Project Gutenberg Etext of Latter-Day Pamphlets by Thomas Carlyle

LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.

by Thomas Carlyle

But as yet struggles the twelfth hour of the Night.  Birds of

darkness are on the wing; spectres uproar; the dead walk; the

living dream.  Thou, Eternal Providence, wilt make the Day

dawn!--JEAN PAUL.

Then said his Lordship, "Well.  God mend all!"--"Nay, by God,

Donald, we must help him to mend it!" said the other.

--RUSHWORTH (_Sir David Ramsay and Lord Rea, in 1630_).

CONTENTS.

I. THE PRESENT TIME

II. MODEL PRISONS

III. DOWNING STREET

IV. THE NEW DOWNING STREET

V. STUMP-ORATOR

 NO. I. THE PRESENT TIME.   [February 1, 1850.]

The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of

all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all

the Future, is ever a "New Era" to the thinking man; and comes

with new questions and significance, however commonplace it look:

to know _it_, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of

knowledge for all of us.  This new Day, sent us out of Heaven,

this also has its heavenly omens;--amid the bustling trivialities

and loud empty noises, its silent monitions, which if we cannot

read and obey, it will not be well with us!  No;--nor is there

any sin more fearfully avenged on men and Nations than that same,

which indeed includes and presupposes all manner of sins:  the

sin which our old pious fathers called "judicial

blindness;"--which we, with our light habits, may still call

misinterpretation of the Time that now is; disloyalty to its real

meanings and monitions, stupid disregard of these, stupid

adherence active or passive to the counterfeits and mere current

semblances of these. This is true of all times and days.

But in the days that are now passing over us, even fools are

arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of

men have seen more impressive days.  Days of endless calamity,

disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded:  if they are

not days of endless hope too, then they are days of utter

despair.  For it is not a small hope that will suffice, the ruin

being clearly, either in action or in prospect, universal.  There

must be a new world, if there is to be any world at all! That

human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry

routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there;

this small hope is not now a tenable one.  These days of

universal death must be days of universal new-birth, if the ruin

is not to be total and final!  It is a Time to make the dullest

man consider; and ask himself, Whence _he_ came? Whither he is

bound?--A veritable "New Era," to the foolish as well as to the wise.

Not long ago, the world saw, with thoughtless joy which might

have been very thoughtful joy, a real miracle not heretofore

considered possible or conceivable in the world,--a Reforming

Pope.  A simple pious creature, a good country-priest, invested

unexpectedly with the tiara, takes up the New Testament, declares

that this henceforth shall be his rule of governing. No more

finesse, chicanery, hypocrisy, or false or foul dealing of any

kind:  God's truth shall be spoken, God's justice shall be done,

on the throne called of St. Peter:  an honest Pope, Papa, or

Father of Christendom, shall preside there.  And such a throne of

St. Peter; and such a Christendom, for an honest Papa to preside

in!  The European populations everywhere hailed the omen; with

shouting and rejoicing leading articles and tar-barrels; thinking

people listened with astonishment,--not with sorrow if they were

faithful or wise; with awe rather as at the heralding of death,

and with a joy as of victory beyond death!  Something pious,

grand and as if awful in that joy, revealing once more the

Presence of a Divine Justice in this world.  For, to such men it

was very clear how this poor devoted Pope would prosper, with his

New Testament in his band.  An alarming business, that of

governing in the throne of St. Peter by the rule of veracity!  By

the rule of veracity, the so-called throne of St. Peter was

openly declared, above three hundred years, ago, to be a falsity,

a huge mistake, a pestilent dead carcass, which this Sun was

weary of.  More than three hundred years ago, the throne of St.

Peter received peremptory judicial notice to quit; authentic

order, registered in Heaven's chancery and since legible in the

hearts of all brave men, to take itself away,--to begone, and let

us have no more to do with _it_ and its delusions and impious

deliriums;--and it has been sitting every day since, it may

depend upon it, at its own peril withal, and will have to pay

exact damages yet for every day it has so sat.  Law of veracity?

What this Popedom had to do by the law of veracity, was to give

up its own foul galvanic life, an offence to gods and men;

honestly to die, and get itself buried.

Far from this was the thing the poor Pope undertook in regard to

it;--and yet, on the whole, it was essentially this too.

"Reforming Pope?" said one of our acquaintance, often in those

weeks, "Was there ever such a miracle? About to break up that

huge imposthume too, by 'curing' it?  Turgot and Necker were

nothing to this.  God is great; and when a scandal is to end,

brings some devoted man to take charge of it in hope, not in

despair!"--But cannot he reform? asked many simple persons;--to

whom our friend in grim banter would reply:  "Reform a

Popedom,--hardly.  A wretched old kettle, ruined from top to

bottom, and consisting mainly now of foul _grime_ and _rust_:

stop the holes of it, as your antecessors have been doing, with

temporary putty, it may hang together yet a while; begin to

hammer at it, solder at it, to what you call mend and rectify

it,--it will fall to sherds, as sure as rust is rust; go all into

nameless dissolution,--and the fat in the fire will be a thing

worth looking at, poor Pope!"--So accordingly it has proved.  The

poor Pope, amid felicitations and tar-barrels of various kinds,

went on joyfully for a season:  but he had awakened, he as no

other man could do, the sleeping elements; mothers of the

whirlwinds, conflagrations, earthquakes.  Questions not very

soluble at present, were even sages and heroes set to solve them,

began everywhere with new emphasis to be asked.  Questions which

all official men wished, and almost hoped, to postpone till

Doomsday.  Doomsday itself _had_ come; that was the terrible

truth!

For, sure enough, if once the law of veracity be acknowledged as

the rule for human things, there will not anywhere be want of

work for the reformer; in very few places do human things adhere

quite closely to that law!  Here was the Papa of Christendom

proclaiming that such was actually the case;--whereupon all over

Christendom such results as we have seen.  The Sicilians, I

think, were the first notable body that set about applying this

new strange rule sanctioned by the general Father; they said to

themselves, We do not by the law of veracity belong to Naples and

these Neapolitan Officials; we will, by favor of Heaven and the

Pope, be free of these.  Fighting ensued; insurrection, fiercely

maintained in the Sicilian Cities; with much bloodshed, much

tumult and loud noise, vociferation extending through all

newspapers and countries.  The effect of this, carried abroad by

newspapers and rumor, was great in all places; greatest perhaps

in Paris, which for sixty years past has been the City of

Insurrections.  The French People had plumed themselves on being,

whatever else they were not, at least the chosen "soldiers of

liberty," who took the lead of all creatures in that pursuit, at

least; and had become, as their orators, editors and litterateurs

diligently taught them, a People whose bayonets were sacred, a

kind of Messiah People, saving a blind world in its own despite,

and earning for themselves a terrestrial and even celestial glory

very considerable indeed.  And here were the wretched

down-trodden populations of Sicily risen to rival them, and

threatening to take the trade out of their hand.

No doubt of it, this hearing continually of the very Pope's glory

as a Reformer, of the very Sicilians fighting divinely for

liberty behind barricades,--must have bitterly aggravated the

feeling of every Frenchman, as he looked around him, at home, on

a Louis-Philippism which had become the scorn of all the world.

"_Ichabod_; is the glory departing from us? Under the sun is

nothing baser, by all accounts and evidences, than the system of

repression and corruption, of shameless dishonesty and unbelief

in anything but human baseness, that we now live under.  The

Italians, the very Pope, have become apostles of liberty, and

France is--what is France!"--We know what France suddenly became

in the end of February next; and by a clear enough genealogy, we

can trace a considerable share in that event to the good simple

Pope with the New Testament in his hand.  An outbreak, or at

least a radical change and even inversion of affairs hardly to be

achieved without an outbreak, everybody felt was inevitable in

France:  but it had been universally expected that France would

as usual take the initiative in that matter; and had there been

no reforming Pope, no insurrectionary Sicily, France had

certainly not broken out then and so, but only afterwards and

otherwise.  The French explosion, not anticipated by the

cunningest men there on the spot scrutinizing it, burst up

unlimited, complete, defying computation or control.

Close following which, as if by sympathetic subterranean

electricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable;

and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous,

amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world

ever saw.  Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has

there been the like.  Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose

monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos.

Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare

to dogs and the profane:--Enter, all the world, see what kind of

Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons,

stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing

in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not

heroes!  Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable

in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go,

as if exclaiming, "We _are_ poor histrios, we sure enough;--did

you want heroes?  Don't kill us; we couldn't help it!"  Not one

of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a

right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no

manner of means.  That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at

present.  Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings

conscious that they are but Play-actors.  The miserable mortals,

enacting their High Life Below Stairs, with faith only that this

Universe may perhaps be all a phantasm and hypocrisis,--the

truculent Constable of the Destinies suddenly enters:

"Scandalous Phantasms, what do _you_ here? Are 'solemnly

constituted Impostors' the proper Kings of men?  Did you think

the Life of Man was a grimacing dance of apes?  To be led always

by the squeak of your paltry fiddle?  Ye miserable, this Universe

is not an upholstery Puppet-play, but a terrible God's Fact; and

you, I think,--had not you better begone!"  They fled

precipitately, some of them with what we may call an exquisite

ignominy,--in terror of the treadmill or worse.  And everywhere

the people, or the populace, take their own government upon

themselves; and open "kinglessness," what we call _anarchy_,--how

happy if it be anarchy _plus_ a street-constable!--is everywhere

the order of the day.  Such was the history, from Baltic to

Mediterranean, in Italy, France, Prussia, Austria, from end to

end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. Since the destruction

of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern Barbarians, I

have known nothing similar.

And so, then, there remained no King in Europe; no King except

the Public Haranguer, haranguing on barrel-head, in leading

article; or getting himself aggregated into a National Parliament

to harangue.  And for about four months all France, and to a

great degree all Europe, rough-ridden by every species of

delirium, except happily the murderous for most part, was a

weltering mob, presided over by M. de Lamartine, at the

Hotel-de-Ville; a most eloquent fair-spoken literary gentleman,

whom thoughtless persons took for a prophet, priest and

heaven-sent evangelist, and whom a wise Yankee friend of mine

discerned to be properly "the first stump-orator in the world,

standing too on the highest stump,--for the time."  A sorrowful

spectacle to men of reflection, during the time he lasted, that

poor M. de Lamartine; with nothing in him but melodious wind and

_soft sawder_, which he and others took for something divine and

not diabolic!  Sad enough; the eloquent latest impersonation of

Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself, and declare

persuasively that it is Cosmos!  However, you have but to wait a

little, in such cases; all balloons do and must give up their gas

in the pressure of things, and are collapsed in a sufficiently

wretched manner before long.

And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and

truculent, more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace

after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds;

and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive,

much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever

before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or

universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic

elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with

all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present

epoch, rests!  The kind of persons who excite or give signal to

such revolutions--students, young men of letters, advocates,

editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly

bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the

millions and blowing it into flame,--might give rise to

reflections as to the character of our epoch.  Never till now did

young men, and almost children, take such a command in human

affairs.  A changed time since the word _Senior_ (Seigneur, or

_Elder_) was first devised to signify "lord," or superior;--as in

all languages of men we find it to have been!  Not an honorable

document this either, as to the spiritual condition of our epoch.

In times when men love wisdom, the old man will ever be

venerable, and be venerated, and reckoned noble:  in times that

love something else than wisdom, and indeed have little or no

wisdom, and see little or none to love, the old man will cease to

be venerated; and looking more closely, also, you will find that

in fact he has ceased to be venerable, and has begun to be

contemptible; a foolish boy still, a boy without the graces,

generosities and opulent strength of young boys.  In these days,

what of _lordship_ or leadership is still to be done, the youth

must do it, not the mature or aged man; the mature man, hardened

into sceptical egoism, knows no monition but that of his own

frigid cautious, avarices, mean timidities; and can lead

no-whither towards an object that even seems noble.  But to

return.

This mad state of matters will of course before long allay

itself, as it has everywhere begun to do; the ordinary

necessities of men's daily existence cannot comport with it, and

these, whatever else is cast aside, will have their way.  Some

remounting--very temporary remounting--of the old machine, under

new colors and altered forms, will probably ensue soon in most

countries:  the old histrionic Kings will be admitted back under

conditions, under "Constitutions," with national Parliaments, or

the like fashionable adjuncts; and everywhere the old daily life

will try to begin again.  But there is now no hope that such

arrangements can be permanent; that they can be other than poor

temporary makeshifts, which, if they try to fancy and make

themselves permanent, will be displaced by new explosions

recurring more speedily than last time.  In such baleful

oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and

conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations,

must European Society continue swaying, now disastrously

tumbling, then painfully readjusting itself, at ever shorter

intervals,--till once the _new_ rock-basis does come to light,

and the weltering deluges of mutiny, and of need to mutiny, abate

again!

For universal _Democracy_, whatever we may think of it, has

declared itself as an inevitable fact of the days in which we

live; and he who has any chance to instruct, or lead, in his

days, must begin by admitting that: new street-barricades, and

new anarchies, still more scandalous if still less sanguinary,

must return and again return, till governing persons everywhere

know and admit that.  Democracy, it may be said everywhere, is

here:--for sixty years now, ever since the grand or _First_

French Revolution, that fact has been terribly announced to all

the world; in message after message, some of them very terrible

indeed; and now at last all the world ought really to believe it.

That the world does believe it; that even Kings now as good as

believe it, and know, or with just terror surmise, that they are

but temporary phantasm Play-actors, and that Democracy is the

grand, alarming, imminent and indisputable Reality:  this, among

the scandalous phases we witnessed in the last two years, is a

phasis full of hope:  a sign that we are advancing closer and

closer to the very Problem itself, which it will behoove us to

solve or die; that all fighting and campaigning and coalitioning

in regard to the _existence_ of the Problem, is hopeless and

superfluous henceforth.  The gods have appointed it so; no Pitt,

nor body of Pitts or mortal creatures can appoint it otherwise.

Democracy, sure enough, is here; one knows not how long it will

keep hidden underground even in Russia;--and here in England,

though we object to it resolutely in the form of

street-barricades and insurrectionary pikes, and decidedly will

not open doors to it on those terms, the tramp of its million

feet is on all streets and thoroughfares, the sound of its

bewildered thousand-fold voice is in all writings and speakings,

in all thinkings and modes and activities of men:  the soul that

does not now, with hope or terror, discern it, is not the one we

address on this occasion.

What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the

Destinies, which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these

latter days?  There lies the question for us.  Whence comes it,

this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the

meaning of it?  A meaning it must have, or it would not be here.

If we can find the right meaning of it, we may, wisely

submitting or wisely resisting and controlling, still hope to

live in the midst of it; if we cannot find the right meaning, if

we find only the wrong or no meaning in it, to live will not be

possible!--The whole social wisdom of the Present Time is

summoned, in the name of the Giver of Wisdom, to make clear to

itself, and lay deeply to heart with an eye to strenuous valiant

practice and effort, what the meaning of this universal revolt of

the European Populations, which calls itself Democracy, and

decides to continue permanent, may be.

Certainly it is a drama full of action, event fast following

event; in which curiosity finds endless scope, and there are

interests at stake, enough to rivet the attention of all men,

simple and wise.  Whereat the idle multitude lift up their

voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose

announcement, more than plentiful, that _now_ the New Era, and

long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come.

Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic

barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty--O Heaven! one

of the inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such

circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and

psalmody, from the universal foolish human throat; drowning for

the moment all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one

that you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and

must resignedly bear your part in the same.  The front wall of

your wretched old crazy dwelling, long denounced by you to no

purpose, having at last fairly folded itself over, and fallen

prostrate into the street, the floors, as may happen, will still

hang on by the mere beam-ends, and coherency of old carpentry,

though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor

rusty nails and worm-eaten dovetailings give way:--but is it

cheering, in such circumstances, that the whole household burst

forth into celebrating the new joys of light and ventilation,

liberty and picturesqueness of position, and thank God that now

they have got a house to their mind?  My dear household, cease

singing and psalmodying; lay aside your fiddles, take out your

work-implements, if you have any; for I can say with confidence

the laws of gravitation are still active, and rusty nails,

worm-eaten dovetailings, and secret coherency of old carpentry,

are not the best basis for a household!--In the lanes of Irish

cities, I have heard say, the wretched people are sometimes found

living, and perilously boiling their potatoes, on such

swing-floors and inclined planes hanging on by the joist-ends;

but I did not hear that they sang very much in celebration of

such lodging.  No, they slid gently about, sat near the back

wall, and perilously boiled their potatoes, in silence for most

part!--

High shouts of exultation, in every dialect, by every vehicle of

speech and writing, rise from far and near over this last avatar

of Democracy in 1848: and yet, to wise minds, the first aspect it

presents seems rather to be one of boundless misery and sorrow.

What can be more miserable than this universal hunting out of the

high dignitaries, solemn functionaries, and potent, grave and

reverend signiors of the world; this stormful rising-up of the

inarticulate dumb masses everywhere, against those who pretended

to be speaking for them and guiding them?  These guides, then,

were mere blind men only pretending to see?  These rulers were

not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and

clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages,

while the work remained undone?  The Kings were Sham-Kings,

play-acting as at Drury Lane;--and what were the people withal

that took them for real?

It is probably the hugest disclosure of _falsity_ in human

things that was ever at one time made.  These reverend

Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and

long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors,

then?  Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing.  The

story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels

they preached to them were not an account of man's real position

in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and

unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,--a

falsity of falsities, which at last _ceases_ to stick together.

Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were

cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were

dupes,--a kind of _inverse_ cheats, too, or they would not have

believed in them so long.  A universal _Bankruptcy of

Imposture_; that may be the brief definition of it.  Imposture

everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody

will change its word into an act any farther:--fallen insolvent;

unable to keep its head up by these false pretences, or make its

pot boil any more for the present!  A more scandalous phenomenon,

wide as Europe, never afflicted the face of the sun. Bankruptcy

everywhere; foul ignominy, and the abomination of desolation, in

all high places:  odious to look upon, as the carnage of a

battle-field on the morrow morning;--a massacre not of the

innocents; we cannot call it a massacre of the innocents; but a

universal tumbling of Impostors and of Impostures into the

street!--

Such a spectacle, can we call it joyful?  There is a joy in it,

to the wise man too; yes, but a joy full of awe, and as it were

sadder than any sorrow,--like the vision of immortality,

unattainable except through death and the grave!  And yet who

would not, in his heart of hearts, feel piously thankful that

Imposture has fallen bankrupt?  By all means let it fall

bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery

to itself and to all of us.  Imposture, be it known then,--known

it must and shall be,--is hateful, unendurable to God and man.

Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for

departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to

return, if possible!  The eternal voices, very audibly again, are

speaking to proclaim this message, from side to side of the

world.  Not a very cheering message, but a very indispensable

one.

Alas, it is sad enough that Anarchy is here; that we are not

permitted to regret its being here,--for who that had, for this

divine Universe, an eye which was human at all, could wish that

Shams of any kind, especially that Sham-Kings should continue?

No:  at all costs, it is to be prayed by all men that Shams may

_cease_.  Good Heavens, to what depths have we got, when this to

many a man seems strange!  Yet strange to many a man it does

seem; and to many a solid Englishman, wholesomely digesting his

pudding among what are called the cultivated classes, it seems

strange exceedingly; a mad ignorant notion, quite heterodox, and

big with mere ruin.  He has been used to decent forms long since

fallen empty of meaning, to plausible modes, solemnities grown

ceremonial,--what you in your iconoclast humor call shams, all

his life long; never heard that there was any harm in them, that

there was any getting on without them.  Did not cotton spin

itself, beef grow, and groceries and spiceries come in from the

East and the West, quite comfortably by the side of shams?  Kings

reigned, what they were pleased to call reigning; lawyers

pleaded, bishops preached, and honorable members perorated; and

to crown the whole, as if it were all real and no sham there, did

not scrip continue salable, and the banker pay in bullion, or

paper with a metallic basis?  "The greatest sham, I have always

thought, is he that would destroy shams."

Even so.  To such depth have _I_, the poor knowing person of this

epoch, got;--almost below the level of lowest humanity, and down

towards the state of apehood and oxhood!  For never till in quite

recent generations was such a scandalous blasphemy quietly set

forth among the sons of Adam; never before did the creature

called man believe generally in his heart that lies were the rule

in this Earth; that in deliberate long-established lying could

there be help or salvation for him, could there be at length

other than hindrance and destruction for him.  O Heavyside, my

solid friend, this is the sorrow of sorrows:  what on earth can

become of us till this accursed enchantment, the general summary

and consecration of delusions, be cast forth from the heart and

life of one and all!  Cast forth it will be; it must, or we are

tending, at all moments, whitherward I do not like to name.

Alas, and the casting of it out, to what heights and what depths

will it lead us, in the sad universe mostly of lies and shams and

hollow phantasms (grown very ghastly now), in which, as in a safe

home, we have lived this century or two!  To heights and depths

of social and individual _divorce_ from delusions,--of "reform"

in right sacred earnest, of indispensable amendment, and stern

sorrowful abrogation and order to depart,--such as cannot well be

spoken at present; as dare scarcely be thought at present; which

nevertheless are very inevitable, and perhaps rather imminent

several of them!  Truly we have a heavy task of work before us;

and there is a pressing call that we should seriously begin upon

it, before it tumble into an inextricable mass, in which there

will be no working, but only suffering and hopelessly

perishing!

Or perhaps Democracy, which we announce as now come, will itself

manage it? Democracy, once modelled into suffrages, furnished

with ballot-boxes and such like, will itself accomplish the

salutary universal change from Delusive to Real, and make a new

blessed world of us by and by?--To the great mass of men, I am

aware, the matter presents itself quite on this hopeful side.

Democracy they consider to _be_ a kind of "Government."  The old

model, formed long since, and brought to perfection in England

now two hundred years ago, has proclaimed itself to all Nations

as the new healing for every woe:  "Set up a Parliament," the

Nations everywhere say, when the old King is detected to be a

Sham-King, and hunted out or not; "set up a Parliament; let us

have suffrages, universal suffrages; and all either at once or by

due degrees will be right, and a real Millennium come!" Such is

their way of construing the matter.

Such, alas, is by no means my way of construing the matter; if it

were, I should have had the happiness of remaining silent, and

been without call to speak here.  It is because the contrary of

all this is deeply manifest to me, and appears to be forgotten by

multitudes of my contemporaries, that I have had to undertake

addressing a word to them.  The contrary of all this;--and the

farther I look into the roots of all this, the more hateful,

ruinous and dismal does the state of mind all this could have

originated in appear to me.  To examine this recipe of a

Parliament, how fit it is for governing Nations, nay how fit it

may now be, in these new times, for governing England itself

where we are used to it so long:  this, too, is an alarming

inquiry, to which all thinking men, and good citizens of their

country, who have an ear for the small still voices and eternal

intimations, across the temporary clamors and loud blaring

proclamations, are now solemnly invited.  Invited by the rigorous

fact itself; which will one day, and that perhaps soon, demand

practical decision or redecision of it from us,--with enormous

penalty if we decide it wrong!  I think we shall all have to

consider this question, one day; better perhaps now than later,

when the leisure may be less.  If a Parliament, with suffrages

and universal or any conceivable kind of suffrages, is the

method, then certainly let us set about discovering the kind of

suffrages, and rest no moment till we have got them.  But it is

possible a Parliament may not be the method!  Possible the

inveterate notions of the English People may have settled it as

the method, and the Everlasting Laws of Nature may have settled

it as not the method!  Not the whole method; nor the method at

all, if taken as the whole?  If a Parliament with never such

suffrages is not the method settled by this latter authority,

then it will urgently behoove us to become aware of that fact,

and to quit such method;--we may depend upon it, however

unanimous we be, every step taken in that direction will, by the

Eternal Law of things, be a step _from_ improvement, not towards it.

Not towards it, I say, if so!  Unanimity of voting,--that will do

nothing for us if so.  Your ship cannot double Cape Horn by its

excellent plans of voting.  The ship may vote this and that,

above decks and below, in the most harmonious exquisitely

constitutional manner:  the ship, to get round Cape Horn, will

find a set of conditions already voted for, and fixed with

adamantine rigor by the ancient Elemental Powers, who are

entirely careless how you vote.  If you can, by voting or without

voting, ascertain these conditions, and valiantly conform to

them, you will get round the Cape:  if you cannot, the ruffian

Winds will blow you ever back again; the inexorable Icebergs,

dumb privy-councillors from Chaos, will nudge you with most

chaotic "admonition;" you will be flung half frozen on the

Patagonian cliffs, or admonished into shivers by your iceberg

councillors, and sent sheer down to Davy Jones, and will never

get round Cape Horn at all! Unanimity on board ship;--yes indeed,

the ship's crew may be very unanimous, which doubtless, for the

time being, will be very comfortable to the ship's crew, and to

their Phantasm Captain if they have one:  but if the tack they

unanimously steer upon is guiding them into the belly of the

Abyss, it will not profit them much!--Ships accordingly do not

use the ballot-box at all; and they reject the Phantasm species

of Captains:  one wishes much some other Entities--since all

entities lie under the same rigorous set of laws--could be

brought to show as much wisdom, and sense at least of

self-preservation, the first command of Nature.  Phantasm

Captains with unanimous votings:  this is considered to be all

the law and all the prophets, at present.

If a man could shake out of his mind the universal noise of

political doctors in this generation and in the last generation

or two, and consider the matter face to face, with his own

sincere intelligence looking at it, I venture to say he would

find this a very extraordinary method of navigating, whether in

the Straits of Magellan or the undiscovered Sea of Time.  To

prosper in this world, to gain felicity, victory and improvement,

either for a man or a nation, there is but one thing requisite,

That the man or nation can discern what the true regulations of

the Universe are in regard to him and his pursuit, and can

faithfully and steadfastly follow these.  These will lead him to

victory; whoever it may be that sets him in the way of

these,--were it Russian Autocrat, Chartist Parliament, Grand

Lama, Force of Public Opinion, Archbishop of Canterbury, M'Croudy

the Seraphic Doctor with his Last-evangel of Political

Economy,--sets him in the sure way to please the Author of this

Universe, and is his friend of friends.  And again, whoever does

the contrary is, for a like reason, his enemy of enemies.  This

may be taken as fixed.

And now by what method ascertain the monition of the gods in

regard to our affairs?  How decipher, with best fidelity, the

eternal regulation of the Universe; and read, from amid such

confused embroilments of human clamor and folly, what the real

Divine Message to us is?  A divine message, or eternal regulation

of the Universe, there verily is, in regard to every conceivable

procedure and affair of man:  faithfully following this, said

procedure or affair will prosper, and have the whole Universe to

second it, and carry it, across the fluctuating contradictions,

towards a victorious goal; not following this, mistaking this,

disregarding this, destruction and wreck are certain for every

affair.  How find it?  All the world answers me, "Count heads;

ask Universal Suffrage, by the ballot-boxes, and that will tell."

Universal Suffrage, ballot-boxes, count of heads? Well,--I

perceive we have got into strange spiritual latitudes indeed.

Within the last half-century or so, either the Universe or else

the heads of men must have altered very much.  Half a century

ago, and down from Father Adam's time till then, the Universe,

wherever I could hear tell of it, was wont to be of somewhat

abstruse nature; by no means carrying its secret written on its

face, legible to every passer-by; on the contrary, obstinately

hiding its secret from all foolish, slavish, wicked, insincere

persons, and partially disclosing it to the wise and noble-minded

alone, whose number was not the majority in my time!

Or perhaps the chief end of man being now, in these improved

epochs, to make money and spend it, his interests in the Universe

have become amazingly simplified of late; capable of being voted

on with effect by almost anybody?  "To buy in the cheapest

market, and sell in the dearest:" truly if that is the summary of

his social duties, and the final divine message he has to follow,

we may trust him extensively to vote upon that. But if it is not,

and never was, or can be?  If the Universe will not carry on its

divine bosom any commonwealth of mortals that have no higher

aim,--being still "a Temple and Hall of Doom," not a mere

Weaving-shop and Cattle-pen?  If the unfathomable Universe has

decided to _reject_ Human Beavers pretending to be Men; and will

abolish, pretty rapidly perhaps, in hideous mud-deluges, their

"markets" and them, unless they think of it?--In that case it

were better to think of it:  and the Democracies and Universal

Suffrages, I can observe, will require to modify themselves a

good deal!

Historically speaking, I believe there was no Nation that could

subsist upon Democracy.  Of ancient Republics, and _Demoi_ and

_Populi_, we have heard much; but it is now pretty well admitted

to be nothing to our purpose;--a universal-suffrage republic, or

a general-suffrage one, or any but a most-limited-suffrage one,

never came to light, or dreamed of doing so, in ancient times.

When the mass of the population were slaves, and the voters

intrinsically a kind of _kings_, or men born to rule others; when

the voters were real "aristocrats" and manageable dependents of

such,--then doubtless voting, and confused jumbling of talk and

intrigue, might, without immediate destruction, or the need of a

Cavaignac to intervene with cannon and sweep the streets clear of

it, go on; and beautiful developments of manhood might be

possible beside it, for a season.  Beside it; or even, if you

will, by means of it, and in virtue of it, though that is by no

means so certain as is often supposed.  Alas, no:  the reflective

constitutional mind has misgivings as to the origin of old Greek

and Roman nobleness; and indeed knows not how this or any other

human nobleness could well be "originated," or brought to pass,

by voting or without voting, in this world, except by the grace

of God very mainly;--and remembers, with a sigh, that of the

Seven Sages themselves no fewer than three were bits of Despotic

Kings, [Gr.] _Turannoi_, "Tyrants" so called (such being greatly

wanted there); and that the other four were very far from Red

Republicans, if of any political faith whatever!  We may quit the

Ancient Classical concern, and leave it to College-clubs and

speculative debating-societies, in these late days.

Of the various French Republics that have been tried, or that are

still on trial,--of these also it is not needful to say any word.

But there is one modern instance of Democracy nearly perfect, the

Republic of the United States, which has actually subsisted for

threescore years or more, with immense success as is affirmed; to

which many still appeal, as to a sign of hope for all nations,

and a "Model Republic."  Is not America an instance in point?

Why should not all Nations subsist and flourish on Democracy, as

America does?

Of America it would ill beseem any Englishman, and me perhaps as

little as another, to speak unkindly, to speak unpatriotically,

if any of us even felt so.  Sure enough, America is a great, and

in many respects a blessed and hopeful phenomenon.  Sure enough,

these hardy millions of Anglo-Saxon men prove themselves worthy

of their genealogy; and, with the axe and plough and hammer, if

not yet with any much finer kind of implements, are triumphantly

clearing out wide spaces, seedfields for the sustenance and

refuge of mankind, arenas for the future history of the world;

doing, in their day and generation, a creditable and cheering

feat under the sun. But as to a Model Republic, or a model

anything, the wise among themselves know too well that there is

nothing to be said.  Nay the title hitherto to be a Commonwealth

or Nation at all, among the [Gr.] _ethne_ of the world, is,

strictly considered, still a thing they are but striving for, and

indeed have not yet done much towards attaining.  Their

Constitution, such as it may be, was made here, not there; went

over with them from the Old-Puritan English workshop ready-made.

Deduct what they carried with them from England

ready-made,--their common English Language, and that same

Constitution, or rather elixir of constitutions, their inveterate

and now, as it were, inborn reverence for the Constable's Staff;

two quite immense attainments, which England had to spend much

blood, and valiant sweat of brow and brain, for centuries long,

in achieving;--and what new elements of polity or nationhood,

what noble new phasis of human arrangement, or social device

worthy of Prometheus or of Epimetheus, yet comes to light in

America?  Cotton crops and Indian corn and dollars come to light;

and half a world of untilled land, where populations that respect

the constable can live, for the present _without_ Government:

this comes to light; and the profound sorrow of all nobler

hearts, here uttering itself as silent patient unspeakable ennui,

there coming out as vague elegiac wailings, that there is still

next to nothing more.  "Anarchy _plus_ a street-constable:" that

also is anarchic to me, and other than quite lovely!

I foresee, too, that, long before the waste lands are full, the

very street-constable, on these poor terms, will have become

impossible: without the waste lands, as here in our Europe, I do

not see how he could continue possible many weeks.  Cease to brag

to me of America, and its model institutions and constitutions.

To men in their sleep there is nothing granted in this world:

nothing, or as good as nothing, to men that sit idly caucusing

and ballot-boxing on the graves of their heroic ancestors,

saying, "It is well, it is well!"  Corn and bacon are granted:

not a very sublime boon, on such conditions; a boon moreover

which, on such conditions, cannot last!--No:  America too will

have to strain its energies, in quite other fashion than this; to

crack its sinews, and all but break its heart, as the rest of us

have had to do, in thousand-fold wrestle with the Pythons and

mud-demons, before it can become a habitation for the gods.

America's battle is yet to fight; and we, sorrowful though

nothing doubting, will wish her strength for it.  New Spiritual

Pythons, plenty of them; enormous Megatherions, as ugly as were

ever born of mud, loom huge and hideous out of the twilight

Future on America; and she will have her own agony, and her own

victory, but on other terms than she is yet quite aware of.

Hitherto she but ploughs and hammers, in a very successful

manner; hitherto, in spite of her "roast-goose with apple-sauce,"

she is not much.  "Roast-goose with apple-sauce for the poorest

workingman:" well, surely that is something, thanks to your

respect for the street-constable, and to your continents of

fertile waste land;--but that, even if it could continue, is by

no means enough; that is not even an instalment towards what will

be required of you.  My friend, brag not yet of our American

cousins!  Their quantity of cotton, dollars, industry and

resources, I believe to be almost unspeakable; but I can by no

means worship the like of these.  What great human soul, what

great thought, what great noble thing that one could worship, or

loyally admire, has yet been produced there?  None:  the American

cousins have yet done none of these things.  "What they have

done?" growls Smelfungus, tired of the subject: "They have

doubled their population every twenty years.  They have

begotten, with a rapidity beyond recorded example, Eighteen

Millions of the greatest _bores_ ever seen in this world

before,--that hitherto is their feat in History!"--And so we

leave them, for the present; and cannot predict the success of

Democracy, on this side of the Atlantic, from their

example.

Alas, on this side of the Atlantic and on that, Democracy, we

apprehend, is forever impossible!  So much, with certainty of

loud astonished contradiction from all manner of men at present,

but with sure appeal to the Law of Nature and the ever-abiding

Fact, may be suggested and asserted once more.  The Universe

itself is a Monarchy and Hierarchy; large liberty of "voting"

there, all manner of choice, utmost free-will, but with

conditions inexorable and immeasurable annexed to every exercise

of the same.  A most free commonwealth of "voters;" but with

Eternal Justice to preside over it, Eternal Justice enforced by

Almighty Power!  This is the model of "constitutions;" this:  nor

in any Nation where there has not yet (in some supportable and

withal some constantly increasing degree) been confided to the

_Noblest_, with his select series of _Nobler_, the divine

everlasting duty of directing and controlling the Ignoble, has

the "Kingdom of God," which we all pray for, "come," nor can "His

will" even _tend_ to be "done on Earth as it is in Heaven" till

then.  My Christian friends, and indeed my Sham-Christian and

Anti-Christian, and all manner of men, are invited to reflect on

this.  They will find it to be the truth of the case. The Noble

in the high place, the Ignoble in the low; that is, in all times

and in all countries, the Almighty Maker's Law.

To raise the Sham-Noblest, and solemnly consecrate him by

whatever method, new-devised, or slavishly adhered to from old

wont, this, little as we may regard it, is, in all times and

countries, a practical blasphemy, and Nature will in nowise

forget it.  Alas, there lies the origin, the fatal necessity, of

modern Democracy everywhere.  It is the Noblest, not the

Sham-Noblest; it is God-Almighty's Noble, not the Court-Tailor's

Noble, nor the Able-Editor's Noble, that must, in some

approximate degree, be raised to the supreme place; he and not a

counterfeit,--under penalties! Penalties deep as death, and at

length terrible as hell-on-earth, my constitutional friend!--Will

the ballot-box raise the Noblest to the chief place; does any

sane man deliberately believe such a thing?  That nevertheless is

the indispensable result, attain it how we may:  if that is

attained, all is attained; if not that, nothing.  He that cannot

believe the ballot-box to be attaining it, will be comparatively

indifferent to the ballot-box.  Excellent for keeping the ship's

crew at peace under their Phantasm Captain; but unserviceable,

under such, for getting round Cape Horn.  Alas, that there should

be human beings requiring to have these things argued of, at this

late time of day!

I say, it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be

governed by the wise; to be guided in the right path by those who

know it better than they. This is the first "right of man;"

compared with which all other rights are as nothing,--mere

superfluities, corollaries which will follow of their own accord

out of this; if they be not contradictions to this, and less than

nothing!  To the wise it is not a privilege; far other indeed.

Doubtless, as bringing preservation to their country, it implies

preservation of themselves withal; but intrinsically it is the

harshest duty a wise man, if he be indeed wise, has laid to his

hand.  A duty which he would fain enough shirk; which

accordingly, in these sad times of doubt and cowardly sloth, he

has long everywhere been endeavoring to reduce to its minimum,

and has in fact in most cases nearly escaped altogether.  It is

an ungoverned world; a world which we flatter ourselves will

henceforth need no governing.  On the dust of our heroic

ancestors we too sit ballot-boxing, saying to one another, It is

well, it is well!  By inheritance of their noble struggles, we

have been permitted to sit slothful so long.  By noble toil , not

by shallow laughter and vain talk, they made this English

Existence from a savage forest into an arable inhabitable field

for us; and we, idly dreaming it would grow spontaneous crops

forever,--find it now in a too questionable state; peremptorily

requiring real labor and agriculture again.  Real "agriculture"

is not pleasant; much pleasanter to reap and winnow (with

ballot-box or otherwise) than to plough!

Who would govern that can get along without governing?  He that

is fittest for it, is of all men the unwillingest unless

constrained.  By multifarious devices we have been endeavoring to

dispense with governing; and by very superficial speculations, of

_laissez-faire_, supply-and-demand, &c. &c. to persuade ourselves

that it is best so.  The Real Captain, unless it be some Captain

of mechanical Industry hired by Mammon, where is he in these

days? Most likely, in silence, in sad isolation somewhere, in

remote obscurity; trying if, in an evil ungoverned time, he

cannot at least govern himself. The Real Captain undiscoverable;

the Phantasm Captain everywhere very conspicuous:--it is thought

Phantasm Captains, aided by ballot-boxes, are the true method,

after all.  They are much the pleasantest for the time being!

And so no _Dux_ or Duke of any sort, in any province of our

affairs, now _leads_:  the Duke's Bailiff _leads_, what little

leading is required for getting in the rents; and the Duke merely

rides in the state-coach.  It is everywhere so:  and now at last

we see a world all rushing towards strange consummations, because

it is and has long been so!

I do not suppose any reader of mine, or many persons in England

at all, have much faith in Fraternity, Equality and the

Revolutionary Millenniums preached by the French Prophets in this

age:  but there are many movements here too which tend inevitably

in the like direction; and good men, who would stand aghast at

Red Republic and its adjuncts, seem to me travelling at full

speed towards that or a similar goal!  Certainly the notion

everywhere prevails among us too, and preaches itself abroad in

every dialect, uncontradicted anywhere so far as I can hear, That

the grand panacea for social woes is what we call

"enfranchisement," "emancipation;" or, translated into practical

language, the cutting asunder of human relations, wherever they

are found grievous, as is like to be pretty universally the case

at the rate we have been going for some generations past.  Let us

all be "free" of one another; we shall then be happy.  Free,

without bond or connection except that of cash-payment; fair

day's wages for the fair day's work; bargained for by voluntary

contract, and law of supply-and-demand:  this is thought to be

the true solution of all difficulties and injustices that have

occurred between man and man.

To rectify the relation that exists between two men, is there no

method, then, but that of ending it?  The old relation has become

unsuitable, obsolete, perhaps unjust; it imperatively requires to

be amended; and the remedy is, Abolish it, let there henceforth

be no relation at all.  From the "Sacrament of Marriage"

downwards, human beings used to be manifoldly related, one to

another, and each to all; and there was no relation among human

beings, just or unjust, that had not its grievances and

difficulties, its necessities on both sides to bear and forbear.

But henceforth, be it known, we have changed all that, by favor

of Heaven:  "the voluntary principle" has come up, which will

itself do the business for us; and now let a new Sacrament, that

of Divorce, which we call emancipation, and spout of on our

platforms, be universally the order of the day!--Have men

considered whither all this is tending, and what it certainly

enough betokens?  Cut every human relation which has anywhere

grown uneasy sheer asunder; reduce whatsoever was compulsory to

voluntary, whatsoever was permanent among us to the condition of

nomadic:--in other words, loosen by assiduous wedges in every

joint, the whole fabric of social existence, stone from stone:

till at last, all now being loose enough, it can, as we already

see in most countries, be overset by sudden outburst of

revolutionary rage; and, lying as mere mountains of anarchic

rubbish, solicit you to sing Fraternity, &c., over it, and to

rejoice in the new remarkable era of human progress we have

arrived at.

Certainly Emancipation proceeds with rapid strides among us, this

good while; and has got to such a length as might give rise to

reflections in men of a serious turn.  West-Indian Blacks are

emancipated, and it appears refuse to work:  Irish Whites have

long been entirely emancipated; and nobody asks them to work, or

on condition of finding them potatoes (which, of course, is

indispensable), permits them to work.--Among speculative persons,

a question has sometimes risen:  In the progress of Emancipation,

are we to look for a time when all the Horses also are to be

emancipated, and brought to the supply-and-demand principle?

Horses too have "motives;" are acted on by hunger, fear, hope,

love of oats, terror of platted leather; nay they have vanity,

ambition, emulation, thankfulness, vindictiveness; some rude

outline of all our human spiritualities,--a rude resemblance to

us in mind and intelligence, even as they have in bodily frame.

The Horse, poor dumb four-footed fellow, he too has his private

feelings, his affections, gratitudes; and deserves good usage; no

human master, without crime, shall treat him unjustly either, or

recklessly lay on the whip where it is not needed:--I am sure if

I could make him "happy," I should be willing to grant a small

vote (in addition to the late twenty millions) for that

object!

Him too you occasionally tyrannize over; and with bad result to

yourselves, among others; using the leather in a tyrannous

unnecessary manner; withholding, or scantily furnishing, the oats

and ventilated stabling that are due.  Rugged horse-subduers, one

fears they are a little tyrannous at times.  "Am I not a horse,

and half-brother?"--To remedy which, so far as remediable,

fancy--the horses all "emancipated;" restored to their primeval

right of property in the grass of this Globe:  turned out to

graze in an independent supply-and-demand manner!  So long as

grass lasts, I dare say they are very happy, or think themselves

so.  And Farmer Hodge sallying forth, on a dry spring morning,

with a sieve of oats in his hand, and agony of eager expectation

in his heart, is he happy?  Help me to plough this day, Black

Dobbin:  oats in full measure if thou wilt.  "Hlunh, No--thank!"

snorts Black Dobbin; he prefers glorious liberty and the grass.

Bay Darby, wilt not thou perhaps?  "Hlunh!"--Gray Joan, then, my

beautiful broad-bottomed mare,--O Heaven, she too answers Hlunh!

Not a quadruped of them will plough a stroke for me.  Corn-crops

are _ended_ in this world!--For the sake, if not of Hodge, then

of Hodge's horses, one prays this benevolent practice might now

cease, and a new and better one try to begin.  Small kindness to

Hodge's horses to emancipate them!  The fate of all emancipated

horses is, sooner or later, inevitable.  To have in this

habitable Earth no grass to eat,--in Black Jamaica gradually

none, as in White Connemara already none;--to roam aimless,

wasting the seedfields of the world; and be hunted home to Chaos,

by the due watch-dogs and due hell-dogs, with such horrors of

forsaken wretchedness as were never seen before!  These things

are not sport; they are terribly true, in this country at this

hour.

Between our Black West Indies and our White Ireland, between

these two extremes of lazy refusal to work, and of famishing

inability to find any work, what a world have we made of it, with

our fierce Mammon-worships, and our benevolent philanderings, and

idle godless nonsenses of one kind and another!

Supply-and-demand, Leave-it-alone, Voluntary Principle, Time will

mend it:--till British industrial existence seems fast becoming

one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral; a

hideous _living_ Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive; such

a Curtius' gulf, communicating with the Nether Deeps, as the Sun

never saw till now.  These scenes, which the _Morning Chronicle_

is bringing home to all minds of men,--thanks to it for a service

such as Newspapers have seldom done,--ought to excite unspeakable

reflections in every mind.  Thirty thousand outcast Needlewomen

working themselves swiftly to death; three million Paupers

rotting in forced idleness, _helping_ said Needlewomen to die:

these are but items in the sad ledger of despair.

Thirty thousand wretched women, sunk in that putrefying well of

abominations; they have oozed in upon London, from the universal

Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in

the _well_ of the concern, to that extent.  British charity is

smitten to the heart, at the laying bare of such a scene;

passionately undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by

other enormous effort, to redress that individual horror; as I

and all men hope it may.  But, alas, what next? This general well

and cesspool once baled clean out to-day, will begin before night

to fill itself anew.  The universal Stygian quagmire is still

there; opulent in women ready to be ruined, and in men ready.

Towards the same sad cesspool will these waste currents of human

ruin ooze and gravitate as heretofore; except in draining the

universal quagmire itself there is no remedy.  "And for that,

what is the method?" cry many in an angry manner.  To whom, for

the present, I answer only, "Not 'emancipation,' it would seem,

my friends; not the cutting loose of human ties, something far

the reverse of that!"

Many things have been written about shirtmaking; but here perhaps

is the saddest thing of all, not written anywhere till now, that

I know of. Shirts by the thirty thousand are made at

twopence-halfpenny each; and in the mean while no needlewoman,

distressed or other, can be procured in London by any housewife

to give, for fair wages, fair help in sewing.  Ask any thrifty

house-mother, high or low, and she will answer.  In high houses

and in low, there is the same answer:  no _real_ needlewoman,

"distressed" or other, has been found attainable in any of the

houses I frequent. Imaginary needlewomen, who demand considerable

wages, and have a deepish appetite for beer and viands, I hear of

everywhere; but their sewing proves too often a distracted

puckering and botching; not sewing, only the fallacious hope of

it, a fond imagination of the mind.  Good sempstresses are to be

hired in every village; and in London, with its famishing thirty

thousand, not at all, or hardly,--Is not No-government beautiful

in human business?  To such length has the Leave-alone principle

carried it, by way of organizing labor, in this affair of

shirtmaking.  Let us hope the Leave-alone principle has now got

its apotheosis; and taken wing towards higher regions than ours,

to deal henceforth with a class of affairs more appropriate for

it!

Reader, did you ever hear of "Constituted Anarchy"?  Anarchy; the

choking, sweltering, deadly and killing rule of No-rule; the

consecration of cupidity, and braying folly, and dim stupidity

and baseness, in most of the affairs of men?  Slop-shirts

attainable three halfpence cheaper, by the ruin of living bodies

and immortal souls?  Solemn Bishops and high Dignitaries, _our_

divine "Pillars of Fire by night," debating meanwhile, with their

largest wigs and gravest look, upon something they call

"prevenient grace"?  Alas, our noble men of genius, Heaven's

_real_ messengers to us, they also rendered nearly futile by the

wasteful time;--preappointed they everywhere, and assiduously

trained by all their pedagogues and monitors, to "rise in

Parliament," to compose orations, write books, or in short speak

words, for the approval of reviewers; instead of doing real

kingly work to be approved of by the gods!  Our "Government," a

highly "responsible" one; responsible to no God that I can hear

of, but to the twenty-seven million _gods_ of the shilling

gallery.  A Government tumbling and drifting on the whirlpools

and mud-deluges, floating atop in a conspicuous manner,

no-whither,--like the carcass of a drowned ass.  Authentic

_Chaos_ come up into this sunny Cosmos again; and all men singing

Gloria in _excelsis_ to it.  In spirituals and temporals, in

field and workshop, from Manchester to Dorsetshire, from Lambeth

Palace to the Lanes of Whitechapel, wherever men meet and toil

and traffic together,--Anarchy, Anarchy; and only the

street-constable (though with ever-increasing difficulty) still

maintaining himself in the middle of it; that so, for one thing,

this blessed exchange of slop-shirts for the souls of women may

transact itself in a peaceable manner!--I, for my part, do

profess myself in eternal opposition to this, and discern well

that universal Ruin has us in the wind, unless we can get out of

this.  My friend Crabbe, in a late number of his _Intermittent

Radiator_, pertinently enough exclaims:--

"When shall we have done with all this of British Liberty,

Voluntary Principle, Dangers of Centralization, and the like?  It

is really getting too bad.  For British Liberty, it seems, the

people cannot be taught to read.  British Liberty, shuddering to

interfere with the rights of capital, takes six or eight millions

of money annually to feed the idle laborer whom it dare not

employ.  For British Liberty we live over poisonous cesspools,

gully-drains, and detestable abominations; and omnipotent London

cannot sweep the dirt out of itself.  British Liberty

produces--what?  Floods of Hansard Debates every year, and

apparently little else at present.  If these are the results of

British Liberty, I, for one, move we should lay it on the shelf a

little, and look out for something other and farther.  We have

achieved British Liberty hundreds of years ago; and are fast

growing, on the strength of it, one of the most absurd

populations the Sun, among his great Museum of Absurdities, looks

down upon at present."

Curious enough:  the model of the world just now is England and

her Constitution; all Nations striving towards it:  poor France

swimming these last sixty years in seas of horrid dissolution and

confusion, resolute to attain this blessedness of free voting, or

to die in chase of it.  Prussia too, solid Germany itself, has

all broken out into crackling of musketry, loud pamphleteering

and Frankfort parliamenting and palavering; Germany too will

scale the sacred mountains, how steep soever, and, by talisman of

ballot-box, inhabit a political Elysium henceforth.  All the

Nations have that one hope.  Very notable, and rather sad to the

humane on-looker.  For it is sadly conjectured, all the Nations

labor somewhat under a mistake as to England, and the causes of

her freedom and her prosperous cotton-spinning; and have much

misread the nature of her Parliament, and the effect of

ballot-boxes and universal suffrages there.

What if it were because the English Parliament was from the

first, and is only just now ceasing to be, a Council of actual

Rulers, real Governing Persons (called Peers, Mitred Abbots,

Lords, Knights of the Shire, or howsoever called), actually

_ruling_ each his section of the country,--and possessing (it

must be said) in the lump, or when assembled as a Council,

uncommon patience, devoutness, probity, discretion and good

fortune,--that the said Parliament ever came to be good for

much?  In that case it will not be easy to "imitate" the English

Parliament; and the ballot-box and suffrage will be the mere bow

of Robin Hood, which it is given to very few to bend, or shoot

with to any perfection.  And if the Peers become mere big

Capitalists, Railway Directors, gigantic Hucksters, Kings of

Scrip, _without_ lordly quality, or other virtue except cash; and

the Mitred Abbots change to mere Able-Editors, masters of

Parliamentary Eloquence, Doctors of Political Economy, and such

like; and all _have_ to be elected by a universal-suffrage

ballot-box,--I do not see how the English Parliament itself will

long continue sea-worthy!  Nay, I find England in her own big

dumb heart, wherever you come upon her in a silent meditative

hour, begins to have dreadful misgivings about it.

The model of the world, then, is at once unattainable by the

world, and not much worth attaining?  England, as I read the

omens, is now called a second time to "show the Nations how to

live;" for by her Parliament, as chief governing entity, I fear

she is not long for this world!  Poor England must herself again,

in these new strange times, the old methods being quite worn out,

"learn how to live."  That now is the terrible problem for

England, as for all the Nations; and she alone of all, not _yet_

sunk into open Anarchy, but left with time for repentance and

amendment; she, wealthiest of all in material resource, in

spiritual energy, in ancient loyalty to law, and in the qualities

that yield such loyalty,--she perhaps alone of all may be able,

with huge travail, and the strain of all her faculties, to

accomplish some solution.  She will have to try it, she has now

to try it; she must accomplish it, or perish from her place in

the world!

England, as I persuade myself, still contains in it many

_kings_; possesses, as old Rome did, many men not needing

"election" to command, but eternally elected for it by the Maker

Himself.  England's one hope is in these, just now.  They are

among the silent, I believe; mostly far away from platforms and

public palaverings; not speaking forth the image of their

nobleness in transitory words, but imprinting it, each on his own

little section of the world, in silent facts, in modest valiant

actions, that will endure forevermore.  They must sit silent no

longer.  They are summoned to assert themselves; to act forth,

and articulately vindicate, in the teeth of howling multitudes,

of a world too justly _maddened_ into all manner of delirious

clamors, what of wisdom they derive from God.  England, and the

Eternal Voices, summon them; poor England never so needed them as

now.  Up, be doing everywhere:  the hour of crisis has verily

come!  In all sections of English life, the god-made _king_ is

needed; is pressingly demanded in most; in some, cannot longer,

without peril as of conflagration, be dispensed with.  He,

wheresoever he finds himself, can say, "Here too am I wanted;

here is the kingdom I have to subjugate, and introduce God's Laws

into,--God's Laws, instead of Mammon's and M'Croudy's and the Old

Anarch's!  Here is my work, here or nowhere."--Are there many

such, who will answer to the call, in England?  It turns on that,

whether England, rapidly crumbling in these very years and

months, shall go down to the Abyss as her neighbors have all

done, or survive to new grander destinies _without_ solution of

continuity!  Probably the chief question of the world at

present.

The true "commander" and king; he who knows for himself the

divine Appointments of this Universe, the Eternal Laws ordained

by God the Maker, in conforming to which lies victory and

felicity, in departing from which lies, and forever must lie,

sorrow and defeat, for each and all of the Posterity of Adam in

every time and every place; he who has sworn fealty to these, and

dare alone against the world assert these, and dare not with the

whole world at his back deflect from these;--he, I know too well,

is a rare man.  Difficult to discover; not quite discoverable, I

apprehend, by manoeuvring of ballot-boxes, and riddling of the

popular clamor according to the most approved methods.  He is not

sold at any shop I know of,--though sometimes, as at the sign of

the Ballot-box, he is advertised for sale.  Difficult indeed to

discover:  and not very much assisted, or encouraged in late

times, to discover _himself_;--which, I think, might be a kind of

help?  Encouraged rather, and commanded in all ways, if he be

wise, to _hide_ himself, and give place to the windy Counterfeit

of himself; such as the universal suffrages can recognize, such

as loves the most sweet voices of the universal suffrages!--O

Peter, what becomes of such a People; what can become?

Did you never hear, with the mind's ear as well, that fateful

Hebrew Prophecy, I think the fatefulest of all, which sounds

daily through the streets, "Ou' clo!  Ou' clo!"--A certain

People, once upon a time, clamorously voted by overwhelming

majority, "Not _he_; Barabbas, not he! _Him_, and what he is, and

what be deserves, we know well enough:  a reviler of the Chief

Priests and sacred Chancery wigs; a seditious Heretic,

physical-force Chartist, and enemy of his country and mankind:

To the gallows and the cross with him!  Barabbas is our man;

Barabbas, we are for Barabbas!"  They got Barabbas:--have you

well considered what a fund of purblind obduracy, of opaque

_flunkyism_ grown truculent and transcendent; what an eye for the

phylacteries, and want of eye for the eternal noblenesses; sordid

loyalty to the prosperous Semblances, and high-treason against

the Supreme Fact, such a vote betokens in these natures?  For it

was the consummation of a long series of such; they and their

fathers had long kept voting so.  A singular People; who could

both produce such divine men, and then could so stone and crucify

them; a People terrible from the beginning!--Well, they got

Barabbas; and they got, of course, such guidance as Barabbas and

the like of him could give them; and, of course, they stumbled

ever downwards and devilwards, in their truculent stiffnecked

way; and--and, at this hour, after eighteen centuries of sad

fortune, they prophetically sing "Ou' clo!"  in all the cities of

the world.  Might the world, at this late hour, but take note of

them, and understand their song a little!

Yes, there are some things the universal suffrage can

decide,--and about these it will be exceedingly useful to consult

the universal suffrage:  but in regard to most things of

importance, and in regard to the choice of men especially, there

is (astonishing as it may seem) next to no capability on the part

of universal suffrage.--I request all candid persons, who have

never so little originality of mind, and every man has a little,

to consider this.  If true, it involves such a change in our now

fashionable modes of procedure as fills me with astonishment and

alarm.  _If_ popular suffrage is not the way of ascertaining what

the Laws of the Universe are, and who it is that will best guide

us in the way of these,--then woe is to us if we do not take

another method.  Delolme on the British Constitution will not

save us; deaf will the Parcae be to votes of the House, to

leading articles, constitutional philosophies.  The other

method--alas, it involves a stopping short, or vital change of

direction, in the glorious career which all Europe, with shouts

heaven-high, is now galloping along:  and that, happen when it

may, will, to many of us, be probably a rather surprising

business!

One thing I do know, and can again assert with great confidence,

supported by the whole Universe, and by some two hundred

generations of men, who have left us some record of themselves

there, That the few Wise will have, by one method or another, to

take command of the innumerable Foolish; that they must be got to

take it;--and that, in fact, since Wisdom, which means also Valor

and heroic Nobleness, is alone strong in this world, and one wise

man is stronger than all men unwise, they can be got.  That they

must take it; and having taken, must keep it, and do their God's

Message in it, and defend the same, at their life's peril,

against all men and devils. This I do clearly believe to be the

backbone of all Future Society, as it has been of all Past; and

that without it, there is no Society possible in the world.  And

what a business _this_ will be, before it end in some degree of

victory again, and whether the time for shouts of triumph and

tremendous cheers upon it is yet come, or not yet by a great way,

I perceive too well!  A business to make us all very serious

indeed.  A business not to be accomplished but by noble manhood,

and devout all-daring, all-enduring loyalty to Heaven, such as

fatally _sleeps_ at present,--such as is not _dead_ at present

either, unless the gods have doomed this world of theirs to die!

A business which long centuries of faithful travail and heroic

agony, on the part of all the noble that are born to us, will not

end; and which to us, of this "tremendous cheering" century, it

were blessedness very great to see successfully begun.  Begun,

tried by all manner of methods, if there is one wise Statesman or

man left among us, it verily must be;--begun, successfully or

unsuccessfully, we do hope to see it!

In all European countries, especially in England, one class of

Captains and commanders of men, recognizable as the beginning of

a new real and not imaginary "Aristocracy," has already in some

measure developed itself:  the Captains of Industry;--happily the

class who above all, or at least first of all, are wanted in this

time.  In the doing of material work, we have already men among

us that can command bodies of men.  And surely, on the other

hand, there is no lack of men needing to be commanded:  the sad

class of brother-men whom we had to describe as "Hodge's

emancipated horses," reduced to roving famine,--this too has in

all countries developed itself; and, in fatal geometrical

progression, is ever more developing itself, with a rapidity

which alarms every one.  On this ground, if not on all manner of

other grounds, it may be truly said, the "Organization of Labor"

(_not_ organizable by the mad methods tried hitherto) is the

universal vital Problem of the world.

To bring these hordes of outcast captainless soldiers under due

captaincy? This is really the question of questions; on the

answer to which turns, among other things, the fate of all

Governments, constitutional and other,--the possibility of their

continuing to exist, or the impossibility. Captainless,

uncommanded, these wretched outcast "soldiers," since they

cannot starve, must needs become banditti,

street-barricaders,--destroyers of every Government that _cannot_

put them under captains, and send them upon enterprises, and in

short render life human to them.  Our English plan of Poor Laws,

which we once piqued ourselves upon as sovereign, is evidently

fast breaking down.  Ireland, now admitted into the Idle

Workhouse, is rapidly bursting it in pieces.  That never was a

"human" destiny for any honest son of Adam; nowhere but in

England could it have lasted at all; and now, with Ireland sharer

in it, and the fulness of time come, it is as good as ended.

Alas, yes.  Here in Connemara, your crazy Ship of the State,

otherwise dreadfully rotten in many of its timbers I believe, has

sprung a leak:  spite of all hands at the pump, the water is

rising; the Ship, I perceive, will founder, if you cannot stop

this leak!

To bring these Captainless under due captaincy?  The anxious

thoughts of all men that do think are turned upon that question;

and their efforts, though as yet blindly and to no purpose, under

the multifarious impediments and obscurations, all point

thitherward.  Isolated men, and their vague efforts, cannot do

it.  Government everywhere is called upon,--in England as loudly

as elsewhere,--to give the initiative.  A new strange task of

these new epochs; which no Government, never so

"constitutional," can escape from undertaking.  For it is vitally

necessary to the existence of Society itself; it must be

undertaken, and succeeded in too, or worse will follow,--and, as

we already see in Irish Connaught and some other places, will

follow soon.  To whatever thing still calls itself by the name of

Government, were it never so constitutional and impeded by

official impossibilities, all men will naturally look for help,

and direction what to do, in this extremity.  If help or

direction is not given; if the thing called Government merely

drift and tumble to and fro, no-whither, on the popular vortexes,

like some carcass of a drowned ass, constitutionally put "at the

top of affairs," popular indignation will infallibly accumulate

upon it; one day, the popular lightning, descending forked and

horrible from the black air, will annihilate said supreme

carcass, and smite it home to its native ooze again!--Your

Lordship, this is too true, though irreverently spoken:  indeed

one knows not how to speak of it; and to me it is infinitely sad

and miserable, spoken or not!--Unless perhaps the Voluntary

Principle will still help us through?  Perhaps this Irish leak,

in such a rotten distressed condition of the Ship, with all the

crew so anxious about it, will be kind enough to stop of

itself?--

Dismiss that hope, your Lordship!  Let all real and imaginary

Governors of England, at the pass we have arrived at, dismiss

forever that fallacious fatal solace to their do-nothingism:  of

itself, too clearly, the leak will never stop; by human skill and

energy it must be stopped, or there is nothing but the sea-bottom

for us all!  A Chief Governor of England really ought to

recognize his situation; to discern that, doing nothing, and

merely drifting to and fro, in however constitutional a manner,

he is a squanderer of precious moments, moments that perhaps are

priceless; a truly alarming Chief Governor.  Surely, to a Chief

Governor of England, worthy of that high name,--surely to him, as

to every living man, in every conceivable situation short of the

Kingdom of the Dead--there is _something_ possible; some plan of

action other than that of standing mildly, with crossed arms,

till he and we--sink?  Complex as his situation is, he, of all

Governors now extant among these distracted Nations, has, as I

compute, by far the greatest possibilities.  The Captains, actual

or potential, are there, and the million Captainless:  and such

resources for bringing them together as no other has.  To these

outcast soldiers of his, unregimented roving banditti for the

present, or unworking workhouse prisoners who are almost uglier

than banditti; to these floods of Irish Beggars, Able-bodied

Paupers, and nomadic Lackalls, now stagnating or roaming

everywhere, drowning the face of the world (too truly) into an

untenantable swamp and Stygian quagmire, has the Chief Governor

of this country no word whatever to say?  Nothing but "Rate in

aid," "Time will mend it," "Necessary business of the Session;"

and "After me the Deluge"? A Chief Governor that can front his

Irish difficulty, and steadily contemplate the horoscope of Irish

and British Pauperism, and whitherward it is leading him and us,

in this humor, must be a--What shall we call such a Chief

Governor?  Alas, in spite of old use and wont,--little other than

a tolerated Solecism, growing daily more intolerable!  He

decidedly ought to have some word to say on this matter,--to be

incessantly occupied in getting something which he could

practically say!--Perhaps to the following, or a much finer

effect?

_Speech of the British Prime-Minister to the floods of Irish and

other Beggars, the able-bodied Lackalls, nomadic or stationary,

and the general assembly, outdoor and indoor, of the Pauper

Populations of these Realms_.

"Vagrant Lackalls, foolish most of you, criminal many of you,

miserable all; the sight of you fills me with astonishment and

despair.  What to do with you I know not; long have I been

meditating, and it is hard to tell. Here are some three millions

of you, as I count:  so many of you fallen sheer over into the

abysses of open Beggary; and, fearful to think, every new unit

that falls is _loading_ so much more the chain that drags the

others over.  On the edge of the precipice hang uncounted

millions; increasing, I am told, at the rate of 1200 a day.  They

hang there on the giddy edge, poor souls, cramping themselves

down, holding on with all their strength; but falling, falling

one after another; and the chain is getting _heavy_, so that ever

more fall; and who at last will stand?  What to do with you?  The

question, What to do with you? especially since the potato died,

is like to break my heart!

"One thing, after much meditating, I have at last discovered, and

now know for some time back:  That you cannot be left to roam

abroad in this unguided manner, stumbling over the precipices,

and loading ever heavier the fatal _chain_ upon those who might

be able to stand; that this of locking you up in temporary Idle

Workhouses, when you stumble, and subsisting you on Indian meal,

till you can sally forth again on fresh roamings, and fresh

stumblings, and ultimate descent to the devil;--that this is

_not_ the plan; and that it never was, or could out of England

have been supposed to be, much as I have prided myself upon it!

"Vagrant Lackalls, I at last perceive, all this that has been

sung and spoken, for a long while, about enfranchisement,

emancipation, freedom, suffrage, civil and religious liberty over

the world, is little other than sad temporary jargon, brought

upon us by a stern necessity,--but now ordered by a sterner to

take itself away again a little.  Sad temporary jargon, I say:

made up of sense and nonsense,--sense in small quantities, and

nonsense in very large;--and, if taken for the whole or permanent

truth of human things, it is no better than fatal infinite

nonsense eternally _untrue_.  All men, I think, will soon have to

quit this, to consider this as a thing pretty well achieved; and

to look out towards another thing much more needing achievement

at the time that now is.

"All men will have to quit it, I believe.  But to you, my

indigent friends, the time for quitting it has palpably arrived!

To talk of glorious self-government, of suffrages and hustings,

and the fight of freedom and such like, is a vain thing in your

case.  By all human definitions and conceptions of the said fight

of freedom, you for your part have lost it, and can fight no

more.  Glorious self-government is a glory not for you, not for

Hodge's emancipated horses, nor you.  No; I say, No.  You, for

your part, have tried it, and _failed_.  Left to walk your own

road, the will-o'-wisps beguiled you, your short sight could not

descry the pitfalls; the deadly tumult and press has whirled you

hither and thither, regardless of your struggles and your

shrieks; and here at last you lie; fallen flat into the ditch,

drowning there and dying, unless the others that are still

standing please to pick you up.  The others that still stand have

their own difficulties, I can tell you!--But you, by imperfect

energy and redundant appetite, by doing too little work and

drinking too much beer, you (I bid you observe) have proved that

you cannot do it!  You lie there plainly in the ditch.  And I am

to pick you up again, on these mad terms; help you ever again, as

with our best heart's-blood, to do what, once for all, the gods

have made impossible?  To load the fatal _chain_ with your

perpetual staggerings and sprawlings; and ever again load it,

till we all lie sprawling?  My indigent incompetent friends, I

will not!  Know that, whoever may be 'sons of freedom,' you for

your part are not and cannot be such.  Not 'free' you, I think,

whoever may be free.  You palpably are fallen

captive,--_caitiff_, as they once named it:--you do, silently but

eloquently, demand, in the name of mercy itself, that some

genuine command be taken of you.

"Yes, my indigent incompetent friends; some genuine practical

command. Such,--if I rightly interpret those mad Chartisms,

Repeal Agitations, Red Republics, and other delirious

inarticulate howlings and bellowings which all the populations of

the world now utter, evidently cries of pain on their and your

part,--is the demand which you, Captives, make of all men that

are not Captive, but are still Free.  Free men,--alas, had you

ever any notion who the free men were, who the not-free, the

incapable of freedom!  The free men, if you could have understood

it, they are the wise men; the patient, self-denying, valiant;

the Nobles of the World; who can discern the Law of this

Universe, what it is, and piously _obey_ it; these, in late sad

times, having cast you loose, you are fallen captive to greedy

sons of profit-and-loss; to bad and ever to worse; and at length

to Beer and the Devil.  Algiers, Brazil or Dahomey hold nothing

in them so authentically _slave_ as you are, my indigent

incompetent friends!

"Good Heavens, and I have to raise some eight or nine millions

annually, six for England itself, and to wreck the morals of my

working population beyond all money's worth, to keep the life

from going out of you:  a small service to you, as I many times

bitterly repeat!  Alas, yes; before high Heaven I must declare it

such.  I think the old Spartans, who would have killed you

instead, had shown more 'humanity,' more of manhood, than I thus

do!  More humanity, I say, more of manhood, and of sense for what

the dignity of man demands imperatively of you and of me and of

us all.  We call it charity, beneficence, and other fine names,

this brutish Workhouse Scheme of ours; and it is but sluggish

heartlessness, and insincerity, and cowardly lowness of soul.

Not 'humanity' or manhood, I think; perhaps _ape_hood

rather,--paltry imitancy, from the teeth outward, of what our

heart never felt nor our understanding ever saw; dim indolent

adherence to extraneous and extinct traditions; traditions now

really about extinct; not living now to almost any of us, and

still haunting with their spectralities and gibbering _ghosts_

(in a truly baleful manner) almost all of us! Making this our

struggling 'Twelfth Hour of the Night' inexpressibly

hideous!-

"But as for you, my indigent incompetent friends, I have to

repeat with sorrow, but with perfect clearness, what is plainly

undeniable, and is even clamorous to get itself admitted, that

you are of the nature of slaves,--or if you prefer the word, of

_nomadic, and now even vagrant and vagabond, servants that can

find no master on those terms_; which seems to me a much uglier

word.  Emancipation?  You have been 'emancipated' with a

vengeance! Foolish souls, I say the whole world cannot emancipate

you.  Fealty to ignorant Unruliness, to gluttonous sluggish

Improvidence, to the Beer-pot and the Devil, who is there that

can emancipate a man in that predicament? Not a whole Reform

Bill, a whole French Revolution executed for his behoof alone:

nothing but God the Maker can emancipate him, by making him

anew.

"To forward which glorious consummation, will it not be well, O

indigent friends, that you, fallen flat there, shall henceforth

learn to take advice of others as to the methods of standing?

Plainly I let you know, and all the world and the worlds know,

that I for my part mean it so.  Not as glorious unfortunate sons

of freedom, but as recognized captives, as unfortunate fallen

brothers requiring that I should command you, and if need were,

control and compel you, can there henceforth be a relation

between us.  Ask me not for Indian meal; you shall be compelled

to earn it first; know that on other terms I will not give you

any.  Before Heaven and Earth, and God the Maker of us all, I

declare it is a scandal to see _such_ a life kept in you, by the

sweat and heart's-blood of your brothers; and that, if we cannot

mend it, death were preferable!  Go to, we must get out of

this--unutterable coil of nonsenses, constitutional,

philanthropical, &c., in which (surely without mutual hatred, if

with less of 'love' than is supposed) we are all strangling one

another!  Your want of wants, I say, is that you be _commanded_

in this world, not being able to command yourselves.  Know

therefore that it shall be so with you.  Nomadism, I give you

notice, has ended; needful permanency, soldier-like obedience,

and the opportunity and the necessity of hard steady labor for

your living, have begun.  Know that the Idle Workhouse is shut

against you henceforth; you cannot enter there at will, nor leave

at will; you shall enter a quite other Refuge, under conditions

strict as soldiering, and not leave till I have done with you.

He that prefers the glorious (or perhaps even the rebellious

_in_glorious) 'career of freedom,' let him prove that he can

travel there, and be the master of himself; and right good speed

to him. He who has proved that he cannot travel there or be the

master of himself,--let him, in the name of all the gods, become

a servant, and accept the just rules of servitude!

"Arise, enlist in my Irish, my Scotch and English 'Regiments of

the New Era,'--which I have been concocting, day and night,

during these three Grouse-seasons (taking earnest incessant

counsel, with all manner of Industrial Notabilities and men of

insight, on the matter), and have now brought to a kind of

preparation for incipiency, thank Heaven!  Enlist there, ye poor

wandering banditti; obey, work, suffer, abstain, as all of us

have had to do:  so shall you be useful in God's creation, so

shall you be helped to gain a manful living for yourselves; not

otherwise than so. Industrial Regiments [_Here numerous persons,

with big wigs many of them, and austere aspect, whom I take to be

Professors of the Dismal Science, start up in an agitated

vehement manner:  but the Premier resolutely beckons them down

again_]--Regiments not to fight the French or others, who are

peaceable enough towards us; but to fight the Bogs and

Wildernesses at home and abroad, and to chain the Devils of the

Pit which are walking too openly among us.

"Work, for you?  Work, surely, is not quite undiscoverable in an

Earth so wide as ours, if we will take the right methods for it!

Indigent friends, we will adopt this new relation (which is _old_

as the world); this will lead us towards such.  Rigorous

conditions, not to be violated on either side, lie in this

relation; conditions planted there by God Himself; which woe will

betide us if we do not discover, gradually more and more

discover, and conform to!  Industrial Colonels, Workmasters,

Task-masters, Life-commanders, equitable as Rhadamanthus and

inflexible as he:  such, I perceive, you do need; and such, you

being once put under law as soldiers are, will be discoverable

for you.  I perceive, with boundless alarm, that I shall have to

set about discovering such,--I, since I am at the top of affairs,

with all men looking to me.  Alas, it is my new task in this New

Era; and God knows, I too, little other than a red-tape

Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence

hitherto, am far behind with it! But street-barricades rise

everywhere:  the hour of Fate has come.  In Connemara there has

sprung a leak, since the potato died; Connaught, if it were not

for Treasury-grants and rates-in-aid, would have to recur to

Cannibalism even now, and Human Society would cease to pretend

that it existed there.  Done this thing must be.  Alas, I

perceive that if I cannot do it, then surely I shall die, and

perhaps shall not have Christian burial!  But I already raise

near upon Ten Millions for feeding you in idleness, my nomadic

friends; work, under due regulations, I really might try to get

of--[_Here arises indescribable uproar, no longer repressible,

from all manner of Economists, Emancipationists,

Constitutionalists, and miscellaneous Professors of the Dismal

Science, pretty numerously scattered about; and cries of "Private

enterprise," "Rights of Capital," "Voluntary Principle,"

"Doctrines of the British Constitution," swollen by the general

assenting hum of all the world, quite drown the Chief Minister

for a while. He, with invincible resolution, persists; obtains

hearing again_:]

"Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science, soft you a little.

Alas, I know what you would say.  For my sins, I have read much

in those inimitable volumes of yours,--really I should think,

some barrowfuls of them in my time,--and, in these last forty

years of theory and practice, have pretty well seized what of

Divine Message you were sent with to me.  Perhaps as small a

message, give me leave to say, as ever there was such a noise

made about before.  Trust me, I have not forgotten it, shall

never forget it. Those Laws of the Shop-till are indisputable to

me; and practically useful in certain departments of the

Universe, as the multiplication-table itself. Once I even tried

to sail through the Immensities with them, and to front the big

coming Eternities with them; but I found it would not do.  As the

Supreme Rule of Statesmanship, or Government of Men,--since this

Universe is not wholly a Shop,--no.  You rejoice in my improved

tariffs, free-trade movements and the like, on every hand; for

which be thankful, and even sing litanies if you choose.  But

here at last, in the Idle-Workhouse movement,--unexampled yet on

Earth or in the waters under the Earth,--I am fairly brought to a

stand; and have had to make reflections, of the most alarming,

and indeed awful, and as it were religious nature!  Professors of

the Dismal Science, I perceive that the length of your tether is

now pretty well run; and that I must request you to talk a little

lower in future.  By the side of the shop-till,--see, your small

'Law of God' is hung up, along with the multiplication-table

itself.  But beyond and above the shop-till, allow me to say, you

shall as good as hold your peace.  Respectable Professors, I

perceive it is not now the Gigantic Hucksters, but it is the

Immortal Gods, yes they, in their terror and their beauty, in

their wrath and their beneficence, that are coming into play in

the affairs of this world!  Soft you a little.  Do not you

interrupt me, but try to understand and help me!--

--"Work, was I saying?  My indigent unguided friends, I should

think some work might be discoverable for you.  Enlist, stand

drill; become, from a nomadic Banditti of Idleness, Soldiers of

Industry!  I will lead you to the Irish Bogs, to the vacant

desolations of Connaught now falling into Cannibalism, to

mistilled Connaught, to ditto Munster, Leinster, Ulster, I will

lead you:  to the English fox-covers, furze-grown Commons, New

Forests, Salisbury Plains:  likewise to the Scotch Hill-sides,

and bare rushy slopes, which as yet feed only sheep,--moist

uplands, thousands of square miles in extent, which are destined

yet to grow green crops, and fresh butter and milk and beef

without limit (wherein no 'Foreigner can compete with us'), were

the Glasgow sewers once opened on them, and you with your

Colonels carried thither.  In the Three Kingdoms, or in the Forty

Colonies, depend upon it, you shall be led to your work!

"To each of you I will then say:  Here is work for you; strike

into it with manlike, soldier-like obedience and heartiness,

according to the methods here prescribed,--wages follow for you

without difficulty; all manner of just remuneration, and at

length emancipation itself follows.  Refuse to strike into it;

shirk the heavy labor, disobey the rules,--I will admonish and

endeavor to incite you; if in vain, I will flog you; if still in

vain, I will at last shoot you,--and make God's Earth, and the

forlorn-hope in God's Battle, free of you.  Understand it, I

advise you!  The Organization of Labor"--[_Left speaking_, says

our reporter.]

"Left speaking:"  alas, that he should have to "speak" so much!

There are things that should be done, not spoken; that till the

doing of them is begun, cannot well be spoken.  He may have to

"speak" seven years yet, before a spade be struck into the Bog of

Allen; and then perhaps it will be too late!-

You perceive, my friends, we have actually got into the "New Era"

there has been such prophesying of:  here we all are, arrived at

last;--and it is by no means the land flowing with milk and honey

we were led to expect!  Very much the reverse.  A terrible _new_

country this:  no neighbors in it yet, that I can see, but

irrational flabby monsters (philanthropic and other) of the giant

species; hyenas, laughing hyenas, predatory wolves; probably

_devils_, blue (or perhaps blue-and-yellow) devils, as St.

Guthlac found in Croyland long ago.  A huge untrodden haggard

country, the "chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;" a country

of savage glaciers, granite mountains, of foul jungles, unhewed

forests, quaking bogs;--which we shall have our own ados to make

arable and habitable, I think!  We must stick by it, however;--of

all enterprises the impossiblest is that of getting out of it,

and shifting into another.  To work, then, one and all; hands to

work!

 No. II.  MODEL PRISONS.   [March 1, 1850.]

The deranged condition of our affairs is a universal topic among

men at present; and the heavy miseries pressing, in their rudest

shape, on the great dumb inarticulate class, and from this, by a

sure law, spreading upwards, in a less palpable but not less

certain and perhaps still more fatal shape on all classes to the

very highest, are admitted everywhere to be great, increasing and

now almost unendurable.  How to diminish them,--this is every

man's question.  For in fact they do imperatively need

diminution; and unless they can be diminished, there are many

other things that cannot very long continue to exist beside them.

A serious question indeed, How to diminish them!

Among the articulate classes, as they may be called, there are

two ways of proceeding in regard to this.  One large body of the

intelligent and influential, busied mainly in personal affairs,

accepts the social iniquities, or whatever you may call them, and

the miseries consequent thereupon; accepts them, admits them to

be extremely miserable, pronounces them entirely inevitable,

incurable except by Heaven, and eats its pudding with as little

thought of them as possible.  Not a very noble class of citizens

these; not a very hopeful or salutary method of dealing with

social iniquities this of theirs, however it may answer in

respect to themselves and their personal affairs!  But now there

is the select small minority, in whom some sentiment of public

spirit and human pity still survives, among whom, or not

anywhere, the Good Cause may expect to find soldiers and

servants:  their method of proceeding, in these times, is also

very strange.  They embark in the "philanthropic movement;" they

calculate that the miseries of the world can be cured by bringing

the philanthropic movement to bear on them.  To universal public

misery, and universal neglect of the clearest public duties, let

private charity superadd itself: there will thus be some balance

restored, and maintained again; thus,--or by what conceivable

method?  On these terms they, for their part, embark in the

sacred cause; resolute to cure a world's woes by rose-water;

desperately bent on trying to the uttermost that mild method.  It

seems not to have struck these good men that no world, or thing

here below, ever fell into misery, without having first fallen

into folly, into sin against the Supreme Ruler of it, by adopting

as a law of conduct what was not a law, but the reverse of one;

and that, till its folly, till its sin be cast out of it, there

is not the smallest hope of its misery going,--that not for all

the charity and rose-water in the world will its misery try to go

till then!

This is a sad error; all the sadder as it is the error chiefly of

the more humane and noble-minded of our generation; among whom,

as we said, or elsewhere not at all, the cause of real Reform

must expect its servants. At present, and for a long while past,

whatsoever young soul awoke in EnGland with some disposition

towards generosity and social heroism, or at lowest with some

intimation of the beauty of such a disposition,--he, in whom the

poor world might have looked for a Reformer, and valiant mender

of its foul ways, was almost sure to become a Philanthropist,

reforming merely by this rose-water method.  To admit that the

world's ways are foul, and not the ways of God the Maker, but of

Satan the Destroyer, many of them, and that they must be mended

or we all die; that if huge misery prevails, huge cowardice,

falsity, disloyalty, universal Injustice high and low, have still

longer prevailed, and must straightway try to cease prevailing:

this is what no visible reformer has yet thought of doing:  All

so-called "reforms" hitherto are grounded either on openly

admitted egoism (cheap bread to the cotton-spinner, voting to

those that have no vote, and the like), which does not point

towards very celestial developments of the Reform movement; or

else upon this of remedying social injustices by indiscriminate

contributions of philanthropy, a method surely still more

unpromising.  Such contributions, being indiscriminate, are but a

new injustice; these will never lead to reform, or abolition of

injustice, whatever else they lead to!

Not by that method shall we "get round Cape Horn," by never such

unanimity of voting, under the most approved Phantasm Captains!

It is miserable to see.  Having, as it were, quite lost our way

round Cape Horn, and being sorely "admonished" by the Iceberg and

other dumb councillors, the pilots,--instead of taking to their

sextants, and asking with a seriousness unknown for a long while,

What the Laws of wind and water, and of Earth and of Heaven

are,--decide that now, in these new circumstances, they will, to

the worthy and unworthy, serve out a double allowance of grog.

In this way they hope to do it,--by steering on the old wrong

tack, and serving out more and more, copiously what little _aqua

vitae_ may be still on board! Philanthropy, emancipation, and

pity for human calamity is very beautiful; but the deep oblivion

of the Law of Right and Wrong; this "indiscriminate mashing up of

Right and Wrong into a patent treacle" of the Philanthropic

movement, is by no means beautiful; this, on the contrary, is

altogether ugly and alarming.

Truly if there be not something inarticulate among us, not yet

uttered but pressing towards utterance, which is much wiser than

anything we have lately articulated or brought into word or

action, our outlooks are rather lamentable.  The great majority

of the powerful and active-minded, sunk in egoistic scepticisms,

busied in chase of lucre, pleasure, and mere vulgar objects,

looking with indifference on the world's woes, and passing

carelessly by on the other side; and the select minority, of whom

better might have been expected, bending all their strength to

cure them by methods which can only make bad worse, and in the

end render cure hopeless. A blind loquacious pruriency of

indiscriminate Philanthropism substituting itself, with much

self-laudation, for the silent divinely awful sense of Right and

Wrong;--testifying too clearly that here is no longer a divine

sense of Right and Wrong; that, in the smoke of this universal,

and alas inevitable and indispensable revolutionary fire, and

burning up of worn-out rags of which the world is full, our

life-atmosphere has (for the time) become one vile London fog,

and the eternal loadstars are gone out for us! Gone out;--yet

very visible if you can get above the fog; still there in their

place, and quite the same as they always were!  To whoever does

still know of loadstars, the proceedings, which expand themselves

daily, of these sublime philanthropic associations, and

"universal sluggard-and-scoundrel protection-societies," are a

perpetual affliction.  With their emancipations and abolition

principles, and reigns of brotherhood and new methods of love,

they have done great things in the White and in the Black World,

during late years; and are preparing for greater.

In the interest of human reform, if there is ever to be any

reform, and return to prosperity or to the possibility of

prospering, it is urgent that the nonsense of all this (and it is

mostly nonsense, but not quite) should be sent about its business

straightway, and forbidden to deceive the well-meaning souls

among us any more.  Reform, if we will understand that divine

word, cannot begin till then.  One day, I do know, this, as is

the doom of all nonsense, will be drummed out of the world, with

due placard stuck on its back, and the populace flinging dead

cats at it:  but whether soon or not, is by no means so certain.

I rather guess, _not_ at present, not quite soon.  Fraternity, in

other countries, has gone on, till it found itself unexpectedly

manipulating guillotines by its chosen Robespierres, and become a

fraternity like Cain's.  Much to its amazement!  For in fact it

is not all nonsense; there is an infinitesimal fraction of sense

in it withal; which is so difficult to disengage;--which must be

disengaged, and laid hold of, before Fraternity can vanish.

But to our subject,--the Model Prison, and the strange theory of

life now in action there.  That, for the present, is my share in

the wide adventure of Philanthropism; the world's share, and how

and when it is to be liquidated and ended, rests with the Supreme

Destinies.

Several months ago, some friends took me with them to see one of

the London Prisons; a Prison of the exemplary or model kind.  An

immense circuit of buildings; cut out, girt with a high

ring-wall, from the lanes and streets of the quarter, which is a

dim and crowded one.  Gateway as to a fortified place; then a

spacious court, like the square of a city; broad staircases,

passages to interior courts; fronts of stately architecture all

round.  It lodges some thousand or twelve hundred prisoners,

besides the officers of the establishment.  Surely one of the

most perfect buildings, within the compass of London.  We looked

at the apartments, sleeping-cells, dining-rooms, working-rooms,

general courts or special and private: excellent all, the

ne-plus-ultra of human care and ingenuity; in my life I never saw

so clean a building; probably no Duke in England lives in a

mansion of such perfect and thorough cleanness.

The bread, the cocoa, soup, meat, all the various sorts of food,

in their respective cooking-places, we tasted:  found them of

excellence superlative.  The prisoners sat at work, light work,

picking oakum, and the like, in airy apartments with glass roofs,

of agreeable temperature and perfect ventilation; silent, or at

least conversing only by secret signs: others were out, taking

their hour of promenade in clean flagged courts: methodic

composure, cleanliness, peace, substantial wholesome comfort

reigned everywhere supreme.  The women in other apartments, some

notable murderesses among them, all in the like state of methodic

composure and substantial wholesome comfort, sat sewing:  in long

ranges of wash-houses, drying-houses and whatever pertains to the

getting-up of clean linen, were certain others, with all

conceivable mechanical furtherances, not too arduously working.

The notable murderesses were, though with great precautions of

privacy, pointed out to us; and we were requested not to look

openly at them, or seem to notice them at all, as it was found to

"cherish their vanity" when visitors looked at them.  Schools too

were there; intelligent teachers of both sexes, studiously

instructing the still ignorant of these thieves.

From an inner upper room or gallery, we looked down into a range

of private courts, where certain Chartist Notabilities were

undergoing their term. Chartist Notability First struck me very

much; I had seen him about a year before, by involuntary accident

and much to my disgust, magnetizing a silly young person; and had

noted well the unlovely voracious look of him, his thick oily

skin, his heavy dull-burning eyes, his greedy mouth, the dusky

potent insatiable animalism that looked out of every feature of

him:  a fellow adequate to animal-magnetize most things, I did

suppose;--and here was the post I now found him arrived at.  Next

neighbor to him was Notability Second, a philosophic or literary

Chartist; walking rapidly to and fro in his private court, a

clean, high-walled place; the world and its cares quite excluded,

for some months to come:  master of his own time and spiritual

resources to, as I supposed, a really enviable extent.  What

"literary man" to an equal extent!  I fancied I, for my own part,

so left with paper and ink, and all taxes and botherations shut

out from me, could have written such a Book as no reader will

here ever get of me.  Never, O reader, never here in a mere house

with taxes and botherations.  Here, alas, one has to snatch one's

poor Book, bit by bit, as from a conflagration; and to think and

live, comparatively, as if the house were not one's own, but

mainly the world's and the devil's.  Notability Second might have

filled one with envy.

The Captain of the place, a gentleman of ancient Military or

Royal-Navy habits, was one of the most perfect governors;

professionally and by nature zealous for cleanliness,

punctuality, good order of every kind; a humane heart and yet a

strong one; soft of speech and manner, yet with an inflexible

rigor of command, so far as his limits went:  "iron hand in a

velvet glove," as Napoleon defined it.  A man of real worth,

challenging at once love and respect:  the light of those mild

bright eyes seemed to permeate the place as with an

all-pervading vigilance, and kindly yet victorious illumination;

in the soft definite voice it was as if Nature herself were

promulgating her orders, gentlest mildest orders, which however,

in the end, there would be no disobeying, which in the end there

would be no living without fulfilment of.  A true "aristos," and

commander of men.  A man worthy to have commanded and guided

forward, in good ways, twelve hundred of the best common-people

in London or the world:  he was here, for many years past, giving

all his care and faculty to command, and guide forward in such

ways as there were, twelve hundred of the worst.  I looked with

considerable admiration on this gentleman; and with considerable

astonishment, the reverse of admiration, on the work he had here

been set upon.

This excellent Captain was too old a Commander to complain of

anything; indeed he struggled visibly the other way, to find in

his own mind that all here was best; but I could sufficiently

discern that, in his natural instincts, if not mounting up to the

region of his thoughts, there was a continual protest going on

against much of it; that nature and all his inarticulate

persuasion (however much forbidden to articulate itself) taught

him the futility and unfeasibility of the system followed here.

The Visiting Magistrates, he gently regretted rather than

complained, had lately taken his tread-wheel from him, men were

just now pulling it down; and how he was henceforth to enforce

discipline on these bad subjects, was much a difficulty with him.

"They cared for nothing but the tread-wheel, and for having their

rations cut short:"  of the two sole penalties, hard work and

occasional hunger, there remained now only one, and that by no

means the better one, as he thought.  The "sympathy" of visitors,

too, their "pity" for his interesting scoundrel-subjects, though

he tried to like it, was evidently no joy to this practical mind.

Pity, yes:  but pity for the scoundrel-species?  For those who

will not have pity on themselves, and will force the Universe and

the Laws of Nature to have no "pity on" them?  Meseems I could

discover fitter objects of pity!

In fact it was too clear, this excellent man had got a field for

his faculties which, in several respects, was by no means the

suitable one.  To drill twelve hundred scoundrels by "the method

of kindness," and of abolishing your very tread-wheel,--how could

any commander rejoice to have such a work cut out for him?  You

had but to look in the faces of these twelve hundred, and

despair, for most part, of ever "commanding" them at all.

Miserable distorted blockheads, the generality; ape-faces,

imp-faces, angry dog-faces, heavy sullen ox-faces; degraded

underfoot perverse creatures, sons of _in_docility, greedy

mutinous darkness, and in one word, of STUPIDITY, which is the

general mother of such.  Stupidity intellectual and stupidity

moral (for the one always means the other, as you will, with

surprise or not, discover if you look) had borne this progeny:

base-natured beings, on whom in the course of a maleficent

subterranean life of London Scoundrelism, the Genius of Darkness

(called Satan, Devil, and other names) had now visibly impressed

his seal, and had marked them out as soldiers of Chaos and of

him,--appointed to serve in _his_ Regiments, First of the line,

Second ditto, and so on in their order.  Him, you could perceive,

they would serve; but not easily another than him. These were the

subjects whom our brave Captain and Prison-Governor was

appointed to command, and reclaim to _other_ service, by "the

method of love," with a tread-wheel abolished.

Hopeless forevermore such a project.  These abject, ape, wolf,

ox, imp and other diabolic-animal specimens of humanity, who of

the very gods could ever have commanded them by love?  A collar

round the neck, and a cart-whip flourished over the back; these,

in a just and steady human hand, were what the gods would have

appointed them; and now when, by long misconduct and neglect,

they had sworn themselves into the Devil's regiments of the line,

and got the seal of Chaos impressed on their visage, it was very

doubtful whether even these would be of avail for the unfortunate

commander of twelve hundred men!  By "love," without hope except

of peaceably teasing oakum, or fear except of a temporary loss of

dinner, he was to guide these men, and wisely constrain

them,--whitherward?  No-whither:  that was his goal, if you will

think well of it; that was a second fundamental falsity in his

problem.  False in the warp and false in the woof, thought one of

us; about as false a problem as any I have seen a good man set

upon lately! To guide scoundrels by "love;" that is a false woof,

I take it, a method that will not hold together; hardly for the

flower of men will love alone do; and for the sediment and

scoundrelism of men it has not even a chance to do.  And then to

guide any class of men, scoundrel or other, _No-whither_, which

was this poor Captain's problem, in this Prison with oakum for

its one element of hope or outlook, how can that prosper by

"love" or by any conceivable method?  That is a warp wholly

false.  Out of which false warp, or originally false condition to

start from, combined and daily woven into by your false woof, or

methods of "love" and such like, there arises for our poor

Captain the falsest of problems, and for a man of his faculty the

unfairest of situations.  His problem was, not to command good

men to do something, but bad men to do (with superficial

disguises) nothing.

On the whole, what a beautiful Establishment here fitted up for

the accommodation of the scoundrel-world, male and female!  As I

said, no Duke in England is, for all rational purposes which a

human being can or ought to aim at, lodged, fed, tended, taken

care of, with such perfection.  Of poor craftsmen that pay rates

and taxes from their day's wages, of the dim millions that toil

and moil continually under the sun, we know what is the lodging

and the tending.  Of the Johnsons, Goldsmiths, lodged in their

squalid garrets; working often enough amid famine, darkness,

tumult, dust and desolation, what work _they_ have to do:--of

these as of "spiritual backwoodsmen," understood to be

preappointed to such a life, and like the pigs to killing, "quite

used to it," I say nothing.  But of Dukes, which Duke, I could

ask, has cocoa, soup, meat, and food in general made ready, so

fit for keeping him in health, in ability to do and to enjoy?

Which Duke has a house so thoroughly clean, pure and airy; lives

in an element so wholesome, and perfectly adapted to the uses of

soul and body as this same, which is provided here for the

Devil's regiments of the line?  No Duke that I have ever known.

Dukes are waited on by deleterious French cooks, by perfunctory

grooms of the chambers, and expensive crowds of eye-servants,

more imaginary than real:  while here, Science, Human Intellect

and Beneficence have searched and sat studious, eager to do their

very best; they have chosen a real Artist in Governing to see

their best, in all details of it, done.  Happy regiments of the

line, what soldier to any earthly or celestial Power has such a

lodging and attendance as you here? No soldier or servant direct

or indirect of God or of man, in this England at present.  Joy to

you, regiments of the line.  Your Master, I am told, has his

Elect, and professes to be "Prince of the Kingdoms of this

World;" and truly I see he has power to do a good turn to those

he loves, in England at least.  Shall we say, May _he_, may the

Devil give you good of it, ye Elect of Scoundrelism?  I will

rather pass by, uttering no prayer at all; musing rather in

silence on the singular "worship of God," or practical "reverence

done to Human Worth" (which is the outcome and essence of all

real "worship" whatsoever) among the Posterity of Adam at this

day.

For all round this beautiful Establishment, or Oasis of Purity,

intended for the Devil's regiments of the line, lay continents of

dingy poor and dirty dwellings, where the unfortunate not _yet_

enlisted into that Force were struggling manifoldly,--in their

workshops, in their marble-yards and timber-yards and tan-yards,

in their close cellars, cobbler-stalls, hungry garrets, and poor

dark trade-shops with red-herrings and tobacco-pipes crossed in

the window,--to keep the Devil out-of-doors, and not enlist with

him.  And it was by a tax on these that the Barracks for the

regiments of the line were kept up.  Visiting Magistrates,

impelled by Exeter Hall, by Able-Editors, and the Philanthropic

Movement of the Age, had given orders to that effect.  Rates on

the poor servant of God and of her Majesty, who still serves both

in his way, painfully selling red-herrings; rates on him and his

red-herrings to boil right soup for the Devil's declared Elect!

Never in my travels, in any age or clime, had I fallen in with

such Visiting Magistrates before.  Reserved they, I should

suppose, for these ultimate or penultimate ages of the world,

rich in all prodigies, political, spiritual,--ages surely with

such a length of ears as was never paralleled before.

If I had a commonwealth to reform or to govern, certainly it

should not be the Devil's regiments of the line that I would

first of all concentrate my attention on!  With them I should be

apt so make rather brief work; to them one would apply the besom,

try to sweep _them_, with some rapidity into the dust-bin, and

well out of one's road, I should rather say.  Fill your

thrashing-floor with docks, ragweeds, mugworths, and ply your

flail upon them,--that is not the method to obtain sacks of

wheat.  Away, you; begone swiftly, _ye_ regiments of the line:

in the name of God and of His poor struggling servants, sore put

to it to live in these bad days, I mean to rid myself of you with

some degree of brevity.  To feed you in palaces, to hire captains

and schoolmasters and the choicest spiritual and material

artificers to expend their industries on you, No, by the Eternal!

I have quite other work for that class of artists;

Seven-and-twenty Millions of neglected mortals who have not yet

quite declared for the Devil.  Mark it, my diabolic friends, I

mean to lay leather on the backs of you, collars round the necks

of you; and will teach you, after the example of the gods, that

this world is _not_ your inheritance, or glad to see you in it.

You, ye diabolic canaille, what has a Governor much to do with

you?  You, I think, he will rather swiftly dismiss from his

thoughts,--which have the whole celestial and terrestrial for

their scope, and not the subterranean of scoundreldom alone.

You, I consider, he will sweep pretty rapidly into some Norfolk

Island, into some special Convict Colony or remote domestic

Moorland, into some stone-walled Silent-System, under hard

drill-sergeants, just as Rhadamanthus, and inflexible as he, and

there leave you to reap what you have sown; he meanwhile turning

his endeavors to the thousand-fold immeasurable interests of men

and gods,--dismissing the one extremely contemptible interest of

scoundrels; sweeping that into the cesspool, tumbling that over

London Bridge, in a very brief manner, if needful!  Who are you,

ye thriftless sweepings of Creation, that we should forever be

pestered with you?  Have we no work to do but drilling Devil's

regiments of the line?

If I had schoolmasters, my benevolent friend, do you imagine I

would set them on teaching a set of unteachables, who as you

perceive have already made up their mind that black is

white,--that the Devil namely is the advantageous Master to serve

in this world?  My esteemed Benefactor of Humanity, it shall be

far from me.  Minds open to that particular conviction are not

the material I like to work upon.  When once my schoolmasters

have gone over all the other classes of society from top to

bottom; and have no other soul to try with teaching, all being

thoroughly taught,--I will then send them to operate on _these_

regiments of the line: then, and, assure yourself, never till

then.  The truth is, I am sick of scoundreldom, my esteemed

Benefactor; it always was detestable to me; and here where I find

it lodged in palaces and waited on by the benevolent of the

world, it is more detestable, not to say insufferable to me than

ever.

Of Beneficence, Benevolence, and the people that come together to

talk on platforms and subscribe five pounds, I will say nothing

here; indeed there is not room here for the twentieth part of

what were to be said of them. The beneficence, benevolence, and

sublime virtue which issues in eloquent talk reported in the

Newspapers, with the subscription of five pounds, and the feeling

that one is a good citizen and ornament to society,--concerning

this, there were a great many unexpected remarks to be made; but

let this one, for the present occasion, suffice:--

My sublime benevolent friends, don't you perceive, for one thing,

that here is a shockingly unfruitful investment for your capital

of Benevolence; precisely the worst, indeed, which human

ingenuity could select for you? "Laws are unjust, temptations

great," &c. &c.:  alas, I know it, and mourn for it, and

passionately call on all men to help in altering it.  But

according to every hypothesis as to the law, and the temptations

and pressures towards vice, here are the individuals who, of all

the society, have yielded to said pressure.  These are of the

worst substance for enduring pressure!  The others yet stand and

make resistance to temptation, to the law's injustice; under all

the perversities and strangling impediments there are, the rest

of the society still keep their feet, and struggle forward,

marching under the banner of Cosmos, of God and Human Virtue;

these select Few, as I explain to you, are they who have fallen

to Chaos, and are sworn into certain regiments of the line.  A

superior proclivity to Chaos is declared in these, by the very

fact of their being here!  Of all the generation we live in,

these are the worst stuff.  These, I say, are the Elixir of the

Infatuated among living mortals:  if you want the worst

investment for your Benevolence, here you accurately have it.  O

my surprising friends!  Nowhere so as here can you be certain

that a given quantity of wise teaching bestowed, of benevolent

trouble taken, will yield zero, or the net _Minimum_ of return.

It is sowing of your wheat upon Irish quagmires; laboriously

harrowing it in upon the sand of the seashore. O my astonishing

benevolent friends!

Yonder, in those dingy habitations, and shops of red herring and

tobacco-pipes, where men have not yet quite declared for the

Devil; there, I say, is land:  here is mere sea-beach.  Thither

go with your benevolence, thither to those dingy caverns of the

poor; and there instruct and drill and manage, there where some

fruit may come from it.  And, above all and inclusive of all,

cannot you go to those Solemn human Shams, Phantasm Captains, and

Supreme Quacks that ride prosperously in every thoroughfare; and

with severe benevolence, ask them, What they are doing here?

They are the men whom it would behoove you to drill a little, and

tie to the halberts in a benevolent manner, if you could!  "We

cannot," say you?  Yes, my friends, to a certain extent you can.

By many well-known active methods, and by all manner of passive

methods, you can.  Strive thitherward, I advise you; thither,

with whatever social effort there may lie in you!  The well-head

and "consecrated" thrice-accursed chief fountain of all those

waters of bitterness,--it is they, those Solemn Shams and Supreme

Quacks of yours, little as they or you imagine it!  Them, with

severe benevolence, put a stop to; them send to their Father, far

from the sight of the true and just,--if you would ever see a

just world here!

What sort of reformers and workers are you, that work only on the

rotten material?  That never think of meddling with the material

while it continues sound; that stress it and strain it with new

rates and assessments, till once it has given way and declared

itself rotten; whereupon you snatch greedily at it, and say, Now

let us try to do some good upon it!  You mistake in every way, my

friends:  the fact is, you fancy yourselves men of virtue,

benevolence, what not; and you are not even men of sincerity and

honest sense.  I grieve to say it; but it is true. Good from you,

and your operations, is not to be expected.  You may go down!

Howard is a beautiful Philanthropist, eulogized by Burke, and in

most men's minds a sort of beatified individual.  How glorious,

having finished off one's affairs in Bedfordshire, or in fact

finding them very dull, inane, and worthy of being quitted and

got away from, to set out on a cruise, over the Jails first of

Britain; then, finding that answer, over the Jails of the

habitable Globe!  "A voyage of discovery, a circum-navigation of

charity; to collate distresses, to gauge wretchedness, to take

the dimensions of human misery:"  really it is very fine.

Captain Cook's voyage for the Terra Australis, Ross's, Franklin's

for the ditto Borealis: men make various cruises and voyages in

this world,--for want of money, want of work, and one or the

other want,--which are attended with their difficulties too, and

do not make the cruiser a demigod.  On the whole, I have myself

nothing but respect, comparatively speaking, for the dull solid

Howard, and his "benevolence," and other impulses that set him

cruising; Heaven had grown weary of Jail-fevers, and other the

like unjust penalties inflicted upon scoundrels,--for scoundrels

too, and even the very Devil, should not have _more_ than their

due;--and Heaven, in its opulence, created a man to make an end

of that.  Created him; disgusted him with the grocer business;

tried him with Calvinism, rural ennui, and sore bereavement in

his Bedfordshire retreat;--and, in short, at last got him set to

his work, and in a condition to achieve it.  For which I am

thankful to Heaven; and do also,--with doffed hat, humbly salute

John Howard.  A practical solid man, if a dull and even dreary;

"carries his weighing-scales in his pocket:"  when your jailer

answers, "The prisoner's allowance of food is so and so; and we

observe it sacredly; here, for example, is a ration."--" Hey!  A

ration this?" and solid John suddenly produces his

weighing-scales; weighs it, marks down in his tablets what the

actual quantity of it is.  That is the art and manner of the man.

 A man full of English accuracy; English veracity, solidity,

simplicity; by whom this universal Jail-commission, not to be

paid for in money but far otherwise, is set about, with all the

slow energy, the patience, practicality, sedulity and sagacity

common to the best English commissioners paid in money and not

expressly otherwise.

For it is the glory of England that she has a turn for fidelity

in practical work; that sham-workers, though very numerous, are

rarer than elsewhere; that a man who undertakes work for you will

still, in various provinces of our affairs, do it, instead of

merely seeming to do it.  John Howard, without pay in money,

_did_ this of the Jail-fever, as other Englishmen do work, in a

truly workmanlike manner:  his distinction was that he did it

without money.  He had not 500 pounds or 5,000 pounds a year of

salary for it; but lived merely on his Bedfordshire estates, and

as Snigsby irreverently expresses it, "by chewing his own cud."

And, sure enough, if any man might chew the cud of placid

reflections, solid Howard, a mournful man otherwise, might at

intervals indulge a little in that luxury.--No money-salary had

he for his work; he had merely the income of his properties, and

what he could derive from within.  Is this such a sublime

distinction, then?  Well, let it pass at its value.  There have

been benefactors of mankind who had more need of money than he,

and got none too.  Milton, it is known, did his _Paradise Lost_

at the easy rate of five pounds.  Kepler worked out the secret of

the Heavenly Motions in a dreadfully painful manner; "going over

the calculations sixty times;" and having not only no public

money, but no private either; and, in fact, writing almanacs for

his bread-and-water, while he did this of the Heavenly Motions;

having no Bedfordshire estates; nothing but a pension of 18

pounds (which they would not pay him), the valuable faculty of

writing almanacs, and at length the invaluable one of dying, when

the Heavenly bodies were vanquished, and battle's conflagration

had collapsed into cold dark ashes, and the starvation reached

too high a pitch for the poor man.

Howard is not the only benefactor that has worked without money

for us; there have been some more,--and will be, I hope!  For the

Destinies are opulent; and send here and there a man into the

world to do work, for which they do not mean to pay him in money.

And they smite him beneficently with sore afflictions, and blight

his world all into grim frozen ruins round him,--and can make a

wandering Exile of their Dante, and not a soft-bedded Podesta of

Florence, if they wish to get a _Divine Comedy_ out of him.  Nay

that rather is their way, when they have worthy work for such a

man; they scourge him manifoldly to the due pitch, sometimes

nearly of despair, that he may search desperately for his work,

and find it; they urge him on still with beneficent stripes when

needful, as is constantly the case between whiles; and, in fact,

have privately decided to reward him with beneficent death by and

by, and not with money at all.  O my benevolent friend, I honor

Howard very much; but it is on this side idolatry a long way, not

to an infinite, but to a decidedly finite extent!  And you,--put

not the modest noble Howard, a truly modest man, to the blush, by

forcing these reflections on us!

Cholera Doctors, hired to dive into black dens of infection and

despair, they, rushing about all day from lane to lane, with

their life in their hand, are found to do their function; which

is a much more rugged one than Howard's.  Or what say we, Cholera

Doctors?  Ragged losels gathered by beat of drum from the

overcrowded streets of cities, and drilled a little and dressed

in red, do not they stand fire in an uncensurable manner; and

handsomely give their life, if needful, at the rate of a shilling

per day? Human virtue, if we went down to the roots of it, is not

so rare.  The materials of human virtue are everywhere abundant

as the light of the sun: raw materials,--O woe, and loss, and

scandal thrice and threefold, that they so seldom are elaborated,

and built into a result! that they lie yet unelaborated, and

stagnant in the souls of wide-spread dreary millions, fermenting,

festering; and issue at last as energetic vice instead of strong

practical virtue!  A Mrs. Manning "dying game,"--alas, is not

that the foiled potentiality of a kind of heroine too?  Not a

heroic Judith, not a mother of the Gracchi now, but a hideous

murderess, fit to be the mother of hyenas!  To such extent can

potentialities be foiled.  Education, kingship, command,--where

is it, whither has it fled?  Woe a thousand times, that this,

which is the task of all kings, captains, priests, public

speakers, land-owners, book-writers, mill-owners, and persons

possessing or pretending to possess authority among mankind,--is

left neglected among them all; and instead of it so little done

but protocolling, black-or-white surplicing, partridge-shooting,

parliamentary eloquence and popular twaddle-literature; with such

results as we see!--

Howard abated the Jail-fever; but it seems to me he has been the

innocent cause of a far more distressing fever which rages high

just now; what we may call the Benevolent-Platform Fever.  Howard

is to be regarded as the unlucky fountain of that tumultuous

frothy ocean-tide of benevolent sentimentality, "abolition of

punishment," all-absorbing "prison-discipline," and general

morbid sympathy, instead of hearty hatred, for scoundrels; which

is threatening to drown human society as in deluges, and leave,

instead of an "edifice of society" fit for the habitation of men,

a continent of fetid ooze inhabitable only by mud-gods and

creatures that walk upon their belly.  Few things more distress a

thinking soul at this time.

Most sick am I, O friends, of this sugary disastrous jargon of

philanthropy, the reign of love, new era of universal

brotherhood, and not Paradise to the Well-deserving but Paradise

to All-and-sundry, which possesses the benighted minds of men and

women in our day.  My friends, I think you are much mistaken

about Paradise!  "No Paradise for anybody:  he that cannot do

without Paradise, go his ways:"  suppose you tried that for a

while!  I reckon that the safer version.  Unhappy sugary

brethren, this is all untrue, this other; contrary to the fact;

not a tatter of it will hang together in the wind and weather of

fact.  In brotherhood with the base and foolish I, for one, do

not mean to live.  Not in brotherhood with them was life hitherto

worth much to me; in pity, in hope not yet quite swallowed of

disgust,--otherwise in enmity that must last through eternity, in

unappeasable aversion shall I have to live with these!

Brotherhood? No, be the thought far from me.  They are Adam's

children,--alas yes, I well remember that, and never shall forget

it; hence this rage and sorrow. But they have gone over to the

dragons; they have quitted the Father's house, and set up with

the Old Serpent:  till they return, how can they be brothers?

They are enemies, deadly to themselves and to me and to you, till

then; till then, while hope yet lasts, I will treat them as

brothers fallen insane;--when hope has ended, with tears grown

sacred and wrath grown sacred, I will cut them off in the name of

God!  It is at my peril if I do not.  With the servant of Satan I

dare not continue in partnership. Him I must put away, resolutely

and forever; "lest," as it is written, "I become partaker of his

plagues."

Beautiful Black Peasantry, who have fallen idle and have got the

Devil at your elbow; interesting White Felonry, who are not idle,

but have enlisted into the Devil's regiments of the line,--know

that my benevolence for you is comparatively trifling!  What I

have of that divine feeling is due to others, not to you.  A

"universal Sluggard-and-Scoundrel Protection Society" is not the

one I mean to institute in these times, where so much wants

protection, and is sinking to sad issues for want of it!  The

scoundrel needs no protection.  The scoundrel that will hasten to

the gallows, why not rather clear the way for him!  Better he

reach _his_ goal and outgate by the natural proclivity, than be

so expensively dammed up and detained, poisoning everything as he

stagnates and meanders along, to arrive at last a hundred times

fouler, and swollen a hundred times bigger! Benevolent men should

reflect on this.--And you Quashee, my pumpkin,--(not a bad fellow

either, this poor Quashee, when tolerably guided!)--idle Quashee,

I say you must get the Devil _sent away_ from your elbow, my poor

dark friend!  In this world there will be no existence for you

otherwise. No, not as the brother of your folly will I live

beside you.  Please to withdraw out of my way, if I am not to

contradict your folly, and amend it, and put it in the stocks if

it will not amend.  By the Eternal Maker, it is on that footing

alone that you and I can live together!  And if you had

respectable traditions dated from beyond Magna Charta, or from

beyond the Deluge, to the contrary, and written sheepskins that

would thatch the face of the world,--behold I, for one

individual, do not believe said respectable traditions, nor

regard said written sheepskins except as things which _you_, till

you grow wiser, will believe.  Adieu, Quashee; I will wish you

better guidance than you have had of late.

On the whole, what a reflection is it that we cannot bestow on an

unworthy man any particle of our benevolence, our patronage, or

whatever resource is ours,--without withdrawing it, it and all

that will grow of it, from one worthy, to whom it of right

belongs!  We cannot, I say; impossible; it is the eternal law of

things.  Incompetent Duncan M'Pastehorn, the hapless incompetent

mortal to whom I give the cobbling of my boots,--and cannot find

in my heart to refuse it, the poor drunken wretch having a wife

and ten children; he _withdraws_ the job from sober, plainly

competent, and meritorious Mr. Sparrowbill, generally short of

work too; discourages Sparrowbill; teaches him that he too may as

well drink and loiter and bungle; that this is not a scene for

merit and demerit at all, but for dupery, and whining flattery,

and incompetent cobbling of every description;--clearly tending

to the ruin of poor Sparrowbill!  What harm had Sparrowbill done

me that I should so help to ruin him?  And I couldn't save the

insalvable M'Pastehorn; I merely yielded him, for insufficient

work, here and there a half-crown,--which he oftenest drank.  And

now Sparrowbill also is drinking!

Justice, Justice:  woe betides us everywhere when, for this

reason or for that, we fail to do justice!  No beneficence,

benevolence, or other virtuous contribution will make good the

want.  And in what a rate of terrible geometrical progression,

far beyond our poor computation, any act of Injustice once done

by us grows; rooting itself ever anew, spreading ever anew, like

a banyan-tree,--blasting all life under it, for it is a

poison-tree!  There is but one thing needed for the world; but

that one is indispensable.  Justice, Justice, in the name of

Heaven; give us Justice, and we live; give us only counterfeits

of it, or succedanea for it, and we die!

Oh, this universal syllabub of philanthropic twaddle!  My friend,

it is very sad, now when Christianity is as good as extinct in

all hearts, to meet this ghastly-Phantasm of Christianity

parading through almost all.  "I will clean your foul

thoroughfares, and make your Devil's-cloaca of a world into a

garden of Heaven," jabbers this Phantasm, itself a

phosphorescence and unclean!  The worst, it is written, comes

from corruption of the best:--Semitic forms now lying putrescent,

dead and still unburied, this phosphorescence rises.  I say

sometimes, such a blockhead Idol, and miserable _White_

Mumbo-jumbo, fashioned out of deciduous sticks and cast clothes,

out of extinct cants and modern sentimentalisms, as that which

they sing litanies to at Exeter Hall and extensively elsewhere,

was perhaps never set up by human folly before.  Unhappy

creatures, that is not the Maker of the Universe, not that, look

one moment at the Universe, and see! That is a paltry Phantasm,

engendered in your own sick brain; whoever follows that as a

Reality will fall into the ditch.

Reform, reform, all men see and feel, is imperatively needed.

Reform must either be got, and speedily, or else we die:  and

nearly all the men that speak, instruct us, saying, "Have you

quite done your interesting Negroes in the Sugar Islands?  Rush

to the Jails, then, O ye reformers; snatch up the interesting

scoundrel-population there, to them be nursing-fathers and

nursing-mothers.  And oh, wash, and dress, and teach, and recover

to the service of Heaven these poor lost souls:  so, we assure

you, will society attain the needful reform, and life be still

possible in this world."  Thus sing the oracles everywhere;

nearly all the men that speak, though we doubt not, there are, as

usual, immense majorities consciously or unconsciously wiser who

hold their tongue.  But except this of whitewashing the

scoundrel-population, one sees little "reform" going on.  There

is perhaps some endeavor to do a little scavengering; and, as the

all-including point, to cheapen the terrible cost of Government:

but neither of these enterprises makes progress, owing to

impediments.

"Whitewash your scoundrel-population; sweep out your abominable

gutters (if not in the name of God, ye brutish slatterns, then in

the name of Cholera and the Royal College of Surgeons):  do these

two things;--and observe, much cheaper if you please!"--Well,

here surely is an Evangel of Freedom, and real Program of a new

Era.  What surliest misanthrope would not find this world lovely,

were these things done:  scoundrels whitewashed; some degree of

scavengering upon the gutters; and at a cheap rate, thirdly?

That surely is an occasion on which, if ever on any, the Genius

of Reform may pipe all hands!--Poor old Genius of Reform; bedrid

this good while; with little but broken ballot-boxes, and

tattered stripes of Benthamee Constitutions lying round him; and

on the walls mere shadows of clothing-colonels, rates-in-aid,

poor-law unions, defunct potato and the Irish difficulty,--he

does not seem long for this world, piping to that effect?

Not the least disgusting feature of this Gospel according to the

Platform is its reference to religion, and even to the Christian

Religion, as an authority and mandate for what it does.

Christian Religion?  Does the Christian or any religion prescribe

love of scoundrels, then?  I hope it prescribes a healthy hatred

of scoundrels;--otherwise what am I, in Heaven's name, to make of

it?  Me, for one, it will not serve as a religion on those

strange terms.  Just hatred of scoundrels, I say; fixed,

irreconcilable, inexorable enmity to the enemies of God:  this,

and not love for them, and incessant whitewashing, and dressing

and cockering of them, must, if you look into it, be the backbone

of any human religion whatsoever.  Christian Religion!  In what

words can I address you, ye unfortunates, sunk in the slushy ooze

till the worship of mud-serpents, and unutterable Pythons and

poisonous slimy monstrosities, seems to you the worship of God?

This is the rotten carcass of Christianity; this mal-odorous

phosphorescence of post-mortem sentimentalism.  O Heavens, from

the Christianity of Oliver Cromwell, wrestling in grim fight with

Satan and his incarnate Blackguardisms, Hypocrisies, Injustices,

and legion of human and infernal angels, to that of eloquent Mr.

Hesperus Fiddlestring denouncing capital punishments, and

inculcating the benevolence on platforms, what a road have we

travelled!

A foolish stump-orator, perorating on his platform mere

benevolences, seems a pleasant object to many persons; a

harmless or insignificant one to almost all.  Look at him,

however; scan him till you discern the nature of him, he is not

pleasant, but ugly and perilous.  That beautiful speech of his

takes captive every long ear, and kindles into quasi-sacred

enthusiasm the minds of not a few; but it is quite in the teeth

of the everlasting facts of this Universe, and will come only to

mischief for every party concerned.  Consider that little

spouting wretch.  Within the paltry skin of him, it is too

probable, he holds few human virtues, beyond those essential for

digesting victual:  envious, cowardly, vain, splenetic hungry

soul; what heroism, in word or thought or action, will you ever

get from the like of him?  He, in his necessity, has taken into

the benevolent line; warms the cold vacuity of his inner man to

some extent, in a comfortable manner, not by silently doing some

virtue of his own, but by fiercely recommending hearsay

pseudo-virtues and respectable benevolences to other people.  Do

you call that a good trade?  Long-eared fellow-creatures, more

or less resembling himself, answer, "Hear, hear!  Live

Fiddlestring forever!"  Wherefrom follow Abolition Congresses,

Odes to the Gallows;--perhaps some dirty little Bill, getting

itself debated next Session in Parliament, to waste certain

nights of our legislative Year, and cause skipping in our Morning

Newspaper, till the abortion can be emptied out again and sent

fairly floating down the gutters.

Not with entire approbation do I, for one, look on that eloquent

individual.  Wise benevolence, if it had authority, would order

that individual, I believe, to find some other trade:  "Eloquent

individual, pleading here against the Laws of Nature,--for many

reasons, I bid thee close that mouth of thine.  Enough of

balderdash these long-eared have now drunk.  Depart thou; _do_

some benevolent work; at lowest, be silent. Disappear, I say;

away, and jargon no more in that manner, lest a worst thing

befall thee."  _Exeat_ Fiddlestring!--Beneficent men are not they

who appear on platforms, pleading against the Almighty Maker's

Laws; these are the maleficent men, whose lips it is pity that

some authority cannot straightway shut.  Pandora's Box is not

more baleful than the gifts these eloquent benefactors are

pressing on us.  Close your pedler's pack, my friend; swift, away

with it!  Pernicious, fraught with mere woe and sugary poison is

that kind of benevolence and beneficence.

Truly, one of the saddest sights in these times is that of poor

creatures, on platforms, in parliaments and other situations,

making and unmaking "Laws;" in whose soul, full of mere vacant

hearsay and windy babble, is and was no image of Heaven's Law;

whom it never struck that Heaven had a Law, or that the

Earth--could not have what kind of Law you pleased!  Human

Statute-books, accordingly, are growing horrible to think of.  An

impiety and poisonous futility every Law of them that is so made;

all Nature is against it; it will and can do nothing but mischief

wheresoever it shows itself in Nature:  and such Laws lie now

like an incubus over this Earth, so innumerable are they.  How

long, O Lord, how long!--O ye Eternities, Divine Silences, do you

dwell no more, then, in the hearts of the noble and the true; and

is there no inspiration of the Almighty any more vouchsafed us?

The inspiration of the Morning Newspapers--alas, we have had

enough of that, and are arrived at the gates of death by means of

that!

"Really, one of the most difficult questions this we have in

these times, What to do with our criminals?" blandly observed a

certain Law-dignitary, in my hearing once, taking the cigar from

his mouth, and pensively smiling over a group of us under the

summer beech-tree, as Favonius carried off the tobacco-smoke; and

the group said nothing, only smiled and nodded, answering by new

tobacco-clouds.  "What to do with our criminals?" asked the

official Law-dignitary again, as if entirely at a loss.--"I

suppose," said one ancient figure not engaged in smoking, "the

plan would be to treat them according to the real law of the

case; to make the Law of England, in respect of them, correspond

to the Law of the Universe.  Criminals, I suppose, would prove

manageable in that way:  if we could do approximately as God

Almighty does towards them; in a word, if we could try to do

Justice towards them."--"I'll thank you for a definition of

Justice?" sneered the official person in a cheerily scornful and

triumphant manner, backed by a slight laugh from the honorable

company; which irritated the other speaker.--"Well, I have no

pocket definition of Justice," said he, "to give your Lordship.

It has not quite been my trade to look for such a definition; I

could rather fancy it had been your Lordship's trade, sitting on

your high place this long while.  But one thing I can tell you:

Justice always is, whether we define it or not.  Everything done,

suffered or proposed, in Parliament or out of it, is either just

or else unjust; either is accepted by the gods and eternal facts,

or is rejected by them.  Your Lordship and I, with or without

definition, do a little know Justice, I will hope; if we don't

both know it and do it, we are hourly travelling down

towards--Heavens, must I name such a place!  That is the place we

are bound to, with all our trading-pack, and the small or

extensive budgets of human business laid on us; and there, if we

_don't know_ Justice, we, and all our budgets and Acts of

Parliament, shall find lodging when the day is done!"--The

official person, a polite man otherwise, grinned as he best

could some semblance of a laugh, mirthful as that of the ass

eating thistles, and ended in "Hah, oh, ah!"--

Indeed, it is wonderful to hear what account we at present give

ourselves of the punishment of criminals.  No "revenge"--O

Heavens, no; all preachers on Sunday strictly forbid that; and

even (at least on Sundays) prescribe the contrary of that.  It is

for the sake of "example," that you punish; to "protect society"

and its purse and skin; to deter the innocent from falling into

crime; and especially withal, for the purpose of improving the

poor criminal himself,--or at lowest, of hanging and ending him,

that he may not grow worse.  For the poor criminal is, to be

"improved" if possible:  against him no "revenge" even on

week-days; nothing but love for him, and pity and help; poor

fellow, is he not miserable enough?  Very miserable,--though much

less so than the Master of him, called Satan, is understood (on

Sundays) to have long deservedly been!

My friends, will you permit me to say that all this, to one poor

judgment among your number, is the mournfulest twaddle that human

tongues could shake from them; that it has no solid foundation in

the nature of things; and to a healthy human heart no credibility

whatever.  Permit me to say, only to hearts long drowned in dead

Tradition, and for themselves neither believing nor disbelieving,

could this seem credible.  Think, and ask yourselves, in spite of

all this preaching and perorating from the teeth outward!  Hearts

that are quite strangers to eternal Fact, and acquainted only at

all hours with temporary Semblances parading about in a

prosperous and persuasive condition; hearts that from their first

appearance in this world have breathed since birth, in all

spiritual matters, which means in all matters not pecuniary, the

poisonous atmosphere of universal Cant, could believe such a

thing.  Cant moral, Cant religious, Cant political; an atmosphere

which envelops all things for us unfortunates, and has long done;

which goes beyond the Zenith and below the Nadir for us, and has

as good as choked the spiritual life out of all of us,--God pity

such wretches, with little or nothing _real_ about them but their

purse and their abdominal department!  Hearts, alas, which

everywhere except in the metallurgic and cotton-spinning

provinces, have communed with no Reality, or awful Presence of a

Fact, godlike or diabolic, in this Universe or this unfathomable

Life at all.  Hunger-stricken asphyxied hearts, which have

nourished themselves on what they call religions, Christian

religions. Good Heaven, once more fancy the Christian religion of

Oliver Cromwell; or of some noble Christian man, whom you

yourself may have been blessed enough, once, long since, in your

life, to know!  These are not _untrue_ religions; they are the

putrescences and foul residues of religions that are extinct,

that have plainly to every honest nostril been dead some time,

and the remains of which--O ye eternal Heavens, will the nostril

never be delivered from them!--Such hearts, when they get upon

platforms, and into questions not involving money, can "believe"

many things!--

I take the liberty of asserting that there is one valid reason,

and only one, for either punishing a man or rewarding him in this

world; one reason, which ancient piety could well define:  That

you may do the will and commandment of God with regard to him;

that you may do justice to him. This is your one true aim in

respect of him; aim thitherward, with all your heart and all your

strength and all your soul, thitherward, and not elsewhither at

all!  This aim is true, and will carry you to all earthly heights

and benefits, and beyond the stars and Heavens.  All other aims

are purblind, illegitimate, untrue; and will never carry you

beyond the shop-counter, nay very soon will prove themselves

incapable of maintaining you even there.  Find out what the Law

of God is with regard to a man; make that your human law, or I

say it will be ill with you, and not well!  If you love your

thief or murderer, if Nature and eternal Fact love him, then do

as you are now doing.  But if Nature and Fact do _not_ love him?

If they have set inexorable penalties upon him, and planted

natural wrath against him in every god-created human

heart,--then I advise you, cease, and change your hand.

Reward and punishment?  Alas, alas, I must say you reward and

punish pretty much alike!  Your dignities, peerages, promotions,

your kingships, your brazen statues erected in capital and county

towns to our select demigods of your selecting, testify loudly

enough what kind of heroes and hero-worshippers you are.  Woe to

the People that no longer venerates, as the emblem of God

himself, the aspect of Human Worth; that no longer knows what

human worth and unworth is!  Sure as the Decrees of the Eternal,

that People cannot come to good.  By a course too clear, by a

necessity too evident, that People will come into the hands of

the unworthy; and either turn on its bad career, or stagger

downwards to ruin and abolition.  Does the Hebrew People

prophetically sing "Ou' clo'!" in all thoroughfares, these

eighteen hundred years in vain?

To reward men according to their worth:  alas, the perfection of

this, we know, amounts to the millennium!  Neither is perfect

punishment, according to the like rule, to be attained,--nor

even, by a legislator of these chaotic days, to be too zealously

attempted.  But when he does attempt it,--yes, when he summons

out the Society to sit deliberative on this matter, and consult

the oracles upon it, and solemnly settle it in the name of God;

then, if never before, he should try to be a little in the right

in settling it!--In regard to reward of merit, I do not bethink

me of any attempt whatever, worth calling an attempt, on the part

of modern Governments; which surely is an immense oversight on

their part, and will one day be seen to have been an altogether

fatal one.  But as to the punishment of crime, happily this

cannot be quite neglected.  When men have a purse and a skin,

they seek salvation at least for these; and the Four Pleas of the

Crown are a thing that must and will be attended to.  By

punishment, capital or other, by treadmilling and blind rigor, or

by whitewashing and blind laxity, the extremely disagreeable

offences of theft and murder must be kept down within limits.

And so you take criminal caitiffs, murderers, and the like, and

hang them on gibbets "for an example to deter others."  Whereupon

arise friends of humanity, and object.  With very great reason,

as I consider, if your hypothesis be correct.  What right have

you to hang any poor creature "for an example"?  He can turn

round upon you and say, "Why make an 'example' of me, a merely

ill-situated, pitiable man?  Have you no more respect for

misfortune?  Misfortune, I have been told, is sacred.  And yet

you hang me, now I am fallen into your hands; choke the life out

of me, for an example! Again I ask, Why make an example of me,

for your own convenience alone?"--All "revenge" being out of the

question, it seems to me the caitiff is unanswerable; and he and

the philanthropic platforms have the logic all on their side.

The one answer to him is:  "Caitiff, we hate thee; and discern

for some six thousand years now, that we are called upon by the

whole Universe to do it. Not with a diabolic but with a divine

hatred.  God himself, we have always understood, 'hates sin,'

with a most authentic, celestial, and eternal hatred.  A hatred,

a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the scoundrel,

and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and

disappearance from the sum of things.  The path of it as the path

of a flaming sword:  he that has eyes may see it, walking

inexorable, divinely beautiful and divinely terrible, through the

chaotic gulf of Human History, and everywhere burning, as with

unquenchable fire, the false and death-worthy from the true and

life-worthy; making all Human History, and the Biography of every

man, a God's Cosmos in place of a Devil's Chaos.  So is it, in

the end; even so, to every man who is a man, and not a mutinous

beast, and has eyes to see.  To thee, caitiff, these things were

and are, quite incredible; to us they are too awfully

certain,--the Eternal Law of this Universe, whether thou and

others will believe it or disbelieve.  We, not to be partakers in

thy destructive adventure of defying God and all the Universe,

dare not allow thee to continue longer among us.  As a palpable

deserter from the ranks where all men, at their eternal peril,

are bound to be:  palpable deserter, taken with the red band

fighting thus against the whole Universe and its Laws, we--send

thee back into the whole Universe, solemnly expel thee from our

community; and will, in the name of God, not with joy and

exultation, but with sorrow stern as thy own, hang thee on

Wednesday next, and so end."

Other ground on which to deliberately slay a disarmed fellow-man

I can see none.  Example, effects upon the public mind, effects

upon this and upon that:  all this is mere appendage and

accident; of all this I make no attempt to keep

account,--sensible that no arithmetic will or can keep account of

it; that its "effects," on this hand and on that, transcend all

calculation.  One thing, if I can calculate it, will include all,

and produce beneficial effects beyond calculation, and no ill

effect at all, anywhere or at any time:  What the Law of the

Universe, or Law of God, is with regard to this caitiff?  That,

by all sacred research and consideration, I will try to find out;

to that I will come as near as human means admit; that shall be

my exemplar and "example;" all men shall through me see that, and

be profited _beyond_ calculation by seeing it.

What this Law of the Universe, or Law made by God, is?  Men at

one time read it in their Bible.  In many Bibles, Books, and

authentic symbols and monitions of Nature and the World (of Fact,

that is, and of Human Speech, or Wise Interpretation of Fact),

there are still clear indications towards it.  Most important it

is, for this and for some other reasons, that men do, in some

way, get to see it a little!  And if no man could now see it by

any Bible, there is written in the heart of every man an

authentic copy of it direct from Heaven itself:  there, if he

have learnt to decipher Heaven's writing, and can read the sacred

oracles (a sad case for him if he altogether cannot), every born

man may still find some copy of it.

"Revenge," my friends! revenge, and the natural hatred of

scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to _revancher_ oneself

upon them, and pay them what they have merited:  this is

forevermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in

the mind of every man.  Only the excess of it is diabolic; the

essence I say is manlike, and even godlike,--a monition sent to

poor man by the Maker himself.  Thou, poor reader, in spite of

all this melancholy twaddle, and blotting out of Heaven's

sunlight by mountains of horsehair and officiality, hast still a

human heart.  If, in returning to thy poor peaceable

dwelling-place, after an honest hard day's work, thou wert to

find, for example, a brutal scoundrel who for lucre or other

object of his, had slaughtered the life that was dearest to thee;

thy true wife, for example, thy true old mother, swimming in her

blood; the human scoundrel, or two-legged wolf, standing over

such a tragedy:  I hope a man would have so much divine rage in

his heart as to snatch the nearest weapon, and put a conclusion

upon said human wolf, for one!  A palpable messenger of Satan,

that one; accredited by all the Devils, to be put an end to by

all the children of God.  The soul of every god-created man

flames wholly into one divine blaze of sacred wrath at sight of

such a Devil's-messenger; authentic firsthand monition from the

Eternal Maker himself as to what is next to be done.  Do it, or

be thyself an ally of Devil's-messengers; a sheep for two-legged

human wolves, well deserving to be eaten, as thou soon wilt

be!

My humane friends, I perceive this same sacred glow of divine

wrath, or authentic monition at first hand from God himself, to

be the foundation for all Criminal Law, and Official

horsehair-and-bombazine procedure against Scoundrels in this

world.  This first-hand gospel from the Eternities, imparted to

every mortal, this is still, and will forever be, your sanction

and commission for the punishment of human scoundrels.  See well

how you will translate this message from Heaven and the

Eternities into a form suitable to this World and its Times.  Let

not violence, haste, blind impetuous impulse, preside in

executing it; the injured man, invincibly liable to fall into

these, shall not himself execute it:  the whole world, in person

of a Minister appointed for that end, and surrounded with the due

solemnities and caveats, with bailiffs, apparitors, advocates,

and the hushed expectation of all men, shall do it, as under the

eye of God who made all men.  How it shall be done?  this is ever

a vast question, involving immense considerations.  Thus Edmund

Burke saw, in the Two Houses of Parliament, with King,

Constitution, and all manner of Civil-Lists, and Chancellors'

wigs and Exchequer budgets, only the  "method of getting twelve

just men put into a jury-box:"  that, in Burke's view, was the

summary of what they were all meant for.  How the judge will do

it?  Yes, indeed:--but let him see well that he does do it:  for

it is a thing that must by no means be left undone!  A sacred

gospel from the Highest:  not to be smothered under horsehair and

bombazine, or drowned in platform froth, or in any wise omitted

or neglected, without the most alarming penalties to all

concerned!

Neglect to treat the hero as hero, the penalties--which are

inevitable too, and terrible to think of, as your Hebrew friends

can tell you--may be some time in coming; they will only

gradually come.  Not all at once will your thirty thousand

Needlewomen, your three million Paupers, your Connaught fallen

into potential Cannibalism, and other fine consequences of the

practice, come to light;--though come to light they will; and

"Ou' clo'!" itself may be in store for you, if you persist

steadily enough.  But neglect to treat even your declared

scoundrel as scoundrel, this is the last consummation of the

process, the drop by which the cup runs over; the penalties of

this, most alarming, extensive, and such as you little dream of,

will straightway very rapidly come.  Dim oblivion of Right and

Wrong, among the masses of your population, will come; doubts as

to Right and Wrong, indistinct notion that Right and Wrong are

not eternal, but accidental, and settled by uncertain votings and

talkings, will come. Prurient influenza of Platform Benevolence,

and "Paradise to All-and-sundry," will come.  In the general

putrescence of your "religions," as you call them, a strange new

religion, named of Universal Love, with Sacraments mainly

of--_Divorce_, with Balzac, Sue and Company for Evangelists, and

Madame Sand for Virgin, will come,--and results fast following

therefrom which will astonish you very much!

"The terrible anarchies of these years," says Crabbe, in his

_Radiator_, "are brought upon us by a necessity too visible.  By

the crime of Kings,--alas, yes; but by that of Peoples too.  Not

by the crime of one class, but by the fatal obscuration, and all

but obliteration of the sense of Right and Wrong in the minds and

practices of every class.  What a scene in the drama of Universal

History, this of ours!  A world-wide loud bellow and bray of

universal Misery; _lowing_, with crushed maddened heart, its

inarticulate prayer to Heaven:--very pardonable to me, and in

some of its transcendent developments, as in the grand French

Revolution, most respectable and ever-memorable.  For Injustice

reigns everywhere; and this murderous struggle for what they call

'Fraternity,' and so forth has a spice of eternal sense in it,

though so terribly disfigured!  Amalgam of sense and nonsense;

eternal sense by the grain, and temporary nonsense by the square

mile:  as is the habit with poor sons of men.  Which pardonable

amalgam, however, if it be taken as the pure final sense, I must

warn you and all creatures, is unpardonable, criminal, and fatal

nonsense;--with which I, for one, will take care not to concern

myself!

"_Dogs should not be taught to eat leather_, says the old adage:

no;--and where, by general fault and error, and the inevitable

nemesis of things, the universal kennel is set to diet upon

_leather_; and from its keepers, its 'Liberal Premiers,' or

whatever their title is, will accept or expect nothing else, and

calls it by the pleasant name of progress, reform, emancipation,

abolition-principles, and the like,--I consider the fate of said

kennel and of said keepers to be a thing settled.  Red republic

in Phrygian nightcap, organization of labor _a la_ Louis Blanc;

street-barricades, and then murderous cannon-volleys _a la_

Cavaignac and Windischgratz, follow out of one another, as

grapes, must, new wine, and sour all-splitting vinegar do:

vinegar is but _vin-aigre_, or the self-same 'wine' grown

_sharp_!  If, moreover, I find the Worship of Human Nobleness

abolished in any country, and a _new_ astonishing

Phallus-Worship, with universal Balzac-Sand melodies and litanies

in treble and in bass, established in its stead, what can I

compute but that Nature, in horrible throes, will repugn against

such substitution,--that, in short, the astonishing new

Phallus-Worship, with its finer sensibilities of the heart, and

'great satisfying loves,' with its sacred kiss of peace for

scoundrel and hero alike, with its all-embracing Brotherhood, and

universal Sacrament of Divorce, will have to take itself away

again!"

The Ancient Germans, it appears, had no scruple about public

executions; on the contrary, they thought the just gods

themselves might fitly preside over these; that these were a

solemn and highest act of worship, if justly done.  When a German

man had done a crime deserving death, they, in solemn general

assembly of the tribe, doomed him, and considered that Fate and

all Nature had from the beginning doomed him, to die with

ignominy.  Certain crimes there were of a supreme nature; him

that had perpetrated one of these, they believed to have declared

himself a prince of scoundrels.  Him once convicted they laid

hold of, nothing doubting; bore him, after judgment, to the

deepest convenient Peat-bog; plunged him in there, drove an oaken

frame down over him, solemnly in the name of gods and men:

"There, prince of scoundrels, that is what we have had to think

of thee, on clear acquaintance; our grim good-night to thee is

that!  In the name of all the gods lie there, and be our

partnership with thee dissolved henceforth.  It will be better

for us, we imagine!"

My friends, after all this beautiful whitewash and humanity and

prison-discipline; and such blubbering and whimpering, and soft

Litany to divine and also to quite other sorts of Pity, as we

have had for a century now,--give me leave to admonish you that

that of the Ancient Germans too was a thing inexpressibly

necessary to keep in mind.  If that is not kept in mind, the

universal Litany to Pity is a mere universal nuisance, and torpid

blasphemy against the gods.  I do not much respect it, that

purblind blubbering and litanying, as it is seen at present; and

the litanying over scoundrels I go the length of disrespecting,

and in some cases even of detesting.  Yes, my friends, scoundrel

is scoundrel:  that remains forever a fact; and there exists not

in the earth whitewash that can make the scoundrel a friend of

this Universe; he remains an enemy if you spent your life in

whitewashing him.  He won't whitewash; this one won't.  The one

method clearly is, That, after fair trial, you dissolve

partnership with him; send him, in the name of Heaven, whither

_he_ is striving all this while and have done with him.  And, in

a time like this, I would advise you, see likewise that you be

speedy about it!  For there is immense work, and of a far

hopefuler sort, to be done _elsewhere_.

Alas, alas, to see once the "prince of scoundrels," the Supreme

Scoundrel, him whom of all men the gods liked worst, solemnly

laid hold of, and hung upon the gallows in sight of the people;

what a lesson to all the people! Sermons might be preached; the

Son of Thunder and the Mouth of Gold might turn their periods now

with some hope; for here, in the most impressive way, is a divine

sermon acted.  Didactic as no spoken sermon could be. Didactic,

devotional too;--in awed solemnity, a recognition that Eternal

Justice rules the world; that at the call of this, human pity

shall fall silent, and man be stern as his Master and Mandatory

is!--Understand too that except upon a basis of even such rigor,

sorrowful, silent, inexorable as that of Destiny and Doom, there

is no true pity possible.  The pity that proves so possible and

plentiful without that basis, is mere _ignavia_ and cowardly

effeminacy; maudlin laxity of heart, grounded on blinkard dimness

of head--contemptible as a drunkard's tears.

To see our Supreme Scoundrel hung upon the gallows, alas, that is

far from us just now!  There is a worst man in England,

too,--curious to think of,--whom it would be inexpressibly

advantageous to lay hold of, and hang, the first of all.  But we

do not know him with the least certainty, the least approach even

to a guess,--such buzzards and dullards and poor children of the

Dusk are we, in spite of our Statistics, Unshackled Presses, and

Torches of Knowledge;--not eagles soaring sunward, not brothers

of the lightnings and the radiances we; a dim horn-eyed,

owl-population, intent mainly on the catching of mice!  Alas, the

supreme scoundrel, alike with the supreme hero, is very far from

being known.  Nor have we the smallest apparatus for dealing with

either of them, if he were known.  Our supreme scoundrel sits, I

conjecture, well-cushioned, in high places, at this time; rolls

softly through the world, and lives a prosperous gentleman;

instead of sinking him in peat-bogs, we mount the brazen image of

him on high columns:  such is the world's temporary judgment

about its supreme scoundrels; a mad world, my masters.  To get

the supreme scoundrel always accurately the first hanged, this,

which presupposes that the supreme hero were always the first

promoted, this were precisely the millennium itself, clear

evidence that the millennium had come:  alas, we must forbear

hope of this.  Much water will run by before we see this.

And yet to quit all aim towards it; to go blindly floundering

along, wrapt up in clouds of horsehair, bombazine, and sheepskin

officiality, oblivious that there exists such an aim; this is

indeed fatal.  In every human law there must either exist such an

aim, or else the law is not a human but a diabolic one.

Diabolic, I say:  no quantity of bombazine, or lawyers' wigs,

three-readings, and solemn trumpeting and bow-wowing in high

places or in low, can hide from me its frightful infernal

tendency;--bound, and sinking at all moments gradually to

Gehenna, this "law;" and dragging down much with it!  "To decree

_injustice_ by a _law_:"  inspired Prophets have long since seen,

what every clear soul may still see, that of all Anarchies and

Devil-worships there is none like this; that this is the

"Throne of Iniquity" set up in the name of the Highest, the human

Apotheosis of Anarchy itself.  "_Quiet_ Anarchy," you exultingly

say?  Yes; quiet Anarchy, which the longer it sits "quiet" will

have the frightfuler account to settle at last.  For every doit

of the account, as I often say, will have to be settled one day,

as sure as God lives.  Principal, and compound interest

rigorously computed; and the interest is at a terrible rate per

cent in these cases!  Alas, the aspect of certain beatified

Anarchies, sitting "quiet;" and of others in a state of infernal

explosion for sixty years back:  this, the one view our Europe

offers at present, makes these days very sad.--

My unfortunate philanthropic friends, it is this long-continued

oblivion of the soul of law that has reduced the Criminal

Question to such a pass among us.  Many other things have come,

and are coming, for the same sad reason, to a pass!  Not the

supreme scoundrel have our laws aimed at; but, in an uncertain

fitful manner, at the inferior or lowest scoundrel, who robs

shop-tills and puts the skin of mankind in danger.  How can

Parliament get through the Criminal Question?  Parliament,

oblivious of Heavenly Law, will find itself in hopeless _reductio

ad absurdum_ in regard to innumerable other questions,--in regard

to all questions whatsoever by and by.  There will be no

existence possible for Parliament on these current terms.

Parliament, in its law-makings, must really try to attain some

vision again of what Heaven's Laws are.  A thing not easy to do;

a thing requiring sad sincerity of heart, reverence, pious

earnestness, valiant manful wisdom;--qualities not overabundant

in Parliament just now, nor out of it, I fear.

Adieu, my friends.  My anger against you is gone; my sad

reflections on you, and on the depths to which you and I and all

of us are sunk in these strange times, are not to be uttered at

present.  You would have saved the Sarawak Pirates, then?  The

Almighty Maker is wroth that the Sarawak cut-throats, with their

poisoned spears, are away?  What must his wrath be that the

thirty thousand Needlewomen are still here, and the question of

"prevenient grace" not yet settled!  O my friends, in sad

earnest, sad and deadly earnest, there much needs that God would

mend all this, and that we should help him to mend it!--And

don't you think, for one thing, "Farmer Hodge's horses" in the

Sugar Islands are pretty well "emancipated" now?  My clear

opinion farther is, we had better quit the Scoundrel-province of

Reform; better close that under hatches, in some rapid summary

manner, and go elsewhither with our Reform efforts.  A whole

world, for want of Reform, is drowning and sinking; threatening

to swamp itself into a Stygian quagmire, uninhabitable by any

noble-minded man.  Let us to the well-heads, I say; to the chief

fountains of these waters of bitterness; and there strike home

and dig!  To puddle in the embouchures and drowned outskirts,

and ulterior and ultimate issues and cloacas of the affair:  what

profit can there be in that?  Nothing to be saved there; nothing

to be fished up there, except, with endless peril and spread of

pestilence, a miscellany of broken waifs and dead dogs!  In the

name of Heaven, quit that!

 No. III.  DOWNING STREET.   [April 1, 1850.]

From all corners of the wide British Dominion there rises one

complaint against the ineffectuality of what are nicknamed our

"red-tape" establishments, our Government Offices, Colonial

Office, Foreign Office and the others, in Downing Street and the

neighborhood.  To me individually these branches of human

business are little known; but every British citizen and

reflective passer-by has occasion to wonder much, and inquire

earnestly, concerning them.  To all men it is evident that the

social interests of one hundred and fifty Millions of us depend

on the mysterious industry there carried on; and likewise that

the dissatisfaction with it is great, universal, and continually

increasing in intensity,--in fact, mounting, we might say, to the

pitch of settled despair.

Every colony, every agent for a matter colonial, has his tragic

tale to tell you of his sad experiences in the Colonial Office;

what blind obstructions, fatal indolences, pedantries,

stupidities, on the right and on the left, he had to do battle

with; what a world-wide jungle of red-tape, inhabited by doleful

creatures, deaf or nearly so to human reason or entreaty, he had

entered on; and how he paused in amazement, almost in despair;

passionately appealed now to this doleful creature, now to that,

and to the dead red-tape jungle, and to the living Universe

itself, and to the Voices and to the Silences;--and, on the

whole, found that it was an adventure, in sorrowful fact, equal

to the fabulous ones by old knights-errant against dragons and

wizards in enchanted wildernesses and waste howling solitudes;

not achievable except by nearly superhuman exercise of all the

four cardinal virtues, and unexpected favor of the special

blessing of Heaven.  His adventure achieved or found

unachievable, he has returned with experiences new to him in the

affairs of men.  What this Colonial Office, inhabiting the head

of Downing Street, really was, and had to do, or try doing, in

God's practical Earth, he could not by any means precisely get

to know; believes that it does not itself in the least precisely

know.  Believes that nobody knows;--that it is a mystery, a kind

of Heathen myth; and stranger than any piece of the old

mythological Pantheon; for it practically presides over the

destinies of many millions of living men.

Such is his report of the Colonial Office:  and if we oftener

hear such a report of that than we do of the Home Office, Foreign

Office or the rest,--the reason probably is, that Colonies excite

more attention at present than any of our other interests.  The

Forty Colonies, it appears, are all pretty like rebelling just

now; and are to be pacified with constitutions; luckier

Constitutions, let us hope, than some late ones have been.  Loyal

Canada, for instance, had to quench a rebellion the other year;

and this year, in virtue of its constitution, it is called upon

to pay the rebels their damages; which surely is a rather

surprising result, however constitutional!--Men have rents and

moneys dependent in the Colonies; Emigration schemes, Black

Emancipations, New-Zealand and other schemes; and feel and

publish more emphatically what their Downing-Street woes in these

respects have been.

Were the state of poor sallow English ploughers and weavers, what

we may call the Sallow or Yellow Emancipation interest, as much

in object with Exeter-Hall Philanthropists as that of the Black

blockheads now all emancipated, and going at large without work,

or need of working, in West-India clover (and fattening very much

in it, one delights to hear), then perhaps the Home Office, its

huge virtual task better understood, and its small actual

performance better seen into, might be found still more

deficient, and behind the wants of the age, than the Colonial

itself is.

How it stands with the Foreign Office, again, one still less

knows. Seizures of Sapienza, and the like sudden appearances of

Britain in the character of Hercules-Harlequin, waving, with big

bully-voice, her huge sword-of-sharpness over field-mice, and in

the air making horrid circles (horrid catherine-wheels and

death-disks of metallic terror from said huge sword), to see how

they will like it,--do from time to time astonish the world, in a

not pleasant manner.  Hercules-Harlequin, the Attorney

Triumphant, the World's Busybody:  none of these are parts this

Nation has a turn for; she, if you consulted her, would rather

not play these parts, but another!  Seizures of Sapienza,

correspondences with Sotomayor, remonstrances to Otho King of

Athens, fleets hanging by their anchor in behalf of the Majesty

of Portugal; and in short the whole, or at present very nearly

the whole, of that industry of protocolling, diplomatizing,

remonstrating, admonishing, and "having the honor to be,"--has

sunk justly in public estimation to a very low figure.

For in fact, it is reasonably asked, What vital interest has

England in any cause now deciding itself in foreign parts?  Once

there was a Papistry and Protestantism, important as life eternal

and death eternal; more lately there was an interest of Civil

Order and Horrors of the French Revolution, important at least as

rent-roll and preservation of the game; but now what is there?

No cause in which any god or man of this British Nation can be

thought to be concerned.  Sham-kingship, now recognized and even

self-recognized everywhere to be sham, wrestles and struggles

with mere ballot-box Anarchy:  not a pleasant spectacle to

British minds.  Both parties in the wrestle professing earnest

wishes of peace to us, what have we to do with it except answer

earnestly, "Peace, yes certainly," and mind our affairs

elsewhere.  The British Nation has no concern with that

indispensable sorrowful and shameful wrestle now going on

everywhere in foreign parts.  The British Nation already, by

self-experience centuries old, understands all that; was lucky

enough to transact the greater part of that, in noble ancient

ages, while the wrestle had not yet become a shameful one, but on

both sides of it there was wisdom, virtue, heroic nobleness

fruitful to all time,--thrice-lucky British Nation!  The British

Nation, I say, has nothing to learn there; has now quite another

set of lessons to learn, far ahead of what is going on there.

Sad example there, of what the issue is, and how inevitable and

how imminent, might admonish the British Nation to be speedy with

its new lessons; to bestir itself, as men in peril of

conflagration do, with the neighboring houses all on fire! To

obtain, for its own very pressing behoof, if by possibility it

could, some real Captaincy instead of an imaginary one:  to

remove resolutely, and replace by a better sort, its own peculiar

species of teaching and guiding histrios of various name, who

here too are numerous exceedingly, and much in need of gentle

removal, while the play is still good, and the comedy has not yet

become _tragic_; and to be a little swift about it withal; and so

to escape the otherwise inevitable evil day!  This Britain might

learn: but she does not need a protocolling establishment, with

much "having the honor to be," to teach it her.

No:--she has in fact certain cottons, hardwares and such like to

sell in foreign parts, and certain wines, Portugal oranges,

Baltic tar and other products to buy; and does need, I suppose,

some kind of Consul, or accredited agent, accessible to British

voyagers, here and there, in the chief cities of the Continent:

through which functionary, or through the penny-post, if she had

any specific message to foreign courts, it would be easy and

proper to transmit the same.  Special message-carriers, to be

still called Ambassadors, if the name gratified them, could be

sent when occasion great enough demanded; not sent when it did

not.  But for all purposes of a resident ambassador, I hear

persons extensively and well acquainted among our foreign

embassies at this date declare, That a well-selected _Times_

reporter or  "own correspondent" ordered to reside in foreign

capitals, and keep his eyes open, and (though sparingly) his pen

going, would in reality be much more effective;--and surely we

see well, he would come a good deal cheaper!  Considerably

cheaper in expense of money; and in expense of falsity and

grimacing hypocrisy (of which no human arithmetic can count the

ultimate cost) incalculably cheaper!  If this is the fact, why

not treat it as such?  If this is so in any measure, we had

better in that measure admit it to be so!  The time, I believe,

has come for asking with considerable severity, How far is it so?

Nay there are men now current in political society, men of weight

though also of wit, who have been heard to say, "That there was

but one reform for the Foreign Office,--to set a live coal under

it," and with, of course, a fire-brigade which could prevent the

undue spread of the devouring element into neighboring houses,

let that reform it!  In such odor is the Foreign Office too, if

it were not that the Public, oppressed and nearly stifled with a

mere infinitude of bad odors, neglects this one,--in fact, being

able nearly always to avoid the street where it is, _escapes_

this one, and (except a passing curse, once in the quarter or so)

as good as forgets the existence of it.

Such, from sad personal experience and credited prevailing rumor,

is the exoteric public conviction about these sublime

establishments in Downing Street and the neighborhood, the

esoteric mysteries of which are indeed still held sacred by the

initiated, but believed by the world to be mere Dalai-Lama pills,

manufactured let not refined lips hint how, and quite

_un_salvatory to mankind.  Every one may remark what a hope

animates the eyes of any circle, when it is reported or even

confidently asserted, that Sir Robert Peel has in his mind

privately resolved to go, one day, into that stable of King

Augeas, which appalls human hearts, so rich is it, high-piled

with the droppings of two hundred years; and Hercules-like to

load a thousand night-wagons from it, and turn running water into

it, and swash and shovel at it, and never leave it till the

antique pavement, and real basis of the matter, show itself clean

again!  In any intelligent circle such a rumor, like the first

break of day to men in darkness, enlightens all eyes; and each

says devoutly, "_Faxitis_, O ye righteous Powers that have pity

on us!  All England grateful, with kindling looks, will rise in

the rear of him, and from its deepest heart bid him good

speed!"

For it is universally felt that some _esoteric_ man, well

acquainted with the mysteries and properties good and evil of the

administrative stable, is the fittest to reform it, nay can alone

reform it otherwise than by sheer violence and destruction, which

is a way we would avoid; that in fact Sir Robert Peel is, at

present, the one likely or possible man to reform it. And

secondly it is felt that "reform" in that Downing-Street

department of affairs is precisely the reform which were worth

all others; that those administrative establishments in Downing

Street are really the Government of this huge ungoverned Empire;

that to clean out the dead pedantries, unveracities, indolent

somnolent impotences, and accumulated dung-mountains there, is

the beginning of all practical good whatsoever.  Yes, get down

once again to the actual _pavement_ of that; ascertain what the

thing is, and was before dung accumulated in it; and what it

should and may, and must, for the life's sake of this Empire,

henceforth become:  here clearly lies the heart of the whole

matter.  Political reform, if this be not reformed, is naught and

a mere mockery.

What England wants, and will require to have, or sink in nameless

anarchies, is not a Reformed Parliament, meaning thereby a

Parliament elected according to the six or the four or any other

number of "points" and cunningly devised improvements in hustings

mechanism, but a Reformed Executive or Sovereign Body of Rulers

and Administrators,--some improved method, innumerable

improvements in our poor blind methods, of getting hold of these.

Not a better Talking-Apparatus, the best conceivable

Talking-Apparatus would do very little for us at present;--but an

infinitely better Acting-Apparatus, the benefits of which would

be invaluable now and henceforth.  The practical question puts

itself with ever-increasing stringency to all English minds:  Can

we, by no industry, energy, utmost expenditure of human

ingenuity, and passionate invocation of the Heavens and Earth,

get to attain some twelve or ten or six men to manage the affairs

of this nation in Downing Street and the chief posts elsewhere,

who are abler for the work than those we have been used to, this

long while?  For it is really a heroic work, and cannot be done

by histrios, and dexterous talkers having the honor to be:  it is

a heavy and appalling work; and, at the starting of it

especially, will require Herculean men; such mountains of pedant

exuviae and obscene owl-droppings have accumulated in those

regions, long the habitation of doleful creatures; the old

_pavements_, the natural facts and real essential functions of

those establishments, have not been seen by eyes for these two

hundred years last past!  Herculean men acquainted with the

virtues of running water, and with the divine necessity of

getting down to the clear pavements and old veracities; who

tremble before no amount of pedant exuviae, no loudest shrieking

of doleful creatures; who tremble only to live, themselves, like

inane phantasms, and to leave their life as a paltry

_contribution_ to the guano mountains, and not as a divine

eternal protest against them!

These are the kind of men we want; these, the nearest possible

approximation to these, are the men we must find and have, or go

bankrupt altogether; for the concern as it is will evidently not

hold long together. How true is this of Crabbe:  "Men sit in

Parliament eighty-three hours per week, debating about many

things.  Men sit in Downing Street, doing protocols, Syrian

treaties, Greek questions, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Egyptian

and AEthiopian questions; dexterously writing despatches, and

having the honor to be.  Not a question of them is at all

pressing in comparison with the English question.  Pacifico the

miraculous Gibraltar Jew has been hustled by some populace in

Greece:--upon him let the British Lion drop, very rapidly indeed,

a constitutional tear.  Radetzky is said to be advancing upon

Milan;--I am sorry to hear it, and perhaps it does deserve a

despatch, or friendly letter, once and away:  but the Irish

Giant, named of Despair, is advancing upon London itself, laying

waste all English cities, towns and villages; that is the

interesting Government despatch of the day!  I notice him in

Piccadilly, blue-visaged, thatched in rags, a blue child on each

arm; hunger-driven, wide-mouthed, seeking whom he may devour:

he, missioned by the just Heavens, too truly and too sadly their

'divine missionary' come at last in this authoritative manner,

will throw us all into Doubting Castle, I perceive!  That is the

phenomenon worth protocolling about, and writing despatches upon,

and thinking of with all one's faculty day and night, if one

wishes to have the honor to be--anything but a Phantasm Governor

of England just now!  I entreat your Lordship's all but undivided

attention to that Domestic Irish Giant, named of Despair, for a

great many years to come.  Prophecy of him there has long been;

but now by the rot of the potato (blessed be the just gods, who

send us either swift death or some beginning of cure at last!),

he is here in person, and there is no denying him, or

disregarding him any more; and woe to the public watchman that

ignores him, and sees Pacifico the Gibraltar Jew instead!"

What these strange Entities in Downing Street intrinsically are;

who made them, why they were made; how they do their function;

and what their function, so huge in appearance, may in net-result

amount to,--is probably known to no mortal.  The unofficial mind

passes by in dark wonder; not pretending to know.  The official

mind must not blab;--the official mind, restricted to its own

square foot of territory in the vast labyrinth, is probably

itself dark, and unable to blab.  We see the outcome; the

mechanism we do not see.  How the tailors clip and sew, in that

sublime sweating establishment of theirs, we know not:  that the

coat they bring us out is the sorrowfulest fantastic mockery of a

coat, a mere intricate artistic network of traditions and

formalities, an embroiled reticulation made of web-listings and

superannuated thrums and tatters, endurable to no grown Nation as

a coat, is mournfully clear!--

Two kinds of fundamental error are supposable in such a set of

Offices; these two, acting and reacting, are the vice of all

inefficient Offices whatever.--_First_, that the work, such as it

may be, is ill done in these establishments.  That it is delayed,

neglected, slurred over, committed to hands that cannot do it

well; that, in a word, the questions sent thither are not wisely

handled, but unwisely; not decided truly and rapidly, but with

delays and wrong at last:  which is the principal character, and

the infallible result, of an insufficient Intellect being set to

decide them. Or _second_, what is still fataler, the work done

there may itself be quite the wrong kind of work.  Not the kind

of supervision and direction which Colonies, and other such

interests, Home or Foreign, do by the nature of them require from

the Central Government; not that, but a quite other kind! The

Sotomayor correspondence, for example, is considered by many

persons not to be mismanaged merely, but to be a thing which

should never have been managed at all; a quite superfluous

concern, which and the like of which the British Government has

almost no call to get into, at this new epoch of time.  And not

Sotomayor only, nor Sapienza only, in regard to that Foreign

Office, but innumerable other things, if our witty friend of the

"live coal" have reason in him!  Of the Colonial Office, too, it

is urged that the questions they decide and operate upon are, in

very great part, questions which they never should have meddled

with, but almost all of which should have been decided in the

Colonies themselves,--Mother Country or Colonial Office reserving

its energy for a quite other class of objects, which are terribly

neglected just now.

These are the two vices that beset Government Offices; both of

them originating in insufficient Intellect,--that sad

insufficiency from which, directly or indirectly, all evil

whatsoever springs!  And these two vices act and react, so that

where the one is, the other is sure to be; and each encouraging

the growth of the other, both (if some cleaning of the Augeas

stable have not intervened for a long while) will be found in

frightful development.  You cannot have your work well done, if

the work be not of a right kind, if it be not work prescribed by

the law of Nature as well as by the rules of the office.

Laziness, which lies in wait round all human labor-offices, will

in that case infallibly leak in, and vitiate the doing of the

work.  The work is but idle; if the doing of it will but pass,

what need of more?  The essential problem, as the rules of office

prescribe it for you, if Nature and Fact say nothing, is that

your work be got to pass; if the work itself is worth nothing, or

little or an uncertain quantity, what more can gods or men

require of it, or, above all, can I who am the doer of it

require, but that it be got to pass?

And now enters another fatal effect, the mother of ever-new

mischiefs, which renders well-doing or improvement impossible,

and drives bad everywhere continually into worse.  The work being

what we see, a stupid subaltern will do as well as a gifted one;

the essential point is, that he be a quiet one, and do not bother

me who have the driving of him.  Nay, for this latter object, is

not a certain height of intelligence even dangerous? I want no

mettled Arab horse, with his flashing glances, arched, neck and

elastic step, to draw my wretched sand-cart through the streets;

a broken, grass-fed galloway, Irish garron, or painful ass with

nothing in the belly of him but patience and furze, will do it

safelier for me, if more slowly. Nay I myself, am I the worse for

being of a feeble order of intelligence; what the irreverent

speculative, world calls barren, red-tapish, limited, and even

intrinsically dark and small, and if it must be said,

stupid?--To such a climax does it come in all Government and

other Offices, where Human Stupidity has once introduced itself

(as it will everywhere do), and no Scavenger God intervenes.  The

work, at first of some worth, is ill done, and becomes of less

worth and of ever less, and finally of none:  the worthless work

can now _afford_ to be ill done; and Human Stupidity, at a

double geometrical ratio, with frightful expansion grows and

accumulates,--towards the unendurable.

The reforming Hercules, Sir Robert Peel or whoever he is to be,

that enters Downing Street, will ask himself this question first

of all, What work is now necessary, not in form and by

traditionary use and wont, but in very fact, for the vital

interests of the British Nation, to be done here?  The second

question, How to get it well done, and to keep the best hands

doing it well, will be greatly simplified by a good answer to

that.  Oh for an eye that could see in those hideous mazes, and a

heart that could dare and do!  Strenuous faithful scrutiny, not

of what is _thought_ to be what in the red-tape regions, but of

what really is what in the realms of Fact and Nature herself;

deep-seeing, wise and courageous eyes, that could look through

innumerable cobweb veils, and detect what fact or no-fact lies at

heart of them,--how invaluable these!  For, alas, it is long

since such eyes were much in the habit of looking steadfastly at

any department of our affairs; and poor commonplace creatures,

helping themselves along, in the way of makeshift, from year to

year, in such an element, do wonderful works indeed.  Such

creatures, like moles, are safe only underground, and their

engineerings there become very daedalean.  In fact, such

unfortunate persons have no resource but to become what we call

Pedants; to ensconce themselves in a safe world of habitudes, of

applicable or inapplicable traditions; not coveting, rather

avoiding the general daylight of common-sense, as very extraneous

to them and their procedure; by long persistence in which course

they become Completed Pedants, hidebound, impenetrable, able to

_defy_ the hostile extraneous element; an alarming kind of men,

Such men, left to themselves for a century or two, in any

Colonial, Foreign, or other Office, will make a terrible affair

of it!

For the one enemy we have in this Universe is Stupidity, Darkness

of Mind; of which darkness, again, there are many sources, every

_sin_ a source, and probably self-conceit the chief source.

Darkness of mind, in every kind and variety, does to a really

tragic extent abound:  but of all the kinds of darkness, surely

the Pedant darkness, which asserts and believes itself to be

light, is the most formidable to mankind!  For empires or for

individuals there is but one class of men to be trembled at; and

that is the Stupid Class, the class that cannot see, who alas are

they mainly that will not see.  A class of mortals under which as

administrators, kings, priests, diplomatists, &c., the interests

of mankind in every European country have sunk overloaded, as

under universal nightmare, near to extinction; and indeed are at

this moment convulsively writhing, decided either to throw off

the unblessed superincumbent nightmare, or roll themselves and it

to the Abyss.  Vain to reform Parliament, to invent ballot-boxes,

to reform this or that; the real Administration, practical

Management of the Commonwealth, goes all awry; choked up with

long-accumulated pedantries, so that your appointed workers have

been reduced to work as moles; and it is one vast boring and

counter-boring, on the part of eyeless persons irreverently

called stupid; and a daedalean bewilderment, writing "impossible"

on all efforts or proposals, supervenes.

The State itself, not in Downing Street alone but in every

department of it, has altered much from what it was in past

times; and it will again have to alter very much, to alter I

think from top to bottom, if it means to continue existing in the

times that are now coming and come!

The State, left to shape itself by dim pedantries and traditions,

without distinctness of conviction, or purpose beyond that of

helping itself over the difficulty of the hour, has become,

instead of a luminous vitality permeating with its light all

provinces of our affairs, a most monstrous agglomerate of

inanities, as little adapted for the actual wants of a modern

community as the worst citizen need wish.  The thing it is doing

is by no means the thing we want to have done.  What we want!

Let the dullest British man endeavor to raise in his mind this

question, and ask himself in sincerity what the British Nation

wants at this time.  Is it to have, with endless jargoning,

debating, motioning and counter-motioning, a settlement effected

between the Honorable Mr. This and the Honorable Mr. That, as to

their respective pretensions to ride the high horse?  Really it

is unimportant which of them ride it.  Going upon past experience

long continued now, I should say with brevity, "Either of

them--Neither of them."  If our Government is to be a

No-Government, what is the matter who administers it?  Fling an

orange-skin into St. James's Street; let the man it hits be your

man.  He, if you breed him a little to it, and tie the due

official bladders to his ankles, will do as well as another this

sublime problem of balancing himself upon the vortexes, with the

long loaded-pole in his hands; and will, with straddling painful

gestures, float hither and thither, walking the waters in that

singular manner for a little while, as well as his foregoers did,

till he also capsize, and be left floating feet uppermost; after

which you choose another.

What an immense pother, by parliamenting and palavering in all

corners of your empire, to decide such a question as that!  I

say, if that is the function, almost any human creature can learn

to discharge it:  fling out your orange-skin again; and save an

incalculable labor, and an emission of nonsense and falsity, and

electioneering beer and bribery and balderdash, which is terrible

to think of, in deciding.  Your National Parliament, in so far as

it has only that question to decide, may be considered as an

enormous National Palaver existing mainly for imaginary purposes;

and certain, in these days of abbreviated labor, to get itself

sent home again to its partridge-shootings, fox-huntings, and

above all, to its rat-catchings, if it could but understand the

time of day, and know (as our indignant Crabbe remarks) that "the

real Nimrod of this era, who alone does any good to the era, is

the rat-catcher!"

The notion that any Government is or can be a No-Government,

without the deadliest peril to all noble interests of the

Commonwealth, and by degrees slower or swifter to all ignoble

ones also, and to the very gully-drains, and thief

lodging-houses, and Mosaic sweating establishments, and at last

without destruction to such No-Government itself,--was never my

notion; and I hope it will soon cease altogether to be the

world's or to be anybody's. But if it be the correct notion, as

the world seems at present to flatter itself, I point out

improvements and abbreviations.  Dismiss your National Palaver;

make the _Times_ Newspaper your National Palaver, which needs no

beer-barrels or hustings, and is _cheaper_ in expense of money

and of falsity a thousand and a million fold; have an economical

red-tape drilling establishment (it were easier to devise such a

thing than a right _Modern University_);--and fling out your

orange-skin among the graduates, when you want a new Premier.

A mighty question indeed!  Who shall be Premier, and take in hand

the "rudder of government," otherwise called the "spigot of

taxation;" shall it be the Honorable Felix Parvulus, or the Right

Honorable Felicissimus Zero? By our electioneerings and Hansard

Debatings, and ever-enduring tempest of jargon that goes on

everywhere, we manage to settle that; to have it declared, with

no bloodshed except insignificant blood from the nose in

hustings-time, but with immense beershed and inkshed and

explosion of nonsense, which darkens all the air, that the Right

Honorable Zero is to be the man.  That we firmly settle; Zero,

all shivering with rapture and with terror, mounts into the high

saddle; cramps himself on, with knees, heels, hands and feet; and

the horse gallops--whither it lists.  That the Right Honorable

Zero should attempt controlling the horse--Alas, alas, he,

sticking on with beak and claws, is too happy if the horse will

only gallop any-whither, and not throw him.  Measure, polity,

plan or scheme of public good or evil, is not in the head of

Felicissimus; except, if he could but devise it, some measure

that would please his horse for the moment, and encourage him to

go with softer paces, godward or devilward as it might be, and

save Felicissimus's leather, which is fast wearing.  This is

what we call a Government in England, for nearly two centuries

now.

I wish Felicissimus were saddle-sick forever and a day!  He is a

dreadful object, however much we are used to him.  If the horse

had not been bred and broken in, for a thousand years, by real

riders and horse-subduers, perhaps the best and bravest the

world ever saw, what would have become of Felicissimus and him

long since?  This horse, by second-nature, religiously respects

all fences; gallops, if never so madly, on the highways

alone;--seems to me, of late, like a desperate Sleswick

thunder-horse who had lost his way, galloping in the labyrinthic

lanes of a woody flat country; passionate to reach his goal;

unable to reach it, because in the flat leafy lanes there is no

outlook whatever, and in the bridle there is no guidance

whatever.  So he gallops stormfully along, thinking it is

forward and forward; and alas, it is only round and round, out of

one old lane into the other;--nay (according to some) "he

mistakes _his own footprints_, which of course grow ever more

numerous, for the sign of a more and more frequented road;" and

his despair is hourly increasing.  My impression is, he is

certain soon, such is the growth of his necessity and his

despair, to--plunge _across_ the fence, into an opener survey of

the country; and to sweep Felicissimus off his back, and comb him

away very tragically in the process!  Poor Sleswicker, I wish you

were better ridden. I perceive it lies in the Fates you must now

either be better ridden, or else not long at all.  This plunging

in the heavy labyrinth of over-shaded lanes, with one's stomach

getting empty, one's Ireland falling into cannibalism, and no

vestige of a goal either visible or possible, cannot

last.

Colonial Offices, Foreign, Home and other Offices, got together

under these strange circumstances, cannot well be expected to be

the best that human ingenuity could devise; the wonder rather is

to see them so good as they are.  Who made them, ask me not.

Made they clearly were; for we see them here in a concrete

condition, writing despatches, and drawing salary with a view to

buy pudding.  But how those Offices in Downing Street were made;

who made them, or for what kind of objects they were made, would

be hard to say at present.  Dim visions and phantasmagories

gathered from the Books of Horace Walpole, Memoirs of Bubb

Doddington, Memoirs of my Lady Sundon, Lord Fanny Hervey, and

innumerable others, rise on us, beckoning fantastically towards,

not an answer, but some conceivable intimations of an answer, and

proclaiming very legibly the old text, "_Quam parva sapientia_,"

in respect of this hard-working much-subduing British Nation;

giving rise to endless reflections in a thinking Englishman of

this day.  Alas, it is ever so: each generation has its task, and

does it better or worse; greatly neglecting what is not

immediately its task.  Our poor grandfathers, so busy conquering

Indias, founding Colonies, inventing spinning-jennies, kindling

Lancashires and Bromwichams, took no thought about the government

of all that; left it all to be governed by Lord Fanny and the

Hanover Succession, or how the gods pleased.  And now we the poor

grandchildren find that it will not stick together on these terms

any longer; that our sad, dangerous and sore task is to discover

some government for this big world which has been conquered to

us; that the red-tape Offices in Downing Street are near the end

of their rope; that if we can get nothing better, in the way of

government, it is all over with our world and us.  How the

Downing-Street Offices originated, and what the meaning of them

was or is, let Dryasdust, when in some lucid moment the whim

takes him, instruct us. Enough for us to know and see clearly,

with urgent practical inference derived from such insight, That

they were not made for us or for our objects at all; that the

devouring Irish Giant is here, and that he cannot be fed with

red-tape, and will eat us if we cannot feed him.

On the whole, let us say Felicissimus made them;--or rather it

was the predecessors of Felicissimus, who were not so dreadfully

hunted, sticking to the wild and ever more desperate Sleswicker

in the leafy labyrinth of lanes, as he now is.  He, I think, will

never make anything; but be combed off by the elm-boughs, and

left sprawling in the ditch.  But in past time, this and the

other heavy-laden red-tape soul had withal a glow of patriotism

in him; now and then, in his whirling element, a gleam of human

ingenuity, some eye towards business that must be done.  At all

events, for him and every one, Parliament needed to be persuaded

that business was done.  By the contributions of many such

heavy-laden souls, driven on by necessity outward and inward,

these singular Establishments are here. Contributions--who knows

how far back they go, far beyond the reign of George the Second,

or perhaps the reign of William Conqueror.  Noble and genuine

some of them were, many of them were, I need not doubt:  for

there is no human edifice that stands long but has got itself

planted, here and there, upon the basis of fact; and being built,

in many respects, according to the laws of statics:  no standing

edifice, especially no edifice of State, but has had the wise and

brave at work in it, contributing their lives to it; and is

"cemented," whether it know the fact or not, "by the blood of

heroes!"  None; not even the Foreign Office, Home Office, still

less the National Palaver itself.  William Conqueror, I find,

must have had a first-rate Home Office, for his share.  The

_Domesday Book_, done in four years, and done as it is, with such

an admirable brevity, explicitness and completeness, testifies

emphatically what kind of under-secretaries and officials William

had.  Silent officials and secretaries, I suppose; not wasting

themselves in parliamentary talk; reserving all their

intelligence for silent survey of the huge dumb fact, silent

consideration how they might compass the mastery of that.  Happy

secretaries, happy William!

But indeed nobody knows what inarticulate traditions, remnants of

old wisdom, priceless though quite anonymous, survive in many

modern things that still have life in them.  Ben Brace, with his

taciturnities, and rugged stoical ways, with his tarry breeches,

stiff as plank-breeches, I perceive is still a kind of

_Lod-brog_ (Loaded-breeks) in more senses than one; and derives,

little conscious of it, many of his excellences from the old

Sea-kings and Saxon Pirates themselves; and how many Blakes and

Nelsons since have contributed to Ben!  "Things are not so false

always as they seem," said a certain Professor to me once:  "of

this you will find instances in every country, and in your

England more than any--and I hope will draw lessons from them.

An English Seventy-four, if you look merely at the articulate law

and methods of it, is one of the impossiblest entities.  The

captain is appointed not by preeminent merit in sailorship, but

by parliamentary connection; the men [this was spoken some years

ago] are got by impressment; a press-gang goes out, knocks men

down.  on the streets of sea-towns, and drags them on board,--if

the ship were to be stranded, I have heard they would nearly all

run ashore and desert.  Can anything be more unreasonable than a

Seventy-four?  Articulately almost nothing.  But it has

inarticulate traditions, ancient methods and habitudes in it,

stoicisms, noblenesses, _true_ rules both of sailing and of

conduct; enough to keep it afloat on Nature's veridical bosom,

after all.  See; if you bid it sail to the end of the world, it

will lift anchor, go, and arrive.  The raging oceans do not beat

it back; it too, as well as the raging oceans, has a relationship

to Nature, and it does not sink, but under the due conditions is

borne along.  If it meet with hurricanes, it rides them out; if

it meet an Enemy's ship, it shivers it to powder; and in short,

it holds on its way, and to a wonderful extent _does_ what it

means and pretends to do.  Assure yourself, my friend, there is

an immense fund of truth somewhere or other stowed in that

Seventy-four."

More important than the past history of these Offices in Downing

Street, is the question of their future history; the question,

How they are to be got mended!  Truly an immense problem,

inclusive of all others whatsoever; which demands to be attacked,

and incessantly persisted in, by all good citizens, as the grand

problem of Society, and the one thing needful for the

Commonwealth!  A problem in which all men, with all their wisdoms

and all their virtues, faithfully and continually co-operating at

it, will never have done _enough_, and will still only be

struggling _towards_ perfection in it.  In which some men can do

much;--in which every man can do something.  Every man, and thou

my present Reader canst do this:  _Be_ thyself a man abler to be

governed; more reverencing the divine faculty of governing, more

sacredly detesting the diabolical semblance of said faculty in

self and others; so shalt thou, if not govern, yet actually

according to thy strength assist in real governing.  And know

always, and even lay to heart with a quite unusual solemnity,

with a seriousness altogether of a religious nature, that as

"Human Stupidity" is verily the accursed parent of all this

mischief, so Human Intelligence alone, to which and to which only

is victory and blessedness appointed here below, will or can cure

it. If we knew this as devoutly as we ought to do, the evil, and

all other evils were curable;--alas, if we had from of old known

this, as all men made in God's image ought to do, the evil never

would have been!  Perhaps few Nations have ever known it less

than we, for a good while back, have done.  Hence these sorrows.

What a People are the poor Thibet idolaters, compared with us and

our "religions," which issue in the worship of King Hudson as our

Dalai-Lama! They, across such hulls of abject ignorance, have

seen into the heart of the matter; we, with our torches of

knowledge everywhere brandishing themselves, and such a human

enlightenment as never was before, have quite missed it.

Reverence for Human Worth, earnest devout search for it and

encouragement of it, loyal furtherance and obedience to it:

this, I say, is the outcome and essence of all true "religions,"

and was and ever will be.  We have not known this.  No; loud as

our tongues sometimes go in that direction, we have no true

reverence for Human Intelligence, for Human Worth and Wisdom:

none, or too little,--and I pray for a restoration of such

reverence, as for the change from Stygian darkness to Heavenly

light, as for the return of life to poor sick moribund Society

and all its interests.  Human Intelligence means little for most

of us but Beaver Contrivance, which produces spinning-mules,

cheap cotton, and large fortunes.  Wisdom, unless it give us

railway scrip, is not wise.

True nevertheless it forever remains that Intellect is the real

object of reverence, and of devout prayer, and zealous wish and

pursuit, among the sons of men; and even, well understood, the

one object.  It is the Inspiration of the Almighty that giveth

men understanding.  For it must be repeated, and ever again

repeated till poor mortals get to discern it, and awake from

their baleful paralysis, and degradation under foul enchantments,

That a man of Intellect, of real and not sham Intellect, is by

the nature of him likewise inevitably a man of nobleness, a man

of courage, rectitude, pious strength; who, even _because_ he is

and has been loyal to the Laws of this Universe, is initiated

into _discernment_ of the same; to this hour a Missioned of

Heaven; whom if men follow, it will be well with them; whom if

men do not follow, it will not be well.  Human Intellect, if you

consider it well, is the exact summary of Human _Worth_; and the

essence of all worth-ships and worships is reverence for that

same. This much surprises you, friend Peter; but I assure you it

is the fact;--and I would advise you to consider it, and to try

if you too do not gradually find it so.  With me it has long been

an article, not of "faith" only, but of settled insight, of

conviction as to what the ordainments of the Maker in this

Universe are.  Ah, could you and the rest of us but get to know

it, and everywhere religiously act upon it,--as our _Fortieth_

Article, which includes all the other Thirty-nine, and without

which the Thirty-nine are good for almost nothing,--there might

then be some hope for us!  In this world there is but one

appalling creature:  the Stupid man _considered_ to be the

Missioned of Heaven, and followed by men.  He is our King, men

say, he;--and they follow him, through straight or winding

courses, I for one know well whitherward.

Abler men in Downing Street, abler men to govern us:  yes, that,

sure enough, would gradually remove the dung-mountains, however

high they are; that would be the way, nor is there any other way,

to remedy whatsoever has gone wrong in Downing Street and in the

wide regions, spiritual and temporal, which Downing Street

presides over!  For the Able Man, meet him where you may, is

definable as the born enemy of Falsity and Anarchy, and the born

soldier of Truth and Order:  into what absurdest element soever

you put him, he is there to make it a little less absurd, to

fight continually with it till it become a little sane and human

again.  Peace on other terms he, for his part, cannot make with

it; not he, while he continues _able_, or possessed of real

intellect and not imaginary.  There is but one man fraught with

blessings for this world, fated to diminish and successively

abolish the curses of the world; and it is he.  For him make

search, him reverence and follow; know that to find him or miss

him, means victory or defeat for you, in all Downing Streets, and

establishments and enterprises here below.--I leave your Lordship

to judge whether this has been our practice hitherto; and would

humbly inquire what your Lordship thinks is likely to be the

consequence of continuing to neglect this.  It ought to have been

our practice; ought, in all places and all times, to be the

practice in this world; so says the fixed law of things

forevermore:--and it must cease to be _not_ the practice, your

Lordship; and cannot too speedily do so I think!--

Much has been done in the way of reforming Parliament in late

years; but that of itself seems to avail nothing, or almost less.

The men that sit in Downing Street, governing us, are not abler

men since the Reform Bill than were those before it.  Precisely

the same kind of men; obedient formerly to Tory traditions,

obedient now to Whig ditto and popular clamors. Respectable men

of office:  respectably commonplace in facility,--while the

situation is becoming terribly original!  Rendering their

outlooks, and ours, more ominous every day.

Indisputably enough the meaning of all reform-movement, electing

and electioneering, of popular agitation, parliamentary

eloquence, and all political effort whatsoever, is that you may

get the ten Ablest Men in England put to preside over your ten

principal departments of affairs.  To sift and riddle the Nation,

so that you might extricate and sift out the true ten gold

grains, or ablest men, and of these make your Governors or Public

Officers; leaving the dross and common sandy or silty material

safely aside, as the thing to be governed, not to govern;

certainly all ballot-boxes, caucuses, Kennington-Common meetings,

Parliamentary debatings, Red Republics, Russian Despotisms, and

constitutional or unconstitutional methods of society among

mankind, are intended to achieve this one end; and some of them,

it will be owned, achieve it very ill!--If you have got your gold

grains, if the men you have got are actually the ablest, then

rejoice; with whatever astonishment, accept your Ten, and thank

the gods; under this Ten your destruction will at least be milder

than under another.  But if you have _not_ got them, if you are

very far from having got them, then do not rejoice at all, then

_lament_ very much; then admit that your sublime political

constitutions and contrivances do not prove themselves sublime,

but ridiculous and contemptible; that your world's wonder of a

political mill, the envy of surrounding nations, does not yield

you real meal; yields you only powder of millstones (called

Hansard Debatings), and a detestable brown substance not unlike

the grindings of dried horse-dung or prepared street-mud, which

though sold under royal patent, and much recommended by the

trade, is quite unfit for culinary purposes!--

But the disease at least is not mysterious, whatever the remedy

be.  Our disease,--alas, is it not clear as the sun, that we

suffer under what is the disease of all the miserable in this

world, _want of wisdom_; that in the Head there is no vision, and

that thereby all the members are dark and in bonds?  No vision in

the head; heroism, faith, devout insight to discern what is

needful, noble courage to do it, greatly defective there:  not

seeing eyes there, but spectacles constitutionally ground, which,

to the unwary, _seem_ to see.  A quite fatal circumstance, had

you never so many Parliaments!  How is your ship to be steered by

a Pilot with no _eyes_ but a pair of glass ones got from the

constitutional optician?  He must steer by the _ear_, I think,

rather than by the eye; by the shoutings he catches from the

shore, or from the Parliamentary benches nearer hand:--one of the

frightfulest objects to see steering in a difficult sea!

Reformed Parliaments in that case, reform-leagues, outer

agitations and excitements in never such abundance, cannot

profit:  all this is but the writhing, and painful blind

convulsion of the limbs that are in bonds, that are all in dark

misery till the head be delivered, till the pressure on the brain

be removed.

Or perhaps there is now no heroic wisdom left in England;

England, once the land of heroes, is itself sunk now to a dim

owlery, and habitation of doleful creatures, intent only on

money-making and other forms of catching mice, for whom the

proper gospel is the gospel of M'Croudy, and all nobler impulses

and insights are forbidden henceforth?  Perhaps these present

agreeable Occupants of Downing Street, such as the parliamentary

mill has yielded them, are the _best_ the miserable soil had

grown?  The most Herculean Ten Men that could be found among the

English Twenty-seven Millions, are these?  There _are_ not, in

any place, under any figure, ten diviner men among us?  Well; in

that case, the riddling and searching of the twenty-seven

millions has been _successful_.  Here are our ten divinest men;

with these, unhappily not divine enough, we must even content

ourselves and die in peace; what help is there?  No help, no

hope, in that case.

But, again, if these are _not_ our divinest men, then evidently

there always is hope, there always is possibility of help; and

ruin never is quite inevitable, till we _have_ sifted out our

actually divinest ten, and set these to try their band at

governing!--That this has been achieved; that these ten men are

the most Herculean souls the English population held within it,

is a proposition credible to no mortal.  No, thank God; low as we

are sunk in many ways, this is not yet credible!  Evidently the

reverse of this proposition is the fact.  Ten much diviner men do

certainly exist. By some conceivable, not forever impossible,

method and methods, ten very much diviner men could be sifted

out!--Courage; let us fix our eyes on that important fact, and

strive all thitherward as towards a door of hope!

Parliaments, I think, have proved too well, in late years, that

they are not the remedy.  It is not Parliaments, reformed or

other, that will ever send Herculean men to Downing Street, to

reform Downing Street for us; to diffuse therefrom a light of

Heavenly Order, instead of the murk of Stygian Anarchy, over this

sad world of ours.  That function does not lie in the capacities

of Parliment.  That is the function of a _King_,--if we could get

such a priceless entity, which we cannot just now!  Failing

which, Statesmen, or Temporary Kings, and at the very lowest one

real Statesman, to shape the dim tendencies of Parliament, and

guide them wisely to the goal:  he, I perceive, will be a primary

condition, indispensable for any progress whatsoever.

One such, perhaps, might be attained; one such might prove

discoverable among our Parliamentary populations?  That one, in

such an enterprise as this of Downing Street, might be

invaluable!  One noble man, at once of natural wisdom and

practical experience; one Intellect still really human, and not

red-tapish, owlish and pedantical, appearing there in that dim

chaos, with word of command; to brandish Hercules-like the divine

broom and shovel, and turn running water in upon the place, and

say as with a fiat, "Here shall be truth, and real work, and

talent to do it henceforth; I will seek for able men to work

here, as for the elixir of life to this poor place and me:"--what

might not one such man effect there!

Nay one such is not to be dispensed with anywhere.  in the

affairs of men. In every ship, I say, there must be a _seeing_

pilot, not a mere hearing one!  It is evident you can never get

your ship steered through the difficult straits by persons

standing ashore, on this bank and that, and shouting _their_

confused directions to you:  "'Ware that Colonial

Sandbank!--Starboard now, the Nigger Question!--Larboard,

_larboard_, the Suffrage Movement!  Financial Reform, your

Clothing-Colonels overboard! The Qualification Movement,

'Ware-re-re!--Helm-a-lee!  Bear a hand there, will you!  Hr-r-r,

lubbers, imbeciles, fitter for a tailor's shopboard than a helm

of Government, Hr-r-r!"--And so the ship wriggles and tumbles,

and, on the whole, goes as wind and current drive.  No ship was

ever steered except to destruction in that manner.  I

deliberately say so:  no ship of a State either.  If you cannot

get a real pilot on board, and put the helm into his hands, your

ship is as good as a wreck.  One real pilot on board may save

you; all the bellowing from the banks that ever was, will not,

and by the nature of things cannot.  Nay your pilot will have to

succeed, if he do succeed, very much in spite of said bellowing;

he will hear all that, and regard very little of it,--in a

patient mild-spoken wise manner, will regard all of it as what it

is.  And I never doubt but there is in Parliament itself, in

spite of its vague palaverings which fill us with despair in

these times, a dumb instinct of inarticulate sense and stubborn

practical English insight and veracity, that would manfully

support a Statesman who could take command with really manful

notions of Reform, and as one deserving to be obeyed.  Oh for one

such; even one!  More precious to us than all the bullion in the

Bank, or perhaps that ever was in it, just now!

For it is Wisdom alone that can recognize wisdom:  Folly or

Imbecility never can; and that is the fatalest ban it labors

under, dooming it to perpetual failure in all things.  Failure

which, in Downing Street and places of _command_ is especially

accursed; cursing not one but hundreds of millions!  Who is there

that can recognize real intellect, and do reverence to it; and

discriminate it well from sham intellect, which is so much more

abundant, and deserves the reverse of reverence?  He that himself

has it!--One really human Intellect, invested with command, and

charged to reform Downing Street for us, would continually

attract real intellect to those regions, and with a divine

magnetism search it out from the modest corners where it lies

hid.  And every new accession of intellect to Downing Street

would bring to it benefit only, and would increase such divine

attraction in it, the parent of all benefit there and

elsewhere!

"What method, then; by what method?" ask many.  Method, alas!  To

secure an increased supply of Human Intellect to Downing Street,

there will evidently be no quite effectual "method" but that of

increasing the supply of Human Intellect, otherwise definable as

Human Worth, in Society generally; increasing the supply of

sacred reverence for it, of loyalty to it, and of life-and-death

desire and pursuit of it, among all classes,--if we but knew such

a "method"!  Alas, that were simply the method of making all

classes Servants of Heaven; and except it be devout prayer to

Heaven, I have never heard of any method!  To increase the

reverence for Human Intellect or God's Light, and the detestation

of Human Stupidity or the Devil's Darkness, what method is there?

No method,--except even this, that we should each of us "pray"

for it, instead of praying for mere scrip and the like; that

Heaven would please to vouchsafe us each a little of it, one by

one!  As perhaps Heaven, in its infinite bounty, by stern

methods, gradually will?  Perhaps Heaven has mercy too in these

sore plagues that are oppressing us; and means to teach us

reverence for Heroism and Human Intellect, by such baleful

experience of what issue Imbecility and Parliamentary Eloquence

lead to?  Such reverence, I do hope, and even discover and

observe, is silently yet extensively going on among us even in

these sad years.  In which small salutary fact there burns for

us, in this black coil of universal baseness fast becoming

universal wretchedness, an inextinguishable hope; far-off but

sure, a divine "pillar of fire by night."  Courage,

courage!--

Meanwhile, that our one reforming Statesman may have free command

of what Intellect there is among us, and room to try all means

for awakening and inviting ever more of it, there has one small

Project of Improvement been suggested; which finds a certain

degree of favor wherever I hear it talked of, and which seems to

merit much more consideration than it has yet received.

Practical men themselves approve of it hitherto, so far as it

goes; the one objection being that the world is not yet prepared

to insist on it,--which of course the world can never be, till

once the world consider it, and in the first place hear tell of

it!  I have, for my own part, a good opinion of this project.

The old unreformed Parliament of rotten boroughs _had_ one

advantage; but that is hereby, in a far more fruitful and

effectual manner, secured to the new.

The Proposal is, That Secretaries under and upper, that all

manner of changeable or permanent servants in the Government

Offices shall be selected without reference to their power of

getting into Parliament;--that, in short, the Queen shall have

power of nominating the half-dozen or half-score Officers of the

Administration, whose presence is thought necessary in

Parliament, to official seats there, without reference to any

constituency but her own only, which of course will mean her

Prime Minister's.  A very small encroachment on the present

constitution of Parliament; offering the minimum of change in

present methods, and I almost think a maximum in results to be

derived therefrom.--The Queen nominates John Thomas (the fittest

man she, much inquiring, can hear tell of in her three kingdoms)

President of the Poor-Law Board, Under Secretary of the

Colonies, Under, or perhaps even Upper Secretary of what she and

her Premier find suitablest for a working head so eminent, a

talent so precious; and grants him, by her direct authority, seat

and vote in Parliament so long as he holds that office.  Upper

Secretaries, having more to do in Parliament, and being so bound

to be in favor there, would, I suppose, at least till new times

and habits come, be expected to be chosen from among the

_People's_ Members as at present.  But whether the Prime

Minister himself is, in all times, bound to be first a People's

Member; and which, or how many, of his Secretaries and

subordinates he might be allowed to take as _Queen's_ Members, my

authority does not say,--perhaps has not himself settled; the

project being yet in mere outline or foreshadow, the practical

embodiment in all details to be fixed by authorities much more

competent than he.  The soul of his project is, That the Crown

also have power to elect a few members to Parliament.

From which project, however wisely it were embodied, there could

probably, at first or all at once, no great "accession of

intellect" to the Government Offices ensue; though a little

might, even at first, and a little is always precious:  but in

its ulterior operation, were that faithfully developed, and

wisely presided over, I fancy an immense accession of intellect

might ensue;--nay a natural ingress might thereby be opened to

all manner of accessions, and the actual flower of whatever

intellect the British Nation had might be attracted towards

Downing Street, and continue flowing steadily thither!  For, let

us see a little what effects this simple change carries in it the

possibilities of.  Here are beneficent germs, which the presence

of one truly wise man as Chief Minister, steadily fostering them

for even a few years, with the sacred fidelity and vigilance that

would beseem him, might ripen into living practices and habitual

facts, invaluable to us all.

What it is that Secretaries of State, Managers of Colonial

Establishments, of Home and Foreign Government interests, have

really and truly to do in Parliament, might admit of various

estimate in these times.  An apt debater in Parliament is by no

means certain to be an able administrator of Colonies, of Home or

Foreign Affairs; nay, rather quite the contrary is to be presumed

of him; for in order to become a "brilliant speaker," if that is

his character, considerable portions of his natural internal

endowment must have gone to the surface, in order to make a

shining figure there, and precisely so much the less (few men in

these days know how much less!) must remain available in the

internal silent state, or as faculty for thinking, for devising

and acting, which latter and which alone is the function

essential for him in his Secretaryship.  Not to tell a good story

for himself "in Parliament and to the twenty-seven millions, many

of them fools;" not that, but to do good administration, to know

with sure eye, and decide with just and resolute heart, what is

what in the _things_ committed to his charge:  this and not that

is the service which poor England, whatever it may think and

maunder, does require and want of the Official Man in Downing

Street.  Given a good Official Man or Secretary, he really ought,

as far as it is possible, to be left working in the silent state.

No mortal can both work, and do good talking in Parliament, or

out of it: the feat is impossible as that of serving two hostile

masters.

Nor would I, if it could be helped, much trouble my good

Secretary with addressing Parliament:  needful explanations; yes,

in a free country, surely;--but not to every frivolous and

vexatious person, in or out of Parliament, who chooses to apply

for them.  There should be demands for explanation too which were

reckoned frivolous and vexatious, and censured as such.  These, I

should say, are the not needful explanations:  and if my poor

Secretary is to be called out from his workshop to answer every

one of these,--his workshop will become (what we at present see

it, deservedly or not) little other than a pillory; the poor

Secretary a kind of talking-machine, exposed to dead cats and

rotten eggs; and the "work" got out of him or of it will, as

heretofore, be very inconsiderable indeed!--Alas, on this side

also, important improvements are conceivable; and will even, I

imagine, get them whence we may, be found indispensable one day.

The honorable gentleman whom you interrupt here, he, in his

official capacity, is not an individual now, but the embodiment

of a Nation; he is the "People of England" engaged in the work of

Secretaryship, this one; and cannot forever afford to let the

three Tailors of Tooley Street break in upon him at all hours!--

But leaving this, let us remark one thing which is very plain:

That whatever be the uses and duties, real or supposed, of a

Secretary in Parliament, his faculty to accomplish these is a

point entirely unconnected with his ability to get elected into

Parliament, and has no relation or proportion to it, and no

concern with it whatever.  Lord Tommy and the Honorable John are

not a whit better qualified for Parliamentary duties, to say

nothing of Secretary duties, than plain Tom and Jack; they are

merely better qualified, as matters stand, for getting admitted

to try them. Which state of matters a reforming Premier, much in

want of abler men to help him, now proposes altering.  Tom and

Jack, once admitted by the Queen's writ, there is every reason to

suppose will do quite as well there as Lord Tommy and the

Honorable John.  In Parliament quite as well:  and elsewhere, in

the other infinitely more important duties of a Government

Office, which indeed are and remain the essential, vital and

intrinsic duties of such a personage, is there the faintest

reason to surmise that Tom and Jack, if well chosen, will fall

short of Lord Tommy and the Honorable John?  No shadow of a

reason.  Were the intrinsic genius of the men exactly equal,

there is no shadow of a reason:  but rather there is quite the

reverse; for Tom and Jack have been at least workers all their

days, not idlers, game-preservers and mere human clothes-horses,

at any period of their lives; and have gained a schooling

_thereby_, of which Lord Tommy and the Honorable John, unhappily

strangers to it for most part, can form no conception!  Tom and

Jack have already, on this most narrow hypothesis, a decided

_superiority_ of likelihood over Lord Tommy and the Honorable

John.

But the hypothesis is very narrow, and the fact is very wide; the

hypothesis counts by units, the fact by millions.  Consider how

many Toms and Jacks there are to choose from, well or ill!  The

aristocratic class from whom Members of Parliament can be elected

extends only to certain thousands; from these you are to choose

your Secretary, if a seat in Parliament is the primary condition.

But the general population is of Twenty-seven Millions; from all

sections of which you can choose, if the seat in Parliament is

not to be primary.  Make it ultimate instead of primary, a last

investiture instead of a first indispensable condition, and the

whole British Nation, learned, unlearned, professional,

practical, speculative and miscellaneous, is at your disposal!

In the lowest broad strata of the population, equally as in the

highest and narrowest, are produced men of every kind of genius;

man for man., your chance of genius is as good among the millions

as among the units;--and class for class, what must it be!  From

all classes, not from certain hundreds now but from several

millions, whatsoever man the gods had gifted with intellect and

nobleness, and power to help his country, could be chosen:  O

Heavens, could,--if not by Tenpound Constituencies and the force

of beer, then by a Reforming Premier with eyes in his head, who I

think might do it quite infinitely better.  Infinitely better.

For ignobleness cannot, by the nature of it, choose the noble:

no, there needs a seeing man who is himself noble, cognizant by

internal experience of the symptoms of nobleness.  Shall we never

think of this; shall we never more remember this, then?  It is

forever true; and Nature and Fact, however we may rattle our

ballot-boxes, do at no time forget it.

From the lowest and broadest stratum of Society, where the births

are by the million, there was born, almost in our own memory, a

Robert Burns; son of one who "had not capital for his poor

moor-farm of Twenty Pounds a year."  Robert Burns never had the

smallest chance to got into Parliament, much as Robert Burns

deserved, for all our sakes, to have been found there. For the

man--it was not known to men purblind, sunk in their poor dim

vulgar element, but might have been known to men of insight who

had any loyalty or any royalty of their own--was a born king of

men:  full of valor, of intelligence and heroic nobleness; fit

for far other work than to break his heart among poor mean

mortals, gauging beer!  Him no Tenpound Constituency chose, nor

did any Reforming Premier:  in the deep-sunk British Nation,

overwhelmed in foggy stupor, with the loadstars all gone out for

it, there was no whisper of a notion that it could be desirable

to choose him,--except to come and dine with you, and in the

interim to gauge. And yet heaven-born Mr. Pitt, at that period,

was by no means without need of Heroic Intellect, for other

purposes than gauging!  But sorrowful strangulation by red-tape,

much _tighter_ then than it now is when so many revolutionary

earthquakes have tussled it, quite tied up the meagre Pitt; and

he said, on hearing of this Burns and his sad hampered case,

"Literature will take care of itself."--"Yes, and of you too, if

you don't mind it!" answers one.

And so, like Apollo taken for a Neat-herd, and perhaps for none

of the best on the Admetus establishment, this new Norse Thor had

to put up with what was going; to gauge ale, and be thankful;

pouring his celestial sunlight through Scottish

Song-writing,--the narrowest chink ever offered to a Thunder-god

before!  And the meagre Pitt, and his Dundasses and red-tape

Phantasms (growing very ghastly now to think of), did not in the

least know or understand, the impious, god-forgetting mortals,

that Heroic Intellects, if Heaven were pleased to send such, were

the one salvation for the world and for them and all of us.  No;

they "had done very well without" such; did not see the use of

such; went along "very well" without such; well presided over by

a singular Heroic Intellect called George the Third:  and the

Thunder-god, as was rather fit of him, departed early, still in

the noon of life, somewhat weary of gauging ale!--O Peter, what a

scandalous torpid element of yellow London fog, favorable to owls

only and their mousing operations, has blotted out the stars of

Heaven for us these several generations back,--which, I rejoice

to see, is now visibly about to take itself away again, or

perhaps to be _dispelled_ in a very tremendous manner!

For the sake of my Democratic friends, one other observation.  Is

not this Proposal the very essence of whatever truth there is in

"Democracy;" this, that the able man be chosen, in whatever rank

be is found?  That he be searched for as hidden treasure is; be

trained, supervised, set to the work which he alone is fit for.

All Democracy lies in this; this, I think, is worth all the

ballot-boxes and suffrage-movements now going.  Not that the

noble soul, born poor, should be set to spout in Parliament, but

that he should be set to assist in governing men:  this is our

grand Democratic interest.  With this we can be saved; without

this, were there a Parliament spouting in every parish, and

Hansard Debates to stem the Thames, we perish,--die

constitutionally drowned, in mere oceans of palaver.

All reformers, constitutional persons, and men capable of

reflection, are invited to reflect on these things.  Let us brush

the cobwebs from our eyes; let us bid the inane traditions be

silent for a moment; and ask ourselves, like men dreadfully

intent on having it _done_, "By what method or methods can the

able men from every rank of life be gathered, as diamond-grains

from the general mass of sand:  the able men, not the

sham-able;--and set to do the work of governing, contriving,

administering and guiding for us!"  It is the question of

questions.  All that Democracy ever meant lies there:  the

attainment of a truer and truer Aristocracy, or Government again

by the _Best_.

Reformed Parliaments have lamentably failed to attain it for us;

and I believe will and must forever fail.  One true Reforming

Statesman, one noble worshipper and knower of human intellect,

with the quality of an experienced Politician too; he, backed by

such a Parliament as England, once recognizing him, would loyally

send, and at liberty to choose his working subalterns from all

the Englishmen alive; he surely might do something?  Something,

by one means or another, is becoming fearfully necessary to be

done!  He, I think, might accomplish more for us in ten years,

than the best conceivable Reformed Parliament, and utmost

extension of the suffrage, in twice or ten times ten.

What is extremely important too, you could try this method with

safety; extension of the suffrage you cannot so try.  With even

an approximately heroic Prime Minister, you could get nothing but

good from prescribing to him thus, to choose the fittest man,

under penalties; to choose, not the fittest of the four or the

three men that were in Parliament, but the fittest from the whole

Twenty-seven Millions that he could hear of,--at his peril.

Nothing but good from this.  From extension of the suffrage, some

think, you might get quite other than good.  From extension of

the suffrage, till it became a universal counting of heads, one

sees not in the least what wisdom could be extracted.  A

Parliament of the Paris pattern, such as we see just now, might

be extracted:  and from that?  Solution into universal slush;

drownage of all interests divine and human, in a Noah's-Deluge of

Parliamentary eloquence,--such as we hope our sins, heavy and

manifold though they are, have not yet quite deserved!

Who, then, is to be the Reforming Statesman, and begin the noble

work for us?  He is the preliminary; one such; with him we may

prosecute the enterprise to length after length; without him we

cannot stir in it at all. A true _king_, temporary king, that

dare undertake the government of Britain, on condition of

beginning in sacred earnest to "reform" it, not at this or that

extremity, but at the heart and centre.  That will expurgate

Downing Street, and the practical Administration of our Affairs;

clear out its accumulated mountains of pendantries and cobwebs;

bid the Pedants and the Dullards depart, bid the Gifted and the

Seeing enter and inhabit.  So that henceforth there be Heavenly

light there, instead of Stygian dusk; that God's vivifying light

instead of Satan's deadening and killing dusk, may radiate

therefrom, and visit with healing all regions of this British

Empire,--which now writhes through every limb of it, in dire

agony as if of death!  The enterprise is great, the enterprise

may be called formidable and even awful; but there is none nobler

among the sublunary affairs of mankind just now.  Nay tacitly it

is the enterprise of every man who undertakes to be British

Premier in these times;--and I cannot esteem him an enviable

Premier who, because the engagement is _tacit_, flatters himself

that it does not exist!  "Show it me in the bond," he says.  Your

Lordship, it actually exists:  and I think you will see it yet,

in another kind of "bond" than that sheepskin one!

But truly, in any time, what a strange feeling, enough to alarm a

very big Lordship, this:  that he, of the size he is, has got to

the apex of English affairs!  Smallest wrens, we know, by

training and the aid of machinery, are capable of many things.

For this world abounds in miraculous combinations, far

transcending anything they do at Drury Lane in the melodramatic

way.  A world which, as solid as it looks, is made all of aerial

and even of spiritual stuff; permeated all by incalculable

sleeping forces and ele