A second thing I know: This lesson will have to be learned,--

under penalties! England will either learn it, or England also

will cease to exist among Nations. England will either learn to

reverence its Heroes, and discriminate them from its Sham-Heroes

and Valets and gaslighted Histrios; and to prize them as the

audible God's-voice, amid all inane jargons and temporary market-

cries, and say to them with heart-loyalty, "Be ye King and

Priest, and Gospel and Guidance for us:" or else England will

continue to worship new and ever-new forms of Quackhood,--and so,

with what resiliences and reboundings matters little, go down to

the Father of Quacks! Can I dread such things of England?

Wretched, thick-eyed, gross-hearted mortals, why will ye worship

lies, and 'Stuffed Clothes-suits, created by the ninth-parts of

men!' It is not your purses that suffer; your farm-rents, your

commerces, your mill-revenues, loud as ye lament over these; no,

it is not these alone, but a far deeper than these: it is your

Souls that lie dead, crushed down under despicable Nightmares,

Atheisms, Brain-fumes; and are not Souls at all, but mere

succedanea for _salt_ to keep your bodies and their appetites

from putrefying! Your cotton-spinning and thrice-miraculous

mechanism, what is this too, by itself, but a larger kind of

Animalism? Spiders can spin, Beavers can build and shew

contrivance; the Ant lays up accumulation of capital, and has,

for aught I know, a Bank of Antland. If there is no soul in man

higher than all that, did it reach to sailing on the cloud-rack

and spinning sea-sand; then I say, man is but an animal, a more

cunning kind of brute: he has no soul, but only a succedaneum

for salt. Whereupon, seeing himself to be truly of the beasts

that perish, he ought to admit it, I think;--and also straightway

universally kill himself; and so, in a manlike manner, at least,

_end,_ and wave these bruteworlds _his_ dignified farewell!--

Chapter XIV

Sir Jabesh Windbag

Oliver Cromwell, whose body they hung on their Tyburn Gallows

because he had found the Christian Religion inexecutable in this

country, remains to me by far the remarkablest Governor we have

had here for the last five centuries or so. For the last five

centuries, there has been no Governor among us with anything like

similar talent; and for the last two centuries, no Governor, we

may say, with the possibility of similar talent,--with an idea in

the heart of him capable of inspiring similar talent, capable of

coexisting therewith. When you consider that Oliver believed in

a God, the difference between Oliver's position and that of any

subsequent Governor of this Country becomes, the more you reflect

on it, the more immeasurable!

Oliver, no volunteer in Public Life, but plainly a ballotted

soldier strictly ordered thither, enters upon Public Life;

comports himself there like a man who carried his own life itself

in his hand; like a man whose Great Commander's eye was always

on him. Not without results. Oliver, well-advanced in years,

finds now, by Destiny and his own Deservings, or as he himself

better phrased it, by wondrous successive 'Births of Providence,'

the Government of England put into his hands. In senate-house

and battle-field, in counsel and in action, in private and in

public, this man has proved himself a man: England and the voice

of God, through waste awful whirlwinds and environments, speaking

to his great heart, summon him to assert formally, in the way of

solemn Public Fact and as a new piece of English Law, what

informally and by Nature's eternal Law needed no asserting, That

he, Oliver, was the Ablest-Man of England, the King of England;

that he, Oliver, would undertake governing England. His way of

making this same 'assertion,' the one way he had of making it,

has given rise to immense criticism: but the assertion itself in

what way soever 'made,' is it not somewhat of a solemn one,

somewhat of a tremendous one!

And now do but contrast this Oliver with my right honourable

friend Sir Jabesh Windbag, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Viscount

Mealymouth, Earl of Windlestraw, or what other Cagliostro,

Cagliostrino, Cagliostraccio, the course of Fortune and

Parliamentary Majorities has constitutionally guided to that

dignity, any time during these last sorrowful hundred-and-fifty

years! Windbag, weak in the faith of a God, which he believes

only at Church on Sundays, if even then; strong only in the

faith that Paragraphs and Plausibilities bring votes; that Force

of Public Opinion, as he calls it, is the primal Necessity of

Things, and highest God we have:--Windbag, if we will consider

him, has a problem set before him which may be ranged in the

impossible class. He is a Columbus minded to sail to the

indistinct country of NOWHERE, to the indistinct country of

WHITHERWARD, by the _friendship_ of those same waste-tumbling

Water-Alps and howling waltz of All the Winds; not by conquest

of them and in spite of them, but by friendship of them, when

once _they_ have made up their mind! He is the most original

Columbus I ever saw. Nay, his problem is not an impossible one:

he will infallibly _arrive_ at that same country of NOWHERE; his

indistinct Whitherward will be a _Thither_ward! In the Ocean

Abysses and Locker of Davy Jones, there certainly enough do he

and _his_ ship's company, and all their cargo and navigatings, at

last find lodgement.

Oliver knew that his America lay THERE, Westward Ho;--and it was

not entirely by _friendship_ of the Water-Alps, and yeasty insane

Froth-Oceans, that he meant to get thither! He sailed

accordingly; had compass-card, and Rules of Navigation,--older

and greater than these Froth-Oceans, old as the Eternal God! Or

again, do but think of this. Windbag in these his probable five

years of office has to prosper and get Paragraphs: the

Paragraphs of these five years must be his salvation, or he is a

lost man; redemption nowhere in the Worlds or in the Times

discoverable for him. Oliver too would like his Paragraphs;

successes, popularities in these five years are not undesirable

to him: but mark, I say, this enormous circumstance: _after_

these five years are gone and done, comes an Eternity for Oliver!

Oliver has to appear before the Most High judge: the utmost flow

of Paragraphs, the utmost ebb of them, is now, in strictest

arithmetic, verily no matter at all; its exact value _zero;_ an

account altogether erased! Enormous;--which a man, in these

days, hardly fancies with an effort! Oliver's Paragraphs are all

done, his battles, division-lists, successes all summed: and now

in that awful unerring Court of Review, the real question first

rises, Whether he has succeeded at all; whether he has not been

defeated miserably forevermore? Let him come with world-wide

_Io-Paens,_ these avail him not. Let him come covered over with

the world's execrations, gashed with ignominious death-wounds,

the gallows-rope about his neck: what avails that? The word

is, Come thou brave and faithful; the word is, Depart thou

quack and accursed!

O Windbag, my right honourable friend, in very truth I pity thee.

I say, these Paragraphs, and low or loud votings of thy poor

fellow-blockheads of mankind, will never guide thee in any

enterprise at all. Govern a country on such guidance? Thou

canst not make a pair of shoes, sell a pennyworth of tape, on

such. No, thy shoes are vamped up falsely to meet the market;

behold, the leather only _seemed_ to be tanned; thy shoes melt

under me to rubbishy pulp, and are not veritable mud-defying

shoes, but plausible vendible similitudes of shoes,--thou

unfortunate, and I! O my right honourable friend, when the

Paragraphs flowed in, who was like Sir Jabesh? On the swelling

tide he mounted; higher, higher, triumphant, heaven-high. But

the Paragraphs again ebbed out, as unwise Paragraphs needs must:

Sir Jabesh lies stranded, sunk and forever sinking in ignominious

ooze; the Mud-nymphs, and ever-deepening bottomless Oblivion,

his portion to eternal time. 'Posterity?' Thou appealest to

Posterity, thou? My right honourable friend, what will Posterity

do for thee! The voting of Posterity, were it continued through

centuries in thy favour, will be quite inaudible, extra-forensic,

without any effect whatever. Posterity can do simply nothing for

a man; nor even seem to do much, if the man be not brainsick.

Besides, to tell thee truth, the bets are a thousand to one,

Posterity will not hear of thee, my right honourable friend!

Posterity, I have found, has generally his own Windbags

sufficiently trumpeted in all market-places, and no leisure to

attend to ours. Posterity, which has made of Norse Odin a

similitude, and of Norman William a brute monster, what will or

can it make of English Jabesh? O Heavens, 'Posterity!'

"These poor persecuted Scotch Covenanters," said I to my inquiring

Frenchman, in such stinted French as stood at command, _"ils

s'en appelaient a"_--_"A la Posterite,"_ interrupted he, helping

me out.--_"Ah, Monsieur, non, mille fois non!_ They appealed to

the Eternal God; not to Posterity at all! _C'etait different."_

Chapter XV

Morrison Again

Nevertheless, O Advanced Liberal, one cannot promise thee any

'New Religion,' for some time; to say truth, I do not think we

have the smallest chance of any! Will the candid reader, by way

of closing this Book Third, listen to a few transient remarks on

that subject?

Candid readers have not lately met with any man who had less

notion to interfere with their Thirty-Nine, or other Church-

Articles; wherewith, very helplessly as is like, they may have

struggled to form for themselves some not inconceivable

hypothesis about this Universe, and their own Existence there.

Superstition, my friend, is far from me; Fanaticism, for any

_Fanum_ likely to arise soon on this Earth, is far. A man's

Church-Articles are surely articles of price to him; and in

these times one has to be tolerant of many strange 'Articles,'

and of many still stranger 'No-articles,' which go about

placarding themselves in a very distracted manner,--the numerous

long placard-poles, and questionable infirm paste-pots,

interfering with one's peaceable thoroughfare sometimes!

Fancy a man, moreover, recommending his fellow men to believe in

God, that so Chartism might abate, and the Manchester Operatives

be got to spin peaceably! The idea is more distracted than any

placard-pole seen hitherto in a public thoroughfare of men! My

friend, if thou ever do come to believe in God, thou wilt find

all Chartism, Manchester riot, Parliamentary incompetence,

Ministries of Windbag, and the wildest Social Dissolutions, and

the burning up of this entire Planet, a most small matter in

comparison. Brother, this Planet, I find, is but an

inconsiderable sandgrain in the continents of Being: this

Planet's poor temporary interests, thy interests and my interests

there, when I look fixedly into that eternal Light-Sea and Flame-

Sea with _its_ eternal interests, dwindle literally into Nothing;

my speech of it is--silence for the while. I will as soon think

of making Galaxies and Star Systems to guide little herring-

vessels by, as of preaching Religion that the Constable may

continue possible. O my Advanced-Liberal friend, this new second

progress, of proceeding 'to invent God,' is a very strange one!

Jacobinism unfolded into Saint-Simonism bodes innumerable blessed

things; but the thing itself might draw tears from a Stoic!--As

for me, some twelve or thirteen New Religions, heavy Packets,

most of them unfranked, having arrived here from various parts of

the world, in a space of six calendar months, I have instructed

my invaluable friend the Stamped Postman to introduce no more of

them, if the charge exceed one penny.

Henry of Essex, duelling in that Thames Island, near to Reading

Abbey, had a religion. But was it in virtue of his seeing armed

Phantasms of St. Edmund 'on the rim of the horizon,' looking

minatory on him? Had that, intrinsically, anything to do with

his religion at all? Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner

Light or Moral Conscience of his own soul; such as is vouchsafed

still to all souls of men;--which Inner Light shone here 'through

such intellectual and other media' as there were; producing

'Phantasms,' Kircherean Visual-Spectra, according to

circumstances! It is so with all men. The clearer my Inner

Light may shine, through the _less_ turbid media; the _fewer_

Phantasms it may produce,--the gladder surely shall I be, and not

the sorrier! Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced-

Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all religion

past, present and to come, was this only: To keep that same

Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining--which

certainly the 'Phantasms' and the 'turbid media' were not

essential for! All religion was here to remind us, better or

worse, of what we already know better or worse, of the quite

_infinite_ difference there is between a Good man and a Bad; to

bid us love infinitely the one, abhor and avoid infinitely the

other,--strive infinitely to _be_ the one, and not to be the

other. 'All religion issues in due Practical Hero-worship: He

that has a soul unasphyxied will never want a religion; he that

has a soul asphyxied, reduced to a succedaneum for salt, will

never find any religion, though you rose from the dead to preach

him one.

But indeed, when men and reformers ask for 'a religion,' it is

analogous to their asking, 'What would you have us to do?' and

such like. They fancy that their religion too shall be a kind of

Morrison's Pill, which they have only to swallow once, and all

will be well. Resolutely once gulp down your Religion, your

Morrison's Pill, you have it all plain sailing now; you can

follow your affairs, your no-affairs, go along money-hunting,

pleasure-hunting, dilettanteing, dangling, and miming and

chattering like a Dead-Sea Ape: your Morrison will do your

business for you. Men's notions are very strange!--Brother, I

say there is not, was not, nor will ever be, in the wide circle

of Nature, any Pill or Religion of that character. Man cannot

afford thee such; for the very gods it is impossible. I advise

thee to renounce Morrison; once for all, quit hope of the

Universal Pill. For body, for soul, for individual or society,

there has not any such article been made. _Non extat._ In

Created Nature it is not, was not, will not be. In the void

imbroglios of Chaos only, and realms of Bedlam, does some shadow

of it hover, to bewilder and bemock the poor inhabitants _there._

Rituals, Liturgies, Creeds, Hierarchies: all this is not

religion; all this, were it dead as Odinism, as Fetishism, does

not kill religion at all! It is Stupidity alone, with never so

many rituals, that kills religion. Is not this still a World?

Spinning Cotton under Arkwright and Adam Smith; founding Cities

by the Fountain of Juturna, on the Janiculum Mount; tilling

Canaan under Prophet Samuel and Psalmist David, man is ever man;

the missionary of Unseen Powers; and great and victorious, while

he continues true to his mission; mean, miserable, foiled, and

at last annihilated and trodden out of sight and memory, when he

proves untrue. Brother, thou art a Man, I think; thou are not a

mere building Beaver, or two-legged Cotton-Spider; thou hast

verily a Soul in thee, asphyxied or otherwise! Sooty

Manchester,--it too is built on the infinite Abysses;

overspanned by the skyey Firmaments; and there is birth in it,

and death in it;--and it is every whit as wonderful, as fearful,

unimaginable, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic City. Go or

stand, in what time, in what place we will, are there not

Immensities, Eternities over us, around us, in us:

'Solemn before us,

Veiled, the dark Portal,

Goal of all mortal:--

Stars silent rest o'er us,

Graves under us silent'

Between _these_ two great Silences, the hum of all our spinning

cylinders, Trades-Unions, Anti-Corn-Law Leagues and Carlton Clubs

goes on. Stupidity itself ought to pause a little, and consider

that. I tell thee, through all thy Ledgers, Supply-and-demand

Philosophies, and daily most modern melancholy Business and Cant,

there does shine the presence of a Primeval Unspeakable; and

thou wert wise to recognise, not with lips only, that same!

The Maker's Laws, whether they are promulgated in Sinai Thunder,

to the ear or imagination, or quite otherwise promulgated, are

the Laws of God; transcendant, everlasting, imperatively

demanding obedience from all men. This, without any thunder, or

with never so much thunder, thou, if there be any soul left in

thee, canst know of a truth. The Universe, I say, is made by

Law; the great Soul of the World is just and not unjust. Look

thou, if thou have eyes or soul left, into this great shoreless

Incomprehensible: in the heart of its tumultuous Appearances,

Embroilments, and mad Time-vortexes, is there not, silent,

eternal, an All-just, an All-beautiful; sole Reality and

ultimate controlling Power of the whole? This is not a figure of

speech; this is a fact. The fact of Gravitation known to all

animals, is not surer than this inner Fact, which may be known to

all men. He who knows this, it will sink, silent, awful,

unspeakable, into his heart. He will say with Faust: "Who

_dare_ name HIM?" Most rituals or 'namings' he will fall in with

at present, are like to be 'namings'--which shall be nameless!

In silence, in the Eternal Temple, let him worship, if there be

no fit word. Such knowledge, the crown of his whole spiritual

being, the life of his life, let him keep and sacredly walk by.

He has a religion. Hourly and daily, for himself and for the

whole world, a faithful, unspoken, but not ineffectual prayer

rises, "Thy will be done." His whole work on Earth is an

emblematic spoken or acted prayer, Be the will of God done on

Earth,--not the Devil's will, or any of the Devil's servants'

wills! He has a religion, this man; an everlasting Loadstar

that beams the brighter in the Heavens, the darker here on Earth

grows the night around him. Thou, if thou know not this, what

are all rituals, liturgies, mythologies, mass-chantings, turnings

of the rotatory calabash? They are as nothing; in a good many

respects they are as _less._ Divorced from this, getting half-

divorced from this, they are a thing to fill one with a kind of

horror; with a sacred inexpressible pity and fear. The most

tragical thing a human eye can look on. It was said to the

Prophet, "Behold, I will shew thee worse things than these:

women weeping to Thammuz." That was the acme of the Prophet's

vision,--then as now.

Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai Thunder: I know more or less

the history of these; the rise, progress, decline and fall of

these. Can thunder from all the thirty-two azimuths, repeated

daily for centuries of years, make God's Laws more godlike to me?

Brother, No. Perhaps I am grown to be a man now; and do not

need the thunder and the terror any longer! Perhaps I am above

being frightened; perhaps it is not Fear, but Reverence alone,

that shall now lead me!--Revelations, Inspirations? Yes: and

thy own god-created Soul; dost thou not call that a

`revelation?' Who made THEE? Where didst Thou come from? The

Voice of Eternity, if thou be not a blasphemer and poor asphyxied

mute, speaks with that tongue of thine! _Thou_ art the latest

Birth of Nature; it is 'the Inspiration of the Almighty' that

giveth thee understanding! My brother, my brother!--

Under baleful Atheisms, Mammonisms, Joe-Manton Dilettantisms,

with their appropriate Cants and Idolisms, and whatsoever

scandalous rubbish obscures and all but extinguishes the soul of

man,--religion now is; its Laws, written if not on stone tables,

yet on the Azure of Infinitude, in the inner heart of God's

Creation, certain as Life, certain as Death! I say the Laws are

there, and thou shalt not disobey them. It were better for thee

not. Better a hundred deaths than yes. Terrible 'penalties'

withal, if thou still need 'penalties,' are there for disobeying.

Dost thou observe, O redtape Politician, that fiery infernal

Phenomenon, which men name FRENCH REVOLUTION, sailing, unlooked-

for, unbidden; through thy inane Protocol Dominion:--far-seen,

with splendour not of Heaven? Ten centuries will see it. There

were Tanneries at Meudon for human skins. And Hell, very truly

Hell, had power over God's upper Earth for a season. The

cruelest Portent that has risen into created Space these ten

centuries: let us hail it, with awestruck repentant hearts, as

the voice once more of a God, though of one in wrath. Blessed be

the God's-voice; for _it_ is true, and Falsehoods have to cease

before it! But for that same preternatural quasi-infernal

Portent; one could not know what to make of this wretched world,

in these days' at all. The deplorablest quack-ridden, and now

hunger-ridden, downtrodden Despicability and _Flebile Ludibrium,_

of redtape Protocols, rotatory Calabashes, Poor-Law Bastilles:

who is there that could think of _its_ being fated to continue?--

Penalties enough, my brother! This penalty inclusive of all:

Eternal Death to thy own hapless Self, if thou heed no other.

Eternal Death, I say,--with many meanings old and new, of which

let this single one suffice us here: The eternal impossibility

for thee to _be_ aught but a Chimera, and swift-vanishing

deceptive Phantasm, in God's Creation;--swift-vanishing, never to

reappear: why should it reappear! Thou hadst one chance, thou

wilt never have another. Everlasting ages will roll on, and no

other be given thee. The foolishest articulate-speaking soul now

extant, may not he say to himself: "A whole Eternity I waited to

be born; and now I have a whole Eternity waiting to see what I

will do when born!" This is not Theology, this is Arithmetic.

And thou but half-discernest this; thou but half-believest it?

Alas, on the shores of the Dead Sea on Sabbath, there goes on

a Tragedy!--

But we will leave this of 'Religion;' of which, to say truth, it

is chiefly profitable in these unspeakable days to keep silence.

Thou needest no 'New Religion;' nor art thou like to get any.

Thou hast already more 'religion' than thou makest use of. This

day, thou knowest ten commanded duties, seest in thy mind ten

things which should be done, for one that thou doest! Do one of

them; this of itself will skew thee ten others which can and

shall be done. "But my future fate?" Yes, thy future fate,

indeed? Thy future fate, while thou makest _it_ the chief

question, seems to me--extremely questionable! I do not think it

can be good. Norse Odin, immemorial centuries ago, did not he,

though a poor Heathen, in the dawn of Time, teach us that, for

the Dastard there was and could be no good fate; no harbour

anywhere, save down with Hela, in the pool of Night! Dastards,

Knaves, are they that lust for Pleasure, that tremble at Pain.

For this world and for the next, Dastards are a class of

creatures made to be 'arrested;' they are good for nothing else,

can look for nothing else. A greater than Odin has been here. A

greater than Odin has taught us--not a greater Dastardism, I

hope! My brother, thou must pray for a _soul;_ struggle, as

with life-and-death energy, to get back thy soul! Know that

'religion' is no Morrison's Pill from without, but a reawakening

of thy own Self from within:--and, above all, leave me alone of

thy 'religions' and 'new religions' here and elsewhere! I am

weary of this sick croaking for a Morrison's-Pill religion; for

any and for every such. I want none such; and discern all such

to be impossible. The resuscitation of old liturgies fallen

dead; much more, the manufacture of new liturgies that will

never be alive: how hopeless Stylitisms, eremite fanaticisms and

fakeerisms; spasmodic agonistic posturemakings, and narrow,

cramped, morbid, if forever noble wrestlings: all this is not a

thing desirable to me. It is a thing the world _has_ done once,

--when its beard was not grown as now!

And yet there is, at worst, one Liturgy which does remain forever

unexceptionable: that of _Praying_ (as the old Monks did withal)

_by Working._ And indeed the Prayer which accomplished itself in

special chapels at stated hours, and went not with a man, rising

up from all his Work and Action, at all moments sanctifying the

same,--what was it ever good for? 'Work is Worship:' yes, in a

highly considerable sense,--which, in the present state of all

'worship,' who is there that can unfold! He that understands it

well, understands the Prophecy of the whole Future; the last

Evangel, which has included all others. Its cathedral the Dome

of Immensity,--hast thou seen it? coped with the star-galaxies;

paved with the green mosaic of land and ocean; and for altar,

verily, the Star-throne of the Eternal! Its litany and psalmody

the noble acts, the heroic work and suffering, and true Heart-

utterance of all the Valiant of the Sons of Men. Its choir-music

the ancient Winds and Oceans, and deep-toned, inarticulate, but

most speaking voices of Destiny and History,--supernal ever as of

old. Between two great Silences:

'Stars silent rest o o'er us,

Graves under us silent!'

Between which two great Silences, do not, as we said, all human

Noises, in the naturalest times, most preternaturally march

and roll?--

I will insert this also, in a lower strain, from Sauerteig's

_Aesthetische Springwurzel._ 'Worship?' says he: 'Before that

inane tumult of Hearsay filled men's heads, while the world lay

yet silent, and the heart true and open, many things were

Worship! To the primeval man whatsoever good came, descended on

him (as, in mere fact, it ever does) direct from God; whatsoever

duty lay visible for him, this a Supreme God had prescribed. To

the present hour I ask thee, Who else? For the primeval man, in

whom dwelt Thought, this Universe was all a Temple; Life

everywhere a Worship.

'What Worship, for example, is there not in mere Washing!

Perhaps one of the most moral things a man, in common cases, has

it in his power to do. Strip thyself, go into the bath, or were

it into the limpid pool and running brook, and there wash and be

clean; thou wilt step out again a purer and a better man. This

consciousness of perfect outer pureness, that to thy skin there

now adheres no foreign speck of imperfection, how it radiates in

on thee, with cunning symbolic influences, to thy very soul!

Thou hast an increase of tendency towards all good things

whatsoever. The oldest Eastern Sages, with joy and holy

gratitude, had felt it so,--and that it was the Maker's gift and

will. Whose else is it? It remains a religious duty, from

oldest times, in the East.--Nor could Herr Professor Strauss,

when I put the question, deny that for us at present it is still

such here in the West! To that dingy fuliginous Operative,

emerging from his soot-mill, what is the first duty I will

prescribe, and offer help towards? That he clean the skin of

him. _Can_ he pray, by any ascertained method? One knows not

entirely:--but with soap and a sufficiency of water, he can wash.

Even the dull English feel something of this; they have a

saying, "Cleanliness is near of kin to Godliness:"--yet never, in

any country, saw I operative men worse washed, and, in a climate

drenched with the softest cloud-water, such a scarcity of

baths!'--Alas, Sauerteig, our 'operative men' are at present

short even of potatoes: what 'duty' can you prescribe to them!

Or let us give a glance at China. Our new friend, the Emperor

there, is Pontiff of three hundred million men; who do all live

and work, these many centuries now; authentically patronised by

Heaven so far; and therefore must have some 'religion' of a

kind. T his Emperor-Pontiff has, in fact, a religious belief of

certain Laws of Heaven; observes, with a religious rigour, his

'three thousand punctualities,' given out by men of insight, some

sixty generations since, as a legible transcript of the same,--

the Heavens do seem to say, not totally an incorrect one. He has

not much of a ritual, this Pontiff-Emperor; believes, it is

likest, with the old Monks, that 'Labour is Worship.' His most

public Act of Worship, it appears, is the drawing solemnly at a

certain day, on the green bosom of our Mother Earth, when the

Heavens, after dead black winter, have again with their vernal

radiances awakened her, a distinct red Furrow with the Plough,--

signal that all the Ploughs of China are to begin ploughing and

worshipping! It is notable enough. He, in sight of the Seen and

Unseen Powers, draws his distinct red Furrow there; saying, and

praying, in mute symbolism, so many most eloquent things!

If you ask this Pontiff, "Who made him? What is to become of him

and us?" he maintains a dignified reserve; waves his hand and

pontiff-eyes over the unfathomable deep of Heaven, the 'Tsien,'

the azure kingdoms of Infinitude; as if asking, "is it doubtful

that we are right _well_ made? Can aught that is _wrong_ become

of us?"--He and his three hundred millions (it is their chief

'punctuality') visit yearly the Tombs of their Fathers; each man

the Tomb of his Father and his Mother: alone there, in silence,

with what of 'worship' or of other thought there may be, pauses

solemnly each man; the divine Skies all silent over him; the

divine Graves, and this divinest Grave, all silent under him;

the pulsings of his own soul, if he have any soul, alone audible.

Truly it may be a kind of worship! Truly, if a man cannot get

some glimpse into the Eternities, looking through this portal,--

through what other need he try it?

Our friend the Pontiff-Emperor permits cheerfully, though with

contempt, all manner of Buddhists, Bonzes, Talapoins and such

like, to build brick Temples, on the voluntary principle; to

worship with what of chantings, paper-lanterns and tumultuous

brayings, pleases them; and make night hideous, since they find

some comfort in so doing. Cheerfully, though with contempt. He

is a wiser Pontiff than many persons think! He is as yet the one

Chief Potentate or Priest in this Earth who has made a distinct

systematic attempt at what we call the ultimate result of all

religion, _'Practical_ Hero-worship:' he does incessantly, with

true anxiety, in such way as he can, search and sift (it would

appear) his whole enormous population for the Wisest born among

them; by which Wisest, as by born Kings, these three hundred

million men are governed. The Heavens, to a certain extent, do

appear to countenance him. These three hundred millions actually

make porcelain, souchong tea, with innumerable other things; and

fight, under Heaven's flag, against Necessity;--and have fewer

Seven-Years Wars, Thirty-Years Wars, French-Revolution Wars, and

infernal fightings with each other, than certain millions

elsewhere have!

Nay, in our poor distracted Europe itself, in these newest times,

have there not religious voices risen,--with a religion new and

yet the oldest; entirely indisputable to all hearts of men?

Some I do know, who did not call or think themselves 'Prophets,'

far enough from that; but who were, in very truth, melodious

Voices from the eternal Heart of Nature once again; souls

forever venerable to all that have a soul. A French Revolution

is one phenomenon; as complement and spiritual exponent thereof,

a Poet Goethe and German Literature is to me another. The old

Secular or Practical World, so to speak, having gone up in fire,

is not here the prophecy and dawn of a new Spiritual World,

parent of far nobler, wider, new Practical Worlds? A Life of

Antique devoutness, Antique veracity and heroism, has again

become possible, is again _seen_ actual there, for the most

modern man. A phenomenon, as quiet as it is, comparable for

greatness to no other! 'The great event for the world is, now as

always, the arrival in it of a new Wise Man.' Touches there are,

be the Heavens ever thanked, of new Sphere-melody; audible once

more, in the infinite jargoning discords and poor scrannel-

pipings of the thing called Literature;--priceless there, as the

voice of new Heavenly Psalms! Literature, like the old Prayer-

Collections of the first centuries, were it 'well selected from

and burnt,' contains precious things. For Literature, with all

its printing-presses, puffing-engines and shoreless deafening

triviality, is yet 'the Thought of Thinking Souls.' A sacred

'religion,' if you like the name, does live in the heart of that

strange froth-ocean, not wholly froth, which we call Literature;

and will more and more disclose itself therefrom;--not now as

scorching Fire: the red smoky scorching Fire has purified itself

into white sunny Light. Is not Light grander than Fire? It is

the same element in a state of purity.

My ingenuous readers, we will march out of this Third Book with a

rhythmic word of Goethe's on our tongue; a word which perhaps

has already sung itself, in dark hours and in bright, through

many a heart. To me, finding it devout yet wholly credible and

veritable, full of piety yet free of cant; to me joyfully

finding much in it, and joyfully missing so much in it, this

little snatch of music, by the greatest German Man, sounds like a

stanza in the grand _Road-Song_ and _Marching-Song_ of our great

Teutonic Kindred, wending, wending, valiant and victorious,

through the undiscovered Deeps of Time! He calls it _Mason-

Lodge,_--not Psalm or Hymn:

The Mason's ways are

A type of Existence,

And his persistance

Is as the days are

Of men in this world.

The Future hides in it

Good hap and sorrow;

We press still thorow,

Nought that abides in it

Daunting us,--onward.

And solemn before us,

Veiled, the dark Portal,

Goal of all mortal:--

Stars silent rest o'er us,

Graves under us silent.

While earnest thou gazest,

Comes boding of terror,

Comes phantasm and error,

Perplexes the bravest

With doubt and misgiving.

But heard are the Voices,--

Heard are the Sages,

The Worlds and the Ages:

"Choose well, your choice is

Brief and yet endless:

Here eyes do regard you,

In Eternity's stilness;

Here is all fulness,

Ye brave, to reward you;

Work, and despair not."

Book IV--Horoscope

Chapter I

Aristocracies

To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so

impossible, had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled;

effaced, and what is worse, defaced! The Past cannot be seen;

the Past, looked at through the medium of 'Philosophical History'

in these times, cannot even be _not_ seen: it is misseen;

affirmed to have existed,--and to have been a godless

Impossibility. Your Norman Conquerors, true royal souls, crowned

kings as such, were vulturous irrational tyrants: your Becket

was a noisy egoist and hypocrite; getting his brains spilt on

the floor of Canterbury Cathedral, to secure the main chance,--

somewhat uncertain how! "Enthusiasm," and even "honest

Enthusiasm,"--yes, of course:

'The Dog, to gain his private ends,

_Went_ mad, and bit the Man!'--

For in truth, the eye sees in all things 'what it brought with it

the means of seeing.' A godless century, looking back on

centuries that were godly, produces portraitures more miraculous

than any other. All was inane discord in the Past; brute Force

bore rule everywhere; Stupidity, savage Unreason, fitter for

Bedlam than for a human World! Whereby indeed it becomes

sufficiently natural that the like qualities, in new sleeker

habiliments, should continue in our time to rule. Millions

enchanted in Bastille Workhouses; Irish Widows proving their

relationship by typhus-fever: what would you have? It was ever

so, or worse. Man's History, was it not always even this: The

cookery and eating up of imbecile Dupedom by successful

Quackhood; the battle, with various weapons, of vulturous Quack

and Tyrant against vulturous Tyrant and Quack? No God was in the

Past Time; nothing but. Mechanisms and Chaotic Brute-gods:--how

shall the poor 'Philosophic Historian,' to whom his own century

is all godless, see any God in other centuries?

Men believe in Bibles, and disbelieve in them: but of all Bibles

the frightfulest to disbelieve in is this 'Bible of Universal

History.' This is the Eternal Bible and God's-Book, 'which every

born man,' till once the soul and eyesight are distinguished in

him, 'can and must, with his own eyes, see the God's-Finger

writing!' To discredit this, is an _infidelity_ like no other.

Such infidelity you would punish, if not by fire and faggot,

which are difficult to manage in our times, yet by the most

peremptory order, To hold its peace till it got something wiser

to say. Why should the blessed Silence be broken into noises, to

communicate only the like of this? If the Past have no God's-

Reason in it, nothing but Devil's-Unreason, let the Past be

eternally forgotten: mention it no more;--we whose ancestors

were all hanged, why should we talk of ropes!

It is, in brief, not true that men ever lived by Delirium,

Hypocrisy, Injustice, or any form of Unreason, since they came to

inhabit this Planet. It is not true that they ever did, or ever

will, live except by the reverse of these. Men will again be

taught this. Their acted History will then again be a Heroism;

their written History, what it once was, an Epic. Nay, forever

it is either such; or else it virtually is--Nothing. Were it

written in a thousand volumes, the Unheroic of such volumes

hastens incessantly to be forgotten; the net content of an

Alexandrian Library of Unheroics is, and will ultimately shew

itself to be, _zero._ What man is interested to remember _it,_

have not all men, at all times, the liveliest interest to forget

it?--'Revelations,' if not celestial, then infernal, will teach

us that God is; we shall then, if needful, discern without

difficulty that He has always been! The Dryasdust Philosophisms

and enlightened Scepticisms of the Eighteenth Century, historical

and other, will have to survive for a while with the

Physiologists, as a memorable _Nightmare-Dream._ All this

haggard epoch, with its ghastly Doctrines, and death's-head

Philosophies 'teaching by example' or otherwise, will one day

have become, what to our Moslem friends their godless ages are,

'the Period of Ignorance.

If the convulsive struggles of the last Half-Century have taught

poor struggling convulsed Europe any truth, it may perhaps be

this as the essence of innumerable others: That Europe requires

a real Aristocracy, a real Priesthood, or it cannot continue to

exist. Huge French Revolutions, Napoleonisms, then Bourbonisms

with their corollary of Three Days, finishing in very unfinal

Louis-Philippisms: all this ought to be didactic! All this may

have taught us, That False Aristocracies are insupportable;

that No-Aristocracies, Liberty-and-Equalities are impossible;

that True Aristocracies are at once indispensable and not

easily attained.

Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing Class and a Teaching

Class: these two, sometimes separate, and endeavouring to

harmonise themselves, sometimes conjoined as one, and the King a

Pontiff-King:--there did no Society exist without these two vital

elements, there will none exist. It lies in the very nature of

man: you will visit no remotest village in the most republican

country of the world, where virtually or actually you do not find

these two powers at work. Man, little as he may suppose it, is

necessitated to obey superiors. He is a social being in virtue

of this necessity; nay he could not be gregarious otherwise. He

obeys those whom he esteems better than himself, wiser, braver;

and will forever obey such; and even be ready and delighted to

do it.

The Wiser, Braver: these, a Virtual Aristocracy everywhere and

everywhen, do in all Societies that reach any articulate shape,

develop themselves into a ruling class, an Actual Aristocracy,

with settled modes of operating, what are called laws and even

_private-laws_ or privileges, and so forth; very notable to look

upon in this world.--Aristocracy and Priesthood, we say, are

sometimes united. For indeed the Wiser and the Braver are

properly but one class; no wise man but needed first of all to

be a brave man, or he never had been wise. The noble Priest was

always a noble Aristos to begin with, and something more to end

with. Your Luther, your Knox, your Anselm, Becket, Abbot Samson,

Samuel Johnson, if they had not been brave enough, by what

possibility could they ever have been wise?--If, from accident or

forethought, this your Actual Aristocracy have got discriminated

into Two Classes, there can be no doubt but the Priest Class is

the more dignified; supreme over the other, as governing head is

over active hand. And yet in practice again, it is likeliest the

reverse will be found arranged;--a sign that the arrangement is

already vitiated; that a split is introduced into it, which will

widen and widen till the whole be rent asunder.

In England, in Europe generally, we may say that these two

Virtualities have unfolded themselves into Actualities, in by far

the noblest and richest manner any region of the world ever saw.

A spiritual Guideship, a practical Governorship, fruit of the

grand conscious endeavours, say rather of the immeasurable

unconscious instincts and necessities of men, have established

themselves; very strange to behold. Everywhere, while so much

has been forgotten, you find the King's Palace, and the

Viceking's Castle, Mansion, Manorhouse; till there is not an

inch of ground from sea to sea but has both its King and

Viceking, long due series of Viceking, its Squire, Earl, Duke or

whatever the title of him,--to whom you have given the land that

he may govern you in it.

More touching still, there is not a hamlet where poor peasants

congregate, but by one means and another a Church-Apparatus has

been got together,--roofed edifice, with revenues and belfries;

pulpit, reading-desk, with Books and Methods: possibility, in

short, and strict prescription, That a man stand there and speak

of spiritual things to men. It is beautiful;--even in its great

obscuration and decadence, it is among the beautifulest, most

touching objects one sees on the Earth. This Speaking Man has

indeed, in these times, wandered terribly from the point; has,

alas, as it were totally lost sight of the point: yet, at

bottom, whom have we to compare with him? Of all public

functionaries boarded and lodged on the Industry of Modern

Europe, is there one worthier of the board he has? A man even

professing, and never so languidly making still some endeavour,

to save the souls of men: contrast him with a man professing to

do little but shoot the partridges of men! I wish he could find

the point again, this Speaking One; and stick to it with

tenacity, with deadly energy; for there is need of him yet! The

Speaking Function, this of Truth coming to us with a living

voice, nay in a living shape, and as a concrete practical

exemplar: this, with all our Writing and Printing Functions, has

a perennial place. Could he but find the point again,--take the

old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover, almost in

contact with him, what the _real_ Satanas, and soul-devouring,

world-devouring _Devil,_ now is! Original Sin and such like are

bad enough, I doubt not: but distilled Gin, dark Ignorance,

Stupidity, dark Corn-Law, Bastille and Company, what are they!

_Will_ he discover our new real Satan, whom he has to fight; or

go on droning through his old nose-spectacles about old extinct

Satans; and never see the real one, till he _feel_ him at his

own throat and ours? That is a question, for the world! Let us

not intermeddle with it here.

Sorrowful, phantasmal as this same Double Aristocracy of Teachers

and Governors now looks, it is worth all men's while to know that

the purport of it is and remains noble and most real. Dryasdust,

looking merely at the surface, is greatly in error as to those

ancient Kings. William Conqueror, William Rufus or Redbeard,

Stephen Curthose himself, much more Henry Beauclerc and our brave

Plantagenet Henry: the life of these men was not a vulturous

Fighting; it was a valorous Governing,--to which occasionally

Fighting did, and alas must yet, though far seldomer now,

superadd itself as an accident, a distressing impedimental

adjunct. The fighting too was indispensable, for ascertaining

who had the might over whom, the right over whom. By much hard

fighting, as we once said, 'the unrealities, beaten into dust,

flew gradually off;' and left the plain reality and fact, "Thou

stronger than I; thou wiser than I; thou king, and subject I,"

in a somewhat clearer condition.

Truly we cannot enough admire, in those Abbot-Samson and William-

Conqueror times, the arrangement they had made of their Governing

Classes. Highly interesting to observe how the sincere insight,

on their part, into what did, of primary necessity, behove to be

accomplished, had led them to the way of accomplishing it, and in

the course of time to get it accomplished! No imaginary

Aristocracy would serve their turn; and accordingly they

attained a real one. The Bravest men, who, it is ever to be

repeated and remembered, are also on the whole the Wisest,

Strongest, every way Best, had here, with a respectable degree of

accuracy, been got selected; seated each on his piece of

territory, which was lent him, then gradually given him, that

he might govern it. These Vicekings, each on his portion of

the common soil of England, with a Head King over all, were

a 'Virtuality perfected into an Actuality' really to an

astonishing extent.

For those were rugged stalwart ages; full of earnestness, of a

rude God's-truth:--nay, at any rate, their _quilting_ was so

unspeakably _thinner_ than ours; Fact came swiftly on them, if

at any time they had yielded to Phantasm! 'The Knaves and

Dastards' had to be 'arrested' in some measure; or the world,

almost within year and day, found that it could not live. The

Knaves and Dastards accordingly were got arrested. Dastards upon

the very throne had to be got arrested, and taken off the

throne,--by such methods as there were; by the roughest method,

if there chanced to be no smoother one! Doubtless there was much

harshness of operation, much severity; as indeed government and

surgery are often somewhat severe. Gurth born thrall of Cedric,

it is like; got cuffs as often as pork-parings, if he

misdemeaned himself; but Gurth did belong to Cedric: no human

creature then went about connected with nobody; left to go his

ways into Bastilles or worse, under _Laissez-faire;_ reduced to

prove his relationship by dying of typhus-fever!--Days come when

there is no King in Israel, but every man is his own king, doing

that which is right in his own eyes;--and tarbarrels are burnt to

'Liberty,' 'Tenpound Franchise' and the like, with considerable

effect in various ways!--

That Feudal Aristocracy, I say, was no imaginary one. To a

respectable degree, its _Jarls,_ what we now call Earls, were

_Strong-Ones_ in fact as well as etymology; its Dukes _Leaders,_

its Lords _Law-wards._ They did all the Soldiering and Police of

the country, all the judging, Law-making, even the Church-

Extension; whatsoever in the way of Governing, of Guiding and

Protecting could be done. It was a Land Aristocracy; it managed

the Governing of this English People, and had the reaping of the

Soil of England in return. It is, in many senses, the Law of

Nature, this same Law of Feudalism;--no right Aristocracy but a

Land one! The curious are invited to meditate upon it in these

days. Soldiering, Police and Judging, Church-Extension, nay real

Government and Guidance, all this was actually _done_ by the

Holders of the Land in return for their Land. How much of it is

now done by them; done by anybody? Good Heavens, "Laissez-

faire, Do ye nothing, eat your wages and sleep," is everywhere

the passionate half-wise cry of this time; and they will not so

much as do nothing, but must do mere Corn-Laws! We raise Fifty-

two millions, from the general mass of us, to get our Governing

done,--or, alas, to get ourselves persuaded that it is done: and

the 'peculiar burden of the Land' is to pay, not all this, but to

pay, as I learn, one twenty-fourth part of all this. Our first

Chartist Parliament, or Oliver _Redivivus,_ you would say, will

know where to lay the new taxes of England!--Or, alas, taxes? If

we made the Holders of the Land pay every shilling still of the

expense of Governing the Land, what were all that? The Land, by

mere hired Governors, cannot be got governed. You cannot hire

men to govern the Land: it is by a mission not contracted for in

the Stock-Exchange, but felt in their own hearts as coming out of

Heaven, that men can govern a Land. The mission of a Land

Aristocracy is a sacred one, in both the senses of that old word.

The footing it stands on, at present, might give rise to thoughts

other than of Corn-Laws!--

But truly a 'Splendour of God,' as in William Conqueror's rough

oath, did dwell in those old rude veracious ages; did inform,

more and more, with a heavenly nobleness, all departments of

their work and life. Phantasms could not yet walk abroad in mere

Cloth Tailorage; they were at least Phantasms 'on the rim of the

horizon,' pencilled there by an eternal Light-beam from within.

A most 'practical' Hero-worship went on, unconsciously or half-

consciously, everywhere. A Monk Samson, with a maximum of two

shillings in his pocket, could, without ballot-box, be made a

Viceking of, being seen to be worthy. The difference between a

good man and a bad man was as yet felt to be, what it forever is,

an immeasurable one. Who _durst_ have elected a Pandarus Dog-

draught, in those days, to any office, Carlton Club, Senatorship,

or place whatsoever? It was felt that the arch Satanas and no

other had a clear right of property in Pandarus; that it were

better for you to have no hand in Pandarus, to keep out of

Pandarus his neighbourhood! Which is, to this hour, the mere

fact; though for the present, alas, the forgotten fact. I think

they were comparatively blessed times those, in their way!

'Violence,' 'war,' 'disorder:' well, what is war, and death

itself, to such a perpetual life-in-death, and 'peace and peace

where there is no peace!' Unless some Hero-worship, in its new

appropriate form, can return, this world does not promise to be

very habitable long.

Old Anselm, exiled Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the purest-

minded 'men of genius,' was traveling to make his appeal to Rome

against King Rufus,--a man of rough ways, in whom the 'inner

Light-beam' shone very fitfully. It is beautiful to read, in

Monk Eadmer, how the Continental populations welcomed and

venerated this Anselm, as no French population now venerates

Jean-Jacques or giant-killing Voltaire; as not even an American

population now venerates a Schnuspel the distinguished Novelist!

They had, by phantasy and true insight, the intensest conviction

that a God's Blessing dwelt in this Anselm,--as is my conviction

too. They crowded round, with bent knees and enkindled hearts,

to receive his blessing, to hear his voice, to see the light of

his face. My blessings on them and on him!--But the notablest

was a certain necessitous or covetous Duke of Burgundy, in

straitened circumstances we shall hope,--who reflected that in

all likelihood this English Archbishop, going towards Rome to

appeal, must have taken store of cash with him to bribe the

Cardinals. Wherefore he of Burgundy, for his part, decided to

lie in wait and rob him. 'In an open space of a wood,' some

'wood' then green and growing, eight centuries ago, in Burgundian

Land,--this fierce Duke, with fierce steel followers, shaggy,

savage, as the Russian Bear, dashes out on the weak old Anselm;

who is riding along there, on his small quiet-going pony;

escorted only by Eadmer and another poor Monk on ponies; and,

except small modicum of roadmoney, not a gold coin in his

possession. The steelclad Russian Bear emerges, glaring: the

old whitebearded man starts not,--paces on unmoved, looking into

him with those clear old earnest eyes, with that venerable

sorrowful time-worn face; of whom no man or thing need be

afraid, and who also is afraid of no created man or thing. The

fire-eyes of his Burgundian Grace meet these clear eye-glances,

convey them swift to his heart: he bethinks him that probably

this feeble, fearless, hoary Figure has in it something of the

Most High God; that probably he shall be damned if he meddle

with it,--that, on the whole, he had better not. He plunges, the

rough savage, from his warhorse, down to his knees; embraces the

feet of old Anselm: he too begs his blessing; orders men to

escort him, guard him from being robbed, and under dread

penalties see him safe on his way. _Per os Dei,_ as his Majesty

was wont to ejaculate!

Neither is this quarrel of Rufus and Anselm, of Henry and Becket,

uninstructive to us. It was, at bottom, a great quarrel. For,

admitting that Anselm was full of divine blessing, he by no means

included in him all forms of divine blessing:--there were far

other forms withal, which he little dreamed of; and William

Redbeard was unconsciously the representative and spokesman of

these. In truth, could your divine Anselm, your divine Pope

Gregory have had their way, the results had been very notable.

Our Western World had all become a European Thibet, with one

Grand Lama sitting at Rome; our one honourable business that of

singing mass, all day and all night. Which would not in the

least have suited us! The Supreme Powers willed it not so.

It was as if King Redbeard unconsciously, addressing Anselm,

Becket and the others, had said: "Right Reverend, your Theory of

the Universe is indisputable by man or devil. To the core of our

heart we feel that this divine thing, which you call Mother

Church, does fill the whole world hitherto known, and is and

shall be all our salvation and all our desire. And yet--and yet

--Behold, though it is an unspoken secret, the world is _wider_

than any of us think, Right Reverend! Behold, there are yet

other immeasurable Sacrednesses in this that you call Heathenism,

Secularity! On the whole I, in an obscure but most rooted

manner, feel that I cannot comply with you. Western Thibet and

perpetual mass-chanting,--No. I am, so to speak, in the family-

way; with child, of I know not what,--certainly of something far

different from this! I have--_Per os Dei,_ I have Manchester

Cotton-trades, Bromwicham Iron-trades, American Commonwealths,

Indian Empires, Steam Mechanisms and Shakspeare Dramas, in my

belly; and cannot do it, Right Reverend!"--So accordingly it was

decided: and Saxon Becket spilt his life in Canterbury Cathedral,

as Scottish Wallace did on Tower-Hill, and as generally a noble

man and martyr has to do,--not for nothing; no, but for a divine

something, other than _he_ had altogether calculated. We will

now quit this of the hard, organic, but limited Feudal Ages; and

glance timidly into the immense Industrial Ages, as yet all

inorganic, and in a quite pulpy condition, requiring desperately

to harden themselves into some organism!

Our Epic having now become _Tools and the Man,_ it is more than

usually impossible to prophesy the Future. The boundless Future

does lie there, predestined, nay already extant though unseen;

hiding, in its Continents of Darkness, 'good hap and sorrow:'

but the supremest intelligence of man cannot prefigure much of

it:--the united intelligence and effort of All Men in all coming

generations, this alone will gradually prefigure it, and figure

and form it into a seen fact! Straining our eyes hitherto, the

utmost effort of intelligence sheds but some most glimmering

dawn, a little way into its dark enormous Deeps: only huge

outlines loom uncertain on the sight; and the ray of prophecy,

at a short distance, expires. But may we not say, here as

always, Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof! To shape the

whole Future is not our problem; but only to shape faithfully a

small part of it, according to rules already known. It is

perhaps possible for each of us, who will with due earnestness

inquire, to ascertain clearly what he, for his own part, ought to

do: this let him, with true heart, do, and continue doing. The

general issue will, as it has always done, rest well with a

Higher Intelligence than ours.

One grand 'outline,' or even two, many earnest readers may

perhaps, at this stage of the business, be able to prefigure for

themselves,--and draw some guidance from. One prediction, or

even two, are already possible. For the Life-tree Igdrasil, in

all its new developments, is the selfsame world-old Life-tree:

having found an element or elements there, running from the very

roots of it in Hela's Realms, in the Well of Mimer and of the

Three Nornas or TIMES, up to this present hour of it in our own

hearts, we conclude that such will have to continue. A man has,

in his own soul, an Eternal; can read something of the Eternal

there, if he will look! He already knows what will continue;

what cannot, by any means or appliance whatsoever, be made

to continue!

One wide and widest 'outline' ought really, in all ways, to be

becoming clear to us; this namely: That a 'Splendour of God,'

in one form or other, will have to unfold itself from the heart

of these our Industrial Ages too; or they will never get

themselves 'organised;' but continue chaotic, distressed,

distracted evermore, and have to perish in frantic suicidal

dissolution. A second 'outline' or prophecy, narrower, but also

wide enough, seems not less certain: That there will again _be_

a King in Israel; a system of Order and Government; and every

man shall, in some measure, see himself constrained to do that

which is right in the King's eyes. This too we may call a sure

element of the Future; for this too is of the Eternal;--this too

is of the Present, though hidden from most; and without it no

fibre of the Past ever was. An actual new Sovereignty,

Industrial Aristocracy, real not imaginary Aristocracy, is

indispensable and indubitable for us.

But what an Aristocracy; on what new, far more complex and

cunningly devised conditions than that old Feudal fighting one!

For we are to bethink us that the Epic verily is not _Arms and

the Man,_ but _Tools and the Man,_--an infinitely wider kind of

Epic. And again we are to bethink us that men cannot now be

bound to men by _brass-collars,_--not at all: that this brass-

collar method, in all figures of it, has vanished out of Europe

forevermore! Huge Democracy, walking the streets everywhere in

its Sack Coat, has asserted so much; irrevocably, brooking no

reply! True enough, man _is_ forever the 'born thrall' of

certain men, born master of certain other men, born equal of

certain others, let him acknowledge the fact or not. It is

unblessed for him when he cannot acknowledge this fact; he is in

the chaotic state, ready to perish, till he do get the fact

acknowledged. But no man is, or can henceforth be, the brass-

collar thrall of any man; you will have to bind him by other,

far nobler and cunninger methods. Once for all, he is to be

loose of the brass-collar, to have a scope as wide as his

faculties now are:--will he not be all the usefuler to you, in

that new state? Let him go abroad as a trusted one, as a free

one; and return home to you with rich earnings at night! Gurth

could only tend pigs; this one will build cities, conquer waste

worlds.--How, in conjunction with inevitable Democracy,

indispensable Sovereignty is to exist: certainly it is the

hugest question ever heretofore propounded to Mankind! The

solution of which is work for long years and centuries. Years

and centuries, of one knows not what complexion;--blessed or

unblessed, according as they shall, with earnest valiant effort,

make progress therein, or, in slothful unveracity and

dilettantism, only talk of making progress. For either progress

therein, or swift and ever swifter progress towards dissolution,

is henceforth a necessity.

It is of importance that this grand reformation were begun; that

Corn-Law Debatings and other jargon, little less than delirious

in such a time, had fled far away, and left us room to begin!

For the evil has grown practical, extremely conspicuous; if it

be not seen and provided for, the blindest fool will have to feel

it ere long. There is much that can wait; but there is

something also that cannot wait. With millions of eager Working

Men imprisoned in 'Impossibility' and Poor-Law Bastilles, it is

time that some means of dealing with them were trying to become

'possible!' Of the Government of England, of all articulate-

speaking functionaries, real and imaginary Aristocracies, of me

and of thee, it is imperatively demanded, "How do you mean to

manage these men? Where are they to find a supportable

existence? What is to become of them,--and of you!"

Chapter II

Bribery Committee

In the case of the late Bribery Committee, it seemed to be the

conclusion of the soundest practical minds that Bribery could not

be put down; that Pure Election was a thing we had seen the last

of, and must now go on without, as we best could. A conclusion

not a little startling; to which it requires a practical mind of

some seasoning to reconcile yourself at once! It seems, then, we

are henceforth to get ourselves constituted Legislators not

according to what merit we may have, or even what merit we may

seem to have, but according to the length of our purse, and our

frankness, impudence and dexterity in laying out the contents of

the same. Our theory, written down in all books and law-books,

spouted forth from all barrel-heads, is perfect purity of

Tenpound Franchise, absolute sincerity of question put and answer

given;--and our practice is irremediable bribery; irremediable,

unpunishable, which you will do more harm than good by attempting

to punish! Once more, a very startling conclusion indeed;

which, whatever the soundest practical minds in parliament

may think of it, invites all British men to meditations of

various kinds.

A Parliament, one would say, which proclaims itself elected and

eligible by bribery, tells the Nation that is governed by it a

piece of singular news. Bribery: have we reflected what bribery

is? Bribery means not only length of purse, which is neither

qualification nor the contrary for legislating well; but it

means dishonesty, and even impudent dishonesty;--brazen

insensibility to lying and to making others lie; total oblivion,

and flinging overboard, for the nonce, of any real thing you can

call veracity, morality; with dexterous putting on the cast-

clothes of that real thing, and strutting about in them! What

Legislating can you get out of a man in that fatal situation?

Nonce that will profit much, one would think! A Legislator who

has left his veracity lying on the door threshold, he, why verily

_he_--ought to be sent out to seek it again!

Heavens, what an improvement, were there once fairly, in Downing-

street, an Election-Office opened, with a Tariff of Boroughs!

Such and such a population, amount of property-tax, ground-

rental, extent of trade; returns two Members, returns one

Member, for so much money down: Ipswich so many thousands,

Nottingham so many,--as they happened, one by one, to fall into

this new Downing-street Schedule A! An incalculable improvement,

in comparison: for now at least you have it fairly by length of

purse, and leave the dishonesty, the impudence, the unveracity

all handsomely aside. Length of purse and desire to be a

Legislator ought to get a man into Parliament, not with, but if

possible _without_ the unveracity, the impudence and the

dishonesty! Length of purse and desire, these are, as intrinsic

qualifications, correctly equal to zero; but they are not yet

less than zero,--as the smallest addition of that latter sort

will make them!

And is it come to this? And does our venerable Parliament

announce itself elected and eligible in this manner? Surely such

a Parliament promulgates strange horoscopes of itself. What is

to become of a Parliament elected or eligible in this manner?

Unless Belial and Beelzebub have got possession of the throne of

this Universe, such Parliament is preparing itself for new

Reform-bills. We shall have to try it by Chartism, or any

conceivable _ism,_ rather than put up with this! There is

already in England 'religion' enough to get six hundred and

fifty-eight Consulting Men brought together who do _not_ begin

work with a lie in their mouth. Our poor old Parliament,

thousands of years old, is still good for something, for several

things;--though many are beginning to ask, with ominous anxiety,

in these days: For what thing? But for whatever thing and

things Parliament be good, indisputably it must start with other

than a lie in its mouth! On the Whole, a Parliament working with

a lie in its mouth, will have to take itself away. To no

Parliament or thing, that one has heard of, did this Universe

ever long yield harbour on that footing. At all hours of the day

and night, some Chartism is advancing, some armed Cromwell is

advancing, to apprise such Parliament: "Ye are no Parliament.

In the name of God,--go!"

In sad truth, once more, how is our whole existence, in these

present days, built on Cant, Speciosity, Falsehood, Dilettantism;

with this one serious Veracity in it: Mammonism! Dig down where

you will, through the Parliament-floor or elsewhere, how

infallibly do you, at spade's depth below the surface, come upon

this universal _Liars_-rock substratum! Much else is ornamental;

true on barrel-heads, in pulpits, hustings, Parliamentary

benches; but this is forever true and truest: "Money does bring

money's worth; Put money in your purse." Here, if nowhere else,

is the human soul still in thorough earnest; sincere with a

prophet's sincerity: and 'the Hell of the English,' as Sauerteig

said, 'is the infinite terror of Not getting on, especially of

Not making money.' With results!

To many persons the horoscope of Parliament is more interesting

than to me: but surely all men with souls must admit that

sending members to Parliament by bribery is an infamous solecism;

an act entirely immoral, which no man can have to do with, more

or less, but he will soil his fingers more or less. No Carlton

Clubs, Reform Clubs, nor any sort of clubs or creatures, or of

accredited opinions or practices, can make a Lie Truth, can make

Bribery a Propriety. The Parliament should really either punish

and put away Bribery, or legalise it by some Office in Downing-

street. As I read the Apocalypses, a Parliament that can do

neither of these things is not in a good way.--And yet, alas,

what of Parliaments and their Elections? Parliamentary Elections

are but the topmost ultimate outcome of an electioneering which

goes on at all hours, in all places, in every meeting of two or

more men. It is _we_ that vote wrong, and teach the poor ragged

Freemen of Boroughs to vote wrong. We pay respect to those

worthy of no respect.

Is not Pandarus Dogdraught a member of select clubs, and admitted

into the drawingrooms of men? Visibly to all persons he is of

the offal of Creation; but he carries money in his purse, due

lacker on his dog-visage, and it is believed will not steal

spoons. The human species does not with one voice, like the

Hebrew Psalmist, 'shun to sit' with Dogdraught, refuse totally to

dine with Dogdraught; men called of honour are willing enough to

dine with him, his talk being lively, and his champagne

excellent. We say to ourselves, "The man is in good society,"--

others have already voted for him; why should not I? We

_forget_ the indefeasible right of property that Satan has in

Dogdraught,--we are not afraid to be near Dogdraught! It is we

that vote wrong; blindly, nay with falsity prepense! It is we

that no longer know the difference between Human Worth and Human

Unworth; or feel that the one is admirable and alone admirable,

the other detestable, damnable! How shall _we_ find out a Hero

and Viceking Samson with a maximum of two shillings in his

pocket? We have no chance to do such a thing. We have got out

of the Ages of Heroism, deep into the Ages of Flunkeyism,--and

must return or die. What a noble set of mortals are we, who,

because there is no Saint Edmund threatening us at the rim of the

horizon, are not afraid to be whatever, for the day and hour, is

smoothest for us!

And now, in good sooth, why should an indigent discerning Freeman

give his vote without bribes? Let us rather honour the poor man

that he does discern clearly wherein lies, for him, the true

kernel of the matter. What is it to the ragged grimy Freeman of

a Tenpound-Franchise Borough, whether Aristides Rigmarole Esq. of

the Destructive, or the Hon. Alcides Dolittle of the Conservative

Party be sent to Parliament;--much more, whether the two-

thousandth part of them be sent, for that is the amount of his

faculty in it? Destructive or Conservative, what will either of

them destroy or conserve of vital moment to this Freeman? Has he

found either of them care, at bottom, a sixpence for him or his

interests, or those of his class or of his cause, or of any class

or cause that is of much value to God or to man? Rigmarole and

Dolittle have alike cared for themselves hitherto; and for their

own clique, and self-conceited crotchets,--their greasy dishonest

interests of pudding, or windy dishonest interests of praise;

and not very perceptibly for any other interest whatever.

Neither Rigmarole nor Dolittle will accomplish any good or any

evil for this grimy Freeman, like giving him a five-pound note,

or refusing to give it him. It will be smoothest to vote

according to value received. That is the veritable fact; and he

indigent, like others that are not indigent, acts conformably

thereto.

Why, reader, truly, if they asked thee or me, Which way we meant

to vote?--were it not our likeliest answer: Neither way! I, as

a Tenpound Franchiser, will receive no bribe; but also I will

not vote for either of these men. Neither Rigmarole nor Dolittle

shall, by furtherance of mine, go and make laws for this country.

I will have no hand in such a mission. How dare I! If other men

cannot be got in England, a totally other sort of men, different

as light is from dark, as star-fire is from street-mud, what is

the use of votings, or of Parliaments in England? England ought

to resign herself; there is no hope or possibility for England.

If England cannot get her Knaves and Dastards 'arrested,' in

some degree, but only get them 'elected,' what is to become

of England?

I conclude, with all confidence, that England will verily have to

put an end to briberies on her Election Hustings and elsewhere,

at what cost soever;--and likewise that we, Electors and

Eligibles, one and all of us, for our own behoof and hers, cannot

too soon begin, at what cost soever, to put an end to

_bribeabilities_ in ourselves. The death-leprosy, attacked in

this manner, by purifying lotions from without, and by rallying

of the vital energies and purities from within, will probably

abate somewhat! It has otherwise no chance to abate.

Chapter III

The One Institution

What our Government can do in this grand Problem of the Working

Classes of England? Yes, supposing the insane Corn-Laws totally

abolished, all speech of them ended, and 'from ten to twenty

years of new possibility to live and find wages' conceded us in

consequence: What the English Government might be expected to

accomplish or attempt towards rendering the existence of our

Labouring Millions somewhat less anomalous, somewhat less

impossible, in the years that are to follow those 'ten or

twenty,' if either 'ten' or 'twenty' there be?

It is the most momentous question. For all this of the Corn-Law

Abrogation, and what can follow therefrom, is but as the shadow

on King Hezekiah's Dial: the shadow has gone back twenty years;

but will again, in spite of Free-Trades and Abrogations, travel

forward its old fated way. With our present system of individual

Mammonism, and Government by Laissez-faire, this Nation cannot

live. And if, in the priceless interim, some new life and

healing be not found, there is no second respite to be counted

on. The shadow on the Dial advances thenceforth without pausing.

What Government can do? This that they call 'Organising of

Labour' is, if well understood, the Problem of the whole Future,

for all who will in future pretend to govern men. But our first

preliminary stage of it, How to deal with the Actual Labouring

Millions of England? this is the imperatively pressing Problem of

the Present, pressing with a truly fearful intensity and

imminence in these very years and days. No Government can longer

neglect it: once more, what can our Government do in it?

Governments are of various degrees of activity: some, altogether

Lazy Governments, in 'free countries' as they are called, seem in

these times almost to profess to do, if not nothing, one knows

not at first what. To debate in Parliament, and gain majorities;

and ascertain who shall be, with a toil hardly second to Ixion's,

the Prime Speaker and Spoke-holder, and keep the Ixion's-Wheel

going, if not forward, yet round? Not altogether so:--much, to

the experienced eye, is not what it seems! Chancery and certain

other Law-Courts seem nothing; yet in fact they are, the worst

of them, something: chimneys for the devilry and contention of

men to escape by;--a very considerable something!--Parliament too

has its tasks, if thou wilt look; fit to wear out the lives of

toughest men. The celebrated Kilkenny Cats, through their

tumultuous congress, cleaving the ear of Night, could they be

said to do nothing? Hadst thou been of them, thou hadst seen!

The feline heart laboured, as with steam up-to the bursting

point; and death-doing energy nerved every muscle: they had a

work there; and did it! On the morrow, two tails were found

left, and peaceable annihilation; a neighbourhood _delivered_

from despair.

Again, are not Spinning-Dervishes an eloquent emblem, significant

of much? Hast thou noticed him, that solemn-visaged Turk, the

eyes shut; dingy wool mantle circularly hiding his figure;--

bell-shaped; like a dingy bell set spinning on the _tongue_ of

it? By centrifugal force the dingy wool mantle heaves itself;

spreads more and more, like upturned cup widening into upturned

saucer: thus spins he, to the praise of Allah and advantage of

mankind, fast and faster, till collapse ensue, and sometimes

death!--

A Government such as ours, consisting of from seven to eight

hundred Parliamentary Talkers, with their escort of Able Editors

and Public Opinion; and for head, certain Lords and Servants of

the Treasury, and Chief Secretaries and others, who find

themselves at once Chiefs and No-Chiefs, and often commanded

rather than commanding,--is doubtless a most complicate entity,

and none of the alertest for getting on with business! Clearly

enough, if the Chiefs be not self-motive and what we call men,

but mere patient lay-figures without self-motive principle, the

Government will not move anywhither; it will tumble

disastrously, and jumble, round its own axis, as for many years

past we have seen it do.--And yet a self-motive man who is not a

lay-figure, place him in the heart of what entity you may, will

make it move more or less! The absurdest in Nature he will make

a little _less_ absurd; he. The unwieldiest he will make to

move;--that is the use of his existing there. He will at least

have the manfulness to depart out of it, if not; to say: "I

cannot move in thee, and be a man; like a wretched drift-log

dressed in man's clothes and minister's clothes, doomed to a lot

baser than belongs to man, I will not continue with thee,

tumbling aimless on the Mother of Dead Dogs here:--Adieu!"

For, on the whole, it is the lot of Chiefs everywhere, this same.

No Chief in the most despotic country but was a Servant withal;

at once an absolute commanding General, and a poor Orderly-

Sergeant, ordered by the very men in the ranks,--obliged to

collect the vote of the ranks too, in some articulate or

inarticulate shape, and weigh well the same. The proper name of

all Kings is Minister, Servant. In no conceivable Government can

a lay-figure get forward! _This_ Worker, surely he above all

others has to 'spread out his Gideon's Fleece,' and collect the

monitions of Immensity; the poor Localities, as we said, and

parishes of Palace-yard or elsewhere, having no due monition in

them. A Prime Minister, even here in England, who shall dare

believe the heavenly omens, and address himself like a man and

hero to the great dumb-struggling heart of England; and speak

out for it, and act out for it, the God's-justice it is writhing

to get uttered and perishing for want of,--yes, he too will see

awaken round him, in passionate burning all-defiant loyalty, the

heart of England, and such a 'support' as no Division-List or

Parliamentary Majority was ever yet known to yield a man! Here

as there, now as then, he who can and dare trust the heavenly

Immensities, all earthly Localities are subject to him. We will

pray for such a Man and First-Lord;--yes, and far better, we will

strive and incessantly make ready, each of us, to be worthy to

serve and second such a First-Lord! We shall then be as good

as sure of his arriving; sure of many things, let him arrive

or not.

Who can despair of Governments that passes a Soldiers'

Guardhouse, or meets a redcoated man on the streets! That a body

of men could be got together to kill other men when you bade

them: this, _a priori,_ does it not seem one of the impossiblest

things? Yet look, behold it: in the stolidest of Donothing

Governments, that impossibility is a thing done. See it there,

with buff-belts, red coats on its back; walking sentry at

guardhouses, brushing white breeches in barracks; an

indisputable palpable fact. Out of grey Antiquity, amid all

finance-difficulties, _scaccarium_-tallies, ship-monies, coat-

and-conduct monies, and vicissitudes of Chance and Time, there,

down to the present blessed hour, it is.

Often, in these painfully decadent and painfully nascent Times,

with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings and

'impossibilities;' meeting a tall Lifeguardsmans in his snow-

white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque Lifeguardsmen in

their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-

black sleek-fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-

Guards,'--it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how,

in such universal down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost

all old institutions, this oldest Fighting Institution is still

so young! Fresh-complexioned, firm-limbed, six feet by the

standard, this fighting-man has verily been got up, and can

fight. While so much has not yet got into being; while so much

has gone gradually out of it, and become an empty Semblance or

Clothes-suit; and highest king's-cloaks, mere chimeras parading

under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye,

unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow's-

blanket,--here still is a reality!

The man in horsehair wig advances, promising that he will get me

'justice:' he takes me into Chancery Law-Courts, into decades,

half-centuries of hubbub, of distracted jargon; and does get

me--disappointment, almost desperation; and one refuge: that of

dismissing him and his 'justice' altogether out of my head. For

I have work to do; I cannot spend my decades in mere arguing

with other men about the exact wages of my work: I will work

cheerfully with no wages, sooner than with a ten-years gangrene

or Chancery Lawsuit in my heart! He of the horsehair wig is a

sort of failure; no substance, but a fond imagination of the

mind. He of the shovel-hat, again, who comes forward professing

that he will save my soul--O ye Eternities, of him in this place

be absolute silence!--But he of the red coat, I say, is a success

and no failure! He will veritably, if he get orders, draw out a

long sword and kill me. No mistake there. He is a fact and not

a shadow. Alive in this Year Forty-three, able and willing to do

his work. In dim old centuries, with William Rufus, William of

Ipres, or far earlier, he began; and has come down safe so far.

Catapult has given place to cannon, pike has given place to

musket, iron mail-shirt to coat of red cloth, saltpetre ropematch

to percussion cap; equipments, circumstances have all changed,

and again changed: but the human battle-engine, in the inside of

any or of each of these, ready still to do battle, stands there,

six feet in standard size. There are Pay-Offices, Woolwich

Arsenals, there is a Horse-Guards, War-Office, Captain-General;

persuasive Sergeants, with tap of drum, recruit in market-towns

and villages;--and, on the whole, I say, here is your actual

drilled fightingman; here are your actual Ninety-thousand of

such, ready to go into any quarter of the world and fight!

Strange, interesting, and yet most mournful to reflect on. Was

this, then, of all the things mankind had some talent for, the

one thing important to learn well, and bring to perfection; this

of, successfully killing one another? Truly you have learned it

well, and carried the business to a high perfection. It is

incalculable what, by arranging, commanding and regimenting, you

can make of men. These thousand straight-standing firm-set

individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance,

retreat; and are, for your behoof, a magazine charged with fiery

death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity: few

months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they?

Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers,

thievish valets; an entirely broken population, fast tending

towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came; by tap

of drum enlisted, or formed lists of them, took heartily to

drilling them;--and he and you have made them this! Most potent,

effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm

combining and commanding among men. Let no man despair of

Governments who looks on these two sentries at the Horse-Guards,

and our United-Service Clubs! I could conceive an Emigration

Service, a Teaching Service, considerable varieties of United and

Separate Services, of the due thousands strong, all effective as

this Fighting Service is; all doing _their_ work, like it;--

which work, much more than fighting, is henceforth the necessity

of these New Ages we are got into! Much lies among us,

convulsively, nigh desperately _struggling to be born._

But mean Governments, as mean-limited individuals do, have stood

by the physically indispensable; have realised that and nothing

more. The Soldier is perhaps one of the most difficult things to

realise; but Governments, had they not realised him, could not

have existed: accordingly he is here. O Heavens, if we saw an

army ninety-thousand strong, maintained and fully equipt, in

continual real action and battle against Human Starvation,

against Chaos, Necessity, Stupidity, and our real 'natural

enemies,' what a business were it! Fighting and molesting not

'the French,' who, poor men, have a hard enough battle of their

own in the like kind, and need no additional molesting from us;

but fighting and incessantly spearing down and destroying

Falsehood, Nescience, Delusion, Disorder, and the Devil and his

Angels! Thou thyself, cultivated reader, hast done something in

that alone true warfare; but, alas, under what circumstances was

it? Thee no beneficent drill-sergeant, with any effectiveness,

would rank in line beside thy fellows; train, like a true

didactic artist, by the wit of all past expedience, to do thy

soldiering; encourage thee when right, punish thee when wrong,

and everywhere with wise word-of-command say, Forward on this

hand, Forward on that! Ah, no: thou hadst to learn thy small-

sword and platoon exercise where and how thou couldst; to all

mortals but thyself it was indifferent whether thou shouldst ever

learn it. And the rations, and shilling a day, were they

provided thee,--reduced as I have known brave Jean-Pauls,

learning their exercise, to live on 'water _without_ the bread?'

The rations; or any furtherance of promotion to corporalship,

lance-corporalship, or due cato'-nine tails, with the slightest

reference to thy deserts, were not provided. Forethought, even

as of a pipe-clayed drill-sergeant, did not preside over thee.

To corporalship, lance-corporalship, thou didst attain; alas,

also to the halberts and cat: but thy rewarder and punisher

seemed blind as the Deluge: neither lancecorporalship, nor

even drummer's cat, because both appeared delirious, brought

thee due profit.

It was well, all this, we know;--and yet it was not well! Forty

soldiers, I am told, will disperse the largest Spitalfields mob:

forty to ten-thousand, that is the proportion between drilled and

undrilled. Much there is which cannot yet be organised in this

world; but somewhat also which can, somewhat also which must.

When one thinks, for example, what Books are becoming for us,

what Operative Lancashires are become; what a Fourth Estate, and

innumerable Virtualities not yet got to be Actualities are become

and becoming,--one sees Organisms enough in the dim huge Future;

and 'United Services' quite other than the redcoat one; and

much, even in these years, struggling to be born!

Of Time-Bill, Factory-Bill and other such Bills the present

Editor has no authority to speak. He knows not, it is for others

than he to know, in what specific ways it may be feasible to

interfere, with Legislation, between the Workers and the Master-

Workers;--knows only and sees, what all men are beginning to see,

that Legislative interference, and interferences not a few are

indispensable; that as a lawless anarchy of supply-and-demand,

on market-wages alone, this province of things cannot longer be

left. Nay interference has begun: there are already Factory

Inspectors,--who seem to have no _lack_ of work. Perhaps there

might be Mine-Inspectors too:--might there not be Furrowfield

Inspectors withal, and ascertain for us how on seven and sixpence

a week a human family does live! Interference has begun; it

must continue, must extensively enlarge itself, deepen and

sharpen itself. Such things cannot longer be idly lapped in

darkness, and suffered to go on unseen: the Heavens do see them;

the curse, not the blessing of the Heavens is on an Earth that

refuses to see them.

Again, are not Sanitary Regulations possible for a Legislature?

The old Romans had their Aediles; who would, I think, in direct

contravention to supply-and-demand, have rigorously seen rammed

up into total abolition many a foul cellar in our Southwarks,

Saint-Gileses, and dark poison-lanes; saying sternly, "Shall a

Roman man dwell there?" The Legislature, at whatever cost of

consequences, would have had to answer, "God forbid!"--The

Legislature, even as it now is, could order all dingy

Manufacturing Towns to cease from their soot and darkness; to

let in the blessed sunlight, the blue of Heaven, and become clear

and clean; to burn their coal-smoke, namely, and make flame of

it. Baths, free air, a wholesome temperature, ceilings twenty

feet high, might be ordained by Act of Parliament, in all

establishments licensed as Mills. There are such Mills already

extant;--honour to the builders of them! The Legislature can say

to others: Go ye and do likewise; better if you can.

Every toiling Manchester, its smoke and soot all burnt, ought it

not, among so many world-wide conquests, to have a hundred acres

or so of free greenfield, with trees on it, conquered, for its

little children to disport in; for its all-conquering workers to

take a breath of twilight air in? You would say so! A willing

Legislature could say so with effect. A willing Legislature

could say very many things! And to whatsoever 'vested interest,'

or such like, stood up, gainsaying merely, "I shall lose

profits,"--the willing Legislature would answer, "Yes, but my

sons and daughters will gain health, and life, and a soul."--

"What is to become of our Cotton-trade?" cried certain Spinners,

when the Factory-Bill was proposed; "What is to become of our

invaluable Cotton-trade?" The Humanity of England answered

steadfastly: "Deliver me these rickety perishing souls of

infants, and let your Cotton-trade take its chance. God Himself

commands the one thing; not God especially the other thing. We

cannot have prosperous Cotton-trades at the expense of keeping

the Devil a partner in them!"--

Bills enough, were the Corn-Law Abrogation Bill once passed, and

a Legislature willing! Nay this one Bill, which lies yet

unenacted, a right Education Bill, is not this of itself the sure

parent of innumerable wise Bills,--wise regulations, practical

methods and proposals, gradually ripening towards the state of

Bills? To irradiate with intelligence, that is to say, with

order, arrangement and all blessedness, the Chaotic,

Unintelligent: how, except by educating, _can_ you-accomplish

this? That thought, reflection, articulate utterance and

understanding be awakened in these individual million heads,

which are the atoms of your Chaos: there is no other way of

illuminating any Chaos! The sum-total of intelligence that is

found in it, determines the extent of order that is possible for

your Chaos,--the feasibility and rationality of what your Chaos

will dimly demand from you, and will gladly obey when proposed by

you! It is an exact equation; the one accurately measures the

other.--If the whole English People, during these 'twenty years

of respite,' be not educated, with at least schoolmaster's

educating, a tremendous responsibility, before God and men, will

rest somewhere! How dare any man, especially a man calling

himself minister of God, stand up in any Parliament or place,

under any pretext or delusion, and for a day or an hour forbid

God's Light to come into the world, and bid the Devil's Darkness

continue in it one hour more! For all light and science, under

all shapes, in all degrees of perfection, is of God; all

darkness, nescience, is of the Enemy of God. 'The schoolmaster's

creed is somewhat awry?' Yes, I have found few creeds entirely

correct; few light-beams shining white, pure of admixture: but

of all creeds and religions now or ever before known, was not

that of thoughtless thriftless Animalism, of Distilled Gin, and

Stupor and Despair, unspeakably the least orthodox? We will

exchange it even with Paganism, with Fetishism; and, on the

whole, must exchange it with something.

An effective 'Teaching Service' I do consider that there must be;

some Education Secretary, Captain-General of Teachers, who will

actually contrive to get us _taught._ Then again, why should

there not be an 'Emigration Service,' and Secretary, with

adjuncts, with funds, forces, idle Navy-ships, and ever-

increasing apparatus; in fine an _effective system_ of

Emigration; so that, at length, before our twenty years of

respite ended, every honest willing Workman who found England too

strait, and the 'Organisation of Labour' not yet sufficiently

advanced, might find likewise a bridge built to carry him into

new Western Lands, there to 'organise' with more elbow-room some

labour for himself? There to be a real blessing, raising new

corn for us, purchasing new webs and hatchets from us; leaving

us at least in peace;--instead of staying here to be a Physical-

Force Chartist, unblessed and no blessing! Is it not scandalous

to consider that a Prime Minister could raise within the year, as

I have seen it done, a Hundred and Twenty Millions Sterling to

shoot the French; and we are stopt short for want of the

hundredth part of that to keep the English living? The bodies of

the English living; and the souls of the English living:--these

two 'Services,' an Education Service and an Emigration Service,

these with others will actually have to be organised!

A free bridge for Emigrants: why, we should then be on a par

with America itself, the most favoured of all lands that have no

government; and we should have, besides, so many traditions and

mementos of priceless things which America has cast away. We

could proceed deliberately to 'organise Labour,' not doomed to

perish unless we effected it within year and day;--every willing

Worker that proved superfluous, finding a bridge ready for him.

This verily will have to be done; the Time is big with this.

Our little Isle is grown too narrow for us; but the world is

wide enough yet for another Six Thousand Years. England's sure

markets will be among new Colonies of Englishmen in all quarters

of the Globe. All men trade with all men, when mutually

convenient; and are even bound to do it by the Maker of men.

Our friends of China, who guiltily refused to trade, in these

circumstances,--had we not to argue with them, in cannon-shot at

last, and convince them that they ought to trade! 'Hostile

Tariffs' will arise, to shut us out; and then again will fall,

to let us in: but the Sons of England, speakers of the English

language were it nothing more, will in all times have the

ineradicable predisposition to trade with England. Mycale was

the _Pan-Ionian,_ rendezvous of all the Tribes of Ion, for old

Greece: why should not London long continue the _All-Saxon-

home,_ rendezvous of all the 'Children of the Harz-Rock,'

arriving, in select samples, from the Antipodes and elsewhere, by

steam and otherwise, to the 'season' here!--What a Future; wide

as the world, if we have the heart and heroism for it,--which, by

Heaven's blessing, we shall:

'Keep not standing fixed and rooted,

Briskly venture, briskly roam;

Head and hand, where'er thou foot it,

And stout heart are still at home.

In what land the sun does visit,

Brisk are we, whate'er betide:

To give space for wandering is it

That the world was made so wide?' *

--------

* Goethe, _Wilhelm Meister_

--------

Fourteen hundred years ago, it was by a considerable 'Emigration

Service,' never doubt it, by much enlistment, discussion and

apparatus, that we ourselves arrived in this remarkable Island,--

and got into our present difficulties among others!

It is true the English Legislature, like the English People, is

of slow temper; essentially conservative. In our wildest periods

of reform, in the Long Parliament itself, you notice always the

invincible instinct to hold fast by the Old; to admit the

minimum of New; to expand, if it be possible, some old habit or

method, already found fruitful, into new growth for the new need.

It is an instinct worthy of all honour; akin to all strength and

all wisdom. The Future hereby is not dissevered from the Past,

but based continuously on it; grows with all the vitalities of

the Past, and is rooted down deep into the beginnings of us. The

English Legislature is entirely repugnant to believe in 'new

epochs.' The English Legislature does not occupy itself with

epochs; has, indeed, other business to do than looking at the

Time-Horologe and hearing it tick! Nevertheless new epochs do

actually come; and with them new imperious peremptory

necessities; so that even an English Legislature has to look up,

and admit, though with reluctance, that the hour has struck. The

hour having struck, let us not say 'impossible:'--it will have to

be possible! 'Contrary to the habits of Parliament, the habits

of Government?' Yes: but did any Parliament or Government ever

sit in a Year Forty-three before? One of the most original,

unexampled years and epochs; in several important respects,

totally unlike any other! For Time, all-edacious and all-

feracious, does run on: and the Seven Sleepers, awakening hungry

after a hundred years, find that it is not their old nurses who

can now give them suck!