Book.____rL X"?.^. CQFm^GHT OEPOSir. o lo. 503. SO Oezxvs A TRl-WEEK, I^ OF THE BEST CURR£Sfr R STAXdARH flTFURTfiRF V. I. 1(1. Nc. 50S. Feb. 3, 18sS. Ai)iuittl Subscription, $30.00. CHARTISM THOMAS CARLYLE Author of "HISTORY OF THE FRENCH REV- OLUTION," " PAST AND PRESENT," &c. Eu leied at the Post Office, N. Y., as second-class matter. Copyright, 1885, by John W. Lovbll Co. + JOHN'W-LOVELL- COMPANY + i^ % \. naat CLOTH TiTN'nT'Na fnr thie unlnm. /■<>•. h. >,kt->in<.rf fpnm tinu k«f,l».ll» <» •..ui.r THE WOKLD. The Nev/ Poor-Law is an announcement, sufficiently dis- tinct, that whosoever will not work ought not to live. Can the poor man that is willing to work, always find work, and live by his work ? Statistic Inquiry, as we saw, has no an- swer to give. Legislation presupposes the answer — to be in the affirmative. A large postulate ; which sh,ould have been made a proposition of ; which should have been demonstrated, made indubitable to all persons ! A man vpilling to work, and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that Fort- une's inequality exhibits under this sun. Burns expresses feehngly what thoughts it gave him ; a poor man seeking work ; seeking leave to toil that he might be fed and shel- tered ! That he might be put on a level with the four-footed workers of the Planet which is his ! There is not a horse wilhng to work but can get food and shelter in requital ; a thing this two-footed worker has to seek for, to solicit occa- sionally in vain. He is nobody's two-footed worker ; he is not even anybody's slave. And yet he is a two-iooied. worker ; it is currently reported there is an immortal soul in him, sent down out of Heaven into the Earth ; and one beholds him seeking for this ! — Nay what will a wise Legislature say, if it turn out that he cannot find it ; that the answer to their pos- tulate proposition is not affirmative but negative ? There is one fact which Statistic Science has communicated, and a most astonishing one ; the infei-ence from which is preg- nant as to this matter, Ireland has near seven- milhons of 22 GHARriSM. working people, the third unit of whom, it appears by Statis- tic Science, has not for thirty weeks each year as many third- rate potatoes as will suffice him. It is a fact perhaps the most eloquent that was ever written down in any language, at any date of the world's history. Was change and reformation needed in Ireland ? Has Ireland been governed and guided in a ' wise and loving ' manner ? A government and guidance of white European men which has issued in perennial hun- ger of potatoes to the third man extant, — ought to drop a veil over its face, and walk out of court under conduct of proper officers ; saying no word ; expecting now of a surety sentence either to change or die. All men, we must repeat, were made by God, and have immortal souls in them. The Sanspotatoe is of the selfsame stuff as the superfinest Lord Lieutenant. Not an individual Sanspotatoe human scarecrow but had a Life given him out of Heaven, with Eternities de- pending on it ; for once and no second time. With Immensi- ties in him, ovej" him and round him ; with feelings which a Shakspeare's speech would not utter ; with desires illimitable as the Autocrat's of all the Kussias ! Him various thrice- honoured persons, things and institutions have long been teaching, long been guiding, governing : and it is to perpetual scarcity of third-rate potatoes, and to what depends thereon, that he has been taught and guided. Figure thyself, O high- minded, clear-headed, clean-burnished reader, clapt by en- chantment into the torn coat and waste hunger-lair of that same root-devouring brother man ! — Social anomalies are things to be defended, things to be amended ; and in all places and things, short of the Pit itself, there is some admixture of worth and good. Eoom for ex- tenuation, for pity, for patience ! And yet when the general result has come to the length of perennial starvation, — yes, then argument, extenuating logic, pity and patience on that subject may be considered as drawing to a close. It may be considered that such arrangement of things will have to termi- nate. That it has all just men for its natural enemies. That all just men, of what outward colour soever in Politics or otherwise, will say : This cannot last, Heaven disowns it. FINEST PEASANTRY IN TEE WORLD. 23 Earth is against it ; Ireland will be burnt into a black unpeo- pled field of ashes rather than this should last. — The woes of Ireland, or 'justice to Ireland,' is not the chapter we have to write at present. It is a deep matter, an abysmal one, which no plummet of ovirs will sound. For the oppression has gone far farther than into the economies of Ireland ; inwards to her very heart and soul. The Irish National character is degraded, disordered ; till this recover itself, nothing is yet recovered. Immethodic, headlong, violent, mendacious ; what can you make of the wretched Irishman? "A finer j)eople never lived," as the Irish lady said to us ; " only they have two faults, they do generally lie and steal : barring these'" — ! A people that knows not to speak the truth, and to act the truth, such people has departed from even the possibility of well-being. Such people works no 'longer on Nature and Keality ; works now on Fantasm, Simulation, Nonentity ; the result it arrives at is naturally not a thing but no-thing, — defect even of po- tatoes. Scarcity, futility, confusion, distraction must be peren- nial there. Such a people circulates not order but disorder, through every vein of it ; — and the cure, if it is to be a cvire, must begin at the heart : not in his condition only but in him- self must the Patient be all changed. Poor Ireland ! And yet let no true Irishman, who believes and sees all this, despair by reason of it. Cannot he too do something to withstand the unproductive falsehood, there as it lies accursed around him, and change it into truth, which is fruitful and blessed ? Every mortal can and shall himself be a true man : it is a great thing, and the parent of great things ; — as from a single acorn the whole earth might in the end be peopled with oaks ! Every mortal can do something : this let him faithfully do, and leave with assured heart the issue to a Higher Power ! We English pay, even now, the bitter smart of long centu- ries of injustice to our neighbour Island. Injustice, doubt it not, abounds ; or Ireland would not be miserable. The Earth is good, bountifully sends food and increase ; if man's unwis- dom did not intervene and forbid. It was an evil day when Strigul first meddled with that people. He could not extir- pate them : could they but have agreed together, and extir- 24 CHARTISM. pated him ! Violent men there Lave been, and merciful ; un- just rulers, and just ; conflicting in a great element of violence, these five wild centuries now ; and the violent and unjust have carried it, and we are come to this. England is guilty towards Ireland ; and reaps at last, in full measure, the fruit of fifteen generations of wrong-doing. But the thing we had to state here was our inference from that mournful fact of- the third Sanspotatoe,- — coupled with this other well-known fact that the Irish speak a partially in- telligible dialect of English, and their fare across by steam is four-pence sterling ! Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our towns. The wild Milesian features, looking false inge- nuity, restlessness, unreason, misery and mockery, salute you on all highways and by-ways. The English coachman, as he whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his tongue ; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back ; for wages that Avill purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condi- ment ; he lodges to his mind in any pighutch or doghutch, roosts in outhouses ; and wears a suit of tatters, the getting off and on of which is said^ to be a difficult operation, trans- acted only in festivals and the hightides of the calendar. The Saxon man if he cannot work on these terms, finds no work. He too may be ignorant ; but he has not sunk from decent manhood to squalid apehood : he cannot continue there. American forests lie uutilled across the ocean ; the uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength but by the opposite of strength, drives out the Saxon native, takes possession in his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made nucleus of degra- dation and disorder. Whosoever struggles, swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how the human being can exist not swimming but sunk. Let him sink ; he is not the worst of men ; not worse than this man. We have quarentines against pestilence ; but there is no pestilence like that ; and against it what quarentine is possible ? It is lamentable to look FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 25 upon. This soil of Britain, these Saxon men have cleared it, made it arable, fertile and a home for them ; they and their fathers have done that. Under the sky there exists no force of men who with arms in their hands could drive them out of it ; all force of men with arms these Saxons would seize, in their grim way, and fling (Heaven's justice and their own Saxon humour aiding them) swiftly into the sea. But beliold, a force of men armed only with rags, ignorance and nakedness ; and the Saxon owners, paralysed by invisible magic of paper formula, have to fly far, and hide themselves in Transatlantic forests. 'Irish repeal?' "Would to God," as Dutch William said, " You were King of Ireland, and could take yourself and it three thousand miles off," — there to repeal it ! And yet these poor Celtiberian Irish brothers, what can they help it ? They cannot stay at home, and starve. It is just and natural that they come hither as a curse to us. Alas, for them too it is not a luxury. It is not a strtiight or joyful way of avenging their sore wrongs this ; but a most sad circuitous one. Yet a way it is, and an effectual way. The time has come when the Irish population must either be improved a little, or else exterminated. Plausible management, adapted to this hollow outcry or to that, wiU no longer do : it must be management, grounded on sincerity and fact, to which the truth of things will respond — hf an actual beginning of im- provement to these wretched brother-men. In a state of per- ennial ultra-savage famine, in the midst of civilisation, they cannot continue. For that the Saxon British will ever submit to sink along with them to such a state, we assume as impos- sible. There is in these latter, thank God, an ingenuity which is not false ; a methodic spirit, of insight, of perseverant well- doing ; a rationality and veracity which Nature with her truth does not disown ; — withal there is a ' Berserkir-rage ' in the heart of them, which wiU prefer all things, including destruc- tion and self-destruction, to that. Let no man awaken it, this same Berserkir-rage ! Deep-hidden it lies, far down in the centre, like genial central fire, Mdth stratum after stratum of arrangement, traditionary method, composed productive- ness, all built above it, vivified and rendered fertile by it : 26 CHARTISM. justice, clearness, silence, perseverance, unliasting unresting diligence, hatred of disorder, hatred of injustice which is the worst disorder, characterise this people ; their inward fire we say, as all such fire should be, is hidden at the centre. Deep- hidden ; but awakenable, but immeasurable; — let no man awaken it ! With tliis strong silent people have the noisy vehement Irish now at length got common cause made. Ire- laud, now for the first time, in such strange circuitous way, does find itself embarked in the same boat with England, to sail together or to sink together ; the wretchedness of Ireland, slowly but inevitably, has crept over to us, and become our own wretchedness. The Irish population must get itself re- dressed and saved, for the sake of the English if for nothing else. Alas, that it should, on both sides, be poor toiling men that pay the smart for unruly Striguls, Plantagenets, Mac- dermots, and O'Donoghues ! The strong have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the weak are set on edge. ' Curses,' says the Proverb, 'are like chickens, they return always home.' But now on the whole, it seems to us, English Statistic Sci- ence, with floods of the finest peasantry in the world stream- ing in on us daily, may fold up her Danaides reticulations on this matter of the Working Classes ; and conclude, what every man who will take the statistic spectacles off his nose, and look, may discern in town or country : That the condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish competing with them in all markets ; that whatsoever labour, to which mere strength with little skill -will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the English price, but at an approximation to the Irish price : at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior to scarcity of third-rate potatoes for thirty weeks yearly ; su- perior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new ^ steamboat, sinking nearer to an equality with that. Half-a-million hand- loom weavers, working fifteen hours a day, in perpetual ina- bility to procure thereby enough of the coarsest food ; Eng- lish farm-labourers at nine shillings and at seven shillings a week ; Scotch farm-labourers who, ' in districts the half of FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD 27 whose husbandry is that of cows, taste no milk, can procure no milk ; ' aU these things are credible to us ; several of them are known to us by the best evidence, by eyesight. "With all this it is consistent that the wages of ' skilled labour,' as it is called, should in many cases be higher than they ever were : the giant Steam engine in a giant English Nation will here create violent demand for labour, and will there annihilate demand. But, alas, the great portion is not skilled : the mil- lions are and must be skilless, where strength alone is wanted ; ploughers, delv'ers, borers ; hewers of wood and drawers of water ; menials of the Steam engine only the diief menials and immediate 6ot?y- servants of which require skill. Enghsh Commerce stretches its fibres over the whole Earth ; sensitive literally, nay quivering in convulsion, to the farthest influences of the Earth. The huge demon of Mechanism smokes and thunders, panting at his great task, in all sections of English land ; changing his shape like a very Proteus ; and infaUibly at every change of shape, oversetting whole multi- tudes of workmen, and as if with the waving of his shadow from afar, hurling them asunder, this way and that, in their crowded march and course, of work or traffic ; so that the wisest no longer knows his whereabout. With an Ireland pouring daily in on us, in these circumstances ; deluging us down to its own waste confusion, outward and inward, it seems a cruel mockery to tell poor drudges that their con- dition is improving. . New Poor-Law ! Laissez-faire, laisser-passer ! The master of horses, when the summer labour is done, has to feed his horses through the winter. If he said to his horses : " Quad- rupeds, I have no longer work for you ; but work exists abundantly over the world : are you ignorant (or must I read you Pohtical-Economy Lectures) that the Steamengine always in the long-run creates additional work ? Railways are form- ing in one quarter of this earth, canals in another, much cartage is wanted : somewhere in Europe, Asia, Africa, or America, doubt it not, ye wiU find cartage : go and seek cartage, and good go with you ! " They with protrusive upper lip, snort dubious ; signifying that Europe, Asia, Afiica, 28 CIIARflSM. and America lie somewhat out of their beat : that what cart- age may be wanted there is not too well known to them. They can find no cartage. They gallop distracted along high- ways, all fenced in to the right and to the left : finall}^, under pains of hunger, they take to leaping fences ; eating foreign property, and — we know the rest. Ah, it is not a joyful mirth, it is sadder than tears, the laugh Humanity is forced to, at Laissez-faire applied to poor peasants, in a world like our Europe of the year 1839 ! So much can observation altogether unstatistic, looking only at a Drogheda or Dublin steamboat, ascertain for itself. Another thing, likewise ascertainable on this vast obscure matter, excites a superficial surprise, but only a superficial one : That it is the best-paid workmen who, by Strikes, Trades- unions, Chartism, and the like, complain the most. No doubt of it ! The best-paid workmen are they alone that can so complain ! How shall he, the handloom weaver, who in the day that is passing over him has to find food for the day, strike work ? If he strike work, he starves within the week. He is past complaint ! — The fact itself, however, is one which, if we consider it, leads us into still deeper regions of the malady. Wages, it would appear, are no index of well-being to the working man : without proper wages there can be no well-being ; but with them also there may be none. Wages of working men differ greatly in different quarters of this country ; according to the researches or the guess of Mr. Symmons, an intelligent humane inquirer, they vary in the ratio of not less than three to one. Cotton-sj)inners, as we learn, are generally well paid, while employed ; their wages, one week with another, wives and children all working, amount to sums which, if well laid out, were fully adequate to comfort- able living. And yet, alas, there seems little question that comfort or reasonable well-being is as much a stranger in these households as in any. At the cold hearth of the ever- toiling, ever-hungering weaver, dwells at least some equability, fixation as if in perennial ice : hope never comes ; but also irregular impatience is absent. Of outward things these others have or might have enough, but of all inward things FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 29 there is the fatallest lack. Economy does not exist among them ; their trade now in plethoric prosperity, anon extenu- ated into inanition and ' short-time,' is of the nature of gamb- ling ; they live by it like gamblers, now in luxurious super- fluity, now in starvation. Black mutinous discontent devours them ; simply the miserablest feeling that can inhabit the heart of man. English Commerce with its world-wide con- vulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable Proteus Steam- demon, makes all paths uncertain for them, all life a bewilder- ment : sobriety, steadfastness, peaceable continuance, the first blessings of man, are not theirs. It is in Glasgow among that class of operatives that ' Num- ber 60,' in his dark room, pays down the price of blood. Be it with reason or with unreason, too surely they do in verity find the time all out of joint ; this world for them no home, but a dingy prison-house of reckless unthrift, rebellion, ran- cour, indignation against themselves and against all men. Is it a green flowery world, with azure everlasting sky stretched over it, the work and government of a God ; or a murky-sim- mering Tophet, of copperas-fumes, cotton-fuz, gin-riot, wrath and toil, created by a Demon, governed by a Demon ? The sum of their wretchedness merited and unmerited welters, huge, dark and baleful, like a Dantean Hell, visible there in the statistics of Gin : Gin justly named the most authentic incarnation of the Infernal Principle in our times, too indis- putable an incarnation ; Gin the black throat into which wretchedness of every sort, consummating itself by calling on delirium to help it, whirls down ; abdication of the power to think or resolve, as too painful now, on the part of men whose lot of all others would require thought and resolution ; liquid Madness sold at ten-pence the quartern, all the products of which are and must be, like its origin, mad, miserable, ruinous, and that only ! If from this black unluminous un- heeded Inferno, and Prisonhouse of souls in pain, there do flash up from time to' time, some dismal wide-spread glare of Chartism or the like, notable to all, claiming remedy from all, — are we to regard it as more baleful than the quiet state, or rather as not so baleful ? Ireland is in chronic atrophy these 30 CHABTISM. five centuries ; the disease of nobler England, identified now with that of Ireland, becomes acute, has crises, and will be cured or kill. CHAPTER V. EIGHTS AND MIGHTS. It is not what a man outwardly has or wants that constitutes the happiness or misery of him. Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insup- portable to all men. The bru tallest black African cannot bear that he should be used unjustly. No man can bear it, or ought to bear it. A deeper law than any parchment-law whatsoever, a law ■\;\T.itten direct by the hand of God in the inmost being of man, incessantly protests against it. What is injustice ? Another name for cZisorder, for unveracity, unreality ; a thing which veracious created Nature, even because it is not Chaos and a waste-whirling baseless Phantasm, rejects and disowns. It is not the outward pain of injustice ; that, were it even the flaying of the back with knotted scourges, the severing; of the head with guillotines, is comparatively a small matter. The real smart is the soul's pain and stigma, the hurt inflicted on the moral self. "'The rudest clown must draw himself up into attitude of battle, and resistance to the death, if such be offered him. He cannot live under it ; his own soul aloud, and all the universe with silent continual beckonings, says. It cannot be. He must revenge himself ; revancJier himself, make himself good again, — that so meum may be mine, tuum thine, and each iDarty standing clear on his own basis, order be re- stored. There is something inflnitely respectable in this, and we may say universally resjDCcted : it is the common stamp of manhood vindicating itself in all of us, the basis of whatever is worthy in all of us, and through superficial diversities, the same in all. As (disorder, insane by the nature of it, is the hatefuUest of things to man, who lives by sanity and order, so injustice is the worst evil, some call it the only evil, in this world. AU EIGHTS AND MIGHTS. 31 men submit to toil, to disappointment, to unhappiness ; it is their lot here ; but in all hearts, inextinguishable by sceptic logic, by sorrow, perversion or despair itself, there is a small still voice intimating that it is not the final lot ; that wild, waste, incoherent as it looks, a God presides over it ; that it is not an injustice but a justice. Force itself, the hopeless- ness of resistance, has doubtless a composing effect ; — against inanimate Simooms, and much other infliction of the like sort, we have found it suffice to produce complete composure. Yet, one would say, a permanent Injustice even from an Infinite Power w^ould prove unendurable by men. If men had lost belief in a God, their only resource against a blind No-God, of Necessity and Mechanism, that held them like a hideous World-Steamengine, like a hideous Plialaris' Bull, imprisoned in its own iron belly, would be, with or without hope, — revolt. They could, as Novalis says, by a ' simultaneous universal act of suicide,' depart out of the World-Steamengine ; and end, if not in victory, yet in invincibilit}', and unsubduable protest that such World-Steamengine was a failure and a stupidity. Conquest, indeed, is a fact often witnessed ; conquest, which seems mere wrong and force, everywhere asserts itself as a right among men. Yet if we examine, we shall find that, in this world, no conquest could ever become permanent, which did not withal shew itself beneficial to the conquered . as well as to conquerors. Mithridates King of Pontus, come now to extremity, ' appealed to the patriotism of his people ; ' but, says the histor}', ' he had squeezed them, and fleeced and plundered them, for long years ;' his requisitions, flying ir- regular, devastative, like the whirlwind, were less supportable than Roman strictness and method, regular though never so rigorous ; he therefore appealed to their patriotism in vain. The Romans conquered Mithridates. The Romans, having conquered the world, held it conquered, because they could best govern the world ; the mass of men found it nowise press- ing to revolt ; their fancy might be afflicted more or less, but in their solid interests they were better off than before. So too in this England long ago, the old Saxon Nobles, disunited among themselves, and in power too nearly equal, could not 32 CRARTISM. have governed the country well ; Harold being slain, their last chance of governing it, except in anarchy and civil war, was over ; a new class of strong Norman Nobles, entering with a strong man, with a succession of strong men at the head of them, and not disunited, but united by many ties, by their very community of language and interest, had there been no other, toCT'e in a condition to govern it ; and did govern it, we can believe, in some rather tolerable manner, or they would not have continued there. They acted, little conscious of such function on their part, as an immense volunteer Police Force, stationed everywhere, united, disciplined, feudally regimented, ready for action ; strong Teutonic men ; who on the whole proved effective men, and drilled this wild Teutonic people into unity and peaceable co-operation better than others could have done ! How can-do, if we will well interpret it, unites itself with shall-do among mortals ; how strength acts ever as the right-arm of justice ; how might and right, so frightfully dis- crepant at first, are ever in the long-run one and the same, — is a cheering consideration, which always in the black tem- pestuous vortices of this world's history, will shine out on us, like an everlasting polar star. Of conquest we may say that it never yet went by brute force and compulsion ; conquest of that kind does not endiu'e. Conquest, along with power of compulsion, an essential uni- versally in human society, must bring benefit along with it, or men, of the ordinary strength of men, will fling it out. The strong man, what is he if we will consider ? The wise man ; the man with the gift of method, of faithfulness and valour, all of which are of the basis of wisdom ; who has in- sight into what is what, into what will follow out of what, the eye to se© and the hand to do ; who is fit to administer, to di- rect, and guidingiy command : he is the strong man. His muscles and bones are no stronger than ours ; but his soul is stronger, his soul is wiser, clearer, — is better and nobler, for that is, has been, and ever will be the root of all clearness worthy of such a name. Beautiful it is, and a gleam from the same eternal pole-star visible amid the destinies of men, that all talent, all intellect is in the first place moral ; — what a world RIGHTS AND MIGHTS. 33 were this otherwise ! But it is the heart always that sees, be- fore the head can see : let us know that ; and know therefore that the Good alone is deathless and victorious, that Hope is siire and steadfast, in all phases of this 'Place of Hope.' — Shiftiness, quirk, attorney-cunning is a kind of thing that fan- cies itself, and is often fancied, to be talent ; but it is luckily mistaken in that. Succeed truly it does, what is called succeed- ing ; and even must in general succeed, if the dispensers of success be of due stupidity : men of due stupidity will needs say to it, " Thou art wisdom, rule thou ! " — Whereupon it rules. But Nature answers, "No, this ruling of thine is not according to omj laws ; thy wisdom was not wise enough ! Dost thou take me too for a Quackery? For a Convention- ality and Attorneyism ? This chaff that thou sowest into my bosom, though it pass at the poll-booth and elsewhere for seed-corn, / will not grow wheat out of it, for it is chaff ! " But to return. Injustice, infidelity to truth and fact and Nature's order, being properly the one evil under the sun, and the feeling of injustice the one intolerable pain under the sun, our grand question as to the condition of these working men would be : Is it just ? And first of all. What belief have they themselves formed about the justice of it ? The words they promulgate are notable by way of answer ; their actions are still more notable. Chartism with its pikes. Swing with his tinder-box, speak a most loud though inarticulate language. Glasgow Thuggery sjDeaks aloud too, in a language we may well call infernal. What kind of ' wild-justice ' must it be in the hearts of these men that prompts them, with cold delib- eration, in conclave assembled, to doom their brother work- man, as the deserter of his order and his order's cause, to die as a traitor and deserter ; and have him executed, since not by any public judge and hangman, then by a private one ; — like your old Chivalry Femgericht, and Secret-Tribunal, sud- denly in this strange guise become new ; suddenty rising once more on the astonished eye, dressed now not in mail- shirts but in fustian jackets, meeting not in Westphalian for- ests but in the paved Gallowgate of Glasgow ! Not loyal lov- ing obedience to those placed over them, but a far other 34 CHARTISM. temper, must animate these men ! It is frightful enough. Such temper must be wide-spread, virulent among the many, Tvhen even in its worst acme, it can take such a form in a few. But indeed decay of loyalty in all senses, disobedience, decay of religious faith, has long been noticeable and lamentable in this largest class, as in other smaller ones. Revolt, sullen re- vengeful humour of revolt against the upper classes, decreasing respect for what their temporal superiors command, decreasing faith for what their spiritual superiors teach, is more and more the universal spirit of the lower classes. Such spirit may be blamed, may be vindicated ; but all men must recognize it as extant there, all may knoAv that it is mournful, that unless altered it will be fatal. Of lower classes so related to upper, happy nations are not made ! To whatever other griefs the lower classes labour under, this bitterest and sorest grief now superadds itself ; the unendurable conviction that they are unfairly dealt with, that their lot in this world is not founded on right, not even on necessity and might, is neither what it should be, nor what it shall be. Or why do we ask of Chartism, Glasgow Trades-Unions, and such like ? Has not broad Europe heard the question, put, and answered, on the great scale ; has not a French Revolution been ? Since the year 1789, there is now half-a-century com- plete ; and a French Revolution not yet complete ! Whoso- ever will look at that enormous Phenomenon may find many meanings in it, but this meaning as the ground of all : That it was a revolt of the oppressed lower classes against the oppress- ing or neglecting upper classes : not a French revolt only ; no, a European one ; full of stern monition to all conntries of Europe. These Chartisms, Radicalisms, Reform Bill, Tithe Bill, and infinite other discrepancy, and acrid argument and jargon that there is yet to be, are our French Revolution : God grant that we with our better methods, may be able to trans- act it by argument alone ! The Fx-ench Revolution, now that we have sufficiently ex- ecrated its horrors and crimes, is found to have had withal a great meaning in it. As indeed, what great thing ever hap- pened in this world, a world understood always to be mac & RIGHTS AND MIGHTS. 35 and governed by a Providence and Wisdom, not by an Un- wisdom, without meaning somewhat ? It was a tolerably audible voice of proclamation, and universal oyez ! to all peo- ple, this of three-and-twenty years' close fighting, sieging, conflagrating, with a anillion or tAvo of men shot dead : the world ought to know by this time that it was verily meant in earnest, that same Phenomenon, and had its own reasons for appearing there ! Which accordingly the world begins now to do. The French Revolution is seen, or begins everywhere to be seen, ' as the crowning phenomenon of our Modern ' Time ; the ine\itable stern end of much ; the fearful;, but also ' wonderful, indispensable and sternly beneficent beginning of ' much.' He who would understand the struggling convulsive unrest of European societ}', in any and everj' country, at this day, may read it in broad glaring lines there, in that the most convulsive phenomenon of the last thousand years. Europe lay pining, obstructed, moribund ; qi;ack-ridden, hag-ridden, — is there a hag, or spectre of the Pit, so baleful, hideous as your accredited quack, were he never so close-shaven, mild- spoken, plausible to himself and others ? Quack-ridden : in that one word lies all misery whatsoever. Sj^eciosity in all departments usurps the place of reality, thrusts reality away ; instead of performance, there is appearance of performance. The quack is a Falsehood Incarnate ; and speaks, and makes and does mere falsehoods, which Nature with her veracity has to disown. As chief priest, as chief governor, he stands there, intrusted with much. The husbandman of ' Time's Seedfield ; ' he is the world's hired sower, hired and solemnly ai^pointed to sow the kind true earth with wheat this yeai', that next year all men may have bread. He, miserable mortal, deceiv- ii]g and self-deceiving, sows it, as we said, not with corn but Avitli chaff ; the world nothing doubting, hari'ows it in, pays him his wages, dismisses him with blessing, and — next year there has no corn sprung. Nature has disowned the chaff, has declined growing chaff', and behold now there is no bread ! It becomes necessar_y, in such case, to do several things : not soft things some of them, but hard. Nay we will add that the very circumstance of quacks in 36 - VHAETISM. unusual quantity getting domination, indicates that the heart of the world is already wrong. The impostor is false ; but neither are his dupes altogether true : is not his first grand dupe the falsest of all, — himself namely ? Sincere men, of never so limited intellect, have an instinct for discriminating- sincerity. The cunningest Mej)histopheles cannot deceive a simple Margaret of honest heart ; ' it stands written on his brow.' Masses of people capable of being led away b}' quacks are themselves of partially untrue spirit, Alas, in such times it grows to be the universal belief, sole accredited knowing- ness, and the contrary of it accounted puerile enthusiasm, this sorrowfuUest disheliet that there is properly speaking any truth in the world ; that the world was, has been, or ever can be guided, except by simulation, dissimulation, and the suf- ficiently dexterous practice of pretence. The faith of men is dead : in what has guineas in its pocket, beefeaters riding be- hind it, and cannons trundling before it, they can believe ; in what has none of these things they cannot believe. Sense for the true and false is last ; there is properly no longer any true or false. It is the heyday of Imposture ; of Semblance recog- nising itself, and getting itself recognised, for Substance. Gaping multitudes listen ; unlistening multitudes see not but that it is all right, and in the order of Nature. Earnest men, one of a million, shut their lij)S ; suppressing thoughts, which there are no words to utter. To them it is too visible that spiritual life has departed ; that mateiial life, in whatsoever figure of it, cannot long remain behind. To them it seems as if our Europe of the Eighteenth Century, long hag-ridden, vexed with foul enchanters, to the length now of gorgeous Domdaniel Farcs-aux-cerfs and ' Peasants living on meal-husks and boiled grass,' had verily sunk down to die and dissolve ; and were now, with its French Philosophisms, Hume Scepti- cisms, Diderot Atheisms, maundering in the -final deliration ; writhing, with its Seven-years Silesian I'obber-wars, in the final agony. Glory to God, our Europe was not to die but to live ! Our Europe rose like a frenzied giant ; shook all that poisonous magician trumpery to right «and left, trampling it stormfuUy under foot ; and declared aloud that there was BIGHTS AND MIGHTS. 37 strength in him, not for life only, but for new and infinitely- wider life. Antseus-like the giant had strvick his foot once more upon Keality and the Earth ; there only, if in this uni- verse at all, lay strength and healing for him. Heaven knows, it was not a gentle process ; no wonder that it was a fearful process, this same ' Phoenix fire-consummation ! ' But the alternative was this or death ; the merciful Heavens, merciful in their severity, sent us this rather. And so the ' rights of man ' were to be written down on paper ; and experimentally wrought upon towards elaboration, in huge battle and wrestle, element conflicting with element, from side to side of this Earth, for three-and-twenty years. Rights of man, wrongs of man ? It is a question which has swallowed whole nations and generations ; a question — on which we will not enter here. Far be it from us ! Logic has small business with this question at present ; logic has no plummet that will sound it at any time. But indeed the rights of man, as has been not unaptly remarked, are little worth ascertaining in comparison to the mights of man, — to what portion of his rights he has any chance of being able to make good ! The accurate final rights of man lie in the far deeps of the Ideal, where ' the Ideal weds itself to the Possi- ble,' as the Philosophers say. The ascertainable temporary rights of man vary not a little, according to place and time. They are known to depend much on what a man's convictions of them are. The Highland wife, with her husband at the foot of the gallows, patted him on the shoulder (if there be historical truth in Joseph Miller), and said amid her tears : " Go up, Donald, my man ; the Laird bids ye." To her it seemed the rights of lairds were great, the rights of men small ; and she acquiesced. Deputy LajDonle, in the Salle des Melius at Versailles, on the 4th of August, 1789, demanded (be did actually ' demand,' and by unanimous vote obtain) that the ' obsolete law ' authorizing a Seigneur, on his return from the chase or other needful fatigue, to slaughter not above two of his vassals, and refresh his feet in their warm blood and bowels, should be ' abrogated.' From such obso- lete law, or mad tradition and phantasm of an obsolete law. 38 CHARTISM. down to any corn-law, game-law, rotten- borough law, or other law or practice clamoured of in this time of ours, the distance travelled over is great ! — What are the rights of men ? All men are justified in demanding and searching for their rights ; moreover, justified or not, they will do it : by Chartisms, Radicalisms, French Revolutions, or whatsoever methods they have. Rights surely are right : on the other hand, this other saying is most true, ' Use every man according to his rightH, and who shall escape whipping ! ' These two things, we say, are both true ; and both are essential to make up the whole truth. All good men know always and feel, each for himself, that the one is not less true than the other ; and act accord- ingly. The contradiction is of the surface only ; as in oppo- site sides of the same fact : universal in this dualism of a life we have. Between these two extremes. Society and all human things must fiuctuatingly adjust themselves the best they can. And yet that there is verily a 'rights of man' let no mortal doubt. An ideal of right does dwell in all men, in all arrange- ments, pactions and procedures of men ; it is to this ideal of right, more and more developing itself as it is more and more approximated to, that human Society for ever tends and strug- gles. We say also that any given thing either is unjust or else just ; however obscure the arguings and strugglings on it be, the thing in itself there as it lies, infallibly enough, is the one or the othei". To which let us add only this, the first, last article of faith, the alpha and omega of all faith among men. That nothing which is unjust can hope to continue in this world. A faith true in all times, more or less forgotten in most, but altogether frightfully brought to remembrance again in ours ! Lyons fusilladings, Nantes noyadings, reigns of terror, and such other universal battle-thunder and exjDlo- sion ; these, if we will understand them, were but a new irre- fragable preaching abroad of that. It would apjDear that Speciosities which are not Realities cannot any longer inhabit this world. It would appear that the unjust thing has no friend in the Heaven, and a majority against it on the earth ; nay, that it has at bottom all men for its enemies ; that it may take shelter in this fallacy and then in that, but will be hunted LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 39 from fallacy to fallacy, till it find no fallacy to shelter in any more, but must march and go elsewhither ; — that, in a woi'd, it ought to prepare incessantly for decent departure, before {/(decent departure, ignominious drummiDg out, nay savage smiting out and burning out, overtake it ! Alas, was that such new tidings ? Is it not from of old indubitable, that L^niruth, lujustice wliich is but acted untruth, has no power i () continue in this true universe of ours ? The tidiugs was world-old, or older, as old as the Fall of Lucifer : and yet in that epoch unhappily it was new tidings, unexpected, incredi- ble ; and there had to be such earthquakes and shakings of ^e nations before it could be listened to, and laid to heart even slightly ! Let us lay it to heart, let us know it well that new shakings be not needed. Known and laid to heart it must everywhere be, before peace can pretend to come. This seems to us the secret of our convulsed era ; this which is so easily written, which is and has been and will be so hard to bring to pass. All true men, high and low, each in his sphere, are consciously or unconsciously bringing it to pass ; all false and half-true men are fruitlessly spending themselves to hin- der it from coming. to pass. CHAPTER VI. LAISSEZ-FAIRE. From all which enormous events, with truths old and new embodied in them, what innumerable practical infer- ences are to be drawn ! Events are written lessons, glaring in huge hiei'Oglyphic picture-writing, that all may read and know them : the terror and horror they inspire is but the note of preparation for the truth they are to teach ; a mere waste of terror if that be not learned. Inferences enough ; most didactic, practically applicable in all departments of English things ! One inference, but one inclusive of all, shall content us here ; this namely : That Laissez-faire has as good as done its j)art in a great many provinces ; that in the prov- ince of the Working Classes, Laissez-faii^e having passed its 40 CHARTISM. New Poor-Law, has reached the suicidal point and now, as felo-de-se, lies djdng there, in torchlight meetings and such Uke ; that, in brief, a government of the under classes by the upper on a principle of Let alone is no longer possible in Eng- land in these days. This is the one inference inclusive of alL For there can be no acting or doing of any kind, till it be recognised that there is a thing to be done ; the thing once recognised, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible. The "Working Classes cannot any longer go on without govern- ment ; without being actually guided and governed ; England cannot subsist in peace till, by some means or othei", some guidance and government for them is found. For, alas, on us too the rude truth has come home. Wra; pages and speciosities all worn off, the haggard naked fact speaks to us : Are these millions taught ? Are these millions guided ? We have a Church, the venerable embodiment of an idea which may well call itself divine ; which our fathers for long ages, feeling it to be divine, have been embodying as we see : it is a Church well furnished with equipments and appurtenances ; educated in universities ; rich in money ; set on high places that it may be conspicuous to all, honoured of all. We have an Aristocracy of landed wealth and commer- cial wealth, in whose hands lies the law-making and the law- administering ; an Aristocracy rich, powerful, long secure in its place ; an Aristocracy with more faculty put free into its hands than was ever before, in any country or time, put into the hands of any class of men. This Church answers : Yes, the people are taught. This Aristocracy', astonishment in every feature, answers : Yes, surely the people are guided ! Do we not pass what Acts of Parliament are needful ; as many as thirty-nine for the shooting of the partridges alone ? Are there not tread-mills, gibbets ; even hospitals, poor-rates, New Poor- Law ? So answers Chui'ch ; so answers ^I'istocracy, astonish- ment in every feature. — Fact, in the meanwhile, takes Jiis luci- fer-box, sets fire to wheat-stacks ; sheds an ail-too dismal light on several things. Fact searches for his third-rate potatoe, not in the meekest humour, six-and-thirty weeks each 3'ear ; and does not find it. Fact passionately joins Messiah Thorn LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 4:1 of Canterbury, and lias himself shot for a new fifth-monarchy brought in by Bedlam. Fact holds his fustian-jacket Fein- gericht in Glasgow City. Fact carts his Petition over London streets, begging that you would simply have the goodness to grant him universal suffrage, and ' the five points,' by way of remedy. These are not symptoms of teaching and guiding. Nay, at bottom, is it not a singular thing- this of Laissez- faire, from the first origin of it? As good as an abdication on the part of governors ; an admission that they are henceforth incompetent to govern, that they are not there to govern at all, but to do — one knows not what ! The universal demand of Laissez-faire by a people from its governors or upper <^''^ses, is a soft-sounding demand ; but it is only one step removed from the fatallest. ' Laissez-faire,' exclaims a sar- donic German writer, ' What is this universal cry for Laissez- 'faire ? Does it mean that human affairs require no guid- 'ance ; that wisdom and forethought cannot guide them bet- * ter than folly and accident ? Alas, does it not mean : " Such ' guidance is worse than none ! Leave us alone of your guid- ' ance ; eat your wages, and sleep ! " ' And now if guidance have grown indispensable, and the sleep continue, what be- comes of the sleep and its wages ? — In those entirely surpris- ing circumstances to which the Eighteenth Century had brought us, in the time of Adam Smith, Laissez-faire was a reasonable cry ; — as indeed, in all circumstances, for a wise governor there will be meaning in the principle of it. To wise governors you will cry : " See what you will, and will not, let alone." To unwise governors, to hungry Greeks throttling down hungry Greeks on the floor of a St. Stephens, you will cry : " Let all things alone ; for Heaven's sake, med- dle ye with nothing!" Kovf Laissezfaire may adjust itself in other provinces we say not : but we do venture to say, and ask whether event^everywhere in world-history and parish- history, in all rnanrlr of dialects are not saying it, That in regard to the lower orders of society, and their governance and guidance, the principle of Laissezfaire has terminated, and is no longer applicable at all, in this Europe of ours, still less in this England of ours. Not misgovernment, nor yet no- 42 GHABTISM. government : only government will now serve. "What is the meaning of the 'five points,' if we will understand them? What are all popular commotions and maddest bellowings, from Peterloo to the Place-de-Grreve itself? Bellowings, in- .articulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain ; to the ear of wisdom they are inarticulate prayers : " Guide me, >govern me ! I am mad, and miserable, and cannot guide ni}'- ;self ! " Surely of all ' rights of man,' this right of the igno- rant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest. Nature herself ordains it from the first ; Society struggles towards perfection by enforcing and accomplishing it more and more. If Freedom have any meaning, it means enjoyment of this right, wherein all other rights are enjoyed. It is a sacred right and duty, on both sides ; and the summary of all social duties whatsoever between the two. Why does the one toil with his hands, if the other be not to toil, still more un- weariedly, with heart and head ? The brawny craftsman finds it no child's play to mould his unpliant rugged masses ; neither is guidance of men a dilettantism : what it becomes when treated as a delettantism, Ave may see ! The wdld horse bounds homeless through the wilderness, is not led to stall and manger : but neither does he toil for you, but for himself only. Democracy, we are well aware, what is called ' self-govern- ment' of the multitude by the multitude, is in words the thing everywhere passionately clamoured for at present. Democ- racy makes rapid progress in these latter times, and ever more rapid, in a perilous accelerative ratio ; towards democracy, and that only, the progress of things is everywhere tending as to the final goal and Avinning-post. So think, so clamour the multitudes everywhere. And yet all men may see, Avhose sight is good for much, that in democracy can lie no finality ; that Avith the completest Avinning of democracy there is noth- ing yet won, — except emptiness, and the free chance to win ! Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-cancelling business : and gives in the long-run a net-result of zero. Where no government is wanted, save that of the parish-constable, as in LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 4Z America with its boundless soil, every man being able to find work and recompense for himself, democracy may subsist ; not elsewhere, except briefly, as a swift transition towards something other and farther. Democracy never yet, that we heard of, was able to accomplish much work, beyond that same cancelling of itself. Rome and Athens are, themes for the schools ; unexceptionable for that purpose. In Rome and Athens, as elsewhere, if we look practicalh^, we shall find that it was not by loud voting and debating of many, but by wise insight and ordei'ing of a few that the work was done. So is it ever, so will it ever be. The French Convention was a Parliament elected 'by the five points,' with ballot-boxes, uni- versal suffrages, and what not, as perfectly as Parliament can hope to be in this world ; and had indeed a pretty spell of work to do, and did it. The French Convention had to cease from being a h'ee Parliament, and become more arbitrary than any Sultan Bajazet, before it could so much as subsist. It had to purge out its argumentative Girondins, elect its Su- preme Committee of Salut, guillotine into silence and extinc- tion all that gainsayed it, and rule and work literally by the sternest despotism ever seen in Europe, before it could rule at all. Napoleon was not president of a republic ; Cromwell tried hard to rule in that way, but found that he could not. These, ' the armed soldiers of democracy,' had to chain democ- racy under their feet, and become despots over it, before they could work out the earnest obscure purpose of democi-acy it- self ! Democracy, take it where you will in our Europe, is found but as a regulated method of rebellion and abrogation ; it abrogates the old arrangement of things ; and leaves, as we say, zero and vacuity for the institution of a new arrangement. It is the consummation of No-government and Laissez-faire. It may be natural for our Europe at present ; but cannot be the ultimatum of it. Not towards the impossibility, 'self- government ' of a multitude by a multitude ; but towards some possibility, government by the wisest, does bewildered Europe struggle. The blessedest possibility : not misgovernment, not Laissez-faire, but veritable govei'nment ! Cannot one dis- cern too, across all democratic turbulence, clattering of ballot- 44 CHARTISM. boxes and infinite sorrowful jangle, needful or not, that this at bottom is the wish and prayer of all human hearts, every- where and at all times : " Give me a leader ; a true leader, not a false sham-leader ; a true leader, that he may guide me on the true way, that I may be loyal to him, that I may swear fealty to him and follow him, and feel that it is well with me ! " The relation of the taught to their teacher, of the loyal sub- ject to his guiding king, is, under one shape or another, the vital element of human Society ; indispensable to it, perennial in it ; without which, as a body reft of its soul, it falls down into death, and with horrid noisome dissolution passes away and disappears. But verily in these times, with their new stern Evangel, that Speciosities which are not Realities can no longer be, all Aris- tocracies, Priesthoods, Persons in Authority, are called upon to consider. What is an Aristocracy ? A corporation of the Best, of the Bravest. To this joyfully, with heart-loyalty, do men pay the half of their substance, to equip and decorate their Best, to lodge them in palaces, to set them high over all. For it is of the nature of men, in every time, to honour and love their Best ; to know no limits in honouring them. What- soever Aristocracy is still a corporation of the Best, is safe from all peril, and the land it rules is a safe and blessed land. What- soever Aristocracy does not even attempt to be that, but only to wear the clothes of that, is not safe ; neither is the land it rules in safe ! For this now is our sad lot, that we must find a real Aristocracy, that an apparent Aristocracy, how plausible soever, has become inadequate for us. One way or other, the world will absolutely need to be governed ; if not by this class of men, then by that. One can predict, without gift of proph- ecy, that the era of routine is nearly ended. Wisdom and fac- ulty alone, faithful, valiant, ever-zealous, not pleasant but pain- ful, continual effort, will suffice. Cost what it may, by one means or another, the toiling multitudes of this perplexed over-crowded Europe, must and will find governors. ' Laissez- faire, Leave them to do ? ' The thing they will do, if so left, is too frightful to think of ! It has been done once, in sight LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 45 of the whole earth, in these generations ; can it need to be done a second time ? For a Priesthood, in like manner, whatsoever its titles, pos- sessions, professions, there is but one question : does it teach and spiritually guide this people, yea or no ? If yea, then is all well. But if no, then let it strive earnestly to alter, for as yet there is nothing well ! Nothing, we say : and indeed is not this that we call spiritual guidance properly the soul of the whole, the life and eyesight of the whole ? The world asks of its Church in these times, more passionately than of any other Institution any question, " Canst thou teach us or not ? " — A Priesthood in France, when the world asked, " What canst thou do for us ? " answered only, aloud and ever louder, " Are we not of God ? Invested with all power ? " — till at length France cut short this controversy too, in what frightful way we know. To all men who believed in the Church, to all men who believed in God and the soul of man, there was no issue of the French Revolution half so sorrowful as that. France cast out its benighted blind Priesthood into destruction ; yet with what a loss to France also ! A solution of continuity, what we may well call such ; and this where continuity is so momentous : the New, whatever it may be, cannot now grow out of the Old, but is severed sheer asunder from the Old, — how much lies wasted in that gap ! That one whole genera- tion of thinkers should be without a religion to believe, or even to contradict ; that Christianity, in thinking France, should as it were fade away so long into a remote extraneous tradition, was one of the saddest facts connected with the future of that country. Look at such Political and Moral Philosophies, St.-Simonisms, Robert-Macairisms, and the 'Lit- erature of Desperation ' ! Kingship was perhaps but a cheap waste, compared with this of the Prrestship ; under which France still, all but unconsciously, labours ; and may long la- bour, remediless the while. Let others consider it, and take warning by it ! France is a pregnant examjDle in all ways. Aiistocracies that do not govern, Priesthoods that do not teach ; the misery of that, and the misery of altering that, — are written in Belshazzar fire-letters on the history of France. 46 CHARTISM. Or does the British reader, safe in the assurance that ' Ebg:, land is not France,' call all this unpleasant doctrine of ours ideology, pei'fectability, and a vacant dream ? Does the Brit- ish reader, resting on the faith that what has been these two generations was from the beginning, and will be to the end, assert to himself that things are already as they can be, as they must be ; that on the whole, no Upper Classes did ever ' govern ' the Lowei', in this sense of governing ? Believe it not, O British reader ! Man is man everywhere ; dislikes to have ' sensible species ' and ' ghosts of defunct bodies ' foisted on him, in England even as in France. How much the Upper Classes did actually, in any of the most perfect Feudal time, return to the Under by way of recompense, in government, guidance, protection, we will not undertake to specify here. In Charity-Balls, Soup-Kitchens, in Quarter-Sessions, Prison- Discipline and Treadmills, we can well believe the old Feudal Aristocracy not to have surpassed the new. Yet we do say that the old Aristocracy were the governors of the Lower Classes, the guides of the Lower Classes ; and even, at bottom, that they existed as an Aristocracy because they were found adequate for that. Not by Charity-Balls and Soup-Kitchens ; not so ; far otherwise ! But it was their happiness that, in struggling for their own objects, they AacZ to govern the LoAver Classes, even in this sense of governing. For, in one word. Gash Payment had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to man ; it was something other than money that the high then expected from the low, and could not live without getting from the low. Not as buyer and seller alone, of land or what else it might be, but in many senses still as soldier and captain, as clansman and head, as loyal subject and guiding king, was the low related to the high. With the supreme triumph of Cash, a changed time has entered ; there must a changed Aristocracy enter. We invite the British reader to meditate earnestly on these things. Another thing, which the British reader often reads and hears in this time, is worth his meditating for a moment : That Society ' exists for the protection of property.' To which it. is added, that the poor man also has property, namely, hia LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 47 •labour,' and the fifteen-pence or three -and-sixpence a-day he can get for that. True enough, O friends, ' for protecting property ; ' most true : and indeed if you will once sufficiently enforce that Eighth Commandment, the whole ' rights of man ' are well cared for : I know no better definition of the rights of man. llioio shalt not luteal, thou shalt not be stolen from : what a Society were that ; Plato's Republic, Moore's Utoj^ia mere emblems of it ! Give every man what is his, the accu- ate price of what he has done and been, no man shall any more complain, neither shall the earth sufier any more. For the protection of property, in very truth, and for that alone ! — And now what is thy property ?. That parchment title-deed, that purse thou buttouest in thy breeches-jDocket ? Is that thy valuable property ? Unhappy brother, most poor insol- vent brother, I without parchment at all, with purse oftenest in the flaccid state, imponderous, which will not fling against the wind, have quite other property than that ! I have the miraculous breath of Life in me, breathed into my nostrils by Almighty God. I have affections, thoughts, a god-given capability to be and do ; rights, therefore, — the right for in- stance to thy love if I love thee, to thy guidance if I obey thee : the strangest rights, whereof in church-pulpits one still hears something, though almost unintelligible now ; rights, stretch- ing high into Immensity, far into Eternity ! Fifteen-pence a-daj' ; three-and-sixpence a-day ; eight hundred pounds and odd a-day, dost thou call that my property ? 1 value that but little ; little all I could purchase with that. For truly, as is said, what matters it ? In torn boots, in soft-hung carriages- and-four, a man gets always to his journey's end. Socrates walked barefoot, or in wooden shoes, and yet arrived happily. They never asked him. What shoes or conveyance? never. What wages hadst thou? but simply. What work didst thou? Property, O brother ? ' Of my very body I have but a life- rent.' As for this flaccid purse of mine, 'tis something, noth- ing ; has been the slave of pickpockets, cutthroats, Jew-brok- ers, gold-dust robbers ; 'twas his, 'tis mine ; — 'tis thine, if thou care mucli to steal it. But my soul, breathed into me by God, my Me and what capability is there ; that is mine, 48 CHARTISM. and I will resist the stealing of it. I call that mine and not thine ; I will keep that, and do what work I can with it : God has given it me, the Devil shall not take it away ! — Alas, my friends. Society exists and has existed for a great many pur- poses, not so easy to specify ! Society, it is understood, does not in any age, prevent a man from being what he can he. A sooty African can become a Toussaint L'ouverture, a murderous Three-fingered Jack, let the yellow West Indies say to it what they will. A Scot- tish Poet, ' proud of his name and country,' can apply fervently to ' Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt,' and become a gauger of beer-barrels, and tragical immortal broken-hearted Singer ; the stifled echo of his melody audible through long centuries, one other note in ' that sacred Miserere ' that rises up to Heaven, out of all times and lands. What I can &e thou de- cidedly wilt not hinder me from being. Nay even for being what I could he, I have the sti-angest claims on thee, — not convenient to adjust at present ! Protection of breeches- pocket property ? O reader, to what shifts is poor Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men ! On the whole, we will advise Society not to talk at all about what she exists for ; but rather with her whole in- dustry to exist, to tr}^ how she can keep existing ! That is her best plan. She may depend upon it, if she ever, by cruel chance, did come to exist only for protection of breeches- pocket property, she would lose very soon the gift of pro- tecting even that, and find her career in our lower world on the point of terminating ! — For the rest, that in the most perfect Feudal Ages, the Ideal of Aristocracy nowhere lived in vacant serene purity as an Ideal, but always as a poor imperfect Actual, little heeding or not knowing at all that an Ideal lay in it, — this too we will cheerfully admit. Imperfection, it is known, cleaves to human things ; far is the Ideal departed from; in most times ; very far ! And yet so long as an Ideal (any soul of Truth) does, in never so confused a manner, exist and work within the NOT LAI8SEZ-FAIRE. 49 Actual, it is a tolerable business. Not so, when the Ideal has entirely departed, and the Actual owns to itself that it has no Idea, no soul of Truth any longer : at that degree of im- perfection human things cannot continue living ; they are obliged to alter or expire, when they attain to that. Blotches and diseases exist on the skin and deeper, the heart continu- ing whole ; but it is another matter when the heart itself be- comes diseased ; when there is no heart, but a monstrous gangrene pretending to exist there as heart ! On the whole, O reader, thou wilt find everywhere that things which have had an existence among men have first of all had to have a truth and worth in them, and were not sem- blances but reahties. Nothing but a reality ever yet got men to pay bed and board to it for long. Look at Mahometanism itself ! Dalai-Lamaism, even Dalai-Lamaism, one rejoices to discover, may be worth its victuals in this world ; not a quack- ery but a sincerity ; not a nothing but a something ! The mistake of those who believe that fraud, force, injustice, whatsoever untrue thing, howsoever cloaked and decorated, was ever or can ever be the principle of man's relations to man, is great, and the greatest. It is the error of the infidel ; in whom the trath as yet is not. It is an error pregnant with mere errors and miseries ; an error fatal, lamentable, to be abandoned by all men. CHAPTEE VII. NOT LAISSEZ-FAIEE. How an Aristocracy, in these present times and circum- stances, could, if never so weU disposed, set about governing the Upper Class ? What they should do ; endeavour or attempt ' to do ? That is even the question of questions : — the question which they have to solve ; which it is our utmost function at present to tell them, lies there for solving, and must and will be solved. Insoluble we cannot fancy it. One select class Society has furnished with wealth, intelligence, leisure, means outward 60 CHARTISM. and inward for governing ; another huge class, furnished by Society with none of these things, declares that it must be governed : Negative stands fronting Positive ; if Negative and Positive cannot unite, — it will be worse for both ! Let the faculty and earnest constant effort of England combine round this matter ; let it once be recognised as a vital matter. Innu- merable things our Upper Classes and Lawgivers might ' do ; ' but the preliminaiy of all things, we must repeat, is to know that a thing must needs be done. We lead them here to the shore of a boundless continent ; ask them, Whether they do not with their own eyes see it, see strange symptoms of it, lying huge, dark, unexplored, inevitable; full of hope, but also full of difficulty, savager}^, almost of despair ? Let them enter ; they must enter ; Time and Necessity have brought them hither ; where they are is no continuing ! Let them enter ; the first step once taken, the nest will have become clearer, all future steps will become possible. It is a great problem for all of us ; but for themselves, we may say, more than for any. On them chiefly, as the expected solvers of it, will the failure of a solution first fall. One way or other there must and will be a solution. True, these matters lie far, very far indeed, from the ' usual habits of Parliament,' in late times ; from the routine course of any Legislative or Administrative body of men that exists among us. Too true ! And that is even the thing we com- plain of : had the mischief been looked into as it gradually rose, it would not have attained this magnitude. That self- cancelling Donothingism and Laiasez-faire should have got so ingrained into our Practice, is the source of all these miseries. It is too true that Parliament, for the matter of near a cen- tury now, has been able to undertake the adjustment of al- most one thing alone, of itself and its own interests ; leaving other interests to rub along very much as they could and would. True, this was the practice of the whole Eighteenth Centiiry ; and struggles still to prolong itself into the Nine- teenth, — which however is no longer the time for it ! Those Eighteenth-century Parliaments, one may hope, will become a curious object one day. Are not these same ' Memoires ' of NOT LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 51 Horace Walpole, to an unparliamentary eye, already a curious object ? One of the clearest-sighted men of the Eighteenth Century writes down his Parliamentary observation of it there ; a determined despiser and merciless dissector of cant ; a lib- eral withal, one who will go all lengths for the ' glorious rev- olution ' and resist Tory principles to the death : he writes, with an indignant elegiac feeling, how Mr. This, who had voted so and then voted so, and was the son of this and the bi'other of that, and had such claims to the fat appointment, was nevertheless scandalously postponed to Mr. That ; — where- upon are not the affairs of this nation in a bad way ? How hungry Greek meets liungTy Greek on the floor of St. Ste- phens, and wrestles him and throttles him till he has to cry. Hold ! the office is thine ! — of this does Horace write. — One must say, the destinies of nations do not always rest entirely on Parliament. One must say, it is a wonderful affair that science of ' government ' as practised in the Eighteenth Cen- tury of the Christian era, and still struggling to practise it- self. One must say, it was a lucky century that could get it so practised : a century which had inherited richly from its predecessors ; and also which did, not unnaturally, bequeath to its successors a French Revolution, general overturn, and reign of terror ; — intimating, in most audible thunder, confla- gration, guillotinement, cannonading and universal war and earthquake, that such century with its practices had ended. Ended ;— for decidedly that course of procedure Avill no longer serve. Parliament will absolutely, with whatever effort, have to Hft itself out of those deep ruts of donothing routine ; and learn to say, on all sides, something more edifying than Laissez-faire. If Parliament cannot learn it, what is to become of Parliament ? The toiling millions of England ask of their English Parliament foremost of all. Canst thou govern us or not ? Parliament with its privileges is strong ; but Necessity and the Laws of Natui-e are stronger than it. If Parliament cannot do this thing, Parliament we prophesy will do some other thing and things which, in the strangest and not the happiest way, Avill forward its being done, — not much to the advantage of Parliament probably ' Done, one way or other, 52 CHARTISM. the thing must be. In these complicated times, with Cash Payment as the sole nexus between man and man, the Toiling Classes of mankind declare, in their confused but most em- phatic way, to the Untoiling, that they will be governed ; that they must — under penalty of Chartisms, Thuggeries, Kick- burnings, and even blacker things than those. Vain also is it to think that the misery of one class, of the great universal under class, can be isolated and kept apart and peculiar, down in that class. By infallible contagion, evident enough to re- flection, evident even to Political Economy that will reflect, the misery of the lowest spreads upwards and upwards till it reaches the very highest ; till all has grown miserable, palpa- bly false and wrong ; and poor drudges hungering ' on meal- husks and boiled grass ' do, by circuitous but sure methods, bring kings' heads to the block ! Cash Payment the sole nexus ; and there are so many things which cash will not pay ! Cash is a great miracle ; yet it has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth. ' Supply and demand ' we will honour also ; and yet how many ' de- mands ' are there, entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than cash, before they can get their supply ! On the whole, what astonishing payments does cash make in this world ! Of your Samuel Johnson furnished with ' fourpence halfpenny a-day,' and solid lodging at nights on the paved streets, as his pay- ment, we do not speak ; — not in the way of complaint : it is a world-old business for the like of him, that same ari'ange- ment or a worse ; perhaps the man, for his own uses, had need even of that and of no better. Nay is not Society, busy with its Talfourd Copja-ight Bill and the like, struggling to do something effectual for that man ; — enacting with all indus- try that his own creation be accounted his own manufacture, and continue unstolen, on his own market-stand, for so long as sixty years ? Perhaps Society is right there ; for discrep- ancies on that side too may become excessive. All men are not patient docile Johnsons ; some of them are half-mad in- flammable Kosseaus. Such, in peculiar times, you may drive too far. In France, for example. Society was not destitute of JVEW BMA8. 53 cash ; Society contrived to pay Philippe d'Orleans not yet Ega- lite three hundred thousand a-year and odd, for driving cabri- olets through the streets of Paris and other work done : but in cash, encouragement, arrangement, recompense or recognition of any kind, it had nothing to give this same half-mad Ros- seau for his work done ; whose brain in consequence, too ' much enforced ' for a weak brain, uttered hasty sparks, Gon- trat Social and the like, which proved not so quenchable again ! In regard to that species of men too, who knows whether Laissez-faire itself (which is Sergeant Talfourd's Copyright Bill continued to eternity instead of sixty years) will not turn out insufficient, and have to cease, one day ?— Alas, in regard to so very many things. Laissez-faire ought partly to endeavour to cease ! But in regard to poor Sans- jDotatoe peasants, Trades-Union craftsmen. Chartist cotton- spinners, the time has come when it must either cease or a worse thing straightway begin, — a thing of tinder-boxes, vitriol-bottles, second-hand pistols, a visibly insupportable thing in the eyes of all. CHAPTER V3IL NEW ERAS. For in very truth it is a ' new Era ; ' a new Practice has be- come indispensable in it. One has heard so often of new eras, new and newest eras, that the world has grown rather empty of late. Yet new eras do come ; there is no fact surer than that they have come more than once. And always with a change of era, with a change of intrinsic conditions, there had to be a change of practice and outward relations brought about, — if not peaceably, then by violence ; for brought about it had to be, there could no rest come till then. How many eras and epochs, not noted at the moment ; — which indeed is the blessedest condition of epochs, that they come quietly, making no proclamation of themselves, and are only visible long after : a Cromwell Rebellion, a French Revolution, ' striking on the Horologe of Time,' to tell all mortals what o'clock it has become, are too expensive, if one could help it ! — 54 CHARTISM. In a strange rhapsodic ' History of the Teuton Kindred {Geschichte der Teutschen Sippschaft),' not yet translated into our language, we have found a Chapter on the Eras of Eng- land, which, Avere there room for it, would be instructive in this place. We shall crave leave to excerpt some jDages ; partly as a relief from the too near vexations of our own rather sorrowful Era ; partly as calculated to throw, more or i:>ss obliquely, some degree of light on the meanings of that. Tlie Author is anonymous ; but we have heard him called the Herr Professor Sauerteig, and indeed think we know him under that name : ' Who shall say what work and works this England has j^et ' to do ? For what purpose this land of Britain was created, ' set like a jewel in the encircling blue of Ocean ; and this ' Tribe of Saxons, fashioned in the depths of Time, " on the ' shores of the Black Sea" or elsewhere, "out of Harzebirge ' rock " or Avhatever other material, was sent travelling hither- ' ward ? No man can say : it was for a work, and for works, ' incapable of announcement in words. Thou seest them ' there, these works ; part of them stand done, and visible to ' the eye ; even these thou canst not navie : how much less ' the others still matter of prophecy only ! — They live and ' labour there, these twenty million Saxon men ; they have ' been born into this mystery of life out of the darkness of ' Past Time : — how changed now since the first Father and ' first Mother of them set forth, quitting the Tribe of Theuih, 'with passionate farewell, under questionable auspices; on ' scanty bullock-cart, if they had even bullocks and a cart ; ' with axe and hunting-spear, to subdue a portion of our com- • 11 ion Planet ! This Nation now has cities and seedfields, has • ispring-vans, dray-waggons. Long-acre carriages, nay railway ' trains ; has coined money, exchange-bills, laws, books, war- ' fleets, spinning jennies, warehouses and West-India Docks : ' see what it has built and done, what it can and will yet build ' and do ! These umbrageous pleasure-woods, green meadows, ' shaven stubble-fields, smooth-sweeping roads ; these high- ' domed cities, and *what they hold and bear ; this mild Good- NEW ERA8. 55 'morrow which the stranger bids thee, equitable, nay for- 'bearant if need were, judicially calm and law-observing 'towards thee a stranger, what work has it not cost? How ' many bi'awny arms, generation after generation, sank down 'wearied ; how many noble hearts, toiling while life lasted, 'and Avise heads that wore themselves dim with scanning and '.discerning, before this waste WhitecHff, Albion so-called, ' with its otlier Cassiterides Tin MancU, became a British ' Empire ! The ritream of World-History has altered its com- ' plexion ; Komans are dead out, English are come in. The ' red broad mark of Eomanhood, stamped ineffaceably on that ' Chart of Time, has disappeared from the present, and be- ' longs only to the past. England plays its part ; England too ' has a mark to leave, and we will hope none of the least sig- ' nificant. Of a truth, whosoever had, wdth the bodily eye, 'seen Hengst and Horsa mooring on the mud-beach of ' Thanet, on that spring morning of the Year 449 ; and then, 'with the spiritual eye, looked forward to New York, Cal- ' cutta, Sidney Cove, across the ages and the oceans ; and ' thouglit what Wellingtons, Washingtons, Shakspears, Mil- ' tons, Watts, Arkwrights, William Pitts and Davie Crocketts ' had to issue from that business, and do their several task- ' words so,— Ae would have said, those leather-boats of Hengst's ' had a kind of cargo in them ! A genealogic Mythus superior ' to any in the old Greek, to almost any in the old Hebrew ' itself ; and not a Mythus either, but every fibre of it fact. ' An Epic Poem was there, and all manner of poems ; except ' that the Poet has not yet made his appearance.' ' Six centuries of obscure endeavour,' continues Sauerteig, ' which to read Historians, 3'ou would incline to call mere ob- ' scure slaughter, discord, and misendeavour ; of which all ' that the human memory, after a thousand readings, can I'e- ' member, is that it resembled, what Milton names it, the ' "flocking and fighting of kites and crows;" this, in brief, ' is the history of the Heptarchy or Seven Kingdoms. Six ' centuries ; a stormy springtime, if thei'e ever was one, for a ' Nation. Obscure fighting of kites and crows, however, was * not the History of it ; but was only what the dim Historians 56 CHARTISM. of it saw good to record. Were not forests felled, bogs drained, fields made arable, towns built, laws made, and the Thought and Practice of men in many ways perfected ? Ven- erable Bede had got a language which he could now not only speak, but sjdcU and put on paper : think what lies in that. Bemurmured by the German sea-flood swinging slow with sullen roar against those hoarse Northumbrian rocks, the venerable man set down several things in a legible man- ner. Or w^as the smith idle, hammering only war-tools? He had learned metallurgy, stithy -work in general ; and made plough-shares withal, and adzes and mason-hammers. Cas- tra, Caesters or Chesters, Dons, Tons {Zauns, In closures or Towns), not a few, did they not stand there ; of burnt brick, of timbei', of lath-and-clay ; sending up the peaceable smoke of hearths ? England had a History then too ; though no Historian to write it. Those " flockings and fightings," sad inevitable necessities, were the expensive tentative steps towards some capability of living and working in concert : experiments they were, not always conclusive, to ascertain who had the might over whom, the right over whom. ' M. Thierry has written an ingenious Book, celebrating with considei'able pathos the fate of the Saxons, fallen under that fierce-heai'ted Conquestor, Acquirer or Conqueror, as he is named. M. Thierry professes to have a turn for looking at that side of things : the fate of the Welsh too moves him ; of the Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into the mountainous nooks of the West, whither they were not worth following. Noble deeds, according to M. Thierry, were done by these unsuccessful men, heroic sufferings undergone ; which it is a pious duty to rescue from forget- feilness. True, surely ! A tear at least is due to the un- happy : it is right and fit that there should be a man to assert that lost cause too, and see what can still be made of it. Most right : — and yet on the whole, taking matters on that great scale, what can we say but that the cause Avhich pleased the gods has in the end pleased Cato also ? Cato cannot alter it ; Cato will find that he cannot at bottom wish to alter it. Might and Right do differ fiightfully from hour NEW ERAS. 57 ' to hour ; but give them centuries to try it in, they are found ' to be identical. Whose land luas this of Britain ? God's ' who made it, His and no other's it was and is. Who of ' God's creatixres had right to live in it ? The wolves and ' bisons ? Yes they ; till one with a better right showed him- ' self. The Celt, "aboriginal savage of Europe," as a snarl- ' ing antiquary names him, arrived, pretending to have a ' better right ; and did accordingly, not without pain to the ' bisons, make good the same. He had a better right to that ' piece of God's land ; namely a better might to turn it to ' use ; — a might to settle himself there, at least, and try what ' use he could turn it to. The bisons disappeared ; the Celts ' took possession, and tilled. Forever, was it to be ? Alas, ' Fore €67- is not a category that can establish itself in. this ' world of Time. A world of Time, by the very definition of ' it, is a world of mortality and mutability, of Beginning and ' Ending. No property is eternal but God the Maker's : ' whom Heaven pei'mits to take possession, his is the right : ' heaven's sanction IS spch permission, — while it lasts : nothing ' more can be said. tVhy does that hyssop grow there, in the ' chink of the wall ? Because the whole universe, sufficiently ' occupied otherwise, could not hitherto prevent its gTowing ! ' It has the might and the right. By the same great law do ' Eoman Empires estabhsh themselves. Christian Eeligions ' promulgate themselves, and all extant Powers bear rule. ' The strong thing is the just thing : this thou wilt find ' throughout in our world ; — as indeed was God and Truth ' the Maker of our world, or was Satan and Falsehood ? ' One proposition widely current as to this Norman Con- ' quest is of a Physiologic sort: That the conquerors and con- ' qaered here were of different races ; nay that the Nobility ' of England is still, to this hour, of a somewhat different ' blood from the commonalty, their fine Norman features con- ' trasting so jDleasantl}^ with the coarse Saxon ones of the ' others. God knows, there are coarse enough features to be ' seen among the commonalty of that country ; but if the No- ' bility's be finer, it is not their Normanhood that can be the ' reason. Does the above Physiologist reflect who those same 58 OH ART ISM. * Normans, Northmen, originally were ? Baltic Saxons, and ' what other miscellany of Lurdanes, Jutes and Deutsch Pi- ' rates from the East-sea marshes would join them in plunder ' of France ! If living three centuries longer in Heathenism, ' sea-robbery, and the unlucrative fishing of ambergris could ' ennoble them beyond the others, then were they ennobled. ' The Normans were Saxons who had learned to speak French. ' No : by Thor and Wodan, the Saxons were all as noble as ' was needful ; — shaped, says the My thus, " from the rock of ' the Harzgebirge ; " brother-tribes being made of clay, wood, ' water, or what other material might be going ! A stubborn, ' taciturn, sulky, indomitable rock-made race of men ; as the ' figure they cut in all quarters, in the cane-brake of Arkansas, ' in the Ghauts of the Himmalayha, no less than in London ' City, in Warwick or Lancaster County, does still abun- ' dantly manifest.' ' To this English People in World-History, there have 'been, shall I prophesy. Two grand tasks assigned? Huge- ' looming through the dim tumult of the always incommen- ' surable Present Time, outlines of two tasks disclose them- ' selves : the grand Industrial task of conquering some half ' or more of this Terraqueous Planet for the use of man ; then ' secondly, the grand Constitutional task of sharing, in some 'pacific endurable manner, the fruit of said conquest, and ' showing all people how it might be done. These I will call ' their two tasks, discernible hitherto in World-History : in ' both of these they have made respectable though unequal ' progress. Steamengines, ploughshares, pickaxes ; what is ' meant by conquering this Planet, they partly know. Elec- 'tive franchise, ballot-box, representative assembly; how io ' accomplish sharing of that conquest, they do not so Vvell ' know. Europe knows not ; Europe vehemently asks in these ' days, but receives no answer, no credible answer. For as to ' the partial Delolmish, Benthamee, or other French or Eug- 'lish answers, current in the proper quarters and highly NEW ERAS. 50 ' beneficial and indispensable there, thy disbelief in them as ' final answers, I take it, is complete.' ' Succession of rebellions ? Successive clippings away of ' the Supreme Authority ; class after class rising in revolt to * s.iy, "We will no moi'e be governed so"? That is not tlio ' history of the English Constitution ; not altogether that. ' Eebellion is the means, but it is not the motive cause. The ' motive cause, and true secret of the matter, were always ' this : The necessity there was for rebelling ? ' Rights I will permit thee to call everywhere correctly-artl- ' dilated mights. A dreadful business to articulate correctly ! ' Consider those Barons of Eunuymead ; consider all manner ' of successfully revolting men ! Your Great Charter has to * be experimented on, by battle and debate, for a hundred- ' and-fifty years ; is then found to he correct ; and stands as ' true Magna Charta, — nigh cut in pieces by a tailor, short of ' measures, in later generations. Mights, I say, are a dread- ' f ul business to articulate correctly ! Yet articulated they * have to be ; the time comes for it, the need comes for it, and ' with enormous difficulty and experimenting it is got done. ' Call it not succession of rebellions ; call it rather succession ' of expansions, of enlightenments, gift of articulate utterance ' descending ever lower. Class after class acquires faculty of ' utterance, — Necessity teaching and compelling ; as the dumb ' youth seeing the knife at his father's throat, suddenly ac- ' quired speech ! Consider too how class after class not only ' acquires faculty of articulating wliat its might is, but like- ' wise grows in might, acquires might or loses might ; so that ' always, after a space, there is not only new gift of articulat- . ' ing, but there is something new to articulate. Constitu- ' tional epochs will never cease among men.' ' And so now, the Barons all settled and satisfied, a new • class hitherto silent had begun to speak ; the Middle Class, 60 vnABTIBM. ' namely. In the time of James First, not only Knights of the ' Shire but Parliamentary Burgesses assemble, to assert, to ' complain and propose ; a real House of Commons has come ' decisively into play, — much to the astonishment of James ' First. We call it a growth of mights, if also of necessities ; ' a growth of power to articulate mights, and make rights of ' them. ' In those jDast silent centuries, among those silent classes, ' much had been going on. Not only had red-deer in the New ' and other Forests been got preserved and shot ; and treach- ' eries of Simon de Montfoi't, wars of Bed and White Eoses, ' Battles of Crecy, Battles of Bosworth and many other battles ' been got transacted and adjusted ; but England wholly, not • without sore toil and aching bones to the millions of sires ' and the millions of sons these eighteen generations, had been ' got drained and tilled, covered with yellow harvests, beauti- ' ful and rich possessions ; the mud wooden Caesters and ' Chesters had become steepled tile-roofed compact Towns. ' Sheffield had taken to the manufacture of Sheffield whittles ; ' Worstead could from wool spin yarn, and knit or weave the ' same into stockings or breeches for men. England had ' property valuable to the auctioneer ; but the accumulated ' manufacturing, commercial, economic i'JciU which lay impal- ' pably warehoused in English hands and heads, what auction- .' eer could estimate ! ' Hardly an Englishman to be met with but could do some- ' thing ; some cunninger thing than break his fellow-creature's ' head with battle-axes. The seven incorporated trades, with ' their million guild-brethren, with their hammers, their shut- ' ties and tools, what an army ; — fit to conquer that land of ' England, as we say, and to hold it conquered ! Nay, strangest ' of all, the English people had acquired the faculty and habit ' of thinking, — even of believing ; individual conscience had ' unfolded itself among them ; Conscience, and Intelligence its ' handmaid. Ideas of innumerable kinds were circulating ' among these men : witness one Shakspeare, a woolcomber, ' poacher, or whatever else at Stratford in Warwickshire, who ' happened to write books ! The finest human figure, as I ap- NEW ERAS. 61 prehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our widely diffused Teutonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt or Sar- mat, I find no human soul so beautiful, these fifteen hundred known years ; — our supreme modern European man. Him Eugland had contrived to realize ; were there not ideas? ' Ideas poetic and also Puritanic, — that had to seek utter- ance in the notablest way ! England had got her Shakspeare ; but was now about to get her Milton and Oliver Cromwell. This too we will call a new expansion, hard as it might be to articulate and adjust ; this, that a man could actually have a Conscience for his own behoof, and not for his Priest's only ; that his Priest, be who he might, would henceforth have to take that fact along with him. One of the hardest things to adjust ! It is not adjusted down to this hour. It lasts onwards to the time they call " Glorious Revolution " before so much as a reasonable truce can be made, and the war proceed by logic mainly. And still it is war, and no peace, unfess we call waste vacancy peace. But it needed to be adjusted, as the others had done, as still others will do. Nobility at Runnymead cannot endure foul play grown palpable ; no more can Gentry in Long Parliament ; no more can Commonalty in Parliament they name Reformed. Prynne's bloody ears were as a testimony and question to all England : "Englishmen, is this fair?" England, no longer continent of herself, answered, bellowing as with the voice of lions : " No, it is not fair ! " ' ' But now on the Industrial side, while this great Constitu- ' tional controversy, and revolt of the Middle Class had not ' ended, had yet but begun, what a shoot was that that Eng- ' land, carelessly, in quest of other objects, struck out across ' the Ocean, into the waste land which it named Neio England ! ' Hail to thee, poor little ship Mayflower, of Delft-Haven ; ' poor common-looking ship, hired by common charter party ' for coined dollars ; caulked with mere oakum and tar ; — pro- ' visioned with vulgarest biscuit and bacon ; — yet what ship 62 CHARTISM. * Argo, or miraculous epic ship built by the Sea-gods, was ' other than a foolish bumbarge in comparison ! Golden ' fleeces or the like these sailed for, with or without effect ; ' thou little Mayflower hadst in thee a veritable Pi-omethean '■ spark ; the life-spark of the largest Nation on our Earth, — so ' we may already name the Transatlantic Saxon Nation. Tiiey ' went seeking leave to hear sermon in their own method, theso ' Mayflower Puritans ; a most honest indispensable search : ' and yet, like Saul the son of Kish, seeking a small thing, they 'found this unexpected great thing! Honour to the bravo ' and true ; they verily, we say, carry fire from Heaven, and * have a power which themselves dream not of. Let all men * honour Puritanism, since God has so honoured it. Islam ' itself, with its wild heartfelt '' Allah akhar, God is great," was ' it not honoui'ed ? There is but one thing Avithout honour ; ' smitten with eternal barrenness and inability to do or be : ' Insincerity, Unbelief. He who believes no thing, who be- ' lieves only the shows of things, is not in relation with Nature ' and Fact at all. Nature denies him ; orders him at his earli- ' est convenience to disappear. Let him disappear from her ' domains, — into those of Chaos, Hypothesis and Simulacrum, ' or wherever else his parish may be.' ' As to the third Constitutional controversy, tha.t of the * Working Classes, which now debates itself everywhere these ' fifty years, in France specifically since 1789, in England too ' since 1831, it is doubtless the hardest of all to get articu- ' lated ; finis of peace, or even reasonable truce on this, is a * thing I have little prospect of for several generations. Dark, ' wild-weltering, dreary, boundless ; nothing heard on it jet ' but ballot-boxes, Parliamentary arguing ; not to speak of ' much far worse arguing, by steel and lead, from Valmy to ' Waterloo, to Peterloo ! ' ' And yet of Kepresentative Assemblies may not this good ' be said : That contending parties in a country do thereby ' ascertain one another's strength? They fight there, since NEW EBA8. 63 ' fight they must, by petition, Parliamentary eloquence, not ' by sword, bayonet and bursts of military cannon. Why do ' men fight at all, if it be not that they are yet wuacquaiuted ' with one another's strength, and must fight and ascertain ' it ? Knowing that thou art stronger than I, that thou canst ' compel me, I will submit to thee : unless I chance to pre- ' fer extermination, and sHghtly circuitous suicide, there is no ' other course for me. That in England, by public meetings, ' by petitions, by elections, leading-articles, and other jang- ' ling hubbub and tongue-fence which perpetually goes on ' everywhere in that country, people ascertain one another's * strength, and the most obdurate House " of Lords has to ' yield and give in before it come to cannonading and guil- ' lotinement ; this is a saving characteristic of England. Nay, ' at bottom, is not this the celebrated English Constitution 'itself? This ttnspoken Constitution, whereof Privilege of ' ParHament, Money-Bill, Mutiny-Bill, and all that could be ' spoken and enacted hitherto, is not the essence and body, ' but only the shape and skin ? Such Constitution is, in our ' times, verily invaluable.' ' Long storm}'- spring-time, wet contentious April, winter ' chilUng the lap of very May ; but at length the season of ' summer does come. So long the tree stood naked ; angry ' wiry naked boughs moaning and creaking in the wind : you ' would say. Cut it down, why cumbereth it the ground ? ' Not so ; we must wait ; all things will have their time. — Of ' the man Shakspeare, and his Elizabethan Era, with its ' Sydneys, Ealeighs, Bacons, what could we say ? — That it was ' a spiritual flower-time. Suddenly, as with the breath of ' June, your rude naked tree is touched ; bursts into leaves ' and flowers, f^uch leaves and flowers. The past long ages of ' nakedness, and wintry fermentation and elaboration, have ' done their part, though seeming to do nothing. The past ' silence has got a voice, all the more significant the longer it ' had continued silent. In trees, men, institutions, creeds. 64 CHARTISM. ' Kations, in all things extant and growing m tins universe, ' we may note such vicissitudes, and budding-times. More- ' over there are spiritual budding-times ; and then also there ' are physical appointed to nations. ' Thus in the middle of that poor calumniated Eighteenth ' Century, see once more ! Long winter again past, the dead- ' seeming tree proves to be living, to have been always living, ' after motionless times, every bough shoots forth on the sud- ' den, very strangely : — it now turns out that this favoured ' England was not only to have had her Shakspeares, Bacons, ' Sydneys, but to have her Watts, Arkwrights, Brindleys ! We ' will honour greatness in all kinds. The Prospero evoked ' the singing of Ariel, and took captive the world with those 'melodies: the same Prospero can send his Fire-demons ' panting across all oceans ; shooting with the speed of me- ' teors, on cunning highways, from end to end of kingdoms ; ' and make Iron his missionary, preaching Us evangel to the ' brute Primeval Powers, which listen and obe}^ : neither is ' this small. Manchester, with its cotton-fuz, its smoke and ' dust, its tumult and contentious squalor, is hideous to thee ? ' Think not so : a precious substance, beautiful as magic ' dreams, and yet no dream but a reality, lies hidden in that ' noisome wi'appage ; — a wrappage struggling indeed (look at ' Chartisms and such like) to cast itself off, and leave the * beauty free and visible there ! Hast thou heard, with sound ' ears, the awakening of a Manchester, on Monday morning, at ' half past five by the clock ; the rushing off of its thousand ' mills, like the broom of an Atlantic tide, ten thousand times ' ten thousand spools and spindles all set humming there, — it ' is perhaps, if thou knew it well, sublime as a Niagara, or ' more so. Cotton-spinning is the clothing of the naked in 'its result; the triumph of man over matter in its means. ' Soot and despair are not the essence of it ; they are divisible 'from it, — at this hour, are they not crying fiercely to be ' divided ? The great Goethe, looking at cotton Switzerland, ' declared it, I am told, to be of all things that he had seen in ' this world the most poetical. Whereat friend Kanzler von * Miiller, in search of the palpable picturesque, could not but J^UW ERAS. 65 'stare wide-eyed. Nevertheless our World-Poet knew well ' what he was saying.' 'Eichard Arkwright, it would seem, was not a beautiful ' man ; no romance-hero with haughty eyes, Apollo-lip, and ' gestiu-e like the herald Mercury ; a plain almost gross, bag- ' cheeked, potbellied Lancashire man, with an air of painful 'reflection, yet also of copious free digestion; — a man sta- ' tioned by the community to shave certain dusty beards, in the ' Northern parts of England, at a half-penny each. To such ' end, we say, by forethought, oversight, accident and arrange- 'ment, had Eichard Arkwright been, by the community of ' England and his own consent, set apart. Nevertheless, in ' strapping of razors, in lathering of dusty beards, and the ' contradictions and confusions attendant thereon, the man * had notions in that rough head of his ; spindles, shuttles, ' wheels and contrivances plying ideally within the same ; ' rather hopeless-looking ; which, however, he did at last bring * to bear. Not without difficulty. His townsfolk rose in mob ' round him, for threatening to shorten labour, to shorten ' wages ; so that he had to fly, with broken washpots, scat- ' tered household, and seek refuge elsewhere. Nay his wife * too, as I learn, rebelled ; burnt his wooden model of his ' spinning wheel ; resolute that he should stick to his razors ' rather : for which, however, he decisively, as thou wilt rejoice ' to understand, packed her out of doors. O reader, what a ' Historical Phenomenon is that bag-cheeked, potbellied, much ' enduring, much-inventing man and barber ? French Eevo- ' lutions were a-brewing : to resist the same in any measure, ' imperial Kaisers were impotent without the cotton and cloth ' of England : and it was this man that had to give England ' the power of cotton.' ' Neither had Watt of the Steamengine a heroic origin, any ' kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this ' world were shooting their partridges ; noisily, in Parliament ' or elsewhere, solving the question, Head or tail ? while this ' man, with blackened fingers, with grim brow, was searching ' out, in his workshop, the Fire-secret ; or, having found it, ' was painfully wending to and fro in quest of a " monied 5 66 CHARTISM. ' man " as indispensable man-midwife of tlie same. Eeader, ' thou slialt admire what is admirable, not what is dressed in ' admirable. . Thou shalt learn to know the British lion even ' when he is not throne-supporter, and also the British jack- ' ass in lion's skin even when he is. Ah, couldst thou always, ' what a world were it ! But has the Berlin Royal Academy ' or any Engiish Usefiol-Knowledge Society discovered, for in- ' stance, who it was that first scratched earth with a stick ; and ' threw corns, the biggest he could find, into it ; seedgrains of ' a certain grass, which he named lohite or loheat ? Again, what ' is the whole Tees- water and other breeding world to him who ' stole home from the forests the first bison-calf, and bred it ' up to be a tame bison, a milk-cow ? No machine of all they ' showed me in Birmingham can be put in comparison for in- ' genuity with that figure of the wedge named knife, of the ■wedges named ^axo, of the lever named hammer: — nay is it ' not with the hammer-knife, named sivord, that m.en fight, and ' maintain any semblance of constituted authority that yet ' survives among us ? The steamengine I call fire-demon and ' great ; but it is nothing to the invention of Jire. Prome- ' theus, Tubal-cain, Triptolemus ! Are not our greatest men ' as good as lost ? The men that walk daily among us, cloth- ' ing us, warming us, feeding us, walk shrouded in darkness, ' mere mythic men. ' It is said, ideas produce revolutions : and truly so they do ; ' not spiritual ideas only, but even mechanical. In this clang- 'ing clashing universal Sword-dance which the European ' world now dances for the last half-century, Voltaire is but ' one choragus, where Eichard Arkwright is another. Let it 'dance itself out. When Arkwright shall have become ' mythic like Arachne, we shall spin in peaceable profit by ' him ; and the Sword-dance, with all its sorrowful shufflings, 'Waterloo waltzes, Moscow gallopades, how forgotten will 'that be !' ' On the whole, were not all these things most unexpected, ' unforeseen ? As indeed what thing is foreseen ; especially 'what man, the parent of things ! Eobert Olive in that same NEW ERAS. 67 'time went out, with a developed gift of penmanship, as ' writer or superior book-keeper to a Trading Factory estab- ' hshed in the distant East. With gift of penmanship devel- ' oped ; with other gifts not yet developed, which the calls of ' the case did by and by develoj)e. Not fit for book-keeping 'alone, the man was found fit for conquering Nawaubs, found- ' ing kingdoms, Indian Empires ! In a questionable manner, ' Indian Empire from the other hemisphere took up its abode ' in Leadenhall Street, in the City of London. ' Accidental all these things and persons look, unexpected 'every one of them to man. Yet inevitable every one of ' them ; foreseen, not unexpected, by Suj)reme Power ; pre- ' pared, appointed from afar. Advancing always through all 'centuries, in the middle of the eighteenth they arrived. ' The Saxon kindred burst forth into cotton-spinning, cloth- ' cropping, iron-forging, steam-engining, railwaying, commerc- ' ing and careering towards all the winds of Heaven, — in this ' inexplicable noisy manner ; the noise of which, in Power- ' mills, in progress-of-the-species Magazines, still deafens us ' somewhat. Most noisy, sudden ! The Staffordshire coal- ' stratum and coal-strata, lay side by side with iron-strata, ' quiet since the creation of the world ! Water flowed in ' Lancashire and Lanarkshire ; bituminous fire lay bedded in ' rocks there too, — over which how many fighting Stanleys, ' black Douglases, and other the like contentious persons, had ' fought out their bickerings and broils, not without result, 'we will hope ! But God said. Let the iron missionaries be ; 'and they were. Coal and iron, so long close unregardful ' neighbours, are wedded together ; Birmingham and Wol- ' verhampton, and the hundred Stygian forges, with their fire- ' throats and never-resting sledge-hammers, rose into day. ' Wet Mancunium stretched out her hand towards Carolina ' and the torrid zone, and plucked cotton there : who could ' forbid her, her that had the skill to weave it ? Fish fled ' therevTpon from the Mersey River, vexed with innumerable ' keels. England, I say, dug out her bitumen-tire, and bade ' it work : towns rose, and steeple-chimneys ; — Chartisms 'also, and Parliaments they name Reformed.' 68 CHARTISM. Sucli, figuratively given, are some prominent points, cliief mountain-summits, of our English, history past and present, according to the Author of this strange untranslated Work, whom we think we recognise to be an old acquaintance. CHAPTER IX. PAELIAMENTAEY EADICALISM. To US looking at these matters somewhat in the same light, Reform-Bills, French Revolutions, Louis-Philippes, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days, and what not, are no longer inexpli- cable. Where the great mass of men is tolei'ably right, all is right ; where they are not right, all is wrong. The speaking classes speak and debate, each for itself ; the great dumb, deep-buried class lies like an Enceladus, who in his pain, if he wiU complain of it, has to produce earthquakes ! Everywhere, in these countries, in these times, the central fact worthy of all consideration forces itself on us in this shape : the claim of the Free Working man to be raised to a level, we may say, with the Working Slave, his anger and cureless discontent till that be done. Food, shelter, due guidance, in return for his labour : candidly interpreted, Chartism and all such isms mean that ; and the madder they are, do they not the more emphatically mean, "See what guidance you have given us ! What delirium we are brought to talk and project, guided by nobody ! " Laissez-faire on the part of the Governing Classes, we repeat again and again, will, with whatever difficulty, have to cease ; pacific mutual division of the spoil, and a world well let alone, will no longer suffice. A Do-nothing G-uid- ance ; and it is a Do-something World ! Would to God our Dacal Duces would become leaders indeed ; our Aristocracies and Priesthoods discover in some suitable degree what the world expected of them, what the world could no longer do without getting of them ! Nameless unmeasured confusions, misery to themselves and us, might so be spared. But that too will be as God has appointed. If they learn, it will be well and happy : if not they, then others instead of them will PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM. 09 and must, and once more, though after a long sad circuit, it will be Avell and happy. Neither is the history of Chartism mysterious in these times ; especially if that of Radicalism be looked at. All along for the last five-and-twenty years, it was curious to note how the internal discontent of England struggled to find vent for itself through any orifice : the poor patient all sick from centre to surface, comj)lains now of this member, now of that ; — corn-laws, currency -laws, free-trade, protection, want of free-trade : the poor patient tossing from side to side, seeking a sound side to lie on, finds none. This Doctor says, it is the liver ; that other, it is the lungs, the head, the heart, defective transpiration in the skin. A thorough-going Doctor of eminence said, it was rotten boroughs ; the Avant of ex- tended suffrage to destroy rotten boroughs. From of old the English patient himself had a continually recurring notion that this was it. The English people are used to suf- frage ; it is their panacea for all that goes wrong with them ; they have a fixed- idea of suffrage. Singular enough ; one's right to vote for a Member of Parliament, to send one's ' twenty thousandth part of a master of tongue-fence to National Palaver,' — the Doctors asserted that this was Free- dom, this and no other. It seemed credible to many men, of high degree and of low. The persuasion of remedy grew, the evil was pressing ; Swing's ricks were on fire. Some nine years ago, a State-surgeon rose, and in peculiar circumstances said : Let there be extension of the suffrage ; let the great Doctor's nostrum, the patient's old passionate prayer be fulfiUed ! Parliamentary Radicalism, while it gave articulate utterance to the discontent of the English people, could not by its worst enemy be said to be without a function. If it is in the natural order of things that there must be discontent, no less so is it that such discontent should have an outlet, a Parlia- mentary voice. Here the matter is debated of, demonstrated, contradicted, qualified, reduced to feasibility ; — can at least solace itself with hope, and die gently, convicted of 2 these, well presided over, may. Intellect, insight, is the discern- ment of order in disorder ; it is the discovery of the will of Nature, of God's will ; the beginning of the capability to walk according to that. With perfect intellect, were such possible without perfect morality, the world would be perfect ; its efforts unerringly correct, its results continually successful, its condition faultless. Intellect is like light ; the Chaos be- comes a World under it : fiat lux. These Twenty-four million intellects are but common intellects ; but they are intellects ; in earnest about the matter, instructed each about his own province of it ; labouring each perpetually, with what partial light can be attained, to bring such province into rationality. From the partial determinations and their conflict, springs the universal. Precisely what quantity of intellect was in the Twenty-four millions will be exhibited by the result they IMPOSSIBLE. T7 arrive at ; that quantity and no more. According as there was intellect or no intellect in the individuals, will the general conclusion they make out embody itself as a world-healing Truth and Wisdom, or as a baseless fateful Hallucination, a Chimsera breathing not fabulous fire ! Dissenters call for one scheme of Education, the Church objects ; this party objects, and that ; there is endless objec- tion, by him and by her and by it : a subject encumbered with difficulties on every side ? Pity that difficulties exist ; that Eeligion, of all things, should occasion difficulties. We do not extenuate them : in their reality they are considerable ; in their ajopearance and pretension, they are insuperable, heart-appalling to all Secretaries of the Home Department. For, in very truth, how can Eeligion be divorced from Educa- tion ? An irreverent knowledge is no knowledge ; may be a development of the logical or other handicraft faculty inward or outward ; but is no culture of the soul of a man. A knowledge that ends in barren self-worship, comparative in- difference or contempt for all God's Universe except one insig- nificant item thereof, what is it V Handicraft development, and even shallow as handicraft. Nevertheless is handicraft itself, and the habit of the merest logic, nothing ? It is al- ready something ; it is the indispensable beginning of every thing ! Wise men know it to be an indispensable something ; not yet much ; and would so gladly superadd to it the ele- ment whereby it may become all. Wise men would not quarrel in attempting this ; they would lovingly co-operate in attempting it. ' And now how teach religion ? ' so asks the indignant Ultra- radical, cited above ; an Ultra-radical seemingly not of the Benthamee species, with whom, though his dialect is far dif- ferent, there are sound churchmen, we hope, who have some fellow-feeling : ' How teach religion ? By inlying with litur- ' gies, catechisms, credos ; droning thirty-nine or other arti- ' cles incessantly into the infant ear ? Friends ! Li that case, ' why not apply to Birmingham, and have Machines made, ' and set up at all street-corners, in highways and byways, to ' repeat and vociferate the same, not ceasing night or day ? 7s CHARTISM. ' The genius of Birmingiiam is adequate to that. Albertua ' Magnus had a leather man that could articulate ; not to speak ' of Martinus Scriblerus's Niirnberg man that could reason as ' well as we know who ! Depend upon it, Birmingham can ' make machines to repeat liturgies and articles ; to do what- ' soever feat is mechanical. And what were all schoolmasters, ' nay all priests and churches compared with this Birmingham ' Iron Church ! Votes of two millions in aid of the church ' were then something. You order, at so many pounds a-head, ' so many thousand iron parsons as your grant covers ; and * fix them by satisfactory masonry in all quarters Avheresoever ' wanted, to preach there independent of the world. In loud ' thoroughfares, still more in unawakened districts, troubled ' with argumentative infideUty, you make the windpipes wider, ' strengthen the main steam-cylinder ; your parson preaches, ' to the due pitch, while you give him coal ; and fears no man ' or thing. Here loere a " Church-extension ; " to which I, ' with my last penny, did I beHeve in it, could subscribe. ' Ye blind leaders of the blind ! Are we Calmucks, that pray ' by turning of a rotatory calebash with written prayers in it ? ' Is Mammon and machinery the means of converting human ' souls, as of spinning cotton ? Is God, as Jean Paul predicted ' it would be, become verily a Force ; the M\hev too a Gas ! ' Alas, that Atheism should have got the length of putting on 'priests' vestments, and penetrating into the sanctuary itself! ' Can dronings of articles, repetitions of liturgies, and all the ' cash and contrivance of Birmingham and the Bank of Eng- ' land united bring ethereal fire into a human soul, quicken it 'out of earthly darkness into heavenly wisdom? Soul is 'kindled only by soul. To "teach" religion, the first thing ' needful, and also the last and the only thing, is finding of a ' man who has religion. All else foUbws from this, church- ' building, church-extension, whatever else is Jieedful follows ; ' without this nothing will follow.' From which we, for our part, conclude that the method of teaching religion to the English people is still far behindhand ; that the wise and pious may well ask themselves in silence wistfully, "How is that last priceless element, by which educa- IMPOSSIBLE. 79 tion becomes perfect, to be superadded ? " and the unwise who think themselves pious, answering aloud, " By this method, By that method," long argue of it to small purpose. But now, in the mean time, could not by some fit official person, some fit announcement be made, in words well-weighed, in plan well-schemed, adequately representing the facts of the thing, that after thirteen centuries of waiting, he the official person, and England with him, was minded now to have the mystery of the Alphabetic Letters imparted to all human souls in this realm? Teacliing of religion was a thing he could not undertake to settle this day ; it would be work for a day after this ; the work of this day was teaching of the al- phabet to all people. The miraculous art of reading and writing, such seemed to him the needful preliminary of all teach- ing, the first corner-stone of what foundation soever could be laid for what edifice soever, in the teaching kind. Let pious Churchism make haste, let pious Dissenterism make haste, let all pious preachers and missionaries make haste, bestir themselves according to their zeal and skill : he the offi- cial person stood up for the Alphabet ; and was even im- patient for it, having waited thirteen centuries now. He in- sisted, and would take no denial, postponement, promise, excuse, or subterfuge, That all English persons should be taught to read. He appealed to all rational Englishmen, of all creeds, classes and colours, Whether tins was not a fair demand ; nay whether it was not an indispensable one in these days, Swing and Chartism having risen ? For a choice of inoffensive Hornbooks, and Schoolmasters able to teach reading, he trusted the mere secular sagacity of a National Collective Wisdom, in proper committee, might be found suf- ficient. He purposed to appoint such Schoolmasters, to ven- ture on the choice of such Hornbooks ; to send a School- master and Hornbook into every township, parish and hamlet of England ; so that, in ten years hence, an Enghshman who could not read might be acknowledged as the monster, which he really is ! This ofiicial person's plan we do not give. The thing lies there, with the facts of it, and with the appearances or sham- so CHAETISM. facts of it ; a plan adequately representing the facts of the thing could by human energy be struck out, does lie there for discovery and striking out. It is his, the official person's duty, not ours, to mature a plan. We can believe that Church- ism and Dissenterism would clamour aloud ; but yet that in the mere secular Wisdom of Parliament a perspicacity equal to the choice of Hornbooks might, in very deed, be found to reside. England we believe would, if consulted, resolve to that effect. Alas, grants of a half-day's revenue once in the thirteen centuries for such an object, do not call out the voice of England, only the superficial clamour of England ! Horn- books unexceptionable to the candid portion of England, we will believe, might be selected. Nay, we can conceive that Schoolmasters fit to teach reading might, by a board of ra- tional men, whether from Oxford or Hoxton, or from both or neither of these places, be pitched upon. We can conceive even, as in Prussia, that a penalty, civil disabilities, that pen- alties and disabilities till they were found effectual, might be by law inflicted on every parent who did not teach his children to read, on every man who had not been taught to read. We can conceive in fine, such is the vigour of our imagination, there might be found in England, at a dead-lift, strength enough to perform this miracle, and produce it henceforth as a miracle done : the teaching of England to read ! Harder things, we do know, have been performed by nations before now, not abler-looking than England. Ah me ! if, by some beneficent chance, there should be an official man found in England who could and would, with deliberate courage, after ripe counsel, with candid insight, with patience, practical sense, knowing realities to be real, knowing clamours to be clamorous and to seem real, propose this thing, and the in- numerable things springing from it, — wo to any Churchism or any Dissenterism that cast itself athwart the path of that man ! Avaunt ye gainsayers ! is darkness, and ignorance of the Alphabet necessary for you ? Eeconcile yourselves to the Al- phabet, or depart elsewhither ! — Would not all that has gen- uineness in England gradually rally round such a man ; all that has strength in England ?- For realities alone have IMPOSSIBLE. 81 strength ; wind-bags are wind ; cant is cant, leave it alone there. Nor are all clamours momentous : among living creatures, we find, the loudest is the longest-eared ; among life- less things the loudest is the drum, the emptiest. Alas, that official persons, and all of us, had but eyes to see what was real, what was merely chimerical, and thought or called itself real ! How many dread minatory Castle-spectres should we leave there, with their admonishing right-hand and ghastly- burning saucer-eyes, to do simply whatsoever they might find themselves able to do ! Alas, that we were but real ourselves ; we should then have surer vision for the real. Castle-spectres, in their utmost terror, are but poor mimicries of that real and most real terror which lies in the Life of every Man : that, thou coward, is the thing to be afraid of, if thou wilt live in fear. It is but the scratch of a bare bodkin ; it is but the flight of a fcAV days of time ; and even thou, poor palpitating featherbrain, wilt find how real it is. Eternity : hast thou heard of that ? Is that a fact, or is it no fact ? Are Bucking- ham House and St. Stephens in that, or not in that ? But now we have to speak of the second great thing : Emi- gration. It was said above, aU new epochs, so convulsed and tumultuous to look upon, are 'expansions,' increase of faculty not yet organised. It is eminently true of the confusions of this time of ours. Disorganic Manchester afflicts us with its Chartisms ; yet is not spinning of clothes for the naked in- trinsically a most blessed thing ? Manchester once organic will bless and not afflict. The confusions, if we would understand them, are at bottom mere increase which we know not yet how to manage ; ' new wealth which the old coffers will not hold.' How true is this, above all, of the strange phenome- non called ' over- population ! ' Over-population is the grand anomaly, which is bringing all other anomalies to a crisis. Now once more, as at the end of the Eoman Empire, a most confused epoch and yet one of the greatest, the Teutonic Coun- tries find themselves too full. On a certain western rim of our small Europe, there are more men than Avere expected. Heaped up against the western shore there, and for a couple 82 CHARTISM. of hundred miles inward, the ' tide of population ' sweUs too high, and confuses itself somewhat ! Over -population ? And yet, if this small western rim of Europe is overpeopled, does not everywhere else a whole vacant Earth, as it were, call to us. Come and till me, come and I'eap me ! Can it be an evil that in an Earth such as ours there should be new Men? Considered as mercantile commodities, as working machines, is there in Birmingham or out of it a machine of such value ? ' Good Heavens ! a white European Man, standing on his two ' legs, with his two five-fingered Hands at his shackle-bones, ' and miraculous Head on his shoulders, is wortli something ' considerable, one would say ! ' The stupid black African man brings money in the market ; the much stupider four- footed horse brings money : — it is we that have not yet learned the art of managing our white European man ! The controversies on Malthus and the 'Poj)ulation Prin- ciple,' 'Preventive Check ' and so forth, with which the public ear has been deafened for a long while, are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventive check and the denial of the preventive check. Anti-Malthusians quoting their Bible against palpable facts, are not a pleasant spectacle. On the other hand, how often have we read in Malthusian benefactors of the species : ' The working people have their condition in ' their own hands : let them diminish the supply of labourers, 'and of course the demand and the remuneration will increase ! ' Yes, let them diminish the supply : but who are they ? They are twenty-four millions of human individuals, scattered over a hundred and eighteen thousand square miles of space and more ; weaving, delving, hammering, joinering ; each unknown to his neighbour ; each distinct within his own skin. They are not a kind of character that can take a resolution, and act on it, very readily. Smart Sally in our alley proves ail-too fascinating to brisk Tom in yours : can Tom be called on to make pause, and calculate the demand for labour in the Brit- ish Empire first ? Nay, if Tom did renounce his highest bless- edness of life, and struggle and conquer like a Saint Francis of Assisi, what would it profit him or us ? Seven millions of IMPOSSIBLE. 83 the finest peasantry do not renounce, but proceed all the more briskly ; and with blue-visaged Hibernians instead of fair Saxon Tomsons, and Sallysous, the latter end of that country is worse than the beginning. O wonderful Malthusian proph- ets ! Millenniums are undoubtedly coming, must come one way or the other : but will it be, think you, by twenty mil- lions of working people simultaneously striking work in that department ; passing, in universal trades-union, a resolution not to beget any more till the labour-market becomes satisfac- tory ? By Day and Night ! they were indeed irresistibly so ; not to be compelled by law or war ; might make their own terms with the richer classes, and defy the world ! A shade more rational is that of those other benefactors of the species, who counsel that in each parish, in some central locality, instead of the Parish Clergyman, there might be es- tablished some Parish Exterminator ; or say a Reservoir of Arsenic, kept up at the pubhc expense, fi-ee to all j)arishioners ; for ivhich Church the rates probably would not be grudged. — Ah, it is bitter jesting on such a subject'. One's heart is sick to look at the dreary chaos, and valley of Jehosaphat, scattered with the limbs and souls of one's fellow-men ; and no divine voice, only creaking of hungry vultures, inarticulate bodeful ravens, horn-eyed parrots that do articulate, proclaiming. Let these bones live ! — Dante's Divina Commedia is called the mournfullest of books : transcendant mistemper of the no- blest soul ; utterance of a boundless, godlike, unspeakable, implacable sorrow and protest against the world. But in Holywell Street, not long ago, we bought, for three-jDence, a book still mournfuller : the Pamphlet of one " Marcus," whom his poor Chartist editor and republisher calls the " Demon Author." This Marcus Pamphlet was the book alluded to by Stephens the Preacher Chartist, in one of his harangues : it proves to be no fable that such a book existed ; here it hes, ' Printed by John Hill, Black-horse Court, Fleet Street, and ' now reprinted for the instruction of the labourer, by Will- 'iam Dugdale, Holywell Street, Strand,' the exasperated Chart- ist editor who sells it yon for three-pence. We have read Mai-cus ; but his sorrow is -iiot divine. We hoped he would 84 CHARTISM. turn out to have been in sport : ah no, it is grim earnest with him : grim as very death. Marcus is not a demon author at all : he is a benefactor of the species in his own kind ; has looked intensely on the world's woes, from a Benthamee Mal- thusian watch-tower, under a Heaven dead as iron ; and does now with much longwindedness, in a drawhng, snuffling, cir- cuitous, extremely dull, yet at bottom handfast and positive manner, recommend that all children of working people, after the third, be disposed of by 'painless extinction.' Charcoal-va- pour and other methods exist. The mothers would consent, might be made to consent. Three children might be left liv- ing ; or perhaps, for Marcus's calculations are not yet perfect, two and a half. There might be ' beautiful cemeteries with colonnades and flower-pots,' in which the patriot infanticide matrons might delight to take their evening walk of contem- plation ; and reflect what patriotesses they were, what a cheer- ful flowery world it was. Such is the scheme of Marcus ; this is what he, for his share, could devise to heal the world's woes, A benefactor of the species, clearly recognisable as such ; the saddest scientific mortal we have ever in this world fallen in with ; sadder even than poetic Dante. His is a wogod-like sor- row ; sadder than the godlike. The Chartist editor, dull as he, calls him demon author, and a man set on by the Poor- Law Commissioners. What a black, godless, waste-struggling world, in this once merry England of ours, do such pamphlets and such editors betoken ! Laissez-faire and Malthus, Malthus and Laissez-faire : ought not these two at length to part com- pany ? Might we not hope that both of them had as good as de- livered their message now, and were about to go their ways ? For all this of the 'painless extinction,' and the rest, is in a world where Canadian Forests stand unfelled, boundless Plains and Prairies unbroken with the plough ; on the west and on the east, green desert spaces never yet made white Avith corn ; and to the overcrowded little western nook of Europe, our Terresti-ial Planet, nine-tenths of it yet vacant or tenanted by nomades, is still crjdng, Come and till me, come and reap me ! And in an Et] gland with wealth, and means for moving, such as no nation ever before had. With ships ; IMPOSSIBLE. 85 with war-ships rotting idle, which, but bidden move and not rot, might bridge all oceans. With trained men, educated to pen and practice, to administer and act ; briefless Barris- ters, chargeless Clergy, taskless Scholars, languishing in all court-houses, hiding in obscure garrets, besieging all ante- chambers, in passionate want of simply one thing, Work ; — with as many Half-pay Officers of both Services, wearing themselves down in wretched tedium, as might lead an Em- igrant host larger than Xerxes' was ! Laissez-faire and Mal- thus positively must part company. Is it not as if this swell- ing, simmering, never-resting Europe of ours stood, once more, on the verge of an expansion without parallel : strug- gling, struggling like a mighty tree again about to burst in the embrace of summer, and shoot forth broad frondent boughs which would fill the whole earth ? A disease but the noblest of all, — as of her who is in pain and sore travail, but travails that she may be a mother, and say. Behold, there is a new Man born ! ' True thou Gold-Hofrath,' exclaims an eloquent satirical German of our acquaintance, in that strange Book of his, * ' True thou Gold-Hofrath : too crowded indeed ! Meanwhile ' what portion of this inconsiderable Terraqueous Globe have ' ye actually tilled and delved, till it will grow no more ? ' How thick stands your population in the Pampas and Savan- ' nas of America : round ancient Carthage, and in the interior ' of Africa ; on both slopes of the Altaic chain, in the central ' Platform of Asia ; in Spain, Greece, Tm-key, Crim Tartary, ' the Curragh of Kildare ? One man, in one year, as I have ' understood it, if you lend him earth, will feed himself and ' nine others. Alas, where now are the Hengsts and Alarics ' of our still glowing, still expanding Europe ; who, when "' their home is grown too narrow, will enlist and, like fire-pil- ' lars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable ' living Valour : equipped, not now with the battle-axe and ' war-chariot, but with the steamengine and ploughshare ? ' Where are they ? — Preserving their Game ! ' * Sartor Resartus, b. iii. c. 4. XjiOSt "to JSl3La.X3Q.^ is that woman who takes no pride in her reputation, who does not care to earn a good name for thrift and cleanliness. If love for oth na did not prompt a wife and mother to keep a tidy house and a bright clean kitchen a regard for her social standing in society ought to teach her to use Saj)olio in all her house-cleaning work. lOo. a cake at all' grocers. ^^m^^^^mmmiiii/W0////MW^^ ^OP infants and Children, *' Castoria is so well ted to children that I recommend it as superior to any prescription known to me. " H. A. AncHER, M.D., 111 So. Oxford St., Brooklyn, N. Y. The CeisTAUR CosirANY, 182 Fulton St., N. T. Send to Centaur Company for Atlas, Almanac and Receipt Booh Castoria cures Colic, Constt pation, Sour Stomach, Diarrhoea, Eructation, Kills Worms, gives sleep, and promotes digestion. Without injurious medication. PEarliN '^jHTJ BEST WASHING COMPOUND EVER INVENTED. No Lady, Married o? Single, Rich or Poor, Housekeeping or Boa>rd» £ng, will be -without it after testing its utility. Sold by all first-class Grocers, but bew^are oi worthless imitations. LO YELL'S LIBRARY ADVERTISER. EECENTLY PUBLISHED: UNDERGROUND RUSSIA: Revolutionary Profiles and Sketches from Life. By STEPNIAK, formerly Editor of " Zemlia i Volia" (Land and Liberty). With a Preface by PETER LAVROPP. Translated from the Italian. 1 vol. 12mo., paper cover, Lovell's Library, No. 173 price 20 cents. "The book is as yet unique in literature; it is a priceless contribution to our knowledge of Ru'ssian thougtit and feeling; as a true and faithful reflection of certain aspects of, perhaps, the most tremendous pohticial movement in history, it seems destined to become a standard work,"— Athbn-eum. An Outline of the History of Ireland, Prom the Earliest Times to the present day. By JUSTIN H. McCARTHY. 1 vol. 12mo., Lovell's Library No. 115, price 10 cents "A timely and exceedingly vigorous and interesting little volume The book is worthy of attentive perusal, and wiJi be all the more inieresung because it involves in its production the warm sympathies, the passionate enthusiasm, and the vivid brilliancy of style which one is glad to welcome from the son of the distinguished journalist and author —Christian World ' All Irishmen who love iteir oountry, and all candid Englishmen, ought to welcome Mr Justin H. McCarthy slitile volume— An Outline of irish History ■ Those who want to know how it has come about that, as John Stuart Mill long ago pointed out, all cries for the remedy of specific Irish grievances are now merged in the dangerous demand for nationality, will do well to read Mr McCarthy s little book. It is eloquently written, and carries us from the earliett legends to the autumn of 1882. The charm of the style and the impetuousnees in the flow of the narrative are refreshing and stimulating, and, as regards his tone impartiality. Mr.McCarthy is far more just than is Mr.Froude. '— Graphi*. "A brightly written and intelligent account of the leading events in Irish annals. . , . ., Mr, McCarthy has performed a difficult task with commendable good spirit and impartiality '— Whitehall Reviett 'To those who enjoy exceptionally brilliant and vigorous ■writing, as well as to those who desire to post themselves up in the Irisb question, we cordially recommend Mr McCarthy s little book.' —Evenins News. ENGLISH MEN OF LETTERS. Edited by JOHN MORLEY. Published in 12mo. vols., paper covers, price 10 cents each. Johnson. By Leslie Stephen. Thackeray By A Trollope, ScoTT, Bv R H Hitton. ^ " Gibbon. By J C. Morisoa. Shelley, By J A. Symonds. HuMB. By Prof Huxley. PR 8. Goldsmith. By William Black. Defoh. By W. Minto Burns. By Principal Shairp fipHNSER. By the Very Rev the Dean of St Paul s BuRKB By John Money BuNTAN By J A. Froude. Pope By Leslie Stephen. Btron By Processor Nichol. CowPER. Bv Goldwin Smith Locke. By Professor Fowler. Wordsworth B v F W H Myers , Milton By Mark Pattison Southey By Professor Dowden. Chaucer. By Prof. A. W Ward, New York: JOHN W. I^OVEIiL COIWPANY. HEART AND SCIENCE. By -V^'IL-KIE COLLINS. 1 Vol., I2mo., cloth, gilt $1.00 1 " " paper ; 50 Also in Lovell's Library, No. 87 20 "Benjulia" is a singularly interesting, and, in a way, fascinating creation. Mr. Collins can deal strongly with, a st"ong situation, but he has done noth'cg more powerful than his sketch of Benjulia's last hours. Mr, Gallllee and Zoe are capital examples of genuine and unforred humor; and the book, as a whole, id thoroughly readable and enthralling from its first page to its last." — Academy. " Mr. Wilkie Collins' latest novel is certainly one of the ablest he has writ- ten. It is quite the equal of ' The Woman in While ' and of ' The Moon- Btone,' consequently it may truthfully be described as a masterpiece in the eculiar line of fiction in which Mr. Collins not only excels but distances every ival in the walk of literature he has marked out for himself. 'Heart and Science ' is in its way a great novel, certainl3- tiJC best we have scon from Mr. Wilkie Collins since ' The Woman in White ' and' Armada'e.' "—Morrdng Post. " We doubt whether the author has ever written a cleverer story. . - . An eloquent and touching tribute to the blessedness and power of a true and 1 oving heart. The book unites in a high degree th^ ai tractions of thrilling nar- rative and clever portraiture of character, of sound wisjom and real humor."' — Congregaiionalist. By OUIDA. 1 vol., 12mo., cloth, gilt • $1.00 1 " " paper 50 Also in Loveir 8 Library, No. 112, 2 parts, each ., .15 "'Wanda' is the story by which Ouida will probably be judged by the literary hi-itorian of the future, for it is di^*tingaished by all her hitrh merits, and not disfigured by any one of her few defects. In poiutof construction this moat recent contribution to the fictional literature of the day is perfect; the disilogues arc both brilliant and stirring, aud the descriptive passages are mas- terpieces. Ouida is seen at her brightest and be-t iu 'Wnnda' the book thrills by its dramatic interest, and delights by its singular freshness and unconven- tional style. There are no more attractive characters in English fiction than Wanda and her peasant husband, and increased fame inust result to the bril- liant novelist frjm this her latest work."- St. Stephen' s Revieiv . " We do not know anything Ouida has done that equals this, her latest novel, in power of delineating character aud describing scenery. Wanda is a fine, high-soiiled character."— CirG, LAHOER TYPE, and more attractive cover than any series in the market. SEE •VT^H^^T IS S-A.IID OE IT : The following extract from a letter recently received shows the appre- ciation in which the Library is held by those who most constantly read it : " Mercantile Librae Y, ) " Baltimore, August 29, 1883. J " Will you i:indly send me two copies of your latest list? I am glad to see that you now issue a volume every day. Your LibrLry we find greatly pi-eferable to the 'Seaside' and ' Franklin Square' Series, and even better than the 12mo. form of the latter, the page being of better shape, the lines better leaded, and the words better spaced. Altogether your series is much more in favor with our subscribers than either of its rivals. S. C. DONALDSON, Assistant Libraman." JOHN W. LOVELL CO., Publishers, 1%I LABOR and CAPITAL 5 A— NEW MONETARY SYSTEM, By EDWARD KELLOGG. Edited by his Daughter, Mary Kellogg Putnak. 1 Vol., 12mo., Handsome Paper Cover, No. Ill of Loyell's Library, 20 Cents. " Labor and Capital " is a remarkable book. It shows how and why Capitalints get bo large a part of the yearly productions of labor, and why the producers get so small a part. The first edition of this worlc was publishtd ia 1848, under toe title of "Labor and Other Capital; or, the rights of each se- cured and the wrongs of both eiadicated." At that time the publics^tion of such a work by a rich and prosperous merchant of New York created consider- able excitement and discussion among political economists. Tlie author was a man of deep percepiion, and, in thettateof the country, he foresaw with clearness all that has tran.'-pi ed in our financial history, during the pa&t thirty years. If the system elaborated by Mr. Kellogg had been fully, instead of partially, adopted by Congress, the various steps which have been taken in the aoplication of his theory would all have b;ien antic pated. Mr. Kellogg be- lieved that the Government of the United States should issue all money or currency that sh^juld be aliowerl to go into circulation. The present United States Treasury Note is a partial exemplification of this plan. The whole work has such an iniporiant bearing upon ihe finaEcial and political state of the country to day that Jie publishers are justifi.ed in issuing it in a cheap form, thus placing it within the reach of all who are interested in the indus- trial problem. ■ ' — A Characteristic Letter From WENDEI.L PHILLIPS, Boston, May 25tk, 1883. Mb. John W. Lovell, Dear Siu:— lam (am I ?) indebted to you for a copy of your reprint of "Labor and Capital," by Kellogg; one of the ablest and most convincing statements of the Financial Problem ever m.ade; and proposing with unansvs'er- able argument, the easiest, if not the only remedy for our troubles and dangers. I am glad that the loving devotion and rare ability of his daughter has made the work so perfect and clear in statement. She deserves well of the students of this question and has their gr&titude. Yours respectfully, Wendell Phillips. For sale by all booksellers and newsdealers, or sent post paid on receiptor 25 cents, by the publiBhers, JOHN W. LOYELL COMPANY, 14 A 16 Vesey Street, Ne^v York. TSie Most Popular Books of the Bay.' Works of "The Duchess, ?j PUBLISHED BY JOHN W. I.OVELL COMPANY, 14 & 16 Vesey St., ITew York. PHYLLIS, 1 Vol., 12 mo., handsome cloh, gilt, $1.00. The sarae in paper, 50 cents. Also, in Lovell's Libraet, No. 78, aO cents. 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Every Piano ought to be judged as to the quality of its tone, its touch, and its work- manship; if any one of these is wanting in excellence, however good the others may be, the instrument will be imperfect. It is the combination of these qualities in the highest degree that constitutes the perfect Piano, and it is thiis combination that has given the " SOHMBR " its honorable position with the trade and the public. BeceiTed First Prize Centennial Exhibition, Fhiladelpliia, 1S76. Received First Prize at Exhibition, Montreal, Canada, 1881 & 1882. SOHMER & CO., Manufacturers, • 149-155 B. 14tli St., New York.