Those of the early days of the war have on the back emblems, varying with the promissory amount, exhibiting bows, arrows, leaves of the oak, orange, &c.
It would be absurd to argue against all use of a paper currency from such specimens as these.
[11] See [Appendix B.]
[12] See [Appendix B.]
CHAPTER V. MORALS OF ECONOMY.
"And yet of your strength there is and can be no clear feeling, save by what you have prospered in, by what you have done. Between vague, wavering capability, and fixed, indubitable performance, what a difference! A certain inarticulate self-consciousness dwells dimly in us; which only our works can render articulate, and decisively discernible. Our works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments. Hence, too, the folly of that impossible precept 'know thyself,' till it be translated into this partially possible one, 'know what thou canst work at.'"
Sartor Resartus, p. 166. Boston Edition.
The glory of the world passeth away. One kind of worldly glory passes away, and another comes. Like a series of clouds sailing by the moon, and growing dim and dimmer as they go down the sky, are the transitory glories which are only brightened for an age by man's smile: dark vapours, which carry no light within themselves. How many such have floated across the expanse of history, and melted away! It was once a glory to have a power of life and death over a patriarchal family: and how mean does this now appear, in comparison with the power of life and death which every man has over his own intellect! It was once a glory to be feared: how much better is it now esteemed to be loved! It was once a glory to lay down life to escape from one's personal woes: how far higher is it now seen to be to accept those woes as a boon, and to lay down life only for truth;—for God and not for self! The heroes of mankind were once its kings and warriors: we look again now, and find its truest heroes its martyrs, its poets, its artisans; men not buried under pyramids or in cathedrals, but whose sepulchre no man knoweth unto this day. To them the Lord showed the land of promise, and then buried them on the confines. There are two aspects under which every individual man may be regarded: as a solitary being, with inherent powers, and an omnipotent will; a creator, a king, an inscrutable mystery: and again, as a being infinitely connected with all other beings, with none but derived powers, with a heavenly-directed will; a creature, a subject, a transparent medium through which the workings of principles are to be eternally revealed. Both these aspects are true, and therefore reconcilable. The Old World dwelt almost exclusively on the first and meaner aspect: as men rise to inhabit the new heavens and the new earth, they will more and more contemplate the other and sublimer. The old glory of a self-originating power and will is passing away: and it is becoming more and more plain that a man's highest honour lies in becoming as clear a medium as possible for the revelations which are to be made through him: in wiping out every stain, in correcting every flaw by which the light that is in him may be made dimness or deception. It was once a glory to defy or evade the laws of man's physical and moral being; and, in so doing, to encroach upon the rights of others: it is now beginning to be shown that there is a higher honour in recognising and obeying the laws of outward and inward life, and in reverencing instead of appropriating the privileges of other wards of Providence.
In other words, it was once a glory to be idle, and a shame to work,—at least with any member or organ but one,—the brain. Yet it is a law of every man's physical nature that he should work with the limbs: of every man's moral nature, that he should know: and knowledge is to be had only by one method; by bringing the ideal and the actual world into contact, and proving each by the other, with one's own brain and hands for instruments, and not another's. There is no actual knowledge even of one's own life, to be had in any other way. Yet this is the way which men have perversely refused to acknowledge, while every one is more or less compelled to practise it. Those who have been able to get through life with the least possible work have been treated as the happiest: those who have had the largest share imposed upon them have been passively pitied as the most miserable. If the experience of the two could have been visibly or tangibly brought into comparison, the false estimate would have been long ago banished for ever from human calculations. If princes and nobles, who have not worked either in war or in council, men sunk in satiety; if women, shut out of the world of reality, and compelled by usage to endure the corrosion of unoccupied thought, and the decay of unemployed powers, were able to speak fully and truly as they sink into their unearned graves, it would be found that their lives had been one hollow misery, redeemed solely by that degree of action that had been permitted to them, in order that they might, in any wise, live. If the half-starved artisan, if the negro slave, could, when lying down at length to rest, see and exhibit the full vision of their own lives, they would complain far less of too much work than of too little freedom, too little knowledge, too many wounds through their affections to their children, their brethren, their race. They would complain that their work had been of too exclusive a kind; too much in the actual, while it had been attempted to close the ideal from them. Nor are their cases alike. The artisan works too much in one way, while too little in another. The negro slave suffers too much by infliction, and yet more by privation; but he rarely or never works too much, even with the limbs. He knows the evil of toil, the reluctance, the lassitude; but with it he knows also the evil of idleness; the vacuity, the hopelessness. He has neither the privilege of the brute, to exercise himself vigorously upon instinct, for an immediate object, to be gained and forgotten; nor the privilege of the man, to toil, by moral necessity, with some pain, for results which yield an evergrowing pleasure. It is not work which is the curse of the slave: he is rarely so blessed as to know what it is.