Aylmer Maude

“ The English Government is in closer touch with the people than the Russian Government is. No doubt, in England as in Russia, the rich and educated make the laws, chiefly for their own advantage ; but in England they have to reckon with the whims, the passions, and the opinions of an active and audible section of the people who occupy themselves with politics. The sins of the English Government are therefore, in a sense, the sins of the people. ”

“ Once assume that we dwell, not in a chaos but in a universe designed for objects which transcend our comprehension, and one can work quietly at what the great Taskmaster sets before us. Expediency and tangible success lose their importance, and even death for ourselves and extinction for our race, cease to be the inexplicable curse from the very thought of which we sought to escape. ”

“ It is merely one of our many elaborate and expensive contrivances for maintaining a selfish system of society. It safeguards the wealth of individuals, but it leaves the community poorer; for all the men who are unproductively engaged in it have to be fed, clothed, and lodged by the labour of workers. Think of trade secrets : manufacturers carefully hiding their processes one from another, and making goods less durable in order that they may be more saleable. ”

“ But "What is truth?" asks, not Pilate only but all thoughtful men who have pierced to the heart of the materialistic philosophy of the day, hoping in it to find solid ground to build on.
God, say they, is a reflection of himself which man has cast upon the clouds. Granted that there may be a great first cause of all things, we can know nothing of it, and must leave it completely out of our reckoning. ”

“ But what sort of example does she set in so simple and practical a matter as dressing ? A magazine lately stated that she wears silk stockings of such extreme fineness that a man has been continually engaged for many years past doing no other productive work than weave stockings for Her Most Gracious Majesty, the Defender of the Christian Faith !
How can want and poverty be avoided in a society in which people think it right and reasonable that the whole labour of a highly-skilled workman shall be devoted to pro- viding the coverings for one woman's legs ? ”

“ Mill's indictment of society remains unanswered and unanswerable : it is evidently wrong that " the produce of labour should be apportioned as we now see it, almost in an inverse ratio to the labour the largest portions to those who have never worked at all, the next largest to those whose work is almost nominal, and so on in a descending scale, the remuneration dwindling as the work grows harder and more disagreeable, until the most fatiguing and exhausting bodily labour cannot count with certainty on being able to earn even the necessaries of life." ”

“ Worst of all in the indictment against our civilisation is this, that the ideal held up for men's admiration that of freedom from the obligation to toil, and the having a legal 'right' to consume extravagantly the fruits of other men's labour is a false light, luring them towards moral quick- sands. The difference which divides the economic teaching and example of respectable society from those of Jesus, is not a difference of degree only but of direction ”

“ For if both are allowed to develop, the day is not far off when they will feel a moral revulsion against the system you represent ; and the activity you force on the one, and the inactivity you inflict on the other, will alike be moral torture to them.
The injustice of our present system to the great bulk of humanity, who have to labour excessively, who are ill-trained, ill-taught, and ill-cared for, and for whom art and science hardly exist, is painfully obvious. ”

“ You may still meet people who talk about wealth being the reward of industry, and poverty being always the merited reward of idleness ; but year by year it requires an increasing degree of obtuseness to enable a man to talk in that way without conscious hypocrisy. ”

“ The agitation for a Reform or a Home Rule Act concentrates and buries itself in one object, which is accomplished to our disappointment, or perhaps never is accomplished at all.
The line of advance in Russia may lie, not in upsetting the Government but in ignoring it What is desirable is, not that another and a better Pougatchef should dethrone the Emperor and declare a Constitution, but that men should open their minds to what is true, and, seeing the right, should " obey God rather than men." ”

“ Is not our society actuated by the same motives of greed (selfish for ourselves, selfish for our families, selfish for our nation) which led those poor peasants to their doom ? and do we not see around us misery and death caused by the industrial competition in which we share ? Within these last hundred and fifty years the productive power of man's labour has doubled and much more than doubled. ”

“ What we can know is matter and its movements ; what can be known of higher forms of life towards which man may be tending must be learnt by studying the evolution of lower forms which he has already surpassed. Morality is a question of expediency : it is one thing for the ants, another for the bees, and a dozen different things for man, according to his race and climate and surroundings. Do not, therefore, elevate your whims and guesses and fancies into the decrees of an " Eternal who makes for righteousness." ”

“ We are so sunk in the bog, that hardly with our utmost effort can we get out of it. But why pretend the thing is good ? Why say it is better to live in a bog than on dry ground ? Why boast so glibly of our progress and our civilisation, when we have well-nigh lost sight of the ideals which were plainly set up before men thousands of years ago ? With an art that, in its efforts to satisfy the rich, demands labour from the poor to build its studios and exhibitions and provide its materials ”

“ Mother earth would yield enough for all without excessive toil or need for any to scramble, to envy, or to hate ; but the aim our competitive system sets before men namely, the out- stripping of their fellows in the race for wealth, the grasping and retaining of ' property rights ' to make ten or one hundred of our fellow-men obey our orders can only be reached by a few ; can only be held precariously and by the use of violence ; and can never be approved by any one to whom Christ's example seems admirable. ”

“ Looked at in this way, the stress and emphasis of Christ's teaching did not appear to lie in the announcement of a mysterious Trinity, or in a theory of Redemption by blood, or in the founding of an infallible Church, or in the institution of any rites or ceremonies, but in the inculcation of love and goodwill among men, who are all sons of one Father ; a sonship that should be practically shown by burdening others as little as possible, and doing as much as possible ourselves : devoting one's talents, not to the service of mammon but to the service of righteousness. ”

“ Who, after all, can yet tell what the final outcome of the conquest of India, of the greed that caused it and of the violence that characterised it, will be ? Does a nation's life consist in the abundance of the things it possesses ? And does an empire gain in well-being when a small minority 'make fortunes' in a distant land, and return to establish families which henceforth live, generation after generation, on the labour of their fellow-men, for whom, in exchange, they perchance make laws which con- travene, but do not surpass, the two great commandments approved by Christ ? ”

“ The other line, followed by such men as Paul, Wyclif, or George Fox, and most conspicuously by Jesus, is that of doing what is right and speaking what is true, leaving the results to be enforced, not by the policeman but by the Eternal. Who can ever measure or tell what results have followed, or will follow, from any action or example ? Is it not better to leave the calculations of expediency to those who do not believe that truth is great and shall prevail ? ”

“ Slavery was bad, economically as well as morally ; and the emancipation of slaves has not impoverished the world nor left us without cloth.
In such problems, the question of conscience and motive is the one we are capable of forming a sound judgment on, not the question of the results of actions. And whether we believe that conscience is a guide to be consulted and followed, depends again on whether we believe that there is a Power " lasting through the ages, which makes for righteousness " and which acts upon us. ”

“ Is not the scramble and massacre on the Hodinskoe Field [1] the very type of what our boasted civilisation has brought us to ? The grab for enamelled mugs and bad sausages at the People's Fete was mere child's play (even with all its bloodshed) to the grab for money which year by year crushes thousands into the workhouses and prisons, and into that worst of deaths prostitution. Some unwhole- some food or petty rewards are offered, by men who never made or earned them, to those who can push hard enough to get them. A struggle ensues : each strives to be first served ”

“ Our pretence that we murder and steal in order to do good to less civilised nations, amounts to a declaration that the best results are obtainable, not by doing right but by doing wrong, and that as a nation we have reached a state of civilisation which we are prepared to force upon others. ”

“ If you search the registers of London churches, I am told, you will find the same family names cropping up for two or three generations and then dying off. Among the classes who do not get away to the seaside or go for long holidays to the country, three, or at most four, generations of city life destroy the family. ”

“ Women not only dress themselves in extravagant clothes, which many people have laboured many days in poverty to produce, but men are tempted from useful work, and paid high wages to serve, together with strong, well-fed horses, in conveying these women, shut up in expensive boxes, to the drawing-room, where they will not do anything more useful than courtesy and kiss Her Most Gracious Majesty's hand. ”

“ Measured in money, and considering the tremendous waste, how few gain and how many lose ! Measured by any other standard than filthy lucre, among the people I know, there are none who profit : all are losers. ”

“ One is that followed, say, by Gladstone (to take a prominent instance) , which is that of aiming at immediate practical results by legal enactments. It may not be always useless, but what is made legal is not always right and what is made illegal is not always wrong ; it generates much friction, is disappointing in its results, and sets no example which all men can follow. It is a line which can, indeed, hardly be pursued except by men who have divorced themselves from the universal duty of man to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. ”

“ His son is cut off from the natural and healthy activity helpful to others for which nature has fitted him, and is constrained by his surroundings to find an outlet for his physical energy in rushing like a lunatic after a tennis or a cricket ball, over ground carefully prepared and kept in order by the labour of working-men. The satisfaction and the moral growth which attend on service well rendered to one's fellows (which, rationally organised, in good company, might be so pleasant) is denied him : and who can say how great in its ultimate effect on mind and character that deprivation is ? ”

“ Instead of using her health and ability to lighten the toil of humanity, she is, economically, a dead-weight, making the world poorer by her presence and failing to reap satisfaction for herself. This indeed is the problem which faces Dives to-day. ”

“ And, however much the influence of the advance of the physical sciences on the happiness of the human race has been overrated, is it not certain that Newton and Darwin have done more to liberate mankind from the thraldom of an ignorant and bigoted priesthood than could be effected by a dozen church-dis- establishment bills ? ”

“ As to the moral revolution which is now fermenting in many lands, especially with regard to economic questions, it can neither be helped nor hindered by shams and lies and surely, as to this revolution, it behoves all men to take heed what side they are on ”

“ Such men would neither put up a fence to protect private property in land, nor serve as soldiers or policemen to en- force ' legal rights,' nor be lawyers to plead the cause of those who can pay for it, nor judges to administer iniquitous laws, nor politicians to set an example of quarrelling where what is wanted is an example of useful and self-sacrificing work, nor priests claiming an endowment and petrifying the beliefs of one age to check the spiritual advance of the next. ”

“ And the rich and great, whose example and guidance has led to such a result, harden their hearts like Pharaoh of old, and hasten to find occupations or amusements, to prepare which the labour and lives of the common people are again demanded. ”

“ There is in England a certain old lady whom poets have panegyrised and about whom the newspapers are never tired of writing ; she is much respected, and is looked up to as an example of all the virtues ”

“ The daughter may not share the work her father and brother are to devote their lives to, nor is that work such as would be likely to attract her or any rational being ; but she is well fed, and requires an outlet for her energies till she gets married and has children, and, too often, she finds it in family quarrels, or in balls, visiting and theatre-going, or in slave-driving which is called housekeeping. ”