LITMIR.BIZ

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Look into the history of any civilized nations; analyze, with reference to this one cause of crime and misery, the lives and thoughts of their nobles, priests, merchants, and men of luxurious life. Every other temptation is at last concentrated into this: pride, and lust, and envy, and anger all give up their strength to avarice. The sin of the whole world is essentially the sin of Judas. 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 great bell.

      L. So you have all actually come to hear about crystallization! I cannot conceive why unless the little ones think that the discussion may involve some reference to sugar-candy.

      (Symptoms of high displeasure among the younger members of council. ISABEL frowns severely at L., and shakes her head violently.)

      My dear children, if you knew it, you are yourselves, at this moment, as you sit in your ranks, nothing, in the eye of a mineralogist, but a lovely group of rosy sugar-candy, arranged by atomic forces. And even admitting you to be something more, you have certainly been crystallizing without knowing it. Did not I hear a great hurrying and whispering ten minutes ago, when you were late in from the playground; and thought you would not all be quietly seated by the time I was ready:—besides some discussion about places—something about "it's not being fair that the little ones should always be nearest?" Well, you were then all being crystallized. When you ran in from the garden, and against one another in the passages, you were in what mineralogists would call a state of solution, and gradual confluence; when you got seated in those orderly rows, each in her proper place, you became crystalline. That is just what the atoms of a mineral do, if they can, whenever they get disordered: they get into order again as soon as may be.

      I hope you feel inclined to interrupt me, and say, "But we know our places; how do the atoms know theirs? And sometimes we dispute about our places; do the atoms—(and, besides, we don't like being compared to atoms at all)—never dispute about theirs?" Two wise questions these, if you had a mind to put them! it was long before I asked them myself, of myself. And I will not call you atoms any more. May I call you—let me see—"primary molecules?" (General dissent indicated in subdued but decisive murmurs.) No! not even, in familiar Saxon, "dust"?

      (Pause, with expression on faces of sorrowful doubt; LILY gives voice to the general sentiment in a timid "Please don't.")

      No, children, I won't call you that; and mind, as you grow up, that you do not get into an idle and wicked habit of calling yourselves that. You are something better than dust, and have other duties to do than ever dust can do; and the bonds of affection you will enter into are better than merely "getting in to order." But see to it, on the other hand, that you always behave at least as well as "dust;" remember, it is only on compulsion, and while it has no free permission to do as it likes, that IT ever gets out of order; but sometimes, with some of us, the compulsion has to be the other way—hasn't it? (Remonstratory whispers, expressive of opinion that the LECTURER is becoming too personal.) I'm not looking at anybody in particular—indeed I am not. Nay, if you blush so, Kathleen, how can one help looking? We'll go back to the atoms.

      "How do they know their places?" you asked, or should have asked. Yes, and they have to do much more than know them: they have to find their way to them, and that quietly and at once, without running against each other.

      We may, indeed, state it briefly thus:—Suppose you have to build a castle, with towers and roofs and buttresses, out of bricks of a given shape, and that these bricks are all lying in a huge heap at the bottom, in utter confusion, upset out of carts at random. You would have to draw a great many plans, and count all your bricks, and be sure you had enough for this and that tower, before you began, and then you would have to lay your foundation, and add layer by layer, in order, slowly.

      But how would you be astonished, in these melancholy days, when children don't read children's books, nor believe any more in fairies, if suddenly a real benevolent

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