Latter Day Pamphlets
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Thomas Carlyle >> Latter Day Pamphlets
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Truly it is high time that same beautiful notion of No-Government
should take itself away. The world is daily rushing towards
wreck, while that lasts. If your Government is to be a
Constituted Anarchy, what issue can it have? Our one interest in
such Government is, that it would be kind enough to cease and go
its ways, _before_ the inevitable arrive. The question, Who is
to float atop no-whither upon the popular vertexes, and act that
sorry character, "carcass of the drowned ass upon the
mud-deluge"? is by no means an important one for almost
anybody,--hardly even for the drowned ass himself. Such drowned
ass ought to ask himself, If the function is a sublime one? For
him too, though he looks sublime to the vulgar and floats atop, a
private situation, down out of sight in his natural ooze, would
be a luckier one.
Crabbe, speaking of constitutional philosophies, faith in the
ballot-box and such like, has this indignant passage: "If any
voice of deliverance or resuscitation reach us, in this our low
and all but lost estate, sunk almost beyond plummet's sounding in
the mud of Lethe, and oblivious of all noble objects, it will be
an intimation that we must put away all this abominable nonsense,
and understand, once more, that Constituted Anarchy, with however
many ballot-boxes, caucuses, and hustings beer-barrels, is a
continual offence to gods and men. That to be governed by small
men is not only a misfortune, but it is a curse and a sin; the
effect, and alas the cause also, of all manner of curses and
sins. That to profess subjection to phantasms, and pretend to
accept guidance from fractional parts of tailors, is what
Smelfungus in his rude dialect calls it, 'a damned _lie_,' and
nothing other. A lie which, by long use and wont, we have grown
accustomed to, and do not the least feel to be a lie, having
spoken and done it continually everywhere for such a long time
past;--but has Nature grown to accept it as a veracity, think
you, my friend? Have the Parcae fallen asleep, because you
wanted to make money in the City? Nature at all moments knows
well that it is a lie; and that, like all lies, it is cursed and
damned from the beginning.
"Even so, ye indigent millionnaires, and miserable bankrupt
populations rolling in gold,--whose note-of-hand will go to any
length in Threadneedle Street, and to whom in Heaven's Bank the
stern answer is, 'No effects!' Bankrupt, I say; and Californias
and Eldorados will not save us. And every time we speak such
lie, or do it or look it, as we have been incessantly doing, and
many of us with clear consciousness, for about a hundred and
fifty years now, Nature marks down the exact penalty against us.
'Debtor to so much lying: forfeiture of existing stock of worth
to such extent;--approach to general damnation by so much.' Till
now, as we look round us over a convulsed anarchic Europe, and at
home over an anarchy not yet convulsed, but only heaving towards
convulsion, and to judge by the Mosaic sweating-establishments,
cannibal Connaughts and other symptoms, not far from convulsion
now, we seem to have pretty much _exhausted_ our accumulated
stock of worth; and unless money's 'worth' and bullion at the
Bank will save us, to be rubbing very close upon that ulterior
bourn which I do not like to name again!
"On behalf of nearly twenty-seven millions of my
fellow-countrymen, sunk deep in Lethean sleep, with mere
owl-dreams of Political Economy and mice-catching, in this
pacific thrice-infernal slush-element; and also of certain select
thousands, and hundreds and units, awakened or beginning to
awaken from it, and with horror in their hearts perceiving where
they are, I beg to protest, and in the name of God to say, with
poor human ink, desirous much that I had divine thunder to say it
with, Awake, arise,--before you sink to death eternal! Unnamable
destruction, and banishment to Houndsditch and Gehenna, lies in
store for all Nations that, in angry perversity or brutal torpor
and owlish blindness, neglect the eternal message of the gods,
and vote for the Worse while the Better is there. Like owls they
say, 'Barabbas will do; any orthodox Hebrew of the Hebrews, and
peaceable believer in M'Croudy and the Faith of Leave-alone will
do: the Right Honorable Minimus is well enough; he shall be our
Maximus, under him it will be handy to catch mice, and Owldom
shall continue a flourishing empire. '"
One thing is undeniable, and must be continually repeated till it
get to be understood again: Of all constitutions, forms of
government, and political methods among men, the question to be
asked is even this, What kind of man do you set over us? All
questions are answered in the answer to this. Another thing is
worth attending to: No people or populace, with never such
ballot-boxes, can select such man for you; only the man of worth
can recognize worth in men;--to the commonplace man of no or of
little worth, you, unless you wish to be _mis_led, need not apply
on such an occasion. Those poor Tenpound Franchisers of yours,
they are not even in earnest; the poor sniffing sniggering
Honorable Gentlemen they send to Parliament are as little so.
Tenpound Franchisers full of mere beer and balderdash; Honorable
Gentlemen come to Parliament as to an Almack's series of evening
parties, or big cockmain (battle of all the cocks) very amusing
to witness and bet upon: what can or could men in that
predicament ever do for you? Nay, if they were in life-and-death
earnest, what could it avail you in such a case? I tell you, a
million blockheads looking authoritatively into one man of what
you call genius, or noble sense, will make nothing but nonsense
out of him and his qualities, and his virtues and defects, if
they look till the end of time. He understands them, sees what
they are; but that they should understand him, and see with
rounded outline what his limits are,--this, which would mean that
they are bigger than he, is forever denied them. Their one good
understanding of him is that they at last should loyally say, "We
do not quite understand thee; we perceive thee to be nobler and
wiser and bigger than we, and will loyally follow thee."
The question therefore arises, Whether, since reform of
parliament and such like have done so little in that respect, the
problem might not be with some hope attacked in the direct
manner? Suppose all our Institutions, and Public Methods of
Procedure, to continue for the present as they are; and suppose
farther a Reform Premier, and the English Nation once awakening
under him to a due sense of the infinite importance, nay the
vital necessity there is of getting able and abler men:--might
not some heroic wisdom, and actual "ability" to do what must be
done, prove discoverable to said Premier; and so the
indispensable Heaven's-blessing descend to us from _above_,
since none has yet sprung from below? From above we shall have
to try it; the other is exhausted,--a hopeless method that! The
utmost passion of the house-inmates, ignorant of masonry and
architecture, cannot avail to cure the house of smoke: not if
_they_ vote and agitate forever, and bestir themselves to the
length even of street-barricades, will the _smoke_ in the least
abate: how can it? Their passion exercised in such ways, till
Doomsday, will avail them nothing. Let their passion rage
steadily against the existing major-domos to this effect, "_Find_
us men skilled in house-building, acquainted with the laws of
atmospheric suction, and capable to cure smoke;" something might
come of it! In the lucky circumstance of having one man of real
intellect and courage to put at the head of the movement, much
would come of it;--a New Downing Street, fit for the British
Nation and its bitter necessities in this Now Era, would come;
and from that, in answer to continuous sacred fidelity and
valiant toil, all good whatsoever would gradually come.
Of the Continental nuisance called "Bureaucracy,"--if this should
alarm any reader,--I can see no risk or possibility in England.
Democracy is hot enough here, fierce enough; it is perennial,
universal, clearly invincible among us henceforth. No danger it
should let itself be flung in chains by sham secretaries of the
Pedant species, and accept their vile Age of Pinchbeck for its
Golden Age! Democracy clamors, with its Newspapers, its
Parliaments, and all its twenty-seven million throats,
continually in this Nation forevermore. I remark, too, that, the
unconscious purport of all its clamors is even this, "Find us men
skilled,"--_make_ a New Downing Street, fit for the New Era!
Of the Foreign Office, in its reformed state, we have not much to
say. Abolition of imaginary work, and replacement of it by real,
is on all hands understood to be very urgent there. Large
needless expenditures of money, immeasurable ditto of hypocrisy
and grimace; embassies, protocols, worlds of extinct traditions,
empty pedantries, foul cobwebs:--but we will by no means apply
the "live coal" of our witty friend; the Foreign Office will
repent, and not be driven to suicide! A truer time will come for
the Continental Nations too: Authorities based on truth, and on
the silent or spoken Worship of Human Nobleness, will again get
themselves established there; all Sham-Authorities, and
consequent Real-Anarchies based on universal suffrage and the
Gospel according to George Sand, being put away; and noble
action, heroic new-developments of human faculty and industry,
and blessed fruit as of Paradise getting itself conquered from
the waste battle-field of the chaotic elements, will once more,
there as here, begin to show themselves.
When the Continental Nations have once got to the bottom of
_their_ Augean Stable, and begun to have real enterprises based
on the eternal facts again, our Foreign Office may again have
extensive concerns with them. And at all times, and even now,
there will remain the question to be sincerely put and wisely
answered, What essential concern _has_ the British Nation with
them and their enterprises? Any concern at all, except that of
handsomely keeping apart from them? If so, what are the methods
of best managing it?--At present, as was said, while Red Republic
but clashes with foul Bureaucracy; and Nations, sunk in blind
ignavia, demand a universal-suffrage Parliament to heal their
wretchedness; and wild Anarchy and Phallus-Worship struggle with
Sham-Kingship and extinct or galvanized Catholicism; and in the
Cave of the Winds all manner of rotten waifs and wrecks are
hurled against each other,--our English interest in the
controversy, however huge said controversy grow, is quite
trifling; we have only in a handsome manner to say to it:
"Tumble and rage along, ye rotten waifs and wrecks; clash and
collide as seems fittest to you; and smite each other into
annihilation at your own good pleasure. In that huge conflict,
dismal but unavoidable, we, thanks to our heroic ancestors,
having got so far ahead of you, have now no interest at all. Our
decided notion is, the dead ought to bury their dead in such a
case: and so we have the honor to be, with distinguished
consideration, your entirely devoted,--FLIMNAP, SEC. FOREIGN
DEPARTMENT."--I really think Flimnap, till truer times come,
ought to treat much of his work in this way: cautious to give
offence to his neighbors; resolute not to concern himself in any
of their self-annihilating operations whatsoever.
Foreign wars are sometimes unavoidable. We ourselves, in the
course of natural merchandising and laudable business, have now
and then got into ambiguous situations; into quarrels which
needed to be settled, and without fighting would not settle.
Sugar Islands, Spice Islands, Indias, Canadas, these, by the real
decree of Heaven, were ours; and nobody would or could believe
it, till it was tried by cannon law, and so proved. Such cases
happen. In former times especially, owing very much to want of
intercourse and to the consequent mutual ignorance, there did
occur misunderstandings: and therefrom many foreign wars, some of
them by no means unnecessary. With China, or some distant
country, too unintelligent of us and too unintelligible to us,
there still sometimes rises necessary occasion for a war.
Nevertheless wars--misunderstandings that get to the length of
arguing themselves out by sword and cannon--have, in these late
generations of improved intercourse, been palpably becoming less
and less necessary; have in a manner become superfluous, if we
had a little wisdom, and our Foreign Office on a good footing.
Of European wars I really hardly remember any, since Oliver
Cromwell's last Protestant or Liberation war with Popish
antichristian Spain some two hundred years ago, to which I for my
own part could have contributed my life with any heartiness, or
in fact would have subscribed money itself to any considerable
amount. Dutch William, a man of some heroism, did indeed get
into troubles with Louis Fourteenth; and there rested still some
shadow of Protestant Interest, and question of National and
individual Independence, over those wide controversies; a little
money and human enthusiasm was still due to Dutch William.
Illustrious Chatham also, not to speak of his Manilla ransoms and
the like, did one thing: assisted Fritz of Prussia, a brave man
and king (almost the only sovereign King I have known since
Cromwell's time) like to be borne down by ignoble men and
sham-kings; for this let illustrious Chatham too have a little
money and human enthusiasm,--a little, by no means much. But
what am I to say of heaven-born Pitt the son of Chatham? England
sent forth her fleets and armies; her money into every country;
money as if the heaven-born Chancellor had got a Fortunatus'
purse; as if this Island had become a volcanic fountain of gold,
or new terrestrial sun capable of radiating mere guineas. The
result of all which, what was it? Elderly men can remember the
tar-barrels burnt for success and thrice-immortal victory in the
business; and yet what result had we? The French Revolution, a
Fact decreed in the Eternal Councils, could not be put down: the
result was, that heaven-born Pitt had actually been fighting (as
the old Hebrews would have said) against the Lord,--that the Laws
of Nature were stronger than Pitt. Of whom therefore there
remains chiefly his unaccountable radiation of guineas, for the
gratitude of posterity. Thank you for nothing,--for eight
hundred millions _less_ than nothing!
Our War Offices, Admiralties, and other Fighting Establishments,
are forcing themselves on everybody's attention at this time.
Bull grumbles audibly: "The money you have cost me these
five-and-thirty years, during which you have stood elaborately
ready to fight at any moment, without at any moment being called
to fight, is surely an astonishing sum. The National Debt itself
might have been half paid by that money, which has all gone in
pipe-clay and blank cartridges! "Yes, Mr. Bull, the money can be
counted in hundreds of millions; which certainly is
something:--but the "strenuously organized idleness," and what
mischief that amounts to,--have you computed it? A perpetual
solecism, and blasphemy (of its sort), set to march openly among
us, dressed in scarlet! Bull, with a more and more sulky tone,
demands that such solecism be abated; that these Fighting
Establishments be as it were disbanded, and set to do some work
in the Creation, since fighting there is now none for them. This
demand is irrefragably just, is growing urgent too; and yet this
demand cannot be complied with,--not yet while the State grounds
itself on unrealities, and Downing Street continues what it is.
The old Romans made their soldiers work during intervals of war.
The New Downing Street too, we may predict, will have less and
less tolerance for idleness on the part of soldiers or others.
Nay the New Downing Street, I foresee, when once it has got its
"_Industrial_ Regiments" organized, will make these mainly do its
fighting, what fighting there is; and so save immense sums. Or
indeed, all citizens of the Commonwealth, as is the right and the
interest of every free man in this world, will have themselves
trained to arms; each citizen ready to defend his country with
his own body and soul,--he is not worthy to have a country
otherwise. In a State grounded on veracities, that would be the
rule. Downing Street, if it cannot bethink itself of returning
to the veracities, will have to vanish altogether!
To fight with its neighbors never was, and is now less than ever,
the real trade of England. For far other objects was the English
People created into this world; sent down from the Eternities, to
mark with its history certain spaces in the current of sublunary
Time! Essential, too, that the English People should discover
what its real objects are; and resolutely follow these,
resolutely refusing to follow other than these. The State will
have victory so far as it can do that; so far as it cannot, defeat.
In the New Downing Street, discerning what its real functions
are, and with sacred abhorrence putting away from it what its
functions are not, we can fancy changes enough in Foreign Office,
War Office, Colonial Office, Home Office! Our War-soldiers
_Industrial_, first of all; doing nobler than Roman works, when
fighting is not wanted of them. Seventy-fours not hanging idly
by their anchors in the Tagus, or off Sapienza (one of the
saddest sights under the sun), but busy, every Seventy-four of
them, carrying over streams of British Industrials to the
immeasurable Britain that lies beyond the sea in every zone of
the world. A State grounding itself on the veracities, not on
the semblances and the injustices: every citizen a soldier for
it. Here would be new _real_ Secretaryships and Ministries, not
for foreign war and diplomacy, but for domestic peace and
utility. Minister of Works; Minister of Justice,--clearing his
Model Prisons of their scoundrelism; shipping his scoundrels
wholly abroad, under hard and just drill-sergeants (hundreds of
such stand wistfully ready for you, these thirty years, in the
Rag-and-Famish Club and elsewhere!) into fertile desert
countries; to make railways,--one big railway (says the Major
[Footnote: Major Carmichael Smith; see his Pamphlets on this
subject]) quite across America; fit to employ all the able-bodied
Scoundrels and efficient Half-pay Officers in
Nature!
Lastly,--or rather firstly, and as the preliminary of all, would
there not be a Minister of Education? Minister charged to get
this English People taught a little, at his and our peril!
Minister of Education; no longer dolefully embayed amid the wreck
of moribund "religions," but clear ahead of all that; steering,
free and piously fearless, towards his divine goal under the
eternal stars!--O heaven, and are these things forever
impossible, then? Not a whit. To-morrow morning they might all
begin to be, and go on through blessed centuries realizing
themselves, if it were not that--alas, if it were not that we are
most of us insincere persons, sham talking-machines and hollow
windy fools! Which it is not "impossible" that we should cease
to be, I hope?
Constitutions for the Colonies are now on the anvil; the
discontented Colonies are all to be cured of their miseries by
Constitutions. Whether that will cure their miseries, or only
operate as a Godfrey's-cordial to stop their whimpering, and in
the end worsen all their miseries, may be a sad doubt to us. One
thing strikes a remote spectator in these Colonial questions:
the singular placidity with which the British Statesman at this
time, backed by M'Croudy and the British moneyed classes, is
prepared to surrender whatsoever interest Britain, as foundress
of those establishments, might pretend to have in the decision.
"If you want to go from us, go; we by no means want you to stay:
you cost us money yearly, which is scarce; desperate quantities
of trouble too: why not go, if you wish it?" Such is the humor
of the British Statesman, at this time.--Men clear for rebellion,
"annexation" as they call it, walk openly abroad in our American
Colonies; found newspapers, hold platform palaverings. From
Canada there comes duly by each mail a regular statistic of
Annexationism: increasing fast in this quarter, diminishing in
that;--Majesty's Chief Governor seeming to take it as a perfectly
open question; Majesty's Chief Governor in fact seldom appearing
on the scene at all, except to receive the impact of a few rotten
eggs on occasion, and then duck in again to his private
contemplations. And yet one would think the Majesty's Chief
Governor ought to have a kind of interest in the thing? Public
liberty is carried to a great length in some portions of her
Majesty's dominions. But the question, "Are we to continue
subjects of her Majesty, or start rebelling against her? So many
as are for rebelling, hold up your hands!" Here is a public
discussion of a very extraordinary nature to be going on under
the nose of a Governor of Canada. How the Governor of Canada,
being a British piece of flesh and blood, and not a Canadian
lumber-log of mere pine and rosin, can stand it, is not very
conceivable at first view. He does it, seemingly, with the
stoicism of a Zeno. It is a constitutional sight like few.
And yet an instinct deeper than the Gospel of M'Croudy teaches
all men that Colonies are worth something to a country! That if,
under the present Colonial Office, they are a vexation to us and
themselves, some other Colonial Office can and must be contrived
which shall render them a blessing; and that the remedy will be
to contrive such a Colonial Office or method of administration,
and by no means to cut the Colonies loose. Colonies are not to be
picked off the street every day; not a Colony of them but has
been bought dear, well purchased by the toil and blood of those
we have the honor to be sons of; and we cannot just afford to cut
them away because M'Croudy finds the present management of them
cost money. The present management will indeed require to be cut
away;--but as for the Colonies, we purpose through Heaven's
blessing to retain them a while yet! Shame on us for unworthy
sons of brave fathers if we do not. Brave fathers, by valiant
blood and sweat, purchased for us, from the bounty of Heaven,
rich possessions in all zones; and we, wretched imbeciles, cannot
do the function of administering them? And because the accounts
do not stand well in the ledger, our remedy is, not to take shame
to ourselves, and repent in sackcloth and ashes, and amend our
beggarly imbecilities and insincerities in that as in other
departments of our business, but to fling the business overboard,
and declare the business itself to be bad? We are a hopeful set
of heirs to a big fortune! It does not suit our Manton
gunneries, grouseshootings, mousings in the City; and like
spirited young gentlemen we will give it up, and let the
attorneys take it?
Is there no value, then, in human things, but what can write
itself down in the cash-ledger? All men know, and even M'Croudy
in his inarticulate heart knows, that to men and Nations there
are invaluable values which cannot be sold for money at all.
George Robins is great; but he is not onmipotent. George Robins
cannot quite sell Heaven and Earth by auction, excellent though
he be at the business. Nay, if M'Croudy offered his own life for
_sale_ in Threadneedle Street, would anybody buy it? Not I, for
one. "Nobody bids: pass on to the next lot," answers Robins.
And yet to M'Croudy this unsalable lot is worth all the
Universe:--nay, I believe, to us also it is worth something; good
monitions, as to several things, do lie in this Professor of the
dismal science; and considerable sums even of money, not to speak
of other benefit, will yet come out of his life and him, for
which nobody bids! Robins has his own field where he reigns
triumphant; but to that we will restrict him with iron limits;
and neither Colonies nor the lives of Professors, nor other such
invaluable objects shall come under his hammer.
Bad state of the ledger will demonstrate that your way of dealing
with your Colonies is absurd, and urgently in want of reform; but
to demonstrate that the Empire itself must be dismembered to
bring the ledger straight? Oh never. Something else than the
ledger must intervene to do that. Why does not England repudiate
Ireland, and insist on the "Repeal," instead of prohibiting it
under death-penalties? Ireland has never been a paying
speculation yet, nor is it like soon to be! Why does not
Middlesex repudiate Surrey, and Chelsea Kensington, and each
county and each parish, and in the end each individual set up for
himself and his cash-box, repudiating the other and his, because
their mutual interests have got into an irritating course? They
must change the course, seek till they discover a soothing one;
that is the remedy, when limbs of the same body come to irritate
one another. Because the paltry tatter of a garment, reticulated
for you out of thrums and listings in Downing Street, ties foot
and hand together in an intolerable manner, will you relieve
yourself by cutting off the hand or the foot? You will cut off
the paltry tatter of a pretended body-coat, I think, and fling
that to the nettles; and imperatively require one that fits your
size better.
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