CHAPTER I.

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ALTON LOCKE,

TAILOR AND POET

An Autobiography.

BY THE REV. CHARLES KINGSLEY,

CANON OF WESTMINSTER, RECTOR OF EVERSLEY,

AND CHAPLAIN IN ORDINARY TO THE QUEEN AND PRINCE OF WALES,

_NEW EDITION_,

WITH A PREFATORY MEMOIR BY THOMAS HUGHES, ESQ., Q.C.,

AUTHOR OF "TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS."

CONTENTS.

PREFATORY MEMOIR

CHEAP CLOTHES AND NASTY

PREFACE--TO THE UNDERGRADUATES OF CAMBRIDGE

PREFACE--TO THE WORKING MEN OF GREAT BRITAIN

CHAPTER I. A POET'S CHILDHOOD

CHAPTER II. THE TAILORS' WORKROOM

CHAPTER III. SANDY MACKAYE

CHAPTER IV. TAILORS AND SOLDIERS

CHAPTER V. THE SCEPTIC'S MOTHER

CHAPTER VI. THE DULWICH GALLERY

CHAPTER VII. FIRST LOVE

CHAPTER VIII. LIGHT IN A DARK PLACE

CHAPTER IX. POETRY AND POETS

CHAPTER X. HOW FOLKS TURN CHARTISTS

CHAPTER XI. "THE YARD WHERE THE GENTLEMEN LIVE"

CHAPTER XII. CAMBRIDGE

CHAPTER XIII. THE LOST IDOL FOUND

CHAPTER XIV. A CATHEDRAL TOWN

CHAPTER XV. THE MAN OF SCIENCE

CHAPTER XVI. CULTIVATED WOMEN

CHAPTER XVII. SERMONS IN STONES

CHAPTER XVIII. MY FALL

CHAPTER XIX. SHORT AND SAD

CHAPTER XX. PEGASUS IN HARNESS

CHAPTER XXI. THE SWEATER'S DEN

CHAPTER XXII. AN EMERSONIAN SERMON

CHAPTER XXIII. THE FREEDOM OF THE PRESS

CHAPTER XXIV. THE TOWNSMAN'S SERMON TO THE GOWNSMAN

CHAPTER XXV. A TRUE NOBLEMAN

CHAPTER XXVI. THE TRIUMPHANT AUTHOR

CHAPTER XXVII. THE PLUSH BREECHES TRAGEDY

CHAPTER XXVIII. THE MEN WHO ARE EATEN

CHAPTER XXIX. THE TRIAL

CHAPTER XXX. PRISON THOUGHTS

CHAPTER XXXI. THE NEW CHURCH

CHAPTER XXXII. THE TOWER OF BABEL

CHAPTER XXXIII. A PATRIOT'S REWARD

CHAPTER XXXIV. THE TENTH OF APRIL

CHAPTER XXXV. THE LOWEST DEEP

CHAPTER XXXVI. DREAMLAND

CHAPTER XXXVII. THE TRUE DEMAGOGUE

CHAPTER XXXVIII. MIRACLES AND SCIENCE

CHAPTER XXXIX. NEMESIS

CHAPTER XL. PRIESTS AND PEOPLE

CHAPTER XLI. FREEDOM, EQUALITY, AND BROTHERHOOD

PREFATORY MEMOIR.

The tract appended to this preface has been chosen to accompany this

reprint of _Alton Locke_ in order to illustrate, from another side, a

distinct period in the life of Charles Kingsley, which stands out very much

by itself. It may be taken roughly to have extended from 1848 to 1856. It

has been thought that they require a preface, and I have undertaken to

write it, as one of the few survivors of those who were most intimately

associated with the author at the time to which the works refer.

No easy task; for, look at them from what point we will, these years must

be allowed to cover an anxious and critical time in modern English history;

but, above all, in the history of the working classes. In the first of them

the Chartist agitation came to a head and burst, and was followed by the

great movement towards association, which, developing in two directions and

by two distinct methods--represented respectively by the amalgamated Trades

Unions, and Co-operative Societies--has in the intervening years entirely

changed the conditions of the labour question in England, and the relations

of the working to the upper and middle classes. It is with this, the social

and industrial side of the history of those years, that we are mainly

concerned here. Charles Kingsley has left other and more important writings

of those years. But these are beside our purpose, which is to give some

such slight sketch of him as may be possible within the limits of a

preface, in the character in which he was first widely known, as the most

outspoken and powerful of those who took the side of the labouring classes,

at a critical time--the crisis in a word, when they abandoned their old

political weapons, for the more potent one of union and association, which

has since carried them so far.

To no one of all those to whom his memory is very dear can this seem a

superfluous task, for no writer was ever more misunderstood or better

abused at the time, and after the lapse of almost a quarter of a century

the misunderstanding would seem still to hold its ground. For through all

the many notices of him which appeared after his death in last January,

there ran the same apologetic tone as to this part of his life's work.

While generally, and as a rule cordially, recognizing his merits as an

author and a man, the writers seemed to agree in passing lightly over this

ground. When it was touched it was in a tone of apology, sometimes tinged

with sarcasm, as in the curt notice in the "Times"--"He was understood, to

be the Parson Lot of those 'Politics for the People' which made no little

noise in their time, and as Parson Lot he declared in burning language

that to his mind the fault in the 'People's Charter' was that it did not

go nearly far enough." And so the writer turns away, as do most of his

brethren, leaving probably some such impression as this on the minds of

most of their readers--"Young men of power and genius are apt to start with

wild notions. He was no exception. Parson Lot's sayings and doings may well

be pardoned for what Charles Kingsley said and did in after years; so let

us drop a decent curtain over them, and pass on."

Now, as very nearly a generation has passed since that signature used to

appear at the foot of some of the most noble and vigorous writing of our

time, readers of to-day are not unlikely to accept this view, and so to

find further confirmation and encouragement in the example of Parson Lot

for the mischievous and cowardly distrust of anything like enthusiasm

amongst young men, already sadly too prevalent in England. If it were only

as a protest against this "surtout point de zèle" spirit, against which it

was one of Charles Kingsley's chief tasks to fight with all his strength,

it is well that the facts should be set right. This done, readers may

safely be left to judge what need there is for the apologetic tone in

connection with the name, the sayings, and doings of Parson Lot.

My first meeting with him was in the autumn of 1848, at the house of Mr.

Maurice, who had lately been appointed Reader of Lincolns Inn. No parochial

work is attached to that post, so Mr. Maurice had undertaken the charge of

a small district in the parish in which he lived, and had set a number of

young men, chiefly students of the Inns of Court who had been attracted by

his teaching, to work in it. Once a week, on Monday evenings, they used

to meet at his house for tea, when their own work was reported upon and

talked over. Suggestions were made and plans considered; and afterwards a

chapter of the Bible was read and discussed. Friends and old pupils of Mr.

Maurice's, residing in the country, or in distant parts of London, were

in the habit of coming occasionally to these meetings, amongst whom was

Charles Kingsley. He had been recently appointed Rector of Eversley, and

was already well known as the author of _The Saint's Tragedy_, his first

work, which contained the germ of much that he did afterwards.

His poem, and the high regard and admiration which Mr. Maurice had for

him, made him a notable figure in that small society, and his presence was

always eagerly looked for. What impressed me most about him when we first

met was, his affectionate deference to Mr. Maurice, and the vigour and

incisiveness of everything he said and did. He had the power of cutting

out what he meant in a few clear words, beyond any one I have ever met.

The next thing that struck one was the ease with which he could turn from

playfulness, or even broad humour, to the deepest earnest. At first I think

this startled most persons, until they came to find out the real deep

nature of the man; and that his broadest humour had its root in a faith

which realized, with extraordinary vividness, the fact that God's Spirit

is actively abroad in the world, and that Christ is in every man, and made

him hold fast, even in his saddest moments,--and sad moments were not

infrequent with him,--the assurance that, in spite of all appearances, the

world was going right, and would go right somehow, "Not your way, or my

way, but God's way." The contrast of his humility and audacity, of his

distrust in himself and confidence in himself, was one of those puzzles

which meet us daily in this world of paradox. But both qualities gave him a

peculiar power for the work he had to do at that time, with which the name

of Parson Lot is associated.

It was at one of these gatherings, towards the end of 1847 or early in

1848, when Kingsley found himself in a minority of one, that he said

jokingly, he felt much as Lot must have felt in the Cities of the Plain,

when he seemed as one that mocked to his sons-in-law. The name Parson Lot

was then and there suggested, and adopted by him, as a familiar _nom de

plume_, He used it from 1848 up to 1856; at first constantly, latterly

much more rarely. But the name was chiefly made famous by his writings in

"Politics for the People," the "Christian Socialist," and the "Journal of

Association," three periodicals which covered the years from '48 to '52; by

"Alton Locke"; and by tracts and pamphlets, of which the best known, "Cheap

Clothes and Nasty," is now republished.

In order to understand and judge the sayings and writings of Parson Lot

fairly, it is necessary to recall the condition of the England of that

day. Through the winter of 1847-8, amidst wide-spread distress, the cloud

of discontent, of which Chartism was the most violent symptom, had been

growing darker and more menacing, while Ireland was only held down by main

force. The breaking-out of the revolution on the Continent in February

increased the danger. In March there were riots in London, Glasgow,

Edinburgh, Liverpool, and other large towns. On April 7th, "the Crown

and Government Security Bill," commonly called "the Gagging Act," was

introduced by the Government, the first reading carried by 265 to 24,

and the second a few days later by 452 to 35. On the 10th of April the

Government had to fill London with troops, and put the Duke of Wellington

in command, who barricaded the bridges and Downing Street, garrisoned the

Bank and other public buildings, and closed the Horse Guards.

When the momentary crisis had passed, the old soldier declared in the House

of Lords that "no great society had ever suffered as London had during the

preceding days," while the Home Secretary telegraphed to all the chief

magistrates of the kingdom the joyful news that the peace had been kept

in London. In April, the Lord Chancellor, in introducing the Crown and

Government Security Bill in the House of Lords, referred to the fact

that "meetings were daily held, not only in London, but in most of the

manufacturing towns, the avowed object of which was to array the people

against the constituted authority of these realms." For months afterwards

the Chartist movement, though plainly subsiding, kept the Government in

constant anxiety; and again in June, the Bank, the Mint, the Custom House,

and other public offices were filled with troops, and the Houses of

Parliament were not only garrisoned but provisioned as if for a siege.

From that time, all fear of serious danger passed away. The Chartists were

completely discouraged, and their leaders in prison; and the upper and

middle classes were recovering rapidly from the alarm which had converted

a million of them into special constables, and were beginning to doubt

whether the crisis had been so serious after all, whether the disaffection

had ever been more than skin deep. At this juncture a series of articles

appeared in the _Morning Chronicle_ on "London Labour and the London Poor,"

which startled the well-to-do classes out of their jubilant and scornful

attitude, and disclosed a state of things which made all fair minded people

wonder, not that there had been violent speaking and some rioting, but that

the metropolis had escaped the scenes which had lately been enacted in

Paris, Vienna, Berlin, and other Continental capitals.

It is only by an effort that one can now realize the strain to which the

nation was subjected during that winter and spring, and which, of course,

tried every individual man also, according to the depth and earnestness of

his political and social convictions and sympathies. The group of men who

were working under Mr. Maurice were no exceptions to the rule. The work of

teaching and visiting was not indeed neglected, but the larger questions

which were being so strenuously mooted--the points of the people's charter,

the right of public meeting, the attitude of the labouring-class to the

other classes--absorbed more and more of their attention. Kingsley was

very deeply impressed with the gravity and danger of the crisis--more so,

I think, than almost any of his friends; probably because, as a country

parson, he was more directly in contact with one class of the poor than any

of them. How deeply he felt for the agricultural poor, how faithfully he

reflected the passionate and restless sadness of the time, may be read in

the pages of "Yeast," which was then coming out in "Fraser." As the winter

months went on this sadness increased, and seriously affected his health.

"I have a longing," he wrote to Mr. Ludlow, "to do _something_--what, God

only knows. You say, 'he that believeth will not make haste,' but I think

he that believeth must _make_ haste, or get damned with the rest. But I

will do anything that anybody likes--I have no confidence in myself or in

anything but God. I am not great enough for such times, alas! '_nè pour

faire des vers_,' as Camille Desmoulins said."

This longing became so strong as the crisis in April approached, that he

came to London to see what could be done, and to get help from Mr. Maurice,

and those whom he had been used to meet at his house. He found them a

divided body. The majority were sworn in as special constables, and several

had openly sided with the Chartists; while he himself, with Mr. Maurice and

Mr. Ludlow, were unable to take active part with either side. The following

extract from a letter to his wife, written on the 9th of April, shows how

he was employed during these days, and how he found the work which he was

in search of, the first result of which was the publication of "those

'Politics for the People' which made no small noise in their times"--

"_April_ 11th, 1848.--The events of a week have been crowded into a few

hours. I was up till four this morning--writing posting placards, under

Maurice's auspices, one of which is to be got out to-morrow morning, the

rest when we can get money. Could you not beg a few sovereigns somewhere

to help these poor wretches to the truest alms?--to words, texts from the

Psalms, anything which may keep even one man from cutting his brother's

throat to-morrow or Friday? _Pray, pray, help us._ Maurice has given me

a highest proof of confidence. He has taken me to counsel, and we are to

have meetings for prayer and study, when I come up to London, and we are to

bring out a new set of real "Tracts for the Times," addressed to the higher

orders. Maurice is _à la hauteur des circonstances_--determined to make a

decisive move. He says, if the Oxford Tracts did wonders, why should not

we? Pray for us. A glorious future is opening, and both Maurice and Ludlow

seem to have driven away all my doubts and sorrow, and I see the blue sky

again, and my Father's face!"

The arrangements for the publication of "Politics for the People" were soon

made; and in one of the earliest numbers, for May, 1848, appeared the paper

which furnishes what ground there is for the statement, already quoted,

that "he declared, in burning language, that the People's Charter did not

go far enough" It was No. 1 of "Parson Lot's Letters to the Chartists." Let

us read it with its context.

"I am not one of those who laugh at your petition of the 10th of April: I

have no patience with those who do. Suppose there were but 250,000 honest

names on that sheet--suppose the Charter itself were all stuff--yet you

have still a right to fair play, a patient hearing, an honourable and

courteous answer, whichever way it may be. But _my only quarrel with the

Charter is that it does not go far enough in reform_. I want to see you

_free_, but I do not see that what you ask for will give you what you want.

I think you have fallen into just the same mistake as the rich, of whom you

complain--the very mistake which has been our curse and our nightmare. I

mean the mistake of fancying that _legislative_ reform is _social_ reform,

or that men's hearts can be changed by Act of Parliament. If any one will

tell me of a country where a Charter made the rogues honest, or the idle

industrious, I will alter my opinion of the Charter, but not till then. It

disappointed me bitterly when I read it. It seemed a harmless cry enough,

but a poor, bald constitution-mongering cry as ever I heard. The French cry

of 'organization of labour' is worth a thousand of it, but yet that does

not go to the bottom of the matter by many a mile." And then, after telling

how he went to buy a number of the Chartist newspaper, and found it in a

shop which sold "flash songsters," "the Swell's Guide," and "dirty milksop

French novels," and that these publications, and a work called "The Devil's

Pulpit," were puffed in its columns, he goes on, "These are strange times.

I thought the devil used to befriend tyrants and oppressors, but he seems

to have profited by Burns' advice to 'tak a thought and mend.' I thought

the struggling freeman's watchword was: 'God sees my wrongs.' 'He hath

taken the matter into His own hands.' 'The poor committeth himself unto

Him, for He is the helper of the friendless.' But now the devil seems all

at once to have turned philanthropist and patriot, and to intend himself to

fight the good cause, against which he has been fighting ever since Adam's

time. I don't deny, my friends, it is much cheaper and pleasanter to be

reformed by the devil than by God; for God will only reform society on the

condition of our reforming every man his own self--while the devil is quite

ready to help us to mend the laws and the parliament, earth and heaven,

without ever starting such an impertinent and 'personal' request, as that

a man should mend himself. _That_ liberty of the subject he will always

respect."--"But I say honestly, whomsoever I may offend, the more I have

read of your convention speeches and newspaper articles, the more I am

convinced that too many of you are trying to do God's work with the devil's

tools. What is the use of brilliant language about peace, and the majesty

of order, and universal love, though it may all be printed in letters a

foot long, when it runs in the same train with ferocity, railing, mad,

one-eyed excitement, talking itself into a passion like a street woman? Do

you fancy that after a whole column spent in stirring men up to fury, a few

twaddling copybook headings about 'the sacred duty of order' will lay the

storm again? What spirit is there but the devil's spirit in bloodthirsty

threats of revenge?"--"I denounce the weapons which you have been deluded

into employing to gain you your rights, and the indecency and profligacy

which you are letting be mixed up with them! Will you strengthen and

justify your enemies? Will you disgust and cripple your friends? Will you

go out of your way to do wrong? When you can be free by fair means will you

try foul? When you might keep the name of Liberty as spotless as the Heaven

from which she comes, will you defile her with blasphemy, beastliness, and

blood? When the cause of the poor is the cause of Almighty God, will you

take it out of His hands to entrust it to the devil? These are bitter

questions, but as you answer them so will you prosper."

In Letter II. he tells them that if they have followed, a different

"Reformer's Guide" from his, it is "mainly the fault of us parsons, who

have never told you that the true 'Reformer's Guide,' the true poor man's

book, the true 'Voice of God against tyrants, idlers, and humbugs, was the

Bible.' The Bible demands for the poor as much, and more, than they demand

for themselves; it expresses the deepest yearnings of the poor man's heart

far more nobly, more searchingly, more daringly, more eloquently than any

modern orator has done. I say, it gives a ray of hope--say rather a certain

dawn of a glorious future, such as no universal suffrage, free trade,

communism, organization of labour, or any other Morrison's-pill-measure can

give--and yet of a future, which will embrace all that is good in these--a

future of conscience, of justice, of freedom, when idlers and oppressors

shall no more dare to plead parchments and Acts of Parliament for their

iniquities. I say the Bible promises this, not in a few places only, but

throughout; it is the thought which runs through the whole Bible, justice

from God to those whom men oppress, glory from God to those whom men

despise. Does that look like the invention of tyrants, and prelates? You

may sneer, but give me a fair hearing, and if I do not prove my words, then

call me the same hard name which I shall call any man, who having read

the Bible, denies that it is the poor man's comfort and the rich man's

warning."

In subsequent numbers (as afterwards in the "Christian Socialist," and the

"Journal of Association") he dwells in detail on the several popular cries,

such as, "a fair day's wage for a fair day's work," illustrating them from

the Bible, urging his readers to take it as the true Radical Reformer's

Guide, if they were longing for the same thing as he was longing for--to

see all humbug, idleness, injustice, swept out of England. His other

contributions to these periodicals consisted of some of his best short

poems: "The Day of the Lord;" "The Three Fishers;" "Old and New," and

others; of a series of Letters on the Frimley murder; of a short story

called "The Nun's Pool," and of some most charming articles on the pictures

in the National Gallery, and the collections in the British Museum,

intended to teach the English people how to use and enjoy their own

property.

I think I know every line which was ever published under the signature

Parson Lot; and I take it upon myself to say, that there is in all that

"burning language" nothing more revolutionary than the extracts given above

from his letters to the Chartists.

But, it may be said, apart from his writings, did not Parson Lot declare

himself a Chartist in a public meeting in London; and did he not preach in

a London pulpit a political sermon, which brought up the incumbent, who had

invited him, to protest from the altar against the doctrine which had just

been delivered?

Yes! Both statements are true. Here are the facts as to the speech, those

as to the sermon I will give in their place. In the early summer of 1848

some of those who felt with C. Kingsley that the "People's Charter" had not

had fair play or courteous treatment, and that those who signed it had real

wrongs to complain of, put themselves into communication with the leaders,

and met and talked with them. At last it seemed that the time was come for

some more public meeting, and one was called at the Cranbourn Tavern, over

which Mr. Maurice presided. After the president's address several very

bitter speeches followed, and a vehement attack was specially directed

against the Church and the clergy. The meeting waxed warm, and seemed

likely to come to no good, when Kingsley rose, folded his arms across his

chest, threw his head back, and began--with the stammer which always came

at first when he was much moved, but which fixed every one's attention at

once--"I am a Church of England parson"--a long pause--"and a Chartist;"

and then he went on to explain how far he thought them right in their claim

for a reform of Parliament; how deeply he sympathized with their sense of

the injustice of the law as it affected them; how ready he was to help in

all ways to get these things set right; and then to denounce their methods,

in very much the same terms as I have already quoted from his letters to

the Chartists. Probably no one who was present ever heard a speech which

told more at the time. I had a singular proof that the effect did not

pass away. The most violent speaker on that occasion was one of the staff

of the leading Chartist newspaper. I lost sight of him entirely for more

than twenty years, and saw him again, a little grey shrivelled man, by

Kingsley's side, at the grave of Mr. Maurice, in the cemetery at Hampstead.

The experience of this meeting encouraged its promoters to continue the

series, which they did with a success which surprised no one more than

themselves. Kingsley's opinion of them may be gathered from the following

extract from a letter to his wife:--

"_June_ 4, 1848, Evening.--A few words before bed. I have just come home

from the meeting. No one spoke but working men, gentlemen I should call

them, in every sense of the term. Even _I_ was perfectly astonished by the

courtesy, the reverence to Maurice, who sat there like an Apollo, their

eloquence, the brilliant, nervous, well-chosen language, the deep simple

earnestness, the rightness and moderation of their thoughts. And these are

the _Chartists_, these are the men who are called fools and knaves--who are

refused the rights which are bestowed on every profligate fop.... It is

God's cause, fear not He will be with us, and if He is with us, who shall

be against us?"

But while he was rapidly winning the confidence of the working classes, he

was raising up a host of more or less hostile critics in other quarters by

his writings in "Politics for the People," which journal was in the midst

of its brief and stormy career. At the end of June, 1848, he writes to Mr.

Ludlow, one of the editors--

"I fear my utterances have had a great deal to do with the 'Politics''

unpopularity. I have got worse handled than any of you by poor and rich.

There is one comfort, that length of ears is in the donkey species always

compensated by toughness of hide. But it is a pleasing prospect for me (if

you knew all that has been said and written about Parson Lot), when I look

forward and know that my future explosions are likely to become more and

more obnoxious to the old gentlemen, who stuff their ears with cotton, and

then swear the children are not screaming."

"Politics for the People" was discontinued for want of funds; but its

supporters, including all those who were working under Mr. Maurice--who,

however much they might differ in opinions, were of one mind as to the

danger of the time, and the duty of every man to do his utmost to meet that

danger--were bent upon making another effort. In the autumn, Mr. Ludlow,

and others of their number who spent the vacation abroad, came back with

accounts of the efforts at association which were being made by the

workpeople of Paris.

The question of starting such associations in England as the best means

of fighting the slop system--which the "Chronicle" was showing to lie at

the root of the misery and distress which bred Chartists--was anxiously

debated. It was at last resolved to make the effort, and to identify the

new journal with the cause of Association, and to publish a set of tracts

in connection with it, of which Kingsley undertook to write the first,

"Cheap Clothes and Nasty."

So "the Christian Socialist" was started, with Mr. Ludlow for editor, the

tracts on Christian Socialism begun under Mr. Maurice's supervision, and

the society for promoting working-men's associations was formed out of the

body of men who were already working with Mr. Maurice. The great majority

of these joined, though the name was too much for others. The question of

taking it had been much considered, and it was decided, on the whole, to be

best to do so boldly, even though it might cost valuable allies. Kingsley

was of course consulted on every point, though living now almost entirely

at Eversley, and his views as to the proper policy to be pursued may be

gathered best from the following extracts from letters of his to Mr.

Ludlow--

"We must touch the workman at all his points of interest. First and

foremost at association--but also at political rights, as grounded both

on the Christian ideal of the Church, and on the historic facts of the

Anglo-Saxon race. Then national education, sanitary and dwelling-house

reform, the free sale of land, and corresponding reform of the land laws,

moral improvement of the family relation, public places of recreation (on

which point I am very earnest), and I think a set of hints from history,

and sayings of great men, of which last I have been picking up from Plato,

Demosthenes, &c."

1849.--"This is a puling, quill-driving, soft-handed age--among our

own rank, I mean. Cowardice is called meekness; to temporize is to be

charitable and reverent; to speak truth, and shame the devil, is to

offend weak brethren, who, somehow or other, never complain of their weak

consciences till you hit them hard. And yet, my dear fellow, I still remain

of my old mind--that it is better to say too much than too little, and more

merciful to knock a man down with a pick-axe than to prick him to death

with pins. The world says, No. It hates anything demonstrative, or violent

(except on its own side), or unrefined."

1849.--"The question of property is one of these cases. We must face it in

this age--simply because it faces us."--"I want to commit myself--I want

to make others commit themselves. No man can fight the devil with a long

ladle, however pleasant it may be to eat with him with one. A man never

fishes well in the morning till he has tumbled into the water."

And the counsels of Parson Lot had undoubtedly great weight in giving an

aggressive tone both to the paper and the society. But if he was largely

responsible for the fighting temper of the early movement, he, at any rate,

never shirked his share of the fighting. His name was the butt at which all

shafts were aimed. As Lot "seemed like one that mocked to his sons-in-law,"

so seemed the Parson to the most opposite sections of the British nation.

As a friend wrote of him at the time, he "had at any rate escaped the

curse of the false prophets, 'Woe unto you when all men shall speak well

of you.'" Many of the attacks and criticisms were no doubt aimed not so

much at him personally as at the body of men with whom, and for whom,

he was working; but as he was (except Mr. Maurice) the only one whose

name was known, he got the lion's share of all the abuse. The storm

broke on him from all points of the compass at once. An old friend and

fellow-contributor to "Politics for the People," led the Conservative

attack, accusing him of unsettling the minds of the poor, making them

discontented, &c. Some of the foremost Chartists wrote virulently against

him for "attempting to justify the God of the Old Testament," who, they

maintained, was unjust and cruel, and, at any rate, not the God "of the

people." The political economists fell on him for his anti-Malthusian

belief, that the undeveloped fertility of the earth need not be overtaken

by population within any time which it concerned us to think about. The

quarterlies joined in the attack on his economic heresies. The "Daily

News" opened a cross fire on him from the common-sense Liberal battery,

denouncing the "revolutionary nonsense, which is termed Christian

Socialisms"; and, after some balancing, the "Guardian," representing in

the press the side of the Church to which he leant, turned upon him in a

very cruel article on the republication of "Yeast" (originally written

for "Fraser's Magazine"), and accused him of teaching heresy in doctrine,

and in morals "that a certain amount of youthful profligacy does no real

permanent harm to the character, perhaps strengthens it for a useful and

religious life."

In this one instance Parson Lot fairly lost his temper, and answered, "as

was answered to the Jesuit of old--_mentiris impudentissime_." With the

rest he seemed to enjoy the conflict and "kept the ring," like a candidate

for the wrestling championship in his own county of Devon against all

comers, one down another come on.

The fact is, that Charles Kingsley was born a fighting man, and believed

in bold attack. "No human power ever beat back a resolute forlorn hope,"

he used to say; "to be got rid of, they must be blown back with grape and

canister," because the attacking party have all the universe behind them,

the defence only that small part which is shut up in their walls. And he

felt most strongly at this time that hard fighting was needed. "It is a

pity" he writes to Mr. Ludlow, "that telling people what's right, won't

make them do it; but not a new fact, though that ass the world has quite

forgotten it; and assures you that dear sweet 'incompris' mankind only

wants to be told the way to the millennium to walk willingly into it--which

is a lie. If you want to get mankind, if not to heaven, at least out of

hell, kick them out." And again, a little later on, in urging the policy

which the "Christian Socialist" should still follow--

1851.--"It seems to me that in such a time as this the only way to fight

against the devil is to attack him. He has got it too much his own way

to meddle with us if we don't meddle with him. But the very devil has

feelings, and if you prick him will roar...whereby you, at all events, gain

the not-every-day-of-the-week-to-be-attained benefit of finding out where

he is. Unless, indeed, as I suspect, the old rascal plays ventriloquist (as

big grasshoppers do when you chase them), and puts you on a wrong scent,

by crying 'Fire!' out of saints' windows. Still, the odds are if you prick

lustily enough, you make him roar unawares."

The memorials of his many controversies lie about in the periodicals of

that time, and any one who cares to hunt them up will be well repaid, and

struck with the vigour of the defence, and still more with the complete

change in public opinion, which has brought the England of to-day clean

round to the side of Parson Lot. The most complete perhaps of his fugitive

pieces of this kind is the pamphlet, "Who are the friends of Order?"

published by J. W. Parker and Son, in answer to a very fair and moderate

article in "Fraser's Mazagine." The Parson there points out how he and

his friends were "cursed by demagogues as aristocrats, and by tories as

democrats, when in reality they were neither." And urges that the very fact

of the Continent being overrun with Communist fanatics is the best argument

for preaching association here.

But though he faced his adversaries bravely, it must not be inferred that

he did not feel the attacks and misrepresentations very keenly. In many

respects, though housed in a strong and vigorous body, his spirit was an

exceedingly tender and sensitive one. I have often thought that at this

time his very sensitiveness drove him to say things more broadly and

incisively, because he was speaking as it were somewhat against the grain,

and knew that the line he was taking would be misunderstood, and would

displease and alarm those with whom he had most sympathy. For he was by

nature and education an aristocrat in the best sense of the word, believed

that a landed aristocracy was a blessing to the country, and that no

country would gain the highest liberty without such a class, holding its

own position firmly, but in sympathy with the people. He liked their habits

and ways, and keenly enjoyed their society. Again, he was full of reverence

for science and scientific men, and specially for political economy and

economists, and desired eagerly to stand well with them. And it was a most

bitter trial to him to find himself not only in sharp antagonism with

traders and employers of labour, which he looked for, but with these

classes also.

On the other hand many of the views and habits of those with whom he found

himself associated were very distasteful to him. In a new social movement,

such as that of association as it took shape in 1849-50, there is certain

to be great attraction for restless and eccentric persons, and in point

of fact many such joined it. The beard movement was then in its infancy,

and any man except a dragoon who wore hair on his face was regarded as a

dangerous character, with whom it was compromising to be seen in any public

place--a person in sympathy with _sansculottes_, and who would dispense

with trousers but for his fear of the police. Now whenever Kingsley

attended a meeting of the promoters of association in London, he was

sure to find himself in the midst of bearded men, vegetarians, and other

eccentric persons, and the contact was very grievous to him. "As if we

shall not be abused enough," he used to say, "for what we must say and do

without being saddled with mischievous nonsense of this kind." To less

sensitive men the effect of eccentricity upon him was almost comic, as

when on one occasion he was quite upset and silenced by the appearance of

a bearded member of Council at an important deputation in a straw hat and

blue plush gloves. He did not recover from the depression produced by those

gloves for days. Many of the workmen, too, who were most prominent in the

Associations were almost as little to his mind--windy inflated kind of

persons, with a lot of fine phrases in their mouths which they did not know

the meaning of.

But in spite of all that was distasteful to him in some of its

surroundings, the co-operative movement (as it is now called) entirely

approved itself to his conscience and judgment, and mastered him so that he

was ready to risk whatever had to be risked in fighting its battle. Often

in those days, seeing how loath Charles Kingsley was to take in hand, much

of the work which Parson Lot had to do, and how fearlessly and thoroughly

he did it after all, one was reminded of the old Jewish prophets, such as

Amos the herdsman of Tekoa--"I was no prophet, neither was I a prophet's

son, but I was an herdsman and a gatherer of sycamore fruit: and the Lord

took me as I followed the flock, and said unto me, Go prophesy unto my

people Israel."

The following short extracts from his correspondence with Mr. Ludlow, as to

the conduct of the "Christian Socialist," and his own contributions to it,

may perhaps serve to show how his mind was working at this time:--

_Sept., 1850_.--"I cannot abide the notion of Branch Churches or Free

(sect) Churches, and unless my whole train of thought alters, I will resist

the temptation as coming from the devil. Where I am I am doing God's work,

and when the Church is ripe for more, the Head of the Church will put the

means our way. You seem to fancy that we may have a _Deus quidam Deceptor_

over us after all. If I did I'd go and blow my dirty brains out and be rid

of the whole thing at once. I would indeed. If God, when people ask Him to

teach and guide them, does not; if when they confess themselves rogues and

fools to Him, and beg Him to make them honest and wise, He does not, but

darkens them, and deludes them into bogs and pitfalls, is he a Father? You

fall back into Judaism, friend."

_Dec., 1850_.--"Jeremiah is my favourite book now. It has taught me more

than tongue can tell. But I am much disheartened, and am minded to speak

no more words in this name (Parson Lot); and yet all these bullyings teach

one, correct one, warn one--show one that God is not leaving one to go

one's own way. 'Christ reigns,' quoth Luther."

It was at this time, in the winter of 1850, that "Alton Locke" was

published. He had been engaged on it for more than a year, working at it

in the midst of all his controversies. The following extracts from his

correspondence with Mr. Ludlow will tell readers more about it than any

criticism, if they have at all realized the time at which it was written,

or his peculiar work in that time.

_February, 1849_.--"I have hopes from the book I am writing, which has

revealed itself to me so rapidly and methodically that I feel it comes

down from above, and that only my folly can spoil it, which I pray against

daily."

1849.--"I think the notion a good one (referring to other work for the

paper which he had been asked to do), but I feel no inspiration at all

that way; and I dread being tempted to more and more bitterness, harsh

judgment, and evil speaking. I dread it. I am afraid sometimes I shall end

in universal snarling. Besides, my whole time is taken up with my book,

and _that_ I do feel inspired to write. But there is something else which

weighs awfully on my mind--(the first number of _Cooper's Journal_, which

he sent me the other day). Here is a man of immense influence openly

preaching Strausseanism to the workmen, and in a fair, honest, manly way

which must tell. Who will answer him? Who will answer Strauss? [Footnote:

He did the work himself. After many interviews, and a long correspondence

with him, Thomas Cooper changed his views, and has been lecturing and

preaching for many years as a Christian.] Who will denounce him as a vile

aristocrat, robbing the poor man of his Saviour--of the ground of all

democracy, all freedom, all association--of the Charter itself? _Oh, si

mihi centum voces et ferrea lingua!_ Think about _that_."

_January, 1850_.--"A thousand thanks for your letter, though it only shows

me what I have long suspected, that I know hardly enough yet to make the

book what it should be. As you have made a hole, you must help to fill it.

Can you send me any publication which would give me a good notion of the

Independents' view of politics, also one which would give a good notion of

the Fox-Emerson-Strauss school of Blague-Unitarianism, which is superseding

dissent just now. It was with the ideal of Calvinism, and its ultimate

bearing on the people's cause, that I wished to deal. I believe that there

must be internecine war between the people's church--_i.e._, the future

development of Catholic Christianity, and Calvinism even in its mildest

form, whether in the Establishment or out of it--and I have counted the

cost and will give every _party_ its slap in their turn. But I will alter,

as far as I can, all you dislike."

_August, 1850_.--"How do you know, dearest man, that I was not right in

making the Alton of the second volume different from the first? In showing

the individuality of the man swamped and warped by the routine of misery

and discontent? How do you know that the historic and human interest of the

book was not intended to end with Mackay's death, in whom old radicalism

dies, 'not having received the promises,' to make room for the radicalism

of the future? How do you know that the book from that point was not

intended to take a mythic and prophetic form, that those dreams come in for

the very purpose of taking the story off the ground of the actual into the

deeper and wider one of the ideal, and that they do actually do what they

were intended to do? How do you know that my idea of carrying out Eleanor's

sermons in practice were just what I could not--and if I could, dared not,

give? that all that I could do was to leave them as seed, to grow by itself

in many forms, in many minds, instead of embodying them in some action

which would have been both as narrow as my own idiosyncrasy, gain the

reproach of insanity, and be simply answered by--'If such things have been

done, where are they?' and lastly, how do you know that I had not a special

meaning in choosing a civilized fine lady as my missionary, one of a class

which, as it does exist, God must have something for it to do, and, as

it seems, plenty to do, from the fact that a few gentlemen whom I could

mention, not to speak of Fowell Buxtons, Howards, Ashleys, &c., have

done, more for the people in one year than they have done for themselves

in fifty? If I had made her an organizer, as well as a preacher, your

complaint might have been just. My dear man, the artist is a law unto

himself--or rather God is a law to him, when he prays, as I have earnestly

day after day about this book--to be taught how to say the right thing

in the right way--and I assure you I did not get tired of my work, but

laboured as earnestly at the end as I did at the beginning. The rest of

your criticism, especially about the interpenetration of doctrine and

action, is most true, and shall be attended to.--Your brother,

"G. K."

The next letter, on the same topic, in answer to criticisms on "Alton

Locke," is addressed to a brother clergyman--

"EVERSLEY, _January 13, 1851_.

"Rec. dear Sir,--I will answer your most interesting letter as shortly as

I can, and if possible in the same spirit of honesty as that in which you

have written to me.

"_First_, I do not think the cry 'Get on' to be anything but a devil's cry.

The moral of my book is that the working man who tries to get on, to desert

his class and rise above it, enters into a lie, and leaves God's path for

his own--with consequences.

"_Second_, I believe that a man might be as a tailor or a costermonger,

every inch of him a saint, a scholar, and a gentleman, for I have seen some

few such already. I believe hundreds of thousands more would be so, if

their businesses were put on a Christian footing, and themselves given by

education, sanitary reforms, &c., the means of developing their own latent

capabilities--I think the cry, 'Rise in Life,' has been excited by the very

increasing impossibility of being anything but brutes while they struggle

below. I know well all that is doing in the way of education, &c., but

I do assert that the disease of degradation has been for the last forty

years increasing faster than the remedy. And I believe, from experience,

that when you put workmen into human dwellings, and give them a Christian

education, so far from wishing discontentedly to rise out of their class,

or to level others to it, exactly the opposite takes place. They become

sensible of the dignity of work, and they begin to see their labour as a

true calling in God's Church, now that it is cleared from the accidentia

which made it look, in their eyes, only a soulless drudgery in a devil's

workshop of a _World_.

"_Third_, From the advertisement of an 'English Republic' you send, I can

guess who will be the writers in it, &c., &c., being behind the scenes.

It will come to nought. Everything of this kind is coming to nought now.

The workmen are tired of idols, ready and yearning for the Church and the

Gospel, and such men as your friend may laugh at Julian Harney, Feargus

O'Connor, and the rest of that smoke of the pit. Only we live in a great

crisis, and the Lord requires great things of us. The fields are white to

harvest. Pray ye therefore the Lord of the harvest, that He may send forth

labourers into His harvest.

"_Fourth_, As to the capacities of working-men, I am afraid that your

excellent friend will find that he has only the refuse of working

intellects to form his induction on. The devil has got the best long ago.

By the neglect of the Church, by her dealing (like the Popish Church and

all weak churches) only with women, children, and beggars, the cream

and pith of working intellect is almost exclusively self-educated, and,

therefore, alas! infidel. If he goes on as he is doing, lecturing on

history, poetry, science, and all the things which the workmen crave for,

and can only get from such men as H----, Thomas Cooper, &c., mixed up with

Straussism and infidelity, he will find that he will draw back to his

Lord's fold, and to his lecture room, slowly, but surely, men, whose powers

will astonish him, as they have astonished me.

"_Fifth_, The workmen whose quarrels you mention are not Christians, or

socialists either. They are of all creeds and none. We are teaching them

to become Christians by teaching them gradually that true socialism, true

liberty, brotherhood, and true equality (not the carnal dead level equality

of the Communist, but the spiritual equality of the church idea, which

gives every man an equal chance of developing and using God's gifts, and

rewards every man according to his work, without respect of persons) is

only to be found in loyalty and obedience to Christ. They do quarrel, but

if you knew how they used to quarrel before association, the improvement

since would astonish you. And the French associations do not quarrel

at all. I can send you a pamphlet on them, if you wish, written by an

eyewitness, a friend of mine.

"_Sixth_, If your friend wishes to see what can be made of workmen's

brains, let him, in God's name, go down to Harrow Weald, and there see Mr.

Monro--see what he has done with his own national school boys. I have his

opinion as to the capabilities of those minds, which we, alas! now so sadly

neglect. I only ask him to go and ask of that man the question which you

have asked of me.

"_Seventh_, May I, in reference to myself and certain attacks on me, say,

with all humility, that I do not speak from hearsay now, as has been

asserted, from second-hand picking and stealing out of those 'Reports on

Labour and the Poor,' in the 'Morning Chronicle,' which are now being

reprinted in a separate form, and which I entreat you to read if you wish

to get a clear view of the real state of the working classes.

"From my cradle, as the son of an active clergyman, I have been brought

up in the most familiar intercourse with the poor in town and country. My

mother, a second Mrs. Fry, in spirit and act. For fourteen years my father

has been the rector of a very large metropolitan parish--and I speak what I

know, and testify that which I have seen. With earnest prayer, in fear and

trembling, I wrote my book, and I trust in Him to whom I prayed that He has

not left me to my own prejudices or idols on any important point relating

to the state of the possibilities of the poor for whom He died. Any use

which you choose you can make of this letter. If it should seem worth your

while to honour me with any further communications, I shall esteem them a

delight, and the careful consideration of them a duty.--Believe me, Rev.

and dear Sir, your faithful and obedient servant,

"C. KINGSLEY."

By this time the society for promoting associations was thoroughly

organized, and consisted of a council of promoters, of which Kingsley was a

member, and a central board, on which the managers of the associations and

a delegate from each of them sat. The council had published a number of

tracts, beginning with "Cheap Clothes and Nasty," which had attracted the

attention of many persons, including several of the London clergy, who

connected themselves more or less closely with the movement. Mr. Maurice,

Kingsley, Hansard, and others of these, were often asked to preach on

social questions, and when in 1851, on the opening of the Great Exhibition,

immense crowds of strangers were drawn to London, they were specially

in request. For many London incumbents threw open their churches, and

organized series of lectures, specially bearing on the great topic of the

day. It was now that the incident happened which once more brought upon

Kingsley the charge of being a revolutionist, and which gave him more pain

than all other attacks put together. One of the incumbents before referred

to begged Mr. Maurice to take part in his course of lectures, and to

ask Kingsley to do so; assuring Mr. Maurice that he "had been reading

Kingsley's works with the greatest interest, and earnestly desired to

secure him as one of his lecturers." "I promised to mention this request to

him," Mr. Maurice says, "though I knew he rarely came to London, and seldom

preached except in his own parish. He agreed, though at some inconvenience,

that he would preach a sermon on the 'Message of the Church to the

Labouring Man.' I suggested the subject to him. The incumbent intimated

the most cordial approval of it. He had asked us, not only with a previous

knowledge of our published writings, but expressly because he had that

knowledge. I pledge you my word that no questions were asked as to what we

were going to say, and no guarantees given. Mr. Kingsley took precisely

that view of the message of the Church to labouring men which every reader

of his books would have expected him to take."

Kingsley took his text from Luke iv. verses 16 to 21: "The spirit of the

Lord is upon me because He hath anointed me to preach the gospel to the

poor," &c. What then was that gospel? Kingsley asks, and goes on--"I assert

that the business for which God sends a Christian priest in a Christian

nation is, to preach freedom, equality, and brotherhood in the fullest,

deepest, widest meaning of those three great words; that in as far as he so

does, he is a true priest, doing his Lord's work with his Lord's blessing

on him; that in as far as he does not he is no priest at all, but a traitor

to God and man"; and again, "I say that these words express the very

pith and marrow of a priest's business; I say that they preach freedom,

equality, and brotherhood to rich and poor for ever and ever." Then he goes

on to warn his hearers how there is always a counterfeit in this world of

the noblest message and teaching.

Thus there are two freedoms--the false, where a man is free to do what he

likes; the true, where a man is free to do what he ought.

Two equalities--the false, which reduces all intellects and all characters,

to a dead level, and gives the same power to the bad as to the good, to the

wise as to the foolish, ending thus in practice in the grossest inequality;

the true, wherein each man has equal power to educate and use whatever

faculties or talents God has given him, be they less or more. This is the

divine equality which the Church proclaims, and nothing else proclaims as

she does.

Two brotherhoods--the false, where a man chooses who shall be his brothers,

and whom he will treat as such; the true, in which a man believes that

all are his brothers, not by the will of the flesh, or the will of man,

but by the will of God, whose children they all are alike. The Church has

three special possessions and treasures. The Bible, which proclaims man's

freedom, Baptism his equality, the Lord's Supper his brotherhood.

At the end of this sermon (which would scarcely cause surprise to-day

if preached by the Archbishop of Canterbury in the Chapel Royal), the

incumbent got up at the altar and declared his belief that great part of

the doctrine of the sermon was untrue, and that he had expected a sermon of

an entirely different kind. To a man of the preacher's vehement temperament

it must have required a great effort not to reply at the moment. The

congregation was keenly excited, and evidently expected him to do so.

He only bowed his head, pronounced the blessing, and came down from the

pulpit.

I must go back a little to take up the thread of his connection with, and

work for, the Society for Promoting Working Men's Associations. After it

had passed the first difficulties of starting, he was seldom able to

attend either Council or Central Board. Every one else felt how much more

important and difficult work he was doing by fighting the battle in the

press, down at Eversley, but he himself was eager to take part in the

everyday business, and uneasy if he was not well informed as to what was

going on.

Sometimes, however, he would come up to the Council, when any matter

specially interesting to him was in question, as in the following example,

when a new member of the Council, an Eton master, had objected to some

strong expressions in one of his letters on the Frimley murder, in the

"Christian Socialist":--

1849.--"The upper classes are like a Yankee captain sitting on the safety

valve, and serenely whistling--but what will be will be. As for the worthy

Eton parson, I consider it infinitely expedient that he be entreated to

vent his whole dislike in the open Council forthwith, under a promise on my

part not to involve him in any controversy or reprisals, or to answer in

any tone except that of the utmost courtesy and respect. Pray do this. It

will at once be a means of gaining him, and a good example, please God,

to the working men; and for the Frimley letter, put it in the fire if you

like, or send it back to have the last half re-written, or 'anything else

you like, my pretty little dear.'"

But his prevailing feeling was getting to be, that he was becoming an

outsider--

"Nobody deigns to tell me," he wrote to me, "how things go on, and who

helps, and whether I can help. In short, I know nothing, and begin to fancy

that you, like some others, think me a lukewarm and timeserving aristocrat,

after I have ventured more than many, because I had more to venture."

The same feeling comes out in the following letter, which illustrates

too, very well, both his deepest conviction as to the work, the mixture

of playfulness and earnestness with which he handled it, and his humble

estimate of himself. It refers to the question of the admission of a new

association to the Union. It was necessary, of course, to see that the

rules of a society, applying for admission to the Union, were in proper

form, and that sufficient capital was forthcoming, and the decision lay

with the Central Board, controlled in some measure by the Council of

Promoters.

An association of clay-pipe makers had applied for admission, and had been

refused by the vote of the central board. The Council, however, thought

there were grounds for reconsidering the decision, and to strengthen the

case for admission, Kingsley's opinion was asked. He replied:--

"EVERSLEY, _May 31, 1850_.

"The sight of your handwriting comforted me--for nobody takes any notice of

me, not even the printers; so I revenge myself by being as idle as a dog,

and fishing, and gardening, and basking in this glorious sun. But your

letter set me thanking God that he has raised up men to do the work of

which I am not worthy. As for the pipe-makers, give my compliments to the

autocrats, and tell them it is a shame. The Vegetarians would have quite

as much right to refuse the Butchers, because, forsooth, theirs is now

discovered not to be a necessary trade. Bosh! The question is this--If

association be a great Divine law and duty, the realization of the Church

idea, no man has _a right_ to refuse any body of men, into whose heart

God has put it to come and associate. It may be answered that these men's

motives are self-interested. I say, 'Judge no man.' You dare not refuse

a heathen baptism because you choose to think that his only motive for

turning Christian is the selfish one of saving his own rascally soul. No

more have you a right to refuse to men an entrance into the social Church.

They must come in, and they will, because association is not men's dodge

and invention but God's law for mankind and society, which He has made, and

we must not limit. I don't know whether I am intelligible, but what's more

important, I know I am right. Just read this to the autocrats, and tell

them, with my compliments, they are Popes, Tyrants, Manichees, Ascetics,

Sectarians, and everything else that is abominable; and if they used as

many pipes as I do, they would know the blessing of getting them cheap,

and start an associate baccy factory besides. Shall we try? But, this one

little mistake excepted (though, if they repeat it, it will become a great

mistake, and a wrong, and a ruinous wrong), they are much better fellows

than poor I, and doing a great deal more good, and at every fresh news of

their deeds I feel like Job's horse, when he scents the battle afar off."

No small part of the work of the Council consisted in mediating and

arbitrating in the disputes between the associates and their managers;

indeed, such work kept the legal members of the board (none of whom were

then overburdened with regular practice) pretty fully occupied. Some such

dispute had arisen in one of the most turbulent of these associations, and

had been referred to me for settlement. I had satisfied myself as to the

facts, and considered my award, and had just begun to write out the draft,

when I was called away from my chambers, and left the opening lines lying

on my desk. They ran as follows:--"The Trustees of the Mile End Association

of Engineers, seeing that the quarrels between the associates have not

ceased"--at which word I broke off. On returning to my chambers a quarter

of an hour later, I found a continuation in the following words:--

"And that every man is too much inclined to behave himself like a beast,

In spite of our glorious humanity, which requires neither God nor priest,

Yet is daily praised and plastered by ten thousand fools at least--

Request Mr. Hughes' presence at their jawshop in the East,

Which don't they wish they may get it, for he goes out to-night to feast

At the Rev. C. Kingsley's rectory, Chelsea, where he'll get his gullet

greased

With the best of Barto Valle's port, and will have his joys increased

By meeting his old college chum, McDougal the Borneo priest--

So come you thief, and drop your brief,

At six o'clock without relief;

And if you won't may you come to grief,

Says Parson Lot the Socialist Chief,

Who signs his mark at the foot of the leaf--thus"

and, at the end, a clenched fist was sketched in a few bold lines, and

under it, "Parson Lot, his mark" written.

I don't know that I can do better than give the history of the rest of the

day. Knowing his town habits well, I called at Parker, the publisher's,

after chambers, and found him there, sitting on a table and holding forth

on politics to our excellent little friend, John Wm. Parker, the junior

partner.

We started to walk down to Chelsea, and a dense fog came on before we had

reached Hyde Park Corner. Both of us knew the way well; but we lost it half

a dozen times, and his spirit seemed to rise as the fog thickened. "Isn't

this like life," he said, after one of our blunders: "a deep yellow fog all

round, with a dim light here and there shining through. You grope your way

on from one lamp to another, and you go up wrong streets and back again;

but you get home at last--there's always light enough for that." After a

short pause he said, quite abruptly, "Tom, do you want to live to be old?"

I said I had never thought on the subject; and he went on, "I dread it more

than I can say. To feel one's powers going, and to end in snuff and stink.

Look at the last days of Scott and Wordsworth, and Southey." I suggested

St. John. "Yes," he said, "that's the right thing, and will do for Bunsen,

and great, tranquil men like him. The longer they live the better for all.

But for an eager, fiery nature like mine, with fierce passions eating one's

life out, it won't do. If I live twenty years I know what will happen to

me. The back of my brain will soften, and I shall most likely go blind."

The Bishop got down somehow by six. The dinner did not last long, for the

family were away, and afterwards we adjourned to the study, and Parson Lot

rose to his best. He stood before the fire, while the Bishop and I took the

two fireside arm chairs, and poured himself out, on subject after subject,

sometimes when much moved taking a tramp up and down the room, a long

clay pipe in his right hand (at which he gave an occasional suck; it was

generally out, but he scarcely noticed it), and his left hand passed behind

his back, clasping the right elbow. It was a favourite attitude with him,

when he was at ease with his company.

We were both bent on drawing him out; and the first topic, I think, raised

by the Bishop was, Fronde's history, then recently published. He took up

the cudgels for Henry VIII., whom we accused of arbitrariness. Henry was

not arbitrary; arbitrary men are the most obstinate of men? Why? Because

they are weak. The strongest men are always ready to hear reason and change

their opinions, because the strong man knows that if he loses an opinion

to-day he can get just as good a one to-morrow in its place. But the weak

man holds on to his opinion, because he can't get another, and he knows it.

Soon afterwards he got upon trout fishing, which was a strong bond of union

between him and me, and discoursed on the proper methods of fishing chalk

streams. "Your flies can't be too big, but they must be on small gut, not

on base viol fiddle strings, like those you brought down to Farnham last

year. I tell you gut is the thing that does it. Trout know that flies don't

go about with a ring and a hand pole through their noses, like so many

prize bulls of Lord Ducie's."

Then he got on the possible effect of association on the future of England,

and from that to the first International Exhibition, and the building which

was going up in Hyde Park.

"I mean to run a muck soon," he said, "against all this talk about genius

and high art, and the rest of it. It will be the ruin of us, as it has been

of Germany. They have been for fifty years finding out, and showing people

how to do everything in heaven and earth, and have done nothing. They are

dead even yet, and will be till they get out of the high art fit. We were

dead, and the French were dead till their revolution; but that brought us

to life. Why didn't the Germans come to life too? Because they set to work

with their arts, sciences, and how to do this, that, and the other thing,

and doing nothing. Goethe was, in great part, the ruin of Germany. He was

like a great fog coming down on the German people, and wrapping them up."

Then he, in his turn, drew the Bishop about Borneo, and its people, and

fauna and flora; and we got some delightful stories of apes, and converts,

and honey bears, Kingsley showing himself, by his questions, as familiar

with the Bornean plants and birds, as though he had lived there. Later on

we got him on his own works, and he told us how he wrote. "I can't think,

even on scientific subjects, except in the dramatic form. It is what Tom

said to Harry, and what Harry answered him. I never put pen to paper till I

have two or three pages in my head, and see them as if they were printed.

Then I write them off, and take a turn in the garden, and so on again." We

wandered back to fishing, and I challenged his keenness for making a bag.

"Ah!" he said, "that's all owing to my blessed habit of intensity, which

has been my greatest help in life. I go at what I am about as if there were

nothing else in the world for the time being. That's the secret of all

hard-working men; but most of them can't carry it into their amusements.

Luckily for me I can stop from all work, at short notice, and turn head

over heels in the sight of all creation, and say, I won't be good or bad,

or wise, or anything, till two o'clock to-morrow."

At last the Bishop would go, so we groped our way with him into the King's

Road, and left him in charge of a link-boy. When we got back, I said

something laughingly about his gift of talk, which had struck me more that

evening than ever before.

"Yes," he said, "I have it all in me. I could be as great a talker as any

man in England, but for my stammering. I know it well; but it's a blessed

thing for me. You must know, by this time, that I'm a very shy man, and

shyness and vanity always go together. And so I think of what every fool

will say of me, and can't help it. When a man's first thought is not

whether a thing is right or wrong, but what will Lady A., or Mr. B. say

about it, depend upon it he wants a thorn in the flesh, like my stammer.

When I am speaking for God, in the pulpit, or praying by bedsides, I never

stammer. My stammer is a blessed thing for me. It keeps me from talking in

company, and from going out as much as I should do but for it."

It was two o'clock before we thought of moving, and then, the fog being as

bad as ever, he insisted on making me up a bed on the floor. While we were

engaged in this process, he confided to me that he had heard of a doctor

who was very successful in curing stammering, and was going to try him. I

laughed, and reminded him of his thorn in the flesh, to which he replied,

with a quaint twinkle of his eye, "Well, that's true enough. But a man has

no right to be a nuisance, if he can help it, and no more right to go about

amongst his fellows stammering, than he has to go about stinking."

At this time he was already at work on another novel; and, in answer to a

remonstrance from a friend, who was anxious that he should keep ail his

strength for social reform, writes--

1851.--"I know that He has made me a parish priest, and that that is the

duty which lies nearest me, and that I may seem to be leaving my calling

in novel writing. But has He not taught me all these very things _by my_

parish priest life? Did He, too, let me become a strong, daring, sporting,

wild man of the woods for nothing? Surely the education He has given me so

different from that which authors generally receive, points out to me a

peculiar calling to preach on these points from my own experience, as it

did to good old Isaac Walton, as it has done in our own day to that truly

noble man, Captain Marryat. Therefore I must believe, '_si tu sequi la tua,

stella_,' with Dante, that He who ordained my star will not lead me _into_

temptation, but _through_ it, as Maurice says. Without Him all places and

methods of life are equally dangerous--with Him, all equally safe. Pray for

me, for in myself I am weaker of purpose than a lost grey hound, lazier

than a dog in rainy weather."

While the co-operative movement was spreading in all directions, the same

impulse was working amongst the trades unions, and the engineers had set

the example of uniting all their branches into one society. In this winter

they believed themselves strong enough to try conclusions with their

employers. The great lock-out in January, 1852, was the consequence. The

engineers had appealed to the Council of Promoters to help them in putting

their case--which had been much misrepresented--fairly before the public,

and Kingsley had been consulted as the person best able to do it. He had

declined to interfere, and wrote me the following letter to explain his

views. It will show how far he was an encourager of violent measures or

views:--

"EVERSLEY, _January 28, 1852_.

"You may have been surprised at my having taken no part in this Amalgamated

Iron Trades' matter. And I think that I am bound to say why I have not, and

how far I wish my friends to interfere in it.

"I do think that we, the Council of Promoters, shall not be wise in

interfering between masters and men; because--1. I question whether the

points at issue between them can be fairly understood by any persons not

conversant with the practical details of the trade...

"2. Nor do I think they have put their case as well as they might. For

instance, if it be true that they themselves have invented many, or most,

of the improvements in their tools and machinery, they have an argument in

favour of keeping out unskilled labourers, which is unanswerable, and yet,

that they have never used--viz.: 'Your masters make hundreds and thousands

by these improvements, while we have no remuneration for this inventive

talent of ours, but rather lose by it, because it makes the introduction

of unskilled labour more easy. Therefore, the only way in which we can get

anything like a payment for this inventive faculty of which we make you a

present over and above our skilled labour, for which you bargained, is to

demand that we, who invent the machines, if we cannot have a share in the

profits of them, shall at least have the exclusive privilege of using them,

instead of their being, as now, turned against us.' That, I think, is a

fair argument; but I have seen nothing of it from any speaker or writer.

"3. I think whatever battle is fought, must be fought by the men

themselves. The present dodge of the Manchester school is to cry out

against us, as Greg did. 'These Christian Socialists are a set of mediæval

parsons, who want to hinder the independence and self-help of the men, and

bring them back to absolute feudal maxims; and then, with the most absurd

inconsistency, when we get up a corporation workshop, to let the men work

on the very independence and self-help of which they talk so fine, they

turn round and raise just the opposite yell, and cry, The men can't be

independent of capitalists; these associations will fail _because_ the men

are helping themselves'--showing that what they mean is, that the men shall

be independent of every one but themselves--independent of legislators,

parsons, advisers, gentlemen, noblemen, and every one that tries to help

them by moral agents; but the slaves of the capitalists, bound to them by

a servitude increasing instead of lightening with their numbers. Now, the

only way in which we can clear the cause of this calumny is to let the men

fight their own battle; to prevent any one saying, 'These men are the tools

of dreamers and fanatics,' which would be just as ruinously blackening to

them in the public eyes, as it would be to let the cry get abroad, 'This is

a Socialist movement, destructive of rights of property, communism, Louis

Blanc and the devil, &c.' You know the infernal stuff which the devil gets

up on such occasions--having no scruples about calling himself hard names,

when it suits his purpose, to blind and frighten respectable old women.

"Moreover, these men are not poor distressed needlewomen or slop-workers.

They are the most intelligent and best educated workmen, receiving incomes

often higher than a gentleman's son whose education has cost £1000, and if

they can't fight their own battles, no men in England can, and the people

are not ripe for association, and we must hark back into the competitive

rot heap again. All, then, that we can do is, to give advice when asked--to

see that they have, as far as we can get at them, a clear stage and no

favour, but not by public, but by private influence.

"But we can help them in another way, by showing them the way to associate.

That is quite a distinct question from their quarrel with their masters,

and we shall be very foolish if we give the press a handle for mixing up

the two. We have a right to say to masters, men, and public, 'We know and

care nothing about the iron strike. Here are a body of men coming to us,

wishing to be shown how to do that which is a right thing for them to

do--well or ill off, strike or no strike, namely, associate; and we will

help and teach them to do _that_ to the very utmost of our power.'

"The Iron Workers' co-operative shops will be watched with lynx eyes,

calumniated shamelessly. Our business will be to tell the truth about them,

and fight manfully with our pens for them. But we shall never be able to

get the ears of the respectabilities and the capitalists, if we appear at

this stage of the business. What we must say is, 'If you are needy and

enslaved, we will fight for you from pity, whether you be associated or

competitive. But you are neither needy, nor, unless you choose, enslaved;

and therefore we will only fight for you in proportion as you become

associates. Do that, and see if we can't stand hard knocks for your

sake.'--Yours ever affectionate, C. KINGSLEY."

In the summer of 1852 (mainly by the continued exertions of the members of

the Council, who had supplied Mr. Slaney's committee with all his evidence,

and had worked hard in other ways for this object) a Bill for legalizing

Industrial Associations was about to be introduced into the House of

Commons. It was supposed at one time that it would be taken in hand by the

Government of Lord Derby, then lately come into office, and Kingsley had

been canvassing a number of persons to make sure of its passing. On hearing

that a Cabinet Minister would probably undertake it, he writes--

"Let him be assured that he will by such a move do more to carry out true

Conservatism, and to reconcile the workmen with the real aristocracy, than

any politician for the last twenty years has done. The truth is, we are in

a critical situation here in England. Not in one of danger--which is the

vulgar material notion of a crisis, but at the crucial point, the point of

departure of principles and parties which will hereafter become great and

powerful. Old Whiggery is dead, old true blue Toryism of the Robert Inglis

school is dead too-and in my eyes a great loss. But as live dogs are better

than dead lions, let us see what the live dogs are.

"1.--The Peelites, who will ultimately, be sure, absorb into themselves all

the remains of Whiggery, and a very large proportion of the Conservative

party. In an effete unbelieving age, like this, the Sadducee and the

Herodian will be the most captivating philosopher. A scientific laziness,

lukewarmness, and compromise, is a cheery theory for the young men of

the day, and they will take to it _con amore_. I don't complain of Peel

himself. He was a great man, but his method of compromise, though useful

enough in particular cases when employed by a great man, becomes a most

dastardly "_schema mundi_" when taken up by a school of little men.

Therefore the only help which we can hope for from the Peelites is that

they will serve as ballast and cooling pump to both parties, but their very

trimming and moderation make them fearfully likely to obtain power. It

depends on the wisdom of the present government, whether they do or not.

"2.--Next you have the Manchester school, from whom Heaven defend us; for

of all narrow, conceited, hypocritical, and anarchic and atheistic schemes

of the universe, the Cobden and Bright one is exactly the worst. I have no

language to express my contempt for it, and therefore I quote what Maurice

wrote me this morning. 'If the Ministry would have thrown Protection to

the dogs (as I trust they have, in spite of the base attempts of the Corn

Law Leaguers to goad them to committing themselves to it, and to hold them

up as the people's enemies), and thrown themselves into social measures,

who would not have clung to them, to avert that horrible catastrophe

of a Manchester ascendency, which I believe in my soul would be fatal

to intellect, morality, and freedom, and will be more likely to move a

rebellion among the working men than any Tory rule which can be conceived.'

"Of course it would. To pretend to be the workmen's friends, by keeping

down the price of bread, when all they want thereby is to keep down wages,

and increase profits, and in the meantime to widen the gulf between the

working man and all that is time-honoured, refined, and chivalrous in

English society, that they may make the men their divided slaves, that

is-perhaps half unconsciously, for there are excellent men amongst

them--the game of the Manchester School."

"I have never swerved from my one idea of the last seven years, that the

real battle of the time is, if England is to be saved from anarchy and

unbelief, and utter exhaustion caused by the competitive enslavement of

the masses, not Radical or Whig against Peelite or Tory--let the dead bury

their dead-but the Church, the gentlemen, and the workman, against the

shop-keepers and the Manchester School. The battle could not have been

fought forty years ago, because, on one side, the Church was an idle

phantasm, the gentleman too ignorant, the workman too merely animal; while,

on the other, the Manchester cotton-spinners were all Tories, and the

shopkeepers were a distinct class interest from theirs. But now these

two latter have united, and the sublime incarnation of shop-keeping and

labour-buying in the cheapest market shines forth in the person of Moses &

Son, and both cotton-spinners and shop-keepers say 'This is the man!'" and

join in one common press to defend his system. Be it so: now we know our

true enemies, and soon the working-men will know them also. But if the

present Ministry will not see the possibility of a coalition between them,

and the workmen, I see no alternative but just what we have been straining

every nerve to keep off--a competitive United States, a democracy before

which the work of ages will go down in a few years. A true democracy, such

as you and I should wish to see, is impossible without a Church and a

Queen, and, as I believe, without a gentry. On the conduct of statesmen it

will depend whether we are gradually and harmoniously to develop England

on her ancient foundations, or whether we are to have fresh paralytic

governments succeeding each other in doing nothing, while the workmen and

the Manchester School fight out the real questions of the day in ignorance

and fury, till the '_culbute generale_' comes, and gentlemen of ancient

family, like your humble servant, betake themselves to Canada, to escape,

not the Amalgamated Engineers, but their 'masters,' and the slop-working

savages whom their masters' system has created, and will by that time have

multiplied tenfold.

"I have got a Thames boat on the lake at Bramshill, and am enjoying

vigorous sculls. My answer to 'Fraser' is just coming out; spread it where

you can."

In the next year or two the first excitement about the co-operative

movement cooled down. Parson Lot's pen was less needed, and he turned to

other work in his own name. Of the richness and variety of that work this

is not the place to speak, but it all bore on the great social problems

which had occupied him in the earlier years. The Crimean war weighed on

him like a nightmare, and modified some of his political opinions. On the

resignation of Lord Aberdeen's Government on the motion for inquiry into

the conduct of the war, he writes, February 5, 1855, "It is a very bad job,

and a very bad time, be sure, and with a laughing House of Commons we shall

go to Gehenna, even if we are not there already--But one comfort is, that

even Gehenna can burn nothing but the chaff and carcases, so we shall be

none the poorer in reality. So as the frost has broken gloriously, I wish

you would get me a couple of dozen of good flies, viz., cock a bondhues,

red palmers with plenty of gold twist; winged duns, with bodies of hare's

ear and yellow mohair mixed well; hackle duns with grey bodies, and a wee

silver, these last tied as palmers, and the silver ribbed all the way down.

If you could send them in a week I shall be very glad, as fishing begins

early."

In the midst of the war he was present one day at a council meeting, after

which the manager of one of the associations referring to threatened bread

riots at Manchester, asked Kingsley's opinion as to what should be done.

"There never were but two ways," he said, "since the beginning of the world

of dealing with a corn famine. One is to let the merchants buy it up and

hold it as long as they can, as we do. And this answers the purpose best in

the long run, for they will be selling corn six months hence when we shall

want it more than we do now, and makes us provident against our wills.

The other is Joseph's plan." Here the manager broke in, "Why didn't our

Government step in then, and buy largely, and store in public granaries?"

"Yes," said Kingsley, "and why ain't you and I flying about with wings and

dewdrops hanging to our tails. Joseph's plan won't do for us. What minister

would we trust with money enough to buy corn for the people, or power to

buy where he chose." And he went on to give his questioner a lecture in

political economy, which the most orthodox opponent of the popular notions

about Socialism would have applauded to the echo.

By the end of the year he had nearly finished "Westward Ho!"--the most

popular of his novels, which the war had literally wrung out of him. He

writes--

? "_December 18, 1855_.

"I am getting more of a Government man every day. I don't see how they

could have done better in any matter, because I don't see but that _I_

should have done a thousand times worse in their place, and that is the

only fair standard.

"As for a ballad--oh! my dear lad, there is no use fiddling while Rome is

burning. I have nothing to sing about those glorious fellows, except 'God

save the Queen and them.' I tell you the whole thing stuns me, so I cannot

sit down to make fiddle rhyme with diddle about it--or blundered with

hundred like Alfred Tennyson. He is no Tyrtæus, though he has a glimpse of

what Tyrtæus ought to be. But I have not even that; and am going rabbit

shooting to-morrow instead. But every man has his calling, and my novel

is mine, because I am fit for nothing better. The book" ('Westward Ho!')

"will be out the middle or end of January, if the printers choose. It is

a sanguinary book, but perhaps containing doctrine profitable for these

times. My only pain is that I have been forced to sketch poor Paddy as a

very worthless fellow then, while just now he is turning out a hero. I have

made the deliberate _amende honorable_ in a note."

Then, referring to some criticism of mine on 'Westward Ho!'--"I suppose you

are right as to Amyas and his mother; I will see to it. You are probably

right too about John Hawkins. The letter in Purchas is to me unknown,

but your conception agrees with a picture my father says he has seen of

Captain John (he thinks at Lord Anglesey's, at Beaudesert) as a prim, hard,

terrier-faced, little fellow, with a sharp chin, and a dogged Puritan eye.

So perhaps I am wrong: but I don't think _that_ very important, for there

must have been sea-dogs of my stamp in plenty too." Then, referring to the

Crimean war--"I don't say that the two cases are parallel. I don't ask

England to hate Russia as she was bound to hate Spain, as God's enemy; but

I do think that a little Tudor pluck and Tudor democracy (paradoxical as

the word may seem, and inconsistently as it was carried out then) is just

what we want now."

"Tummas! Have you read the story of Abou Zennab, his horse, in Stanley's

'Sinai,' p. 67? What a myth! What a poem old Wordsworth would have writ

thereon! If I didn't cry like a babby over it. What a brick of a horse he

must have been, and what a brick of an old head-splitter Abou Zennab must

have been, to have his commandments keeped unto this day concerning of his

horse; and no one to know who he was, nor when, nor how, nor nothing. I

wonder if anybody'll keep _our_ commandments after we be gone, much less

say, 'Eat, eat, O horse of Abou Kingsley!'"

By this time the success of "Westward Ho!" and "Hypatia" had placed him in

the first rank of English writers. His fame as an author, and his character

as a man, had gained him a position which might well have turned any man's

head. There were those amongst his intimate friends who feared that it

might be so with him, and who were faithful enough to tell him so. And I

cannot conclude this sketch better than by giving his answer to that one

of them with whom he had been most closely associated in the time when, as

Parson Lot, every man's hand had been against him--

"MY DEAR LUDLOW,

"And for this fame, &c.,

"I know a little of her worth.

"And I will tell you what I know,

"That, in the first place, she is a fact, and as such, it is not wise to

ignore her, but at least to walk once round her, and see her back as well

as her front.

"The case to me seems to be this. A man feels in himself the love of

praise. Every man does who is not a brute. It is a universal human faculty;

Carlyle nicknames it the sixth sense. Who made it? God or the devil? Is

it flesh or spirit? a difficult question; because tamed animals grow to

possess it in a high degree; and our metaphysician does not yet allow

them spirit. But, whichever it be, it cannot be for bad: only bad when

misdirected, and not controlled by reason, the faculty which judges between

good and evil. Else why has God put His love of praise into the heart of

every child which is born into the world, and entwined it into the holiest

filial and family affections, as the earliest mainspring of good actions?

Has God appointed that every child shall be fed first with a necessary

lie, and afterwards come to the knowledge of your supposed truth, that the

praise of God alone is to be sought? Or are we to believe that the child is

intended to be taught as delicately and gradually as possible the painful

fact, that the praise of all men is not equally worth having, and to use

his critical faculty to discern the praise of good men from the praise

of bad, to seek the former and despise the latter? I should say that the

last was the more reasonable. And this I will say, that if you bring up

any child to care nothing for the praise of its parents, its elders, its

pastors, and masters, you may make a fanatic of it, or a shameless cynic:

but you will neither make it a man, an Englishman, or a Christian.

"But 'our Lord's words stand, about not seeking the honour which comes from

men, but the honour which comes from God only!' True, they do stand, and

our Lord's fact stands also, the fact that He has created every child to

be educated by an honour which comes from his parents and elders. Both are

true. Here, as in most spiritual things, you have an antinomia, an apparent

contradiction, which nothing but the Gospel solves. And it does solve it;

and your one-sided view of the text resolves itself into just the same

fallacy as the old ascetic one. 'We must love God alone, therefore we must

love no created thing.' To which St. John answers pertinently 'He who

loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath

not seen?' If you love your brethren, you love Christ in them. If you love

their praise, you love the praise of Christ in them. For consider this,

you cannot deny that, if one loves any person, one desires that person's

esteem. But we are bound to love all men, and that is our highest state.

Therefore, in our highest state, we shall desire all men's esteem.

Paradoxical, but true. If we believe in Christmas-day; if we believe in

Whitsunday, we shall believe that Christ is in all men, that God's spirit

is abroad in the earth, and therefore the dispraise, misunderstanding, and

calumny of men will be exquisitely painful to us, and ought to be so; and,

on the other hand, the esteem of men, and renown among men for doing good

deeds will be inexpressibly precious to us. They will be signs and warrants

to us that God is pleased with us, that we are sharing in that 'honour and

glory' which Paul promises again and again, with no such scruples as yours,

to those who lead heroic lives. We shall not neglect the voice of God

within us; but we shall remember that there is also a voice of God without

us, which we must listen to; and that in a Christian land, _vox populi_,

patiently and discriminately listened to, is sure to be found not far off

from the _vox Dei_.

"Now, let me seriously urge this last fact on you. Of course, in listening

to the voice of the man outside there is a danger, as there is in the use

of any faculty. You may employ it, according to Divine reason and grace,

for ennobling and righteous purposes; or you may degrade it to carnal and

selfish ones; so you may degrade the love of praise into vanity, into

longing for the honour which comes from men, by pandering to their passions

and opinions, by using your powers as they would too often like to use

theirs, for mere self-aggrandisement, by saying in your heart--_quam

pulchrum digito monstrari el diceri hic est_. That is the man who wrote the

fine poem, who painted the fine picture, and so forth, till, by giving way

to this, a man may give way to forms of vanity as base as the red Indian

who sticks a fox's tail on, and dances about boasting of his brute cunning.

I know all about that, as well as any poor son of Adam ever did. But I

know, too, that to desire the esteem of as many rational men as possible;

in a word, to desire an honourable, and true renown for having done good

in my generation, has nothing to do with that; and the more I fear and

struggle against the former, the more I see the exceeding beauty and

divineness, and everlasting glory of the latter as an entrance into the

communion of saints.

"Of course, all this depends on whether we do believe that Christ is in

every man, and that God's spirit is abroad in the earth. Of course, again,

it will be very difficult to know who speaks by God's spirit, and who

sees by Christ's light in him; but surely the wiser, the humbler path, is

to give men credit for as much wisdom and rightness as possible, and to

believe that when one is found fault with, one is probably in the wrong.

For myself, on Looking back, I see clearly with shame and sorrow, that the

obloquy which I have brought often on myself and on the good cause, has

been almost all of it my own fault--that I have given the devil and bad

men a handle, not by caring what people would say, but by _not caring_--by

fancying that I was a very grand fellow, who was going to speak what I knew

to be true, in spite of all fools (and really did and do intend so to do),

while all the while I was deceiving myself, and unaware of a canker at

the heart the very opposite to the one against which you warn me. I mean

the proud, self-willed, self-conceited spirit which made no allowance for

other men's weakness or ignorance; nor again, for their superior experience

and wisdom on points which I had never considered--which took a pride in

shocking and startling, and defying, and hitting as hard as I could, and

fancied, blasphemously, as I think, that the word of God had come to me

only, and went out from me only. God forgive me for these sins, as well

as for my sins in the opposite direction; but for these sins especially,

because I see them to be darker and more dangerous than the others.

"For there has been gradually revealed to me (what my many readings in the

lives of fanatics and ascetics ought to have taught me long before), that

there is a terrible gulf ahead of that not caring what men say. Of course

it is a feeling on which the spirit must fall back in hours of need, and

cry, 'Thou, God, knowest mine integrity. I have believed, and therefore I

will speak; thou art true, though all men be liars!' But I am convinced

that that is a frame in which no man can live, or is meant to live;

that it is only to be resorted to in fear and trembling, after deepest

self-examination, and self-purification, and earnest prayer. For otherwise,

Ludlow, a man gets to forget that voice of God without him, in his

determination to listen to nothing but the voice of God within him, and so

he falls into two dangers. He forgets that there is a voice of God without

him. He loses trust in, and charity to, and reverence for his fellow-men;

he learns to despise, deny, and quench the Spirit, and to despise

prophesyings, and so becomes gradually cynical, sectarian, fanatical.

"And then comes a second and worse danger. Crushed into self, and his own

conscience and _schema mundi_, he loses the opportunity of correcting his

impression of the voice of God within, by the testimony of the voice of God

without; and so he begins to mistake more and more the voice of that very

flesh of his, which he fancies he has conquered, for the voice of God,

and to become, without knowing it, an autotheist. And out of that springs

eclecticism, absence of tenderness _for_ men, for want of sympathy _with_

men; as he makes his own conscience his standard for God, so he makes his

own character the standard for men; and so he becomes narrow, hard, and

if he be a man of strong will and feelings, often very inhuman and cruel.

This is the history of thousands-of Jeromes, Lauds, Puritans who scourged

Quakers, Quakers who cursed Puritans; nonjurors, who though they would die

rather than offend their own conscience in owning William, would plot with

James to murder William, or to devastate England with Irish Rapparees and

Auvergne dragoons. This, in fact, is the spiritual diagnosis of those many

pious persecutors, who though neither hypocrites or blackguards themselves,

have used both as instruments of their fanaticism.

"Against this I have to guard myself, you little know how much, and to

guard my children still more, brought up, as they will be, under a father,

who, deeply discontented with the present generation, cannot but express

that discontent at times. To make my children '_banausoi_,' insolent and

scoffing radicals, believing in nobody and nothing but themselves, would be

perfectly easy in me if I were to make the watchword of my house, 'Never

mind what people say.' On the contrary, I shall teach them that there are

plenty of good people in the world; that public opinion has pretty surely

an undercurrent of the water of life, below all its froth and garbage;

and that in a Christian country like this, where, with all faults, a man

(sooner or later) has fair play and a fair hearing, the esteem of good men,

and the blessings of the poor, will be a pretty sure sign that they have

the blessing of God also; and I shall tell them, when they grow older, that

ere they feel called on to become martyrs, in defending the light within

them against all the world, they must first have taken care most patiently,

and with all self-distrust and humility, to make full use of the light

which is around them, and has been here for ages before them, and would be

here still, though they had never been born or thought of. The antinomy

between this and their own conscience may be painful enough to them some

day. To what thinking man is it not a life-long battle? but I shall not

dream that by denying one pole of the antinomy I can solve it, or do

anything but make them, by cynicism or fanaticism, bury their talent in the

earth, and _not_ do the work which God has given them to do, because they

will act like a parson who, before beginning his sermon, should first kick

his congregation out of doors, and turn the key; and not like St. Paul, who

became all things to all men, if by any means he might save some.

"Yours ever affectionately, with all Christmas blessings,

"C. KINGSLEY.

"FARLY COURT, _December 26, 1855_.

"I should be very much obliged to you to show this letter to Maurice."

One more letter only I will add, dated about the end of the "Parson Lot"

period. He had written to inform me that one of the old Chartist leaders,

a very worthy fellow, was in great distress, and to ask me to do what I

could for him. In my reply I had alluded somewhat bitterly to the apparent

failure of the Association movement in London, and to some of our blunders,

acknowledging how he had often seen the weak places, and warned us against

them. His answer came by return of post:--

"EVERSLEY, _May, 1856_.

"DEAR TOM,--It's an ill bird that fouls its own nest; and don't cry

stinking fish, neither don't hollow till you're out of the wood--which you

oughtn't to have called yourself Tom fool, and blasphemed the holy name

thereby, till you knowed you was sich, which you wasn't, as appears by

particulars. And I have heard from T---- twice to-day, and he is agreeable,

which, if he wasn't, he is an ass, and don't know half a loaf is better

than no bread, and you musn't look a gift horse in the mouth, but all is as

right as a dog-fox down wind and vi. _millia passuum_, to the next gorse.

But this £25 of his is a grueller, and I learnt with interest that you are

inclined to get the fishes nose out of the weed. I have offered to lend him

£10--hopes it may be lending--and have written a desperate begging letter

to R. Monckton Milnes, Esq., which 'evins prosper. Poor T---- says to-night

that he has written to Forster about it--which he must have the small of

his back very hard against the ropes so to do, so the sooner we get the

ginger-beer bottle out the longer he'll fight, or else he'll throw up the

sponge at once; for I know his pride. I think we can raise it somehow. I

have a last card in old ----, the judge who tried and condemned him, and is

the dearest old soul alive, only he will have it T---- showed dunghill, and

don't carry a real game nackle. If I am to tackle he you must send me back

those letters to appeal to his piety and 'joys as does abound,' as your

incomparable father remarks. When _will_ you give me that canticle? He

says Tom Taylor (I believe all the world is called Thomas) has behaved to

him like a brother, which, indeed, was to be expexed, and has promised

him copying at a shilling an hour, and _will_ give him a chop daily free

gracious; but the landlord won't wait, which we musn't neither.

"Now, business afore pleasure. You are an old darling, and who says no,

I'd kick him, if it warn't for my cloth; but you are green in cottoning to

me about our '48 mess. Because why? I lost nothing--I risked nothing. You

fellows worked like bricks, spent money, and got midshipman's half-pay

(nothing a-day and find yourself), and monkey's allowance (more kicks than

halfpence). I risked no money; 'cause why, I had none; but _made_ money out

of the movement, and fame too. I've often thought what a dirty beast I was.

I made £150 by Alton Locke, and never lost a farthing; and I got, not in

spite of, but by the rows, a name and a standing with many a one who would

never have heard of me otherwise, and I should have been a stercoraceous

mendicant if I had hollowed when I got a facer, while I was winning by the

cross, though I didn't mean to fight one. No. And if I'd had £100,000, I'd

have, and should have, staked and lost it all in 1848-50. I should, Tom,

for my heart was and is in it, and you'll see it will beat yet; but we

ain't the boys. We don't see but half the bull's eye yet, and don't see

_at all_ the policeman which is a going on his beat behind the bull's eye,

and no thanks to us. Still, _some_ somedever, it's in the fates, that

Association is the pure caseine, and must be eaten by the human race if it

would save its soul alive, which, indeed, it will; only don't you think me

a good fellow for not crying out, when I never had more to do than scratch

myself and away went the fleas. But you all were real bricks; and if you

were riled, why let him that is without sin cast the first stone, or let me

cast it for him, and see if I don't hit him in the eye.

"Now to business; I have had a sortér kindèr sample day. Up at 5, to see a

dying man; ought to have been up at 2, but Ben King the rat-catcher, who

came to call me, was taken nervous!!! and didn't make row enough; was from

5.30 to 6.30 with the most dreadful case of agony--insensible to me, but

not to his pain. Came home, got a wash and a pipe, and again to him at

8. Found him insensible to his own pain, with dilated pupils, dying of

pressure of the brain--going any moment. Prayed the commendatory prayers

over him, and started for the river with West. Fished all the morning

in a roaring N.E. gale, with the dreadful agonized face between me and

the river, pondering on THE mystery. Killed eight on 'March brown' and

'governor,' by drowning the flies, and taking _'em out gently to see_ if

ought was there--which is the only dodge in a north-easter. 'Cause why? The

water is warmer than the air--_ergo_, fishes don't like to put their noses

out o' doors, and feeds at home down stairs. It is the only wrinkle, Tom.

The captain fished a-top, and caught but three all day. They weren't going

to catch a cold in their heads to please him or any man. Clouds burn up at

1 P.M. I put on a minnow, and kill three more; I should have had lots, but

for the image of the dirty hickory stick, which would 'walk the waters like

a thing of life,' just ahead of my minnow. Mem.--Never fish with the sun in

your back; it's bad enough with a fly, but with a minnow it's strichnine

and prussic acid. My eleven weighed together four and a-half pounds--three

to the pound; not good, considering I had spased many a two-pound fish, I

_know_.

"Corollary.--Brass minnow don't suit the water. Where is your wonderful

minnow? Send him me down, or else a _horn_ one, which I believes in

desperate; but send me something before Tuesday, and I will send you P.O.O.

Horn minnow looks like a gudgeon, which is the pure caseine. One pounder I

caught to-day on the 'March brown' womited his wittles, which was rude, but

instructive; and among worms was a gudgeon three inches long and more. Blow

minnows--gudgeon is the thing.

"Came off the water at 3. Found my man alive, and, thank God, quiet. Sat

with him, and thought him going once or twice. What a mystery that long,

insensible death-struggle is! Why should they be so long about it? Then had

to go Hartley Row for an Archdeacon's Sunday-school meeting--three hours

useless (I fear) speechifying and 'shop'; but the Archdeacon is a good

man, and works like a brick beyond his office. Got back at 10:30, and sit

writing to you. So goes one's day. All manner of incongruous things to

do--and the very incongruity keeps one beany and jolly. Your letter was

delightful. I read part of it to West, who says, you are the best fellow on

earth, to which I agree.

"So no more from your sleepy and tired--C. KINGSLEY."

This was almost the last letter I ever received from him in the Parson Lot

period of his life, with which alone this notice has to do. It shows, I

think, very clearly that it was not that he had deserted his flag (as has

been said) or changed his mind about the cause for which he had fought so

hard and so well. His heart was in it still as warmly as ever, as he says

himself. But the battle had rolled away to another part of the field.

Almost all that Parson Lot had ever striven for was already gained. The

working-classes had already got statutory protection for their trade

associations, and their unions, though still outside the law, had become

strong enough to fight their own battles. And so he laid aside his fighting

name and his fighting pen, and had leisure to look calmly on the great

struggle more as a spectator than an actor.

A few months later, in the summer of 1856, when he and I were talking

over and preparing for a week's fishing in the streams and lakes of his

favourite Snowdonia, he spoke long and earnestly in the same key. I well

remember how he wound it all up with, "the long and short of it is, I am

becoming an optimist. All men, worth anything, old men especially, have

strong fits of optimism--even Carlyle has--because they can't help hoping,

and sometimes feeling, that the world is going right, and will go right,

not your way, or my way, but its own way. Yes; we've all tried our

Holloway's Pills, Tom, to cure all the ills of all the world--and we've

all found out I hope by this time that the tough old world has more in

its inside than any Holloway's Pills will clear out." A few weeks later I

received the following invitation to Snowdon, and to Snowdon we went in the

autumn of 1856.

THE INVITATION.

Come away with me, Tom,

Term and talk is done;

My poor lads are reaping,

Busy every one.

Curates mind the parish,

Sweepers mind the Court,

We'll away to Snowdon

For our ten days' sport,

Fish the August evening

Till the eve is past,

Whoop like boys at pounders

Fairly played and grassed.

When they cease to dimple,

Lunge, and swerve, and leap,

Then up over Siabod

Choose our nest, and sleep.

Up a thousand feet, Tom,

Round the lion's head,

Find soft stones to leeward

And make up our bed.

Bat our bread and bacon,

Smoke the pipe of peace,

And, ere we be drowsy,

Give our boots a grease.

Homer's heroes did so,

Why not such as we?

What are sheets and servants?

Superfluity.

Pray for wives and children

Safe in slumber curled,

Then to chat till midnight

O'er this babbling world.

Of the workmen's college,

Of the price of grain,

Of the tree of knowledge,

Of the chance of rain;

If Sir A. goes Romeward,

If Miss B. sings true,

If the fleet comes homeward,

If the mare will do,--

Anything and everything--

Up there in the sky

Angels understand us,

And no "_saints_" are by.

Down, and bathe at day-dawn,

Tramp from lake to lake,

Washing brain and heart clean

Every step we take.

Leave to Robert Browning

Beggars, fleas, and vines;

Leave to mournful Ruskin

Popish Apennines,

Dirty Stones of Venice

And his Gas-lamps Seven;

We've the stones of Snowdon

And the lamps of heaven.

Where's the mighty credit

In admiring Alps?

Any goose sees "glory"

In their "snowy scalps."

Leave such signs and wonders

For the dullard brain,

As æsthetic brandy,

Opium, and cayenne;

Give me Bramshill common

(St. John's harriers by),

Or the vale of Windsor,

England's golden eye.

Show me life and progress,

Beauty, health, and man;

Houses fair, trim gardens,

Turn where'er I can.

Or, if bored with "High Art,"

And such popish stuff,

One's poor ears need airing,

Snowdon's high enough.

While we find God's signet

Fresh on English ground,

Why go gallivanting

With the nations round?

Though we try no ventures

Desperate or strange;

Feed on common-places

In a narrow range;

Never sought for Franklin

Round the frozen Capes;

Even, with Macdougall,

Bagged our brace of apes;

Never had our chance, Tom,

In that black Redan;

Can't avenge poor Brereton

Out in Sakarran;

Tho' we earn our bread, Tom,

By the dirty pen,

What we can we will be,

Honest Englishmen.

Do the work that's nearest,

Though it's dull at whiles;

Helping, when we meet them

Lame dogs over stiles;

See in every hedgerow

Marks of angels' feet,

Epics in each pebble

Underneath our feet;

Once a-year, like schoolboys,

Robin-Hooding go.

Leaving fops and fogies

A thousand feet below.

T. H.

CHEAP CLOTHES AND NASTY.

King Ryence, says the legend of Prince Arthur, wore a paletot trimmed with

kings' beards. In the first French Revolution (so Carlyle assures us)

there were at Meudon tanneries of human skins. Mammon, at once tyrant and

revolutionary, follows both these noble examples--in a more respectable

way, doubtless, for Mammon hates cruelty; bodily pain is his devil--the

worst evil of which he, in his effeminacy, can conceive. So he shrieks

benevolently when a drunken soldier is flogged; but he trims his

paletots, and adorns his legs, with the flesh of men and the skins of

women, with degradation, pestilence, heathendom, and despair; and then

chuckles self-complacently over the smallness of his tailors' bills.

Hypocrite!--straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! What is flogging,

or hanging, King Ryence's paletot, or the tanneries of Meudon, to the

slavery, starvation, waste of life, year-long imprisonment in dungeons

narrower and fouler than those of the Inquisition, which goes on among

thousands of free English clothes-makers at this day?

"The man is mad," says Mammon, smiling supercilious pity. Yes, Mammon; mad

as Paul before Festus; and for much the same reason, too. Much learning has

made us mad. From two articles in the "Morning Chronicle" of Friday, Dec.

14th, and Tuesday, Dec. 18th, on the Condition of the Working Tailors,

we learnt too much to leave us altogether masters of ourselves. But there

is method in our madness; we can give reasons for it--satisfactory to

ourselves, perhaps also to Him who made us, and you, and all tailors

likewise. Will you, freshly bedizened, you and your footmen, from

Nebuchadnezzar and Co.'s "Emporium of Fashion," hear a little about how

your finery is made? You are always calling out for facts, and have a firm

belief in salvation by statistics. Listen to a few.

The Metropolitan Commissioner of the "Morning Chronicle" called two

meetings of the Working Tailors, one in Shadwell, and the other at the

Hanover Square Rooms, in order to ascertain their condition from their

own lips. Both meetings were crowded. At the Hanover Square Rooms there

were more than one thousand men; they were altogether unanimous in their

descriptions of the misery and slavery which they endured. It appears

that there are two distinct tailor trades--the "honourable" trade, now

almost confined to the West End, and rapidly dying out there, and the

"dishonourable" trade of the show-shops and slop-shops--the plate-glass

palaces, where gents--and, alas! those who would be indignant at that

name--buy their cheap-and-nasty clothes. The two names are the tailors'

own slang; slang is true and expressive enough, though, now and then. The

honourable shops in the West End number only sixty; the dishonourable, four

hundred and more; while at the East End the dishonourable trade has it all

its own way. The honourable part of the trade is declining at the rate of

one hundred and fifty journeymen per year; the dishonourable increasing at

such a rate that, in twenty years it will have absorbed the whole tailoring

trade, which employs upwards of twenty-one thousand journeymen. At the

honourable shops the work is done, as it was universally thirty years ago,

on the premises and at good wages. In the dishonourable trade, the work is

taken home by the men, to be done at the very lowest possible prices, which

decrease year by year, almost month by month. At the honourable shops, from

36s. to 24s. is paid for a piece of work for which the dishonourable shop

pays from 22s. to 9s. But not to the workmen; happy is he if he really

gets two-thirds, or half of that. For at the honourable shops, the master

deals directly with his workmen; while at the dishonourable ones, the

greater part of the work, if not the whole, is let out to contractors, or

middle-men--"_sweaters_," as their victims significantly call them--who, in

their turn, let it out again, sometimes to the workmen, sometimes to fresh

middlemen; so that out of the price paid for labour on each article, not

only the workmen, but the sweater, and perhaps the sweater's sweater, and a

third, and a fourth, and a fifth, have to draw their profit. And when the

labour price has been already beaten down to the lowest possible, how much

remains for the workmen after all these deductions, let the poor fellows

themselves say!

One working tailor (at the Hanover Square Rooms Meeting) "mentioned a

number of shops, both at the east and west ends, whose work was all

taken by sweaters; and several of these shops were under royal and noble

patronage. There was one notorious sweater who kept his carriage. He was a

Jew, and, of course, he gave a preference to his own sect. Thus, another

Jew received it from him second hand and at a lower rate; then it went to a

third--till it came to the unfortunate Christian at perhaps the eighth rate,

and he performed the work at barely living prices; this same Jew required a

deposit of 5_l_. in money before he would give out a single garment to be

made. He need not describe the misery which this system entailed upon the

workmen. It was well known, but it was almost impossible, except for those

who had been at the two, to form an idea of the difference between the

present meeting and one at the East-end, where all who attended worked for

slop-shops and sweaters. The present was a highly respectable assembly; the

other presented no other appearance but those of misery and degradation."

Another says--"We have all worked in the honourable trade, so we know the

regular prices from our own personal experience. Taking the bad work with

the good work we might earn 11s. a week upon an average. Sometimes we do

earn as much as 15s.; but, to do this, we are obliged to take part of our

work home to our wives and daughters. We are not always fully employed. We

are nearly half our time idle. Hence, our earnings are, upon an average

throughout the year, not more than 5s. 6d. a week." "Very often I have made

only 3s. 4d. in the week," said one. "That's common enough with us all, I

can assure you," said another. "Last week my wages was 7s. 6d.," declared

one. "I earned 6s. 4d.," exclaimed the second. "My wages came to 9s. 2d.

The week before I got 6s. 3d." "I made 7s. 9d.," and "I 7s. or 8s., I can't

exactly remember which." "This is what we term the best part of our winter

season. The reason why we are so long idle is because more hands than

are wanted are kept on the premises, so that in case of a press of work

coming in, our employers can have it done immediately. Under the day work

system no master tailor had more men on the premises than he could keep

continually going; but since the change to the piecework system, masters

made a practice of engaging double the quantity of hands that they

have any need for, so that an order may be executed 'at the shortest

possible notice,' if requisite. A man must not leave the premises when,

unemployed,--if he does, he loses his chance of work coming in. I have been

there four days together, and had not a stitch of work to do." "Yes; that

is common enough." "Ay, and then you're told, if you complain, you can go,

if you don't like it. I am sure twelve hands would do all they have done at

home, and yet they keep forty of us. It's generally remarked that, however

strong and healthy a man may be when he goes to work at that shop, in a

month's time he'll be a complete shadow, and have almost all his clothes in

pawn. By Sunday morning, he has no money at all left, and he has to subsist

till the following Saturday upon about a pint of weak tea, and four slices

of bread and butter per day!!!"

"Another of the reasons for the sweaters keeping more hands than they want

is, the men generally have their meals with them. The more men they have

with them the more breakfasts and teas they supply, and the more profit

they make. The men usually have to pay 4d., and very often, 5d. for their

breakfast, and the same for their tea. The tea or breakfast is mostly a

pint of tea or coffee, and three to four slices of bread and butter. _I

worked for one sweater who almost starved the men; the smallest eater there

would not have had enough if he had got three times as much. They had only

three thin slices of bread and butter, not sufficient for a child, and the

tea was both weak and bad. The whole meal could not have stood him in 2d.

a head, and what made it worse was, that the men who worked there couldn't

afford to have dinners, so that they were starved to the bone._ The

sweater's men generally lodge where they work. A sweater usually keeps

about six men. These occupy two small garrets; one room is called the

kitchen, and the other the workshop; and here the whole of the six men, and

the sweater, his wife, and family, live and sleep. One sweater _I worked

with had four children and six men, and they, together with his wife,

sister-in-law, and himself, all lived in two rooms, the largest of which

was about eight feet by ten. We worked in the smallest room and slept there

as well--all six of us. There were two turnup beds in it, and we slept

three in a bed. There was no chimney, and, indeed, no ventilation whatever.

I was near losing my life there--the foul air of so many people working

all day in the place, and sleeping there at night, was quite suffocating.

Almost all the men were consumptive, and I myself attended the dispensary

for disease of the lungs. The room in which we all slept was not more than

six feet square. We were all sick and weak, and loth to work._ Each of the

six of us paid 2s. 6d. a week for our lodging, or 15s. altogether, and I

am sure such a room as we slept and worked in might be had for 1s. a week;

you can get a room with a fire-place for 1s. 6d. a week. The usual sum that

the men working for sweaters pay for their tea, breakfasts, and lodging

is 6s. 6d. to 7s. a week, and they seldom earn more money in the week.

Occasionally at the week's end they are in debt to the sweater. This is

seldom for more than 6d., for the sweater will not give them victuals if

he has no work for them to do. Many who live and work at the sweater's are

married men, and are obliged to keep their wives and children in lodgings

by themselves. Some send them to the workhouse, others to their friends

in the country. Besides the profit of the board and lodging, the sweater

takes 6d. out of the price paid for every garment under 10s.; some take

1s., and I do know of one who takes as much as 2s. This man works for a

large show-shop at the West End. The usual profit of the sweater, over and

above the board and lodging, is 2s. out of every pound. Those who work

for sweaters soon lose their clothes, and are unable to seek for other

work, because they have not a coat to their back to go and seek it in.

_Last week, I worked with another man at a coat for one of her Majesty's

ministers, and my partner never broke his fast while he was making his half

of it._ The minister dealt at a cheap West End show-shop. All the workman

had the whole day-and-a-half he was making the coat was a little tea. But

sweaters' work is not so bad as government work after all. At that, we

cannot make more than 4s. or 5s. a week altogether--that is, counting the

time we are running after it, of course. _Government contract work is the

worst of all, and the starved-out and sweated-out tailor's last resource._

But still, government does not do the regular trade so much harm as the

cheap show and slop shops. These houses have ruined thousands. They have

cut down the prices, so that men cannot live at the work; and the masters

who did and would pay better wages, are reducing the workmen's pay every

day. They say they must either compete with the large show shops or go into

the 'Gazette.'"

Sweet competition! Heavenly maid!--Now-a-days hymned alike by

penny-a-liners and philosophers as the ground of all society--the only

real preserver of the earth! Why not of Heaven, too? Perhaps there is

competition among the angels, and Gabriel and Raphael have won their rank

by doing the maximum of worship on the minimum of grace? We shall know some

day. In the meanwhile, "these are thy works, thou parent of all good!"

Man eating man, eaten by man, in every variety of degree and method! Why

does not some enthusiastic political economist write an epic on "The

Consecration of Cannibalism"?

But if any one finds it pleasant to his soul to believe the poor

journeymen's statements exaggerated, let him listen to one of the sweaters

themselves:--

"I wish," says he, "that others did for the men as decently as I do. I

know there are many who are living entirely upon them. Some employ as many

as fourteen men. I myself worked in the house of a man who did this. The

chief part of us lived, and worked, and slept together in two rooms, on the

second floor. They charged 2s. 6d. per head for the lodging alone. Twelve

of the workmen, I am sure, lodged in the house, and these paid altogether

30s. a week rent to the sweater. I should think the sweater paid 8s. a week

for the rooms--so that he gained at least 22s. clear out of the lodging

of these men, and stood at no rent himself. For the living of the men he

charged--5d. for breakfasts, and the same for teas, and 8d. for dinner--or

at the rate of 10s. 6d. each per head. Taking one with the other, and

considering the manner in which they lived, I am certain that the cost for

keeping each of them could not have been more than 5s. This would leave 5s.

6d. clear profit on the board of each of the twelve men, or, altogether,

£3, 6s. per week; and this, added to the £1, 2s. profit on the rent, would

give £4, 8s. for the sweater's gross profit on the board and lodging of

the workmen in his place. But, besides this, he got 1s. out of each coat

made on his premises, and there were twenty-one coats made there, upon an

average, every week; so that, altogether, the sweater's clear gains out of

the men were £5, 9s. every week. Each man made about a coat and a half in

the course of the seven days (_for they all worked on a Sunday--they were

generally told to 'borrow a day off the Lord_.') For this coat and a half

each hand got £1, 2s. 6d., and out of it he had to pay 13s. for board and

lodging; so that there was 9s. 6d. clear left. These are the profits of the

sweater, and the earnings of the men engaged under him, when working for

the first rate houses. But many of the cheap houses pay as low as 8s. for

the making of each dress and frock coat, and some of them as low as 6s.

Hence the earnings of the men at such work would be from 9s. to 12s. per

week, and the cost of their board and lodging without dinners, for these

they seldom have, would be from 7s. 6d. to 8s. per week. Indeed, the men

working under sweaters at such prices generally consider themselves well

off if they have a shilling or two in their pockets for Sunday. The profits

of the sweater, however, would be from £4 to £5 out of twelve men, working

on his premises. The usual number of men working under each sweater is

about six individuals; and the average rate of profit, about £2, 10s.,

without the sweater doing any work himself. It is very often the case that

a man working under a sweater is obliged to pawn his own coat to get any

pocket-money that he may require. Over and over again the sweater makes out

that he is in his debt from 1s. to 2s. at the end of the week, and when

the man's coat is in pledge, he is compelled to remain imprisoned in the

sweater's lodgings for months together. In some sweating places, there is

an old coat kept called a "reliever," and this is borrowed by such men as

have none of their own to go out in. There are very few of the sweaters'

men who have a coat to their backs or a shoe to their feet to come out into

the streets on Sunday. Down about Fulwood's Rents, Holborn, I am sure I

would not give 6d. for the clothes that are on a dozen of them; and it is

surprising to me, working and living together in such numbers and in such

small close rooms, in narrow close back courts as they do, that they are

not all swept off by some pestilence. I myself have seen half-a-dozen men

at work in a room that was a little better than a bedstead long. It was as

much as one could do to move between the wall and the bedstead when it was

down. There were two bedsteads in this room, and they nearly filled the

place when they were down. The ceiling was so low, that I couldn't stand

upright in the room. There was no ventilation in the place. There was no

fireplace, and only a small window. When the window was open, you could

nearly touch the houses at the back, and if the room had not been at the

top of the house, the men could not have seen at all in the place. The

staircase was so narrow, steep, and dark, that it was difficult to grope

your way to the top of the house--it was like going up a steeple. This is

the usual kind of place in which the sweater's men are lodged. The reason

why there are so many Irishmen working for the sweaters is, because they

are seduced over to this country by the prospect of high wages and plenty

of work. They are brought over by the Cork boats at 10s. a-head, and when

they once get here, the prices they receive are so small, that they are

unable to go back. In less than a week after they get here, their clothes

are all pledged, and they are obliged to continue working under the

sweaters.

"The extent to which this system of 'street kidnapping' is carried on

is frightful. Young tailors, fresh from the country, are decoyed by the

sweaters' wives into their miserable dens, under extravagant promises of

employment, to find themselves deceived, imprisoned, and starved, often

unable to make their escape for months--perhaps years; and then only

fleeing from one dungeon to another as abominable."

In the meantime, the profits of the beasts of prey who live on these poor

fellows--both masters and sweaters--seem as prodigious as their cruelty.

Hear another working tailor on this point:--"In 1844, I belonged to the

honourable part of the trade. Our house of call supplied the present

show-shop with men to work on the premises. The prices then paid were at

the rate of 6d. per hour. For the same driving capes that they paid 18s.

then, they give only 12s. for now. For the dress and frock coats they gave

15s. then, and now they are 14s. The paletots and shooting coats were 12s.;

there was no coat made on the premises under that sum. At the end of the

season, they wanted to reduce the paletots to 9s. The men refused to make

them at that price, when other houses were paying as much as 15s. for them.

The consequence of this was, the house discharged all the men, and got a

Jew middle-man from the neighbourhood of Petticoat-lane, to agree to do

them all at 7s. 6d. a piece. The Jew employed all the poor people who were

at work for the slop warehouses in Houndsditch and its vicinity. This

Jew makes on an average 500 paletots a week. The Jew gets 2s. 6d. profit

out of each, and having no sewing trimmings allowed to him, he makes the

work-people find them. The saving in trimmings alone to the firm, since

the workmen left the premises, must have realized a small fortune to them.

Calculating men, women, and children, I have heard it said that the cheap

house at the West End employs 1,000 hands. The trimmings for the work done

by these would be about 6d. a week per head, so that the saving to the

house since the men worked on the premises has been no less than £1,300

a year, and all this taken out of the pockets of the poor. The Jew who

contracts for making the paletots is no tailor at all. A few years ago he

sold sponges in the street, and now he rides in his carriage. The Jew's

profits are 500 half-crowns, or £60 odd, per week--that is upwards of

£3,000 a-year. Women are mostly engaged at the paletot work. When I came to

work for the cheap show-shop I had £5, 10s. in the saving bank; now I have

not a half-penny in it. All I had saved went little by little to keep me

and my family. I have always made a point of putting some money by when I

could afford it, but since I have been at this work it has been as much as

I could do to _live_, much more to _save_. One of the firm for which I work

has been heard publicly to declare that he employed 1,000 hands constantly.

Now the earnings of these at the honourable part of the trade would be upon

an average, taking the skilful with the unskilful, 15s. a week each, or

£39,000 a year. But since they discharged the men from off their premises,

they have cut down the wages of the workmen one-half--taking one garment

with another--_though the selling prices remain the same to the public_, so

that they have saved by the reduction of the workmen's wages no less than

£19,500 per year. Every other quarter of a year something has been 'docked'

off our earnings, until it is almost impossible for men with families to

live decently by their labour; and now, for the first time, they pretend

to feel for them. They even talk of erecting a school for the children of

their workpeople; but where is the use of erecting schools, when they know

as well as we do, that at the wages they pay, the children must be working

for their fathers at home? They had much better erect workshops, and employ

the men on the premises at fair living wages, and then the men could

educate their own children, without being indebted to their charity."

On this last question of what the master-cannibals had "much better do," we

have somewhat to say presently. In the meantime, hear another of the things

which they had much better _not_ do. "Part of the fraud and deception of

the slop trade consists in the mode in which the public are made believe

that the men working for such establishments earn more money than they

really do. The plan practised is similar to that adopted by the army

clothier, who made out that the men working on his establishment made per

week from 15s. to 17s. each, whereas, on inquiry, it was found that a

considerable sum was paid out of that to those who helped to do the looping

for those who took it home. When a coat is given to me to make, a ticket is

handed to me with the garment, similar to this one which I have obtained

from a friend of mine.

+--------------------------------------------+

| 448 |

| Mr. _Smith_ 6,675 Made by _M_ |

| _Ze_ = 12s. = _lined lustre |

| quilted double stitched |

| each side seams_ |

| |

| 448. No. 6,675. |

| o'clock _Friday_ |

| |

| Mr. _Smith_ |

+--------------------------------------------+

On this you see the price is marked at 12s.," continued my informant, "and

supposing that I, with two others, could make three of these garments in

the week, the sum of thirty-six shillings would stand in the books of the

establishment as the amount earned by me in that space of time. This would

be sure to be exhibited to the customers, immediately that there was the

least outcry made about the starvation price they paid for their work, as

a proof that the workpeople engaged on their establishment received the

full prices; whereas, of that 36s. entered against my name, _I should have

had to pay 24s. to those who assisted me_; besides this, my share of the

trimmings and expenses would have been 1s. 6d., and probably my share of

the fires would be 1s. more; so that the real fact would be, that I should

make 9s. 6d. clear, and this it would be almost impossible to do, if I did

not work long over hours. I am obliged to keep my wife continually at work

helping me, in order to live."

In short, the condition of these men is far worse than that of the wretched

labourers of Wilts or Dorset. Their earnings are as low and often lower;

their trade requires a far longer instruction, far greater skill and

shrewdness; their rent and food are more expensive; and their hours of

work, while they have work, more than half as long again. Conceive sixteen

or eighteen hours of skilled labour in a stifling and fetid chamber,

earning not much more than 6s. 6d. or 7s. a week! And, as has been already

mentioned in one case, the man who will earn even that, must work all

Sunday. He is even liable to be thrown out of his work for refusing to work

on Sunday. Why not? Is there anything about one idle day in seven to be

found among the traditions of Mammon? When the demand comes, the supply

must come; and will, in spite of foolish auld-warld notion about keeping

days holy--or keeping contracts holy either, for, indeed, Mammon has no

conscience--right and wrong are not words expressible by any commercial

laws yet in vogue; and therefore it appears that to earn this wretched

pittance is by no means to get it. "For," says one, and the practice is

asserted to be general, almost universal, "there is at our establishment a

mode of reducing the price of our labour even lower than we have mentioned.

The prices we have stated are those _nominally_ paid for making the

garments; but it is not an uncommon thing in our shop for a man to make a

garment, and receive nothing at all for it. I remember a man once having a

waistcoat to do, the price of making which was 2s., and when he gave the

job in he was told that he owed the establishment 6d. The manner in which

this is brought about is by a system of fines. We are fined if we are

behind time with our job, 6d. the first hour, and 3d. for each hour that we

are late." "I have known as much as 7s. 6d. to be deducted off the price of

a coat on the score of want of punctuality," one said; "and, indeed, very

often the whole money is stopped. It would appear, as if our employers

themselves strove to make us late with our work, and so have an opportunity

of cutting down the price paid for our labour. They frequently put off

giving out the trimmings to us till the time at which the coat is due has

expired. If to the trimmer we return an answer that is considered 'saucy,'

we are find 6d. or 1s., according to the trimmer's temper." "I was called a

thief," another of the three declared, "and because I told the man I would

not submit to such language, I was fined 6d. These are the principal of

the in-door fines. The out-door fines are still more iniquitous. There are

full a dozen more fines for minor offences; indeed, we are fined upon every

petty pretext. We never know what we have to take on a Saturday, for the

meanest advantages are taken to reduce our wages. If we object to pay these

fines, we are told that we may leave; but they know full well that we are

afraid to throw ourselves out of work."

Folks are getting somewhat tired of the old rodomontade that a slave is

free the moment he sets foot on British soil! Stuff!--are these tailors

free? Put any conceivable sense you will on the word, and then say--are

they free? We have, thank God, emancipated the black slaves; it would seem

a not inconsistent sequel to that act to set about emancipating these

white ones. Oh! we forgot; there is an infinite difference between the two

cases--the black slaves worked for our colonies; the white slaves work for

_us_. But, indeed, if, as some preach, self-interest is the mainspring

of all human action, it is difficult to see who will step forward to

emancipate the said white slaves; for all classes seem to consider it

equally their interest to keep them as they are; all classes, though by

their own confession they are ashamed, are yet not afraid to profit by the

system which keeps them down.

Not only the master tailors and their underlings, but the retail tradesmen,

too, make their profit out of these abominations. By a method which smacks

at first sight somewhat of benevolence, but proves itself in practice to be

one of those "precious balms which break," not "the head" (for that would

savour of violence, and might possibly give some bodily pain, a thing

intolerable to the nerves of Mammon) but the heart--an organ which, being

spiritual, can of course be recognized by no laws of police or commerce.

The object of the State, we are told, is "the conservation of body and

goods"; there is nothing in that about broken hearts; nothing which should

make it a duty to forbid such a system as a working-tailor here describes--

"Fifteen or twenty years ago, such a thing as a journeyman tailor having

to give security before he could get work was unknown; but now I and such

as myself could not get a stitch to do first handed, if we did not either

procure the security of some householder, or deposit £5 in the hands of the

employer. The reason of this is, the journeymen are so badly paid, that the

employers know they can barely live on what they get, and consequently they

are often driven to pawn the garments given out to them, in order to save

themselves and their families from starving. If the journeyman can manage

to scrape together £5, he has to leave it in the hands of his employer all

the time that he is working for the house. I know one person who gives out

the work for a fashionable West End slop-shop that will not take household

security, and requires £5 from each hand. I am informed by one of the

parties who worked for this man that he has as many as 150 hands in

his employ, and that each of these has placed £5 in his hands, so that

altogether the poor people have handed over £750 to increase the capital

upon which he trades, and for which he pays no interest whatsoever."

This recalls a similar case (mentioned by a poor stay-stitcher in another

letter, published in the "Morning Chronicle"), of a large wholesale

staymaker in the City, who had amassed a large fortune by beginning to

trade upon the 5s. which he demanded to be left in his hands by his

workpeople before he gave them employment.

"Two or three years back one of the slopsellers at the East End became

bankrupt, and the poor people lost all the money that had been deposited

as security for work in his hands. The journeymen who get the security

of householders are enabled to do so by a system which is now in general

practice at the East End. Several bakers, publicans, chandler-shop keepers,

and coal-shed keepers, make a trade of becoming security for those seeking

slop-work. They consent to be responsible for the workpeople upon the

condition of the men dealing at their shops. The workpeople who require

such security are generally very good customers, from the fact of their

either having large families, all engaged in the same work, or else several

females or males working under them, and living at their house. The parties

becoming securities thus not only greatly increase their trade, but furnish

a second-rate article at a first-rate price. It is useless to complain of

the bad quality or high price of the articles supplied by the securities,

for the shopkeepers know, as well as the workpeople, that it is impossible

for the hands to leave them without losing their work. I know one baker

whose security was refused at the slop-shop because he was already

responsible for so many, and he begged the publican to be his deputy, so

that by this means the workpeople were obliged to deal at both baker's

and publican's too. I never heard of a butcher making a trade of becoming

security, _because the slopwork people cannot afford to consume much meat_.

"The same system is also pursued by lodging-house keepers. They will become

responsible if the workmen requiring security will undertake to lodge at

their house."

But of course the men most interested in keeping up the system are those

who buy the clothes of these cheap shops. And who are they? Not merely

the blackguard gent--the butt of Albert Smith and Punch, who flaunts at

the Casinos and Cremorne Gardens in vulgar finery wrung out of the souls

and bodies of the poor; not merely the poor lawyer's clerk or reduced

half-pay officer who has to struggle to look as respectable as his class

commands him to look on a pittance often no larger than that of the day

labourer--no, strange to say--and yet not strange, considering our modern

eleventh commandment--"Buy cheap and sell dear," the richest as well as the

poorest imitate the example of King Ryence and the tanners of Meudon, At

a great show establishment--to take one instance out of many--the very

one where, as we heard just now, "however strong and healthy a man may be

when he goes to work at that shop, in a month's time he will be a complete

shadow, and have almost all his clothes in pawn"--

"We have also made garments for Sir ---- ----, Sir ---- ----, Alderman

----, Dr. ----, and Dr. ----. We make for several of the aristocracy. We

cannot say whom, because the tickets frequently come to us as Lord ---- and

the Marquis of ----. This could not be a Jew's trick, because the buttons

on the liveries had coronets upon them. And again, we know the house is

patronized largely by the aristocracy, clergy, and gentry, by the number of

court-suits and liveries, surplices, regimentals, and ladies' riding-habits

that we continually have to make up. _There are more clergymen among the

customers than any other class, and often we have to work at home upon

the Sunday at their clothes, in order to get a living._ The customers are

mostly ashamed of dealing at this house, for the men who take the clothes

to the customers' houses in the cart have directions to pull up at the

corner of the street. We had a good proof of the dislike of gentlefolks to

have it known that they dealt at that shop for their clothes, for when the

trousers buttons were stamped with the name of the firm, we used to have

the garments returned, daily, to have other buttons put on them, and now

the buttons are unstamped"!!!

We shall make no comment on this extract. It needs none. If these men know

how their clothes are made, they are past contempt. Afraid of man, and not

afraid of God! As if His eye could not see the cart laden with the plunder

of the poor, because it stopped round the corner! If, on the other hand,

they do _not_ know these things, and doubtless the majority do not,--it is

their sin that they do not know it. Woe to a society whose only apology to

God and man is, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Men ought to know the condition

of those by whose labour they live. Had the question been the investment

of a few pounds in a speculation, these gentlemen would have been careful

enough about good security. Ought they to take no security when they invest

their money in clothes, that they are not putting on their backs accursed

garments, offered in sacrifice to devils, reeking with the sighs of the

starving, tainted--yes, tainted, indeed, for it comes out now that diseases

numberless are carried home in these same garments from the miserable

abodes where they are made. Evidence to this effect was given in 1844; but

Mammon was too busy to attend to it. These wretched creatures, when they

have pawned their own clothes and bedding, will use as substitutes the

very garments they are making. So Lord ----'s coat has been seen covering

a group of children blotched with small-pox. The Rev. D---- finds himself

suddenly unpresentable from a cutaneous disease, which it is not polite to

mention on the south of Tweed, little dreaming that the shivering dirty

being who made his coat has been sitting with his arms in the sleeves for

warmth while he stitched at the tails. The charming Miss C---- is swept off

by typhus or scarlatina, and her parents talk about "God's heavy judgment

and visitation"--had they tracked the girl's new riding-habit back to the

stifling undrained hovel where it served as a blanket to the fever-stricken

slopworker, they would have seen _why_ God had visited them, seen that His

judgments are true judgments, and give His plain opinion of the system

which "speaketh good of the covetous whom God abhorreth"--a system, to

use the words of the "Morning Chronicle's" correspondent, "unheard of

and unparalleled in the history of any country--a scheme so deeply laid

for the introduction and supply of under-paid labour to the market, that

it is impossible for the working man not to sink and be degraded, by it

into the lowest depths of wretchedness and infamy--a system which is

steadily and gradually increasing, and sucking more and more victims out

of the honourable trade, who are really intelligent artizans, living in

comparative comfort and civilization, into the dishonourable or sweating

trade in which the slopworkers are generally almost brutified by their

incessant toil, wretched pay, miserable food, and filthy homes."

But to us, almost the worse feature in the whole matter is, that the

government are not merely parties to, but actually the originators of this

system. The contract system, as a working tailor stated, in the name of the

rest, "had been mainly instrumental in destroying the living wages of the

working man. Now, the government were the sole originators of the system

of contracts and of sweating. Forty years ago, there was nothing known of

contracts, except government contracts; and at that period the contractors

were confined to making slops for the navy, the army, and the West India

slaves. It was never dreamt of then that such a system was to come

into operation in the better classes of trade, till ultimately it was

destructive of masters as well as men. The government having been the cause

of the contract system, and consequently of the sweating system, he called

upon them to abandon it. The sweating system had established the show shops

and the ticket system, both of which were countenanced by the government,

till it had become a fashion to support them.

"Even the court assisted to keep the system in fashion, and the royal arms

and royal warrants were now exhibited common enough by slopsellers."

Government said its duty was to do justice. But was it consistent with

justice to pay only 2s. 6d. for making navy jackets, which would be paid

10s. for by every 'honourable' tradesman? Was it consistent with justice

for the government to pay for Royal Marine clothing (private's coat and

epaulettes) 1s. 9d.? Was it consistent with justice for the government to

pay for making a pair of trousers (four or five hours' work) only 2-1/2d?

And yet, when a contractor, noted for paying just wages to those he

employed, brought this under the consideration of the Admiralty, they

declared they had nothing to do with it. Here is their answer:--

"Admiralty, March 19, 1847.

"Sir,--Having laid before my Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, your

letter of the 8th inst., calling their attention to the extremely low

prices paid for making up articles of clothing, provided for Her Majesty's

naval service, I am commanded by their lordships to acquaint you, that

they have no control whatever over the wages paid for making up contract

clothing. Their duty is to take care that the articles supplied are of good

quality, and well made: the cost of the material and the workmanship are

matters which rest with the contractor; and if the public were to pay him a

higher price than that demanded, it would not ensure any advantage to the

men employed by him, as their wages depend upon the amount of competition

for employment amongst themselves. I am, Sir, your most obedient servant,

"H. G. WARD.

"W. Shaw, Esq."

Oh most impotent conclusion, however officially cautious, and

"philosophically" correct! Even if the wages did depend entirely on the

amount of competition, on whom does the amount of competition depend?

Merely on the gross numbers of the workmen? Somewhat, too, one would think,

on the system according to which the labour and the wages are distributed.

But right or wrong, is it not a pleasant answer for the poor working

tailors, and one likely to increase their faith, hope, and charity towards

the present commercial system, and those who deny the possibility of any

other?

"The government," says another tailor at the same meeting, "had really been

the means of reducing prices in the tailoring trade to so low a scale that

no human being, whatever his industry, could live and be happy in his lot.

The government were really responsible for the first introduction of female

labour. He would clearly prove what he had stated. He would refer first

to the army clothing. Our soldiers were comfortably clothed, as they had

a right to be; but surely the men who made the clothing which was so

comfortable, ought to be paid for their labour so as to be able to keep

themselves comfortable and their families virtuous. But it was in evidence,

that the persons working upon army clothing could not, upon an average,

earn more than 1s. a-day. Another government department, the post-office,

afforded a considerable amount of employment to tailors; but those who

worked upon the post-office clothing earned, at the most, only 1s. 6d.

a-day. The police clothing was another considerable branch of tailoring;

this, like the others, ought to be paid for at living prices; but the men

at work at it could only earn 1s. 6d. a-day, supposing them to work hard

all the time, fourteen or fifteen hours. The Custom House clothing gave

about the same prices. Now, all these sorts of work were performed by time

workers, who, as a natural consequence of the wages they received, were the

most miserable of human beings. Husband, wife, and family all worked at

it; they just tried to breathe upon it; to live it never could be called.

_Yet the same Government which paid such wretched wages, called upon the

wretched people to be industrious, to be virtuous, and happy_, How was

it possible, whatever their industry, to be virtuous and happy? The fact

was, the men who, at the slack season, had been compelled to fall back

upon these kinds of work, became so beggared and broken down by it,

notwithstanding the assistance of their wives and families, that they were

never able to rise out of it."

And now comes the question--What is to be done with these poor tailors, to

the number of between fifteen and twenty thousand? Their condition, as it

stands, is simply one of ever-increasing darkness and despair. The system

which is ruining them is daily spreading, deepening. While we write, fresh

victims are being driven by penury into the slopworking trade, fresh

depreciations of labour are taking place. Like Ulysses' companions in

the cave of Polyphemus, the only question among them is, to scramble so

far back as to have _a chance of being eaten at last_. Before them is

ever-nearing slavery, disease, and starvation. What can be done?

First--this can be done. That no man who calls himself a Christian--no

man who calls himself a man--shall ever disgrace himself by dealing at

any show-shop or slop-shop. It is easy enough to know them. The ticketed

garments, the impudent puffs; the trumpery decorations, proclaim

them,--every one knows them at first sight, He who pretends not to do so,

is simply either a fool or a liar. Let no man enter them--they are the

temples of Moloch--their thresholds are rank with human blood. God's curse

is on them, and on those who, by supporting them, are partakers of their

sins. Above all, let no clergyman deal at them. Poverty--and many clergymen

are poor--doubly poor, because society often requires them to keep up the

dress of gentlemen on the income of an artizan; because, too, the demands

on their charity are quadruple those of any other class--yet poverty is no

excuse. The thing is damnable--not Christianity only, but common humanity

cries out against it. Woe to those who dare to outrage in private the

principles which they preach in public! God is not mocked; and his curse

will find out the priest at the altar, as well as the nobleman in his

castle.

But it is so hard to deprive the public of the luxury of cheap clothes!

Then let the public look out for some other means of procuring that

priceless blessing. If that, on experiment, be found impossible--if the

comfort of the few be for ever to be bought by the misery of the many--if

civilization is to benefit every one except the producing class--then this

world is truly the devil's world, and the sooner so ill-constructed and

infernal a machine is destroyed by that personage, the better.

But let, secondly, a dozen, or fifty, or a hundred journeymen say to

one another: "It is competition that, is ruining us, and competition is

division, disunion, every man for himself, every man against his brother.

The remedy must be in association, co-operation, self-sacrifice for the

sake of one another. We can work together at the honourable tailor's

workshop--we can work and live together in the sweater's den for the

profit of our employers; why should we not work and live together in our

own workshops, or our own homes, for our own profit? The journeymen of

the honourable trade are just as much interested as the slopworkers in

putting down sweaters and slopsellers, since their numbers are constantly

decreasing, so that their turn must come some day. Let them, if no one else

does, lend money to allow us to set up a workshop of our own, a shop of our

own. If the money be not lent, still let us stint and strain ourselves to

the very bone, if it were only to raise one sweater's security-money, which

one of us should pay into the slopseller's hands, in his own name, but on

behalf of all: that will at least save one sweater's profit out of our

labour, and bestow it upon ourselves; and we will not spend that profit,

but hoard it, till we have squeezed out all the sweaters one by one. Then

we will open our common shop, and sell at as low a price as the cheapest

of the show shops. We _can_ do this,--by the abolition of sweaters'

profits,--by the using, as far as possible, of one set of fires, lights,

rooms, kitchens, and washhouses,--above all, by being true and faithful

to one another, as all partners should be. And, then, all that the master

slopsellers had better do, will be simply to vanish and become extinct."

And again, let one man, or half-a-dozen men arise, who believe that the

world is not the devil's world at all, but God's: that the multitude of

the people is not, as Malthusians aver, the ruin, but as Solomon believed,

"the strength of the rulers"; that men are not meant to be beasts of prey,

eating one another up by competition, as in some confined pike pond, where

the great pike having despatched the little ones, begin to devour each

other, till one overgrown monster is left alone to die of starvation. Let a

few men who have money, and believe that, arise to play the man.

Let them help and foster the growth of association by all means. Let them

advise the honourable tailors, while it is time, to save themselves from

being degraded into slopsellers by admitting their journeymen to a share in

profits. Let them encourage the journeymen to compete with Nebuchadnezzar &

Co. at their own game. Let them tell those journeymen that the experiment

is even now being tried, and, in many instances successfully, by no less

than one hundred and four associations of journeymen in Paris. Let them

remind them of that Great Name which the Parisian "ouvrier" so often

forgets--of Him whose everlasting Fatherhood is the sole ground of all

human brotherhood, whose wise and loving will is the sole source of all

perfect order and government. Let them, as soon as an association is

formed, provide for them a properly ventilated workshop, and let it out

to the associate tailors at a low, fair rent. I believe that they will

not lose by it--because it is right. God will take care of their money.

The world, it comes out now, is so well ordered by Him, that model

lodging-houses, public baths, wash-houses, insurance offices, all pay a

reasonable profit to those who invest money in them--perhaps associate

workshops may do the same. At all events, the owners of these show-shops

realize a far higher profit than need be, while the buildings required for

a tailoring establishment are surely not more costly than those absurd

plate-glass fronts, and brass scroll-work chandeliers, and puffs, and paid

poets. A large house might thus be taken, in some central situation, the

upper floors of which might be fitted up as model lodging-rooms for the

tailor's trade alone. The drawing-room floor might be the work-room; on the

ground floor the shop; and, if possible, a room of call or registration

office for unemployed journeymen, and a reading-room. Why should not this

succeed, if the owners of the house and the workers who rent it are only

true to one another? Every tyro in political economy knows that association

involves a saving both of labour and of capital. Why should it not succeed,

when every one connected with the establishment, landlords and workmen,

will have an interest in increasing its prosperity, and none whatever in

lowering the wages of any party employed?

But above all, so soon as these men are found working together for common

profit, in the spirit of mutual self-sacrifice, let every gentleman and

every Christian, who has ever dealt with, or could ever have dealt with,

Nebuchadnezzar and Co., or their fellows, make it a point of honour and

conscience to deal with the associated workmen, and get others to do the

like. _It is by securing custom, far more than by gifts or loans of money,

that we can help the operatives._ We should but hang a useless burthen of

debt round their necks by advancing capital, without affording them the

means of disposing of their produce.

Be assured, that the finding of a tailors' model lodging house, work rooms,

and shop, and the letting out of the two latter to an association, would

be a righteous act to do. If the plan does not pay, what then? only a part

of the money can be lost; and to have given that to an hospital or an

almshouse would have been called praiseworthy and Christian charity; how

much more to have spent it not in the cure, but in the prevention of

evil--in making almshouses less needful, and lessening the number of

candidates for the hospital!

Regulations as to police order, and temperance, the workmen must, and, if

they are worthy of the name of free men, they can organize for themselves.

Let them remember that an association of labour is very different from

an association of capital. The capitalist only embarks his money on the

venture; the workman embarks his time--that is, much at least of his

life. Still more different is the operatives' association from the single

capitalist, seeking only to realize a rapid fortune, and then withdraw. The

association knows no withdrawal from business; it must grow in length and

in breadth, outlasting rival slopsellers, swallowing up all associations

similar to itself, and which might end by competing with it. "Monopoly!"

cries a free-trader, with hair on end. Not so, good friend; there will

be no real free trade without association. Who tells you that tailors'

associations are to be the only ones?

Some such thing, as I have hinted, might surely be done. Where there is a

will there is a way. No doubt there are difficulties--Howard and Elizabeth

Fry, too, had their difficulties. Brindley and Brunel did not succeed at

the first trial. It is the sluggard only who is always crying, "There is a

lion in the streets." Be daring--trust in God, and He will fight for you;

man of money, whom these words have touched, godliness has the promise

of this life, as well as of that to come. The thing must be done, and

speedily; for if it be not done by fair means, it will surely do itself

by foul. The continual struggle of competition, not only in the tailors'

trade, but in every one which is not, like the navigator's or engineer's,

at a premium from its novel and extraordinary demand, will weaken and

undermine more and more the masters, who are already many of them

speculating on borrowed capital, while it will depress the workmen to a

point at which life will become utterly intolerable; increasing education

will serve only to make them the more conscious of their own misery; the

boiler will be strained to bursting pitch, till some jar, some slight

crisis, suddenly directs the imprisoned forces to one point, and then--

What then?

Look at France, and see.

PARSON LOT.

PREFACE

_To the UNDERGRADUATES of CAMBRIDGE._

I have addressed this preface to the young gentlemen of the University,

first, because it is my duty to teach such of them as will hear me, Modern

History; and I know no more important part of Modern History than the

condition and the opinions of our own fellow-countrymen, some of which are

set forth in this book.

Next, I have addressed them now, because I know that many of them, at

various times, have taken umbrage at certain scenes of Cambridge life drawn

in this book. I do not blame them for having done so. On the contrary, I

have so far acknowledged the justice of their censure, that while I have

altered hardly one other word in this book, I have re-written all that

relates to Cambridge life.

Those sketches were drawn from my own recollections of 1838-1842. Whether

they were overdrawn is a question between me and men of my own standing.

But the book was published in 1849; and I am assured by men in whom I have

the most thorough confidence, that my sketches had by then at least become

exaggerated and exceptional, and therefore, as a whole, untrue; that a

process of purification was going on rapidly in the University; and that I

must alter my words if I meant to give the working men a just picture of

her.

Circumstances took the property and control of the book out of my hand, and

I had no opportunity of reconsidering and of altering the passages. Those

circumstances have ceased, and I take the first opportunity of altering all

which my friends tell me should be altered.

But even if, as early as 1849, I had not been told that I must do so, I

should have done so of my own accord, after the experiences of 1861. I have

received at Cambridge a courtesy and kindness from my elders, a cordial

welcome from my co-equals, and an earnest attention from the undergraduates

with whom I have come in contact, which would bind me in honour to say

nothing publicly against my University, even if I had aught to say. But I

have nought. I see at Cambridge nothing which does not gain my respect for

her present state and hope for her future. Increased sympathy between the

old and young, increased intercourse between the teacher and the taught,

increased freedom and charity of thought, and a steady purpose of internal

self-reform and progress, seem to me already bearing good fruit, by making

the young men regard their University with content and respect. And

among the young men themselves, the sight of their increased earnestness

and high-mindedness, increased sobriety and temperance, combined with a

manliness not inferior to that of the stalwart lads of twenty years ago,

has made me look upon my position among them as most noble, my work among

them as most hopeful, and made me sure that no energy which I can employ in

teaching them will ever have been thrown away.

Much of this improvement seems to me due to the late High-Church movement;

much to the influence of Dr. Arnold; much to that of Mr. Maurice; much to

the general increase of civilization throughout the country: but whatever

be the causes of it, the fact is patent; and I take delight in thus

expressing my consciousness of it.

Another change I must notice in the tone of young gentlemen, not only

at Cambridge, but throughout Britain, which is most wholesome and most

hopeful. I mean their altered tone in speaking to and of the labouring

classes. Thirty years ago, and even later, the young men of the labouring

classes were "the cads," "the snobs," "the blackguards"; looked on with a

dislike, contempt, and fear, which they were not backward to return, and

which were but too ready to vent themselves on both sides in ugly words and

deeds. That hateful severance between the classes was, I believe, an evil

of recent growth, unknown to old England. From the middle ages, up to the

latter years of the French war, the relation between the English gentry and

the labourers seems to have been more cordial and wholesome than in any

other country of Europe. But with the French Revolution came a change for

the worse. The Revolution terrified too many of the upper, and excited too

many of the lower classes; and the stern Tory system of repression, with

its bad habit of talking and acting as if "the government" and "the people"

were necessarily in antagonism, caused ever increasing bad blood. Besides,

the old feudal ties between class and class, employer and employed,

had been severed. Large masses of working people had gathered in the

manufacturing districts in savage independence. The agricultural labourers

had been debased by the abuses of the old Poor-law into a condition upon

which one looks back now with half-incredulous horror. Meanwhile, the

distress of the labourers became more and more severe. Then arose Luddite

mobs, meal mobs, farm riots, riots everywhere; Captain Swing and his

rickburners, Peterloo "massacres," Bristol conflagrations, and all the

ugly sights and rumours which made young lads, thirty or forty years ago,

believe (and not so wrongly) that "the masses" were their natural enemies,

and that they might have to fight, any year, or any day, for the safety of

their property and the honour of their sisters.

How changed, thank God! is all this now. Before the influence of religion,

both Evangelical and Anglican; before the spread of those liberal

principles, founded on common humanity and justice, the triumph of which we

owe to the courage and practical good sense of the Whig party; before the

example of a Court, virtuous, humane, and beneficent; the attitude of the

British upper classes has undergone a noble change. There is no aristocracy

in the world, and there never has been one, as far as I know, which has so

honourably repented, and brought forth fruits meet for repentance; which

has so cheerfully asked what its duty was, that it might do it. It is not

merely enlightened statesmen, philanthropists, devotees, or the working

clergy, hard and heartily as they are working, who have set themselves to

do good as a duty specially required of them by creed or by station. In

the generality of younger laymen, as far as I can see, a humanity (in the

highest sense of the word) has been awakened, which bids fair, in another

generation, to abolish the last remnants of class prejudices and class

grudges. The whole creed of our young gentlemen is becoming more liberal,

their demeanour more courteous, their language more temperate. They inquire

after the welfare, or at least mingle in the sports of the labouring man,

with a simple cordiality which was unknown thirty years ago; they are

prompt, the more earnest of them, to make themselves of use to him on the

ground of a common manhood, if any means of doing good are pointed out to

them; and that it is in any wise degrading to "associate with low fellows,"

is an opinion utterly obsolete, save perhaps among a few sons of squireens

in remote provinces, or of parvenus who cannot afford to recognize the

class from whence they themselves have risen. In the army, thanks to the

purifying effect of the Crimean and Indian wars, the same altered tone

is patent. Officers feel for and with their men, talk to them, strive to

instruct and amuse them more and more year by year; and--as a proof that

the reform has not been forced on the officers by public opinion from

without, but is spontaneous and from within, another instance of the

altered mind of the aristocracy--the improvement is greatest in those

regiments which are officered by men of the best blood; and in care for

and sympathy with their men, her Majesty's Footguards stands first of all.

God grant that the friendship which exists there between the leaders and

the led may not be tested to the death amid the snow-drift or on the

battle-field; but if it be so, I know too that it will stand the test.

But if I wish for one absolute proof of the changed relation between

the upper and the lower classes, I have only to point to the volunteer

movement. In 1803, in the face of the most real and fatal danger, the

Addington ministry was afraid of allowing volunteer regiments, and Lord

Eldon, while pressing the necessity, could use as an argument that if the

people did not volunteer for the Government, they would against it. So

broad was even then the gulf between the governed and the governors. How

much broader did it become in after years! Had invasion threatened us at

any period between 1815 and 1830, or even later, would any ministry have

dared to allow volunteer regiments? Would they have been justified in doing

so, even if they had dared?

And now what has come to pass, all the world knows: but all the world

should know likewise, that it never would have come to pass save for--not

merely the late twenty years of good government in State, twenty years

of virtue and liberality in the Court, but--the late twenty years of

increasing right-mindedness in the gentry, who have now their reward in

finding that the privates in the great majority of corps prefer being

officered by men of a rank socially superior to their own. And as good

always breeds fresh good, so this volunteer movement, made possible by the

goodwill between classes, will help in its turn to increase that goodwill.

Already, by the performance of a common duty, and the experience of a

common humanity, these volunteer corps are become centres of cordiality

between class and class; and gentleman, tradesman, and workman, the more

they see of each other, learn to like, to trust, and to befriend each other

more and more; a good work in which I hope the volunteers of the University

of Cambridge will do their part like men and gentlemen; when, leaving this

University, they become each of them, as they ought, an organizing point

for fresh volunteers in their own districts.

I know (that I may return to Cambridge) no better example of the way in

which the altered tone of the upper classes and the volunteer movement

have acted and reacted upon each other, than may be seen in the

Cambridge Working Men's College, and its volunteer rifle corps, the 8th

Cambridgeshire.

There we have--what perhaps could not have existed, what certainly did not

exist twenty years ago--a school of a hundred men or more, taught for the

last eight years gratuitously by men of the highest attainments in the

University; by a dean--to whom, I believe, the success of the attempt is

mainly owing; by professors, tutors, prizemen, men who are now head-masters

of public schools, who have given freely to their fellow-men knowledge

which has cost them large sums of money and the heavy labour of years.

Without insulting them by patronage, without interfering with their

religious opinions, without tampering with their independence in any wise,

but simply on the ground of a common humanity, they have been helping to

educate these men, belonging for the most part, I presume, to the very

class which this book sets forth as most unhappy and most dangerous--the

men conscious of unsatisfied and unemployed intellect. And they have their

reward in a practical and patent form. Out of these men a volunteer corps

is organized, officered partly by themselves, partly by gentlemen of the

University; a nucleus of discipline, loyalty, and civilization for the

whole population of Cambridge.

A noble work this has been, and one which may be the parent of works nobler

still. It is the first instalment of, I will not say a debt, but a duty,

which the Universities owe to the working classes. I have tried to express

in this book, what I know were, twenty years ago, the feelings of clever

working men, looking upon the superior educational advantages of our class.

I cannot forget, any more than the working man, that the Universities

were not founded exclusively, or even primarily, for our own class; that

the great mass of students in the middle ages were drawn from the lower

classes, and that sizarships, scholarships, exhibitions, and so forth, were

founded for the sake of those classes, rather than of our own. How the case

stands now, we all know. I do not blame the Universities for the change. It

has come about, I think, simply by competition. The change began, I should

say, in the sixteenth century. Then, after the Wars of the Roses, and the

revival of letters, and the dissolution of the monasteries, the younger

sons of gentlemen betook themselves to the pursuit of letters, fighting

having become treasonable, and farming on a small scale difficult (perhaps

owing to the introduction of large sheep-farms, which happened in those

days), while no monastic orders were left to recruit the Universities, as

they did continually through the middle ages, from that labouring-class to

which they and their scholars principally belonged.

So the gentlemen's sons were free to compete against the sons of working

men; and by virtue of their superior advantages they beat them out of

the field. We may find through the latter half of the sixteenth and the

beginning of the seventeenth centuries, bequest after bequest for the

purpose of stopping this change, and of enabling poor men's sons to enter

the Universities; but the tendency was too strong to be effectually

resisted then. Is it too strong to be resisted now? Does not the increased

civilization and education of the working classes call on the Universities

to consider whether they may not now try to become, what certainly they

were meant to be, places of teaching and training for genius of every

rank, and not merely for that of young gentlemen? Why should not wealthy

Churchmen, in addition to the many good deeds in which they employ their

wealth now-a-days, found fresh scholarships and exhibitions, confined to

the sons of working men? If it be asked, how can they be so confined? What

simpler method than that of connecting them with the National Society, and

bestowing them exclusively on lads who have distinguished themselves in our

National Schools? I believe that money spent in such a way, would be well

spent both for the Nation, the Church, and the University. As for the

introduction of such a class of lads lowering the tone of the University, I

cannot believe it. There is room enough in Cambridge for men of every rank.

There are still, in certain colleges, owing to circumstances which I should

be very sorry to see altered, a fair sprinkling of young men who, at least

before they have passed through a Cambridge career, would not be called

well-bred. But they do not lower the tone of the University; the tone of

the University raises them. Wherever there is intellectual power, good

manners are easily acquired; the public opinion of young men expresses

itself so freely, and possibly coarsely, that priggishness and forwardness

(the faults to which a clever National School pupil would be most prone)

are soon hammered out of any Cambridge man; and the result is, that some of

the most distinguished and most popular men in Cambridge, are men who have

"risen from the ranks." All honour to them for having done so. But if they

have succeeded so well, may there not be hundreds more in England who would

succeed equally? and would it not be as just to the many, as useful to the

University, in binding her to the people and the people to her, to invent

some method for giving those hundreds a fair chance?

I earnestly press this suggestion (especially at the present time of

agitation among Churchmen on the subject of education) upon the attention,

not of the University itself, but of those wealthy men who wish well both

to the University and to the people. Not, I say, of the University: it is

not from her that the proposal must come, but from her friends outside. She

is doing her best with the tools which she has; fresh work will require

fresh tools, and I trust that such will be some day found for her.

I have now to tell those of them who may read this book, that it is not

altogether out of date.

Those political passions, the last outburst of which it described, have,

thank God, become mere matter of history by reason of the good government

and the unexampled prosperity of the last twelve years: but fresh outbursts

of them are always possible in a free country, whenever there is any

considerable accumulation of neglects and wrongs; and meanwhile it is

well--indeed it is necessary--for every student of history to know what

manner of men they are who become revolutionaries, and what causes drive

them to revolution; that they may judge discerningly and charitably of

their fellow-men, whenever they see them rising, however madly, against the

powers that be.

As for the social evils described in this book, they have been much

lessened in the last few years, especially by the movement for Sanatory

Reform: but I must warn young men that they are not eradicated; that for

instance, only last year, attention was called by this book to the working

tailors in Edinburgh, and their state was found, I am assured, to be

even more miserable than that of the London men in 1848. And I must warn

them also that social evils, like dust and dirt, have a tendency to

re-accumulate perpetually; so that however well this generation may have

swept their house (and they have worked hard and honestly at it), the

rising generation will have assuredly in twenty years' time to sweep it

over again.

One thing more I have to say, and that very earnestly, to the young men of

Cambridge. They will hear a "Conservative Reaction" talked of as imminent,

indeed as having already begun. They will be told that this reaction is

made more certain by the events now passing in North America; they will be

bidden to look at the madnesses of an unbridled democracy, to draw from

them some such lesson as the young Spartans were to draw from the drunken

Helots, and to shun with horror any further attempts to enlarge the

suffrage.

But if they have learnt (as they should from the training of this

University) accuracy of thought and language, they will not be content with

such vague general terms as "Conservatism" and "Democracy": but will ask

themselves--If this Conservative Reaction is at hand, what things is it

likely to conserve; and still more, what ought it to conserve? If the

violences and tyrannies of American Democracy are to be really warnings

to, then in what points does American Democracy coincide with British

Democracy?--For so far and no farther can one be an example or warning for

the other.

And looking, as they probably will under the pressure of present

excitement, at the latter question first, they will surely see that no

real analogy would exist between American and English Democracy, even were

universal suffrage to be granted to-morrow.

For American Democracy, being merely arithmocratic, provides no

representation whatsoever for the more educated and more experienced

minority, and leaves the conduct of affairs to the uneducated and

inexperienced many, with such results as we see. But those results are, I

believe, simply impossible in a country which possesses hereditary Monarchy

and a House of Lords, to give not only voice, but practical power to

superior intelligence and experience. Mr. J. S. Mill, Mr. Stapleton, and

Mr. Hare have urged of late the right of minorities to be represented as

well as majorities, and have offered plans for giving them a fair hearing.

That their demands are wise, as well as just, the present condition of the

Federal States proves but too painfully. But we must not forget meanwhile,

that the minorities of Britain are not altogether unrepresented. In a

hereditary Monarch who has the power to call into his counsels, private and

public, the highest intellect of the land; in a House of Lords not wholly

hereditary, but recruited perpetually from below by the most successful

(and therefore, on the whole, the most capable) personages; in a free

Press, conducted in all its most powerful organs by men of character and

of liberal education, I see safeguards against any American tyranny of

numbers, even if an enlargement of the suffrage did degrade the general

tone of the House of Commons as much as some expect.

As long, I believe, as the Throne, the House of Lords, and the Press, are

what, thank God, they are, so long will each enlargement of the suffrage be

a fresh source not of danger, but of safety; for it will bind the masses to

the established order of things by that loyalty which springs from content;

from the sense of being appreciated, trusted, dealt with not as children,

but as men.

There are those who will consider such language as this especially

ill-timed just now, in the face of Strikes and Trades' Union outrages.

They point to these things as proofs of the unfitness of workmen for the

suffrage; they point especially to the late abominable murder at Sheffield,

and ask, not without reason, would you give political power to men who

would do that?

Now that the Sheffield murder was in any wise planned or commanded by the

Trades' Unions in general, I do not believe; nor, I think, does any one

else who knows aught of the British workman. If it was not, as some of the

Sheffield men say, a private act of revenge, it was the act of only one

or two Trades' Unions of that town, which are known; and their conduct

has been already reprobated and denounced by the other Trades' Unions of

England, But there is no denying that the case as against the Trades'

Unions is a heavy one. It is notorious that they have in past years planned

and commanded illegal acts of violence. It is patent that they are too apt,

from a false sense of class-honour, to connive at such now, instead of

being, as they ought to be, the first to denounce them. The workmen will

not see, that by combining in societies for certain purposes, they make

those societies responsible for the good and lawful behaviour of all their

members, in all acts tending to further those purposes, and are bound to

say to every man joining a Trades' Union: "You shall do nothing to carry

out the objects which we have in view, save what is allowed by British

Law." They will not see that they are outraging the first principles of

justice and freedom, by dictating to any man what wages he should receive,

what master he shall work for, or any other condition which interferes with

his rights as a free agent.

But, in the face of these facts (and very painful and disappointing

they are to me), I will ask the upper classes: Do you believe that the

average of Trades' Union members are capable of such villanies as that at

Sheffield? Do you believe that the average of them are given to violence

or illegal acts at all, even though they may connive at such acts in their

foolish and hasty fellows, by a false class-honour, not quite unknown,

I should say, in certain learned and gallant professions? Do you fancy

that there are not in these Trades' Unions, tens of thousands of loyal,

respectable, rational, patient men, as worthy of the suffrage as any

average borough voter? If you do so, you really know nothing about the

British workman. At least, you are confounding the workman of 1861 with the

workman of 1831, and fancying that he alone, of all classes, has gained

nothing by the increased education, civilization, and political experience

of thirty busy and prosperous years. You are unjust to the workman; and

more, you are unjust to your own class. For thirty years past, gentlemen

and ladies of all shades of opinion have been labouring for and among the

working classes, as no aristocracy on earth ever laboured before; and do

you suppose that all that labour has been in vain? That it has bred in the

working classes no increased reverence for law, no increased content with

existing institutions, no increased confidence in the classes socially

above them? If so, you must have as poor an opinion of the capabilities of

the upper classes, as you have of those of the lower.

So far from the misdoings of Trades' Unions being an argument against the

extension of the suffrage, they are, in my opinion, an argument for it. I

know that I am in a minority just now. I know that the common whisper is

now, not especially of those who look for a Conservative reaction, that

these Trades' Unions must be put down by strong measures: and I confess

that I hear such language with terror. Punish, by all means, most severely,

all individual offences against individual freedom, or personal safety;

but do not interfere, surely, with the Trades' Unions themselves. Do not

try to bar these men of their right as free Englishmen to combine, if they

choose, for what they consider their own benefit. Look upon these struggles

between employers and employed as fair battles, in which, by virtue of the

irreversible laws of political economy, the party who is in the right is

almost certain to win; and interfere in no wise, save to see fair play, and

lawful means used on both sides alike. If you do more; if you interfere

in any wise with the Trades' Unions themselves, you will fail, and fail

doubly. You will not prevent the existence of combinations: you will only

make them secret, dark, revolutionary: you will demoralize the working man

thereby as surely as the merchant is demoralized by being converted into a

smuggler; you will heap up indignation, spite, and wrath against the day

of wrath; and finally, to complete your own failure, you will drive the

working man to demand an extension of the suffrage, in tones which will

very certainly get a hearing. He cares, or seems to care, little about

the suffrage now, just because he thinks that he can best serve his own

interests by working these Trades' Unions. Take from him that means of

redress (real or mistaken, no matter); and he will seek redress in a way in

which you wish him still less to seek it; by demanding a vote and obtaining

one.

That consummation, undesirable as it may seem to many, would perhaps be the

best for the peace of the trades. These Trades' Unions, still tainted with

some of the violence, secrecy, false political economy which they inherit

from the evil times of 1830-40, last on simply, I believe, because the

workman feels that they are his only organ, that he has no other means of

making his wants and his opinions known to the British Government. Had he a

vote, he believes (and I believe with him) he could send at least a few men

to Parliament who would state his case fairly in the House of Commons, and

would not only render a reason for him, but hear reason against him, if

need were. He would be content with free discussion if he could get that.

It is the feeling that he cannot get it that drives him often into crooked

and dark ways. If any answer, that the representatives, whom he would

choose would be merely noisy demagogues, I believe them to be mistaken.

No one can have watched the Preston strike, however much he may have

disapproved, as I did, of the strike itself, without seeing from the

temper, the self-restraint, the reasonableness, the chivalrous honour of

the men, that they were as likely to choose a worthy member for the House

of Commons as any town constituency in England; no one can have watched the

leaders of the working men for the last ten years without finding among

them men capable of commanding the attention and respect of the House of

Commons, not merely by their eloquence, surprising as that is, but by their

good sense, good feeling, and good breeding.

Some training at first, some rubbing off of angles, they might require:

though two at least I know, who would require no such training, and who

would be ornaments to any House of Commons; the most inexperienced of the

rest would not give the House one-tenth the trouble which is given by a

certain clique among the representatives of the sister Isle; and would,

moreover, learn his lesson in a week, instead of never learning it at all,

like some we know too well. Yet Catholic emancipation has pacified Ireland,

though it has brought into the House an inferior stamp of members: and much

more surely would an extension of the suffrage pacify the trades, while

it would bring into the House a far superior stamp of member to those who

compose the clique of which I have spoken.

But why, I hear some one say impatiently, talk about this subject of all

others at this moment, when nobody, not even the working classes, cares

about a Reform Bill?

Because I am speaking to young men, who have not yet entered public life;

and because I wish them to understand, that just because the question of

parliamentary reform is in abeyance now, it will not be in abeyance ten

years or twenty years hence. The question will be revived, ere they are

in the maturity of their manhood; and they had best face that certain

prospect, and learn to judge wisely and accurately on the subject, before

they are called on, as they will be, to act upon it. If it be true that the

present generation has done all that it can do, or intends to do, towards

the suffrage (and I have that confidence in our present rulers, that I

would submit without murmuring to their decision on the point), it is

all the more incumbent on the rising generation to learn how to do (as

assuredly they will have to do) the work which their fathers have left

undone. The question may remain long in abeyance, under the influence of

material prosperity such as the present; or under the excitement of a war,

as in Pitt's time; but let a period of distress or disaster come, and it

will be re-opened as of yore. The progress towards institutions more and

more popular may be slow, but it is sure. Whenever any class has conceived

the hope of being fairly represented, it is certain to fulfil its own

hopes, unless it employs, or provokes, violence impossible in England.

The thing will be. Let the young men of Britain take care that it is done

rightly when it is done.

And how ought it to be done? That will depend upon any circumstances now

future and uncertain. It will depend upon the pace at which sound education

spreads among the working classes. It will depend, too, very much--I fear

only too much--upon the attitude of the upper classes to the lower, in this

very question of Trades' Unions and of Strikes. It will depend upon their

attitude toward the unrepresented classes during the next few years, upon

this very question of extended suffrage. And, therefore, I should advise,

I had almost said entreat, any young men over whom I have any influence,

to read and think freely and accurately upon the subject; taking, if

I may propose to them a text-book, Mr. Mill's admirable treatise on

"Representative Government." As for any theory of my own, if I had one

I should not put it forward. How it will not be done, I can see clearly

enough. It will not be done well by the old charter. It will not be done

well by merely lowering the money qualification of electors. But it may

be done well by other methods beside; and I can trust the freedom and

soundness of the English mind to discover the best method of all, when it

is needed.

Let therefore this "Conservative Reaction" which I suspect is going on in

the minds of many young men at Cambridge, consider what it has to conserve.

It is not asked to conserve the Throne. That, thank God, can take good care

of itself. Let it conserve the House of Lords; and that will be conserved,

just in proportion as the upper classes shall copy the virtues of Royalty;

both of him who is taken from us, and of her who is left. Let the upper

classes learn from them, that the just and wise method of strengthening

their political power, is to labour after that social power, which comes

only by virtue and usefulness. Let them make themselves, as the present

Sovereign has made herself, morally necessary to the people; and then there

is no fear of their being found politically unnecessary. No other course

is before them, if they wish to make their "Conservative Reaction" a

permanent, even an endurable fact. If any young gentlemen fancy (and some

do) that they can strengthen their class by making any secret alliance with

the Throne against the masses, then they will discover rapidly that the

sovereigns of the House of Brunswick are grown far too wise, and far too

noble-hearted, to fall once more into that trap. If any of them (and some

do) fancy that they can better their position by sneering, whether in

public or in their club, at a Reformed House of Commons and a Free Press,

they will only accelerate the results which they most dread, by forcing

the ultra-liberal party of the House, and, what is even worse, the most

intellectual and respectable portion of the Press, to appeal to the people

against them; and if again they are tempted (as too many of them are) to

give up public life as becoming too vulgar for them, and prefer ease and

pleasure to the hard work and plain-speaking of the House of Commons; then

they will simply pay the same penalty for laziness and fastidiousness which

has been paid by the Spanish aristocracy; and will discover that if they

think their intellect unnecessary to the nation, the nation will rapidly

become of the same opinion, and go its own way without them.

But if they are willing to make themselves, as they easily can, the

best educated, the most trustworthy, the most virtuous, the most truly

liberal-minded class of the commonweal; if they will set themselves to

study the duties of rank and property, as of a profession to which they are

called by God, and the requirements of which they must fulfil; if they will

acquire, as they can easily, a sound knowledge both of political economy,

and of the social questions of the day; if they will be foremost with

their personal influence in all good works; if they will set themselves

to compete on equal terms with the classes below them, and, as they may,

outrival them: then they will find that those classes will receive them not

altogether on equal terms; that they will accede to them a superiority,

undefined perhaps, but real and practical enough to conserve their class

and their rank, in every article for which a just and prudent man would

wish.

But if any young gentlemen look forward (as I fear a few do still) to a

Conservative Reaction of any other kind than this; to even the least return

to the Tory maxims and methods of George the Fourth's time; to even the

least stoppage of what the world calls progress--which I should define

as the putting in practice the results of inductive science; then do

they, like king Picrochole in Rabelais, look for a kingdom which shall be

restored to them at the coming of the Cocqcigrues. The Cocqcigrues are

never coming; and none know that better than the present able and moderate

leaders of the Conservative party; none will be more anxious to teach that

fact to their young adherents, and to make them swim with the great stream,

lest it toss them contemptuously ashore upon its banks, and go on its way

unheeding.

Return to the system of 1800--1830, is, I thank God, impossible. Even

though men's hearts should fail them, they must onward, they know not

whither: though God does know. The bigot, who believes in a system, and not

in the living God; the sentimentalist, who shrinks from facts because they

are painful to his taste; the sluggard, who hates a change because it

disturbs his ease; the simply stupid person, who cannot use his eyes and

ears; all these may cry feebly to the world to do what it has never done

since its creation--stand still awhile, that they may get their breaths.

But the brave and honest gentleman--who believes that God is not the

tempter and deceiver, but the father and the educator of man--he will

not shrink, even though the pace may be at moments rapid, the path be at

moments hid by mist; for he will believe that freedom and knowledge, as

well as virtue, are the daughters of the Most High; and he will follow them

and call on the rest to follow them, whithersoever they may lead; and will

take heart for himself and for his class, by the example of that great

Prince who is of late gone home. For if, like that most royal soul, he and

his shall follow with single eye and steadfast heart, freedom, knowledge,

and virtue; then will he and his be safe, as Royalty is safe in England

now; because both God and man have need thereof.

PREFACE.

_Written in 1854._

ADDRESSED TO THE WORKING MEN OF GREAT BRITAIN.

My Friends,--Since I wrote this book five years ago, I have seen a good

deal of your class, and of their prospects. Much that I have seen has given

me great hope; much has disappointed me; nothing has caused me to alter the

opinions here laid down.

Much has given me hope; especially in the North of England. I believe that

there, at least, exists a mass of prudence, self-control, genial and sturdy

manhood, which will be England's reserve-force for generations yet to come.

The last five years, moreover, have certainly been years of progress for

the good cause. The great drag upon it--namely, demagogism--has crumbled to

pieces of its own accord; and seems now only to exhibit itself in anilities

like those of the speakers who inform a mob of boys and thieves that wheat

has lately been thrown into the Thames to keep up prices, or advise them

to establish, by means hitherto undiscovered, national granaries, only

possible under the despotism of a Pharaoh. Since the 10th of April, 1848

(one of the most lucky days which the English workman ever saw), the trade

of the mob-orator has dwindled down to such last shifts as these, to which

the working man sensibly seems merely to answer, as he goes quietly about

his business, "Why will you still keep talking, Signor Benedick? Nobody

marks you."

But the 10th of April, 1848, has been a beneficial crisis, not merely in

the temper of the working men, so called, but in the minds of those who are

denominated by them "the aristocracy." There is no doubt that the classes

possessing property have been facing, since 1848, all social questions with

an average of honesty, earnestness, and good feeling which has no parallel

since the days of the Tudors, and that hundreds and thousands of "gentlemen

and ladies" in Great Britain now are saying, "Show what we ought to do to

be just to the workman, and we will do it, whatsoever it costs." They may

not be always correct (though they generally are so) in their conceptions

of what ought to be done; but their purpose is good and righteous; and

those who hold it are daily increasing in number. The love of justice and

mercy toward the handicraftsman is spreading rapidly as it never did before

in any nation upon earth; and if any man still represents the holders of

property, as a class, as the enemies of those whom they employ, desiring

their slavery and their ignorance, I believe that he is a liar and a child

of the devil, and that he is at his father's old work, slandering and

dividing between man and man. These words may be severe: but they are

deliberate; and working men are, I hope, sufficiently accustomed to hear me

call a spade a spade, when I am pleading for them, to allow me to do the

same when I am pleading to them.

Of the disappointing experiences which I have had I shall say nothing,

save in as far as I can, by alluding to them, point out to the working man

the causes which still keep him weak: but I am bound to say that those

disappointments have strengthened my conviction that this book, in the

main, speaks the truth.

I do not allude, of course, to the thoughts, and feelings of the hero. They

are compounded of right and wrong, and such as I judged (and working men

whom I am proud to number among my friends have assured me that I judged

rightly) that a working man of genius would feel during the course of

his self-education. These thoughts and feelings (often inconsistent and

contradictory to each other), stupid or careless, or ill-willed persons,

have represented as my own opinions, having, as it seems to me, turned

the book upside down before they began to read it. I am bound to pay the

working men, and their organs in the press, the compliment of saying that

no such misrepresentations proceeded from them. However deeply some of

them may have disagreed with me, all of them, as far as I have been able

to judge, had sense to see what I meant; and so, also, have the organs of

the High-Church party, to whom, differing from them on many points, I am

equally bound to offer my thanks for their fairness. But, indeed, the way

in which this book, in spite of its crudities, has been received by persons

of all ranks and opinions, who instead of making me an offender for a

word, have taken the book heartily and honestly, in the spirit and not in

the letter, has made me most hopeful for the British mind, and given me

a strong belief that, in spite of all foppery, luxury, covetousness, and

unbelief, the English heart is still strong and genial, able and willing

to do and suffer great things, as soon as the rational way of doing and

suffering them becomes plain. Had I written this book merely to please

my own fancy, this would be a paltry criterion, at once illogical and

boastful; but I wrote it, God knows, in the fear of God, that I might speak

what seems to me the truth of God. I trusted in Him to justify me, in spite

of my own youth, inexperience, hastiness, clumsiness; and He has done it;

and, I trust, will do it to the end.

And now, what shall I say to you, my friends, about the future? Your

destiny is still in your own hands. For the last seven years you have let

it slip through your fingers. If you are better off than you were in 1848,

you owe it principally to those laws of political economy (as they are

called), which I call the brute natural accidents of supply and demand, or

to the exertions which have been made by upright men of the very classes

whom demagogues taught you to consider as your natural enemies. Pardon me

if I seem severe; but, as old Aristotle has it, "Both parties being my

friends, it is a sacred duty to honour truth first." And is this not the

truth? How little have the working men done to carry out that idea of

association in which, in 1848-9, they were all willing to confess their

salvation lay. Had the money which was wasted in the hapless Preston strike

been wisely spent in relieving the labour market by emigration, or in

making wages more valuable by enabling the workman to buy from co-operative

stores and mills his necessaries at little above cost price, how much

sorrow and heart-burning might have been saved to the iron-trades. Had the

real English endurance and courage which was wasted in that strike been

employed in the cause of association, the men might have been, ere now, far

happier than they are ever likely to be, without the least injury to the

masters. What, again, has been done toward developing the organization

of the Trades' Unions into its true form, Association for distribution,

from its old, useless, and savage form of Association for the purpose of

resistance to masters--a war which is at first sight hopeless, even were it

just, because the opposite party holds in his hand the supplies of his foe

as well as his own, and therefore can starve him out at his leisure? What

has been done, again, toward remedying the evils of the slop system, which

this book especially exposed? The true method for the working men, if they

wished to save their brothers and their brothers' wives and daughters from

degradation, was to withdraw their custom from the slopsellers, and to

deal, even at a temporary increase of price, with associate workmen. Have

they done so? They can answer for themselves. In London (as in the country

towns), the paltry temptation of buying in the cheapest market has still

been too strong for the labouring man. In Scotland and in the North of

England, thank God, the case has been very different; and to the North I

must look still, as I did when I wrote Alton Locke, for the strong men in

whose hands lies the destiny of the English handicraftsman.

God grant that the workmen of the South of England may bestir themselves

ere it be too late, and discover that the only defence against want is

self-restraint; the only defence against slavery, obedience to rule; and

that, instead of giving themselves up, bound hand and foot, by their own

fancy for a "freedom" which is but selfish and conceited license, to the

brute accidents of the competitive system, they may begin to organize

among themselves associations for buying and selling the necessaries of

life, which may enable them to weather the dark season of high prices and

stagnation, which is certain sooner or later, to follow in the footsteps of

war.

On politics I have little to say. My belief remains unchanged that true

Christianity, and true monarchy also, are not only compatible with, but

require as their necessary complement, true freedom for every man of every

class; and that the Charter, now defunct, was just as wise and as righteous

a "Reform Bill" as any which England had yet had, or was likely to have.

But I frankly say that my experience of the last five years gives me little

hope of any great development of the true democratic principle in Britain,

because it gives me little sign that the many are fit for it. Remember

always that Democracy means a government not merely by numbers of isolated

individuals, but by a Demos--by men accustomed to live in Demoi, or

corporate bodies, and accustomed, therefore, to the self-control, obedience

to law, and self-sacrificing public spirit, without which a corporate body

cannot exist: but that a "democracy" of mere numbers is no democracy,

but a mere brute "arithmocracy," which is certain to degenerate into an

"ochlocracy," or government by the mob, in which the numbers have no real

share: an oligarchy of the fiercest, the noisiest, the rashest, and the

most shameless, which is surely swallowed up either by a despotism, as in

France, or as in Athens, by utter national ruin, and helpless slavery to

a foreign invader. Let the workmen of Britain train themselves in the

corporate spirit, and in the obedience and self-control which it brings, as

they easily can in associations, and bear in mind always that _only he who

can obey is fit to rule_; and then, when they are fit for it, the Charter

may come, or things, I trust, far better than the Charter; and till they

have done so, let them thank the just and merciful Heavens for keeping

out of their hands any power, and for keeping off their shoulders any

responsibility, which they would not be able to use aright. I thank God

heartily, this day, that I have no share in the government of Great

Britain; and I advise my working friends to do the same, and to believe

that, when they are fit to take their share therein, all the powers of

earth cannot keep them from taking it; and that, till then, happy is the

man who does the duty which lies nearest him, who educates his family,

raises his class, performs his daily work as to God and to his country, not

merely to his employer and himself; for it is only he that is faithful over

a few things who will be made, or will be happy in being made, ruler over

many things.

Yours ever,

C. K.

ALTON LOCKE,

TAILOR AND POET.

CHAPTER I.

A POET'S CHILDHOOD.

I am a Cockney among Cockneys. Italy and the Tropics, the Highlands

and Devonshire, I know only in dreams. Even the Surrey Hills, of whose

loveliness I have heard so much, are to me a distant fairy-land, whose

gleaming ridges I am worthy only to behold afar. With the exception of two

journeys, never to be forgotten, my knowledge of England is bounded by the

horizon which encircles Richmond Hill.

My earliest recollections are of a suburban street; of its jumble of little

shops and little terraces, each exhibiting some fresh variety of capricious

ugliness; the little scraps of garden before the doors, with their dusty,

stunted lilacs and balsam poplars, were my only forests; my only wild

animals, the dingy, merry sparrows, who quarrelled fearlessly on my

window-sill, ignorant of trap or gun. From my earliest childhood, through

long nights of sleepless pain, as the midnight brightened into dawn, and

the glaring lamps grew pale, I used to listen, with pleasant awe, to the

ceaseless roll of the market-waggons, bringing up to the great city the

treasures of the gay green country, the land of fruits and flowers, for

which I have yearned all my life in vain. They seemed to my boyish fancy

mysterious messengers from another world: the silent, lonely night, in

which they were the only moving things, added to the wonder. I used to get

out of bed to gaze at them, and envy the coarse men and sluttish women who

attended them, their labour among verdant plants and rich brown mould, on

breezy slopes, under God's own clear sky. I fancied that they learnt what

I knew I should have learnt there; I knew not then that "the eye only sees

that which it brings with it the power of seeing." When will their eyes be

opened? When will priests go forth into the highways and the hedges, and

preach to the ploughman and the gipsy the blessed news, that there too, in

every thicket and fallow-field, is the house of God,--there, too, the gate

of Heaven?

I do not complain that I am a Cockney. That, too, is God's gift. He

made me one, that I might learn to feel for poor wretches who sit

stifled in reeking garrets and workrooms, drinking in disease with every

breath,--bound in their prison-house of brick and iron, with their own

funeral pall hanging over them, in that canopy of fog and poisonous smoke,

from their cradle to their grave. I have drunk of the cup of which they

drink. And so I have learnt--if, indeed, I have learnt--to be a poet--a

poet of the people. That honour, surely, was worth buying with asthma,

and rickets, and consumption, and weakness, and--worst of all to me--with

ugliness. It was God's purpose about me; and, therefore, all circumstances

combined to imprison me in London. I used once, when I worshipped

circumstance, to fancy it my curse, Fate's injustice to me, which kept

me from developing my genius, asserting my rank among poets. I longed to

escape to glorious Italy, or some other southern climate, where natural

beauty would have become the very element which I breathed; and yet, what

would have come of that? Should I not, as nobler spirits than I have done,

have idled away my life in Elysian dreams, singing out like a bird into the

air, inarticulately, purposeless, for mere joy and fulness of heart; and

taking no share in the terrible questionings, the terrible strugglings of

this great, awful, blessed time--feeling no more the pulse of the great

heart of England stirring me? I used, as I said, to call it the curse of

circumstance that I was a sickly, decrepit Cockney. My mother used to tell

me that it was the cross which God had given me to bear. I know now that

she was right there. She used to say that my disease was God's will. I do

not think, though, that she spoke right there also. I think that it was

the will of the world and of the devil, of man's avarice and laziness and

ignorance. And so would my readers, perhaps, had they seen the shop in

the city where I was born and nursed, with its little garrets reeking

with human breath, its kitchens and areas with noisome sewers. A sanitary

reformer would not be long in guessing the cause of my unhealthiness. He

would not rebuke me--nor would she, sweet soul! now that she is at rest and

bliss--for my wild longings to escape, for my envying the very flies and

sparrows their wings that I might flee miles away into the country, and

breathe the air of heaven once, and die. I have had my wish. I have made

two journeys far away into the country, and they have been enough for me.

My mother was a widow. My father, whom I cannot recollect, was a small

retail tradesman in the city. He was unfortunate; and when he died, my

mother came down, and lived penuriously enough, I knew not how till I

grew older, down in that same suburban street. She had been brought

up an Independent. After my father's death she became a Baptist, from

conscientious scruples. She considered the Baptists, as I do, as the only

sect who thoroughly embody the Calvinistic doctrines. She held it, as I do,

an absurd and impious thing for those who believe mankind to be children

of the devil till they have been consciously "converted," to baptise

unconscious infants and give them the sign of God's mercy on the mere

chance of that mercy being intended for them. When God had proved by

converting them, that they were not reprobate and doomed to hell by His

absolute and eternal will, then, and not till then, dare man baptise them

into His name. She dared not palm a presumptuous fiction on herself,

and call it "charity." So, though we had both been christened during

my father's lifetime, she purposed to have us rebaptised, if ever that

happened--which, in her sense of the word, never happened, I am afraid, to

me.

She gloried in her dissent; for she was sprung from old Puritan blood,

which had flowed again and again beneath the knife of Star-Chamber

butchers, and on the battle-fields of Naseby and Sedgemoor. And on winter

evenings she used to sit with her Bible on her knee, while I and my little

sister Susan stood beside her and listened to the stories of Gideon and

Barak, and Samson and Jephthah, till her eye kindled up, and her thoughts

passed forth from that old Hebrew time home into those English times which

she fancied, and not untruly, like them. And we used to shudder, and yet

listen with a strange fascination, as she told us how her ancestor called

his seven sons off their small Cambridge farm, and horsed and armed them

himself to follow behind Cromwell, and smite kings and prelates with "the

sword of the Lord and of Gideon." Whether she were right or wrong, what

is it to me? What is it now to her, thank God? But those stories, and the

strict, stern Puritan education, learnt from the Independents and not the

Baptists, which accompanied them, had their effect on me, for good and ill.

My mother moved by rule and method; by God's law, as she considered, and

that only. She seldom smiled. Her word was absolute. She never commanded

twice, without punishing. And yet there were abysses of unspoken tenderness

in her, as well as clear, sound, womanly sense and insight. But she thought

herself as much bound to keep down all tenderness as if she had been some

ascetic of the middle ages--so do extremes meet! It was "carnal," she

considered. She had as yet no right to have any "spiritual affection" for

us. We were still "children of wrath and of the devil,"--not yet "convinced

of sin," "converted, born again." She had no more spiritual bond with us,

she thought, than she had with a heathen or a Papist. She dared not even

pray for our conversion, earnestly as she prayed on every other subject.

For though the majority of her sect would have done so, her clear logical

sense would yield to no such tender inconsistency. Had it not been decided

from all eternity? We were elect, or we were reprobate. Could her prayers

alter that? If He had chosen us, He would call us in His own good time:

and, if not,--. Only again and again, as I afterwards discovered from a

journal of hers, she used to beseech God with agonized tears to set her

mind at rest by revealing to her His will towards us. For that comfort she

could at least rationally pray. But she received no answer. Poor, beloved

mother! If thou couldst not read the answer, written in every flower and

every sunbeam, written in the very fact of our existence here at all, what

answer would have sufficed thee.

And yet, with all this, she kept the strictest watch over our morality.

Fear, of course, was the only motive she employed; for how could our still

carnal understandings be affected with love to God? And love to herself

was too paltry and temporary to be urged by one who knew that her life was

uncertain, and who was always trying to go down to the deepest eternal

ground and reason of everything, and take her stand upon that. So our god,

or gods rather, till we were twelve years old, were hell, the rod, the ten

commandments, and public opinion. Yet under them, not they, but something

deeper far, both in her and us, preserved us pure. Call it natural

character, conformation of the spirit,--conformation of the brain, if you

like, if you are a scientific man and a phrenologist. I never yet could

dissect and map out my own being, or my neighbour's, as you analysts do. To

me, I myself, ay, and each person round me, seem one inexplicable whole; to

take away a single faculty whereof, is to destroy the harmony, the meaning,

the life of all the rest. That there is a duality in us--a lifelong battle

between flesh and spirit--we all, alas! know well enough; but which is

flesh and which is spirit, what philosophers in these days can tell us?

Still less bad we two found out any such duality or discord in ourselves;

for we were gentle and obedient children. The pleasures of the world

did not tempt us. We did not know of their existence; and no foundlings

educated in a nunnery ever grew up in a more virginal and spotless

innocence--if ignorance be such--than did Susan and I.

The narrowness of my sphere of observation only concentrated the faculty

into greater strength. The few natural objects which I met--and they, of

course, constituted my whole outer world (for art and poetry were tabooed

both by my rank and my mother's sectarianism, and the study of human beings

only develops itself as the boy grows into the man)--these few natural

objects, I say, I studied with intense keenness. I knew every leaf and

flower in the little front garden; every cabbage and rhubarb plant in

Battersea fields was wonderful and beautiful to me. Clouds and water I

learned to delight in, from my occasional lingerings on Battersea bridge,

and yearning westward looks toward the sun setting above rich meadows and

wooded gardens, to me a forbidden El Dorado.

I brought home wild-flowers and chance beetles and butterflies, and pored

over them, not in the spirit of a naturalist, but of a poet. They were to

me God's angels shining in coats of mail and fairy masquerading dresses. I

envied them their beauty, their freedom. At last I made up my mind, in the

simple tenderness of a child's conscience, that it was wrong to rob them of

the liberty for which I pined,--to take them away from the beautiful broad

country whither I longed to follow them; and I used to keep them a day or

two, and then, regretfully, carry them back, and set them loose on the

first opportunity, with many compunctions of heart, when, as generally

happened, they had been starved to death in the mean time.

They were my only recreations after the hours of the small day-school at

the neighbouring chapel, where I learnt to read, write, and sum; except,

now and then, a London walk, with my mother holding my hand tight the whole

way. She would have hoodwinked me, stopped my ears with cotton, and led

me in a string,--kind, careful soul!--if it had been reasonably safe on

a crowded pavement, so fearful was she lest I should be polluted by some

chance sight or sound of the Babylon which she feared and hated--almost as

much as she did the Bishops.

The only books which I knew were the Pilgrim's Progress and the Bible. The

former was my Shakespeare, my Dante, my Vedas, by which I explained every

fact and phenomenon of life. London was the City of Destruction, from

which I was to flee; I was Christian; the Wicket of the Way of Life I

had strangely identified with the turnpike at Battersea-bridge end; and

the rising ground of Mortlake and Wimbledon was the Land of Beulah--the

Enchanted Mountains of the Shepherds. If I could once get there I was

saved: a carnal view, perhaps, and a childish one; but there was a dim

meaning and human reality in it nevertheless.

As for the Bible, I knew nothing of it really, beyond the Old Testament.

Indeed, the life of Christ had little chance of becoming interesting to me.

My mother had given me formally to understand that it spoke of matters too

deep for me; that "till converted, the natural man could not understand the

things of God": and I obtained little more explanation of it from the two

unintelligible, dreary sermons to which I listened every dreary Sunday, in

terror lest a chance shuffle of my feet, or a hint of drowsiness,--natural

result of the stifling gallery and glaring windows and gas lights,--should

bring down a lecture and a punishment when I returned home. Oh, those

"sabbaths!"--days, not of rest, but utter weariness, when the beetles and

the flowers were put by, and there was nothing to fill up the long vacuity

but books of which I could not understand a word: when play, laughter,

or even a stare out of window at the sinful, merry, sabbath-breaking

promenaders, were all forbidden, as if the commandment had run, "In it thou

shalt take no manner of amusement, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter." By

what strange ascetic perversion has _that_ got to mean "keeping holy the

sabbath-day"?

Yet there was an hour's relief in the evening, when either my mother told

us Old Testament stories, or some preacher or two came in to supper after

meeting; and I used to sit in the corner and listen to their talk; not that

I understood a word, but the mere struggle to understand--the mere watching

my mother's earnest face--my pride in the reverent flattery with which the

worthy men addressed her as "a mother in Israel," were enough to fill up

the blank for me till bed-time.

Of "vital Christianity" I heard much; but, with all my efforts, could find

out nothing. Indeed, it did not seem interesting enough to tempt me to find

out much. It seemed a set of doctrines, believing in which was to have a

magical effect on people, by saving them from the everlasting torture due

to sins and temptations which I had never felt. Now and then, believing,

in obedience to my mother's assurances, and the solemn prayers of the

ministers about me, that I was a child of hell, and a lost and miserable

sinner, I used to have accesses of terror, and fancy that I should surely

wake next morning in everlasting flames. Once I put my finger a moment

into the fire, as certain Papists, and Protestants too, have done, not

only to themselves, but to their disciples, to see if it would be so very

dreadfully painful; with what conclusions the reader may judge.... Still, I

could not keep up the excitement. Why should I? The fear of pain is not the

fear of sin, that I know of; and, indeed, the thing was unreal altogether

in my case, and my heart, my common sense, rebelled against it again and

again; till at last I got a terrible whipping for taking my little sister's

part, and saying that if she was to die,--so gentle, and obedient, and

affectionate as she was,--God would be very unjust in sending her to

hell-fire, and that I was quite certain He would do no such thing--unless

He were the Devil: an opinion which I have since seen no reason to change.

The confusion between the King of Hell and the King of Heaven has cleared

up, thank God, since then!

So I was whipped and put to bed--the whipping altering my secret heart just

about as much as the dread of hell-fire did.

I speak as a Christian man--an orthodox Churchman (if you require that

shibboleth). Was I so very wrong? What was there in the idea of religion

which was represented to me at home to captivate me? What was the use

of a child's hearing of "God's great love manifested in the scheme of

redemption," when he heard, in the same breath, that the effects of that

redemption were practically confined only to one human being out of a

thousand, and that the other nine hundred and ninety-nine were lost and

damned from their birth-hour to all eternity--not only by the absolute

will and reprobation of God (though that infernal blasphemy I heard often

enough), but also, putting that out of the question, by the mere fact of

being born of Adam's race? And this to a generation to whom God's love

shines out in every tree and flower and hedge-side bird; to whom the

daily discoveries of science are revealing that love in every microscopic

animalcule which peoples the stagnant pool! This to working men, whose

craving is only for some idea which shall give equal hopes, claims, and

deliverances, to all mankind alike! This to working men, who, in the smiles

of their innocent children, see the heaven which they have lost--the

messages of baby-cherubs, made in God's own image! This to me, to whom

every butterfly, every look at my little sister, contradicted the lie! You

may say that such thoughts were too deep for a child; that I am ascribing

to my boyhood the scepticism of my manhood; but it is not so; and what went

on in my mind goes on in the minds of thousands. It is the cause of the

contempt into which not merely sectarian Protestantism, but Christianity

altogether, has fallen in the minds of the thinking workmen. Clergymen, who

anathematize us for wandering into Unitarianism--you, you have driven us

thither. You must find some explanation of the facts of Christianity more

in accordance with the truths which we do know, and will live and die for,

or you can never hope to make us Christians; or, if we do return to the

true fold, it will be as I returned, after long, miserable years of

darkling error, to a higher truth than most of you have yet learned to

preach.

But those old Jewish heroes did fill my whole heart and soul. I learnt from

them lessons which I never wish to unlearn. Whatever else I saw about them,

this I saw,--that they were patriots, deliverers from that tyranny and

injustice from which the child's heart,--"child of the devil" though you

may call him,--instinctively, and, as I believe, by a divine inspiration,

revolts. Moses leading his people out of Egypt; Gideon, Barak, and Samson,

slaying their oppressors; David, hiding in the mountains from the tyrant,

with his little band of those who had fled from the oppressions of an

aristocracy of Nabals; Jehu, executing God's vengeance on the kings--they

were my heroes, my models; they mixed themselves up with the dim legends

about the Reformation martyrs, Cromwell and Hampden, Sidney and Monmouth,

which I had heard at my mother's knee. Not that the perennial oppression

of the masses, in all ages and countries, had yet risen on me as an

awful, torturing, fixed idea. I fancied, poor fool! that tyranny was the

exception, and not the rule. But it was the mere sense of abstract pity

and justice which was delighted in me. I thought that these were old fairy

tales, such as never need be realized again. I learnt otherwise in after

years.

I have often wondered since, why all cannot read the same lesson as I did

in those old Hebrew Scriptures--that they, of all books in the world,

have been wrested into proofs of the divine right of kings, the eternal

necessity of slavery! But the eye only sees what it brings with it the

power of seeing. The upper classes, from their first day at school, to

their last day at college, read of nothing but the glories of Salamis and

Marathon, of freedom and of the old republics. And what comes of it? No

more than their tutors know will come of it, when they thrust into the

boys' hands books which give the lie in every page to their own political

superstitions.

But when I was just turned of thirteen, an altogether new fairy-land was

opened to me by some missionary tracts and journals, which were lent to my

mother by the ministers. Pacific coral islands and volcanoes, cocoa-nut

groves and bananas, graceful savages with paint and feathers--what an El

Dorado! How I devoured them and dreamt of them, and went there in fancy,

and preached small sermons as I lay in my bed at night to Tahitians and New

Zealanders, though I confess my spiritual eyes were, just as my physical

eyes would have been, far more busy with the scenery than with the souls

of my audience. However, that was the place for me, I saw clearly. And one

day, I recollect it well, in the little dingy, foul, reeking, twelve foot

square back-yard, where huge smoky party-walls shut out every breath of air

and almost all the light of heaven, I had climbed up between the water-butt

and the angle of the wall for the purpose of fishing out of the dirty fluid

which lay there, crusted with soot and alive with insects, to be renewed

only three times in the seven days, some of the great larvæ and kicking

monsters which made up a large item in my list of wonders: all of a sudden

the horror of the place came over me; those grim prison-walls above, with

their canopy of lurid smoke; the dreary, sloppy, broken pavement; the

horrible stench of the stagnant cesspools; the utter want of form, colour,

life, in the whole place, crushed me down, without my being able to analyse

my feelings as I can now; and then came over me that dream of Pacific

Islands, and the free, open sea; and I slid down from my perch, and

bursting into tears threw myself upon my knees in the court, and prayed

aloud to God to let me be a missionary.

Half fearfully I let out my wishes to my mother when she came home. She

gave me no answer; but, as I found out afterwards,--too late, alas! for

her, if not for me,--she, like Mary, had "laid up all these things, and

treasured them in her heart."

You may guess, then, my delight when, a few days afterwards, I heard that a

real live missionary was coming to take tea with us. A man who had actually

been in New Zealand!--the thought was rapture. I painted him to myself over

and over again; and when, after the first burst of fancy, I recollected

that he might possibly not have adopted the native costume of that

island, or, if he had, that perhaps it would look too strange for him to

wear it about London, I settled within myself that he was to be a tall,

venerable-looking man, like the portraits of old Puritan divines which

adorned our day-room; and as I had heard that "he was powerful in prayer,"

I adorned his right hand with that mystic weapon "all-prayer," with

which Christian, when all other means have failed, finally vanquishes

the fiend--which instrument, in my mind, was somewhat after the model

of an infernal sort of bill or halbert--all hooks, edges, spikes, and

crescents--which I had passed, shuddering, once, in the hand of an old suit

of armour in Wardour Street.

He came--and with him the two ministers who often drank tea with my mother;

both of whom, as they played some small part in the drama of my after-life,

I may as well describe here. The elder was a little, sleek, silver-haired

old man, with a blank, weak face, just like a white rabbit. He loved me,

and I loved him too, for there were always lollipops in his pocket for me

and Susan. Had his head been equal to his heart!--but what has been was

to be--and the dissenting clergy, with a few noble exceptions among the

Independents, are not the strong men of the day--none know that better than

the workmen. The old man's name was Bowyer. The other, Mr. Wigginton, was a

younger man; tall, grim, dark, bilious, with a narrow forehead, retreating

suddenly from his eyebrows up to a conical peak of black hair over his

ears. He preached "higher doctrine," _i.e._, more fatalist and antinomian

than his gentler colleague,--and, having also a stentorian voice, was much

the greater favourite at the chapel. I hated him--and if any man ever

deserved hatred, he did.

Well, they came. My heart was in my mouth as I opened the door to them, and

sank back again to the very lowest depths of my inner man when my eyes fell

on the face and figure of the missionary--a squat, red-faced, pig-eyed,

low-browed man, with great soft lips that opened back to his very ears:

sensuality, conceit, and cunning marked on every feature--an innate

vulgarity, from which the artisan and the child recoil with an instinct as

true, perhaps truer, than that of the courtier, showing itself in every

tone and motion--I shrank into a corner, so crestfallen that I could not

even exert myself to hand round the bread and butter, for which I got duly

scolded afterwards. Oh! that man!--how he bawled and contradicted, and laid

down the law, and spoke to my mother in a fondling, patronizing way, which

made me, I knew not why, boil over with jealousy and indignation. How he

filled his teacup half full of the white sugar to buy which my mother had

curtailed her yesterday's dinner--how he drained the few remaining drops

of the threepennyworth of cream, with which Susan was stealing off to keep

it as an unexpected treat for my mother at breakfast the next morning--how

he talked of the natives, not as St. Paul might of his converts, but as a

planter might of his slaves; overlaying all his unintentional confessions

of his own greed and prosperity, with cant, flimsy enough for even a boy to

see through, while his eyes were not blinded with the superstition that a

man must be pious who sufficiently interlards his speech with a jumble of

old English picked out of our translation of the New Testament. Such was

the man I saw. I don't deny that all are not like him. I believe there are

noble men of all denominations, doing their best according to their light,

all over the world; but such was the one I saw--and the men who were sent

home to plead the missionary cause, whatever the men may be like who stay

behind and work, are, from my small experience, too often such. It appears

to me to be the rule that many of those who go abroad as missionaries, go

simply because they are men of such inferior powers and attainments that if

they stayed in England they would starve.

Three parts of his conversation, after all, was made up of abuse of the

missionaries of the Church of England, not for doing nothing, but for being

so much more successful than his own sect; accusing them, in the same

breath, of being just of the inferior type of which he was himself, and

also of being mere University fine gentlemen. Really, I do not wonder, upon

his own showing, at the savages preferring them to him; and I was pleased

to hear the old white-headed minister gently interpose at the end of one of

his tirades--"We must not be jealous, my brother, if the Establishment has

discovered what we, I hope, shall find out some day, that it is not wise to

draft our missionaries from the offscouring of the ministry, and serve God

with that which costs us nothing except the expense of providing for them

beyond seas."

There was somewhat of a roguish twinkle in the old man's eye as he said it,

which emboldened me to whisper a question to him.

"Why is it, Sir, that in olden times the heathens used to crucify the

missionaries and burn them, and now they give them beautiful farms, and

build them houses, and carry them about on their backs?"

The old man seemed a little puzzled, and so did the company, to whom he

smilingly retailed my question.

As nobody seemed inclined to offer a solution, I ventured one myself.

"Perhaps the heathens are grown better than they used to be?"

"The heart of man," answered the tall, dark minister, "is, and ever was,

equally at enmity with God."

"Then, perhaps," I ventured again, "what the missionaries preach now is not

quite the same as what the missionaries used to preach in St. Paul's time,

and so the heathens are not so angry at it?"

My mother looked thunder at me, and so did all except my white-headed

friend, who said, gently enough,

"It may be that the child's words come from God."

Whether they did or not, the child took very good care to speak no more

words till he was alone with his mother; and then finished off that

disastrous evening by a punishment for the indecency of saying, before his

little sister, that he thought it "a great pity the missionaries taught

black people to wear ugly coats and trousers; they must have looked so

much handsomer running about with nothing on but feathers and strings of

shells."

So the missionary dream died out of me, by a foolish and illogical

antipathy enough; though, after all, it was a child of my imagination only,

not of my heart; and the fancy, having bred it, was able to kill it also.

And David became my ideal. To be a shepherd-boy, and sit among beautiful

mountains, and sing hymns of my own making, and kill lions and bears,

with now and then the chance of a stray giant--what a glorious life! And

if David slew giants with a sling and a stone, why should not I?--at all

events, one ought to know how; so I made a sling out of an old garter and

some string, and began to practise in the little back-yard. But my first

shot broke a neighbour's window, value sevenpence, and the next flew

back in my face, and cut my head open; so I was sent supperless to bed

for a week, till the sevenpence had been duly saved out of my hungry

stomach--and, on the whole, I found the hymn-writing side of David's

character the more feasible; so I tried, and with much brains-beating,

committed the following lines to a scrap of dirty paper. And it was

strangely significant, that in this, my first attempt, there was an

instinctive denial of the very doctrine of "particular redemption," which

I had been hearing all my life, and an instinctive yearning after the

very Being in whom I had been told I had "no part nor lot" till I was

"converted." Here they are. I am not ashamed to call them--doggerel though

they be--an inspiration from Him of whom they speak. If not from Him, good

readers, from whom?

Jesus, He loves one and all;

Jesus, He loves children small;

Their souls are sitting round His feet,

On high, before His mercy-seat.

When on earth He walked in shame,

Children small unto Him came;

At His feet they knelt and prayed,

On their heads His hands He laid.

Came a spirit on them then,

Greater than of mighty men;

A spirit gentle, meek, and mild,

A spirit good for king and child.

Oh! that spirit give to me,

Jesus, Lord, where'er I be!

So--

But I did not finish them, not seeing very clearly what to do with that

spirit when I obtained it; for, indeed, it seemed a much finer thing to

fight material Apollyons with material swords of iron, like my friend

Christian, or to go bear and lion hunting with David, than to convert

heathens by meekness--at least, if true meekness was at all like that of

the missionary whom I had lately seen.

I showed the verses in secret to my little sister. My mother heard us

singing them together, and extorted, grimly enough, a confession of the

authorship. I expected to be punished for them (I was accustomed weekly to

be punished for all sorts of deeds and words, of the harmfulness of which

I had not a notion). It was, therefore, an agreeable surprise when the old

minister, the next Sunday evening, patted my head, and praised me for them.

"A hopeful sign of young grace, brother," said he to the dark tall man.

"May we behold here an infant Timothy!"

"Bad doctrine, brother, in that first line--bad doctrine, which I am

sure he did not learn from our excellent sister here. Remember, my boy,

henceforth, that Jesus does _not_ love one and all--not that I am angry

with you. The carnal mind cannot be expected to understand divine things,

any more than the beasts that perish. Nevertheless, the blessed message of

the Gospel stands true, that Christ loves none but His Bride, the Church.

His merits, my poor child, extend to none but the elect. Ah! my dear sister

Locke, how delightful to think of the narrow way of discriminating grace!

How it enhances the believer's view of his own exceeding privileges, to

remember that there be few that be saved!"

I said nothing. I thought myself only too lucky to escape so well from the

danger of having done anything out of my own head. But somehow Susan and I

never altered it when we sang it to ourselves.

* * * * *

I thought it necessary, for the sake of those who might read my story, to

string together these few scattered recollections of my boyhood,--to give,

as it were, some sample of the cotyledon leaves of my young life-plant, and

of the soil in which it took root, ere it was transplanted--but I will not

forestall my sorrows. After all, they have been but types of the woes of

thousands who "die and give no sign." Those to whom the struggles of every,

even the meanest, human being are scenes of an awful drama, every incident

of which is to be noted with reverent interest, will not find them void of

meaning; while the life which opens in my next chapter is, perhaps, full

enough of mere dramatic interest (and whose life is not, were it but truly

written?) to amuse merely as a novel. Ay, grim and real is the action and

suffering which begins with my next page,--as you yourself would have

found, high-born reader (if such chance to light upon this story), had

you found yourself at fifteen, after a youth of convent-like seclusion,

settled, apparently for life--in a tailor's workshop.

Ay--laugh!--we tailors can quote poetry as well as make your court-dresses:

You sit in a cloud and sing, like pictured angels,

And say the world runs smooth--while right below

Welters the black fermenting heap of griefs

Whereon your state is built....