The Ethics of the Dust | Page 7

Men do not
disbelieve their Christ; but they sell Him.
SIBYL. But surely that is the fault of human nature? it is not caused by
the accident, as it were, of there being a pretty metal, like gold, to be
found by digging. If people could not find that, would they not find
something else, and quarrel for it instead?
L. No. Wherever legislators have succeeded in excluding, for a time,
jewels and precious metals from among national possessions, the
national spirit has remained healthy. Covetousness is not natural to
man--generosity is; but covetousness must be excited by a special cause,
as a given disease by a given miasma; and the essential nature of a
material for the excitement of covetousness is, that it shall be a
beautiful thing which can be retained without a use. The moment we
can use our possessions to any good purpose ourselves, the instinct of
communicating that use to others rises side by side with our power. If
you can read a book rightly, you will want others to hear it; if you can
enjoy a picture rightly, you will want others to see it: learn how to
manage a horse, a plough, or a ship, and you will desire to make your
subordinates good horsemen, ploughmen, or sailors; you will never be
able to see the fine instrument you are master of, abused; but, once fix
your desire on anything useless, and all the purest pride and folly in
your heart will mix with the desire, and make you at last wholly
inhuman, a mere ugly lump of stomach and suckers, like a cuttle-fish.
SIBYL. But surely, these two beautiful things, gold and diamonds,
must have been appointed to some good purpose?
L. Quite conceivably so, my dear: as also earthquakes and pestilences;
but of such ultimate purposes we can have no sight. The practical,
immediate office of the earthquake and pestilence is to slay us, like
moths; and, as moths, we shall be wise to live out of their way. So, the
practical, immediate office of gold and diamonds is the multiplied
destruction of souls (in whatever sense you have been taught to
understand that phrase); and the paralysis of wholesome human effort
and thought on the face of God's earth: and a wise nation will live out

of the way of them. The money which the English habitually spend in
cutting diamonds would, in ten years, if it were applied to cutting rocks
instead, leave no dangerous reef nor difficult harbor round the whole
island coast. Great Britain would be a diamond worth cutting, indeed, a
true piece of regalia. (Leaves this to their thoughts for a little while.)
Then, also, we poor mineralogists might sometimes have the chance of
seeing a fine crystal of diamond unhacked by the jeweler.
SIBYL. Would it be more beautiful uncut?
L. No; but of infinite interest. We might even come to know something
about the making of diamonds.
SIBYL. I thought the chemists could make them already?
L. In very small black crystals, yes; but no one knows how they are
formed where they are found; or if indeed they are formed there at all.
These, in my hand, look as if they had been swept down with the gravel
and gold; only we can trace the gravel and gold to their native rocks,
but not the diamonds. Read the account given of the diamond in any
good work on mineralogy;--you will find nothing but lists of localities
of gravel, or conglomerate rock (which is only an old indurated gravel).
Some say it was once a vegetable gum; but it may have been charred
wood; but what one would like to know is, mainly, why charcoal
should make itself into diamonds in India, and only into black lead in
Borrowdale.
SIBYL. Are they wholly the same, then?
L. There is a little iron mixed with our black lead; but nothing to hinder
its crystallization. Your pencils in fact are all pointed with formless
diamond, though they would be H H H pencils to purpose, if it
crystallized.
SIBYL. But what IS crystallization?
L. A pleasant question, when one's half asleep, and it has been tea-time
these two hours. What thoughtless things girls are!
SYBIL. Yes, we are; but we want to know, for all that.
L. My dear, it would take a week to tell you.
SIBYL. Well, take it, and tell us.
L. But nobody knows anything about it.
SIBYL. Then tell us something that nobody knows.
L. Get along with you, and tell Dora to make tea.
(The house rises; but of course the LECTURER wanted to be forced to

lecture again, and was.)

LECTURE 2.
THE PYRAMID BUILDERS
In the large Schoolroom, to which everybody has been summoned by
ringing of the