It is really deserving of note how every dirty and dishonourable act is wrapped about with a moral sanction, as a comfit with a motto in a cracker.
We always profess to be actuated by noble and disinterested motives, and yet they are generally mean and personal. Our ancestors regarded the planets only so far as they by their conjunctions and interferences with each other’s houses affected the constitutions and careers of these ancestors of ours. Jupiter is 1250 times larger than the earth, and has seven moons, and this planet with its moons revolves and illumines the sky to affect the spleen of Master Jack Sparrow and disturb the courtship of Mistress Jenny Wren. Jupiter is distant five-hundred millions of miles from Jack and Jenny—but what of that? According to Euclid a straight line can be drawn between any two given points, accordingly between the planet at one end and these little nobodies at the other, lines exist. Now all people actually do draw invisible lines between themselves and every other object in heaven and earth, and contemplate these objects along these lines, and value and despise them according as these objects affect them along these lines.
The author was travelling in a second-class railway-carriage on that memorable Monday morning after the Phœnix-Park tragedy that thrilled all England with horror and rage. Facing him, sat a gentleman reading his paper, who ever and anon slapped his knee, and exclaimed, “Famous! Splendid! Nothing better could have happened!” Presently, unable to understand these exclamations, the author asked, “Sir! do you mean to say that you approve of the crime?”
“Oh, no!” was his answer. “Certainly not, but, consider how it will make the papers sell! I have shares in one or two.”
The writer was talking the other day to a timber merchant on the condition of Ireland. “I trust,” said he, “that the Plan of Campaign will not be suppressed as yet. We can buy Irish oak at fourpence a foot just now.”
The writer was discussing the annexation of Alsace with a native farmer. “Well,” said he, “when we belonged to France I sold for a franc what I now sell for a mark, therefore, God save Kaiser Wilhelm.” “But,” was objected, “probably you now have to pay a mark for what formerly cost you a franc.” He considered for a moment, and then said, “That is true, vive la France!” Twopence turned his patriotism this way to Berlin, or that way to Paris. He was a German when selling, a Frenchman when buying, all for twopence.
The professional politician is a man who lives by politics as the professional chess-player lives by chess. He acquires a professional conscience. His profession has to fill his pockets and find bread for his children, and politics must be kept going to do so. The chess-player sacrifices pawns to gain his end. The stoker shovels on coals into the furnace to make his engine gallop; and the electrician pours vitriol into the battery to produce a current in his wires. They have none of them the slightest scruple in doing these things—they belong to the business, and the professional politician has no scruple in playing with facts, and throwing them away as pawns in his game, or of exciting the passions and prejudices of men, or of using the most biting and corroding acid in his endeavours to evoke a current of feeling. When an organist desires to produce a noise, he pulls out stop diapason, and dances on the pedals. The professional politician deals with the public in the same way; that is his instrument. What in the organ are the pedals for but to be kicked, and the keys but to be struck, and the stops but to be drawn out, and what are the social classes but the manuals, and the individuals composing them, but the keys, and the grudges, greed, ambition, envy, and prejudices but the stops, which a clever player understands to manipulate?
Mr. Welsh was a worthy man, eminently respectable, a good husband, and a kind friend. He was truthful, honest, reliable in his family and social relations, but professionally unscrupulous. The sea-line stood in its old place on one side of his character, but on another a wide tract, that tract on which he grew his harvest, had been reclaimed from the waves of conscience. It is so with a good many others besides Mr. Welsh, and in a good many other trades and professions than journalism and politics. We are conscientious in every department except that of money-making, and in that we allow of tricks and meannesses, which we excuse to ourselves as forced on us by the exigencies of competition. Recently Mr. Welsh had been slightly indisposed, so he came from town into the country, on a holiday, to spend the Sunday with his sister, and then run on to see a congenial friend in a town in the same county.
In the afternoon he took a stroll by himself in the woods, smoking his pipe, and, always with an eye to business, looking about him for material for an article.
“Halloo!” said Mr. Welsh, halting in front of the ruinous cottage of Patience Kite. “What have we here? Does any one inhabit this tumble-down concern?”