Mr. Greg strictly confines himself to an examination of [[339]]the benefits conferred on the public by this so agreeable festivity; but he must not be surprised or indignant that some inquiry should be made as to the resulting condition of the épicier de Bénavente.
And it is all the more necessary that such inquiry be instituted, when the captain of the expedition is a minion, not of the moon, but of the sun; and dazzling, therefore, to all beholders. “It is heaven which dictates what I ought to do upon this occasion,”[3] says Henry of Navarre; “my retreat out of this city, before I have made myself master of it, will be the retreat of my soul out of my body. Accordingly, all the quarter which still held out, we forced,” says M. de Rosny; “after which the inhabitants, finding themselves no longer able to resist, laid down their arms, and the city was given up to plunder. My good fortune threw a small iron chest in my way, in which I found about four thousand gold crowns.”
I cannot doubt that the Baron’s expenditure of this sum would be in the highest degree advantageous to France, and to the Protestant religion. But complete economical science must study the effect of its abstraction on the immediate prosperity of the town of Cahors; and [[340]]even beyond this—the mode of its former acquisition by the town itself, which perhaps, in the economies of the nether world, may have delegated some of its citizens to the seventh circle.
And the most curious points, in the modes of study pursued by modern economical science, are, that while it always waives this question of ways and means with respect to rich persons, it studiously pushes it in the case of poor ones; and while it asserts the consumption of such an article of luxury as wine (to take that which Mr. Greg himself instances) to be economically expedient, when the wine is drunk by persons who are not thirsty, it asserts the same consumption to be altogether inexpedient, when the privilege is extended to those who are. Thus Mr. Greg dismisses, at page 618, with compassionate disdain, the extremely vulgar notion “that a man who drinks a bottle of champagne worth five shillings, while his neighbour is in want of actual food, is in some way wronging his neighbour;” and yet Mr. Greg himself, at page 624, evidently remains under the equally vulgar impression that the twenty-four millions of much thirstier persons who spend fifteen per cent. of their incomes in drink and tobacco, are wronging their neighbours by that expenditure.
It cannot, surely, be the difference in degree of refinement between malt liquor and champagne which causes Mr. Greg’s conviction that there is moral delinquency and economical error in the latter case, but none in the [[341]]former; if that be all, I can relieve him from his embarrassment by putting the cases in more parallel form. A clergyman writes to me, in distress of mind, because the able-bodied labourers who come begging to him in winter, drink port wine out of buckets in summer. Of course Mr. Greg’s logical mind will at once admit (as a consequence of his own very just argumentum ad hominem in page 617) that the consumption of port wine out of buckets must be as much a benefit to society in general as the consumption of champagne out of bottles; and yet, curiously enough, I am certain he will feel my question, “Where does the drinker get the means for his drinking?” more relevant in the case of the imbibers of port than in that of the imbibers of champagne. And although Mr. Greg proceeds, with that lofty contempt for the dictates of nature and Christianity which radical economists cannot but feel, to observe (p. 618) that “while the natural man and the Christian would have the champagne drinker forego his bottle, and give the value of it to the famishing wretch beside him, the radical economist would condemn such behaviour as distinctly criminal and pernicious,” he would scarcely, I think, carry out with the same triumphant confidence the conclusions of the unnatural man and the Anti-Christian with respect to the labourer as well as the idler; and declare that while the extremely simple persons who still believe in the laws of nature, and the mercy of God, would have the port-drinker forego his bucket, and give the value of [[342]]it to the famishing wife and child beside him, “the radical economist would condemn such behaviour as distinctly criminal and pernicious.”
Mr. Greg has it indeed in his power to reply that it is proper to economize for the sake of one’s own wife and children, but not for the sake of anybody else’s. But since, according to another exponent of the principles of Radical Economy, in the ‘Cornhill Magazine,’ a well-conducted agricultural labourer must not marry till he is forty-five, his economies, if any, in early life, must be as offensive to Mr. Greg, on the score of their abstract humanity, as those of the richest bachelor about town.
There is another short sentence in this same page 618, of which it is difficult to overrate the accidental significance.
The superficial observer, says Mr. Greg, “recollects a text which he heard in his youth, but of which he never considered the precise applicability—‘He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none.’ ”
The assumptions that no educated Englishman can ever have heard that text except in his youth, and that those who are old enough to remember having heard it, “never considered its precise applicability,” are surely rash, in the treatment of a scientific subject. I can assure Mr. Greg that a few grey-headed votaries of the creed of Christendom still read—though perhaps under their breath—the words which early associations have [[343]]made precious to them; and that in the bygone days, when that Sermon on the Mount was still listened to with respect by many not illiterate persons, its meaning was not only considered, but very deliberately acted upon. Even the readers of the ‘Contemporary Review’ may perhaps have some pleasure in retreating from the sunshine of contemporary science, for a few quiet moments, into the shadows of that of the past; and hearing in the following extracts from two letters of Scott’s (the first describing the manner of life of his mother, whose death it announces to a friend; the second, anticipating the verdict of the future on the management of his estate by a Scottish nobleman) what relations between rich and poor were possible, when philosophers had not yet even lisped in the sweet numbers of Radical Sociology.
“She was a strict economist, which she said enabled her to be liberal; out of her little income of about £300 a year, she bestowed at least a third in well-chosen charities, and with the rest, lived like a gentlewoman, and even with hospitality more general than seemed to suit her age; yet I could never prevail on her to accept of any assistance. You cannot conceive how affecting it was to me to see the little preparations of presents which she had assorted for the New Year, for she was a great observer of the old fashions of her period—and to think that the kind heart was cold which delighted in all these arts of kindly affection.” [[344]]