To the man who _works,_ who attempts, in never so ungracious

barbarous a way, to get forward with some work, you will hasten

out with furtherances, with encouragements, corrections; you

will say to him: "Welcome, thou art ours; our care shall be of

thee." To the idler, again, never so gracefully going idle,

coming forward with never so many parchments, you will not hasten

out; you will sit still, and be disinclined to rise. You will

say to him: "Not welcome, O complex Anomaly; would thou hadst

staid out of doors: for who of mortals knows what to do with

thee? Thy parchments: yes, they are old, of venerable

yellowness; and we too honour parchment, old-established

settlements, and venerable use and wont. Old parchments in very

truth:--yet on the whole, if thou wilt remark, they are young to

the Granite Rocks, to the Groundplan of God's Universe! We

advise thee to put up thy parchments; to go home to thy place,

and make no needless noise whatever. Our heart's wish is to save

thee: yet there as thou art, hapless Anomaly, with nothing but

thy yellow parchments, noisy futilities, and shotbelts and fox-

brushes, who of gods or men can avert dark Fate? Be counselled,

ascertain if no work exist for thee on God's Earth; if thou find

no commanded-duty there but that of going gracefully idle? Ask,

inquire earnestly, with a half-frantic earnestness; for the

answer means Existence or Annihilation to thee. We apprise thee

of the world-old fact, becoming sternly disclosed again in these

days, That he who cannot work in this Universe cannot get existed

in it: had he parchments to thatch the face of the world, these,

combustible fallible sheepskin, cannot avail him. Home, thou

unfortunate; and let us have at least no noise from thee!"

Suppose the unfortunate Idle Aristocracy, as the unfortunate

Working one has done, were to 'retire three days to _its_ bed,'

and consider itself there, what o'clock it had become?--

How have we to regret not only that men have 'no religion,' but

that they have next to no reflection; and go about with heads

full of mere extraneous noises, with eyes wide-open but

visionless,--for most part, in the somnambulist state!

Chapter VIII

Unworking Aristocracy

It is well said, 'Land is the right basis of an Aristocracy;'

whoever possesses the Land, he, more emphatically than any other,

is the Governor, Viceking of the people on the Land. It is in

these days as it was in those of Henry Plantagenet and Abbot

Samson; as it will in all days be. The Land is _Mother_ of us

all; nourishes, shelters, gladdens, lovingly enriches us all;

in how many ways, from our first wakening to our last sleep on

her blessed mother-bosom, does she, as with blessed mother-arms,

enfold us all!

The Hill I first saw the Sun rise over, when the Sun and I and

all things were yet in their auroral hour, who can divorce me

from it? Mystic, deep as the world's centre, are the roots I

have struck into my Native Soil; no _tree_ that grows is rooted

so. From noblest Patriotism to humblest industrial Mechanism;

from highest dying for your country, to lowest quarrying and

coal-boring for it, a Nation's Life depends upon its Land. Again

and again we have to say, there can be no true Aristocracy but

must possess the Land.

Men talk of 'selling' Land. Land, it is true, like Epic Poems

and even higher things, in such a trading world, has to be

presented in the market for what it will bring, and as we say be

'sold:' but the notion of 'selling,' for certain bits of metal,

the _Iliad_ of Homer, how much more the _Land_ of the World-

Creator, is a ridiculous impossibility! We buy what is saleable

of it; nothing more was ever buyable. Who can, or could, sell

it to us? Properly speaking, the Land belongs to these two: To

the Almighty God; and to all His Children of Men that have ever

worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on it. No

generation of men can or could, with never such solemnity and

effort, sell Land on any other principle: it is not the property

of any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations

that have worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall

work on it. Again, we hear it said, The soil of England, or of

any country, is properly worth nothing, except the labour

bestowed on it: This, speaking even in the language of

Eastcheap, is not correct. The rudest space of country equal in

extent to England, could a whole English Nation, with all their

habitudes, arrangements, skills, with whatsoever they do carry

within the skins of them, and cannot be stript of, suddenly take

wing, and alight on it,--would be worth a very considerable

thing! Swiftly, within year and day, this English Nation, with

its multiplex talents of ploughing, spinning, hammering, mining,

road-making and trafficking, would bring a handsome value out of

such a space of country. On the other hand, fancy what an

English Nation, once 'on the wing,' could have done with itself,

had there been simply no soil, not even an inarable one, to

alight on? Vain all its talents for ploughing, hammering, and

whatever else; there is no Earth-room for this Nation with its

talents: this Nation will have to keep hovering on the wing,

dolefully shrieking to and fro; and perish piecemeal; burying

itself, down to the last soul of it, in the waste unfirmamented

seas. Ah yes, soil, with or without ploughing, is the gift of

God. The soil of all countries belongs evermore, in a very

considerable degree, to the Almighty Maker! The last stroke of

labour bestowed on it is not the making of its value, but only

the increasing thereof.

It is very strange, the degree to which these truisms are

forgotten in our days; how, in the ever-whirling chaos of

Formulas, we have quietly lost sight of Fact,--which it is so

perilous not to keep forever in sight! Fact, if we do not see

it, will make us _feel_ it by and by!--From much loud controversy

and Corn-Law debating there rises, loud though inarticulate, once

more in these years, this very question among others, Who made

the Land of England? Who made it, this respectable English Land,

wheat-growing, metalliferous, carboniferous, which will let

readily hand over head for seventy millions or upwards, as it

here lies: who did make it?--"We!" answer the much-_consuming_

Aristocracy; "We!" as they ride in, moist with the sweat of

Melton Mowbray: "It is we that made it; or are the heirs,

assigns and representatives of those who did!"--My brothers, You?

Everlasting honour to you, then; and Corn-Laws as many as you

will, till your own deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice of

human pity for our famine bids you Hold! Ye are as gods, that

can create soil. Soil-creating gods there is no withstanding.

They have the might to sell wheat at what price they list; and

the right, to all lengths, and famine-lengths,--if they be

pitiless infernal gods! Celestial gods, I think, would stop

short of the famine-price; but no infernal nor any kind of god

can be bidden stop!--Infatuated mortals, into what questions are

you driving every thinking man in England?

I say, you did _not_ make the Land of England; and, by the

possession of it, you _are_ bound to furnish guidance and

governance to England! That is the law of your position on this

God's-Earth; an everlasting act of Heaven's Parliament, not

repealable in St. Stephen's or elsewhere! True government and

guidance; not no-government and Laissez-faire; how much less,

misgovernment and Corn-Law! There is not an imprisoned Worker

looking out from these Bastilles but appeals, very audibly in

Heaven's High Courts, against you, and me, and every one who is

not imprisoned, "Why am I here?" His appeal is audible in

Heaven; and will become audible enough on Earth too, if it

remain unheeded here. His appeal is against you, foremost of

all; you stand in the front-rank of the accused; you, by the

very place you hold, have first of all to answer him and Heaven!

What looks maddest, miserablest in these mad and miserable Corn-

Laws is independent altogether of their 'effect on wages,' their

effect on 'increase of trade,' or any other such effect: it is

the continual maddening proof they protrude into the faces of all

men, that our Governing Class, called by God and Nature and the

inflexible law of Fact, either to do something towards governing,

or to die and be abolished,--have not yet learned even to sit

still, and do no mischief! For no Anti-Corn-Law League yet asks

more of them than this;--Nature and Fact, very imperatively,

asking so much more of them. Anti-Corn-Law League asks not, Do

something; but, Cease your destructive misdoing, Do ye nothing!

Nature's message will have itself obeyed: messages of mere Free-

Trade, Anti-Corn-Law League and Laissez-faire, will then need

small obeying!--Ye fools, in name of Heaven, work, work, at the

Ark of Deliverance for yourselves and us, while hours are still

granted you! No: instead of working at the Ark, they say, "We

cannot get our hands kept rightly warm;" and _sit obstinately

burning the planks._ No madder spectacle at present exhibits

itself under this Sun.

The Working Aristocracy; Mill-owners, Manufacturers, Commanders

of Working Men: alas, against them also much shall be brought in

accusation; much,--and the freest Trade in Corn, total abolition

of Tariffs, and uttermost 'Increase of Manufactures' and

'Prosperity of Commerce,' will permanently mend no jot of it.

The Working Aristocracy must strike into a new path; must

understand that money alone is _not_ the representative either of

man's success in the world, or of man's duties to man; and

reform their own selves from top to bottom, if they wish England

reformed. England will not be habitable long, unreformed.

The Working Aristocracy--Yes, but on the threshold of all this,

it is again and again to be asked, What of the Idle Aristocracy?

Again and again, what shall we say of the Idle Aristocracy, the

Owners of the Soil of England; whose recognised function is that

of handsomely consuming the rents of England, shooting the

partridges of England, and as an agreeable amusement (if the

purchase-money and other conveniences serve), dilettante-ing in

Parliament and Quarter-Sessions for England? We will say

mournfully, in the presence of Heaven and Earth,--that we stand

speechless, stupent, and know not what to say! That a class of

men entitled to live sumptuously on the marrow of the earth;

permitted simply, nay entreated, and as yet entreated in vain, to

do nothing at all in return, was never heretofore seen on the

face of this Planet. That such a class is transitory,

exceptional, and, unless Nature's Laws fall dead, cannot

continue. That it has continued now a moderate while; has, for

the last fifty years, been rapidly attaining its state of

perfection. That it will have to find its duties and do them;

or else that it must and will cease to be seen on the face of

this Planet, which is a Working one, not an Idle one.

Alas, alas, the Working Aristocracy, admonished by Trades-unions,

Chartist conflagrations, above all by their own shrewd sense kept

in perpetual communion with the fact of things, will assuredly

reform themselves, and a working world will still be possible:--

but the fate of the Idle Aristocracy, as one reads its horoscope

hitherto in Corn-Laws and such like, is an abyss that fills one

with despair. Yes, my rosy fox-hunting brothers, a terrible

_Hippocratic look_ reveals itself (God knows, not to my joy)

through those fresh buxom countenances of yours. Through your

Corn-Law Majorities, Sliding-Scales, Protecting-Duties, Bribery-

Elections and triumphant Kentish-fires a thinking eye discerns

ghastly images of ruin, too ghastly for words; a handwriting as

of MENE, MENE? Men and brothers, on your Sliding-scale you seem

sliding, and to have slid,--you little know whither! Good God!

did not a French Donothing Aristocracy, hardly above half a

century ago, declare in like manner, and in its featherhead

believe in like manner, "We cannot exist, and continue to dress

and parade ourselves, on the just rent of the soil of France;

but we must have farther payment than rent of the soil, we must

be exempted from taxes too,"--we must have a Corn-Law to extend

our rent? This was in 1789: in four years more--Did you look

into the Tanneries of Meudon, and the long-naked making for

themselves breeches of human skins! May the merciful Heavens

avert the omen; may we be wiser, that so we be less wretched.

A High Class without duties to do is like a tree planted on

precipices; from the roots of which all the earth has been

crumbling. Nature owns no man who is not a Martyr withal. Is

there a man who pretends to live luxuriously housed up; screened

from all work, from want, danger, hardship, the victory over

which is what we name work;--he himself to sit serene, amid down-

bolsters and appliances, and have all his work and battling done

by other men? And such man calls himself a _noble_-man? His

fathers worked for him, he says; or successfully gambled for

him: here _he_ sits; professes, not in sorrow but in pride,

that he and his have done no work, time out of mind. It is the

law of the land, and is thought to be the law of the Universe,

that he, alone of recorded men, shall have no task laid on him,

except that of eating his cooked victuals, and not flinging

himself out of window. Once more I will say, there was no

stranger spectacle ever shewn under this Sun. A veritable fact

in our England of the Nineteenth Century. His victuals he does

eat: but as for keeping in the inside of the window,--have not

his friends, like me, enough to do? Truly, looking at his Corn-

Laws, Game-Laws, Chandos-Clauses, Bribery-Elections and much

else, you do shudder over the tumbling and plunging he makes,

held back by the lappelles and coatskirts; only a thin fence of

window-glass before him,--and in the street mere horrid iron

spikes! My sick brother, as in hospital-maladies men do, thou

dreamest of Paradises and Eldorados, which are far from thee.

'Cannot I do what I like with my own?' Gracious Heaven, my

brother, this that thou seest with those sick eyes is no firm

Eldorado, and Corn-Law Paradise of Donothings, but a dream of thy

own fevered brain. It is a glass-window, I tell thee, so many

stories from the street; where are iron spikes and the law

of gravitation!

What is the meaning of nobleness, if this be 'noble?' In a

valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others

suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie. The chief of men is he

who stands in the van of men; fronting the peril which frightens

back all others; which, if it be not vanquished, will devour the

others. Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a

crown of thorns. The Pagan Hercules, why was he accounted a

hero? Because he had slain Nemean Lions, cleansed Augean

Stables, undergone Twelve Labours only not too heavy for a god.

In modern, as in ancient and all societies, the Aristocracy, they

that assume the functions of an Aristocracy, doing them or not,

have taken the post of honour; which is the post of difficulty,

the post of danger,--of death, if the difficulty be not overcome.

_Il faut payer de sa vie._ Why was our life given us, if not

that we should manfully give it? Descend, O Donothing Pomp;

quit thy down-cushions; expose thyself to learn what wretches

feel, and how to cure it! The Czar of Russia became a dusty

toiling shipwright; worked with his axe in the Docks of Saardam;

and his aim was small to thine. Descend thou: undertake this

horrid 'living chaos of Ignorance and Hunger' weltering round thy

feet; say, "I will heal it, or behold I will die foremost in

it." Such is verily the law. Everywhere and everywhen a man has

to _'pay_ with his life;' to do his work, as a soldier does, at

the expense of life. In no Piepowder earthly Court can you sue

an Aristocracy to do its work, at this moment: but in the Higher

Court, which even it calls 'Court of Honour,' and which is the

Court of Necessity withal, and the eternal Court of the Universe,

in which all Fact comes to plead, and every Human Soul is an

apparitor,--the Aristocracy is answerable, and even now

answering, _there._

Parchments? Parchments are venerable: but they ought at all

times to represent, as near as they by possibility can, the

writing of the Adamant Tablets; otherwise they are not so

venerable! Benedict the Jew in vain pleaded parchments; his

usuries were too many. The King said, "Go to, for all thy

parchments, thou shalt pay just debt; down with thy dust, or

observe this tooth-forceps!" Nature, a far juster Sovereign, has

far terribler forceps. Aristocracies, actual and imaginary,

reach a time when parchment pleading does not avail them. "Go

to, for all thy parchments, thou shalt pay due debt!" shouts the

Universe to them, in an emphatic manner. They refuse to pay,

confidently pleading parchment: their best grinder-tooth, with

horrible agony, goes out of their jaw. Wilt thou pay now? A

second grinder, again in horrible agony, goes: a second, and a

third, and if need be, all the teeth and grinders, and the life

itself with them;--and _then_ there is free payment, and an

anatomist-subject into the bargain!

Reform Bills, Corn-Law Abrogation Bills, and then Land-Tax Bill,

Property-Tax Bill, and still dimmer list of _etceteras;_ grinder

after grinder:---my lords and gentlemen, it were better for

you to arise, and begin doing your work, than sit there and

plead parchments!

We write no Chapter on the Corn-Laws, in this place; the Corn-

Laws are too mad to have a Chapter. There is a certain

immorality, when there is not a necessity, in speaking about

things finished; in chopping into small pieces the already

slashed and slain. When the brains are out, why does not a

Solecism die! It is at its own peril if it refuse to die; it

ought to make all conceivable haste to die, and get itself

buried! The trade of Anti-Corn-Law Lecturer in these days, still

an indispensable, is a highly tragic one.

The Corn-Laws will go, and even soon go: would we were all as

sure of the Millennium as they are of going! They go swiftly in

these present months; with an increase of velocity, an ever-

deepening, ever-widening sweep of momentum, truly notable. It is

at the Aristocracy's own damage and peril, still more than at any

other's whatsoever, that the Aristocracy maintains them;--at a

damage, say only, as above computed, of a 'hundred thousand

pounds an hour!' The Corn-Laws keep all the air hot: fostered

by their fever-warmth, much that is evil, but much also, how

much that is good and indispensable, is rapidly coming to life

among us!

Chapter IX

Working Aristocracy

A poor Working Mammonism getting itself 'strangled in the

partridge-nets of an Unworking Dilettantism,' and bellowing

dreadfully, and already black in the face, is surely a disastrous

spectacle! But of a Midas-eared Mammonism, which indeed at

bottom all pure Mammonisms are, what better can you expect? No

better;--if not this, then something other equally disastrous, if

not still more disastrous. Mammonisms, grown asinine, have to

become human again, and rational; they have, on the whole, to

cease to be Mammonisms, were it even on compulsion, and pressure

of the hemp round their neck!--My friends of the Working

Aristocracy, there are now a great many things which you also, in

your extreme need, will have to consider.

The Continental people, it would seem, are 'exporting our

machinery, beginning to spin cotton and manufacture for

themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that!'

Sad news indeed; but irremediable;--by no means the saddest

news. The saddest news is, that we should find our National

Existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling

manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other

People. A most narrow stand for a great Nation to base itself

on! A stand which, with all the Corn-Law Abrogations

conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.

My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came

honestly down from it, and said: "This is our minimum of

cottonprices. We care not, for the present, to make cotton any

cheaper. Do you, if it seem so blessed to you, make cotton

cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton-fuzz, your hearts with

copperas-fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the general

gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!"--I admire a Nation which

fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other Nations, to

the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to _under_sell

them; we will be content to _equal_-sell them; to be happy

selling equally with them! I do not see the use of underselling

them. Cotton-cloth is already two-pence a yard or lower; and

yet bare backs were never more numerous among us. Let inventive

men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving how

cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent, a little, how

cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier

divided among us! Let inventive men consider, Whether the Secret

of this Universe, and of Man's Life there, does, after all, as we

rashly fancy it, consist in making money? There is One God,

just, supreme, almighty: but is Mammon the name of him?--With a

Hell which means 'Failing to make money,' I do not think there is

any Heaven possible that would suit one well; nor so much as an

Earth that can be habitable long! In brief, all this Mammon-

Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and

Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest

Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.

Even with Dilettante partridge-nets, and at a horrible

expenditure of pain, who shall regret to see the entirely

transient, and at best somewhat despicable life strangled out of

_it?_ At the best, as we say, a somewhat despicable, unvenerable

thing, this same 'Laissez-faire;' and now, at the worst, fast

growing an altogether detestable one!

"But what is to be done with our manufacturing population, with

our agricultural, with our ever-increasing population?" cry

many.--Aye, what? Many things can be done with them, a hundred

things, and a thousand things,--had we once got a soul, and begun

to try. This one thing, of doing for them by 'underselling all

people,' and filling our own bursten pockets and appetites by the

road; and turning over all care for any 'population,' or human

or divine consideration except cash only, to the winds, with a

"Laissez-faire" and the rest of it: this is evidently not the

thing. 'Farthing cheaper per yard:' no great Nation can stand

on the apex of such a pyramid; screwing itself higher and

higher; balancing itself on its great-toe! Can England not

subsist without being _above_ all people in working? England

never deliberately purposed such a thing. If England work better

than all people, it shall be well. England, like an honest

worker, will work as well as she can; and hope the gods may

allow her to live on that basis. Laissez-faire and much else

being once well dead, how many 'impossibles' will become

possible! They are 'impossible,' as cotton-cloth at two-pence an

ell was--till men set about making it. The inventive genius of

great England will not forever sit patient with mere wheels and

pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers whirring in the head

of it. The inventive genius of England is not a Beaver's, or a

Spinner's or Spider's genius: it is a _Man's_ genius, I hope,

with a God over him!

Supply-and-demand? One begins to be weary of such work. Leave

all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of

applause:--it is the Gospel of Despair! Man is a Patent-

Digester, then: only give him Free Trade, Free digesting-room;

and each of us digest what he can come at, leaving the rest to

Fate! My unhappy brethren of the Working Mammonism, my unhappier

brethren of the Idle Dilettantism, no world was ever held

together in that way for long. A world of mere Patent-Digesters

will soon have nothing to digest: such world ends, and by Law of

Nature must end, in 'over-population;' in howling universal

famine, 'impossibility,' and suicidal madness, as of endless dog-

kennels run rabid. Supply-and-demand shall do its full part, and

Free Trade shall be free as air;--thou of the shotbelts, see thou

forbid it not, with those paltry, _worse_ than 'Mammonish'

swindleries and Sliding-scales of thine, which are seen to be

swindleries for all thy canting, which in times like ours are

very scandalous to see! And Trade never so well freed, and all

Tariffs settled or abolished, and Supply-and-demand in full

operation,--let us all know that we have yet done nothing; that

we have merely cleared the ground for doing.

Yes, were the Corn-Laws ended tomorrow, there is nothing yet

ended; there is only room made for all manner of things

beginning. The Corn-Laws gone, and Trade made free, it is as

good as certain this paralysis of industry will pass away. We

shall have another period of commercial enterprise, of victory

and prosperity; during which, it is likely, much money will

again be made, and all the people may, by the extant methods,

still for a space of years, be kept alive and physically fed.

The strangling band of Famine will be loosened from our necks;

we shall have room again to breathe; time to bethink ourselves,

to repent and consider! A precious and thrice-precious space of

years; wherein to struggle as for life in reforming our foul

ways; in alleviating, instructing, regulating our people;

seeking, as for life, that something like spiritual food be

imparted them, some real governance and guidance be provided

them! It will be a priceless time. For our new period or

paroxysm of commercial prosperity will and can, on the old

methods of 'Competition and Devil take the hindmost,' prove but a

paroxysm: a new paroxysm,--likely enough, if we do not use it

better, to be our _last._ In this, of itself, is no salvation.

If our Trade in twenty years, 'flourishing' as never Trade

flourished, could double itself; yet then also, by the old

Laissez-faire method, our Population is doubled: we shall

then be as we are, only twice as many of us, twice and ten

times as unmanageable!

All this dire misery, therefore; all this of our poor Workhouse

Workmen, of our Chartisms, Trades-strikes, Corn-Laws, Toryisms,

and the general downbreak of Laissez-faire in these days,--may we

not regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom of Nature, saying to

us: Behold! Supply-and-demand is not the one Law of Nature;

Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man,--how far from

it! Deep, far deeper than Supply-and-demand, are Laws,

Obligations sacred as Man's Life itself: these also, if you will

continue to do work, you shall now learn and obey. He that will

learn them, behold Nature is on his side, he shall yet work and

prosper with noble rewards. He that will not learn them, Nature

is against him; he shall not be able to do work in Nature's

empire,--not in hers. Perpetual mutiny, contention, hatred,

isolation, execration shall wait on his footsteps, till all men

discern that the thing which he attains, however golden it look

or be, is not success, but the want of success.

Supply-and-demand,--alas! For what noble work was there ever yet

any audible 'demand' in that poor sense? The man of Macedonia,

speaking in vision to an Apostle Paul, "Come over and help us,"

did not specify what rate of wages he would give! Or was the

Christian Religion itself accomplished by Prize-Essays,

Bridgewater Bequests, and a 'minimum of Four thousand five

hundred a year?'' No demand that I heard of was made then,

audible in any Labour-market, Manchester Chamber of Commerce, or

other the like emporium and hiring establishment; silent were

all these from any whisper of such demand;--powerless were all

these to 'supply' it, had the demand been in thunder and

earthquake, with gold Eldorados and Mahometan Paradises for the

reward. Ah me, into what waste latitudes, in this Time-Voyage,

have we wandered; like adventurous Sindbads;--where the men go

about as if by galvanism, with meaningless glaring eyes, and have

no soul, but only a beaver-faculty and stomach! The haggard

despair of Cotton-factory, Coal-mine operatives, Chandos Farm-

labourers, in these days, is painful to behold; but not so

painful, hideous to the inner sense, as the brutish god-

forgetting Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, and Life-theory, which we

hear jangled on all hands of us, in senate-houses, spouting-

clubs, leading-articles, pulpits and platforms, everywhere as the

Ultimate Gospel and candid Plain-English of Man's Life, from the

throats and pens and thoughts of all but all men!--

Enlightened Philosophies, like Moliere Doctors, will tell you:

"Enthusiasms, Self-sacrifice, Heaven, Hell and such like: yes,

all that was true enough for old stupid times; all that used to

be true: but we have changed all that, _nous avons change tout

cela!"_ Well; if the heart be got round now into the right side,

and the liver to the left; if man have no heroism in him deeper

than the wish to eat, and in his soul there dwell now no Infinite

of Hope and Awe, and no divine Silence can become imperative

because it is not Sinai Thunder, and no tie will bind if it be

not that of Tyburn gallows-ropes,--then verily you have changed

all that; and for it, and for you, and for me, behold the Abyss

and nameless Annihilation is ready. So scandalous a beggarly

Universe deserves indeed nothing else; I cannot say I would save

it from Annihilation. Vacuum, and the serene Blue, will be much

handsomer; easier too for all of us. I, for one, decline living

as a Patent-Digester. Patent-Digester, Spinning-Mule, Mayfair

Clothes-Horse: many thanks, but your Chaosships will have the

goodness to excuse me!

Chapter X

Plugson of Undershot

One thing I do know: Never, on this Earth, was the relation of

man to man long carried on by Cash-payment alone. If, at any

time, a philosophy of Laissez-faire, Competition and Supply-and-

demand, start up as the exponent of human relations, expect that

it will soon end.

Such philosophies will arise: for man's philosophies are usually

the 'supplement of his practice;' some ornamental Logic-varnish,

some outer skin of Articulate Intelligence, with which he strives

to render his dumb Instinctive Doings presentable when they are

done. Such philosophies will arise; be preached as Mammon-

Gospels, the ultimate Evangel of the World; be believed, with

what is called belief, with much superficial bluster, and a kind

of shallow satisfaction real in its way:--but they are ominous

gospels! They are the sure, and even swift, forerunner of great

changes. Expect that the old System of Society is done, is dying

and fallen into dotage, when it begins to rave in that fashion.

Most Systems that I have watched the death of, for the last three

thousand years, have gone just so. The Ideal, the True and Noble

that was in them having faded out, and nothing now remaining but

naked Egoism, vulturous Greediness, they cannot live; they are

bound and inexorably ordained by the oldest Destinies, Mothers of

the Universe, to die. Curious enough: they thereupon, as I have

pretty generally noticed, devise some light comfortable kind of

'wine-and-walnuts philosophy' for themselves, this of Supply-and-

demand or another; and keep saying, during hours of mastication

and rumination, which they call hours of meditation: "Soul, take

thy ease, it is all _well_ that thou art a vulture-soul;"

--and pangs of dissolution come upon them, oftenest before they

are aware!

Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the

union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his

deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth

to the end of the world. I invite his Grace of Castle-Rackrent

to reflect on this;--does he think that a Land Aristocracy when

it becomes a Land Auctioneership can have long to live? Or that

Sliding-scales will increase the vital stamina of it? The

indomitable Plugson too, of the respected Firm of Plugson, Hunks

and Company, in St. Dolly Undershot, is invited to reflect on

this; for to him also it will be new, perhaps even newer.

Bookkeeping by double entry is admirable, and records several

things in an exact manner. But the Mother-Destinies also keep

their Tablets; in Heaven's Chancery also there goes on a

recording; and things, as my Moslem friends say, are 'written on

the iron leaf.'

Your Grace and Plugson, it is like, go to Church occasionally:

did you never in vacant moments, with perhaps a dull parson

droning to you, glance into your New Testament, and the cash-

account stated four times over, by a kind of quadruple entry,--in

the Four Gospels there? I consider that a cash-account, and

balance-statement of work done and wages paid, worth attending

to. Precisely _such,_ though on a smaller scale, go on at all

moments under this Sun; and the statement and balance of them in

the Plugson Ledgers and on the Tablets of Heaven's Chancery are

discrepant exceedingly;--which ought really to teach, and to have

long since taught, an indomitable common-sense Plugson of

Undershot, much more an unattackable _un_common-sense Grace of

Rackrent, a thing or two!--In brief, we shall have to dismiss the

Cash-Gospel rigorously into its own place: we shall have to

know, on the threshold, that either there is some infinitely

deeper Gospel, subsidiary, explanatory and daily and hourly

corrective, to the Cash one; or else that the Cash one itself

and all others are fast traveling!

For all human things do require to have an Ideal in them; to

have some Soul in them, as we said, were it only to keep the Body

unputrefied. And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul,

place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body

with its own nobleness; will gradually, incessantly, mould,

modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last

beautiful, and to a certain degree divine!--O, if you could

dethrone that Brute-god Mammon, and put a Spirit-god in his

place! One way or other, he must and will have to be dethroned.

Fighting, for example, as I often say to myself, Fighting with

steel murder-tools is surely a much uglier operation than

Working, take it how you will. Yet even of Fighting, in

religious Abbot Samson's days, see what a Feudalism there had

grown,--a 'glorious Chivalry,' much besung down to the present

day. Was not that one of the 'impossiblest' things? Under the

sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth, and

hellfire eyes, hacking one another's flesh; converting precious

living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses

of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure. How did a

Chivalry ever come out of that; how anything that was not

hideous, scandalous, infernal? It will be a question worth

considering by and by.

I remark, for the present, only two things: first, that the

Fighting itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a Fighting

without cause, but more or less with cause. Man is created to

fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier;

his life 'a battle and a march,' under the right General. It is

forever indispensable for a man to fight: now with Necessity,

with Barrenness, Scarcity, with Puddles, Bogs, tangled Forests,

unkempt Cotton;--now also with the hallucinations of his poor

fellow Men. Hallucinatory visions rise in the head of my poor

fellow man; make him claim over me rights which are not his.

All Fighting, as we noticed long ago, is the dusty conflict of

strengths each thinking itself the strongest, or, in other words,

the justest;--of Mights which do in the long-run, and forever

will in this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights. In

conflict the perishable part of them, beaten sufficiently, flies

off into dust: this process ended, appears the imperishable, the

true and exact.

And now let us remark a second thing: how, in these baleful

operations, a noble devout-hearted Chevalier will comfort

himself, and an ignoble godless Bucanier and Chactaw Indian.

Victory is the aim of each. But deep in the heart of the noble

man it lies forever legible, that, as an Invisible just God made

him, so will and must God's justice and this only, were it never

so invisible, ultimately prosper in all controversies and

enterprises and battles whatsoever. What an Influence; ever-

present,--like a Soul in the rudest Caliban of a body; like a

ray of Heaven, and illuminative creative _Fiat-Lux,_ in the

wastest terrestrial Chaos! Blessed divine Influence, traceable

even in the horror of Battlefields and garments rolled in blood:

how it ennobles even the Battlefield; and, in place of a Chactaw

Massacre, makes it a Field of Honour! A Battlefield too is

great. Considered well, it is a kind of Quintessence of Labour;

Labour distilled into its utmost concentration; the significance

of years of it compressed into an hour. Here too thou shalt be

strong, and not in muscle only, if thou wouldst prevail. Here

too thou shalt be strong of heart, noble of soul; thou shalt

dread no pain or death, thou shalt not love ease or life; in

rage, thou shalt remember mercy, justice;--thou shalt be a Knight

and not a Chactaw, if thou wouldst prevail! It is the rule of

all battles, against hallucinating fellow Men, against unkempt

Cotton, or whatsoever battles they may be which a man in this

world has to fight.

Howel Davies' dyes the West Indian Seas with blood, piles his

decks with plunder; approves himself the expertest Seaman, the

daringest Seafighter: but he gains no lasting victory, lasting

victory is not possible for him. Not, had he fleets larger than

the combined British Navy all united with him in bucaniering.

He, once for all, cannot prosper in his duel. He strikes down

his man: yes; but his man, or his man's representative, has no

notion to lie struck down; neither, though slain ten times, will

he keep so lying;--nor has the Universe any notion to keep him so

lying! On the contrary, the Universe and he have, at all

moments, all manner of motives to start up again, and desperately

fight again. Your Napoleon is flung out, at last, to St. Helena;

the latter end of him sternly compensating the beginning. The

Bucanier strikes down a man, a hundred or a million men: but

what profits it? He has one enemy never to be struck down; nay

two enemies: Mankind and the Maker of Men. On the great scale

or on the small, in fighting of men or fighting of difficulties,

I will not embark my venture with Howel Davies: it is not the

Bucanier, it is the Hero only that can gain victory, that can do

more than seem to succeed. These things will deserve meditating;

for they apply to all battle and soldiership, all struggle and

effort whatsoever in this Fight of Life. It is a poor Gospel,

Cash-Gospel or whatever name it have, that does not, with clear

tone, uncontradictable, carrying conviction to all hearts,

forever keep men in mind of these things.

Unhappily, my indomitable friend Plugson of Undershot has, in a

great degree, forgotten them;--as, alas, all the world has; as,

alas, our very Dukes and Soul-Overseers have, whose special trade

it was to remember them! Hence these tears.--Plugson, who has

indomitably spun Cotton merely to gain thousands of pounds, I

have to call as yet a Bucanier and Chactaw; till there come

something better, still more indomitable from him. His hundred

Thousand-pound Notes, if there be nothing other, are to me but as

the hundred Scalps in a Chactaw wigwam. The blind Plugson: he

was a Captain of Industry, born member of the Ultimate genuine

Aristocracy of this Universe, could he have known it! These

thousand men that span and toiled round him, they were a regiment

whom he had enlisted, man by man; to make war on a very genuine

enemy: Bareness of back, and disobedient Cotton-fibre, which

will not, unless forced to it, consent to cover bare backs. Here

is a most genuine enemy; over whom all creatures will wish him

victory. He enlisted his thousand men; said to them, "Come,

brothers, let us have a dash at Cotton!" They follow with

cheerful shout; they gain such a victory over Cotton as the

Earth has to admire and clap hands at: but, alas, it is yet only

of the Bucanier or Chactaw sort,--as good as no victory! Foolish

Plugson of St. Dolly Undershot: does he hope to become

illustrious by hanging up the scalps in his wigwam, the hundred

thousands at his banker's, and saying, Behold my scalps? Why,

Plugson, even thy own host is all in mutiny: Cotton is

conquered; but the 'bare backs'--are worse covered than ever!

Indomitable Plugson, thou must cease to be a Chactaw; thou and

others; thou thyself, if no other!

Did William the Norman Bastard, or any of his Taillefers,

_Ironcutters,_ manage so? Ironcutter, at the end of the

campaign, did not turn off his thousand fighters, but said to

them: "Noble fighters, this is the land we have gained; be I

Lord in it,--what we will call _Law-ward,_ maintainer and

_keeper_ of Heaven's _Laws:_ be I _Law-ward,_ or in brief

orthoepy _Lord_ in it, and be ye Loyal Men around me in it; and

we will stand by one another, as soldiers round a captain, for

again we shall have need of one another!" Plugson, bucanier-

like, says to them: "Noble spinners, this is the Hundred

Thousand we have gained, wherein I mean to dwell and plant

vineyards; the hundred thousand is mine, the three and sixpence

daily was yours: adieu, noble spinners; drink my health with

this groat each, which I give you over and above!" The entirely

unjust Captain of Industry, say I; not Chevalier, but Bucanier!

'Commercial Law' does indeed acquit him; asks, with wide eyes,

What else? So too Howel Davies asks, Was it not according to the

strictest Bucanier Custom? Did I depart in any jot or tittle

from the Laws of the Bucaniers?

After all, money, as they say, is miraculous. Plugson wanted

victory; as Chevaliers and Bucaniers, and all men alike do. He

found money recognised, by the whole world with one assent, as

the true symbol, exact equivalent and synonym of victory;--and

here we have him, a grim-browed, indomitable Bucanier, coming

home to us with a 'victory,' which the whole world is _ceasing_

to clap hands at! The whole world, taught somewhat impressively,

is beginning to recognise that such victory is but half a

victory; and that now, if it please the Powers, we must--have

the other half!

Money is miraculous. What miraculous facilities has it yielded,

will it yield us; but also what never-imagined confusions,

obscurations has it brought in; down almost to total extinction

of the moral-sense in large masses of mankind! 'Protection of

property,' of what is _'mine,'_ means with most men protection of

money,--the thing which, had I a thousand padlocks over it, is

least of all _mine;_ is, in a manner, scarcely worth calling

mine! The symbol shall be held sacred, defended everywhere with

tipstaves, ropes and gibbets; the thing signified shall be

composedly cast to the dogs. A human being who has worked with

human beings clears all scores with them, cuts himself with

triumphant completeness forever loose from them, by paying down

certain shillings and pounds. Was it not the wages I promised

you? There they are, to the last sixpence,--according to the

Laws of the Bucaniers!--Yes, indeed;--and, at such times, it

becomes imperatively necessary to ask all persons, bucaniers and

others, Whether these same respectable Laws of the Bucaniers are

written on God's eternal Heavens at all, on the inner Heart of

Man at all; or on the respectable Bucanier Logbook merely, for

the convenience of bucaniering merely? What a question;--whereat

Westminster Hall shudders to its driest parchment; and on the

dead wigs each particular horsehair stands on end!

The Laws of Laissez-faire, O Westminster, the laws of industrial

Captain and industrial Soldier, how much more of idle Captain and

industrial Soldier, will need to be remodelled, and modified, and

rectified in a hundred and a hundred ways,--and _not_ in the

Sliding-scale direction, but in the totally opposite one! With

two million industrial Soldiers already sitting in Bastilles, and

five million pining on potatoes, methinks Westminster cannot

begin too soon!--A man has other obligations laid on him, in

God's Universe, than the payment of cash: these also

Westminster, if it will continue to exist and have board-wages,

must contrive to take some charge of:--by Westminster or by

another, they must and will be taken charge of; be, with

whatever difficulty, got articulated, got enforced, and to a

certain approximate extent, put in practice. And, as I say, it

cannot be too soon! For Mammonism, left to itself, has become

Midas-eared; and with all its gold mountains, sits starving for

want of bread: and Dilettantism with its partridge-nets, in this

extremely earnest Universe of ours, is playing somewhat too high

a game. 'A man by the very look of him promises so much:' yes;

and by the rent-roll of him does he promise nothing?--

Alas, what a business will this be, which our Continental

friends, groping this long while somewhat absurdly about it and

about it, call 'Organisation of Labour;'--which must be taken out

of the hands of absurd windy persons, and put into the hands of

wise, laborious, modest and valiant men, to begin with it

straightway: to proceed with it, and succeed in it more and

more, if Europe, at any rate if England, is to continue habitable

much longer. Looking at the kind of most noble Corn-Law Dukes or

Practical _Duces_ we have, and also of right reverend Soul-

Overseers, Christian Spiritual _Duces_ 'on a minimum of four

thousand five hundred,' one's hopes are a little chilled.

Courage, nevertheless; there are many brave men in England! My

indomitable Plugson,--nay is there not even in thee some hope?

Thou art hitherto a Bucanier, as it was written and prescribed

for thee by an evil world: but in that grim brow, in that

indomitable heart which _can_ conquer Cotton, do there not

perhaps lie other ten times nobler conquests?

Chapter XI

Labour

For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work.

Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there

is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works: in

Idleness alone is there perpetual despair. Work, never so

Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature; the real

desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to

truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth.

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.

It has been written, 'an endless significance lies in Work;' a

man perfects himself by working. Foul jungles are cleared away,

fair seedfields rise instead, and stately cities; and withal the

man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome

desert thereby. Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of

Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real

harmony, the instant he sets himself to work! Doubt, Desire,

Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like

helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of

every man: but he bends himself with free valour against his

task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far

off into their caves. The man is now a man. The blessed glow

of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all

poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made

bright blessed flame!

Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us. A

formless Chaos, once set it _revolving,_ grows round and ever

rounder; ranges itself, by mere force of gravity, into strata,

spherical courses; is no longer a Chaos, but a round compacted

World. What would become of the Earth, did she cease to revolve?

In the poor old Earth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities,

irregularities disperse themselves; all irregularities are

incessantly becoming regular. Hast thou looked on the Potter's

wheel,--one of the venerablest objects; old as the Prophet

Ezechiel and far older? Rude lumps of clay, how they spin

themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular

dishes. And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his

wheel; reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by

mere kneading and baking! Even such a Potter were Destiny, with

a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work

and spin! Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, like

the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead

nothing other than a botch; let her spend on him what expensive

colouring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a

botch. Not a dish; no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling,

squint-cornered, amorphous botch,--a mere enamelled vessel of

dishonour! Let the idle think of this.

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 grass-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: from the inmost heart of the Worker

rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence

breathed into him by Almighty God; from his inmost heart awakens

him to all nobleness,--to all knowledge, 'self-knowledge' and

much else, so soon as Work fitly begins. Knowledge? The

knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that;

for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that. Properly

thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working:

the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge; a thing to be

argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless

logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it. 'Doubt, of whatever

kind, can be ended by Action alone.'

And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance,

Openness to light; readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do

better next time? All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the

dim brute Powers of Fact, in ordering of thy fellows in such

wrestle, there and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt continually

learn. Set down a brave Sir Christopher in the middle of black

ruined Stoneheaps, of foolish unarchitectural Bishops, redtape

Officials, idle Nell-Gwyn Defenders of the Faith; and see

whether he will ever raise a Paul's Cathedral out of all that,

yea or no! Rough, rude, contradictory are all things and

persons, from the mutinous masons and Irish hodmen, up to the

idle Nell-Gwyn Defenders, to blustering redtape Officials,

foolish unarchitectural Bishops. All these things and persons

are there not for Christopher's sake and his Cathedral's; they

are there for their own sake mainly! Christopher will have to

conquer and constrain all these,--if he be able. All these are

against him. Equitable Nature herself, who carries her

mathematics and architectonics not on the face of her, but deep

in the hidden heart of her,--Nature herself is but partially for

him; will be wholly against him, if he constrain her not! His

very money, where is it to come from? The pious munificence of

England lies far-scattered, distant, unable to speak, and say, "I

am here;"--must be spoken to before it can speak. Pious

munificence, and all help, is so silent, invisible like the gods;

impediment, contradictions manifold are so loud and near! O

brave Sir Christopher, trust thou in those, notwithstanding, and

front all these; understand all these; by valiant patience,

noble effort, insight, by man's strength, vanquish and compel all

these,--and, on the whole, strike down victoriously the last

topstone of that Paul's Edifice; thy monument for certain

centuries, the stamp 'Great Man' impressed very legibly on

Portland-stone there!--Yes, all manner of help, and pious

response from Men or Nature, is always what we call silent;

cannot speak or come to light, till it be seen, till it be spoken

to. Every noble work is at first impossible. In very truth, for

every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through

Immensity; inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith. Like

Gideon thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent;

see whether under the wide arch of Heaven there be any bounteous

moisture, or none. Thy heart and life-purpose shall be as a

miraculous Gideon's fleece, spread out in silent appeal to

Heaven; and from the kind Immensities, what from the poor unkind

Localities and town and country Parishes there never could,

blessed dew-moisture to suffice thee shall have fallen!

Work is of a religious nature:--work is of a _brave_ nature;

which it is the aim of all religion to be. 'All work of man is

as the swimmer's:' a waste ocean threatens to devour him; if he

front it not bravely, it will keep its word. By incessant wise

defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it

loyally supports him, bears him as its conqueror along. 'It

is so,' says Goethe, with all things that man undertakes in

this world.'

Brave Sea-captain, Norse Sea-king,--Columbus, my hero, royalest

Sea-king of all! It is no friendly environment this of thine, in

the waste deep waters; around thee mutinous discouraged souls,

behind thee disgrace and ruin, before thee the unpenetrated veil

of Night. Brother, these wild water-mountains, bounding from

their deep bases (ten miles deep, I am told), are not entirely

there on thy behalf! Meseems _they_ have other work than

floating thee forward:--and the huge Winds, that sweep from Ursa

Major to the Tropics and Equators, dancing their giant-waltz

through the kingdoms of Chaos and Immensity, they care little

about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small shoulder-of-

mutton sails in this cockle-skiff of thine! Thou art not among

articulate-speaking friends, my brother; thou art among

immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling wide as the world

here. Secret, far off, invisible to all hearts but thine, there

lies a help in them: see how thou wilt get at that. Patiently

thou wilt wait till the mad Southwester spend itself, saving

thyself by dexterous science of defence, the while; valiantly,

with swift decision, wilt thou strike in, when the favouring

East, the Possible, springs up. Mutiny of men thou wilt sternly

repress; weakness, despondency, thou wilt cheerily encourage:

thou wilt swallow down complaint, unreason, weariness, weakness

of others and thyself;--how much wilt thou swallow down! There

shall be a depth of Silence in thee, deeper than this Sea, which

is but ten miles deep: a Silence unsoundable; known to God

only. Thou shalt be a Great Man. Yes, my World-Soldier, thou of

the World Marine-service,--thou wilt have to be _greater_ than

this tumultuous unmeasured World here round thee is: thou, in

thy strong soul, as with wrestler's arms, shalt embrace it,

harness it down; and make it bear thee on,--to new Americas, or

whither God wills!

Chapter XII

Reward

'Religion,' I said; for properly speaking, all true Work is

Religion: and whatsoever Religion is not Work may go and dwell

among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where it

will; with me it shall have no harbour. Admirable was that of

the old Monks, _'Laborare est Orare,_ Work is Worship.'

Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached,

inarticulate, but ineradicable, forever-enduring Gospel: Work,

and therein have well-being. Man, Son of Earth and of Heaven,

lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a Spirit of

active Method, a Force for Work;--and burns like a painfully

smouldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till

thou write it down in beneficent Facts around thee! What is

immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated, arable;

obedient and productive to thee. Wheresoever thou findest

Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy; attack him swiftly, subdue

him; make Order of him, the subject not of Chaos, but of

Intelligence, Divinity and Thee! The thistle that grows in thy

path, dig it out, that a blade of useful grass, a drop of

nourishing milk, may grow there instead. The waste cotton-shrub,

gather its waste white down, spin it, weave it; that, in place

of idle litter, there may be folded webs, and the naked skin of

man be covered.

But above all, where thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity, Brute-

mindedness,--yes, there, with or without Church-tithes and

Shovel-hat, with or without Talfourd-Mahon Copyrights, or were it

with mere dungeons and gibbets and crosses, attack it, I say;

smite it wisely, unweariedly, and rest not while thou livest and

it lives; but smite, smite, in the name of God! The Highest

God, as I understand it, does audibly so command thee; still

audibly, if thou have ears to hear. He, even He, with his

_un_spoken voice, awfuler than any Sinai thunders or syllabled

speech of Whirlwinds; for the SILENCE of deep Eternities, of

Worlds from beyond the morning-stars, does it not speak to thee?

The unborn Ages; the old Graves, with their long-mouldering

dust, the very tears that wetted it now all dry,--do not these

speak to thee, what ear hath not heard? The deep Death-kingdoms,

the Stars in their never-resting courses, all Space and all Time,

proclaim it to thee in continual silent admonition. Thou too, if

ever man should, shalt work while it is called Today. For the

Night cometh, wherein no man can work.

All true Work is sacred; in all true Work, were it but true

hand-labour, there is something of divineness. Labour, wide as

the Earth, has its summit in Heaven. Sweat of the brow; and up

from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart; which

includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all

Sciences, all spoken Epics, all acted Heroisms, Martyrdoms,--up

to that 'Agony of bloody sweat,' which all men have called

divine! O brother, if this is not 'worship,' then I say, the

more pity for worship; for this is the noblest thing yet

discovered under God's sky. 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, celestial

Bodyguard of the Empire of Mankind. Even in the weak Human

Memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as gods; they

alone surviving; peopling, they alone, the unmeasured solitudes

of Time! To thee Heaven, though severe, is _not_ unkind; Heaven

is kind,--as a noble Mother; as that Spartan Mother, saying

while she gave her son his shield, "With it, my son, or upon it!"

Thou too shalt return _home_ in honour; to thy far-distant Home,

in honour; doubt it not,--if in the battle thou keep thy shield!

Thou, in the Eternities and deepest Death-kingdoms, art not an

alien; thou everywhere art a denizen! Complain not; the very

Spartans did not _complain._

And who art thou that braggest of thy life of Idleness;

complacently shewest thy bright gilt equipages; sumptuous

cushions; appliances for folding of the hands to mere 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, in this extraordinary Century or Half-Century

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. That God is

a lie; and that Man and his Life are a lie.--Alas, alas, who of

us _is_ there that can say, I have worked? The faithfulest of us

are unprofitable servants; the faithfulest of us know that best.

The faithfulest of us may say, with sad and true old Samuel,

"Much of my life has been trifled away!" But he that has, and

except 'on public occasions' professes to have, no function but

that of going idle in a graceful or graceless manner; and of

begetting sons to go idle; and to address Chief Spinners and

Diggers, who at least _are_ spinning and digging, "Ye scandalous

persons who produce too much"--My Corn-Law friends, on what

imaginary still richer Eldorados, and true iron-spikes with law

of gravitation, are ye rushing!

As to the Wages of Work there might innumerable things be said;

there will and must yet innumerable things be said and spoken, in

St. Stephen's and out of St. Stephen's; and gradually not a few

things be ascertained and written, on Law-parchment, concerning

this very matter:--'Fair day's-wages for a fair day's-work' is

the most unrefusable demand! Money-wages 'to the extent of

keeping your worker alive that he may work more;' these, unless

you mean to dismiss him straightway out of this world, are

indispensable alike to the noblest Worker and to the least noble!

One thing only I will say here, in special reference to the

former class, the noble and noblest; but throwing light on all

the other classes and their arrangements of this difficult

matter: The 'wages' of every noble Work do yet lie in Heaven or

else Nowhere. Not in Bank-of-England bills, in Owen's Labour-

bank, or any the most improved establishment of banking and

money-changing, needest thou, heroic soul, present thy account of

earnings. Human banks and labour-banks know thee not; or know

thee after generations and centuries have passed away, and thou

art clean gone from 'rewarding,'--all manner of bank-drafts,

shoptills, and Downing-street Exchequers lying very invisible, so

far from thee! 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 whole spiritual secret of the new epoch

lies in this, that thou canst answer for thyself, with thy whole

clearness of head and heart, deliberately, No.

My brother, 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?

The just price of thy LIFE to thee,--why, God's entire Creation

to thyself, the whole Universe of Space, the whole Eternity of

Time, and what they hold: that is the price which would content

thee; that, and if thou wilt be candid, nothing short of that!

It is thy all; and for it thou wouldst have all. Thou art an

unreasonable mortal;--or rather thou art a poor _infinite_

mortal, who, in thy narrow clay-prison here, _seemest_ so

unreasonable! 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! The heroic man,--and is not every man, God be

thanked, a potential hero?--has to do so, in all times and

circumstances. In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic,

he will have to say, as Burns said proudly and humbly of his

little Scottish Songs, little dewdrops of Celestial Melody in an

age when so much was unmelodious: "By Heaven, they shall either

be invaluable or of no value; I do not need your guineas for

them!" It is an element which should, and must, enter deeply

into all settlements of wages here below. They never will be

'satisfactoy' otherwise; they cannot, O Mammon Gospel, they

never can! Money for my little piece of work 'to the extent that

will allow me to keep working;' yes, this,--unless you mean that

I shall go my ways _before_ the work is all taken out of me: but

as to 'wages'--!--

On the whole, we do entirely agree with those old Monks,

_Laborare est Orare._ In a thousand senses, from one end of it

to the other, true Work is Worship. He that works, whatsoever be

his work, he bodies forth the form of Things Unseen; a small

Poet every Worker is. The idea, were it but of his poor Delf

Platter, how much more of his Epic Poem, is as yet 'seen,'

halfseen, only by himself; to all others it is a thing unseen,

impossible; to Nature herself it is a thing unseen, a thing

which never hitherto was;--very 'impossible,' for it is as yet a

No-thing! The Unseen Powers had need to watch over such a man;

he works in and for the Unseen. Alas, if he look to the Seen

Powers only, he may as well quit the business; his No-thing will

never rightly issue as a Thing, but as a Deceptivity, a Sham-

thing,--which it had better not do!

Thy No-thing of an Intended Poem, O Poet who hast looked merely

to reviewers, copyrights, booksellers, popularities, behold it

has not yet become a Thing; for the truth is not in it! Though

printed, hot-pressed, reviewed, celebrated, sold to the twentieth

edition: what is all that? The Thing, in philosophical

uncommercial language, is still a No-thing, mostly semblance, and

deception of the sight;--benign Oblivion incessantly gnawing at

it, impatient till chaos to which it belongs do reabsorb it!--

He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will

never come real visibility and speech. Thou must descend to the

_Mothers,_ to the _Manes,_ and Hercules-like long suffer and

labour there, wouldst thou emerge with victory into the sunlight.

As in battle and the shock of war,--for is not this a battle?--

thou too shalt fear no pain or death, shalt love no ease or life;

the voice of festive Lubberlands, the noise of greedy Acheron

shall alike lie silent under thy victorious feet. Thy work, like

Dante's, shall 'make thee lean for many years.' The world and

its wages, its criticisms, counsels, helps, impediments, shall be

as a waste ocean-flood; the chaos through which thou art to swim

and sail. Not the waste waves and their weedy gulf-streams,

shalt thou take for guidance: thy star alone,--'Se to segui tua

stella!' Thy star alone, now clear-beaming over Chaos, nay now

by fits gone out, disastrously eclipsed: this only shalt thou

strive to follow. O, it is a business, as I fancy, that of

weltering your way through Chaos and the murk of Hell! Green-

eyed dragons watching you, three-headed Cerberuses,--not without

sympathy of their sort! "Eccovi l'uom ch'e stato all'Inferno."

For in fine, as Poet Dryden says, you do walk hand in hand with

sheer Madness, all the way,--who is by no means pleasant company!

You look fixedly into Madness, and her undiscovered, boundless,

bottomless Night-empire; that you may extort new Wisdom out of

it, as an Eurydice from Tartarus. The higher the Wisdom, the

closer was its neighbourhood and kindred with mere Insanity;

literally so;--and thou wilt, with a speechless feeling, observe

how highest Wisdom, struggling up into this world, has oftentimes

carried such tinctures and adhesions of Insanity still cleaving

to it hither!

All Works, each in their degree, are a making of Madness sane;--

truly enough a religious operation; which cannot be carried on

without religion. You have not work otherwise; you have eye-

service, greedy grasping of wages, swift and ever swifter

manufacture of semblances to get hold of wages. Instead of

better felt-hats to cover your head, you have bigger lath-and-

plaster hats set traveling the streets on wheels. Instead of

heavenly and earthly Guidance for the souls of men, you have

'Black or White Surplice' Controversies, stuffed hair-and-leather

Popes;--terrestrial _Law-wards,_ Lords and Law-bringers,

'organising Labour' in these years, by passing Corn-Laws. With

all which, alas, this distracted Earth is now full, nigh to

bursting. Semblances most smooth to the touch and eye; most

accursed nevertheless to body and soul. Semblances, be they of

Sham-woven Cloth or of Dilettante Legislation, which are _not_

real wool or substance, but Devil's-dust, accursed of God and

man! No man has worked, or can work, except religiously; not

even the poor day-labourer, the weaver of your coat, the sewer of

your shoes. All men, if they work not as in a Great Taskmaster's

eye, will work wrong, work unhappily for themselves and you.

Industrial work, still under bondage to Mammon, the rational soul

of it not yet awakened, is a tragic spectacle. Men in the

rapidest motion and self-motion; restless, with convulsive

energy, as if driven by Galvanism, as if possessed by a Devil;

tearing asunder mountains,--to no purpose, for Mammonism is

always Midas-eared! This is sad, on the face of it. Yet

courage: the beneficent Destinies, kind in their sternness, are

apprising us that this cannot continue. Labour is not a devil,

even while encased in Mammonism; Labour is ever an imprisoned

god, writhing unconsciously or consciously to escape out of

Mammonism! Plugson of Undershot, like Taillefer of Normandy,

wants victory; how much happier will even Plugson be to have a

Chivalrous victory than a Chactaw one. The unredeemed ugliness

is that of a slothful People. Shew me a People energetically

busy; heaving, struggling, all shoulders at the wheel; their

heart pulsing, every muscle swelling, with man's energy and

will;--I Shew you a People of whom great good is already

predicable; to whom all manner of good is yet certain, if their

energy endure. By very working, they will learn; they have,

Antaeus-like, their foot on Mother Fact: how can they but learn?

The vulgarest Plugson of a Master-Worker, who can command Workers

and get work out of them, is already a considerable man. Blessed

and thrice-blessed symptoms I discern of Master-Workers who are

not vulgar men; who are Nobles, and begin to feel that they must

act as such: all speed to these, they are England's hope at

present! But in this Plugson himself, conscious of almost no

nobleness whatever, how much is there! Not without man's

faculty, insight, courage, hard energy, is this rugged figure.

His words none of the wisest; but his actings cannot be

altogether foolish. Think, how were it, stoodst thou suddenly in

his shoes! He has to command a thousand men. And not imaginary

commanding; no, it is real, incessantly practical. The evil

passions of so many men (with the Devil in them, as in all of us)

he has to vanquish; by manifold force of speech and of silence,

to repress or evade. What a force of silence, to say nothing of

the others, is in Plugson! For these his thousand men he has to

provide raw-material, machinery, arrangement, house-room; and

ever at the week's end, wages by due sale. No Civil-List, or

Goulburn-Baring Budget has he to fall back upon, for paying of

his regiment; he has to pick his supplies from this confused

face of the whole Earth and Contemporaneous History, by his

dexterity alone. There will be dry eyes if he fail to do it!--He

exclaims, at present, 'black in the face,' near strangled with

Dilettante Legislation: "Let me have elbow-room, throat-room,

and I will not fail! No, I will spin yet, and conquer like a

giant: what 'sinews of war' lie in me, untold resources towards

the Conquest of this Planet, if instead of hanging me, you

husband them, and help me!"--My indomitable friend, it is _true;_

and thou shalt and must be helped.

This is not a man I would kill and strangle by Corn-Laws, even if

I could! No, I would fling my Corn-Laws and Shotbelts to the

Devil; and try to help this man. I would teach him, by noble

precept and law-precept, by noble example most of all, that

Mammonism was not the essence of his or of my station in God's

Universe; but the adscititious excrescence of it; the gross,

terrene, godless embodiment of it; which would have to become,

more or less, a godlike one. By noble _real_ legislation, by

true _noble's_-work, by unwearied, valiant, and were it wageless

effort, in my Parliament and in my Parish, I would aid,

constrain, encourage him to effect more or less this blessed

change. I should know that it would have to be effected; that

unless it were in some measure effected, he and I and all of us,

I first and soonest of all, were doomed to perdition!--Effected

it will be; unless it were a Demon that made this Universe;

which I, for my own part, do at no moment, under no form, in the

least believe.

May it please your Serene Highnesses, your Majesties, Lordships

and Law-wardships, the proper Epic of this world is not now 'Arms

and the Man;' how much less, 'Shirt-frills and the Man:' no, it

is now 'Tools and the Man:' that, henceforth to all time is now

our Epic;--and you, first of all others, I think, were wise to

take note of that!

Chapter XIII

Democracy

If the Serene Highnesses and Majesties do not take note of that,

then, as I perceive, _that_ will take note of itself! The time

for levity, insincerity, and idle babble and play-acting, in all

kinds, is gone by; it is a serious, grave time. Old long-vexed

questions, not yet solved in logical words or parliamentary laws,

are fast solving themselves in facts, somewhat unblessed to

behold! This largest of questions, this question of Work and

Wages, which ought, had we heeded Heaven's voice, to have begun

two generations ago or more, cannot be delayed longer without

hearing Earth's voice. 'Labour' will verily need to be somewhat

'organised,' as they say,--God knows with what difficulty. Man

will actually need to have his debts and earnings a little better

paid by man; which, let Parliaments speak of them or be silent

of them, are eternally his due from man, and cannot, without

penalty and at length not without death-penalty, be withheld.

How much ought to cease among us straightway; how much ought to

begin straightway, while the hours yet are!

Truly they are strange results to which this of leaving all to

'Cash;' of quietly shutting up the God's Temple, and gradually

opening wide-open the Mammon's Temple, with 'Laissez-faire, and

Every man for himself,'--have led us in these days! We have

Upper, speaking Classes, who indeed do 'speak' as never man spake

before; the withered flimsiness, the godless baseness and

barrenness of whose Speech might of itself indicate what kind of

Doing and practical Governing went on under it! For Speech is

the gaseous element out of which most kinds of Practice and

Performance, especially all kinds of moral Performance, condense

themselves, and take shape; as the one is, so will the other be.

Descending, accordingly, into the Dumb Class in its Stockport

Cellars and Poor-Law Bastilles, have we not to announce that they

also are hitherto unexampled in the History of Adam's Posterity?

Life was never a May-game for men: in all times the lot of the

dumb millions born to toil was defaced with manifold sufferings,

injustices, heavy burdens, avoidable and unavoidable; not play

at all, but hard work that made the sinews sore, and the heart

sore. As bond-slaves, _villani, bordarii, sochemanni,_ nay

indeed as dukes, earls and kings, men were oftentimes made weary

of their life; and had to say, in the sweat of their brow and of

their soul, Behold it is not sport, it is grim earnest, and our

back can bear no more! Who knows not what massacrings and

harryings there have been; grinding, long-continuing, unbearable

injustices,--till the heart had to rise in madness, and some _"Eu

Sachsen, nimith euer sachses,_ You Saxons, out with your gully-

knives then!" You Saxons, some 'arrestment,' partial 'arrestment

of the Knaves and Dastards' has become indispensable!--The page

of Dryasdust is heavy with such details.

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the

beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of

toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now

passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger,

that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must

die,--the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But

it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet

gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated,

girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly

all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite

Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull!

This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God

has made. Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms,

Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them,

are really unexampled.

Never before did I hear of an Irish Widow reduced to 'prove her

sisterhood by dying of typhus-fever and infecting seventeen

persons,'--saying in such undeniable way, "You see, I was your

sister!" Sisterhood, brotherhood was often forgotten; but not

till the rise of these ultimate Mammon and Shotbelt Gospels, did

I ever see it so expressly denied. If no pious Lord or _Law-

ward_ would remember it, always some pious Lady (_'Hlaf-dig,'_

Benefactress, _'Loaf-giveress,'_ they say she is,--blessings on

her beautiful heart!) was there, with mild mother-voice and hand,

to remember it; some pious thoughtful _Elder,_ what we now call

'Prester,' _Presbyter_ or 'Priest,' was there to put all men in

mind of it, in the name of the God who had made all.

Not even in Black Dahomey was it ever, I think, forgotten to the

typhus-fever length. Mungo Park, resourceless, had sunk down to

die under the Negro Village-Tree, a horrible White object in the

eyes of all. But in the poor Black Woman, and her daughter who

stood aghast at him, whose earthly wealth and funded capital

consisted of one small calabash of rice, there lived a heart

richer than _'Laissez-faire:'_ they, with a royal munificence,

boiled their rice for him; they sang all night to him, spinning

assiduous on their cotton distaffs, as he lay to sleep: "Let us

pity the poor white man; no mother has he to fetch him milk, no

sister to grind him corn!" Thou poor black Noble One,--thou

_Lady_ too: did not a God make thee too; was there not in thee

too something of a God!--

Gurth born thrall of Cedric the Saxon has been greatly pitied by

Dryasdust and others. Gurth with the brass collar round his

neck, tending Cedric's pigs in the glades of the wood, is not

what I call an exemplar of human felicity: but Gurth, with the

sky above him, with the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage

round him, and in him at least the certainty of supper and social

lodging when he came home; Gurth to me seems happy, in

comparison with many a Lancashire and Buckinghamshire man, of

these days, not born thrall of anybody! Gurth's brass collar did

not gall him: Cedric _deserved_ to be his Master. The pigs were

Cedric's, but Gurth too would get his parings of them. Gurth had

the inexpressible satisfaction of feeling himself related

indissolubly, though in a rude brass-collar way, to his fellow-

mortals in this Earth. He had superiors, inferiors, equals.--

Gurth is now 'emancipated' long since; has what we call

'Liberty.' Liberty, I am told, is a Divine thing. Liberty when

it becomes the 'Liberty to die by starvation' is not so divine!

Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in

his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and

to walk thereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he

actually was able for; and then, by permission, persuasion, and

even compulsion, to set about doing of the same! That is his

true blessedness, honour, 'liberty' and maximum of wellbeing: if

liberty be not that, I for one have small care about liberty.

You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you

violate his liberty, you that are wise; and keep him, were it in

strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices! Every stupid, every

cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpable madman: his true

liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every wiser man,

could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way,

lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him

to go a little righter. O if thou really art my _Senior,_

Seigneur, my _Elder,_ Presbyter or Priest,--if thou art in very

deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to

'conquer' me, to command me! If thou do know better than I what

is good and right, I conjure thee in the name of God, force me to

do it; were it by never such brass collars, whips and handcuffs,

leave me not to walk over precipices! That I have been called,

by all the Newspapers, a 'free man' will avail me little, if my

pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that the Newspapers

had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet

voices to name me, and I had attained not death, but life!--

Liberty requires new definitions.

A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly, of Baseness;

Stupidity, Poltroonery and all that brood of things, dwells deep

in some men: still deeper in others an unconscious abhorrence

and intolerance, clothed moreover by the beneficent Supreme

Powers in what stout appetites, energies, egoisms so-called, are

suitable to it;--these latter are your Conquerors, Romans,

Normans Russians, Indo-English; Founders of what we call

Aristocracies: Which indeed have they not the most 'divine

right' to found;--being themselves very truly [greek], BRAVEST,

BEST; and conquering generally a confused rabble of WORST, or at

lowest; clearly enough, of WORSE? I think their divine right,

tried, with affirmatory verdict, in the greatest Law-Court known

to me, was good! A class of men who are dreadfully exclaimed

against by Dryasdust; of whom nevertheless beneficent Nature has

oftentimes had need; and may, alas, again have need.

When, across the hundredfold poor scepticisms, trivialisms, and

constitutional cobwebberies of Dryasdust, you catch any

glimpse of a William the Conqueror, a Tancred of Hauteville or

such like,--do you not discern veritably some rude outline of a

true God-made King; whom not the Champion of England cased in

tin, but all Nature and the Universe were calling to the throne?

It is absolutely necessary that he get thither. Nature does not

mean her poor Saxon children to perish, of obesity, stupor or

other malady, as yet: a stern Ruler and Line of Rulers therefore

is called in,--a stern but most beneficent _Perpetual House-

Surgeon_ is called in, by Nature, and even the appropriate fees

are provided for him! Dryasdust talks lamentably about Hereward

and the Fen Counties; fate of Earl Waltheof; Yorkshire and the

North reduced to ashes; all which is undoubtedly lamentable.

But even Dryasdust apprises me of one fact: 'A child; in this

William's reign, might have carried a purse of gold from end to

end of England. My erudite friend, it is a fact which outweighs

a thousand! Sweep away thy constitutional, sentimental and other

cobwebberies; look eye to eye, if thou still have any eye, in

the face of this big burly William Bastard: thou wilt see a

fellow of most flashing discernment, of most strong lionheart;--

in whom, as it were, within a frame of oak and iron, the gods

have planted the soul of 'a man of genius!' Dost thou call that

nothing? I call it an immense thing!--Rage enough was in this

Willelmus Conquestor, rage enough for his occasions;--and yet the

essential element of him, as of all such men, is not scorching

_fire,_ but shining illuminative _light._ Fire and light are

strangely interchangeable; nay, at bottom, I have found them

different forms of the same most godlike 'elementary substance'

in our world: a thing worth stating in these days. The

essential element of this Conquestor is, first of all, the most

sun-eyed perception of what is really what on this God's-Earth;--

which, thou wilt find, does mean at bottom 'Justice,' and

'Virtues' not a few: _Conformity_ to what the Maker has seen

good to make; that, I suppose, will mean Justice and a Virtue

or two?--

Dost thou think Willelmus Conquestor would have tolerated ten

years' jargon, one hour's jargon, on the propriety of killing

Cotton-manufactures by partridge Corn-Laws? I fancy, this was

not the man to knock out of his night's-rest with nothing but a

noisy bedlamism in your mouth! "Assist us still better to bush

the partridges; strangle Plugson who spins the shirts?"--_"Par

la Splendeur de Dieu!"_--Dost thou think Willelmus Conquestor, in

this new time, with Steam-engine Captains of Industry on one hand

of him, and Joe-Manton Captains of Idleness on the other, would

have doubted which _was_ really the BEST; which did deserve

strangling, and which not?

I have a certain indestructible regard for Willelmus Conquestor.

A resident House-Surgeon, provided by Nature for her beloved

English People, and even furnished with the requisite 'fees,' as

I said; for he by no means felt himself doing Nature's work,

this Willelmus, but his own work exclusively! And his own work

withal it was; informed _'par la Splendeur de Dieu.'_--I say, it

is necessary to get the work out of such a man, however harsh

that be! When a world, not yet doomed for death, is rushing down

to ever-deeper Baseness and Confusion, it is a dire necessity of

Nature's to bring in her ARISTOCRACIES, her BEST, even by

forcible methods. When their descendants or representatives

cease entirely to _be_ the Best, Nature's poor world will very

soon rush down again to Baseness; and it becomes a dire

necessity of Nature's to cast them out. Hence French

Revolutions, Five-point Charters, Democracies, and a mournful

list of _Etceteras,_ in these our afflicted times.

To what extent Democracy has now reached, how it advances

irresistible with ominous, ever-increasing speed, he that will

open his eyes on any province of human affairs may discern.

Democracy is everywhere the inexorable demand of these ages,

swiftly fulfilling itself. From the thunder of Napoleon battles,

to the jabbering of Open-vestry in St. Mary Axe, all things

announce Democracy. A distinguished man, whom some of my readers

will hear again with pleasure, thus writes to me what in these

days he notes from the Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo, where our

London fashions seem to be in full vogue. Let us hear the Herr

Teufelsdrockh again, were it but the smallest word!

'Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern

you, and contented putting up with the want of them,--alas, thou

too, _mein Lieber,_ seest well how close it is of kin to

_Atheism,_ and other sad _Isms:_ he who discovers no God

whatever, how shall he discover Heroes, the visible Temples of

God?--Strange enough meanwhile it is, to observe with what

thoughtlessness, here in our rigidly Conservative Country, men

rush into Democracy with full cry. Beyond doubt, his Excellenz

the Titular-Herr Ritter Kauderwalsch von Pferdefuss-Quacksalber,

he our distinguished Conservative Premier himself, and all but

the thicker-headed of his Party, discern Democracy to be

inevitable as death, and are even desperate of delaying it much!

'You cannot walk the streets without beholding Democracy announce

itself: the very Tailor has become, if not properly

Sansculottic, which to him would be ruinous, yet a Tailor

unconsciously symbolising, and prophesying with his scissors, the

reign of Equality. What now is our fashionable coat? A thing of

superfinest texture, of deeply meditated cut; with Malineslace

cuffs; quilted with gold; so that a man can carry, without

difficulty, an estate of land on his back? _Keineswegs,_ By no

manner of means! The Sumptuary Laws have fallen into such a

state of desuetude as was never before seen. Our fashionable

coat is an amphibium between barn-sack and drayman's doublet.

The cloth of it is studiously coarse; the colour a speckled

sootblack or rust-brown grey;--the nearest approach to a

Peasant's. And for shape,--thou shouldst see it! The last

consummation of the year now passing over us is definable as

Three Bags: a big bag for the body, two small bags for the arms,

and by way of collar a hem! The first Antique Cheruscan who, of

felt-cloth or bear's-hide, with bone or metal needle, set about

making himself a coat, before Tailors had yet awakened out of

Nothing,--did not he make it even so? A loose wide poke for

body, with two holes to let out the arms; this was his original

coat: to which holes it was soon visible that two small loose

pokes, or sleeves, easily appended, would be an improvement.

'Thus has the Tailor-art, so to speak, overset itself, like most

other things; changed its centre-of-gravity; whirled suddenly

over from zenith to nadir. Your Stulz, with huge Somerset,

vaults from his high shopboard down to the depths of primal

savagery,--carrying much along with him! For I will invite thee

to reflect that the Tailor, as topmost ultimate froth of Human

Society, is indeed swift-passing, evanescent, slippery to

decipher; yet significant of much, nay of all. Topmost

evanescent froth, he is churned up from the very lees, and from

all intermediate regions of the liquor. The general outcome he,

visible to the eye, of what men aimed to do, and were obliged and

enabled to do, in this one public department of symbolising

themselves to each other by covering of their skins. A smack of

all Human Life lies in the Tailor: its wild struggles towards

beauty, dignity, freedom, victory; and how, hemmed in by Sedan

and Huddersfield, by Nescience, Dulness, Prurience, and other sad

necessities and laws of Nature, it has attained just to this:

Grey Savagery of Three Sacks with a hem!

'When the very Tailor verges towards Sansculottism, is it not

ominous? The last Divinity of poor mankind dethroning himself;

sinking _his_ taper too, flame downmost, like the Genius of Sleep

or of Death; admonitory that Tailor-time shall be no more!--For

little as one could advise Sumptuary Laws at the present epoch,

yet nothing is clearer than that where ranks do actually exist,

strict division of costumes will also be enforced; that if we

ever have a new Hierarchy and Aristocracy, acknowledged veritably

as such, for which I daily pray Heaven, the Tailor will reawaken;

and be, by volunteering and appointment, consciously and

unconsciously, a safeguard of that same.'--Certain farther

observations, from the same invaluable pen, on our never-ending

changes of mode, our 'perpetual nomadic and even ape-like

appetite for change and mere change' in all the equipments of our

existence, and the 'fatal revolutionary character' thereby

manifested, we suppress for the present. It may be admitted that

Democracy, in all meanings of the word, is in full career;

irresistible by any Ritter Kauderwalsch or other Son of Adam, as

times go. 'Liberty' is a thing men are determined to have.

But truly, as I had to remark in the meanwhile, 'the liberty of

not being oppressed by your fellow man' is an indispensable, yet

one of the most insignificant fractional parts of Human Liberty.

No man oppresses thee, can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go,

without reason shewn. True; from all men thou art emancipated:

but from Thyself and from the Devil--? No man, wiser, unwiser,

can make thee come or go: but thy own futilities, bewilderments,

thy false appetites for Money, Windsor Georges and such like? No

man oppresses thee, O free and independent Franchiser: but does

not this stupid Porter-pot oppress thee? No Son of Adam can bid

thee come or go; but this absurd Pot of Heavy-wet, this can and

does! Thou art the thrall not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy

own brutal appetites, and this scoured dish of liquor. And thou

pratest of thy liberty? Thou entire blockhead!

Heavy-wet and gin: alas, these are not the only kinds of

thraldom. Thou who walkest in a vain shew, looking out with

ornamental dilettante sniff and serene supremacy at all Life and

all Death; and amblest jauntily; perking up thy poor talk into

crotchets, thy poor conduct into fatuous somnambulisms;--and art

as an 'enchanted Ape' under God's sky, where thou mightest have

been a man, had proper Schoolmasters and Conquerors, and

Constables with cat-o'-nine tails, been vouchsafed thee: dost

thou call that 'liberty?' Or your unreposing Mammon-worshipper,

again, driven, as if by Galvanisms, by Devils and Fixed-Ideas,

who rises early and sits late, chasing the impossible; straining

every faculty 'to fill himself with the east wind '--how merciful

were it, could you, by mild persuasion or by the severest tyranny

so-called, check him in his mad path, turn him into a wiser one!

All painful tyranny, in that case again, were but mild 'surgery;'

the pain of it cheap, as health and life, instead of galvanism

and fixed-idea, are cheap at any price.

Sure enough, of all paths a man could strike into, there is, at

any given moment, a _best path_ for every man; a thing which,

here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do;--which

could he be but led or driven to do, he were then doing 'like a

man,' as we phrase it; all men and gods agreeing with him, the

whole Universe virtually exclaiming Well-done to him! His

success, in such case, were complete; his felicity a maximum.

This path, to find this path and walk in it, is the one thing

needful for him. Whatsoever forwards him in that, let it come to

him even in the shape of blows and spurnings, is liberty:

whatsoever hinders him, were it wardmotes, open-vestries,

pollbooths, tremendous cheers, rivers of heavy-wet, is slavery.

The notion that a man's liberty consists in giving his vote at

election-hustings, and saying, "Behold now I too have my twenty-

thousandth part of a Talker in our National Palaver; will not

all the gods be good to me?"--is one of the pleasantest! Nature

nevertheless is kind at present; and puts it into the heads of

many, almost of all. The liberty especially which has to

purchase itself by social isolation, and each man standing

separate from the other, having 'no business with him' but a

cash-account: this is such a liberty as the Earth seldom saw;--

as the Earth will not long put up with, recommend it how you may.

This liberty turns out, before it have long continued in action,

with all men flinging up their caps round it, to be, for the

Working Millions a liberty to die by want of food; for the Idle

Thousands and Units, alas, a still more fatal liberty to live in

want of work; to have no earnest duty to do in this God's-World

any more. What becomes of a man in such predicament? Earth's

Laws are silent; and Heaven's speak in a voice which is not

heard. No work, and the ineradicable need of work, give rise to

new very wondrous life-philosophies, new very wondrous life-

practices! Dilettantism, Pococurantism, Beau-Brummelism, with

perhaps an occasional, half-mad, protesting burst of Byronism,

establish themselves: at the end of a certain period,--if you go

back to 'the Dead Sea,' there is, say our Moslem friends, a very

strange 'Sabbath-day' transacting itself there!--Brethren, we

know but imperfectly yet, after ages of Constitutional

Government, what Liberty is and Slavery is.

Democracy, the chase of Liberty in that direction, shall go its

full course; unrestrainable by him of Pferdefuss-Quacksalber, or

any of _his_ household. The Toiling Millions of Mankind, in most

vital need and passionate instinctive desire of Guidance, shall

cast away False-Guidance; and hope, for an hour, that No-

Guidance will suffice them: but it can be for an hour only. The

smallest item of human Slavery is the oppression of man by his

Mock-Superiors; the palpablest, but I say at bottom the

smallest. Let him shake off such oppression, trample it

indignantly under his feet; I blame him not, I pity and commend

him. But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well shaken off, the

grand problem yet remains to solve: That of finding government

by your Real-Superiors! Alas, how shall we ever learn the

solution of that, benighted, bewildered, sniffing, sneering,

godforgetting unfortunates as we are? It is a work for

centuries; to be taught us by tribulations, confusions,

insurrections, obstructions; who knows if not by conflagration

and despair! It is a lesson inclusive of all other lessons; the

hardest of all lessons to learn.

One thing I do know: Those Apes chattering on the branches by

the Dead Sea never got it learned; but chatter there to this

day. To them no Moses need come a second time; a thousand

Moseses would be but so many painted Phantasms, interesting

Fellow-Apes of new strange aspect,--whom they would 'invite to

dinner,' be glad to meet with in lion-soirees. To them the voice

of Prophecy, of heavenly monition, is quite ended. They chatter

there, all Heaven shut to them, to the end of the world. The

unfortunates! O, what is dying of hunger, with honest tools in

your hand, with a manful purpose in your heart, and much real

labour lying round you done, in comparison? You honestly quit

your tools; quit a most muddy confused coil of sore work, short

rations, of sorrows, dispiritments and contradictions, having now

honestly done with it all;--and await, not entirely in a

distracted manner, what the Supreme Powers, and the Silences and

the Eternities may have to say to you.