( ifornia Dnal ity CHARTISM. THOMAS CARLYLE. It never smokes but there is fire." — Old Proverb. SECOISD ED;r^;;OJS^ Q. r T CHAPMAN AND. HALL, SfRAND. M.DCCC.XLIl. SBLF ^^ 561.1 C3 CONTENTS. CHAP. PAGE I. Condition-of-England Question ... 1 II. Statistics ....... 9 III. New Poor-Law 16 IV. Finest Peasantry in the World . . .24 V. Rights and Mights . . . . . .36 VI. Laissez-Faire ....... 49 VII. Not Laissez-Faire 63 VIII. New Eras 69 IX. Parliamentary Radicalism . . . .89 X. Impossible 96 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 surely, at an epoch of history when the ' National Petition' carts itself in waggons along the streets, and is presented ' 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 un- natural ! To us individually 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 fashion 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 inquiry about it ! B 2 CHARTISM. We are aware that, according to the newspapers, Chartism is extinct ; that a Reform 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 doAvn ; 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 the bitter discontent grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition therefore or the wrong disposition, of the Working 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, ncAv levy of soldiers, grants of money to Birmingham ; all this is well, or is not Avell ; 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, either ' put down,' into secret treason, Avith rusty pistols, vitriol- bottle 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. 3 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 horror do for it ? Wliat 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 are curable or incurable, — small matter which, while the virulent humour 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 wovdd 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 4? 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 rigour of coercion seems more at home, coercion will by no means do all, coercion by itself w^ill not even do much. If there do exist general madness of discontent, then sanity and some measure of content must be brought about again, — not by con- stabulary 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 re- covered 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 before they get the length of pikes and torches ! For what end at all are men. Honourable Members and Reform Members, sent to St. Stephen's, with clamour and effort ; kept talking, struggling, motioning and CHAP. I. CONDITION-OF-E\GLAND QUESTION. O counter-motioning ? The condition of the gi'eat body of people in a country is 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; Afri- can Blacks, Hill Coolies, Smithfield cattle, and Dog- carts, — all manner of questions and subjects, except simply this the alpha and omega of all ! Surely Ho- nourable Members ought to speak of the Condition-of- Eugland 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 cannot 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 natu- rally in their deep-rutted routine, common-place worn b CHARTISM. into ruts axle-deep, from which only strength, insight and courageous generous exertion can lift any Parlia- ment or vehicle ; how in Parliaments, Reformed or Un- reformed, 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 in their deep ruts of common- place, find, as so many of vis otherwise do, that the ruts are axle-deep, and the travelling very toilsome of itself, and for the day the evil thereof sufficient ! What Parliaments ought to have done 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 %vliich we need not enter at this moment. What they have done is un- happily 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 ! 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 insight 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 mean ; 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, the battle would cease. No man at bottom means injustice ; it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that he con- tends : an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in the wonderfullest way, by natural dimness and self- ishness ; getting tenfold more diffracted by exaspera- tion of contest, till at length it become all but irre- cognisable ; yet still the image of a right. Could a man own to himself 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 ; he could fight for it no longer. Nay inde- pendently of right, could the contending parties get but accurately to discern one another's might and strength to contend, the one would peaceably yield to the other and to Necessity ; the contest in this case too were over. No African 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 Simoom continues blowing occasion- ally, hateful as ever, maddening as ever ; but one ex- pedition 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 pa- tiently under it, patiently undergo it when the hour comes. Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might : either of these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these. 8 CHARTISM. What are the rights, what are the mights of the dis- contented Working Classes in England at this epoch ? He were an Qidipus, 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 have 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 tjieir 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, are 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 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 are 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 innu- merable circumstances ; and one circumstance left out may be the vital one on which all turned. Statistics is a science which ought to be honourable, 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. Con- clusive 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 aPactolus never so golden : these find only gravel ; the seer and finder alone picks up gold grains there. And now the purblind offering you, with asseveration and protrusive importunity, his basket of gravel as gold, what steps B 2 10 CHARTISM. 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 sa- tirist 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 he 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 va- pidity, good only for the gutters. Twice or three times have we 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 aver- age 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 general 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 Pamphlet ' published by Charles Knight and Com- CHAP. II. STATISTICS. 11 pany,'* — 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. Heysham 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 of 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 I ' The condition of the working man in this country, what it is and has been, whether it is improving or retrograding, — is a question to which from statistics hitherto no solution can be got. Hitherto, after many tables and statements, one is still left mainly to what he can ascertain by his own eyes, looking at the con- crete phenomenon for himself. There is no other method; and yet it is a most imperfect method. Each man expands his own handbreadth of observation to the limits of the general whole ; more or less, each man must take what he himself has seen and ascer- tained for a sample of all that is seeable and ascertain- able. Hence discrepancies, controversies, wide-spread, long-continued ; which there is at present no means or hope of satisfactorily ending. When Parliament takes * An Essay on the Means of Insurance against the Casnalties of &c. &c. London, Charles Knight and Company, 1836. Price two shillings. 12 CHARTISM. 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 complex matter ; on which, whether for the past or the present. Statistic Inquiry, with its limited means, with its short vision and headlong ex- tensive dogmatism, as yet too often throws not light, but error worse than darkness. 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-centu- ries, 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 employment ; what is the difficulty of finding employ- ment; the fluctuation from season to season, from year to year ? Is it constant, calculable wages ; or fluctu- ating, incalculable, more or less of the nature of gam- bling? This secondary circumstance, of quality in wages, is perhaps even more important than the pri- mary one of quantity. Farther we ask, Can the labourer, by thrift and industry, hope to rise to mas- tership ; or is such hope cut off from him ? How is CHAP. II. STATISTICS. IS he related to his employer ; by l)on(ls 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 creature be sup- posed to enjoy in that position? With hunger preying on him, his contentment is likely to be small I But even with abundance, his discontent, his real misery may be great. The 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 arithmetic represent all this? So much is still to be ascertained; 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 ascertained. 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 without and within, is not yet desperate ; that he looks forward to a better day coming, and is still reso- lutely steering towards the same ; that all the lights and darknesses of his lot are united under a blessed radiance of hope, — the last, first, nay one may say the sole blessedness 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 14" CHARTISM. eyes, it is decreasing, and in many quarters all but disappearing. Statistic 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 knowledge, 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 exhibited mere blank and zero. That they swell yearly now, if such be the fact, indicates that what thrift exists 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- CHAP. II. STATISTICS. 15 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, without evidence as to all this. Perhaps their New Poor-Law Bill is itself only intended as an experi- mentum crucis to ascertain all this ? Chartism is an answer, seemingly not in the affirmative. 16 CHAPTER III. NEW POOR-LAW. To read the Repoi'ts 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. III. 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 element, harsh but salutary, in the progress of things. That this Poor-Law Amendment Act meanwhile should be, as we 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 eat 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 la- bourers' disappear, and cease from the establishment. A still briefer method is that of arsenic ; perhaps even a milder, where otherAvise 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' by this new system of affliction, when labour complaining of want can find no audience, one cannot but pause. That misery 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 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 ffiil-du-Boeuf, 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 not 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 Caesar ; 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 the 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 Avithal we are far from joining in the 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 hoiTor, deserving instant abrogation. They are not tigers ; they are men filled with an idea of a theory : their Amendment Act, heretical and damnable as a whole truth, is orthodox laudable as a half-truth ; 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 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 in this England of ours. He that will not work, and 20 CHARTISM. save according to his means, let liim go elsewhither ; let him know that for Jiim 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 vainlj- contend against in the long-run, he is doomed either 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 endeavouring 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 latter generations (if we will under- stand their convulsions and confusions), sparing to apply. Work is the mission of man in this Earth. CHAP. in. 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. We 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 half-ve^w\i, 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 j^rosper 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 Avhatsoever, rather than a conflict of charges, varying from parish to pax'ish; 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 univei'sally 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 ! jNIost harsh and barren lies the new ploughers' falloM-field, the crude subsoil all turned up, which never saw the sun ; which as yet grows no herb ; which has 'out-door relief for no one. Yet patience : innumerable weeds and corrup- tions lie safely turned down and extinguished under it ; this same crude subsoil is the first step of all true husbandry ; by Heavens 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 it ; not for this, but for something far diflerent 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 he 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 we not say, it is even for this, That guidance and government, which he cannot CHAP. irr. 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 the 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 unlamed right-hand, with the cunning industry^ that lies in it, is not this defined to be ' the sceptre of our Planet' ? He that can work is a born king of something ; is in communion with Nature, is master of a thing or things, is a priest and king of Nature so far. He that can work at nothing is but a usurping king, be his trappings what the}^ may ; he is 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. 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 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 ; he is not even anybody's slave. And yet he is a #wo-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 reforma- tion needed in Ireland ? Has Ireland been governed and guided in a ' wise and loving ' manner ? A go- vernment 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 ; saying no word ; expecting now of a surety sentence either to change or die. All men, we must repeat, were made by God, and have immortal souls in them. The Sanspotatoe is of the selfsame stuff as the 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 Shakspeare's speech would not utter ; with desires illimitable as the Autocrat's of all the Russias ! Him various thrice- honoured persons, things and institutions have long been teaching, long been guiding, governing : and it is to perpetual scarcity of third-rate potatoes, and to what depends thereon, that he has been taught and guided. Figure thyself, O high-minded, clear-headed, clean -burnished reader, clapt by enchantment into the c 26 CHARTISM. torn coat and waste hunger-lair of that same root- devouring brother man ! — Social anomalies are things to be defended, things to be amended ; and in all places and things, short of the Pit itself, there is some admixture of worth and good. 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 present. 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. Iramethodic, 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 jiotatoes. Scarcity, futility, confusion, dis- traction must be 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 tlie 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 ? Every mortal can and shall himself be a true man : it is a great thing, and the parent of great things ; — as from a single acorn the whole earth might in the end be peopled with oaks ! Every mortal can do something : this let him faithfully do, and leave with assured heart the issue to a Higher Power ! We English pay, even now, the bitter smart of long 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 hini with his tongue ; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand and back ; for wages that 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 Celtiberian Irish brothers, what can thei/ 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 so 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, they cannot continue. For that the Saxon British will ever submit to sink along with them to such a state, we assume as impossible. There is in these latter, thank God, an ingenuity which is not false ; a methodic spirit, of insight, of perseverant well-doing ; a rationality and veracity which Nature with her truth does not disown ; — withal there is a ' Berserkir-rage' in the heart of them, which Avill prefer all things, including destruction and self-destruction, to that. Let no man awaken it, this same Berserkir- rage ! Deep-hidden it lies, far down in the centre, like genial central -fire, 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 centi'e. Deep-hidden ; but awakenable, but immeasurable; — let no man awaken it I With this strong silent people have the noisy vehement Irish now at length got common cause made. Ireland, now for the first time, in such strange circuitous way, does 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, Macdermots, and O'Donoghues I The strong have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the weak are set on edge. ' Curses,' says the Proverb, 'are like chickens, they return 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 in town or country : That the condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approximates more and more to that of the Irish competing with them in all markets ; that whatsoever labour, to which mere strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done not at the English price, but at an ap- proximation to the Irish price : at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior to scarcity of third- rate potatoes for thirty weeks yearly ; superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat, sink- ing nearer to an equality with that. Half-a-million handloom weavers, working fifteen hours a-day, in per- petual inability to procure thereby enough of the 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 are credible to us ; several of them are known to us by the best evidence, by eyesight. With all this 32 CHARTISM. it is consistent tliat the wages of ' skilled labour,' as it is called, should in many cases be higher than they ever were : the giant Steamengine 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 are and must be skilless, where strength alone is wanted ; ploughers, delvers, borers ; hewers of wood and drawers of water ; menials of the Steamengine, only the chief menials and immediate ioe?'/?/;' most true : and indeed if you will once sufficiently en- force that Eighth Commandment, the whole ' rights of man' are well cared for; I know no better definition of the riglits of man. Thou shalt not steal, thou shall not he stolen from : what a Society were that ; Plato's Republic, More'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, neither shall the earth suffer any more. For the pro- tection of property, in very truth, and for that alone ! — And now Avhat is thy property ? That parchment title-deed, that purse thou buttonest in thy breeches- pocket ? Is that thy valuable property ? Unhappy brother, most poor insolvent brother, I without parch- ment at all, with purse oftenest in the flaccid state, imponderous, which will not fling against the wind, have quite other property than that! I have the miraculous breath of Life in me, breathed into my nostrils by Almighty God. I have affections, thoughts, a god-given capability to be and do ; rights, there- fore, — the right for instance to thy love if I love thee, to thy guidance if I obey thee : the strangest rights, whereof in church-pulpits one still hears something, though almost unintelligible now ; rights, 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 carriages-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 this flaccid purse of mine, 'tis something, nothing ; has been the 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, breathed into me by God, my Me and what capability is there ; that is mine, and I will resist the stealing of it. I call that mine and not thine ; I will keep that, and do what work I can with it : God has given it me, the Devil shall not take it away ! Alas, my friends, Society exists and has existed for a great many purposes, not so easy to s2Jecify ! Society, it is understood, does not in any age, pre- vent a man from being what he can be. A sooty Afri- can can become a Toussaint L'ouverture, a murderous Three-fingered Jack, let the yellow West 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. What 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 breeches-pocket property ? O reader, to what shifts is poor Society i-ediiced, struggling to give still some account of herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole nexus of man to men ! On the whole, we will advise Society not to talk at all about what she exists for ; but rather with her whole 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 protecting even that, and find her career in our lower world on the point of terminating ! — For the rest, that in the most perfect Feudal Ages, the Ideal of Aristocracy nowhere lived in vacant serene purity as an Ideal, but always as a poor 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) does, 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 things 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- 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 miseries ; 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 eifort 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 the 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, W^hether 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 still 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 ' Memoires of Horace Walpole, to an unparliamentary eye, already a curious object? One of the clearest- sighted men of the Eighteenth Century writes down his Parliamentary observation of it there ; a determined despiser and merciless dissector of cant ; a liberal CHAP. Vri. 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 the 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 office is thine ! — of this does Horace write. — One must say, the destinies of nations do not always rest entirely on Parliament. One must say, it is a wonderful affair that science of ' government,' as practised in the Eighteenth 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 elided. Ended; — for decidedly that course of procedure will no longer serve. Parliament will absolutely, with whatever effort, have to lift itself out of those deep ruts of donotliing 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 66 CHARTISM. govern us or not? Parliament with its privileges is strong ; but Necessity and tlie 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 meal-husks and boiled grass' do, by circuitous but sure methods, bring kings' heads to the block ! Cash Payment the sole nexus ; and there are so many things which cash will not pay ! Cash is a great miracle ; yet it has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth. ' Supply and demand' we will honour also ; and yet how many ' 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. 67 payments does cash make in this world ! Of your Samuel Johnson furnished with ' fourpence halfpenny a-day,' and solid lodging at nights on the paved streets, as his payment, we do not speak ; — not in the way of complaint : it is a world-old business for the like of him, that same arrangement or a worse ; perhaps the man, for his own uses, had need even of that and of no better. Nay is not Society, busy with its Talfourd Copyright Bill and the like, struggling to do some- thing effectual for that man ; — enacting with all in- dustry that his own creation be accounted his own manufacture, and continue unstolen, on his own market-stand, for so long as sixty years? Perhaps Society is right there ; for discrepancies on that side too may become excessive. All men are not patient docile Johnsons ; some of them are half-mad inflam- mable Rousseaus. Such, in peculiar times, you may drive too far. Society in France, 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 in consequence, too ' much enforced' for a weak brain, uttered hasty sparks, Contrat Social and the like, which proved not so quenchable again ! In regard to that species of men too, who knows whether Laissez- faire itself (which is Sergeant Talfourd's Copyright Bill continued to eternity instead of sixty years) will 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 endeavour to cease ! But in 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 more than once. And always with a change of era, with a change of intrinsic conditions, there had to be a change of practice and outward relations brought about, — if not peaceably, then by violence ; for brought about it had to be, there could no rest come till then. How many eras and epochs, not noted at the moment ; — which indeed is the blessedest condition of epochs, that they come quietly, making no proclamation of themselves, and are only visible long after : a 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 Teutscheii Sippschaft)," not yet translated into our language, we have found a Chapter on the Eras of England, which, were there room for it, would be instructive in this place. We 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 the 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 Harzgebirge 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 seedfields, has spring- vans, dray-waggons. Long-acre carriages, nay railway trains ; has coined-money, exchange-bills, laws, books, war-fleets, spinning -jennies, Avarehouses and West- India Docks : see what it has built and done, what it can and will yet build and do ! These umbrageous pleasure-woods, green meadows, shaven stubble-fields, smooth-sweeping roads : these high-domed cities, and CHAP. VIII. NEW ERAS. 71 what they hold and bear ; this mild Good-morrow Avhich the stranger bids thee, equitable, nay forbearant if need were, judicially calm and law-observing towards thee a stranger, what work has it not cost? How many 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, Avith its other Cassiterides Tin Islands, became a British Empire ! The stream of World-History has altered its complexion ; Romans are dead out, English are come in. The red broad mark of Romanhood, stamped inefFaceably 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 we will hope none of the least significant. Of a truth, whosoever had, with the bodily eye, seen Hengst and Horsa mooring on the mud-beach of Thanet, on that spring morning of the Year 449 ; and then, with the spiritual eye, looked forward to New York, Calcutta, Sidney Cove, across the ages and the oceans ; and thought what Wellingtons, Washingtons, Shakspears, Miltons, ' W^atts, 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 Hengst's 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 Sauerteig, '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 one, for a Nation. Obscure fighting of kites and crows, however, was not the History of it ; l)ut was only what the dim His- torians of it saw good to record. Were not forests felled, bogs drained, fields made arable, towns built, laws made, and the Thought and Practice of men in many ways perfected ? 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 made ploughshares withal, and adzes and mason-hammers. Castra, Caesters or Chesters, Dons, Tons (^Zauns, Inclosures or Toivns), 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 patlios 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 Welsh too moves him ; of the Celts gener- ally, whom a fiercer race swept before them into the mountainous nooks of the West, whither they were not worth following. Noble deeds, according to M. Thierry, were done by these unsuccessful men, heroic sufferings undergone ; which it is a pious duty to rescue from forgetfulness. True, surely 1 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, Avhat can we 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 are found to be identical. Whose land loas this of Britain ? God's who made it. His and no other's it was and is. Who of God's creatures had risht 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- £ 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 try 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, by the very definition of it, is a world of mortality and mutability, of Beginning and Ending. No property is eternal but God the Maker's : whom Heaven 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- mulgate themselves, and all extant Powers bear rule. The strong thing is the just thing : this thou wilt find throughout in our world ; — as indeed was God and Truth the Maker of our world, or was Satan and Falsehood ? ' One proposition widely current as to this Norman 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. Does 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 marshes 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 were they ennobled. The Normans were Saxons who had learned to speak French. No : by Thor and Wodan, the Saxons were all as noble as 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 World-History, there have been, shall I prophesy, 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 for the use of man ; then secondly, the grand Consti- 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. Steamengines, 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, " We 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, to assert, to complain and propose ; a real House of Commons has come decisively into play, — much to the astonishment of James First. We call it a growth of mights, if also of necessities ; a growth of power to articulate mights, and make rights of them. ' In those past silent centuries, among those silent classes, much had been going on. Not only had red- 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 the 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 cunninger thing than break his fellow-creature's head with battle-axes. The seven incorporated trades, with their million guild-brethren, with their hammers, their shuttles and tools, Avhat an army ; — fit to conquer that land of England, as we say, and to hold it conquered ! Nay, strangest of all, the English people had acquired the faculty and habit of thinking, — even of believing : individual conscience had unfolded itself among them ; Conscience, and 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. 79 finest human figure, as I apprehend, that Nature has hitherto seen fit to make of our widely diffused Teu- tonic clay. Saxon, Norman, Celt or Sarmat, I find no human soul so beautiful, these fifteen hundred known years; — our supreme modern European man. Him England had contrived to realise : were there not ideas? ' Ideas poetic and also Puritanic, — that had to seek utterance in the notablest way ! England had got her Shakspeare ; but was now about to get her Milton and Oliver Cromwell. This too we will call a new expan- sion, hard as i^ might be to articulate and adjust ; this, that a man could actually have a Conscience for his own behoof, and not for his Priest's only ; that his Priest, be who he might, would henceforth have to take that fact along with him. One of the hardest things to adjust ! It is not adjusted down to this hour. It lasts onwards to the time they call " Glorious 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 ears were as a testimony and question to all England : " Englishmen, is this fair ?" England, no longer continent of herself, answered, bellowing as with the voice of lions : " No, it is not fair !" ' But now on the Industrial side, while this great 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 which it named New England ! Hail to thee, poor little ship Mayflower, of Delft-Haven : poor common-looking ship, hired by common charterparty for coined dollars ; caulked with mere oakum and tar ; provisioned with vulgarest biscuit and bacon ; — yet what ship Argo, or miraculous epic ship built by the Sea-gods, was other than a foolish bumbarge in com- parison ! Golden fleeces or the like these sailed for, with or without eff"ect; 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 the 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 thing, 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 ; smitten with eternal barrenness, inability to do or be : Insincerity, Unbelief. He who believes no thing, who 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 pro- spect 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, to Peterloo ! ' — ' And yet of Representative Assemblies may not this good be said : That contending parties in a country do thereby ascertain one another's strength ? They fight there, since fight they must, by petition. Parlia- mentary eloquence, not by sword, bayonet and bursts of military cannon. W^hy do men fight at all, if it be not that they are yet z^?«acquainted 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 E 2 82 CHARTISM. it come to cannonading and guillotinement : this is a saving characteristic of England. Nay, at bottom, is not this the celebrated English Constitution itself? This Mwspoken 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 Constitu- tion 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 does come. So long the 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 things will have their time. — Of the man Shak- speare, and his Elizabethan Era, with its Sydneys, Raleighs, Bacons, what could we say ? That it was a spiritual flower-time. Suddenly, as with the breath of June, your rude naked tree is touched ; bursts into leaves and flowers, 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 are 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 Watts, Arkwrights, Brindleys ! We will honour greatness in all kinds. The Prospero evoked the singing of Ariel, and took captive the world with those melodies : the same Prospero can send his Fire-demons panting across all oceans ; shooting with the speed of 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 squaloi", 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 nulls, 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 Kanzler von Miiller, 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, w as 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 Arkwright 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 the same : rather hopeless-looking ; which, however, he did at last bring to bear. Not without difficulty ! His townsfolk rose in mob round him, for threatening to shorten labour, to shorten wages ; so that he had to fly, with broken washpots, 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 CHAT. VIII. NEW ERAS. 85 stick to his razors rather; — for which, however, he decisively, as tliou wilt rejoice to understand, packed her out of doors. O reader, what a Historical Pheno- menon is that bag-cheeked, 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 the power of cotton.' ' Neither had Watt of the Steamengine a heroic origin, any kindred with the princes of this world. The princes of this world were shooting their 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 the 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 ; seedgrains of a certain grass, which he named white or icheat ? 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 86 CHARTISM. Birmingham can be put in comparison for ingenuity with that figure of the wedge named knife, of the wedges named saiv, 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 oi fire. Prometheus, Tubal- cain, Triptolemus ! 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, we 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. XEW 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 Avas found fit for conquering Nawaubs, found- ing kingdoms, Indian Empires ! In a questionable manner, Indian Empire from the other hemisphere took up its abode in Leadenhall Street, in the City of London. ' Accidental all these things and persons look, 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. The Saxon kindred burst forth into cotton-spinning, cloth-cropping, 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 ; bitu- minous 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 pi-ominent points, chief mountain-summits, of our English His- tory past and present, according to the Author of this strange untranslated Work, whom we think we recog- nise to be 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 Working Slave ; his anger and cureless discontent till that be done. Food, shelter, due guidance, in return for his labour : candidly interpreted, Chartism and all such isms mean that ; and the madder they are, do they not the more emphatically mean, " See what guidance you have given us ! What delirium we are brought to talk and project, guided by nobody !" Laissez-faire on the part of the Governing Classes, we repeat again and again, will, with whatever difficulty, have to cease ; pacific mutual division of the spoil, and a world well let alone, will no longer suffice. A Do-nothing Guid- ance ; and it is a Do-something World ! Would to 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 I 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 five-and-twenty years, it was curious to note how the internal discontent of England struggled to find vent for itself through any orifice : the poor patient, all sick fi'om 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 suff'rage to destroy rotten boroughs. From of old, the English patient himself had a continually recurring notion that this was it. The English people are used to suffrage ; it is their panacea for all that goes wrong with them ; they have a fixed-idea of sufiVage. Singular enough : one's right to vote for a Member of Parliament, to send one's ' twenty-thousandth part of a master of tongue- fence to National Palaver,' — the Doctors asserted that CHAP, IX. PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM. 91 this was Freedom, this and no other. It seemed cre- dible to many men, of high degree and of low. The persuasion of remedy grew, the evil was pressing; Swing's ricks were on fire. Some nine years ago, a State-surgeon rose, and in peculiar circumstances said: Let there be extension of the suffrage ; let the great Doctor's nostrum, the patient's old passionate prayer be fulfilled ! Parliamentary Radicalism, while it gave articulate utterance to the discontent of the English people, could not by its worst enemy be said to be without a function. If it is in the natural order of things that there must be discontent, no less so is it that such dis- content should have an outlet, a Parliamentary voice. Here the matter is debated of, demonstrated, contra- dicted, qualified, reduced to feasibility ; — can at least solace itself with hope, and die gently, convinced of «?ifeasibility. 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 does, indeed, without effort groan and complain ; but not without effort does 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 CHARTISir. 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 know^n 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 -Rate, 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 we 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, " We are a Reform Ministry; will ye not support usf We have sup- ported them ; borne them forward indignantly on our shoulders, time after time, fall after fall, when they CHAP. IX. PARLIAMENTARY RADICALISM. 93 had been hurled out into the street ; and lay prostrate, helpless, like dead luggage. It is the fact of a Reform Ministry, not the name of one that we would support ! Languor, sickness of hope deferred pervades the public mind ; the public mind says at last. Why all this struggle for the name of a Reform Ministry ? Let the Tories be Ministry if they will ; let at least some living reality be Ministry ! A rearing horse that will only run backward, he is not the horse one would choose to travel on : yet of all conceivable horses the worst is the dead horse. Mounted on a rearing horse, you may back him, spur him, check him, make a little way even backwards : but seated astride of your dead horse, what chance is there for you in the chapter of possibilities ? You sit motionless, hope- less, 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 the toiling complaining mil- lions not misery, but only a raw-material which 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 tis : 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 I 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. 95 points,' borne aloft on pikeheads and torchlight meet- ings, is there. Chartism is one of the most natural phenomena in England. Not that Chartism now exists should provoke wonder ; but that the invited hungry people should have sat eight years at such table of the Barmecide, patiently expecting somewhat from the Name of a Reform Ministry, and not till after eight years have grown hopeless, this is the respectable side 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 avail to do. But the first of all things, as already said, is to gird thyself up for actual doing ; to know that thou actually either 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 ; the 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. Unheroic common- place being now clearly all we have to look for, comes the Napoleon, comes the conquest of the world. It was proved by fluxionary 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, minimum there ; by law of Nature, and geometric demonstration : — what could be done ? The 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 elites jamais ce hete de mot, Never name to me that blockhead of a word !" There is a phenomenon which one might call Paralytic Radicalism, in these days ; which 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 are an unreasonable class who cry, "Peace, peace," when there is no peace. But what kind of class are they who cry, " Peace, peace, have I 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 F 98 CHARTISM. not to be 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, O 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- sand years the Sons of Adam, in sleepless effort, have been devising, doing, discovering; in mysterious infi- 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 empire 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 100 CHARTISM. below ; of which the Earth's centuries are but as fur- rows, for it stretches forth from the Beginning onward even into 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 (30,000/. is but that) shall, after Thirteen Centuries, be laid out on it, or not laid out on it. Have we 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 the 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. What intellect were able to regulate them ? The intellect of a Bacon, CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE. 101 the energy of a Luther, if left to their own strength, might pause in dismay before such a task ; a Bacon and Luther added together, to be perpetual prime minister over us, could not do it. No one great and greatest intellect can do it. What can ? Only Twenty- four million ordinary intellects, once awakened into action ; these, well presided over, may. Intellect, insight, is the discernment of order in disorder ; it is the discovery of the will of Nature, of God's will ; the beginning of the capability to walk according to that. With perfect intellect, were such possible without per- fect morality, the world would be perfect ; its efforts unerringly correct, its results continually successful, its condition faultless. Intellect is like light; the Chaos becomes a World under it : fiat lux. These 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 intellect was in the Twenty-four millions will be ex- hibited 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 con- clusion they make out embody itself as a world- healing Truth and Wisdom, or as a baseless fateful Hallucination, a Chimasra breathing 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 F 2 102 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 ! Wise men know it to be an indispensable something ; not yet much ; and would so gladly superadd to it tlie element Avhereby 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 I In that case, why not apply to Birmingham, and have Machines made, and CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE. l03 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 Scriblerus' 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 sometiiing. 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 ! Are we Calmucks, that pray by turning of a rotatory caleba.sh 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 Avould be, become verily a Force ; the iEther 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 lieavenly wisdom ? Soul is kindled only by soul. To "teach" religion, the first thing needful, and also the last and the only thing, is finding of a man who has religion. All else 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 the facts of the thing. That after thirteen centuries of waiting, he the official person, and England with him, was minded now to have the mystery of the Alphabetic Letters imparted to all human souls in this realm ? 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 the thing could by human energy be struck out, does lie there for discovery and striking out. It is his, the official person's duty, not ours, to mature a plan. We can believe that Churchism and Dissenterism wovdd clamour aloud ; but yet that in the mere secular Wisdom of Pai'liament 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, we 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 teaching of Eng- land to read I Harder things, we do know, have been performed by nations before now, not abler-looking than England. Ah me ! if, by some beneficent chance, there should be an official man found in England who could and would, with deliberate courage, after ripe counsel, with candid insight, with patience, 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 east itself athwart the path of that man ! Avaunt ye gainsayers ! is darkness and ignorance of the Alphabet necessary for you ? Reconcile yourselves to the Al- CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE. 107 phabet, or dopart 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, we 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 Castle-spectres should we leave there, with their admonishing right-hand and ghastly-burning saucer-eyes, to do simply whatsoever they might find themselves able to do ! Alas, that we were 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 find how real it is. Eternity: hast thou heard of that? Is that a fact, or is it no fact ? Are Buckingham House ^nd 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, so convulsed and tumultuous to look upon, are ' ex- pansions,' increase of faculty not yet organised. It i:^ 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 a most blessed thing ? Manchester once or- ganic Avill bless and not afflict. The confusions, if we would understand them, are at bottom mere increase which we know not yet how to manage ; ' new wealth which the old coffers will not hold.' How true is this, above all, of the strange 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 the 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 I 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 we that have not yet learned the art of managing our white European man I CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE. 109 The controversies on Malthus and the ' Population Principle,' ' Preventive check' and so forth, Mith m hich the public ear has been deafened for a long m hile, are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventive check and the denial of the preventive check. Anti-Malthusians quoting their Bible against palpable facts, are not a pleasant spectacle. On the other hand, how often have we read in Malthusian benefactors of the species : ' The working people have their condition in their own hands ; let them 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 the 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 ; and 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 I Millenniums are undoubt- G 110 CHARTISM. edly coming, must come one way or the other : but will it be, think you, by twenty millions of working peojDle simultaneously striking work in that depart- ment ; passing, in universal trades-union, a resolutio-n 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 Jehosa- 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 mournfuUest 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 mournfuUer: the Pamphlet of one "Marcus," whom his poor Chartist editor and republisher calls the " Demon Author." This Marcus Pamphlet was the book alluded to by Stephens the Preacher Chartist, in one of his harangues : it proves to be no fable that CHAP. X. IMPOSSIBLE. Ill such a book existed; here it lies, 'Printed by John Hill, Black-horse Court, Fleet Sti-eet, and now reprinted for the instruction of the labourer, by William 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. We 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 : he 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 longwindedness, 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-plots,' 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 wogod-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 rest, is in a world where Canadian Forests stand un- felled, boundless Plains and Prairies unbroken with the plough ; on the west and on the east, 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, Work ; — with as many Half-pay OflScers 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 German of our acquaintance, in that strange Book of his,* ' True thou Gold-Hofrath : too crowded indeed ! Meanwhile what portion of this inconsider- able 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 Platform of Asia ; in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Crim Tartary, the Curragh of Kildare ? One man, in one year, as I have understood it, if you lend him earth, wiU feed himself and nine others. Alas, where now are the Hengsts and Alarics of our still glowing, still expanding Europe ; who, when their home is grown too narrow, will enlist and, like fire-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 plough- share ? Where are they ? — Preserving their Game !' * Sartor Resartus, p. 239. THE END. LONDON : PRINTED BY ROBSON, LEVEY, AND FRANKLYN, 46 St. Martin's Lime. WORKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR. 1. Second Edition. In 3 vols. 12mo, price \l. 5s., cloth and lettered, THE FRENCH REVOLUTION. A History. Vol. I. — The Bastille. Vol. II. — The Constitution. Vol. III. — The Guillotine. II. A new Edition, revised. In 3 vols. 12mo, U. 5s., cloth and lettered, TRANSLATION OF GOETHE'S WILHELM MEISTER; containing MEISTER'S APPRENTICESHIP AND MEISTER'S TRAVELS. III. In 1 vol. small Svo, price 10s (id. SARTOR RESARTUS ; THE LIFE AND OPINIONS OF HERR TEUFELSDROCKH. In three Books. IV. A new Edition in the Press, of CRITICAL AND MISCELLANEOUS ESSAYS. *^* The principal contents of these four voUimes are : Jean Paul Friedrich Richter — State of German Literature — Werner — Goethe's Helena — Goethe — Burns — Heyne — German Play- Wrights — Voltaire — Novalis — Signs of the Times — Jean Paul Friedrich Richter again — On History — Schiller — The Nibel- lungen Lied — Early German Literature — Taylor's Historic Sui-- vey of German Poetry — Characteristics • — Johnson — Death of Goethe — Goethe's Works — Diderot — On History again — Count Cagliostro — Corn - Law Rhymes — • The Diamond Necklace — Mirabeau — French Parliamentary History — Walter Scott. JAMES FRASER, LONDON. University of California SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 305 De Neve Drive - Parking Lot 17 • Box 951388 LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 90095-1388 Return this material to the library from which it was borrowed. UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY AA 000 832 294 BOUND BY ONE * SON, FLEET STREe lONDON. p. ^