YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

CONTENTS.

BOSTON:
FREEMAN AND BOLI.ES, PRINTERS,
WABHrNGrOtf STREET.

CHAP. I. Condition-of-England Question
II. Statistics ....

PAGE 1
9

III. New Poor-Law

. 16

IV. Finest Peasantry in the World
V. Rights and Mights ....
VT. Laissez-Faire ....

2436
49

VII. Not Laissez-Faire ....
VIII. New Eras 

63
69

IX. Parliamentary Kadicalism
X. Impossible

8996

CHARTISM.

CHAPTER I.
CONDITION-OF-ENGLAND QUESTION.
A feeling very generally exists that the condition and
disposition of the Working Classes is a rather ominous
matter at present ; that something ought to be said,
something ought to be done, in regard to it. And sure
ly, at an epoch of history when the ' National Petition-
carts itself in waggons along tlie streets, and is present
ed ' bound with iron hoops, four men bearing it,' to a
Reformed House of Commons ; and Chartism numbered
by the million and half, taking nothing by its iron-hooped
Petition, breaks out into brickbats, cheap pikes, and
even into sputterings of conflagration, such very general
feeling cannot be considered unnatural ! To us in
dividually this matter appears, and has for many years
appeared, to be the most ominous of all practical matters
whatever ; a matter in regard to which if something be
not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fash- '
ion that will please nobody. The time is verily come
for acting in it ; how much more for consultation about
acting in it, for speech and articulate inquiiy about it !
1

<5 CHARTISM.
We are aware that, according to the newspapers,
ChartiMii is extinct ; that a Beform Ministry has • put
down the chimera of Chartism' in the most felicitous
effectual manner. So say the newspapers ; — and yet,
alas, most readers of newspapers know withal that it
is indeed the ' chimera' of Chartism, not the reality,
which has been put down. The distracted incoherent
embodiment of Chartism, whereby in late months it
took shape and became visible, this has been put
down ; or rather has fallen down and gone asunder by,
gravitation and law of nature : but the living essence
of Chartism has not been put down. Chartism means
I che bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong
\ condition therefore or the wrong disposition, of the
iWorking Classes of England. It is a new name for a
thing which has had many names, which will yet have
many. The matter of Chartism is weighty, deep-
rooted, far-extending; did not begin yesterday; will
by no means end this day or to-morrow. Reform Mi
nistry, constabulary rural police, new levy of soldiers,
grants of money to Birmingham ; all this is well, or is
not well ; all this will put down only the embodiment
or ' chimera' of Chartism. The essence continuing,
new and ever new embodiments, chimeras madder or
less mad, have to continue. The melancholy fact re
mains, that this thing known at present by the name
Chartism does exist ; has existed ; and, cither ' put
down,' into secret treason, with rusty pistols, vitriol-
bottlo and match-box, or openly brandishing pike and
torch (one knows not in which case more fatal-looking),
is like to exist till quite other methods have been tried
with it. What means this bitter discontent of the

CHAP. I. CONDITION-OF-ENGLAND QUESTION.

\

Working Classes ? Whence comes it, whither goes it ?
Above all, at what price, on what terms, will it pro
bably consent to depart from us and die into rest?
These are questions.
To say that it is mad, incendiary, nefarious, is no
answer. To say all this, in never so many dialects, is
saying little. ' Glasgow Thuggery,' ' Glasgow Thugs ; '
it is a witty nickname : the practice of ' Number 60 '
^entering his dark room, to contract for and settle the
price of blood with operative assassins, in a Christian
city, once distinguished by its rigorous Christianism, is
doubtless a fact worthy of all horror ; but what will hor
ror do for it ? What will execration ; nay at bottom,
what will condemnation and banishment to Botany Bay
do for it? Glasgow Thuggery, Chartist torch-meet
ings, Birmingham riots, Swing conflagrations, are so
many symptoms on the surface ; you abolish the symp
tom to no purpose, if the disease is left untouched.^
Boils on the surface arc curable or incurable, — small
matter which, while the virulent humor festers deep
within ; poisoning the sources of life ; and certain
enough to find for itself ever new boils and sore is
sues ; ways of announcing that it continues there, that
it would fain not continue there.
Delirious Chartism will not have raged entirely
to no purpose, as indeed no earthly thing does so, if it
have forced all thinking men of the community to
think of this vital matter, too apt to be overlooked
otherwise. Is the condition of the English working
people wrong ; so wrong that rational working men
cannot, will not, and even should not rest quiet under
it ? A most grave case, complex beyond all others in

•a

t CHARTISM.
the world ; a case wherein Botany Bay, constabulary
rural police, and such like, will avail but little. Or is
the discontent itself mad, like the shape it took ? Not
the condition of the working people that is wrong ; but
their disposition, their own thoughts, beliefs and feel
ings that are wrong? This too were a most grave
case, little less alarming, little less complex than the
former one. In this case too, where constabulary po
lice and mere rigor of coercion seems more at home,
coercion will by no means do all, coercion by itself
will not even do much. If there do exist general mad
ness of discontent, then sanity and some measure of
content must be brought about again, — not by consta
bulary police alone. When the thoughts of a people,
in the great mass of it, have grown mad, the combined
issue of that people's workings will be a madness, an
; incoherency and ruin ! Sanity will have to be recov-
; ered for the general mass; coercion itself will other
wise cease to be able to coerce.
We have heard it asked, Why Parliament throws
no light on this question of the Working Classes, and
the condition or disposition they are in ? Truly to a
remote observer of Parliamentary procedure it seems
surprising, especially in late Reformed times, to see
what space this question occupies in the Debates of
the Nation. Can any other business whatsoever be so
pressing on legislators ? A Reformed Parliament, one
would think, should - inquire into popular discontents
lefore they get the length of pikes and torches ! For
what end at all are men, Honorable Members and
Reform Members, sent to St. Stephen's with clamor
and effort; kept talking, struggling, motioning and

CHAP. I. CONDITION-OF-ENGLAND QUESTION.

counter-motioisag ? The condition of the great body
of people in a country,,4s the condition of the country '
itself : this you would say is a truism in all times ; a
truism rather pressing to get recognised as a truth now,
and be acted upon, in these times. Yet read Hansard's
Debates, or the Morning Papers, if you have nothing
to do ! The old grand question, whether A is to be in
office or B, with the innumerable subsidiary questions
^growing out of that, courting paragraphs and suffrages
for a blessed solution of that : Canada question, Irish
Appropriation question, West India question, Queen's
Bedchamber question ; Game Laws, Usury Laws ;
African Blacks, Hill Coolies, Smithfield cattle, and
Dog-carts, — all manner of questions and subjects, ex
cept simply this the alpha and omega of all ! Surely
Honorable Members ought to speak of the Condition-
of-England question too. Radical Members, above all ;
friends of the people ; chosen with effort, by the people,
to interpret and articulate the dumb deep want of the
people ! To a remote observer they seem oblivious of
their duty. Are they not there, by trade, mission, and
express appointment of themselves and others, to speak
for the good of the British Nation ? Whatsoever great
British interest can the least speak for itself, for that
beyond all they are called to speak. They are either
speakers for that great dumb toiling class which cannoi
speak, or they are nothing that one can well specify.
Alas, the remote observer knows not the nature of
Parliaments : how Parliaments, extant there for the
British Nation's sake, find that they are extant withal
for their own sake ; how Parliaments travel so naturally
in their deep-rutted routine, common-place worn into
1*

CHARTISM.

ruts axle-deep, from which only strength, insight and
courageous generous exertion can lift any Parliament
or vehicle ; how in Parliaments, Reformed or Unre-
formed, there may chance to be a strong man, an
original, clear-sighted, great-hearted, patient and valiant
man, or to be none such ; — how, on the whole, Parlia
ments, lumbering along m their deep ruts of common-
place, find, as so many of us otherwise do, that the
ruts are axle-deep, and the travelling very toilsome of
itself, and for the clay the evil thereof sufficient ! What
Parliaments ought to have dono in this business, what
they will, can or cannot yet do, and where the limits of
their faculty and culpability may lie, in regard to it,
were a long investigation ; into wliich wc°nccd not
enter at this moment. What they have done is unhap
pily plain enough. Hitherto, on this most national of
' questions, the Collective Wisdom of the Nation has
, availed us as good as nothing whatever.
And yet, as we say, it is a question which cannot
be left to the Collective Folly of the Nation J In or
out of Parliament, darkness, neglect, hallucination must
contrive to cease in regard to it ; true insight into it
must be had. How inexpressibly useful were true in
sight into it; a genuine understanding by the upper
classes of society what it is that the under classes in
trinsically mean ; a clear interpretation of the thought
which at heart torments these wild inarticulate souls,
struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb
creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them !
Something they do id can ; some true thing withal,
in the centre of their confused hearts, — for they are
hearts created by Heaven too : to the Heaven it is

CHAP. I. CONDITION-OF-ENGLAND QUESTION. 7
clear what thing ; to us not clear. Would that it were !
Perfect clearness on it were equivalent to remedy of it.
For, as is well said, all battle is misunderstanding ; did
the parties know one another, tlie battle would cease.
No man at bottom means injustice ; it is always for j
some obscure distorted image of a right that he con- j
tends : an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the I
wondcrfullest way, by natural dimness and selfishness ;
getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of con
test, till at length it become all but irrecognisable ; yet
still the imago of a right. Could a man own to him
self that the thing he fought for was wrong, contrary to
fairness and the law of reason, he would own also that
it thereby stood condemned and hopeless ; be could
fight for it no longer. Nay independently of right,
could the contending parties get but accurately to dis
cern one another's might and strength to contend, the
one would peaceably yield to the other and to Neces
sity ; the contest in this case too were over. No Afri
can expedition now, as in the days of Herodotus, is
fitted out against the South-wind. One expedition was
satisfactory in that department. The South-wind Si
moom continues blowing occasionally, hateful as ever,
maddening as ever ; but one expedition was enough.
Do we not all submit to Death ? The highest sentence
of the law, sentence of death, is passed on all of us
by the fact of birth ; yet we live patiently under it,
patiently undergo it when the hour comes. Clear unde
niable right, clear undeniable might : cither of these
once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a
confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.

CHARTISM.

: , What are the rights, what are the mights of the dis-
¦I contented Working Classes in England at this epoch ?
He were an (Edipus, and deliverer from sad social
pestilence, who could resolve us fully ! For we may
say beforehand, The struggle that divides the upper
and lower in society over Europe, and more painfully
and notably in England than elsewhere, this too is a
struggle which will end and adjust itself as all other
struggles do and hove done, by making the right clear
and the might clear ; not otherwise than by that. Mean-
• time, the questions, Why are the Working Classes dis
contented ; what is their condition, economical, moral,
in their houses and their hearts, as it is in reality and
as they figure it to themselves to be ; what do they
complain of; what ought they, and ought they not
to complain of? — these are measurable questions ; on
some of these any common mortal, did he but turn his
eyes to them, might throw some light. Certain re
searches and considerations of ours on the matter,
since no one else will undertake it, arc now to be made
public. The researches have yielded us little, almost .
nothing ; but the considerations are of old date, and
press to have utterance. We are not without hope
that our general notion of the business, if we can
get it uttered at all, will meet some assent from many
candid men.

CHAPTER II.

STATISTICS.

A witty statesman said you might prove anything by
I figures. We have looked into various statistic works,
Statistic-Society Reports, Poor-Law Reports, Reports
and Pamphlets not a few, with a sedulous eye to this
question of the Working Classes and their general con
dition in England ; we grieve to say, with as good as
no result whatever. Assertion swallows assertion ; ac
cording to the old Proverb, ' as the statist thinks, the
bell clinks ! ' Tables arc like cobwebs, like the sieve
of the Danaides ; beautifully reticulated, orderly to look
upon, but which will hold no conclusion. Tables are
abstractions, and the object a most concrete one, so
difficult to read the essence of. There are innumera
ble circumstances ; and one circumstance left out may
be the vital one on which all turned. Statistics is a
science which ought to be honorable, the basis of many
most important sciences ; but it is not to be carried on
by steam, this science, any more than others are ; a
wise head is requisite for carrying it on. Conclusive
facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a head
that already understands and knows. Vain to send the
purblind and blind to the shore of a Pactolus never so
golden: these find only gravel; the seer and finder
alone picks up gold grains there. And now the pur
blind offering you, with asseveration and protrusive

10

CHAETISM.

importunity, his basket of gravel as gold, what steps
are to be taken with him ? —Statistics, one may hope,
will improve gradually, and become good for some
thing. Meanwhile it is to be feared, the crabbed sati
rist, was partly right, as things go : 'A judicious man,'
says he, ' looks at Statistics, not to get knowledge, but
to save himself from having ignorance foisted on him.'
With what serene conclusiveness a member of some
Useful-Knowledge Society stops your mouth with a
figure of arithmetic ! To him it seems ho has there
extracted the elixir of the matter, on which now no-
| thing more can be said. It is needful that you look
! into his said extracted elixir; and ascertain, alas, too
probably, not without a sigh, that it is wash and vapi
dity, good only for tho gutters.
Twice or three times have wc heard the lamenta
tions and prophecies of a humane Jeremiah, mourner
for the poor, cut short by a statistic fact of the most
decisive nature : How can the condition of the poor be
other than good, be other than better ; has not the ave
rage duration of life in England, and therefore among
the most numerous class in England, been proved to
have increased ? Our Jeremiah had to admit that, if
so, it was an astounding fact ; whereby all that ever he,
for his part, had observed on other sides of the matter
was overset without remedy. If life last longer, life
must be less worn upon, by outward suffering, by in
ward discontent, by hardship of any kind ; the gene
ral condition of the poor must be bettering instead of
worsening. So was our Jeremiah cut short. And now
for the • proof ? Readers who are curious in statistic
proofs may see it drawn out with all solemnity in a

CHAP. II. STATISTICS.

11

Pamphlet 'published by Charles Knight and Compa-
ny-' * — and perhaps himself draw inferences from it.
Northampton Tables, compiled by Dr. Price, ' from re
gisters of the Parish of All Saints from 1735 to 1780;'
Carlisle Tables, collected by Dr. Hcysham from ob
servation of Carlisle City for eight years, ' the calcu
lations founded on them ' conducted by another Doctor;
incredible 'document considered satisfactory by men
jof science in France : ' — alas, is it not as if some zeal
ous scientific son of Adam had proved the deepening
of the Ocean, by survey, accurate or cursory, of two
mud-plashes on the coast of the Isle of Dogs ? ' Not
to get knowledge, but to save yourself from having
ignorance foisted on you ! '
The condition of the working man in this country,
what it is and has been, whether it is improving or ret
rograding,— is a question to which from statistics hith
erto no solution can be got. Hitherto, after many tables
and statements, ono is still left mainly to what he can
ascertain by his own eyes, looking at tho concrete phe
nomenon for himself. There is no other method ; and
yet it is a most imperfect method. Each man expands
his own hand breadth of observation to the limits ofthe
general whole ; more or less, each man must take what
he himself has seen and ascertained for a sample of all
that is sccahle and ascertainable. Hence discrepancies,
controversies, wide-spread, long-continued ; which there
is at present no means or hope of satisfactorily ending.
* An Essay on Hie Means of Insurance against tlie Casualties
of &c. &c. London, Charles Knight and Company, I83G. Price
two shillings.

12

CHARTISM.

When Parliament takes up ' the Condition-of-England
question,' as it will have to do one day, then indeed
much may be amended ! Inquiries wisely gone into,
even on this most complex matter, will yield results
worth something, not nothing. But it is a most com
plex matter ; on which, whether for the past or the pre
sent, Statistic Inquiry, with its limited means, with its
short vision and headlong extensive dogmatism, as yet
too often throws not light, but error worse than dark
ness. What constitutes the well-being of a man ? Many
things ; of which the wages he gets, and the bread he
buys with them, are but one preliminary item. Grant,
however, that the wages were the whole; that once
knowing the wages and the price of bread, we know
all ; then what are the wages ? Statistic Inquiry, in its
present unguided condition, cannot tell. The average
rate of day's wages is not correctly ascertained for any
portion of this country ; not only not for half-centuries,
it is not even ascertained anywhere for decades or
years : far from instituting comparisons with the past,
the present itself is unknown to us. And then, given
the average of wages, what is the constancy of employ
ment ; what is the difficulty of finding employment ; the
fluctuation from season to season, from year to year ?
Is it constant, calculable wages ; or fluctuating, incal
culable, more or less of the nature of gambling ? This
secondary circumstance, of quality in wages, is perhaps
even more important than the primary one of quantity.
Farther we ask, Can the labourer, by thrift and indus
try, hope to rise to mastership ; or is such hope cut off
from him ? How is he related to his employer ; by

CHAP. II. STATISTICS.

13

bonds of friendliness and mutual help ; or by hostility,
opposition, and chains of mutual necessity alone ? In
a word, what degree of contentment can a human crea
ture be supposed to enjoy in that position ? With hun
ger preying on him, his contentment is likely to be
small ! But even with abundance, his discontent, his
real misery may be great. Tbe labourer's feelings,
his notion of being justly dealt with or unjustly ; his
^ wholesome composure, frugality, prosperity in the one
case, his acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and
gradual ruin in the other, — how shall figures of arith
metic represent all this ? So much is still to be ascer
tained ; much of it by no means easy to ascertain!
Till, among the ' Hill Cooly ' and ' Dog-cart' questions^
there arise in Parliament and extensively out of it a
' Condition-of-England question,' and quite a new set of
inquirers and methods, little of it is likely to be ascer
tained. One fact on this subject, a fact which arithmetic is
capable of representing, we have often considered would
be worth all the rest : Whether the labourer, whatever
his wages are, is saving money ? Laying up money,
he proves that his condition, painful as it may be with
out and within, is not yet desperate ; that ho looks for
ward to a belter day coming, and is still resolutely
steering towards the same ; that all the lights and dark
nesses of his lot are united under a blessed radiance of
hope, — the last, first, nay one may say the sole bless
edness of man. Is the habit of saving increased and
increasing, or the contrary ? Where the present writer
has been able to look with his own eyes, it is decreas
ing, and in many quarters all but disappearing. Statis-
2

14

CHARTISM.

CHAP. II. STATISTICS.

1

tic science turns up her Savings-Bank Accounts, and
answers, " Increasing rapidly." Would that one could
believe it ! But the Danaides'-sieve character of such
statistic reticulated documents is too manifest. A few
years ago, in regions where thrift, to one's own know
ledge, still was, Savings-Banks were not ; the labourer
lent his money to some farmer, of capital, or supposed
to be of capital, — and has too often lost it since ; or he
bought a cow with it, bought a cottage with it ; nay hid
it under his thatch : the Savings-Banks books then ex
hibited mere blank and zero. That they swell yearly
now, if such be the fact, indicates that what thrift ex
ists does gradually resort more and more thither rather
than elsewhither ; but the question, Is thrift increasing ?
runs through the reticulation, and is as water spilt on
the ground, not to be gathered here.
These are inquiries on which, had there been a
proper ' Condition-of-England question,' some light
would have been thrown, before ' torch-meetings' arose
to illustrate them ! Far as they lie out of the course
of Parliamentary routine, they should have been gone
into, should have been glanced at, in one or the other
fashion. A Legislature making laws for the Working
Classes, in total uncertainty as to these things, is legis
lating in the dark ; not wisely, nor to good issues. The
simple fundamental question, Can the labouring man
in this England of ours, who is willing to labour,
find work, and subsistence by his work ? is matter of
mere conjecture and assertion hitherto ; not ascertain
able by authentic evidence : the Legislature, satisfied
to legislate in the dark, has not yet sought any evi
dence on it. They pass their New Poor-Law Bill,

15

without evidence as to all this. Perhaps their 'New! V 11
Poor-Law Bill is itself only intended as an experimen- ' "
turn crucis to ascertain all this ? Chartism is an answer, /
seemingly not in the affirmative.

16

CHAPTER III.

NEW POOR-LAW.

To read the Reports of the Poor-Law Commissioners, if
one had faith enough, would be a pleasure to the friend
of humanity. One sole recipe seems to have been
needful for the woes of England : ' refusal of out-door
relief.' England lay in sick discontent, writhing power
less on its fever-bed, dark, nigh desperate, in waste
fulness, want, improvidence, and eating care, till like
Hyperion down the eastern steeps, the Poor-Law Com
missioners arose, and said, Let there be workhouses,
and bread of affliction and water of affliction there !
It was a simple invention ; as all truly great inventions
are. And see, in any quarter, instantly as the walls of
the workhouse arise, misery and necessity fly away,
out of sight, — out of being, as is fondly hoped, and
dissolve into the inane ; industry, frugality, fertility,
rise of wages, peace on earth and goodwill towards
men do, — in the Poor-Law Commissioners' Reports, —
infallibly, rapidly or not so rapidly, to the joy of all
parties, supervene. It was a consummation devoutly
to be wished. We have looked over these four annual
Poor-Law Reports with a variety of reflections ; with
no thought that our Poor-Law Commissioners are the
inhuman men their enemies accuse them of being ;
with a feeling of thankfulness rather that there do
exist men of that structure too ; with a persuasion
deeper and deeper that Nature, who makes nothing to

CHAP. m. NEW POOR-LAW.

17

no purpose, has not made either them or their Poor-
Law Amendment Act in vain. We hope to prove that
they and it were an indispensable clement, harsh but
salutary, in the progress of things.
That this Poor-Law Amendment Act meanwhile
should be, as wc sometimes hear it named, the ' chief
glory ' of a Reform Cabinet, betokens, one would ima
gine, rather a scarcity of glory there. To say to the
poor, Ye shall cat the bread of affliction and drink the
water of affliction, and be very miserable while here,
required not so much a stretch of heroic faculty in
any sense, as due toughness of bowels. If paupers
are made miserable, paupers will needs decline in mul
titude. It is a secret known to all rat-catchers : stop
up the granary-crevices, afflict with continual mewing,
alarm, and going-off of traps, your ' chargeable labour
ers ' disappear, and cease from the establishment. A
still briefer method is that of arsenic ; perhaps even
a milder, where otherwise permissible. Rats and pau
pers can be abolished ; the human faculty was from of
old adequate to grind them down, slowly or at once,
and needed no ghost or Reform Ministry to teach it.
Furthermore when one hears of ' all the labour of the
country being absorbed into employment ' hy this new
system of affliction, when labour complaining of want
can find no audience, one cannot but pause. That mis
ery and unemployed labour should ' disappear ' in that
case is natural enough ; should go out of sight,  but
out of existence ? What we do know is that ' the
rates are diminished,' as they cannot well help being:
that no statistic tables as yet report much increase of
deaths by starvation : this we do know, and not very
2*

18

CHARTISM.

conclusively anything more than this. If this be ab
sorption of all the labour of the country, then all the
labour of the country is absorbed.
To believe practically that the poor and luckless
are here only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated,
and in some permissible manner made away with, and
swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith. That
the arrangements of good and ill success in this per
plexed scramble of a world, which a blind goddess was
always thought to preside over, are in fact the work of
a seeing goddess or god, and require only not to be
meddled with : what stretch of heroic faculty or inspi
ration of genius was needed to teach one that ? To
' button your pockets and stand still, is no complex
recipe. Laissez faire, laissez passer ! Whatever goes
on, ought it not to go on ; ' the widow picking nettles
for her children's dinner, and the perfumed seigneur
delicately lounging in the C3il-du-Bceuf, who has an
alchemy whereby he will extract from her the third
nettle, and name it rent and law ? ' What is written
and enacted, has it pot black-on-white to shew for
itself? Justice is justice; but all attorney's parch
ment is of the nature of Targum or sacred-parchment.
In brief, ours is a world requiring only to be well
let alone. Scramble along, thou insane scramble of
a world, with thy pope's tiaras, king's mantles and
beggar's gabardines, chivalry-ribbons and plebeian gal
lows-ropes, where a Paul shall die on the gibbet and a
Nero sit fiddling as imperial Ca-sar ; thou art all right,
and shalt scramble even so ; and whoever in the press
( is trodden down, has only to lie there and be trampled
.' broad : — Such at bottom seems to be the chief social

CHAP. III. NEW POOR-LAW.

19

principle, if principle it have, which tho Poor-Law
Amendment Act has the merit of courageously as-
serting, in opposition to many things. A chief social
principle which this present writer, for one, will by no
manner of means believe in, but pronounce at all fit
times to be false, heretical and damnable, if ever
aught was !
And yet, as we said, Nature makes nothing in vain ;
not even a Poor-Law Amendment Act. For withal wc'
are far from joining in tho outcry raised against these
poor Poor-Law Commissioners, as if they were tigers
in men's shape; as if their Amendment Act were
a mere monstrosity and horror, deserving instant ab-
rogation. They are not tigers; they are men filled
with an idea of a theory : their Amendment Act,
heret.cal and damnable as a whole truth, is orthodox '
laudable as a half-tmth ; and was imperatively re-
quired to be put in practice. To create men filled '
with a theory that refusal of out-door relief was the one
thing needful : Nature had no readier way of getting
out-door relief refused. In fact, if we look at the old i
Poor-Law, in its assertion of the opposite social prin-
ciple, that Fortune's awards are not those of Justice
we shall find it to have become still more unsupport-
able demanding, if England was not destined for
speedy anarchy, to be done away with.
Any law, however well meant as a law, which
has become a bounty on unthrift, idleness, bastardy
and beer-drinking, must be put an end to. In all
ways it needs, especially in these times, to be pro
claimed aloud that for the idle man there is no place
m this England of ours. He that will not work, and

20

CHARTISM.

save according to his means, let him go elsewhither ;
let him know that for him the Law has made no soft
provision, but a hard and stern one ; that by the Law
of Nature, which the law of England would vainly
contend against in the long-run, he is doomed cither
to quit these habits, or miserably be extruded from
this Earth, which is made on principles different from
these. He that will not work according to his faculty,
let him perish according to his necessity : there is no
law juster than that. Would to Heaven one could
preach it abroad into the hearts of all sons and daugh
ters of Adam, for it is a law applicable to all ; and
bring it to bear, with practical obligation strict as the
Poor-Law Bastille, on all ! We had then in good
truth, a ' perfect constitution of society ; ' and ' God's
fair Earth and Task-garden, where whosoever is not
working must be begging or stealing,'' were then ac
tually what always, through so many changes and
struggles, it is endeavoring to become.
That this law of No work no recompense, should
first of all be enforced on the manual worker, and
brought stringently home to him and his numerous
class, while so many other classes and persons still go
loose from it, was natural to the case. Let it be
enforced there, and rigidly made good. It behoves to
be enforced everywhere, and rigidly made good; —
alas, not by such simple methods as ' refusal of out
door relief,' but by far other and costlier ones ; which
too, however, a bountiful Providence is not unfurnished
with, nor, in these later generations (if we will under
stand their convulsions and confusions), sparing to
apply. Work is the mission of man in this Earth,

CHAP. III. NEW POOR-LAW.

21

A day is ever struggling forward, a day will arrive in
some approximate degree, when he who has no work
to do, by whatever name he may be named, will not
find it good to shew himself in our quarter of the
Solar System ; but may go and look out elsewhere,
If there be any Idle Planet discoverable ? — Let the
honest working man rejoice that such law, the first
of Nature, has been made good on him ; and hope
that, by and by, all else will be made good. It is the
beginning of all. Wc define the harsh New Poor-Law
to be withal a ' protection of the thrifty labourer ;
against the thriftless and dissolute ;"' a thing inex
pressibly important ; a 7t«7/-result, detestable, if you
will, when looked upon as the whole result ; yet with
out which the whole result is forever unattainable.
Let wastefulness, idleness, drunkenness, improvidence
take the fate which God has appointed them ; that
their opposites may also have a chance for their fate.
Let the Poor-Law Administrators be considered as
useful labourers whom Nature has furnished with a
whole theory of the universe, that they might accom
plish an indispensable fractional practice there, and
prosper in it in spite of much contradiction.
We will praise the New Poor-Law, farther, as the
probable preliminary of some general charge to be
taken of the lowest classes by the higher. Any gene
ral charge whatsoever, rather than a conflict of charges,
varying from parish to parish ; the emblem of darkness,
of unreadable confusion. Supervisal by the central
government, in what spirit soever executed, is super
visal from a centre. By degrees the object will be
come clearer, as it is at once made thereby universally

22

CHARTISM.

conspicuous. By degrees true vision of it will become
attainable, will be universally attained ; whatsoever
order regarding it is just and wise, as grounded on the
truth of it, will then be capable of being taken. Let
us welcome the New Poor-Law as the harsh beginning
of much, the harsh ending of much ! Most harsh and I
barren lies the new ploughers' fallow-field, the crude I
subsoil all turned up, which never saw the sun ; which I
as yet grows no herb ; which has ' out-door relief for no j
one. Yet patience : innumerable weeds and corrup- !
tions lie safely turned down and extinguished under :
it ; this same crude subsoil is the first stop of all true :
husbandry ; by Heaven's blessing and the skyey influ
ences, fruits that are good and blessed will yet come
of it. For, in truth, the claim of the poor labourer is
something quite other than that ' Statute of the Forty-
third of Elizabeth' will ever fulfil for him. Not to
be supported by -roundsmen systems, by never so
liberal parish doles, or lodged in free and easy work
houses when distress overtakes him ; not for this,
however in words he may clamour for il ; not for this,
but for something far different does the heart of him
struggle. It is 'for justice' that he struggles; for
'just wages,' — not in money alone ! An ever-toiling
inferior, he would fain (though as yet ho knows it not)
find for himself a superior that should lovingly and
wisely govern : is not that too the 'just wages' of his
service done ? It is for a manlike place and relation,
in this world where he sees himself a man, that he
struggles. At bottom may wc not say, it is even for
this, That guidance and government, which he cannot

CHAP. III. NEW POOR-LAW.

23

give himself, which in our so complex world he can
no longer do without, might be afforded him ? The
thing he struggles for is one which no Forty-third of
Elizabeth is in any condition to furnish him, to put
him on the road towards getting. Let him quit the
Forty-third of Elizabeth altogether ; and rejoice that
tlie Poor-Law Amendment Act has, even by harsh
methods and against his own will, forced him away
from it. That was a broken reed to lean on, if there
: ever was one ; and did but run into his lamed right-
hand. Let him cast it far from him, that broken reed,
and look to quite the opposite point of the heavens for
help. His unlamcd right-hand, with the cunning in
dustry that lies in it, is not this defined to be ' the
sceptre of our Planet ' ? He that can work is a born J
. king of something ; is in communion with Nature, '
I is master of a thing or things, is a priest and king of
j Nature so far. He that can work at nothing is but a '
j usurping king, be his trappings what they may ; he is
i the born slave of all things. Let a man honour his
| craftmanship, his can-do ; and know that his rights of
' man have no concern at all with the Forty-third of
Elizabeth.

24

CHAPTER IV.
FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD.
i The New Poor-Law is an announcement, sufficiently
distinct, 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 answer to give. Legislation presupposes
fa I the answer — to be in the affirmative. A large postu
late ; which should have been made a proposition of ;
which should have been demonstrated, made indubit
able to all persons ! A man willing to work, and
unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that
Fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun. Burns
expresses feelingly what thoughts it gave him : a poor
man seeking work ; seeking leave to toil that he might
be fed and sheltered ! That he might but be put on
a level with the four-footed workers of the Planet which
is his ! There is not a horse willing to work but can
get food and shelter in requital ; a thing this two-footed
worker has to seek for, to solicit occasionally, in vain.
He is nobody's two-footed worker ; ho is not even
anybody's slave. And yet he is a too-footed 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 postulate proposition is not
affirmative but negative ?

CHAP. IV. FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 25
There is one fact which Statistic Science has com
municated, and a most astonishing one ; the inference
from which is pregnant as to this matter. Ireland has
near seven millions of working people, the third unit of
whom, it appears by Statistic 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 govern
ment and guidance of white European men which has
issued in perennial hunger 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 ; sayinc
no word ; expecting now of a surety sentence cither
to change or die. AU men, we must repeat, were
made by God, and have immortal souls in them.
The Sanspotatoe is of the selfsame stuff as the super-
finest Lord Lieutenant. Not an individual Sanspotatoe
human scarecrow but had a Life given him out of
Heaven, with Eternities depending on it ; for once and
no second time. With Immensities in him, over him
and round him ; with feelings which a Shakspcarc's
speech would not utter; with desires illimitable as the
Autocrat's of all the Russins ! Ilim various thrice-
honored 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 enchantment into the
3

26

CHARTISM.

torn coat and waste hunger-lair of that same root-
devouring brother man ! —
Social anomalies arc 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. Room for extenuation, for pity, for patience !
And yet when the general result has come to the length
of perennial starvation, 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 terminate. 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 dis
owns it, Earth is against it ; Ireland will be burnt into
a black unpeopled 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 pres :nt. It is a
deep matter, an abyssmal one, which no plummet of
ours will sound. For the oppression has gone far
farther than into the economics of Ireland ; inwards to
her very heart and soul. The Irish National charac
ter 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 people 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 Reality ; works now

CHAP. IV. FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 27

on Fantasm, Simulation, Nonentity ; the result it ar
rives at is naturally not a thing but no-thing, — defect
even of potatoes. Scarcity, futility, confusion, dis
traction must he perennial there. Such a people cir
culates not order but disorder, through every vein of
it ; — and the cure, if it is to be a cure, must begin at
the heart : not in his condition only but in himself
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 r 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 !
Wc English pay, even now, the bitter smart of long
centuries of injustice to our neighbour Island. Injus
tice, doubt it not, abounds ; or Ireland would not be
miserable. The Earth is good, bountifully sends food
and increase ; if man's unwisdom did not intervene
and forbid. It was an evil day when Strigul first
meddled with that people. He could not extirpate
them : could they but have agreed together, and ex
tirpated him ! Violent men there have been, and
merciful ; unjust 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

28

CHARTISM.

at last, in full measure, the fruit of fifteen generations
of wrong-doing. But the thing we had to state here was our infer
ence from that mournful fact of the third Sanspotatoe,
— coupled with this other well-known fact that the
Irish speak a partially intelligible 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 ingenuity, restless
ness, unreason, misery and mockery, salute you on all
highways and byways. The English coachman, as he
whirls past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses
him with his tongue ; tho 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 will pur
chase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condi
ment ; he lodges to his mind in any pighutch or dog-
hutch, roosts in outhouses ; and wears a suit of tatters,
the getting off and on of which is said to be a difficult
operation, transacted 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 igno
rant ; but he has not sunk from decent manhood to
squalid apehood : he cannot continue there. Ameri
can forests lie unfilled across the ocean ; the uncivilised
Irishman, not by his strength but by the opposite of
strength, drives out the Saxon native, takes posses
sion in his room. There abides he, in his squalor
and unreason, in his falsity and drunken violence, as
the ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder.

CHAP. IV. FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 29
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
quarantines against pestilence ; but there is no pesti
lence like that ; and against it what quarantine is pos
sible ? It is lamentable to look 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 behold, 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 Ccltibcrian 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 straight 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, will no longer do ; it
3*

30

CHARTISM.

must be management grounded on sincerity and fact,
to which the truth of things will respond — by an actual
beginning of improvement to these wretched brother-
men. In a state of perennial ultra-savage famine, in
the midst of civilisation, thoy cannot continue. For
that the Saxon British will ever submit to sink along
with them to such a state, wc assume as impossible.
There is in these latter, thank God, an ingenuity which
is not false ; a methodic spirit, of insight, of perscverant
well-doing ; a rationality and veracity which Nature
with her truth does not disown; — withal there is a
' Bcrserkir-ragc' in the heart of them, which will prefer
all things, including destruction and self-destruction,
to that. Let no man awaken it, this same Bcrscrkir-
rage ! Deep-hidden it lies, far down in the centre,
like genial central-fire, with stratum after stratum of
arrangement, traditionary method, composed produc
tiveness, all built above it, vivified and rendered fertile
by it : justice, clearness, silence, perseverance, unhast-
ing 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 this strong silent people have the noisy vehement
Jrish now at length got common cause made. Ireland,
now for the first time, in such strange circuitous way,
docs find itself embarked in the same boat with Eng-
land, to sail together, or to sink together ; the wretch
edness of Ireland, slowly but inevitably, has crept over
to us, and become our own wretchedness. The Irish
population must get itself redressed and saved, for the

CHAP. IV. FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 31
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, Henrys, Macdcrmots, and
O'Donogbucs I The strong have eaten sour grapes,
and the teeth of tho weak are set ou edge. ' Curses '
says the Proverb, ' are like chickens, they return al-
ways home?
But now on the whole, it seems to us, English
Statistic Science, with floods of the finest peasantry in
the world streaming 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 dis
cern that 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 I
them ,n 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 ap-'
proxnnation to the Irish price: at a price superior as |
yet to the Irish, that is, superior to scarcity of third- j
rate potatoes for thirty weeks yearly ; superior, yet
hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat, sink
ing nearer to an equality with that. Ilalf-a-million
hnndloom weavers, working fifieon hours a-day, in per
petual inability to procure thereby enough of th-f j
coarsest food ; English farm-labourers at nine shillings !
and at seven shillings a week ; Scotch farm-labourers
who, ' in districts the half of whose husbandry is that
of cows, taste no milk, can procure no milk :' all these
things arc credible to us ; several of them arc known
to us by the best evidence, by eye-sight. With all this

I

32

CHARTISM.

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 Stcamcnginc in a giant English
Nation will here create violent demand for labour, and
will there annihilate demand. But, alas, the great por
tion of labour is not skilled : the millions arc and must
be skillcss, where strength alone is wanted ; ploughers,
dclvcrs, borers ; hewers of wood and drawers of water;
menials of the Stcamcnginc, only the chief menials
and immediate hod (/-servants of which require skill,
English Commerce stretches its fibres over the whole
earth ; sensitive literally, nay quivering in convulsion,
to the furthest 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 infallibly
at every change of shape, overselling whole multitudes
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 cir
cumstances ; deluging us down to its own waste confu
sion, outward and inward, it seems a cruel mockery to
tell poor drudges that their condition is improving.
New Poor-Law! Laisscz-jaire.,laissez-passcr ! The
master of horses, when the summer labour is done,
has to feed his horses through the winter. If he said
to his horses : " Quadrupeds, I have no longer work
for you ; but work exists abundantly over the world :
arc you ignorant (or must 1 read you Political-Eco
nomy Lectures) that the Stcamcnginc always in the

CHAP. IV. FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 33
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 will find cartage :
go and seek cartage, and good go with you ! " They,
with protrusive upper lip, snort dubious ; signifying
that Europe, Asia, Africa and America lie somewhat
out of their beat ; that what cartage may be wanted
there is not too well known to them. They can find ¦
no cartage. Thoy gallop distracted along highways, {
all fenced in to the right and to the left; finally,
under pains of hunger, they take to leaping fences :
eating foreign property, and — wo 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, 7
looking only at a Drogbeda or Dublin steamboat, as
certain for itself. Another thing, likewise ascertain
able 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, Chart
ism, and the like, complain most. No doubt of it !
The best-paid workmen are they alone that c«w so com- >
plain! How shall he, the lmndloom 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, lie is past complaint! — The fact1
itself, however, is one which, if wc consider it, leads O
us into still deeper regions of tho malady. Wages, it
would appear, arc no index of well-being to the work-

34

CHARTISM.

ing man : without proper wages there can be no well-
being : but with them also there may be none. Wages
of working men dilfer greatly in different quarters of
this country : according to the researches or the guess
of Mr. Symmons, an intelligent humane inquire)-, they
vary in the ratio of -iot less than throe to one. Cotton-
spinners, as wc learn, arc 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 comfortable 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 there is the fatallest lack.
Economy does not exist among them ; their trade now
in plethoric prosperity, anon extenuated into inanition
and 'short-time,' is of the nature of gambling; they
live by it like gamblers, now in luxurious superfluity,
now in starvation. Black mutinous discontent devours
them ; simply the iniserablest feeling that can inhabit
the heart of man. English Commerce with its world
wide convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable
Proteus Steam-demon, makes all paths uncertain for
them, all life a bewilderment; sobriety, steadfastness,
peaceable continuance, the first blessings of man, are
not theirs.
It is in Glasgow among that class of operatives that
' Number 60,' in his dark room, pays down the price

CHAP. IV. FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD. 35
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, rancour, indig
nation 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-simmering Tophct, 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 indisputable an incarnation : Gin tho black
throat into which wretchedness of every sort, con
summating 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 arc and must bo, like its origin,
mad, miserable, ruinous, and that only ! If from this
black unluminous unheeded 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, — arc we to
regard it as more baleful than the quiet state, or
rather as not so baleful ? Ireland is in chronic atrophy
these five centuries; the disease of nobler England,
identified now with that of Ireland, becomes acute, has
crises, and will be cured or kill.

36

CHAPTER V.

RIGHTS AND MIGHTS.

It is not what a man outwardly has or wants that
constitutes the happiness or misery of him. Naked
ness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have
been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It
is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all
men. The brutallcst 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 written direct by the hand of
God in the inmost being of man, incessantly protests
against it. What is injustice? Another name for
disorder, for unvorncity, 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 bo. He must revenge him
self; revancher himself, make himself good again, —
that so meum may be mine, tuum thine, and each party

CHAP. V. RIGHTS AND MIGHTS.

37

standing clear on his own basis, order be restored.
There is something infinitely respectable in this, and
we may say universally respected ; 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
hatefullest 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. All 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 hopelessness 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 would 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 Pha- i
laris' Bull, imprisoned in its own iron belly, would be, i
with or without hope, — revolt. They could, as Novalis '
says, by a ' simultaneous universal act of suicide,' de
part out of the World-Steamengine ; and end, if not
in victory, yet in invincibility, and unsubduablc pro
test that such World-Steamengine was a failure and
a stupidity. 4

38

CHARTISM.

Conquest, indeed, is a fact often witnessed ; con
quest, which seems mere wrong and force, everywhere
asserts itself as a right among men. Yet if wc exa
mine, 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. Mithridales King of Pontus, come now
to extremity, ' appealed to the patriotism of his peo
ple ; ' but, says the history, ' he had squeezed them,
and fleeced and plundered them, for long years ; ' his
requisitions, flying irregular, devastativo, like the
whirlwind, were less supportable than Roman strict
ness 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 pressing 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
Jong ago, the old Saxon Nobles, disunited among
themselves, and in power too nearly equal, could not
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 tics, by their very community of
language and interest, had there been no other, were
in a condition to govern il ; and did govern it, we can
believe, in some rather tolerable manner, or they would
not have continued there. They acted, little conscious

CHAP. V. RIGHTS AND MIGHTS.

39

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 peace
able co-operation better than others could have done !
How can-do, if wc 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 discrepant at first, arc ever in the long-run
one and the same, — is a cheering consideration, which
always in the black tempestuous vortices of this world's
history, will shine out on us, like an everlasting polar
star. Of conquest wc may say that it never yet went by
brute force and compulsion ; conquest of that kind
docs not endure. Conquest, along with power of
compulsion, an essential universally in human society,
must bring benefit along with it, or men, of the ordi
nary strength of men, will fling it out. The strong
man, what is he if he 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 insight into what is what, into what will follow
out of what, the eye to see and the hand to do ; who is
jit to administer, to direct, and guidingly 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

40

CHARTISBI.

men, that all talent, all intellect is in the first place
j moral; — what a world were this otherwise ! But it is
I the heart always that sees, before the head can see :
| let us know that ; and know therefore that the Good
alone is deathless and victorious, that hope is sure and
steadfast, in all phases of this 'Place of Hope.' —
Shiftiness, quirk, attorney-cunning is a kind of thing
that fancies itself, and is often fancied, to he talent ;
but it is luckily mistaken in that. Succeed truly it
does, what is called succeeding ; and even must in
general succeed, if the dispensers of success be of due
stupidity : men of clue 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 my laws ; thy wisdom was not wise
enough ! Dost thou take me too for a Quackery ?
For a Conventionality and Attorneyism ? This chaff
that thou so west into my bosom, though it pass at the
poll-booth and elsewhere for seed-corn, I 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 in
tolerable 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 them
selves 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
speaks aloud too, in a language we may well call in-

CHAP. V. RIGHTS AND MIGHTS.

41

fernal. What kind of ' wild-justice ' must it be in the
hearts of these men that prompts them, with cold deli
beration, in conclave assembled, to doom their brother
workman, 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 Fem-
gericht, and Secret-Tribunal, suddenly in this strange
guise become new ; suddenly rising once more on the
astonished eye, dressed now not in mail-shirts but in
fustian jackets, meeting not in Westphalian forests but
in the paved Gallowgate of Glasgow ! Not loyal loving
obedience to those placed over them, but a far other
temper, must animate these men! It is frightful
enough. Such temper must be wide-spread, virulent
among the many, when 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
revengeful 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 recognise it as extant
there, all may know that it is mournful, that unless
altered it will be fatal. Of lower classes so related to
upper, happy nations arc not made! To whatever
other griefs the lower classes labour under, this bit
terest and sorest grief now superadds itself: the un-
endurable conviction that they arc unfairly dealt with,
4*

I

42

CHARTISM.

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 he.
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 complete ; and a
French Revolution not yet complete ! Whosoever
will look at that enormous Phenomenon may find
many meanings in u, but this meaning as the ground
of all : That it was a revolt of the oppressed lower
classes against the oppressing or neglecting upper
classes : not a French revolt only ; no, a European
one ; full of stern monition to all countries 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 wc, with our better
methods, may be able to transact it by argument
alone !
The French Revolution, now that we have suffi
ciently execrated its horrors and crimes, is found to
have had withal a great meaning in it. As indeed,
what great thing ever happened in this world, a world
understood always to be made and governed by a
Providence and AVisdom, not by an Unwisdom, with
out meaning somewhat? It was a tolerably audible
voice of proclamation, and universal oyez ! to all
people, this of three-and-twenty years' close fighting,
sieging, conflagrating, with a million or two of men
shot dead : the world ought to know by this time that

CHAP. V. RIGHTS AND MIGHTS.

43

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 every where to bo seen
' as the crowning phenomenon of our Modern Time ; '
'the inevitable 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 society, in
any and every 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 ; quack-ridden, hag-rid
den,— is there a hag, or spectre of the Pit, so baleful,
hideous as your accredited quack, were ho never so
close-shaven, mild-spoken, plausible to himself and
others ? Quack-ridden : in that one word lies all mi
sery whatsoever. Speciosity 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 docs 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 Scediicld ; ' he is the
world's hired sower, hired and solemnly appointed to
sow the kind true earth with wheat this year, that next
year all men may have bread. He, miserable mortal,
deceiving and self-deceiving, sows it, as we said, not
with corn but with chaff; the world nothing doubting,
harrows it in, pays him his wages, dismisses him with
blessing, and — next year there has no corn sprung,

44

CHARTISM.

Nature has disowned the chaff, declined growing chaff,
and behold now there is no bread ! It becomes neces
sary, 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 unusual quantity getting domination, indi
cates that the heart of the world is already wrong.
The imposter is false ; but neither arc his dupes alto
gether 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 Mcphistophclcs cannot de
ceive a simple Margaret of honest heart ; ' it stands
written on his brow.' Masses of people capable of
being led away by quacks are themselves of partially
untrue spirit. Alas, in such times it grows to be the
universal belief, sole accredited knowingncss, and the
contrary of it accounted puerile enthusiasm, this sor-
rowfullest disbelief that there is properly speaking any
truth in the world ; that the world was, has been, or
ever can be guided, except by simulation, dissimula
tion, and the sufficiently dexterous practice of pre
tence. The faith of men is dead : in what has guineas
in its pocket, beefeaters riding behind 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 lost ; there is properly no longer any
true or false. It is the heyday of Imposture ; of Sem
blance recognising itself, and getting itself recog
nised, for Substance. Gaping multitudes listen; un-
listening multitudes see not but that it is all right, and
in the order of Nature. Earnest men, one of a mil-

CIIAP. V. RIGHTS AND MIGHTS.

45

lion, shut their lips ; suppressing thoughts, wliich there
are no words to utter. To them it is too visible that
spiritual life has departed ; that material life, in what
soever 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 Parcs-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 Scep
ticisms, Diderot Atheisms, maundering in the final
dcliration ; writhing, with its Seven-years Silcsian
robber-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 ma
gician trumpery to right and left, trampling it storm-
fully under foot ; and declared aloud that there was
strength in him, not for life only, but for new and
infinitely wider life. Antacus-like the giant had struck
his foot once more upon Reality and the Earth ; there
only, if in this universe 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 it or death; tho merciful Heavens, merciful in
their severity, sent us it 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, ele
ment conflicting with element, from side to side of this
earth, for thrcc-and-twenty years. Rights of man,
wrongs of man ? It is a question which has swal-

46

CHARTISM.

lowed whole natiora and generations ; a question — on
which wc will not enter hero. 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 Possible,'
as the Philosophers say. The ascertainable temporary
rights of man vary not a little, according to place and
time. They arc known to depend much on what a
man's convictions of them are. The Highland wife,
with her husband at the foot cf 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 Lapoulc, in the Salle des Menus
at Versailles, on the 4th of August, 1789, demanded
(ho did actually ' demand,' and by unanimous vote
obtain) that the ' obsolete law ' authorizing a Seig
neur, on his return from the chase or other needful
fatigue, to slaughter not above two of his vassals, and
refresh his feet in then- warm blood and bowels, should
be ' abrogated.' From such obsolete law, or mud tra
dition and phantasm of an obsolete law, down to any
corn-law, game-law, rotten-borough law, or other law
or practice clamoured of in this time of ours, tho dis
tance travelled over is great ! — What arc tho rights of
men ? All men arc justified in demanding and search-

CHAP. V. RIGHTS AND MIGHTS.

47

ing for their rights ; moreover, justified or not, they
will do it : by Chartisms, Radicalisms, French Revo
lutions, or whatsoever methods they have. Rights
surely arc right : on tho other hand, this other saying /
is most true, ' Use every man according to his rights,
and who shall escape whipping ! ' These two things,
we say, are both true ; and both arc 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 accordingly. The contradiction is
of the surface only ; as in opposite sides of the same
fact : universal in this dualism of a life wc have.
Between these two extremes, Society and all human
things must fluctuatingly 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 arrangements, pactions and procedures of
men : it is to this ideal of right, more and more de
veloping itself as it is more and more approximated to,
that human Society for ever tends and struggles. We
say also that any given thing either is unjust or else
just ; however obscure the arguings and stragglings on
it be, the thing in itself there as it lies, infallibly enough,
is the one or the other. To which lot us add only
this, the first, last article of faith, the alpha and omega
of all faith among nvn, 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 explosion ;

48

CHARTISM.

these, if we will understand them, were but a new irre
fragable preaching abroad of that. It would appear
that Speciositics which are not Realities cannot any
longer inhabit this world. It would appear that the
unjust thing has no friend in tho Heaven, and a ma
jority 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 from
fallacy to fallacy till i; find no fallacy to shelter in any
more, but must march and go elsewhither ; — that, in a
word, it ought to prepare incessantly for decent depart
ure, before zwdeccnt departure, ignominious drumming
out, nay savage smiting out and burning out, overtake
it ! Alas, was that such new tidings ? Is it not from
of old indubitable, that Untruth, Injustice wliich is but
acted untruth, has no power to continue in this true
universe of ours ? The tidings was world-old, or older,
as old as the Fall of Lucifer : and yet in that epoch
unhappily it was new tidings, unexpected, incredible ;
and there had to be such earthquakes and shakings of
the 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, wliich
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 them
selves to hinder it from coming to pass.

49

CHAPTER VI.

LAISSEZ-FAIRE.

From all which enormous events, with truths old and
new embodied in them, what innumerable practical in
ferences arc to be drawn ! Events are written lessons,
glaring in huge hieroglyphic 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 part in a great many provinces ; that in the
province of the Working Classes, Laissez-faire having
passed its New Poor-Law, has reached the suicidal
point, and now, as felo-de-se, lies dying there, in torch
like meetings and such like ; that, in brief, a govern
ment of the under classes by the upper on a principle
of Let alone is no longer possible in England 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 government ; without being actually guided i '
and governed ; England cannot subsist in peace till, by
5

50

CHARTISM.

some means or other, some guidance and government
for them is found.
For, alas, on us too the rude truth has come home.
Wrappages and speciocities all worn off, the haggard
naked fact speaks to us : Are these millions taught ?
Are these millions guided ? Wo 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 appurte
nances ; educated in universities ; rich in money ; set
on high places that it may be conspicuous to all, ho
noured of all. Wc have an Aristocracy of landed
wealth and commercial wealth, in whose hands lies the
law-making and the law-administering ; an Aristocracy
rich, powerful, long secure in its place ; an Aristo
cracy 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. 'Phis Church answers :
Yes, the people are taught. This Aristocracy, astonish
ment in every feature, answers : Yes, surely the people
are guided ! Do wc 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 Church ; so answers Aristocracy, astonish
ment in every feature. — Fact, in the meanwhile, takes
his lucifcr-box, sets fire to wheat-stacks ; sheds an ail-
too dismal light on several things. Fact searches for
his third-rate potatoc, not in the meekest humour, six-
and-thirty weeks each year ; and docs not find it. Fact
passionately joins Messiah Thorn of Canterbury, and

CHAP. VI. LAISSEZ-FAIRE.

51

has himself shot for a new fifth-monarchy brought in
by Bedlam. Fact holds his fustian-jacket FemgericM
in Glasgow City. Fact carts his Petition over London
streets, begging that you would simply have the good-
ness to grant him universal suffrage, and ' the five
points,' by way of remedy. These arc 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 classes,
is a soft-sounding demand ; but it is only one step
removed from the fatallcst. ' Laissez-faire,' exclaims
a sardonic German writer, ' What is this universal cry
for Laissiz-fairc ? Docs it mean that human affairs
require no guidance ; that wisdom and forethouo-ht
cannot guide them better than folly and accidem ?
Alas, does it not mean : " Such guidance is worse than
none ! Leave us alone of your guidance ; cat your
wages, and sleep ! " ' And now if guidance have grown
indispensable, and the sleep continue, what becomes of
the sleep and its wages?— 1„ those entirely surprising
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 prin
ciple of it. To wise governors you will cry : " See
what you will, and will not, let alone." To unwise
governors, to hungry Greeks throttling clown hungry

52

CHARTISM.

Greeks on the floor of a St. Stephens, you will cry :
" Let all things alone ; for Heaven's sake, meddle ye
with nothing ! " How Laissez-faire may adjust itself
in other provinces wc say not ; hut wc do venture to say,
and ask whether events everywhere, in world-history and
parish-history, in all manner of dialects are not saying
it, That in regard to the lower orders of society, and
their governance and guidance, the principle of Laissez-
faire has terminated, and is no longer applicable at
all, in this Europe of ours, still less in this England
of ours. Not misgovcrnment, nor yet no-government ;
only government will now serve. What is the mean
ing of the ' five points,' if wc will understand them ?
What are all popular commotions and maddest bel-
lowings, from Peterloo to the Place-dc-Greve itself?
Bellowings, inarticulate cries as of a dumb creature in
rage and pain ; to the car of wisdom they are inar
ticulate prayers : " Guide me, govern mc ! I am mad,
and miserable, and cannot guide myself ! " Surely of
all ' rights of man,'' this right of the ignorant man to be
guided by the wiser, to be, gently or forcibly, held in
the true course by him, is the indisputablcst. Nature
herself ordains it from the first ; Society struggles to
wards 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 docs the one toil with his
hands, if the other be not to toil, still more un-
weariedly, with heart and head ? The brawny crafts
man finds it no child's play to mould his unpliant

CHAP. VI. LAISSEZ-FAIRE.

53

rugged masses ; neithe. is guidance of men a dilet
tantism : what it becomes when treated as a dilettant
ism, we may see ! The wild 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-government' ofthe multitude by the multitude,
is in words the thing everywhere passionately cla
moured for at present. Democracy makes rapid pro
gress in these latter times, and ever more rapid, ir.
a perilous accelcrative ratio ; towards democracy, and
that only, the progress of things is everywhere tending
as to the final goal and winning-post. So think, so
clamour the multitudes everywhere. And yet all men
may see, whose sight is good for much, that in de
mocracy can lie no finality ; that with the complctest
winning of democracy there is nothing yet won, —
except emptiness, and the free chance to win ! De
mocracy is, by the nature of it, a self-cancelling-busi-
ness ; and gives in the long-run a net-result of zero.
Where no government is wanted, save that of the
parish-constable, as in America with its boundless soil,
every man being able to find work and recompense for
himself, democracy may subsist; not elsewhere, ex
cept briefly, as a swift transition towards something
other and father. 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 pur
pose. In Rome and Athens, as elsewhere, if we look
practically, we shall find that it was not by loud voting
and debating of many, but by wise insight and order-
5*

54

CHARTISM.

ing of a few that the work was done. So is il ever, so
will it ever be. The French Convention was a Par
liament elected ' by the five points,' with ballot-boxes,
universal suffrages, and what not, as perfectly as Par
liament 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 free Parliament,
and become more arbitrary than any Sultan Bajazct,
before it could so much as subsist. It had to purge
out its argumentative Girondins, elect its Supreme
Committee of Salut, guillotine into silence and ex
tinction all that gainsayed it, and rule and work lite
rally by the sternest despotism ever seen in Europe,
before it could rule at all. Napoleon was not presi
dent of the republic ; Cromwell tried hard to rule in
that way, but found that he could not. These, 'the
armed soldiers of democracy,' had to chain democracy
under their feet, and become despots over it, before
they could work out the earnest obscure purpose of
democracy itself ! Democracy, take it where you will
in our Europe, is found but as a regulated method of
rebellion and abrogation ; it abrogates the old ar
rangement 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 government! Cannot one discern

CHAP. VI. LAISSEZ-FAIRE.

55

too, across all democratic turbulence, clattering of
ballot-boxes and infinite sorrowful jangle, needful or
not, that this at bottom is the wish and prayer of all
human hearts, everywhere and at all times : " Give
me a leader ; a true leader, not a false sham-leader ; a
true leader, that ho may guido 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 subject to his guiding king, is, under one shape
or another, the vital clement of human Society ; in
dispensable 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 Speciositics which are not Realities can
no longer be, all Aristocracies, Priesthoods, Persons
in Authority, are called upon to consider. AVhat is
an Aristocracy ? A corporation of tho 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, 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. Whatsoever Aristocracy is
still a corporation of the Best, is safe from all peril, and
the land it rules is a safe and blessed land. Whatso
ever 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, ,

1 1

56

CHARTISM.

that we must find a real Aristocracy, that an apparent
Aristocracy, how plausible soever, has become inade
quate for us. One way or other, the world will abso
lutely need to be governed ; if not by this class of men,
then by that. One can predict, without gift of pro
phecy, that the era of routine is nearly ended. AVisdom
and faculty alone, faithful, valiant, ever-zealous, not
pleasant but painful, continual effort, will suffice. Cost
what it may, by one means or another, the toiling mul
titudes of this perplexed, over-crowded Europe, must
and will find governors. ' Laissez-faire, Leave them
to do ?' The thing thoy will do, if so left, is too
frightful to think of ! It has been done once, in sight
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, possessions, 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 ?" an
swered 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
wc know. To all men who believed in the Church, to
all men who believed in God and the soul of man, there

CHAP. VI. LAISSEZ-FAIRE.

57

I

was no issue of the French Revolution half so sorrowful
as that. France cast out its benighted blind Priesthood
into destitution ; 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 generation
of thinkers should be without a religion to believe,
or even to contradict ; that Christianity, in thinking
Franco, 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 ' Literature of Desperation ' !
Kingship was perhaps but a cheap waste, compared with
this of the Priestship ; under which France still, all but
unconsciously, labours ; and may long labour, remedi
less the while. Let others consider it, and take warn
ing by it ! France is a pregnant example in all ways.
Aristocracies that do not govern, Priesthoods that do j
not teach ; the misery of that, and the misery of alter- i
ing that, — are written in Bclshazzar fire-letters on the j
history of France.
Or docs the British reader, safe in the assurance
that ' England is not France,' call all this unpleasant
doctrine of ours ideology, perfectibility, and a vacant
dream ? Docs the British 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
tilings arc already as they can be, as they must be ;
that on the whole, no Upper Classes did ever ' govern '

58

CHARTISM.

the Lower, in this sense of governing ? Believe it not,
0 British reader ! Man is man everywhere ; dislikes
to have ' sensible species ' and ' ghosts of defunct
boilies' foisted on him, in England even as in France.
How much tho Upper Classes did actually, in any the
most perfect Feudal time, return to ihe Under by way
of recompense, in government, guidance, protection,
we will not undertake to specify hero. In Charity-
Balls, Soup-Kitchcns, in Quarter-Sessions, Prison-Dis
cipline 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-Kitchcns ;
not so ; far otherwise ! But it was their happiness
that, in struggling for their own objects, they had to
govern the Lower Classes, even in this sense of govern
ing. For, in one word, Cash Payment had not then
grown to bo 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 get
ting from the low. Not as buyer and seller alone, of
land or what else it might be, hut 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 ear
nestly on these things.
Another thing, which the British reader often reads

CHAP. VI. LAISSEZ-FAIRE.

59

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, his ' labour,' and the fifteen-
pence or thrcc-and-sixpencc a-day he can get for that.
True enough, O friends, 'for protecting property;'1
most true : and indeed if you will once sufficiently en
force that Eighth Commandment, the whole ' rights of
man ' arc well cared for ; I know no better definition
of the rights of man. Thou shalt not steal, thou shalt
not be stolen from : what a Society were that ; Plato's
Republic, Morc's Utopia mere emblems of it ! Give
every man what is his, the accurate price of what he
has done and been, no man shall any more complain, I
neither shall the earth suffer any more. For the pro
tection of property, in very truth, and for that alone ! !
— And now what is thy property? That parchment
title-deed, that purse thou buttoncst in thy breeches-
pocket? Is that thy valuable property? Unhappy
brother, most poor insolvent brother, I without parch
ment at all, with purse oftcnest in the flaccid state,
impondcrous, which will not fling against the wind,
have quite other property than that! I have the
miraculous breath of Life in mo, breathed into my
nostrils by Almighty God. I have affections, thoughts,
a god-given capability to be and do; rights, there
fore, — the right for instance to thy love if I love thee,
to thy guidance if I obey thec : the strangest rights,
whereof in church-pulpits one still hears something,
though almost unintelligible now ; rights, stretching,
high into Immensity, far into Eternity ! Fifteen-pence
a-day ; three-and-sixpence a-day ; eight hundred pounds

/

60

CHARTISM.

and odd a-day, dost thou call that my property ?
I value that little ; little all I could purchase with
that. For truly, as is said, what matters it ? In torn
boots, in soft-hung carriagcs-and-four, a man gets al
ways 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 lliis flaccid purse of
mine, 'tis something, nothing ; has been tho slave of
pickpockets, cutthroats, Jew-brokers, gold-dust-robbers ;
'twas his, 'tis mine; — 'tis thine, if thou care much to
steal it. But my soul, brealhed into mo by God, my
Me and what capability is there ; that is mine, and 1
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 purposes, not so easy to specify I
Society, it is understood, docs not in any age, pre
vent a man from being what he can be. A sooty Afri
can can become a Toussaint L'ouvcrturc, a murderous,
Three-fingered Jack, let the yellow AVest Indies say
to it what they will. A Scottish 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.
AVhat I can be thou decidedly wilt not hinder me from

CHAP. VI. LAISSEZ-FAIRE.

61

being. Nay even for being what I could be, I have the
strangest claims on thee, — not convenient to adjust
at present ! Protection of brccchcs-pockct property ?
0 rentier, 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, wc will advise Society
not to talk at all about what she exists for ; but rather
with her whole industry to exist, to try how she can
keep existing ! That is her best plan. She may de
pend upon it, if she ever, by cruel chance, did come
to exist only for protection of breeches-pocket pro
perty, she would lose very soon the gift of protectim*
even that, and find her career in our lower world on
the point of terminating ! —

For the rest, that in the most perfect Feudal Ao-cs,
tlie Ideal of Aristocracy nowhere lived in vacant
serene purity as an Ideal, but always as a poor imper
fect 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)
docs, in never so confused a manner, exist and work
within the 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 imperfection human tinners
cannot continue living ; they are obliged to alter or
expire, when they attain to that. Blotches and dis
eases exist on the skin and deeper, the heart continu-
6

62

CHARTISM.

ing whole ; but it is another matter when the heart
itself becomes 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 semblances but realities. Nothing not
a reality ever yet got men to pay bed and board to it
for long. Look at Mahometanism itself ! Dalai-La-
maism, even Dalai-Lamaism, one rejoices to discover,
may be worth its victuals in this world ; not a quackery
but a sincerity ; not a nothing but a something ! The
mistake of those who believe that fraud, force, injus
tice, 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 truth as yet is
not. It is an error pregnant-with mere errors and mis
eries ; an error fatal, lamentable, to be abandoned by
all men.

63

CHAPTER VII.

NOT LAISSEZ-FAIRE.

How an Aristocracy, in these present times and cir
cumstances, could, if never so well disposed, set about
governing the Under Class ? What they should do ;
endeavour or attempt to do ? That is even the ques
tion 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 and inward for governing ; another
huge class, furnished by Society with none of those
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. Innumerable things our Upper Classes and
Lawgivers might ' do ; ' but tho preliminary 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, savagery, almost of despair ?
Let them enter ; they must enter ; Time and Necessity

64

CHARTISM.

have brought them hither ; where they are is no con
tinuing ! Let them enter ; the first step once taken,
the next 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 Administra
tive body of men that exists among us. Too true !
And that is even the thing we complain of : had the
mischief been looked into as it gradually rose, it would
not have attained this magnitude. That self-cancelling
Donothingism and Laissez-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 century now, has been able to undertake the
adjustment of almost 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 Century ; and
struggles st ill to prolong itself into the Nineteenth, —
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
' Memoircs"1 of Horace AValpolc, 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 liberal

CHAP. VII. NOT LAISSEZ-FAIRE.

65

withal, one who will go all lengths for the ' glorious
revolution,' 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
tlie son of this and the brother of that, and had such
claims to the fat appointment, was nevertheless scan
dalously postponed to Mr. That ; — whereupon are not
the affairs of this nation in a bad way ? How hungry
Greek meets hungry Greek on the floor of St. Ste
phens, and wrestles him and throttles him till he has
to cry, Hold ! the oflice is thine ! — of this docs 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 Century of the Christian
era, and still struggling to practise itself. One must
say, it was a lucky century that could get it so prac
tised : 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, conflagration, guillotinement, cannon
ading and universal war and earthquake, that such
century with its practices had ended.
Ended; — for decidedly that course of procedure \
will no longer serve. Parliament will absolutely, j
with whatever effort, have to lift itself out of those 1
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
6*

66

CHARTISM.

govern us or not ? Parliament with its privileges is
strong ; but Necessity and the Laws of Nature 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, will forward its being done, — not much to the
advantage of Parliament probably ! Done, one way
or other, 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 emphatic way, to the Un-
toiling, that they will be governed ; that they must,—
under penalty of Chartisms, Thuggeries, Rick-burn
ings, 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 con
tagion, evident enough to reflection, 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, palpably
false and wrong; and poor drudges hungering 'on
nleal-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' wc will honour also ;
and yet how many ' demands' are there, entirely indis
pensable, 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

CHAP. VII. NOT LAISSEZ-FAIRE. 6
payments does cash make in this world ! Of you f?
Samuel Johnson furnished with ' fourpence halfpenn
a-day,' and solid lodging at nights on the paved streets ^
as his payment, wc do not speak ; — not in the way c r
complaint : it is a world-old business for the like o 1
him, that same arrangement or a worse ; perhaps th.
man, for his own uses, had need even of that and o W
no better. Nay is not Society, busy with its Talfoun v
Copyright Bill and the like, struggling to do some M
tiimg effectual for that man ; — enacting with all in *
dustry that his own creation be accounted his owi '?'.
manufacture, and continue unstolen, on his owi 1
market-stand, for so long as sixty years? Perhap
Society is right there ; for discrepancies on that aid!
too may become excessive. All men are not patien
docile Johnsons ; some of them arc half-mad inflam-
mablc Rousscaus. Such, in peculiar times, you may
drive too for. Society in Franco, for example, was not
destitute of cash : Society contrived to pay Philippe
d'Orleans not yet Egalite three hundred thousand
a-year and odd, for driving cabriolets through the
streets of Paris and other work done : but in° cash
encouragement, arrangement, recompense or recogni
tion of any kind, it had nothing to give this same
half-mad Rousseau for his work done; whose brain :'
m consequence, too ¦ much enforced' for a weak brain
uttered hasty sparks, Conlrat 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 Sargeant Talfourd's Copyright
Bill continued to eternity instead of sixty years) will

68

CHARTISM.

not turn out insufficient, and have to cease, one
day ? —
Alas, in regard to so very many things, Laissez-
faire ought partly to endeavor to cease ! But in
rj regard to poor Sanspotatoe 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.

69

CHAPTER VIII.

NEW ERAS.

For in very truth it is a ' new Era ; ' a new Practice
has become indispensable in it. One has heard so
often of new eras, new and newest eras, that the word
has grown rather empty of late. Yet new eras do
come ; there is no fact surer than that they have come
moro 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 blcsscdest condition of epochs,
that they come quietly, making no proclamation of
themselves, and are only visible long after : a Crom
well 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 ! —
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 England, which, were there
room for it, would bo instructive in this place. AVe
shall crave leave to excerpt some pages ; partly as a
relief from the too near vexations of our own rather
sorrowful Era ; partly as calculated to throw, more or
less obliquely, some degree of light on tho meanings

70

CHARTISM.

of that. The 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 yet 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 Harzgcbirgc rock " or whatever
other material, was sent travelling hitherward ? No
man can say : it was for a work, and for works, inca
pable of announcement in words. Thou seest them
there ; part of them stand done, and visible to the
eye ; even these thou canst not name : 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 Theuth, with passionate farewell,
under questionable auspices ; on scanty bullock-cart, if
they had even bullocks and a cart ; with axe and hunt
ing-spear, to subdue a portion of our common Planet !
This Nation now has cities and secdficlds, has spring-
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 clone, what it
qan and will yet build and do ! These umbrageous
pleasure-woods, green meadows, shaven stubble-fields,
smooth-sweeping roads; these high-domed cities, and

CHAP. VIII. NEW ERAS.

71

what they hold and bear; this mild Good-morrow which
the stranger bids thee, equitable, nay forbearant if
need were, judiciously calm and law-observing towards
thee a stranger, what work has it not cost? How
uany brawny arms, generation after generation, sank
down wearied ; how many noble hearts, toiling while
life lasted, and wise heads that wore themselves dim
with scanning and discerning, before this waste White-
cliff, Albion so-called, with its other Cassiterides Tin
Islands, became a British Empire! The stream
of AVorld-History has altered its complexion ; Romans
arc dead out, English arc come in. The red broad
mark of Romanhood, stamped incflaccably on that
Chart of Time, has disappeared from the present, and
belongs only to the past. England plays its part;
England too has a mark to leave, and wc will hope
none of the least significant. Of a truth, whosoever
had, with the bodily eye, seen Hcngst and Horsa
mooring on the mud-beach of Thanct, on that spring
morning of the year 449 ; and then, with the spiritual
eye, looked forward to New York, Calcutta, Sidney
Cove, across the ages and the oceans; and thought
what Wellingtons, Washingtons, Shakspears, Miltons,
Watts, Arkwrights, William Pitts and Davie Crocketts
had to issue from that business, and do their several
taskworks so, — he would have said, those leather-boats
of Hengsts had a kind of cargo in them ! A genea-
logic 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.'

72

chartism.

'Six centuries of obscure endeavour,'' continues
Saucrtcig, 'which to read Historians, you would in
cline to call mere obscure slaughter, discord, and mis-
endeavour ; of which all that the human memory, after
a thousand readings, can remember, 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 spring-time, if there ever was ono, for a Nation.
Obscure fighting of kites and crows, however, was
not the History of it ; but was only what the dim His
torians of it saw good to record. AVere not forests
felled, bogs drained, fields made arable, towns built,
laws made, and the Thought and Practice of men in
many ways perfected? Venerable Bede had got a
language which he could now not only speak, but spell
and put on paper: think what lies in that. Bemur-
mured 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
manner. Or was the smith idle, hammering only war-
tools ? He had learned metallurgy, stithy-work in
general ; and malo ploughshares withal, and adzes and
mason-hammers. Castra, Cacstcrs or Chcstcrs, Dons,
Tons (Zauns, Inclosures, or Towns), not a few, did
they not stand there ; of burnt brick, of timber, 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 fight
ings," sad inevitable necessities, were the expensive
tentative steps towards some capability of living and
working in concert : experiments they were, not always

CHAP. VIII. NEW ERAS.

73

conclusive, to ascertain who had the might over whom,
the right over whom.

' M. Thierry has written an ingenious Book, cele
brating with considerable pathos the fate of the Saxons
fallen under that fierce-hearted Conquistator, 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 AVclsh too moves him ; of the Celts gener
ally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into the
mountainous nooks of the AYest, 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 forgetfulness. True, surely ! A tear at
least is due to the unhappy : 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 wc say but that the cause which pleased
the gods has in the end to please Cato also? Cato
cannot alter it ; Cato will find that he cannot at bottom
wish to alter it. Might and Right do differ frightfully
from hour to hour; but give them centuries to try it
in, they arc found to be identical. AVhose land was
this of Britain? God's who made it, His and no
other's it was and is. AVho of God's creatures had
right to live in it? The wolves and bisons? Yes
they ; till one with a better right shewed himself. The
Celt, " aboriginal savage of Europe," as a snarling anti-
7

74

CHARTISM.

quary 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 tiy what use he could turn it to. The bisons
disappeared ; the Celts took possession, and tilled.
Forever, was it to be ? Alas, Forever is not a category
that can establish itself in this world of Time. A
world of Time, hy 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 permits to take possession, his is the right;
Heaven's sanction is such permission, — while it lasts :
nothing more can be said. Why does that hyssop
grow there, in the chink of the wall ? Because the
whole universe, sufficiently occupied otherwise, could
not hitherto prevent its growing! It has the might
and the right. By the same great law do Roman
Empires establish themselves, Christian Religions pro-
j mulgate themselves, and all extant Powers bear rule.
The strong thing is the just thing ; this thou wilt find
I 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
Conquest is of a Physiologic sort : That the con
querors and conquered 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 contrasting so pleasantly
with the coarse Saxon ones of the others. God knows,

CHAP. VIII. NEW ERAS.

75

there are coarse enough features to be seen among the
commonalty of that country ; but if the Nobility's be
finer, it is not their Normanhood that can be the rea
son. Docs the above Physiologist reflect who those
same Normans, Northmen, originally were? Baltic
Saxons, and what other miscellany of Lurdanes, Jutes
and Deutsch Pirates from the East-sea marches would
join them in plunder of France ! If living three cen
turies longer in Heathenism, sea-robbery, and the
unlucrative fishing of ambergris could ennoble them
beyond the others, then they were ennobled. The
Normans were Saxons who had learned to speak
French. No : by Thor and AVodan, the Saxons were
all as noble as needful; — shaped, says the Mythus,
" from the rock of the Harzgebirge ; " brother-tribes
being made of clay, wood, water, or what other mate
rial 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
abundantly manifest.

'To this English People in AVorld-History, there
have been, shall I prophecy, Two grand tasks assigned ?
Huge-looming through the dim tumult of the always
incommensurable, Present Time, outlines of two tasks
disclose themselves : the grand Industrial task of con
quering some half or more of this Terraqueous Planet j
for the use of man ; then secondly, the grand Consti- I
tutional task of sharing, in some pacific endurable '

76

CHARTISM.

manner, the fruit of said conquest, and shewing 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 un
equal progress. Steamengincs, ploughshares, pick
axes ; what is meant by conquering this Planet, they
partly know. Elective franchise, ballot-box, represen
tative assembly; how to accomplish sharing of that
conquest, they do not so well know. Europe knows
not; Europe vehemently asks in these days, but re
ceives no answer, no credible answer. For as to the
partial Delolmish, Benthamee, or other French or
English answers, current in the proper quarters and
highly 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 say, " Wc will no more be governed so ? "
That is not the history of the English Constitution;
not altogether that. Rebellion 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-articulated mights:' A dreadful business
to articulate correctly! Consider those Barons of
Runnymead; consider all manner of successfully re
volting men! Your Great Charter has to be experi
mented on, by battle and debate, for a hundred-and-
fifty years ; is then found to be correct ; and stands as

CHAP. VIII. NEW ERAS.

77

true Magna Charta, — nigh cut in pieces by a tailor,
short of measures, in later generations. Mights, I say,
are a dreadful 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 descend
ing ever lower. Class after class acquires faculty of
utterance, — Necessity teaching and compelling; as
the dumb man, seeing the knife at his father's throat,
suddenly acquired speech! Consider too how class
after class not only acquires faculty of articulating
what its might is, but likewise grows in might, ac
quires might or loses might ; so that always, after a
space, there is not only new gift of articulating, but
there is something new to articulate. Constitutional
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, namely. In the time of James First, not
only Knights of the Shire but Parliamentary Burgesses
assemble ; a real House of Commons has come deci
sively into play, — much to the astonishment of James
First. Wc call it a growth of mights, if also of neces
sities ; a growth of power to articulate mights, and
make rights of them.
' In those past silent centuries, among those silent
classes, much had been going on. Not only had red-
7*

78

CHARTISM.

deer in the New and other Forests been got preserved
and shot ; and treacheries of Simon de Montfort, wars
of Red and White Roses, 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 tho millions of sires and the
millions of sons these eighteen generations, had been
got drained and tilled, covered with yellow harvests,
beautiful and rich possessions ; the mud-wooden
Caesters and Chesters had become steepled tile-roofed
compact Towns. Sheffield had taken to the manufac
ture 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 accumulate manufacturing,
commercial, economic skill which lay impalpably
warehoused in English hands and heads, what auc
tioneer could estimate ?
' Hardly an Englishman to be met with but could
do something ; some cunningcr thing than break his
fellow-creature's head with battle-axes. The seven
incorporated trades, with their million-guild brethren,
with their hammers, their shuttles and tools, what an
arnly ; — fit to conquer the 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 Intel
ligence 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

CHAP. VIII. NEW ERAS. 7' '-.
finest human figure, as I apprehend, that Nature haii ia
hitherto seen fit to make of our widely diffused Teu ¦;,'¦,;•
tonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt or Sarmat, I find nt r
human soul so beautiful, these fifteen hundred knowi <
years; — our supreme modern European man. Hin fit
England had contrived to realise : were there not ideas ih
' Ideas poetic and also Puritanic, — that had to seel
utterance in the notablcst way ! England had got he:
Shakspeare ; but was now about to get her Milton am,;
Oliver Cromwell. This too we will call a new expan
sion, hard as it might be to articulate and adjust ; this *
that a man could actually have a Conscience for hi
own behoof, and not for his Priest's only ; that hi .iii
Priest, be who he might, would henceforth have to tab. -;.';
that fact along with him. One of the hardest thing:
to adjust ! It is not adjusted down to this hour.
It lasts onwards to the time they call " Glorious Re
volution" 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, unless we call waste vacancy
peace. But it needed to be adjusted, as the others
had done, as still others will do. Nobility at Runny-
mead 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 cars 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

80

CHARTISM.

Constitutional controversy, and revolt of the Middle
Class had not ended, had yet but begun, what a shoot
was that that England, carelessly, in quest of other
objects, struck out across the Ocean, into the waste
land wliich it named Neio England f Hail to thee,
poor little ship Mayflower, of Delft-Haven ; poor
common-looking ship, hired by common chartcrparty
for coined dollars ; caulked with mere oakum and
tar ; provisioned with vulgarcst biscuit and bacon ; —
yet what ship Argo, or miraculous epic ship built by
the Sea-gods, was not a foolish bumbarge in compari
son ! Golden fleeces or the like these sailed for, with
or without effect ; thou little Mayflower, hadst in thee
a veritable Promethean spark ; the life-spark of the
largest Nation on our Earth, — so we may already name
tlie Transatlantic Saxon Nation. They went seeking
leave to hear sermon in their own method, these May
flower Puritans ; a most honest indispensable search :
and yet, like Saul the son of Kish, seeking a small
tiling, they found this unexpected great thing ! Ho
nour to the brave and true ; they verily, we say, carry
fire from Heaven and, have a power that themselves
dream not of. Let all men honour Puritanism, since
God has so honoured it. Islam itself, with its wild
¦ heartfelt " Allah akbar, God is great," was it not ho-
| noured ? There is but one thing without honour ;
i smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or be :
i Insincerity, Unbelief. He who believes no thing, who
j believes only the shows of things, is not in relation
', with Nature and Fact at all. Nature denies him ;
< orders him at his earliest convenience to disappear.
Let him disappear from her domains, — into those of

CHAP. VIII. NEW ERAS.

81

Chaos, Hypothesis and Simulacrum, or wherever else
his parish may be.'

' As to the Third Constitutional controversy, that of
the Working Classes, which now debates itself every
where these fifty years, in France specifically since
1789, in England too since 1831, it is doubtless the
hardest of all to get articulated : finis of peace, or even
reasonable truce on this, is a thing I have little pros
pect of for several generations. Dark, wild-weltering,
dreary, boundless ; nothing heard on it yet but ballot-
boxes, Parliamentary arguing ; not to speak of much
far worse arguing, by steel and lead, from Valmy to
Waterloo, lo Peterloo ! ' —
' And yet of Representative Assemblies may not this
good be said : That contending parties in a country
do thereby ascertain ono another's strength ? They
fight there, since fight they must, by petition, Parlia
mentary eloquence, not by sword, bayonet and bursts
of military cannon. AVhy do men fight at all, if it be
not that they arc yet imacquaiiited 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 prefer
extermination, and slightly circuitous suicide, there is
no other course for me. That in England, by public
meetings, by petitions, by elections, leading-articles,
and other jangling hubbub and tongue-fence which
perpetually goes on everywhere in that country, peo
ple ascertain one another's strength, and the most ob
durate House of Lords has to yield and give in before

82

CHARTISM.

it come to cannonading and guillotinement : this is a
saving characteristic of England. Nay, at bottom, is
hot this the celebrated English Constitution itself?
This imspoken Constitution, whereof Privilege of Par
liament, 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 stormy spring-time, wet contentious April,
winter chilling the lap of very May ; but at length the
season of summer docs come. So long tho tree stood
naked ; angry wiry naked boughs moaning and creak
ing in the wind : you would say, Cut it down, why
cumbereth it the ground ? Not so ; we must wait ;
all tilings will have their time. — Of the man Shak
speare, and his Elizabethan Era, with its Sydneys,
Raleighs, Bacons, what could wc 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, such 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, nations, in all things
extant and growing in this universe, we may note such
vicissitudes, and budding-times. Moreover there are
spiritual budding-times ; and then also there arc phy
sical, appointed to nations.
' Thus in the middle of that poor calumniated

CHAP. VIII. NEW ERAS.

83

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 sudden, very
strangely : — it now turns out that this favoured Eng
land was not only to have had her Shakspeares,
Bacons, Sydneys, but to have her AVatts, Arkwrights,
Brindleys ! We will honour greatness in all kinds. The
Prospcro evoked the singing of Ariel, and took captive
tlie world with those melodies : the same Prospero
can send his Fire-demons panting across all oceans ;
shooting with the speed of meteors, on cunning high
ways, from end to end of kingdoms ; and make Iron
his missionary, preaching its evangel to the brute Pri
meval Powers, which listen and obey : 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 wrappage ; — a wrappage strug
gling 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 boom 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

84

CHARTISM.

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 Kanzlcr von Muller,
in search of the palpable picturesque, could not but
stare wide-eyed. Nevertheless our World-Poet knew
well what he was saying.'

' Richard Arkwright, it would seem, was not a
beautiful man ; no romance-hero with haughty eyes,
Apollo-lip, and gesture like the herald Mercury ; a
plain almost gross, bag-cheeked, potbellied Lancashire
man, with an air of painful reflection, yet also of copi
ous free digestion ; — a man stationed by the commu
nity to shave certain dusty beards, in the Northern
parts of England, at a halfpenny each. To such end,
we say, by forethought, oversight, accident and arrange
ment, had Richard Ar!-wright been, by the community
of England and his own consent, set apart. Never
theless, in strapping of razors, in lathering of dusty
beards, and the contradictions and confusions attend
ant thereon, the man had notions in that rough head
of his ; spindles, shuttles, wheels and contrivances ply
ing ideally within tho 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,
scattered 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

CHAP. VIII. NEW ERAS.

85

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 Pheno
menon is that bag-checked, potbellied, much-enduring,
much-inventing barber ! French Revolutions 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 Eng
land ti.e power of cotton.'
'Neither had AVatt of the Steamengine a heroic
origin, any kindred with the princes of this world.
The princes of this world were shooting their par
tridges ; 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 " mo-
nied man," as indispensable man-midwife of the same.
Reader, thou shalt admire what is admirable ; not what
is dressed in admirable ; learn to know the British lion
even when he is not throne-supporter, and also the
British jackass in lion's skin even when he is. Ah,
couldst thou always, what a world were it ! But has
tlie Berlin Royal Academy or any English Useful-
Knowledge Society discovered, for instance, who it
was that first scratched earth with a stick ; and threw
corns, the biggest he could find, into it ; scedgrains of
a certain grass, which he named lohite or wheat ?
Again, what is the whole Tees-water and other breed
ing-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 shewed me in
8

86

CHARTISM.

Birmingham can be put in comparison for ingenuity
with that figure of the wedge named knife, of the
wedges named saw, of the lever named hammer: —
nay is it not with the hammer-knife, named sword,
that men fight, and maintain any semblance of consti
tuted authority that yet survives among us? The
steamengine I call fire-demon and great; but it is
nothing to the invention ot fire. Prometheus, Tubal-
cain, Tripotolemus ! Are not our greatest men as good
as lost ? The men that walk daily among us, clothing
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 clanging clashing universal Sword-dance that
the European world now dances for the last half-cen
tury, Voltaire is but one choragus, where Richard Ark
wright is another. Let it dance itself out. When
Arkwright shall have become mythic like Arachne,
wo shall still spin in peaceable profit by him ; and the
Sword-dance, with all its sorrowful shufflings, Water
loo 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 !
Robert Clive in that same time went out, with a de
veloped gift of penmanship, as writer or superior book
keeper to a trading factory established in the distant
East. With gift of penmanship developed ; with other

CHAP. VIII. NEW ERAS.

87

gifts not yet developed, which the calls of the case did
by and by develope. 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 tho City of
London. 'Accidental all these things and persons look, un
expected every one of them to man. Yet inevitable
every one of them ; foreseen, not unexpected, by Su
preme Power ; prepared, appointed from afar. Ad
vancing always through all centuries, in the middle of
the eighteenth they arrived. Tho Saxon kindred burst
forth into cotton-spinning, cloth-dropping, iron forging,
steamengining, railwaying, commercing 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 ; bitumi
nous 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 unre-
gardful neighbours, are wedded together; Birming
ham and Wolverhampton, and the hundred Stygian
forges, with their fire-throats and never-resting sledge
hammers, rose into day. Wet Manconium stretched

88

CHARTISM.

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 thereupon
from the Mersey River, vexed with innumerable keels.
England, I say, dug out her bitumen-fire, and bade it
work : towns rose, and steeple chimneys ; — Chartisms
also, and Parliaments they name Reformed.'
Such, figuratively given, are some prominent points,
chief mountain-summits, of our English Histoiy past
and present, according to the Author of this strange
untranslated Work, whom we think we recognise to bo
an old acquaintance.

89

CHAPTER IX.

PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM.
To us, looking at these matters somewhat in the same
light, Reform-Bills, French Revolutions, Louis-Phi-
lippes, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days, and what
not, are no longer inexplicable. Where the great mass
of men is tolerably 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 will
complain of it, has to produce earthquakes ! Every
where, 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 AVorking Slave ;
his anger and cureless discontent till that bo 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 ! AVhat delirium we arc 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 Guid
ance ; and it is a Do-something World ! AVould to
8*

90

CHARTISM.

God our Ducal 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 in
stead of them will and must, and once more, though
after a long sad circuit, it will be well 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 fivc-and-twcnty years, it
was curious to note how the internal discontent of
England struggled to find vent for itself through any
i orifice : the poor patient, all sick from centre to sur
face, complains 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 Doc
tor says, it is the liver ; that other, it is the lungs, the
head, the heart, defective transpiration in the skin. A
thoroughgoing Doctor of eminence said, it was rotten
boroughs ; the want of extended suffrage to destroy
rotten boroughs. From of old, the English patient
himself had a continually recurring notion that this
was it. The English people arc used to suffrage ; 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
J one's ' twenty-thousandth part of a master of tongue-
fence to National Palaver,' — the Doctors asserted that

CHAP. IX. PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM.
this was Freedom, this and no other. It seemed ; t?i>
dible to many men, of high degree and of low. '¦ '; 3
persuasion of remedy grew, the evil was pressii v ¦-'
Swing's ricks were on fire. Some nine years ag: , a.
State-surgeon rose, and in peculiar circumstances si . :' ,
Let there be extension of the suffrage; let the g: -a
Doctor's nostrum, the patient's old passionate pra j <¦¦'}
be fulfilled !
Parliamentary Radicalism, while it gave articu.nc
utterance to the discontent of the English peoni,
could not by its worst enemy be said to be withoi s
function. If it is in the natural order of things (1:<
there must be discontent, no less so is it that such <]•.
content should have an outlet, a Parliamentary voir :.
Here the matter is debated of, demonstrated, conti a-
dicted, qualified, reduced to feasibility ; — can at least
solace itself with hope, and die gently, convinced of
tmfeasibility. The New, Untried ascertains how it will
fit itself into the arrangements of the Old ; whether the
Old can be compelled to admit it ; how in that case it
may, with the minimum of violence, be admitted. Nor
let us count it an easy one, this function of Radi
calism ; it was one of the most difficult. The pain-
stricken patient docs, indeed without effort groan and
complain ; but not without effort docs the physician
ascertain what it is that has gone wrong with him
how some remedy may be devised for him. And
above all, if your patient is not one sick man, but a
whole sick nation! Dingy dumb millions, grimed
with dust and sweat, with darkness, rage and sorrow,
stood round these men saying, or struggling as they
could to say : " Behold, our lot is unfair ; our life is

92

CHARTISM.

not whole but sick ; we cannot live under injustice ;
go ye and get us justice !' For whether the poor
operative clamoured for Time-bill, Factory-bill, Corn-
bill, for or against whatever bill, this was what he
meant. All bills plausibly presented might have some
look of hope in them, might get some clamour of
approval from him ; as, for the man wholly sick,
there is no disease in the Nosology but he can trace
in himself some symptoms of it. Such was the mission
of Parliamentary Radicalism.
How Parliamentary Radicalism has fulfilled this
mission, entrusted to its management these eight years
now, is known to all men. The expectant millions
have sat at a feast of the Barmecide ; been bidden
fill themselves with the imagination of meat. What
thing has Radicalism obtained for them ; what other
than shadows of things has it so much as asked for
them ? Cheap Justice, Justice to Ireland, Irish Ap
propriation-Clause, Ratepaying Clause, Poor-Rate,
Church-Rato, Household Suffrage, Ballot-Question
'open' or shut: not things but shadows of things;
Benthamee formulas ; barren as the east-wind ! An
Ultra-radical, not seemingly of the Benthamee species,
is forced to exclaim : ' The people are at last wearied.
They say, Why should wc be ruined in our shops,
thrown out of our farms, voting for these men ?
Ministerial majorities decline ; this Ministry has be
come impotent, had it even the will to do good.
They have called long to us, " AVo arc a Reform
Ministry ; will ye not support us ? " AVe have sup
ported them ; borne them forward indignantly on our
shoulders, time after time, fall after fall, when they

CHAP. IX. PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM.
had been hurled out into the street; and lay proslra r
helpless, like dead luggage. It is the fact of a Rcfo.
Ministry, not tho name of one that we would suppo; ¦¦•„.
Languor, sickness of hope deferred pervades the pub ' ¦'. :
mind ; the public mind says at last, Why all tl i
struggle for the name of a Reform Ministry ? I •
tlie Tories be Ministry if they will ; let at least sor i
living reality be Ministry! A rearing horse that wi'1
only run backward, he is not the horse one wou c
choose to travel on ; yet of all conceivable horses tl •
worst is the dead horse. Mounted on a rearing hors
you may back him, spur him, check him, make j-
httlc way even backwards ; but seated astride of yot ¦
dead horse, what chance is there for you in the dia
ler of possibilities? You sit motionless, hopeless, a
spectacle to gods and men.'
There is a class of revolutionists named Girondins,
whose fate in history is remarkable enough! Men
who rebel, and urge the Lower Classes to rebel, ought
to have other than Formulas to go upon. Men who
discern in the misery of tho toiling complaining mil-
lions not misery, but only a raw-material wliich can
be wrought upon, and traded in, for one's own poor
hidebound theories and egoisms ; to whom millions of
living fellow-creatures, with beating hearts in their
bosoms, beating, suffering, hoping, are ' masses,' mere
'explosive masses for blowing down Bastilles with,'
for voting at hustings for us: such men are of the
questionable species ! No man is justified in resisting
by word or deed the Authority he lives under, for a
light cause, be such Authority what it may. Obe
dience, little as many may consider that side of the

94

CHARTISM.

matter, is the primary duty of man. No man but is
bound indefeasibly, with all force of obligation, to obey.
Parents, teachers, superiors, leaders, these all creatures
recognise as deserving obedience. Recognised or not
recognised, a man has his superiors, a regular hier
archy above him ; extending up, degree above degree :
to Heaven itself and God the Maker, who made His
world not for anarchy but for rule and order. It is
not a light matter when the just man can recognise in
the powers set over him no longer anything that is
divine ; when resistance against such becomes a deeper
law of order than obedience to them ; when the just
man sees himself in the tragical position of a stirrer
up of strife ! Rebel, without due and most due cause,
is the ugliest of words ; the first rebel was Satan. —
But now in these circumstances shall we blame
the unvoting disappointed millions that they turn away
with horror from this name of a Reform Ministry,
name of a Parliamentary Radicalism, and demand a
fact and reality thereof? That they too, having still
faith in what so many had faith in, still count ' exten
sion of the suffrage ' the one thing needful ; and say,
in such manner as they can, Let the suffrage be still
extended, then all will be well ? It is the ancient British
faith ; promulgated in these ages by prophets and evan
gelists ; preached forth from barrel-heads by all manner
of men. He who is free and blessed has his twenty-
thousandth part of a master of tongue-fence in National
Palaver; whosoever is not blessed but unhappy, the
ailment of him is that he has it not. Ought he not to
have it then ? By the law of God and of men, yea ; —
and will have it withal! Chartism, with its 'five

CHAP. IX. PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM.
points,' borne aloft on pikeheads and torchlight
ings, is there. Chartism is one of the most m
phenomena in England. Not that Chartism now
should provoke wonder; but that the invited hit
people should have sat eight years at such table c
Barmecide, patiently expecting somewhat fron
Name of a Reform Ministry, and not till after
years have grown hopeless, this is the respectable
of the miracle.

96

CHAPTER X.

IMPOSSIBLE.

" But what are we to do ? " exclaims the practical
man, impatiently on every side : " Descend from
speculation and the safe pulpit, down into the rough
market-place, and say what can be done ! " — O prac
tical man, there seem very many things which practice
and true manlike effort, in Parliament and out of it,
might actually avril to do. But the first of all things,
as already said, is to gird thyself up for actual doing ;
to know that thou actually cither must do, or, as the
Irish say, * come out of that ! '
It is not a lucky word this same impossible : no
good comes of those that have it so often in their
mouth. Who is he that says always, There is a lion
in the way? Sluggard, thou must slay the lion then;
tlie way has to be travelled ! In Art, in Practice, in
numerable critics will demonstrate that most things
are henceforth impossible ; that we are got, once for
all, into the region of perennial commonplace, and
must contentedly continue there. Let such critics de
monstrate ; it is the nature of them : what harm is in
it ? Poetry once well demonstrated to be impossible,
arises the Burns, arises the Goethe. Unhcroic common
place being now clearly all wc have too look for, comes
tlie Napoleon, comes the conquest of the world. It was
proved by fiuxionary calculus, that steamships could
never get across from the farthest point of Ireland

CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE.

97

to the nearest of Newfoundland : impelling force, re
sisting force, maximum here, minium there ; by law
of Nature, and geometric demonstration : — what could
be done ? Tho Great Western could weigh anchor
from Bristol Port ; that could be done. The Great
Western, bounding safe through the gullets of the
Hudson, threw her cable out on the capstan of New
York, and left our still moist paper-demonstration to
dry itself at leisure. " Impossible ?" cried Mirabeau
to his secretary, " Ne me dites jamais ce bete de mot,
Never name to me that blockhead of a word ! "
There is a phenomenon which one might call
Paralytic Radicalism, in these days ; wliich gauges '
with Statistic measuring-reed, sounds with Philo
sophic Politico-Economic plummet the deep dark sea
of troubles ; and having taught us rightly what an
infinite sea of troubles it is, sums up with the prac
tical inference, and use of consolation, That nothing
whatever can be done in it by man, who has simply
to sit still, and look wistfully to ' time and general
laws ;' and thereupon, without so much as recommend
ing suicide, coldly takes its leave of us. Most paralytic,
uninstructive ; unproductive of any comfort to one!
They arc an unreasonable class who cry, " Peace, peace,"
when there is no peace. But what kind of class are
they who cry, " Peace, peace, have 1 not told you that
there is no peace !" Paralytic Radicalism, frequent
among those Statistic friends of ours, is one of the most
afflictive phenomena the mind of man can be called
to contemplate. One prays that it at least might
cease. Let Paralysis retire into secret places, and
dormitories proper for it ; the public highways ought
9

98

CHARTISM.

not to he occupied by people demonstrating that mo
tion is impossible. Paralytic ; — and also, thank Heaven,
entirely false ! Listen to a thinker of another sort :
' All evil, and this evil too, is as a nightmare ; the
instant you begin to stir under it, the evil is, properly
speaking, gone.' Consider, 0 reader, whether it be
not actually so ? Evil, once manfully fronted, ceases to
be evil ; there is generous battle-hope in place of dead
passive misery ; the evil itself has become a kind of
good. To the practical man, therefore, we will repeat
that he has, as the first thing he can ' do,'' to gird
himself up for actual doing ; to know well that he is
either there to do, or not there at all. Once rightly
girded up, how many things will present themselves
as doable which now are not attemptible ! Two things,
great things, dwell, for the last ten years, in all
thinking heads in England ; and are hovering, of late,
even on the tongues of not a few. With a word on
each of these, we will dismiss the practical man, and
right gladly take ourselves into obscurity and silence
again. Universal Education is the first great thing
we mean ; general Emigration is the second.

Who would suppose that Education were a thing
which had to be advocated on the ground of local
expediency, or indeed on any ground ? As if it stood
not on the basis of everlasting duty, as a prime neces
sity of man. It is a thing that should need no advo
cating ; much as it does actually need. To impart the
gift of thinking to those who cannot think, and yet
who could in that case think : this, one would imagine,

CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE.

99

was the first function a government had to set about;
discharging. Were it not a cruel thing to see, in any
province of an empire, the inhabitants living all muti
lated in their limbs, each strong man with his right-"!
arm lamed ? How much crueller to find the strong
soul, with its eyes still sealed, its eyes extinct so that?.
it sees not ! Light has come into the world, but to
this poor peasant it has come in vain. For six thou- T
sand years tho Sons of Adam, in sleepless effort, have .
been devising, doing, discovering ; in mysterious infi-:l
nite indissoluble communion, warring, a little band of
brothers, against the great black empire of Necessity
and Night ; they have accomplished such a conquest
and conquests : and to this man it is all as if it had
not been. The four-and- twenty letters of the Alpha
bet are still Runic enigmas to him. He passes by on
the other side ; and that great Spiritual Kingdom, the
toilwon conquest of his own brothers, all that his
brothers have conquered, is a thing non-extant for
him. An invisible empire ; he knows it not, suspects
it not. And is it not his withal ; the conquest of his
own brothers, the lawfully acquired possession of all
men ? Baleful enchantment lies over him, from gene
ration to generation ; he knows not that such an em
pire is his, that such an empire is at all. O, what
are bills of rights, emancipations of black slaves into
black apprentices, lawsuits in chancery for some short
usufruct of a bit of land ? The grand ' seedfield of
Time ' is this man's, and you give it him not. Time's
seedfield, which includes the Earth and all her seed-
fields and pearl-oceans, nay her sowers too and pearl-
divers, all that was wise and heroic and victorious here

1 ¦

100

CHARTISM.

below ; of which the Earth's centuries are but as fur
rows, for it stretches forth from the Beginning onward
even unto this Day !
' My inheritance, how lordly wide and fair ;
Time is my fair seedfield, to Time I'm heir ! '
Heavier wrong is not done under the sun. It lasts
from year to year, from century to century ; the
blinded sire slaves himself out, and leaves a blinded
son ; and men, made in the image of God, continue
as two-legged beasts of labour ; — and in the largest
empire of the world, it is a debate whether a small
fraction of the Revenue of one Day (30,000Z. is but
that) shall, after Thirteen Centuries, be laid out on it,
or not laid out on it. Have wc Governors, have we
Teachers ; have we had a Church these thirteen hun
dred years ? What is an Overseer of souls, an Arch-
overseer, Archiepiscopus ? Is he something ? If so,
let him lay his hand on his heart, and say what
thing !
But quitting all that, of which the human soul
cannot well speak in terms of civility, let us observe
• now that Education is not only an eternal duty, but
has at length become even a temporary and ephemeral
one, which tho necessities of the hour will oblige us to
look after. These Twenty-four million labouring men,
if their affairs remain unregulated, chaotic, will burn
ricks and mills ; reduce us, themselves and the world
into ashes and ruin. • Simply their affairs cannot re
main unregulated, chaotic ; but must be regulated,
;-, brought into some kind of order. AVhat intellect

were able to regulate them ? The intellect of a Bacon,

CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE.

Il

the energy of a Luther, if left to their own strength
might pause in dismay before such a task ; a Baccit
and Luther added together, to be perpetual prim*
minister over us, could not do it. No one great ar. :
greatest intellect can do it. What can ? Only Twenty.
four million ordinary intellects, once awakened in
action ; these, well presided over, may. Intellect.
insight, is the discernment of order in disorder; it h
the discovery of the will of nature, of God's will; tb:
beginning of the capability to walk according to thai,
With perfect intellect, were such possible without pet:.
feet morality, the world would be perfect ; its effort!.
unerringly correct, its results continually successful;
its condition faultless. Intellect is like light ; this
Chaos becomes a World under it : fiat lux. Thesu
Twenty-four million intellects are but common in
tellects ; 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 intel
lect was in the Twenty-four millions will be exhibited
by the result they 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 AVisdom,
or as a baseless fateful Hallucination, a Chimrcra breath
ing not fabulous fire !
Dissenters call for one scheme of Education, the
Church objects ; this party objects, and that ; there is '
endless objection, by him and by her and by it : a
9*

102

CHARTISM.

subject encumbered with difficulties on every side !
Pity that difficulties exist ; that Religion, of all things,
should occasion difficulties. We do not extenuate
them : in their reality they are considerable ; in their
appearance and pretension, they are insuperable, heart-
appalling to all Secretaries of the Home Department.
For, in very truth, how can Religion be divorced from
Education ? An irreverent knowledge is no know
ledge ; may be a development of the logical or other
handicraft faculty inward or outward ; but is no cul
ture of the soul of a man. A knowledge that ends in
barren self- worship, comparative indifference or con
tempt for all God's Universe except one insignificant
item thereof, what is it? Handicraft development,
and even shallow as handicraft. Nevertheless is handi
craft itself, and the habit of the merest logic, nothing ?
It is already something ; it is the indispensable begin
ning of every thing ! AVise men know it to bo an
indispensable something ; not yet much ; and would
so gladly superadd to it the element whereby it may
become all. Wise men would not quarrel in attempt
ing this ; they would lovingly co-operate in attempt
ing it.
' And now how teach religion ? ' so asks the indig
nant Ultra-radical, cited above ; an Ultra-radical seem
ingly not of the Benthamee species, with whom, though
his dialect is far different, there are sound Churchmen,
we hope, who have some fellow-feeling : ' How teach
religion ? By plying with liturgies, catechisms, cre
dos ; droning thirty-nine or other articles incessantly
into the infant ear ? Friends ! In that case, why not
apply to Birmingham, and have Machines made, and

CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE.

103

set up at all street-corners, in highways and byways,
to repeat and vociferate the same, not ceasing night
or day ? The genius of Birmingham is adequate to
that. Albertus Magnus had a leather man that could
articulate ; not to speak of Martinus Scriblcrus' Niirn-
berg man that could reason as well as we know who !
Depend upon it, Birmingham can make machines to
repeat liturgies and articles ; to do whatsoever feat is
mechanical. And what were all schoolmasters, nay
all priests and churches compared with this Birming
ham 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 wheresoever wanted, to preach
there independent of the world. In loud thorough
fares, still more in unawakened districts, troubled with
argumentative infidelity, you make the windpipes
wider, strengthen the main steam-cylinder ; your par
son preaches, to the due pitch, while you give him coal ;
and fears no man or thing. Here were a ' Church
extension ;'' to which I, with my last penny, did I be
lieve in it, would subscribe.  Ye blind leaders of
the blind ! Arc wc 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 ./Ether 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

104

CHARTISM.

! ;

contrivance of Birmingham and the Bank of England
united bring ethereal fire into a human soul, quicken
it out of earthly darkness into heavenly wisdom ? Soul
is kmdled 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 follows
from this, church-building, church-extension, what
ever else is needful 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 education 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 tho facts of the thing, That after thirteen
centuries of waiting, ho 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 ? Teaching 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
alphabet to all people. The miraculous art of read
ing and writing, such seemed to him the needful pre
liminary of all teaching, the first corner-stone of what
foundation soever could be laid for what edifice soever,
in the teaching kind. Let pious Churchism make

CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE.

105

haste, let pious Dissenterism make haste, let all pious
preachers and missionaries make haste, bestir them
selves according to their zeal and skill : he the official
person stood up for the Alphabet ; and was even im
patient for it, having waited thirteen centuries now.
He insisted, and would take no denial, postponement,
promise, excuse or subterfuge, That all English per
sons should be taught to read. He appealed to all
rational Englishmen, of all creeds, classes and colours,
Whether this 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 sufficient. He purposed to appoint such School
masters, to venture on the choice of such Hornbooks ;
to send a Schoolmaster and Hornbook into every
township, parish and hamlet of England ; so that, in
ten years hence, an Englishman who could not read
might be acknowledged as the monster, which he
really is !
This official person's plan we do not give. The
thing lies there, with the facts of it, and with the ap
pearances or sham-facts of it ; a plan adequately repre
senting the facts of tho 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 Churchism 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,

106

CHARTISM.

be found to reside. England we believe would, if con
sulted, 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 ! Hornbooks unex
ceptionable to the candid portion of England, we will
believe, might be selected. Nay, wc can conceive that
Schoolmasters, fit to teach reading might, by a board of
rational 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 penalties 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 teachinjr of Ena-
land to read ! Harder things, wc 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, prac
tical sense, knowing realities to be real, knowing
clamours to be clamorous and to seem real, propose
this thing, and the innumerable things springing from
it, — wo to any Churchism or any Dissenterism that
cast itself athwart the path of that man! Avaum ye
gainsayers ! is darkness and ignorance of the Alphabet
necessary for you ? Reconcile yourselves to the Al-

CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE. 107
phabet, or depart elsewhither! — Would not all that
has genuineness in England gradually rally round
such a man ; all that has strength in England ? For
realities alone have strength ; wind-bags are wind ; cant
is cant, leave it alone there. Nor are all clamours mo
mentous : among living creatures, wc find, the loudest
is the longest-eared ; among lifeless things the loudest is
the drum, the emptiest. Alas, that official persons, and
all of us, had not eyes to see what was real, what was
merely chimerical, and thought or called itself real !
How many dread minatory Castlc-spcctrcs 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 not real ourselves ; we should otherwise have surer
vision for the real. Castle-spectres, in their utmost ter
ror, 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 few days of time ; and even thou, poor
palpitating featherbrain, wilt thou find how real it is.
Eternity : hast thou heard of that ? Is that a fact,
or is it no fact? Are Buckingham House and St.
Stephens in that, or not in that ?

But now we have to speak of the second great
thing: Emigration. It was said above, all new epochs, Il
so convulsed and tumultuous to look upon, are 'ex
pansions,' 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 ;

108

CHARTISM.

yet is not spinning of clothes for the naked intrinsi
cally u most blessed thing? Manchester once or
ganic will bless and not afllict. The confusions, if wc
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 phenomenon 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 Roman Empire, a
most confused epoch and yet one of the greatest, the
Teutonic Countries find themselves too full. On a
certain western rim of our small Europe, there are
more men than were expected. Heaped up against
tlie western shore there, and for a couple of hundred
miles inward, the 'tide of population' swells too high,
and confuses itself somewhat ! Over-population ? And
yet, if this small western rim of Europe is overpeo
pled, does not everywhere else a whole vacant Earth,
as it were, call to us, Come and till me, come and reap
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 Bir
mingham 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 worth 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 wc that have not yet learned the art of managing
our white European man !

CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE.

109

The controversies on Malthus and the ' Population
Principle,' ' Preventive check' and so forth, with which
tlie public car 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
tlie 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 dimi
nish 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 dis
tinct 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 la
bour in tho British Empire first ? Nay, if Tom did
renounce his highest blessedness of life, and struggle
and conquer like a Saint Francis of Assisi, what would
it profit him or us ? Seven millions of the finest
peasantry do not renounce, but proceed all the more
briskly; ami with blue-visaged Hibernians instead of
fair Saxon Tomsons and Sallysons, the latter end of
that country is worse than the beginning. O wonder
ful Malthusian prophets ! Milleniums are undoubt-
10

110

CHARTISM.

edly coming, must come one way or the other : but
will it be, think you, by twenty millions of working
people simultaneously striking work in that depart
ment ; passing, in universal trades-union, a resolution
not to beget any more till the labour-market become
satisfactory ? By Day and Night ! they were indeed
irresistible 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 bene
factors of the species, who counsel that in each parish,
in some central locality, instead of the Parish Clergy
man, there might be established some Parish Exter
minator ; or say a Reservoir of Arsenic, kept up at
the public expense, free to all parishioners ; for which
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 Jchosa-
phat, 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 : transcendent mistemper of the noblest soul ; ut
terance of a boundless, godlike, unspeakable, implacable
sorrow and protest against the world. But in Holy
well Street, not long ago, we bought, for three-pence, a
book still mournfuller : the Pamphlet of one " Marcus,"
whom his poor Chartist editor and rcpublisber 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

CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE.

Ill

such a book existed ; here it lies, ' Printed by John Hill,
Black-horse Court, Fleet Street, and now reprinted
for the instruction of the labourer, by AVilliam Dug-
dale, Holywell Street, Strand,' the exasperated Char
tist editor who sells it you for three-pence. We have
read Marcus ; but his sorrow is not divine. AVe hoped
he would 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 : ho is a benefactor of the
species in his own kind ; has looked intensely on the
world's woes, from a Benthamee Malthusian watch-
tower, under a Heaven dead as iron ; and does now,
with much longwindcdness, in a drawling, snuffling,
circuitous, extremely dull, yet at bottom handfast and
positive manner, recommend that all children of work
ing people, after the third, be disposed of by ' painless
extinction.' Charcoal-vapour and other methods exist.
The mothers would consent, might be made to con
sent. Three children might be left living ; 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 in
fanticide matrons might delight to take their evening
walk of contemplation ; and reflect what patriotesses
they were, what a cheerful 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 bene
factor 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 nogod-like sorrow ; sadder than the godlike. The
Chartist editor, dull as he, calls him demon author,

112

CHARTISM.

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 company ? Might we not hope that
both of them had as good as delivered their message
now, and were about to go their ways ?
For all this of the ' painless extinction,' and the
i rest, is in a world where Canadian Forests stand tvn-
I felled, boundless Plains and Prairies unbroken with
\ the plough ; on the west and on the cast, green desert
spaces never yet made white with corn ; and to the
overcrowded little western nook of Europe, our Terres
trial Planet, nine-tenths of it yet vacant or tenanted
by nomades, is still crying, Come and till me, come
and reap me ! And in an England with wealth, and
means for moving, such as no nation ever before had.
With ships ; with war-ships rotting idle, which, but
bidden move and not rot, might bridge all oceans.
With trained men, educated to pen and practise, to
• administer and act ; briefless Barristers, chargeless
Clergy, taskless Scholars, languishing in all court
houses, hiding in obscure garrets, besieging all ante
chambers, in passionate want of simply one thing,
AVork ; — with as many Half-pay Officers of both Ser
vices, wearing themselves down in wretched tedium,
as might lead an Emigrant host larger than Xerxes'
was ! Laissez-faire and Malthus positively must part
, company. Is it not as if this swelling, simmering,
| never-resting Europe of ours stood, once more, on the
verge of an expansion without parallel ; struggling,

CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE.

113

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 Gorman 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 Savannas of America ;
round ancient Carthage, and in the interior of Africa ;
on both slopes of the Altaic chain, in the central Plat
form of Asia; in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Crim Tartary,
the Curragh of Kildarc ? One man, in one year, as I
have understood it, if you lend him earlh, will feed
himself and nine others. Alas, where now are the
Hcngsts and Alarics of our still glowing, still expanding
Europe; who, when their home is grown' too narrow,
will enlist and, like fire-pillars, 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, p. 239.

THE END.