Latter Day Pamphlets
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Thomas Carlyle >> Latter Day Pamphlets
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Miserabler theory than that of money on the ledger being the
primary rule for Empires, or for any higher entity than City owls
and their mice-catching, cannot well be propounded. And I would
by no means advise Felicissimus, ill at ease on his
high-trotting and now justly impatient Sleswicker, to let the
poor horse in its desperation go in that direction for a
momentary solace. If by lumber-log Governors, by Godfrey's
cordial Constitutions or otherwise, be contrived to cut off the
Colonies or any real right the big British Empire has in her
Colonies, both he and the British Empire will bitterly repent it
one day! The Sleswicker, relieved in ledger for a moment, will
find that it is wounded in heart and honor forever; and the
turning of its wild forehoofs upon Felicissimus as he lies in the
ditch combed off, is not a thing I like to think of! Britain,
whether it be known to Felicissimus or not, has other tasks
appointed her in God's Universe than the making of money; and woe
will betide her if she forget those other withal. Tasks,
colonial and domestic, which are of an eternally _divine_ nature,
and compared with which all money, and all that is procurable by
money, are in strict arithmetic an imponderable quantity, have
been assigned this Nation; and they also at last are coming upon
her again, clamorous, abstruse, inevitable, much to her
bewilderment just now!
This poor Nation, painfully dark about said tasks and the way of
doing them, means to keep its Colonies nevertheless, as things
which somehow or other must have a value, were it better seen
into. They are portions of the general Earth, where the children
of Britain now dwell; where the gods have so far sanctioned their
endeavor, as to say that they have a right to dwell. England
will not readily admit that her own children are worth nothing
but to be flung out of doors! England looking on her Colonies
can say: "Here are lands and seas, spice-lands, corn-lands,
timber-lands, overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by
many-sounding seas; wide spaces of the Maker's building, fit for
the cradle yet of mighty Nations and their Sciences and Heroisms.
Fertile continents still inhabited by wild beasts are mine, into
which all the distressed populations of Europe might pour
themselves, and make at once an Old World and a New World human.
By the eternal fiat of the gods, this must yet one day be; this,
by all the Divine Silences that rule this Universe, silent to
fools, eloquent and awful to the hearts of the wise, is
incessantly at this moment, and at all moments, commanded to
begin to be. Unspeakable deliverance, and new destiny of
thousand-fold expanded manfulness for all men, dawns out of the
Future here. To me has fallen the godlike task of initiating all
that: of me and of my Colonies, the abstruse Future asks, Are
you wise enough for so sublime a destiny? Are you too foolish?"
That you ask advice of whatever wisdom is to be had in the
Colony, and even take note of what _un_wisdom is in it, and
record that too as an existing fact, will certainly be very
advantageous. But I suspect the kind of Parliament that will
suit a Colony is much of a secret just now! Mr. Wakefield, a
democratic man in all fibres of him, and acquainted with
Colonial Socialities as few are, judges that the franchise for
your Colonial Parliament should be decidedly select, and advises
a high money-qualification; as there is in all Colonies a
fluctuating migratory mass, not destitute of money, but very much
so of loyalty, permanency, or civic availability; whom it is
extremely advantageous not to consult on what you are about
attempting for the Colony or Mother Country. This I can well
believe;--and also that a "high money-qualification," in the
present sad state of human affairs, might be some help to you in
selecting; though whether even that would quite certainly bring
"wisdom," the one thing indispensable, is much a question with
me. It might help, it might help! And if by any means you could
(which you cannot) exclude the Fourth Estate, and indicate
decisively that Wise Advice was the thing wanted here, and
Parliamentary Eloquence was not the thing wanted anywhere just
now,--there might really some light of experience and human
foresight, and a truly valuable benefit, be found for you in such
assemblies.
And there is one thing, too apt to be forgotten, which it much
behooves us to remember: In the Colonies, as everywhere else in
this world, the vital point is not who decides, but what is
decided on! That measures tending really to the best advantage
temporal and spiritual of the Colony be adopted, and strenuously
put in execution; there lies the grand interest of every good
citizen British and Colonial. Such measures, whosoever have
originated and prescribed them, will gradually be sanctioned by
all men and gods; and clamors of every kind in reference to them
may safely to a great extent be neglected, as clamorous merely,
and sure to be transient. Colonial Governor, Colonial Parliament,
whoever or whatever does an injustice, or resolves on an
_un_wisdom, he is the pernicious object, however parliamentary he
be!
I have known things done, in this or the other Colony, in the
most parliamentary way before now, which carried written on the
brow of them sad symptoms of eternal reprobation; not to be
mistaken, had you painted an inch thick. In Montreal, for
example, at this moment, standing amid the ruins of the "Elgin
Marbles" (as they call the burnt walls of the Parliament House
there), what rational British soul but is forced to institute the
mournfulest constitutional reflection? Some years ago the
Canadas, probably not without materials for discontent, and blown
upon by skilful artists, blazed up into crackling of musketry,
open flame of rebellion; a thing smacking of the gallows in all
countries that pretend to have any "Government." Which flame of
rebellion, had there been no loyal population to fling themselves
upon it at peril of their life, might have ended we know not how.
It ended speedily, in the good way; Canada got a
Godfrey's-cordial Constitution; and for the moment all was
varnished into some kind of feasibility again. A most poor
feasibility; momentary, not lasting, nor like to be of profit to
Canada! For this year, the Canadian most constitutional
Parliament, such a congeries of persons as one can imagine,
decides that the aforesaid flame of rebellion shall not only be
forgotten as per bargain, but that--the loyal population, who
flung their lives upon it and quenched it in the nick of time,
shall pay the rebels their damages! Of this, I believe, on
sadly conclusive evidence, there is no doubt whatever. Such,
when you wash off the constitutional pigments, is the
Death's-head that discloses itself. I can only say, if all the
Parliaments in the world were to vote that such a thing was just,
I should feel painfully constrained to answer, at my peril, "No,
by the Eternal, never!" And I would recommend any British
Governor who might come across that Business, there or here, to
overhaul it again. What the meaning of a Governor, if he is not
to overhaul and control such things, may be, I cannot conjecture.
A Canadian Lumber-log may as well be made Governor. _He_ might
have some cast-metal hand or shoulder-crank (a thing easily
contrivable in Birmingham) for signing his name to Acts of the
Colonial Parliament; he would be a "native of the country" too,
with popularity on that score if on no other;--he is your man, if
you really want a Log Governor!--
I perceive therefore that, besides choosing Parliaments never so
well, the New Colonial Office will have another thing to do:
Contrive to send out a new kind of Governors to the Colonies.
This will be the mainspring of the business; without this the
business will not go at all. An experienced, wise and valiant
British man, to represent the Imperial Interest; he, with such a
speaking or silent Collective Wisdom as he can gather round him
in the Colony, will evidently be the condition of all good
between the Mother Country and it. If you can find such a man,
your point is gained; if you cannot, lost. By him and his
Collective Wisdom all manner of _true_ relations, mutual
interests and duties such as they do exist in fact between Mother
Country and Colony, can be gradually developed into practical
methods and results; and all manner of true and noble successes,
and veracities in the way of governing, be won. Choose well your
Governor;--not from this or that poor section of the Aristocracy,
military, naval, or red-tapist; wherever there are born kings of
men, you had better seek them out, and breed them to this work.
All sections of the British Population will be open to you: and,
on the whole, you must succeed in finding a man _fit_. And
having found him, I would farther recommend you to keep him some
time! It would be a great improvement to end this present
nomadism of Colonial Governors. Give your Governor due power;
and let him know withal that he is wedded to his enterprise, and
having once well learned it, shall continue with it; that it is
not a Canadian Lumber-log you want there, to tumble upon the
vertexes and sign its name by a Birmingham shoulder-crank, but a
Governor of Men; who, you mean, shall fairly gird himself to his
enterprise, and fail with it and conquer with it, and as it were
live and die with it: he will have much to learn; and having
once learned it, will stay, and turn his knowledge to account.
From this kind of Governor, were you once in the way of finding
him with moderate certainty, from him and his Collective Wisdom,
all good whatsoever might be anticipated. And surely, were the
Colonies once enfranchised from red-tape, and the poor Mother
Country once enfranchised from it; were our idle Seventy-fours
all busy carrying out streams of British Industrials, and those
Scoundrel Regiments all working, under divine drill-sergeants, at
the grand Atlantic and Pacific Junction Railway,--poor Britain
and her poor Colonies might find that they _had_ true relations
to each other: that the Imperial _Mother_ and her
constitutionally obedient Daughters were not a red-tape fiction,
provoking bitter mockery as at present, but a blessed God's-Fact
destined to fill half the world with its fruits one day!
But undoubtedly our grand primary concern is the Home Office, and
its Irish Giant named of Despair. When the Home Office begins
dealing with this Irish Giant, which it is vitally urgent for us
the Home Office should straightway do, it will find its duties
enlarged to a most unexpected extent, and, as it were, altered
from top to bottom. A changed time now when the question is,
What to do with three millions of paupers (come upon you for
food, since you have no work for them) increasing at a frightful
rate per day? Home Office, Parliament, King, Constitution will
find that they have now, if they will continue in this world
long, got a quite immense new question and continually recurring
set of questions. That huge question of the Irish Giant with his
Scotch and English Giant-Progeny advancing open-mouthed upon us,
will, as I calculate, change from top to bottom not the Home
Office only but all manner of Offices and Institutions
whatsoever, and gradually the structure of Society itself. I
perceive, it will make us a new Society, if we are to continue a
Society at all. For the alternative is not, Stay where we are,
or change? But Change, with new wise effort fit for the new
time, to true and wider nobler National Life; or Change, by
indolent folding of the arms, as we are now doing, in horrible
anarchies and convulsions to Dissolution, to National Death, or
Suspended-animation? Suspended-animation itself is a frightful
possibility for Britain: this Anarchy whither all Europe has
preceded us, where all Europe is now weltering, would suit us as
ill as any! The question for the British Nation is: Can we work
our course pacifically, on firm land, into the New Era; or must
it be, for us too, as for all the others, through black abysses
of Anarchy, hardly escaping, if we do with all our struggles
escape, the jaws of eternal Death?
For Pauperism, though it now absorbs its high figure of millions
annually, is by no means a question of money only, but of
infinitely higher and greater than all conceivable money. If our
Chancellor of the Exchequer had a Fortunatus' purse, and
miraculous sacks of Indian meal that would stand scooping from
forever,--I say, even on these terms Pauperism could not be
endured; and it would vitally concern all British Citizens to
abate Pauperism, and never rest till they had ended it again.
Pauperism is the general leakage through every joint of the ship
that it is rotten. Were all men doing their duty, or even
seriously trying to do it, there would be no Pauper. Were the
pretended Captains of the world at all in the habit of
commanding; were the pretended Teachers of the world at all in
the habit of teaching,--of admonishing said Captains among
others, and with sacred zeal apprising them to what place such
neglect was leading,--how could Pauperism exist? Pauperism would
lie far over the horizon; we should be lamenting and denouncing
quite inferior sins of men, which were only tending afar off
towards Pauperism. A true Captaincy; a true Teachership, either
making all men and Captains know and devoutly recognize the
eternal law of things, or else breaking its own heart, and going
about with sackcloth round its loins, in testimony of continual
sorrow and protest, and prophecy of God's vengeance upon such a
course of things: either of these divine equipments would have
saved us; and it is because we have neither of them that we are
come to such a pass!
We may depend upon it, where there is a Pauper, there is a sin;
to make one Pauper there go many sins. Pauperism is our Social
Sin grown manifest; developed from the state of a spiritual
ignobleness, a practical impropriety and base oblivion of duty,
to an affair of the ledger. Here is not now an unheeded sin
against God; here is a concrete ugly bulk of Beggary demanding
that you should buy Indian meal for it. Men of reflection have
long looked with a horror for which there was no response in the
idle public, upon Pauperism; but the quantity of meal it demands
has now awakened men of no reflection to consider it. Pauperism
is the poisonous dripping from all the sins, and putrid
unveracities and god-forgetting greedinesses and devil-serving
cants and jesuitisms, that exist among us. Not one idle Sham
lounging about Creation upon false pretences, upon means which he
has not earned, upon theories which he does not practise, but
yields his share of Pauperism somewhere or other. His sham-work
oozes down; finds at last its issue as human Pauperism,--in a
human being that by those false pretences cannot live. The Idle
Workhouse, now about to burst of overfilling, what is it but the
scandalous poison-tank of drainage from the universal Stygian
quagmire of our affairs? Workhouse Paupers; immortal sons of Adam
rotted into that scandalous condition, subter-slavish, demanding
that you would make slaves of them as an unattainable blessing!
My friends, I perceive the quagmire must be drained, or we cannot
live. And farther, I perceive, this of Pauperism is the corner
where we must _begin_,--the levels all pointing thitherward, the
possibilities lying all clearly there. On that Problem we shall
find that innumerable things, that all things whatsoever hang.
By courageous steadfast persistence in that, I can foresee
Society itself regenerated. In the course of long strenuous
centuries, I can see the State become what it is actually bound
to be, the keystone of a most real "Organization of Labor,"--and
on this Earth a world of some veracity, and some heroism, once
more worth living in!
The State in all European countries, and in England first of all,
as I hope, will discover that its functions are now, and have
long been, very wide of what the State in old pedant Downing
Streets has aimed at; that the State is, for the present, not a
reality but in great part a dramatic speciosity, expending its
strength in practices and objects fallen many of them quite
obsolete; that it must come a little nearer the true aim again,
or it cannot continue in this world. The "Champion of England"
eased in iron or tin, and "able to mount his horse with little
assistance,"--this Champion and the thousand-fold cousinry of
Phantasms he has, nearly all dead now but still walking as
ghosts, must positively take himself away: who can endure him,
and his solemn trumpetings and obsolete gesticulations, in a Time
that is full of deadly realities, coming open-mouthed upon us?
At Drury Lane, let him play his part, him and his thousand-fold
cousinry; and welcome, so long as any public will pay a shilling
to see him: but on the solid earth, under the extremely earnest
stars, we dare not palter with him, or accept his tomfooleries
any more. Ridiculous they seem to some; horrible they seem to
me: all lies, if one look whence they come and whither they go,
are horrible.
Alas, it will be found, I doubt, that in England more than in any
country, our Public Life and our Private, our State and our
Religion, and all that we do and speak (and the most even of what
we _think_), is a tissue of half-truths and whole-lies; of
hypocrisies, conventionalisms, worn-out traditionary rags and
cobwebs; such a life-garment of beggarly incredible and
uncredited falsities as no honest souls of Adam's Posterity were
ever enveloped in before. And we walk about in it with a stately
gesture, as if it were some priestly stole or imperial mantle;
not the foulest beggar's gabardine that ever was. "No Englishman
dare believe the truth," says one: "he stands, for these two
hundred years, enveloped in lies of every kind; from nadir to
zenith an ocean of traditionary cant surrounds him as his
life-element. He really thinks the truth dangerous. Poor
wretch, you see him everywhere endeavoring to temper the truth by
taking the falsity along with it, and welding them together; this
he calls 'safe course,' 'moderate course,' and other fine names;
there, balanced between God and the Devil, he thinks he _can_
serve two masters, and that things will go well with him."
In the cotton-spinning and similar departments our English friend
knows well that truth or God will have nothing to do with the
Devil or falsehood, but will ravel all the web to pieces if you
introduce the Devil or Non-veracity in any form into it: in this
department, therefore, our English friend avoids falsehood. But
in the religious, political, social, moral, and all other
spiritual departments he freely introduces falsehood, nothing
doubting; and has long done so, with a profuseness not elsewhere
met with in the world. The unhappy creature, does he not know,
then, that every lie is accursed, and the parent of mere curses?
That he must _think_ the truth; much more speak it? That, above
all things, by the oldest law of Heaven and Earth which no man
violates with impunity, he must not and shall not wag the tongue
of him except to utter his thought? That there is not a grin or
beautiful acceptable grimace he can execute upon his poor
countenance, but is either an express veracity, the image of what
passes within him; or else is a bit of Devil-worship which he and
the rest of us will have to pay for yet? Alas, the grins he
executes upon his poor _mind_ (which is all tortured into St.
Vitus dances, and ghastly merry-andrewisms, by the practice) are
the most extraordinary this sun ever saw.
We have Puseyisms, black-and-white surplice controversies:--do
not, officially and otherwise, the select of the longest heads in
England sit with intense application and iron gravity, in open
forum, judging of "prevenient grace"? Not a head of them
suspects that it can be improper so to sit, or of the nature of
treason against the Power who gave an Intellect to man;--that it
can be other than the duty of a good citizen to use his god-given
intellect in investigating prevenient grace, supervenient
moonshine, or the color of the Bishop's nightmare, if that
happened to turn up. I consider them far ahead of Cicero's Roman
Augurs with their chicken-bowels: "Behold these divine
chicken-bowels, O Senate and Roman People; the midriff has
fallen eastward!" solemnly intimates one Augur. "By Proserpina
and the triple Hecate!" exclaims the other, "I say the midriff
has fallen to the west!" And they look at one another with the
seriousness of men prepared to die in their opinion,--the
authentic seriousness of men betting at Tattersall's, or about to
receive judgment in Chancery. There is in the Englishman
something great, beyond all Roman greatness, in whatever line you
meet him; even as a Latter-Day Augur he seeks his fellow!--Poor
devil, I believe it is his intense love of peace, and hatred of
breeding discussions which lead no-whither, that has led him
into this sad practice of amalgamating true and false.
He has been at it these two hundred years; and has now carried it
to a terrible length. He couldn't follow Oliver Cromwell in the
Puritan path heavenward, so steep was it, and beset with
thorns,--and becoming uncertain withal. He much preferred, at
that juncture, to go heavenward with his Charles Second and merry
Nell Gwynns, and old decent formularies and good respectable
aristocratic company, for escort; sore he tried, by glorious
restorations, glorious revolutions and so forth, to perfect this
desirable amalgam; hoped always it might be possible;--is only
just now, if even now, beginning to give up the hope; and to see
with wide-eyed horror that it is not at Heaven he is arriving,
but at the Stygian marshes, with their thirty thousand
Needlewomen, cannibal Connaughts, rivers of lamentation,
continual wail of infants, and the yellow-burning gleam of a
Hell-on-Earth!--Bull, my friend, you must strip that astonishing
pontiff-stole, imperial mantle, or whatever you imagine it to be,
which I discern to be a garment of curses, and poisoned
Nessus'-shirt now at last about to take fire upon you; you must
strip that off your poor body, my friend; and, were it only in a
soul's suit of Utilitarian buff, and such belief as that a big
loaf is better than a small one, come forth into contact with
your world, under _true_ professions again, and not false. You
wretched man, you ought to weep for half a century on discovering
what lies you have believed, and what every lie leads to and
proceeds from. O my friend, no honest fellow in this Planet was
ever so served by his cooks before; or has eaten such quantities
and qualities of dirt as you have been made to do, for these two
centuries past. Arise, my horribly maltreated yet still beloved
Bull; steep yourself in running water for a long while, my
friend; and begin forthwith in every conceivable direction,
physical and spiritual, the long-expected _Scavenger Age_.
Many doctors have you had, my poor friend; but I perceive it is
the Water-Cure alone that will help you: a complete course of
_scavengerism_ is the thing you need! A new and veritable
heart-divorce of England from the Babylonish woman, who is
Jesuitism and Unveracity, and dwells not at Rome now, but under
your own nose and everywhere; whom, and her foul worship of
Phantasms and Devils, poor England _had_ once divorced, with a
divine heroism not forgotten yet, and well worth remembering now:
a clearing-out of Church and State from the unblessed host of
Phantasms which have too long nestled thick there, under those
astonishing "Defenders of the Faith,"--Defenders of the
Hypocrisies, the spiritual Vampires and obscene Nightmares, under
which England lies in syncope;--this is what you need; and if you
cannot get it, you must die, my poor friend!
Like people, like priest. Priest, King, Home Office, all manner
of establishments and offices among a people bear a striking
resemblance to the people itself. It is because Bull has been
eating so much dirt that his Home Offices have got into such a
shockingly dirty condition,--the old pavements of them quite gone
out of sight and out of memory, and nothing but mountains of
long-accumulated dung in which the poor cattle are sprawling and
tumbling. Had his own life been pure, had his own daily conduct
been grounding itself on the clear pavements or actual beliefs
and veracities, would he have let his Home Offices come to such a
pass? Not in Downing Street only, but in all other thoroughfares
and arenas and spiritual or physical departments of his
existence, running water and Herculean scavengerism have become
indispensable, unless the poor man is to choke in his own
exuviae, and die the sorrowfulest death.
If the State could once get back to the real sight of its
essential function, and with religious resolution begin doing
that, and putting away its multifarious imaginary functions, and
indignantly casting out these as mere dung and insalubrious
horror and abomination (which they are), what a promise of reform
were there! The British Home Office, surely this and its
kindred Offices exist, if they will think of it, that life and
work may continue possible, and may not become impossible, for
British men. If honorable existence, or existence on human terms
at all, have become impossible for millions of British men, how
can the Home Office or any other Office long exist? With thirty
thousand Needlewomen, a Connaught fallen into potential
cannibalism, and the Idle Workhouse everywhere bursting, and
declaring itself an inhumanity and stupid ruinous brutality not
much longer to be tolerated among rational human creatures, it is
time the State were bethinking itself.
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