A Joy For Ever; (And Its Price in the Market) | Page 6

cultivation of a province or of an island. Whatever rebuke you would
address to the improvident master of an ill-managed patrimony,
precisely that rebuke we should address to ourselves, so far as we leave
our population in idleness and our country in disorder. What would you
say to the lord of an estate who complained to you of his poverty and
disabilities, and when you pointed out to him that his land was half of it
overrun with weeds, and that his fences were all in ruin, and that his
cattle-sheds were roofless, and his labourers lying under the hedges

faint for want of food, he answered to you that it would ruin him to
weed his land or to roof his sheds--that those were too costly operations
for him to undertake, and that he knew not how to feed his labourers
nor pay them? Would you not instantly answer, that instead of ruining
him to weed his fields, it would save him; that his inactivity was his
destruction, and that to set his labourers to work was to feed them?
Now, you may add acre to acre, and estate to estate, as far as you like,
but you will never reach a compass of ground which shall escape from
the authority of these simple laws. The principles which are right in the
administration of a few fields, are right also in the administration of a
great country from horizon to horizon: idleness does not cease to be
ruinous because it is extensive, nor labour to be productive because it is
universal.
13. Nay, but you reply, there is one vast difference between the nation's
economy and the private man's: the farmer has full authority over his
labourers; he can direct them to do what is needed to be done, whether
they like it or not; and he can turn them away if they refuse to work, or
impede others in their working, or are disobedient, or quarrelsome.
There is this great difference; it is precisely this difference on which I
wish to fix your attention, for it is precisely this difference which you
have to do away with. We know the necessity of authority in farm, or in
fleet, or in army; but we commonly refuse to admit it in the body of the
nation. Let us consider this point a little.
14. In the various awkward and unfortunate efforts which the French
have made at the development of a social system, they have at least
stated one true principle, that of fraternity or brotherhood. Do not be
alarmed; they got all wrong in their experiments, because they quite
forgot that this fact of fraternity implied another fact quite as
important--that of paternity, or fatherhood. That is to say, if they were
to regard the nation as one family, the condition of unity in that family
consisted no less in their having a head, or a father, than in their being
faithful and affectionate members, or brothers. But we must not forget
this, for we have long confessed it with our lips, though we refuse to
confess it in our lives. For half an hour every Sunday we expect a man
in a black gown, supposed to be telling us truth, to address us as

brethren, though we should be shocked at the notion of any
brotherhood existing among us out of church. And we can hardly read a
few sentences on any political subject without running a chance of
crossing the phrase "paternal government," though we should be utterly
horror-struck at the idea of governments claiming anything like a
father's authority over us. Now, I believe those two formal phrases are
in both instances perfectly binding and accurate, and that the image of
the farm and its servants which I have hitherto used, as expressing a
wholesome national organization, fails only of doing so, not because it
is too domestic, but because it is not domestic enough; because the real
type of a well-organized nation must be presented, not by a farm
cultivated by servants who wrought for hire, and might be turned away
if they refused to labour, but by a farm in which the master was a father,
and in which all the servants were sons; which implied, therefore, in all
its regulations, not merely the order of expediency, but the bonds of
affection and responsibilities of relationship; and in which all acts and
services were not only to be sweetened by brotherly concord, but to be
enforced by fatherly authority.[2]
[Note 2: See note 1st, in Addenda.]
15. Observe, I do not mean in the least that we ought to place such an
authority in the hands of any one person, or of any class or body of
persons. But I do mean to say that as