MR. GEORGE MOORE.
Q 0 far as we know, no such honour as that paid this wee.k to Mr. George Moore has ever been paid, for the same reason, to an Englishman before. Mr. Moore was a man of humble parentage, with very little education and no particular abilities, except a capacity for work and strong, shrewd sense, who began life as a bagman in the lace trade, married his master's daughter, and made a considerable but not a first-class fortune by astute dealing in one of the most useless of gewgaws, fine lace. He never did anything in politics, or anything conspicuous in municipal affairs, did not govern the nation, or defend it, or enlighten it, or assert that he had any capacity for performing any of those tasks. He had no very great " social " reputation. He did not "foster art," or breed race-horses, or open theatres, or play in any way whatever the part of a "merchant prince ;" but lived quietly, though pleasantly, as a thousand other men with good incomes, good constitutions, and a liking for the double life of town and country usually live. There was a tradition among some of his acquaintance—absurdly untrue—that he could hardly write—a tradition founded, we suppose, on his frequent regrets for his incomplete education—and to the last he had no personal charm beyond a certain impression of truthfulness, and a willing- ness to listen patiently to any representation that might be made to him. When he died he did not found anything, but left his property in the usual way to his wife, and a lad selected from among his kindred to be bred up a rich squire ; while his wealth proved not to be of the awe-inspiring kind, but was counted in hundreds of thousands, instead of the millions which have of late become so common. It was only about £600,000 in all. Nevertheless, his life had made such an impression on all who knew its details, that his death was felt as a loss by thousands who had never seen him, and a public meeting, presided over by the Archbishop of Can- terbury, and attended by all manner of notables, has decided that his virtues must be commemorated in some lasting fashion,
while speaker after speaker vied with one another in lauding the qualities of the deceased, and no one sees anything incongruous or excessive in the laudation.
The truth is, that a life like Mr. George Moore's—a life of active, strenuous benevolence, led by a man who has every pos- sible temptation to lead a life of easy self-indulgence, without doing any violence to his conscience—is a very rare thing, and excites at once the admiration which the world seldom fails to bestow on any virtues which it cordially recognises to be virtues, yet suspects that it does not itself possess in any sufficient measure. Even ordinary benevolence—the power of giving money away disinterestedly in large proportion- to income —is a much rarer quality than is generally supposed. It scarcely exists_ upon the Continent, except among the class of believers who think that in parting with their cash they are in some way making an investment in heaven, and cordially agree with the Scotch minister who replied to a penitent's suggestion that a huge gift to the Church might help his case,—" I'm no just free to guarantee ye, but it's 'an experiment wed worth the trying." The difficulty of obtaining a subscription in France or Genhany is well known, and does not proceed altogether from the narrowness of individual means,—a narrowness which, as regards France at least, is often exaggerated in this country. It.results rather from thrift, from an intense sense of the amount oPcomfort and power which each guinea, if only kept at home, will bring. In England and the .United States, no doubt, the habit of giving flourishes widely—Americans especially part with money in their lifetimes—and very expensive organisations obtain from free-will offerings a revenue as regular as an income front estates, but benevolence on a serious scale is still far more unusual than the world suspects. We believe the actual mana- gers of the great distributing institutions, such as thern Foreign Missions, which bring absolutely no direct return to the giver, even in patronage or importance, will bear us out in- saying that their main revenue comes, and always has come, from a com- paratively limited number of families, who give out of all propor- tion to the remainder, and that the great majority even of those who accept their views give nothing but a little silver, and in scores of thousands of cases not even that. We saw, nearly a quarter of a century ago, a table prepared by one of the most experienced collectors in England, in which he essayed to prove, and in our judgment did prove, that the bulk of the vast charitable work of Great Britain was performed by less than ten thousand persons; and though the number may be greater now, from the wider diffusion of wealth, the disproportion between the numbers of the benevolent and the numbers of the payers of income-tax is, we fear, as great as. ever. Even of those who give, a great majority give very little compared with their means, and think that giving exonerates them from any personal duty, while of those who will both give greatly and work hard the number is few indeed. Among them Mr. G. Moore was one of the first, if not.the very first. His entire later life was one long scene of continuous, strenuous, and well-guided beneficence. He did not attempt to lead a very ascetic life. He did not, like Mr. Peabody, make any single enormous grant to any particular object. But he was a Bishop of the Church Benevolent. He held himself, in the moderate, unenthusiastic, English way, to be a trustee of his wealth, and all that other men would have spent on hobbies, or squandered, or saved, he expended in trying to leave mankind a little better than he found them. He must, in many years, have given away much more than half his income, and he did it in a way which involved a quantity of worry and labour such as the benevolent very often shrink from. He cross- examined every man he helped, and investigated the proceedings of every institution to which he afforded serious aid. He was always providing for orphans—and if anybody wants to under- stand the occasional limits of thanklessness, let him try that amusement—or finding maintenance for poor widows, or aiding the people in his own employ, or righting some institution in a mess, or doing a dozen men's work in the way of distri- bution. The Archbishop of, Canterbury told a story of his having, when immersed in anxious business of his own, given days of arduous labour to rescue a charitable affair in a distant part of England out of a financial muddle ; and Colonel S. Wortley bore personal testimony to his zeal and ability in relieving the distress. of Paris, when he distributed £40,000 in food and £30,000 in money, at a cost to the subscribers of only £73. That was geod, solid work, besides the money it must have cost him,— and thankless work besides. He made, in fact, a business of benevolence, and worked at it as other men work at their trades, giving his whole strength, in judgment, energy, and inquisitive- ness, to bear upon his end,—the diminution of the total sum of human suffering. It may be said that he liked the work, and therefore in doing it only pleased himself, as another man might do in keeping horses, or buying land, or any other bobby net in itself necessarily evil. That may be true in a certain degree, though we do not see why the world, which grows so extatic over-beauty; or high-breeding, or intellectual force, should not acknowledge a fine grace of nature like that, particularly when it is so scarce, but H- is only partially true. It is evident from Mr. Moore's career and from his will that he had as many temptations to take care of his money as other people ; that he liked to be rich, if only for the power the money gave him ; that he was by no means indifferent to his place in society—though, as the Archbishop showed by a characteristic story, totally-free from what Currer Bell calls the "mucky kind of pride ;" and that he desired, as the lawyers say, to "make an eldest son." He was a tradesman, too, with a keen idea of what money meant, and no desire at all to be revealed to, the world at his death as an unexpectedly poor man, who had enjoyed all his life the deference paid to wealth on false pre-- tences. To maintain a career like his for so many years, deliber- ately to give himself and his fortune up to benevolence, as other. men give themselves up to collecting or amusement, must there- fore in such a nature have involved almost constant self..denia4 a definite postponement of his own objects to the happi- nes4 of other people, who could never repay him in. any way of which he could be cognisant. There is graciousness, if not exactly nobility, in such a character, and we see not why. a world over-given to recognitionsshould nottecognise benevolence of the- active and effective type. Of course, it is not.heroism—we are not making a Charles Borromeo of Mr. George Moore—but it is very worthy, useful virtue of the work-a-day type, and is indefi-. nitely less cultivated than it ought to be.
The single objection that we see to the Archbishop's testi- monial which has any validity is the most common-place of all, that in recognising benevolence in a man like Mr. Moore we are really recognising wealth. "if," many men will say, "Mr. Moore had not heaped up a great deal, no man would have heard of his bene- factions. The poor are often as benevolent as the rich, but no Archbishop sings•the praises of the man who, with 15s. a week, gives away 7s. 6d. and goes beerless to bed, that a sick neighbour may have nourishing food. Mr. Moore gave, and Archbishops saw him, and so he is acknowledged ; while the poor man gives, and is not seen, and- is, perhaps, censured by the district visitor for extravagance." Well, well,—the objection, though_ cynical in form, really springs out of that pity for the unnoticed mass which is the root of all social good, and should not, therefore, be lightly thrust aside. But, nevertheless, to urge it is only to urge that human eyes are badly made in not being microscopic.. It is not man's fault, but the Creator's, that he cannot adequately recognise the strength in the limbs of a flea ; that the wisdom of a village Solon so often escapes him ; that the rich man who gives so much impresses him more than the curate who gives perhaps all; that, in fact, size is essential to visibility in the moral as well as the physical world. The world is made so, that is all we can say, but the strength .of the flea's leap is no reason for withholding, our tribute of admiration from the much smaller but more visible stride of a horse at speed. The rich man who is benevolent is no better than the poor man who is benevolent, perhaps not so good, because he does not give up necessaries ; but still he is bene- volent, and benevolence is good. At least we may accord him- this praise,—that he has in large measure that free-will to give which is disinterested above most forms of giving, because it is not alloyed with any secret fear that he may one day need the assistance which now he so freely renders to his fellow-men. Even Rochefoucauld could not suggest that Mr. George Moore gave lest one day in his own poverty he should ask in vain.
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