B.—REWARDS OF CONFORMITY.
The English word king, like Danish kong and German König, are derived from können (practical knowledge), and the first ruler was the most skilful, as likely as the strongest, man of his tribe. Skill, whether in the sense of bodily agility or of mechanical cleverness, established the superiority of man over his fellow-creatures, and is still in many respects a test of precedence between man and man. Supreme physical dexterity is always at a premium, in peace as in war, in the sports of princes, in the pastimes of pleasure-seekers, in the adventures of travelers, in moments of danger, in camps, in the wilderness and on the sea, as well as in smithies and workshops. Conscious skill and agility form the basis of a kind of self-reliance which wealth can only counterfeit. In a cosmopolitan sea-port town of western Europe I once overheard a controversy on the comparative value of protective weapons. Revolvers, stilettos, air guns, slung-shots, and bowie knives found clever advocates, but all arguments yielded to the remark of an old sea-captain, who had faced danger in four different continents. “There’s a use for all that, no [[76]]doubt,” said he, “but, I tell you, mynheers, in a close row the best thing to rely upon is a pair of quick fists.” For the efficacy, even of the best weapons, depends to a large degree on the expertness of the handler, the panoply of a weakling being as unprofitable as the library of an idiot. “Presence of mind” is often only the outcome of such expertness, and in sudden emergencies theories are shamed by the prompt expedients of a practical man. In war the issue of a doubtful campaign has more than once been decided by the superior constructiveness of an army that could bridge a river while their opponents waited for the subsiding of a flood. The conquest of Canada was achieved by the skill of a British soldier who devised a plan for hauling cannon to the top of a steep plateau. The fate of the Byzantine empire was decided by the mechanical expedient of a Turkish engineer who contrived a tramway of rollers and greased planks, as an overland road for a fleet of war ships. By the invention of the chain grappling-hook Duilius transferred the empire of the Mediterranean from Carthage to Rome.
Even for the sake of its hygienic influence the development of mechanical skill deserves more general encouragement. Crank-work gymnastics are apt to pall, but in pursuit of a favorite handicraft even an invalid can beguile himself into a good deal of health-giving exercise, and, besides, the versatile development of the muscular system reacts on the functions of the vital organs, and thus explains the robust health of active mechanics often laboring under the disadvantage of indoor confinement. The poet [[77]]Goethe, whose intuitions of practical philosophy rival those of Bacon and Franklin, records the opinion that every brain-worker should have some mechanical by-trade in order to obviate one-sidedness, and mental as well as physical debility. Every handicraft reveals by-laws of Nature which no cyclopedia can teach an inquirer; manual labor is a school of practical wisdom, and sound “common sense,” as the English language happily expresses the sum of that wisdom, is a prerogative of farmers and mechanics far, far oftener than of speculative philosophers.
Nor are such benefits limited to emergencies from which wealth could dispense its possessor. An amateur handicraft is the best safeguard against the chief bane of wealth: ennui, with its temptations to folly and vice. Nabobs can do worse than imitate the example of Carlo Boromeo, who spent every leisure hour of his philanthropic life in practical landscape gardening, and turned a large and once barren lake-island into the loveliest paradise of southern Europe. “Heroum filii noxae,” “the sons of the great are apt to be nuisances,” would be less true if Goethe’s advice were heeded by our fashionable educators, and the benefits of his plan would extend to emergencies for which fashionable accomplishments afford only a dubious safeguard. “A mechanical trade,” says Jean Jacques Rousseau, “is the best basis of safety against the caprices of fortune. Classical scholarship may go begging, where technical skill finds its immediate reward. A distressed savant may recover his loss in the course of years; a skilful mechanic need only enter the next workshop and show [[78]]a sample of his handiwork. ‘Well, let’s see you try,’ the reply will be; ‘step this way and pitch in.’ ”
Thus, too, gymnastic agility is the best safeguard against numberless perils. A mother who hopes to protect her boy by keeping him at home and guarding him from the rough sports of his playmates, forgets that her apron-strings cannot guide him through the perils of after years; and a better plan was that of Cato, the statesman, warrior, and philosopher, who, in the midst of his manifold duties, found time to instruct his young sons in leaping ditches, and swimming rapid rivers, in order to “teach them to overcome danger that could not be permanently avoided.”
C.—PERVERSION.
The absurd contempt of mechanical accomplishments is due partly to the direct influence of anti-physical dogmas, partly to the indirect tendency of that caste spirit which has for ages fostered the antagonism of wealth and labor. The opulent Brahmans of ancient Hindostan thought themselves so immeasurably superior to the children of toil that a Sudra was not permitted to approach a priest without ample precautions against the defilement of the worshipful entity. The temples of high-caste devotees were closed against low-caste believers. The very breath of a Sudra was supposed to pollute articles of food to such an extent that a Brahman had always to take his meals alone.
The secret of such prejudices was probably the supposed antagonism of body and soul and the imagined necessity of emphasizing that contrast by [[79]]constant insults to the representatives of physical interests and occupations. For in Europe, too, the propagation of an anti-physical creed went hand in hand with the systematic depreciation of secular work, excepting, perhaps, the trade of professional manslaughter, the military caste, which here, as in India, found always means to enforce respect by methods of their own. During the most orthodox centuries of the Middle Ages industrial burghers were valued only as tax-payers; peasants were treated little better than beasts of burden—in many respects decidedly worse, for after drudging all day for an inexorable master, the serf had often to work by moonlight, in order to get a little bread for himself and his family. The proposition to join in any manual occupation (the handling of a whip, perhaps, excepted) would have been resented as a gross insult by every little baron or priest of Christian Europe. Paul Courier describes the indignation of a French nobleman who caught a tutor instructing his boys in botany and the secret of improving trees by grafting: “Going to make a clown of him? You had better get an assistant-teacher with a manure cart.” The manual-labor dread of several medieval princes went to the length of employing special chamberlains for every detail of their toilet: a chief and assistant shirt-warmer, a wig-adjuster, a hand-washer, a foot-bather, a foot-dryer. German barons thought mechanical labor an incomparable disgrace—more shameful, in fact, than crime—for the same Ritter who would have starved rather than put his hand to a plow, had no hesitation in eking out an income by [[80]]highway robbery. The princes of the church thought it below their dignity to walk afoot, and kept sedan-bearers to transport them to church and back. They kept writing and reading clerks, and now and then fought a duel by proxy, or sent a vicar to lay the corner-stone of a new court-house, in order to convey the impression that their spiritual duties left them no time for secular concerns.