First, I want to show that the existence of my class is necessary.
Although men in various occupations often acquire a considerable degree of culture outside their trade, the highest results of culture can scarcely ever be attained by men whose time is taken up in earning a fortune. Every man has but a limited flow of mental energy per day; and if this is used up in an industrial leadership, he cannot do much more in the intellectual sphere than simply ascertain what has been done by others. Now, although we have a certain respect, and the respect is just, for those who know what others have accomplished, it is clear that if no one did more than this, if no one made any fresh discoveries, the world would make no progress whatever; and in fact, if nobody ever had been dedicated to intellectual pursuits in preceding ages, the men who only learn what others have done, would in these days have had nothing to learn. Past history proves the immensity of the debt which the world owes to men who gave their whole time and attention to intellectual pursuits; and if the existences of these men could be eliminated from the past of the human race, its present would be very different from what it is. A list has been published of men who have done much good work in the intervals of business, but still the fact remains that the great intellectual pioneers were absorbed and devoted men, scorning wealth so far as it affected themselves, and ready to endure everything for knowledge beyond the knowledge of their times. Instances of such enthusiasm abound, an enthusiasm fully justified by the value of the results which it has achieved. When Alexander Humboldt sold his inheritance to have the means for his great journey in South America, and calmly dedicated the whole of a long life, and the strength of a robust constitution, to the advancement of natural knowledge, he acted foolishly indeed, if years, and strength, and fortune are given to us only to be well invested in view of money returns; but the world has profited by his decision. Faraday gave up the whole of his time to discovery when he might have earned a large fortune by the judicious investment of his extraordinary skill in chemistry. Livingstone has sacrificed everything to the pursuit of his great work in Africa. Lives such as these—and many resemble them in useful devotion of which we hear much less—are clearly not compatible with much money-getting. A decent existence, free from debt, is all that such men ought to be held answerable for.
I have taken two or three leading instances, but there is quite a large class of intellectual people who cannot in the nature of things serve society effectively in their own way without being quite outside of the industrial life. There is a real incompatibility between some pursuits and others. I suspect that you would have been a good general, for you are a born leader and commander of men; but it would have been difficult to unite a regular military career with strict personal attention to your factories. We often find the same difficulty in our intellectual pursuits. We are not always quite so unpractical as you think we are; but the difficulty is how to find the time, and how to arrange it so as not to miss two or three distinct classes of opportunities. We are not all of us exactly imbeciles in money matters, though the pecuniary results of our labors seem no doubt pitiful enough. There is a tradition that a Greek philosopher, who was suspected by the practical men of his day of incapacity for affairs, devoted a year to prove the contrary, and traded so judiciously that he amassed thereby great riches. It may be doubtful whether he could do it in one year, but many a fine intellectual capacity has overshadowed a fine practical capacity in the same head by the withdrawal of time and effort.
It is because the energies of one man are so limited, and there is so little time in a single human life, that the intellectual and industrial functions must, in their highest development, be separated. No one man could unite in his own person your life and Humboldt’s, though it is possible that he might have the natural capacity for both. Grant us, then, the liberty not to earn very much money, and this being once granted, try to look upon our intellectual superiority as a simple natural fact, just as we look upon your pecuniary superiority.
In saying in this plain way that we are intellectually superior to you and your class, I am guilty of no more pride and vanity than you when you affirm or display your wealth. The fact is there, in its simplicity. We have culture because we have paid the twenty or thirty years of labor which are the price of culture, just as you have great factories and estates which are the reward of your life’s patient and intelligent endeavor.
Why should there be any narrow jealousy between us; why any contempt on the one side or the other? Each has done his appointed work, each has caused to fructify the talent which the Master gave.
Yet a certain jealousy does exist, if not between you and me personally, at least between our classes. The men who have culture without wealth are jealous of the power and privileges of those who possess money without culture; and on the other hand, the men whose time has been too entirely absorbed by commercial pursuits to leave them any margin sufficient to do justice to their intellectual powers, are often painfully sensitive to the contempt of the cultivated, and strongly disposed, from jealousy, to undervalue culture itself. Both are wrong so far as they indulge any unworthy and unreasonable feeling of this kind. The existence of the two classes is necessary to an advanced civilization. The science of accumulating and administrating material wealth, of which you yourself are a great practical master, is the foundation of the material prosperity of nations, and it is only when this prosperity is fully assured to great numbers that the arts and sciences can develop themselves in perfect liberty and with the tranquil assurance of their own permanence. The advancement of material well-being in modern states tends so directly to the advancement of intellectual pursuits, even when the makers of fortunes are themselves indifferent to this result, that it ought always to be a matter of congratulation for the intellectual class itself, which needs the support of a great public with leisure to read and think. It is easy to show how those arts and sciences which our class delights to cultivate are built upon those developments of industry which have been brought about by the energy of yours. Suppose the case of a scientific chemist: the materials for his experiments are provided ready to his hand by the industrial class; the record of them is preserved on paper manufactured by the same industrial class; and the public which encourages him by its attention is usually found in great cities which are maintained by the labors of the same useful servants of humanity. It is possible, no doubt, in these modern times, that some purely pastoral or agricultural community might produce a great chemist, because a man of inborn scientific genius who came into the world in an agricultural country might in these days get his books and materials from industrial centres at a distance, but his work would still be based on the industrial life of others. No pastoral or agricultural community which was really isolated from industrial communities ever produced a chemist. And now consider how enormously important this one science of chemistry has proved itself even to our intellectual life! Several other sciences have been either greatly strengthened or else altogether renewed by it, and the wonderful photographic processes have been for nature and the fine arts what printing was for literature, placing reliable and authentic materials for study within the reach of every one. Literature itself has profited by the industrial progress of the present age, in the increased cheapness of everything that is material in books. I please myself with the reflection that even you make paper cheaper by manufacturing so much cotton.
All these are reasons why we ought not to be jealous of you; and now permit me to indicate a few other reasons why it is unreasonable on your part to feel any jealousy of us.
Suppose we were to cease working to-morrow—cease working, I mean, in our peculiar ways—and all of us become colliers and factory operatives instead, with nobody to supply our places. Or, since you may possibly be of opinion that there is enough literature and science in the world at the present day, suppose rather that at some preceding date the whole literary and scientific and artistic labor of the human race; had come suddenly to a standstill. Mind, I do not say of Englishmen merely, but of the whole race, for if any intellectual work had been done in France or Germany, or even in Japan, you would have imported it like cotton and foreign cereals. Well, I have no hesitation in telling you that although there was a good deal of literature and science in England before the 1st of January, 1800, the present condition of the nation would have been a very chaotic condition if the intellectual class had ceased on that day to think and observe and to place on record its thoughts and observations. The life of a progressive nation cannot long go forward exclusively on the thinking of the past: its thoughtful men must not be all dead men, but living men who accompany it on its course. It is they who make clear the lessons of experience; it is they who discover the reliable general laws upon which all safe action must be founded in the future; it is they who give decision to human action in every direction by constantly registering, in language of comprehensive accuracy, both its successes and its failures. It is their great and arduous labor which makes knowledge accessible to men of action at the cost of little effort and the smallest possible expenditure of time. The intellectual class grows in numbers and in influence along with the numbers and influence of the materially productive population of the State. And not only are the natural philosophers, the writers of contemporary and past history, the discoverers in science, necessary in the strictest sense to the life of such a community as the modern English community, but even the poets, the novelists, the artists are necessary to the perfection of its life. Without them and their work the national mind would be as incomplete as would be the natural universe without beauty. But this, perhaps, you will perceive less clearly, or be less willing to admit.