by George Eliot
It has been a too common notion that to insist much on the preservation of order is the part of a selfish aristocracy and a selfish commecrial class, because among these, in the nature of things, have been found the opponents of change. I am a Radical; and, what is more, I am not a Radical with a title, or a French cook, or even an entrance into fine society. I expect great changes, and I desire them. But I don’t expect them to come in a hurry, by mere inconsiderate sweeping. A Hercules with a big besom is a fine thing for a filthy stable, but not for weeding a seed-bed, where his besom would soon make a barren floor.
That is old-fashioned talk, some one may say. We know all that.
Yes, when things are put in an extreme way, most people think they know them; but, after all, they are comparatively few who see the small degrees by which those extremes are arrived at, or have the resolution and self-control to resist the little impulses by which they creep on surely towards a fatal end. Does anybody set out meaning to ruin himself, or to drink himself to death, or to waste his life so that he becomes a despicable old man, a super-annuated nuisance, like a fly in winter? Yet there are plenty, of whose lot this is the pitiable story. Well now, supposing all us to have the best intentions, we working men, as a body, run some risk of bringing evil on the nation in that unconscious manner – half-hurrying, half-pushed in a jostling march towards an end we are not thinking of. For just as there are many things which we know better and feel much more strongly than the richer, softer-handed classes can know or feel them; so there are many things – many precious benefits – which we, by the very fact of our privations, our lack of leisure and instructions, are not so likely to be aware of and take into our account. Those precious benefits form a chief part of what I may call the common estate of society: a wealth over and above buildings, machinery, produce, shipping, and so on, though closely connected with these; a wealth of a more delicate kind, that we may more unconsciously bring into danger, doing harm and not knowing that we do it. I mean that treasure of knowledge, science, poetry, refinement of thought, feeling, and manners, great memories and the interpretation of great records, which is carried on from the minds of one generation to the minds of another. This is something distinct from the indulgences of luxury and the pursuit of vain finery; and one of the hardships in the lot of working men is that they have been for the most part shut out from sharing in this treasure. It can make a man’s life very great, very full of delight though he has no smart furniture and no horses: it also yields a great deal of discovery that corrects error, and of invention that lessens bodily pain, and must at last make life easier for all.
Now the security of this treasure demands, not only the preservation of order, but a certain patience on our part with many institutions and facts of various kinds, especially touching the accumulation of wealth, which from the light we stand in, we are more likely to discern the evil than the good of It is constantly the task of practical wisdom not to say, ‘This is good, and I will have it,’ but to say, ‘This is the less of two unavoidable evils, and I will bear it’. And this treasure of knowledge, which consists in the fine activity, the exalted vision of many minds is bound up at present with conditions which have much evil in them. Just as in the case of material wealth and its distribution we are obliged to take the selfishness and weakness of human nature into account, and however we insist that men might act better, are forced, unless we are fanatical simpletons, to consider how they are likely to act; so in this matter of the wealth that is carried in men’s minds, we have to reflect that the too absolute predominance of a class whose wants have been of a common sort, who are chiefly struggling to get better and more food, clothing, shelter, and bodily recreation, may lead to hasty measures for the sake of having things more fairly shared, which, even if they did not fail of their object, would at last debase the life of the nation. Do anything which will throw the classes who hold the treasures of knowledge – nay, I may say, the treasure of refined needs – into the background, cause them to withdraw from public affairs, stop too suddenly any of the sources by which their leisure and ease are furnished, rob them of the chances by which they may be influential and pre-eminent, and you do something as shortsighted as the acts of France and Spain when in jealousy and wrath, not altogether unprovoked, they drove from among them races and classes that held the traditions of handicraft and agriculture. You injure your own inheritance and the inheritance of your children. You may truly say that this which I call the common estate of society has been anything but common to you; but the same may be said, by many of us, of the sunlight and the air, of the sky and the fields, of parks and holiday games. Nevertheless, that these blessings exist makes life worthier to us, and urges us the more to energetic, likely means of getting our share in them; and I say, let us watch carefully, lest we do anything to lessen this treasure which is held in the minds of men, while we exert ourselves first of all, and to the very utmost, that we and our children may share in all its benefits. Yes; exert ourselves to the utmost, to break the yoke of ignorance. If we demand more leisure, more ease in our lives, let us show that we don’t deserve the reproach of wanting to shirk that industry which, in some form or other, every man, whether rich or poor, should feel himself as much bound to as he is bound to decency. Let us show that we want to have some time and strength left to us, that we may use it, not for brutal indulgence, but for the rational exercise of the faculties which make us men. Without this no political measures can benefit us. No political institution will alter the nature of Ignorance, or hinder it from producing vice and misery. Let Ignorance start how it will, it must run the same round of low appetites, poverty, slavery, and superstition. Some of us know this well – nay, I will say, feel it; for knowledge of this kind cuts deep; and to us it is one of the most painful facts belonging to our condition that there are numbers of our fellow-workmen who are so far from feeling in the same way, that they never use the imperfect opportunities already offered them for giving their children some schooling, but turn their little ones of tender age into breadwinners, often at cruel tasks, exposed to the horrible infection of childish vice. Of course, the causes of these hideous things go a long way back. Parents’ misery has made parents’ wickedness. But we, who are still blessed with the hearts of fathers and the consciences of men – we who have some knowledge of the curse entailed on broods of creatures in human shape, whose enfeebled bodies and dull perverted minds are mere centres of uneasiness, in whom even appetite is feeble and joy impossible – I say we are bound to use all the means at our command to help in putting a stop to this horror. Here, it seems to me, is a way in which we may use extended co-operation among us to the most momentous of all purposes, and make conditions of enrolment that would strengthen all educational measures. It is true enough that there is a low sense of parental duties in the nation at large, and that numbers who have no excuse in bodily hardship seem to think it a light thing to beget children, to bring human beings with all their tremendous possibilities into this difficult world, and then take little heed how they are disciplined and furnished for the perilous journey they are sent on without any asking of their own. This is a sin shared in more or less by all classes; but there are sins which, like taxation, fall the heaviest on the poorest, and none have such galling reasons as we working-men to try and rouse to the utmost the feeling of responsibility in fathers and mothers. We have been urged into co-operation by the pressure of common demands. In war men need each other more; and where a given point has to be defended, fighters inevitably find themselves shoulder to shoulder. So fellowship grows, so grow the rules of fellowship, which gradually shape themselves to thoroughness as the idea of a common good becomes more complete. We feel a right to say, If you will be one of us, you must make such and such a contribution – you must renounce such and such a separate advantage – you must set your face against such and such an infringement. If we have any false ideas about our common good, our rules will be wrong, and we shall be co-operating to damage each other. But now, h
ere is a part of our good, without which everything else we strive for will be worthless – I mean, the rescue of our children. Let us demand from the members of our Unions that they fulfil their duty as parents in this definite matter, which rules can reach. Let us demand that they send their children to school, so as not to go on recklessly breeding a moral pestilence among us, just as strictly as we demand that they pay their contributions to a common fund, understood to be for a common benefit. While we watch our public men, let us watch one another as to this duty, which is also public, and more momentous even than obedience to sanitary regulations. Whilst we resolutely declare against the wickedness in high places, let us set ourselves also against the wickedness in low places, not quarrelling which came first, or which is the worse of the two – not trying to settle the miserable precedence of plague or famine, but insisting unflinchingly on remedies once ascertained, and summoning those who hold the treasure of knowledge to remember that they hold it in trust, and that with them lies the task of searching for new remedies, and finding the right methods of applying them.
To find right remedies and right methods. Here is the great function of knowledge: here the life of one man may make a fresh era straight away, in which a sort of suffering that has existed shall exist no more. For the thousands of years down to the middle of the sixteenth century since Christ that human limbs had been hacked and amputated, nobody knew how to stop the bleeding except by searing the ends of the vessels with red hot iron. But then came a man named Ambrose Paré, and said, ‘Tie up the arteries!’ That was a fine word to utter. It contained the statement of a method – a plan by which a particular evil was for ever assuaged. Let us try to discern the men whose words carry that sort of kernel, and choose such men to be our guides and representatives – not choose platform swaggerers, who bring us nothing but the ocean to make our broth with.
To get the chief power into the hands of the wisest, which means to get our life regulated according to the truest principles mankind is in possession of, is a problem as old as the very notion of wisdom. The solution comes slowly, because men collectively can only be made to embrace principles, and to act on them, by the slow stupendous teaching of the world’s events. Men will go on planting potatoes, and nothing else but potatoes, till a potatoe-disease comes and forces them to find out the advantage of a varied crop. Selfishness, stupidity, sloth, persist in trying to adapt the world to their desires, till a time comes when the world manifests itself as too decidedly inconvenient to them. Wisdom stands outside of man and urges itself upon him, like the marks of the changing seasons, before it finds a home within him, directs his actions, and from the precious effects of obedience begets a corresponding love.
But while still outside of us, wisdom often looks terrible, and wears strange forms, wrapped in the changing conditions of a struggling world. It wears now the form of wants and just demands in a great multitude of British men: wants and demands urged into existence by the forces of a maturing world. And it is in virtue of this – in virtue of this presence of wisdom on our side as a mighty fact, physical, and moral, which must enter into and shape the thoughts and actions of mankind – that we working men have obtained the suffrage. Not because we are an excellent multitude, but because we are a needy multitude.
But now, for our own part, we have seriously to consider this outside wisdom which lies in the supreme unalterable nature of things, and watch to give it a home within us and obey it. If the claims of the unendowed multitude of working men hold within them principles which must shape the future, it is not less true that the endowed classes, in their inheritance from the past, hold the precious material without which no worthy, noble future can be moulded. Many of the highest uses of life are in their keeping; and if privilege has often been abused, it also has been the nurse of excellence. Here again we have to submit ourselves to the great law of inheritence. If we quarrel with the way in which the labours and earnings of the past have been preserved and handed down, we are just as bigoted, just as narrow, just as wanting in that religion which keeps an open ear and an obedient mind to the teachings of fact, as we accuse those of being, who quarrel with the new truths and new needs which are disclosed in the present. The deeper insight we get into the causes of human trouble, and the ways by which men are made better and happier, the less we shall be inclined to the unprofitable spirit and practice of reproaching classes as such in a wholesale fashion. Not all the evils of our condition are such as we can justly blame others for; and, I repeat, many of them are such as no changes of institutions can quickly remedy. To discern between the evils that energy can remove and the evils that patience must bear, makes the difference between manliness and childishness, between good sense and folly. And more than that, without such discernment, seeing that we have grave duties towards our own body and the country at large, we can hardly escape acts of fatal rashness and injustice.
I am addressing a mixed assembly of workmen, and some of you may be as well or better fitted than I am to take up this office. But they will not think it amiss in me that I have tried to bring together the considerations most likely to be of service to us in preparing ourselves for the use of our new opportunities. I have avoided touching on special questions. The best help towards judging well on these is to approach them in the right temper without vain expectation, and with a resolution which is mixed with temperance.
NOTES
VOLUME EPIGRAPHS
‘The Poly-Olbion or A Chorographicall Description of Tracts, Rivers, Mountains, Forests, and other Parts of this renownd Isle of Great Britain’ was written by Michael Drayton between 1598 and 1622, celebrating the natural beauties and the ‘Antiquities, Wonders … and Commodities’ of England in thirty ‘Songs’, each of 300–500 lines. The epigraph is taken from the Thirteenth Song, lines 1–2 and 8–12. Eliot makes a number of minor changes; Drayton wrote ‘That shire’ (referring to Warwickshire) where Eliot has ‘The shires’ (1. 2), Eliot’s ‘My native country thou’ is in Drayton ‘My native country then’, Eliot’s ‘virtues’ (1. 9) is ‘vertue’ in Drayton, and ‘thou bred’st’ in the following line is ‘thou breathd’st’ in the original. The choice of the Poly-Olbion was specifically commended by Blackwood; ‘I think it gives the key note beautifully,’ he wrote to Eliot on 26 April 1866.
INTRODUCTION
1 (p. 3). Introduction: Eliot seems to have written the Introduction at a fairly late stage of composition of Felix Holt. Even when Blackwood read the first two volumes of Felix Holt before accepting the novel for publication in April 1866, his comments make it clear that the opening sequence is still that of the description of Transome Court which begins Chapter I: ‘The opening picture is perfectly beautiful and so distinct. The description of Transome Court has the vivid power of an old ballad. One has a feeling of oppression as one walks up to the Hall door.’
2 (p. 3). Five-and-thirty years ago: the specific time reference here is not to the period occupied by the main body of the novel (which runs from September 1832 to May 1833) but instead to the time before the passing of the First Reform Act in June 1832. It is this ‘unreformed’ era which Eliot initially brings to the fore, evident in the subsequent references to the large manufacturing and industrial towns such as Birmingham which still lacked political representation, to the Nottingham riots of 1831, and to the still uncurbed prevalence of pocket boroughs.
3 (p. 3). the mail still announced itself: the mail had begun to be carried by stage-coach in 1784. J. W. Cross, in Volume I of George Eliot’s Life (1885), records that in Eliot’s childhood the passing of the coach on its route between Birmingham and Stamford was ‘the great event of the day’ as, twice each day, it passed ‘before the gate of Griff House, which lies at a bend of the highroad between Coventry and Nuneaton’.
4 (p. 3). pocket boroughs: pocket boroughs, also known as ‘nomination boroughs’ or ‘proprietary boroughs’, were parliamentary constituencies in which elections tended to be under the control of a single individual, often a large la
nded proprietor, whose influence ensured that voters whose livelihood depended upon him would vote in accordance with his wishes. The existence of boroughs of this kind was a marked feature of the unreformed parliamentary system before June 1832, though even after the passing of the Reform Act, they were (contrary to Eliot’s own assumptions here) only partially eradicated. They did not finally disappear until the Third Reform Act of 1885.
5 (p. 3). a Birmingham unrepresented in Parliament and compelled to make strong representations: in spite of its population of 146,000, Birmingham, in common with a number of other large manufacturing and industrial towns such as Leeds or Manchester, was entirely without political representation before the Reform Act of 1832. Cornwall, on the other hand, was able to return forty-four MPs to Parliament. Such inequities in distribution were one of the major targets of demands for parliamentary reform. Following the Reform Act, levels of representation in Cornwall were indeed reduced and those in Birmingham increased, the latter gaining one MP, a level of representation which, however, placed it on a par with a town such as Marlow with its own tally of 6,000 inhabitants.
