An American rhapsodist, singing the pæan of money in the pages of the “Bankers’ Magazine,” says in its mighty name: “I am the minister of war and the messenger of peace. No army can march without my command. Until I speak, no ship of trade can sail from any port.”
“Until I speak”! Always the emphasis upon that powerful voice which is so mute and inglorious without the compelling mind of man. When President Cleveland said that if it took every dollar in the Treasury, and every soldier in the United States army, to deliver a postal card in Chicago, that postal card should be delivered, he was perhaps glad to think that the nation’s wealth, like the nation’s force, could be used to fulfil the nation’s obligations. But back of wealth, and back of force, was purpose. When man lays hand upon the “hilt of action,” money stops talking and obeys.
Mr. Shane Leslie, shrinking sensitively from that oppressive word, “efficiency,” and seeking what solace he can find in the survival of unpractical ideals, ventures to say that every university man “carries away among the husks of knowledge the certainty that there are less things saleable in heaven and earth than the advocates of sound commercial education would suppose.” This truth, more simply phrased by the Breton peasant woman who said “Le bon Dieu ne vend pas ses biens,” has other teachers besides religion and the classics. History, whether we read it or live in it, makes nothing clearer. Mr. Henry Ford is credited with saying that he would not give a nickel for all the history in the world; but though he can, and does, forbear to read it, he has to live in it with the rest of us, and learn its lessons first-hand. No one desired the welfare—or what he conceived to be the welfare—of mankind more sincerely than he did; and he was prepared to buy it at a handsome figure. Yet Heaven refused to sell, and earth, inasmuch as the souls of men are not her possessions, had nothing worth his purchase.
The price of war can be computed in figures; the price of peace calls for another accountant. The tanker, Gold Shell, which first crossed the “forbidden” zone did more than a score of peace ships could have done to secure the civilization of the world. Its plain sailors who put something (I don’t know what they called it) above personal safety, and their plain captain who expressed in the regrettable language of the sea his scorn of German pirates, were prepared to pay a higher price than any millionaire could offer for their own and their country’s freedom. We know what these men risked because we know what agonizing deaths the sailors on the tanker, Healdton, suffered at Germany’s hands. The Gold Shell seamen knew it too, and met frightfulness with fearlessness. The world is never so bad but that men’s souls can rise above its badness, and restore our fainting faith.
Mohammed prayed that he might be found among the poor on the Judgment Day,—a prayer echoed by Saint Bernard, who took some pains to insure its being answered. Yet, as a mere abstraction, of what worth is poverty? The jewel in the toad’s head is as glittering as adversity is sweet. One has been well likened to the other. Bishop Lawrence, undismayed by the most humiliating page of our country’s history, seized a crucial moment in which to say very simply and gallantly that Americans are not wedded to ease, or enthralled by wealth. The time has come to prove him in the right. God will not sell us safety. We learned this much in the winter of 1917, when we dug our mail out of an American steamer, and asked Britain—Britain burdened with debt and bleeding at every pore—to carry it over the sea. For our own sake, no less than for the world’s sake, we must show that we coin money in no base spirit, that we cherish it with no base passion. The angel who looked too long at heaven’s golden pavement was flung, into hell.
Cruelty and Humour
The unhallowed alliance between the cruelty that we hate and the humour that we prize is a psychological problem which frets the candid mind. Hazlitt analyzed it pitilessly, but without concern, because humanity was not his playing card. No writer of the nineteenth century dared to be so clearly and consciously inhumane as was Hazlitt. Shakespeare and Scott recognized this alliance, and were equally unconcerned, because they accepted life on its own terms, and were neither the sport of illusions nor the prey of realities. It took the public—always more or less kind-hearted—two hundred years to sympathize with the wrongs of Shylock, and three hundred years to wince at the misery of Malvolio.
It was with something akin to regret that Andrew Lang watched the shrivelling of that “full-blown comic sense” which accompanied the cruel sports of an earlier generation, the bull-baiting and badger-drawing and cock-fights and prize-fights which Englishmen loved, and which taught them to value courage and look unmoved on pain. In 1699 the old East India Company lost its claim against the New Company by two parliamentary votes; and this measure was passed in the absence of friendly members who had been seduced from their posts by the unwonted spectacle of a tiger-baiting. In 1818 Christopher North (black be his memory!) described graphically and with smothered glee the ignoble game of cat-worrying, which ran counter to British sporting instincts, to the roughly interpreted fair play which severed brutality from baseness. There was never a time when some English voice was not raised to protest against that combination of cruelty and cowardice which pitted strength against weakness, or overwhelming odds against pure gallantry of spirit. The first Englishman to assert that animals had a right to legal protection was John Evelyn. He grasped this novel point of view through sheer horror and disgust because a stallion had been baited with dogs in London, and had fought so bravely that the dogs could not fasten on him until the men in charge ran him through with their swords. Evelyn asked, and asked in vain, that the law should intervene to punish such barbarity.
A century later we hear the same cry of indignation, the same appeal for pity and redress. This time it comes from Horace Walpole, who is beside himself with fury because some scoundrels at Dover had roasted a fox alive, to mark—with apt symbolism—their disapproval of Charles Fox. Walpole, whom Lord Minto characterized as “a prim, precise, pretending, conceited savage, but a most un-English one,” demonstrated on this occasion the alien nature of his sympathies by an outbreak of rage against the cruelty which he was powerless to punish. It is interesting to note that he denounced the deed as “a savage meanness which an Iroquois would have scorned”; showing that he and Lord Minto regarded savagery from different angles. So, it will be remembered, did Lord Byron and Izaak Walton. When the former dared to call the latter “a sentimental savage,” he brought down upon his own head, “bloody but unbowed,” the wrath of British sportsmen, of British churchmen, of British sensibility. Even in far-off America an outraged editor protested shrilly against this monde bestorné, this sudden onslaught of vice upon virtue, this reversal of outlawry and order.
The effrontery of the attack startled a decorous world. Lord Byron had so flaunted his immoralities that he had become the scapegoat of society. He had been driven forth from a pure, or at least respectable, island, to dally with sin under less austere skies. The household virtues shuddered at his name. Izaak Walton, on the contrary, had been recognized in his day as a model of domestic sobriety. He had lived happily with two wives (one at a time), and had spent much of his life “in the families of the eminent clergymen of England, of whom he was greatly beloved.” He was buried in Winchester Cathedral, where English fishermen erected a statue to commemorate his pastime. His bust adorns the church of Saint Mary, Stafford, where he was baptized. His second wife sleeps under a monument in Worcester Cathedral. Dr. Johnson and Wordsworth—great sponsors of morality—united in his praise. Mr. Lang (an enthusiastic angler) pronounced him to be “a kind, humorous, and pious soul.” Charles Lamb, who thought angling a cruel sport, wrote to Wordsworth, “Izaak Walton hallows any page in which his reverend name appears.”