THE CANT OF CAUTION.
WHAT a nefarious little person is the captious critic! His watchword is caution, and he goes about damping down the fires of enthusiasm, only happy when be can hear some aspiring little flame fizzling out At present he is enjoying himself hugely. All good people are registering rash vows to be of some use at a supreme crisis, and he is busy explaining to them in detail that it is of no sort of good for them to try. All their attempts, he would have them believe, are defeating themselves. They bad better do nothing than what they are doing, he persuades them. Their efforts are involving a very great risk. A woman cannot so much as make a shirt for a sick soldier but he is down upon her. "Here is she," he declares, "busily taking the bread out of the mouth of a seamstress. Put the work down at once!" he commands, and nervous listeners comply. Determined not to be altogether baulked, they turn their attention to something else. They give their time to Red Cross work or to seeing after the soldiers' wives and children. They write reams of letters, they walk miles upon miles, they split their heads with thinking hard for those who, it may be said without injustice, seem incapable of thinking for themselves. In like anxiety with the women they visit, they offer sympathy and sustenance as best they may. " Was ever such folly ! " says the captions critic. " Here are armies of clerks and half-trained nurses out of work. Let them write and walk and talk and think, and make a living thereby at the same time." " We thought we were doing right," plead the workers. "The work is very arduous. We are not doing it for pleasure, even if we are doing it for love." " Sentimental nonsense ! " says the captions critic. "You ought to pay a substitute to do it for you," and off he goes to see whether he can discourage a few men. "What are you doing ?" says he. " Trying to get your servants to enlist! It is very unlikely that they will. You are just putting more men out of work for the country to maintain." Then, as they explain their good intentions, he begins to " cold-water" some one else's efforts. "Here are you keeping on men to do your
work who ought to be at the front," he shouts. "But we are keeping them on at a great sacrifice because we thought it right," they reply. "Right indeed !" says the critic. "It's you mistaken rigbtdoers who do half the harm that is done in the world!" The captious critic, however, is not as successful with men as with women. Sometimes when he has been talking only a very short while they will tell him to go and be hanged, and they will patiently get on with what they are doing. Women are more easily made to doubt, especially if they are women of leisure. They are not accustomed to use their whole energies. Just now they would gladly do so, but as they start to work betimes in the morning they find the road picketed by captious critics. The great Trade Union of substitutes forbids free labour, the pickets explain, and a few women creep home convinced, while others push on to work hampered by doubt.
All these objectors have been answered long ago in Bastiat's Sophistries .geonomignes, but it is to be feared not so many people read that immortal book as could be wished. Those who have read it "know the end of these men." They know that they and their arguments must perish with the machine- breakers of old. They are as logical and as short-sighted as a doctor would be who refused to make public a cure lest he threw the faculty out of work. In the professional economy of the doctor the consumer has always taken his right place, and work has always been a means to an end. To suggest that the medical profession could feel otherwise would be, as Bastiat says, to be guilty of less humaniti. It is the most curious instance in the world of the power of the heart to enlighten the head.
But quite apart from the doctrines of political economy, surely it is not fair to declare war on wealth by insisting that the rich should idle. Certainly where women are concerned this is the logical conclusion of the arguments of the captious critic. Unless we are prepared to say that the rich have no right to any virtues at all—and surely a monopoly of virtue is a monopoly that even the most ardent of old-fashioned pro- tectionists could never uphold—we must not put obstacles in the way of their industry. Can we really ask them to sit with their bands before them at such a time as this ? Are they to do nothing but touch the button and set some one else to work ? As each man or woman becomes a little richer is he to become, to make it a matter of conscience to become, a little idler, of a little less use ? That no one should do anything who could possibly eat bread without is a strange doctrine to hear from the mouths of those who constantly proclaim the sacred right to work.
Again, we must take the world as we find it, and the world is something of a snob. Every one who works for nothing does something to honour that work. Work which none would do if he could help it is very naturally looked down on. It is in favour of every trade that some one should do it for love of it. Take the new profession which has obviously relieved the world of some of its burden of pain—sick nursing. Suppose that in the early days of trained nurses every well-off young woman, from Florence Nightingale downwards, had paid a substitute instead of working herself. Would the honourable status of the nursing profession have been what it now is? When the poorest of the poor alone followed it as a profession to what a level did it fall ! The status of the governess has very much changed in the last few years, and salaries have gone up at the same time. There is still room for improvement, however, both in the position and the pay of governesses. Probably the thing which would help the pro- fession the most would be that a few rich and highly educated young women should take it into their heads that teaching other people's little girls was the moat honourable and delight. ful work in the world. There would be a great outcry among their poorer sisters, especially if they worked for nothing, but the outcry would be utterly unreasonable. Unpaid work is open to much criticism so far as its quality is concerned, but on that ground alone; and when all has been said, it has certain compensating advantages far from negligible in times of stress and emotion. Voluntary work probably touches the top and the bottom for excellence and worthlessness.
In the sphere of ordinary charity the captions critic is always at work. The charitable instinct—we mean the good impulse which leads to almsgiving—has withstood for many years the fire of criticism—not captions but sane criticism. It has come out of the ordeal purified, but somewhat attenuated, and we are sometimes tempted to wonder whether it can stand much more cleansing without being consumed. This sort of charity is useless, that sort of charity is harmful, we have heard on all sides, and sometimes the instinct of pity stands in danger of destruction. The generous man has been cautioned by the professional philanthropist till he is posi- tively afraid to put his hand into his pocket. At a crisis like the present the sane critic lets him alone, and ceases to moralize, but the captious critic takes up the tale, and in his mouth caution becomes cant. The harm done by the bestowed shilling has surely been somewhat exaggerated. It is difficult to go on believing that it is better to refuse where one ought to give than to give where one ought to refuse, worse to bestow a shilling wrongly than wrongly to refuse a pound. It is an ungracious dogma—which rich men believe in times of peace and plenty, and all men begin to doubt when distress comes near to themselves.
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