Зображення сторінки
PDF
ePub

The Beloved, it is the Present, the beautiful Humanity of our own age, to be loved and laboured for even as one would love and labour for a mistress. The Child, it is the Future, for which the Present toils and accumulates, for which it freely gives its restless days and sleepless nights; for which, if needful, in harness, on Liberty's battle field, or on that most holy altar kings call the scaffold, it would cheerfully render up its life. In one's own family are first learned the lessons of true Republicanism: the equality between the loving,—the equal rights of the young souls which we call our children, but which are God's children, even as ourselves, not property, but unpossessable human lives as important as our own, by whose cradles we kneel to proffer homage, foreseeing that they shall be greater than ourselves, that we are but their ministers; the freedom of growth which we see to be so needful for them (alas! one cannot forget the poor factory children when one speaks of the free growth which children ought to have), without which the very race deteriorates, and God's promise of the progression of Humanity through them is made a lie and an impossibility; and the fraternal association which is prophecied in the days of simple childhood,―the parents themselves but as elder children in a blessed hierarchy, reverently looked up to, loved, and freely and gladly obeyed, not merely because they are called parents, but because they are felt and believed to be the wisest and the best.

Equality, Liberty, and Brotherly Association, must have their first seeds planted in the Family. Whoever would destroy this would destroy the very nursery of republican virtue.

But the Family is only the nursery. We may not bound our sympathies within the walls of home. Though we need not our fellows' help, yet they need us. In the continual battle of life not one soldier can be spared: in the world's work the labourers are ever few (spite of Malthus and the like) compared with the harvest that awaits them. Is Humanity only to be served by those who have no family? Can Society afford that they who have had the best opportunities of learning the worth of Equality, Liberty, and Fraternity, shall be excused from teaching what they have learned, by the example of an extended practice? But our special question here is not so much the duty of the individual to Humanity, as the spheres in which that duty can most advantageously be fulfilled. We say that the first sphere, or inner circle, is the Family; the next the City -the village, parish, or commune; and the Country next.

The Family is the simplest method of association, the most natural, the easiest, and the most binding. We do not believe that it could be loosened without violating the best instincts of our nature, without a loss of influence for good which no other method of association could replace. The association of locality and common occupation we hold to be also worth preserving. A fishing community, a shipping community, a manufacturing community, an agricultural community, either of these will naturally grow up on the spot where its work may be best done. The peculiar habits of their lives impress a peculiarity of character. That and the identity of occupation beget a spirit of companionship, and the brotherly feeling has a wider extension through that growth of natural circumstances than from any arbitrary arrangement for mere economical purposes. We believe in the worth of such local attachments, of such local schools, in whose narrow precincts men may first learn something of the fervour, the devotedness,

the intense passion of patriotism. Let the hamlet or the township be a rallying point, a larger home, and a pride to its inhabitants; let them toil for the increase of its importance and its renown, jealous of it as a child of the honour of its family. Let the Family be the nursery of republican virtue, the Village—or the City-the first public school for the republican life. Each is the Republic in miniature, complete in itself. Complete, but not incapable of expansion. As each Individual is but a part of the Family, so each Family is but a member of the Township, Parish, or Commune; and so again each Township, Parish, or Commune, is but a member of the Country. There, on that broad scale, the value of local sympathies, the force of similarity of nature, habit, and idea, are more plainly discernible: and little need be said to prove their importance. History and tradition, habits of thought, modes of life, identity of aim,—all these stamp the men of one country as better fitted to work together than to work with the men of another country; all these indicate the essential differences in human character, which help to preserve variety, necessary for the improvement of the race. Language itself, which is but the outward manifestation of character, is not so different as the character beneath. These are the spheres of human work, not necessarily of disunion. Because the men of one craft labour in one workshop, and those of another craft in another, their different work being so best performed, is that any reason why they should be at variance, or any hinderance to their meeting on any common ground to do together that which requires their combined efforts, or that for which one has no more special aptitude than the other? Need Italy and England be less close in the brotherhood of nations, because each shall be distinct as a nation, each having its special task to accomplish in the world's work, each having something to do which can be better done by each in its own sphere, than through any cosmopolitan fusion or confusion of the two? We believe that Family, City, and Country, have not been arbitrarilyestablished spheres of human activity; but that they are the natural, the Godappointed modes of human organization, which through republican institutions shall be harmonized together. And we believe this none the less though, under patriarchal despotism the Family has been abused, children treated as property, as if they were for the parents and not the parents for them; though in the hard and foolish competition of an untaught and unorganized individualism, the City has been walled up, town contending against town, even to the destruction of a common nationality: and though kings and diplomatic apes have made the sacred name of Country a mere bye-word of unpatriotic antagonism. Such is the power of the false principle of monarchy, which perverts the truest means of life. In the Republic it shall be otherwise. The nation of many families shall be as a brother in the great family of the world, as a loyal township in the human commonwealth.

WORK-PROPERTY.

"We believe in the holiness of work, in its inviolability, and in the property which proceeds from it as its sign and its fruit.

The holiness of work, its inviolability. We mean that, as work is a social duty, every one has a right to the means of fulfilling it, a right to the instruments and

opportunities of labour; that no one has the right of hindering another from work.

And the property which proceeds from it. That is to say we do not believe that the institution' of private property is inevitably a nuisance. Our complaint is not that there is too much individual property, but that there is too little; not that the few have, but that the many have not. Property, wherever it is the real result of work-its sign and its fruit'-we deem inviolable, sacred as individual right.

On a piece of wild land, unclaimed by any, I build a log hut; I clear a portion of the ground; I plant potatoes or sow wheat: with my own hands labouring unaided. The wheat or potatoes there grown are just sufficient to feed me and my family. They are my property. They (not the land) are my work, a growth which is the result, the sign and fruit of my toil. If the title is not absolutely mine, at least none other can show so good a title. I have created at least the overplus of wheat or potatoes that remains after subtracting an amount of seed equal to that sown (if there is any question how I came by that). I, only I, have the right to my own creation.

I have a rose-tree,-one I budded on a wild stock. I have cared for it, tended it, nursed it through severe winters. It is mine. What right have you to it? Will the State intervene and appoint what is mine and what thine? Giving me perhaps some other rose-tree and you this. It can only do so ignorantly. The State knows nothing of the value of my rose,-its peculiar value to me. Its flowers have been gathered for my sick children; the Beloved has shed her last smile upon its bloom. It is a sacred thing to me. To all the world else it is only a common rose-bush. How can the world's title to it equal mine?

I have a dog which I have reared from a puppy. He knows me, loves me. He might be useful to others: he would be to none what he is to me; none can be to him what I have been and am. Have not I the best title to him?

If my superior taste or ingenuity-perhaps working extra hours-can, without taking from others, adorn the walls of my house, improve its furniture, and make my home a palace in comparison with my neighbour's-is there any reason why he should share with me, take my pictures or my sofas into his rooms,-take even one of them? Or rather, why I should be deprived of these enjoyments of may own creation until others, either through their own labour or mine, could acquire the same enjoyments?

All these things fairly produced by me are mine; they are as it were an atmosphere of my own with which I have surrounded myself, a radiance from my own light of life, an emanation from myself. No Government, State, or Commonweal, has any right here, to trench upon my personal, private, individual right, to rob me for even the world's benefit.

But suppose I produce more than sufficient, while others need? Has the State no right then? No, it has not. Let it try its right! I unaided by it profond. It has power, and it will confiscate. What follows? This:-I will not again be fool enough to produce for confiscation. I care nothing for your 'tyrant's plea of necessity for the general good. I will not produce, if I cannot be secure in my possession. Some one says-But you have told us of a duty towards Thamani y That is true too. Put here we have been talking of the r ̧ at folk, Lot of the key to give, I acknowledge the duty. I esteem the

blessedness of being able to give; esteem it too much to bear patiently the being robbed of it. I would be of my own free-will the dutiful servant of Humanity. I will not be its slave. Or am I dull, brutish, selfish, caring only to hare, to be a 'rich man,' not anxious to give my substance to those who need? Then educate me; enlighten me; better me by precept and example; if I mend not, point at me as a monster: but dare not to cross my threshold, to touch the veriest trifle that I have honestly earned or obtained, to profane my household gods, to violate my individual right, which stands sovereignly, however savagely, defying the world.

Property is that which is a man's own, what he may properly own, that which is justly his, his work, or his work's worth or purchase, or a free gift from another whose it fairly was.

Work is the doing of worth,-something of value made, created, or produced, or help toward that. Stealing is not work. Swindling is a shabbier sort of stealing. Overreaching is swindling.

Since property is definable as the sign and the fruit of work, clearly that which is neither the sign nor the fruit of work is not property. A pedlar takes eyeless needles to a tribe of ignorant savages, and sells them,' bartering his needles for things of worth. He produces the worth, but not fairly. The things of worth are not fairly his. They are not legitimately property. He has stolen them. The profit of a swindling trade is not property. Is it not swindling when a young child is taken in at a factory, and receives-in exchange for childhood's beauty, youth's hope, manhood's glorious strength, and the calm sunset of a well-aged life,—some paltry shillings a week? Nay, we will not wrong you, Trader! that 'is not all' you give him. You also give him ignorance, and vice, and suffering, and emaciation, a crippled beggarly life and a miserable death, in exchange for the health and joy of which God had made him capable. Why, man! selling eyeless needles to savages is Christian honesty compared with that. And one cannot but repeat that we dare not so abuse language as to call the profit of a swindling trade your property. It is stolen. A thief is not a proprietor. The words cannot be synonymous. Where is the title-deed showing work done and value created? WORK DONE? The paving of your palace-floors with children's faces! Moses and Son,-and some who think themselves honester,—have no right to a pennyworth of their dishonest gains. If the State should confiscate their fortunes and distribute it among distressed needle-women and the like, I, for my part, should think no wrong done, but be thankful for so much retributive justice. When the usurer (we call him capitalist now) takes advantage of his fellow's need to over reach the common ground of human brotherhood upon which they originally stood, and to steal a profit out of that need,—this is not work, or worth-doing, toil he never so toilsomely. His profit is not his property. Or when a landlord' claims possession of God's earth,-I do not say of certain produce, but absolute possession of the land itself,-because his ancestor, some duke (thieves' leader) of by-gone times, stole that land, or because he bought it of some degenerate thief (not a leader), well knowing it to be stolen,-can we allow that to be property, properly his? God's earth and ocean, God's mountains, plains, seas, and rivers, are not property,-no more than his sky. They are his work, not man's. Let the fisherman make a property of the fish he catches.

B

'Why? he does not create them.' Yet he does in some sense produce them. Their worth to man is nothing in the sea. It is their being caught, which is the result of his work, that gives them value. The possession of them is the sign of that work. Let the husbandman till the ground, and what he produces shall be his. That produce is the fruit of his toil. But the earth is not his. Would I'parcel the land out among all the dwellers on the earth'? No, certainly. For the fisher cares not for his proportion;-neither does the merchant, who brings goods from the far land, giving honest toil in their bringing, and justly possessing them as the sign and fruit thereof. Let who will occupy the land. But recollect that the fisher's and the merchant's shares are there also. It is a common property, which cannot be parcelled out: because every minute a new co-inheritor is born, and every birth would necessitate a new division. But I see no reason, therefore, why any should not hold any amount of land (only limited by the needs of others) in undisturbed and perpetual tenure, paying to the State a rent for the same. What has the State to do with appointing to each landholder his limits, or assigning to him his locality? Here again would be an interference with individual right. It might give me my acres in the plain, and my brother his upon the mountain side; and he loves the level ground, while to me flood and fell are dear, and I dislike the monotony of the plain. Or why should the State refuse land to individuals, and compel it to be held in common? All these things may best adjust themselves: the business of Government not being to intermeddle with individual right, but to have that respected, and to maintain order, caring that none encroach upon the rights of others, and that all are organized harmoniously together. The one is for the prevention of evil, the other the preparation for good; the one involves the questions of property and credit, the other the question of education.

Of property we have already spoken. The duty of Government here may be thus summed up. It has to see that every one holds inviolate his right to enjoy or to bestow the fruits of his own honest labour; and also that none shall, by endeavouring to appropriate common property, prevent another from producing to the utmost of his capacity. Its business is to care that common property shall never be appropriated by individuals, nor private property meddled with by any.

The questions of credit and education are the necessary concomitants of this.

'We believe in the duty of society to furnish the element of material work by credit, of intellectual and moral work by education.'

CREDIT.

The right to one's sharc, or one's share's worth, in the common heritage-the land, and the right to the produce of one's own honest toil: if the State guarantees these, it is enough. For what do these rights imply?

The worth of one's share in the land is not an exact numerical proportion of al that is done in or on that land, nor yet a certain sum of money or amount of material wealth apportioned to each in exchange for giving up the land;-but simply one's share in the rental of the land, which, accruing to the State treasury, is a fund for common assurance, and for the use of all the members of the State.

« НазадПродовжити »