"But what will reflective readers say of a governing class,
such as ours, addressing its workers with an indictment of
'over-production!' Over-production: runs it not so? 'Ye
miscellaneous ignoble, manufacturing individuals, ye have
produced too much. We accuse you of making above two hundred
thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind. Your trousers
too, which you have made of fustian, of cassimere, of Scotch
plaid, of jane, nankeen, and woollen broadcloth, are they not
manifold? Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the human
foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with--Nay, what say we
of hats and shoes? You produce gold watches, jewelleries,
silver forks and épergnes, commodes, chiffoniers, stuffed
sofas--Heavens, the Commercial Bazar and multitudinous Howel
and James cannot contain you! You have produced, produced;--he
that seeks your indictment, let him look around. Millions of
shirts and empty pairs of breeches hang there in judgment
against you. We accuse you of over-producing; you are
criminally guilty of producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes,
and commodities in a frightful over-abundance. And now there is
a glut, and your operatives cannot be fed.'
"Never, surely, against an earnest working mammonism was there
brought by game-preserving aristocratic dilettantism, a
stranger accusation since this world began. My Lords and
Gentlemen--why it was _you_ that were appointed, by the fact
and by the theory of your position on the earth, to make and
administer laws. That is to say, in a world such as ours, to
guard against 'gluts,' against honest operatives who had done
their work remaining unfed! I say, you were appointed to
preside over the distribution and appointment of the wages of
work done; and to see well that there went no labourer without
his hire, were it of money coins, were it of hemp
gallows-ropes: that formation was yours, and from immemorial
time has been yours, and as yet no other's. These poor
shirt-spinners have forgotten much, which by the virtual
unwritten law of their position they should have remembered;
but by any written recognized law of their position, what have
they forgotten? They were set to make shirts. The community,
with all its voices commanded them, saying, 'make shirts;'--and
there the shirts are! Too many shirts? Well, that is a novelty,
in this intemperate earth, with its nine hundred millions of
bare backs! But the community commanded you, saying, 'See that
the shirts are well apportioned, that our human laws be emblems
of God's law;' and where is the apportionment? Two millions
shirt-less, or ill-shirted workers sit enchanted in work-house
Bastiles, five millions more (according to some) in Ugoline
hunger-cellars; and for remedy, you say--what say you? 'Raise
our rents!' I have not in my time heard any stranger speech,
not even on the shores of the Dead Sea. You continue addressing
these poor shirt-spinners and over-producers in really a _too_
triumphant manner.
"Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse _us_ of
over-production? We take the heavens and the earth to witness,
that we have produced nothing at all. Not from us proceeds this
frightful overplus of shirts. In the wide domains of created
nature, circulates nothing of our producing. Certain
fox-brushes nailed upon our stable-door, the fruit of fair
audacity at Melton Mowbray; these we have produced, and they
are openly nailed up there. He that accuses us of producing,
let him show himself, let him name what and when. We are
innocent of producing,--ye ungrateful, what mountains of things
have we not, on the contrary, had to consume, and make away
with! Mountains of those your heaped manufactures, wheresoever
edible or wearable, have they not disappeared before us, as if
we had the talent of ostriches, of cormorants, and a kind of
divine faculty to eat? Ye ungrateful!--and did you not grow
under the shadow of our wings? Are not your filthy mills built
on these fields of ours; on this soil of England, which belongs
to--whom think you? And we shall not offer you our own wheat at
the price that pleases us, but that partly pleases you? A
precious notion! What would become of you, if we chose at any
time to decide on growing no wheat more?"
An amusing--caustic--exaggeration, more like a portion of a clever
satire on man and society, than a sincere discussion of political evils
and remedies; and not intended, we trust, for Mr Carlyle's own sake, to
express his real belief in the true causes of the evils of society. If
we could suppose that this piece of extravagant and one-sided invective
were meant to be seriously taken, as embodying Mr Carlyle's social and
political creed, we should scarcely find words strong enough to
reprobate its false and mischievous tendency.
We have already said, that we regard the chief _value_ of Mr Carlyle's
writings to consist in the _tone of mind_ which the individual reader
acquires from their perusal;--manly, energetic, enduring, with high
resolves and self-forgetting effort; and we here again, at the close of
our paper, revert to this remark: _Past and Present_, has not, and could
not have, the same wild power which _Sartor Resartus_ possessed, in our
opinion, over the feelings of the reader; but it contains passages which
look the same way, and breathe the same spirit. We will quote one or two
of these, and then conclude our notice. Their effect will not be
injured, we may observe, by our brief manner of quotation. Speaking of
"the man who goes about pothering and uproaring for his _happiness_," he
says:--
"Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair; belongs not to
the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times.
'Happiness, our being's end and aim,' is at bottom, if we will
count well, not yet two centuries old in the world. The only
happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much
about was, happiness enough to get his work done. Not, 'I can't
eat!' but, 'I can't work!' that was the burden of all wise
complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of
a man--that he cannot work--that he cannot get his destiny as a
man fulfilled."
* * * * *
"The latest Gospel in this world, is, know thy work and do it.
'Know thyself;' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine
tormented thee; thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe!
Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an
unknowable individual; know what thou canst work at; and work
at it like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan."
* * * * *
"Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other
blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it,
and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and
torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's
existence, like an ever-deepening river, there it runs and
flows;--draining off the sour festering water gradually from
the root of the remotest glass-blade; making, instead of
pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its
clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let
the stream and _its_ value be great or small. Labour is life!"
* * * * *
"Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain
not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow workmen there,
in God's eternity--surviving there--they alone
surviving--sacred band of the Immortals. Even in the weak human
memory they survive so long as saints, as heroes, as gods; they
alone surviving--peopling, they alone, the immeasured solitudes
of time! To thee, Heaven, though severe, is _not_ unkind.
Heaven is kind, as a noble mother--as that Spartan mother,
saying, as she gave her son his shield, 'with it, my son, or
upon it!'
"And, who art thou that braggest of thy life of idleness;
complacently showest thy bright gilt equipages; sumptuous
cushions; appliances for the folding of the hands to more
sleep? Looking up, looking down, around, behind, or before,
discernest thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any _idle_
hero, saint, god, or even devil? Not a vestige of one. 'In the
heavens, in the earth, in the waters under the earth, is none
like unto thee.' Thou art an original figure in this creation,
a denizen in Mayfair alone. One monster there is in the world:
the idle man. What is his 'religion?' That nature is a
phantasm, where cunning, beggary, or thievery, may sometimes
find good victual."
* * * * *
"The 'wages' of every noble work do yet lie in heaven, or else
nowhere. Nay, at bottom dost thou need any reward? Was it thy
aim and life-purpose, to be filled with good things for thy
heroism; to have a life of pomp and ease, and be what men call
'happy' in this world, or in any other world? I answer for
thee, deliberately, no?
"The brave man has to give his life away. Give it, I advise
thee--thou dost not expect to _sell_ thy life in an adequate
manner? What price, for example, would content thee?... Thou
wilt never sell thy life, or any part of thy life, in a
satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart--let the price
be nothing; thou hast then, in a certain sense, got all for
it!"
Well said! we again repeat, O Diogenes Teufelsdrockh!
* * * * *
_Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work_.
* * * * *