Wherever man has tried to possess others he has lost possession of himself. That is the price inevitably paid by any class or section of the community which seeks to dominate the lives and restrict the liberty of its fellows. Tyranny does not strengthen but weakens the moral nature of those who exercise it, and he who owns slaves cannot himself be free. Domination is as destructive to human worth and more destructive to moral integrity than subjection. If “possession is nine points of the law” on the material plane, the tenth point—spiritual in its working—is anarchy to the soul.
From time immemorial man has claimed it as his natural right to possess woman. And it is in consequence in relation to woman, and in matters of sex, that he has most obviously lost self-possession. And just as he has claimed that to possess woman is the natural prerogative of the male, so you will hear him maintain that lack of self-possession in regard to woman is natural also—and a certain degree of licence the male prerogative. The two things go together—claim to possess others and you lose possession of yourself: Give to all with whom you come in contact their full right of self-possession and self-development, and you, from that social discipline and service, will in your own body and mind become self-possessed. For that is true possession which, while it brings you a sense of enlargement and joy, takes nothing from the freedom and the joy of others.
Of that kind of possession you may be prodigal, but of that which takes anything from others, or demands any condition of service from others, have a care! And look well what the conditions may be. Ask yourself constantly what is this or that demand for service or labour doing to other souls? What conditions does it lay upon them? You may boast that you have simplified your life—rid yourself, for instance, of domestic service by getting rid of cook and housemaid. You have not. The bread, the meat, even the ground flour that comes into your house is all provided by a domestic service which takes place outside your door and which you do not see. And you are as morally concerned for the conditions of that labour as if you yourself supervised it. You need it and use it as much; it is only done for you at a further remove—out of sight and out of mind—so that it is much easier (but not more justifiable), to be callous as to the conditions of those who render it. And if upon those material lines of comfort and luxury you extend your demands, you are also extending your claim over the lives of others—and your responsibility for those lives, if they go lacking where you go fed.
Surely, for the whole of that part of your life you are under a strict obligation to render service in return—equal to that which you claim. And if you, by your service, cannot insure to others an equality of possession in things material (and make as good and wholesome a use of them as they could make), those material possessions should be a weight upon your conscience, till you have got matters more fairly adjusted. Take it as your standard of life to consume no more than you, by your own labour, in your own lifetime, could produce. What right has any man to more than that, except through the bounty and kindness of his fellows? But if he insists on more, and takes more, does he really possess it? Only in an ever diminishing degree in proportion to his excess, because as he exceeds he is ever diminishing his true faculty for reception.
Here is a simple illustration of that truth, a gross example which I read in a newspaper the other day: In America a prize is annually given to the man who can eat the largest number of pies at a sitting—each of the pies, a compound of jam and pastry, weighing on an average half a pound. The prize-winner became the external possessor of twenty-seven. But internally he could hardly be said to possess them at all—they possessed him, and made him, one would imagine, a thoroughly ineffective citizen for at least the two or three following days. That man would have been far more really the possessor of three or four pies (seeing that he could have properly digested them) than it was possible for him to be of the twenty-seven. In this excess he merely injured himself without any gain, except the monetary bribe which induced him to make a beast of himself. And how many men are there not, who (receiving the monetary bribe of our present unequal and inequitable system of reward for industry or for idleness) proceed to make beasts of themselves—more elaborately, but just as truly and completely as this pie-eater; and by making beasts of themselves are by so much the less men of soul and understanding—not more, but less the possessors of their human birthright.
If we store up treasure materially (treasure of a kind which, if one has more of it, another must needs have less)—if we gather about us, in excess, creature comforts for the over-indulgence of our bodily appetites, we are gathering that which is liable to moth and rust and theft—liable to be a cause of envy and covetousness in others; and when we have gathered to ourselves this excess of perishable delight and have applied it, the result, more likely than not, is a cloying of those very appetites to which we seek to minister—and, eventually, deterioration and enfeeblement of the body itself.
And as with individuals so with nations; there is no greatness of possession in holding that which involves the deprivation of others, the diminution of their freedom, their happiness, their power of self-development. That is not true kingdom. It is the manufacture of slaves. But if we lay up treasure in the kingdom of the mind, in the development of our sense of beauty, our faculty for joy, we have something here on earth which neither moth nor rust can corrupt, nor thieves steal. Our possessions then are things that can arouse no base covetousness, we need not hold them under lock and key, or make laws for their protection, for none can deprive us of them. And while you so hold them on such free and noble conditions, you do not fail to dispense something of their beauty and worth to those with whom you associate.
These possessions, with which you have enriched your lives, make no man poorer, rob no fellow creature of his right, conflict not with the law of charity to all.
Seeking possession upon those lines, you shall find that noble things do tend to make possible a form of possession in which all alike may share; that architecture, music, literature and painting do offer themselves to the service of a far nobler and more communal interpretation of wealth than that which would keep it for separate and individual enjoyment. A thousand may look upon the beauty of one picture, and detract nothing, in the enjoyment of each, from the enjoyment of all; nor has virtue or value gone out of it because so many have looked on it; and so it is (or so it may be) with all beauty whether we find it in nature or in art.
If I were asked to name the man who in the last hundred years had the greatest possessions, I think I would name Wordsworth. Read his poetry with this thought in your mind, of how day by day he gathered possessions of an imperishable kind, which needed no guardianship beyond the purity of his mind, and excited in others no envy. Nay, how much of those wonderful possessions was he not able to give to others? Some of his loveliest lines of poetry are a record of possession rightly attained. I give here only one of his poems—one of his simplest in inspiration—to show what I mean: