ONE TO SOW, ANOTHER TO REAP. SITTING at Jacob's well, conversing with His dis ciples, and pointing to the fields that were white already to harvest, our Lord told them, as by a parable, that He had sent them to reap that whereon they had bestowed no labour: other men laboured, and they reaped the product, or entered into their labours, and enjoyed the fruit of them. "And herein is that saying true, One soweth, and another reapeth." It is an elementary principle in equity, and it is apostolic doctrine, that the husbandman that laboureth must be first partaker, or the first to partake, of the fruits. But in the common law of facts in this worky-day world, it is not so; not so invariably, or without very many and very markworthy exceptions. What is denounced in the prophecies of Micah as a retributory threat, is often fulfilled in fact as an ethical anomaly,-"Thou shalt sow, but thou shalt not reap; thou shalt tread the olives, but thou shalt not anoint thee with oil; and sweet wine, but shalt not drink wine." He that laboureth, laboureth for himself, for his mouth craveth it of him, says one of the proverbs of Solomon; but this law of labour not always holds good, but ever and anon is love's labour lost. The labourer finds he has not laboured for himself, but for others; and what his mouth craveth of him is reserved for other mouths. Sic vos non vobis-even so do birds build nests that shall not be for themselves, and bees make honey that shall be the beemaster's, and oxen bear the yoke for man's profit, and sheep fleeces of which they shall be fleeced. NN 546 ONE TO SOW, ANOTHER TO REAP. It is of the new heaven and the new earth that the greatest of the greater prophets is speaking when he gives utterance to the promise, “They shall not build, and another inhabit; they shall not plant, and another eat," but shall enjoy the work of their own hands, and shall not labour in vain, nor bring forth for trouble. And elsewhere the promise was deemed worthy of a Divine oath, Jehovah swearing by His right hand, and by the arm of His strength, “Surely I will no more give thy corn to be meat for thine enemies; and the sons of the stranger shall not drink thy wine, for the which thou hast laboured." The deprecating imprecation, so to speak, of the protesting Man of Uz was, that if he was faulty to the extent and in the manner alleged, "Then let me sow, and another eat." And as it was the signal privilege of the children of Israel, as Moses apprised them in recounting their blessings, that the Lord their God would give them, in the promised land, great and goodly cities which they builded not, and houses full of all good things which they filled not, and wells digged which they digged not, and vineyards and olive-trees which they planted not; so was the warning sounded in their ears, at another time, but by the same voice of depth and power and consecration, that,—if unfaithful to their vows, and regardless of their high calling, they should plant vineyards and dress them, but should neither drink of the wine nor gather the grapes; and though possessing olive-trees throughout all their coasts, they should not anoint themselves with the oil.* The historian of the Conquest of Mexico tells us of that Velasquez whose name is so often conjoined with that of Cortez, and whose life was a series of errors, that * Cf. 2 Tim. ii. 6; Micah vi. 15; Isaiah lxv. 22, lxii. 8, 9; Job xxxi. 8; Prov. xvi. 26; Deut. vi. 11, xxviii. 38 seq. SIC VOS NON VOBIS. 547 he proposed others should fight his battles, and he win the laurels; that others should make discoveries, and he reap the fruits of them. The account by Tacitus of the Battle of the Grampians has been said to be chiefly interesting for the glimpse it reveals of Roman tactics (under Agricola) at that period: all the loss and danger must fall upon the Batavians, the Usipians, the Gauls and Spaniards; but when the day is won by the blood of her subjects, it is Rome that reaps the profit, and the legions of Rome that reap the glory, and acquire the titles of Rapacious and Invincible, Apollinean and Minervian. My lord of Leicester pens his plaint from the Netherlands in 1585: "But so is the hap of some, that all they do is nothing; and others that do nothing, do all, and have all the thanks." Sic vos non vobis mellificatis apes. "Little dost thou think, thou busy, busy bee, What is the end of thy toil. When the latest flowers of the ivy are gone, Thy master comes for the spoil." Mr. Pecksniff's pupils draw clever plans, and he appropriates the profit and the praise. Given the time when a new idea can be pressed with a hope of practical success, it is seldom the man who first starts it who gets the credit of it; "another steppeth down before" the original prophet, and wins the success and credit which should rightly have been his: the first mover therefore is laughed at as an "idea-monger," while the second comes in for the honours of a "successful reformer." Happy the unselfish sower beside all waters that can say with the philosophic poet, applying it to himself:— "If thou have thrown a glorious thought Upon life's common ways, Should other men the gain have caught, 548 ONE SOWETH AND ANOTHER REAPETH. The financial story of the Great Eastern steamship was accepted by meditative journalists as a signal illustration of the melancholy and pathetic law, that all great benefactors of their kind who happen to be in advance of their times are only rewarded with failure and ruin. There was the golden grain; but what about the patient oxen-the original Atlantic Telegraph shareholders? It is a common saying, that projectors are in general ruined, while others make fortunes on the foundation laid by the inventors. Dr. Newman speaks of it as "notorious," that those who first suggest the most happy inventions, and open a way to the secret stores of nature; those who weary themselves in the search after truth, who strike out momentous principles of action, who painfully force upon their contemporaries the adoption of beneficial measures, or are the original cause of the chief events in national history, are commonly supplanted, as regards celebrity and reward, by inferior men. "Their works are not called after them, nor the arts and systems which they have given the world." Their schools, he adds, are usurped by strangers; and their maxims of wisdom circulate among the children of their people, forming, perhaps, a nation's character, but not embalming in their own immortality the names of their original authors. "Young children gather as their own The harvest that the dead have sown— Mr. Buckle was thinking of himself when he pictured the philosophic historian laying the foundation of the science of history, while it would be for his successors to raise the edifice: "Their hands will give the last touch; they will reap the glory; their names will be * Arthur Hugh Clough. SIC VOS NON VOBIS. 549 remembered when his is forgotten." Like Ovid's apples, Nostra quoque consita quondam, Sed non et nostra poma legenda manu. Like the labourers in Mr. Matthew Arnold's Sick King in Bokhara : "And these all, labouring for a lord, To that man's mind who understands." Columbus sails through the weedy seas, and, as Mr. Dallas words it, rasps his prow upon a western isle: the mariner who follows in his wake lights on the mainland, and calls it after himself-America. Another com mentator on this trite text has more recently dismissed it with the reflection, that it were impertinence to enlarge on so patent a truism, or to illustrate anew this dull commonplace of moralists. When Joab had fought successfully against Rabbah, he sent messengers to David, desiring him to advance with his host, and encamp against the city, and take it; "lest I take the city, and it be called after my name." The general is seen to advantage in such a message. Some commanders of high note have unduly appropriated the gains of others, by them superseded, or on their account. To take the management of any affair of public concern from the man who has almost brought it to a conclusion, is justly, as Adam Smith observes, regarded as the most invidious injustice: as he had done so much, he should, one thinks, have been allowed to acquire the complete merit of putting a finish to it. "It was objected to Pompey, that he came upon the victories of Lucullus, and gathered those laurels which were due to the fortune and valour of another." So again Plutarch relates of Metellus, that he was overcome with grief and resentment, to think that when he had in a measure |