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

show 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 posture-makings, 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'er us,

Graves under us silent!'

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

Noises, in the naturalest times, most _preter_naturally march and

roll?--

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

_AEsthetische Springwurzeln_. '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 cloudwater, 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. This

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 Buddists, Bonzes, Talapoins and suchlike, 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 lips; 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 persistence

Is as the days are

Of men in this world.

The Future hides in it

Gladness 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 stillness;

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! 'Policy, Fanaticism,'

or say 'Enthusiasm,' even 'honest Enthusiasm,'--ah 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 extinguished 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

show 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 Vicekings, 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

suchlike 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, everyway 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 way 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.'

'Ten-pound 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 Dogdraught, 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, 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 travelling to make his appeal to Rome against

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

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

white-bearded 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 war-horse, 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, 'gladness 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 dextrous

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? None 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 service, 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 drawing-rooms of men? Visibly to all persons he is of the offal of

Creation; but he carries money in his purse, due lacquer 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 Flunkyism,--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 very 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 Soldier's Guard-house, 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 guard-houses, brushing white breeches in barracks; an

indisputable palpable fact. Out of gray Antiquity, amid all

finance-difficulties, _scaccarium_-tallies, ship-moneys,

coat-and-conduct moneys, 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 Lifeguardsman 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 fighting-man; 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 firmset 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 experience, 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 cat-o'-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 lance-corporalship, 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 become and 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 suchlike, 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.'[28]

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!

For the rest, let not any Parliament, Aristocracy, Millocracy, or

Member of the Governing Class, condemn with much triumph this small

specimen of 'remedial measures;' or ask again, with the least anger,

of this Editor, What is to be done, How that alarming problem of the

Working Classes is to be managed? Editors are not here, foremost of

all, to say How. A certain Editor thanks the gods that nobody pays him

three hundred thousand pounds a year, two hundred thousand, twenty

thousand, or any similar sum of cash for saying How;--that his wages

are very different, his work somewhat fitter for him. An Editor's

stipulated work is to apprise _thee_ that it must be done. The 'way to

do it,'--is to try it, knowing that thou shalt die if it be not done.

There is the bare back, there is the web of cloth; thou shalt cut me a

coat to cover the bare back, thou whose trade it is. 'Impossible?'

Hapless Fraction, dost thou discern Fate there, half unveiling herself

in the gloom of the future, with her gibbet-cords, her steel-whips,

and very authentic Tailor's Hell; waiting to see whether it is

'possible'? Out with thy scissors, and cut that cloth or thy own

windpipe!

FOOTNOTES:

[28] Goethe, _Wilhelm Meister_.

CHAPTER IV.

CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY.

If I believed that Mammonism with its adjuncts was to continue

henceforth the one serious principle of our existence, I should reckon

it idle to solicit remedial measures from any Government, the disease

being insusceptible of remedy. Government can do much, but it can in

no wise do all. Government, as the most conspicuous object in Society,

is called upon to give signal of what shall be done; and, in many

ways, to preside over, further, and command the doing of it. But the

Government cannot do, by all its signaling and commanding, what the

Society is radically indisposed to do. In the long-run every

Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and

unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.--The main

substance of this immense Problem of Organising Labour, and first of

all of Managing the Working Classes, will, it is very clear, have to

be solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it; by those

who themselves work and preside over work. Of all that can be enacted

by any Parliament in regard to it, the germs must already lie

potentially extant in those two Classes, who are to obey such

enactment. A Human Chaos _in_ which there is no light, you vainly

attempt to irradiate by light shed _on_ it: order never can arise

there.

But it is my firm conviction that the 'Hell of England' will _cease_

to be that of 'not making money;' that we shall get a nobler Hell and

a nobler Heaven! I anticipate light _in_ the Human Chaos, glimmering,

shining more and more; under manifold true signals from without That

light shall shine. Our deity no longer being Mammon,--O Heavens, each

man will then say to himself: "Why such deadly haste to make money? I

shall not go to Hell, even if I do not make money! There is another

Hell, I am told!" Competition, at railway-speed, in all branches of

commerce and work will then abate:--good felt-hats for the head, in

every sense, instead of seven-feet lath-and-plaster hats on wheels,

will then be discoverable! Bubble-periods, with their panics and

commercial crises, will again become infrequent; steady modest

industry will take the place of gambling speculation. To be a noble

Master, among noble Workers, will again be the first ambition with

some few; to be a rich Master only the second. How the Inventive

Genius of England, with the whirr of its bobbins and billy-rollers

shoved somewhat into the backgrounds of the brain, will contrive and

devise, not cheaper produce exclusively, but fairer distribution of

the produce at its present cheapness! By degrees, we shall again have

a Society with something of Heroism in it, something of Heaven's

Blessing on it; we shall again have, as my German friend asserts,

'instead of Mammon-Feudalism with unsold cotton-shirts and

Preservation of the Game, noble just Industrialism and Government by

the Wisest!'

It is with the hope of awakening here and there a British man to know

himself for a man and divine soul, that a few words of parting

admonition, to all persons to whom the Heavenly Powers have lent power

of any kind in this land, may now be addressed. And first to those

same Master-Workers, Leaders of Industry; who stand nearest and in

fact powerfulest, though not most prominent, being as yet in too many

senses a Virtuality rather than an Actuality.

* * * * *

The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are virtually

the Captains of the World; if there be no nobleness in them, there

will never be an Aristocracy more. But let the Captains of Industry

consider: once again, are they born of other clay than the old

Captains of Slaughter; doomed forever to be no Chivalry, but a mere

gold-plated _Doggery_,--what the French well name _Canaille_,

'Doggery' with more or less gold carrion at its disposal? Captains of

Industry are the true Fighters, henceforth recognisable as the only

true ones: Fighters against Chaos, Necessity and the Devils and

Joetuns; and lead on Mankind in that great, and alone true, and

universal warfare; the stars in their courses fighting for them, and

all Heaven and all Earth saying audibly, Well done! Let the Captains

of Industry retire into their own hearts, and ask solemnly, If there

is nothing but vulturous hunger, for fine wines, valet reputation and

gilt carriages, discoverable there? Of hearts made by the Almighty God

I will not believe such a thing. Deep-hidden under wretchedest

god-forgetting Cants, Epicurisms, Dead-Sea Apisms; forgotten as under

foulest fat Lethe mud and weeds, there is yet, in all hearts born into

this God's-World, a spark of the Godlike slumbering. Awake, O

nightmare sleepers; awake, arise, or be forever fallen! This is not

playhouse poetry; it is sober fact. Our England, our world cannot live

as it is. It will connect itself with a God again, or go down with

nameless throes and fire-consummation to the Devils. Thou who feelest

aught of such a Godlike stirring in thee, any faintest intimation of

it as through heavy-laden dreams, follow _it_, I conjure thee. Arise,

save thyself, be one of those that save thy country.

Bucaniers, Chactaw Indians, whose supreme aim in fighting is that

they may get the scalps, the money, that they may amass scalps and

money: out of such came no Chivalry, and never will! Out of such came

only gore and wreck, infernal rage and misery; desperation quenched in

annihilation. Behold it, I bid thee, behold there, and consider! What

is it that thou have a hundred thousand-pound bills laid-up in thy

strong-room, a hundred scalps hung-up in thy wigwam? I value not them

or thee. Thy scalps and thy thousand-pound bills are as yet nothing,

if no nobleness from within irradiate them; if no Chivalry, in action,

or in embryo ever struggling towards birth and action, be there.

Love of men cannot be bought by cash-payment; and without love men

cannot endure to be together. You cannot lead a Fighting World without

having it regimented, chivalried: the thing, in a day, becomes

impossible; all men in it, the highest at first, the very lowest at

last, discern consciously, or by a noble instinct, this necessity. And

can you any more continue to lead a Working World unregimented,

anarchic? I answer, and the Heavens and Earth are now answering, No!

The thing becomes not 'in a day' impossible; but in some two

generations it does. Yes, when fathers and mothers, in Stockport

hunger-cellars, begin to eat their children, and Irish widows have to

prove their relationship by dying of typhus-fever; and amid Governing

'Corporations of the Best and Bravest,' busy to preserve their

game by 'bushing,' dark millions of God's human creatures start

up in mad Chartisms, impracticable Sacred-Months, and Manchester

Insurrections;--and there is a virtual Industrial Aristocracy as yet

only half-alive, spell-bound amid money-bags and ledgers; and an

actual Idle Aristocracy seemingly near dead in somnolent delusions, in

trespasses and double-barrels; 'sliding,' as on inclined-planes,

which every new year they _soap_ with new Hansard's-jargon under God's

sky, and so are 'sliding,' ever faster, towards a 'scale' and

balance-scale whereon is written _Thou art found Wanting_:--in such

days, after a generation or two, I say, it does become, even to the

low and simple, very palpably impossible! No Working World, any more

than a Fighting World, can be led on without a noble Chivalry of Work,

and laws and fixed rules which follow out of that,--far nobler than

any Chivalry of Fighting was. As an anarchic multitude on mere

Supply-and-demand, it is becoming inevitable that we dwindle in horrid

suicidal convulsion and self-abrasion, frightful to the imagination,

into _Chactaw_ Workers. With wigwams and scalps,--with palaces and

thousand-pound bills; with savagery, depopulation, chaotic desolation!

Good Heavens, will not one French Revolution and Reign of Terror

suffice us, but must there be two? There will be two if needed; there

will be twenty if needed; there will be precisely as many as are

needed. The Laws of Nature will have themselves fulfilled. That is a

thing certain to me.

Your gallant battle-hosts and work-hosts, as the others did, will need

to be made loyally yours; they must and will be regulated,

methodically secured in their just share of conquest under

you;--joined with you in veritable brotherhood, sonhood, by quite

other and deeper ties than those of temporary day's wages! How would

mere redcoated regiments, to say nothing of chivalries, fight for you,

if you could discharge them on the evening of the battle, on payment

of the stipulated shillings,--and they discharge you on the morning of

it! Chelsea Hospitals, pensions, promotions, rigorous lasting covenant

on the one side and on the other, are indispensable even for a hired

fighter. The Feudal Baron, much more,--how could he subsist with mere

temporary mercenaries round him, at sixpence a day; ready to go over

to the other side, if sevenpence were offered? He could not have

subsisted;--and his noble instinct saved him from the necessity of

even trying! The Feudal Baron had a Man's Soul in him; to which

anarchy, mutiny, and the other fruits of temporary mercenaries, were

intolerable: he had never been a Baron otherwise, but had continued a

Chactaw and Bucanier. He felt it precious, and at last it became

habitual, and his fruitful enlarged existence included it as a

necessity, to have men round him who in heart loved him; whose life he

watched over with rigour yet with love; who were prepared to give

their life for him, if need came. It was beautiful; it was human! Man

lives not otherwise, nor can live contented, anywhere or any-when.

Isolation is the sum-total of wretchedness to man. To be cut off, to

be left solitary: to have a world alien, not your world; all a hostile

camp for you; not a home at all, of hearts and faces who are yours,

whose you are! It is the frightfulest enchantment; too truly a work of

the Evil One. To have neither superior, nor inferior, nor equal,

united manlike to you. Without father, without child, without brother.

Man knows no sadder destiny. 'How is each of us,' exclaims Jean Paul,

'so lonely in the wide bosom of the All!' Encased each as in his

transparent 'ice-palace;' our brother visible in his, making signals

and gesticulations to us;--visible, but forever unattainable: on his

bosom we shall never rest, nor he on ours. It was not a God that did

this; no!

Awake, ye noble Workers, warriors in the one true war: all this must

be remedied. It is you who are already half-alive, whom I will welcome

into life; whom I will conjure, in God's name, to shake off your

enchanted sleep, and live wholly! Cease to count scalps, gold-purses;

not in these lies your or our salvation. Even these, if you count only

these, will not long be left. Let bucaniering be put far from you;

alter, speedily abrogate all laws of the bucaniers, if you would gain

any victory that shall endure. Let God's justice, let pity, nobleness

and manly valour, with more gold-purses or with fewer, testify

themselves in this your brief Life-transit to all the Eternities, the

Gods and Silences. It is to you I call; for ye are not dead, ye are

already half-alive: there is in you a sleepless dauntless energy, the

prime-matter of all nobleness in man. Honour to you in your kind. It

is to you I call: ye know at least this, That the mandate of God to

His creature man is: Work! The future Epic of the World rests not with

those that are near dead, but with those that are alive, and those

that are coming into life.

Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion,

destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not

march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-and-demand

principle: they will not; nor ought they, nor can they. Ye shall

reduce them to order, begin reducing them. To order, to just

subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls

are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner. Not as a

bewildered bewildering mob; but as a firm regimented mass, with real

captains over them, will these men march any more. All human

interests, combined human endeavours, and social growths in this

world, have, at a certain stage of their development, required

organising: and Work, the grandest of human interests, does now

require it.

God knows, the task will be hard: but no noble task was ever easy.

This task will wear away your lives, and the lives of your sons and

grandsons: but for what purpose, if not for tasks like this, were

lives given to men? Ye shall cease to count your thousand-pound

scalps, the noble of you shall cease! Nay the very scalps, as I say,

will not long be left if you count only these. Ye shall cease wholly

to be barbarous vulturous Chactaws, and become noble European

Nineteenth-Century Men. Ye shall know that Mammon, in never such gigs

and flunky 'respectabilities,' is not the alone God; that of himself

he is but a Devil, and even a Brute-god.

Difficult? Yes, it will be difficult. The short-fibre cotton; that too

was difficult. The waste cotton-shrub, long useless, disobedient, as

the thistle by the wayside,--have ye not conquered it; made it into

beautiful bandana webs; white woven shirts for men; bright-tinted

air-garments wherein flit goddesses? Ye have shivered mountains

asunder, made the hard iron pliant to you as soft putty: the

Forest-giants, Marsh-joetuns bear sheaves of golden-grain; AEgir the

Sea-demon himself stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and

on Firehorses and Windhorses ye career. Ye are most strong. Thor

red-bearded, with his blue sun-eyes, with his cheery heart and strong

thunder-hammer, he and you have prevailed. Ye are most strong, ye Sons

of the icy North, of the far East,--far marching from your rugged

Eastern Wildernesses, hitherward from the gray Dawn of Time! Ye are

Sons of the _Joetun_-land; the land of Difficulties Conquered.

Difficult? You must try this thing. Once try it with the understanding

that it will and shall have to be done. Try it as ye try the paltrier

thing, making of money! I will bet on you once more, against all

Joetuns, Tailor-gods, Double-barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos

whatsoever!

CHAPTER V.

PERMANENCE.

Standing on the threshold, nay as yet outside the threshold, of a

'Chivalry of Labour,' and an immeasurable Future which it is to fill

with fruitfulness and verdant shade; where so much has not yet come

even to the rudimental state, and all speech of positive enactments

were hazardous in those who know this business only by the eye,--let

us here hint at simply one widest universal principle, as the basis

from which all organisation hitherto has grown up among men, and all

henceforth will have to grow: The principle of Permanent Contract

instead of Temporary.

* * * * *

Permanent not Temporary:--you do not hire the mere redcoated fighter

by the day, but by the score of years! Permanence, persistence is the

first condition of all fruitfulness in the ways of men. The 'tendency

to persevere,' to persist in spite of hindrances, discouragements and

'impossibilities:' it is this that in all things distinguishes the

strong soul from the weak; the civilised burgher from the nomadic

savage,--the Species Man from the Genus Ape! The Nomad has his very

house set on wheels; the Nomad, and in a still higher degree the Ape,

are all for 'liberty;' the privilege to flit continually is

indispensable for them. Alas, in how many ways, does our humour, in

this swift-rolling, self-abrading Time, show itself nomadic, apelike;

mournful enough to him that looks on it with eyes! This humour will

have to abate; it is the first element of all fertility in human

things, that such 'liberty' of apes and nomads do by freewill or

constraint abridge itself, give place to a better. The civilised man

lives not in wheeled houses. He builds stone castles, plants lands,

makes lifelong marriage-contracts;--has long-dated hundred-fold

possessions, not to be valued in the money-market; has pedigrees,

libraries, law-codes; has memories and hopes, even for this Earth,

that reach over thousands of years. Lifelong marriage-contracts: how

much preferable were year-long or month-long--to the nomad or ape!

Month-long contracts please me little, in any province where there can

by possibility be found virtue enough for more. Month-long contracts

do not answer well even with your house-servants; the liberty on both

sides to change every month is growing very apelike, nomadic;--and I

hear philosophers predict that it will alter, or that strange results

will follow: that wise men, pestered with nomads, with unattached

ever-shifting spies and enemies rather than friends and servants, will

gradually, weighing substance against semblance, with indignation,

dismiss such, down almost to the very shoeblack, and say, "Begone; I

will serve myself rather, and have peace!" Gurth was hired for life to

Cedric, and Cedric to Gurth. O Anti-Slavery Convention, loud-sounding

long-eared Exeter-Hall--But in thee too is a kind of instinct towards

justice, and I will complain of nothing. Only black Quashee over the

seas being once sufficiently attended to, wilt thou not perhaps open

thy dull sodden eyes to the 'sixty-thousand valets in London itself

who are yearly dismissed to the streets, to be what they can, when the

season ends;'--or to the hunger-stricken, pallid, _yellow_-coloured

'Free Labourers' in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Buckinghamshire, and all

other shires! These Yellow-coloured, for the present, absorb all my

sympathies: if I had a Twenty Millions, with Model-Farms and Niger

Expeditions, it is to these that I would give it! Quashee has already

victuals, clothing; Quashee is not dying of such despair as the

yellow-coloured pale man's. Quashee, it must be owned, is hitherto a

kind of blockhead. The Haiti Duke of Marmalade, educated now for

almost half a century, seems to have next to no sense in him. Why, in

one of those Lancashire Weavers, dying of hunger, there is more

thought and heart, a greater arithmetical amount of misery and

desperation, than in whole gangs of Quashees. It must be owned, thy

eyes are of the sodden sort; and with thy emancipations, and thy

twenty-millionings and long-eared clamourings, thou, like Robespierre

with his pasteboard _Etre Supreme_, threatenest to become a bore to

us: _Avec ton Etre Supreme tu commences m'embeter!_--

* * * * *

In a Printed Sheet of the assiduous, much-abused, and truly useful Mr.

Chadwick's, containing queries and responses from far and near as to

this great question, 'What is the effect of education on working-men,

in respect of their value as mere workers?' the present Editor,

reading with satisfaction a decisive unanimous verdict as to

Education, reads with inexpressible interest this special remark, put

in by way of marginal incidental note, from a practical manufacturing

Quaker, whom, as he is anonymous, we will call Friend Prudence.

Prudence keeps a thousand workmen; has striven in all ways to attach

them to him; has provided conversational soirees; play-grounds, bands

of music for the young ones; went even 'the length of buying them a

drum:' all which has turned out to be an excellent investment. For a

certain person, marked here by a black stroke, whom we shall name

Blank, living over the way,--he also keeps somewhere about a thousand

men; but has done none of these things for them, nor any other thing,

except due payment of the wages by supply-and-demand. Blank's workers

are perpetually getting into mutiny, into broils and coils: every six

months, we suppose, Blank has a strike; every one month, every day and

every hour, they are fretting and obstructing the shortsighted Blank;

pilfering from him, wasting and idling for him, omitting and

committing for him. "I would not," says Friend Prudence, "exchange my

workers for his _with seven thousand pounds to boot_."[29]

Right, O honourable Prudence; thou art wholly in the right: Seven

thousand pounds even as a matter of profit for this world, nay for the

mere cash-market of this world! And as a matter of profit not for this

world only, but for the other world and all worlds, it outweighs the

Bank of England!--Can the sagacious reader descry here, as it were the

outmost inconsiderable rock-ledge of a universal rock-foundation, deep

once more as the Centre of the World, emerging so, in the experience

of this good Quaker, through the Stygian mud-vortexes and general

Mother of Dead Dogs, whereon, for the present, all swags and

insecurely hovers, as if ready to be swallowed?

* * * * *

Some Permanence of Contract is already almost possible; the principle

of Permanence, year by year, better seen into and elaborated, may

enlarge itself, expand gradually on every side into a system. This

once secured, the basis of all good results were laid. Once permanent,

you do not quarrel with the first difficulty on your path, and quit it

in weak disgust; you reflect that it cannot be quitted, that it must

be conquered, a wise arrangement fallen on with regard to it. Ye

foolish Wedded Two, who have quarrelled, between whom the Evil Spirit

has stirred-up transient strife and bitterness, so that

'incompatibility' seems almost nigh, ye are nevertheless the Two who,

by long habit, were it by nothing more, do best of all others suit

each other: it is expedient for your own two foolish selves, to say

nothing of the infants, pedigrees and public in general, that ye agree

again; that ye put away the Evil Spirit, and wisely on both hands

struggle for the guidance of a Good Spirit!

The very horse that is permanent, how much kindlier do his rider and

he work, than the temporary one, hired on any hack principle yet

known! I am for permanence in all things, at the earliest possible

moment, and to the latest possible. Blessed is he that continueth

where he is. Here let us rest, and lay-out seedfields; here let us

learn to dwell. Here, even here, the orchards that we plant will yield

us fruit; the acorns will be wood and pleasant umbrage, if we wait.

How much grows everywhere, if we do but wait! Through the swamps we

will shape causeways, force purifying drains; we will learn to thread

the rocky inaccessibilities; and beaten tracks, worn smooth by mere

travelling of human feet, will form themselves. Not a difficulty but

can transfigure itself into a triumph; not even a deformity but, if

our own soul have imprinted worth on it, will grow dear to us. The

sunny plains and deep indigo transparent skies of Italy are all

indifferent to the great sick heart of a Sir Walter Scott: on the back

of the Apennines, in wild spring weather, the sight of bleak Scotch

firs, and snow-spotted heath and desolation, brings tears into his

eyes.[30]

O unwise mortals that forever change and shift, and say, Yonder, not

Here! Wealth richer than both the Indies lies everywhere for man, if

he will endure. Not his oaks only and his fruit-trees, his very heart

roots itself wherever he will abide;--roots itself, draws nourishment

from the deep fountains of Universal Being! Vagrant Sam-Slicks, who

rove over the Earth doing 'strokes of trade,' what wealth have they?

Horseloads, shiploads of white or yellow metal: in very sooth, what

_are_ these? Slick rests nowhere, he is homeless. He can build stone

or marble houses; but to continue in them is denied him. The wealth of

a man is the number of things which he loves and blesses, which he is

loved and blessed by! The herdsman in his poor clay shealing, where

his very cow and dog are friends to him, and not a cataract but

carries memories for him, and not a mountain-top but nods old

recognition: his life, all encircled as in blessed mother's-arms, is

it poorer than Slick's with the ass-loads of yellow metal on his back?

Unhappy Slick! Alas, there has so much grown nomadic, apelike, with

us: so much will have, with whatever pain, repugnance and

'impossibility,' to alter itself, to fix itself again,--in some wise

way, in any not delirious way!

* * * * *

A question arises here: Whether, in some ulterior, perhaps some not

far-distant stage of this 'Chivalry of Labour,' your Master-Worker may

not find it possible, and needful, to grant his Workers permanent

_interest_ in his enterprise and theirs? So that it become, in

practical result, what in essential fact and justice it ever is, a

joint enterprise; all men, from the Chief Master down to the lowest

Overseer and Operative, economically as well as loyally concerned for

it?--Which question I do not answer. The answer, near or else far, is

perhaps, Yes;--and yet one knows the difficulties. Despotism is

essential in most enterprises; I am told, they do not tolerate

'freedom of debate' on board a Seventy-four! Republican senate and

_plebiscita_ would not answer well in Cotton-Mills. And yet observe

there too: Freedom, not nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom;

this is indispensable. We must have it, and will have it! To reconcile

Despotism with Freedom:--well, is that such a mystery? Do you not

already know the way? It is to make your Despotism _just_. Rigorous as

Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all

men obey these, and have no 'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The

way is already known, part of the way;--and courage and some qualities

are needed for walking on it!

FOOTNOTES:

[29] _Report on the Training of Pauper Children_ (1841), p. 18.

[30] Lockhart's _Life of Scott_.

CHAPTER VI.

THE LANDED.

A man with fifty, with five hundred, with a thousand pounds a day,

given him freely, without condition at all,--on condition, as it now

runs, that he will sit with his hands in his pockets and do no

mischief, pass no Corn-Laws or the like,--he too, you would say, is or

might be a rather strong Worker! He is a Worker with such tools as no

man in this world ever before had. But in practice, very astonishing,

very ominous to look at, he proves not a strong Worker;--you are too

happy if he will prove but a No-worker, do nothing, and not be a

Wrong-worker.

You ask him, at the year's end: "Where is your three-hundred thousand

pound; what have you realised to us with that?" He answers, in

indignant surprise: "Done with it? Who are you that ask? I have eaten

it; I and my flunkies, and parasites, and slaves two-footed and

four-footed, in an ornamental manner; and I am here alive by it; _I_

am realised by it to you!"--It is, as we have often said, such an

answer as was never before given under this Sun. An answer that fills

me with boding apprehension, with foreshadows of despair. O stolid

Use-and-wont of an atheistic Half-century, O Ignavia, Tailor-godhood,

soul-killing Cant, to what passes art thou bringing us!--Out of the

loud-piping whirlwind, audibly to him that has ears, the Highest God

is again announcing in these days: "Idleness shall not be." God has

said it, man cannot gainsay.

Ah, how happy were it, if he this Aristocrat Worker would, in like

manner, see _his_ work and do it! It is frightful seeking another to

do it for him. Guillotines, Meudon Tanneries, and half-a-million men

shot dead, have already been expended in that business; and it is yet

far from done. This man too is something; nay he is a great thing.

Look on him there: a man of manful aspect; something of the

'cheerfulness of pride' still lingering in him. A free air of graceful

stoicism, of easy silent dignity sits well on him; in his heart, could

we reach it, lie elements of generosity, self-sacrificing justice,

true human valour. Why should he, with such appliances, stand an

incumbrance in the Present; perish disastrously out of the Future!

From no section of the Future would we lose these noble courtesies,

impalpable yet all-controlling; these dignified reticences, these

kingly simplicities;--lose aught of what the fruitful Past still gives

us token of, memento of, in this man. Can we not save him:--can he not

help us to save him! A brave man, he too; had not undivine Ignavia,

Hearsay, Speech without meaning,--had not Cant, thousandfold Cant

within him and around him, enveloping him like choke-damp, like thick

Egyptian darkness, thrown his soul into asphyxia, as it were

extinguished his soul; so that he sees not, hears not, and Moses and

all the Prophets address him in vain.

Will he awaken, be alive again, and have a soul; or is this death-fit

very 'death? It is a question of questions, for himself and for us

all! Alas, is there no noble work for this man too? Has not he

thickheaded ignorant boors; lazy, enslaved farmers, weedy lands?

Lands! Has not he weary heavy-laden ploughers of land; immortal souls

of men, ploughing, ditching, day-drudging; bare of back, empty of

stomach, nigh desperate of heart; and none peaceably to help them but

he, under Heaven? Does he find, with his three-hundred thousand

pounds, no noble thing trodden down in the thoroughfares, which it

were godlike to help up? Can he do nothing for his Burns but make a

Gauger of him; lionise him, bedinner him, for a foolish while; then

whistle him down the wind, to desperation and bitter death?--His work

too is difficult, in these modern, far-dislocated ages. But it may be

done; it may be tried;--it must be done.

A modern Duke of Weimar, not a god he either, but a human duke,

levied, as I reckon, in rents and taxes and all incomings whatsoever,

less than several of our English Dukes do in rent alone. The Duke of

Weimar, with these incomings, had to govern, judge, defend, everyway

administer _his_ Dukedom. He does all this as few others did: and he

improves lands besides all this, makes river-embankments, maintains

not soldiers only but Universities and Institutions;--and in his Court

were these four men: Wieland, Herder, Schiller, Goethe. Not as

parasites, which was impossible; not as table-wits and poetic

Katerfeltoes; but as noble Spiritual Men working under a noble

Practical Man. Shielded by him from many miseries; perhaps from many

shortcomings, destructive aberrations. Heaven had sent, once more,

heavenly Light into the world; and this man's honour was that he gave

it welcome. A new noble kind of Clergy, under an old but still noble

kind of King! I reckon that this one Duke of Weimar did more for the

Culture of his Nation than all the English Dukes and _Duces_ now

extant, or that were extant since Henry the Eighth gave them the

Church Lands to eat, have done for theirs!--I am ashamed, I am alarmed

for my English Dukes: what word have I to say?

_If_ our Actual Aristocracy, appointed 'Best-and-Bravest,' will be

wise, how inexpressibly happy for us! If not,--the voice of God from

the whirlwind is very audible to me. Nay, I will thank the Great God,

that He has said, in whatever fearful ways, and just wrath against us,

"Idleness shall be no more!" Idleness? The awakened soul of man, all

but the asphyxied soul of man, turns from it as from worse than death.

It is the life-in-death of Poet Coleridge. That fable of the Dead-Sea

Apes ceases to be a fable. The poor Worker starved to death is not the

saddest of sights. He lies there, dead on his shield; fallen down into

the bosom of his old Mother; with haggard pale face, sorrow-worn, but

stilled now into divine peace, silently appeals to the Eternal God and

all the Universe,--the most silent, the most eloquent of men.

Exceptions,--ah yes, thank Heaven, we know there are exceptions. Our

case were too hard, were there not exceptions, and partial exceptions

not a few, whom we know, and whom we do not know. Honour to the name

of Ashley,--honour to this and the other valiant Abdiel, found

faithful still; who would fain, by work and by word, admonish their

Order not to rush upon destruction! These are they who will, if not

save their Order, postpone the wreck of it;--by whom, under blessing

of the Upper Powers, 'a quiet euthanasia spread over generations,

instead of a swift torture-death concentred into years,' may be

brought about for many things. All honour and success to these. The

noble man can still strive nobly to save and serve his Order;--at

lowest, he can remember the precept of the Prophet: "Come out of her,

my people; come out of her!"

* * * * *