MR. FROITDE ON MORAL DESERT.
1N the November number of Fraser's Magazine will be found an interesting fable or dream of Mr. Fronde's, the purpOse of which is to convey some conception of Mr. Froude's ideal of human desert. Under the figure of a railway. train, full of all sorts of passengers, from grandees to the humblest labourers, a train which is suddenly stopped, and
where the passengers are all called up pushed off into a siding, to have their belongings examined and tested, Mr. Froude gives us roughly his notion of the mode in which the true work of human life should be gauged at death. Of course, it would be unfair to try a parable of this kind by any very rigid standard. Its object is to translate moral impressions into a picturesque form, and any rigid exactness of thought is inconsistent with that form. At the same time, the whole value of such a parable consists in its placing before us with sufficient vivacity a truer view of the moral subject with which it deals, than we should be otherwise likely to form ; and though we should hesitate to say that this may not be the case with the majority of the readers of Mr. Froude's parable, we should certainly hesitate to say that it would be so. Mr. Froude's view of the meaning of moral desert appears to us to be deficient both in clearness and in soundness, and therefore, while his parable is certain to be widely read, and probably to be of some use in compelling people to define more clearly for themselves what they mean by merit and demerit, we should be sorry to think that its leading ideas would recommend themselves to the greater number of its readers.
The first test which Mr. Froude's parable lays down as a condition sine quel non of a life of any merit, is that the work,—the honest and true work,--done in it, shall more than exceed the worth of the wages secured for that work. Until this test has been satisfied, he makes his spiritual judges reserve altogether any further test,—any test, for instance, of the aims, motives, and conduct of the per: son who is the subject of judgment. "The first examination," says Mr. Fronde, "was confined to the literal work done by each man for the general good,—how much he had contributed, and how much society had done for him in return ; and no one, it seemed, could be allowed to go on further,"—i.e., to the sem. tiny into moral conduct,—" without a certificate of having passed this satisfactorily." And again, Mr. Fronde makes the chief Examiner reply thus to the complaints of those who urged that, though they had lived by the earnings of others, they had stolen nothing, and taken nothing either by violence or fraud:—" Geu. tlemen, we have heard this many times ; yet as often as it is repeated, we feel fresh astonishment. You have been in a world where work is the condition of life. Not a meal can be had by any one, that some one has not worked to provide. Those who work, deserve to eat ; those who do not, deserve to starve. There are but three ways of living,—by working, by stealing or by begging. Those who have not lived by the first, have lived by one of the other two. And. no matter how superior you think yourselves, you will not pass here till you have something of your own to produce." We suppose this to be a fragment from Mr. Carlyle's gospel of labour,—a gospel we have always held to contain almost as much falsehood as truth. Is it true, as a matter of fact, that a good rough test of desert is the amount of productive work a man has done, as distinguished from the character he has formed in himself ? for we must remember that Mr. Fronde keeps this for a second and, further test of the deserts of those who have passed the first rougher test, and will not allow the higher criterion to be applied at all to men who cannot in some shape or other produce a good labour schedule to begin with. Now, we hold that a very considerable class of human beings,— a great number of women and a small number of men,—may lead extremely profitable, nay, much more than profitable, lives, and yet be quite unable to produce such a preliminary record as this, in the sense required by Mr. Fronde. It is not true to say that there are but three ways of living,—by work, by stealing, or by begging. There is a fourth, which applies to a very large portion of human existence,—namely, by receiving willingly what is voluntarily given out of the work of others, Of course,
we are not wishing to throw any doubt at all on the general principle that, after some fashion or other, every life ought to be made profitable fdr the world, as well as for itself. But Mr. Froude is not content with this. He insists that before you even begin to weigh the moral profit of men's or women's lives, you should first weigh the physical value of their labour. He will not apply the moral test at all, till after the physical test has been successfully passed. Unless each man, woman, and, child can produce a record of labour profitable tooth ers which more than outweighs the wages received for it, he stamps that in au' smom an's, and child's career as a failure, without the least regatd to the moral character of the agent. That seems to us a very crude and even false doctrine—crude in any form in which you could put
it—positively false and misleading, if it is intended to suggest that relative desert, as between man and man, bears any pro- portion at all to the relative amount of sterling work achieved. There are many, and those amongst the very highest, the value of whose whole work consists almost exclusively of the work done in forming their own characters. Such, for instance, are life-long invalids, or the prisoners of political persecution. Such, again, are the many—and much too many, no doubt, they have been and are—whose chief
work in life has consisted in completing the lives of others, a work involving much self-effacement, but little or nothing of the toil which Mr. Fronde insists on having evidence of, before he will take any account at all of self- effacement or of any other inward quality. With children, and those whose real or fancied duty it has been to live wholly for others so far as this is possible without absolute wrong-doing, • the'w hole work that deserves valuation at all has not unfrequently consisted in the self-deniul winch has rendered it impossible for them•to produce visible work,—in their willingness, in short, to accept the comparatively small gilt of a share in the visible work of others, in return for their own much greater gift of a generous willingness to lean where they might easily stand alone. But
mistaken as we hold the absolute test of work to be,—the doctrine to which it can hardly help leading, that the greater relative desert belongs to him who has the greater bulk of ster- ling work to show, is still falser. Indeed, the more spontaneous human energy becomes, the less has it of the proper nature of work,—for the less is it of a task, the less does it tax the will, and fatigue the moral energies. Yet, of course, it is not the toilers and moilers, however noble and honest, who do the most profitable work for man. The greater the genius, the greater the creative originality, the more conspicuous the ease of pro- duction, the greater also, in general, is the benefit•to man, but the less, is the effort, the toil. And of course the proportion between laborious and effortless productiveness in human life, ought to vary indefinitely in different men. We may say, in general, that all men and all women should know what real toil is. But
we may also say that different people should know it by a very widely different amount of experience, and that, speaking gener- ally, women, in the more civilised ages of the world, perform their functions best when they know far less of what toil means, than men ought to know. In one word, the absolute work-test is fallacious ; and. the relative work-test is more than fallacious, —positively misleading. If a distinction is to be drawn at all between the labour test and the moral test of human desert, there are very many human beings in whom the former test might wholly fail, and who would. yet stand very high in the scale of human worth ; while multitudes of those who would pass the labour-test with the most honour, would be the first to own that their industry would not be worth what it is, but for the comparatively easy and happy activity of human beings whose best energy is not .ivorls at all, because it is the mere glad overflow of spontaneous powers. But the oddest part of Mr. Fronde's parable is that in which he lays down the mode in which he would compute the wages by which your work, whatever it may be, has been compensated. He sees himself brought up for judgment :•—
"Bat at that moment the hell rang again, and my own name was called. There was no occasion to ask who I was. In every instance the identity of tho person, his history, small or large, and all that he had said or done was placed before the court so clearly that there was no need for extorting a confession. There stood the catalogue inexorably impartial, the bad actions in a schedule painfully large, tho few good actions veined with personal motives which spoilt the best of them. In the way of work there was nothing to be shown but certain books and other writings, and these were spread out to be tested. A fluid was poured on the pages, the effect of which was to obliterate entirely every untrue proposition, and to make every partially true proposition grow faint in proportion to the false element which entered into it. Alas ! chapter after chapter vanished away, leaving the paper clean as if no compositor had over laboured in setting typo for it. Palo and illegi- ble became the fine-sounding paragraphs on which I had secretly prided myself. A few passages, however' survived hero and there at long intervals. They were those on which I had laboured least and had almost forgotten, or those, as I observed in one or two instances, which had been selected for special reprobation in the weekly Journals. Something stood to my credit, and the worst charge of wilfully and intentionally setting down what I did not believe to be true was not alleged against me. Ignorance, prejudice, carelessness; sins of iufirmity—culpable indeed, but not culpable in the last degree ; the water in the ink, the common-places, the ineffectual senti- ments; these, to any unspeakable comfort, I perceived were my heaviest crimes. Had I been accused of absolute worthlessness, 1 should have pleaded guilty, in the state of humiliation to which 1 was reduced ; but things were better than they might have been. I was flattering myself that when it came to the wages question, the balance would be in my favour ; so many years of labour—such and such cheques received from my publisher. Hero at least I held myself safe. I was in good hope that I might serape through. The examiner was good-natured in his manner. A reviewer who had been listening for my condemnation was beginning to look disgusted, when suddenly one of the walls of the court became transparent, and there appeared an interminable vista of creatures—creatures of all kinds from land and water, reaching away into the extreme distance. They were those which in the course of My life 1 had devoured, either in part or whole, to sustain may unconscionable carcass. There they stood in lines, with solemn and reproachful faces—oxen and calves, sheep and lambs, deer, hares, rabbits, turkeys, ducks, chickens, pheasants, grouse, and partridges, down to the larks and sparrows and blackbirds, which I had shot when a boy and made into puddings—every one of them had come up to boar witness against their murderer; out of sea and river had conic the trout and salmon, the soles and turbots, the ling and cod, the whiting and mackerel, the smelts and whitebait, the oysters, the crabs, the lobsters, the shrimps. They seemed literally to be in millions, and I had eaten them all. I talked of wages. These had boon my wages. At this enormous cost, had my existence been maintained. A large ox spoke for the rest. ' We all,' he said, were sacrificed to keep this cormorant in being, and to enable him to produce tho miserable bits of printed paper whioh are all that he hes to show for himself. Our lives wore dear to us. In meadow and wood, in air and water, we wandered harmless and innocent, enjoying the pleasant sunlight, the light of heaven, and the sparkling waves ; we were not worth much ; we have no pretensions to high qualities. If the person who stands here to answer for himself can affirm that his value in the universe was equivalent to the value of all of us who were sacrificed to feed him, we have no more to say. Let it be so pronounced. We shall look at our numbers, and we shall wonder on the judgment, but we shall withdraw our complaint. But for ourselves, we say freely that we have long watehod him—him and his fellows—and we have failed to see in what the seperiority of the human creature lies. We know him only as the most cunning, the most destructive, and, unhappily, the longest lived of all carnivorous beasts. His delight is in killing. Even when his hunger is satisfied, be kills us for his mere amusement.' Tho oxen lowed approval, the sheep bleated, the birds screamed, the fishes flapped their taiI. I, for myself, stood mute and self-condemned. What answer but one was possible F Had I been myself on the bench, I could not have hesitated. I heard my sentence You passed your first examination by mistake ; you must go back to the place from which you came, and whoa you appear again before us, may you have a better account to render of yourself. This only we can allow you. Though you have been unworthy, you have not been wholly unworthy. Against this array of accusation a small fraction of good desert is standing to your credit. Therefore it shall be with you as if you had not been stopped at this station for the present. You shall not begin a now existence again in some other form, to devour fresh hundreds of thousands of creatures like these that have come to witness against you; you tu ynoausrlliall tnke up your life where it was dropped and finish it t end, and if you can find any bettor employment for take totro it.emtining years than that of book-writing, I advise you to k H this be a joke, it is not clear what the point of the joke is. If it be not a joke, surely it is the most eccentric doctrine which a, moralist ever yet propounded, and suggests rather a vegetarian than an ethical motive in the writer. If Mr. Fronde were really counting up the rewards of his labours, we should have sup- posed that he would have counted all the pleasures, whether mental, moral, or physical, by which they were really rewarded,—the joys of imaginative satisfaction,—the admira- tion and approbation of his fellow-men,—the self-approval of his own conscience when he had striven against a popular outcry, —and finally, the pleasures, physical or otherwise, which his
" wages " had procured him. But of all these we hear nothing, except so far as concerns the quantity of the animal food which he has consumed, the vegetable food apparently going for nothing. And on what is this very odd. exclusiveness of selection apparently founded P As far as we can see upon this,—that the animals which ho has eaten were the only elements of his wages to which other creatures capable of sensitive enjoyment had been compelled to contribute at the cost of their own life and. enjoying-power. But surely Mr. Fronde does not hold that if he had been a vegetarian all his life, all the lives of the creatures he has eaten would have been enjoyed to their natural close, and. that that enjoy- ment would. have constituted a clear addition to the sum of
happiness. In point of fact, no doubt, for every man who should leave off animal food, there would be a reduction in the demand for such food, and therefore in the number of creatures capable of supplying that demand which would be born and bred. In a completely vegetarian society, so great would be the demand for vegetable food, that it would be impossible to permit any of those large numbers of animals which are now brought into the world only to supply the food market,—and which must either live on vegetable food themselves, or on animals which live directly or indirectly on such food,—to exist at all. It is perfectly obvious, therefore, that it is ridiculous to represent the con- sumption of animal food as involving a special sacrifice of sensitive enjoyment to the selfishness of man. And yet if that is not what this strange d6nonement of Mr. Froude's parable means, what does it mean ? We are wholly at a loss to conjecture. In any case, we do not think Mr. Froude'e apologue very likely to raise, in any considerable degree, the tone in which the con- science of man criticises the frivolous element in human life. As regards his gospel of work, which is the best part of the paper, the criterion suggested is too coarse. And as regards his estimate of wages, the drift is, as far as we can Judge, either a very obscure joke, or a. wholly untenable argument for a vegetarian creed. Perhaps, indeed, Mr. Frowle may mean to say that no man is worthy to live, of whom it could not be said that it is the happier for the world that he does live,. than it would be if, in his room, some innocent creature incapable of either morality or immorality, were enjoying its exiett mee. But if he means to say that, he says it very obscurely indeed, nor do we think that it is true. On the whole, Mr. Froude's dream of the "Siding at a Railway Station," at which official justice is administered by trained inspectors of human life, appears to us somewhat incoherent. Mr. Fronde cannot be said to have had any "open vision."
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