115
of all true men in all true centuries, I fancy ! Alas, compared
with any of the Isms current in these poor clays, what a thing !
Compared with the respectablest, morbid, struggling Method-
ism, never so earnest ; with the respeciablest, ghastly, dead
or galvanised Dilettantism, never so spasmodic !
Methodism with its eye forever turned on its own navel ;
asking itself with torturing anxiety of Hope and Fear, " Am
I right, am I wrong? Shall I be saved, shall I not be
damned ? " — what is this, at bottom, but a new phasis of Ego-
ism, stretched out into the Infinite ; not always the heavenlier
for its infinitude '. Brother, so soon as possible, endeavour to
rise above all that. " Thou art wrong ; thou art like to be
damned : " consider that as the fact, reconcile thyself even to
that, if thou be a man ; — then first is the devouring Universe
subdued under thee, and from the black murk of midnight
and noise of greedy Acheron, dawn as of an everlasting
morning, how far above all Hope and all Fear, springs for
thee, enlightening thy steep path, awakening in thy heart
celestial Memnon's music.
But of our Dilettantisms, and galvanised Dilettantisms ; of
Puseyism — O Heavens, what shall we say of Puseyism, in
comparison to Twelfth-Century Catholicism ? Little or noth-
ing ; for indeed it is a matter to strike one dumb.
The Builder of tins Universe was wise,
He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles:
The Plan He shap'd all Worlds and iEons by
Was Heavens ! — Was thy small Mne-and- thirty Articles ?
That certain human souls, living on this practical Earth,
should think to save themselves and a ruined world by noisy
theoretic demonstrations and laudations of the Church, in-
stead of some unnoisy, unconscious, but practical, total, heart-
and-soul demonstration of a Church : this, in the circle of
revolving ages, this also was a thing we were to see. A kind
of penultimate thing, precursor of very strange consumma-
tions ; last thing but one ? If there is no atmosphere, what
will it serve a man to demonstrate the excellence of lungs ?
How much profitabler when you can, like Abbot Samson,
breathe ; and go along your way !
116
THE ANCIENT MONK.
CHAPTER XVI.
ST. EDMUND.
Abbot Samson built many useful, many pious edifices ; human
dwellings, churches, church-steeples, barns ; — all fallen now
and vanished, but useful while they stood. He built and en-
dowed ' the Hospital of Bab well : ' built 'fit houses for the St,
Edmundsbury Schools.' Many are the roofs once 'thatched
with reeds ' which he ' caused to be covered with tiles ; ' or if
they w T ere churches, probably ' with lead. ' For all ruinous
incomplete things, buildings or other, were an eye-sorrow to
the man. We saw his ' great tower of St. Edmund's ; ' or at
least the roof-timbers of it, lying cut and stamped in Elmset
Wood. To change combustible decaying reed-thatch into
tile or lead ; and material, still more, moral wreck into rain-
tight order, what a comfort to Samson !
One of the things he could not in any wise but rebuild was
the great Altar, aloft on which stood the Shrine itself ; the
great Altar, which had been damaged by fire, by the careless
rubbish and careless candle of two somnolent Monks, one
night, — the Shrine escaping almost as if by miracle ! Abbot
Samson read his Monks a severe lecture : "A Dream one of
us had, that he saw St. Edmund naked and in lamentable
plight. Know ye the interpretation of that Dream ? St.
Edmund proclaims himself naked, because ye defraud the
naked Poor of your old clothes, and give with reluctance what
ye are bound to give them of meat and drink : the idleness
moreover and negligence of the Sacristan and his people is
too evident from the late misfortune by fire. Well might our
Holy Martyr seem to lie .cast out from his Shrine, and say
with groans that he was stript of his garments, and wasted
with hunger and thirst ! "
This is Abbot Samson's interpretation of the Dream ; — dia-
metrically the reverse of that given by the Monks themselves,
who scruple not to say privily, " It is ive that are the naked and
ST. EDMUND.
117
famished limbs of the Martyr ; we whom the Abbot curtails
of all our privileges, setting his own official to control our very
Cellarer ! " Abbot Samson adds, that this judgment by fire
has fallen upon them for murmuring about their meat and
drink.
Clearly enough, meanwhile, the Altar, whatever the burning
of it mean or foreshadow, must needs be reedified. Abbot
Samson reedifies it, all of polished marble ; with the highest
stretch of art and sumptuosity, reembellishes the Shrine for
which it is to serve as pediment. Nay farther, as had ever
been among his prayers, he enjoys, he sinner, a glimpse of the
glorious Martyr's very Body in the process ; having solemnly
opened the Locidus, Chest or sacred Coffin, for that purpose.
It is the culminating moment of Abbot Samson's life. Bozzy
Jocelin himself rises into a kind of Psalmist solemnity on this
occasion ; the laziest monk c weeps ' warm tears, as Te Deum
is sung.
Very strange ; — how far vanished from us in these unwor-
shipping ages of ours ! The Patriot Hampden, best beatified
man we have, had lain in like manner some two centuries in
his narrow home, when certain dignitaries of us, ' and twelve
grave-diggers with pulleys,' raised him also up, under cloud
of night ; cut off his arms with penknives, pulled the scalp off
his head, — and otherwise worshipped our Hero Saint in the
most amazing manner ! * Let the modern eye look earnestly
on that old midnight hour in St. Edmundsbury Church, shin-
ing yet on us, ruddy-bright, through the depths of seven hun-
dred years ; and consider mournfully what our Hero-worship
once was, and what it now is ! We translate with all the
fidelity we can :
' The Festival of St. Edmund now approaching, the marble
' blocks are polished, and all things are in readiness for lifting
£ of the Shrine to its new place. A fast of three days was held
' by all the people, the cause and meaning thereof being pub-
' \icly set forth to them. The Abbot announces to the Con-
* vent that all must prepare themselves for transferring of the
* Annual Register (year 1828, Chronicle, p. 93), Gentleman's Maga-
zine, &c, &c.
118
THE ANCIENT MONK
6 Shrine, and appoints time and way for the work. Coming
' therefore that night to matins, we found the great Shrine
£ ( feretrum magnum) . raised upon the Altar, but empty ; cov-
s ered all over with white doeskin leather, fixed to the wood
' with silver nails ; but one pannel of the Shrine w T as left down
6 below, and resting thereon, beside its old column of the
£ Church, the Loculus with the Sacred Body yet lay where it
£ was wont. Praises being sung, we all proceeded to com-
£ mence our disciplines (ad disciplinas suscipiendas). These
£ finished, the Abbot and certain with him are clothed in their
£ albs ; and, approaching reverently, set about uncovering the
c Loculus. There was an outer cloth of linen, enwrapping
£ the Loculus and all ; this we found tied on the upper side
£ with strings of its own : within this was a cloth of silk, and
£ then another linen cloth, and then a third ; and so at last
' the Loculus was uncovered, and seen resting on a little tray
£ of wood, that the bottom of it might not be injured by the
£ stone. Over the breast of the Martyr, there lay, fixed to the
£ surface of the Loculus, a Golden Angel about the length of
£ a human foot ; holding in one hand a golden sword, and in
£ the other a banner : under this there was a hole in the lid of
£ the Loculus, on which the ancient servants of the Martyr
4 had been wont to lay their hands for touching the Sacred
£ Body. And over the figure of the Angel was this verse in-
£ scribed :
i Martlris ecce zoma served Micliaelis agalmct. *
' At the head and foot of the Loculus were iron rings where-
£ by it could be lifted.
£ Lifting the Loculus and Body, therefore, they carried it
' to the Altar ; and I put-to my sinful hand to help in carry-
£ ing, though the Abbot had commanded that none should
£ approach except called. And the Loculus was placed in the
£ Shrine ; and the pannel it had stood on was put in its place,
£ and the Shrine for the present closed. We all thought that
£ the Abbot would shew the Loculus to the people ; and bring
1 out the Sacred Body again, at a certain period of the Fes-
* This is the Martyr's Garment, which Michael's Image guards.
ST. EDMUND.
119
* tival. But in this we were wofully mistaken, as the sequel
' shews.
' For in the fourth holiday of the Festival, while the Con-
' vent were all singing Gompletorium, our Lord Abbot spoke
' privily with the Sacristan and Walter the Medicus ; and
4 order was taken that twelve of the Brethren should be ap-
6 pointed against midnight, who were strong for carrying the
' pannel-planks of the Shrine, and skilful in unfixing them,
* and putting them together again. The Abbot then said that
* it was among his prayers to look once upon the Body of his
* Patron ; and that he wished the Sacristan and Walter the
' Medicus to be with him. The Twelve appointed Brethren
' were these : The Abbot's two Chaplains, the two Keepers of
' the Shrine, the two Masters of the Vestry ; and six more,
* namely, the Sacristan Hugo, Walter the Medicus, Augustin,
' William of Dice, Kobert, and Bichard. I alas, was not of
* the number.
' The Convent therefore being all asleep, these Twelve,
6 clothed in their albs, with the Abbot, assembled at the
6 Altar ; and opening a pannel of the Shrine, they took out
' the Loculus ; laid it on a table, near where the Shrine used
' to be ; and made ready for unfastening the lid, which was
6 joined and fixed to the Loculus with sixteen very long nails.
' Which when, with difficulty, they had done, all except the
' two forenamed associates are ordered to draw back. The
6 Abbot and they two were alone privileged to look in. The
' Loculus was so filled with the Sacred Body that you could
' scarcely put a needle between the head and the wood, or
£ between the feet and the wood : the head lay united to the
' body, a little raised with a small pillow. But the Abbot,
fi looking close, found now a silk cloth veiling the whole Body,
' and then a linen cloth of wondrous whiteness ; and upon the
' head was spread a small linen cloth, and then another small
c and most fine silk cloth, as if it were the veil of a nun.
£ These coverings being lifted off, they found now the Sacred
• ' Body all wrapt in linen ; and so at length the lineaments
' of the same appeared. But here the Abbot stopped ; saying
* he durst not proceed farther, or look at the sacred flesh
120
THE ANCIENT MONK.
( naked. Taking the head between his hands, he thus spake
1 groaning : " Glorious Martyr, holy Edmund, blessed be the
c hour when thou wert born. Glorious Martyr, turn it not to
c my perdition that I have so dared to touch thee, I miserable
e and sinful ; thou knowest my devout love, and the intention of
' my mind." And proceeding, he touched the eyes ; and the
£ nose, which was very massive and prominent {calde grossum
( et valde eminentem) ; and then he touched the breast and
6 arms ; and raising the left arm he touched the fingers, and
' placed his own fingers between the sacred fingers. And
6 proceeding he found the feet standing stiff up, like the feet
£ of a man dead yesterday ; and he touched the toes, and
' counted them (tangendo numeravit).
■ And now it was agreed that the other Brethren should bo
' called forward to see the miracles ; and accordingly those
c ten now advanced, and along with them six others who had
' stolen in without the Abbot's assent, namely, Walter of St.
< Alban's, Hugh the Infirmirarius, Gilbert brother of the Prior,
' Richard of Henham, Jocellus our cellarer, and Turstan the
' Little ; and all these saw the Sacred Body, but Turstan alone
c of them put forth his hand, and touched the Saint's knees
c and feet. And that there might be abundance of witnesses,
c one of our Brethren, John of Dice, sitting on the roof of the
' Church, with the servants of the Vestry, and looking through,
c clearly saw all these things.'
What a scene ; shining luminous effulgent, as the lamps of
St. Edmund do, through the dark Night ; John of Dice, with
vestrymen, clambering on the roof to look through ; the Con-
vent all asleep, and the Earth all asleep, — and since then,
Seven Centuries of Time mostly gone to sleep ! Yes, there,
sure enough, is the martyred Body of Edmund landlord of
the Eastern Counties, who, nobly doing what he liked with
his own, was slain three hundred years ago : and a noble awe
surrounds the memory of him, symbol and promoter of many
other right noble things.
But have not we now advanced to strange new stages of
Hero-worship, now in the little Church of Hampden, with our
m\ EDMUND.
121
pen-knives out, and twelve grave-diggers with pulleys ? The
manner of men's Hero-worship, verily it is the innermost fact
of their existence, and determines all the rest, — at public
hustings, in private drawing-rooms, in church, in market, and
wherever else. Have true reverence, and what indeed is in-
separable therefrom, reverence the right man, all is well ;
have sham-reverence, and what also follows, greet with it the
wrong man, then all is ill, and there is nothing well. Alas, if
Hero-worship become Dilettantism, and all except Mammon-
ism be a Vain grimace, how much, in this most earnest Earth,
has gone and is evermore going to fatal destruction, and lies
wasting in quiet lazy ruin, no man regarding it ! Till at
length no heavenly Ism any longer coming down upon us,
Isms from the other quarter have to mount up. For the
Earth, I say, is an earnest place ; Life is no grimace, but a
most serious fact. And so, under universal Dilettantism much
having been stript bare, not the souls of men only, but their
very bodies and bread-cupboards having been stript bare, and
life now no longer possible, — all is reduced to desperation, to
the iron law of Necessity and very Fact again ; and to temper
Dilettantism, and astonish it, and burn it up with infernal
fire, arises Chartism, Bare- back-ism, Sansculottism so-called !
May the gods, and what of unworshipped heroes still remain
among us, avert the omen. —
But however this may be, St. Edmund's Loculus, we find,
has the veils of silk and linen reverently replaced, the lid fast-
ened down again with its sixteen ancient nails ; is wrapt in
a new costly covering of silk, the gift of Hubert Archbishop
of Canterbury : and through the sky-window John of Dice
sees it lifted to its place in the Shrine, the pannels of this lat-
ter duly refixed, fit parchment documents being introduced
withal ; — and now John and his vestrymen* can slide down
from the roof, for all is over, and the Convent wholly awakens
to matins. ' When we assembled to sing matins,' says Joce-
lin, £ and understood what had been done, grief took hold of
' all that had -not seen these things, each saying to himself,
' " Alas, I was deceived." Matins over, the Abbot called the
122
THE ANCIENT MONK.
1 Convent to the great Altar ; and briefly recounting the mat-
' ter, alleged that it had not been in his power, nor was it
' permissible or fit, to invite us all to the sight of such things.
* At hearing of which, we all wept, and with tears sang Tc
' Deum laudamus ; and hastened to toll the bells in the
< Choir.'
Stupid blockheads, to reverence their St. Edmund's dead
Body in this manner? Yes, brother ; — and yet, on the whole,
who knows how to reverence the Body of a Man ? It is the
most reverend phenomenon under this Sun. For the Highest
God dwells visible in that mystic unfathomable Visibility,
which calls itself "I" on the Earth. 'Bending before men/
says Novalis, 6 is a reverence done to this Revelation in the
' Flesh. We touch Heaven when w T e lay our hand on a hu-
■ man Body/ And the Body of one Dead ;— a temple where
the Hero-soul once was and now is not : Oh, all mystery, all
pity, all mute awe and wonder ; Super naturalism brought
home to the very dullest ; Eternity laid open, and the nether
Darkness and the upper Light-Kingdoms ; do cod join there,
or exist nowhere ! Sauerteig used to say to me, in his pecu-
liar way : " A Chancery Lawsuit ; justice, nay justice in mere
money, denied a man, for all his pleading, till twenty, till
forty years of his Life are gone seeking it : and a Cockney
Funeral, Death reverenced by hatchments, horse-hair, brass-
lacker, and unconcerned bipeds carrying long poles and bags
of black silk : — are not these two reverences, this reverence
for Death and that reverence for Life, a notable pair of rever-
ences among you English ? "
Abbot Samson, at this culminating point of his existence,
may, and indeed must, be left to vanish with his Life-scenery
from the eyes of modern men. He had to run into France to
settle with King* Richard for the military service there of his
St. Edmundsbury Knights ; and with great labor got it done.
He had to decide on the dilapidated Coventry Monks ; and
with great labour, and much pleading and journeying, got
them reinstated ; dined with them all, and with the ' Masters
of the Schools of Oxneford/ — the veritable Oxford Caput sit-
THE BEGINNINGS.
123
ting there at dinner, in a dim but undeniable manner, in the
City of Peeping Tom ! He had, not without labour, to con-
trovert the intrusive Bishop of Ely, the intrusive Abbot of
Ciuny. Magnanimous Samson, his life is but a labour and a
journey ; a bustling and a justling, till the still Night come.
He is sent for again, over sea, to advise King Richard touch-
ing certain Peers of England, who had taken the Cross, but
never followed it to Palestine ; whom the Pope is inquiring
after. The magnanimous Abbot makes preparation for de-
parture ; departs, and And Jocelin's Boswellean Narra-
tive, suddenly shorn through by the scissors of Destiny, ends.
There are no words more ; but a black line, and leaves of
blank paper. Irremediable : the miraculous hand that held
all this theatric machinery suddenly quits hold ; impenetrable
Time-Curtains rush down ; in the mind's eye all is again dark,
void ; with loud dinning in the mind's ear, our real-phantas-
magory of St. Edmundsbury plunges into the bosom of the
Twelfth Century again, and all is over. Monks, Abbot, Hero-
worship, Government, Obedience, Cceur-de-Lion and St. Ed-
mund's Shrine, vanish like Mirza's Vision ; and there is
nothing left but a mutilated black Ruin amid green botanic
expanses, and oxen, sheep and dilettanti pasturing in their
places.
CHAPTER XVII.
THE BEGINNINGS.
What a singular shape of a Man, shape of a Time, have we
in this Abbot Samson and his history ; how strangely do
modes, creeds, formularies, and the date and place of a man's
birth, modify the figure of the man !
Formulas too, as we call them, have a reality in Human Life.
They are real as the very skin and muscular tissue of a Man's
Life ; and a most blessed indispensable thing, so long as they
have vitality withal, and are a living skin and tissue to him !
No man, or man's life, can go abroad and do business in the
world without skin and tissues. No ; first of all, these have
to fashion themselves, — as indeed they spontaneously and in-
124
THE ANCIENT MONK.
evitably do. Foam itself, and this is worth thinking of, can
harden into oyster-shell ; all living objects do by necessity
form to themselves a skin.
And yet, again, when a man's Formulas become dead ; as
all Formulas, in the progress of living growth, are very sure
to do ! When the poor man's integuments, no longer nour-
ished from within, become dead skin, mere adscititious leather
and callosity, wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier ;
till no heart any longer can be felt beating through them, so
thick, callous, calcined are they ; and all over it has now
grown mere calcified oyster- shell, or were it polished mother-
of-pearl, inwards almost to the very heart of the poor man : —
yes then, you may say, his usefulness once more is quite ob-
structed ; once more, he cannot go abroad and do business in
the world ; it is time that he take to bed, and prepare for de-
parture, which cannot now be distant.
Ubi homines sunt modi sunt. Habit is the deepest law of
human nature. It is our supreme strength ; if also, in certain
circumstances, our miserablest weakness. — From Stoke to
Stowe is as yet a field, all pathless, untrodden : from Stoke
where I live, to Stowe where I have to make my merchandises,
perform my businesses, consult my heavenly oracles, there is as
yet no path or human footprint ; and I, impelled by such ne-
cessities, must nevertheless undertake the journey. Let me
go once, scanning my way with any earnestness of outlook,
and successfully arriving, my footprints are an invitation to
me a second time to go by the same way. It is easier than
any other way : the industry of ' scanning ' lies already in-
vested in it for me ; I can go this time with less of scanning,
or without scanning at all. Nay, the very sight of my foot-
prints, what a comfort for me ; and in a degree, for all my
brethren of mankind ! The footprints are trodden and re-
trodden ; the path wears ever broader, smoother, into a broad
highway, where even wheels can run ; and many travel it ; —
till— till the Town of Stowe disappear from that locality (as
towns have been known to do), or no merchandising, heavenly
oracle, or real business any longer exist for one there : then
why should anybody travel the way ?— Habit is our primal,
THE BEGINNINGS.
125
fundamental law ; Habit and Imitation, there is nothing more
perennial in us than these two. They are the source of all
"Working and all Apprenticeship, of all Practice and all Learn-
ing, in this world.
Yes, the wise man too speaks, and acts, in Formulas ; all
men do so. And in general, the more completely cased with
Formulas a man may be, the safer, happier is it for him. Thou
who, in an All of rotten Formulas, seemest to stand nigh bare,
having indignantly shaken off the superannuated rags and
unsound callosities of Formulas, — consider how thou too art
still clothed ! This English Nationality, whatsoever from un-
counted ages is genuine and a fact among thy native People,
in their words and ways : all this, has it not made for thee a
skin or second-skin, adhesive actually as thy natural skin ?
This thou hast not stript off, this thou wilt never strip off :
the humour that thy mother gave thee has to shew itself
through this. A common, or it may be an uncommon Eng-
lishman thou art : but good Heavens, what sort of Arab,
Chinaman, Jew-Clothesman, Turk, Hindoo, African Mandingo,
Avouldst thou have been, thou with those mother-qualities of
thine !
It strikes me dumb to look over the long series of faces,
such as any full Church, Courthouse, London-Tavern Meeting,
or miscellany of men will show them. Some score or two of
years ago all these were little red-coloured pulpy infants ;
each of them capable of being kneaded, baked into any social
form you chose : yet I see now how they are fixed and hard-
ened, — into artisans, artists, clergy, gentry, learned sergeants,
unlearned dandies, and can and shall now be nothing else
henceforth !
Mark on that nose the colour left by too copious port and
viands ; to which the profuse cravat with exorbitant breastpin,
and the fixed, forward, and as it were menacing glance of the
eyes correspond. That is a c Man of Business ; ' prosperous
manufacturer, house-contractor, engineer, law-manager ; his
eye, nose, cravat have, in such work and fortune, got such
a character : deny him not thy praise, thy pity. Pity him too,
the Hard-handed, with bony brow, rudely combed hair, eyes
12G
THE ANCIENT MONK.
looking out as in labour, in difficulty and uncertainty ; rude
mouth, the lips coarse, loose, as in hard toil and lifelong
fatigue they have got the habit of hanging : hast thou seen
aught more touching than the rude intelligence, so cramped,
yet energetic, unsubduable, true, which looks out of that
marred visage ? Alas, and his poor wife, with her own hands,
washed that cotton neckcloth for him, buttoned that coarse
shirt, sent him forth creditably trimmed as she could. In
such imprisonment lives he, for his part ; man cannot now
deliver him : the red pulpy infant has been baked and fash-
ioned so.
Or what kind of baking was it tliat this other brother-mor-
tal got, which has baked him into the genus Dandy? Elegant
Vacuum ; serenely looking down upon all Plenums and En-
tities, as low and poor to his serene Chimera-skip and Nonen-
tity laboriously attained ! Heroic Vacuum ; inexpugnable,
■while purse and present condition of society hold out ; cura-
ble by no hellebore. The doom of Fate was, Be thou a Dandy !
Have thy eye-glasses, opera-glasses, thy Long-Acre cabs with
white-breeched tiger, thy yawning impassivities, pococurante
isms ; fix thyself in Dandyhood undeliverable ; it is thy doom.
And all these, we say, were red-coloured infants ; of the
same pulp and stuff, few years ago ; now irretrievably shaped
and kneaded as we see ! Formulas ? There is no mortal ex-
tant, out of the depths of Bedlam, but lives all skinned,
thatched, covered over with Formulas ; and is, as it were, held
in from delirium and the Inane by his Formulas ! They are
withal the most beneficent, indispensable of human equip-
ments : blessed he who has a skin and tissues, so it be a liv-
ing one ; and the heart-pulse everywhere discernible through
it. Monachism, Feudalism, with a real King Plantagenet,
with real Abbots Samson, and their other living realities, how
blessed ! —
Not without a mournful interest have we surveyed that au-
thentic image of a Time now wkolly swallowed. Mournful
reflections crowd on us ; — and yet consolatory. How many
brave men kave lived before Agamemnon ! Here is a brave
THE BEGINNINGS.
12?
governor Samson, a man fearing God, and fearing nothing else ;
of whom as First Lord of the Treasury, as King, Chief, Edi-
tor, High Priest, we could be so glad and proud ; of whom
nevertheless Fame has altogether forgotten to make mention !
The faint image of him, revived in this hour, is found in the
gossip of one poor Monk, and in Nature nowhere else. Ob
livion had so nigh swallowed him altogether, even to the echo
of his ever having existed. "What regiments and hosts and
generations of such has Oblivion already swallowed ! Their
crumbled dust makes up the soil our life fruit grows on. Said
I not, as my old Norse Fathers taught. me, The Life-tree Igdra-
sil, which waves round thee in this hour, whereof thou in this
hour art portion, has its roots down deep in the oldest Death-
Kingdoms ; and grows ; the Three Nomas, or Times, Past,
Present, Future, watering it from the Sacred Well !
For example, who taught thee to speak ? From the day
when two hairy-naked or fig-leaved Human Figures began, as
uncomfortable dummies, anxious no longer to be dumb, but
to impart themselves to one another ; and endeavoured, with
gaspings, gesturings, with un syllabled cries, with painful pan-
tomime and interjections, in a very unsuccessful manner, — up
to the writing of this present copyright Book, which also is
not very successful ! Between that day and this, I say, there
has been a pretty space of time ; a pretty spell of work, which
somebody has done ! Thinkest thou there were no poets till
Dan Chaucer ? No heart burning with a thought, which it
could not hold, and had no word for ; and needed to shape
and coin a word for, — what thou callest a metaphor, trope, or
the like ? For eve^ word we have, there was such a man and
poet. The coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor,
and bold questionable originality. ' Thy very attention, does
it not mean an aUentio, & stretching-to ? ' Fancy that act of
the mind, which all were conscious of, which none had yet
named, — when this new 6 poet ' first felt bound and driven to
name it ! His questionable originality, and new glowing met-
aphor, was found adoptable, intelligible ; and remains our
name for it to this day.
Literature : — and look at Paul's Cathedral, and the Mason*
328
THE ANCIENT MONK.
ries and Worships and Quasi-Worships that are there ; not
to speak of Westminster Hall and its wings ! Men had not
a hammer to begin with, not a syllabled articulation,: they
had it all to make ; — and they have made it. What thous-
and thousand articulate, semi-articulate, earnest- stammering
Prayers ascending up to Heaven, from hut and cell, in many
lands, in many centuries, from the fervent kindled souls of
innumerable men, each struggling to pour itself forth incom-
pletely as it might, before the incompletest Liturgy could be
compiled ! The Liturgy, or adoptable and generally adopted
Set of Prayers and Prayer-Method, was what we can call the
Select Adoptabilities, ' Select Beauties ' well-edited (by (Ecu-
menic Councils and other Useful-Knowledge Societies) from
that wide waste imbroglio of Prayers already extant and ac-
cumulated, good and bad. The good were found adoptable
by men ; were gradually got together, well-edited, accredited :
the bad, found inappropriate, unadoptable, were gradually
forgotten, disused and burnt. It is the way with human
things. The first man who, looking with opened soul on this
august Heaven and Earth, this Beautiful and Awful, which
we name Nature, Universe and such like, the essence of which
remains forever Unnameable ; he who first, gazing into this,
fell on his knees awestruck, in silence as is likeliest, — he,
driven by inner necessity, the 'audacious original' that he
was, had done a thing, too, which all thoughtful hearts saw
straightway to be an expressive, altogether adoptable thing !
To bow the knee was ever since the attitude of supplication.
Earlier than any spoken Prayers, Litanias, or Leitourgias ; the
beginning of all Worship, — which needed but a beginning, so
rational was it. What a poet he ! Yes, this bold original was
a successful one withal. The wellhead this one, hidden in the
primeval dusks and distances, from whom as from a Nile-source
all Forms of Worship now : — such a Nile -river (somewhat
muddy and malarious now !) of Forms of Worship sprang
there, and flowed, and flows, down to Puseyism, Rotatory
Calabash, Archbishop Laud at St. Catherine Creed's, and per-
haps lower !
Things rise, I say, in that way. The Iliad Poem, and in-
THE BEGINNINGS.
129
deed most other poetic, especially epic things, have risen as
the Liturgy did. The great Iliad in Greece, and the small
Robin Hood's Garland in England, are each, as I understand,
the well-edited ' Select Beauties ' of an immeasurable waste
imbroglio of Heroic Ballads in their respective centuries. and
countries. Think what strumming of the seven-stringed he-
roic lyre, torturing of the less heroic fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic
Kings' Courts, and English wayside Public Houses ; and
beating of the studious Poetic brain, and gasping here too in
the s*mi- articulate windpipe of Poetic men, before the Wrath
of a Divine Achilles, the Prowess of a Will Scarlet or Wake-
field Pinder, could be adequately sung ! Honour to you, ye
nameless great and greatest ones, ye long-forgotten brave !
Nor was the Statute De Tallagio non concedendo, nor any
Statute, Law-method, Lawyer's- wig, much less were the Sta-
tute-Book and Four Courts, with Coke upon Lyttleton and
Three Estates of Parliament in the rear of them, got together
without human labour, — mostly forgotten now ! From the
time of Cain's slaying Abel by swift head-breakage, to this
time of killing your man in Chancery by inches, and slow
heart-break for forty years, — there too is an interval ! Ven-
erable Justice herself began by Wild Justice ; all Law is as a
tamed furrowfield, slowly worked out, and rendered arable,
from the waste jungle of Club-La w. Valiant Wisdom tilling
and draining ; escorted by owl- eyed Pedantry, by owlish and
vulturish and many other forms of Folly ; — the valiant hus-
bandman assiduously tilling ; the blind greedy enemy too as-
siduously sowing tares ! It is because there is yet in vener-
able wigged Justice some wisdom, amid such mountains of
wiggeries and folly, that men have not cast her into the
River ; that she still sits there, like Dryden's Head in the
Battle of the Books, — a huge helmet, a huge mountain of
greased parchment, of unclean horsehair, first striking the
eye ; and then in the innermost corner, visible at last, in size
as a hazelnut, a real fraction of God's Justice, perhaps not yet
unattainable to some, surely still indispensable to all ; — and
men know not what to do with her ! Lawyers were not all
pedants, voluminous voracious persons ; Lawyers too were
9
130
THE ANCIENT MONK.
poets, were heroes, — or their Law had been past the Nora
long before this time. Their Owlisms, Vulturisms, to an in-
credible extent, will disappear by and by, their Heroisms only
remaining, and the helmet be reduced to something like the
size of the head, we hope ! —
It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed,
articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World. The
hands of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us ;
they, — honour to them ; they, in spite of the idle and the
dastard. This English Land, here and now, is the summary
of what was found of wise, and noble, and accordant with
God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men. Our
English Speech is speakable because there were Hero-Poets
of our blood and lineage ; speakable in proportion to the
number of these. This Land of England has its conquerors,
possessors, which change from epoch to epoch, from day to
day ; but its real conquerors, creators, and eternal proprietors
are these following, and their representatives if you can find
them : All the Heroic Souls that ever were in England, each
in their degree ; all the men that ever cut a thistle, drained
a puddle out of England, contrived a wise scheme in England,
did or said a true and valiant thing in England. I tell thee,
they had not a hammer to begin with ; and yet Wren built St.
Paul's : not an articulated syllable ; and yet there have come
English Literatures, Elizabethan Literatures, Satanic-School,
Cockney-School and other Literatures ; — once more, as in the
old time of the Leitourgia, a most waste imbroglio, and world-
wide jungle and jumble waiting terrible to be ' well-edited,'
and ' well-burnt ! ' Arachne started with forefinger and thumb,
and had not even a distaff ; yet thou seest Manchester, and
Cotton Cloth, which will shelter naked backs, at twopence an
ell.
Work ? The quantity of clone and forgotten work that lies
silent under my feet in this world, and escorts and attends me,
and supports and keeps me alive, wheresoever I walk or stand,
whatsoever I think or do, gives rise to reflections ! Is it not
enough, at any rate, to strike the thing called 1 Fame ' into
total silence for a wise man ? For fools and unreflective per-
THE BEGINNINGS.
131
sons, she is and will be very noisy, this 'Fame,' and talks of
her ' immortals,' and so forth : but if you will consider it, what
is she ? Abbot Samson was not nothing because nobody said
anything of him. Or thinkest thou, the Eight Honourable Sir
Jabesh Windbag can be made something by Parliamentary
Majorities and Leading Articles ? Her £ immortals ! ' Scarcely
two hundred years back can Fame recollect articulately at all ;
and there she but maunders and mumbles. She manages to
recollect a Shakspeare or so ; and prates, considerably like
a goose, about him ; —and in the rear of that, onwards to the
birth of Theuth, to Hengst's Invasion, and the bosom of Eter-
nity, it was all blank ; and the respectable Teutonic Languages,
Teutonic Practices, Existences, all came of their own accord,
as the grass springs, as the trees grow ; no Poet, no work from
the inspired heart of a Man needed there ; and Fame has not
an articulate word to say about it ! Or ask her, What, with
all conceivable appliances and mnemonics, including apotheo-
sis and human sacrifices among the number, she carries in her
head with regard to a Wodan, even a Moses, or other such ?
She begins to be uncertain as to what they were, whether
spirits or men of mould, — gods, charlatans ; begins sometimes
to have a misgiving that they were mere symbols, ideas of the
mind ; perhaps nonentities, and Letters of the Alphabet ! She
is the noisiest, inarticulately babbling, hissing, screaming,
f oolishest, unmusicalest of fowls that fly ; and needs no £ trum-
pet,' I think, but her own enormous goose-throat, — measur-
ing several degrees of celestial latitude, so to speak. Her
c wings,' in these days, have grown far swifter than ever ; but
her goose- throat hitherto seems only larger, louder and fool-
isher than ever. She is transitory, futile, a goose-goddess : —
if she were not transitory, what would become of us ! It is a
chief comfort that she forgets us all ; all, even to the very Wo-
dans ; and grows to consider us, at last, as probably non-
entities and Letters of the Alphabet.
Yes, a noble Abbot Samson resigns himself to Oblivion
too ; feels it no hardship, but a comfort ; counts it as a still
resting-place, from much sick fret and fever and stupidity,
which in the night-watches often made his strong heart sigh,
132
THE ANCIENT MONK.
Your most sweet voices, making one enormous goose-voice, 0
Bobus and Company, how can they be a guidance for any Son
of Adam ? In silence of you and the like of you, the ' small still
voices ' will speak to him better ; in which does lie guidance.
My friend, all speech and rumor is shortlived, foolish, un-
true. Genuine Work alone, what thou workest faithfully, that
is eternal, as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder him-
self. Stand thou by that ; and let ' Fame' and the rest of it
go prating.
" Heard are the Voices,
Heard are the sages,
The worlds and the ages :
4 'Choose well, your choice is
Brief and yet endless ;
Here eyes do regard you,
In Eternity's stillness ;
Here is all fulness,
Ye brave, to reward yon \
Work, and despair not." J *
* Goethe*
BOOK IIL
THE MODERN WORKER,
CHAPTER I.
PHENOMENA.
But, it is said, our religion is gone ; we no longer believe in
St. Edmund, no longer see the figure of him ' on the rim of
the sky,' minatory or confirmatory ! God's absolute Laws,
sanctioned by an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have
become Moral Philosophies, sanctioned by able computations
of Profit and Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of
Virtue and the Moral Sublime.
It is even so. To speak in the ancient dialect, we c have
forgotten God ; ' — in the most modern dialect and very truth
of the matter, we have taken up the Fact of this Universe as it
is not. We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Sub-
stance of things, and opened them only to the Shews and
Shams of things. We quietly believe this Universe to be in-
trinsically a great unintelligible Perhaps ; extrinsically, clear
enough, it is a great, most extensive Cattlefold and work-
house, with most extensive Kitchen-ranges, Dining -tables, —
whereat he is wise who can find a place ! All the Truth of
this Universe is uncertain ; only the profit and loss of it, the
pudding and praise of it, are and remain very visible to the
practical man.
There is no longer any God for us ! God's Laws are become
a Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency :
the Heavens "overarch us only as an Astronomical Time-keeper ;
a butt for Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot
134
THE MODERN WORKER.
sentimentalities at : — in our and old Johnson's dialect, man
has lost the soul out of him ; and now, after the due period,—
begins to find the want of it ! This is verily the plague-spot ;
centre of the universal Social Gangrene, threatening all mod-
ern things with frightful death. To him that will consider it,
here is the stem, with its roots and taproot, with its world-
wide upas-boughs and accursed poison exudations, under
which the world lies writhing in apathy and agoiry. You
touch the focal-centre of all our diseases, of our frightful
nosology of diseases, when you lay your hand on this. There
is no religion ; there is no God ; man has lost his soul, and
vainly seeks antiseptic salt. Vainly : in killing Kings, in pass-
ing Reform Bills, in French Revolutions, Manchester Insurrec-
tions, is found no remedy. The foul elephantine leprosy
alleviated for an hour, reappears in new force and desperate
ness next hour.
For actually this is not the real fact of the world ; the world
is not made so, but otherwise ! — Truly, any Society setting
out from this No-God hypothesis will arrive at a result or two.
The Un veracities, escorted, each Unveracity of them by its
corresponding Misery and Penalty ; the Phantasms, and Fatui-
ties, and ten-years Corn-Law Debatings, that shall walk the
Earth at noonday, — must needs be numerous ! The Universe
being intrinsically a Perhaps, being too probably an c infinite
Humbug,' why should any minor Humbug astonish us ? It is
all according to the order of Nature ; and Phantasms riding
with huge clatter along the streets, from end to end of our ex-
istence, astonish nobody, Enchanted St. Ives Workhouses and
Joe-Manton Aristocracies ; giant "Working Mammonism near
strangled in the partridge-nets of giant-looking Idle Dilettant-
ism, — this, in all its branches, in its thousand thousand modes
and figures, is a sight familiar to us.
The Popish Religion, we are told, flourishes extremely in
these years ; and is the most vivacious-looking religion to be
met with at present.
Pope of Rome, finding it laborious to kneel so long while they
PHENOMENA.
135
cart him through the streets to bless the people on Corpus-
Christi Day, complains of rheumatism ; whereupon his Car-
dinals consult ; — construct him, after some study, a stuffed
cloaked figure, of iron and wood, with wool or baked hair ;
and place it in a kneeling posture. Stuffed figure, or rump
of a figure ; to this stuffed rump he, sitting at his ease on a
lower level, joins, by the aid of cloaks and drapery, his living
head and outspread hands ; the rump with its cloak kneels,
the Pope looks, and holds his hands spread ; and so the two
in concert bless the Roman population on Corpus- Christi Day,
as well as they can.
I have considered this amphibious Pope, with the wool-and-
iron back, with the flesh head and hands ; and endeavoured
to calculate his horoscope. I reckon him the remarkablest
Pontiff that has darkened God's daylight, or painted himself
in the human retina, for these several thousand years. Nay,
since Chaos first shivered, and £ sneezed,' as the Arabs say, with
the first shaft of sunlight shot through it, what stranger pro-
duct was there of Nature and Art working together ? Here is a
Supreme Priest who believes God to bo — What, in the name
of God, does he believe God to be ? — and discerns that all wor-
ship of God is a scenic phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-
blasts, Gregorian Chants, mass-brayings, purple monsignori,
wool-and-iron rumps, artistically spread out, — to save the
ignorant from worse.
O reader, I say not who are Belial's elect. This poor amphib-
ious Pope too gives loaves to the Poor ; has in him more
good latent than he is himself aware of. His poor Jesuits,
in the late Italian Cholera, were, with a few German Doctors,
the only creatures whom dastard terror had not driven mad :
they descended fearless into all gulfs and bedlams ; watched
over the pillow of the dying, with help, with counsel and
hope ; shone as luminous fixed stars, when all else had gone
out in chaotic night : honour to them ! This Poor Pope, —
who knows what good is in him ? In a Time otherwise too
prone to forget, he keeps up the mournfulest ghastly memorial
of the Highest, Blessedest, which once was ; which, in new
fit forms, will again partly have to be. Is he not as a perpet*
136
THE MODERN WORKER.
ual death's-head and cross-bones, with their Resurgam, on tha
grave of a Universal Heroism, — grave of a Christianity ? Such
Noblenesses, purchased by the world's best heart's -blood,
must not be lost ; we cannot afford to lose them, in what
confusions soever. To all of us the day will come, to a few
of us it has already come, w T hen no mortal, with his heart
yearning for a 'Divine Humility,' or other 4 Highest form of
Valour,' will need to look for it in death's heads, but will see
it round him in here and there a beautiful living head.
Besides, there is in this poor Pope, and his practice of the
Scenic Theory of Worship, a frankness which I rather honour.
Not half and half, but with undivided heart does he set about
worshipping by stage machinery ; as if there were now, and
could again be, in Nature no other. He will ask you, "What
other? Under this my Gregorian Chant, and beautiful wax-
light Phantasmagory, kindly hidden from you is an Abyss, of
black Doubt, Scepticism, nay Sansculottic Jacobinism ; an
Orcus that has no bottom. Think of that. ' Groby Pool is
thatched with pancakes,' — as Jeannie Deans's Innkeeper defied
it to be ! The Bottomless of Scepticism, Atheism, Jacobinism,
behold, it is thatched over, hidden from your despair, by
stage-properties judiciously arranged. This stuffed rump of
mine saves not me only from rheumatism, but you also
from what other isms 1 In this your Life-pilgrimage No-
whither, a fine Squallacci marching-music, and Gregorian
Chant, accompanies you, and the hollow Night of Orcus is
well hid !
Yes truly, few men that worship by the rotatory Calabash
of the Calmucks do it in half so great, frank or effectual a
way. Drury-lane, it is said, and that is saying much, might
learn from him in the dressing of parts, in. the arrangement
of lights and shadows. He is the greatest Play-actor that at
present draws salary in this world. Poor Pope ; and I am
told he is fast growing bankrupt too ; and will, in a measur-
able term of years (a great way within the £ three hundred')
not have a penny to make his pot boil ! His old rheumatic
back will then get to rest ; and himself and his stage-prop-
erties sleep well in Chaos for evermore.
PHENOMENA.
137
Or, alaSj why go to Borne for Phantasms walking the
streets ? Phantasms, ghosts, in this midnight hour, hold
jubilee, and screech and jabber ; and the question rather
were, What high Reality anywhere is yet awake ? Aristocracy
has become Phantasm-Aristocracy, no longer able to do its
work, not in the least conscious that it has any work longer
to do. Unable, totally careless to do its work ; careful only
to clamour for the wages of doing its work, — nay for higher,
and palpably undue wages, and Corn-Laws and increase of
rents ; the old rate of wages not being adequate now ! In
hydra- wrestle, giant c Mittocr&cy 9 so called, a real giant,
though as yet a blind one and but half-awake, wrestles and
wrings in choking nightmare, ' like to be strangled in the
partridge-nets of Phantasm-Aristocracy,' as we said, which
fancies itself still to be a giant. Wrestles, as under night-
mare, till it do awaken ; and gasps and struggles thousand-
fold, we may say, in a truly painful manner, through all
fibres of our English Existence, in these hours and years !
Is our poor English Existence wholly becoming a Nightmare ;
full of mere Phantasms? —
The Champion of England, cased in iron or tin, rides into
Westminster Hall, ' being lifted into his saddle with little
assistance,' and there asks, If in the four quarters of the
world, under the cope of Heaven, is any man or demon that
dare question the right of this King? Under the cope of
Heaven no man makes intelligible answer, — as several men
ought already to have done. Does not this Champion too
know the world ; that it is a huge Imposture, and bottomless
Inanity, thatched over with bright cloth and other ingenious
tissues ? Him let us leave there, questioning all men and
demons.
Him we have left to his destiny ; but whom else have we
found ? Erom this the highest apex of things, downwards
through all strata and breadths, how many fully awakened
Realities have we fallen in with : alas, on the contrary, what
troops and populations of Phantasms, not God-Veracities but
Devil-Falsities, down to the very lowest stratum, — which now,
by such superincumbent weight of Unveracities, lies enchant<
138
THE MODERN WORKER.
ed in St Ives' Workhouses, broad enough, helpless enough 1
You will walk in no public thoroughfare or remotest byway
of English Existence but you will meet a man, an interest of
men, that has given up hope in the Everlasting, True, and
placed its hope in the Temporary, half or wholly False. The
Honourable Member complains unmusically that there is
' devils-dust ' in Yorkshire cloth. Yorkshire cloth — why, the
very Paper I now write on is made, it seems, partly of plaster-
lime well-smoothed, and obstructs my writing ! You are lucky
if you can find now any good Paper, — any work really done ;
search where you will, from highest Phantasm apex to lowest
Enchanted basis.
Consider for example that great Hat seven-feet high, which
now perambulates London Streets ; which my Friend Sauer-
teig regarded justly as one of our English notabilities ; " the
topmost point as yet," said he, " would it were your culmi-
nating and returning point, to which English Puffery has
been observed to reach ! " — the Hatter in the Strand of Lon-
don, instead of making better felt-hats than another, mounts
a huge lath-and-plaster Hat, seven-feet high, upon wheels ;
sends a man to drive it through the streets ; hoping to be
saved thereby. He has not attempted to make better hats, as
he was appointed by the Universe to do, and as with this inge-
nuity of his he could very probably have done ; but his whole
industry is turned to persuade us that he has made such !
He too knows that the Quack has become God. Laugh not
at him, O Keader ; or do -not laugh only. He has ceased to
be comic ; he is fast becoming tragic. To me this all-deafen-
ing blast of Puffery, of poor Falsehood grown necessitous,
of poor Heart-Atheism fallen now into Enchanted Work-
houses, sounds too surely like a Doom's-blast. I have to say
to myself in old dialect : " God's blessing is not written on all
this ; His curse is written on all this ! " Unless perhaps the
Universe be a chimera ; — some old totally deranged eightday
clock, dead as brass ; which the Maker, if there ever was any
Maker, has long ceased to meddle with?— To my friend
Sauerteig this poor seven-feet Hat-Manufacturer, as the top
Btone of English Puffery, was very notable.
'PHENOMENA,
139
Alas, that we natives note him little, that we view him as a
thing of course, is the very burden of the misery. We take
it for granted, the most rigorous of us, that all men who have
made anything are expected and entitled to make the loudest-
possible proclamation of it, and call on a discerning public to
reward them for it. Every man his own trumpeter ; that is,
to a really alarming extent, the accepted rule. Make loudest
possible proclamation of your Hat : true proclamation if that
will do ; ii that will not do, then false proclamation, — to such
extent of falsity as will serve your purpose ; as will not seem
too false to be credible ! — I answer, once for all, that the fact
is not so. Nature requires no man to make proclamation of
his doings and hat-makings ; Nature forbids all men to make
such. There is not a man or hat-maker born into the world
but feels, or has felt, that he is degrading himself if he speak
of his excellencies and prowesses, and supremacy in his craft :
his inmost heart says to him, "Leave thy friends to speak of
these ; if possible, thy enemies to speak of these ; but at all
events, thy friends ! " He feels. that he is already a poor brag-
gart ; fast hastening to be a falsity and speaker of the "Untruth.
Nature's Laws, I must repeat, are eternal : her small still
voice, speaking from the inmost heart of us, shall not, under
terrible penalties, be disregarded. No one man can depart
from the truth without damage to himself ; no one million
of men ; no Twenty-seven Millions of men. Shew me a Na-
tion fallen everywhere into this course, so that each expects
it, permits it to others and himself, I will shew you a na-
tion travelling with one assent on the broad way. The
broad way, however many Banks of England, Cotton-Mills
and Duke's Palaces it may have. Not at happy Elysian
fields, and everlasting crowns of victory, earned by silent Val-
our, will this Nation arrive ; but at precipices, devouring
gulfs, if it pause not. Nature has appointed happy fields, vic-
torious laurel-crowns ; but only to the brave and true : Un-
nature, what we call Chaos, holds nothing in it but vacuities,
devouring gulfs. "What are Twenty-seven Millions, and their
unanimity ? Believe them not : the Worlds and the Ages>
God and Nature and All Men say otherwise.
140
THE MODERN WORKER.
' Khetoric all this ? ' No, my brother, very singular to say,
it is Fact all this. Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer. Forgot-
ten in these days, it is old as the foundations of the Universe,
and will endure till the Universe cease. It is forgotten now ;
and the first mention of it puckers thy sweet countenance
into a sneer : but it will be brought to mind again, — unless
indeed the Law of Gravitation chance to cease, and men find
that they can walk on vacancy. Unanimity of the Twenty-
seven Millions will do nothing ; walk not thou with them ;
fly from them as for thy life. Twenty-seven Millions trav-
elling on such courses, with gold jingling in every pocket,
with vivats heaven-high, are incessantly advancing, let me
again remind thee, toward^ the firm-land's end, — towards
the end and extinction of what Faithfulness, Veracity, real
"Worth, was in their 'way of life/ Their noble ancestors
have fashioned for them a ' life-road ; ' — in how many thou-
sand senses, this ! There is not an old wise Proverb on
their tongue, an honest Principle articulated in their hearts
into utterance, a wise true method of doing and de-
spatching any work or commerce of men, but helps yet to
carry them forward. Life is still possible to them, because
all is not yet Puffery, Falsity, Mammon-worship and Unna-
ture ; because somewhat is yet Faithfulness, Veracity and
Valour. With a certain very considerable finite quantity of
Unveracity and Phantasm, social life is still possible ; not
with an infinite quantity ! Exceed your certain quantity, the
seven-feet Hat, and all things upwards to the very Champion
cased in tin, begin to reel and flounder, — in Manchester In-
surrections, Chartisms, Sliding-scales ; the Law of Gravita-
tion not forgetting to act. You advance incessantly towards
the land's end ; you are, literally enough, ' consuming the
way.' Step after step, Twenty-seven Million unconscious
men ; — till you are at the land's end ; till there is not faith-
fulness enough among you any more : and the next step
now is lifted not over land, but into air, over ocean-deeps
and roaring abysses : — unless perhaps the Law of Gravita-
tion have forgotten to act?
Oh, it is frightful when a whole Nation, as our Fathers
GOSPEL OF MAMMONISH.
141
used to say, has 6 forgotten God ; ' has remembered only
Mammon, and what Mammon leads to ! "When your self-
trumpeting Hat-maker is the emblem of almost all makers,
and workers, and men, that make anything, — from soul-over-
seerships, body-overseerships, epic poems, acts of parliament,
to hats and shoe-blacking ! Not one false man but does un-
accountable mischief : how much, in a generation or two, will
Twenty-seven Millions, mostly false, manage to accumulate?
The sum of it, visible in every street, market-place, senate-
house, circulating library, cathedral, cotton-mill, and union-
workhouse, fills one not with a comic feeling !
CHAPTEE H.
GOSPEL OF MAMMONISM.
Beader, even Christian Eeacler as thy title goes, hast thou
any notion of Heaven and Hell? I rather apprehend, not.
Often as the words are on our tongue, they have got a fabulous
or semi-fabulous character for most of us, and pass on like a
kind of transient similitude, like a sound signifying little.
Yet it is well worth while for us to know, once and always,
that they are not a similitude, nor a fable nor a semi-fable ;
that they are an everlasting highest fact ! " No Lake of Sicil-
ian or other sulphur burns now anywhere in these ages,"
say est thou ? Well, and if there did not ! Believe that there
does not ; believe it if thou wilt, nay hold by it as a real in-
crease, a rise to higher stages, to wider horizons and empires.
All this has vanished, or has not vanished ; believe as thou
wilt as to all this. But that an Infinite of Practical Importance,
speaking with strict arithmetical exactness, an Infinite, has
vanished or can vanish from the Life of any Man : this thou
shalt not believe ! O brother, the Infinite of Terror, of Hope,
of Pity, did it not at any moment disclose itself to thee, in-
dubitable, unnameable ? Came it never, like the gleam of
preter-natural eternal Oceans, like the voice of old Eternities,
far-sounding through thy heart of hearts ? Never ? Alas,
it was not thy Liberalism then ; it was thy Animalism ! Tha
142
THE MODERN WORKER
Infinite is more sure than any other fact. But only men can
discern it ; mere building beavers, spinning arachnes, much
more the predatory vulturous and vulpine species, do not
discern it well ! —
'The word Hell/ says Sauerteig, 'is still frequently in use
' among the English People : but I could not without diffiU
' culty ascertain what they meant by it. Hell generally sig-
' nines the Infinite Terror, the thing a man is infinitely afraid
'of, and shudders and shrinks from, struggling with his whole
' »oul to escape from it. There is a Hell therefore, if you will
c consider, which accompanies man, in all stages of his history,
' and religious or other development : but the Hells of men
c and Peoples differ notably. With Christians it is the in-
' finite terror of being found guilty before the Just Judge.
'With old Komans, I conjecture, it was the terror not of
' Pluto, for whom probably they cared little, but of doing un-
' worthily, doing unvirtuously, which was their word for umnan-
' fully. And now what is it, if you pierce through his Cants,
' his oft-repeated Hearsays, what he calls his Worships and so
'forth, — what is it that the modern English soul does, in very
' truth, dread infinitely, and contemplate with entire despair ?
' What is his Hell ; after all these reputable, oft-repeated
' Hearsays, what is it ? With hesitation, with astonishment, I
'pronounce it to be : The terror of " Not succeeding ;" of
' not making money, fame, or some other figure in the world,
' — chiefly of not making money ! Is not that a somewhat
singular Hell ? '
Yes, O Sauerteig, it is very singular. If we do not ' suc-
ceed,' where is the use of us? We had better never have been
born. "Tremble intensely," as our friend the Emperor of
China says : there is the black Bottomless of Terror ; what
Sauerteig calls the ' Hell of the English ! ' — But indeed this
Hell belongs naturally to the Gospel of Mammonism, which
also has its corresponding Heaven. For there is one Reality
among so many phantasms ; about one thing we are entirely
in earnest : The making of money. Working Mammonism
does divide the world with idle game-preserving Dilettantism :
■ — thank Heaven that there is even a Mammonism, anything
GOSPEL OF MAMMON ISM.
143
we are in earnest about ! Idleness is worst, Idleness alone is
without hope : work earnestly at anything, you will by de-
grees learn to work at almost all things. There is endless
hope in work, were it even work at making money.
True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mam-
mon-Gospel, have come to strange conclusions. We call it a
Society ; and go about professing openly the totalest separa-
tion, isolation. Our life is not a- mutual helpfulness ; but
rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named £ fair competi-
tion ' and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have pro-
foundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the
sole relation of human beings ; we think, nothing doubting,
that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man. "My
starving workers ? " answers the rich Mill-owner. " Did not
I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them, to the
last sixpence, the sum covenanted for ? What have I to do
with them more ? " — Verily Mammon- worship is a melancholy
creed. When Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel, and
was questioned, " Where is thy brother ? 99 he too made an-
swer, fC Am I my brothers keeper ? " Did I not pay my
brother his wages, the thing he had merited from me?
O sumptuous Merchant-Prince, illustrious game-preserving
Duke, is there no way of c killing ' thy brother but Cain's
rude way ! ' A good man by the very look of him, by his
c very presence with us as a fellow wayfarer in this Life-pil-
f grimage, promises so much : ' wo to Trim if he forget all
such promises, if he never know that they were given ! To a
deadened soul, seared with the brute Idolatry of Sense, to
whom going to Hell is equivalent to not making money, all
£ promises,' and moral duties, that cannot be pleaded for in
Courts of Requests, address themselves in vain. Money he can
be ordered to pay, but nothing more. I have not heard in all
Past History, and expect not to hear in all Future History, of
any Society anywhere under God's Heaven supporting itself
on such Philosophy. The Universe is not made so ; it is
made otherwise than so. The man or nation of men that
thinks it is made so, marches forward nothing doubting, step
after step ; but marches — whither we know ! In these last
THE MODERN WORKER.
two centuries of Atheistic Government (near two centuries
now, since the blessed restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and
Defender of the Faith, Charles Second), I reckon that we
have pretty well exhausted what of ' firm earth ' there was for
us to march on ; — and are now, very ominously, shuddering,
reeling, and let us hope trying to recoil, on the cliff s edge ! —
For out of this that we call Atheism come so many other
isms and falsities, each falsity with its misery at its heels ! —
A soul is not like wind (spirit us, or breath) contained within
a capsule ; the Almighty Maker is not like a Clockmaker that
once, in old immemorial ages, having made his Horologe of a
Universe, sits ever since and sees it go ! Not at all. Hence
comes Atheism ; come, as we say, many other isms ; and as
the sum of all, comes Valetism, the reverse of Heroism ; sad
root of all v/oes whatsoever. For indeed, as no man ever
saw the above-said wind-element enclosed within its capsule,
and finds it at bottom more deniable than conceivable ; so
too he finds, in spite of Bridge water Bequests, your Clock-
maker Almighty an entirely questionable affair, a deniable
affair ; — and accordingly denies it, and along with it so much
else. Alas, one knows not what and how much else ! For the
faith in an Invisible, Unnameable, God-like, present every-
where in all that we see and work and suffer, is the essence
of all faith whatsoever ; and that once denied, or still worse,
asserted with lips only, and out of bound prayer-books only,
what other thing remains believable ? That Cant welhor-
dered is marketable Cant : that Heroism means gas-lighted
Histrionism ; that seen with ' clear eyes ' (as they call Valet-
e} r er-i), no man is a Hero, or ever was a Hero, but all men are
Valets and Varlets. The accursed practical quintessence of
all sorts of Unbelief ! For if there be now no Hero, and the
Histrio himself .begin to be seen into, what hope is there for
the seed of Adam here below ? We are the doomed everlast-
ing prey of the Quack ; who, now in this guise, now in that,
is to filch us, to pluck and eat us, by such modes as are con-
venient for him. For the modes and guises I care little.
The Quack once inevitable, let him come swiftly, let him
pluck ana eat me , — swiftly, that 1 may at least have done
GOSPEL OF MAMMON ISM.
145
with him ; for in his Quack-world I can have no wish to
linger. Though he slay me, yet will I not trust in him.
Though he conquer nations, and have all the Flunkeys of
the Universe shouting at his heels, yet will I know well that
he is an Inanity ; that for him and his there is no continu-
ance appointed, save only in Gehenna and the Pool. Alas,
the Atheist world, from its utmost summits of Heaven and
Westminster Hall, downwards through poor seven-feet Hats
and ' "[Inveracities fallen hungry,' down to the lowest cellars
and neglected hunger-dens of it, is very wretched.
One of Dr. Alison's Scotch facts struck us much.* A poor
Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of
Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all re-
source, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of
that City. At this Charitable Establishment and then at that
she was refused : referred from one to the other, helped by
none ; — till she had exhausted them all ; till her strength and
heart failed her : she sank down in typhus fever ; died, and
infected her Lane with fever, so that ' seventeen other per-
sons ' died of fever there in consequence. The humane Phy-
sician asks thereupon, as with a heart too full for speaking,
Would it not have been economy to help this poor Widow ?
She took typhus-fever, and killed seventeen of you ! — Very
curious. The forlorn Irish Widow applies to her fellow-
creatures, as if saying, "Behold I am sinking, bare of help :
ye must help me ! I am your sister, bone of your bone ; one
God made us ; ye must help me ! " They answer, " No ; im-
possible : thou art no sister of ours," But she proves her
sisterhood ; her typhus-fever kills them ; they actually were
her brothers, though denying it ! Had human creature ever
to go lower for a proof ?
For, as indeed was very natural in such case, all govern-
ment of the Poor by the Rich has long ago been given over
to Supply-and-demand, Laissez-faire and such like, and uni-
versally declared to be ' impossible.' "You are no sister of
ours ; what shadow of proof is there ? Here are our parch-
* Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland : By Wil-
liam Pulteney Alison, M.D. (Edinburgh, 1840.)
10
146
THE MODERN WORKER
ments, our padlocks, proving indisputably our money-safes to
be oars, and you to have no business with them. Depart ! It
is impossible ! " — Nay, what wouldst thou thyself have us do ?
cry indignant readers Nothing, my friends, — till you have
got a soul for yourselves again. Till then all things are 6 im-
possible.' Till then I cannot even bid you buy, as the old
Spartans would have done, two-pence worth of powder and
lead, and compendiously shoot to death this poor Irish Widow :
even that is ' impossible ' for you. Nothing is left but that
she prove her sisterhood by dying, and infecting you with
typhus. Seventeen of you lying dead will not deny such
proof that she was flesh of your flesh ; and perhaps some of
the living may lay it to heart.
' Impossible : ' of a certain two-legged animal with feathers
it is said, if you draw a distinct chalk-circle round him, he
sits, imprisoned, as if girt with the iron ring of Fate ; and will
die there, though within sight of victuals, or sit in sick misery
there, and be fatted to death. The name of this poor two-
legged animal is — Goose ; and they make of him, when well
fattened, Pate defoie gras, much prized by some !
CHAPTER m
GOSPEL OF DILETTANTISM.
But after all, the Gospel of Dilettantism, producing a Gov-
erning Class who do not govern, nor understand in the least
that they are bound or expected to govern, is still mournfuler
than that of Mammonism. Mammonism, as we said, at least
works ; this goes idle. Mammonism has seized some portion
of the message of Nature to man ; and seizing that, and fol-
lowing it, will seize and appropriate more and more of
Nature's message : but Dilettantism has missed it wholly.
' Make money : ' that will mean withal, £ Do work in order to
make money.' But, * Go gracefully idle in Mayfair,' what
does or can that mean ? An idle, game-preserving and even
corn-la wing Aristocracy, in such an England as ours : has the
GOSPEL OF DILETTANTISM.
147
world, if we take thought of it, ever seen such a phenomenon
till very lately ? Can it long continue to see such ?
Accordingly the impotent, insolent Donothingism in Prac-
tice, and Saynothingism in Speech, which we have to witness
ori that side of our affairs, is altogether amazing. A Corn-
Law demonstrating itself openly, for ten years or more, with
' arguments ' to make the angels, and some other classes of
creatures, weep ! For men are not ashamed to rise in Parlia-
ment and elsewhere, and speak the things they do not think.
' Expediency,' 6 Necessities of Party,' &c. &c ! It is not known
that the Tongue of Man is a sacred organ ; that Man himself
is definable in Philosophy as an ' Incarnate Word ; ' the Word
not there, you have no Man there either, but a Phantasm in-
stead ! In this way it is that xAbsurdities may live long
enough, — still walking, and talking for themselves, years and
decades after the brains are quite out ! How are ' the knaves
and dastards ' ever to be got £ arrested ' at that rate ? —
" No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend
Sauerteig would say, "speaks a jDlain w r ord to me. Every
man feels bound to be something more than plain ; to be
pungent withal, witty, ornamental. His poor fraction of
sense has to be perked into some epigrammatic shape, that it
may prick into me ; — perhaps (this is the commonest) to be
topsyturvied, left standing on its head, that I may remember
it the better ! Such grinning inanity is very sad to the soul
of man. Human faces should not grin on one like masks
they should look on one like faces ! I love honest laughter,
as I do sunlight ; but not dishonest : most kinds of dancing
too ; but the St. Vitus kind not at all ! A fashionable wit,
ach Ifimmel, if you ask, "Which, he or a Death's head, will be
the cheerier company for me ? pray send not him ! "
Insincere Speech, truly, is the prime material of insincere
Action. Action hangs, as it were, dissolved in Speech, in
Thought whereof Speech is the shadow ; and precipitates it-
self therefrom. The kind of Speech in a man betokens the
kind of Action you will get from him. Our Speech, in these
modern days, has become amazing. Johnson complained,
" Nobody speaks in earnest, Sir ; there is no serious conver-
148
THE MODERN WORKER.
sation." To us all serious speech of men, as that of Seven-
teenth-Century Puritans, Twelfth-Century Catholics, German
Poets of this Century, has become jargon, more or less in-
sane. Cromwell was mad and a quack ; Anselm, Becket,
Goethe, ditto, ditto.
Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more
significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers
by the Dead Sea. A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that
same Asphaltic Lake ; and having forgotten, as we are all too
prone to do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the
falsities and outer semblances of it, were fallen into sad con-
ditions, — verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Lake.
Whereupon it pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet
Moses, with an instructive word of warning out of which
might have sprung ' remedial measures ' not a few. But no :
the men of the Dead Sea discovered, as the valet-species
always does in heroes or prophets, no comeliness in Moses ;
listened with real tedium to Moses, with light grinning, or
with splenetic sniffs and sneers, affecting even to yawn ; and
signified, in short, that they found him a humbug, and even
a bore. Such was the candid theory these men of the Asphalt
Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That probably he was a
humbug, and certainly he was a bore.
Moses withdrew ; but Nature and her rigorous veracities
did not withdraw. The men of the Dead Sea, when we next
went to visit them, were all £ changed into Apes ; ' * sitting
on the trees there, grinning now in the most an affected
manner ; gibbering and chattering very genuine nonsense ;
finding the whole Universe now a most indisputable Humbug !
The Universe has become a Humbug to these Apes who
thought it one. There they sit and chatter, to this hour :
only, I believe, every Sabbath there returns to them a bewil-
dered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence; and they sit,
with their wizzened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of
supreme tragicality as Apes may ; looking out through those
blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest
* Sale's Koran {Introduction).
HAPPY.
149
universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered
Dusk of Things ; wholly an Uncertainty, Unint eligibility,
they and it ; and for commentary thereon, here and there an
unmusical chatter or mew : — truest, tragicalest Humbug con-
ceivable by the mind of man or ape ! They made no use of
their souls ; and so have lost them. Their worship on the
Sabbath now is to roost there, with unmusical screeches, and
half-remember that they had souls.
Didst thou never, O Traveller, fall in with parties of this
tribe ? Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our
day.
CHAPTER IV.
HAPPY.
All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble ; work is alone
noble : be that here said and asserted once more. And in
like manner, too, all dignity is painful ; a life of ease is not
for any man, nor for any god. The life of all gods figures
itself to us as a Sublime Sadness, — earnestness of Infinite
Battle against Infinite Labour. Our highest religion is
named the 'Worship of Sorrow/ For the son of man there
is no noble crown, well worn, or even ill worn, but is a crown
of thorns ! — These things, in spoken words, or still better, in
felt instincts alive in every heart, were once well known.
Does. not the whole wretchedness, the whole Atheism as I
call it, of man's ways, in these generations, shadow itself for
us in that unspeakable Life-philosophy of his : The pretension
to be what he calls ' happy ? ' Every pitif ulest whipster that
walks within a skin has his head filled with the notion that he
is, shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be,
' happy.' His wishes, the pitifulest whipster's, are to be ful-
filled for him ; his days, the pitifulest whipster's, are to flow
on in ever-gentle current of enjoyment, impossible even for
the gods. The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be happy ;
thou shalt love pleasant things, and find them. The people
clamour, "Why have we not found pleasant things ?
We construct our theory of Human Duties, not on any
150
THE MODERN WORKER.
Greatest-Nobleness Principle, never so mistaken ; no, but on
a Greatest-Happiness Principle. ' The word Soul with us, as
in some Slavonic dialects, seems to be synonymous with
Stomach' We plead and speak, in our Parliaments and else-
where, not as from the Soul, but from the Stomach ; — where-
fore, indeed, our pleadings are so slow to profit. "We plead
not for God's Justice ; we are not ashamed to stand clamour-
ing and pleading for our own ' interests, ' our own rents and
trade-profits ; we say, They are the ' interests ' of so many ;
there is such an intense desire in us for them ! We demand
Free Trade, with much just vociferation and benevolence,
That the poorer classes, who are terribly ill-off at present, may
have cheaper New-Orleans bacon. Men ask on Free-trade
platforms, How can the indomitable spirit of Englishmen be
kept up without plenty of bacon ? We shall become a ruined
Nation ! — Surely, my friends, plenty of bacon is good and in-
dispensable : but I doubt, you will never get even bacon by
aiming only at that. You are men, not animals of prey, well-
used or ill-used ! Your Greatest-Happiness Principle seems
to me fast becoming a rather unhappy one. — What if we should
cease babbling about ' happiness,' and leave it resting on its
own basis, as it used to do !
A gifted Byron rises in his wrath ; and feeling too surely
that he for his part is not ' happy,' declares the same in very
violent language, as a piece of news that may be interesting.
It evidently has surprised him much. One dislikes to see a
man and poet reduced to proclaim on the streets such tidings ;
but on the whole, as matters go, that is not the most dislik-
able. Byron speaks the truth in this matter. Byron's large
audience indicates how true it is felt to be.
'Happy,' my brother? First of all, what difference is it
whether thou art happy or not ! Today becomes Yesterday
so fast, all Tomorrows become Yesterdays ; and then there is
no question whatever of the 'happiness,' but quite another
question. Nay, thou hast such a sacred pity left at least for
thyself, thy very pains, once gone over into Yesterday, become
joys to thee. Besides, thou knowest not what heavenly bless-
edness and indispensable sanative virtue was in them ; thou
HAPPY.
151
shalt only know it after many days, when thou art wiser ! — A
benevolent old Surgeon sat once in our company, with a Pa-
tient fallen sick by gourmandising, whom he had just, too
briefly in the Patient's judgment, been examining. The fool-
ish Patient still at intervals continued to break in on our dis-
course, which rather promised to take a philosophic turn : "But
I have lost my appetite," said he, objurgatively, with a tone of
irritated pathos; "I have no appetite; I can't eat!" — -"My
dear fellow," answered the Doctor in mildest tone, " it isn't
of the slightest consequence ;" — and continued his philosophi-
cal disco ursings with us !
Or does the reader not know the history of that Scottish
iron Misanthrope ? The inmates of some town-mansion, in
those Northern parts, were thrown into the fearfulest alarm
by indubitable symptoms of a ghost inhabiting the next house,
or perhaps even the partition-wall ! Ever at a certain hour,
with preternatural gnarring, growling and screeching, which
attended as running bass, there began, in a horrid, semi-
articulate, unearthly voice, this song : " Once I was hap-hap-
happy, but now I'm mees-evohle ! Clack-clack-clack, gnarr-
r-r, whuz-z : Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm mis-
erable !" — Rest, rest, perturbed spirit ; — or indeed, as the good
old Doctor said : My dear fellow, it isn't of the slightest con-
sequence ! But no ; the perturbed spirit could not rest ; and
to the neighbours, fretted, affrighted, or at least insufferably
bored by him, it was of such consequence that they had to go
and examine in his haunted chamber. In his haunted cham-
ber, they find that the perturbed spirit is an unfortunate —
Imitator of Byron ? No, is an unfortunate rusty Meat-jack,
gnarring and creaking with rust and work ; and this, in Scot-
tish dialect, is its Byronian musical Life-philosophy, sung ac-
cording to ability !
Truly, I think the man who goes about pothering and up-
roaring for his 'happiness,' — pothering, and were it ballot-
boxing, poem-making, or in what way soever fussing and ex-
erting himself, — he is not the man that will help us to e get
our knaves and dastards arrested !' No ; he rather is on the
152
THE MODERN WORKER.
way to increase the number, — by at least one unit and his tail \
Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair ; belongs not to
the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times. ' Hap-
piness our being's end and aim,' all that very paltry specula-
tion, is at bottom, if we will count well, not. yet two centuries
>1 1 in the world.
The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with
asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work
done. Not "I can't eat!" but "I can't work !" that was the
burden of all wise complaining among men. It is, after all,
the one unhappiness of a man. That he cannot work ; that
he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled. Behold, the day
is passing swiftly over, our life is passing swiftly over; and
the night cometh when no man can work. The night once
come, our happiness, our unhappiness, — it is all abolished ;
vanished, clean gone ; a thing that has been" : ' not of the slight-
est consequence ' whether we were happy as eupeptic Curtis,
as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as Job with pot-
sherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and sensibilities of the
heart ; as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard labour and rust !
But our work, — behold that is not abolished, that has not
vanished : our work, behold it remains, or the want of it re-
mains ; — for endless Times and Eternities, remains ; and that
is now the sole question with u£ forevermore ! Brief brawling
Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns tinsel-
gilt, is gone ; and divine everlasting Night with her star-dia-
dems, with her silences and her veracities, is come ! What
hast thou done, and how? Happiness, unhappiness : all that
was but the wages thou hadst ; thou hast spent all that, in
sustaining thyself hitherward ; not a coin of it remains with
thee, it is all spent, eaten : and now thy work, where is thy
work ? Swift, out with it, let us see thy work !
Of a truth, if man were not a poor hungry dastard, and
even much of a blockhead withal, he would cease criticising
his victuals to such extent ; and criticise himself rather, what
he does with his victuals !
THE ENGLISH.
153
CHAPTEK V.
THE ENGLISH.
And yet, with all thy theoretic platitudes, what a depth vi
practical sense in thee, great England ! Depth of sense, of
justice, and courage ; in which, under all emergencies and
world-bewilderments, and under this most complex of emer-
gencies we now live in, there is still hope, there is still assu-
rance !
The English are a dumb people. They can do great acts,
but not describe them. Like the old Komans and some few
others, their Epic Poem is written on the earth's surface :
England her Mark ! It is complained that they have no ar-
tists : one Shakspeare indeed ; but for Raphael only a Rey-
nolds ; for Mozart nothing but a Mr. Bishop ; not a picture,
not a song. And yet they did produce one Shakspeare : con-
sider how the element of Shakspearean melody does lie im-
prisoned m their nature ; reduced to unfold itself in mere
Cotton-mills, Constitutional Governments, and such like ; —
all the more interesting when it does become visible, as even
in such unexpected shapes it succeeds in doing ! Goethe
spoke of the Horse, how impressive, almost affecting it was
that an animal of such qualities should stand obstructed so ;
its speech nothing but an inarticulate neighing, its handiness
mere /ioq/iness, the fingers all constricted, tied together, the
finger-nails coagulated into a mere hoof, shod with iron. The
more significant, thinks he, are those eye-flashings of the
generous noble quadruped ; those prancings, curvings of the
neck clothed with thunder.
A Dog of Knowledge has free utterance ; but the Warhorse
is almost mute, very far from free ! It is even so. Truly,
your freest utterances are not by any means always the best :
they are the worst rather ; the feeblest, trivialest ; their mean-
ing prompt, but small, ephemeral. Commend me to the silent
English, to' the silent Romans. Nay, the silent Russians too
I believe to be worth something : are they not even now drill-
ing, under much obloquy, an immense semi-barbarous half*
154
THE MODERN WORKER.
world from Finland to Kamtschatka, into rule, subordination,
civilisation, — really in an old Roman fashion ; speaking no
word about it ; quietly hearing all manner of vituperative
Able Editors speak ! While your ever-talking, ever-gesticu-
lating French, for example, what are they at this moment
drilling ? — Nay, of all animals, the freest of utterance, I should
judge, is the genus Simia : go into the Indian woods, say all
Travellers, and look what a brisk, adroit, unresting Ape-popu-
lation it is !
The spoken "Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epit-
ome of the man ; how much more the done Work. What-
soever of morality and of intelligence ; what of patience, per-
severance, faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity, energy ;
in a word, whatsoever of Strength the man had in him will lie
written in the Work he does. To work : why, it is to try
himself against Nature, and her everlasting unerring Laws ;
these will tell a true verdict as to the man. So much of vir-
tue and of faculty did we find in him ; so much and no more !
He had such capacity of harmonising himself with me and my
unalterable ever-veracious Laws ; of cooperating and working
as /bade him; — and has prospered, and has not prospered,
as you see ? — Working as great Nature bade him : does not
that mean virtue of a kind ; nay, of all kinds ? Cotton can
be spun and sold, Lancashire operatives can be got to spin it,
and at length one has the woven webs and sells them, by fol-
lowing Nature's regulations in that matter : by not following
Nature's regulations, you have them not. You have them
not ; — there is no Cotton -web to sell : Nature finds a bill
against you ; your ' Strength ' is not Strength, but Futility !
Let faculty be honoured, so far as it is faculty. A man that
can succeed in working is to me always a man.
How one loves to see the burly figure of him, this thick-
skinned, seemingly opaque, perhaps sulky, almost stupid Man
of Practice, pitted against some light adroit Man of Theory,
all equipt with clear logic, and able anywhere to give you
Why for Wherefore ! The adroit Man of Theory, so light of
movement, clear of utterance, with his bow full-bent and
THE ENGLISH.
155
quiver full of arrow-arguments, — surely he will strike down
the game, transfix everywhere the heart of the matter ; tri-
umph everywhere, as he proves that he shall and must do ?
To your astonishment, it turns out oftenest No. The cloudy-
browed, thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no logic-utter-
ance, in silence mainly, with here and there a low grunt or
growl, has in him what transcends all logic-utterance : a Con-
gruity with the Unuttered. The Speakable, which lies atop,
as a superficial film, or outer skin, is his or is not his : but the
Doable, which reaches down to the World's centre, you find
him there !
The rugged Brindley has little to say for himself; the
rugged Brindley, when difficulties accumulate on him, re-
tires silent, 6 generally to his bed ; ' retires c sometimes for
i three days together to his bed, that he may be in perfect
'privacy there,' and ascertain in his rough head how the
difficulties can be overcome. The ineloquent Brindley, be-
hold he has chained seas together ; his ships do visibly float
over valleys, invisibly through the hearts of mountains ; the
Mersey and the Thames, the Humber and the Severn have
shaken hands : Nature most audibly answers, Yes ! The Man
of Theory twangs his full-bent bow ; Nature's Fact ought to
fall stricken, but does not : his logic arrow glances from it as
from a scaly dragon, and the obstinate Fact keeps walking
its way. How singular ! At bottom you will have to grap-
ple closer with the dragon ; take it home to you, by real
faculty, not by seeming faculty ; try whether you are stronger
or it is stronger. Close with it, wrestle it : sheer obstinate
toughness of muscle ; but much more, what we call tough-
ness of heart, which will mean persistance hopeful and even
desperate, unsubduable patience, composed candid openness,
clearness of mind : all this shall be 6 strength ' in wrestling
your dragon ; the whole man's real strength is in this work,
we shall get the measure of him here.
Of all the Nations in the world at present the English are
the stupidest in speech, the wisest in action. As good as a
4 dumb ' Nation, I say, who cannot speak, and have never yet
spoken, — spite of the Shakspeares and Miltons who shew -us
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THE MODERN WORKER.
-what possibilities there are ! — 0 Mr. Bull, I look in that surly
face of thine with a mixture of pity and laughter, yet also
with wonder and veneration. Thou complainest not, my il-
lustrious friend ; and yet I believe the heart of thee is full of
sorrow, of unspoken sadness, seriousness, — profound melan-
choly (as some have said) the basis of thy being. Uncon-
sciously, for thou speakest of nothing, this great Universe is
great to thee. Not by levity of floating, but by stubborn
force of swimming, shalt thou make thy way. The Fates
sing of thee that thou shalt many times be thought an ass
and a dull ox, and shalt with a godlike indifference believe it.
My friend, — and it is all untrue, nothing ever falser in point
of fact ! Thou art of those great ones whose greatness the
small passer-by does not discern. Thy very stupidity is wiser
than their wisdom. A grand vis inertia? is in thee ; how
many grand qualities unknown to small men ! Nature alone
knows thee, acknowledges the bulk and strength of thee : tby
Epic, unsung in words, is written in huge characters on the
face of this Planet, — sea-moles, cotton-trades, railways, fleets
and cities, Indian Empires, Americas, New-Hollands ; legible
throughout the Solar System !
But the dumb Russians too, as I said, they, drilling all wild
Asia and wild Europe into military rank and file, a terrible
yet hitherto a prospering enterprise, are still dumber. The
old Romans also could not speak, for many centuries : — not
till the world was theirs ; and so many speaking Greekdoms,
their logic-arrows all spent, had been absorbed and abolished.
The logic-arrows, how they glanced futile from obdurate
thick-skinned Facts ; Facts to be wrestled down only by the
real vigour of Roman thews ! — As for me, I honour, in these
loud-babbling days, all the Silent rather. A grand Silence
that of Romans ; — nay the grandest of all, is it not that of the
gods ! Even Triviality, Imbecility, that can sit silent, how
respectable is it in comparison ! The £ talent of silence ' is
our fundamental one. Great honour to him whose Epic is a
melodious hexameter Iliad ; not a jingling Sham-Iliad, nothing
true in it but the hexameters and forms merely. But still
greater honour, if his Epic be a mighty Empire slowly built
THE ENGLISH.
157
together, a mighty Series of Heroic deeds, — a mighty Conquest
over Chaos ; which Epic the ' Eternal Melodies ' have, and
must have, informed and dwelt in, as it sung itself ! There is
no mistaking that latter Epic. Deeds are greater than Words.
Deeds have such a life, mute bat undeniable, and grow as
living trees and fruit-trees do ; they people the vacuity of
Time, and make it green and worthy. Why should the oak
prove logically that it ought to grow, and will grow ? Plant
it, try it ; what gifts of diligent judicious assimilation and
secretion it has, of progress and resistance, of force to grow,
will then declare themselves. My much-honoured, illustrious,
extremely inarticulate Mr. Bull ! —
Ask Bull his spoken opinion of any matter, — oftentimes the
force of dulness can no farther go. You stand silent, in-
credulous, as over a platitude that borders on the Infinite.
The man's Churchisms, Dissenterisms, Puseyisms, Bentham-
isms, College Philosophies, Fashionable Literatures, are unex-
ampled in this world. Fate's prophecy is fulfilled ; you call
the man an ox and an ass. But set him once to work, — re-
spectable man ! His spoken sense is next to nothing, nine-
tenths of it 'palpable nonsense : but his unspoken sense, his
inner silent feeling of what is true, what does agree with fact,
what is doable and what is not doable, — this seeks its fellow
in the world. A terrible worker ; irresistible against marshes,
mountains, impediments, disorder, in civilisation ; everywhere
vanquishing disorder, leaving it behind him as method and
order. He c retires to his bed three days ' and considers !
Nay withal, stupid as he is, our dear John, — ever, after in-
finite tumblings, and spoken platitudes innumerable from
barrel-heads and parliament-benches, he does settle down
somewhere about the just conclusion ; you are certain that
his jumblings and tumblings will end, after years or centuries,
in the stable equilibrium. Stable equilibrium, I say ; centre-
of-gravity lowest ; — not the unstable, with centre-of-gravity
highest, as I have known it done by quicker people ! For
indeed, do but jumble and tumble sufficiently, you avoid that
worst fault,, of settling with your centre-of-gravity highest ;
your centre of-gravity is certain to come lowest, and to stay
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THE MODERN WORKER.
there. If slowness, what we in our impatience call £ stupidity,'
be the price of stable equilibrium over unstable, shall we
grudge a little slowness ? Not the least admirable quality of
Bull is, after all, that of remaining insensible to logic ; hold-
ing out for considerable periods, ten years or more, as in this
of the Corn-Laws, after all arguments and shadow of argu-
ments have faded away from him, till the very urchins on the
street titter at the arguments he brings. Logic, — Aoyi/a), the
' Art of Speech,' — does indeed speak so and so ; clear enough :
nevertheless Bull still shakes his head ; will see whether
nothing else illogical, not yet ' spoken,' not yet able to be
' spoken,' do not lie in the business, as there so often does !- —
My firm belief is, that, finding himself now enchanted, hand-
shackled, foot-shackled, in Poor-Law Bastilles and elsewhere,
he will retire three days to his bed, and arrive at a conclusion
or two ! His three years ' total stagnation of trade,' alas, is
not that a painful enough ' lying in bed to consider himself ? 1
Poor Bull!
Bull is a born Conservative ; for this too I inexpressibly
honour him. All great Peoples are conservatives ; slow to be-
lieve in novelties ; patient of much error in actualties ; deeply
and forever certain of the greatness that is in Law, in Custom
once solemnly established, and now long recognised as just
and final. — True, O Radical Reformer, there is no Custom
that can, properly speaking, be final ; none. And yet thou
seest Customs which, in all civilised countries, are accounted
final ; nay, under the Old-Roman name of Mores, are ac-
counted Morality, Virtue, Laws of God Himself. Such, I as-
sure thee, not a few of them are ; such almost all of them once
were. And greatly do I respect the solid character, — a block-
head, thou wilt say ; yes, but a w r ell-conditioned blockhead,
and the best-conditioned, — who esteems all 'Customs once
solemnly acknowledged ' to be ultimate, divine, and the rule
for a man to walk by, nothing doubting, not inquiring farther.
"What a time of it had we, were all men's life and trade still,
in all parts of it, a problem, a hypothetic seeking, to be set-
tled by painful Logics and Baconian Inductions ! The Clerk
in Eastcheap cannot spend the day in verifying his Ready-
THE ENGLISH.
159
Reckoner ; lie must take it as verified, true and indisputable ;
or his Book-keeping by Double Entry will stand still " Where
is your Posted Ledger ?" asks the Master at night. — " Sir,"
answers the other, " I was verifying my Ready-Reckoner, and
find some errors. The Ledger is — ! " — Fancy such a thing !
True, all turns on your Ready-Reckoner being moderately
correct, — being not insupportably incorrect ! A Ready-Reck-
oner which has led to distinct entries in your Ledger such as
these : 6 Creditor an English People by fifteen hundred years
6 of good Labour ; and Debtor to lodging in enchanted Poor-
' Law Bastilles : Creditor by conquering the* largest Empire
' the Sun ever saw ; and Debtor to Donothingism and " Im-
possible " written on all departments of the government
' thereof : Creditor by mountains of gold ingots earned ; and
' Debtor to No Bread purchasable by them : ' such Ready-
Reckoner, methinks, is beginning to be suspect ; nay is ceas-
ing, and has ceased, to be suspect ! Such Ready-Reckoner is
a Solecism in Eastcheap ; and must, whatever be the press of
business, and will and shall be rectified a little. Business can
go on no longer with it. The most Conservative English Peo-
ple, thickest-skinned, most patient of Peoples, is driven alike
by its Logic and its Unlogic, by things ¥ spoken,' and by
things not yet spoken or very speakable, but only felt and
very unendurable, to be wholly a Reforming People. Their
Life as it is has ceased to be longer possible for them.
Urge not this noble silent People ; rouse not the Berserkir-
rage that lies in them ! Do you know their Cromwells, Hamp-
dens, their Pyms and Bradshaws ? Men very peaceable, but
men that can be made very terrible ! Men who, like their old
Teutsch Fathers in Agrippa's days, ' have a soul that despises
death ;' to whom 'death,' compared with falsehoods and in-
justices, is light; — c in whom there is a rage unconquerable
by the immortal gods ! ' Before this, the English People have
taken very preternatural-looking Spectres by the beard ; say-
ing virtually : " And if thou wert 1 preternatural ? ' Thou with
thy c divine-rights ' grown diabolical wrongs? Thou — not
even ' natural ; ' decapitable ; totally extinguishable ! " ■
Yes, just so godlike as this People's patience was, even so
160
THE MODERN WORKER.
godlike will and must its impatience be. Away, ye scandalous
Practical Solecisms, children actually of the Prince of Dark-
ness ; ye have near broken our hearts ; we can and will en-
dure you no longer. Begone, we say ; depart while the play
is good ! By the Most High Gocl, whose sons and born mis-
sionaries true men are, ye shall not continue here ! You and
we have become incompatible ; can inhabit one house no
longer. Either you must go, or we. Are ye ambitious to try
which it shall be ?
O my Conservative friends, who still specially name and
struggle to approve yourselves £ Conservative,' would to Heaven
I could persuade you of this world-old fact, than which Fate
is not surer, That Truth and Justice alone are capable of beiiig
' conserved ' and preserved ! The thing which is unjust, which
is not according to God's Law, will you, in a God's Universe,
try to conserve that ? It is so old, say you ? Yes, and the
hotter haste ought you, of all others, to be in to let it grow
no older ! If but the faintest whisper in your hearts intimate
to you that it is not fair, — hasten, for the sake of Conservatism
itself, to probe it rigorously, to cast it forth at once and for-
ever if guilty. How will or can you preserve it, the thing that
is not fair ? ' Impossibility ' a thousandfold is marked on that.
And ye call yourselves Conservatives, Aristocracies : — ought
not honour and nobleness of mind, if they had departed from
all the Earth elsewhere, to find their last refuge with you ?
Ye unfortunate !
The bough that is dead shall be cut away, for the sake of
the tree itself. ' Old ? Yes, it is too old. Many a weary win-
ter has it swung and creaked there, and gnawed and fretted,
with its dead wood, the organic substance and still living fibre
of this good tree ; many a long summer has its ugly naked
brown defaced the fair green umbrage ; every day it has done
mischief, and that only : off with it, for the tree's sake, if for
nothing more : let the Conservatism that would preserve cut
it away. Did no wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough
with its dead root left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous ;
is as a dead iron spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven
into the living substance ; — nay is far worse ; for in every
TWO CENTURIES.
161
windstorm (' commercial crisis ' or the like), it frets and creaks,
jolts itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as your dead iron
spike would !
If I were the Conservative Party of England (which is another
bold figure of speech), I would not for a hundred thousand
pounds an hour allow those Corn-Laws to continue. Po-
tosi and Golconda put together would not purchase my as-
sent to them. Do you count what treasuries of bitter indig-
nation they are laying up for you in every just English heart ?
Do you know what questions, not as to Corn-prices and Slid-
ing-scales alone, they are forcing every reflective Englishman
to ask himself? Questions insoluble, or hitherto unsolved ;
deeper than any of our Logic plummets hitherto will sound :
questions deep enough, — which it were better that we did
not name even in thought ! You are forcing us to think of
them, to begin uttering them. The utterance of them is
begun ; and where will it be ended, think you ? When two
millions of one's brother-men sit in Workhouses, and five mill-
ions, as is insolently said, ' rejoice in potatoes,' there are vari-
ous things that must be begun, let them end where they can.
CHAPTER VI.
TWO CENTURIES.
The Settlement effected by our 'Healing Parliament' in
the Year of Grace 1660, though accomplished under universal
acclamations from the four corners of the British Dominions,
turns out to have been one of the mournfulest that ever took
place in this land of ours. It called and thought itself a Set-
tlement of the brightest hope and fulfilment, bright as the
blaze of universal tar-barrels and bonfires could make it : and
we find it now, on looking back on it with the insight which
trial has yielded, a Settlement as of despair. Considered well,
it was a settlement to govern henceforth without God, with
only some decent Pretence of God.
Governing by the Christian Law of God had been found a
thing of battle, convulsion, confusion, an infinitely difficult
11
162
THE MODERN WORKER.
thing : wherefore let us now abandon it, and govern only by
so much of God's Christian Law as — as may prove quiet and
convenient for us. What is the end of Government? To
guide men in the way wherein they should go ; towards their
true good in this life, the portal of infinite good in a life to
come ? To guide men in such way, and ourselves in such
way, as, the Maker of men, whose eye is upon us, will sanc-
tion at the Great Day ? — Or alas, perhaps at bottom is there
no Great Day, no sure outlook of any life to come ; but only
this poor life, and what of taxes, felicities, Nell-Gwyns and
entertainments we can manage to muster here ? In that case,
the end of Government will be, To suppress all noise and dis-
turbance, whether of Puritan preaching, Cameronian psalm-
singing, thieves'-riot, murder, arson, or what noise soever,
and — be careful that supplies do not fail ! A very notable
conclusion, if we will think of it ; and not without an abun-
dance of fruits for us. Oliver Cromwell's body hung on the
Tyburn-gallows, as the type of Puritanism found futile, inex-
ecutable, execrable, — yes, that gallows-tree has been a finger-
post into very strange country indeed. Let earnest Puritan-
ism die ; let decent Formalism, whatsoever cant it be or grow
to, live ! We have had a pleasant journey in that direction ;
and are — arriving at our inn ?
To support the Four Pleas of the Crown, and keep Taxes
coming in : in very sad seriousness, has not this been, ever
since, even in the best times, almost the one admitted end and
aim of Government ? Religion, Christian Church, Moral Duty ;
the fact that .man had a soul at all ; that in man's life there
was any eternal truth or justice at all, — has been as good as
left quietly out of sight. Church indeed, — alas, the endless
talk and struggle we have had of High-Church, Low-Church,
Church-Extension, Church-in-Danger : we invite the Christian
reader to think whether it has not been a too miserable
screech-owl phantasm of talk and struggle, as for a ' Church,'
which one had rather not define at present !
But now in these godless two centuries, looking at Eng-
land and her efforts and doings, if we ask, What of England's
doings the Law of Nature had accepted, Nature's King had
TWO CENTURIES.
163
actually furthered and pronounced to have truth in them, —
where is our answer ? Neither the ' Church ' of Hurd and
Warburton, nor the Anti-church of Hume and Paine ; not in
any shape the Spiritualism of England : all this is already
seen, or beginning to be seen, for what it is ; a thing that
Nature does not own. On the one side is dreary Cant, with
a reminiscence of things noble and divine ; on the other is but
acrid Candour, with a prophecy of things brutal, infernal.
Hurd and Warburton are sunk into the sere and yellow leaf ;
no considerable body of true-seeing men looks thitherward
for healing : the Paine-and-Hume Atheistic theory of 6 things
well let alone/ with Liberty, Equality and the like, is also in
these days declaring itself naught, unable to keep the world
from taking fire.
The theories and speculations of both these parties, and we
may say, of all intermediate parties and persons, prove to be
things which the Eternal Veracity did not accept ; things
superficial, ephemeral, which already a near Posterity, finding
them already dead and brown-leafed, is about to suppress and
forget. The Spiritualism of England, for those godless years,
is, as it were, all forgettable. Much has been written : but the
perennial Scriptures of Mankind have had small accession :
from all English Books, in rhyme or prose, in leather binding
or in paper wrappage, how many verses have been added to
these ? Our most melodious Singers have sung as from the
throat outwards : from the inner Heart of Man, from the
great Heart of Nature, through no Pope or Philips, has there
come any tone. The Oracles have been dumb. In brief, the
Spoken Word of England has not been true. The Spoken
Word of England turns out to have been trivial ; of short en-
durance ; not valuable, not available as a Word, except for
the passing day. It has been accordant with transitory Sem-
blance ; discordant with eternal Fact. It has been unfortu-
nately not a Word, but a Cant ; a helpless involuntary Cant,
nay too often a cunning voluntary one : either way, a very
mournful Cant ; the Voice not of Nature and Fact, but of
something other than these.
With all its miserable shortcomings, with its wars, contro-
164
THE MODERN WORKER
versies, with its trades-unions, famine-insurrections, — it is het
Practical Material Work alone that England has to shew for
herself ! This, and hitherto almost nothing more ; yet actually
this. The grim inarticulate veracity of the English People, un-
able to speak its meaning in words, has turned itself silently on
things ; and the dark powers of Material Nature have answered,
" Yes, this at least is true, this is not false ! " So answers Na-
ture. " Waste desert-shrubs of the Tropical swamps have be-
come Cotton-trees ; and here, under my furtherance, are verily
woven shirts, — hanging unsold, undistributed, but capable to
be distributed, capable to cover the bare backs of my children
of men. Mountains, old as the Creation, I have permitted to
be bored through : bituminous fuel-stores, the wreck of for-
ests that were green a million years ago, — I have opened them
from my secret rock- chambers, and they are yours, ye English.
Your huge fleets, steamships, do sail the sea : huge Indias do
obey you ; from huge New Englands and Antipodal Austraiias,
comes profit and traffic to this Old England of mine ! " So
answers Nature. The Practical Labour of England is not a
chimerical Triviality r it is a Fact, acknowledged by all the
Worlds ; which no man and no demon will contradict. It is,
very audibly, though very inarticulately as yet, the one God's
Voice we have heard in these two atheistic centuries.
And now to observe with what bewildering obscurations and
impediments all this as yet stands entangled, and is yet intelli-
gible to no man ! How, with our gross Atheism, we hear it
not to be the Voice of God to us, but regard it merely as a
Voice of earthly Profit-and-Loss. And have a Hell in England,
— the Hell of not making money. And coldly see the all-con-
quering valiant Sons of Toil sit enchanted, by the million, in
their Poor-Law Bastille, as if this were Nature's Law ; — mum-
bling to ourselves .some vague janglement of Laissez-faire,
Supply-and-demand, Cash-payment the one nexus of man to
man : Eree-trade, Competition, and Devil take the hindmost, *
our latest Gospel yet preached !
As if, in truth, there were no God of Labour ; as if godlike
Labour and brutal Mammonism were convertible terms. A
0 VER-PROD UCTIOK
165
serious, most earnest Mammonism grown Midas-eared ; an
unserious Dilettantism, earnest about nothing, grinning with
inarticulate incredulous incredible jargon about all things, as
the enchanted Dilettanti do by the Dead Sea ! It is mournful
enough, for the present hour ; were there, not an endless hope
in it withal. Giant Labour, truest emblem there is of God the
World- Worker, Demiurgus, and Eternal Maker ; noble La-
bour, which is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the
highest throne, — staggering hitherto like a blind irrational
giant, hardly allowed to have his common place on the street-
pavements ; idle Dilettantism, Dead-Sea Apism, crying out,
" Down with him, he is dangerous ! "
Labour must become a seeing rational giant, with a soul in
the body of him, and take his place on the throne of things, —
leaving his Mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the
lower steps of said throne.
CHAPTER VII.
OVER-PRODUCTION.
But what will reflective readers say of a Governing Class,
such as ours, addressing its Workers with an indictment of
4 Over-production ! ' Over-production : runs it not so ? "Ye
miscellaneous, ignoble manufacturing individuals, ye have
produced too much ! W"e accuse you of making above two-
hundred thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind.
Your trousers, too, which you have made, of fustian, of cassi-
mere, of Scotch-plaid, of jane, nankeen and woollen broad-
cloth, are they not manifold ? Of hats for the human head,
of shoes for the human foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat
with- — Nay, what say we hats or shoes ? You produce gold
watches, jewelleries, silver forks and epergnes, commodes,
chiffoniers, stuffed sofas — Heavens, the Commercial Bazaar
and multitudinous Howel-and-Jameses cannot contain you.
You have produced, produced ; — he that seeks your indict-
ment let him look around. Millions of shirts, and empty
pairs of breeches, hang there in judgment against you. We
THE MODERN WORKER.
accuse you of over-producing : you are criminally guilty of
producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes and commodities, in
a frightful over-abundance. And now there is a glut, and
your operatives cannot be fed ! "
Never, surely, against an earnest Working Mammonism
was there brought, by Game-preserving aristocratic Dilettant-
ism, a stranger accusation, since this world began. My lords
and gentlemen, — why, it was you that were appointed, bj
the fact and by the theory of your position on the Earth, to
' make and administer Laws/ that is to say, in a world such
as ours, to guard against e gluts ; ' against honest operatives,
who had done their work, remaining unfed ! I say, you
were appointed to preside over the Distribution and Appor-
tionment of the Wages of Work done ; and to see well that
there went no labourer without his hire, were it of money-
coins, were it of hemp gallows-ropes : that function was
yours, and from immemorial time has been ; yours, and as
yet no other's. These poor shirt-spinners have forgotten
much, which by the virtual unwritten law of their position
they should have remembered : but by any written recognised
law of their position, what have they forgotten ? They were
set to make shirts. The Community with all its voices com-
manded them, saying, " Make shirts ; " — and there the shirts
are ! Too many shirts ? Well, that is a novelty, in this
intemperate Earth, with its nine-hundred millions of bare
backs ! But the Community commanded you, saying, " See
that the shirts are well apportioned, that our Human Laws
be emblem of God's Laws ; " — and where is the apportion-
ment? Two million shirtless or ill-shirted workers sit en-
chanted in Workhouse Bastilles, five million more (according
to some) in TJgolino Hunger-cellars ; and for remedy, you
say, — what say you? — Baise our rents ! " I have not in my
time heard any stranger speech, not even on the Shores of
the Dead Sea. You continue addressing these poor shirt-
spinners and over-producers, in really a too triumphant a
manner :
" Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse us of over-
production ? We take the Heavens and the Earth to witness
0 VER-PROD UGTIOK
167
that we have produced nothing at all. Not from us proceeds
this frightful overplus of shirts. In the wide domains of
created Nature, circulates no shirt or thing of our producing.
Certain fox-brushes nailed upon our stable-door, the fruit of
fair audacity at Melton Mowbray ; these we have produced,
and they are openly nailed up there. He that accuses us of
producing, let him shew himself, let him name what and
when. We are innocent of producing ; — ye ungrateful, what
mountains of things have we not, on the contrary, had to
' consume,' and make away with! Mountains of those your
heaped manufacturers, wheresoever edible or wearable, have
they not disappeared before us, as if we had the talent of
ostriches, of cormorants, and a kind of divine faculty to eat ?
Ye ungrateful ! — and did you not grow under the shadow of
our wings? Are not your filthy mills built on these fields
of ours ; on this soil of England, which belongs to — whom
think you ? And we shall not offer you our own wheat at the
price that pleases us, but that partly pleases you? A prec-
ious notion ! What would become of you, if we chose, at
any time, to decide on growing no wheat more ? "
Yes, truly, here is the ultimate rock-basis of all Corn-Laws ;
whereon, at the bottom of much arguing, they rest, as se-
curely as they can : What would become of you, if we decided,
some day, on growing no more wheat at all ? If we chose to
grow only partridges henceforth, and a modicum of wheat for
our own uses ? Cannot we do what we like with our own ? —
Yes, indeed ! For my share, if I could melt Gneiss Rock,
and create Law of Gravitation ; if I could stride out to the
Doggerbank, some morning, and striking down my trident
there into the mud- waves, say, " Be land, be fields, meadows,
mountains, and fresh-rolling streams ! " by Heaven, I should
incline to have the letting of that land in perpetuity, and sell
the wheat of it, or burn the wheat of it, according to my own
good judgment ! My Corn-Lawing friends, you affright me.
To the £ Millo-cracy ' so-called, to the Working Aristocracy,
steeped too deep in mere ignoble Mammonism, and as yet all
unconscious of its noble destinies, as yet but an irrational or
168
THE MODERN WORKER.
semi-rational giant, struggling to awake some soul in itself,—*
the world will have much to say, reproachfully, reprovingly,
admonishingly. But to the Idle Aristocracy, what will the
world have to say ? Things painful and not pleasant !
To the man who ivorks, who attempts, in never so ungra-
cious barbarous a way, to get forward with some work, you
will hasten out with furtherances, with encouragements, cor-
rections ; you will say to him : " Welcome ; thou art ours ;
our care shall be of thee." To the Idler, again, never so
gracefully going idle, coming forward with never so many
parchments, you will not hasten out ; you will sit still, and be
disinclined to rise. You will say to him : " Not welcome, O
complex Anomaly ; would thou hadst stayed out of doors :
for who of mortals knows what to do with thee ? Thy parch-
ments : yes, they are old, of venerable yellowness ; and we
too honour parchment, old-established settlements, and ven
erable use and wont. Old parchments in very truth : — yet on
the whole, if thou wilt remark, they are young to the Granite
Rocks, to the Groundplan of God's Universe ! We advise
thee to put up thy parchments ; to go home to thy place, and
make no needless noise whatever. Our heart's wish is to save
thee : yet there as thou art, hapless Anomaly, with nothing
but thy yellow parchments, noisy futilities, and shotbelts and
fox-brushes, who of gods or men can avert dark Fate ? Be
counselled, ascertain if no work exist for thee on God's Earth ;
if thou find no commanded-duty there but that of going grace-
fully idle? Ask, inquire earnestly, with a half-frantic ear-
nestness ; for the answer means Existence or Annihilation to
thee. We apprise thee of the world-old fact, becoming sternly
disclosed again in these days, That he who cannot work in
this Universe cannot get existed in it : had he parchments to
thatch the face of the world, these, combustible fallible sheep-
skin, cannot avail him. Home, thou unfortunate ; and let us
have at least no noise from thee ! "
Suppose the unfortunate Idle Aristocracy, as the unfortu-
nate Working one has done, were to ' retire three days to its
bed,' and consider itself there, what o'clock it had become ? —
How have we to regret not only that men have ' no religion,'
UN WORKING ARISTOCRACY.
100
but that they have next to no reflection ; and go about with
heads full of mere extraneous noises, with eyes wide-open but
visionless, — for most part, in the somnambulist state !
CHAPTER VIII.
UN WORKING ARISTOCRACY.
It is well said, £ Land is the right basis of an Aristocracy ; '
whoever possesses the Land, he, more emphatically than any
other, is the Governor, Viceking of the people on the Land.
It is in these days as it was in those of Henry Plantagenet
and Abbot Samson ; as it will in all days be. The Land is
Mother of us all ; nourishes, shelters, gladdens, lovingly en-
riches us all ; in how many ways, from our first wakening to
our last sleep on her blessed mother-bosom, does she, as
with blessed mother-arms, enfold us all !
The Hill I first saw the Sun rise over, when the Sun and I
and all things were yet in their auroral hour, who can divorce
me from it ? Mystic, deep as the world's centre, are the
roots I have struck into my Native Soil ; no tree that grows
is rooted so. From noblest Patriotism to humblest industrial
Mechanism ; from highest dying for your country, to lowest
quarrying and coal-boring for it, a Nation's Life depends
upon its Land. Again and again we have to say, there can
be no true Aristocracy but must possess the Land.
Men talk of 'selling' Land. Land, it is true, like Epic
Poems and even higher things, in such a trading world, has
to be presented in the market for what it will bring, and as
we say be ' sold : ' but the notion of ' selling,' for certain bits
of metal, the Iliad of Homer, how much more the Land of the
World-Creator, is a ridiculous impossibility ! We buy what
is saleable of it ; nothing more was ever buyable. Who can,
or could, sell it to us ? Properly speaking, the Land belongs
to these two : To the Almighty God ; and to all His Children
of Men that have ever worked well on it, or that shall ever
work well on it. No generation of men can or could, with
never such solemnity and effort, sell Land on any other prin
170
THE MODERN WORKER.
ciple : it is not the property of any generation, we say, but
that of all the past generations that have worked on it, and
of all the future ones that shall work on it.
Again, we hear it said, The soil of England, or of any coun-
try, is properly worth nothing, except £ the labour bestowed
on it.' This, speaking even in the language of Eastcheap, is
not correct. The rudest space of country equal in extent to
England, could a whole English Nation, with all their habi-
tudes, arrangements, skills, with whatsoever they do carry
within the skins of them, and cannot be stript of, suddenly
take wing, and alight on it, — would be worth a very consider-
able thing ! Swiftly, within year and day, this English Na-
tion, with its multiplex talents of ploughing, spinning, ham-
mering, mining, road-making and trafficking, would bring a
handsome value out of such a space of country. On the
other hand, fancy what an English Nation, once 'on the
wing,' could have done with itself, had there been simply no
soil, not even an inarable one, to alight on ? Vain all its tal-
ents for ploughing, hammering, and whatever else ; there is
no Earth-room for this Nation with its talents : this Nation
will have to keep hovering on the wing, dolefully shrieking to
and fro ; and perish piecemeal ; burying itself, down to the
last soul of it, in the waste unfirmamented seas. Ah yes,
soil, with or without ploughing, is the gift of God. The soil
of all countries belongs evermore, in a very considerable
degree, to the Almighty Maker ! The last stroke of labour
bestowed on it is not the making of its value, but only the
increasing thereof.
It is very strange, the degree to which these truisms are
forgotten in our days ; how, in the ever-whirling chaos of
Formulas, we have quietly lost sight of Fact, — which it is
so perilous not to keep for ever in sight. Fact, if we do not
see it, will make us feel it by and by ! — From much loud
controversy and Corn-Law debating there rises, loud though
inarticulate, once more in these years, this very question
among others, Who made the Land of England ? Who made
it, this respectable English Land, wheat-growing, metallifer-
ous, carboniferous, which will let readily hand over head for
UN WORKING ARISTO CRA C Y.
171
seventy millions or upwards, as it here lies : who did make
it? — " We ! " answer the much-comumi?ig Aristocracy ; " We ! "
as they ride in, moist with the sweat of Melton Mowbray :
"It is we that made it ; or are the heirs, assigns and repre-
sentatives of those who did ! " — My brothers, You ? Ever-
lasting honor to you, then ; and Corn-Laws as many as you
will, till your own deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice
of human pity for our famine bids you Hold ! Ye are^ as
gods, that can create soil. Soil-creating gods there is no
withstanding. They have the might to sell wheat at what
price they list ; and the right, to all lengths, and famine-
lengths, — if they be pitiless infernal gods ! Celestial gods, I
think, would stop short of the famine-price ; but no infernal
nor any kind of god can be bidden stop ! Infatuated mor-
tals, into what questions are you driving every thinking man
in England !
I say, you did not make the Land of England ; and, by the
possession of it, you are bound to furnish guidance and gov-
ernance to England ! That is the law of your position on
this God's-Earth ; an everlasting act of Heaven's Parliament,
not repealable in St. Stephen's or elsewhere ! True govern-
ment and guidance ; not no-government and Laissez-faire ;
how much less, misgovernment and Corn -Law ! There is not
an imprisoned Worker looking out from these Bastilles but
appeals, very audibly in Heaven's High Courts, against you,
and me, and every one who is not imprisoned, " Why am I
here ? " His appeal is audible in Heaven ; and will become
audible enough on Earth too, if it remain unheeded here.
His appeal is against you, foremost of all ; you stand in the
front rank of the accused ; you, by the very place you hold,
have first of all to answer him and Heaven !
What looks maddest, miserablest in these mad and miser-
able Corn-Laws is independent altogether of their ' effect on
wages,' their effect on 'increase of trade,' or any other such
effect : it is the continual maddening proof they protrude into
the faces of all men, that our Governing Class, called by God
and Nature and the inflexible law of Fact, either to do some-
172
THE MODERN WORKER
thing towards governing, or to die and be abolished, — have
not yet learned even to sit still, and do no mischief ! For no
Anti-Corn-Law League yet asks more of them than this ; —
Nature and Fact, very imperatively, asking so much more of
them. Anti-Corn-Law League asks not, Do something ; but,
Cease your destructive misdoing, Do ye nothing !
Nature's message will have itself obeyed : messages of mere
Free-Trade, Anti-Corn-Law League and Laissez-faire, w T ill then
need small obeying ! — Ye fools, in the name of Heaven,
work, work, at the Ark of Deliverance for yourselves and us,
while hours are still granted you ! No : instead of working
at the Ark, they say, " We cannot get our hands kept rightly
warm ; " and sit obstinately burning the planks. No madder
spectacle at present exhibits itself under this Sun.
The Working Aristocracy ; Mill-owners, Manufacturers,
Commanders of Working Men : alas, against them also much
shall be brought in accusation; much, — and the freest Trade
in Corn, total abolition of Tariffs, and uttermost ' Increase of
Manufactures' and c Prosperity of Commerce,' will perma-
nently mend no jot of it. The Working Aristocracy must
strike into a new path ; must understand that money alone is
not the representative either of man's success in the world, or
of man's duties to man ; and reform their own selves from
top to bottom, if they wish England reformed. England will
not be habitable long unreformed.
The Working Aristocracy — Yes, but on the threshold of
all this, it is again and again to be asked, What of the Idle
Aristocracy ? Again and again, What shall we say of the Idle
Aristocracy, the Owners of the Soil of England ; whose rec-
ognised function is that of handsomely consuming the rents
of England, shooting the partridges of England, and as an
agreeable amusement (if the purchase-money and other con-
veniences serve), dilettante-ing in Parliament and Quarter-
Sessions for England? We will say mournfully, in the
presence of Heaven and Earth, — that we stand speechless,
stupent, and know not what to say ! That a class of men en-
titled to live sumptuously on the marrow of the earth ; per-
UN WORKING ARIS TO OR A C Y.
173
mitted simply, nay entreated, and as yet entreated in vain, to
do nothing at all in return, was never heretofore seen on the
face of this Planet. That such a class is transitory, excep-
tional, and, unless Nature's Laws fall dead, cannot continue.
That it has continued now a moderate while ; has, for the last
fifty years, been rapidly attaining its state of perfection. That
it will have to find its duties and do them ; or else that it
must and will cease to be seen on the face of this Planet,
which is a Working one, not an Idle one.
Alas, alas, the Working Aristocracy, admonished by Trades-
unions, Chartist conflagrations, above all by their own shrewd
sense kept in perpetual communion with the fact of things,
will assuredly reform themselves, and a working world will
still be possible : — but the fate of the Idle Aristocracy, as one
reads its horoscope hitherto in Corn-Laws and such like, is an
abyss that fills one with despair. Yes, my rosy fox-hunting
brothers, a terrible Hippocratic look reveals itself (God knows,
not to my joy) through those fresh buxom countenances of
yours. Through your Corn-Law Majorities, Sliding-Scales,
Protecting-Duties, Bribery-Elections and triumphant Kentish-
fire, a thinking eye discerns ghastly, images of ruin, too
ghastly for words ; a handwriting as of Mene, Mene. Men
and brothers, on your Sliding-scale you seem sliding, and to
have slid, — you little know whither ! Good God ! did not a
French Donothing Aristocracy, hardly above half a century
ago, declare in like manner, and in its featherhead believe
in like manner, " We cannot exist, and continue to dress and
parade ourselves, on the just rent of the soil of France ; but
we must have farther payment than rent of the soil, we must
be exempted from taxes too," — we must have a Corn-Law to
extend our rent? This was in 1789: in four years more —
Did you look into the Tanneries of Meudon, and the long-
naked making for themselves breeches of human skins !
May the merciful Heavens avert the omen ; may we be wiser,
that so we be less wretched.
A High Class without duties to do is like a tree planted on
precipices ; from the roots of which all the earth has been
174
THE MODERN WORKER.
crumbling. Nature owns no man who is not a Martyr
withal. Is there a man who pretends to live luxuriously
housed up ; screened from all work, from want, danger, hard-
ships, the victory over which is what we name work ; — he
himself to sit serene, amid down-bolsters and appliances, and
have all his work and battling done by other men ? And such
man calls himself a noble-man ? His fathers worked for him,
he' says ; or successfully gambled for him : here he sits ; pro-
fesses, not in sorrow but in pride, that he and his have done
no work, time out of mind. It is the law of the land, and is
thought to be the law of the Universe, that he, alone of re-
corded men, shall have no task laid on him, except that of
eating his cooked victuals, and not flinging himself out of
window Once more I will say, there was no stranger specta-
cle ever shewn under this Sun. A veritable fact in our Eng-
land of the Nineteenth Century. His victuals he does eat : but
as for keeping in the inside of the window, — have not his
friends, like me, enough to do ? Truly, looking at his Corn-
Laws, Game-Laws, Chandos-Clauses, Bribery-Elections and
much else, you do shudder over the tumbling and plunging-
he makes, held back* by the lappelles and coatskirts ; only a
thin fence of window-glass before him, — and in the street
mere horrid iron spikes ! My sick brother, as in hospital-
maladies men do, thou dream est of Paradises and Eldorados,
which are far from thee. * Cannot I do what I like with my
own ? ' Gracious Heaven, my brother, this that thou seest
with those sick eyes is no firm Eldorado, and Corn-Law Para-
dise of Donothings, but a dream of thy own fevered brain. It
is a glass-window, I tell thee, so many stories from the street ;
where are iron spikes and the law of gravitation !
What is the meaning of nobleness, if this be 1 noble ? ' In a
valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others
suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie. The chief of men is he
who stands in the van of men ; fronting the peril which
frightens back all others ; which, if it be not vanquished, will
devour the others. Every noble crown is, and on Earth will
forever be, a crown of thorns. The Pagan Hercules, why was
he accounted a hero ? Because he had slain Nemean Lions
UN WORKING ARISTOCRACY.
175
cleansed Augean Stables, undergone Twelve Labours only not
too heavy for a god. In modern, as in ancient and all societies,
the Aristocracy, they that assume the functions of an Aristoc-
racy, doing them or not, have taken the post of honour ; which
is the post of difficulty, the post of danger, — of death, if the
difficulty be not overcome. II faut payer de sa vie. Why was
our life given us, if not that we should manfully give it ?
Descend, O Donothing Pomp : quit thy down-cushions ; ex-
pose thyself to learn what wretches feel, and how to cure it !
The Czar of Eussia became a dusty toiling shipwright ; worked
with his axe in the Docks of Saardam ; and his aim was small
to thine. Descend thou : undertake this horrid 6 living chaos
of Ignorance and Hunger ' weltering round thy feet ; say, " I
will heal it, or behold I will die foremost in it." Such is verily
ihe law. Everywhere and every when a man has to ' pay with
his life ; ' to do his work, as a soldier does, at the expense of
life. In no Piepowder earthly Court can you sue an Aristoc-
rary to do its work, at this moment : but in the Higher Court,
which even it calls ' Court of Honour,' and which is the Court
of Necessity withal, and the eternal Court of the Universe, in
which all Facts comes to plead, and every Human Soul is an
apparitor, — the Aristocracy is answerable, and even now an-
swering, there.
Parchments ? Parchments are venerable : but they ought
at all times to represent, as near as they by possibility can,
the writing of the Adamant Tablets ; otherwise they are not
so venerable ! Benedict the Jew in vain pleaded parchments ;
his usuries were too many. The King said, " Go to, for all
thy parchments, thou shalt pay just debt ; down with thy
dust, or observe this tooth-forceps ! " Nature, a far juster
Sovereign, has far terribler forceps ! " Aristocracies, actual
and imaginary, reach a time when parchment pleading does
not avail them. " Go to, for all thy parchments, thou shalt
pay due debt ! " shouts the Universe to them, in an emphatic
manner. They refuse to pay, confidently pleading parch-
ment : their best grinder-tooth, with horrible agony, goes out
of their jaw. Wilt thou pay now ? A second grinder, again in
176
THE MODERN WORKER.
horrible agony, goes : a second, and a third, and if need be,
all the teeth and grinders, and the life itself with them ; — and
then there is free payment, and an anatomist subject into the
bargain !
Keform Bills, Corn-Law Abrogation Bills, and then Land-
Tax Bill, Property-Tax Bill, and still dimmer list of etceteras ;
grinder after grinder : — my lords and gentlemen, it were bet-
ter for you to arise, and begin doing your work, than sit there
and plead parchments !
We write no chapter on the Corn-Laws, in this place ; the
Corn-Laws are too mad to have a Chapter. There is a certain
immorality, when there is not a necessity, in speaking about
things finished ; in chopping into small pieces the already
slashed and slain. "When the brains are out, why does not a
Solecism die ! It is at its own peril if it refuse to die ; it
ought to make all conceivable haste to die, and get itself
buried! The. trade of Anti-Corn-Law Lecturer in these days,
still an indispensable, is a highly tragic one.
The Corn-Laws will go, and even soon go : would we were
all as sure of the Millennium as they are of going ! They go
swiftly in these present months ; with an increase of velocity,
an ever-deepening, ever-widening sweep of momentum, truly
notable. It is at the Aristocracy's own damage and peril, still
more than at any other's whatsoever, that the Aristocracy
maintains them ; — at a damage, say only, as above computed,
of a ' hundred thousand pounds an hour!' The Corn-Laws
keep all the air hot-fostered by their fever- warmth, much that
is evil, but much also, how much that is good and indispensable,
is rapidly coming to life among us !
CHAPTEE IX.
WORKING ARISTOCRACY.
A poor Working Mammonism getting itself ' strangled in
the partridge-nets of an Unworking Dilettantism,' and bellow-
ing dreadfully, and already black in the face, is surely a dis-
astrous spectacle ! But of a Midas-eared Mammonism, which
WORKING ARISTOCRACY.
177
indeed at bottom all pure Mammonisms are, what better can
you expect ? No better ; — if not this, then something other
equally disastrous, if not still more disastrous. Mammonisms,
grown asinine, have to become human again, and rational ;
they have, on the whole, to cease to be Mammonisms, were it
even on compulsion, and pressure of the hemp round their
neck !■ — My friends of the Working Aristocracy, there are now
a great many things which you also, in your extreme need,
will have to consider.
The Continental people, it would seem, are ' exporting our
'machinery, beginning to spin cotton and manufacture for
'themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that ! '
Sad news indeed ; but irremediable ; — by no means the sad-
dest news. The saddest news is, that we should find our
National Existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on
selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than
any other People. A most narrow stand for a great Nation
to base itself on ! A stand which, with all the Corn-Law Abro-
gations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.
My friends, suppose we quitted that stand ; suppose we came
honestly down from it, and said : " This is our minimum of cot-
ton-prices. "We care not, for the present, to make cotton any
cheaper. Do you, if it seem so blessed to you, make cotton
cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton-fuz, your hearts with
copperas-fumes, with rage and mutiny ; become ye the general
gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp ! " — I admire a Nation
which fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other Nations,
to the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to undersell
them ; we will be content to equal-sell them ; to be happy sell-
ing equally with them ! I do not see the use of underselling
them. Cotton-cloth is already two-pence a yard or lower ; and
yet bare backs were never more numerous among us. Let in-
ventive men cease to spend their existence incessantly con-
triving how cotton can be made cheaper ; and try to invent, a
little, how cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat
justlier divided among us. Let inventive men consider,
Whether the Secret of this Universe, and of Man's Life there,
12
178
THE MODERN WORKER
does, after all, as we, rashly fancy it, consist in making money ?
There is One God, just, supreme, almighty : but is Mammon
the name of him ? — With a Hell which means ' Failing to make
money,' I do not think there is any Heaven possible that would
suit one well ; nor so much as an Earth that can be habitable
long ! In brief, all this Mammon- Gospel, of Supply-and-de-
mand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the hindmost,
begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached ; or
altogether the shabbiest. Even with Dilettante partridge-nets,
and at a horrible expenditure of pain, who shall regret to see
the entirely transient, and at best somewhat despicable life
strangled out of it ? At the best, as we say, a somewhat despi-
cable, un venerable thing, this same ' Laissez-faire ; ' and now,
at the vjorst, fast growing an altogether detestable one !
"But what is to be done with our manufacturing popula-
tion, with our agricultural, with our ever-increasing popula-
tion?" cry many. — Aye, what? Many things can be done
with them, a hundred things, and a thousand things, — had we
once got a soul and begun to try. This one thing, of doing
for them by e underselling all people/ and filling our own
bursten pockets and appetites by the road ; and turning over
all care for any c population,' or human or divine consideration
except cash only, to the winds, with a " Laissez-faire " and the
rest of it : this is evidently not the thing. Farthing cheaper
per yard ? No great Nation can stand on the apex of such a
pyramid; screwing itself higher and higher ; balancing itself
on its great-toe ! Can England not subsist without being
above all people in working ? England never deliberately pur-
posed such a thing. If England work better than all people,
it shall be well. England, like an honest worker, will work
as well as she can ; and hope the gods may allow her to live
on that basis. Laissez-faire and much else being once well
dead, how many 6 impossibles 9 will become possible ! They
are impossible, as cotton-cloth at two-pence an ell was— till
men set about making it. The inventive genius of great Eng-
land will not forever sit patient with mere wheels and pinions,
bobbins, straps and billy-rollers whirring in the head of it.
The inventive genius of England is not a Beaver's, or a Spin-
WORKING ARISTOCRACY.
179
ner's or Spider's genius : it is a Mans genius, I hope, with a
God over him !
Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand, — one begins to be weary
of all that. Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money,
of pleasure, of applause ;— it is the Gospel of Despair ! Man
is a Patent-Digester, then : only give him Free Trade, Free
digesting room ; and each of us digest what he can come
at, leaving the rest to Fate ! My unhappy brethren of the
Working Mammonism, my unhappy brethren of the Idle
Dilettantism, no world was ever held together in that way for
long. A world of mere Patent-Digesters will soon have
nothing to digest ; such world ends, and by Law of Nature
must end, in e over-population ; ' in howling universal famine,
4 impossibility,' and suicidal madness, as of endless dog-ken-
nels run rabid. Supply-and-demand shall do its full part,
and Free Trade shall be free as air ; thou of the shotbelts,
see thou forbid it not, with those paltry, worm than Mam-
monish swindleries and Sliding-scales of thine, which are
seen to be swindleries for all thy canting, which in times
like ours are very scandalous to see ! And trade never so
well freed, and all Tariffs settled or abolished, and Supj^ly-
and-demand in full operation, — let us all know that we have
yet done nothing ; that we have merely cleared the ground
for doing.
Yes, were the Corn-Laws ended tomorrow, there is nothing
yet ended ; there is only room made for all manner of things
beginning. The Corn-Laws gone, and Trade made free, it is
as good as certain this paralysis of industry will pass away.
We shall have another period of commercial enterprise, of
victory and prosperity ; during which, it is likely, much
money will again be made, and all the people may, by the ex-
tant methods, still for a space of years, be kept alive and phy-
sically fed. The strangling band of Famine will be loosened
from our necks ; we shall have room again to breathe ; time
to bethink ourselves, to repeat and consider ! A precious
and thrice-precious space of years ; wherein to struggle as for
life in reforming our foul ways ; in alleviating, instructing,
regulating our people ; seeking as for life, that something
ISO
THE MODERN WORKER.
like spiritual food be imparted them, some real governance and
guidance be provided them ! It will be a priceless time.
For our new period or paroxysm of commercial prosperity
will and can, on the old methods of ' Competition and Devil
take the hindmost,' prove but a paroxysm : a new paroxysm, —
likely enough, if we do not use it better, to be our last. In
tins, of itself, is no salvation. If our Trade in twenty years 1
' flourishing ' as never Trade flourished, could double itself ;
yet then also, by the old Laissez-faire method, jour Population
is doubled : we shall then be as we are, only twice as many of
us, twice and ten times as unmanageable !
All this dire misery, therefore ; all this of our poor Work-
house Workmen, of our Chartisms, Trades-strikes, Corn-Laws,
Toryisms, and the general downbreak of Laissez-faire in these
days, — may we not regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom
of Nature, saying to us : " Behold ! Supply-and-demand is
not the one Law of Nature ; Cash-payment is not the sole
nexus of man with man, — how far from it ! Deep, far deeper
than Supply-and-demand, are Laws, Obligations sacred as
Man's Life itself : these also, if you will continue to do
work, you shall now learn and obey. He that will learn them,
behold Nature is on his side, he shall yet w^ork and prosper
with noble rewards. He that will not learn them, Nature is
against him, he shall not be able to do work in Nature's em-
pire, — not in hers. Perpetual mutiny, contention, hatred,
isolation, execration shall wait on his footsteps, till all men
discern that the thing which he attains; however golden it
look or be, is not success, but the want of success."
Supply-and-demand, — alas ! For what noble w r ork was there
ever yet any audible 6 demand ' in that poor sense ? The
man of' Macedonia, speaking in vision to an Apostle Paul,
"Come over and help us," did not specify what rate of wages
he would give ! Or was the Christian Keligion itself accom-
plished by Prize-Essays, Bridgewater Bequests, and a ' mini-
mum of Four thousand Ave hundred a year ? No demand that
I heard of w r as made then, audible in any Labour-market, Man-
chester Chamber of Commerce, or other the like emporium and
WORKING ARISTOCRACY.
181
hiring establishment ; silent were all these from any whisper
of such demand ; — powerless were all these to * supply ' it,
had the demand been in thunder and earthquake, with gold
Eldorados and Mahometan Paradises for the reward. Ah
me, into what waste latitudes, in this Time- Voyage, have we
wandered ; like adventurous Sindbads ; — where the men go
about as if by galvanism, with meaningless glaring eyes, and
have no soul, but only a beaver-faculty and stomach ! The
haggard despair of Cotton-factory, Coai-mine operatives, Chan-
dos Farm-labourers, in these days, is painful to behold ; but
not so painful, hideous to the inner sense, as that brutish
godforgetting Profit- and-Loss Philosophy, and Life-theory,
which we hear jangled on all hands of us, in senate-houses,
spouting-clubs, leading-articles, pulpits and platforms, every-
where, as the Ultimate Gospel and candid Plain-English of
Man's Life, from the throats and pens and thoughts of all but
all men ! —
Enlightened Philosophies, like Moliere Doctors, will tell
you : " Enthusiasms, Self-sacrifice, Heaven, Hell and such
like : yes, all that was true enough for old stupid times ; all
that used to be true : but we have changed all that, nous avons
change tout cela ! " Well ; if the heart be got round now
into the right side, and the liver to the left ; if man have no
heroism in him deeper than a wish to eat, and in his soul
there dwell now no Infinite of Hope and Awe, and no divine
Silence can become imperative because it is not Sinai Thunder,
and no tie will bind if it be not that of Tyburn gallows-ropes,
r — then verily you have changed all that ; and for it, and for
you, and for me, behold the Abyss and nameless Annihilation
is ready. So scandalous a beggarly Universe deserves indeed
nothing else ; I cannot say I would save it from annihilation.
Vacuum, and the serene Blue, will be much handsomer ;
easier too for all of us. I, for one, decline living as a Patent-
Digester. Patent-Digester, Spinning-Mule, Mayfair Clothes-
Horse : many thanks, but your Chaosships will have the good-
ness to excuse me !
