Latter-Day Pamphlets NO. IV. The New Downing Street.
by Thomas Carlyle
[April 15, 1850.]
In looking at this wreck of Governments in all European
countries, there is one consideration that suggests itself, sadly
elucidative of our modern epoch. These Governments, we may be
well assured, have gone to anarchy for this one reason inclusive
of every other whatsoever, That they were not wise enough; that
the spiritual talent embarked in them, the virtue, heroism,
intellect, or by whatever other synonyms we designate it, was not
adequate,--probably had long been inadequate, and so in its dim
helplessness had suffered, or perhaps invited falsity to
introduce itself; had suffered injustices, and solecisms, and
contradictions of the Divine Fact, to accumulate in more than
tolerable measure; whereupon said Governments were overset, and
declared before all creatures to be too false.
This is a reflection sad but important to the modern Governments
now fallen anarchic, That they had not spiritual talent enough.
And if this is so, then surely the question, How these
Governments came to sink for want of intellect? is a rather
interesting one. Intellect, in some measure, is born into every
Century; and the Nineteenth flatters itself that it is rather
distinguished that way! What had become of this celebrated
Nineteenth Century's intellect? Surely some of it existed, and
was "developed" withal;--nay in the "undeveloped," unconscious,
or inarticulate state, it is not dead; but alive and at work, if
mutely not less beneficently, some think even more so! And yet
Governments, it would appear, could by no means get enough of it;
almost none of it came their way: what had become of it? Truly
there must be something very questionable, either in the
intellect of this celebrated Century, or in the methods
Governments now have of supplying their wants from the same. One
or other of two grand fundamental shortcomings, in regard to
intellect or human enlightenment, is very visible in this
enlightened Century of ours; for it has now become the most
anarchic of Centuries; that is to say, has fallen practically
into such Egyptian darkness that it cannot grope its way at all!
Nay I rather think both of these shortcomings, fatal deficits
both, are chargeable upon us; and it is the joint harvest of both
that we are now reaping with such havoc to our affairs. I rather
guess, the intellect of the Nineteenth Century, so full of
miracle to Heavyside and others, is itself a mechanical or
beaver intellect rather than a high or eminently human one. A
dim and mean though authentic kind of intellect, this; venerable
only in defect of better. This kind will avail but little in the
higher enterprises of human intellect, especially in that highest
enterprise of guiding men Heavenward, which, after all, is the
one real "governing" of them on this God's-Earth:--an enterprise
not to be achieved by beaver intellect, but by other higher and
highest kinds. This is deficit first. And then secondly,
Governments have, really to a fatal and extraordinary extent,
neglected in late ages to supply themselves with what intellect
was going; having, as was too natural in the dim time, taken up a
notion that human intellect, or even beaver intellect, was not
necessary to them at all, but that a little of the vulpine sort
(if attainable), supported by routine, red-tape traditions, and
tolerable parliamentary eloquence on occasion, would very well
suffice. A most false and impious notion; leading to fatal
lethargy on the part of Governments, while Nature and Fact were
preparing strange phenomena in contradiction to it.
These are two very fatal deficits;--the remedy of either of which
would be the remedy of both, could we but find it! For indeed
they are vitally connected: one of them is sure to produce the
other; and both once in action together, the advent of darkness,
certain enough to issue in anarchy by and by, goes on with
frightful acceleration. If Governments neglect to invite what
noble intellect there is, then too surely all intellect, not
omnipotent to resist bad influences, will tend to become
beaverish ignoble intellect; and quitting high aims, which seem
shut up from it, will help itself forward in the way of making
money and such like; or will even sink to be sham intellect,
helping itself by methods which are not only beaverish but
vulpine, and so "ignoble" as not to have common honesty. The
Government, taking no thought to choose intellect for itself,
will gradually find that there is less and less of a good quality
to choose from: thus, as in all impieties it does, bad grows
worse at a frightful double rate of progression; and your
impiety is twice cursed. If you are impious enough to tolerate
darkness, you will get ever more darkness to tolerate; and at
that inevitable stage of the account (inevitable in all such
accounts) when actual light or else destruction is the
alternative, you will call to the Heavens and the Earth for
light, and none will come!
Certainly this evil, for one, has not "wrought its own cure;"
but has wrought precisely the reverse, and has been hourly eating
away what possibilities of cure there were. And so, I fear, in
spite of rumors to the contrary, it always is with evils, with
solecisms against Nature, and contradictions to the divine fact
of things: not an evil of them has ever wrought its own cure in
my experience;--but has continually grown worse and wider and
uglier, till some good (generally a good man) not able to
endure the abomination longer, rose upon it and cured or else
extinguished it. Evil Governments, divested of God's light
because they have loved darkness rather, are not likelier than
other evils to work their own cure out of that bad plight.
It is urgent upon all Governments to pause in this fatal course;
persisted in, the goal is fearfully evident; every hour's
persistence in it is making return more difficult. Intellect
exists in all countries; and the function appointed it by
Heaven,--Governments had better not attempt to contradict that,
for they cannot! Intellect has to govern in this world and
will do it, if not in alliance with so-called "Governments" of
red-tape and routine, then in divine hostility to such, and
sometimes alas in diabolic hostility to such; and in the end, as
sure as Heaven is higher than Downing Street, and the Laws of
Nature are tougher than red-tape, with entire victory over them
and entire ruin to them. If there is one thinking man among the
Politicians of England, I consider these things extremely well
worth his attention just now.
Who are available to your Offices in Downing Street? All the
gifted souls, of every rank, who are born to you in this
generation. These are appointed, by the true eternal "divine
right" which will never become obsolete, to be your governors and
administrators; and precisely as you employ them, or neglect to
employ them, will your State be favored of Heaven or disfavored.
This noble young soul, you can have him on either of two
conditions; and on one of them, since he is here in the world,
you must have him. As your ally and coadjutor; or failing that,
as your natural enemy: which shall it be? I consider that every
Government convicts itself of infatuation and futility, or
absolves and justifies itself before God and man, according as it
answers this question. With all sublunary entities, this is the
question of questions. What talent is born to you? How do you
employ that? The crop of spiritual talent that is born to you,
of human nobleness and intellect and heroic faculty, this is
infinitely more important than your crops of cotton or corn, or
wine or herrings or whale-oil, which the Newspapers record with
such anxiety every season. This is not quite counted by seasons,
therefore the Newspapers are silent: but by generations and
centuries, I assure you it becomes amazingly sensible; and
surpasses, as Heaven does Earth, all the corn and wine, and
whale-oil and California bullion, or any other crop you grow. If
that crop cease, the other crops--please to take them also, if
you are anxious about them. That once ceasing, we may shut shop;
for no other crop whatever will stay with us, nor is worth having
if it would.
To promote men of talent, to search and sift the whole society in
every class for men of talent, and joyfully promote them, has not
always been found impossible. In many forms of polity they have
done it, and still do it, to a certain degree. The degree to
which they succeed in doing it marks, as I have said, with very
great accuracy the degree of divine and human worth that is in
them, the degree of success or real ultimate victory they can
expect to have in this world.--Think, for example, of the old
Catholic Church, in its merely terrestrial relations to the
State; and see if your reflections, and contrasts with what now
is, are of an exulting character. Progress of the species has
gone on as with seven-league boots, and in various directions has
shot ahead amazingly, with three cheers from all the world; but
in this direction, the most vital and indispensable, it has
lagged terribly, and has even moved backward, till now it is
quite gone out of sight in clouds of cotton-fuzz and
railway-scrip, and has fallen fairly over the horizon to
rearward!
In those most benighted Feudal societies, full of mere tyrannous
steel Barons, and totally destitute of Tenpound Franchises and
Ballot-boxes, there did nevertheless authentically preach itself
everywhere this grandest of gospels, without which no other
gospel can avail us much, to all souls of men, "Awake ye noble
souls; here is a noble career for you!" I say, everywhere a road
towards promotion, for human nobleness, lay wide open to all men.
The pious soul,--which, if you reflect, will mean the ingenuous
and ingenious, the gifted, intelligent and nobly-aspiring
soul,--such a soul, in whatever rank of life it were born, had
one path inviting it; a generous career, whereon, by human worth
and valor, all earthly heights and Heaven itself were attainable.
In the lowest stratum of social thraldom, nowhere was the noble
soul doomed quite to choke, and die ignobly. The Church, poor
old benighted creature, had at least taken care of that: the
noble aspiring soul, not doomed to choke ignobly in its penuries,
could at least run into the neighboring Convent, and there take
refuge. Education awaited it there; strict training not only to
whatever useful knowledge could be had from writing and reading,
but to obedience, to pious reverence, self-restraint,
annihilation of self,--really to human nobleness in many most
essential respects. No questions asked about your birth,
genealogy, quantity of money-capital or the like; the one
question was, "Is there some human nobleness in you, or is there
not?" The poor neat-herd's son, if he were a Noble of Nature,
might rise to Priesthood, to High-priesthood, to the top of this
world,--and best of all, he had still high Heaven lying high
enough above him, to keep his head steady, on whatever height or
in whatever depth his way might lie!
A thrice-glorious arrangement, when I reflect on it; most
salutary to all high and low interests; a truly human
arrangement. You made the born noble yours, welcoming him as
what he was, the Sent of Heaven: you did not force him either to
die or become your enemy; idly neglecting or suppressing him as
what he was not, a thing of no worth. You accepted the blessed
light; and in the shape of infernal lightning it needed not
to visit you. How, like an immense mine-shaft through the dim
oppressed strata of society, this Institution of the Priesthood
ran; opening, from the lowest depths towards all heights and
towards Heaven itself, a free road of egress and emergence
towards virtuous nobleness, heroism and well-doing, for every
born man. This we may call the living lungs and
blood-circulation of those old Feudalisms. When I think of that
immeasurable all-pervading lungs; present in every corner of
human society, every meanest hut a cell of said lungs; inviting
whatsoever noble pious soul was born there to the path that was
noble for him; and leading thereby sometimes, if he were worthy,
to be the Papa of Christendom, and Commander of all Kings,--I
perceive how the old Christian society continued healthy, vital,
and was strong and heroic. When I contrast this with the noble
aims now held out to noble souls born in remote huts, or beyond
the verge of Palace-Yard; and think of what your Lordship has
done in the way of making priests and papas,--I see a society
without lungs, fast wheezing itself to death, in horrid
convulsions; and deserving to die.
Over Europe generally in these years, I consider that the State
has died, has fairly coughed its last in street musketry, and
fallen down dead, incapable of any but galvanic life
henceforth,--owing to this same fatal want of lungs, which
includes all other wants for a State. And furthermore that it
will never come alive again, till it contrive to get such
indispensable vital apparatus; the outlook toward which
consummation is very distant in most communities of Europe. If
you let it come to death or suspended animation in States, the
case is very bad! Vain to call in universal-suffrage parliaments
at that stage: the universal-suffrage parliaments cannot give
you any breath of life, cannot find any wisdom for you; by long
impiety, you have let the supply of noble human wisdom die out;
and the wisdom that now courts your universal suffrages is
beggarly human attorneyism or sham-wisdom, which is not an
insight into the Laws of God's Universe, but into the laws of
hungry Egoism and the Devil's Chicane, and can in the end profit
no community or man.
No; the kind of heroes that come mounted on the shoulders of the
universal suffrage, and install themselves as Prime Ministers and
healing Statesmen by force of able editorship, do not bid very
fair to bring Nations back to the ways of God. Eloquent
high-lacquered pinchbeck specimens these, expert in the arts of
Belial mainly;--fitter to be markers at some exceedingly
expensive billiard-table than sacred chief-priests of men!
"Greeks of the Lower Empire;" with a varnish of parliamentary
rhetoric; and, I suppose, this other great gift, toughness of
character,--proof that they have persevered in their Master's
service. Poor wretches, their industry is mob-worship,
place-worship, parliamentary intrigue, and the multiplex art of
tongue-fence: flung into that bad element, there they swim for
decades long, throttling and wrestling one another according to
their strength,--and the toughest or luckiest gets to land, and
becomes Premier. A more entirely unbeautiful class of Premiers
was never raked out of the ooze, and set on high places, by any
ingenuity of man. Dame Dubarry's petticoat was a better
seine-net for fishing out Premiers than that. Let all Nations
whom necessity is driving towards that method, take warning in
time!
Alas, there is, in a manner, but one Nation that can still take
warning! In England alone of European Countries the State yet
survives; and might help itself by better methods. In England
heroic wisdom is not yet dead, and quite replaced by attorneyism:
the honest beaver faculty yet abounds with us, the heroic manful
faculty shows itself also to the observant eye, not dead but
dangerously sleeping. I said there were many kings in England:
if these can yet be rallied into strenuous activity, and set to
govern England in Downing Street and elsewhere, which their
function always is,--then England can be saved from anarchies and
universal suffrages; and that Apotheosis of Attorneyism, blackest
of terrestrial curses, may be spared us. If these cannot, the
other issue, in such forms as may be appropriate to us, is
inevitable. What escape is there? England must conform to the
eternal laws of life, or England too must die!
England with the largest mass of real living interests ever
intrusted to a Nation; and with a mass of extinct imaginary and
quite dead interests piled upon it to the very Heavens, and
encumbering it from shore to shore,--does reel and stagger
ominously in these years; urged by the Divine Silences and the
Eternal Laws to take practical hold of its living interests and
manage them: and clutching blindly into its venerable extinct
and imaginary interests, as if that were still the way to do it.
England must contrive to manage its living interests, and quit
its dead ones and their methods, or else depart from its place in
this world. Surely England is called as no Nation ever was, to
summon out its kings, and set them to that high work!--Huge
inorganic England, nigh choked under the exuviae of a thousand
years, and blindly sprawling amid chartisms, ballot-boxes,
prevenient graces, and bishops' nightmares, must, as the
preliminary and commencement of organization, learn to breathe
again,--get "lungs" for herself again, as we defined it. That is
imperative upon her: she too will die, otherwise, and cough her
last upon the streets some day;--how can she continue living? To
enfranchise whatsoever of Wisdom is born in England, and set that
to the sacred task of coercing and amending what of Folly is born
in England: Heaven's blessing is purchasable by that; by not
that, only Heaven's curse is purchasable. The reform
contemplated, my liberal friends perceive, is a truly radical
one; no ballot-box ever went so deep into the roots: a radical,
most painful, slow and difficult, but most indispensable reform
of reforms!
How short and feeble an approximation to these high ulterior
results, the best Reform of Downing Street, presided over by the
fittest Statesman one can imagine to exist at present, would be,
is too apparent to me. A long time yet till we get our living
interests put under due administration, till we get our dead
interests handsomely dismissed. A long time yet till, by
extensive change of habit and ways of thinking and acting, we
get living "lungs" for ourselves! Nevertheless, by Reform of
Downing Street, we do begin to breathe: we do start in the way
towards that and all high results. Nor is there visible to me
any other way. Blessed enough were the way once entered on;
could we, in our evil days, but see the noble enterprise begun,
and fairly in progress!
What the "New Downing Street" can grow to, and will and must if
England is to have a Downing Street beyond a few years longer, it
is far from me, in my remote watch-tower, to say with precision.
A Downing Street inhabited by the gifted of the intellects of
England; directing all its energies upon the real and living
interests of England, and silently but incessantly, in the
alembics of the place, burning up the extinct imaginary
interests of England, that we may see God's sky a little plainer
overhead, and have all of us a great accession of "heroic wisdom"
to dispose of: such a Downing Street--to draw the plan of it,
will require architects; many successive architects and builders
will be needed there. Let not editors, and remote unprofessional
persons, interfere too much!--Change in the present edifice,
however, radical change, all men can discern to be inevitable;
and even, if there shall not worse swiftly follow, to be
imminent. Outlines of the future edifice paint themselves
against the sky (to men that still have a sky, and are above the
miserable London fogs of the hour); noble elements of new State
Architecture, foreshadows of a new Downing Street for the New Era
that is come. These with pious hope all men can see; and it is
good that all men, with whatever faculty they have, were
earnestly looking thitherward;--trying to get above the fogs,
that they might look thitherward!
Among practical men the idea prevails that Government can do
nothing but "keep the peace." They say all higher tasks are
unsafe for it, impossible for it,--and in fine not necessary for
it or for us. On this footing a very feeble Downing Street might
serve the turn!--I am well aware that Government, for a long time
past, has taken in hand no other public task, and has professed
to have no other, but that of keeping the peace. This public
task, and the private one of ascertaining whether Dick or Jack
was to do it, have amply filled the capabilities of Government
for several generations now. Hard tasks both, it would appear.
In accomplishing the first, for example, have not heaven-born
Chancellors of the Exchequer had to shear us very bare; and to
leave an overplus of Debt, or of fleeces shorn before they are
grown, justly esteemed among the wonders of the world? Not a
first-rate keeping of the peace, this, we begin to surmise! At
least it seems strange to us.
For we, and the overwhelming majority of all our acquaintances,
in this Parish and Nation and the adjacent Parishes and Nations,
are profoundly conscious to ourselves of being by nature
peaceable persons; following our necessary industries; without
wish, interest or faintest intention to cut the skin of any
mortal, to break feloniously into his industrial premises, or do
any injustice to him at all. Because indeed, independent of
Government, there is a thing called conscience, and we dare not.
So that it cannot but appear to us, "the peace," under dexterous
management, might be very much more easily kept, your Lordship;
nay, we almost think, if well let alone, it would in a measure
keep itself among such a set of persons! And how it happens
that when a poor hardworking creature of us has laboriously
earned sixpence, the Government comes in, and (as some compute)
says, "I will thank you for threepence of that, as per account,
for getting you peace to spend the other threepence," our
amazement begins to be considerable,--and I think results will
follow from it by and by. Not the most dexterous keeping of the
peace, your Lordship, unless it be more difficult to do than
appears!
Our domestic peace, we cannot but perceive, as good as keeps
itself. Here and there a select Equitable Person, appointed by
the Public for that end, clad in ermine, and backed by certain
companies of blue Police, is amply adequate, without immoderate
outlay in money or otherwise, to keep down the few exceptional
individuals of the scoundrel kind; who, we observe, by the nature
of them, are always weak and inconsiderable. And as to foreign
peace, really all Europe, now especially with so many railroads,
public journals, printed books, penny-post, bills of exchange,
and continual intercourse and mutual dependence, is more and more
becoming (so to speak) one Parish; the Parishioners of which
being, as we ourselves are, in immense majority peaceable
hard-working people, could, if they were moderately well guided,
have almost no disposition to quarrel. Their economic interests
are one, "To buy in the cheapest market, and sell in the
dearest;" their faith, any religious faith they have, is one,
"To annihilate shams--by all methods, street-barricades
included." Why should they quarrel? The Czar of Russia, in the
Eastern parts of the Parish, may have other notions; but he knows
too well he must keep them to himself. He, if he meddled with the
Western parts, and attempted anywhere to crush or disturb that
sacred Democratic Faith of theirs, is aware there would rise from
a hundred and fifty million human throats such a Hymn of the
Marseillaise as was never heard before; and England, France,
Germany, Poland, Hungary, and the Nine Kingdoms, hurling
themselves upon him in never-imagined fire of vengeance, would
swiftly reduce his Russia and him to a strange situation!
Wherefore he forbears,--and being a person of some sense, will
long forbear. In spite of editorial prophecy, the Czar of Russia
does not disturb our night's rest. And with the other parts of
the Parish our dreams and our thoughts are of anything but of
fighting, or of the smallest need to fight.
For keeping of the peace, a thing highly desirable to us , we
strive to be grateful to your Lordship. Intelligible to us,
also, your Lordship's reluctance to get out of the old routine.
But we beg to say farther, that peace by itself has no feet to
stand upon, and would not suit us even if it had. Keeping of the
peace is the function of a policeman, and but a small fraction of
that of any Government, King or Chief of men. Are not all men
bound, and the Chief of men in the name of all, to do properly
this: To see, so far as human effort under pain of eternal
reprobation can, God's Kingdom incessantly advancing here below,
and His will done on Earth as it is in Heaven? On Sundays your
Lordship knows this well; forgot it not on week-days. I assure
you it is forevermore a fact. That is the immense divine and
never-ending task which is laid on every man, and with
unspeakable increase of emphasis on every Government or
Commonwealth of men. Your Lordship, that is the basis upon which
peace and all else depends! That basis once well lost, there is
no peace capable of being kept,--the only peace that could then
be kept is that of the churchyard. Your Lordship may depend on
it, whatever thing takes upon it the name of Sovereign or
Government in an English Nation such as this will have to get out
of that old routine; and set about keeping something very
different from the peace, in these days!
Truly it is high time that same beautiful notion of No-Government
should take itself away. The world is daily rushing towards
wreck, while that lasts. If your Government is to be a
Constituted Anarchy, what issue can it have? Our one interest in
such Government is, that it would be kind enough to cease and go
its ways, before the inevitable arrive. The question, Who is
to float atop no-whither upon the popular vertexes, and act that
sorry character, "carcass of the drowned ass upon the
mud-deluge"? is by no means an important one for almost
anybody,--hardly even for the drowned ass himself. Such drowned
ass ought to ask himself, If the function is a sublime one? For
him too, though he looks sublime to the vulgar and floats atop, a
private situation, down out of sight in his natural ooze, would
be a luckier one.
Crabbe, speaking of constitutional philosophies, faith in the
ballot-box and such like, has this indignant passage: "If any
voice of deliverance or resuscitation reach us, in this our low
and all but lost estate, sunk almost beyond plummet's sounding in
the mud of Lethe, and oblivious of all noble objects, it will be
an intimation that we must put away all this abominable nonsense,
and understand, once more, that Constituted Anarchy, with however
many ballot-boxes, caucuses, and hustings beer-barrels, is a
continual offence to gods and men. That to be governed by small
men is not only a misfortune, but it is a curse and a sin; the
effect, and alas the cause also, of all manner of curses and
sins. That to profess subjection to phantasms, and pretend to
accept guidance from fractional parts of tailors, is what
Smelfungus in his rude dialect calls it, 'a damned lie,' and
nothing other. A lie which, by long use and wont, we have grown
accustomed to, and do not the least feel to be a lie, having
spoken and done it continually everywhere for such a long time
past;--but has Nature grown to accept it as a veracity, think
you, my friend? Have the Parcae fallen asleep, because you
wanted to make money in the City? Nature at all moments knows
well that it is a lie; and that, like all lies, it is cursed and
damned from the beginning.
"Even so, ye indigent millionnaires, and miserable bankrupt
populations rolling in gold,--whose note-of-hand will go to any
length in Threadneedle Street, and to whom in Heaven's Bank the
stern answer is, 'No effects!' Bankrupt, I say; and Californias
and Eldorados will not save us. And every time we speak such
lie, or do it or look it, as we have been incessantly doing, and
many of us with clear consciousness, for about a hundred and
fifty years now, Nature marks down the exact penalty against us.
'Debtor to so much lying: forfeiture of existing stock of worth
to such extent;--approach to general damnation by so much.' Till
now, as we look round us over a convulsed anarchic Europe, and at
home over an anarchy not yet convulsed, but only heaving towards
convulsion, and to judge by the Mosaic sweating-establishments,
cannibal Connaughts and other symptoms, not far from convulsion
now, we seem to have pretty much exhausted our accumulated
stock of worth; and unless money's 'worth' and bullion at the
Bank will save us, to be rubbing very close upon that ulterior
bourn which I do not like to name again!
"On behalf of nearly twenty-seven millions of my
fellow-countrymen, sunk deep in Lethean sleep, with mere
owl-dreams of Political Economy and mice-catching, in this
pacific thrice-infernal slush-element; and also of certain select
thousands, and hundreds and units, awakened or beginning to
awaken from it, and with horror in their hearts perceiving where
they are, I beg to protest, and in the name of God to say, with
poor human ink, desirous much that I had divine thunder to say it
with, Awake, arise,--before you sink to death eternal! Unnamable
destruction, and banishment to Houndsditch and Gehenna, lies in
store for all Nations that, in angry perversity or brutal torpor
and owlish blindness, neglect the eternal message of the gods,
and vote for the Worse while the Better is there. Like owls they
say, 'Barabbas will do; any orthodox Hebrew of the Hebrews, and
peaceable believer in M'Croudy and the Faith of Leave-alone will
do: the Right Honorable Minimus is well enough; he shall be our
Maximus, under him it will be handy to catch mice, and Owldom
shall continue a flourishing empire. '"
One thing is undeniable, and must be continually repeated till it
get to be understood again: Of all constitutions, forms of
government, and political methods among men, the question to be
asked is even this, What kind of man do you set over us? All
questions are answered in the answer to this. Another thing is
worth attending to: No people or populace, with never such
ballot-boxes, can select such man for you; only the man of worth
can recognize worth in men;--to the commonplace man of no or of
little worth, you, unless you wish to be misled, need not apply
on such an occasion. Those poor Tenpound Franchisers of yours,
they are not even in earnest; the poor sniffing sniggering
Honorable Gentlemen they send to Parliament are as little so.
Tenpound Franchisers full of mere beer and balderdash; Honorable
Gentlemen come to Parliament as to an Almack's series of evening
parties, or big cockmain (battle of all the cocks) very amusing
to witness and bet upon: what can or could men in that
predicament ever do for you? Nay, if they were in life-and-death
earnest, what could it avail you in such a case? I tell you, a
million blockheads looking authoritatively into one man of what
you call genius, or noble sense, will make nothing but nonsense
out of him and his qualities, and his virtues and defects, if
they look till the end of time. He understands them, sees what
they are; but that they should understand him, and see with
rounded outline what his limits are,--this, which would mean that
they are bigger than he, is forever denied them. Their one good
understanding of him is that they at last should loyally say, "We
do not quite understand thee; we perceive thee to be nobler and
wiser and bigger than we, and will loyally follow thee."
The question therefore arises, Whether, since reform of
parliament and such like have done so little in that respect, the
problem might not be with some hope attacked in the direct
manner? Suppose all our Institutions, and Public Methods of
Procedure, to continue for the present as they are; and suppose
farther a Reform Premier, and the English Nation once awakening
under him to a due sense of the infinite importance, nay the
vital necessity there is of getting able and abler men:--might
not some heroic wisdom, and actual "ability" to do what must be
done, prove discoverable to said Premier; and so the
indispensable Heaven's-blessing descend to us from above,
since none has yet sprung from below? From above we shall have
to try it; the other is exhausted,--a hopeless method that! The
utmost passion of the house-inmates, ignorant of masonry and
architecture, cannot avail to cure the house of smoke: not if
they vote and agitate forever, and bestir themselves to the
length even of street-barricades, will the smoke in the least
abate: how can it? Their passion exercised in such ways, till
Doomsday, will avail them nothing. Let their passion rage
steadily against the existing major-domos to this effect, "Find
us men skilled in house-building, acquainted with the laws of
atmospheric suction, and capable to cure smoke;" something might
come of it! In the lucky circumstance of having one man of real
intellect and courage to put at the head of the movement, much
would come of it;--a New Downing Street, fit for the British
Nation and its bitter necessities in this Now Era, would come;
and from that, in answer to continuous sacred fidelity and
valiant toil, all good whatsoever would gradually come.
Of the Continental nuisance called "Bureaucracy,"--if this should
alarm any reader,--I can see no risk or possibility in England.
Democracy is hot enough here, fierce enough; it is perennial,
universal, clearly invincible among us henceforth. No danger it
should let itself be flung in chains by sham secretaries of the
Pedant species, and accept their vile Age of Pinchbeck for its
Golden Age! Democracy clamors, with its Newspapers, its
Parliaments, and all its twenty-seven million throats,
continually in this Nation forevermore. I remark, too, that, the
unconscious purport of all its clamors is even this, "Find us men
skilled,"--make a New Downing Street, fit for the New Era!
Of the Foreign Office, in its reformed state, we have not much to
say. Abolition of imaginary work, and replacement of it by real,
is on all hands understood to be very urgent there. Large
needless expenditures of money, immeasurable ditto of hypocrisy
and grimace; embassies, protocols, worlds of extinct traditions,
empty pedantries, foul cobwebs:--but we will by no means apply
the "live coal" of our witty friend; the Foreign Office will
repent, and not be driven to suicide! A truer time will come for
the Continental Nations too: Authorities based on truth, and on
the silent or spoken Worship of Human Nobleness, will again get
themselves established there; all Sham-Authorities, and
consequent Real-Anarchies based on universal suffrage and the
Gospel according to George Sand, being put away; and noble
action, heroic new-developments of human faculty and industry,
and blessed fruit as of Paradise getting itself conquered from
the waste battle-field of the chaotic elements, will once more,
there as here, begin to show themselves.
When the Continental Nations have once got to the bottom of
their Augean Stable, and begun to have real enterprises based
on the eternal facts again, our Foreign Office may again have
extensive concerns with them. And at all times, and even now,
there will remain the question to be sincerely put and wisely
answered, What essential concern has the British Nation with
them and their enterprises? Any concern at all, except that of
handsomely keeping apart from them? If so, what are the methods
of best managing it?--At present, as was said, while Red Republic
but clashes with foul Bureaucracy; and Nations, sunk in blind
ignavia, demand a universal-suffrage Parliament to heal their
wretchedness; and wild Anarchy and Phallus-Worship struggle with
Sham-Kingship and extinct or galvanized Catholicism; and in the
Cave of the Winds all manner of rotten waifs and wrecks are
hurled against each other,--our English interest in the
controversy, however huge said controversy grow, is quite
trifling; we have only in a handsome manner to say to it:
"Tumble and rage along, ye rotten waifs and wrecks; clash and
collide as seems fittest to you; and smite each other into
annihilation at your own good pleasure. In that huge conflict,
dismal but unavoidable, we, thanks to our heroic ancestors,
having got so far ahead of you, have now no interest at all. Our
decided notion is, the dead ought to bury their dead in such a
case: and so we have the honor to be, with distinguished
consideration, your entirely devoted,--FLIMNAP, SEC. FOREIGN
DEPARTMENT."--I really think Flimnap, till truer times come,
ought to treat much of his work in this way: cautious to give
offence to his neighbors; resolute not to concern himself in any
of their self-annihilating operations whatsoever.
Foreign wars are sometimes unavoidable. We ourselves, in the
course of natural merchandising and laudable business, have now
and then got into ambiguous situations; into quarrels which
needed to be settled, and without fighting would not settle.
Sugar Islands, Spice Islands, Indias, Canadas, these, by the real
decree of Heaven, were ours; and nobody would or could believe
it, till it was tried by cannon law, and so proved. Such cases
happen. In former times especially, owing very much to want of
intercourse and to the consequent mutual ignorance, there did
occur misunderstandings: and therefrom many foreign wars, some of
them by no means unnecessary. With China, or some distant
country, too unintelligent of us and too unintelligible to us,
there still sometimes rises necessary occasion for a war.
Nevertheless wars--misunderstandings that get to the length of
arguing themselves out by sword and cannon--have, in these late
generations of improved intercourse, been palpably becoming less
and less necessary; have in a manner become superfluous, if we
had a little wisdom, and our Foreign Office on a good footing.
Of European wars I really hardly remember any, since Oliver
Cromwell's last Protestant or Liberation war with Popish
antichristian Spain some two hundred years ago, to which I for my
own part could have contributed my life with any heartiness, or
in fact would have subscribed money itself to any considerable
amount. Dutch William, a man of some heroism, did indeed get
into troubles with Louis Fourteenth; and there rested still some
shadow of Protestant Interest, and question of National and
individual Independence, over those wide controversies; a little
money and human enthusiasm was still due to Dutch William.
Illustrious Chatham also, not to speak of his Manilla ransoms and
the like, did one thing: assisted Fritz of Prussia, a brave man
and king (almost the only sovereign King I have known since
Cromwell's time) like to be borne down by ignoble men and
sham-kings; for this let illustrious Chatham too have a little
money and human enthusiasm,--a little, by no means much. But
what am I to say of heaven-born Pitt the son of Chatham? England
sent forth her fleets and armies; her money into every country;
money as if the heaven-born Chancellor had got a Fortunatus'
purse; as if this Island had become a volcanic fountain of gold,
or new terrestrial sun capable of radiating mere guineas. The
result of all which, what was it? Elderly men can remember the
tar-barrels burnt for success and thrice-immortal victory in the
business; and yet what result had we? The French Revolution, a
Fact decreed in the Eternal Councils, could not be put down: the
result was, that heaven-born Pitt had actually been fighting (as
the old Hebrews would have said) against the Lord,--that the Laws
of Nature were stronger than Pitt. Of whom therefore there
remains chiefly his unaccountable radiation of guineas, for the
gratitude of posterity. Thank you for nothing,--for eight
hundred millions less than nothing!
Our War Offices, Admiralties, and other Fighting Establishments,
are forcing themselves on everybody's attention at this time.
Bull grumbles audibly: "The money you have cost me these
five-and-thirty years, during which you have stood elaborately
ready to fight at any moment, without at any moment being called
to fight, is surely an astonishing sum. The National Debt itself
might have been half paid by that money, which has all gone in
pipe-clay and blank cartridges! "Yes, Mr. Bull, the money can be
counted in hundreds of millions; which certainly is
something:--but the "strenuously organized idleness," and what
mischief that amounts to,--have you computed it? A perpetual
solecism, and blasphemy (of its sort), set to march openly among
us, dressed in scarlet! Bull, with a more and more sulky tone,
demands that such solecism be abated; that these Fighting
Establishments be as it were disbanded, and set to do some work
in the Creation, since fighting there is now none for them. This
demand is irrefragably just, is growing urgent too; and yet this
demand cannot be complied with,--not yet while the State grounds
itself on unrealities, and Downing Street continues what it is.
The old Romans made their soldiers work during intervals of war.
The New Downing Street too, we may predict, will have less and
less tolerance for idleness on the part of soldiers or others.
Nay the New Downing Street, I foresee, when once it has got its
"Industrial Regiments" organized, will make these mainly do its
fighting, what fighting there is; and so save immense sums. Or
indeed, all citizens of the Commonwealth, as is the right and the
interest of every free man in this world, will have themselves
trained to arms; each citizen ready to defend his country with
his own body and soul,--he is not worthy to have a country
otherwise. In a State grounded on veracities, that would be the
rule. Downing Street, if it cannot bethink itself of returning
to the veracities, will have to vanish altogether!
To fight with its neighbors never was, and is now less than ever,
the real trade of England. For far other objects was the English
People created into this world; sent down from the Eternities, to
mark with its history certain spaces in the current of sublunary
Time! Essential, too, that the English People should discover
what its real objects are; and resolutely follow these,
resolutely refusing to follow other than these. The State will
have victory so far as it can do that; so far as it cannot, defeat.
In the New Downing Street, discerning what its real functions
are, and with sacred abhorrence putting away from it what its
functions are not, we can fancy changes enough in Foreign Office,
War Office, Colonial Office, Home Office! Our War-soldiers
Industrial, first of all; doing nobler than Roman works, when
fighting is not wanted of them. Seventy-fours not hanging idly
by their anchors in the Tagus, or off Sapienza (one of the
saddest sights under the sun), but busy, every Seventy-four of
them, carrying over streams of British Industrials to the
immeasurable Britain that lies beyond the sea in every zone of
the world. A State grounding itself on the veracities, not on
the semblances and the injustices: every citizen a soldier for
it. Here would be new real Secretaryships and Ministries, not
for foreign war and diplomacy, but for domestic peace and
utility. Minister of Works; Minister of Justice,--clearing his
Model Prisons of their scoundrelism; shipping his scoundrels
wholly abroad, under hard and just drill-sergeants (hundreds of
such stand wistfully ready for you, these thirty years, in the
Rag-and-Famish Club and elsewhere!) into fertile desert
countries; to make railways,--one big railway (says the Major
[Footnote: Major Carmichael Smith; see his Pamphlets on this
subject]) quite across America; fit to employ all the able-bodied
Scoundrels and efficient Half-pay Officers in
Nature!
Lastly,--or rather firstly, and as the preliminary of all, would
there not be a Minister of Education? Minister charged to get
this English People taught a little, at his and our peril!
Minister of Education; no longer dolefully embayed amid the wreck
of moribund "religions," but clear ahead of all that; steering,
free and piously fearless, towards his divine goal under the
eternal stars!--O heaven, and are these things forever
impossible, then? Not a whit. To-morrow morning they might all
begin to be, and go on through blessed centuries realizing
themselves, if it were not that--alas, if it were not that we are
most of us insincere persons, sham talking-machines and hollow
windy fools! Which it is not "impossible" that we should cease
to be, I hope?
Constitutions for the Colonies are now on the anvil; the
discontented Colonies are all to be cured of their miseries by
Constitutions. Whether that will cure their miseries, or only
operate as a Godfrey's-cordial to stop their whimpering, and in
the end worsen all their miseries, may be a sad doubt to us. One
thing strikes a remote spectator in these Colonial questions:
the singular placidity with which the British Statesman at this
time, backed by M'Croudy and the British moneyed classes, is
prepared to surrender whatsoever interest Britain, as foundress
of those establishments, might pretend to have in the decision.
"If you want to go from us, go; we by no means want you to stay:
you cost us money yearly, which is scarce; desperate quantities
of trouble too: why not go, if you wish it?" Such is the humor
of the British Statesman, at this time.--Men clear for rebellion,
"annexation" as they call it, walk openly abroad in our American
Colonies; found newspapers, hold platform palaverings. From
Canada there comes duly by each mail a regular statistic of
Annexationism: increasing fast in this quarter, diminishing in
that;--Majesty's Chief Governor seeming to take it as a perfectly
open question; Majesty's Chief Governor in fact seldom appearing
on the scene at all, except to receive the impact of a few rotten
eggs on occasion, and then duck in again to his private
contemplations. And yet one would think the Majesty's Chief
Governor ought to have a kind of interest in the thing? Public
liberty is carried to a great length in some portions of her
Majesty's dominions. But the question, "Are we to continue
subjects of her Majesty, or start rebelling against her? So many
as are for rebelling, hold up your hands!" Here is a public
discussion of a very extraordinary nature to be going on under
the nose of a Governor of Canada. How the Governor of Canada,
being a British piece of flesh and blood, and not a Canadian
lumber-log of mere pine and rosin, can stand it, is not very
conceivable at first view. He does it, seemingly, with the
stoicism of a Zeno. It is a constitutional sight like few.
And yet an instinct deeper than the Gospel of M'Croudy teaches
all men that Colonies are worth something to a country! That if,
under the present Colonial Office, they are a vexation to us and
themselves, some other Colonial Office can and must be contrived
which shall render them a blessing; and that the remedy will be
to contrive such a Colonial Office or method of administration,
and by no means to cut the Colonies loose. Colonies are not to be
picked off the street every day; not a Colony of them but has
been bought dear, well purchased by the toil and blood of those
we have the honor to be sons of; and we cannot just afford to cut
them away because M'Croudy finds the present management of them
cost money. The present management will indeed require to be cut
away;--but as for the Colonies, we purpose through Heaven's
blessing to retain them a while yet! Shame on us for unworthy
sons of brave fathers if we do not. Brave fathers, by valiant
blood and sweat, purchased for us, from the bounty of Heaven,
rich possessions in all zones; and we, wretched imbeciles, cannot
do the function of administering them? And because the accounts
do not stand well in the ledger, our remedy is, not to take shame
to ourselves, and repent in sackcloth and ashes, and amend our
beggarly imbecilities and insincerities in that as in other
departments of our business, but to fling the business overboard,
and declare the business itself to be bad? We are a hopeful set
of heirs to a big fortune! It does not suit our Manton
gunneries, grouseshootings, mousings in the City; and like
spirited young gentlemen we will give it up, and let the
attorneys take it?
Is there no value, then, in human things, but what can write
itself down in the cash-ledger? All men know, and even M'Croudy
in his inarticulate heart knows, that to men and Nations there
are invaluable values which cannot be sold for money at all.
George Robins is great; but he is not onmipotent. George Robins
cannot quite sell Heaven and Earth by auction, excellent though
he be at the business. Nay, if M'Croudy offered his own life for
sale in Threadneedle Street, would anybody buy it? Not I, for
one. "Nobody bids: pass on to the next lot," answers Robins.
And yet to M'Croudy this unsalable lot is worth all the
Universe:--nay, I believe, to us also it is worth something; good
monitions, as to several things, do lie in this Professor of the
dismal science; and considerable sums even of money, not to speak
of other benefit, will yet come out of his life and him, for
which nobody bids! Robins has his own field where he reigns
triumphant; but to that we will restrict him with iron limits;
and neither Colonies nor the lives of Professors, nor other such
invaluable objects shall come under his hammer.
Bad state of the ledger will demonstrate that your way of dealing
with your Colonies is absurd, and urgently in want of reform; but
to demonstrate that the Empire itself must be dismembered to
bring the ledger straight? Oh never. Something else than the
ledger must intervene to do that. Why does not England repudiate
Ireland, and insist on the "Repeal," instead of prohibiting it
under death-penalties? Ireland has never been a paying
speculation yet, nor is it like soon to be! Why does not
Middlesex repudiate Surrey, and Chelsea Kensington, and each
county and each parish, and in the end each individual set up for
himself and his cash-box, repudiating the other and his, because
their mutual interests have got into an irritating course? They
must change the course, seek till they discover a soothing one;
that is the remedy, when limbs of the same body come to irritate
one another. Because the paltry tatter of a garment, reticulated
for you out of thrums and listings in Downing Street, ties foot
and hand together in an intolerable manner, will you relieve
yourself by cutting off the hand or the foot? You will cut off
the paltry tatter of a pretended body-coat, I think, and fling
that to the nettles; and imperatively require one that fits your
size better.
Miserabler theory than that of money on the ledger being the
primary rule for Empires, or for any higher entity than City owls
and their mice-catching, cannot well be propounded. And I would
by no means advise Felicissimus, ill at ease on his
high-trotting and now justly impatient Sleswicker, to let the
poor horse in its desperation go in that direction for a
momentary solace. If by lumber-log Governors, by Godfrey's
cordial Constitutions or otherwise, be contrived to cut off the
Colonies or any real right the big British Empire has in her
Colonies, both he and the British Empire will bitterly repent it
one day! The Sleswicker, relieved in ledger for a moment, will
find that it is wounded in heart and honor forever; and the
turning of its wild forehoofs upon Felicissimus as he lies in the
ditch combed off, is not a thing I like to think of! Britain,
whether it be known to Felicissimus or not, has other tasks
appointed her in God's Universe than the making of money; and woe
will betide her if she forget those other withal. Tasks,
colonial and domestic, which are of an eternally divine nature,
and compared with which all money, and all that is procurable by
money, are in strict arithmetic an imponderable quantity, have
been assigned this Nation; and they also at last are coming upon
her again, clamorous, abstruse, inevitable, much to her
bewilderment just now!
This poor Nation, painfully dark about said tasks and the way of
doing them, means to keep its Colonies nevertheless, as things
which somehow or other must have a value, were it better seen
into. They are portions of the general Earth, where the children
of Britain now dwell; where the gods have so far sanctioned their
endeavor, as to say that they have a right to dwell. England
will not readily admit that her own children are worth nothing
but to be flung out of doors! England looking on her Colonies
can say: "Here are lands and seas, spice-lands, corn-lands,
timber-lands, overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by
many-sounding seas; wide spaces of the Maker's building, fit for
the cradle yet of mighty Nations and their Sciences and Heroisms.
Fertile continents still inhabited by wild beasts are mine, into
which all the distressed populations of Europe might pour
themselves, and make at once an Old World and a New World human.
By the eternal fiat of the gods, this must yet one day be; this,
by all the Divine Silences that rule this Universe, silent to
fools, eloquent and awful to the hearts of the wise, is
incessantly at this moment, and at all moments, commanded to
begin to be. Unspeakable deliverance, and new destiny of
thousand-fold expanded manfulness for all men, dawns out of the
Future here. To me has fallen the godlike task of initiating all
that: of me and of my Colonies, the abstruse Future asks, Are
you wise enough for so sublime a destiny? Are you too foolish?"
That you ask advice of whatever wisdom is to be had in the
Colony, and even take note of what unwisdom is in it, and
record that too as an existing fact, will certainly be very
advantageous. But I suspect the kind of Parliament that will
suit a Colony is much of a secret just now! Mr. Wakefield, a
democratic man in all fibres of him, and acquainted with
Colonial Socialities as few are, judges that the franchise for
your Colonial Parliament should be decidedly select, and advises
a high money-qualification; as there is in all Colonies a
fluctuating migratory mass, not destitute of money, but very much
so of loyalty, permanency, or civic availability; whom it is
extremely advantageous not to consult on what you are about
attempting for the Colony or Mother Country. This I can well
believe;--and also that a "high money-qualification," in the
present sad state of human affairs, might be some help to you in
selecting; though whether even that would quite certainly bring
"wisdom," the one thing indispensable, is much a question with
me. It might help, it might help! And if by any means you could
(which you cannot) exclude the Fourth Estate, and indicate
decisively that Wise Advice was the thing wanted here, and
Parliamentary Eloquence was not the thing wanted anywhere just
now,--there might really some light of experience and human
foresight, and a truly valuable benefit, be found for you in such
assemblies.
And there is one thing, too apt to be forgotten, which it much
behooves us to remember: In the Colonies, as everywhere else in
this world, the vital point is not who decides, but what is
decided on! That measures tending really to the best advantage
temporal and spiritual of the Colony be adopted, and strenuously
put in execution; there lies the grand interest of every good
citizen British and Colonial. Such measures, whosoever have
originated and prescribed them, will gradually be sanctioned by
all men and gods; and clamors of every kind in reference to them
may safely to a great extent be neglected, as clamorous merely,
and sure to be transient. Colonial Governor, Colonial Parliament,
whoever or whatever does an injustice, or resolves on an
unwisdom, he is the pernicious object, however parliamentary he
be!
I have known things done, in this or the other Colony, in the
most parliamentary way before now, which carried written on the
brow of them sad symptoms of eternal reprobation; not to be
mistaken, had you painted an inch thick. In Montreal, for
example, at this moment, standing amid the ruins of the "Elgin
Marbles" (as they call the burnt walls of the Parliament House
there), what rational British soul but is forced to institute the
mournfulest constitutional reflection? Some years ago the
Canadas, probably not without materials for discontent, and blown
upon by skilful artists, blazed up into crackling of musketry,
open flame of rebellion; a thing smacking of the gallows in all
countries that pretend to have any "Government." Which flame of
rebellion, had there been no loyal population to fling themselves
upon it at peril of their life, might have ended we know not how.
It ended speedily, in the good way; Canada got a
Godfrey's-cordial Constitution; and for the moment all was
varnished into some kind of feasibility again. A most poor
feasibility; momentary, not lasting, nor like to be of profit to
Canada! For this year, the Canadian most constitutional
Parliament, such a congeries of persons as one can imagine,
decides that the aforesaid flame of rebellion shall not only be
forgotten as per bargain, but that--the loyal population, who
flung their lives upon it and quenched it in the nick of time,
shall pay the rebels their damages! Of this, I believe, on
sadly conclusive evidence, there is no doubt whatever. Such,
when you wash off the constitutional pigments, is the
Death's-head that discloses itself. I can only say, if all the
Parliaments in the world were to vote that such a thing was just,
I should feel painfully constrained to answer, at my peril, "No,
by the Eternal, never!" And I would recommend any British
Governor who might come across that Business, there or here, to
overhaul it again. What the meaning of a Governor, if he is not
to overhaul and control such things, may be, I cannot conjecture.
A Canadian Lumber-log may as well be made Governor. He might
have some cast-metal hand or shoulder-crank (a thing easily
contrivable in Birmingham) for signing his name to Acts of the
Colonial Parliament; he would be a "native of the country" too,
with popularity on that score if on no other;--he is your man, if
you really want a Log Governor!--
I perceive therefore that, besides choosing Parliaments never so
well, the New Colonial Office will have another thing to do:
Contrive to send out a new kind of Governors to the Colonies.
This will be the mainspring of the business; without this the
business will not go at all. An experienced, wise and valiant
British man, to represent the Imperial Interest; he, with such a
speaking or silent Collective Wisdom as he can gather round him
in the Colony, will evidently be the condition of all good
between the Mother Country and it. If you can find such a man,
your point is gained; if you cannot, lost. By him and his
Collective Wisdom all manner of true relations, mutual
interests and duties such as they do exist in fact between Mother
Country and Colony, can be gradually developed into practical
methods and results; and all manner of true and noble successes,
and veracities in the way of governing, be won. Choose well your
Governor;--not from this or that poor section of the Aristocracy,
military, naval, or red-tapist; wherever there are born kings of
men, you had better seek them out, and breed them to this work.
All sections of the British Population will be open to you: and,
on the whole, you must succeed in finding a man fit. And
having found him, I would farther recommend you to keep him some
time! It would be a great improvement to end this present
nomadism of Colonial Governors. Give your Governor due power;
and let him know withal that he is wedded to his enterprise, and
having once well learned it, shall continue with it; that it is
not a Canadian Lumber-log you want there, to tumble upon the
vertexes and sign its name by a Birmingham shoulder-crank, but a
Governor of Men; who, you mean, shall fairly gird himself to his
enterprise, and fail with it and conquer with it, and as it were
live and die with it: he will have much to learn; and having
once learned it, will stay, and turn his knowledge to account.
From this kind of Governor, were you once in the way of finding
him with moderate certainty, from him and his Collective Wisdom,
all good whatsoever might be anticipated. And surely, were the
Colonies once enfranchised from red-tape, and the poor Mother
Country once enfranchised from it; were our idle Seventy-fours
all busy carrying out streams of British Industrials, and those
Scoundrel Regiments all working, under divine drill-sergeants, at
the grand Atlantic and Pacific Junction Railway,--poor Britain
and her poor Colonies might find that they had true relations
to each other: that the Imperial Mother and her
constitutionally obedient Daughters were not a red-tape fiction,
provoking bitter mockery as at present, but a blessed God's-Fact
destined to fill half the world with its fruits one day!
But undoubtedly our grand primary concern is the Home Office, and
its Irish Giant named of Despair. When the Home Office begins
dealing with this Irish Giant, which it is vitally urgent for us
the Home Office should straightway do, it will find its duties
enlarged to a most unexpected extent, and, as it were, altered
from top to bottom. A changed time now when the question is,
What to do with three millions of paupers (come upon you for
food, since you have no work for them) increasing at a frightful
rate per day? Home Office, Parliament, King, Constitution will
find that they have now, if they will continue in this world
long, got a quite immense new question and continually recurring
set of questions. That huge question of the Irish Giant with his
Scotch and English Giant-Progeny advancing open-mouthed upon us,
will, as I calculate, change from top to bottom not the Home
Office only but all manner of Offices and Institutions
whatsoever, and gradually the structure of Society itself. I
perceive, it will make us a new Society, if we are to continue a
Society at all. For the alternative is not, Stay where we are,
or change? But Change, with new wise effort fit for the new
time, to true and wider nobler National Life; or Change, by
indolent folding of the arms, as we are now doing, in horrible
anarchies and convulsions to Dissolution, to National Death, or
Suspended-animation? Suspended-animation itself is a frightful
possibility for Britain: this Anarchy whither all Europe has
preceded us, where all Europe is now weltering, would suit us as
ill as any! The question for the British Nation is: Can we work
our course pacifically, on firm land, into the New Era; or must
it be, for us too, as for all the others, through black abysses
of Anarchy, hardly escaping, if we do with all our struggles
escape, the jaws of eternal Death?
For Pauperism, though it now absorbs its high figure of millions
annually, is by no means a question of money only, but of
infinitely higher and greater than all conceivable money. If our
Chancellor of the Exchequer had a Fortunatus' purse, and
miraculous sacks of Indian meal that would stand scooping from
forever,--I say, even on these terms Pauperism could not be
endured; and it would vitally concern all British Citizens to
abate Pauperism, and never rest till they had ended it again.
Pauperism is the general leakage through every joint of the ship
that it is rotten. Were all men doing their duty, or even
seriously trying to do it, there would be no Pauper. Were the
pretended Captains of the world at all in the habit of
commanding; were the pretended Teachers of the world at all in
the habit of teaching,--of admonishing said Captains among
others, and with sacred zeal apprising them to what place such
neglect was leading,--how could Pauperism exist? Pauperism would
lie far over the horizon; we should be lamenting and denouncing
quite inferior sins of men, which were only tending afar off
towards Pauperism. A true Captaincy; a true Teachership, either
making all men and Captains know and devoutly recognize the
eternal law of things, or else breaking its own heart, and going
about with sackcloth round its loins, in testimony of continual
sorrow and protest, and prophecy of God's vengeance upon such a
course of things: either of these divine equipments would have
saved us; and it is because we have neither of them that we are
come to such a pass!
We may depend upon it, where there is a Pauper, there is a sin;
to make one Pauper there go many sins. Pauperism is our Social
Sin grown manifest; developed from the state of a spiritual
ignobleness, a practical impropriety and base oblivion of duty,
to an affair of the ledger. Here is not now an unheeded sin
against God; here is a concrete ugly bulk of Beggary demanding
that you should buy Indian meal for it. Men of reflection have
long looked with a horror for which there was no response in the
idle public, upon Pauperism; but the quantity of meal it demands
has now awakened men of no reflection to consider it. Pauperism
is the poisonous dripping from all the sins, and putrid
unveracities and god-forgetting greedinesses and devil-serving
cants and jesuitisms, that exist among us. Not one idle Sham
lounging about Creation upon false pretences, upon means which he
has not earned, upon theories which he does not practise, but
yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or other. His sham-work
oozes down; finds at last its issue as human Pauperism,--in a
human being that by those false pretences cannot live. The Idle
Workhouse, now about to burst of overfilling, what is it but the
scandalous poison-tank of drainage from the universal Stygian
quagmire of our affairs? Workhouse Paupers; immortal sons of Adam
rotted into that scandalous condition, subter-slavish, demanding
that you would make slaves of them as an unattainable blessing!
My friends, I perceive the quagmire must be drained, or we cannot
live. And farther, I perceive, this of Pauperism is the corner
where we must begin,--the levels all pointing thitherward, the
possibilities lying all clearly there. On that Problem we shall
find that innumerable things, that all things whatsoever hang.
By courageous steadfast persistence in that, I can foresee
Society itself regenerated. In the course of long strenuous
centuries, I can see the State become what it is actually bound
to be, the keystone of a most real "Organization of Labor,"--and
on this Earth a world of some veracity, and some heroism, once
more worth living in!
The State in all European countries, and in England first of all,
as I hope, will discover that its functions are now, and have
long been, very wide of what the State in old pedant Downing
Streets has aimed at; that the State is, for the present, not a
reality but in great part a dramatic speciosity, expending its
strength in practices and objects fallen many of them quite
obsolete; that it must come a little nearer the true aim again,
or it cannot continue in this world. The "Champion of England"
eased in iron or tin, and "able to mount his horse with little
assistance,"--this Champion and the thousand-fold cousinry of
Phantasms he has, nearly all dead now but still walking as
ghosts, must positively take himself away: who can endure him,
and his solemn trumpetings and obsolete gesticulations, in a Time
that is full of deadly realities, coming open-mouthed upon us?
At Drury Lane, let him play his part, him and his thousand-fold
cousinry; and welcome, so long as any public will pay a shilling
to see him: but on the solid earth, under the extremely earnest
stars, we dare not palter with him, or accept his tomfooleries
any more. Ridiculous they seem to some; horrible they seem to
me: all lies, if one look whence they come and whither they go,
are horrible.
Alas, it will be found, I doubt, that in England more than in any
country, our Public Life and our Private, our State and our
Religion, and all that we do and speak (and the most even of what
we think), is a tissue of half-truths and whole-lies; of
hypocrisies, conventionalisms, worn-out traditionary rags and
cobwebs; such a life-garment of beggarly incredible and
uncredited falsities as no honest souls of Adam's Posterity were
ever enveloped in before. And we walk about in it with a stately
gesture, as if it were some priestly stole or imperial mantle;
not the foulest beggar's gabardine that ever was. "No Englishman
dare believe the truth," says one: "he stands, for these two
hundred years, enveloped in lies of every kind; from nadir to
zenith an ocean of traditionary cant surrounds him as his
life-element. He really thinks the truth dangerous. Poor
wretch, you see him everywhere endeavoring to temper the truth by
taking the falsity along with it, and welding them together; this
he calls 'safe course,' 'moderate course,' and other fine names;
there, balanced between God and the Devil, he thinks he can
serve two masters, and that things will go well with him."
In the cotton-spinning and similar departments our English friend
knows well that truth or God will have nothing to do with the
Devil or falsehood, but will ravel all the web to pieces if you
introduce the Devil or Non-veracity in any form into it: in this
department, therefore, our English friend avoids falsehood. But
in the religious, political, social, moral, and all other
spiritual departments he freely introduces falsehood, nothing
doubting; and has long done so, with a profuseness not elsewhere
met with in the world. The unhappy creature, does he not know,
then, that every lie is accursed, and the parent of mere curses?
That he must think the truth; much more speak it? That, above
all things, by the oldest law of Heaven and Earth which no man
violates with impunity, he must not and shall not wag the tongue
of him except to utter his thought? That there is not a grin or
beautiful acceptable grimace he can execute upon his poor
countenance, but is either an express veracity, the image of what
passes within him; or else is a bit of Devil-worship which he and
the rest of us will have to pay for yet? Alas, the grins he
executes upon his poor mind (which is all tortured into St.
Vitus dances, and ghastly merry-andrewisms, by the practice) are
the most extraordinary this sun ever saw.
We have Puseyisms, black-and-white surplice controversies:--do
not, officially and otherwise, the select of the longest heads in
England sit with intense application and iron gravity, in open
forum, judging of "prevenient grace"? Not a head of them
suspects that it can be improper so to sit, or of the nature of
treason against the Power who gave an Intellect to man;--that it
can be other than the duty of a good citizen to use his god-given
intellect in investigating prevenient grace, supervenient
moonshine, or the color of the Bishop's nightmare, if that
happened to turn up. I consider them far ahead of Cicero's Roman
Augurs with their chicken-bowels: "Behold these divine
chicken-bowels, O Senate and Roman People; the midriff has
fallen eastward!" solemnly intimates one Augur. "By Proserpina
and the triple Hecate!" exclaims the other, "I say the midriff
has fallen to the west!" And they look at one another with the
seriousness of men prepared to die in their opinion,--the
authentic seriousness of men betting at Tattersall's, or about to
receive judgment in Chancery. There is in the Englishman
something great, beyond all Roman greatness, in whatever line you
meet him; even as a Latter-Day Augur he seeks his fellow!--Poor
devil, I believe it is his intense love of peace, and hatred of
breeding discussions which lead no-whither, that has led him
into this sad practice of amalgamating true and false.
He has been at it these two hundred years; and has now carried it
to a terrible length. He couldn't follow Oliver Cromwell in the
Puritan path heavenward, so steep was it, and beset with
thorns,--and becoming uncertain withal. He much preferred, at
that juncture, to go heavenward with his Charles Second and merry
Nell Gwynns, and old decent formularies and good respectable
aristocratic company, for escort; sore he tried, by glorious
restorations, glorious revolutions and so forth, to perfect this
desirable amalgam; hoped always it might be possible;--is only
just now, if even now, beginning to give up the hope; and to see
with wide-eyed horror that it is not at Heaven he is arriving,
but at the Stygian marshes, with their thirty thousand
Needlewomen, cannibal Connaughts, rivers of lamentation,
continual wail of infants, and the yellow-burning gleam of a
Hell-on-Earth!--Bull, my friend, you must strip that astonishing
pontiff-stole, imperial mantle, or whatever you imagine it to be,
which I discern to be a garment of curses, and poisoned
Nessus'-shirt now at last about to take fire upon you; you must
strip that off your poor body, my friend; and, were it only in a
soul's suit of Utilitarian buff, and such belief as that a big
loaf is better than a small one, come forth into contact with
your world, under true professions again, and not false. You
wretched man, you ought to weep for half a century on discovering
what lies you have believed, and what every lie leads to and
proceeds from. O my friend, no honest fellow in this Planet was
ever so served by his cooks before; or has eaten such quantities
and qualities of dirt as you have been made to do, for these two
centuries past. Arise, my horribly maltreated yet still beloved
Bull; steep yourself in running water for a long while, my
friend; and begin forthwith in every conceivable direction,
physical and spiritual, the long-expected Scavenger Age.
Many doctors have you had, my poor friend; but I perceive it is
the Water-Cure alone that will help you: a complete course of
scavengerism is the thing you need! A new and veritable
heart-divorce of England from the Babylonish woman, who is
Jesuitism and Unveracity, and dwells not at Rome now, but under
your own nose and everywhere; whom, and her foul worship of
Phantasms and Devils, poor England had once divorced, with a
divine heroism not forgotten yet, and well worth remembering now:
a clearing-out of Church and State from the unblessed host of
Phantasms which have too long nestled thick there, under those
astonishing "Defenders of the Faith,"--Defenders of the
Hypocrisies, the spiritual Vampires and obscene Nightmares, under
which England lies in syncope;--this is what you need; and if you
cannot get it, you must die, my poor friend!
Like people, like priest. Priest, King, Home Office, all manner
of establishments and offices among a people bear a striking
resemblance to the people itself. It is because Bull has been
eating so much dirt that his Home Offices have got into such a
shockingly dirty condition,--the old pavements of them quite gone
out of sight and out of memory, and nothing but mountains of
long-accumulated dung in which the poor cattle are sprawling and
tumbling. Had his own life been pure, had his own daily conduct
been grounding itself on the clear pavements or actual beliefs
and veracities, would he have let his Home Offices come to such a
pass? Not in Downing Street only, but in all other thoroughfares
and arenas and spiritual or physical departments of his
existence, running water and Herculean scavengerism have become
indispensable, unless the poor man is to choke in his own
exuviae, and die the sorrowfulest death.
If the State could once get back to the real sight of its
essential function, and with religious resolution begin doing
that, and putting away its multifarious imaginary functions, and
indignantly casting out these as mere dung and insalubrious
horror and abomination (which they are), what a promise of reform
were there! The British Home Office, surely this and its
kindred Offices exist, if they will think of it, that life and
work may continue possible, and may not become impossible, for
British men. If honorable existence, or existence on human terms
at all, have become impossible for millions of British men, how
can the Home Office or any other Office long exist? With thirty
thousand Needlewomen, a Connaught fallen into potential
cannibalism, and the Idle Workhouse everywhere bursting, and
declaring itself an inhumanity and stupid ruinous brutality not
much longer to be tolerated among rational human creatures, it is
time the State were bethinking itself.
So soon as the State attacks that tremendous cloaca of Pauperism,
which will choke the world if it be not attacked, the State will
find its real functions very different indeed from what it had
long supposed them! The State is a reality, and not a
dramaturgy; it exists here to render existence possible,
existence desirable and noble, for the State's subjects. The
State, as it gets into the track of its real work, will find that
same expand into whole continents of new unexpected, most blessed
activity; as its dramatic functions, declared superfluous, more
and more fall inert, and go rushing like huge torrents of extinct
exuviae, dung and rubbish, down to the Abyss forever. O Heaven,
to see a State that knew a little why it was there, and on what
ground, in this Year 1850, it could pretend to exist, in so
extremely earnest a world as ours is growing! The British State,
if it will be the crown and keystone of our British Social
Existence, must get to recognize, with a veracity very long
unknown to it, what the real objects and indispensable
necessities of our Social Existence are. Good Heavens, it is not
prevenient grace, or the color of the Bishop's nightmare, that is
pinching us; it is the impossibility to get along any farther for
mountains of accumulated dung and falsity and horror; the total
closing-up of noble aims from every man,--of any aim at all, from
many men, except that of rotting out in Idle Workhouses an
existence below that of beasts!
Suppose the State to have fairly started its "Industrial
Regiments of the New Era," which alas, are yet only beginning to
be talked of,--what continents of new real work opened out, for
the Home and all other Public Offices among us! Suppose the Home
Office looking out, as for life and salvation, for proper men to
command these "Regiments." Suppose the announcement were
practically made to all British souls that the want of wants,
more indispensable than any jewel in the crown, was that of men
able to command men in ways of industrial and moral well-doing;
that the State would give its very life for such men; that such
men were the State; that the quantity of them to be found in
England lamentably small at present, was the exact measure of
England's worth,--what a new dawn of everlasting day for all
British souls! Noble British soul, to whom the gods have given
faculty and heroism, what men call genius, here at last is a
career for thee. It will not be needful now to swear fealty to
the Incredible, and traitorously cramp thyself into a cowardly
canting play-actor in God's Universe; or, solemnly forswearing
that, into a mutinous rebel and waste bandit in thy generation:
here is an aim that is clear and credible, a course fit for a
man. No need to become a tormenting and self-tormenting
mutineer, banded with rebellious souls, if thou wouldst live; no
need to rot in suicidal idleness; or take to platform preaching,
and writing in Radical Newspapers, to pull asunder the great
Falsity in which thou and all of us are choking. The great
Falsity, behold it has become, in the very heart of it, a great
Truth of Truths; and invites thee and all brave men to cooperate
with it in transforming all the body and the joints into the
noble likeness of that heart! Thrice-blessed change. The State
aims, once more, with a true aim; and has loadstars in the
eternal Heaven. Struggle faithfully for it; noble is this
struggle; thou too, according to thy faculty, shalt reap in due
time, if thou faint not. Thou shalt have a wise command of men,
thou shalt be wisely commanded by men,--the summary of all
blessedness for a social creature here below. The sore struggle,
never to be relaxed, and not forgiven to any son of man, is once
more a noble one; glory to the Highest, it is now once more a
true and noble one, wherein a man can afford to die! Our path is
now again Heavenward. Forward, with steady pace, with drawn
weapons, and unconquerable hearts, in the name of God that made
us all!--
Wise obedience and wise command, I foresee that the regimenting
of Pauper Banditti into Soldiers of Industry is but the beginning
of this blessed process, which will extend to the topmost heights
of our Society; and, in the course of generations, make us all
once more a Governed Commonwealth, and Civitas Dei, if it
please God! Waste-land Industrials succeedingt, other kinds of
Industry, as cloth-making, shoe-making, plough-making,
spade-making, house-building,--in the end, all kinds of Industry
whatsoever, will be found capable of regimenting.
Mill-operatives, all manner of free operatives, as yet
unregimented, nomadic under private masters, they, seeing such
example and its blessedness, will say: "Masters, you must
regiment us a little; make our interests with you permanent a
little, instead of temporary and nomadic; we will enlist with
the State otherwise!" This will go on, on the one hand, while
the State-operation goes on, on the other: thus will all Masters
of Workmen, private Captains of Industry, be forced to
incessantly co-operate with the State and its public Captains;
they regimenting in their way, the State in its way, with
ever-widening field; till their fields meet (so to speak) and
coalesce, and there be no unregimented worker, or such only as
are fit to remain unregimented, any more.--O my friends, I
clearly perceive this horrible cloaca of Pauperism, wearing
nearly bottomless now, is the point where we must begin. Here,
in this plainly unendurable portion of the general quagmire, the
lowest point of all, and hateful even to M'Croudy, must our main
drain begin: steadily prosecuting that, tearing that along with
Herculean labor and divine fidelity, we shall gradually drain the
entire Stygian swamp, and make it all once more a fruitful
field!
For the State, I perceive, looking out with right sacred
earnestness for persons able to command, will straightway also
come upon the question: "What kind of schools and seminaries, and
teaching and also preaching establishments have I, for the
training of young souls to take command and to yield obedience?
Wise command, wise obedience: the capability of these two is the
net measure of culture, and human virtue, in every man; all good
lies in the possession of these two capabilities; all evil,
wretchedness and ill-success in the want of these. He is a good
man that can command and obey; he that cannot is a bad. If my
teachers and my preachers, with their seminaries, high schools
and cathedrals, do train men to these gifts, the thing they are
teaching and preaching must be true; if they do not, not
true!"
The State, once brought to its veracities by the thumb-screw in
this manner, what will it think of these same seminaries and
cathedrals! I foresee that our Etons and Oxfords with their
nonsense-verses, college-logics, and broken crumbs of mere
speech,--which is not even English or Teutonic speech, but old
Grecian and Italian speech, dead and buried and much lying out of
our way these two thousand years last past,--will be found a most
astonishing seminary for the training of young English souls to
take command in human Industries, and act a valiant part under
the sun! The State does not want vocables, but manly wisdoms and
virtues: the State, does it want parliamentary orators, first of
all, and men capable of writing books? What a rag-fair of
extinct monkeries, high-piled here in the very shrine of our
existence, fit to smite the generations with atrophy and
beggarly paralysis,--as we see it do! The Minister of Education
will not want for work, I think, in the New Downing Street!
How it will go with Souls'-Overseers, and what the new kind
will be, we do not prophesy just now. Clear it is, however, that
the last finish of the State's efforts, in this operation of
regimenting, will be to get the true Souls'-Overseers set over
men's souls, to regiment, as the consummate flower of all, and
constitute into some Sacred Corporation, bearing authority and
dignity in their generation, the Chosen of the Wise, of the
Spiritual and Devout-minded, the Reverent who deserve reverence,
who are as the Salt of the Earth;--that not till this is done can
the State consider its edifice to have reached the first story,
to be safe for a moment, to be other than an arch without the
keystones, and supported hitherto on mere wood. How will this be
done? Ask not; let the second or the third generation after this
begin to ask!--Alas, wise men do exist, born duly into the world
in every current generation; but the getting of them regimented
is the highest pitch of human Polity, and the feat of all feats
in political engineering:--impossible for us, in this poor age,
as the building of St. Paul's would be for Canadian Beavers,
acquainted only with the architecture of fish-dams, and with no
trowel but their tail.
Literature, the strange entity so called,--that indeed is here.
If Literature continue to be the haven of expatriated
spiritualisms, and have its Johnsons, Goethes and true
Archbishops of the World, to show for itself as heretofore, there
may be hope in Literature. If Literature dwindle, as is
probable, into mere merry-andrewism, windy twaddle, and feats of
spiritual legerdemain, analogous to rope-dancing, opera-dancing,
and street-fiddling with a hat carried round for halfpence, or
for guineas, there will be no hope in Literature. What if our
next set of Souls'-Overseers were to be silent ones very
mainly?--Alas, alas, why gaze into the blessed continents and
delectable mountains of a Future based on truth, while as yet
we struggle far down, nigh suffocated in a slough of lies,
uncertain whether or how we shall be able to climb at all!
Who will begin the long steep journey with us; who of living
statesmen will snatch the standard, and say, like a hero on the
forlorn-hope for his country, Forward! Or is there none; no one
that can and dare? And our lot too, then, is Anarchy by
barricade or ballot-box, and Social Death?--We will not think so.
Whether Sir Robert Peel will undertake the Reform of Downing
Street for us, or any Ministry or Reform farther, is not known.
He, they say, is getting old, does himself recoil from it, and
shudder at it; which is possible enough. The clubs and coteries
appear to have settled that he surely will not; that this
melancholy wriggling seesaw of red-tape Trojans and Protectionist
Greeks must continue its course till--what can happen, my
friends, if this go on continuing?
And yet, perhaps, England has by no means so settled it. Quit
the clubs and coteries, you do not hear two rational men speak
long together upon politics, without pointing their inquiries
towards this man. A Minister that will attack the Augeas Stable
of Downing Street, and begin producing a real Management, no
longer an imaginary one, of our affairs; he, or else in few
years Chartist Parliament and the Deluge come: that seems the
alternative. As I read the omens, there was no man in my time
more authentically called to a post of difficulty, of danger, and
of honor than this man. The enterprise is ready for him, if he
is ready for it. He has but to lift his finger in this
enterprise, and whatsoever is wise and manful in England will
rally round him. If the faculty and heart for it be in him, he,
strangely and almost tragically if we look upon his history, is
to have leave to try it; he now, at the eleventh hour, has the
opportunity for such a feat in reform as has not, in these late
generations, been attempted by all our reformers put
together.
As for Protectionist jargon, who in these earnest days would
occupy many moments of his time with that? "A Costermonger in
this street," says Crabbe, "finding lately that his rope of
onions, which he hoped would have brought a shilling, was to go
for only sevenpence henceforth, burst forth into lamentation,
execration and the most pathetic tears. Throwing up the window,
I perceived the other costermongers preparing impatiently to pack
this one out of their company as a disgrace to it, if he would
not hold his peace and take the market-rate for his onions. I
looked better at this Costermonger. To my astonished
imagination, a star-and-garter dawned upon the dim figure of the
man; and I perceived that here was no Costermonger to be expelled
with ignominy, but a sublime goddess-born Ducal Individual, whom
I forbear to name at this moment! What an omen;--nay to my
astonished imagination, there dawned still fataler omens.
Surely, of all human trades ever heard of, the trade of Owning
Land in England ought not to bully us for drink--money just
now!"
"Hansard's Debates," continues Crabbe farther on, "present many
inconsistencies of speech; lamentable unveracities uttered in
Parliament, by one and indeed by all; in which sad list Sir
Robert Peel stands for his share among others. Unveracities not
a few were spoken in Parliament: in fact, to one with a sense of
what is called God's truth, it seemed all one unveracity, a
talking from the teeth outward, not as the convictions but as
the expediencies and inward astucities directed; and, in the
sense of God's truth, I have heard no true word uttered in
Parliament at all. Most lamentable unveracities continually
spoken in Parliament, by almost every one that had to open his
mouth there. But the largest veracity ever done in Parliament
in our time, as we all know, was of this man's doing;--and that,
you will find, is a very considerable item in the
calculation!"
Yes, and I believe England in her dumb way remembers that too.
And "the Traitor Peel" can very well afford to let innumerable
Ducal Costermongers, parliamentary Adventurers, and lineal
representatives of the Impenitent Thief, say all their say about
him, and do all their do. With a virtual England at his back,
and an actual eternal sky above him, there is not much in the
total net-amount of that. When the master of the horse rides
abroad, many dogs in the village bark; but he pursues his journey
all the same.
