ordinary opinions, we shall give his own words. "One inference," says he," inclusive of all, shall content us here; that Laissez-Faire has as good as done its part in a great many provinces, that in the province of the working classes, Laissez-Faire having passed its new poor law, has reached the suicidal point, and now, as felo de se lies dying there, in torch-light meetings and such like." Again, speaking of democracy, he observes, that in "what is called self-government of the multitude by the multitude, can be no finality; that with the completest winning of democracy is nothing won, except emptiness and the free chance to win. Democracy is, by the nature of it, a self-cancelling business, and gives in the long run a net result of zero." Democracy never yet, that we heard of, was able to accomplish much work beyond that same cancelling of itself." "Democracy, take it where you will, in our Europe is found but as a regulated method of rebellion and abrogation; it abrogates the old arrangement of things, and leaves, as we say, zero and vacuity for the institution of a new arrangement. It is the consummation of no-government and Laissez-Faire. Not towards the impossibility, self-government of a multitude by a multitude; but towards some possibility, government by the wisest, does bewildered Europe struggle. The blessedest possibility, not misgovernment, not Laissez-Faire, but veritable government. Cannot we discern too, across all democratic turbulence, clattering of ballot-boxes and infinite sorrowful jangle, needful or not, that this at bottom is the wish and prayer of all human hearts, everywhere and at all times: 'Give me a leader; a true leader, not a false sham-leader; a true leader, that he may guide me on the true way, that I may be loyal to him, that I may swear fealty to him and follow him, and feel that it is well with me!' Reserving to another place the remarks which readily suggest themselves on this topic, we proceed to give what the author thinks should be done in the premises. His great complaint is that England, with a church richly endowed, well appointed with the means of instruction, old, venerable, wealthy, and conspicuous in its professions of attachment to the spiritual and moral welfare of mankind; with an aristocracy abounding in commercial and landed wealth, enlightened, refined, powerful, secure in its place, controlling the law-making and the law-administering functions of the nation; with every inducement to a career of active benevolence, and every facility in its execution; has turned a deaf ear to the cries of the great toiling mass, "crying with inarticulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage or pain." Not even as in the old feudal days have the nobility discharged their duties towards the dependent lower classes. Then there was some bond of union between the two, some reciprocity of feeling, some mutual acts of kindness, and something like a recognition of their respective duties and rights. But now there is neither guidance on the one hand, nor submission on the other, but contempt supplanting friend liness, and jealousy and hatred succeeding to feelings of loyalty and love. A petition is ascending constantly from the depths of society, ' Guide us, govern us, we are mad and miserable,' but no ear is turned, and no hand is moved by the frivolous and superficial nobility, who have the wish without the ability to govern. What they should do, Mr. Carlyle, in answer to the supposed inquiry of the practical declares: man, "To the practical man, therefore, we will repeat that he has, as the first thing he can 'do,' to gird himsef up for actual doing; to know well that he is either there to do, or not there at all. Once rightly girded up, how many things will present themselves as doable which now are not attemptible! Two things, great things, dwell, for the last ten years, in all thinking heads in England; and are hovering, of late, even on the tongues of not a few. With a word on each of these, we will dismiss the practical man, and right gladly take ourselves into obscurity and silence again. universal education is the first great thing we mean; general emigration is the second. "Who would suppose that education were a thing which had to be advocated on the ground of local expediency, or indeed on any ground? As if it stood not on the basis of everlasting duty, as a prime necessity of man. It is a thing that should need no advocating; much as it does actually need. To impart the gift of thinking to those who cannot think, and yet who could in that case think; this, one would imagine, was the first function a government had to set about discharging. Were it not a cruel thing to see, in any province of an empire, the inhabitants living all mutilated in their limbs, each strong man with his right-arm lamed? How much crueller to find the strong soul, with its eyes still sealed, its eyes extinct so that it sees not! Light has come into the world, but to this poor peasant it come in vain. For six thousand years the Sons of Adam, in sleepless effort, have been devising, doing, discovering; in mysterious infinite indissoluble communion, warring, a little band of brothers, against the great black empire of Necessity and Night; they have accomplished such a conquest and conquests: and to this man it is all as if it had not been. The four and twenty letters of the alphabet are still Runic enigmas to him. He passes by on the other side: and that great Spiritual Kingdom, the toilwon conquest of his own brothers, all that his brothers have conquered, is a thing non-extant for him. An invisible empire; he knows it not, suspects it not. And is it not his withal; the conquest of his own brothers, the lawfully acquired possession of all men? Baleful enchantment lies over him, from generation to generation; he knows not that such an empire is his, that such an empire is at all. O, what are bills of rights, emancipations of black slaves into black apprentices, lawsuits in chancery for some short usufruct of a bit of land? The grand 'seedfield of Time' is this man's, and you give it him not. Time's seedfield, which includes the earth and all her seedfields and pearl-oceans, nay, her sowers too and pearl-divers, all that was wise and heroic and victorious here below; of which the Earth's centuries are but as furrows, for it stretches forth from the beginning onward even unto this day! 'My inheritance, how lordly wide and fair;` Time is my fair seedfield, to Time I'm heir!' Heavier wrong is not done under the sun. It lasts from year to year, from century to century; the blinded sire slaves himself out, and leaves a blinded son; and men, made in the image of God, continue as two-legged beasts of labor;-and in the largest empire of the world, it is a debate whether a small fraction of the revenue of one day (£30,000, it is but that) shall, after thirteen centuries, be laid out on it, or not laid out on it. Have we governors, have we teachers; have we had a church these thirteen hundred years? What is an overseer of souls, an arch overseer, Archiepiscopus? Is he something? If so, let him lay his hand on his heart, and say what thing! * * * * * * "But now we have to speak of the second great thing: Emigration. It was said above, all new epochs, so convulsed and tumultuous to look upon, are expansions,' increase of faculty not yet organized. It is eminently true of the confusions of this time of ours. Disorganic Manchester afflicts us with its Chartisms; yet is not spinning of clothes for the naked intrinsically a most blessed thing? Manchester once organic will bless and not afflict. The confusions, if we would understand them, are at bottom mere increase which we know not yet how to manage; 'new wealth which the old coffers will not hold.' How true is this, above all, of the strange phenomenon called 'over-population!' Over-population is the grand anomaly, which is bringing all other anomalies to a crisis. Now once more, as at the end of the Roman Empire, a most confused epoch and yet one of the greatest, the Teutonic countries find themselves too full. On a certain western rim of our small Europe, there are more men than were expected. Heaped up against the western shore, there, and for a couple of hundred miles inward, the tide of population' swells too high, and confuses itself somewhat! Over-population? And yet, if this small western rim of Europe is overpeopled, does not everywhere else a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to us, Come till me, come and reap me! Can it be an evil that in an earth such as ours there should be new men? Considered as mercantile commodities, as working machines, is there in Birmingham or out of it a machine of such value? "Good heavens! a white European man, standing on his two legs, with his two five-fingered hands at his shackle-bones, and miraculous head on his shoulders, is worth something considerable, one would say!' The stupid black African man brings money in the market; the much stupider fourfooted horse brings money :-it is we that have not yet learned the art of managing our white European man! "The controversies on Malthus and the Population Principle,' 'Preventive check,' and so forth, with which the public ear has been deafened for a long while, are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventive check and the denial of the preventive check. Anti-Malthusians quoting their Bible against palpable facts, are not a pleasant spectacle. On the other hand, how often have we read in Malthusian bene factors of the species: 'The working people have their condition in their own hands; let them diminish the supply of laborers, and of course the demand and the remuneration will increase!' Yes, let them diminish the supply: but who are they? They are twenty-four millions of human individuals scattered over a hundred and eighteen thousand square miles of space and more; weaving, delving, hammering, joinering; each unknown to his neighbor; each distinct within his own skin. They are not a kind of character that can take a resolution, and act on it very readily. Smart Sally in our alley proves all-too fascinating to brisk Tom in yours: can Tom be called on to make pause, and calculate the demand for labor in the British Empire first? Nay, if Tom did renounce his highest blessedness of life, and struggle and conquer like a Saint Francis of Assisi, what would it profit him or us? Seven millions of the finest peasantry do not renounce, but proceed all the more briskly ; and with blue-visaged Hibernians instead of fair Saxon Tomsons and Sallysons, the latter end of that country is worse than the beginning. O, wonderful Malthusian prophets! Milleniums are undoubtedly coming, must come one way or the other but will it be, think you, by twenty millions of working people simultaneously striking work in that department; passing, in universal trades-union, a resolution not to beget any more till the labor-market become satisfactory? By day and night! they were indeed irresistible so; not to be compelled by law or war; might make their own terms with the richer classes, and defy the world! "A shade more rational is that of those other benefactors of the species, who : counsel that in each parish, in some central locality, instead of the parish clergyman, there might be established some Parish Exterminator; or say a Reservoir of Arsenic, kept up at the public expense, free to all parishioners; for which church the rates probably would not be grudged. Ah, it is bitter jesting on such a subject. One's heart is sick to look at the dreary chaos, and valley of Jehosaphat, scattered with the limbs and souls of one's fellow-men; and no divine voice, only creaking of hungry vultures, inarticulate bodeful ravens, horn-eyed parrots that do articulate, proclaiming, Let these bones live!-Dante's Divina Commedia is called the mournfullest of books: transcendent mistemper of the noblest soul; utterance of a boundless, godlike, unspeakable, implacable sorrow and protest against the world. But in Holywell-street, not long ago, we bought, for three-pence, a book still mournfuller: the Pamphlet of one “ Marcus,” whom his poor Chartist editor and republisher calls the Demon Author." This Marcus Pamphlet was the book alluded to by Stephens, the Preacher Chartist, in one of his harangues: It proves to be no fable that such a book existed; here it lies, Printed by John Hill, Black-horse Court, Fleet-street, and now reprinted for the instruction of the laborer, by William Dugdale, Holywell-street, Strand,' the exasperated Chartist editor who sell it you for three-pence. We have read Marcus; but his sorrow is not divine. We hoped he would turn out to have been in sport: ah, no, it is grim earnest with him; grim as very death. Marcus is not a demon author at all: he is a benefactor of the species in his own kind; has looked intensely on the world's woes, from a Benthamee Malthusian watchtower, under a Heaven dead as iron; and does now, with much longwindedness, in a drawling snuffling, circuitous, extremely dull, yet at bottom handfast and positive manner, recommend that all children of working people, after the third, be disposed of by painless extinction." Charcoal-vapor and other methods exist. The mothers would consent, might be made to consent. Three children might be left living; or perhaps, for Marcus's calculations are not yet perfect, two and a half. There might be "beautiful cemeteries with colonnades and flower-pots,' in which the patriot infanticide matrons might delight to take their evening walk of contemplation; and reflect what patriotesses they were, what a cheerful flowery world it was. Such is the scheme of Marcus; this is what he, for his share, could devise to heal the world's woes. A benefactor of the species, clearly recognisable as such the saddest scientific mortal we have ever in this world fallen in with; sadder even than poetic Dante. His is a no-godlike sorrow; sadder than the godlike. The Chartist editor, dull as he, calls him demon author, and a man set on by the Poor-Law Commissioners. What a black, godless, wastestruggling world, in this once merry England of ours, do such pamphlets and such editors betoken! Laissez-Faire and Malthus, Malthus and Laissez-Faire; ought not these two at length to part company? Might we not hope that both of them has as good as delivered their message now, and were about to go their ways? : 6 "For all this of the 'painless extinction,' and the rest, is in a world where Canadian forests stand unfelled, boundless plains and prairies unbroken with the plough; on the west and on the east, green desert spaces never yet made white with corn; and to the overcrowded little western nook of Europe, our terrestrial planet, nine-tenths of it yet vacant or tenanted by nomades, is still crying, Come and till me, come and reap me! And in an England with wealth, and means for moving, such as no nation ever before had. With ships; with war-ships rotting idle, which, but bidden move and not rot, might bridge all oceans. With trained men, educated to pen and practice, to administer and act; briefless barristers, chargeless clergy, taskless scholars, languishing in all court-houses, hiding in obscure garrets, besieging all ante-chambers, in passionate want of simply one thing, work ;-with as many half-pay officers of both services wearing themselves down in wretched tedium, as might lead an Emigrant host larger than Xerxes' was! Laissez-Faire and Malthus positively must part company. Is it not as if this swelling, simmering, never-resting Europe of ours stood once more on the verge of an expansion without parallel; struggling, struggling like a mighty tree again about to burst in the embrace of summer, and shoot forth broad frondent boughs which would fill the whole earth? A disease; but the noblest of all-as of her who is in pain and sore travail, but travails that she may be a mother, and say, Behold, there is a new man born! "True, thou Gold-Hofrath,' exclaims an eloquent satirical German of our acquaintance, in that strange book of his,* True, thou Gold-Hofrath; too crowded indeed! Meanwhile what portion of this inconsiderable Terraqeous Globe have ye actually tilled and delved, till it will grow no more? How thick stands your population in the Pampas and Savannas of America; round ancient Carthage, and in the interior of Africa; on both slopes of the Altaic chain, in the central platform of Asia; in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Crim Tartary, the Currah of Kildare? One man, in one year, as I have understood it, if you lend him earth, will feed himself and nine others. Alas, where now are the Hengsts and Alarics of our still glowing, still expanding Europe; who, when their home is now grown too narrow, will enlist and, like firepillars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable living valor; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and war-charriot, but with the steam-engine and ploughshare? Where are they?-Preserving their Game!"" Such are Mr. Carlyle's specifics for the disease. Our extracts have already extended to such a length as to preclude the comments which, in the outset, we designed to make upon the pregnant text which he has furnished. We cannot, however, refrain from expressing the opinion, that with his manner of executing it we are in some respects dissatisfied. It is not the book we could have wished to see, nor was Mr Carlyle the man, with his peculiar structure of intellect, vigorous and brilliant as it is, to grapple with so delicate, so comprehensive, and so momentous a subject. There are many stirring passages, many moving appeals, many bold and striking pictures in his book, but an entire want of those direct truths and practical suggestions, which the circumstances required, and which alone could be of any avail to the immense multitude immediately interested in the discussion of the question. Both in his descriptions of the actual condition of the British people, and in his recommendation of a remedy, there is an indefiniteness and vague generalizing which leave the mind altogether unsatisfied. We are given to understand that there is a great wrong pervading society, presaging some terrible convulsion, that it may possibly be meliorated by education and emigration, but as to the exact cause of the wrong, or as to the precise mode of bringing about the remedy, we are vouchsafed not a word. This is the more to be regretted, because it relates to those points on which especially we desire to be informed. We could have wished that the author had been more specific and detailed in his account of the operation of unjust laws, oppressive institutions, unequal social arrangements, and of the influence of a government pervaded in all its departments by a rank spirit of despotism. Above all, we could have wished, that he had more correctly interpreted that vast popular movement which he describes, and which is of such fearful import to * Sartor Resartus, p. 239. |