Or whence could virtue flow?
There are many, surely, who, looking back into their past lives, feel most thankful for those acts which came least from their own mere natural volition—can see that what did them most good was what they themselves would least have chosen; that things which, in fact, they were forced to, were, after all, the best things that ever happened to them. There are some, surely, who have had reason to bless a wholesome compulsion; there are some who prefer doing right under a master to doing nothing but enjoy themselves as their own masters; who, rather than be left to their own unaided feebleness, hesitation, and indolence, would voluntarily, for their own and the common good, enter a condition of what thenceforth would be ‘involuntary servitude.’ The mature freewill of the grown man looks back, undoubtedly, with some little regret, but also with no little scorn, upon the bygone puerile spontaneities of the time when he did as he liked.
There are periods, it is true, in the life of the individual human being, and perhaps of the collective human race, when expansion is the first of necessities. Such, it is possible, may be the present. But because we would be rid of existing restrictions, it does not follow that restriction of all kinds is an evil; because our present house is too small for us, it is not to be inferred that we shall live henceforth in the open air.
As a general rule of life and conduct, we see as yet no reason to believe that liberty, if this be its meaning, is better than service. It does not seem to be established that the system on which the things we live amongst were arranged, is that of spontaneous development, rather than of coercion met by a mixture of resistance and submission. The latter hypothesis seems intrinsically as much more elevating as the other does more agreeable. Meantime, as a matter of language, we should be inclined to reject altogether this modern sense of our old-established word Liberty. If the new theory wants a name, let it find a new one. It will but perplex and cheat us by claiming one already otherwise appropriated. When we hear people demanding liberty, we shall consider them to express their desire, not for the golden age, but either for release from some particular form of restriction, or, it may be, for a less degree of restriction in general. Liberty for us will mean either more liberty—just as, in the Black Hole of Calcutta, ‘air’ meant ‘more air’—or distinct emancipation, for example, from personal slavery, or from foreign rule. Liberty in itself is but the power of doing what we please; a power which, for all human beings, has its natural limits. We may easily, indeed, have too much or too little of it; we can only have it in degree, but without some degree of it we cannot exist.
The crying evil, as it appears to us, of the present system of unrestricted competition, is not so much the distress of the workmen as the extreme slovenliness and badness of their work. The joy and satisfaction of making really good things is destroyed by the criminal eagerness to make them to suit the market. The love of art, which, quite as much as virtue, is its own reward, used in the old times to penetrate down as far as to the meanest manufacture, of kettles, for example, and pots. With us, on the contrary, the miserable truckling to the bad taste of the multitude has gradually stolen up to the very regions of the highest art—into architecture, sculpture, painting, music, literature. Nay, has it not infected even morality and religion? And do we never hear spiritual advice, which in fact bids us do as little good, and get as much applause for it, as we can; and, above all things, know the state of the market?
So far as co-operative societies or guilds would remove this evil, they would be of great use. But let it not be forgotten that the object of human society is not the mere ‘culinary’ one of securing equal apportionments of meat and drink to all its members. Men combine for some higher object; and to that higher object it is, in their social capacity, the privilege and real happiness of individuals to sacrifice themselves. The highest political watchword is not Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, nor yet Solidarity, but Service.
The true comfort to the soldiers, serving in the great industrial army of arts, commerce, and manufactures, is neither to tell them, with the Utopians, that a good time is coming, when they will have plenty of victuals and not so much to do; nor yet, with the Economists, to hold out to them the prospect of making their fortune; but to show them that what they are now doing is good and useful service to the community; to call upon them to do it well and thoroughly; and to teach them how they may; and all this quite irrespectively of any prospects either of making a fortune or living on into a good time.
We are not sure that our author would quite coincide with us in a comparative disregard of physical discomfort, privation, and suffering. Yet we think he would join us in the belief that the real want of the present time is, above all things, the distinct recognition and steady observance of a few plain, and not wholly modern, rules of morality.
It is very fine, perhaps not very difficult, to do every now and then some noble or generous act. But what is wanted of us is to do no wrong ones. It may be, for instance, in many eyes, a laudable thing to amass a colossal fortune by acts not in all cases of quite unimpeachable integrity, and then to expend it in magnificent benevolence. But the really good thing is not to make the fortune. Thorough honesty and plain undeviating integrity—these are our real needs; on these substructions only can the fabric of individual or national well-being safely be reared. ‘Other foundation can no man lay.’ Common men, who, in their petty daily acts, maintain these ordinary unostentatious truths, are the real benefactors of mankind, the real pillars of the State, are the apostles and champions of—something not to be named within a few pages of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity, the Solidarity of the Peoples, and the Universal Republic.