With the common fate of all things human, it is said that every career
and walk in life has some one peculiar disparagement--something that,
attaching to the duties of the station as a sort of special grievance,
serves to show that none of us, no matter how favoured, are to imagine
there can be any lot exempted from its share of troubles. Ask the
soldier, the sailor, the parson, the doctor, the lawyer, or the actor,
and each will give you a friendly warning to adopt any other career than
his own.
In most cases the _quid amarum_, the one bitter drop, is to be found in
the career itself, something that belongs to that one craft or calling;
just as the white-lead colic, for instance, is the fatal malady of
painters. There are, however, a few rare cases in which the detracting
element attaches itself to the followers and not to the profession, as
though it would seem there was a something in the daily working of that
peculiar craft which warped the minds and coerced the natures of men
to be different from what temperament and character should have made of
them.
The two classes which most prominently exhibit what I mean are somewhat
socially separated, but they have a number of small analogies in common.
They are Sweeps and Statesmen! It would be tempting--but I resist the
temptation--to show how many points of resemblance unite them--how each
works in the dark, in a small, narrow, confined sphere, without view or
outlet; how the tendency of each is to scratch his way upwards and gain
the top, caring wonderfully little how black and dirty the process has
made him. One might even go farther, and mark how, when indolence or
weariness suggested sloth, the stimulus of a little fire underneath,
whether a few lighted straws or a Birmingham mass-meeting, was sure to
quicken progress and excite activity.
Again, I make this statement on the faith of Lord Shaftesbury, who
pronounced it before their Lordships in the Upper House:--“It is no
uncommon thing to buy and sell them. There is a regular traffic in them;
and through the agency of certain women, not the models of their sex,
you can get any quantity of them you want.” Last of all, on the same
high authority, we are told of their perfect inutility, “since there is
nothing that they do could not be better done by a machine.”
I resist, as I say, all temptations of this kind, and simply address
myself to the one point of similarity between them which illustrates the
theory with which I have started--and now to state this as formally as
I am able. Let me declare that in all the varied employments of life
I have never met with men who have the same dread of their possible
successors as sweeps and statesmen. The whole aim and object of each
is directed, first of all, to keep those who do their work as little
as possible, well knowing that the time will come when these small
creatures will find the space too confined for them, and set up for
themselves.
A volume might be written on the subtle artifices adopted to keep them
“little”--the browbeatings, the insults, the crushing cruelties, the
spare diet intermixed with occasional stimulants, the irregular hours,
and the heat and confinement of the sphere they work in. Still, nature
is stronger than all these crafty contrivances. The little sweep will
grow into the big sweep, and the small under-sec. will scratch his way
up to the Cabinet I will not impose on my reader the burden of carrying
along with him this double load. I will address myself simply to one
of these careers--the Statesman’s. It is a strange but a most
unquestionable fact, that no other class of men are so ill-disposed to
those who are the most likely to succeed them--not of an Opposition,
for that would be natural enough, but of their own party, of their
own colour, of their own rearing. Let us be just: when a man has long
enjoyed place, power, and pre-eminence, dispensed honours and pensions
and patronage, it is not a small trial to discover that one of those
little creatures he has made--whose first scraper and brush he himself
paid for--I can’t get rid of the sweep out of my head--will turn
insolently on him and declare that he will no longer remain a
subordinate, but go and set up for himself. This is excessively hard,
and might try the temper of a man even without a fit of the gout.
It is exactly what has just happened; an apprentice, called Gladstone,
having made a sort of connection in Manchester and Birmingham, a
district abounding in tall chimneys, has given warning to his master Pam
that he will not sweep any longer. He is a bold, aspiring sort of lad,
and he is not satisfied with saying--as many others have done--that he
is getting too broad-shouldered for his work; but he declares that the
chimneys for the future must be all made bigger and the flues wider,
just because he likes climbing, and doesn’t mean to abandon it. There is
no doubt of it. Manchester and Stockport and Birmingham have put this in
his head. Their great smelting-houses and steam-power factories require
big chimneys; and being an overbearing set of self-made vulgar fellows,
they say they ought to be a law to all England. You don’t want to make
cotton-twist, or broad-gauge iron; so much the worse for you. It is
the grandest object of humanity. Providence created men to manufacture
printed cottons and cheap penknives. We of Manchester understand what
our American friends call manifest destiny; we know and feel ours will
be--to rule England. Once let us only introduce big chimneys, and you’ll
see if you won’t take to spinning-jennies and mules and treddles;
and there’s that climbing boy Gladstone declares he’ll not leave the
business, but go up, no matter how dirty the flue, the day we want him.
Some shrewd folk, who see farther into the millstone than their
neighbours, have hinted that this same boy is of a crotchety, intriguing
type, full of his own ingenuity, and enamoured of his own subtlety;
so that make the chimney how great you will, he’ll not go up it, but
scratch out another flue for himself, and come out, heaven knows where
or how. Indeed, they tell that on one occasion of an alarm of fire
in the house--caused by a pantry-boy called Russell burning some
wasterpaper instead of going up the chimney as he was ordered--this
same Will began to tell how the Greeks had no chimneys, and a mass
of antiquarian rubbish of the same kind, so that his master, losing
patience, exclaimed, “Of all plagues in the world he knew of none to
compare with these ‘climbing boys!’”