A Joy For Ever; (And Its Price in the Market) | Page 2

might not be taught to a youth as soon as he can be trusted with an annual allowance, or to a young lady as soon as she is of age to be taken into counsel by the housekeeper.
I might, with more appearance of justice, be blamed for thinking it necessary to enforce what everybody is supposed to know. But this fault will hardly be found with me, while the commercial events recorded daily in our journals, and still more the explanations attempted to be given of them, show that a large number of our so-called merchants are as ignorant of the nature of money as they are reckless, unjust, and unfortunate in its employment.
The statements of economical principles given in the text, though I know that most, if not all, of them are accepted by existing authorities on the science, are not supported by references, because I have never read any author on political economy, except Adam Smith, twenty years ago. Whenever I have taken up any modern book upon this subject, I have usually found it encumbered with inquiries into accidental or minor commercial results, for the pursuit of which an ordinary reader could have no leisure, and by the complication of which, it seemed to me, the authors themselves had been not unfrequently prevented from seeing to the root of the business.
Finally, if the reader should feel induced to blame me for too sanguine a statement of future possibilities in political practice, let him consider how absurd it would have appeared in the days of Edward I. if the present state of social economy had been then predicted as necessary, or even described as possible. And I believe the advance from the days of Edward I. to our own, great as it is confessedly, consists, not so much in what we have actually accomplished, as in what we are now enabled to conceive.

CONTENTS.
LECTURE I. PAGE THE DISCOVERY AND APPLICATION OF ART 1
A Lecture delivered at Manchester, July 10th, 1857.
LECTURE II.
THE ACCUMULATION AND DISTRIBUTION OF ART 70
Continuation of the previous Lecture; delivered July 13th, 1857.
ADDENDA.
NOTE 1.--"FATHERLY AUTHORITY" 151 " 2.--"RIGHT TO PUBLIC SUPPORT" 159 " 3.--"TRIAL SCHOOLS" 169 " 4.--"PUBLIC FAVOUR" 180 " 5.--"INVENTION OF NEW WANTS" 183 " 6.--"ECONOMY OF LITERATURE" 187 " 7.--"PILOTS OF THE STATE" 189 " 8.--"SILK AND PURPLE" 193
SUPPLEMENTARY ADDITIONAL PAPERS.
EDUCATION IN ART 213
ART SCHOOL NOTES 229
SOCIAL POLICY 240

"A JOY FOR EVER."

LECTURE I.
THE DISCOVERY AND APPLICATION OF ART.
A Lecture delivered at Manchester, July 10, 1857.
1. Among the various characteristics of the age in which we live, as compared with other ages of this not yet very experienced world, one of the most notable appears to me to be the just and wholesome contempt in which we hold poverty. I repeat, the just and wholesome contempt; though I see that some of my hearers look surprised at the expression. I assure them, I use it in sincerity; and I should not have ventured to ask you to listen to me this evening, unless I had entertained a profound respect for wealth--true wealth, that is to say; for, of course, we ought to respect neither wealth nor anything else that is false of its kind: and the distinction between real and false wealth is one of the points on which I shall have a few words presently to say to you. But true wealth I hold, as I said, in great honour; and sympathize, for the most part, with that extraordinary feeling of the present age which publicly pays this honour to riches.
2. I cannot, however, help noticing how extraordinary it is, and how this epoch of ours differs from all bygone epochs in having no philosophical nor religious worshippers of the ragged godship of poverty. In the classical ages, not only were there people who voluntarily lived in tubs, and who used gravely to maintain the superiority of tub-life to town-life, but the Greeks and Latins seem to have looked on these eccentric, and I do not scruple to say, absurd people, with as much respect as we do upon large capitalists and landed proprietors; so that really, in those days, no one could be described as purse proud, but only as empty-purse proud. And no less distinct than the honour which those curious Greek people pay to their conceited poor, is the disrespectful manner in which they speak of the rich; so that one cannot listen long either to them, or to the Roman writers who imitated them, without finding oneself entangled in all sorts of plausible absurdities; hard upon being convinced of the uselessness of collecting that heavy yellow substance which we call gold, and led generally to doubt all the most established maxims of political economy.
3. Nor are matters much better in the Middle Ages. For the Greeks and Romans contented themselves