Project Gutenberg's From a Cornish Window, by Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

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Title: From a Cornish Window
A New Edition

Author: Arthur Thomas Quiller-Couch

Release Date: March 29, 2008 [EBook #24946]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK FROM A CORNISH WINDOW ***

Produced by Lionel Sear

FROM A CORNISH WINDOW.

By

ARTHUR THOMAS QUILLER-COUCH.

DEDICATION.

MY DEAR WILLIAM ARCHER,

Severe and ruthlessly honest man that you are, you will find that the
levities and the gravities of this book do not accord, and will say so.

I plead only that they were written at intervals, and in part for
recreation, during years in which their author has striven to maintain a
cheerful mind while a popular philosophy which he believed to be cheap
took possession of men and translated itself into politics which he knew
to be nasty. I may summarise it, in its own jargon, as the philosophy of
the Superman, and succinctly describe it as an attempt to stretch a part
of the Darwinian hypothesis and make it cover the whole of man's life and
conduct. I need not remind you how fatally its doctrine has flattered, in
our time and in our country, the worst instincts of the half-educated:
but let us remove it from all spheres in which we are interested and
contemplate it as expounded by an American Insurance 'Lobbyist,' a few days
ago, before the Armstrong Committee:--

"The Insurance world to-day is the greatest financial proposition in
the United States; and, _as great affairs always do, it commands a
higher law._"

I have read precisely the same doctrine in a University Sermon preached by
an Archbishop; but there its point was confused by pietistic rhetoric:
the point being that in life, which is a struggle, success has in itself
something divine, by virtue of which it can be to itself a law of right
and wrong; and (inferentially) that a man is relieved of the noble
obligation to command himself so soon and in so far as he is rich enough
or strong enough to command other people.

But why (you will ask) do I drag this doctrine into a dedication?
Because, my dear Archer, I have fought a