THE MAYOR OF BATLEY'S GOLD CHAIN.
WE entirely sympathize with the wish of the Town Council of Batley to buy a handlome gold chain worth £200, and adorned with emblems of the borough,—a wool-manufacturing place in Yorkshire, — in the shape of a bale of wool, a sheep's fleece, and a sheaf of wheat,—for its Mayor. And though we do not doubt that Vice-Chancellor Wickens was legally quite right in granting the injunction against that mode of using the ratepayers' money, we strongly recommend some rich citizen of Batley to present at once to the Corporation the coveted insignia of the chief magistrate ; and cannot agree at all in the Vice-Chancellor's statement that the wish of the Town Council was "childish and foolish." We may ask in what that wish differs from the preference of Londoners, and Englishmen generally, for having their Judges and Vice-Chancellors knighted. Does Sir John Wickens gain or not in authority by being Sir John Wickens, and no longer Mr. Wickens ? We suppose he does, for his title expresses the respect of the English people for his office, and respect publicly and conspicuously expressed is apt to run much deeper and steadier than respect only entertained and not habitually expressed. There is no practice more natural or more universal than that of conveying by symbols the dignity in which an office is held. For many centuries before the time when Pharaoh "took off his ring from his hand, and put it upon Joseph's hand, and arrayed him in vestures of fine linen, and put a gold chain about his neck ; and he made him to ride in the second chariot which he had ; and they cried before him, Bow the knee ; and he made him rider over all the land of Egypt," the practice of distinguishing by special dignity of dress special dignity of office, must have been habitual in Egypt and the States which were Egypt's humble rivals in civilisation. Even in the most barbarous of known tribes, the chiefs are distinguished by special grandeur of dress, and, in the most civilised, while the tendency to simplicity becomes greater and greater in relation to private dress, it is still held to be mischievous to let this simplicity extend to the dress of great public functionaries. The newest Orders are as expensive, often more expensive than the old. The highest Order of the Star of India, an invention of yesterday, is worn on a dress which is as valuable as the State robes of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. More especially for offices which are intended to confer authority without that practical weight always attaching in England to offices carrying official incomes, something to mark out the permanent consideration in which those who fill them are held by the public is absolutely requisite. Let unpaid offices in England once cease to be invested with any public token of consideration, and they will gradually cease also to be respected by the people, and to be coveted by those who can alone fill them with credit. We may say that there is nothing intrinsically impressive in a grand gown and a gold chain, and that a man of weight without any such official symbols will exercise a great deal more authority than a goose with them. And that may be more or less true, but if it be ever so true, it is not to the point, for the question is not how we are to get good men without in- signia of office obeyed, but how we are to get good men to desire office at all, if the public ceases to express in any popular and simple and striking way its appreciation of the value of its officials, and its impression that there is something enviable in ad- mitted fitness for the offices. Official dress is merely the natural lan- guage of public esteem for, and of public sympathy with, authority. If there is no distinguishing frame, as it were, in which the official picture is set, there can hardly be any familiar and popular recog- nition of its significance. In the case of the most important functions of the State, we add the recognition of symbolic dress to the more solid recognition of a high official salary. The Lord Chancellor, all the Judges, and the Speaker of the House of Com- mons, are distinguished by dress as well as high salary ; and, in the case of the Judges at least, we all of us feel that such cere- mony carries with it a most important reminder, both to those who observe it and to the mere spectators, of the stateliness of the public functions exercised and the reverence which is due to those who exercise them. Sir John Wickens, and still more less able lawyers, would miss the influence of their judicial wigs even more than that of their titles, in the gradually altered demeanour of Courts in which nothing outward to express the high authority of a Judge was to be seen. But if this is necessary in the case of officials who hold great and most justly coveted places of emolument, it is obviously far more necessary in the case of men who are expected to take much trouble for no pecuniary reward at all. If you do not enlist the childlike popular reverence for such positions on your side, there will soon be no temptation at all to able men who have either made their fortunes, or are busy in making them, to serve the people. Every day municipal dignities become less and less popular, chiefly because the dignity they confer is less and less clearly realized. The value of local authority dwindles in the eyes of the world as people hear more and more of the doings of the superior central authority, and if once we divest it of those visible signs by which alone it is possible to keep before the eyes of men the traditionary honour in which it was and is held, it would not be long before "honorary (in the sense of the gratuitous) offices would be sedulously avoided by the men most competent to hold them. You could no more hope to keep up the sense of popular honour attaching to an office without insignia of that office, than you could hope to keep up a nobility without either titles or estates. That which does not admit of being embodied in some visible form fades away out of the popular imagination. The worst blow you could strike, not only at the public respect for the House of Commons, but at the respect of the House of Commons for the Speaker, would be to abolish the Speaker's chair and mace and canopy, and let him sit where he could in the House, so long as he was tolerably accessible to all. When you make light of the frame of a picture you are on the direct way to make light of the picture itself. All much-prized jewels have a valuable setting; and you diminish, even without intending it, your own appreciation for the gem, when you leave it to be judged by its own intrinsic value. It is not the imposing character of fine
*dress, but the difficulty of expressing in any other conspicuous way the public honour attaching to public functions, which renders it -so undesirable to restrain public bodies from spending a mode- rate amount of public money upon the insignia of office.
There are two growing tendencies which naturally cause a re- action against such expenditure, —one of them the increasing desire for economy, partly caused by real sympathy with the poverty of the people, and partly by the increasing necessity of popular cries ; and the other of them a certain democratic jealousy of all signs of even temporary elevation out of the ranks of the people,—a jealousy which makes the democracy of the United States, for instance, unwisely hostile to any assumption of state by its own servants and disposed to enforce the idea of mere agency, delegation, and almost humiliation upon its nominees. Neither of these tendencies, in the exaggerated form which they seem likely to take, is at all likely to promote the happiness of the people. As for the economical movement, sound and fundamen- tally healthy as it is, it is almost uniformly carried to extremes in which it causes a vast deal more secret waste than it saves of open expenditure; and this is truest of all in relation to the subject we are now speaking of, the dignity of official life. The other tendency,— the jealousy of exceptional power, which shows itself so strongly in America in what looks to our eyes like the humiliation of public servants, and which shows itself in England, where classes are not yet levelled to one uniform flat, in the disgust with which working-class men seem to look upon representatives of their own order,—enorm- ously aggravates the effect of the former tendency, and makes it almost impossible, in relation to new offices at least, to clothe them with anything like the charm of importance with which they have always been clothed in the barbarous and primitive ages of the world. The favour of educated people for simplicity, and a sort of shamefacedness which they feel at the wearing of grand costumes, goes to aid powerfully the feeling in favour of economy and (as regards men at least) of equality of dress, because what the office-bearers themselves are half ashamed to wear, it becomes still more difficult to ask the public to press on them. Nevertheless, we are perfectly satisfied that the old feeling,—the same which still produces the far greater variety of costume amongst all simple peoples,—and especially the feeling which induces them to clothe high officers with some ostensible grandeur, is the wise one, and that the modern economy and jealousy and shamefacedness in this respect are blunders of civili- sation. There can be no greater danger than the tendency to make light of official duty, and unless the people honour their officials, those officials will never honour their duties. Yet it is very difficult for ordinary people to honour adequately even a good official all whose qualifications are hidden in his own brain, and who on the surface has nothing to distinguish him from any other citizen of the world. The local colour of life, the external mark put on external distinctions, is a perfectly natural device for keeping perpetually and agreeably before the minds of men what has otherwise a tendency to escape them. Any stranger going into a new country fancies at first that all people are alike except those whom marked by dif- ferent costumes distinguish, and it only seems so to him because superficially it really is so, and the distinctions which he fails to see are relatively minute. He sees the difference between the peasant and the burgher, between the burgher and the priest, between the different orders of the clergy, and so on, because all these distinctions are directly pictured to his eye. Well, then, clearly -offices of dignity,—especially those carrying an authority which needs to be impressed as broadly and strongly on the imagination of the most ignorant and simple as those distinctions of a primitive country are impressed on a traveller who visits it for the first time,—should be marked and distinguished in like manner. The true popular feeling, though we admit that it is not the common democratic feeling of modern times, should be to take a pride in all authority which popular institutions confer, and to regard it as the expression of the popular conscience and the popular will. Such authority should not be allowed to keep an incognito, at all events when it is in exercise. You might almost as well expect the special gentleness and respect paid to women to survive the extinction of all differences between men's and women's costume, as to expect the deference given to persons in authority to survive the disguise of private clothes. For we maintain that in relation to public duties and authority of this sort, private dress is the disguise,—as it is admitted to be in the case of kings, in the case of soldiers, and in the case of police, —and public symbols of authority are the natural, and decent, and decorous expression of the popular esteem which conferred it, and the popular reverence which submits to its decisions.
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