Prose remains of Arthur Hugh Clough, with a selection from his letters and a memoir

by Arthur Hugh Clough

You will say, I am pleading the cause not of Irish peasants, but of English factory people and excavators. I am pleading the cause of both. Is it not English labour that has this year kept Ireland alive? What is to do the kind office in the next year? Mainly, I fear, English labour again. Yet may we not hope, too, that if we keep alive Irishmen in their wretched Skibbereens, we shall preserve not only hungry mouths, but also strong hands that in the end will do work? But it is true; I plead for both.

And for the tradesmen and the tradesmen’s work-people, what can be done? Surely it is idle to keep up an unnatural and vicious demand which finds no better means of feeding one set of men than wasting food on another. We are guilty, I think, in having brought this state of things upon ourselves, that many families depend for their present sustenance on the continuance of such a system. One thing however there is, which will relieve at any rate the tradesmen, and through them perhaps do something for their dependants: and that is, paying bills. I for my part urge no man to give alms at this time, till he has paid his debts. It is not, I think, due to the tradesmen to go on spending; but to pay for what has been received, I think is due.

Here then we come to another objection, the soundness of which I have at once admitted. It is said, If I save at all, I must save to pay my debts; we must be just before we are generous. It is said, and said most fairly. But is it never added (how fairly I will not ask), I will therefore not save at all? Why should I, this year more than last year? My savings will not go to the Irish; why need I have savings at all? And therefore while others starve I will surfeit; while others cry out for husks, and submit if they cannot have them, I, no less loudly, will clamour for a new pleasure, and be indignant if it is not found me. And therefore if this affliction should be, as in some degree it surely will be, continued into another year, or extended, no unlikely event, in some form or other into England itself, I shall still be helpless, still have the same ready plea for doing nothing, the same happy excuse for self-indulgence. Verily it is to be feared there are some who, with money in their pockets, will refuse to give to the Irish, because they owe sums to tradesmen; neglect to pay their tradesmen, because paying tradesmen is not giving to Ireland; and so in the end will do neither, will let their bills go on increasing, and spend their ready money on extra amusements not to be had without it. It is not impossible there are men who will say, What money I have I owe to Bennett, or Bickerstaff; however, as Bennett and Bickerstaff are not famishing, they may as well wait; and then I shall have my money to take me up to town, to carry me to the opera, to pay my way in my long vacation continental excursion.

What then! truly, indeed, if Bennett and Bickerstaff are not famishing and may as well wait, why you may as well not go to the opera, and pay your opera’s price to keep your countrymen alive. But do not suppose it is I who so advise. Pay your debts by all means. Surprise Bennett with bank-notes, and gratify Bickerstaff with gold. There is need, as we saw just now. I ask you not to be generous before you are just; I only bid you make haste and be just that you may be generous the sooner. I only beseech you not to say (they are indeed ‘vain words’) I cannot be generous, and as for being just, that will do a year hence. Pay if you can; if you cannot, why, cripple not at any rate your means for generosity alike and justice in years to come. In any case and every case, let not the sky which in Ireland looks upon famishment and fever, see us here at Oxford in the midst of health and strength over-eating, over-drinking, and over-enjoying. Let us not scoff at eternal justice with our champagne and our claret, our breakfasts and suppers, our club-dinners, and desserts, wasteful even to the worst taste, luxurious even to unwholesomeness—or yet again by our silly and fantastic frippery of dandyism, in the hazardous elaboration of which the hundred who fail are sneered at, and the one who succeeds is smiled at.

I know not if there be any who venture on the bold declaration, The money is mine, and I will have the good of it; I have got, and I will spend; the Irish have not, and they must do without. Something however too much approaching to this feeling undoubtedly does exist. In the ravelled and tangled skein, of which is constituted the content and quietness of conscience enjoyed by us, the purse-aristocracy of England, this thread, I think, may here and there be detected even by unskilful fingers. To these sticklers for the rights of property it is worth while putting one question. If you had been wrecked the other day in the ‘Tweed’ steamer, and had been successful in reaching the place of safety in the rocks, would you, if the articles of food secured there from the waters had happened to belong to your own peculiar private stores—would you, I ask, have entertained a thought that to you exclusively belonged the right to enjoy them? This barrel of biscuits is marked with my letters, and was always known to be mine; did I not pay for it? mine has come, all the better for me, yours has not, all the worse for you.

O ye, born to be rich, or at least born not to be poor; ye young men of Oxford, who gallop your horses over Bullingdon, and ventilate your fopperies arm-in-arm up the High Street, abuse if you will to the full that other plea of the spirits and thoughtlessness of youth, but let me advise you to hesitate ere you venture the question, May I not do what I like with my own? ere you meddle with such edge-tools as the subject of property. Some one, I fear, might be found to look up your title-deeds, and to quote inconvenient Scriptures.

The Institution of Property, he might urge, is all well enough as a human expedient to secure its reward to industry, and protect the provident labourer against the careless and idle. But for half-million-per-annum fortunes, fifty-mile-long estates, and may-I-not-do-what-I-please-with-my-own proprietors, some other justification, it would seem, must be sought. Sought and found. Found it must be by owners, or looked for it will be by others.

For consider it, he might say, a little more closely. How come you to have money? It comes from your father. Then your father or your father’s father, we hope—(for by begging, stealing, or serving, all men live, said Mirabeau)—your ancestor, we hope, in time past, did service to receive it; worked for it; earned it. And who gave him that work to do? Many a strong man have we known in our days begging for work, no matter what, to save him from starving. The will to work, plain enough, is not all: Archimedes must have his ποῦ στῶ: the workman his somewhat to work at: man labours not ‘as one that beateth the air.’ Who was it then, who, when your father or father’s father asked for work, gave it him? Ultimately you most likely will find it was He who gave us the earth. Ultimately it is the earth that forms our wealth and our subsistence. Philosophers and merchants, poets and shopkeepers, soldiers, sailors, tinkers, tailors—in our most spiritual, as in our most material productions, we all alike start in this, in the earth have our ποῦ στῶ and πόθεν ἐσθίω, our work to work at.

And ‘the earth hath He given to the children of men.’

Not, says the Scripture, to the children of the rich, or of the noble, or of those who have had it hitherto; not to the well-bred and well-educated—rather, it might seem, to the children of those by the sweat of whose brow it is subdued.