible use 
 (for even if it had been occupied by a saat, as in old 
 time it might have been, everybody walking along 
 the street would have fallen over the legs of the repos- 
 ing wayfarer). But, by way of making this two 
 feet depth of freehold land more expressive of ths 
 dignity of an establishment for the sale of spirituous 
 liquors, it was fenced from the pavement by an iiu 
 posing iron railing, having four or five spearheads to 
 the yard of it, and six feet high ; containing as much 
 iron and iron-work, indeed, as could well be put 
 into the space ; and by this stately arrangement, the
 
 6 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 little piece of dead ground within, between wall and 
 street, became a protective receptacle of refuse ; cigar 
 ends, and oyster shells, and the like, such as an open- 
 handed English street-populace habitually scatters ; 
 and was thus left, unsweepable by any ordinary 
 methods. Now the iron bars which, uselessly (or 
 in great degree worse than uselessly), enclosed this 
 bit of ground, and made it pestilent, represented a 
 quantity of work which would have cleansed the 
 Carshalton pools three times over: of work, partly 
 cramped and perilous, in the mine ; partly grievous 
 and horrible, at the furnace ; partly foolish and 
 sedentary, of ill-taught students making bad designs : 
 work from the beginning to the last fruits of it, and 
 in all the branches of it, venomous, deathful,* and 
 miserable. 
 
 3. Now, how did it come to pass that this work 
 was done instead of the other; that the strength 
 
 * A fearful occurrence took place a few days since, near Wolver- 
 hampton. Thomas Snape, aged nineteen, was on duty as the " keeper " 
 of a blast furnace at Deepfield, assisted by John Gardner, aged eigh- 
 teen, and Joseph Swift, aged thirty-seven. The furnace contained 
 four tons of molten iron, and an equal amount of cinders, and ought 
 to have been run out at 7.30 P.M. But Snape and his mates, engaged 
 in talking and drinking, neglected their duty, and, in the meantime, 
 the iron rose in the furnace until it reached a pipe wherein water was 
 contained. Just as the men had stripped, and were proceeding to tap 
 the furnace, the water in the pipe, converted into steam, burst down 
 its front and let loose on them the molten metal, which instantaneously 
 consumed Gardner; Snape, terribly burnt, and mad with pain, leaped 
 Into the canal and then ran home and fell dead on the threshold. Swift 
 survived to reach the hospital, where he died too. 
 
 In further illustration of this matter, I beg the reader to look at the 
 article on the " Decay of the English Race," in the Pall-Mall Gazette 
 of April 17, of this year; and at the articles on the "Report of the 
 Thames Commission," in any journals of the same date.
 
 INTRODUCTION. 7 
 
 and life of the English operative were spent in defil- 
 ing ground, instead of redeeming it, and in produ- 
 cing an entirely (in that place) valueless piece of 
 metal, which can neither be eaten nor breathed, 
 instead of medicinal fresh air and pure water? 
 
 4. There is but one reason for it, and at present a 
 conclusive one, that the capitalist can charge per- 
 centage on the work in the one case, and cannot in the 
 other. If, having certain funds for supporting labor 
 at my disposal, I pay men merely to keep my ground 
 in order, my money is, in that function, spent once 
 for all ; but if I pay them to dig iron out of my ground 
 and work it, and sell it, I can charge rent for the 
 ground, and percentage both on the manufacture and 
 the sale, and make my capital profitable in these three 
 by-ways. The greater part of the profitable invest- 
 ment of capital, in the present day, is in operations 
 of this kind, in which the public is persuaded to buy 
 something of no use to it, on production or sale of 
 which the capitalist may charge percentage ; the said 
 public remaining all the while under the persuasion 
 that the percentages thus obtained are real national 
 gains, whereas, they are merely filchings out of 
 partially light pockets, to swell heavy ones. 
 
 5. Thus, the Croyden publican buys the iron rail- 
 ing, to make himself more conspicuous to drunkards. 
 The public-house keeper on the other side of the way 
 presently buys another railing, to out-rail him with. 
 Both are, as to their relative attractiveness, just where 
 they were before ; but they have lost the price of the 
 railings ; which they must either themselves finally 
 ^ose, or make their aforesaid customers, the amateurs
 
 8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 of railings, pay, by raising the price of their beer, or 
 adulterating it. Either the publicans, or their cus- 
 tomers, are thus poorer by precisely what the capital- 
 ist has gained', and the value of the industry itself, 
 meantime, has been lost to the nation ; the iron bars 
 in that form and place being wholly useless. 
 
 6. It is this mode of taxation of the poor by the 
 rich which is referred to in the text ( 34), in 
 comparing the modern acquisitive power of capital 
 with that of the lance and sword ; the only difference 
 being that the levy of blackmail in old times was by 
 force, and is now by cozening. The old rider and 
 reiver frankly quartered himself on the publican for 
 the night ; the modern one merely makes his lance 
 into an iron spike, and persuades his host to buy it. 
 One comes as an open robber, the other as a cheating 
 pedler ; but- the result, to the injured person's pocket, 
 is absolutely the same. Of course many useful 
 industries mingle with, and disguise the useless ones ; 
 and in the habits of energy aroused by the struggle, 
 there is a certain direct good. It is better to spend 
 four thousand pounds in making a gun, and then to 
 blow it to pieces, than to pass life in idleness. 
 Only do not let the proceeding be called "political 
 economy." 
 
 7. There is also a confused notion in the minds 
 of many persons, that the gathering of the prop- 
 erty of the poor into the hands of the rich does 
 no ultimate harm ; since, in whosesoever hands it 
 may be, it must be spent at last, and thus, they think, 
 return to the poor again. This fallacy has been 
 again and again exposed ; but granting the plea true,
 
 INTRODUCTION. 9 
 
 the same apology may, of course, be made for black 
 mail, or any other form of robbery. It might be 
 (though practically it never is) as advantageous for 
 the nation that the robber should have the spending 
 of the money he extorts, as that the person robbed 
 should have spent it. But this is no excuse for the 
 theft. If I were to put a turnpike on the road where 
 it passes my own gate, and endeavor to exact a 
 shilling from every passenger, the public would soon 
 do away with my gate, without listening to any plea 
 on my part that ' it was as advantageous to them, in 
 the end, that I should spend their shillings, as that 
 they themselves should. 1 But if, instead of out- 
 facing them with a turnpike, I can only persuade there 
 to come in and buy stones, or old iron, or any other 
 useless thing, out of my ground, I may rob them to 
 the same extent, and be, moreover, thanked as a 
 public benefactor, and promoter of commercial pros- 
 perity. And this main question for the poor of 
 England for the poor of all countries is wholly 
 omitted in every common treatise on the subject of 
 wealth. Even by the laborers themselves, the opera- 
 tion of capital is regarded only in its effect on their 
 immediate interests ; never in the far more terrific 
 power of its appointment of the kind and the object 
 of labor. It matters little, ultimately, how much a 
 laborer is paid for making anything ; but it matters 
 fearfully what the thing is, which he is compelled to 
 make. If his labor is so ordered as to produce food, 
 and fresh air, and fresh water, no matter that his 
 wages are low ; the food and fresh air and water 
 will be at last there ; and he will at last get them
 
 10 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 But if he is paid to destroy food and fresh air, or to 
 produce iron bars instead of them, the food and 
 air will finally not be there, and he will not get them, 
 to his great and final inconvenience. 
 
 8. I have been long accustomed, as all men engaged 
 in work of investigation must be, to hear my state- 
 ments laughed at for years before they are examined 
 or believed ; and I am generally content to wait the 
 public's time. But it has not been without displeased 
 surprise that I have found myself totally unable, as 
 yet, by any repetition, or illustration, to force this 
 plain thought into my readers 1 heads, that the 
 wealth of nations, as of men, consists in substance, 
 not in ciphers ; and that the real good of all work, 
 and of all commerce, depends on the final intrinsic 
 worth of the thing you make, or get by it. This is a 
 " practical " enough statement, one would think : but 
 the English public has been so possessed by its 
 modern school of economists with the notion that 
 Business is always good, whether it be busy in mis- 
 chief or in benefit ; and that buying and selling are 
 always salutary, whatever the intrinsic worth of what 
 you buy or sell, that it seems impossible to gain so 
 much as a patient hearing for any inquiry respecting 
 the substantial result of our eager modern labor. 
 
 9. I have never felt more checked by the sense of 
 this impossibility than in arranging the heads of the 
 following lectures, which, though delivered at con- 
 siderable intervals of time, and in different places, 
 were not prepared without reference to each other. 
 Their connection would, however, have been made 
 far more distinct, if I had not been prevented, by
 
 INl^ROD UCTION. 1 1 
 
 what I feel to be another great difficulty in address- 
 ing English audiences, from enforcing, with any 
 decision, the common, and to me the most important, 
 part of their subjects. I chiefly desired to question 
 my hearers operatives, merchants, and soldiers, 
 
 as to the ultimate meaning of the business they 
 had in hand ; and to know from them what they 
 expected or intended their manufacture to come to, 
 their selling to come to, and their killing to come 
 to. That appeared the first point needing deter- 
 mination before I could speak to them with any 
 real utility or effect. "You craftsmen salesmen 
 
 swordsmen, do but tell me clearly what you 
 want ; then, if I can say anything to help you, I 
 will ; and if not, I will account to you as I best may 
 for my inability." 
 
 10. But in order to put this question into any terms, 
 one had first of all to face the difficulty to me for 
 the present insuperable, the difficulty of knowing 
 whether to address one's audience as believing, or 
 not believing, in any other world than this. For if 
 you address any average modern English company 
 as believing in an Eternal life, and then endeavor to 
 draw any conclusions, from this assumed belief, as 
 to their present business, they will forthwith tell you 
 that " what you say is very beautiful, but it is not prac- 
 tical." If, on the contrary, you frankly address them 
 as believers in Eternal life, and try to draw any 
 consequences from that unbelief, they immediately 
 hold you for an accursed person, and shake off the 
 dust from their feet at you. 
 
 11. And the more I thought over what I had got
 
 12 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 to say, the less I found I could say it, without some 
 reference to this intangible or intractable question. 
 It made all the difference, in asserting any principle 
 of war, whether one assumed that a discharge of 
 artillery would merely knead down a certain quantity 
 of once living clay into a level line, as in a brick- 
 field ; or whether, out of every separately Christian- 
 named portion of the ruinous heap, there .vent out, 
 into the smoke and dead-fallen air of battle, some 
 astonished condition of soul, unwillingly released. 
 It made all the difference, in speaking of the possible 
 range of commerce, whether one assumed that all 
 bargains related only to visible property or whether 
 property, for the present invisible, but nevertheless 
 real, was elsewhere purchasable on other terms. It 
 made all the difference, in addressing a body of men 
 subject to considerable hardship, and having to find 
 some way out of it whether one could confidently 
 say to them, "My friends, you have only to die, 
 and all will be right ; " or whether one had any secret 
 misgiving that such advice was more blessed to him 
 that gave, than to him that took it. 
 
 12. And therefore the deliberate reader will find, 
 throughout these lectures, a hesitation in driving 
 points home, and a pausing short of conclusions 
 which he .will feel I would fain have come to ; 
 hesitation which arises wholly from this uncertainty 
 of my hearers' temper. For I do not speak, nor 
 have I ever spoken, since the time of first forward 
 youth, in any proselyting temper, as desiring to per- 
 suade any one to believe anything ; but whomsoever 
 1 venture to address, I take for the time his creed as
 
 INTRODUCTION. 13 
 
 / find it, and endeavor to push it into such vital fruit 
 as it seems capable of. Thus, it is a creed with a 
 great part of the existing English people, that they 
 are in possession of a book which tells them, straight 
 from the lips of God, all they ought to do, and need 
 to know. I have read that book, with as much care 
 as most of them, for some forty years ; and am 
 thankful that, on those who trust it, I can press its 
 pleadings. My endeavor has been uniformly to make 
 them trust it more deeply than they do ; trust it, no^ 
 in their own favorite verses only, but in the sum o 
 all ; trust it not as a fetish or talisman, which thej 
 are to be saved by daily repetitions of; but as a 
 Captain's order, to be heard and obeyed at their 
 peril. I was always encouraged by supposing my 
 hearers to hold such belief. To these, if to any, ' 
 once had hope of addressing, with acceptance, words 
 which insisted on the guilt of pride, and the futility 
 of avarice ; from these, if from any, I once expected 
 ratification of a political economy, which asserted 
 that the life was more than the meat, and the body 
 than raiment ; and these, it once seemed to me, 
 I might ask, without being accused of fanaticism, 
 not merely in doctrine of the lips, but in the bestowal 
 of their heart's treasure, to separate themselves from 
 the crowd of whom it is written, "After all these 
 things do the Gentiles seek." 
 
 13. It cannot, however, be assumed, with any sem- 
 blance of reason, that a general audience is now 
 wholly, or even in majority, composed of these reli- 
 gious persons. A large portion must always consist 
 of men who admit no such creed ; or who, at least,
 
 14 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 are inaccessible to appeals founded on it. And as, 
 with the so-called Christian, I desired to plead for 
 honest declaration and fulfilment of his belief in life, 
 with the so-called Infidel, I desired to plead for an 
 honest declaration and fulfilment of his belief in 
 death. The dilemma is inevitable. Men must either 
 hereafter live, or hereafter die ; fate may be bravely 
 met, and conduct wisely ordered, on either expecta- 
 tion; but never in hesitation between ungrasped 
 hope, and unconfronted fear. We usually believe in 
 immortality, so far as to avoid preparation for death ; 
 and in mortality, so far as to avoid preparation for 
 anything after death. Whereas, a wise man will at 
 least hold himself ready for one or other of two 
 events, of which one or other is inevitable ; and will 
 have all things ended in order for his sleep, or left 
 in order for his awakening. 
 
 14. Nor have we any right to call it an ignoble 
 judgment, if he determine to end them in order, as 
 for sleep. A brave belief in life is indeed an enviable 
 state of mind, but, as far as I can discern, an unusual 
 one. I know few Christians so convinced of the splen- 
 dor of the rooms in their Father's house, as to be hap- 
 pier when their friends are called to those mansions, 
 than they would have been if the Queen had sent for 
 them to live at court : nor has the Church's most ardent 
 " desire to depart, and be with Christ," ever cured it 
 cf the singular habit of putting on mourning for 
 every person summoned to such departure. On the 
 contrary, a brave belief in death has been assuredly 
 held by many not ignoble persons, and it is a sign 
 of the last depravity in the Church itself, when it
 
 INTRODUCTION. 1 5 
 
 assumes that such a belief is inconsistent with either 
 purity of character, or energy of hand. The short7 
 ness of life is not, to any rational person, a conclusive 
 reason for wasting the space of it which may be 
 granted him ; nor does the anticipation of death to- 
 morrow suggest, to any one but a drunkard, the ex- 
 pediency of drunkenness to-day. To teach that there 
 is no device in the grave, may indeed make the de- 
 viceless person more contented in his dulness ; but 
 it will make the deviser only more earnest in devising ; 
 nor is human conduct likely, in every case, to be 
 purer, under the conviction that all its evil may in 
 a moment be pardoned, and all its wrong-doing in a 
 moment redeemed ; and that the sigh of repentance, 
 which purges the guilt of the past, will waft the soul 
 into a felicity which forgets its pain, than it may be 
 under the sterner, and to many not unwise minds, 
 more probable, apprehension, that " what a man sow- 
 eth that shall he also reap " or others reap, when 
 he, the living seed of pestilence, walketh no more in 
 darkness, but lies down therein. 
 
 15. But to men for whom feebleness of sight, or 
 bitterness of soul, or the offence given by the conduct 
 of those who claim higher hope, may have rendered 
 this painful creed the only possible one, there is an 
 appeal to be made, more secure than any which can be 
 addressed to happier persons. Might not a preacher, 
 in comfortless but faithful zeal from the poor height 
 of a grave-hillock for his Hill of Mars, and with the 
 Cave of the Eumenides at his side say to them : 
 Hear me, you dying men, who will soon be deaf for- 
 ever. For these others, at your right hand and your
 
 16 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 eft, who look forward to a state of infinite existence, 
 
 n which all their errors will be overruled, and all 
 
 
 
 their faults forgiven ; for these, who, stained and 
 blackened in the battle smoke of mortality, have but 
 to dip themselves for an instant in the font of death, 
 and to rise renewed of plumage, as a dove that is 
 covered with silver, and her feathers like gold : for 
 these, indeed, it may be permissible to waste their 
 numbered moments, through faith in a future of in- 
 numerable hours ; to these, in their weakness, it 
 may be conceded that they should tamper with sin 
 which can only bring forth fruit of righteousness, 
 and profit by the iniquity which, one day, will be 
 remembered no more. In them, it may be no sign 
 of hardness of heart to neglect the poor, over whom 
 they know their Master is watching; and to leave 
 those to perish temporarily, who cannot perish eter- 
 nally. But, for you, there is no such hope, and 
 therefore no such excuse. This fate, which you 
 ordain for the wretched, you believe to be all their 
 inheritance ; you may crush them, before the moth, 
 and they will never rise to rebuke you ; their 
 breath, which fails for lack of food, once expiring, 
 will never be recalled to whisper against you a word 
 of accusing ; they and you, as you think, shall lie 
 down together in the dust, and the worms cover you ; 
 and for them there shall be no consolation, and 
 on you no vengeance, only the question murmured 
 above your grave: "Who shall repay him what he 
 hath done ? " Is it therefore easier for you in your 
 heart to inflict the sorrow for which there is no 
 remedy? Will you take, wantonly, this little all of
 
 INTRODUCTION. 17 
 
 his life from your poor brother, and make his brief 
 hours long to him with pain? Will you be more 
 prompt to the injustice which can never be redressed ; 
 and more niggardly of the mercy which you can bestow 
 but once, and which, refusing, you refuse forever ? 
 
 16. I think better of you, even of the most selfish, 
 than that you would do this, well understanding your 
 act. And for yourselves, it seems to me, the ques- 
 tion becomes not less grave when brought into these 
 curt limits. If your life were but a fever fit, 
 .he madness of a night, whose follies were all to 
 be forgotten in the dawn, it might matter little how 
 you fretted away the sickly hours, what toys you 
 snatched at, or let fall, what visions you followed 
 wistfully with the deceived eyes of sleepless frenzy. 
 Is the earth only an hospital ? are health and heaven 
 to come ? Then play, if you care to play, on the 
 floor of the hospital dens. Knit its straw into 
 what crowns please you ; gather the dust of it for 
 treasure, and die rich in that, though clutching at 
 the black motes in the air with your dying hands ; 
 and yet, it may be well with you. But if this 
 life be no dream, and the world no hospital, but 
 your Palace-inheritance ; if all the peace and 
 power and joy you can ever win, must be won 
 now, and all fruit of victory gathered here, or 
 never ; will you still, throughout the puny totality 
 of your life, weary yourselves in the fire for vanity? 
 If there is no rest which remaineth for you, is there 
 none you might presently take? was this grass 
 of the earth made green for your shroud only, not 
 for your bed? and can you never lie down upon it,
 
 l8 INTRODUCTION. 
 
 but enry under it? The heathen, in their sad- 
 dest hours, thought not so. They knew that life 
 brought its contest, but they expected from it also 
 the crown of all contest : No proud one ! no jew- 
 elled circlet flaming through Heaven above the 
 height of the unmerited throne ; only some few 
 leaves of wild olive, cool to the tired brow, through 
 a few years of peace. It should have been of gold, 
 they thought ; but Jupiter was poor ; this was the 
 best the god could give them. Seeking a better 
 than this, they had known it a mockery. Not in 
 war, not in wealth, not in tyranny, was there any 
 happiness to be found for them only in kindly 
 peace, fruitful and free. The wreath was to be of 
 wild olive, mark you : the tree that grows care- 
 lessly, tufting the rocks with no vivid bloom, no ver- 
 dure of branch ; only with soft snow of blossom, and 
 scarcely fulfilled fruit, mixed with gray leaf and 
 thornset stem ; no fastening of diadem for you but 
 with such sharp embroidery ! But this, such as it is, 
 you may win while yet you live ; type of gray honor 
 and sweet rest.* Free-heartedness, and gracious- 
 ness, and undisturbed trust, and requited love, and 
 the sight of the peace of others, and the ministry to 
 their pain; these, and the blue sky above you, and 
 the sweet waters and flowers of the earth beneath ; 
 and mysteries and presences, innumerable, of living 
 things, may yet be here your riches ; untorment- 
 ing and divine : serviceable for the life that now is \ 
 nor, it may be, without promise of that which is to 
 come. 
 
 y vtKt><
 
 CONTENTS. 
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 PAGE 
 
 WORK . at 
 
 LECTURE II. 
 TRAFFIC 57 
 
 LECTURE III. 
 WAR . 89 
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 THE FUTVRE OF ENGLAND .... 131 
 
 APPENDIX 157 
 
 19
 
 LECTURE I. 
 
 WORK.
 
 LECTURE I. 
 WORK. 
 
 Delivered before the Working Men's Institute, at 
 Camberwell. 
 
 17. MY FRIENDS, I have not come among you 
 to-night to endeavor to give you an entertaining lec- 
 ture ; but to tell you a few plain facts, and ask you 
 a few plain questions. I have seen and known too 
 much of the struggle for life among our laboring 
 population, to feel at ease, under any circumstances, 
 in inviting them to dwell on the trivialities of my own 
 studies ; but, much more, as I meet to-night, for the 
 first time, the members of a working Institute estab- 
 lished in the district in which I have passed the 
 greater part of my life, I am desirous that we should 
 at once understand each other, on graver matters. 
 I would fain tell you, with what feelings, and with 
 what hope, I regard this Institute, as one of many 
 such, now happily established throughout England, 
 as well as in other countries ; and preparing the way 
 for a great change in all the circumstances of indus- 
 trial life ; but of which the success must wholly depend 
 upon our clearly understanding the conditions, and 
 above all, the necessary limits of this change. No 
 teacher can truly promote the cause of education, 
 
 23
 
 24 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE 
 
 until he knows the mode of life for which that eau- 
 cation is to prepare his pupil. And the fact that 
 he is called upon to address you, nominally, as a 
 " Working Class," must compel him, if he is in any 
 wise earnest or thoughtful, to inquire in the outset, 
 on what you yourselves suppose this class distinction 
 has been founded in the past, and must be founded 
 in the future. The manner of the amusement, and 
 the matter of the teaching, which any of us can offer 
 you, must depend wholly on our first understanding 
 from you, whether you think the distinction hereto- 
 fore drawn between working men and others is truly 
 or falsely founded. Do you accept it as it stands ? 
 do you wish it to be modified ? or do you think the 
 object of education is to efface it, and make us forge 
 it forever ? 
 
 1 8. Let me make myself more distinctly under 
 stood. We call this you and I a "Working 
 Men's" Institute, and our college in London, a 
 " Working Men's " College. Now, how do you con- 
 sider that these several institutes differ, or ought to 
 differ, from " idle men's " institutes and " idle men's " 
 colleges ? Or by what other word than " idle" shall 
 I distinguish those whom the happiest and wisest of 
 working men do not object to call the " Upper 
 Classes " ? Are there necessarily upper classes ? 
 necessarily lower ? How much should those always 
 be elevated, how much these always depressed ? 
 And I pray those among my audience who chance to 
 occupy, at present, the higher position, to forgive me 
 what offence there may be in what I am going to say. 
 It is not / who wish to say it. Bitter voices say it ;
 
 WORK. 25 
 
 voices of battle and of famine through all the world, 
 which must be heard some day, whoever keeps silence 
 Neither, as you well know, is it to you specially that 
 I say it. I am sure that most now present know their 
 duties of kindness, and fulfil them, better perhaps 
 than I do mine. But I speak to you as representing 
 your whole class, which errs, I know, chiefly by 
 thoughtlessness, but not therefore the less terribly. 
 Wilful error is limited by the will, but what limit is 
 there to that of which we are unconscious ? 
 
 19. Bear with me, therefore, while I turn to these 
 workmen, and ask them what they think the " upper 
 classes " are, and ought to be, in relation to them. 
 Answer, you workmen who are here, as you would 
 among yourselves, frankly; and tell me how you 
 would have me call your employers. Am I to call 
 them would you think me right in calling them 
 the idle classes ? I think you would feel somewha 
 uneasy, and as if I were not treating my subjec, 
 honestly, or speaking from my heart, if I proceeded 
 in my lecture under the supposition that all rich 
 people were idle. You would be both unjust and 
 unwise if you allowed me to say that ; not less un- 
 just than the rich people who say that all the poor 
 are idle, and will never work if they can help it, or 
 more than they can help. 
 
 20.* For indeed the fact is, that there are idle 
 poor and idle rich ; and there are busy poor and busy 
 rich. Many a beggar is as lazy as if he had ten thou- 
 
 * Note this paragraph. I cannot enough wonder at the want of 
 common charity which blinds so many people to the quite simple truth 
 to which it refers.
 
 26 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 sand a year ; and many a man of large fortune is busier 
 than his errand-boy, and never would think of stop- 
 ping in the street to play marbles. So that, in a large 
 view, the distinction between workers and idlers, as 
 between knaves and honest men, runs through the 
 very heart and innermost nature of men of all ranks 
 and in all positions. There is a working class 
 strong and happy, among both rich and poor ; there 
 is an idle class weak, wicked, and miserable, 
 among both rich and poor. And the worst of the 
 misunderstandings arising between the two orders 
 come of the unlucky fact that the wise of one class 
 [how little wise in this !] habitually contemplate the 
 foolish of the other. If the busy rich people watched 
 and rebuked the idle rich people, all would be right 
 among them : and if the busy poor people watched 
 and rebuked the idle poor people, all would be right 
 among them. But each looks for the faults of the 
 other. A hardworking man of property is particu- 
 larly offended by an idle beggar; and an orderly, 
 but poor, workman is naturally intolerant of the 
 licentious luxury of the rich. And what is severe 
 judgment in the minds of the just men of either class, 
 becomes fierce enmity in the unjust but among the 
 unjust only. None but the dissolute among the poor 
 look upon the rich as their natural enemies, or desire 
 to pillage their houses and divide their property. 
 None but the dissolute among the rich speak in 
 opprobrious terms of the vices and follies of the poor. 
 21. There is, then, no worldly distinction be- 
 tween idle and industrious people ; and I am going 
 to-night to speak only of the industrious. The idle
 
 WORK. 27 
 
 people we will put out of our thoughts at once they 
 are mere nuisances what ought to be done with 
 them, we'll talk of at another time. But there are 
 class distinctions among the industrious themselves ; 
 tremendous distinctions, which rise and fall to 
 every degree in the infinite thermometer of human 
 pain and of human power, distinctions of high and 
 low, of lost and won, to the whole reach of man's 
 soul and body. 
 
 22. These separations we will study, and the 
 laws of them, among energetic men only, who, 
 whether they work or whether they play, put their 
 strength into the work, and their strength into the 
 game; being in the full sense of the word "indus- 
 trious," one way or another, with purpose, or with- 
 out. And these distinctions are mainly four : 
 
 I. Between those who work, and those who play. 
 
 II. Between those who produce the means of life, 
 and those who consume them. 
 
 III. Between those who work with the head, and 
 those who work with the hand. 
 
 IV. Between those who work wisely, and those 
 who work foolishly. 
 
 For easier memory, let us say we are going to op- 
 pose, in our examination, 
 I. Work to play; 
 II. Production to consumption ; 
 
 III. Head to hand ; and, 
 
 IV. Sense to nonsense. 
 
 23. I. First, then, of the distinction between 
 the classes who work and the classes who play. Of 
 course we must agree upon a definition of these
 
 28 THE CROWN OF WILD OLJVE. 
 
 terms, work and play, before going farther 
 Now, roughly, not with vain subtlety of definition, 
 but for plain use of the words, " play" is an exertion 
 of body or mind, made to please ourselves, and with 
 no determined end; and work is a thing done be- 
 cause it ought to be done, and with a determined end. 
 You play, as you call it, at cricket, for instance. That 
 is as hard work as anything else ; but it amuses you, 
 and it has no result but the amusement. If it were 
 done as an ordered form of exercise, for health's sake, 
 it would become work directly. So, in like manner, 
 whatever we do to please ourselves, and only for the 
 sake of the pleasure, not for an ultimate object, is 
 "play," the "pleasing thing," not the useful thing, 
 jrlay may be useful in a secondary sense (nothing is 
 Jideed more useful or necessary) ; but the use of it 
 depends on its being spontaneous. 
 
 24. Let us, then, inquire together what sort of 
 games the playing class in England spend their lives 
 in playing at. 
 
 The first of all English games is making money. 
 That is an all-absorbing game ; and we knock each 
 other down oftener in playing at that than at foot- 
 ball, or any other roughest sport ; and it is absolutely 
 without purpose ; no one who engages heartily in 
 that game ever knows why. Ask a great money- 
 maker what he wants to do with his money he 
 never knows. He doesn't make it to do anything 
 with it. He gets it only that he may get it. " What 
 will you make of what you have got ? " you ask. 
 " Well, I'll get more," he says. Just as, at cricket, 
 you get more runs. There's no use in the runs, but
 
 WORK. 9 
 
 to get more of them than other people is the game. 
 And there's no use in the money, but to have more 
 of it than other people is the game. So all that 
 great foul city of London there, rattling, growling, 
 smoking, stinking, a ghastly heap of fermenting 
 brickwork, pouring out poison at every pore, you 
 fancy it is a city of work? Not a street of it ! It is 
 a great city of play ; very nasty play, and very hard 
 play, but still play. It is only Lord's cricket ground 
 without the turf, a huge billiard table without the 
 cloth, and with pockets as deep as the bottomless pit: 
 but mainly a billiard table, after all. 
 
 25. Well, the first great English game is this 
 playing at counters. It differs from the rest in that it 
 appears always to be producing money, while every 
 other game is expensive. But it does not always 
 produce money. There's a great difference between 
 " winning" money and " making" it ; a great differ- 
 ence between getting it out of another man's pocket 
 into ours, or filling both. 
 
 26. Our next great English games, however, 
 hunting and shooting, are costly altogether ; and how 
 much we are fined for them annually in land, horses, 
 gamekeepers, and game laws, and the resultant de- 
 moralization of ourselves, our children, and our retain- 
 ers, and all else that accompanies that beautiful and 
 special English game, I will not endeavor to count 
 now : but note only that, except for exercise, this is 
 not merely a useless game, but a deadly one, to all 
 connected with it. For through horse-racing, you 
 get every form of what the higher classes everywhere 
 call " Play," in distinction from all other plays ; that
 
 3 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 is, gambling; and through game-preserving, you get 
 also some curious laying out of ground ; that beau- 
 tiful arrangement of dwelling-house for man and 
 beast, by which we have grouse and black-cock 
 so many brace to the acre, and men and women 
 
 so many brace to the garret. I often wonder what 
 the angelic builders and surveyors the angelic 
 builders who build the " many mansions" up above 
 there ; and the angelic surveyors, who measured 
 that four-square city with their measuring reeds 
 I wonder what they think, or are supposed to think v 
 of the laying out of ground by this nation.* 
 
 27. Then, next to the gentlemen's game of hunt- 
 ing, we must put the ladies' game of dressing. It is 
 not the cheapest of games. And I wish I could tell 
 you what this "play" costs, altogether, in England, 
 France, and Russia annually. But it is a pretty game, 
 and on certain terms I like it; nay, I don't see it 
 played quite as much as I would fain have it. You 
 ladies like to lead the fashion : by all means lead it 
 
 lead it thoroughly, lead it far enough. Dress 
 yourselves nicely, and dress everybody else nicely. 
 Lead the fashions for the poor first ; make them look 
 well, and you yourselves will look, in ways of which 
 you have now no conception, all the better. The 
 fashions you have set for some time among your 
 peasantry are not pretty ones ; their doublets are too 
 irregularly slashed, or as Chaucer calls it "all to- 
 
 * The subject is pursued at some length in Fors Clavigera for 
 March, 1873 ; but I have not yet properly stated the opposite side of 
 the question nor insisted on the value of uncultivated land to the 
 national health of body and mind.
 
 WORK. 3* 
 
 slittered," though not for " queintise," and the wind 
 blows too frankly through them. 
 
 28. Then there are other games, wild enough, as 
 I could show you if I had time. 
 
 There's playing at literature, and playing at art ; 
 very different, both, from working at literature, or 
 working at art, but I've no time to speak of these. I 
 pass to the greatest of all the play of plays, the 
 great gentlemen's game, which ladies like them best 
 to play at, the game of War. It is entrancingly 
 pleasant to the imagination ; we dress for it, how- 
 ever, more finely than for any other sport ; and go 
 out to it, not merely in scarlet, as to hunt, but in 
 scarlet and gold, and all manner of fine colors ; of 
 course we could fight better in gray, and without 
 feathers ; but all nations have agreed that it is good 
 to be well dressed at this play. Then the bats and 
 balls are very costly ; our English and French bats, 
 with the balls and wickets, even those which we 
 don't make any use of, costing, I suppose, now, 
 about fifteen millions of money annually to each 
 nation ; all which you know is paid for by hard 
 laborer's work in the furrow and furnace. A costly 
 game ! not to speak of its consequences ; I will say 
 at present nothing of these. The mere immediate 
 cost of all these plays is what I want you to con- 
 sider; they are all paid for in deadly work some- 
 where, as many of us know too well. The jewel- 
 cutter, whose sight fails over the diamonds ; the 
 weaver, whose arm fails over the web ; the iron- 
 forger, whose breath fails before the furnace they 
 know what work is they, who have all the work,
 
 32 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 and none of the play, except a kind they have named 
 for themselves down in the black north country, 
 where "play" means being laid up by sickness. It 
 is a pretty example for philologists, of varying dia- 
 lect, this change in the sense of the word, as used 
 in the black country of Birmingham, and the red 
 and black country of Baden Baden. Yes,' gentle- 
 men, and gentlewomen, of England, who think " one 
 moment unamused a misery, not made for feeble 
 man," this is what you have brought the word 
 "play" to mean, in the heart of merry England! 
 You may have your fluting and piping; but there 
 are sad children sitting in the market-place, who 
 indeed cannot say to you, " We have piped unto 
 you, and ye have not danced : " but eternally shall 
 say to you, " We have mourned unto you, and ye 
 have not lamented." 
 
 29. This, then, is the first distinction between 
 the "upper and lower" classes. And this is one 
 which is by no means necessary ; which indeed must, 
 in process of good time, be by all honest men's consent 
 abolished. Men will be taught that an existence of 
 play, sustained by the blood of other creatures, is a 
 good existence for gnats and jelly-fish ; but not for 
 men : that neither days, nor lives, can be made holy 
 or noble by doing nothing in them : that the best 
 prayer at the beginning of a day is that we may not 
 lose its moments ; and the best grace before meat, 
 the consciousness that we have justly earned our 
 dinner. And when we have this much of plain 
 Christianity preached to us again, and cease to trans- 
 late the strict words, " Son, go work to-day in my
 
 WORK. 33 
 
 vineyard," into the dainty ones: "Baby, go play 
 to-day in my vineyard," we shall all be workers, in 
 one way or another ; and this much at least of the 
 distinction between "upper" and "lower" forgotten. 
 
 30. II. I pass then to our second distinction; 
 between the rich and poor, between Dives and Laz- 
 arus, distinction which exists more sternly, I sup- 
 pose, in this day, than ever in the world, Pagan or 
 Christian, till now. Consider, for instance, what the 
 general tenor of such a paper as the Morning Post 
 implies of delicate luxury among the rich ; and then 
 read this chance extract from it : 
 
 " Yesterday morning, at eight o'clock, a woman, 
 passing a dung-heap in the stone-yard near the re- 
 cently erected almshouses in Shadwell Gap, High 
 Street, Shadwell, called the attention of a Thames 
 police-constable to a man in a sitting position on the 
 dung-heap, and said she was afraid he was dead. 
 Her fears proved to be true. The wretched creature 
 appeared to have been dead several hours. He had 
 perished of cold and wet, and the rain had been beat- 
 ing down on him all night. The deceased was a 
 bone-picker. He was in the lowest stage of poverty, 
 poorly clad, and half-starved. The police had fre- 
 quently driven him away from the stone-yard, between 
 sunset and sunrise, and told him to go home. He 
 selected a most desolate spot for his wretched death. 
 A penny and some bones were found in his pcckets. 
 The deceased was between fifty and sixty years of 
 age. Inspector Roberts, of the K division, has given 
 directions for inquiries to be made at the lodging- 
 houses respecting the deceased, to ascertain his idea-
 
 34 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 tity if possible." Morning Post, November 25, 
 1864. 
 
 Compare the statement of the finding bones in his 
 pocket with the following, from the Telegraph of 
 January 16 of this year : 
 
 "Again, the dietary scale for adult and juvenile 
 paupers was drawn up by the most conspicuous politi- 
 cal economists in England. It is low in quantity, 
 but it is sufficient to support nature ; yet within ten 
 years of the passing of the Poor Law Act, we heard 
 of the paupers in the Andover Union gnawing the 
 scraps of putrH flesh and sucking the marrow from 
 the bones of horses which they were employed to 
 crush." 
 
 You see my reason for thinking that our Lazarus of 
 Christianity has some advantage over the Jewish one. 
 Jewish Lazarus expected, or at least prayed, to be fed 
 with crumbs from the rich man's table ; but our 
 Lazarus is fed with crumbs from the dog's table. 
 
 31. Now this distinction between rich and poor 
 rests on two bases. Within its proper limits, on a 
 basis which is lawful and everlastingly necessary ; 
 beyond them, on a basis unlawful, and everlastingly 
 corrupting the frame-work of society. The lawful basis 
 of wealth is, that a man who works should be paid the 
 fair value of his work ; and that if he does not choose 
 to spend it to-day, he should have free leave to keep 
 it, and spend it to-morrow. Thus, an industrious 
 man working daily, and laying by daily, attains at 
 last the possession of an accumulated sum of wealth, 
 to which he has absolute right. The idle person who 
 will not work, and the wasteful person who lays noth-
 
 WORK. 35 
 
 Ing by, at the end of the same time will be doubly 
 poor poor in possession, and dissolute in moral 
 habit ; and he will then naturally covet the money 
 which the other has saved. And if he is then allowed 
 to attack the other, and rob him of his well-earned 
 wealth, there is no more any motive for saving, or 
 any reward for good conduct ; and all society is 
 thereupon dissolved, or exists only in systems of 
 rapine. Therefore the first necessity of social life is 
 the clearness of national conscience in enforcing the 
 law that he should keep who has JUSTLY EARNED. 
 32. That law, I say, is the proper basis of dis- 
 tinction between rich and poor. But there is also a 
 false basis of distinction ; namely, the power held 
 over those who are earning wealth by those who 
 already possess it, and only use it to gam more. 
 There will be always a number of men who would 
 fain set themselves to the accumulation of wealth as 
 the sole object of their lives. Necessarily, that class 
 of men is an uneducated class, inferior in intellect, 
 and more or less cowardly. It is physically impossi- 
 ble for a well-educated, intellectual, or brave man to 
 make money the chief object of his thoughts ; just 
 as it is for him to make his dinner the principal object 
 of them. All healthy people like their dinners, but 
 their dinner is not the main object of their lives. So 
 all healthily-minded people like making money 
 ought to like it, and to enjoy the sensation of win- 
 ning it ; but the main object of their life is not 
 money ; it is something better than money. A good 
 soldier, for instance, mainly wishes to do his fighting 
 well. He is glad of his pay very properly so, and
 
 36 THE CROWN Of WILD OLIVE. 
 
 justly grumbles when you keep him ten years without 
 it still, his main notion of life is to win battles, 
 not to be paid for winning them. So of clergymen. 
 They like pew-rents, and baptismal fees, of course; 
 but yet, if they are brave and well-educated, the pew- 
 rent is not the sole object of their lives, and the bap- 
 tismal fee is not the sole purpose of the baptism ; 
 the clergyman's object is essentially to baptize and 
 preach, not to be paid for preaching. So of doctors. 
 They like fees no doubt, ought to like them ; yet if 
 they are brave and well-educated, the entire object of 
 their lives is not fees. They, on the whole, desire to 
 cure the sick ; and, if they are good doctors, and 
 the choice were fairly put to them, would rather 
 cure their patient and lose their fee, than kill him, 
 and get it. And so with all other brave and rightly- 
 trained men ; their work is first, their fee second 
 very important always, but still second. But in every 
 nation, as I said, there are a vast class who are ill- 
 educated, cowardly, and more Or less stupid. And 
 with these people, just as certainly the fee is first, 
 and the work second, as with brave people the work 
 is first and the fee second. And this is no small 
 distinction. It is between life and death in a man, 
 between heaven and hell for him. You cannot 
 serve two masters ; you must serve one or other. 
 If your work is first with you, and your fee second, 
 work is your master, and the lord of work, who is 
 God. But if your fee is first with you, and your work 
 second, fee is your master, and the lord of fee, who is 
 the Devil ; and not only the Devil, but the lowest of 
 devils the " least erected fiend that fell." So there
 
 WORK. 37 
 
 you have it in brief terms ; Work first you are God's 
 servants; Fee first you are the Fiend's. And it 
 makes a difference, now and ever, believe me, 
 whether you serve Him who has on His vesture and 
 thigh written, " King of Kings," and whose service 
 is perfect freedom ; or him on whose vesture and 
 thigh the name is written, " Slave of Slaves," and 
 whose service is perfect slavery. 
 
 33. However, in every nation there are, and must 
 always be, a certain number of these Fiend's servants, 
 who have it principally for the object of their lives to 
 make money. They are always, as I said, more or 
 less stupid, and cannot conceive of anything else so 
 nice as money. Stupidity is always the basis of the 
 Judas bargain. We do great injustice to Iscariot, in 
 thinking him wicked above all common wickedness. 
 He was only a common money-lover, and, like all 
 money-lovers, did not understand Christ ; could not 
 make out the worth of Him, or meaning of Him. 
 He never thought He would be killed. He was horror- 
 struck when he found that Christ would be killed ; 
 threw his money away instantly, and hanged himself. 
 How many of our present money-seekers, think you, 
 would have the grace to hang themselves, whoever 
 was killed? But Judas was a common, selfish, 
 muddle-headed, pilfering fellow ; his hand always in 
 the bag of the poor, not caring for them. Helpless 
 to understand Christ, yet believed in Him, much 
 more than most of us do ; had seen Him do miracles, 
 thought He was quite strong enough to shift for Him- 
 self, and he, Judas, might as well make his own little 
 bye-perquisites out of the affair. Christ would come
 
 38 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 out of it well enough, and he have his thirty pieces. 
 Now, that is the money-seeker's idea, all over the 
 world. He doesn't hate Christ, but can't understand 
 Him doesn't care for Him sees no good in that 
 benevolent business ; makes his own little job out 
 of it at all events, come what will. And thus, out of 
 every mass of men, you have a certain number of bag- 
 men your " fee-first" men, whose main object is to 
 make money. And they do make it make it in all 
 sorts of unfair ways, chiefly by the weight and force 
 of money itself, or what is called the power of capi- 
 tal ; that is to say, the power which money, once 
 obtained, has over the labor of the poor, so that the 
 capitalist can take all its produce to himself, except 
 the laborer's food. That is the modern Judas's way 
 of "carrying the bag," and "bearing what is put 
 therein." 
 
 34. Nay, but (it is asked) how is that an unfair 
 advantage? Has not the man who has worked for the 
 money a right to use it as he best can? No, in this 
 respect, money is now exactly what mountain prom- 
 ontories over public roads were in old times. The 
 barons fought for them fairly : the strongest and 
 cunningest got them ; then fortified them, and made 
 everyone who passed below pay toll. Well, capital 
 now is exactly what crags were then. Men fight fairly 
 (we will, at least, grant so much, though it is more 
 than we ought) for their money ; but, once having got 
 it, the fortified millionaire can make everybody who 
 passes below pay toll to his million, and build another 
 tower of his money castle. And I can tell you, the 
 poor vagrants by the roadside suffer now quite as
 
 WORK. 39 
 
 much from the bag-baron, as ever they did from the 
 crag-baron. Bags and crags have just the same result 
 on rags. I have not time, however, to-night to show 
 you in how many ways the power of capital is unjust ; 
 but remember this one great principle you will 
 find it unfailing that whenever money is the prin- 
 cipal object of life with either man or nation, it 
 is both got ill, and spent ill ; and does harm both 
 in the getting and spendimg ; but when it is not the 
 principal object, it and all other things will be well 
 got and well spent. And here is the test, with 
 every man, of whether money is the principal object 
 with him, or not. If in mid-life he could pause and 
 say, " Now I have enough to live upon, I'll live upon 
 it ; and having well earned it, I will also well spend it, 
 and go out of the world poor, as I came into it," 
 then money is not principal with him ; but if, having 
 enough to live upon in the manner befitting his char- 
 acter and rank, he still wants to make more, and to 
 die rich, then money is the principal object with him, 
 and it becomes a curse to himself, and generally to 
 those who spend it after him. For you know it must 
 be spent some day ; the only question is whether the 
 man who makes it shall spend it, or some one else, 
 and generally it is better for the maker to spend it, 
 for he will know best its value and use. And if a 
 man does not choose thus to spend his money, he 
 must either hoard it or lend it, and the worst thing 
 he can generally do is to lend it ; for borrowers are 
 nearly always ill-spenders, and it is with lent money 
 that all evil is mainly done, and all unjust war pro- 
 tracted.
 
 40 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 35. For observe what the real fact is, respecting 
 loans to foreign military governments, and how strange 
 it is. If your little boy came to you to ask for money 
 to spend in squibs and crackers, you would think twice 
 before you gave it him, and you would have some idea 
 that it was wasted, when you saw it fly off in fireworks, 
 even though he did no mischief with it. But the 
 Russian children and Austrian children come to you, 
 borrowing money, not to spend in innocent squibs, 
 but in cartridges and bayonets to attack you in India 
 with, and to keep down all noble life in Italy with, 
 and to murder Polish women and children with ; and 
 that you will give at once, because they pay you inter- 
 est for it. Now, in order to pay you that interest, 
 they must tax every working peasant in their domin- 
 ions ; and on that work you live. You therefore at 
 once rob the Austrian peasant, assassinate or banish 
 the Polish peasant, and you live on the produce of the 
 theft, and the bribe for the assassination ! That is the 
 broad fact that is the practical meaning of your 
 foreign loans, and of most large interest of money ; 
 and then you quarrel with Bishop Colenso, forsooth, 
 as if ^denied the Bible, and you believed it! though, 
 every deliberate act of your lives is a new defiance of 
 its primary orders. 
 
 36. III. I must pass, however, now to our third 
 condition of separation, between the men who work 
 with the hand and those who work with the head. 
 
 And here we have at last an inevitable distinction. 
 There must be work done by the arms, or none of us 
 could live. There must be work done by the brains, 
 or the life we get would not be worth having. And
 
 WORK. 41 
 
 the same men cannot do both. There is rough 
 work to be done, and rough men must do it ; there 
 is gentle work to be done, and gentlemen must do it j 
 and it is physically impossible that one class should 
 do, or divide, the work of the other. And it is of 
 no use to try to conceal this sorrowful fact by fine 
 words, and to talk to the workman about the honor- 
 ableness of manual labor, and the dignity of human- 
 ity. Rough work, honorable or not, takes the life 
 out of us ; and the man who has been heaving clay 
 out of a ditch all day, or driving an express train 
 against the north wind all night, or holding a col- 
 lier's helm in a gale on a lee-shore, or whirling 
 white-hot iron at a furnace mouth, is not the same 
 man at the end of his day, or night, as one who 
 has been sitting in a quiet room, with everything 
 comfortable about him, reading books, or classing 
 butterflies, or painting pictures.* If it is any com- 
 fort to you to be told that the rough work is the 
 more honorable of the two, I should be sorry to take 
 that much of consolation from you ; and in some 
 sense I need not. The rough work is at all events 
 real, honest, and, generally, though not always, use- 
 ful ; while the fine work is, a great deal of it, foolish 
 and false as well as fine, and therefore dishonorable : 
 but when both kinds are equally well and worthily 
 done, the head's is the noble work, and the hand's 
 the ignoble. Therefore, of all hand work whatsoever, 
 necessary for the maintenance of life, those old words, 
 "In the sweat of thy face thou shalt eat bread," in- 
 dicate that the inherent nature of it is one of calamity : 
 
 * Compare 57.
 
 42 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 and that the ground, cursed for our sake, casts also 
 some shadow of degradation into our contest with 
 its thorn and its thistle ; so that all nations have 
 held their days honorable, or " holy," and consti- 
 tuted them "holydays" or " holidays," by making 
 them days of rest ; and the promise, which, among 
 all our distant hopes, seems to cast the chief bright- 
 ness over death, is that blessing of the dead who 
 die in the Lord, that " they rest from their labors, 
 and their works do follow them." 
 
 37. And thus the perpetual question and contest 
 must arise, who is to do this rough work ? and how is 
 the worker of it to be comforted, redeemed, and 
 rewarded? and what kind of play should he have, 
 and what rest, in this world, sometimes, as well as 
 in the next? Well, my good laborious friends, these 
 questions will take a little time to answer yet. 
 They must be answered : all good men are occupied 
 with them, and all honest thinkers. There's grand 
 head work doing about them ; but much must be 
 discovered, and much attempted in vain, before any- 
 thing decisive can be told you. Only note these few 
 particulars, which are already sure. 
 
 38. As to the distribution of the hard work. None 
 of us, or very few of us, do either hard or soft work 
 because we think we ought ; but because we have 
 chanced to fall into the way of it, and cannot help 
 ourselves. Now, nobody does anything well that 
 they cannot help doing : work is only done well when 
 it is done with a will ; and no man has a thoroughly 
 sound will unless he knows he is doing what he should, 
 and is in his place. And, depend upon it, all work
 
 WORK. 43 
 
 must be done at last, not in a disorderly, scrambling, 
 doggish way, but in an ordered, soldierly, human 
 way a lawful or "loyal" way. Men are enlisted 
 for the labor that kills the labor of war : they are 
 counted, trained, fed, dressed, and praised for that. 
 Let them be enlisted also for the labor that feeds : 
 let them be counted, trained, fed, dressed, praised for 
 that. Teach the plough exercise as carefully as you 
 do the sword exercise, and let the officers of troops 
 of life be held as much gentlemen as the officers of 
 troops of death ; and all is done : but neither this, 
 nor any other right thing, can be accomplished 
 you can't even see your way to it unless, first of 
 all, both servant and master are resolved that, come 
 what will of it, they will do each ether justice. 
 
 39. People are perpetually squabbling about what 
 will be best to do, or easiest to do, or advisablest 
 to do, or profitablest to do ; but they never, so 
 far as I hear them talk, ever ask what it is just 
 to do. And it is the law of heaven that you 
 shall not be able to judge what is wise or easy, 
 unless you are first resolved to judge what is just, 
 and to do it. That is the one thing constantly re- 
 iterated by our Master the order of all others that is 
 given oftenest " Do justice and judgment." That's 
 your Bible order; that's the "Service of God," 
 not praying nor psalm-singing. You are told, 
 indeed, to sing psalms when you are merry, and to 
 pray when you need anything ; and, by the perverse- 
 ness of the Evil Spirit, we get to think that praying 
 and psalm-singing are "service." If a child finds 
 itself in want of anything, it runs in and asks its
 
 44 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 father for it does it call that doing its father a 
 service? If it begs for a toy or a piece of cake 
 does it call that serving its father? That, with God, 
 is prayer, and He likes to hear it : He likes you to 
 ask Him for cake when you want it ; but He doesn't 
 call that "serving Him." Begging is not serving: 
 God likes mere beggars as little as you do He likes 
 honest servants, not beggars. So when a child 
 loves its father very much, and is very happy, it may 
 sing little songs about him ; but it doesn't call that 
 serving its father; neither is singing songs about 
 God, serving God. It is enjoying ourselves, if it's 
 anything; most probably it is nothing; but if it's 
 anything, it is serving ourselves, not God. And yet 
 we are impudent enough to call our beggings and 
 chauntings "Divine service :" we say " Divine ser- 
 vice will be ' performed ' " (that's our word the form 
 of it gone through) "at so-and-so o'clock." Alas! 
 unless we perform Divine service in every willing 
 act of life, we never perform it at all. The one 
 Divine work the one ordered sacrifice is to do 
 justice ; and it is the last we are ever inclined to do. 
 Anything rather than that ! As much charity as you 
 choose, but no justice. " Nay," you will say, 
 "charity is greater than justice." Yes, it is greater ; 
 it is the summit of justice it is the temple of 
 which justice is the foundation. But you can't have 
 the top without the bottom ; you cannot build upon 
 charity. You must build upon justice, for this main 
 reason, that you have not, at first, charity to build 
 with. It is the last reward of good work. Do jus- 
 tice to your brother (you can do that, whether you
 
 WORK. 45 
 
 .ove him or not), and you will come to love him. 
 But do injustice to him, because you don't love him ; 
 and you will come to hate him. 
 
 40. It is all very fine to think you can build upon 
 charity to begin with ; but you will find all you will 
 have got to begin with, begins at home, and is essen- 
 tially love of yourself. You well-to-do people, for 
 instance, who are here to-night, will go to " Divine 
 service " next Sunday, all nice and tidy, and your little 
 children will have their tight little Sunday boots on, 
 and lovely little Sunday feathers in their hats ; and 
 you'll think, complacently and piously, how lovely 
 they look going to church in their best ! So they do : 
 and you love them heartily, and you like sticking feath- 
 ers in their hats. That's all right : that is charity ; 
 but it is charity beginning at home. Then you will 
 come to the poor little crossing-sweeper, got up also, 
 it, in its Sunday dress, the dirtiest rags it has, 
 that it may beg the better : you will give it a 
 penny, and think how good you are, and how good 
 God is to prefer your child to the crossing-sweeper 
 and bestow on it a divine hat, feathers, and boots, 
 and the pleasure of giving pence instead of begging 
 for them. That's charity going abroad. But what 
 does Justice say, walking and watching near us? 
 Christian Justice has been strangely mute, and seem- 
 ingly blind ; and, if not blind, decrepit, this many a 
 day: she keeps her accounts still, however quite 
 steadily doing them at nights, carefully, with her 
 bandage off, and through acutest spectacles (the only 
 modern scientific invention she cares about). You 
 must put your ear down ever so close to her lips to
 
 46 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE- 
 
 hear her speak ; and then you will start at what she 
 first whispers, for it will certainly be, " Why shouldn't 
 that little crossing-sweeper have a feather on its head, 
 as well as your own child?" Then you may ask 
 Justice, in an amazed manner, " How she can pos- 
 sibly be so foolish as to think children could sweep 
 crossings with feathers on their heads ? " Then you 
 stoop again, and Justice says still in her dull, stupid 
 way "Then, why don't you, every other Sunday, 
 leave your child to sweep the crossing, and take the 
 little sweeper to church in a hat and feather?" 
 Mercy on us (you think), what will she say next? 
 And you answer, of course, that "you don't, because 
 every body ought to remain content in the position 
 in which Providence has placed them." Ah, my 
 friends, that's the gist of the whole question. Did 
 Providence put them in that position, or did you ? 
 You knock a man into a ditch, and then you tell him 
 to remain content in the " position in which Provi- 
 dence has placed him." That's modern Christianity. 
 You say " We did not knock him into the ditch." 
 We shall never know what you have done or left 
 undone, until the question with us every morning, is 
 not how to do the gainful thing, but how to do the 
 just thing during the day ; nor until we are at least 
 so far on the way to being Christian, as to acknowl- 
 edge that maxim of the poor half-way Mahometan, 
 " One hour in the execution of justice is worth seventy 
 years of prayer." 
 
 41. Supposing, then, we have it determined with 
 appropriate justice, who is to do the hand work, the 
 next questions must be how the hand-workers are to
 
 WORK. 47 
 
 be paid, and how they are to be refreshed, and what 
 play they are to have. Now, the possible quantity 
 of play depends on the possible quantity of pay ; 
 and the quantity of pay is not a matter for considera- 
 tion to hand-workers only, but to all workers. Gen- 
 erally, good, useful work, whether of the hand or 
 head, is either ill-paid, or not paid at all. I don't 
 say it should be so, but it always is so. People, as 
 a rule, only pay for being amused or being cheated, 
 not for being served. Five thousand a year to your 
 talker, and a shilling a day to your fighter, digger, 
 and thinker, is the rule. None of the best head 
 work in art, literature, or science, is ever paid for. 
 How much do you think Homer got for his Iliad? or 
 Dante for his Paradise ? only bitter bread and salt, 
 and going up and down other people's stairs. In 
 science, the man who discovered the telescope, and 
 first saw heaven, was paid with a dungeon ; the man 
 who invented the microscope, and first saw earth, 
 died of starvation, driven from his home. It is in- 
 deed very clear that God means all thoroughly good 
 work and talk to be done for nothing. Baruch, the 
 scribe, did not get a penny a line for writing Jere- 
 miah's second roll for him, I fancy ; and St. Stephen 
 did not get bishop's pay for that long sermon of his 
 to the Pharisees ; nothing but stones. For, indeed, 
 .hat is the world-father's proper payment. So surely 
 as any of the world's children work for the world's 
 good, honestly, with head and heart ; and come to it, 
 saying, " Give us a little bread, just to keep the life 
 in us," the world-father answers them, " No, my 
 children, not bread ; a stone, if you like, or as many
 
 48 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 as you need, to keep you quiet and tell to future ages, 
 how unpleasant you made yourself to the one you 
 lived in." 
 
 42. But the hand-workers are not so ill off as all 
 this comes to. The worst that can happen to you is 
 to break stones ; not be broken by them. And for 
 you there will come a time for better payment ; we 
 shall pay people not quite so much for talking in Par- 
 liament and doing nothing, as for holding their tongues 
 out of it and doing something ; we shall pay our plough- 
 man a little more, and our lawyer a little less, and so 
 on : but, at least, we may even now take care that 
 whatever work is done shall be fully paid for ; and the 
 man who does it paid for it, not somebody else ; and 
 that it shall be done in an orderly, soldierly, well- 
 guided, wholesome way, under good captains and lieu- 
 tenants of labor ; and that it shall have its appointed 
 times of rest, and enough of them ; and that in those 
 times the play shall be wholesome play, not in theatri 
 cal gardens, with tin flowers and gas sunshine, and 
 girls dancing because of their misery ; but in true 
 gardens, with real flowers, and real sunshine, and 
 children dancing because of their gladness ; so that 
 truly the streets shall be full (the " streets," mind you, 
 not the gutters) of children, playing in the midst 
 thereof. We may take care that working-men shall 
 have at least as good books to read as anybody else, 
 when they've time to read them ; and as comfortable 
 firesides to sit at as anybody else, when they've time 
 to sit at them. This, I think, can be managed for you, 
 my laborious friends, in the good time. 
 
 43. IV. 1 must go on, however, to our last head,
 
 WORK. 49 
 
 concerning ourselves all, as workers. What is wise 
 work, and what is foolish work? What the difference 
 between sense and nonsense, in daily occupation? 
 
 There are three tests of wise work : that it must 
 be honest, useful, and cheerful. 
 
 1. It is HONEST. I hardly know anything more 
 strange than that you recognize honesty in play, and 
 you do not in work. In your lightest games, you 
 have always some one to see what you call " fair- 
 play." In boxing, you must hit fair ; in racing, start 
 fair. Your English watchword is " fair-//ay," your 
 English hatred, " foul-/V#/." Did it never strike you 
 that you wanted another watchword also, " fair- 
 work," and another and bitterer hatred " foul- 
 ivork " ? Your prize-fighter has some honor in him 
 yet ; and so have the men in the ring round him : 
 they will judge him to lose the match, by foul hitting. 
 But your prize-merchant gains his match by foul sell- 
 ing, and no one cries out against that. You drive a 
 gambler out of the gambling-room who loads dice, 
 but you leave a tradesman in flourishing business 
 who loads scales ! For observe, all dishonest dealing 
 is loading scales. What difference does it make 
 whether I get short weight, adulterate substance, or 
 dishonest fabric ? unless that flaw in the substance 
 or fabric is the worse evil of the two. Give me short 
 measure of food, and I only lose by you ; but give me 
 adulterate food, and 1 die by you. Here, then, is 
 your chief duty, you workmen and tradesmen to 
 be true to yourselves, and to us who would help you. 
 We can do nothing for you, nor you for yourselves, 
 without honesty. Get that, you get all ; without that,
 
 $0 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 your suffrages, your reforms, your free-trade meas- 
 ures, your institutions of science, are all in vain. It 
 is useless to put your heads together, if you can't put 
 your hearts together. Shoulder to shoulder, right 
 hand to right hand, among yourselves, and no wrong 
 hand to anybody else, and you'll win the world yet. 
 
 44. II. Then, secondly, wise work is USEFUL. 
 No man minds, or ought to mind, its being hard, if 
 only it comes to something ; but when it is hard, and 
 comes to nothing ; when all our bees 1 business turns 
 to spiders' ; and for honey-comb we have only result- 
 ant cobweb, blown away by the next breeze that is 
 the cruel thing for the worker. Yet do we ever ask 
 ourselves, personally, or even nationally, whether our 
 work is coming to anything or not? We don't care 
 to keep what has been nobly done ; still less do we 
 care to do nobly what others would keep ; and, least 
 of all, to make the work itself useful instead of deadly 
 to the doer, so as to exert his life indeed, but not to 
 waste it. Of all wastes, the greatest waste that you 
 can commit is the waste of labor. If you went down 
 in the morning into your dairy, and found that 
 your youngest child had got down before you, and 
 that he and the cat were at play together, and that he 
 had poured out all the cream on the floor for the cat 
 to lap up, you would scold the child, and be sorry 
 the cream was wasted. But if, instead of wooden 
 bowls with milk in them, there are golden bowls with 
 human life in them, and instead of the cat to play 
 with the devil to play with ; and you yourself the 
 player; and instead of leaving that golden bowl to 
 be broken by God at the fountain, you break it in the
 
 WORK. 51 
 
 dust yourself, and pour the human life out on the 
 ground for the fiend to lick up that is no 
 waste ! 
 
 45. What! you perhaps think, "to waste the 
 labor of men is not to kill them." Is it not? I 
 should like to know how you could kill them more 
 utterly kill them with second deaths, seventh 
 deaths, hundredfold deaths? It is the slightest way 
 of killing to stop a man's breath. Nay, the hunger, 
 and the cold, and the whistling bullets our love- 
 messengers between nation and nation have 
 brought pleasant messages to many a man before 
 now ; orders of sweet release, and leave at last to go 
 where he will be most welcome and most happy. At 
 the worst you do but shorten his life, you do not cor- 
 rupt his life. But if you put him to base labor, if you 
 bind his thoughts, if you blind his eyes, if you blunt 
 his hopes, if you steal his joys, if you stunt his body, 
 and blast his soul, and at last leave him not so much 
 as strength to reap the poor fruit of his degradation, 
 but gather that for yourself, and dismiss him to the 
 grave, when you have done with him, having, so far 
 as in you lay, made the walls of that grave everlast- 
 ing ; (though, indeed, I fancy the goodly bricks of 
 some of our family vaults will hold closer in the 
 resurrection day than the sod over the laborer's 
 head) , this you think is no waste and no sin ! 
 
 46. III. Then, lastly, wise work is CHEERFUL, 
 as a child's work is. And now I want you to take 
 one thought home with you, and let it stay with 
 you. 
 
 Everybody in this room has been taught to pray
 
 52 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 daily, " Thy kingdom come." Now, if we hear a 
 man swear in the streets, we think it very wrong, 
 and say he " takes God's name in vain." But there's 
 a twenty times worse way of taking His name in vain, 
 than that. It is to ask God for what we don't want. 
 He doesn't like that sort of prayer. If you don't 
 want a thing, don't ask for it : such asking is the 
 worst mockery of your King you can insult Him with ; 
 the soldiers striking Him on the head with the reed 
 was nothing to that. If you do not wish for His king- 
 dom, don't pray for it. But if you do, you must do 
 more than pray for it ; you must work for it. And, to 
 work for it, you must know what it is : we have all 
 prayed for it many a day without thinking. Observe, 
 it is a kingdom that is to come to us ; we are not to 
 go to it. Also, it is not to be a kingdom of the dead, 
 but of the living. Also, it is not to come all at once, 
 but quietly ; nobody knows how. " The kingdom of 
 God cometh not with observation." Also, it is not 
 to come outside of us, but in our hearts : " the king- 
 dom of God is within you." And, being within 
 us, it is not a thing to be seen, but to be felt ; and 
 though it brings all substance of good with it, it does 
 not consist in that: "the kingdom of God is not 
 meat and drink, but righteousness, peace, and joy in 
 the Holy Ghost-." joy, that is to say, in the holy, 
 healthful, and helpful Spirit. Now, if we want to 
 work for this kingdom, and to bring it, and enter into 
 it, there's one curious condition to be first accepted. 
 You must enter it as children, or not at all ; " Who- 
 soever will not receive it as a little child shall not enter 
 therein." And again, " Suffer little children to come
 
 WORK, ' 53 
 
 unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the king- 
 dom of heaven." * 
 
 47. Of such, observe. Not of children them- 
 selves, but of such as children. I believe most 
 mothers who read that text think that all heaven or 
 the earth when it gets to be like heaven is to be 
 fall of babies. But that's not so. " Length of days, 
 and long life and peace," that is the blessing, not to. 
 die, still less to live, in babyhood. It is the character 
 of children we want, and must gain at our peril ; let 
 us see, briefly, in what it consists. 
 
 The first character of right childhood is that it is 
 Modest. A well-bred child does not think it can 
 teach its parents, or that it knows everything. It 
 may think its father and mother know everything, 
 perhaps that all grown-up people know everything; 
 very certainly it is sure that it does not. And it is 
 always asking questions, and wanting to know more. 
 Well, that is the first character of a good and wise 
 man at his work. To know that he knows very little ; 
 to perceive that there are many above him wiser 
 than he ; and to be always asking questions, wanting 
 to learn, not to teach. No one ever teaches well who 
 wants to teach, or governs well who wants to govern : 
 it is an old saying (Plato's, but I know not if his, 
 first), and as wise as old. 
 
 48. Then, the second character of right childhood 
 is to be Faithful. Perceiving that its father knows 
 best what is good for it, and having found always, when 
 it has tried its own way against his, that he was right 
 
 * I have referred oftener to the words of the English Bible in this 
 lecture than in any other of my addresses, because I was here speaking 
 to an audience which professed to accept its authority implicitly.
 
 54 THE CROWN OF W/LD OLIVE. 
 
 and it was wrong, a noble child trusts him at last 
 wholly, gives him its hand, and will walk blindfold 
 with him, if he bids it. And that is the true char- 
 acter of all good men also, as obedient workers, or 
 soldiers under captains. They must trust their cap- 
 tains ; they are bound for their lives to choose none 
 but those whom they can trust. Then, they are not 
 always to be thinking that what seems strange to 
 them, or wrong in what they are desired to do, is 
 strange or wrong. They know their captain : where 
 he leads they must follow, what he bids, they must 
 do; and without this trust and faith, without this 
 captainship and soldiership, no great deed, no great 
 salvation, is possible to man. 
 
 49. Then the third character of right childhood 
 is to be Loving. Give a little love to a child, 
 and you get a great deal back. It loves everything 
 near it, when it is a right kind of child ; would hurt 
 nothing, would give the best it has away, always, if you 
 need it ; does not lay plans for getting everything in 
 the house for itself, and delights in helping people ; 
 you cannot please it so much as by giving it a chance 
 of being useful, in ever so humble a way. 
 
 50. And because of all these characters, lastly, it 
 3 Cheerful. Putting its trust in its father, it is careful 
 
 for nothing being full of love to every creature, it 
 is happy always, whether in its play or in its duty. 
 Well, that's the great worker's character also Tak- 
 ing no thought for the morrow ; taking thought only 
 for the duty of the day ; trusting somebody else to 
 take care of to-morrow ; knowing indeed what labor 
 is, but not what sorrow is ; and always ready for play
 
 WORK. 55 
 
 beautiful play. For lovely human play is like the 
 play of the Sun. There's a worker for you. He, 
 steady to his time, is set as a strong man to run his 
 course, but also, he rejoiceth as a strong man to run 
 his course. See how he plays in the morning, with 
 the mists below, and the clouds above, with a ray 
 here and a flash there, and a shower of jewels every- 
 where ; that's the Sun's play ; and great human 
 play is like his all various all full of light and 
 life, and tender, as the dew of the morning. 
 
 51. So then, you have the child's character in 
 these four things Humility, Faith, Charity, and 
 Cheerfulness. That's what you have got to be con- 
 verted to. " Except ye be converted and become as 
 little children." You hear much of conversion nowa- 
 days ; but people always seem to think they have got 
 to be made wretched by conversion, to be converted 
 to long faces. No, friends, you have got to be con- 
 verted to short ones ; you have to repent into child- 
 hood, to repent into delight, and delightsomeness. 
 You can't go into a conventicle but you'll hear plenty 
 of talk of backsliding. Backsliding, indeed ! I can 
 tell you, on the ways most of us go, the faster we 
 slide back the better. Slide back into the cradle, if 
 going on is into the grave: back, I tell you: back 
 
 out of your long faces, and into your long clothes. 
 It is among children only, and as children only, that 
 you will find medicine for your healing and true 
 wisdom for your teaching. There is poison in the 
 counsels of the men of this world ; the words they 
 speak are all bitterness, " the poison of asps is under 
 their lips," but, " the sucking child shall play by the
 
 & THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 hole of the asp." There is death in the looks of men. 
 " Their eyes are privily set against the poor; " they 
 are as the uncharmable serpent, the cockatrice, which 
 slew by seeing. But " the weaned child shall lay his 
 hand on the cockatrice den." There is death in the 
 steps of men: " their feet are swift to shed blood; 
 they have compassed us in our steps like the lion that 
 is greedy of his prey, and the young lion lurking in 
 secret places ; " but, in that kingdom, the wolf shall 
 lie down with the lamb, and the failing with the lion, 
 and "a little child shall lead them." There is death 
 in the thoughts of men : the world is one wide riddle 
 to them, darker and darker as it draws to a close ; 
 but the secret of it is known to the child, and the 
 Lord of heaven and earth is most to be thanked in 
 that " He has hidden these things from the wise and 
 prudent, and has revealed them unto babes." Yes, 
 and there is death infinitude of death in the princi- 
 palities and powers of men. As far as the east is 
 from the west, so far our sins are not set from us, 
 but multiplied around us : the Sun himself, think you 
 he now " rejoices " to run his course, when he plunges 
 westward to the horizon, so widely red, not with 
 clouds, but blood? And it will be red more widely 
 yet. Whatever drought of the early and latter rain 
 may be, there will be none of that red rain. You 
 fortify yourselves, you arm yourselves against it in 
 vain ; the enemy and avenger will be upon you also, 
 unless you learn that it is not out of the mouths of 
 the knitted gun, or the smoothed rifle, but " out of 
 the mouths of babes and sucklings " that the strength 
 is ordained, which shall " still the enemy and avenger."
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 TRAFFIC.
 
 LECTURE II. 
 
 TRAFFIC. 
 Delivered in the Town Hall, Bradford. 
 
 52. MY good Yorkshire friends, you asked me down 
 here among your hills that I might talk to you .about 
 this Exchange you are going to build : but earnestly 
 and seriously asking you to pardon me, I am going to 
 do nothing of the kind. I cannot talk, or at least can 
 say very little, about this same Exchange. I must 
 talk of quite other things, though not willingly ; I 
 could not deserve your pardon, if when you invited 
 me to speak on one subject, I wilfully spoke on 
 another. But I cannot speak, to purpose, of any- 
 thing about which I do not care ; and most simply 
 and sorrowfully I have to tell you, in the outset, that 
 I do not care about this Exchange of yours. 
 
 If, however, when you sent me your invitation, I 
 had answered, " I won't come, I don't care about the 
 Exchange of Bradford," you would have been justly 
 offended with me, not knowing the reasons of so 
 blunt a carelessness. So I have come down, hoping 
 that you will patiently let me tell you why, on this, 
 nd many other such occasions, I now remain silent, 
 when formerly I should have caught at the opportunity 
 of speaking to a gracious audience. 
 
 59
 
 60 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 53. In a word, then, I do not care about this Ex- 
 change, because you don't ; and because you know 
 perfectly well I cannot make you. Look at the essen- 
 tial conditions of the case, which you, as business 
 men, know perfectly well, though perhaps you think I 
 forget them. You are going to spend ^30,000, which 
 to you, collectively, is nothing ; the buying a new coat 
 is, as to the cost of it, a much more important matter 
 of consideration to me than building a new Exchange 
 is to you. But you think you may as well have the 
 right thing for your money. You know there are a 
 great many odd styles of architecture about ; you 
 don't want to do anything ridiculous ; you hear of 
 me, among others, as a respectable architectural man- 
 milliner ; and you send for me, that I may tell you the 
 leading fashion ; and what is, in our shops, for the 
 moment, the newest and sweetest thing in pinnacles. 
 
 54. Now, pardon me for telling you frankly, you 
 cannot have good architecture merely by asking 
 people's advice on occasion. All good architecture is 
 the expression of national life and character ; and it 
 is produced by a prevalent and eager national taste, 
 or desire for beauty. And I want you to think a little 
 of the deep significance of this word " taste ; " for no 
 statement of mine has been more earnestly or oftener 
 controverted than that good taste is essentially a 
 moral quality. " No," say many of my antagonists, 
 " taste is one thing, morality is another. Tell us 
 what is pretty : we shall be glad to know that ; but 
 we need no sermons even were you able to preach 
 them, which may be doubted." 
 
 Permit me, therefore, to fortify this old dogma of
 
 TRAFFIC. 6 1 
 
 mine somewhat. Taste is not only a part and an 
 index of morality it is the ONLY morality. The 
 first, and last, and closest trial question to any living 
 creature is, " What do you like?" Tell me what you 
 like, and I'll tell you what you are. Go out into the 
 street, and ask the first man or woman you meet, 
 what their "taste" is, and if they answer candidly, 
 you know them, body and soul. "You, my friend 
 in the rags, with the unsteady gait, what do you 
 like?" "A pipe and a quartern of gin." I know 
 you. "You, good woman, with the quick step and 
 tidy bonnet, what do you like?" "A swept hearth 
 and a clean tea-table, and my husband opposite me, 
 and a baby at my breast." Good, I know you also. 
 "You, little girl with the golden hair and the soft 
 eyes, what do you like?" "My canary, and a run 
 among the wood hyacinths." " You, little boy with 
 the dirty hands and the low forehead, what do you 
 like ? " "A shy at the sparrows, and a game at pitch 
 farthing." Good ; we know them all now. What 
 more need we ask? 
 
 55. "Nay," perhaps you answer: "we need 
 rather to ask what these people and children do, than 
 what they like. If they do right, it is no matter that 
 they like what is wrong ; and if they do wrong, it is 
 no matter that they like what is right. Doing is the 
 great thing ; and it does not matter that the man likes 
 drinking, so that he does not drink ; nor that the 
 little girl likes to be kind to her canary, if she will 
 not learn her lessons ; nor that the little boy likes 
 throwing stones at the sparrows, if he goes to the 
 Sunday School." Indeed, for a short time, and in a
 
 62 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 provisional sense, this is true. For if, resolutely 
 people do what is right, in time they come to like 
 doing it. But they only are in a right moral state 
 when they have come to like doing it ; and as long as 
 they don't like it, they are still in a vicious state. 
 The man is not in health of body who is always 
 thinking of the bottle in the cupboard, though he 
 bravely bears his thirst ; but the man who heartily 
 enjoys water in the morning and wine in the evening, 
 each in its proper quantity and time. And the entire 
 object of true education is to make people not merely 
 do the right things, but enjoy the right things not 
 merely industrious, but to love industry not merely 
 learned, but to love knowledge not merely pure, 
 but to loye purity not merely just, but to hunger 
 and thirst after justice. 
 
 56. But you may answer or think, " Is the liking 
 for outside ornaments, for pictures, or statues, or 
 furniture, or architecture, a moral quality?" Yes, 
 most surely, if a rightly set liking. Taste for any 
 pictures or statues is not a moral quality, but taste 
 for good ones is. Only here again we have to define 
 the word "good." I don't mean by ' good, 11 clever 
 or learned or difficult in the doing. Take a pic- 
 ture by Teniers, of sots quarrelling over their dice : 
 it is an entirely clever picture ; so clever that nothing 
 in its kind has ever been done equal to it ; but it is 
 also an entirely base and evil picture. It is an ex- 
 pression of delight in the prolonged contemplation 
 of a vile thing, and delight in that is an " unman- 
 nered," or " immoral " quality. It is " bad taste " in 
 the profoundest sense it is the taste of the devils.
 
 TRAFFIC. 63 
 
 On the other hand, a picture of Tidar's, or a Greek 
 statue, or a Greek coin, or a Turner landscape, ex- 
 presses delight in the perpetual contemplation of a 
 good and perfect thing. That is an entirely moral 
 quality it is the taste of the angels. And all delight 
 in fine art, and all love of it, resolve themselves into 
 simple love of that which deserves love. That deserv- 
 ing is the quality which we call "loveliness " (we 
 ought to have an opposite word, hateliness, to be 
 said of the things which deserve to be hated) ; and 
 it is not an indifferent nor optional thing whether we 
 love this or that ; but it is just the vital function of 
 all our being. What we like determines what we are, 
 and is the sign of what we are ; and to teach taste is 
 inevitably to form character. 
 
 57. As I was thinking over this, in walking up 
 Fleet Street the other day, my eye caught the title of 
 a book standing open in a book-seller's window. It 
 was "On the necessity of the diffusion of taste 
 among all classes." " Ah," I thought to myself, " my 
 classifying friend, when you have diffused your taste, 
 where will your classes be? The man who likes 
 what you like, belongs to the same class with you, 
 1 think. Inevitably so. You may put him to other 
 work if you choose ; but, by the condition you have 
 brought him into, he will dislike the other work as 
 much as you would yourself. You get hold of a 
 scavanger, or a costermonger, who enjoyed the New- 
 gate Calendar for literature, and " Pop goes the 
 Weasel " for music. You think you can make him 
 like Dante and Beethoven? I wish you joy of your 
 iessons ; but if you do, you have made a gentleman
 
 64 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 of him : he won't like to go back to his coster- 
 mongering." 
 
 58. And so completely and unexceptionally is 
 this so, that, if I had time to-night, I could show you 
 that a nation cannot be affected by any vice, or weak- 
 ness, without expressing it, legibly, and forever, either 
 in bad art, or by want of art ; and that there is no 
 national virtue, small or great, which is not mani- 
 festly expressed in all the art which circumstances 
 enable the people possessing that virtue to produce. 
 Take, for instance, your great English virtue of 
 enduring and patient courage. You have at present 
 in England only one art of any consequence that 
 is, iron-working. You know thoroughly well how to 
 cast and hammer iron. Now, do you think in those 
 masses of lava which you build volcanic cones to 
 melt, and which you forge at the mouths of the 
 Infernos you have created ; do you think, on those 
 iron plates, your courage and endurance are not 
 written forever not merely with an iron pen, but 
 on iron parchment ? And take also your great Eng- 
 lish vice European vice vice of all the world 
 vice of all other worlds that roll or shine in heaven, 
 bearing with them yet the atmosphere of hell the 
 vice of jealousy, which brings competition into your 
 commerce, treachery into your councils, and dishonor 
 into your wars that vice which has rendered for 
 you, and for your next neighboring nation, the daily 
 occupations of existence no longer possible, but with 
 the mail upon your breasts and the sword loose in its 
 sheath ; so that at last, you have realized for all the 
 multitudes of the two great peoples who lead the so-
 
 TRAFFIC. 65 
 
 called civilization of the earth, you have realized 
 for them all, I say, in person and in policy, what was 
 once true only of the rough Border riders of your 
 Cheviot hills 
 
 " They carved at the meal 
 
 With gloves of steel, 
 And they drank the red wine through the helmet barr'd ; " 
 
 do you think that this national shame and dastardli- 
 ness of heart are not written as legibly on every rivet 
 of your iron armor as the strength of the right hands 
 that forged it? 
 
 59. Friends, I know not whether this thing be 
 the more ludicrous or the more melancholy. It is 
 quite unspeakably both. Suppose, instead of being 
 now sent for by you, I had been sent for by some 
 private gentleman, living in a surburban house, with 
 his garden separated only by a fruit-wall from his 
 next door neighbor's ; and he had called me to 
 consult with him on the furnishing of his drawing 
 room. I begin looking about me, and find the walls 
 rather bare ; I think such and such a paper might be 
 desirable perhaps a little fresco here and there on 
 the ceiling a damask curtain or so at the windows. 
 " Ah," says my employer, " damask curtains, indeed! 
 That's all very fine, but you know I can't afford that 
 kind of thing just now!" "Yet the world credits 
 you with a splendid income ! " " Ah, yes," says my 
 friend, " but do you know, at present, I am obliged 
 to spend it nearly all in steel-traps?" " Steel-traps ! 
 for whom?" "Why, for that fellow on the other 
 side the wall, you know : we're very good friends, 
 capital friends ; but we are obliged to keep our traps
 
 66 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 set on both sides of the wall ; we could not possibly 
 keep on friendly terms without them, and our spring 
 guns. The worst of it is, we are both clever fellows 
 enough ; and there's never a day passes that we don't 
 find out a new trap, or a new gun-barrel, or some- 
 thing ; we spend about fifteen millions a year each 
 in our traps, take it all together ; and I don't see how 
 we're to do with less." A highly comic state of life 
 for two private gentlemen ! but for two nations, it 
 seems to me, not wholly comic? Bedlam would be 
 comic, perhaps, if there were only one madman in it ; 
 and your Christmas pantomime is comic, when there 
 is only one clown in it ; but when the whole world 
 turns clown, and paints itself red with its own heart's 
 blood instead of vermilion, it is something else than 
 comic, I think. 
 
 60. Mind, I know a great deal of this is play, and 
 willingly allow for that. You don't know what to do 
 with yourselves for a sensation : fox-hunting and 
 cricketing will not carry you through the whole of 
 this unendurably long mortal life : you liked pop-guns 
 when you were schoolboys, and rifles and Armstrongs 
 are only the same things better made : but then the 
 worst of it is, that what was play to you when boys, 
 was not play to the sparrows ; and what is play to you 
 now, is not play to the small birds of State neither ; 
 and for the black eagles, you are somewhat shy of 
 taking shots at them, if I mistake not. 
 
 61. I must get back to the matter in hand, how- 
 ever. Believe me, without farther instance, I could 
 show you, in all time, that every nation's vice, or virtue, 
 was written in its art : the soldiership of early Greece ;
 
 TRAFFIC. 67 
 
 the sensuality of late Italy ; the visionary religion of 
 Tuscany ; the splendid human energy and beauty of 
 Venice. I have no time to do this to-night (I have 
 done it elsewhere before now) ; but I proceed to apply 
 the principle to ourselves in a more searching manner. 
 I notice that among all the new buildings which cover 
 your once wild hills, churches and schools are mixed 
 in due, that is to say, in large proportion, with your 
 mills and mansions ; and I notice also that the churches 
 and schools are almost always Gothic, and the man- 
 sions and mills are never Gothic. Will you allow me 
 to ask precisely the meaning of this ? For, remem- 
 ber, it is peculiarly a modern phenomenon. When 
 Gothic was invented, houses were Gothic as well as 
 churches ; and when the Italian style superseded the 
 Gothic, churches were Italian as well as houses. If 
 there is a Gothic spire to the cathedral of Antwerp, 
 there is a Gothic belfry to the Hotel de Ville at Brus- 
 sels ; if Inigo Jones builds an Italian Whitehall, Sir 
 Christopher Wren builds an Italian St. Paul's. But 
 now you live under one school of architecture, and 
 worship under another. What do you mean by doing 
 this ? Am I to understand that you are thinking of 
 changing your architecture back to Gothic ; and that 
 you treat your churches experimentally, because it 
 does not matter what mistakes you make in a church ? 
 Or am I to understand that you consider Gothic a pre- 
 eminently sacred and beautiful mode of building, 
 which you think, like the fine frankincense, should 
 be mixed for the tabernacle only, and reserved for 
 your religious services ? For if this be the feeling, 
 though it may seem at first as if it were graceful and
 
 68 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 reverent, at the root of the matter, it signifies neither 
 more nor less than that you have separated your 
 religion from your life. 
 
 62. For consider what a wide significance this fact 
 has ; and remember that it is not you only, but all the 
 people of England, who are behaving thus just now. 
 
 You have all got into the habit of calling the church 
 " the house of God." I have seen, over the doors of 
 many churches, the legend actually carved, " This is 
 the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." 
 Now, note where that legend comes from, and of 
 what place it was first spoken. A boy leaves his 
 father's house to go on a long journey on foot, to visit 
 his uncle ; he has to cross a wild hill-desert ; just as 
 if one of your own boys had to cross the wolds 
 to visit an uncle at Carlisle. The second or third 
 day your boy finds himself somewhere between 
 Hawes and Brough, in the midst of the moors, 
 at sunset. It is stony ground, and boggy ; he cannot 
 go one foot farther that night. Down he lies, to 
 sleep, on Wharnside, where best he may, gathering 
 a few of the stones together to put under his head ; 
 so wild the place is, he cannot get anything but 
 stones. And there, lying under the broad night, he 
 has a dream ; and he sees a ladder set up on the earth, 
 and the top of it reaches to heaven, and the angels 
 of God are seen ascending and descending upon it. 
 And when he wakes out of his sleep, he says, " How 
 dreadful is this place ; surely, this is none other than 
 the house of God, and this is the gate of heaven." 
 This PLACE, observe ; not this church ; not this city ; 
 not this stone, even, which he puts up for a memorial
 
 TRAFFIC. 69 
 
 . the piece of flint on which his head has lain. But 
 this place; this windy slope of Wharnside ; this 
 moorland hollow, torrent-bitten, snow-blighted ; this 
 any place where God lets down the ladder. And how 
 are you to know where that will be ? or how are you 
 to determine where it may be, but by being ready for 
 it always ? Do you know where the lightning is to 
 fall next ? You do know that, partly ; you can guide 
 the lightning ; but you cannot guide the going forth 
 of the Spirit, which is as that lightning when it shines 
 from the east to the west. 
 
 63. But the perpetual and insolent warping of that 
 strong verse to serve a merely ecclesiastical purpose, 
 is only one of the thousand instances in which we 
 sink back into gross Judaism. We call our churches 
 " temples." Now, you know perfectly well they 
 are not temples. They have never had, never can 
 have, anything whatever to do with temples. They 
 are " synagogues " " gathering places " where 
 you gather yourselves together as an assembly ; and 
 by not calling them so, you again miss the force of 
 another mighty text "Thou, when thou prayest, 
 shalt not be as the hypocrites are ; for they love to 
 pray standing in the churches " [we should translate 
 it] , " that they may be seen of men. But thou, when 
 thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou 
 hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father," which is, 
 not in chancel nor in aisle, but " in secret." 
 
 64 Now, you feel, as I say this to you I know 
 you feel as if I were trying to take away the honor 
 of your churches. Not so ; I am trying to prove 
 to you the honor of your houses and your hills ;
 
 70 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 not that the Church is not sacred but that the 
 whole Earth is. I would have you feel, what care- 
 less, what constant, what infectious sin there is in 
 all modes of thought, whereby, in calling your 
 churches only "holy," you call your hearths and 
 homes " profane ; " and have separated yourselves 
 from the heathen by casting all your household gods 
 to the ground, instead of recognizing, in the place of 
 their many and feeble Lares, the presence of your 
 One and Mighty Lord and Lar. 
 
 65. " But what has all this to do with our Ex- 
 change ?" you ask me, impatiently. My dear friends, 
 it has just everything to do with it ; on these inner and 
 great questions depend all the outer and little ones ; 
 and if you have asked me down here to speak to you, 
 because you had before been interested in anything I 
 have written, you must know that all I have yet said 
 about architecture was to show this. The book I 
 called " The Seven Lamps " was to show that certain 
 right states of temper and moral feeling were the 
 magic powers by which all good architecture, without 
 exception, had been produced. " The Stones of 
 Venice "had, from beginning to end, no other aim 
 than to show that the Gothic architecture of Venice 
 had arisen out of, and indicated in all its features, a 
 state of pure national faith, and of domestic virtue ; 
 and that its Renaissance architecture had arisen out 
 of, and in all its features indicated, a state of con- 
 cealed national infidelity, and of domestic corruption. 
 And now, you ask me what style is best to build in ; 
 and how can I answer, knowing the meaning of the 
 two styles, but by another question do you mean
 
 TRAFFIC. 71 
 
 to build as Christians or as Infidels ? And still more 
 
 do you mean to build as honest Christians or as 
 honest Infidels ? as thoroughly and confessedly either 
 one or the other ? You don't like to be asked such 
 rude questions. I cannot help it ; they are of much 
 more importance than this Exchange business ; and 
 if they can be at once answered, the Exchange busi- 
 ness settles itself in a moment.- But, before I press 
 them farther, I must ask leave to explain one point 
 clearly. 
 
 66. In all my past work, my endeavor has been 
 to show that good architecture is essentially religious 
 
 the production of a faithful and virtuous, not of an 
 infidel and corrupted people. But in the course of 
 doing this, I have had also to show that good archi- 
 tecture is not ecclesiastical. People are so apt to look 
 upon religion as the business of the clergy, not their 
 own, that the moment they hear of anything depend- 
 ing on "religion," they think it must also have de- 
 pended on the priesthood ; and I have had to take 
 what place was to be occupied between these two 
 errors, and fight both, often with seeming contradic- 
 tion. Good architecture is the work of good and be- 
 lieving men ; therefore, you say, at least some people 
 say, " Good architecture must essentially have been 
 the work of the clergy, not of the laity. 1 ' No a 
 thousand times no ; good architecture * has always 
 been the work of the commonalty, not of the clergy. 
 What, you say, those glorious cathedrals the pride 
 of Europe did their builders not form Gothic archi- 
 
 * And all other arts, for the most part; even of incredulous and 
 secularly-minded commonalities.
 
 72 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 lecture ? No ; they corrupted Gothic architecture. 
 Gothic was formed in the baron's castle, and the 
 burgher's street. It was formed by the thoughts, and 
 hands, and powers of free citizens and warrior kings. 
 By the monk it was used as an instrument for the aid 
 of his superstition ; when that superstition became a 
 beautiful madness, and the best hearts of Europe 
 vainly dreamed and pined in the cloister, and vainly 
 raged and perished in the crusade through that fury 
 of perverted faith and wasted war, the Gothic rose 
 also to its loveliest, most fantastic, and, finally, most 
 foolish dreams ; and, in those dreams, was lost. 
 
 67. I hope, now, that there is no risk of your mis- 
 understanding me when I come to the gist of what I 
 want to say to-ni^ht ; when I repeat, that every great 
 national architecture has been the result and expo- 
 nent of a great national religion. You can't have bits 
 of it here, bits there you must have it everywhere, 
 or nowhere. It is not the monopoly of a clerical com- 
 pany it is not the exponent of a theological dogma 
 it is not the hieroglyphic writing of an initiated 
 priesthood ; it is the manly language of a people 
 inspired by resolute and common purpose, and render- 
 ing resolute and common fidelity to the legible laws 
 of an undoubted God. 
 
 68. Now, there have as yet been three distinct 
 schools of European architecture. I say, European, 
 because Asiatic and African architectures belong so 
 entirely to other races and climates, that there is no 
 question of them here; only, in passing, I will simply 
 assure you that whatever is good or great in Egypt, 
 and Syria, and India, is just good or great for the
 
 TRAFFIC. 73 
 
 same reasons as the buildings on our side of the 
 Bosphorus. We Europeans, then, have had three 
 great religions : the Greek, which was the worship of 
 the God of Wisdom and Power ; the Mediaeval, which 
 was the Worship of the God of Judgment and Con- 
 solation ; the Renaissance, which was the worship of 
 the God of Pride and Beauty ; these three we have 
 had they are past, and now, at last, we English 
 have got a fourth religion, and a God of our own, 
 about which I want to ask you. But I must explain 
 these three old ones first. 
 
 69. I repeat, first, the Greeks essentially wor- 
 shipped the God of Wisdom ; so that whatever 
 contended against their religion, to the Jews a 
 stumbling block, was, to the Greeks Foolishness. 
 
 The first Greek idea of Deity was that expressed in 
 the word, of which we keep the remnant in our words 
 " ZV-urnal " and " Z?/-vine " the god of Day, Jupitei 
 the revealer. Athena is his daughter, but especially 
 daughter of the Intellect, springing armed from the 
 head. We are only with the help of recent investi- 
 gation beginning to penetrate the depth of meaning 
 couched under the Athenaic symbols : but I may note 
 rapidly, that her asgis, the mantle with the serpent 
 fringes, in which she often, in the best statues, is 
 represented as folding up her left hand for better 
 guard, and the Gorgon on her shield, are both repre- 
 sentative mainly of the chilling horror and sadness 
 ( turning men to stone, as it were,) of the outmost 
 and superficial spheres of knowledge that knowledge 
 which separates, in bitterness, hardness, and sorrow, 
 the heart of the full-grown man from the heart of the
 
 74 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 child. For out of imperfect knowledge spring terror, 
 dissension, danger, and disdain ; but from perfect 
 knowledge, given by the full-revealed Athena, strength 
 and peace, in sign of which she is crowned with the 
 olive spray, and bears the resistless spear. 
 
 This, then, was the Greek conception of purest 
 Deity, and every habit of life, and every form of his 
 art developed themselves from the seeking this bright, 
 serene, resistless wisdom ; and setting himself, as a 
 man, to do things evermore rightly and strongly ; * 
 not with any ardent affection or ultimate hope ; but 
 with a resolute and continent energy of will, as know- 
 ing that for failure there was no consolation, and for 
 sin there was no remission. And the Greek architec- 
 ture rose unerring, bright, clearly defined, and self- 
 contained. 
 
 70. Next followed in Europe the great Christian 
 faith, which was essentially the religion of Comfort. 
 Its great doctrine is the remission of sins ; for which 
 cause it happens, too often, in certain phases of Christi- 
 anity, that sin and sickness themselves are partly glori- 
 fied, as if, the more you had to be healed of, the more 
 divine was the healing. The practical result of this 
 doctrine, in art, is a continual contemplation of sin 
 
 * It is an error to suppose that the Greek worship, or seeking, wa 
 chiefly of Beauty. It was essentially of Rightness and Strength, 
 founded on Forethought : the principal character of Greek art is not 
 Beauty, but design : and the Dorian Apollo-worship and Athenian 
 Virgin-worship are both expressions of adoration of divine Wisdom and 
 Purity. Next to these great deities rank, in power over the national 
 mind, Dionysus and Ceres, the givers of human strength and life : 
 then, for heroic example, Hercules. There is no Venus-worship among 
 the Greeks in the great times : and the Muses are essentially teachers 
 of Truth, and of its harmonies. Compare Aratra Pentelici, 200.
 
 TRAFFIC. 75 
 
 and disease, and of imaginary states of purification 
 from them ; thus we have an architecture conceived 
 in a mingled sentiment of melancholy and aspiration, 
 partly severe, partly luxuriant, which will bend itself 
 to every one of our needs, and every one of our fancies, 
 and be strong or weak with us, as we are strong or 
 weak ourselves. It is, of all architecture, the basest, 
 when base people build it of all, the noblest, when 
 built by the noble. 
 
 71. And now note that both these religions 
 Greek and Mediaeval perished by falsehood in their 
 own main purpose. The Greek religion of Wisdom 
 perished in a false philosophy "Oppositions of 
 science, falsely so callea '' The Mediaeval religion 
 of Consolation perished in false comfort ; in remis- 
 sion of sins given lyingly. It was the selling of 
 absolution that ended the Mediaeval faith ; and I can 
 tell you more, it is the selling of absolution which, to 
 the end of time, will mark false Christianity. Pure 
 Christianity gives her remission of sins only by ending 
 them ; but false Christianity gets her remission of 
 sins by compounding for them. And there are many 
 ways of compounding for them. We English have 
 beautiful little quiet ways of buying absolution, 
 whether in low Church or high, far more cunning 
 than any of Tetzel's trading. 
 
 72. Then, thirdly, there followed the religion of 
 Pleasure, in which all Europe gave itself to luxury, 
 ending in death. First, bals masques in every 
 saloon, and then guillotines in every square. And 
 all these three worships issue in vast temple building. 
 Your Greek worshipped Wisdom, and built you the
 
 76 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 Parthenon the Virgin's temple. The Mediaeva* 
 worshipped Consolation, and built you Virgin temples 
 also but to our Lady of Salvation. Then the 
 Revivalist worshipped beauty, of a sort, and built you 
 Versailles, and the Vatican. Now, lastly, will you 
 tell me what we worship, and what we build ? 
 
 73. You know we are speaking always of the real, 
 active, continual, national worship ; that by which 
 men act while they live ; not that which they talk of 
 when they die. Now, we have, indeed, a nominal 
 religion, to which we pay tithes of property and 
 sevenths of time ; but we have also a practical and 
 earnest religion, to which we devote nine-tenths of 
 our property and sixth-sevenths of our time. And 
 we dispute a great deal about the nominal religion ; 
 but we are all unanimous about this practical one, of 
 which I think you will admit that the ruling goddess 
 may be best generally described as the " Goddess of 
 Getting-on," or " Britannia of the Market." The 
 Athenians had an "Athena Agoraia," or Athena of 
 the Market ; but she was a subordinate type of their 
 goddess, while our Britannia Agoraia is the principal 
 type of ours. And all your great architectural works, 
 are, of course, built to her. It is long since you 
 built a great cathedral ; and how you would laugh at 
 me, if I proposed building a cathedral on the top of 
 one of these hills of yours, to make it an Acropolis ! 
 But your railroad mounds, vaster than the walls of 
 Babylon ; your railroad stations, vaster .han the tem- 
 ple of Ephesus, and innumerable ; your chimneys 
 how much more mighty and costly than cathedral 
 spires ! your harbor piers ; your warehouses ; your
 
 TRAFFIC. 77 
 
 exchanges ! all these are built to your great God- 
 dess of " Getting-on ; " and she has formed, and will 
 continue to form, your architecture, as long as you 
 worship her; and it is quite vain to ask me to tell 
 you how to build to her ; you know far better than I. 
 74. There might indeed, on some theories, be a 
 conceivably good architecture for Exchanges that 
 is to say, if there were any heroism in the fact or 
 deed of exchange, which might be typically carved on 
 the outside of your building. For, you know, all 
 beautiful architecture must be adorned with sculpture 
 or painting ; and for sculpture or painting, you must 
 have a subject. And hitherto it has been a received 
 opinion among the nations of the world that the only 
 right subjects for either, were heroisms of some sort. 
 Even on his pots and his flagons, the Greek put a 
 Hercules slaying lions, or an Apollo slaying serpents, 
 or Bacchus slaying melancholy giants, and earth-born 
 despondencies. On his temples, the Greek put con- 
 tests of great warriors in founding states, or of gods 
 with evil spirits. On his houses and temples alike, 
 the Christian put carvings of angels conquering devils ; 
 or of hero-martyrs exchanging this world for another ; 
 subject inappropriate, I think, to our direction of 
 exchange here. And the Master of Christians not 
 only left his followers without any orders as to the 
 sculpture of affairs of exchange on the outside of 
 buildings, but gave some strong evidence of his dis- 
 like of affairs of exchange within them. And yet 
 there might surely be a heroism in such affairs ; and 
 all commerce become a kind of selling of doves, not 
 impious. The wonder has always been great to me-
 
 78 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 that heroism has never been supposed to be in any- 
 wise consistent with the practice of supplying people 
 with food, or clothes ; but rather with that of quarter- 
 ing one's self upon them for food, and stripping them 
 of their clothes. Spoiling of armor is an heroic deed 
 in all ages ; but the selling of clothes, old or new, 
 has never taken any color of magnanimity. Yet one 
 does not see why feeding the hungry and clothing the 
 naked should ever become base businesses, even when 
 engaged in on a large scale. If one could contrive 
 to attach the notion of conquest to them anyhow ! so 
 that, supposing there were anywhere an obstinate 
 race, who refused to be comforted, one might take 
 some pride in giving them compulsory comfort ! * and 
 as it were, "occupying a country" with one's gifts, 
 instead of one's armies? If one could only consider 
 it as much a victory to get a barren field sown, as to 
 get an eared field stripped ; and contend who should 
 build villages, instead of who should " carry " them ! 
 Are not all forms of heroism, conceivable in doing 
 these serviceable deeds ? You doubt who is strong- 
 est? It might be ascertained by push of spade, as 
 well as push of sword. Who is wisest? There are 
 witty things to be thought of in planning other busi- 
 ness than campaigns. Who is bravest? There are 
 always the elements to fight with, stronger than men ; 
 and nearly as merciless. 
 
 75. The only absolutely and unapproachably 
 heroic element in the soldier's work seems to be 
 that he is paid little for it and regularly : while 
 you traffickers, and exchangers, and others occupied 
 
 * Quite serious, all this, though it reads like jest.
 
 TRAFFIC. 79 
 
 in presumably benevolent business, like to be paid 
 much for it and by chance. I never can make out 
 how it is that a knight '-errant does not expect to be 
 paid for his trouble, but a /^d/fcr-errant always does ; 
 that people are willing to take hard knocks for 
 nothing, but never to sell ribands cheap ; that 
 they are ready to go on fervent crusades to recover 
 the tomb of a buried God, but never on any travels 
 to fulfil the orders of a living one ; that they will 
 go anywhere barefoot to preach their faith, but must be 
 well bribed to practise it, and are perfectly ready to 
 give the Gospel gratis, but never the loaves and fishes.* 
 76. If you chose to take the matter up on any 
 such soldierly principle, to do your commerce, and 
 your feeding of nations, for fixed salaries ; and to be as 
 particular about giving people the best food, and the 
 best cloth, as soldiers are about giving them the best 
 gunpowder, I could carve something for you on your 
 exchange worth looking at. But I can only at present 
 suggest decorating its frieze with pendent purses ; and 
 making its pillars broad at the base, for the sticking 
 of bills. And in the innermost chambers of it there 
 might be a statue of Britannia of the Market, who 
 may have, perhaps advisably, a partridge for her crest, 
 typical at once of her courage in fighting for noble 
 ideas, and of her interest in game; and round its 
 neck the inscription in golden letters, " Perdix fovit 
 quae non peperit." \ Then, for her spear, she might 
 
 * Please think over this paragraph, too briefly and antithetically 
 put, but one of those which I am happiest in having written. 
 
 t Jerem. xvii. n (best in Septuagint and Vulgate). " As the par- 
 tridge, fostering what she brought not forth, so he that getteth riches, 
 not by right shall leave them in the midst of his days, and at his end 
 shall be a fool. "
 
 8o THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 have a weaver's beam ; and on her shield, instead of 
 St. George's Cross, the Milanese boar, semi-fleeced, 
 with the town of Gennesaret proper, in the field, and 
 ihe legend " In the best market," * and her corselet, 
 of leather, folded over her heart in the shape of a 
 purse, with thirty slits in it for a piece of money to 
 go in at, on each day of the month. And I doubt not 
 but that people would come to see your exchange, 
 and its goddess, with applause. 
 
 77. Nevertheless, I want to point out to you cer- 
 tain strange characters in this goddess of yours. She 
 differs from the great Greek and Mediaeval deities 
 essentially in two things first, as to the continu- 
 ance of her presumed power; secondly, as to the 
 extent of it. 
 
 1st, as to the Continuance. 
 
 The Greek Goddess of Wisdom gave continual 
 ncrease of wisdom, as the Christian Spirit of Com- 
 fort (or Comforter) continual increase of comfort. 
 There was no question, with these, of any limit or 
 cessation of function. But with your Agora God- 
 dess, that is just the most important question. Get- 
 ting on but where to? Gathering together but 
 how much ? Do you mean to gather always never 
 to spend ? If so, I wish you joy of your goddess, for 
 I am just as well off as you, without the trouble of 
 worshipping her at all. But if you do not spend, 
 somebody else will somebody else must. And it 
 is because of this (among many other such errors) 
 that I have fearlessly declared your so-called science 
 of Political Economy to be no science ; because, 
 
 * Meaning fully, " We have brought our pigs to it."
 
 TRAFFIC. 8 1 
 
 namely, it has omitted the study of exactly the most 
 important branch of the business the study of 
 spending. For spend you must, and as much as you 
 make, ultimately. You gather corn : will you bury 
 England under a heap of grain ; or will you, when 
 you have gathered, finally eat? You gather gold : 
 will you make your house-roofs of it, or pave your 
 streets with it? That is still one way of spending it. 
 But if you keep it, that you may get more, I'll give 
 you more ; I'll give you all the gold you want all 
 you can imagine if you can tell me what you'll do 
 wifh it. You shall have thousands of gold pieces ; 
 thousands of thousands millions mountains, of 
 gold : where will you keep them ? Will you put an 
 Olympus of silver upon a golden Pelion make 
 Ossa like a wart ? Do you think the rain and dew 
 would then come down to you, in the streams from 
 such mountains, more blessedly than they will down 
 the mountains which God has made for you, of moss 
 and whinstone ? But it is not gold that you want to 
 gather ! What is it ? greenbacks ? No ; not those 
 neither. What is it then is it ciphers after a capi- 
 tal I ? Cannot you practise writing ciphers, and write 
 as many as you want? Write ciphers for an hour 
 every morning, in a big book, and say every evening, 
 I am worth all those noughts more than I was yester- 
 day. Won't that do? Well, what in the name of 
 Plutus is it you want? Not gold, not greenbacks, 
 not ciphers after a capital 1? You will have to 
 answer, after all, " No; we want, somehow or other, 
 money's worth." Well, what is that? Let your 
 Goddess of Getting-on discover it, and let her learn 
 to stay therein.
 
 82 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 78. II. But there is yet another question to be 
 asked respecting this Goddess of Getting-on. The 
 first was of the continuance of her power ; the second 
 is of its extent. 
 
 Pallas and the Madonna were supposed to be all 
 the world's Pallas, and all the world's Madonna. 
 They could teach all men, and they could comfort all 
 men. But, look strictly into the nature of the power 
 of your Goddess of Getting-on ; and you will find she 
 is the Goddess not of everybody's getting on but 
 only of somebody's getting on. This is a vital, or 
 rather deathful, distinction. Examine it in your own 
 ideal of the state of national life which this Goddess 
 is to evoke and maintain. I asked you what it was, 
 when I was last here ; * you have never told me. 
 Now, shall I try to tell you ? 
 
 79. Your ideal of human life then is, I think, that 
 it should be passed in a pleasant undulating world, with 
 iron and coal everywhere underneath it. On each 
 pleasant bank of this world is to be a beautiful man- 
 sion, with two wings ; and stables, and coach-houses : 
 a moderately sized park ; a large garden and hot- 
 houses ; and pleasant carriage drives through the 
 shrubberies. In this mansion are to live the favored 
 votaries of the Goddess ; the English gentleman, 
 with his gracious wife, and his beautiful family ; 
 always able to have the boudoir and the jewels for 
 the wife, and the beautiful ball dresses for the daugh- 
 ters, and hunters for the sons, and a shooting in the 
 Highlands for himself. At the bottom of the bank, 
 
 *"The Two Paths," p. 115 (small edition), and p. 99 of vol. x. oi 
 th'e " Revised Series of the Entire Works."
 
 TRAFFIC. 83 
 
 is to be the mill ; not less than a quarter of a mile 
 long, with a steam engine at each end, and two in the 
 middle, and a chimney three hundred feet high. In 
 this mill are to be in constant employment from eight 
 hundred to a thousand workers, who never drink, 
 never strike, always go to church on Sunday, and 
 always express themselves in respectful language. 
 
 80. Is not that, broadly, and in the main features, 
 the kind of thing you propose to yourselves ? It is very 
 pretty indeed, seen from above ; not at all so pretty, 
 seen from below. For, observe, while to one family 
 this deity is indeed the Goddess of Getting-on, to a 
 thousand families she is the Goddess of not Getting- 
 on. " Nay," you say, " they have all their chance." 
 Yes, so has every one in a lottery, but there must 
 always be the same number of blanks. "Ah! but 
 in a lottery it is not skill and intelligence which take 
 the lead, but blind chance." What then! do you 
 think the old practice, that " they should take who 
 have the power, and they should keep who can," is 
 less iniquitous, when the power has become power of 
 brains instead of fist? and that, though we may not 
 take advantage of a child's or a woman's weakness, 
 we may of a man's foolishness? "Nay, but finally, 
 work must be done, and some one must be at the 
 top, ?ome one at the bottom." Granted, my friends. 
 Work must always be, and captains of work must 
 always be ; and if you in the least remember the tone 
 of any of my writings, you must know that they are 
 thought unfit for this age, because they are always 
 insisting on need of government, and speaking with 
 scorn of liberty. But I beg you to observe that there
 
 84 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 is a wide difference between being captains or gov- 
 ernors of work, and taking the profits of it. It does 
 not follow, because you are general of an army, that 
 you are to take all the treasure, or land, it wins (if it 
 fight for treasure or land) ; neither, because you are 
 king of a nation, that you are to consume all the 
 profits of the nation's work. Real kings, on the con- 
 trary, are known invariably by their doing quite the 
 reverse of this, by their taking the least possible 
 quantity of the nation's work for themselves. There 
 is no test of real kinghood so infallible as that. Does 
 the crowned creature live simply, bravely, unostenta- 
 tiously ? probably he is a King. Does he cover his 
 body with jewels, and his ta,ble with delicates? in all 
 probability he is not a King. It is possible he may 
 be, as Solomon was ; but that is when the nation 
 shares his splendor with him. Solomon made gold, 
 not only to be* in his own palace as stones, but to be 
 in Jerusalem as stones. But even so, for the most 
 part, these splendid kinghoods expire in ruin, and 
 only the true kinghoods live, which are of royal 
 laborers governing loyal laborers ; who, both leading 
 rough lives, establish the true dynasties. Conclu- 
 sively you will find that because you are king of a 
 nation, it does not follow that you are to gather fof 
 yourself all the wealth of that nation ; neither, be- 
 cause you are king of a small part of the nation, and 
 lord over the means of its maintenance over field, 
 or mill, or mine, are you to take all the produce ol 
 that piece of the foundation of national existence for 
 yourself. 
 81. You will tell me I need not preach against
 
 TRAFFIC. 85 
 
 these things, for I cannot mend them. No, good 
 friends, I cannot ; but you can, and you will ; or 
 something else can and will. Even good things 
 have no abiding power and shall these evil things 
 persist in victorious evil ? All history shows, on the 
 contrary, that to be the exact thing they never can 
 do. Change must come ; but it is ours to determine 
 whether change of growth, or change of death. Shall 
 the Parthenon be in ruins on its rock, and Bolton 
 priory in its meadow, but these mills of yours be the 
 consummation of the buildings of the earth, and their 
 wheels be as the wheels of eternity ? Think you that 
 " men may come, and men may go," but mills 
 go on forever? Not so; out of these, better or 
 ivorse shall come ; and H is for you to choose which. 
 82. I know that none of this wrong is done with 
 deliberate purpose. I know, on the contrary, that 
 you wish your workmen well ; that you do much for 
 them, and that you desire to do more for them, if 
 you saw your way to such benevolence safely. I 
 know that even all this wrong and misery are brought 
 about by a warped sense of duty, each of you striving 
 to do his best ; but unhappily, not knowing for whom 
 this best should be done. And all our hearts have 
 been betrayed by the plausible impiety of the modern 
 economist, that "To do the best for yourself, is 
 finally to do the best for others." Friends, our great 
 Master said not so ; and most absolutely we shall 
 find this world is not made so. Indeed, to do the 
 best for others, is finally to do the best for ourselves ; 
 hut it will not do to have our eyes fixed on that issue. 
 The Pagans had got beyond that. Hear what a
 
 86 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 Pagan says of this matter ; hear what were, perhaps, 
 the last written words of Plato, if not the last 
 actually written (for this we cannot know), yet 
 assuredly in fact and power his parting words in 
 which, endeavoring to give full crowning and harmo- 
 nious close to all his thoughts, and to speak the sum 
 of them by the imagined sentence of ne Great 
 Spirit, his strength and his heart fail him, and the 
 words cease, broken off forever. 
 
 83. They are at the close of the dialogue called 
 " Critias," in which he describes, partly from real 
 tradition, partly in ideal dream, the early state of 
 Athens ; and the genesis, and order, and religion, 
 of the fabled isle of Atlantis ; in which genesis he 
 conceives the same first perfection and final degen- 
 eracy of man, which in our own Scriptural tradition 
 is expressed by saying that the Sons of God inter- 
 married with the daughters of men, for he supposes 
 the earliest race to have been indeed the chil- 
 dren of God ; and to have corrupted themselves, 
 until "their spot was not the spot of his children." 
 And this, he says, was the end ; that indeed " through 
 many generations, so long as the God's nature in 
 them yet was full, they were submissive to the sacred 
 laws, and carried themselves lovingly to all that had 
 kindred with them in divineness ; for their uttermost 
 spirit was faithful and true, and in every wise great ; 
 so that, in all meekness of wisdom, they dealt with 
 each other, and took all the chances of life ; and de- 
 spising all things except virtue, they cared little what 
 happened day by day, and bore lightly the burden o/ 
 gold and of possessions ; for they saw that, if onl)
 
 TRAFFIC. 87 
 
 their common love and virtue increased, all these 
 things would be increased together with them ; but 
 to set their esteem and ardent pursuit upon material 
 possession would be to lose that first, and their vir- 
 tue and affection together with it. And by such 
 reasoning, and what of the divine nature remained 
 in them, they gained all this greatness of which we 
 have already told ; but when the God's part of them 
 faded and became extinct, being mixed again and 
 again, and effaced by the prevalent mortality ; and the 
 human nature at last exceeded, they then became 
 unable to endure the courses of fortune ; and fell into 
 shapelessness of life, and baseness in the sight of him 
 who could see, having lost everything that was fairest 
 of their honor ; while to the blind hearts which could 
 not discern the true life, tending to happiness, it 
 seemed that they were then chiefly noble and happy, 
 being filled with all iniquity of inordinate possession 
 and power. Whereupon, the God of gods, whose 
 Kinghood is in laws, beholding a once just nation 
 thus cast into misery, and desiring to lay such pun- 
 ishment upon them as might make them repent into 
 restraining, gathered together all the 'gods into his 
 dwelling-place, which from heaven's centre overlooks 
 whatever has part in creation ; and having assembled 
 them, he said " 
 
 84. The rest is silence. Last words of the chief 
 wisdom of the heathen, spoken of this idol of 
 riches ; this idol of yours ; this golden image high 
 by measureless cubits, set up where your green fields 
 of England are furnace-burnt into the likeness of the 
 plain of Dura : this idol, forbidden to us, first of all
 
 88 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 idols, by our own Master and faith ; forbidden to us 
 also by every human lip that has ever, in any age or 
 people, been accounted of as able to speak according 
 to the purposes of God. Continue to make that for- 
 bidden deity your principal one, and soon no more 
 art, no more science, no more pleasure will be possi- 
 ble. Catastrophe will come ; or worse than catas- 
 trophe, slow mouldering and withering into Hades. 
 But if you can fix some conception of a true human 
 state of life to be striven for life good for all men as 
 for yourselves if you can determine some honest 
 and simple order of existence ; following those trodden 
 ways of wisdom, which are pleasantness, and seek 
 ing her quiet and withdrawn paths, which are peace ; * 
 then, and so sanctifying wealth into "common- 
 wealth," all your art, your literature, your daily labors 
 your domestic affection, and citizen's duty, will joir 
 and increase into one magnificent harmony. You 
 will know then how to build, well enough ; you will 
 build with stone well, but with flesh better; temples 
 not made with hands, but riveted of hearts ; and that 
 kind of marble, crimson-veined, is indeed eternal. 
 
 * I imagine the Hebrew chant merely intends passionate repetition, 
 and not a distinction of this somewhat fanciful kind; yet we may 
 profitably make it in reading the English.
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 WAR.
 
 LECTURE III. 
 
 WAR. 
 
 Delivered at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, 
 1865. 
 
 85. YOUNG soldiers, I do not doubt but that many 
 of you came unwillingly to-night, and many in merely 
 contemptuous curiosity, to hear what a writer on 
 painting could possibly say, or would venture to say, 
 respecting your great art of war. You may well 
 think within yourselves, that a painter might, per- 
 haps without immodesty, lecture younger painters 
 upon painting, but not young lawyers upon law, nor 
 young physicians upon medicine least of all, it 
 may seem to you, young warriors upon war. And, 
 indeed, when I was asked to address you, I declined 
 at first, and declined long ; for I felt that you would 
 not be interested in my special business, and would 
 certainly think there was small need for me to come 
 to teach you yours. Nay, I knew that there ought 
 to be no such need, for the great veteran soldiers of 
 England are now men every way so thoughtful, so 
 noble, and so good, that no other teaching than 
 their knightly example, and their few words of grave 
 and tried counsel should be either necessary for you, 
 or even, without assurance of due modesty in the 
 offerer, endured by you. 
 
 9*
 
 92 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 86. But being asked, not once nor twice, I have 
 not ventured persistently to refuse ; and I will try, in 
 very few words, to lay before you some reason why 
 you should accept my excuse, and hear me patiently. 
 You may imagine that your work is wholly foreign to, 
 and separate from mine. So far from that, all the 
 pure and noble arts of peace are founded on war ; no 
 great art ever yet rose on earth, but among a nation 
 of soldiers. There is no art among a shepherd 
 people, if it remains at peace. There is no art 
 among an agricultural people, if it remains at peace. 
 Commerce is barely consistent with fine art ; but can- 
 not produce it. Manufacture not only is unable to 
 produce it, but invariably destroys whatever seeds of 
 it exist. There is no great art possible to a nation 
 but that which is based on battle. 
 
 87. Now, though I hope you love fighting for its 
 own sake, you must, I imagine, be surprised at my 
 assertion that there is any such good fruit of fight- 
 ing. You supposed, probably, that your office was 
 to defend the works of peace, but certainly not to 
 found them : nay, the common course of war, you 
 may have thought, was only to destroy them. And 
 truly, I who tell you this of the use of war, should 
 have been the last of men to tell you so, had I 
 trusted my own experience only. Hear why : I have 
 given a considerable part of my life to the investiga- 
 tion of Venetian painting, and the result of that in- 
 quiry was my fixing upon one man as the greatest of 
 all Venetians, and therefore, as I believed, of all 
 painters whatsoever. I formed this faith (whether 
 right or wrong matters at present nothing), in the
 
 WAR. 93 
 
 supremacy of the painter Tintoret, under ? roof cov- 
 ered with his pictures ; and of those pictures, three 
 of the noblest were then in the form of shreds of 
 ragged canvas, mixed up with the laths of the roof, 
 rent through by three Austrian shells. Now it is no', 
 every lecturer who could tell you that he had seen 
 three of his favorite pictures torn to rags by bomb- 
 shells. And after such a sight, it is not every lec- 
 turer who would tell you that, nevertheless, war was 
 the foundation of all great art. 
 
 88. Yet the conclusion is inevitable, from any 
 careful comparison of the states of great historic 
 races at different periods. Merely to show you what 
 I mean, I will sketch for you, very briefly, the broad 
 steps of the advance of the best art of the 
 world. The first dawn of it is in Egypt ; and the 
 power of it is founded on the perpetual contemplation 
 of death, and of future judgment, by the mind of a 
 nation of which the ruling caste were priests, and 
 the second, soldiers. The greatest works produced 
 by them are sculptures of their kings going out to 
 battle, or receiving the homage of conquered armies. 
 And you must remember also, as one of the great 
 keys to the splendor of the Egyptian nation, that 
 the priests were not occupied in theology only. 
 Their theology was the basis of practical government 
 and law ; so that they were not so much priests as 
 religious judges ; the office of Samuel, among the Jews, 
 being as nearly as possible correspondent to theirs. 
 
 89. All the rudiments of art then, and much more 
 than the rudiments of all science, are laid first by 
 this great warrior-nation, which held in contempt all
 
 94 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 mechanical trades, and in absolute hatred the peace- 
 ful life of shepherds. From Egypt art passes 
 directly into Greece, where all poetry, and all paint- 
 ing, are nothing else than the description, praise, or 
 dramatic representation of war, or of the exercises 
 which prepare for it, in their connection with offices 
 of religion. All Greek institutions had first respect 
 to war ; and their conception of it, as one necessary 
 office of all human and divine life, is expressed 
 simply by the images of their guiding gods. Apollo 
 is the god of all wisdom of the intellect ; he bears 
 the arrow and the bow, before he bears the lyre. 
 Again, Athena is the goddess of all wisdom in conduct. 
 It is by the helmet and the shield, oftener than by the 
 shuttle, that she is distinguished from other deities. 
 
 90. There were, however, two great differences 
 in principle between the Greek and the Egyptian 
 theories of policy. In Greece there was no soldier 
 caste ; every citizen was necessarily a soldier. And, 
 again, while the Greeks rightly despised mechanical 
 arts as much as the Egyptians, they did not make 
 the fatal mistake of despising agricultural and pas- 
 toral life ; but perfectly honored both. These two 
 conditions of truer thought raise them quite into the 
 highest rank of wise manhood that has yet been 
 reached ; for all our great arts, and nearly all our 
 great thoughts, have been borrowed or derived from 
 them. Take away from us what they have given ; 
 and I hardly can imagine how low the modern * 
 European would stand. 
 
 * The modern, observe, because we have lost all inheritance from 
 Florence or Venice, and are now pensioners upon the Greeks only.
 
 WAR. 95 
 
 91 . Now, you are to remember, in passing to the 
 next phase of history, that though you must have war 
 to produce art you must also have much more than 
 war ; namely, an art-instinct or genius in the people ; 
 and that, though all the talent for painting in the 
 world won't make painters of you, unless you have 
 a gift for fighting as well, you may have the gift for 
 fighting, and none for painting. Now, in the next 
 great dynasty of soldiers, the art-instinct is wholly 
 wanting. I have not yet investigated the Roman 
 character enough to tell you the causes of this ; but I 
 believe, paradoxical as it may seem to you, that, 
 however truly the Roman might say of himself that 
 he was born of Mars, and suckled by the wolf, he 
 was nevertheless, at heart, more of a farmer than a 
 soldier. The exercises of war were with him practi- 
 cal, not poetical ; his poetry was in domestic life 
 only, and the object of battle, " pacis imponere 
 morem." And the arts are extinguished in his 
 hands, and do not rise again, until, with Gothic 
 chivalry, there comes back into the mind of Europe 
 a passionate delight in war itself, for the sake of war. 
 And then, with the romantic knighthood which can 
 imagine no other noble employment, under the 
 fighting kings of France, England, and Spain ; and 
 under the fighting dukeships and citizenships of Italy, 
 art is born again, and rises to her height in the great 
 valleys of Lombardy and Tuscany, through which 
 there flows not a single stream, from all their Alps 
 or Apennines, that did not once run dark red from 
 battle : and it reaches its culminating glory in the 
 city which gave to history the most intense type of
 
 96 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 soldiership yet seen among men ; the city whose 
 armies were led in their assault by their king, led 
 through it to victory by their king,* and so led, 
 though that king of theirs was blind, and in the 
 extremity of his age. 
 
 92. And from this time forward, as peace is estab- 
 lished or extended in Europe, the arts decline. They 
 reach an unparalleled pitch of costliness, but lose their 
 life, enlist themselves at last on the side of luxury 
 and various corruption, and, among wholly tranquil 
 nations, wither utterly away ; remaining only in par- 
 tial practice among races who, like the French and 
 us, have still the minds, though we cannot all live 
 the lives, of soldiers. 
 
 93. " It may be so," I can suppose that a philan- 
 thropist might exclaim. "Perish then the arts, if 
 they can flourish only at such a cost. What worth 
 is there in toys of canvas and stone, if compared to 
 the joy and peace of artless domestic life ? " And 
 the answer is truly, in themselves, none. But as 
 expressions of the highest state of the human spirit, 
 their worth is infinite. As results they may be 
 worthless, but, as signs, they are above price. For 
 it is an assured truth that, whenever the faculties of 
 men are at their fulness, they must express them- 
 selves by art ; and to say that a state is without such 
 expression, is to say that it is sunk from its proper 
 level of manly nature. So that, when I tell you that 
 war is the foundation of all the arts, I mean also that 
 it is the foundation of all the high virtues and 
 faculties of men. 
 
 * Henry Dandolo: the King of Bohemia is very grand/ *oo, and by 
 the issue, his knighthood is, to us, more memorable.
 
 WAR. 97 
 
 94. It is very strange to me to discover this ; and 
 very dreadful but I saw it to be quite an undeniable 
 fact. The common notion that peace and the virtues 
 of civil life flourished together, I found to be wholly 
 untenable. Peace and the vices of civil life only 
 flourish together. We talk of peace and learning, 
 and of peace and plenty, and of peace and civilization ; 
 but I found that those were not the words which the 
 Muse of History coupled together : that on her lips, 
 the words were peace and sensuality, peace and 
 selfishness, peace and corruption, peace and death. 
 I found, in brief, that all great nations learned their 
 truth of word, and strength of thought, in war ; that 
 they were nourished in war, and wasted by peace ; 
 taught by war, and deceived by peace ; trained by 
 war, and betrayed by peace ; in a word, that they 
 were born in war and expired in peace. 
 
 95. Yet now note carefully, in the second place, 
 it is not all war of which this can be said nor all 
 dragon's teeth, which, sown, will start up into men. 
 It is not the ravage of a barbarian wolf-flock, as under 
 Genseric or Suwarrow ; nor the habitual restlessness 
 and rapine of mountaineers, as on the old borders of 
 Scotland ; nor the occasional struggle of a strong 
 peaceful nation for its life, as in the wars of the Swiss 
 with Austria ; nor the contest of merely ambitious 
 nations for extent of power, as in the wars of France 
 under Napoleon, or the just terminated war in America. 
 None of these forms of war build anything but tombs. 
 But the creative or foundational war is that in which 
 the natural restlessness and love of contest among 
 men are disciplined, by consent, into modes of beau-
 
 98 THE CROWN Ob WILD OLIVE. 
 
 tiful though it may be fatal play : in which the 
 natural ambition and love of power of men are dis- 
 ciplined into the aggressive conquest of surrounding 
 evil : and in which the natural instincts of self-defence 
 are sanctified by the nobleness of the institutions, 
 and purity of the households, which they are appointed 
 to defend. To such war as this all men are born ; 
 in such war as this any man may happily die ; and 
 out of such war as this have arisen throughout the 
 extent of past ages, all the highest sanctities and 
 virtues of humanity. 
 
 1 shall therefore divide the war of which I would 
 speak to you into three heads. War for exercise or 
 play; war for dominion ; and, war for defence. 
 
 96. I. And first, of war for exercise or play. I 
 speak of it primarily, in this light, because, through all 
 past history, manly war has been more an exercise 
 than anything else, among the classes who cause, and 
 proclaim it. It is not a game to the conscript, or the 
 pressed sailor ; but neither of these are the causers of 
 it. To the governor who determines that war shall 
 be, and to the youths who voluntarily adopt it as their 
 profession, it has always been a grand pastime ; and 
 chiefly pursued because they had nothing else to do. 
 And this is true without any exception. No king 
 whose mind was fully occupied with the development 
 of the inner resources of his kingdom, or with any 
 other sufficing subject of thought, ever entered into 
 war but on compulsion. No youth who was earnestly 
 busy with any peaceful subject of study, or set OP 
 any serviceable course of action, ever voluntarily 
 became a soldier. Occupy him early and wisely, in
 
 WAR. 99 
 
 agriculture or business, in science or in literature, 
 and he will never think of war otherwise than as a 
 calamity.* But leave him idle ; and, the more brave 
 and active and capable he is by nature, the more he 
 will thirst for some appointed field for action ; and 
 find, in the passion and peril of battle, the only 
 satisfying fulfilment of his unoccupied being. And 
 from the earliest incipient civilization until now, the 
 population of the earth divides itself, when you look 
 at it widely, into two races ; one of workers, and the 
 other of players one tilling the ground, manufac- 
 turing, building, and otherwise providing for the 
 necessities of life ; the other part proudly idle, and 
 continually therefore needing recreation, in which 
 they use the productive and laborious orders partly 
 as their cattle, and partly as their puppets or pieces 
 in the game of death. 
 
 97. f Now, remember, whatever virtue or goodli- 
 ness there may be in this game of war, rightly played, 
 there is none when you thus play it with a multitude 
 of human pawns. 
 
 If you, the gentlemen of this or any other kingdom, 
 choose to make your pastime of contest, do so, and 
 welcome ; but set not up these unhappy peasant- 
 pieces upon the checker of forest and field. If the 
 wager is to be of death, lay it on your own heads, not 
 
 * A wholesome calamity, observe, not to be shrunk from, though 
 not to be provoked. 
 
 t I dislike more and more every day the declamatory forms in 
 which what I most desired to make impressive was arranged for oral 
 delivery, but these two paragraphs, 97 and 98, sacrifice no accuracy in 
 their endeavor to be pompous, and are among the most importantly 
 true passages I have ever written.
 
 100 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 theirs. A goodly struggle in the Olympic dust, 
 though it be the dust of the grave, the gods will look 
 upon, and be with you in ; but they will not be with 
 you, if you sit on the sides of the amphitheatre, whose 
 steps are the mountains of earth, whose arena its 
 valleys, to urge your peasant millions into gladiatorial 
 war. You also, you tender and delicate women, for 
 whom, and by whose command, all true battle has 
 been, and must ever be ; you would perhaps shrink 
 now, though you need not, from the thought of sit- 
 ting as queens above set lists where the jousting game 
 might be mortal. How much more, then, ought you 
 to shrink from the thought of sitting above a theatre 
 pit in which even a few condemned slaves were slay- 
 ing each other only for your delight ! And do you 
 not shrink from the fact of sitting above a theatre pit, 
 where, not condemned slaves, but the best and 
 bravest of the poor sons of your people, slay each 
 other, not man to man, as the coupled gladiators ; 
 but race to race, in duel of generations ? You would 
 tell me, perhaps, that you do not sit to see this ; and 
 it is indeed true, that the women of Europe those 
 who have no heart-interest of their own at peril in the 
 contest draw the curtains of their boxes, and muffle 
 the openings ; so that from the pit of the circus of 
 slaughter there may reach them only at intervals a 
 half-heard cry and a murmur as of the wind's sighing, 
 when myriads of souls expire. They shut out the 
 death-cries ; and are happy, and talk wittily among 
 themselves. That is the utter literal fact of what our 
 Jadies do in their pleasant lives. 
 98. Nay, you might answer, speaking with them
 
 WAR. 1 01 
 
 " We do not let these wars come to pass for our 
 play, nor by our carelessness ; we cannot help them. 
 How can any final quarrel of nations be settled other- 
 wise than by war ? " 
 
 I cannot now delay to tell you how political quarrels 
 might be otherwise settled. But grant that they 
 cannot. Grant that no law of reason can be under- 
 stood by nations ; no law of justice submitted to 
 by them : and that, while questions of a few acres, 
 and of petty cash, can be determined by truth and 
 equity, the questions which are to issue in the perish- 
 ing or saving of kingdoms can be determined only by 
 the truth of the sword, and the equity of the rifle. 
 Grant this, and even then, judge if it will always be 
 necessary for you to put your quarrel into the hearts 
 of your poor, and sign your treaties with peasants' 
 blood. You would be ashamed to do this in your own 
 private position and power. Why should you not be 
 ashamed also to do it in public place and power? If 
 you quarrel with your neighbor, and the quarrel be 
 indeterminable by law, and mortal, you and he do not 
 send your footmen to Battersea fields to fight it out ; 
 nor do you set fire to his tenants' cottages, nor spoil 
 their goods. You fight out your quarrel yourselves, 
 and at your own danger, if at all. And you do not 
 think it materially affects the arbitrament that one of 
 you has a larger household than the other ; so that, if 
 the servants or tenants were brought into the field 
 with their masters, the issue of the contest could not 
 be doubtful? You either refuse the private duel, or 
 you practise it under laws of honor, not of physical 
 force ; that so it may be, in a manner, justly concluded
 
 102 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 Now the just or unjust conclusion of the private feud 
 is of little moment, while the just or unjust conclusion 
 of the public feud is of eternal moment : and yet, in 
 this public quarrel, you take your servants 1 sons from 
 their arms to fight for it, and your servants 1 food 
 from their lips to support it ; and the black seals on 
 the parchment of your treaties of peace are the 
 deserted hearth and the fruitless field. 
 
 99. There is a ghastly ludicrousness in this, as 
 there is mostly in these wide and universal crimes. 
 Hear the statement of the very fact of it in the 
 most literal words of the greatest of our English 
 thinkers : 
 
 " What, speaking in quite unofficial language, is the 
 net purport and upshot of war ? To my own knowl- 
 edge, for example, there dwell and toil, in the British 
 village of Dumdrudge, usually some five hundred 
 souls. From these, by certain 'natural enemies 1 of 
 the French, there are successively selected, during 
 the French war, say thirty able-bodied men. Dum- 
 drudge, at her own expense, has suckled and nursed 
 them ; she has, not without difficulty and sorrow, fed 
 them up to manhood, and even trained them to crafts, 
 so that one can weave, another build, another ham- 
 mer, and the weakest can stand under thirty stone 
 avoirdupois. Nevertheless, amid much weeping and 
 swearing, they are selected ; all dressed in red ; and 
 shipped away, at the public charges, some two thou- 
 sand miles, or say only to the south of Spain ; and 
 fed there till wanted. 
 
 " And now to that same spot in the south of Spain 
 are thirty similar French artisans, from a French
 
 WAR. 163 
 
 Dumdrudge, in like manner wending ; till at length, 
 after infinite effort, the two parties come into actual 
 juxtaposition ; and Thirty stands fronting Thirty, each 
 with a gun in his hand. 
 
 " Straightway the word ' Fire ! ' is given, and they 
 blow the souls out of one another, and in place of 
 sixty brisk useful craftsmen, the world has sixty dead 
 carcases, which it must bury, and anon shed tears 
 for. Had these men any quarrel ? Busy as the devil 
 is, not the smallest ! They lived far enough apart ; 
 were the entirest strangers ; nay, in so wide a uni- 
 verse, there was even, unconsciously, by commerce, 
 some mutual helpfulness between them. How then ? 
 Simpleton ! their governors had fallen out ; and in- 
 stead of shooting one another, had the cunning to 
 make these poor blockheads shoot." (Sartor Resar- 
 tus.) 
 
 loo. Positively, then, gentlemen, the game of 
 battle must not, and shall not, ultimately be played 
 this way. But should it be played any way ? Should 
 it, if not by your servants, be practised by yourselves ? 
 I think, yes. Both history and human instinct seem 
 alike to say, yes. All healthy men like fighting, and 
 like the sense of danger ; all brave women like to 
 hear of their fighting, and of their facing danger. 
 This is a fixed instinct in the fine race of them ; and 
 I cannot help fancying that fair fight is the best play 
 for them ; and that a tournament was a better game 
 than a steeple-chase. The time may perhaps come 
 in France as well as here, for universal hurdle-races 
 and cricketing : but I do not think universal crick- 
 ets will bring out the best qualities of the nobles o'i
 
 104 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 either country. I use, in such question, the test 
 which I have adopted, of the connection of war with 
 other arts ; and I reflect how, as a sculptor, I should 
 feel, if I were asked to design a monument for a dead 
 knight, in Westminister abbey, with a carving of a 
 bat at one end, and a ball at the other. It may be 
 the remains in me only of savage Gothic prejudice ; 
 but I had rather carve it with a shield at one end, and 
 a sword at the other. And this, observe, with no re- 
 ference whatever to any story of duty done, or cause 
 defended. Assume the knight merely to have ridden 
 out occasionally to fight his neighbor for exercise ; 
 assume him even a soldier of fortune, and to have 
 gained his bread, and filled his purse, at the sword's 
 point. Still, I feel as if it were, somehow, grander 
 and worthier in him to have made his bread by sword 
 play than any other play ; I had rather he had made 
 it by thrusting than by batting ; much rather, than 
 by betting. Much rather that he should ride war 
 horses, than back race horses ; and I say it sternly 
 and deliberately much rather would I have him slay 
 his neighbor, than cheat him. 
 
 101. But remember, so far as this may be true, 
 the game of war is only that in which the full per- 
 sonal power of the human creature is brought out in 
 management of its weapons. And this for three 
 reasons : 
 
 First, the great justification of this game is that it 
 truly when well played, determines who is the best 
 man; who is the highest bred, the most self-deny- 
 ing, the most fearless, the coolest of nerve, the swift- 
 st of eye and hand. You cannot test these qualities
 
 WAR. 105 
 
 wholly, unless there is a clear possibility of the strug- 
 gle's ending in death. It is only in the fronting of 
 that condition that the full trial of the man, soul and 
 body, comes out. You may go to your game of 
 wickets, or of hurdles, or of cards, and any knavery 
 that is in you may stay unchallenged all the while. 
 But if the play may be ended at any moment by a 
 lance-thrust, a man will probably make up his ac- 
 counts a little before he enters it. Whatever is rot- 
 ten and evil in him will weaken his hand more in 
 holding a sword-hilt, than in balancing a billiard-cue ; 
 and on the whole, the habit of living lightly hearted, 
 in daily presence of death, always has had, and 
 must have, power both in the making and testing of 
 honest men. But for the final testing, observe, you 
 must make the issue of battle strictly dependent on 
 fineness of frame, and firmness of hand. You must 
 not make it the question, which of the combatants 
 has the longest gun, or which has got behind the 
 biggest tree, or which has the wind in his face, or 
 which has gunpowder made by the best chemists, or 
 iron smelted with the best coal, or the angriest mob 
 at his back. Decide your battle, whether of nations, 
 or individuals, on those terms ; and you have only 
 multiplied confusion, and added slaughter to iniquity. 
 But decide your battle by pure trial which has the 
 strongest arm, and steadiest heart, and you have 
 gone far to decide a great many matters besides, and 
 to decide them rightly.* 
 
 1 02. And the other reasons for this mode of 
 decision of cause, are the diminution both of the 
 
 * Compare Fors Clavigera, Letter XIV. p. 9.
 
 io6 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 material destructiveness, or cost, and of the physica\ 
 distress of war. For you must not think that in 
 speaking to you in this (as you may imagine), fantas- 
 tic praise of battle, I have overlooked the conditions 
 weighing against me. I pray all of you, who have not 
 read, to read with the most earnest attention, Mr. 
 Helps's two essays on War and Government, in the 
 first volume of the last series of " Friends in Council." 
 Everything that can be urged against war is there 
 simply, exhaustively, and most graphically stated. 
 And all, there urged, is true. But the two great counts 
 of evil alleged against war by that most thoughtful 
 writer, hold only against modern war. If you have 
 to take away masses of men from all industrial em- 
 ployment, to feed them by the labor of others, 
 to provide them with destructive machines, varied 
 daily in national rivalship of inventive cost ; if you 
 have to ravage the country which you attack, 
 to destroy for a score of future years, its roads, its 
 woods, its cities, and its harbors; and if, finally, 
 having brought masses of men, counted by hundreds 
 of thousands, face to face, you tear those masses to 
 pieces with jagged shot, and leave the living crea- 
 tures, countlessly beyond all help of surgery, to 
 starve and parch, through days of torture, down into 
 clots of clay what book of accounts shall record 
 the cost of your work ; what book of judgment 
 sentence the guilt of it ? 
 
 103. That, I say, is modern war, scientific war, 
 chemical and mechanic war, how much worse 
 than the savage's poisoned arrow ! And yet you wilt 
 tell me, perhaps, that any other war than this is im-
 
 WAR. 107 
 
 possible now. It may be so ; the progress of science 
 cannot, perhaps, be otherwise registered than by new 
 facilities of destruction ; and the brotherly love of our 
 enlarging Christianity be only proved by multiplica- 
 tion of murder. Yet hea~, for a moment, what war 
 was, in Pagan and ignorant days ; what war might 
 yet be, if we could extinguish our science in darkness, 
 and join the heathen's practice to the Christian's 
 theory. I read you this from a book which probably 
 most of you know well, and all ought to know Miil- 
 ler's " Dorians ; " * but I have put the points I wish 
 you to remember in closer connection than in his 
 text. 
 
 104. "The chief characteristic of the warriors of 
 Sparta was great composure and subdued strength ; . 
 the violence (kvaact) of Aristodemus and Isadas being 
 considered as deserving rather of blame than praise ; 
 and these qualities in general distinguished the Greeks 
 from the northern Barbarians, whose boldness always 
 consisted in noise and tumult. For the same reason 
 the Spartans sacrificed to the Muses before an action ; 
 these goddesses being expected to produce regularity 
 and order in battle ; as they sacrificed on the same 
 occasion in Crete to the god of love, as the confirmer 
 of mutual esteem and shame. Every man put on a 
 crown, when the band of flute-players gave the signal 
 for attack ; all the shields of the line glittered with 
 their high polish, and mingled their splendor with 
 the dark red of the purple mantles, which were meant 
 both to adorn the combatant, and to conceal the 
 blood of the wounded ; to fall well and decorously 
 
 * Vol. ii., chap. 12, 9.
 
 io8 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 being an incentive the more to the most heroic valor. 
 The conduct of the Spartans in battle denotes a high 
 and noble disposition, which rejected all the extremes 
 of brutal rage. The pursuit of the enemy ceased 
 when the victory was completed ; and after the signal 
 for retreat had been given, all hostilities ceased. The 
 spoiling of arms, at least during the battle, was also 
 interdicted ; and the consecration of the spoils of 
 slain enemies to the gods, as, in general, all rejoi- 
 cings for victory, were considered as ill-omened." 
 
 105. Such was the war of the greatest soldiers 
 who prayed to heathen gods. What Christian war is, 
 preached by Christian ministers, let any one tell you, 
 who saw the sacred crowning, and heard the sacred 
 flute-playing, and was inspired and sanctified by the 
 divinely-measured and musical language, of any North 
 American regiment preparing for its charge. And 
 what is the relative cost of life in pagan and Christian 
 wars, let this one fact tell you : the Spartans won 
 the decisive battle of Corinth with the loss of eight 
 men ; the victors at indecisive Gettysburg confess to 
 the loss of 30,000. 
 
 106. II. I pass now to our second order of war, 
 the commonest among men, that undertaken in desire 
 of dominion. And let me ask you to think for a few 
 moments what the real meaning of this desire of 
 dominion is first in the minds of kings then in 
 that of nations. 
 
 Now, mind you this first, that I speak either 
 about kings, or masses of men, with a fixed conviction 
 that human nature is a noble and beautiful thing ; not 
 a foul nor a base thing. All the sin of men I esteem
 
 WAR. 109 
 
 as their disease, not their nature ; as a folly which 
 may be prevented, not a necessity which must be 
 accepted. And my wonder, even when things are at 
 their worst, is always at the height which this human 
 nature can attain. Thinking it high, I find it always 
 a higher thing than I thought it ; while those who 
 think it low, find it, and will find it, always lower than 
 they thought it : the fact being, that it is infinite, 
 and capable of infinite height and infinite fall ; but the 
 nature of it and here is the faith which I would 
 have you hold with me the nature of it is in the 
 nobleness, not in the catastrophe. 
 
 107. Take the faith in its utmost terms. When 
 the captain of the " London" shook hands with his 
 mate, saying "God speed you! I will go down with 
 my passengers," that I believe to be " human nature." 
 He does not do it from any religious motive from 
 any hope of reward, or any fear of punishment ; he does 
 it because he is a man. But when a mother, living 
 among the fair fields of merry England, gives her two- 
 year-old child to be suffocated under a mattress in her 
 inner room, while the said mother waits and talks out- 
 side ; that I believe to be not human nature. You have 
 the two extremes there, shortly. And you, men, and 
 mothers, who are here face to face with me to-night, 
 I call upon you to say which of these is human, and 
 which inhuman which " natural "and which " unnat- 
 ural " ? Choose your creed at once, I beseech you : 
 choose it with unshaken choice choose it forever. 
 Will you take, for foundation of act and hope, the 
 faith that this man was such as God made him, or 
 that this woman was such as God made her ? Which
 
 no THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 of them has failed from their nature from their 
 present, possible, actual nature ; not their nature of 
 long ago, but their nature of now ? Which has be- 
 trayed it falsified it? Did the guardian who died 
 in his trust, die inhumanly, and as a fool ; and did the 
 murderess of her child fulfil the law of her being? 
 Choose, I say ; infinitude of choices hang upon this. 
 You have had false prophets among you for cen- 
 turies you have had them solemnly warned against 
 them though you were ; false prophets, who have told 
 you that all men are nothing but fiends or wolves, half 
 beast, half devil. Believe that, and indeed you may 
 sink to that. But refuse that, and have faith that God 
 " made you upright," though you have sought out 
 many inventions ; so, you will strive daily to become 
 more what your Maker meant and means you to be, 
 and daily gives you also the power to be and you 
 will cling more and more to the nobleness and virtue 
 that is in you, saying, " My righteousness I hold fast, 
 and will not let it go." 
 
 108. I have put this to you as a choice, as if you 
 might hold either of these creeds you liked best. But 
 there is in reality no choice for you ; the facts being 
 quite easily ascertainable. You have no business to 
 think about this matter, or to choose in it. The broad 
 fact is, that a human creature of the highest race, 
 and most perfect as a human thing, is invariably both 
 kind and true ; and that as you lower the race, you 
 get cruelty and falseness, as you get deformity : and 
 this so steadily and assuredly, that the two great 
 words which, in their first use, meant only perfection 
 of race, have come, by consequence of the invariable
 
 WAR. Ill 
 
 connection of virtue with the fine human nature, both 
 to signify benevolence of disposition. The word 
 generous, and the word gentle, both, in their origin, 
 meant only " of pure race," but because charity and 
 tenderness are inseparable from this purity of blood, 
 the words which once stood only for pride, now stand 
 as synonyms for virtue. 
 
 109. Now, this being the true power of our inher- 
 ent humanity, and seeing that all the aim of education 
 should be to develop this ; and seeing also what 
 magnificent self-sacrifice the higher classes of men 
 are capable of, for any cause that they understand or 
 feel, it is wholly inconceivable to me how well-edu- 
 cated princes, who ought to be of all gentlemen the 
 gentlest, and of all nobles the most generous, and 
 whose title of royalty means only their function of 
 doing every man " right" how these, I say, through- 
 out history, should so rarely pronounce themselves 
 on the side of the poor and of justice, but continually 
 maintain themselves and their own interests by op- 
 pression of the poor, and by wresting of justice ; and 
 how this should be accepted as so natural, that the 
 word loyalty, which means faithfulness to law, is used 
 as if it were only the duty of a people to be loyal to 
 their king, and not the duty of a king to be infin- 
 itely more loyal to his people. How comes it to 
 pass that a captain will die with his passengers, and 
 lean over the gunwale to give the parting boat its 
 course ; but that a king will not usually die with, 
 much less for, his passengers, thinks it rather in- 
 cumbent on his passengers in any number, to die for 
 him f
 
 112 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 no. Think, I beseech you, of the wonder of this. 
 The sea captain, not captain by divine right, but only 
 by company's appointment ; not a man of royal 
 descent, but only a plebeian who can steer ; not 
 with the eyes of the world upon him, but with feeble 
 chance, depending on one poor boat, of his name 
 being ever heard above the wash of the fatal waves ; 
 not with the cause of a nation resting on his act, but 
 helpless to save so much as a child from among the 
 lost crowd with whom he resolves to be lost, yet 
 goes down quietly to his grave, rather than break his 
 faith to these few emigrants. But your captain by 
 divine right, your captain with the hues of a hun- 
 dred shields of kings upon his breast, your captain 
 whose every deed, brave or base, will be illuminated 
 or branded forever before unescapable eyes of men, 
 your captain whose every thought and act are benefi- 
 cent, or fatal, from sunrising to setting, blessing as 
 the sunshine, or shadowing as the night, this cap- 
 tain, as you find him in history, for the most part 
 thinks only how he may tax his passengers, and sit 
 at most ease in his state cabin ! 
 
 in. For observe, if there had been indeed in the 
 hearts of the rulers of great multitudes of men any 
 such conception of work for the good of those under 
 their command, as there is in the good and thoughtful 
 masters of any small company of men, not only wars 
 for the sake of mere increase of power could never 
 take place, b'lt our idea of power itself would be en- 
 tirely altered. Do you suppose that to think and act 
 even for a million of men, to hear their complaints, 
 watch their weaknesses, restrain their vices, make
 
 WAR. 113 
 
 laws for them, lead them, day by day, to purer life, 
 is not enough for one man's work ? If any of us 
 were absolute lord only of a district of a hundred 
 miles square, and were resolved on doing our utmost 
 for it ; making it feed as large a number of people as 
 possible ; making every clod productive, and every 
 rock defensive, and every human being happy ; should 
 we not have enough on our hands think you ? 
 
 112. But if the ruler has any other aim than this; 
 if, careless of the result of his interference, he desire 
 only the authority to interfere ; and, regardless of what 
 is ill-done or well-done, cares only that it shall be done 
 at his bidding ; if he would rather do two hundred 
 miles' space of mischief, than one hundred miles' 
 space of good, of course he will try to add to his ter- 
 ritory ; and to add inimitably. But does he add to 
 his power ? Do you call it power in a child, if he is 
 allowed to play with the wheels and bands of some 
 vast engine, pleased with their murmur and whirl, till 
 his unwise touch, wandering where it ought not, scat- 
 ters beam and wheel into ruin ? Yet what machine 
 is so vast, so incognizable, as the working of the 
 mind of a nation ; what child's touch so wanton, as 
 the word of a selfish king ? And yet, how long have 
 we allowed the historian to speak of the extent of the 
 calamity a man causes, as a just ground for his pride ; 
 and to extol him as the greatest prince, who is only 
 the centre of the widest error. Follow out this 
 thought by yourselves ; and you will find that all 
 power, properly so called, is wise and benevolent. 
 There may be capacity in a drifting fire-ship to de- 
 stroy a fleet ; there may be venom enough in a dead
 
 H4 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 
 
 body to infect a nation: but which of you, the 
 most ambitious, would desire a drifting kinghood, 
 robed in consuming fire, or a poison-dipped sceptre 
 whose touch was mortal ? There is no true potency, 
 remember, but that of help ; nor true ambition, but 
 ambition to save. 
 
 113. And then, observe farther, this true power, 
 the power of saving, depends neither on multitude of 
 men, nor on extent of territory. We are continually 
 assuming that nations become strong according to 
 their numbers. They indeed become so, if those 
 numbers can be made of one mind ; but how are you 
 sure you can stay them in one mind, and keep them 
 from having north and south minds ? Grant them 
 unanimous, how know you they will be unanimous in 
 right ? If they are unanimous in wrong, the more 
 they are, essentially the weaker they are. Or, sup- 
 pose that they can neither be of one mind, nor of two 
 minds, but can only be of no mind ? Suppose they 
 are a mere helpless mob ; tottering into precipitant 
 catastrophe, like a waggon-load of stones when the 
 wheel comes off. Dangerous enough for their neigh- 
 bors, certainly, but not " powerful." 
 
 114. Neither does strength depend on extent of 
 territory, any more than upon number of population. 
 Take up your maps when you go home this evening, 
 put the cluster of British Isles beside the mass of 
 South America ; and then consider whether any race 
 of men need care how much ground they stand upon. 
 The strength is in the men, and in their unity anc 
 virtue, not in their standing room : a little group of 
 wise hearts is better than a wilderness full of fools ;
 
 WAR. 115 
 
 and only that nation gains true territory, which gains 
 itself. 
 
 115. And now for the brief practical outcome of 
 all this. Remember, no government is ultimately 
 strong, but in proportion to its kindness and justice ; 
 and that a nation does not strengthen, by merely mul- 
 tiplying and diffusing itself. We have not strength- 
 ened as yet, by multiplying into America. Nay, even 
 when it has not to encounter the separating condi- 
 tions of emigration, a nation need not boast itself of 
 multiplying on its own ground, if it multiplies only as 
 flies or locusts do, with the god of flies for its god. 
 It multiplies its strength only by increasing as one 
 great family, in perfect fellowship and brotherhood. 
 And lastly, it does not strengthen itself by seizing 
 dominion over races whom it cannot benefit. Austria 
 is not strengthened, but weakened, by her grasp 
 of Lombardy ; and whatever apparent increase of 
 majesty and of wealth may have accrued to us from 
 the possession of India, whether these prove to us 
 ultimately power or weakness, depends wholly on the 
 degree in which our influence on the native race shall 
 be benevolent and exalting. 
 
 116. But, as it is at their own peril that any race 
 extends their dominion in mere desire of power, so it 
 is at their own still greater peril that they refuse to 
 undertake aggressive war, according to their force, 
 whenever they are assured that their authority would 
 be helpful and protective. Nor need you listen to 
 any sophistical objection of the impossibility of know- 
 ing when a people's help is needed, or when not. 
 Make your national conscience clean, and your nations
 
 n6 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 eyes will soon be clear. No man who is truly ready 
 to take part in a noble quarrel will ever stand long in 
 doubt by whom, or in what cause, his aid is needed. 
 I hold it my duty to make no political statement of 
 any special bearing in this presence ; but I tell you 
 broadly and boldly, that, within these last ten years, 
 we English have, as a knightly nation, lost our spurs : 
 we have fought where we should not have fought, for 
 gain ; and we have been passive where we should not 
 have been passive, for fear. I tell you that the prin- 
 ciple of non-intervention, as now preached among us, 
 is as selfish and cruel as the worst frenzy of conquest, 
 and differs from it only by being not only malignant, 
 but dastardly. 
 
 117. I know, however, that my opinions on this 
 subject differ too widely from those ordinarily held, 
 to be any farther intruded upon you ; and therefore I 
 pass lastly to examine the conditions of the third 
 kind of noble war ; war waged simply for defence 
 of the country in which we were born, and for the 
 maintenance and execution of her laws, by whomso- 
 ever threatened or defied. It is to this duty that I 
 suppose most men entering the army consider them- 
 selves in reality to be bound, and I want you now to 
 reflect what the laws of mere defence are ; and what 
 the soldier's duty, as now understood, or supposed to 
 be understood. You have solemnly devoted your- 
 selves to be English soldiers, for the guardianship 
 of England. I want you to feel what this vow of 
 yours indeed means, or is gradually coming to 
 mean. 
 
 118. You take it upon you, first, while you are
 
 WAR. 117 
 
 sentimental schoolboys ; you go into your military 
 convent, or barracks, just as a girl goes into her 
 convent while she is a sentimental schoolgirl ; neither 
 of you then know what you are about, though 
 both the good soldiers and the good nuns make the 
 best of it afterwards. You don't understand perhaps 
 why I call you "sentimental" schoolboys, when you 
 go into the army? Because, on the whole, it is love 
 of adventure, of excitement, of fine dress and of the 
 pride of fame, all which are sentimental motives, 
 which chiefly make a boy like going into the Guards 
 better than into a counting-house. You fancy, per- 
 haps, that there is a severe sense of duty mixed with 
 these peacocky motives? And in the best of you, 
 there is ; but do not think that it is principal. If you 
 cared to do your duty to your country in a prosaic and 
 unsentimental way, depend upon it, there is now 
 truer duty to be done in raising harvests, than in burn- 
 ing them ; more in building houses, than in shelling 
 them more in winning money by your own work, 
 wherewith to help men, than in taxing other people's 
 work, for money wherewith to slay men ; more duty 
 finahy, in honest and unselfish living than in honest 
 and unselfish dying, though that seems to your boys' 
 eyes the bravest. So far then, as for your own honor, 
 and the honor of your families, you choose brave death 
 in a red coat before brave life in a black one, you are 
 sentimental ; and now see what this passionate vow of 
 yours comes to. For a little while you ride, and you 
 hunt tigers or savages, you shoot, and are shot ; you 
 are happy, and proud, always, and honored and wepf 
 if you die ; and you are satisfied with your life, and
 
 Ii8 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 with the end of it ; believing, on the whole, that good 
 rather, than harm of it comes to others, and much 
 pleasure to you. 
 
 119. But as the sense of duty enters into your 
 forming minds, the vow takes another aspect. You 
 find that you have put yourselves into the hand of 
 your country as a weapon. You have vowed to 
 strike, when she bids you, and to stay scabbarded 
 when she bids you ; all that you need answer for is, 
 that you fail not in her grasp. And there is goodness 
 in this, and greatness, if you can trust the hand and 
 heart of the Britomart who has braced you to her side, 
 and are assured that when she leaves you sheathed in 
 darkness, there is no need for your flash to the sun. 
 But remember, good and noble as this state may be, 
 it is a state of slavery. There are different kinds of 
 slaves and different masters . Some slaves are scourged 
 to their work by whips, others are scourged to it by 
 restlessness or ambition. It does not matter what the 
 whip is ; it is none the less a whip, because you have 
 cut thongs for it out of your own souls : the fact, so far, 
 of slavery, is in being driven to your work without 
 thought, at another's bidding. Again, some slaves 
 are bought with money, and others with praise. It 
 matters not what the purchase-money is. The distin- 
 guishing sign of slavery is to have a price, and be 
 bought for it. Again, it matters not what kind of 
 work you are set on ; some slaves are set to forced 
 diggings, others to forced marches ; some dig furrows, 
 others field-works, and others graves. Some press 
 the juice of reeds, and some the juice of vines, and 
 some the blood of men. The fact of the captivity is
 
 WAR. I ig 
 
 the same whatever work we are set upon, though the 
 fruits of the toil may be different. 
 
 1 20. But, remember, in thus vowing ourselves to 
 be the slaves of any master, it ought to be some sub- 
 ject of forethought with us, what work he is likely to 
 put us upon. You may think that the whole duty of 
 a soldier is to be passive, that it is the country you 
 have left behind who is to command, and you have 
 only to obey. But are you sure that you have left 
 all your country behind, or that the part of it you 
 have so left is indeed the best part of it? Suppose 
 and, remember, it is quite conceivable that you 
 yourselves are indeed the best part of England ; that 
 you, who have become the slaves, ought to have been 
 the masters ; and that those who are the masters, 
 ought to have been the slaves ! If it is a noble 
 and whole-hearted England, whose bidding you are 
 bound to do, it is well ; but if you are yourselves 
 the best of her heart, and the England you have 
 left be but a half-hearted England, how say you of 
 your obedience ? You were too proud to become shop- 
 keepers : are you satisfied then to become the servants 
 of shop-keepers? You were too proud to become 
 merchants or farmers yourselves : will you have mer- 
 chants or farmers then for your field marshals ? You 
 had no gifts of special grace for Exeter Hall : will you 
 have some gifted person thereat for your commander- 
 in-chief, to judge of your work, and reward it? You 
 imagine yourselves to be the army of England : how 
 if you should find yourselves, at last, only the police 
 of her manufacturing towns, and the beadles of her 
 little Bethels?
 
 120 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 121. It is not so yet, nor will be so, I trust, for- 
 ever; but what I want you to see, and to be assured 
 of, is, that the ideal of soldiership is not mere passive 
 obedience and bravery; that, so far from this, no 
 country is in a healthy state which has separated, even 
 in a small degree, her civil from her military power. 
 All states of the world, however great, fall at once 
 when they use mercenary armies ; and although it is 
 a less instant form of error (because involving no 
 national taint of cowardice) , it is yet an error no less 
 ultimately fatal it is the error especially of modern 
 times, of which we cannot yet know all the calamitous 
 consequences to take away the best blood and 
 strength of the nation, all the soul-substance of it 
 that is brave, and careless of reward, and scornful of 
 pain, and faithful in trust ; and to cast that into steel, 
 and make a mere sword of it ; taking away its voice 
 and will ; but to keep the worst part of the nation 
 whatever is cowardly, avaricious, sensual, and faith- 
 less and to give to this the voice, to this the au- 
 thority, to this the chief privilege, where there is 
 least capacity, of thought. 
 
 122. The fulfilment of your vow for the defence 
 of England will by no means consist in carrying out 
 such a system. You are not true soldiers, if you 
 only mean to stand at a shop door, to protect shop- 
 boys who are cheating inside. A soldier's vow to his 
 country is that he will die for the guardianship of 
 her domestic virtue, of her righteous laws, and of 
 her anyway challenged or endangered honor. A 
 state without virtue, without laws, and without 
 honor, he is bound not to defend ; nay, bound to
 
 WAR. 121 
 
 redress by his own right hand that which he sees 
 to be base in her. 
 
 123. So sternly is this the law of Nature and 
 life, that a nation once utterly corrupt can only be 
 redeemed by a military despotism never by talk- 
 ing, nor by its free effort. And the health of any 
 state consists simply in this : that in it, those who 
 are wisest shall also be strongest ; its rulers should 
 be also its soldiers ; or, rather, by force of intellect 
 more than of sword, its soldiers also its rulers. 
 Whatever the hold which the aristocracy of England 
 has on the heart of England, in that they are still 
 always in front of her battles, this hold will not be 
 enough, unless they are also in front of her thoughts. 
 And truly her thoughts need good captain's leading 
 now, if ever ! Do you know what, by this beautiful 
 division of labor (her brave men fighting, and her 
 cowards thinking) , she has come at last to think ? 
 Here is a bit of paper in my hand,* a good one 
 too, and an honest one ; quite representative of 
 the best common public thought of England at this 
 
 * I do not care to refer to the journal quoted, because the article 
 was unworthy of its general tone, though in order to enable the audi- 
 ence to verify the quoted sentence, I left the number containing it on 
 the table, when I gave this lecture. But a saying of Baron Liebig's, 
 quoted at the head of a leader on the same subject in the Daily 
 Telegraph of January n, 1866, summarily digests and presents the 
 maximum folly of modern thought in this respect. " Civilization," says 
 the Baron, "is the economy of power, and English power is coal." 
 Not altogether so, my chemical friend. Civilization is the making of 
 civil persons, which is a kind of distillation of which alembics are in- 
 capable, and does not at all imply the turning of a small company of 
 gentlemen into a large company of ironmongers. And English power 
 what little of it may be left) is by no means coal, but, indeed, of that 
 which, " when the whole world turns to coal, then chiefly lives."
 
 122 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 moment ; and it is holding forth in one of its leaders 
 upon our " social welfare," upon our "vivid life" 
 upon the " political supremacy of Great Britain." 
 And what do you think all these are owing to ? To 
 what our English sires have done for us, and taught 
 us, age after age ? No : not to that. To our honesty 
 of heart, or coolness of head, or steadiness of will ? 
 No: not to these. To our thinkers, or our states- 
 men, or our poets, or our captains, or our martyrs, or 
 the patient labor of our poor ? No : not to these ; 
 or at least not to these in any chief measure. Nay, 
 says the journal, " more than any agency, it is the 
 cheapness and abundance of our coal which have 
 made us what we are." If it be so, then " ashes to 
 ashes " be our epitaph ! and the sooner the better. 
 
 124. Gentlemen of England, if ever you would 
 have your country breathe the pure breath of heaven 
 again, and receive again a soul into her body, instead 
 of rotting into a carcase, blown up in the belly with 
 carbonic acid (and great that way), you must think, 
 and feel, for your England, as well as fight for her: 
 you must teach her that all the true greatness she ever 
 had, or ever can have, she won while her fields were 
 green and her faces ruddy ; that greatness is still 
 possible for Englishmen, even though the ground be 
 not hollow under their feet, nor the sky black over 
 their heads. 
 
 And bear with me you soldier youths, who are 
 thus in all ways the hope of your country ; or must 
 be, if she have any hope : if I urge you with rude 
 earnestness to remember that your fitness for all 
 future trust depends upon what you are now. No
 
 WAR. 123 
 
 good soldier in his old age was ever careless ot 
 indolent in his youth. Many a giddy and thought- 
 less boy has become a good bishop, or a good lawyer, 
 or a good merchant ; but no such an one ever became 
 a good general. I challenge you, in all history, to 
 find a record of a good soldier who was not grave 
 and earnest in his youth. And, in general, I have 
 no patience with people who talk about " the thought- 
 lessness of youth" indulgently. I had infinitely 
 rather hear of thoughtless old age, and the indul- 
 gence due to that. When a man has done his work, 
 and nothing can any way be materially altered in his 
 fete, let him forget his toil, and jest with his fate, if 
 he will ; but what excuse can you find for wilfulness 
 of thought, at the very time when every crisis of 
 future fortune hangs on your decisions ? A youth 
 thoughtless ! when all the happiness of his home for- 
 ever depends on the chances, or the passions, of an 
 hour ! A youth thoughtless ! when the career of all 
 his days depends on the opportunity of a moment ! 
 A youth thoughtless ! when his every act is as a torch 
 to the laid train of future conduct, and every imagina- 
 tion a fountain of life or death ! Be thoughtless in any 
 after years, rather than now though, indeed, there 
 is only one place where a man may be nobly thought- 
 less, his deathbed. No thinking should ever be 
 left to be done there. 
 
 126. Having, then, resolved that you will not waste 
 recklessly, but earnestly use, these early days of 
 yours, remember that all the duties of her children 
 to England may be summed in two words industry, 
 and honor. I say first, industry, for it is in this that
 
 124 THE CROWN OF WILD O*LIVE. 
 
 soldier youth are especially tempted to fail. Yet, 
 surely, there is no reason, because your life may pos- 
 sibly or probably be shorter than other men's, that 
 you should therefore waste more recklessly the portion 
 of it that is granted you ; neither do the duties of 
 your profession, which require you to keep your 
 bodies strong, in any wise involve the keeping of 
 your minds weak. So far from that, the experience, 
 the hardship, and the activity of a soldier's life ren- 
 der his powers of thought more accurate than those 
 of other men ; and while, for others, all knowledge 
 is often little more than a means of amusement, there 
 is no form of science which a soldier may not at some 
 time or other find bearing on business of life and 
 death. A young mathematician may be excused for 
 languor in studying curves to be described only with a 
 pencil ; but not in tracing those which are to be de- 
 scribed with a rocket. Your knowledge of a whole- 
 some herb may involve the feeding of an army ; and 
 acquaintance with an obscure point of geography, the 
 success of a campaign. Never waste an instant's 
 time, therefore ; the sin of idleness is a thousand-fold 
 greater in you than in other youths ; for the fates of 
 those who will one day be under your command hang 
 upon your knowledge ; lost moments now will be lost 
 lives then, and every instant which you carelessly 
 take for play, you buy with blood. 
 
 127. But there is one way of wasting time, of all 
 the vilest, because it wastes, not time only, but the 
 interest and energy of your minds. Of all the un- 
 gentlemanly habits into which you can fall, the vilest 
 is betting, or interesting yourselves in the issues of
 
 WAR. 125 
 
 betting. It unites nearly every condition of folly 
 and vice ; you concentrate your interest upon a mat- 
 ter of chance, instead of upon a subject of true 
 knowledge ; and you back opinions which you have 
 no grounds for forming, merely because they are your 
 own. All the insolence of egotism is in this ; and so 
 far as the love of excitement is complicated with the 
 hope of winning money, you turn yourselves into the 
 basest sort of tradesmen those who live by specu- 
 lation. Were there no other ground for industry, 
 this would be a sufficient one ; that it protected you 
 from the temptation to so scandalous a vice. Work 
 faithfully, and you will put yourselves in possession 
 of a glorious and enlarging happiness ; not such as 
 can be won by the speed of a horse, or marred by 
 the obliquity of a ball. 
 
 128. First, then, by industry you must fulfil your 
 vow to your country ; but all industry and earnestness 
 will be useless unless they are consecrated by your 
 resolution to be in all things men of honor ; not honor 
 in the common sense only, but in the highest. Rest 
 on the force of the two main words in the great verse, 
 integer vitae, scelerisque purus. You have vowed 
 your life to England ; give it her wholly a bright, 
 stainless, perfect life a knightly life. Because you 
 have to fight with machines instead of lances, there 
 may be a necessity for more ghastly danger, but there 
 is none for less worthiness of character, than in olden 
 time. You may be true knights yet, though perhaps 
 not equites ; you may have to call yourselves " can- 
 nonry " instead of " chivalry," but that is no reason 
 why you should not call yourselves true men. So the
 
 126 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 first thing you have to see to in becoming soldiers is 
 that you make yourselves wholly true. Courage is a 
 mere matter of course among any ordinarily well- 
 born youths ; but neither truth nor gentleness is mat- 
 ter of course. You must bind them like shields 
 about your necks ; you must write them on the tables 
 of your hearts. Though it be not exacted of you, 
 yet exact it of yourselves, this vow of stainless truth. 
 Your hearts are, if you leave them unstirred, as 
 tombs in which a god lies buried. Vow yourselves 
 crusaders to redeem that sacred sepulchre. And re- 
 member, before all things for no other memory 
 will be so protective of you that the highest law of 
 this knightly truth is that under which it is vowed to 
 women. Whomsoever else you deceive, whomsoever 
 you injure, whomsoever you leave unaided, you must 
 not deceive, nor injure, nor leave unaided, according 
 to your power, any woman of whatever rank. Believe 
 me, every virtue of the higher phases of manly char- 
 acter begins in this ; in truth and modesty before 
 the face of all maidens ; in truth and pity, or truth 
 and reverence, to all womanhood. 
 
 129. And now let me turn for a moment to you, 
 wives and maidens, who are the souls of soldiers ; to 
 you, mothers, who have devoted your children to 
 the great hierarchy of war. Let me ask you to con- 
 sider what part you have to take for the aid of those 
 who love you ; for if you fail in your part they cannot 
 fulfil theirs ; such absolute helpmates you are that no 
 man can stand without that help, nor labor in his own 
 strength. 
 
 I know your hearts, and that the truth of then.
 
 WA R. 127 
 
 never fails when an hour of trial comes which you 
 recognize for such. But you know not when the hour 
 of trial first finds you, nor when it verily finds you. 
 You imagine that you are only called upon to wait and 
 to suffer ; to surrender and to mourn. You know that 
 you must not weaken the hearts of your husbands and 
 Jovers, even by the one fear of which those hearts are 
 capable, the fear of parting from you, or of caus- 
 ing you grief. Through weary years of separation ; 
 through fearful expectancies of unknown fate ; through 
 the tenfold bitterness of the sorrow which might so 
 easily have been joy, and the tenfold yearning for 
 glorious life struck down in its prime through all 
 these agonies you fail not, and never will fail. But 
 your trial is not in these. To be heroic in danger is 
 little ; you are Englishwomen. To be heroic in 
 change and sway of fortune is little ; for do you 
 not love ? To be patient through the great chasm 
 and pause of loss is little ; for do you not still love 
 in heaven ? But to be heroic in happiness ; to bear 
 yourselves gravely and righteously in the dazzling ot 
 the sunshine of morning ; not to forget the God in 
 whom you trust, when He gives you most ; not to 
 fail those who trust you, when they seem to need you 
 least; this is the difficult fortitude. It is not in the 
 oining of absence, not in the peril of battle, not in 
 he wasting of sickness, that your prayer should be 
 most passionate, or your guardianship most tender. 
 Pray, mothers and maidens, for your young soldiers 
 in the bloom of their pride ; pray for them, while 
 the only dangers round them are in their own way- 
 ward wills ; watch you, and pray, when they have to
 
 128 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 face, not death, but temptation. But it is this forti- 
 tude also for which there is the crowning reward. 
 Believe me, the whole course and character of your 
 lovers' lives is in your hands ; what you would have 
 them be, they shall be, if you not only desire to have 
 them so, but deserve to have them so ; for they are 
 but mirrors in which you will see yourselves imaged. 
 If you are frivolous, they will be so also ; if you have 
 no understanding of the scope of their duty, they 
 also will forget it ; they will listen, they can listen, 
 to no other interpretation of it than that uttered 
 from your lips. Bid them be brave ; they will be 
 brave for you ; bid them be cowards ; and how noble 
 soever they be ; they will quail for you. Bid them 
 be wise, and they will be wise for you ; mock at their 
 counsel, they will be fools for you : such and so abso- 
 lute is your rule over them. You fancy, perhaps, as 
 you have been told so often, that a wife's rule should 
 only be over her husband's house, not over his mind. 
 Ah, no ! the true rule is just the reverse of that; a 
 true wife, in her husband's house, is his servant ; it 
 is in his heart that she is queen. Whatever of best 
 he can conceive, it is her part to be ; whatever of 
 highest he can hope, it is hers to promise ; all that is 
 dark in him she must purge into purity ; all that is 
 failing in him she must strengthen into truth : from 
 her, through all the world's clamor, he must win his 
 praise; in her, through all the world's warfare, he 
 must find his peace. 
 
 130. And, now, but one word more. You may 
 wonder, perhaps, that I have spoken all this night in 
 praise of war. Yet, truly if it might be, I, for one,
 
 WAR. 129 
 
 would fain join in the cadence of hammer-strokes 
 that should beat swords into ploughshares : and that 
 this cannot be, is not the fault of us men. It is your 
 fault. Wholly yours. Only by your command, or by 
 your permission, can any contest take place among us. 
 And the real, final, reason for all the poverty, misery, 
 and rage of battle, throughout Europe, is simply that 
 you women, however good, however religious, how- 
 ever self-sacrificing for those whom you love, are too 
 selfish and too thoughtless to take pains for any 
 creature out of your own immediate circles. You 
 fancy that you are sorry for the pain of others. Now 
 I just tell you this, that if the usual course of war, 
 instead of unroofing peasants' houses, and ravaging 
 peasants' fields, merely broke the china upon your 
 own drawing-room tables, no war in civilized countries 
 would last a week. I tell you more, that at whatever 
 moment you chose to put a period to war, you could 
 do it with less trouble than you take any day to go out 
 to dinner. You know, or at least you might know if 
 you would think, that every battle you hear of has 
 made many widows and orphans. We have, none of 
 us, heart enough truly to mourn with these. But at 
 least we might put on the outer symbols of mourning 
 with them. Let but every Christian lady who has 
 conscience toward God, vow that she will mourn, at 
 least outwardly, for His killed creatures. Your pray- 
 ing is useless, and your churchgoing mere mockery of 
 God, if you have not plain obedience in you enough 
 for this. Let every lady in the upper classes of civil- 
 ized Europe simply vow that, while any cruel war 
 proceeds, she will wear black; a mute's black,
 
 13 THE CROWN Of WILD OLIVE. 
 
 with no jewel, no ornament, no excuse for, or evasion 
 into prettiness. I tell you again, no war would last a 
 week. 
 
 131. And lastly. You women of England are 
 all now shrieking with one voice, you and your 
 clergymen together, because you hear of your 
 Bibles being attacked. If you choose to obey your 
 Bibles, you will never care who attacks them. It is 
 just because you never fulfil a single downright pre- 
 cept of the Book, that you are so careful for its credit : 
 and just because you don't care to obey its whole 
 words, that you are so particular about the letters of 
 them. The Bible tells you to dress plainly, and 
 you are mad for finery ; the Bible tells you to have 
 pity on the poor, and you crush them under your 
 carriage-wheels ; the Bible tells you to do judgment 
 and justice, and you do not know, nor care to 
 know, so much as what the Bible word "justice" 
 means. Do but learn so much of God's truth as that 
 comes to ; know what He means when He tells you 
 to be just : and teach your sons, that their bravery 
 is but a fool's boast, and their deeds but a firebrand's 
 tossing, unless they are indeed Just men, and Perfect 
 in the Fear of God ; and you will soon have no 
 more war, unless it be indeed such as is willed by 
 Him, of whom, though Prince of Peace, it is also 
 written, " In Righteousness He doth judge, and make 
 war."
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND.
 
 LECTURE IV. 
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 
 
 Delivered at the R. A . Institution, Woolwich, 
 December 14, 1869. 
 
 132. I WOULD fain have left to the frank expression 
 of the moment, but fear I could not have found clear 
 words I cannot easily find them, even deliberately, 
 to tell you how glad I am, and yet how ashamed, 
 to accept your permission to speak to you. Ashamed 
 of appearing to think that I can tell you any truth 
 which you have not more deeply felt than I ; but 
 glad in the thought that my less experience, and way 
 of life sheltered from the trials, and free from the re- 
 sponsibilities of yours, may have left me with some- 
 thing of a child's power of help to you ; a sureness 
 of hope, which may perhaps be the one thing that 
 can be helpful to men who have done too much not 
 to have often failed in doing all that they desired. 
 And indeed, even the most hopeful of us, cannot but 
 now be in many things apprehensive. For this at 
 least we all know too well, that we are on the eve of 
 a great political crisis, if not of political change. 
 That a struggle is approaching between the newly- 
 risen power of democracy and the apparently depart- 
 ing power of feudalism ; and another struggle, no 
 less imminent, and far more dangerous, between 
 
 '33
 
 134 THE CROWN Ob' WILD OLIVE. 
 
 wealth and pauperism. These two quarrels are con- 
 stantly thought of as the same. They are being 
 fought together, and an apparently common interest 
 unites for the most part the millionnaire with the 
 noble, in resistance to a multitude, crying, part of it 
 for bread and part of it for liberty. 
 
 133. And yet no two quarrels can be more distinct. 
 Riches so far from being necessary to noblesse 
 are adverse to it. So utterly adverse, that the first 
 character of all the Nobilities which have founded 
 great dynasties in the world is to be poor ; often poor 
 by oath always poor by generosity. And of every 
 true knight in the chivalric ages, the first thing history 
 tells you is, that he never kept treasure for himself. 
 
 134. Thus the causes of wealth and noblesse are 
 not the same ; but opposite. On the other hand, the 
 causes of anarchy and of the poor are not the same, 
 but opposite. Side by side, in the same rank, are 
 now indeed set the pride that revolts against author- 
 ity, and the misery that appeals against avarice. But, 
 so far from being a common cause, all anarchy is the 
 forerunner of poverty, and all prosperity begins in 
 obedience. So that, thus, it has become impossible 
 to give due support to the cause of order, without 
 seeming to countenance injury ; and impossible to 
 plead justly the claims of sorrow, without seeming to 
 plead also for those of license. 
 
 Let me try, then, to put in very brief terms, the 
 real plan of this various quarrel, and the truth of the 
 cause on each side. Let us face that full truth, what- 
 ever it may be, and decide what part, according to 
 our power, we should take in the quarrel.
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 135 
 
 135. First. For eleven hundred years, all but five, 
 since Charlemagne set on his head the Lombard 
 crown, the body of European people have submitted 
 patiently to be governed; generally by kings al- 
 ways by single leaders of some kind. But for the 
 last fifty years they have begun to suspect, and of 
 late they have many of them concluded, that they 
 have been on the whole ill-governed, or misgoverned, 
 by their kings. Whereupon they say, more and 
 more widely, " Let us henceforth have no kings ; and 
 no government at all." 
 
 Now we said, we must face the full truth of the 
 matter, in order to see what we are to do. And 
 the truth is that the people have been misgoverned ; 
 that very little is to be said, hitherto, for most of 
 their masters and that certainly in many places 
 they will try their new system of "no masters : " 
 and as that arrangement will be delightful to all fool- 
 ish persons, and, at first, profitable to all wicked 
 ones, and as these classes are not wanting or un- 
 important in any human society, the experiment 
 is likely to be tried extensively. And the world may 
 be quite content to endure much suffering with this 
 fresh hope, and retain its faith in anarchy, whatever 
 comes of it, till it can endure no more. 
 
 136. Then, secondly. The people have begun to 
 suspect that one particular form of this past mis- 
 government has been, that their masters have set 
 them to do all the work, and have themselves taken 
 all the wages. In a word, that what was called 
 governing them, meant only wearing fine clothes, 
 and living on good fare at their expense. And I am
 
 136 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 sorry to say, the people are quite right in this opinion 
 also. If you inquire into the vital fact of the matter, 
 this you will find to be the constant structure of 
 European society for the thousand years of the feudal 
 system ; it was divided into peasants who lived by 
 working ; priests who lived by begging ; and knights 
 who lived by pillaging ; and as the luminous public 
 mind becomes gradually cognizant of these facts, it 
 will assuredly not suffer things to be altogether ar- 
 ranged that way any more ; and the devising of other 
 ways will be an agitating business ; especially because 
 the first impression of the intelligent populace is, that 
 whereas, in the dark ages, half the nation lived idle, 
 in the bright ages to come, the whole of it may. 
 
 137. Now, thirdly and here is much the wors' 
 phase of the crisis. This past system of misgovern- 
 ment, especially during the last three hundred years, 
 has prepared, by its neglect, a class among the lower 
 orders which it is now peculiarly difficult to govern. 
 It deservedly lost their respect but that was the 
 least part of mischief. The deadly part of it was, 
 that the lower orders lost their habit, and at last 
 their faculty, of respect ; lost the very capability of 
 reverence, which is the most precious part of the 
 human soul. Exactly in the degree in which you can 
 find creatures greater than yourself, to look up to, in 
 that degree, you are ennobled yourself, and, in that 
 degree, happy. If you could live always in the pres- 
 ence of archangels, you would be happier than in 
 that of men ; but even if only in the company of 
 admirable knights and beautiful ladies, the more 
 noble and bright they were, and the more you could
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 13? 
 
 reverence their virtue, the happier you would be. 
 On the contrary, if you were condemned to live among 
 a multitude of idiots, dumb, distorted, and malicious, 
 you would not be happy in the constant sense of your 
 own superiority. Thus all real joy and power of 
 progress in humanity depend on finding something 
 to reverence, and all the baseness and misery of 
 humanity begin in a habit of disdain. Now, by 
 general misgovernment, I repeat, we have created in 
 Europe a vast populace, and out of Europe a still 
 vaster one, which has lost even the power and con- 
 ception of reverence ; * which exists only in the wor- 
 ship of itself which can neither see anything beauti- 
 ful around it, nor conceive anything virtuous above it ; 
 which has, towards all goodness and greatness, no 
 other feelings than those of the lowest creatures 
 fear, hatred, or hunger ; a populace which has sunk 
 below your appeal in their nature, as it has risen 
 beyond your power in their multitude ; whom you 
 can now no more charm than you can the adder, no: 
 discipline, than you can the summer fly. 
 
 It is a crisis, gentlemen ; and time to think of it. 
 I have roughly and broadly put it before you in its 
 darkness. Let us look what we may find of light. 
 
 138. Only the other day, in a journal which is a 
 fairly representative exponent of the Conservatism of 
 our day, and for the most part not at all in favor of 
 strikes or other popular proceedings ; only about 
 three weeks since, there was a leader, with this, or a 
 similar, title " What is to become of the House of 
 
 * Compare Time and Tide, 169, and Fan Clavigera, Lettel 
 XIV. page 9.
 
 138 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 Lords ? " It startled me, for it seemed as if we were 
 going even faster than I had thought, when such a 
 question was put as a subject of quite open debate, 
 in a journal meant chiefly for the reading of the 
 middle and upper classes. Open or not the debate 
 is near. What is to become of them? And the 
 answer to such question depends first on their being 
 able to answer another question " What is the use 
 of them ? " For some time back, I think the theory of 
 the nation has been, that they are useful as impedi- 
 ments to business, so as to give time for second 
 thoughts. But the nation is getting impatient of 
 impediments to business ; and certainly, sooner or 
 later, will think it needless to maintain these expen- 
 sive obstacles to its humors. And I have not heard, 
 either in public, or from any of themselves, a clear 
 expression of their own conception of their use. So 
 that it seems thus to become needful for all men to 
 tell them, as our one quite clear-sighted teacher, 
 Carlyle, has been telling us for many a year, that the 
 use of the Lords of a country is to govern the country. 
 If they answer that use, the country will rejoice in 
 keeping them ; if not, that will become of them which 
 must of all things found to have lost their service- 
 ableness. 
 
 139. Here, therefore, is the one question, at this 
 crisis, for them, and for us. Will they be lords 
 indeed, and give us laws dukes indeed, and give 
 us guiding ^- princes indeed, and give us beginning, 
 of truer dynasty, which shall not be soiled by co^et- 
 ousness, nor disordered by iniquity? Have they 
 themselves sunk so far as not to hope this? Are
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 139 
 
 there yet any among them who can stand forward 
 with open English brows, and say, So far as in me 
 lies, I will govern with my might, not for Dieu et 
 man Droit, but for the first grand reading of the war 
 cry from which that was corrupted, " Dieu et Droit? " 
 Among them I know there are some among you, 
 soldiers of England, I know there are many, who can 
 do this ; and in you is our trust. I, one of the lower 
 people of your country, ask of you in their name, 
 you whom I will not any more call soldiers, but by 
 the truer name of Knights ; Equites of England, 
 how many yet of you are there, knights errant now 
 beyond all former fields of danger knights patient 
 now beyond all former endurance ; who still retain 
 the ancient and eternal purpose of knighthood, to 
 subdue the wicked, and aid the weak? To them, be 
 they few or many, we English people call for help 
 to the wretchedness, and for rule over the baseness, 
 of multitudes desolate and deceived, shrieking to one 
 another, this new gospel of their new religion. " Let 
 the weak do as they can, and the wicked as they 
 will." 
 
 140. I can hear you saying in your hearts, even 
 the bravest of you, " The time is past for all that." 
 Gentlemen, it is not so. The time has come for 
 more than all that. Hitherto, soldiers have given 
 their lives for false fame, and for cruel power. The 
 day is now when they must give their lives for true 
 fame, and for beneficent power : and the work is near 
 every one of you close beside you the means of 
 it even thrust into your hands. The people are cry- 
 ing to you for command, and you stand there at
 
 140 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE, 
 
 pause, and silent. You think they don't want to be 
 commanded ; try them ; determine what is needful 
 for them honorable for them ; show it them, promise 
 to bring them to it, and they will follow you through 
 fire. " Govern us," they cry with one heart, though 
 many minds. They can be governed still, these 
 English ; they are men still ; not gnats, nor serpents. 
 They love their old ways yet, and their old masters, 
 and their old land. They would fain live in it, as 
 many as may stay there, if you will show them how, 
 there, to live; or show them even, how, there, 
 like Englishmen, to die. 
 
 141. "To live in it, as many as may!" How 
 many do you think may? How many can? How 
 many do you want to live there? As masters, your 
 first object must be to increase your power ; and in 
 what does the power of a country consist? Will you 
 have dominion over its stones, or over its clouds, or 
 over its souls ? What do you mean by a great nation, 
 but a great multitude of men who are true to each 
 other, and strong, and of worth ? Now you can in- 
 crease the multitude only definitely your island has 
 only so much standing room but you can increase 
 the worth zdefinitely. It is but a little island ; 
 suppose, little as it is, you were to fill it with friends ? 
 You may, and that easily. "You must, and that 
 speedily ; or there will be an end to this England of 
 ours, and to all its loves and enmities. 
 
 142. To fill this little island with true friends 
 men brave, wise and happy! Is it so impossible, 
 think you, after the world's eighteen hundred years of 
 Christianity, and our own thousand years of toil, to fill
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 141 
 
 only this little white gleaming crag with happy 
 creatures, helpful to each other? Africa, and India, 
 and the Brazilian wide-watered plain, are these not 
 wide enough for the ignorance of our race ? have they 
 not space enough for its pain? Must we remain here 
 also savage, here at enmity with each other, here 
 foodless, houseless, in rags, in dust, and without 
 hope, as thousands and tens of thousands of us are 
 lying? Do not think it, gentlemen. The thought 
 that it is inevitable is the last infidelity ; infidelity not 
 to God only, but to every creature and every law that 
 He has made. Are we to think that the earth was 
 only shaped to be a globe of torture ; and that there 
 cannot be one spot of it where peace can rest, or jus- 
 tice reign ? Where are men ever to be happy, if not 
 in England ? by whom shall they ever be taught to do 
 right, if not by you ? Are we not of a race first among 
 the strong ones of the earth ; the blood in us inca- 
 pable of weariness, unconquerable by grief ? Have 
 we not a history of which we can hardly think with- 
 out becoming insolent in our just pride of it ? Can 
 we dare, without passing every limit of courtesy to 
 other nations, to say how much more we have to be 
 proud of in our ancestors than they? Among our 
 ancient monarchs, great crimes stand out as mon- 
 strous and strange. But their valor, and, according to 
 their understanding, their benevolence, are constant. 
 The Wars of the Roses, which are as a fearful crim- 
 son shadow on our land, represent the normal condi- 
 tion of other nations ; while from the days of the 
 Heptarchy downwards we have had examples given 
 us, in all ranks, of the most varied and exalted
 
 142 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 virtue ; a heap of treasure that no moth can corrupt, 
 and which even our traitorship, if we are to become 
 traitors to it, cannot sully. 
 
 143. And this is the race, then, that we know not 
 any more how to govern! and this the history 
 which we are to behold broken off by sedition ! and 
 this is the country, of all others, where life is to be- 
 come difficult to the honest, and ridiculous to the 
 wise ! And the catastrophe, forsooth, is to come just 
 when we have been making swiftest progress beyond 
 the wisdom and wealth of the past. Our cities are a 
 wilderness of spinning wheels instead of palaces ; yet 
 the people have not clothes. We have blackened 
 every leaf of English greenwood with ashes, and the 
 people die of cold ; our harbors are a forest of mer- 
 chant ships, and the people die of hunger. 
 
 Whose fault is it? Yours, gentlemen; yours only. 
 You alone can feed them, and clothe, and bring into 
 their right minds, for you only can govern that is 
 to say, you only can educate them. 
 
 144. Educate, or govern, they are one and the 
 same word. Education does not mean teaching 
 people to know what they do not know. It means 
 teaching them to behave as they do not behave. And 
 the true "compulsory education " which the people 
 now ask of you is not catechism, but drill. It is not 
 teaching the youth of England the shapes of letters 
 and the tricks of numbers ; and then leaving them to 
 turn their arithmetic to roguery, and their literature 
 to lust. It is, on the contrary, training them 
 into the perfect exercise and kingly continence of 
 their bodies and souls. It is a painful, continual,
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 143 
 
 and difficult work ; to be done by kindness, by watch- 
 ing, by warning, by precept, and by praise, but 
 above all by example. 
 
 145. Compulsory! Yes, by all means! "Go ye 
 out into the highways and hedges, and compel them 
 to come in." Compulsory! Yes, and gratis also. 
 Dei Gratia, they must be taught, as, Dei Gratia, 
 you are set to teach them. I hear strange talk con- 
 tinually, "how difficult it is to make people pay for 
 being educated ! " Why, I should think so ! Do 
 you make your children pay for their education, or 
 do you give it them compulsorily, and gratis? You 
 do not expect them to pay you for their teaching, 
 except by becoming good children. Why should you 
 expect a peasant to pay for his, except by becoming 
 a good man? payment enough, I think, if we knew 
 it. Payment enough to himself, as to us. For that 
 is another of our grand popular mistakes people 
 are always thinking of education as a means of liveli- 
 hood. Education is not a profitable business, but 
 a costly one ; nay, even the best attainments of it are 
 always unprofitable, in any terms of coin. No nation 
 ever made its bread either by its great arts, or its 
 great wisdoms. By its minor arts or manufactures, 
 by its practical knowledges, yes : but its noble 
 scholarship, its noble philosophy, and its noble art, 
 are always to be bought as a treasure, not sold for a 
 livelihood. You do not learn that you may live 
 you live that you may learn. You are to spend on 
 National Education, and to be spent for it, and to 
 make by it, not more money, but better men ; 
 to get into this British Island the greatest possible
 
 144 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 number of good and brave Englishmen. They are to 
 be your " money's worth." 
 
 But where is the money to come from? Yes, that 
 is to be asked. Let us, as quite the first business in 
 this our national crisis, look not only into our affairs, 
 but into our accounts, and obtain some general 
 notion how we annually spend our money, and what 
 we are getting for it. Observe, I do not mean 10 
 inquire into the public revenue only ; of that some 
 account is rendered already. But let us do the best 
 we can to set down the items of the national private 
 expenditure ; and know what we spend altogether, 
 and how. 
 
 146. To begin with this matter of education. You 
 probably have nearly all seen the admirable lecture 
 lately given by Captain Maxse, at Southampton. It 
 contains a clear statement of the facts at present 
 ascertained as to our expenditure in that respect. It 
 appears that of our public moneys, for every pound 
 that we spend on education we spend twelve either 
 in charity or punishment ; ten millions a year in 
 pauperism and crime, and eight hundred thousand in 
 instruction. Now Captain Maxse adds to this esti- 
 mate of ten millions public money spent on crime 
 and want, a more or less conjectural sum of eight 
 millions for private charities. My impression is that 
 this is much beneath the truth, but at all events it 
 leaves out of consideration much the heaviest and 
 saddest form of charity the maintenance, by the 
 working members of families, of the unfortunate or ill- 
 conducted persons whom the general course of misrule 
 now leaves helpless to be the burden of the rest.
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 145 
 
 147. Now I want to get first at some, I do not say 
 approximate, but at all events some suggestive, esti- 
 mate of the quantity of real distress and misguided 
 jife in this country. Then next, I want some fairly 
 representative estimate of our private expenditure in 
 1 luxuries. We won't spend more, publicly, it appears, 
 than eight hundred thousand a year, on educating 
 men, gratis. I want to know, as nearly as possible, 
 what we spend privately a year, in educating horses 
 gratis. Let us, at least, quit ourselves in this from 
 the taunt of Rabshakeh, and see that for every horse 
 we train also a horseman ; and that the rider be at 
 least as high-bred as the horse, not jockey, but 
 chevalier. Again, we spend eight hundred thousand, 
 which is certainly a great deal of money, in making 
 /ough minds bright. I want to know how much we 
 spend annually in making rough stones bright ; that 
 is to say, what may be the united annual sum, or 
 near it, of our jewellers' bills. So much we pay for 
 educating children gratis ; how much for educating 
 diamonds gratis ? and which pays best for brighten- 
 ing, the spirit, or the charcoal? Let us get those two 
 items set down with some sincerity, and a few more 
 of the same kind. Publicly set down. We must not 
 be ashamed of the way we spend our money. If 
 our right hand is not to know what our left does, 
 it must not be because it would be ashamed if it did. 
 
 That is, therefore, quite the first practical thing to 
 be done. Let every man who wishes well to his 
 country, render it yearly an account of his income, 
 and of the main heads of his expenditure ; or, if he is 
 ashamed to do so, let him no more impute to the
 
 146 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 poor their poverty as a crime, nor set them to break 
 stones in order to frighten them from committing it. 
 To lose money ill is indeed often a crime ; but to get 
 it ill is a worse one, and to spend it ill, worst of all. 
 You object, Lords of England, to increase, to the 
 poor, the wages' you give them, because they spend 
 them, you say, unadvisedly. Render them, there- 
 fore, an account of the wages which they give you ; 
 and show them, by your example, how to spend 
 theirs, to the last farthing, advisedly. 
 
 148. It is indeed time to make this an acknowl- 
 edged subject of instruction, to the working-man, 
 how to spend his wages. For, gentlemen, we must 
 give that instruction, whether we will or no, one way 
 or the other. We have given it in years gone by ; 
 and now we find fault with our peasantry for having 
 been too docile, and profited too shrewdly by our 
 tuition. Only a few days since I had a letter from 
 the wife of a village rector, a man of common sense 
 and kindness, who was greatly troubled in his mind 
 because it was precisely the men who got highest 
 wages in summer that came destitute to his door in the 
 winter. Destitute, and of riotous temper for their 
 method of spending wages in their period of pros- 
 perity was by sitting two days a week in the tavern 
 parlor, ladling port wine, not out of bowls, but out 
 of buckets. Well, gentlemen, who taught them that 
 method of festivity? Thirty years ago, I, a most in- 
 experienced freshman, went to my first college sup- 
 per ; at the head of the table sat a nobleman of high 
 promise and of admirable powers, since dead of 
 palsy; there also we had in the midst of us, not
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 147 
 
 buckets, indeed, but bowls as large as buckets ; there 
 also, we helped ourselves with ladles. There (for 
 this beginning of college education was compulsory), 
 I, choosing -ladlefuls of punch instead of claret, be- 
 cause I was then able, unperceived, to pour them into 
 my waistcoat instead of down my throat, stood it 
 out to the end, and helped to carry four of my fellow 
 students, one of them the son of the head of a 
 college, head foremost, down stairs and home. 
 
 149. Such things are no more ; but the fruit of 
 them remains, and will for many a day to come. 
 The laborers whom you cannot now shut out of the 
 ale-house are only the too faithful disciples of the 
 gentlemen who were wont to shut themselves into 
 the dining-room. The gentlemen have not thought 
 it necessary, in order to correct their own habits, to 
 diminish their incomes ; and, believe me, the way to 
 deal with your drunken workman is not to lower his 
 wages, but to mend his wits.* 
 
 150. And if indeed we do not yet see quite clearly 
 how to deal with the sins of our poor brother, it is 
 possible that our dimness of sight may still have other 
 causes that can be cast out. There are two opposite 
 cries of the great Liberal and Conservative parties, 
 which are both most right, and worthy to be rallying 
 cries. On their side, " Let every man have his 
 chance;" on yours, "Let every man stand in his 
 place." Yes, indeed, let that be so, every man in his 
 place, and every man fit for it. See that he holds 
 that place from Heaven's Providence ; and not from 
 his family's Providence. Let the Lords Spiritual 
 
 * Compare 70 of Time and Tidt.
 
 148 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 quit themselves of simony, we laymen will look after 
 the heretics for them. Let the Lords Temporal quit 
 themselves of nepotism, and we will take care of 
 their authority for them. Publish for us, you 
 soldiers, an army gazette, in which the one subject of 
 daily intelligence shall be the grounds of promotion ; 
 a gazette which shall simply tell us, what there cer- 
 tainly can be no detriment to the service in our know- 
 ing, when any officer is appointed to a new command, 
 -^ what his former services and successes have been, 
 whom he has superseded, and on what ground. 
 It will be always a satisfaction to us ; it may some- 
 times be an advantage to you : and then, when there 
 is really necessary debate respecting reduction of 
 wages, let us always begin not with the wages of the 
 industrious classes, but with those of the idle ones 
 Let there be honorary titles, if people like them ; bu: 
 let there be no honorary incomes. 
 
 151. So much for the master's motto, "Every 
 man in his place." Next for the laborer's motto, 
 "Every man his chance." Let us mend that for 
 them a little, and say, " Every man his certainty" 
 certainty, that if he does well, he will be honored, 
 and aided, and advanced in such degree as may be 
 fitting for his faculty and consistent with his peace ; 
 and equal certainty that if he does ill, he will by sure 
 justice be judged, and by sure punishment be chas- 
 tised ; if it may be, corrected ; and if that may not 
 be, condemned. That is the right reading of the 
 Republican motto, "Every man his chance." And 
 then, with such a system of government, pure, 
 watchful, and just, you may approach your great
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 149 
 
 problem of national education, or in other words, ot 
 national employment. For all education begins in 
 work. What we think, or what we know, or what 
 we believe, is in the end, of little consequence. The 
 only thing of consequence is what we do : and for 
 man, woman or child, the first point of education is 
 to make them do their best. It is the law.of good 
 economy to make the best of everything. How much 
 more to make the best of every creature ! There- 
 fore, when your pauper comes to you and asks for 
 bread, ask of him instantly What faculty have you ? 
 What can you do best? Can you drive a nail into 
 wood? Go and mend the parish fences. Can you 
 lay a brick? Mend the walls of the cottages where 
 the wind comes in. Can you lift a spadeful of earth? 
 Turn this field up three feet deep all over. Can you 
 only drag a weight with your shoulders ? Stand at 
 the bottom of this hill and help up the overladen 
 horses. Can you weld iron and chisel stone? For- 
 tify this wreck-strewn coast into a harbor; and 
 change these shifting sands into fruitful ground. 
 Wherever death was, bring life ; that is to be your 
 work ; that your parish refuge ; that your education. 
 So and no otherwise can we meet existent distress. 
 But for the continual education of the whole people, 
 and for their future happiness, they must have such 
 consistent employment, as shall develop all the 
 powers of the fingers, and the limbs, and the brain: 
 and that development is only to be obtained by hand- 
 labor, of which you have these four great divisions 
 hand-labor on the earth, hand-labor on the sea, 
 aand-labor in art, hand-labor in war. Of the last
 
 15 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 two of these I cannot speak to-night, and of the first 
 two only with extreme brevity. 
 
 152. I. Hand-labor on the earth, the work of the 
 husbandman and of the shepherd ; to dress the 
 earth and to keep the flocks of it the first task of 
 man, and the final one the education always of 
 noblest lawgivers, kings and teachers ; the education 
 of Hesiod, of Moses, of David, of all the true strength 
 of Rome ; and all its tenderness : the pride of Cin- 
 cinnatus, and the inspiration of Virgil. Hand-labor 
 on the earth, and the harvest of it brought forth with 
 singing : not steam-piston labor on the earth, 
 and the harvest of it brought forth with steam-whis- 
 tling. You will have no prophet's voice accompanied 
 by that shepherd's pipe, and pastoral symphony. Do 
 you know that lately, in Cumberland, in the chief 
 pastoral district of England, in Wordsworth's own 
 home, a procession of villagers on their festa day 
 provided for themselves, by way of music, a steam- 
 plough whistling at the head of them ! 
 
 153. Give me patience while I put the principle of 
 machine labor before you, as clearly and in as short 
 compass as possible ; it is one that should be known 
 at this juncture. Suppose a farming proprietor needs 
 to employ a hundred men on his estate, and that 
 the labor of these hundred men is enough, but not 
 more than enough, to till all his land, and to raise 
 from it food foi his own family, and for the hundred 
 laborers. He is obliged under such circumstances, 
 to maintain all the men in moderate comfort, and 
 can only by economy accumulate much for himself. 
 But, suppose he contrive a machine that will easily
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 151 
 
 do the work of fifty men, with only one man to watch 
 it. This sounds like a great advance in civilization. 
 The farmer of course gets his machine made, turns 
 off the fifty men, who may starve or emigrate at their 
 choice, and now he can keep half of the produce of 
 his estate, which formerly went to feed them, all tc 
 himself. That is the essential and constant opera- 
 tion of machinery among us at this moment. 
 
 154. Nay, it is at first answered; no man can in 
 reality keep half the produce of an estate to himself, 
 nor can he in the end keep more than his own human 
 share of anything ; his riches must diffuse themselves 
 at some time ; he must maintain somebody else with 
 them, however he spends them. That is mainly true 
 (not altogether so) , for food and fuel are in ordinary 
 circumstances personally wasted by rich people, in 
 quantities which would save many lives. One of my 
 own great luxuries, for instance, is candlelight 
 and I probably burn, for myself alone, as many 
 candles during the winter, as would comfort the old 
 eyes, or spare the young ones, of a whole rushlighted 
 country village. Still, it is mainly true that it is not 
 by their personal waste that rich people prevent 
 the lives of the poor. This is the way they do it. 
 Let me go back to my farmer. He has got his 
 machine made, which goes creaking, screaming, and 
 occasionally exploding, about modern Arcadia. He 
 has turned off his fifty men to starve. Now, at some 
 distance from his own farm, there is another on which 
 the laborers were working for their bread in the 
 same way, by tilling the land. The machinist sends 
 over to these, saying "I have got food enough
 
 152 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 for you without your digging or ploughing any more. 
 I can maintain you in other occupations instead o' 
 ploughing that land ; if you rake in its gravel you will 
 find some hard stones you shall grind those on 
 mills till they glitter ; then, my wife shall wear a 
 necklace of them. Also, if you turn up the meadows 
 ;>elow you will find some fine white clay, of which 
 you shall make a porcelain service for me : and the 
 rest of the farm I want for pasture for horses for 
 my carriage and you shall groom them, and some 
 of you ride behind the carriage with staves in your 
 hands, and I will keep you much fatter for doing 
 that than you can keep yourselves by digging." 
 
 155. Well but it is answered, are we to have no 
 diamonds, nor china, nor pictures, nor footmen, then 
 but all to be farmers ? I am not saying what we 
 ought to do, I want only to show you with perfect 
 clearness first what we are doing; and that, I repeat 
 is the upshot of machine-contriving in this country 
 And observe its effect on the national strength 
 Without machines, you have a hundred and fifty 
 yeomen ready to join for defence of the land. You 
 get your machine, starve fifty of them, make diamond- 
 cutters or footmen of as many more, and for your 
 national defence against an enemy, you have now, 
 and can have, only fifty men, instead of a hundred 
 and fifty ; these also now with minds much alienated 
 from you as their chief,* and the rest, lapidaries or 
 footmen ; and a steam plough. 
 
 1 56. That is the one effect of machinery ; but at 
 
 * [They were deserting, I am informed, in the early part of this 
 year, 1873, at the rate of a regiment a week.]
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 153 
 
 all events, if we have thus lost in men, we have 
 gained in riches ; instead of happy human souls, we 
 have at least got pictures, china, horses, and are 
 ourselves better off than we were before. But very 
 6ften, and in much of our machine-contriving, even 
 that result does not follow. We are not one whit 
 the richer for the machine, we only employ it for 
 our amusement. For observe, our gaining in riches 
 depends on the men who are out of employment 
 consenting to be starved, or sent ouL of the country. 
 But suppose they do not consent passively to be 
 starved, but some of them become criminals, and 
 have to be taken charge of and fed at a much greater 
 cost than if they were at work, and others, paupers, 
 rioters, and the like, then you attain the real outcome 
 of modern wisdom and ingenuity. You had your hun- 
 dred men honestly at country work ; but you don't like 
 the sight of human beings in your fields ; you like bet- 
 ter to see a smoking kettle. You pay, as an amateur, 
 for that pleasure, and you employ your fifty men in 
 picking oakum, or begging, rioting, and thieving. 
 
 157. By hand-labor, therefore, and that alone, we 
 are to till the ground. By hand-labor also to plough 
 the sea ; both for food, and in commerce, and in war: 
 not with floating kettles there neither, but with 
 hempen bridle, and the winds of heaven in harness. 
 That is the way the power of Greece rose on her 
 Egean, the power of Venice on her Adria, of Amalfi 
 in her blue bay, of the Norman sea-riders from the 
 North Cape to Sicily : so, your own dominion also 
 of the past. Of the past, mind you. On the Baltic 
 and the Nile, your power is already departed. By
 
 154 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 machinery you would advance to discovery; by 
 machinery you would carry your commerce; you 
 would be engineers instead of sailors ; and instantly 
 in the North seas you are beaten among the ice, and 
 before the very Gods of Nile, beaten among the 
 sand. Agriculture, then, by the hand or by the 
 plough drawn only by animals ; and shepherd and pas- 
 toral husbandry, are to be the chief schools of English- 
 men. And this most royal academy of all academies 
 you have to open over all the land, purifying your 
 heaths and hills, and waters, and keeping them full 
 of every kind of lovely natural organism, in tree, 
 herb, and living creature. All land that is waste and 
 ugly, you must redeem into ordered fruitfulness ; all 
 ruin, desolateness, imperfectness of hut or habitation, 
 you must do away with ; and throughout every vil- 
 lage and city of your English dominion, there must 
 not be a hand that cannot find a helper, nor a heart 
 that cannot find a comforter. 
 
 158. " How impossible ! " I know, you are thinking. 
 Ah ! So far from impossible, it is easy, it is natural, 
 it is necessary, and I declare to you that, sooner or 
 later, it must be done, at our peril. If now our Eng- 
 lish lords of land will fix this idea steadily before them ; 
 take the people to their hearts, trust to their loyalty, 
 lead their labor ; then indeed there will be princes 
 again in the midst of us, worthy of the island throne, 
 
 " This royal throne of kings this sceptred isle* 
 This fortress built by nature for herself 
 Against infection, and the hand of war ; 
 This precious stone set in the silver sea ; 
 This happy breed of men this little world: 
 This other Eden Demi-Paradise."
 
 THE FUTURE OF ENGLAND. 155 
 
 But if they refuse to do this, and hesitate and equiv- 
 ocate, clutching through the confused catastrophe of 
 all things only at what they can still keep stealthily 
 for themselves, their doom is nearer than even their 
 adversaries hope, and it will be deeper than even 
 their despisers dream. 
 
 159. That, believe me, is the work you have to do 
 in England ; and out of England you have room for 
 everything else you care to do. Are her dominions 
 in the world so narrow that she can find no place to 
 spin cotton in but Yorkshire? We may organize 
 emigration into an infinite power. We may assemble 
 troops of the more adventurous and ambitious cff our 
 youth ; we may send them on truest foreign service, 
 founding new seats of authority, and centres of 
 thought, in uncultivated and unconquered lands ; re- 
 taining the full affection to the native country no less 
 in our colonists than in our armies, teaching them to 
 maintain allegiance to their fatherland in labor no less 
 than in battle ; aiding them with free hand in the 
 prosecution of discovery, and the victory over adverse 
 natural powers ; establishing seats of every manu- 
 facture in the climates and places best fitted for it, 
 and bringing ourselves into due alliance and harmony 
 of skill with the dexterities of every race, and the 
 wisdoms of every tradition and every tongue. 
 
 160. And then you may make England itself the 
 centre of the learning, of the arts, of the courtesies 
 and felicities of the world. You may cover her 
 mountains with pasture ; her plains with corn, her 
 valleys with the lily, and her gardens with the rose. 
 You may bring together there in peace the wise and
 
 1 56 THE CROWN OF WILD OLIVE. 
 
 the pure, and the gentle of the earth, and by their 
 word, command through its farthest darkness the 
 birth of " God's first creature, which was Light." 
 You know whose words those are ; the words of the 
 wisest of Englishmen. He, and with him the wisest 
 of all other great nations, have spoken always to 
 men of this hope, and they would not hear. Plato, 
 in the dialogue of Critias, his last, broken off at his 
 death, Pindar, in passionate singing of the fortu- 
 nate islands, Virgil, in the prophetic tenth eclogue, 
 Bacon, in his fable of the New Atlantis, More, 
 in the book which, too impatiently wise, became the 
 bye- word of fools these, all, have told us with one 
 voice what we should strive to attain ; they not hope- 
 less of it, but for our follies forced, as it seems, by 
 heaven, to tell us only partly and in parables, lest we 
 should hear them and obey. 
 
 Shall we never listen to the words of these wisest 
 of men? Then listen at least to the words of your 
 children let us in the lips of babes and sucklings 
 find our strength ; and see that we do not make them 
 mock instead of pray, when we teach them, night and 
 morning, to ask for what we believe never can be 
 granted; that the will of the Father, which is, 
 that His creatures may be righteous and happy, 
 should be done, on earth, as it is in Heaven.
 
 APPENDIX.
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 NOTES ON THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 
 
 I AM often accused of inconsistency; but believe 
 myself defensible against the charge with respect to 
 what I have said on nearly every subject except that 
 of war. It is impossible for me to write consistently 
 of war, for the groups of facts I have gathered about 
 it lead me to two precisely opposite conclusions. 
 
 When I find this the case, in other matters, I am 
 silent, till I can choose my conclusion : but, with 
 respect to war, I am forced to speak, by the necessi- 
 ties of time ; and forced to act, one way or another. 
 The conviction on which I act is, that it causes an 
 incalculable amount of avoidable human suffering, 
 and that it ought to cease among Christian nations ; 
 and if therefore any of my boy-friends desire to be 
 soldiers, I try my utmost to bring them into what I 
 conceive to be a better mind. But, on the other 
 hand, I know certainly that the most beautiful char- 
 acters yet developed among men have been formed 
 in war ; that all great nations have been warrior 
 nations, and that the only kinds of peace which we 
 are likely to get in the present age are ruinous alike 
 to the intellect, and the heart.
 
 160 APPENDIX. 
 
 The third lecture, in this volume, addressed to 
 young soldiers, had for its object to strengthen their 
 trust in the virtue of their profession. It is incon- 
 sistent with itself, in its closing appeal to women, 
 praying them to use their influence to bring wars to 
 an end. And 1 have been hindered from completing 
 my long intended notes on the economy of the Kings 
 of Prussia by continually increasing doubt how far 
 the machinery and discipline of war, under which 
 they learned the art of government, was essential for 
 such lesson ; and what the honesty and sagacity of 
 the Friedrich who so nobly repaired his ruined Prussia, 
 might have done for the happiness of his Prussia, 
 ..nruined. 
 
 In war, however, or in peace, the character which 
 Carlyle chiefly loves him for, and in which Carlyle 
 has shown him to differ from all kings up to this time 
 succeeding him, is his constant purpose to use every 
 power intrusted to him for the good of his people ; 
 and be, not in name only, but in heart and hand, 
 their king. 
 
 Not in ambition, but in natural instinct of duty. 
 Friedrich, born to govern, determines to govern to the 
 best of his faculty. That " best " may sometimes be 
 unwise ; and self-will, or love of glory, may have 
 their oblique hold on his mind, and warp it this way 
 or that ; but they are never principal with him. He 
 believes that war is necessary, and maintains it ; sees 
 that peace is necessary, and calmly persists in the 
 work of it to the day of his death, not claiming 
 therein more praise than the head of any ordinary 
 household, who rules it simply because it is his
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 161 
 
 place, and he must not yield the mastery of it to 
 another. 
 
 How far, in the future, it may be possible for men 
 to gain the strength necessary for kingship without 
 either fronting death, or inflicting it, seems to me not 
 at present determinable. The historical facts are that, 
 broadly speaking, none but soldiers, or persons with 
 a soldierly faculty, have ever yet shown themselves 
 fit to be kings ; and that no other men are so gentle, 
 so just, or so clear-sighted. Wordsworth's character 
 of the happy warrior cannot be reached in the height 
 of it but by a warrior ; nay, so much is it beyond 
 common strength that I had supposed the entire 
 meaning of it to be metaphorical, until one of the 
 best soldiers of England himself read me the poem,* 
 and taught me, what I might have known, had I 
 enough watched his own life, that it was entirely 
 literal. There is nothing of so high reach distinctly 
 demonstrable in Friedrich : but I see more and more, 
 as 1 grow older, that the things which are the most 
 worth, encumbered among the errors and faults of 
 every man's nature, are never clearly demonstrable ; 
 and are often most forcible when they are scarcely 
 distinct to his own conscience, how much less, 
 clamorous for recognition by others ! 
 
 Nothing can be more beautiful than Carlyle's show- 
 ing of this, to any careful reader of Friedrich. But 
 careful readers are but one in the thousand ; and by 
 the careless, the masses of detail with which the 
 historian must deal are insurmountable. 
 
 * The late Sir Herbert Edwardes.
 
 1 62 APPENDIX. 
 
 My own notes, made for the special purpose of 
 hunting down the one point of economy, though 
 they cruelly spoil Carlyle's own current and method 
 of thought, may yet be useful in enabling readers, 
 unaccustomed to books involving so vast a range of 
 conception, to discern what, on this one subject 
 only, may be gathered from that history. On any 
 other subject of importance, similar gatherings might 
 be made of other passages. The historian has to 
 deal with all at once. 
 
 I therefore have determined to print here, as a 
 sequel to the Essay on War, my notes from the first 
 volume of Friedrich, on the economies of Branden- 
 burg, up to the date of the establishment of the 
 Prussian monarchy. The economies of the first 
 three Kings of Prussia I shall then take up in Fors 
 Clavtgera, finding them fitter for examination in 
 connection with the subject of that book than of 
 this. 
 
 I assume, that the reader will take down his first 
 volume of Carlyle, and read attentively the passages 
 to which I refer him. I give the reference first to 
 the largest edition, in six volumes (1858-1865) ; then, 
 in parenthesis, to the smallest or "people's edition" 
 (1872-1873). The pieces which I have quoted in 
 my own text are for the use of readers who may not 
 have ready access to the book ; and are enough for 
 the explanation of the points to which 1 wish them 
 to direct their thoughts in reading such histories 
 of soldiers or soldier-kingdoms.
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 163 
 
 I. 
 
 Year 928 to 936. Dawn of Order in Christian 
 Germany. 
 
 Book II. Chap. i. p. 67 (47). 
 
 HENRY THE FOWLER, "the beginning of German 
 kings," is a mighty soldier in the cause of peace; his 
 essential work the building and organization of for- 
 tified towns for the protection of men. 
 
 Read page 72 with utmost care (51), " He fortified 
 towns," to end of small print. I have added some 
 notes on the matter in my lecture on Giovanni Pisano ; 
 but whether you can glance at them or not, fix in 
 your mind this institution of truly civil or civic build- 
 ing in Germany, as distinct from the building of 
 baronial castles for the security of robbers : and of a 
 standing army consisting of every ninth man, called 
 a "burgher" ("townsman") a soldier, appointed 
 to learn that profession that he may guard the walls 
 the exact reverse of our notion of a burgher. 
 
 Frederick's final idea of his army is, indeed, only 
 this. 
 
 Brannibor, a chief fortress of the Wends, is thus 
 taken, and further strengthened by Henry the Fowler ; 
 wardens appointed for it ; and thus the history of 
 Brandenburg begins. On all frontiers, also, this 
 " beginning of German kings" has his " Markgraf," 
 "Ancient of the marked place." Read page 73, 
 measuredly, learning it by heart, if it may be.
 
 164 APPENDIX. 
 
 II. 
 936 1000. History of Nascent Brandenburg. 
 
 THE passage I last desired you to read ends with 
 this sentence: "The sea-wall you build, and what 
 main floodgates you establish in it, will depend on 
 the state of the outer sea." 
 
 From this time forward you have to keep clearly 
 separate in your minds, (A) the history of that outer 
 sea, Pagan Scandinavia, Russia, and Bor-Russia, or 
 Prussia proper ; (B) the history of Henry the Fowler's 
 Eastern and Western Marches ; asserting themselves 
 gradually as Austria and the Netherlands ; and (c) the 
 history of this inconsiderable fortress of Brandenburg, 
 gradually becoming considerable, and the capital 
 city of increasing district between them. That last 
 history, however, Carlyle is obliged to leave vague 
 and gray for two hundred years after Henry's death. 
 Absolutely dim for the first century, in which nothing 
 is evident but that its wardens or Markgraves had 
 no peaceable possession of the place. Read the 
 second paragraph in page 74 (52-3), " in old books" 
 to "reader," and the first in page 83 (59), "mean- 
 while" to " substantial," consecutively. They bring 
 the story of Brandenburg itself down, at any rate, 
 from 936 to 1000. 
 
 III. 
 
 936 1000. State of the Outer Sea. 
 
 READ now Chapter II. beginning at page 76 (54), 
 wherein you will get account of the beginning of
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 165 
 
 vigorous missionary work on the outer sea, in Prus- 
 sia proper; of the death of St. Adalbert, and of 
 the purchase of his dead body by the Duke of 
 Poland. 
 
 You will not easily understand Carlyle's laugh in 
 this chapter, unless you have learned yourself to laugh 
 in sadness, and to laugh in love. 
 
 " No Czech blows his pipe in the woodlands with- 
 out certain precautions and preliminary fuglings of a 
 devotional nature." (Imagine St. Adalbert, in spirit, 
 at the railway station in Birmingham !) 
 
 My own main point for notice in the chapter is the 
 purchase of his body for its " weight in gold." 
 Swindling angels held it up in the scales ; it did not 
 weigh so much as a web of gossamer. " Had such 
 excellent odor, too, and came for a mere nothing of 
 gold," says Carlyle. It is one of the first commercial 
 transactions of Germany, but I regret the conduct of 
 the angels on the occasion. Evangelicalism has 
 been proud of ceasing to invest in relics, its swindling 
 angels helping it to better things, as it supposes. 
 For my own part, I believe Christian Germany could 
 not have bought at this time any treasure more 
 precious ; nevertheless, the missionary work itself you 
 find is wholly vain. The difference of opinion be^ 
 tween St. Adalbert and the Wends, on Divine mat-r 
 ters, does not signify to the Fates. They will not 
 have it disputed about; and end the dispute ad- 
 versely to St. Adalbert, adversely, even, to Bran- 
 denburg and its civilizing power, as you will im- 
 mediately see.
 
 1 66 APPENDIX, 
 
 IV. 
 
 1000 1030. History of Brandenburg in 
 Trouble. 
 
 Book II. Chap. iii. p. 83 (59). 
 
 THE adventures of Brandenburg in contest with 
 Pagan Prussia, irritated, rather than amended, by 
 St. Adalbert. In 1023, roughly, a hundred years 
 after Henry the Fowler's death, Brandenburg is taken 
 by the Wends, and its first line of Markgraves ended ; 
 its population mostly butchered, especially the priests ; 
 and the Wends 1 God, Triglaph, "something like 
 three whales 1 cubs combined by boiling," set up on 
 the top of St. Mary's Hill. 
 
 Here is an adverse "Doctrine of the Trinity" 
 which has its supporters ! It is wonderful, this 
 Tripod and Triglyph, three-footed, three-cut faith 
 of the North and South, the leaf of the oxalis, and 
 strawberry, and clover, fostering the same in their 
 simple manner. I suppose it to be the most savage 
 and natural of notions about Deity ; a prismatic idol- 
 shape of Him, rude as a triangular log, as a trefoil 
 grass. I do not find how long Triglaph held his 
 state on St. Mary's Hill. " For a time," says Carlyle, 
 " the priests all slain or fled, shadowy Markgraves 
 the like church and state lay in ashes, and Tri- 
 glaph, like a triple porpoise under the influence of 
 laudanum, stood, I know not whether on his head or 
 his tail, aloft on the Harlungsberg, as the Supreme 
 of this Universe for the time being."
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 
 
 V. 
 
 1030 1130. Brandenburg under the Ditmarsch 
 Markgraves, or Ditmarsch-Stade Markgraves. 
 
 Book II. Chap. iii. p. 85 (60). 
 
 OF Anglish, or Saxon breed. They attack Bran- 
 denburg, under its Triglyphic protector, take it 
 dethrone him, and hold the town fot a hundred 
 years, their history " stamped beneficially on the face 
 of things, Markgraf after Markgraf getting killed in 
 the business. ' Erschlagen,' ' slain,' fighting with 
 the Heathen say the old books, and pass on to 
 another." If we allow seven years to Triglaph we 
 get a clear century for these as above indicated. 
 They die out in 1130. 
 
 VI. 
 
 1 130 1 170. Brandenburg under Albert the 
 Bear. 
 
 Book II. Chap. iv. p. 91 (64). 
 
 HE is the first of the Ascanien Markgraves, whose 
 castle of Ascanica is on the northern slope of the 
 Hartz Mountains, " ruins still dimly traceable." 
 
 There had been no soldier or king of note among 
 the Ditmarsch Markgraves, so that you will do well to 
 fix in your mind successively the three men, Henry 
 the Fowler, St. Adalbert, and Albert the Bear. A 
 soldier again, and a strong one. Named the Bear 
 only from the device on his shield, first wholly de- 
 finite Markgraf of Brandenburg that there is, "and
 
 1 68 APPENDIX. 
 
 that the luckiest of events for Brandenburg." Read 
 page 93 (66) carefully, and note this of his econ- 
 omies. 
 
 " Nothing better is known to me of Albert the Bear 
 than his introducing large numbers of Dutch Nether- 
 landers into those countries ; men thrown out of 
 work, who already knew how to deal with bog and 
 sand, by mixing and delving, and who first taught 
 Brandenburg what greenness and cow -pasture was. 
 The Wends, in presence of such things, could not 
 but consent more and more to efface themselves 
 either to become German, and grow milk and cheese 
 in the Dutch manner, or to disappear from the world. 
 
 " After two hundred and fifty years of barking and 
 worrying, the Wends are now finally reduced to 
 silence ; their anarchy well buried and wholesome 
 Dutch cabbage planted over it ; Albert did several 
 great things in the world ; but this, for posterity, 
 remains his memorable feat. Not done quite easily, 
 but done : big destinies of nations or of persons are 
 not founded gratis in this world. He had a sore, 
 toilsome time of it, coercing, warring, managing 
 among his fellow-creatures, while his day's work 
 lasted fifty years or so, for it began early. He 
 died in his Castle of Ballenstadt, peaceably among 
 the Hartz Mountains at last, in the year 1170, age 
 about sixty-five." 
 
 Now, note in all this the steady gain of soldiership 
 enforcing order and agriculture, with St. Adalbert 
 giving higher strain to the imagination. Henry the
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 169 
 
 Fowler establishes walled towns, fighting for mere 
 peace. Albert the Bear plants the country with cab- 
 bages, fighting for his cabbage-fields. And the dis- 
 ciples of St. Adalbert, generally, have succeeded in 
 substituting some idea of Christ for the idea of 
 Triglaph. Some idea only; other ideas than of 
 Christ haunt even to this day those Hartz Mountains 
 among which Albert the Bear died so peacefully. 
 Mephistopheles, and all his ministers, inhabit there, 
 commanding mephitic clouds and earth-born dreams. 
 
 VII. 
 
 1170 1320. Brandenburg 150 years under the 
 Ascanien Markgraves. 
 
 Vol. I. Book II. Chap. viii. p. 135 (96). 
 
 " WHOLESOME Dutch cabbages continued to be 
 more and more planted by them in the waste sand : 
 intrusive chaos, and Triglaph held at bay by them," 
 till at last in 1240, seventy years after the great 
 Bear's death, they fortify a new Burg, a " little ram- 
 part," Wehrlin, diminutive of Wehr (or vallum), 
 gradually smoothing itself, with a little echo of the 
 Bear in it too, into Ber-lin, the oily river Spree flow- 
 ing by, "in which you catch various fish;" while 
 trade over the flats and by the dull streams, is widely 
 possible. Of the Ascanien race, the notablest is Otto 
 with the Arrow, whose story see, pp. 138-141 (98- 
 109), noting that Otto is one of the first Minne- 
 singers ; that, being a prisoner to the Archbishop of 
 Magdeburg, his wife rescues him, selling her jewels
 
 1 70 APPENDIX. 
 
 to bribe the canons ; and that the Knight, set free on 
 parole and promise of further ransom, rides back 
 with his own price in his hand ; holding himself 
 thereat cheaply bought, though no angelic legerde- 
 main happens to the scales now. His own estimate 
 of his price "Rain gold ducats on my war-horse 
 and me, till you cannot see the point of my spear 
 atop." 
 
 Emptiness of utter pride, you think? 
 
 Not so. Consider with yourself, reader, how much 
 you dare to say, aloud, you are worth. If you have 
 no courage to name any price whatsoever for your- 
 self, believe me, the cause is not your modesty, but 
 that in very truth you feel in your heart there would 
 be no bid for you at Lucian's sale of lives, were that 
 again possible, at Christie and Manson's. 
 
 Finally (1319 exactly; say 1320, for memory), the 
 Ascanien line expired in Brandenburg, and the little 
 town and its electorate lapsed to the Kaiser : mean- 
 time other economical arrangements had been in 
 progress ; but observe first how far we have got. 
 
 The Fowler, St. Adalbert, and the Bear have 
 established order, and some sort of Christianity ; but 
 the established persons begin to think somewhat too 
 well of themselves. On quite honest terms, a dead 
 saint or a living knight ought to be worth their true 
 "weight in gold." But a pyramid, with only the 
 point of the spear seen at top, would be many times 
 over one's weight in gold. And although men were 
 yet far enough from the notion of modern days, that 
 the gold is better than the flesh, and from buying it 
 with the clay of one's body, and even the fire of one's
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 171 
 
 soul, instead of soul and body with it, they were 
 beginning to fight for their own supremacy, or for 
 their own religious fancies, and not at all to any use- 
 ful end, until an entirely unexpected movement is 
 made in the old useful direction forsooth, only by 
 some kind ship-captains of Lubeck ! 
 
 VIII. 
 
 1210 1320. Civil work, aiding military, during 
 the Ascanien period. 
 
 Vol. I. Book II. Chap. vi. p. 109 (77). 
 
 IN the year 1190, Acre not yet taken, and the 
 crusading army wasting by murrain on the shore, the 
 German soldiers especially having none to look after 
 them, certain compassionate ship-captains of Liibeck, 
 one Walpot von Bassenheim taking the lead, formed 
 themselves into an union for succor of the sick and 
 the dying, set up canvas tents from the Lubeck ship 
 stores, and did what utmost was in them silently in 
 the name of mercy and heaven. Finding its work 
 prosper, the little medicinal and weather-fending 
 company took vows on itself, strict chivalry forms, 
 and decided to become permanent "Knights Hospi- 
 tallers of our dear Lady of Mount Zion," separate 
 from the former Knights Hospitallers, as being 
 entirely German : yet soon, as the German Order of 
 St. Mary, eclipsing in importance Templars, Hos- 
 pitallers, and every other chivalric order then extant ; 
 no purpose of battle in them, but much strength for 
 ; t; their purpose only the helping of German pil-
 
 172 APPENDIX. 
 
 grims. To this only they are bound by their vow, 
 "geliibde," and become one of the usefullest of clubs 
 in all the Pall Mall of Europe. 
 
 Finding pilgrimage in Palestine falling slack, and 
 more need for them on the homeward side of the sea, 
 their Hochmeister, Hermann of the Salza, goes over 
 to Venice in 1210. There, the titular bishop of still 
 unconverted Preussen advises him of that field of 
 work for his idle knights. Hermann thinks well of 
 it : sets his St. Mary's riders at Triglaph, with the 
 sword in one hand and a missal in the other. 
 
 Not your modern way of effecting conversion ! Too 
 illiberal, you think ; and what would Mr. J . S. Mill say ? 
 
 But if Triglaph had been verily "three whales 1 
 cubs combined by boiling," you would yourself have 
 promoted attack on him for the sake of his oil, would 
 not you? The Teutsch Ritters, fighting him for 
 charity, are they so much inferior to you? 
 
 "They built, and burnt, innumerable stockades for 
 and against ; built wooden forts which are now stone 
 towns. They fought much and prevalently ; galloped 
 desperately to and fro, ever on the alert. In peace- 
 abler ulterior times, they fenced in the Nogat and the 
 Weichsel with dams, whereby unlimited quagmire 
 might become grassy meadow as it continues to 
 this day. Marienburg (Mary's Burg), with its grand 
 stone Schloss still visible and even habitable : this 
 was at length their headquarter. But how many 
 Burgs of wood and stone they built, in different 
 parts ; what revolts, surprisals, furious fights in 
 woody, boggy places they had, no man has counted.
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 173 
 
 " But always some preaching by zealous monks, 
 accompanied the chivalrous fighting. And colonists 
 came in from Germany ; trickling in, or at times 
 streaming. Victorious Ritterdom offers terms to the 
 beaten heathen : terms not of tolerant nature, but 
 which 'will be punctually kept by Ritterdom. When 
 the flame of revolt or general conspiracy burnt up 
 again too extensively, high personages came on 
 crusade to them. Ottocar, King of Bohemia, with 
 his extensive far-shining chivalry, 'conquered Sam- 
 land in a month ; ' tore up the Romova where Adal- 
 bert had been massacred, and burnt it from the face 
 of the earth. A certain fortress was founded at that 
 time, in Ottocar's presence ; and in honor of him 
 they named it King's Fortress, ' Konigsberg.' Among 
 King Ottocar's esquires, or subaltern junior officials, 
 on this occasion, is one Rudolf, heir of a poor Swiss 
 lordship and gray hill castle, called Hapsburg, rather 
 in reduced circumstances, whom Ottocar likes for his 
 prudent, hardy ways ; a stout, modest, wise young 
 man, who may chance to redeem Hapsburg a little, if 
 he lives. 
 
 " Conversion, and complete conquest once come, 
 there was a happy time for Prussia ; ploughshare in- 
 stead of sword : busy sea-havens, German towns, get- 
 ting built ; churches everywhere rising ; grass growing, 
 and peaceable cows, where formerly had been quagmire 
 and snakes, and for the Order a happy time. On the 
 whole, this Teutsch Ritterdom, for the first century 
 and more, was a grand phenomenon, and flamed like 
 a bright blessed beacon through the night of things, 
 in those Northern countries. For above a century,
 
 174 APPENDIX. 
 
 we perceive, it was the rallying place of all brave men 
 who had a career to seek on terms other than vulgar. 
 The noble soul, aiming beyond money, and sensible 
 to more than hunger in this world, had a beacon 
 burning (as we say), if the night chanced to over- 
 take it, and the earth to grow too intricate, as is not 
 uncommon. Better than the career of stump-oratory, 
 I should fancy, and its Hesperides apples, golden, 
 and of gilt horse-dung. Better than puddling away 
 one's poor spiritual gift of God (loan, not gift), such 
 as it may be, in building the lofty rhyme, the lofty 
 review article, for a discerning public that has six- 
 pence to spare ! Times alter greatly." * 
 
 We must pause here again for a moment to think 
 where we are, and who is -with us. The Teutsch 
 Ritters have been fighting, independently of all 
 states, for their own hand, or St. Adalbert's ; 
 partly for mere love of fight, partly for love of order, 
 partly for love of God. Meantime, other Riders 
 have been fighting wholly for what they could get by 
 it; and other persons, not Riders, have not been 
 fighting at all, but in their own towns peacefully 
 manufacturing and selling. 
 
 Of Henry the Fowler's Marches, Austria has be- 
 come a military power, Flanders a mercantile one, 
 pious only in the degree consistent with their several 
 occupations. Prussia is now a practical and farming 
 country, more Christian than its longer-converted 
 neighbors. 
 
 * I would much rather print these passages of Carlyle in large 
 golden letters than small black ones ; but they are only here at all iot 
 unlucky people who can't read them with the context.
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 175 
 
 " Towns are built, Konigsberg (King Ottocar's 
 town), Thoren (Thorn, City of the Gates), with 
 many others ; so that the wild population and the 
 tame now lived tolerably together, under Gospel and 
 Liibeck law ; and all was ploughing and trading." 
 
 But Brandenburg itself, what of it? 
 
 The Ascanien Markgraves rule it on the whole 
 prosperously down to 1320, when their line expires, 
 and it falls into the power of Imperial Austria. 
 
 IX. 
 
 1320 1415- Brandenburg under the Austrians. 
 
 A CENTURY the fourteenth of miserable anar- 
 chy and decline for Brandenburg, its Kurfiirsts, in 
 deadly succession, making what they can out of it 
 for their own pockets. The city itself and its terri- 
 tory utterly helpless. Read pp. 180, 181 (129, 130). 
 "The towns suffered much, any trade they might 
 have had going to wreck. Robber castles flourished, 
 all else decayed, no highway safe. What are Ham- 
 burg pedlers made for but to be robbed?" 
 
 X. 
 
 1415 1440. Brandenburg under Friedrich of 
 Nuremberg. 
 
 THIS is the fourth of the men whom you are to 
 remember as creators of the Prussian monarchy, 
 Henry the Fowler, St. Adalbert, Albert the Bear, of 
 Ascanian, and Friedrich of Nuremberg ; (of Hohen
 
 176 APPENDIX. 
 
 zollern by name, and by country of the Black 
 Forest, north of the Lake of Constance) . 
 
 Brandenburg is sold to him at Constance, during 
 the great Council, for about ^200,000 of our money, 
 worth perhaps a million in that day ; still, with its 
 capabilities, " dog cheap." Admitting, what no one 
 at the time denied, the general marketableness of 
 states as private property, this is the one practical 
 result, thinks Carlyle (not likely to think wrong) , of 
 that oecumenical deliberation, four years long, of the 
 "elixir of the intellect and dignity of Europe. And 
 that one thing was not its doing ; but a pawnbroking 
 job, intercalated," putting, however, at last, Branden- 
 burg again under the will of one strong man. On 
 St. John's Day, 1412, he first set foot in his town, 
 " and Brandenburg, under its wise Kurfiirst, begins 
 to be cosmic again." The story of Heavy Peg, pages 
 195-198 (138, 140), is one of the most brilliant and 
 important passages of the first volume ; page 199, 
 specially to our purpose, must be given entire : 
 
 " The offer to be Kaiser was made him in his old 
 days ; but he wisely declined that too. It was in 
 Brandenburg, by what he silently founded there, that 
 he did his chief benefit to Germany and mankind. 
 He understood the noble art of governing men ; had 
 in him the justness, clearness, valor, and patience 
 needed for that. A man of sterling probity, for one 
 thing. Which indeed is the first requisite in said 
 art : if you will have your laws obeyed without 
 mutiny, see well that they be pieces of God 
 Almighty's law; otherwise all the artillery in the 
 world will not keep down mutiny.
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA, l^^ 
 
 " Friedrich ' travelled much over Brandenburg ; ' 
 looking into everything with his own eyes ; making, 1 
 can well fancy, innumerable crooked things straight ; 
 reducing more and more that famishing dog-kennel 
 of a Brandenburg into a fruitful arable field. His 
 portraits represent a square-headed, mild-looking, 
 solid gentleman, with a certain twinkle of mirth in 
 the serious eyes of him. Except in those Hussite 
 wars for Kaiser Sigismund and the Reich, in which 
 no man could prosper, he may be denned as con- 
 stantly prosperous. To Brandenburg he was, very 
 literally, the blessing of blessings ; redemption out 
 of death into life. In the ruins of that old Friesack 
 Castle, battered down by Heavy Peg, antiquarian 
 science (if it had any eyes) might look for the tap- 
 root of the Prussian nation, and the beginning of all 
 that Brandenburg has since grown to under the sun." 
 
 Which growth is now traced by Carlyle in its vari- 
 ous budding and withering, under the succession of 
 the twelve Electors, of whom Friedrich, with his 
 Heavy Peg, is first, and Friedrich, first King of 
 Prussia, grandfather of Friedrich the Great, the 
 twelfth. 
 
 XI. 
 
 1415 1701. Brandenburg under the Hohenzollern 
 Kurfiirsts. 
 
 Book III. 
 
 WHO the Hohenzollerns were, and how they came 
 to power in Nuremberg, is told in Chap. v. of 
 Book II.
 
 178 APPENDIX. 
 
 Their succession in Brandenburg is given in brief at 
 page 377 (269) . I copy it, in absolute barrenness of 
 enumeration, for our momentary convenience, here : 
 
 Friedrich 1st of Brandenburg (6th of 
 
 Nuremberg) 1412-1440 
 
 Friedrich II., called " Iron Teeth " . 1440-1472 
 
 Albert 1472-1486 
 
 Johann 1486-1499 
 
 Joachim 1 1499-1535 
 
 Joachim II. I 535- I 57 1 
 
 Johann George 1571-1598 
 
 Joachim Friedrich .... 1598-1608 
 
 Johann Sigismund .... 1608-1619 
 
 George Wilhelm 1619-1640 
 
 Friedrich Wilhelm (the Great Elector) . 1640-1688 
 Friedrich, first King; crowned i8th Jan- 
 uary . . . . . . 1701 
 
 Of this line of princes we have to say they fol- 
 lowed generally in their ancestor's steps, and had 
 success of the like kind more or less ; Hohenzollerns 
 all of them, by character and behavior as well as by 
 descent. No lack of quiet energy, of thrift, sound 
 sense. There was likewise solid fair-play in general, 
 no founding of yourself on ground that will not carry, 
 and there was instant, gentle, but inexorable crushing 
 of mutiny, if it showed itself, which, after the Second 
 Elector, or at most the Third, it had altogether 
 ceased to do. 
 
 This is the general account of them ; of special 
 matters note the following :
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 179 
 
 II. Friedrich, called " Iron-teeth," from his firm- 
 ness, proves a notable manager and governor. Builds 
 the palace at Berlin in its first form, and makes it his 
 chief residence. Buys Neumark from the fallen 
 Teutsch Ritters, and generally establishes things on 
 securer footing. 
 
 III. Albert, "a fiery, tough old Gentleman," 
 called the Achilles of Germany in his day ; has half- 
 a-century of fighting with his own Nurembergers, 
 with Bavaria, France, Burgundy and its fiery Charles, 
 besides being head constable to the Kaiser among 
 any disorderly persons in the East. His skull, long 
 shown on his tomb, "marvellous for strength and 
 with no visible sutures." 
 
 IV. John, the orator of his race ; (but the orations 
 unrecorded). His second son, Archbishop of Maintz, 
 for whose piece of memorable work see page 223 
 (143), and^ead in connection with that the history 
 of Markgraf George, pp. 237 241 (152 154), and 
 the 8th chapter of the third book. 
 
 V. Joachim I., of little note; thinks there has 
 been enough Reformation, and checks proceedings 
 in a dull stubbornness, causing him at least grave 
 domestic difficulties. Page 271 (173). 
 
 VI. Joachim II. Again active in the Reforma- 
 tion, and staunch, 
 
 "though generally in a cautious, weighty, never in a 
 rash, swift way, to the great cause of Protestantism 
 and to all good causes. He was himself a solemnly 
 devout man ; deep, awe-stricken reverence dwelling 
 in his view of this universe. Most serious, though
 
 l8o APPENDIX. 
 
 with a jocose dialect, commonly having a cheerful 
 wit in speaking to men. Luther's books he called his 
 Seelenschatz (soul's treasure) ; Luther and the Bible 
 were his chief reading. Fond of profane learning, 
 too, and of the useful or ornamental arts ; given to 
 music, and ' would himself sing aloud ' when he had 
 a melodious leisure hour." 
 
 VII. Johann George, a prudent thrifty Herr; no 
 mistresses, no luxuries allowed ; at the sight of a 
 new-fashioned coat he would fly out on an unhappy 
 youth and pack him from his presence. Very strict 
 in point of justice ; a peasant once appealing to him 
 in one of his inspection journeys through the coun- 
 try- 
 
 " ' Grant me justice, Durchlaucht, against so and 
 so; I am your Highness's born subject.' 'Thou 
 shouldst have it, man, wert thou a born Turk ! ' 
 answered Johann George." 
 
 Thus, generally, we find this line of Electors 
 representing in Europe the Puritan mind of Eng- 
 land in a somewhat duller, but less dangerous, form ; 
 receiving what Protestantism could teach of honesty 
 and common sense, but not its anti-Catholic fury, or 
 its selfish spiritual anxiety. Pardon of sins is not to 
 be had from Tetzel ; neither, the Hohenzollern mind 
 advises with itself, from even Tetzel's master, for 
 either the buying, or the asking. On the whole, 
 we had better commit as few as possible, and live 
 just lives and plain ones.
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 181 
 
 " A conspicuous thrift, veracity, modest solidity, 
 looks through the conduct of this Herr ; a deter- 
 mined Protestant he too, as indeed all the following 
 were and are." 
 
 VIII. Joachim Friedrich. Gets hold of Prussia., 
 which hitherto, you observe, has always been spoken 
 of as a separate country from Brandenburg. March 
 n, 1605 " Squeezed his way into the actual guard- 
 ianship of Preussen and its imbecile Duke, which was 
 his by right." 
 
 For my own part, I do not trouble myself much 
 about these rights, never being able to make out any 
 single one, to begin with, except the right to keep 
 everything and every place about you in as good 
 order as you can Prussia, Poland, or what else. I 
 should much like, for instance, just now, to hear of 
 any honest Cornish gentleman of the old Drake 
 breed taking a fancy to land in Spain, and trying 
 what he could make of his rights as far round Gib- 
 raltar as he could enforce them. At all events, 
 Master Joachim has somehow got hold of Prussia; 
 and means to keep it. 
 
 IX. Johann Sigismund. Only notable for our 
 economical purposes, as getting the "guardianship" 
 of Prussia confirmed to him. The story at page 317 
 (226), "a strong flame of choler," indicates a new 
 order of things among the knights of Europe 
 " princely etiquettes melting all into smoke." Too 
 literally so, that being one of the calamitous functions 
 of the plain lives we are living, and of the busy life 
 our country is living. In the Duchy of Cleve, espe
 
 l82 APPENDIX. 
 
 daily, concerning which legal dispute begins in Sigis- 
 mund's time. And it is well worth the lawyers' 
 trouble, it seems. 
 
 " It amounted, perhaps, to two Yorkshires in ex- 
 tent. A naturally opulent country of fertile meadows, 
 shipping capabilities, metalliferous hills, and at this 
 time, in consequence of the Dutch-Spanish war, and 
 the multitude of Protestant refugees, it was getting 
 filled with ingenious industries, and rising to be what 
 it still is, the busiest quarter of Germany. A country 
 lowing with kine ; the hum of the flax-spindle heard 
 in its cottages in those old days ' much of the 
 linen called Hollands is made in Jiilich, and only 
 bleached, stamped, and sold by the Dutch,' says 
 Biisching. A country in our days which is shrouded 
 at short intervals with the due canopy of coal-smoke, 
 and loud with sounds of the anvil and the loom." 
 
 The lawyers took two hundred and six years to 
 settle the question concerning this Duchy, and the 
 thing Johann Sigismund had claimed legally in 1609 
 was actually handed over to Johann Sigismund's de- 
 scendant in the seventh generation. "These liti- 
 gated duchies are now the Prussian provinces, Jiilich, 
 Berg, Cleve, and the nucleus of Prussia's possessions 
 in the Rhine country." 
 
 X. George Wilhelm. Read pp. 325 to 327 (231, 
 333) on this Elector and German Protestanism, now 
 fallen cold, and somewhat too little dangerous. But 
 George Wilhelm is the only weak prince of all the 
 twelve. For another example how the heart and life
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 185 
 
 of a country depend upon its prince, not on its coun- 
 cil, read this, of Gustavus Adolphus, demanding the 
 cession of Spandau and Kustrin : 
 
 " Which cession Kiirfurst George Wilhelm, though 
 giving all his prayers to the good cause, could by no 
 means grant. Gustav had to insist, with more and 
 more emphasis, advancing at last with military men- 
 ace upon Berlin itself. He was met by George Wil- 
 helm and his Council, ' in the woods of Copenick,' 
 short way to the east of that city ; there George Wil- 
 helm and his Council wandered about, sending 
 messages, hopelessly consulting, saying among each 
 other, ' Que faire? ils ont des canons.' For many- 
 hours so, round the inflexible Gustav, who was there 
 like a fixed milestone, and to all questions and 
 comers had only one answer." 
 
 On our special question of war and its conse- 
 quences, read this of the Thirty Years' one : 
 
 44 But on the whole, the grand weapon in it, and 
 towards the latter times the exclusive one, was 
 hunger. The opposing armies tried to starve one 
 another ; at lowest, tried each not to starve. Each 
 trying to eat the country or, at any rate, to leave 
 nothing eatable in it; what that will mean for the 
 country we may consider. As the armies too fre 
 quently, and the Kaiser's armies habitually, lived 
 without commissariat, often enough without pay, all 
 horrors of war and of being a seat of war, that have 
 been since heard of, are poor to those then practised,
 
 184 APPENDIX 
 
 the detail of which is still horrible to read Germany, 
 in all eatable quarters of it, had to undergo the pro- 
 cess ; tortured, torn to pieces, wrecked, and brayed 
 as in mortar, under the iron mace of war. Branden- 
 burg saw its towns seized and sacked, its country 
 populations driven to despair by the one party and 
 the other. Three times first in the Wallenstein- 
 Mecklenburg times, while fire and sword were the 
 weapons, and again, twice over, in the ultimate stages 
 of the struggle, when starvation had become the 
 method Brandenburg fell to be the principal theatre 
 of conflict, where all forms of the dismal were at 
 their height. In 1638, three years after that precious 
 ' Peace of Prag, 1 . . . the ravages of the starving 
 Gallas and his Imperialists excelled all precedent, 
 . . . men ate human flesh, nay, human creatures ate 
 their own children.' ' Que faire ? ils ont des 
 canons ! ' " 
 
 "We have now arrived at the lowest nadir point" 
 (says Carlyle) "of the history of Brandenburg under 
 the Hohenzollerns." Is this then all that Heavy Peg 
 and our nine Kiirfursts have done for us? 
 
 Carlyle does not mean that : but even he, greatest 
 of historians since Tacitus, is not enough careful to 
 mark for us the growth of national character, as dis- 
 tinct from the prosperity of dynasties. 
 ; A republican historian would think of this develop- 
 ment only, and suppose it to be possible without any 
 dynasties. 
 
 Which is indeed in a measure so, and the work 
 now chiefly needed in moral philosophy, as well as
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 185 
 
 history, is an analysis of the constant and prevalent, 
 yet unthought of, influences, which, without any ex- 
 ternal help from kings, and in a silent and entirely 
 necessary manner, form, in Sweden, in Bavaria, in 
 the Tyrol, in the Scottish border, and on the French 
 seacoast, races of noble peasants ; pacific, poetic, 
 heroic, Christian-hearted in the deepest sense, who 
 may indeed perish by sword or famine in any cruel 
 thirty years' war, or ignoble thirty years' peace, and 
 yet leave such strength to their children that the 
 country, apparently ravaged into hopeless ruin, re- 
 vives, under any prudent king, as the cultivated fields 
 do under the spring rain. How the rock to which 
 no seed can cling, and which no rain can soften, is 
 subdued into the good ground which can bring forth 
 its hundredfold, we forget to watch, while we follow 
 the footsteps of the sower, or mourn the catastrophes 
 of storm. All this while, the Prussian earth, 
 the Prussian soul, has been thus dealt upon by suc- 
 cessive fate ; and now, though laid, as it seems, 
 utterly desolate, it can be revived by a few years of 
 wisdom and of peace. 
 
 Vol. I. Book III. Chap, xviii. The Great Elector, 
 Friedrich Wilhelm. Eleventh of the dynasty : 
 
 " There hardly ever came to sovereign power a 
 young man of twenty under more distressing, hope- 
 less-looking circumstances. Political significance 
 Brandenburg had none ; a mere Protestant append- 
 age, dragged about by a Papist Kaiser, His father's 
 Prime Minister, as we have seen, was in the interest 
 of his enemies; not Brandenburg's servant, but
 
 1 86 APPENDIX. 
 
 Austria's. The very commandants of his fortresses 
 Commandant of Spandau more especially, refused to 
 obey Friedrich Wilhelm on his accession ; ' were 
 bound to obey the Kaiser in the first place.' 
 
 " For twenty years past Brandenburg had been 
 scoured by hostile armies, which, especially the 
 Kaiser's part of which, committed outrages new in 
 human history. In a year or two hence, Branden- 
 burg became again the theatre of business. Austrian 
 Gallas advancing thither again (1644) with intent 
 ' to shut up Torstenson and his Swedes in Jutland.' 
 Gallas could by no means do what he intended ; on 
 the contrary, he had to run from Torstenson what 
 feet could do ; was hunted, he and his Merode Briider 
 (beautiful inventors of the ' marauding ' art) , till 
 they pretty much all died (crepirten) says Kohler. 
 No great loss to society, the death of these artists, 
 but we can fancy what their life, and especially what 
 the process of their dying, may have cost poor Bran- 
 denburg again ! 
 
 " Friedrich Wilhelm's aim, in this as in other emer- 
 gencies, was sun-clear to himself, but for most part 
 dim to everybody else. He had to walk very warily, 
 Sweden on one hand of him, suspicious Kaiser on 
 the other : he had to wear semblances, to be ready 
 with evasive words, and advance noiselessly by many 
 circuits. More delicate operation could not be im- 
 agined. But advance he did; advance and arrive. 
 With extraordinary talent, diligence, and felicity the 
 young man wound himself out of this first fatal 
 position, got those foreign armies pushed out of hi 
 country, and kept them out. His first concern had
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 187 
 
 been to find some vestige of revenue, to put that 
 upon a clear footing, and by loans or otherwise to 
 scrape a little ready-money together. On the strength 
 of which a small body of soldiers could be collected 
 about him, and drilled into real ability to fight and 
 obey. This as a basis : on this followed all manner 
 of things, freedom from Swedish-Austrian invasions, 
 as the first thing. He was himself, as appeared by- 
 and-by, a fighter of the first quality, when it came 
 to that ; but never was willing to fight if he could 
 help it. Preferred rather to shift, manoeuvre, and 
 negotiate, which he did in most vigilant, adroit, and 
 masterly manner. But by degrees he had grown 
 to have, and could maintain it, an army of 24,000 
 men, among the best troops then in being." 
 
 To wear semblances, to be ready with evasive 
 words, how is this, Mr. Carlyle? thinks perhaps, the 
 rightly thoughtful reader. 
 
 Yes, such things have to be. There are lies and 
 lies, and there are truths and truths. Ulysses can- 
 not ride on the ram's back, like Phryxus ; but must 
 ride under his belly. Read also this, presently fol- 
 lowing : 
 
 " Shortly after which, Friedrich Wilhelm, who had 
 shone much in the battle of Warsaw, into which he 
 was dragged against his will, changed sides. An 
 inconsistent, treacherous man? Perhaps not, O 
 reader! perhaps a many advancing " in circuits," the 
 only way he has ; spirally, face now to east, now to 
 west, with his own reasonable private aim sun-clear 
 to him all the while ? "
 
 l88 APPENDIX, 
 
 The battle of Warsaw, three days long, fought 
 with Gustavus, the grandfather of Charles XII., 
 against the Poles, virtually ends the Polish power: 
 
 " Old Johann Casimir, not long after that peace 
 of Oliva, getting tired of his unruly Polish chivalry 
 and their ways, abdicated retired to Paris, and 
 ' lived much with Ninon de TEnclos and her circle, ' 
 for the rest of his life. He used to complain of his 
 Polish chivalry, that there was no solidity in them ; 
 nothing but outside glitter, with tumult and anarchic 
 noise ; fatal want of one essential talent, the talent of 
 obeying ; and has been heard to prophesy that a 
 glorious Republic, persisting in such courses, would 
 arrive at results which would surprise it. 
 
 " Onward from this time, Friedrich Wilhelm figures 
 in the world; public men watching his procedure; 
 kings anxious to secure him Dutch print-sellers 
 sticking up hi? portraits for a hero-worshipping 
 public. Fighting hero, had the public known it, 
 was not his essential character, though he had to 
 fight a great deal. He was essentially an industrial 
 man ; great in organizing, regulating, in constraining 
 chaotic heaps to become cosmic for him. He drains 
 bogs, settles colonies in the waste places of his 
 dominions, cuts canals ; unweariedly encourages trade 
 and work. The Friedrich Wilhelm's Canal, which 
 still carries tonnage from the Oder to the Spree, is a 
 monument of his zeal in this way ; creditable with the 
 means he had. To the poor French Protestants in 
 the Edict-of-Nantes affair, he was like an express 
 benefit of Heaven; one helper appointed to whom
 
 POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PRUSSIA. 189 
 
 .he help itself was profitable. He munificently wel- 
 comed them to Brandenburg ; showed really a noble 
 piety and human pity, as well as judgment ; nor did 
 Brandenburg and he want their reward. Some 
 20,000 nimble French souls, evidently of the best 
 French quality, found a home there ; made ' waste 
 sands about Berlin into potherb gardens;' and in 
 spiritual Brandenburg, too, did something of horti- 
 culture which is still noticeable." 
 
 Now read carefully the description of the man, p. 
 352 (224-5) ? tne story of the battle of Fehrbellin, " the 
 Marathon of Brandenburg," p. 354 (225) ; and of 
 the winter campaign of 1679, p. 356 (227), beginning 
 with its week's marches at sixty miles a day ; his wife 
 as always, being with him : 
 
 "Louisa, honest and loving Dutch girl, aunt to 
 our William of Orange, who trimmed up her own 
 ' Orange-burg' (country-house), twenty miles north 
 of Berlin, into a little jewel of the Dutch type, 
 potherb gardens, training-schools for young girls, 
 and the like, a favorite abode of hers when she was 
 at liberty for recreation. But her life was busy and 
 earnest ; she was helpmate, not in name only, to an 
 ever busy man. They were married young; a mar- 
 riage of love withal. Young Friedrich Wilhelm's 
 courtship ; wedding in Holland ; the honest, trustful 
 walk and conversation of the two sovereign spouses, 
 their journeyings together, their mutual hopes, fears, 
 and manifold vicissitudes, till death, with stern 
 beauty, shut it in ; all is human, true, and whole- 
 some in it, interesting to look upon, and rare among 
 sovereign persons."
 
 190 APPENDIX. 
 
 Louisa died in 1667, twenty-one years before her 
 husband, who married again (little to his content- 
 ment) died in 1688; and Louisa's second son, 
 Friedrich, ten years old at his mother's death, and 
 now therefore thirty-one, succeeds, becoming after- 
 wards Friedrich I. of Prussia. 
 
 And here we pause on two great questions. Prussia 
 is assuredly at this point a happier and better coun- 
 try than it was when inhabited by Wends. But 
 is Friedrich I. a happier and better man than Henry 
 the Fowler? Have all these kings thus improved 
 their country, but never themselves ? Is this some- 
 what expensive and ambitious Herr, Friedrich I., 
 buttoned in diamonds, indeed the best that Protest- 
 antism can produce, as against Fowlers, Bears, and 
 Red Beards ? Much more, Friedrich Wilhelm, ortho- 
 dox on predestination ; most of all, his less orthodox 
 son ; have we, in these, the highest results which 
 Dr. Martin Luther can produce for the present, 
 in the first circles of society ? And if not, how is it 
 that the country, having gained so much in intelligence 
 and strength, lies more passively in their power than 
 the baser country did under that of nobler men? 
 
 These, and collateral questions, I mean to work 
 out as I can, with Carlyle's good help ; but must 
 pause for this time ; in doubt, as heretofore. Only 
 of this one thing I doubt not, that the name of all 
 great kings, set over Christian nations, must at last 
 be, in fulfilment, the hereditary one of these German 
 princes, " Rich in Peace ;" and that their coronation 
 will be with Wild olive, not wHh gold.
 
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