One thing I do know: Never, on this Earth, was the relation of
man to man long carried on by Cash-payment alone. If, at any
time, a philosophy of Laissez-faire, Competition and Supply-and-
demand, start up as the exponent of human relations, expect that
it will soon end.
Such philosophies will arise: for man's philosophies are usually
the 'supplement of his practice;' some ornamental Logic-varnish,
some outer skin of Articulate Intelligence, with which he strives
to render his dumb Instinctive Doings presentable when they are
done. Such philosophies will arise; be preached as Mammon-
Gospels, the ultimate Evangel of the World; be believed, with
what is called belief, with much superficial bluster, and a kind
of shallow satisfaction real in its way:--but they are ominous
gospels! They are the sure, and even swift, forerunner of great
changes. Expect that the old System of Society is done, is dying
and fallen into dotage, when it begins to rave in that fashion.
Most Systems that I have watched the death of, for the last three
thousand years, have gone just so. The Ideal, the True and Noble
that was in them having faded out, and nothing now remaining but
naked Egoism, vulturous Greediness, they cannot live; they are
bound and inexorably ordained by the oldest Destinies, Mothers of
the Universe, to die. Curious enough: they thereupon, as I have
pretty generally noticed, devise some light comfortable kind of
'wine-and-walnuts philosophy' for themselves, this of Supply-and-
demand or another; and keep saying, during hours of mastication
and rumination, which they call hours of meditation: "Soul, take
thy ease, it is all well that thou art a vulture-soul;"
--and pangs of dissolution come upon them, oftenest before they
are aware!
Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the
union-bond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his
deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth
to the end of the world. I invite his Grace of Castle-Rackrent
to reflect on this;--does he think that a Land Aristocracy when
it becomes a Land Auctioneership can have long to live? Or that
Sliding-scales will increase the vital stamina of it? The
indomitable Plugson too, of the respected Firm of Plugson, Hunks
and Company, in St. Dolly Undershot, is invited to reflect on
this; for to him also it will be new, perhaps even newer.
Bookkeeping by double entry is admirable, and records several
things in an exact manner. But the Mother-Destinies also keep
their Tablets; in Heaven's Chancery also there goes on a
recording; and things, as my Moslem friends say, are 'written on
the iron leaf.'
Your Grace and Plugson, it is like, go to Church occasionally:
did you never in vacant moments, with perhaps a dull parson
droning to you, glance into your New Testament, and the cash-
account stated four times over, by a kind of quadruple entry,--in
the Four Gospels there? I consider that a cash-account, and
balance-statement of work done and wages paid, worth attending
to. Precisely such, though on a smaller scale, go on at all
moments under this Sun; and the statement and balance of them in
the Plugson Ledgers and on the Tablets of Heaven's Chancery are
discrepant exceedingly;--which ought really to teach, and to have
long since taught, an indomitable common-sense Plugson of
Undershot, much more an unattackable uncommon-sense Grace of
Rackrent, a thing or two!--In brief, we shall have to dismiss the
Cash-Gospel rigorously into its own place: we shall have to
know, on the threshold, that either there is some infinitely
deeper Gospel, subsidiary, explanatory and daily and hourly
corrective, to the Cash one; or else that the Cash one itself
and all others are fast traveling!
For all human things do require to have an Ideal in them; to
have some Soul in them, as we said, were it only to keep the Body
unputrefied. And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul,
place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body
with its own nobleness; will gradually, incessantly, mould,
modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last
beautiful, and to a certain degree divine!--O, if you could
dethrone that Brute-god Mammon, and put a Spirit-god in his
place! One way or other, he must and will have to be dethroned.
Fighting, for example, as I often say to myself, Fighting with
steel murder-tools is surely a much uglier operation than
Working, take it how you will. Yet even of Fighting, in
religious Abbot Samson's days, see what a Feudalism there had
grown,--a 'glorious Chivalry,' much besung down to the present
day. Was not that one of the 'impossiblest' things? Under the
sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth, and
hellfire eyes, hacking one another's flesh; converting precious
living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses
of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure. How did a
Chivalry ever come out of that; how anything that was not
hideous, scandalous, infernal? It will be a question worth
considering by and by.
I remark, for the present, only two things: first, that the
Fighting itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a Fighting
without cause, but more or less with cause. Man is created to
fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier;
his life 'a battle and a march,' under the right General. It is
forever indispensable for a man to fight: now with Necessity,
with Barrenness, Scarcity, with Puddles, Bogs, tangled Forests,
unkempt Cotton;--now also with the hallucinations of his poor
fellow Men. Hallucinatory visions rise in the head of my poor
fellow man; make him claim over me rights which are not his.
All Fighting, as we noticed long ago, is the dusty conflict of
strengths each thinking itself the strongest, or, in other words,
the justest;--of Mights which do in the long-run, and forever
will in this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights. In
conflict the perishable part of them, beaten sufficiently, flies
off into dust: this process ended, appears the imperishable, the
true and exact.
And now let us remark a second thing: how, in these baleful
operations, a noble devout-hearted Chevalier will comfort
himself, and an ignoble godless Bucanier and Chactaw Indian.
Victory is the aim of each. But deep in the heart of the noble
man it lies forever legible, that, as an Invisible just God made
him, so will and must God's justice and this only, were it never
so invisible, ultimately prosper in all controversies and
enterprises and battles whatsoever. What an Influence; ever-
present,--like a Soul in the rudest Caliban of a body; like a
ray of Heaven, and illuminative creative Fiat-Lux, in the
wastest terrestrial Chaos! Blessed divine Influence, traceable
even in the horror of Battlefields and garments rolled in blood:
how it ennobles even the Battlefield; and, in place of a Chactaw
Massacre, makes it a Field of Honour! A Battlefield too is
great. Considered well, it is a kind of Quintessence of Labour;
Labour distilled into its utmost concentration; the significance
of years of it compressed into an hour. Here too thou shalt be
strong, and not in muscle only, if thou wouldst prevail. Here
too thou shalt be strong of heart, noble of soul; thou shalt
dread no pain or death, thou shalt not love ease or life; in
rage, thou shalt remember mercy, justice;--thou shalt be a Knight
and not a Chactaw, if thou wouldst prevail! It is the rule of
all battles, against hallucinating fellow Men, against unkempt
Cotton, or whatsoever battles they may be which a man in this
world has to fight.
Howel Davies' dyes the West Indian Seas with blood, piles his
decks with plunder; approves himself the expertest Seaman, the
daringest Seafighter: but he gains no lasting victory, lasting
victory is not possible for him. Not, had he fleets larger than
the combined British Navy all united with him in bucaniering.
He, once for all, cannot prosper in his duel. He strikes down
his man: yes; but his man, or his man's representative, has no
notion to lie struck down; neither, though slain ten times, will
he keep so lying;--nor has the Universe any notion to keep him so
lying! On the contrary, the Universe and he have, at all
moments, all manner of motives to start up again, and desperately
fight again. Your Napoleon is flung out, at last, to St. Helena;
the latter end of him sternly compensating the beginning. The
Bucanier strikes down a man, a hundred or a million men: but
what profits it? He has one enemy never to be struck down; nay
two enemies: Mankind and the Maker of Men. On the great scale
or on the small, in fighting of men or fighting of difficulties,
I will not embark my venture with Howel Davies: it is not the
Bucanier, it is the Hero only that can gain victory, that can do
more than seem to succeed. These things will deserve meditating;
for they apply to all battle and soldiership, all struggle and
effort whatsoever in this Fight of Life. It is a poor Gospel,
Cash-Gospel or whatever name it have, that does not, with clear
tone, uncontradictable, carrying conviction to all hearts,
forever keep men in mind of these things.
Unhappily, my indomitable friend Plugson of Undershot has, in a
great degree, forgotten them;--as, alas, all the world has; as,
alas, our very Dukes and Soul-Overseers have, whose special trade
it was to remember them! Hence these tears.--Plugson, who has
indomitably spun Cotton merely to gain thousands of pounds, I
have to call as yet a Bucanier and Chactaw; till there come
something better, still more indomitable from him. His hundred
Thousand-pound Notes, if there be nothing other, are to me but as
the hundred Scalps in a Chactaw wigwam. The blind Plugson: he
was a Captain of Industry, born member of the Ultimate genuine
Aristocracy of this Universe, could he have known it! These
thousand men that span and toiled round him, they were a regiment
whom he had enlisted, man by man; to make war on a very genuine
enemy: Bareness of back, and disobedient Cotton-fibre, which
will not, unless forced to it, consent to cover bare backs. Here
is a most genuine enemy; over whom all creatures will wish him
victory. He enlisted his thousand men; said to them, "Come,
brothers, let us have a dash at Cotton!" They follow with
cheerful shout; they gain such a victory over Cotton as the
Earth has to admire and clap hands at: but, alas, it is yet only
of the Bucanier or Chactaw sort,--as good as no victory! Foolish
Plugson of St. Dolly Undershot: does he hope to become
illustrious by hanging up the scalps in his wigwam, the hundred
thousands at his banker's, and saying, Behold my scalps? Why,
Plugson, even thy own host is all in mutiny: Cotton is
conquered; but the 'bare backs'--are worse covered than ever!
Indomitable Plugson, thou must cease to be a Chactaw; thou and
others; thou thyself, if no other!
Did William the Norman Bastard, or any of his Taillefers,
Ironcutters, manage so? Ironcutter, at the end of the
campaign, did not turn off his thousand fighters, but said to
them: "Noble fighters, this is the land we have gained; be I
Lord in it,--what we will call Law-ward, maintainer and
keeper of Heaven's Laws: be I Law-ward, or in brief
orthoepy Lord in it, and be ye Loyal Men around me in it; and
we will stand by one another, as soldiers round a captain, for
again we shall have need of one another!" Plugson, bucanier-
like, says to them: "Noble spinners, this is the Hundred
Thousand we have gained, wherein I mean to dwell and plant
vineyards; the hundred thousand is mine, the three and sixpence
daily was yours: adieu, noble spinners; drink my health with
this groat each, which I give you over and above!" The entirely
unjust Captain of Industry, say I; not Chevalier, but Bucanier!
'Commercial Law' does indeed acquit him; asks, with wide eyes,
What else? So too Howel Davies asks, Was it not according to the
strictest Bucanier Custom? Did I depart in any jot or tittle
from the Laws of the Bucaniers?
After all, money, as they say, is miraculous. Plugson wanted
victory; as Chevaliers and Bucaniers, and all men alike do. He
found money recognised, by the whole world with one assent, as
the true symbol, exact equivalent and synonym of victory;--and
here we have him, a grim-browed, indomitable Bucanier, coming
home to us with a 'victory,' which the whole world is ceasing
to clap hands at! The whole world, taught somewhat impressively,
is beginning to recognise that such victory is but half a
victory; and that now, if it please the Powers, we must--have
the other half!
Money is miraculous. What miraculous facilities has it yielded,
will it yield us; but also what never-imagined confusions,
obscurations has it brought in; down almost to total extinction
of the moral-sense in large masses of mankind! 'Protection of
property,' of what is 'mine,' means with most men protection of
money,--the thing which, had I a thousand padlocks over it, is
least of all mine; is, in a manner, scarcely worth calling
mine! The symbol shall be held sacred, defended everywhere with
tipstaves, ropes and gibbets; the thing signified shall be
composedly cast to the dogs. A human being who has worked with
human beings clears all scores with them, cuts himself with
triumphant completeness forever loose from them, by paying down
certain shillings and pounds. Was it not the wages I promised
you? There they are, to the last sixpence,--according to the
Laws of the Bucaniers!--Yes, indeed;--and, at such times, it
becomes imperatively necessary to ask all persons, bucaniers and
others, Whether these same respectable Laws of the Bucaniers are
written on God's eternal Heavens at all, on the inner Heart of
Man at all; or on the respectable Bucanier Logbook merely, for
the convenience of bucaniering merely? What a question;--whereat
Westminster Hall shudders to its driest parchment; and on the
dead wigs each particular horsehair stands on end!
The Laws of Laissez-faire, O Westminster, the laws of industrial
Captain and industrial Soldier, how much more of idle Captain and
industrial Soldier, will need to be remodelled, and modified, and
rectified in a hundred and a hundred ways,--and not in the
Sliding-scale direction, but in the totally opposite one! With
two million industrial Soldiers already sitting in Bastilles, and
five million pining on potatoes, methinks Westminster cannot
begin too soon!--A man has other obligations laid on him, in
God's Universe, than the payment of cash: these also
Westminster, if it will continue to exist and have board-wages,
must contrive to take some charge of:--by Westminster or by
another, they must and will be taken charge of; be, with
whatever difficulty, got articulated, got enforced, and to a
certain approximate extent, put in practice. And, as I say, it
cannot be too soon! For Mammonism, left to itself, has become
Midas-eared; and with all its gold mountains, sits starving for
want of bread: and Dilettantism with its partridge-nets, in this
extremely earnest Universe of ours, is playing somewhat too high
a game. 'A man by the very look of him promises so much:' yes;
and by the rent-roll of him does he promise nothing?--
Alas, what a business will this be, which our Continental
friends, groping this long while somewhat absurdly about it and
about it, call 'Organisation of Labour;'--which must be taken out
of the hands of absurd windy persons, and put into the hands of
wise, laborious, modest and valiant men, to begin with it
straightway: to proceed with it, and succeed in it more and
more, if Europe, at any rate if England, is to continue habitable
much longer. Looking at the kind of most noble Corn-Law Dukes or
Practical Duces we have, and also of right reverend Soul-
Overseers, Christian Spiritual Duces 'on a minimum of four
thousand five hundred,' one's hopes are a little chilled.
Courage, nevertheless; there are many brave men in England! My
indomitable Plugson,--nay is there not even in thee some hope?
Thou art hitherto a Bucanier, as it was written and prescribed
for thee by an evil world: but in that grim brow, in that
indomitable heart which can conquer Cotton, do there not
perhaps lie other ten times nobler conquests?
