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 indocility, 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!
