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For the 'inviolability' of work, the sacredness of it and of property as its fruit, means something more than that we shall have all we can earn under our present take-who-can system, the system of free trade' in men and other commodities. The 'inviolability' of work implies that there shall be no artificial hinderances in the way of work. The right to the produce of one's honest toil is a mere cheat, if that toil by any tyranny, constitutional enactment, or subterfuge, can be hindered from producing to the utmost of its natural ability, aided by the interest of the common heritage-the rental of the land. Such a hinderance is the present tyranny of capital.

Say you give a man free access to the land. What use is that when he has no money for implements, stock, manure, or seed? when he has no means of living even to the first harvest? To throw the whole land open, giving to each man, for himself and family, their proportion of measured value (some two acres a head), what use would that be to the millions whose existence depends upon their having wages next Saturday night? They could sell it, perhaps.' Yes, for whatever the capitalist might choose to give them for it, when he had kept off the purchase till the sellers should be at starvation point. Something more is evidently wanted to make the land available.

Or say that the State guarantees to every man the produce of his honest toil. Well, it does that now, if that means only such produce as the capitalist, who rules the market will allow him to have. No mere enactment of that sort could benefit the wages slave. But, he shall have his share of all he earns,' says such a law. Shall he not also be free to sell that share? To give the factory slave his share of what he has earned-so many bales of cotton, what would it avail him? Could he take it into the market? Or, rather, could he afford to warehouse it when the market is glutted and none will buy? He must sell it; for Saturday night sees him starving. And so his master will have it at the present price-a wage.

Besides there is good in the division of employments, and only loss of time to accrue from every man being both producer and seller.

The inviolability of work implies free access at all times to the means of work. For this purpose the State must be the capitalist, the banker, the moneylender.

Look at things as they are. A poor man is out of work. Illness has come upon him, or his trade is slack. He must needs lie by. His little savings (if he has any) are exhausted. He sells his clothes, his furniture, all he can spare, -no not spare, but realize anything upon. At last he sells his tools. He recovers; trade is brisk again. He could find work readily enough, but he has no tools. How fares he now? Why, unless private charity helps him to new tools, he may starve, he and his. The case is common. So much Society' does now for its able members.

So many hundred weavers are thrown out of employ by a new invention. They are unfit for other work. They have no means of living while they might learn another craft. They may starve. Nay, not that; Government' gives them a poorhouse, and grudgingly keeps life' in their bodies, caring neither for their well-being, nor for any interest the State has in them. They are simply so much

refuse of the capitalist, which the State insists shall be carted away with some show of decency.

Every year in this free Britain' how many thousand men wander about our streets and lanes, wishing for work and finding none, haggardly wasting, starving, because no private speculator cares to employ them,-starving idly, worthlessly (not even turned to account as manure), not because they will not work, nor because food is scanty or work not wanting doing, but because under our present system there is no getting work to do, unless it subserves the pleasure or profit of certain monied individuals,—because the State does not protect the sacred right of every human being to work and to enjoy the fruit thereof.

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The rental of the land is the proper capital of the whole nation. Why should go to a pawnbroker, or usurer, when my own money lies in the Treasury? Why should I starve, lacking means while I learn a new trade, my own failing, when my money is in the Treasury? Why should so many thousands of us, O my brothers, so well-disposed to work, be idle, famished, and unprofitable, while our money lies in the Treasury: with the use of which we would reclaim waste lands (some fifteen millions of acres at this present lying 'uncultivated but reclaimable,' as the political economist knows,) better cultivate lands even now reclaimed, and build homes for the houscless, and improve the hovels where human creatures now lie waiting for the plague, and weave clothes for the naked, and feed the hungry, and educate the ignorant. Good God! what work awaits the doing,—and our capital every day pours into the public Treasury, and there lies idle, (unless, indeed, thieves take it thence,) and we may not help either ourselves or the helpless, unless we can get our tools from the pawnbroker, and leave to be made tools of from some private speculator.

It is one business of Government (not Tory ruffianism or Whig rascality, neither of which is Government) to be the Nation's Banker, to furnish each individual with the material means-the capital-for work, at all times and under all circumstances. Else one's right to property as the fruit of one's work is a mere mockery. As the just appropriation of the land would sweep away all those useless middlemen called landlords (not cultivators of land), so a sound system of national credit-a mutual assurance of the Nation-would rid us of all those mischievous middlemen called capitalists, who stand now between the work and the worker (no matter whether the worker be a captain of industry'-who has not always capital-or only its lowest soldier), not helping but hindering the one, and so ever robbing, and but too often murdering, the other.

Through what special provisions, or under what guarantees Government should exercise this function of supplying capital, is a matter not to be prescribed by any theorist (though the researches of such may indicate the method): it can be determined only by the Nation, whensoever it may please the People to constitute themselves a Nation, and to appoint their Government.

EDUCATION.

The land is the common inheritance of man; but he has yet another heritagehis share in the result of all experience, research, and achievement, since the beginning of Humanity. And as it is the business of Government to secure to

him those means of material improvement which are the interest or rent of his property in the land, so it is the business of Government to secure to him those means of intellectual and moral improvement which constitute his share in the common intellectual and moral stock. Capital, or credit supplies him with the material element, education with the moral and intellectual. It would be worse than mockery to give him only the first.

Education is the business of Government, because only Government can be intrusted with it, and because only Government can effectually manage it.

And first, what is this Education, to which every human being is equally entitled? It is the culture of the whole nature, the development of its full powers of growth-the perfecting of the physical-the due training of the moral and intellectual-and the fitting both heart and intellect to embrace the highest aspiration and completest knowledge of the time, so far as natural organization will permit :-the purport of such culture being the raising of strong and excellent human beings to do the work of Humanity. Education is, indeed, the Present endowing the Future with all its wealth and power, that the Future may start from that vantage ground to reach the further heights of progress. To whom shall this be intrusted except to the nation's rulers, to those whom the nation has chosen as its Wisest and Most Virtuous? Upon them, the head and heart of the Present Time (we are speaking of the good time which shall be Present, not of our own little day of Whig expediences)—upon them it devolves to rule the Present, so as may best provide for the Future. It is theirs to utter the nation's faith, to teach that faith to the young generation, which shall in its turn become the nation. Whom would you choose for this work? Whom, instead of these your voices have already declared to be your Best and Wisest? How shall they lead the nation, if its youth are exempted from their controul? Shall they be your rulers, and yet not rule your children? Your children! But indeed they are not yours, if that your is to mean property. You have no property in your children. They are the nation's in trust for God and the Future.

'But what then becomes- I hear some one ask,-'what becomes of individual liberty if our children are to be placed in the hands of a Government, of any, even the best government ?'

Whose individual liberty? Yours, or your child's? What right have you to possess a human soul? To make it yours, to twist it to your bent, to cast it in your mould? The soul of the little child is your equal,-has its own independent rights, and demands its own growth-not a growth of your dictation. What right have you to confiscate that soul to your uses, to sacrifice it upon the private altar of your particular opinions? Has not every man, then, the right of teaching what he believes? Is it not his duty to propagandize his own idea of truth?' Truly so, among his equals, but not to take an unfair advantage,—which is tyrannizing. Between you and the weak and easily-impressible child rightly.

Let it be borne in mind that, whenever the word Government is used in these Letters, it is the reality which is spoken of-not the impudent counterfeit which now mocks and curses society. It is more than usually important to bear in mind this distinction in treating of Education, because confusion here is the rock upon which men commonly split in debating of the different merits of State-education and Voluntaryisin.

steps the protection of the State, guaranteeing to that child that he shall not be stinted to the narrow paternal pasture; but that he shall be enabled to become not merely a pride and pleasure to his father, but worthy of his nation. It is that which he has to serve.

Besides, shall the poorest-souled individual be free to inculcate his private crotchet, and the nation's Best and Wisest be prohibited from teaching that which is the generally-acknowledged truth of their time, the actual religion of Humanity?

It may happen that the father is in advance of his time: but who shall guarantee this? Must every child take his chance?

It may also happen that the father's tenets are far behind his time. Shall we, in virtue of our profession of Equality, Liberty, Fraternity, after abolishing the slavery of the body, allow the soul of the child to be enslaved, simply because the enslaver is the parent; or deny the child's liberty of growth because a parent would have the training of him; and rob the Future of its worker, its soldier, and its priest, because some one called a parent claims the child as his rather than God's?

If a Government-the elect of the nation, the real priesthood of the people, their wiser voice, then indeed the Voice of God,' for the people is the sole interpreter of his law,—if a Government have a faith to teach, what individual out of the mass shall step between them and the child to forbid their uttering that faith in the child's ears? If the 'government' is imbecile, or so buried in dirty traflic, that it has no faith, then let all true men combine, or, failing combination, let every brave man for himself do his utmost, to keep his children from being contaminated by the abominable doctrines which alone such misgovernment could teach. But if it is your own chosen government, and has a faith ?—Where is the room for this very English jealousy of a compulsory State-education?

'And religious education also?' EDUCATION IS RELIGIOUS. Meaning by religion that which binds Humanity to God; that which links the ages together, making of every generation one strong and perfect link, welded into one by faith in the necessity of harmonizing men's lives-man's life-with the Eternal, and by the organization which such faith would insure to a nation. This is religion: the teaching of which is the highest duty, function, and object of Government. Sectarian dogmas and ceremonies are not included here. It may be left to voluntary zeal to determine with what verbal forms, with what gestures, or upon what particular occasions, such and such a congregation shall sing or pray together. That is a matter of individual liberty, with which, so long as public decency remains unoffended, or private right unassailed, the State has no business to meddle. The ceremonial observances of some few hours in a week may be left to the conscience of the seet, or of the individual; but the religion which is to actuate the daily life of the whole people is the proper affair of Government, if government is to be real.

There is no middle course between this organization of human life and the anarchy of our present system, an anarchy which is called liberty, but which is only the unrestrained tyranny of the stronger. How this sort of license results, private vice and selfishness, national crime and weakness and degradation, and ruin, may only too soon inform us.

After all, it is not individual liberty-the right of conscience of speech-for which men need have fear when intrusting the education of the nation's youth to those whom the nation shall have chosen as its Government. Teach as zealously and as carefully as you will in your State-schools-the fear will still be, not of the government-teacher overlaying the parental doctrine, but of the parentif so disposed-by daily opposition or perversion, eradicating the lessons of the publie school.

In all cases too (as a necessary consequence of the law of progress) however excellent your arrangements, there will be a minority to complain, and perhaps to suffer. The minority here will be those very few wiser than their time, who could teach their children even better than the collective wisdom of their nation. But of how much would these have to complain? Free out of school hours to teach their children, if they had but to add the higher knowledge, their task would be easy; neither would time or opportunity be wanting if haply they had somewhat to correct. They have their voice, too, in the councils of the nation, to make their greater wisdom heard-with it to convince even the schoolmasters, if its sound may be of sufficient potency.

RULE OF THE MAJORITY

MUTUAL SACREDNESS OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND SOCIETY.

"We believe that the interpretation of the moral law and rule of progress cannot be confided to a caste or an individual; but only to the people, enlightened by national education, directed by those among them whom virtue and genius point out to them as their best.

'We believe in the sacredness of both individuality and society, which ought not to be effaced, nor to combat, but to harmonize together for the amelioration of all by all!

The whole question of politics is an educational question. Government—if it bas any meaning-is the organized power which educates-rules-orders. We believe that this educational power cannot be intrusted to a caste, whether an aristocracy, a corporation, or a priesthood. It matters not what numbers compose the caste,-whether few or many; it matters not whether there be careful patriarchal training, or the constitutional carelessness of those governors' who are content with being a corrupt and inefficient police. Many or few, careful or careless, the difference is one only of degree. If a caste rules, you can have but tyrants on one side, and slaves upon the other. There can be no real education there, no certain progress: for there is not the People. The instinct of the whole People is alone the conscience of Humanity; it alone can be trusted to interpret the law of progress.

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Still less can the government be intrusted to an individual. He will teach, or order, in accordance with his own wish, at best his consciencious thought; he cannot give expression to the universal conscience. To confide the rule to

the hands of one is to let the exception give law. Though even the true prophet

How inefficient even as a merc police, weekly records of murder, robbery, and swindling may well inform us.

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