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Chapter X - WealthChapter X - Wealth
Chapter X - Wealth
There is no country in which so absolute a homage is paid to wealth. In
America, there is a touch of shame when a man exhibits the evidences of large
property, as if, after all, it needed apology. But the Englishman has pure
pride in his wealth, and esteems it a final certificate. A coarse logic rules
throughout all English souls; - if you have merit, can you not show it by your
good clothes, and coach and horses? How can a man be a gentleman without a
pipe of wine?
Haydon says, "There is a fierce resolution to make every man live
according to the means he possesses." There is a mixture of religion in it.
They are under the Jewish law, and read with sonorous emphasis that their days
shall be long in the land, they shall have sons and daughters, flocks and
herds, wine and oil. In exact proportion, is the reproach of poverty. They do
not wish to be represented except by opulent men. An Englishman who has lost
his fortune, is said to have died of a broken heart. The last term of insult
is, "a beggar." Nelson said, "The want of fortune is a crime which I can never
get over." Sydney Smith said, "Poverty is infamous in England." And one of
their recent writers speaks, in reference to a private and scholastic life, of
"the grave moral deterioration which follows an empty exchequer." You shall
find this sentiment, if not so frankly put, yet deeply implied, in the novels
and romances of the present century, and not only in these, but in biography,
and in the votes of public assemblies, in the tone of the preaching, and in
the table-talk.
I was lately turning over Wood`s Athenae Oxonienses; and looking
naturally for another standard in a chronicle of the scholars of Oxford for
two hundred years. But I found the two disgraces in that, as in most English
books, are, first, disloyalty to Church and State, and, second, to be born
poor, or to come to poverty. A natural fruit of England is the brutal
political economy. Malthus finds no cover laid at nature`s table for the
laborer`s son. In 1809, the majority in Parliament expressed itself by the
language of Mr. Fuller in the House of Commons, "If you do not like the
country, damn you, you can leave it." When Sir S. Romilly proposed his bill
forbidding parish officers to bind children apprentices at a greater distance
than forty miles from their home, Peel opposed, and Mr. Wortley said, "Though
in the higher ranks, to cultivate family affections was a good thing, `twas
not so among the lower orders. Better take them away from those who might
deprave them. And it was highly injurious to trade to stop binding to
manufactures, as it must raise the price of labor, and of manufactured goods."
The respect for truth of facts in England is equalled only by the respect
for wealth. It is at once the pride of art of the Saxon, as he is a wealth -
maker, and his passion for independence. The Englishman believes that every
man must take care of himself, and has himself to thank, if he do not mend his
condition. To pay their debts is their national point of honor. From the
Exchequer and the East India House to the huckster`s shop, everything
prospers, because it is solvent. The British armies are solvent, and pay for
what they take. The British Empire is solvent; for, in spite of the huge
national debt, the valuation mounts. During the war from 1789 to 1815, whilst
they complained that they were taxed within an inch of their lives, and, by
dint of enormous taxes, were subsidizing all the continent against France, the
English were growing rich every year faster than any people ever grew before.
It is their maxim, that the weight of taxes must be calculated not by what is
taken, but by what is left. Solvency is in the ideas and mechanism of an
Englishman. The Crystal Palace is not considered honest until it pays; - no
matter how much convenience, beauty, or eclat, it must be self-supporting.
They are contented with slower steamers, as long as they know the swifter
boats lose money. They proceed logically by the double method of labor and
thrift. Every household exhibits an exact economy, and nothing of that
uncalculated headlong expenditure which families use in America. If they
cannot pay, they do not buy; for they have no presumption of better fortunes
next year, as our people have; and they say without shame, I cannot afford it.
Gentlemen do not hesitate to ride in the second-class cars, or in the second
cabin. An economist, or a man who can proportion his means and his ambition,
or bring the year round with expenditure which expresses his character,
without embarrassing one day of his future, is already a master of life, and a
freeman. Lord Burleigh writes to his son, "that one ought never to devote more
than two-thirds of his income to the ordinary expenses of life, since the
extraordinary will be certain to absorb the other third."
The ambition to create value evokes every kind of ability, government
becomes a manufacturing corporation, and every house a mill. The headlong bias
to utility will let no talent lie in a napkin, - if possible, will teach
spiders to weave silk stockings. An Englishman, while he eats and drinks no
more, or not much more, than another man, labors three times as many hours in
the course of a year as any other European; or his life as a workman is three
lives. He works fast. Everything in England is at a quick pace. They have
reinforced their own productivity by the creation of that marvellous machinery
which differences this age from any other age.
`T is a curious chapter in modern history, the growth of the machine -
shop. Six hundred years ago Roger Bacon explained the precession of the
equinoxes, the consequent necessity of the reform of the calendar; measured
the length of the year, invented gunpowder; and announced (as if looking from
his lofty cell, over five centuries, into ours), "that machines can be
constructed to drive ships more rapidly than a whole galley of rowers could
do; nor would they need anything but a pilot to steer them. Carriages also
might be constructed to move with an incredible speed, without the aid of any
animal. Finally, it would not be impossible to make machines which, by means
of a suit of wings, should fly in the air in the manner of birds." But the
secret slept with Bacon. The six hundred years have not yet fulfilled his
words. Two centuries ago the sawing of timber was done by hand; the carriage
wheels ran on wooden axles; the land was tilled by wooden ploughs. And it was
to little purpose that they had pit-coal, or that looms were improved,
unless Watt and Stephenson had taught them to work force-pumps and
powerlooms by steam. The great strides were all taken within the last hundred
years. The Life of Sir Robert Peel, who died the other day, the model
Englishman, very properly has for a frontispiece a drawing of the spinning -
jenny, which wove the web of his fortunes. Hargreaves invented the spinning -
jenny, and died in a workhouse. Arkwright improved the invention; and the
machine dispensed with the work of ninety-nine men: that is, one spinner
could do as much work as one hundred had done before. The loom was improved
further. But the men would sometimes strike for wages, and combine against the
masters, and, about 1829-30, much fear was felt, lest the trade would be drawn
away by these interruptions, and the emigration of the spinners to Belgium and
the United States. Iron and steel are very obedient. Whether it were not
possible to make a spinner that would not rebel, nor mutter, nor scowl, nor
strike for wages, nor emigrate? At the solicitation of the masters, after a
mob and riot at Staley Bridge, Mr. Roberts, of Manchester, undertook to create
this peaceful fellow, instead of the quarrelsome fellow God had made. After a
few trials he succeeded, and in 1830 procured a patent for his self-acting
mule; a creation the delight of mill-owners, and "destined," they said, "to
restore order among the industrious classes;" a machine requiring only a
child`s hand to piece the broken yarns. As Arkwright had destroyed domestic
spinning, so Roberts destroyed the factory spinner. The power of machinery in
Great Britain, in mills, has been computed to be equal to 600,000,000 men, one
man being able by the aid of steam to do the work which required two hundred
and fifty men to accomplish fifty years ago. The production has been
commensurate. England already had this laborious race, rich soil, water, wood,
coal, iron, and favorable climate. Eight hundred years ago commerce had made
it rich, and it was recorded, "England is the richest of all the northern
nations." The Norman historians recite that, "in 1067, William carried with
him into Normandy, from England, more gold and silver than had ever before
been seen in Gaul." But when to this labor and trade and these native
resources was added this goblin of steam, with his myriad arms, never tired,
working night and day everlastingly, the amassing of property has run out of
all figures. It makes the motor of the last ninety years. The steampipe has
added to her population and wealth the equivalent of four or five Englands.
Forty thousand ships are entered in Lloyd`s lists. The yield of wheat has gone
on from 2,000,000 quarters in the time of the Stuarts, to 13,000,000 in 1854.
A thousand million of pounds sterling are said to compose the floating money
of commerce. In 1848 Lord John Russell stated that the people of this country
had laid out 300,000,000 pounds of capital in railways in the last four years.
But a better measure than these sounding figures is the estimate that there is
wealth enough in England to support the entire population in idleness for one
year.
The wise, versatile, all-giving machinery makes chisels, roads,
locomotives, telegraphs. Whitworth divides a bar to a millionth of an inch.
Steam twines huge cannon into wreaths, as easily as it braids straw, and vies
with the volcanic forces which twisted the strata. It can clothe shingle
mountains with ship-oaks, make sword-blades that will cut gun-barrels in two.
In Egypt, it can plant forests, and bring rain after three thousand years.
Already it is ruddering the balloon, and the next war will be fought in the
air. But another machine more potent in England than steam, is the Bank. It
votes an issue of bills, population is stimulated, and cities rise; it refuses
loans, and emigration empties the country; trade sinks; revolutions break out;
kings are dethroned. By these new agents our social system is moulded. By dint
of steam and of money, war and commerce are changed. Nations have lost their
old omnipotence; the patriotic tie does not hold. Nations are getting
obsolete, we go and live where we will. Steam has enable men to choose what
law they will live under. Money makes place for them. The telegraph is a
limp-band that will hold the Fenris-wolf of war. For now that a telegraph line
runs through France and Europe, from London, every message it transmits makes
stronger by one thread the band which war will have to cut.
The introduction of these elements gives new resources to existing
proprietors. A sporting duke may fancy that the state depends on the House of
Lords, but the engineer sees that every stroke of the steampiston gives value
to the duke`s land, fills it with tenants; doubles, quadruples, centuples the
duke`s capital, and creates new measures and new necessities for the culture
of his children. Of course, it draws the nobility into the competition as
stockholders in the mine, the canal, the railway, in the application of steam
to agriculture, and sometimes into trade. But it also introduces large classes
into the same competition; the old energy of the Norse race arms itself with
these magnificent powers; new men prove an overmatch for the land-owner, and
the mill buys out the castle. Scandinavian Thor, who once forged his bolts in
icy Hecla and built galleys by lonely fiords, in England has advanced with the
times, has shorn his beard, enters Parliament, sits down at a desk in the
India House, and lends Miollnir to Birmingham for a steam-hammer.
The creation of wealth in England in the last ninety years is a main fact
in modern history. The wealth of London determines prices all over the globe.
All things precious, or useful, or amusing, or intoxicating, are sucked into
this commerce and floated to London. Some English private fortunes reach, and
some exceed, a million of dollars a year. A hundred thousand palaces adorn the
island. All that can feed the senses and passions, all that can succor the
talent, or arm the hands, of the intelligent middle class, who never spare in
what they buy for their own consumption; all that can aid science, gratify
taste, or soothe comfort, is in open market. Whatever is excellent and
beautiful in civil, rural, or ecclesiastic architecture; in fountain, garden,
or grounds; the English noble crosses sea and land to see and to copy at home.
The taste and science of thirty peaceful generations; the gardens which Evelyn
planted; the temples and pleasure-houses which Inigo Jones and Christopher
Wren built; the wood that Gibbons carved; the taste of foreign and domestic
artists, Shenstone, Pope, Brown, Loudon, Paxton, are in the vast auction, and
the hereditary principle heaps on the owner of to-day the benefit of ages of
owners. The present possessors are to the full as absolute as any of their
fathers, in choosing and procuring what they like. This comfort and splendor,
the breadth of lake and mountain, tillage, pasture and park, sumptuous castle
and modern villa, - all consist with perfect order. They have no revolutions;
no horse-guards dictating to the crown; no Parisian poissardes and
barricades; no mob: but drowsy habitude, daily dress-dinners, wine, and ale,
and beer, and gin, and sleep.
With this power of creation, and this passion for independence, property
has reached an ideal perfection. It is felt and treated as the national life -
blood. The laws are framed to give property the securest possible basis, and
the provisions to lock and transmit it have exercised the cunningest heads in
a profession which never admits a fool. The rights of property nothing but
felony and treason can override. The house is a castle which the king cannot
enter. The Bank is a strong box to which the king has no key. Whatever surly
sweetness possession can give, is tested in England to the dregs. Vested
rights are awful things, and absolute possession gives the smallest freeholder
identity of interest with the duke. High stone fences and padlocked garden -
gates announce the absolute will of the owner to be alone. Every whim of
exaggerated egotism is put into stone and iron, into silver and gold, with
costly deliberation and detail.
An Englishman hears that the Queen Dowager wishes to establish some claim
to put her park paling a rod forward into his grounds, so as to get a
coachway, and save her a mile to the avenue. Instantly he transforms his
paling into stone-masonry, solid as the walls of Cuma, and all Europe cannot
prevail on him to sell or compound for an inch of the land. They delight in a
freak as the proof of their sovereign freedom. Sir Edward Boynton, at Spic
Park, at Cadenham, on a precipice of incomparable prospect, built a house like
a long barn, which had not a window on the prospect side. Strawberry Hill of
Horace Walpole, Fonthill Abbey of Mr. Beckford, were freaks; and Newstead
Abbey became one in the hands of Lord Byron.
But the proudest result of this creation has been the great and refined
forces it has put at the disposal of the private citizen. In the social world,
an Englishman to-day has the best lot. He is a king in a plain coat. He goes
with the most powerful protection, keeps the best company, is armed by the
best education, is seconded by wealth; and his English name and accidents are
like a flourish of trumpets announcing him. This, with his quiet style of
manners, gives him the power of a sovereign, without the inconveniences which
belong to that rank. I must prefer the condition of an English gentleman of
the better class, to that of any potentate in Europe, - whether for travel, or
for opportunity of society, or for access to means of science or study, or for
mere comfort and easy healthy relation to people at home.
Such as we have seen is the wealth of England, a mighty mass, and made
good in whatever details we care to explore. The cause and spring of it is the
wealth of temperament in the people. The wonder of Britain is this plenteous
nature. Her worthies are ever surrounded by as good men as themselves; each is
a captain a hundred strong, and that wealth of men is represented again in the
faculty of each individual, - that he has waste strength, power to spare. The
English are so rich, and seem to have established a taproot in the bowels of
the planet, because they are constitutionally fertile and creative.
But a man must keep an eye on his servants, if he would not have them
rule him. Man is a shrewd inventor, and is ever taking the hint of a new
machine from his own structure, adapting some secret of his own anatomy in
iron, wood, and leather, to some required function in the work of the world
But it is found that the machine unmans the user. What he gains in making
cloth, he loses in general power. There should be temperance in making cloth,
as well as in eating. A man should not be a silk-worm, nor a nation a tent of
caterpillars. The robust rural Saxon degenerates in the mills to the Leicester
stockinger, to the imbecile Manchester spinner, - far on the way to be spiders
and needles. The incessant repetition of the same hand-work dwarfs the man,
robs him of his strength, wit, and versatility, to make a pin-polisher, a
buckle-maker, or any other specialty; and presently, in a change of industry,
whole towns are sacrificed like ant-hills, when the fashion of shoe-strings
supersedes buckles, when cotton takes the place of linen, or railways of
turnpikes, or when commons are inclosed by landlords. The society is
admonished of the mischief of the division of labor, and that the best
political economy is care and culture of men; for, in these crises, all are
ruined except such as are proper individuals, capable of thought, and of new
choice and the application of their talent to new labor. Then a gain come in
new calamities. England is aghast at the disclosure of her fraud in the
adulteration of food, of drugs, and of almost every fabric in her mills and
shops; finding that milk will not nourish, nor sugar sweeten, nor bread
satisfy, nor pepper bite the tongue, nor glue stick. In true England all is
false and forged. This too is the reaction of machinery, but of the larger
machinery of commerce. `Tis not, I suppose, want of probity, so much as the
tyranny of trade, which necessitates a perpetual competition of underselling,
and that again a perpetual deterioration of the fabric.
The machinery has proved, like the balloon, unmanageable, and flies away
with the aeronaut. Steam, from the first, hissed and screamed to warm him; it
was dreadful with its explosion, and crushed the engineer. The machinist has
wrought and watched, engineers and firemen without number have been sacrificed
in learning to tame and guide the monster. But harder still it has proved to
resist and rule the dragon Money, with his paper wings. Chancellors and Boards
of Trade, Pitt, Peel, and Robinson, and their Parliaments, and their whole
generation, adopted false principles, and went to their graves in the belief
that they were enriching the country which they were impoverishing. They
congratulated each other on ruinous expedients. It is rare to find a merchant
who knows why a crisis occurs in trade, why prices rise or fall, or who knows
the mischief of paper money. In the culmination of national prosperity, in the
annexation of countries; building of ships, depots, towns; in the influx of
tons of gold and silver; amid the chuckle of chancellors and financiers, it
was found that bread rose to famine prices, that the yeoman was forced to sell
his cow and pig, his tools, and his acre of land; and the dreadful barometer
of the poor-rates was touching the point of ruin. The poor-rate was
sucking in the solvent classes, and forcing an exodus of farmers and
mechanics. What befalls from the violence of financial crisis, befalls daily
in the violence of artificial legislation.
Such a wealth has England earned, ever new, bounteous, and augmenting.
But the question recurs, does she take the step beyond, namely, to the wise
use, in view of the supreme wealth of nations? We estimate the wisdom of
nations by seeing what they did with their surplus capital. And, in view of
these injuries, some compensation has been attempted in England. A part of the
money earned returns to the brain to buy schools, libraries, bishops,
astronomers, chemists, and artists with; and a part to repair the wrongs of
this intemperate weaving, by hospitals, savings-banks, Mechanics`
Institutes, public grounds, and other charities and amenities. But the
antidotes are frightfully inadequate, and the evil requires a deeper cure,
which time and a simpler social organization must supply. At present, she does
not rule her wealth. She is simply a good England, but no divinity, or wise
and instructed soul. She too is in the stream of fate, one victim more in a
common catastrophe.
But being in the fault, she has the misfortune of greatness to be held as
the chief offender. England must be held responsible for the despotism of
expense. Her prosperity, the splendor which so much manhood and talent and
perseverance has thrown upon vulgar aims, is the very argument of materialism.
Her success strengthens the hands of base wealth. Who can propose to youth
poverty and wisdom, when mean gain has arrived at the conquest of letters and
arts; when English success has grown out of the very renunciation of
principles, and the dedication to outsides? A civility of trifles, of money
and expense, an erudition of sensation takes place, and the putting as many
impediments as we can, between the man and his objects. Hardly the bravest
among them have the manliness to resist it successfully. Hence, it has come
that not the aims of a manly life, but the means of meeting a certain
ponderous expense, is that which is to be considered by a youth in England,
emerging from his minority. A large family is reckoned a misfortune. And it is
a consolation in the death of the young, that a source of expense is closed.
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