Latter Day Pamphlets

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LATTER-DAY PAMPHLETS.
by Thomas Carlyle

But as yet struggles the twelfth hour of the Night. Birds of
darkness are on the wing; spectres uproar; the dead walk; the
living dream. Thou, Eternal Providence, wilt make the Day
dawn!--JEAN PAUL.

Then said his Lordship, "Well. God mend all!"--"Nay, by God,
Donald, we must help him to mend it!" said the other.--RUSHWORTH
(_Sir David Ramsay and Lord Rea, in 1630_).

CONTENTS.

I. THE PRESENT TIME II. MODEL PRISONS III. DOWNING STREET IV.
THE NEW DOWNING STREET V. STUMP-ORATOR

[February 1, 1850.] NO. I. THE PRESENT TIME.

The Present Time, youngest-born of Eternity, child and heir of
all the Past Times with their good and evil, and parent of all
the Future, is ever a "New Era" to the thinking man; and comes
with new questions and significance, however commonplace it look:
to know _it_, and what it bids us do, is ever the sum of
knowledge for all of us. This new Day, sent us out of Heaven,
this also has its heavenly omens;--amid the bustling trivialities
and loud empty noises, its silent monitions, which if we cannot
read and obey, it will not be well with us! No;--nor is there
any sin more fearfully avenged on men and Nations than that same,
which indeed includes and presupposes all manner of sins: the
sin which our old pious fathers called "judicial
blindness;"--which we, with our light habits, may still call
misinterpretation of the Time that now is; disloyalty to its real
meanings and monitions, stupid disregard of these, stupid
adherence active or passive to the counterfeits and mere current
semblances of these. This is true of all times and days.

But in the days that are now passing over us, even fools are
arrested to ask the meaning of them; few of the generations of
men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity,
disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded: if they are
not days of endless hope too, then they are days of utter
despair. For it is not a small hope that will suffice, the ruin
being clearly, either in action or in prospect, universal. There
must be a new world, if there is to be any world at all! That
human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry
routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there;
this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of
universal death must be days of universal new-birth, if the ruin
is not to be total and final! It is a Time to make the dullest
man consider; and ask himself, Whence _he_ came? Whither he is
bound?--A veritable "New Era," to the foolish as well as to the wise.

Not long ago, the world saw, with thoughtless joy which might
have been very thoughtful joy, a real miracle not heretofore
considered possible or conceivable in the world,--a Reforming
Pope. A simple pious creature, a good country-priest, invested
unexpectedly with the tiara, takes up the New Testament, declares
that this henceforth shall be his rule of governing. No more
finesse, chicanery, hypocrisy, or false or foul dealing of any
kind: God's truth shall be spoken, God's justice shall be done,
on the throne called of St. Peter: an honest Pope, Papa, or
Father of Christendom, shall preside there. And such a throne of
St. Peter; and such a Christendom, for an honest Papa to preside
in! The European populations everywhere hailed the omen; with
shouting and rejoicing leading articles and tar-barrels; thinking
people listened with astonishment,--not with sorrow if they were
faithful or wise; with awe rather as at the heralding of death,
and with a joy as of victory beyond death! Something pious,
grand and as if awful in that joy, revealing once more the
Presence of a Divine Justice in this world. For, to such men it
was very clear how this poor devoted Pope would prosper, with his
New Testament in his band. An alarming business, that of
governing in the throne of St. Peter by the rule of veracity! By
the rule of veracity, the so-called throne of St. Peter was
openly declared, above three hundred years, ago, to be a falsity,
a huge mistake, a pestilent dead carcass, which this Sun was
weary of. More than three hundred years ago, the throne of St.
Peter received peremptory judicial notice to quit; authentic
order, registered in Heaven's chancery and since legible in the
hearts of all brave men, to take itself away,--to begone, and let
us have no more to do with _it_ and its delusions and impious
deliriums;--and it has been sitting every day since, it may
depend upon it, at its own peril withal, and will have to pay
exact damages yet for every day it has so sat. Law of veracity?
What this Popedom had to do by the law of veracity, was to give
up its own foul galvanic life, an offence to gods and men;
honestly to die, and get itself buried.

Far from this was the thing the poor Pope undertook in regard to
it;--and yet, on the whole, it was essentially this too.
"Reforming Pope?" said one of our acquaintance, often in those
weeks, "Was there ever such a miracle? About to break up that
huge imposthume too, by 'curing' it? Turgot and Necker were
nothing to this. God is great; and when a scandal is to end,
brings some devoted man to take charge of it in hope, not in
despair!"--But cannot he reform? asked many simple persons;--to
whom our friend in grim banter would reply: "Reform a
Popedom,--hardly. A wretched old kettle, ruined from top to
bottom, and consisting mainly now of foul _grime_ and _rust_:
stop the holes of it, as your antecessors have been doing, with
temporary putty, it may hang together yet a while; begin to
hammer at it, solder at it, to what you call mend and rectify
it,--it will fall to sherds, as sure as rust is rust; go all into
nameless dissolution,--and the fat in the fire will be a thing
worth looking at, poor Pope!"--So accordingly it has proved. The
poor Pope, amid felicitations and tar-barrels of various kinds,
went on joyfully for a season: but he had awakened, he as no
other man could do, the sleeping elements; mothers of the
whirlwinds, conflagrations, earthquakes. Questions not very
soluble at present, were even sages and heroes set to solve them,
began everywhere with new emphasis to be asked. Questions which
all official men wished, and almost hoped, to postpone till
Doomsday. Doomsday itself _had_ come; that was the terrible
truth!

For, sure enough, if once the law of veracity be acknowledged as
the rule for human things, there will not anywhere be want of
work for the reformer; in very few places do human things adhere
quite closely to that law! Here was the Papa of Christendom
proclaiming that such was actually the case;--whereupon all over
Christendom such results as we have seen. The Sicilians, I
think, were the first notable body that set about applying this
new strange rule sanctioned by the general Father; they said to
themselves, We do not by the law of veracity belong to Naples and
these Neapolitan Officials; we will, by favor of Heaven and the
Pope, be free of these. Fighting ensued; insurrection, fiercely
maintained in the Sicilian Cities; with much bloodshed, much
tumult and loud noise, vociferation extending through all
newspapers and countries. The effect of this, carried abroad by
newspapers and rumor, was great in all places; greatest perhaps
in Paris, which for sixty years past has been the City of
Insurrections. The French People had plumed themselves on being,
whatever else they were not, at least the chosen "soldiers of
liberty," who took the lead of all creatures in that pursuit, at
least; and had become, as their orators, editors and litterateurs
diligently taught them, a People whose bayonets were sacred, a
kind of Messiah People, saving a blind world in its own despite,
and earning for themselves a terrestrial and even celestial glory
very considerable indeed. And here were the wretched
down-trodden populations of Sicily risen to rival them, and
threatening to take the trade out of their hand.

No doubt of it, this hearing continually of the very Pope's glory
as a Reformer, of the very Sicilians fighting divinely for
liberty behind barricades,--must have bitterly aggravated the
feeling of every Frenchman, as he looked around him, at home, on
a Louis-Philippism which had become the scorn of all the world.
"_Ichabod_; is the glory departing from us? Under the sun is
nothing baser, by all accounts and evidences, than the system of
repression and corruption, of shameless dishonesty and unbelief
in anything but human baseness, that we now live under. The
Italians, the very Pope, have become apostles of liberty, and
France is--what is France!"--We know what France suddenly became
in the end of February next; and by a clear enough genealogy, we
can trace a considerable share in that event to the good simple
Pope with the New Testament in his hand. An outbreak, or at
least a radical change and even inversion of affairs hardly to be
achieved without an outbreak, everybody felt was inevitable in
France: but it had been universally expected that France would
as usual take the initiative in that matter; and had there been
no reforming Pope, no insurrectionary Sicily, France had
certainly not broken out then and so, but only afterwards and
otherwise. The French explosion, not anticipated by the
cunningest men there on the spot scrutinizing it, burst up
unlimited, complete, defying computation or control.

Close following which, as if by sympathetic subterranean
electricities, all Europe exploded, boundless, uncontrollable;
and we had the year 1848, one of the most singular, disastrous,
amazing, and, on the whole, humiliating years the European world
ever saw. Not since the irruption of the Northern Barbarians has
there been the like. Everywhere immeasurable Democracy rose
monstrous, loud, blatant, inarticulate as the voice of Chaos.
Everywhere the Official holy-of-holies was scandalously laid bare
to dogs and the profane:--Enter, all the world, see what kind of
Official holy it is. Kings everywhere, and reigning persons,
stared in sudden horror, the voice of the whole world bellowing
in their ear, "Begone, ye imbecile hypocrites, histrios not
heroes! Off with you, off!" and, what was peculiar and notable
in this year for the first time, the Kings all made haste to go,
as if exclaiming, "We _are_ poor histrios, we sure enough;--did
you want heroes? Don't kill us; we couldn't help it!" Not one
of them turned round, and stood upon his Kingship, as upon a
right he could afford to die for, or to risk his skin upon; by no
manner of means. That, I say, is the alarming peculiarity at
present. Democracy, on this new occasion, finds all Kings
conscious that they are but Play-actors. The miserable mortals,
enacting their High Life Below Stairs, with faith only that this
Universe may perhaps be all a phantasm and hypocrisis,--the
truculent Constable of the Destinies suddenly enters:
"Scandalous Phantasms, what do _you_ here? Are 'solemnly
constituted Impostors' the proper Kings of men? Did you think
the Life of Man was a grimacing dance of apes? To be led always
by the squeak of your paltry fiddle? Ye miserable, this Universe
is not an upholstery Puppet-play, but a terrible God's Fact; and
you, I think,--had not you better begone!" They fled
precipitately, some of them with what we may call an exquisite
ignominy,--in terror of the treadmill or worse. And everywhere
the people, or the populace, take their own government upon
themselves; and open "kinglessness," what we call _anarchy_,--how
happy if it be anarchy _plus_ a street-constable!--is everywhere
the order of the day. Such was the history, from Baltic to
Mediterranean, in Italy, France, Prussia, Austria, from end to
end of Europe, in those March days of 1848. Since the destruction
of the old Roman Empire by inroad of the Northern Barbarians, I
have known nothing similar.

And so, then, there remained no King in Europe; no King except
the Public Haranguer, haranguing on barrel-head, in leading
article; or getting himself aggregated into a National Parliament
to harangue. And for about four months all France, and to a
great degree all Europe, rough-ridden by every species of
delirium, except happily the murderous for most part, was a
weltering mob, presided over by M. de Lamartine, at the
Hotel-de-Ville; a most eloquent fair-spoken literary gentleman,
whom thoughtless persons took for a prophet, priest and
heaven-sent evangelist, and whom a wise Yankee friend of mine
discerned to be properly "the first stump-orator in the world,
standing too on the highest stump,--for the time." A sorrowful
spectacle to men of reflection, during the time he lasted, that
poor M. de Lamartine; with nothing in him but melodious wind and
_soft sawder_, which he and others took for something divine and
not diabolic! Sad enough; the eloquent latest impersonation of
Chaos-come-again; able to talk for itself, and declare
persuasively that it is Cosmos! However, you have but to wait a
little, in such cases; all balloons do and must give up their gas
in the pressure of things, and are collapsed in a sufficiently
wretched manner before long.

And so in City after City, street-barricades are piled, and
truculent, more or less murderous insurrection begins; populace
after populace rises, King after King capitulates or absconds;
and from end to end of Europe Democracy has blazed up explosive,
much higher, more irresistible and less resisted than ever
before; testifying too sadly on what a bottomless volcano, or
universal powder-mine of most inflammable mutinous chaotic
elements, separated from us by a thin earth-rind, Society with
all its arrangements and acquirements everywhere, in the present
epoch, rests! The kind of persons who excite or give signal to
such revolutions--students, young men of letters, advocates,
editors, hot inexperienced enthusiasts, or fierce and justly
bankrupt desperadoes, acting everywhere on the discontent of the
millions and blowing it into flame,--might give rise to
reflections as to the character of our epoch. Never till now did
young men, and almost children, take such a command in human
affairs. A changed time since the word _Senior_ (Seigneur, or
_Elder_) was first devised to signify "lord," or superior;--as in
all languages of men we find it to have been! Not an honorable
document this either, as to the spiritual condition of our epoch.
In times when men love wisdom, the old man will ever be
venerable, and be venerated, and reckoned noble: in times that
love something else than wisdom, and indeed have little or no
wisdom, and see little or none to love, the old man will cease to
be venerated; and looking more closely, also, you will find that
in fact he has ceased to be venerable, and has begun to be
contemptible; a foolish boy still, a boy without the graces,
generosities and opulent strength of young boys. In these days,
what of _lordship_ or leadership is still to be done, the youth
must do it, not the mature or aged man; the mature man, hardened
into sceptical egoism, knows no monition but that of his own
frigid cautious, avarices, mean timidities; and can lead
no-whither towards an object that even seems noble. But to
return.

This mad state of matters will of course before long allay
itself, as it has everywhere begun to do; the ordinary
necessities of men's daily existence cannot comport with it, and
these, whatever else is cast aside, will have their way. Some
remounting--very temporary remounting--of the old machine, under
new colors and altered forms, will probably ensue soon in most
countries: the old histrionic Kings will be admitted back under
conditions, under "Constitutions," with national Parliaments, or
the like fashionable adjuncts; and everywhere the old daily life
will try to begin again. But there is now no hope that such
arrangements can be permanent; that they can be other than poor
temporary makeshifts, which, if they try to fancy and make
themselves permanent, will be displaced by new explosions
recurring more speedily than last time. In such baleful
oscillation, afloat as amid raging bottomless eddies and
conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foundations,
must European Society continue swaying, now disastrously
tumbling, then painfully readjusting itself, at ever shorter
intervals,--till once the _new_ rock-basis does come to light,
and the weltering deluges of mutiny, and of need to mutiny, abate
again!

For universal _Democracy_, whatever we may think of it, has
declared itself as an inevitable fact of the days in which we
live; and he who has any chance to instruct, or lead, in his
days, must begin by admitting that: new street-barricades, and
new anarchies, still more scandalous if still less sanguinary,
must return and again return, till governing persons everywhere
know and admit that. Democracy, it may be said everywhere, is
here:--for sixty years now, ever since the grand or _First_
French Revolution, that fact has been terribly announced to all
the world; in message after message, some of them very terrible
indeed; and now at last all the world ought really to believe it.
That the world does believe it; that even Kings now as good as
believe it, and know, or with just terror surmise, that they are
but temporary phantasm Play-actors, and that Democracy is the
grand, alarming, imminent and indisputable Reality: this, among
the scandalous phases we witnessed in the last two years, is a
phasis full of hope: a sign that we are advancing closer and
closer to the very Problem itself, which it will behoove us to
solve or die; that all fighting and campaigning and coalitioning
in regard to the _existence_ of the Problem, is hopeless and
superfluous henceforth. The gods have appointed it so; no Pitt,
nor body of Pitts or mortal creatures can appoint it otherwise.
Democracy, sure enough, is here; one knows not how long it will
keep hidden underground even in Russia;--and here in England,
though we object to it resolutely in the form of
street-barricades and insurrectionary pikes, and decidedly will
not open doors to it on those terms, the tramp of its million
feet is on all streets and thoroughfares, the sound of its
bewildered thousand-fold voice is in all writings and speakings,
in all thinkings and modes and activities of men: the soul that
does not now, with hope or terror, discern it, is not the one we
address on this occasion.

What is Democracy; this huge inevitable Product of the
Destinies, which is everywhere the portion of our Europe in these
latter days? There lies the question for us. Whence comes it,
this universal big black Democracy; whither tends it; what is the
meaning of it? A meaning it must have, or it would not be here.
If we can find the right meaning of it, we may, wisely
submitting or wisely resisting and controlling, still hope to
live in the midst of it; if we cannot find the right meaning, if
we find only the wrong or no meaning in it, to live will not be
possible!--The whole social wisdom of the Present Time is
summoned, in the name of the Giver of Wisdom, to make clear to
itself, and lay deeply to heart with an eye to strenuous valiant
practice and effort, what the meaning of this universal revolt of
the European Populations, which calls itself Democracy, and
decides to continue permanent, may be.

Certainly it is a drama full of action, event fast following
event; in which curiosity finds endless scope, and there are
interests at stake, enough to rivet the attention of all men,
simple and wise. Whereat the idle multitude lift up their
voices, gratulating, celebrating sky-high; in rhyme and prose
announcement, more than plentiful, that _now_ the New Era, and
long-expected Year One of Perfect Human Felicity has come.
Glorious and immortal people, sublime French citizens, heroic
barricades; triumph of civil and religious liberty--O Heaven! one
of the inevitablest private miseries, to an earnest man in such
circumstances, is this multitudinous efflux of oratory and
psalmody, from the universal foolish human throat; drowning for
the moment all reflection whatsoever, except the sorrowful one
that you are fallen in an evil, heavy-laden, long-eared age, and
must resignedly bear your part in the same. The front wall of
your wretched old crazy dwelling, long denounced by you to no
purpose, having at last fairly folded itself over, and fallen
prostrate into the street, the floors, as may happen, will still
hang on by the mere beam-ends, and coherency of old carpentry,
though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor
rusty nails and worm-eaten dovetailings give way:--but is it
cheering, in such circumstances, that the whole household burst
forth into celebrating the new joys of light and ventilation,
liberty and picturesqueness of position, and thank God that now
they have got a house to their mind? My dear household, cease
singing and psalmodying; lay aside your fiddles, take out your
work-implements, if you have any; for I can say with confidence
the laws of gravitation are still active, and rusty nails,
worm-eaten dovetailings, and secret coherency of old carpentry,
are not the best basis for a household!--In the lanes of Irish
cities, I have heard say, the wretched people are sometimes found
living, and perilously boiling their potatoes, on such
swing-floors and inclined planes hanging on by the joist-ends;
but I did not hear that they sang very much in celebration of
such lodging. No, they slid gently about, sat near the back
wall, and perilously boiled their potatoes, in silence for most
part!--

High shouts of exultation, in every dialect, by every vehicle of
speech and writing, rise from far and near over this last avatar
of Democracy in 1848: and yet, to wise minds, the first aspect it
presents seems rather to be one of boundless misery and sorrow.
What can be more miserable than this universal hunting out of the
high dignitaries, solemn functionaries, and potent, grave and
reverend signiors of the world; this stormful rising-up of the
inarticulate dumb masses everywhere, against those who pretended
to be speaking for them and guiding them? These guides, then,
were mere blind men only pretending to see? These rulers were
not ruling at all; they had merely got on the attributes and
clothes of rulers, and were surreptitiously drawing the wages,
while the work remained undone? The Kings were Sham-Kings,
play-acting as at Drury Lane;--and what were the people withal
that took them for real?

It is probably the hugest disclosure of _falsity_ in human
things that was ever at one time made. These reverend
Dignitaries that sat amid their far-shining symbols and
long-sounding long-admitted professions, were mere Impostors,
then? Not a true thing they were doing, but a false thing. The
story they told men was a cunningly devised fable; the gospels
they preached to them were not an account of man's real position
in this world, but an incoherent fabrication, of dead ghosts and
unborn shadows, of traditions, cants, indolences, cowardices,--a
falsity of falsities, which at last _ceases_ to stick together.
Wilfully and against their will, these high units of mankind were
cheats, then; and the low millions who believed in them were
dupes,--a kind of _inverse_ cheats, too, or they would not have
believed in them so long. A universal _Bankruptcy of
Imposture_; that may be the brief definition of it. Imposture
everywhere declared once more to be contrary to Nature; nobody
will change its word into an act any farther:--fallen insolvent;
unable to keep its head up by these false pretences, or make its
pot boil any more for the present! A more scandalous phenomenon,
wide as Europe, never afflicted the face of the sun. Bankruptcy
everywhere; foul ignominy, and the abomination of desolation, in
all high places: odious to look upon, as the carnage of a
battle-field on the morrow morning;--a massacre not of the
innocents; we cannot call it a massacre of the innocents; but a
universal tumbling of Impostors and of Impostures into the
street!--

Such a spectacle, can we call it joyful? There is a joy in it,
to the wise man too; yes, but a joy full of awe, and as it were
sadder than any sorrow,--like the vision of immortality,
unattainable except through death and the grave! And yet who
would not, in his heart of hearts, feel piously thankful that
Imposture has fallen bankrupt? By all means let it fall
bankrupt; in the name of God let it do so, with whatever misery
to itself and to all of us. Imposture, be it known then,--known
it must and shall be,--is hateful, unendurable to God and man.
Let it understand this everywhere; and swiftly make ready for
departure, wherever it yet lingers; and let it learn never to
return, if possible! The eternal voices, very audibly again, are
speaking to proclaim this message, from side to side of the
world. Not a very cheering message, but a very indispensable
one.

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