“Suffers! How?”
"Nay, you need but look in his face to see whether he is a happy man or not; but what his ailments are, I do not pretend to say. His nerves torture him, I am certain——"
Mrs. Sneyd insinuated speculations about indulgence in brandy, opium, spices, &c., and about remorse, fear, and the whole demon band of the passions. Dr. Sneyd’s conjecture was that Temple’s affairs were in an unsatisfactory condition, and that this trouble, acting on the mind of a coward, probably drove him to the use of sufficient stimulus to irritate instead of relieving him. Great allowance, he insisted, should be made for a man in so pitiable a state, even by the parents of his wife. This was so effectually admitted by the good lady, that she not only sent a double portion of pomegranate preserve to the Lodge, but restrained her anger when she heard that Rundell could not obtain liberty to invest as he pleased the capital he had saved, owing to Temple’s evil influence at the land-office; and that Arthur’s interests were wantonly injured by his interference. Arthur had taken great pains to secure a supply of fresh meat and fresh butter for the approaching winter; and besides the hope of profit from his fine sheep and cows, he had the assurance of the gratitude of his neighbours, who had grown heartily weary of salt pork and salt butter the winter before. But Mr. Temple now set up a grand salting establishment; and made it generally understood that only those who were prudent enough to furnish themselves with his cheap salt provision, rather than Mr. Sneyd’s dear mutton, should have his custom in the market, and his countenance at the land-office. Arthur’s first-slain sheep had to be eaten up by his father’s household and his own; and it was a piece of great forbearance in Mrs. Sneyd, when she heard that Arthur meant to kill no more mutton, to say only, “The poor little man punishes nobody so much as himself. I do not see how he can relish his own fresh mutton very much, while he prevents other people having any.”
“He cannot altogether prevent that, mother,” said Arthur. "He may prevent mutton bearing any price in the market, and cut off my gains; but we may still slay a sheep now and then, for ourselves; and find neighbours who will quietly make such an exchange of presents as will take off what we cannot consume. But I wish I could see an end of this dictation,—this tyranny."
“It does seem rather strange to have come to a land of freedom to be in the power of such a despot. I wonder the people do not shake him off, and send him to play the tyrant farther in the wilds.”
“They are only waiting till his substance is all consumed, I fancy. He has such a hold over the investments of some, and finds so much employment for the labour of others, that they will submit to everything for a time. But his hour will come, if he does not beware.”
“It may be all very well for those who have investments to take time to extricate their capital from his grasp,” said Mrs. Sneyd; “but as for the builders and gardeners he employs, I think they would be wiser if they carried their labour where they might depend on a more lasting demand for it. Anybody may see that if he spends more every year in undoing what he did the year before, his substance must soon come to an end, and his labourers become his creditors. If I were they, I would rather go and build barns that are paid for by the preservation of the corn that is in them, and till fields that will maintain the labour of tillage, and set more to work next year, than turn round a fine house from south to west, and from west to south, and change shrubberies into lawns, and lawns into flower-gardens, knowing that such waste must come to an end.”
“But some do not believe that it is waste, mother. They see the money that pays them still in existence, still going the round of the market; and they talk (as some people in England do about royal palaces, and spendthrift noblemen’s establishments) of the blessing of a liberal expenditure, and the patriotism of employing so much labour.”
"Which would be all very well if the labourers lived upon the sight of the money they are paid with. But, as long as that money is changed many times over for bread and clothing, which all disappears in the process, it is difficult to make out that anything is gained but the pleasure,—which may be justifiable or not, according to the circumstances of the employers. In the end, the money remains as it was before, and instead of so much food and clothing, there is a royal palace. If you do not like your palace, and pull it down and rebuild it, the money exists as before, and for a double quantity of food and clothing, you still have a palace."
“The wrong notion you speak of arises partly,” said Dr. Sneyd, “from a confusion between one sort of unproductive expenditure and another. People hear of its being a fine thing to employ a crowd of labourers in making a new line of road, or building a bridge, and they immediately suppose it must be a patriotic thing to employ a crowd of labourers in building any thing.”