Latter Day Pamphlets
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Thomas Carlyle >> Latter Day Pamphlets
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To rectify the relation that exists between two men, is there no
method, then, but that of ending it? The old relation has become
unsuitable, obsolete, perhaps unjust; it imperatively requires to
be amended; and the remedy is, Abolish it, let there henceforth
be no relation at all. From the "Sacrament of Marriage"
downwards, human beings used to be manifoldly related, one to
another, and each to all; and there was no relation among human
beings, just or unjust, that had not its grievances and
difficulties, its necessities on both sides to bear and forbear.
But henceforth, be it known, we have changed all that, by favor
of Heaven: "the voluntary principle" has come up, which will
itself do the business for us; and now let a new Sacrament, that
of Divorce, which we call emancipation, and spout of on our
platforms, be universally the order of the day!--Have men
considered whither all this is tending, and what it certainly
enough betokens? Cut every human relation which has anywhere
grown uneasy sheer asunder; reduce whatsoever was compulsory to
voluntary, whatsoever was permanent among us to the condition of
nomadic:--in other words, loosen by assiduous wedges in every
joint, the whole fabric of social existence, stone from stone:
till at last, all now being loose enough, it can, as we already
see in most countries, be overset by sudden outburst of
revolutionary rage; and, lying as mere mountains of anarchic
rubbish, solicit you to sing Fraternity, &c., over it, and to
rejoice in the new remarkable era of human progress we have
arrived at.
Certainly Emancipation proceeds with rapid strides among us, this
good while; and has got to such a length as might give rise to
reflections in men of a serious turn. West-Indian Blacks are
emancipated, and it appears refuse to work: Irish Whites have
long been entirely emancipated; and nobody asks them to work, or
on condition of finding them potatoes (which, of course, is
indispensable), permits them to work.--Among speculative persons,
a question has sometimes risen: In the progress of Emancipation,
are we to look for a time when all the Horses also are to be
emancipated, and brought to the supply-and-demand principle?
Horses too have "motives;" are acted on by hunger, fear, hope,
love of oats, terror of platted leather; nay they have vanity,
ambition, emulation, thankfulness, vindictiveness; some rude
outline of all our human spiritualities,--a rude resemblance to
us in mind and intelligence, even as they have in bodily frame.
The Horse, poor dumb four-footed fellow, he too has his private
feelings, his affections, gratitudes; and deserves good usage; no
human master, without crime, shall treat him unjustly either, or
recklessly lay on the whip where it is not needed:--I am sure if
I could make him "happy," I should be willing to grant a small
vote (in addition to the late twenty millions) for that
object!
Him too you occasionally tyrannize over; and with bad result to
yourselves, among others; using the leather in a tyrannous
unnecessary manner; withholding, or scantily furnishing, the oats
and ventilated stabling that are due. Rugged horse-subduers, one
fears they are a little tyrannous at times. "Am I not a horse,
and half-brother?"--To remedy which, so far as remediable,
fancy--the horses all "emancipated;" restored to their primeval
right of property in the grass of this Globe: turned out to
graze in an independent supply-and-demand manner! So long as
grass lasts, I dare say they are very happy, or think themselves
so. And Farmer Hodge sallying forth, on a dry spring morning,
with a sieve of oats in his hand, and agony of eager expectation
in his heart, is he happy? Help me to plough this day, Black
Dobbin: oats in full measure if thou wilt. "Hlunh, No--thank!"
snorts Black Dobbin; he prefers glorious liberty and the grass.
Bay Darby, wilt not thou perhaps? "Hlunh!"--Gray Joan, then, my
beautiful broad-bottomed mare,--O Heaven, she too answers Hlunh!
Not a quadruped of them will plough a stroke for me. Corn-crops
are _ended_ in this world!--For the sake, if not of Hodge, then
of Hodge's horses, one prays this benevolent practice might now
cease, and a new and better one try to begin. Small kindness to
Hodge's horses to emancipate them! The fate of all emancipated
horses is, sooner or later, inevitable. To have in this
habitable Earth no grass to eat,--in Black Jamaica gradually
none, as in White Connemara already none;--to roam aimless,
wasting the seedfields of the world; and be hunted home to Chaos,
by the due watch-dogs and due hell-dogs, with such horrors of
forsaken wretchedness as were never seen before! These things
are not sport; they are terribly true, in this country at this
hour.
Between our Black West Indies and our White Ireland, between
these two extremes of lazy refusal to work, and of famishing
inability to find any work, what a world have we made of it, with
our fierce Mammon-worships, and our benevolent philanderings, and
idle godless nonsenses of one kind and another!
Supply-and-demand, Leave-it-alone, Voluntary Principle, Time will
mend it:--till British industrial existence seems fast becoming
one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral; a
hideous _living_ Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive; such
a Curtius' gulf, communicating with the Nether Deeps, as the Sun
never saw till now. These scenes, which the _Morning Chronicle_
is bringing home to all minds of men,--thanks to it for a service
such as Newspapers have seldom done,--ought to excite unspeakable
reflections in every mind. Thirty thousand outcast Needlewomen
working themselves swiftly to death; three million Paupers
rotting in forced idleness, _helping_ said Needlewomen to die:
these are but items in the sad ledger of despair.
Thirty thousand wretched women, sunk in that putrefying well of
abominations; they have oozed in upon London, from the universal
Stygian quagmire of British industrial life; are accumulated in
the _well_ of the concern, to that extent. British charity is
smitten to the heart, at the laying bare of such a scene;
passionately undertakes, by enormous subscription of money, or by
other enormous effort, to redress that individual horror; as I
and all men hope it may. But, alas, what next? This general well
and cesspool once baled clean out to-day, will begin before night
to fill itself anew. The universal Stygian quagmire is still
there; opulent in women ready to be ruined, and in men ready.
Towards the same sad cesspool will these waste currents of human
ruin ooze and gravitate as heretofore; except in draining the
universal quagmire itself there is no remedy. "And for that,
what is the method?" cry many in an angry manner. To whom, for
the present, I answer only, "Not 'emancipation,' it would seem,
my friends; not the cutting loose of human ties, something far
the reverse of that!"
Many things have been written about shirtmaking; but here perhaps
is the saddest thing of all, not written anywhere till now, that
I know of. Shirts by the thirty thousand are made at
twopence-halfpenny each; and in the mean while no needlewoman,
distressed or other, can be procured in London by any housewife
to give, for fair wages, fair help in sewing. Ask any thrifty
house-mother, high or low, and she will answer. In high houses
and in low, there is the same answer: no _real_ needlewoman,
"distressed" or other, has been found attainable in any of the
houses I frequent. Imaginary needlewomen, who demand considerable
wages, and have a deepish appetite for beer and viands, I hear of
everywhere; but their sewing proves too often a distracted
puckering and botching; not sewing, only the fallacious hope of
it, a fond imagination of the mind. Good sempstresses are to be
hired in every village; and in London, with its famishing thirty
thousand, not at all, or hardly,--Is not No-government beautiful
in human business? To such length has the Leave-alone principle
carried it, by way of organizing labor, in this affair of
shirtmaking. Let us hope the Leave-alone principle has now got
its apotheosis; and taken wing towards higher regions than ours,
to deal henceforth with a class of affairs more appropriate for
it!
Reader, did you ever hear of "Constituted Anarchy"? Anarchy; the
choking, sweltering, deadly and killing rule of No-rule; the
consecration of cupidity, and braying folly, and dim stupidity
and baseness, in most of the affairs of men? Slop-shirts
attainable three halfpence cheaper, by the ruin of living bodies
and immortal souls? Solemn Bishops and high Dignitaries, _our_
divine "Pillars of Fire by night," debating meanwhile, with their
largest wigs and gravest look, upon something they call
"prevenient grace"? Alas, our noble men of genius, Heaven's
_real_ messengers to us, they also rendered nearly futile by the
wasteful time;--preappointed they everywhere, and assiduously
trained by all their pedagogues and monitors, to "rise in
Parliament," to compose orations, write books, or in short speak
words, for the approval of reviewers; instead of doing real
kingly work to be approved of by the gods! Our "Government," a
highly "responsible" one; responsible to no God that I can hear
of, but to the twenty-seven million _gods_ of the shilling
gallery. A Government tumbling and drifting on the whirlpools
and mud-deluges, floating atop in a conspicuous manner,
no-whither,--like the carcass of a drowned ass. Authentic
_Chaos_ come up into this sunny Cosmos again; and all men singing
Gloria in _excelsis_ to it. In spirituals and temporals, in
field and workshop, from Manchester to Dorsetshire, from Lambeth
Palace to the Lanes of Whitechapel, wherever men meet and toil
and traffic together,--Anarchy, Anarchy; and only the
street-constable (though with ever-increasing difficulty) still
maintaining himself in the middle of it; that so, for one thing,
this blessed exchange of slop-shirts for the souls of women may
transact itself in a peaceable manner!--I, for my part, do
profess myself in eternal opposition to this, and discern well
that universal Ruin has us in the wind, unless we can get out of
this. My friend Crabbe, in a late number of his _Intermittent
Radiator_, pertinently enough exclaims:--
"When shall we have done with all this of British Liberty,
Voluntary Principle, Dangers of Centralization, and the like? It
is really getting too bad. For British Liberty, it seems, the
people cannot be taught to read. British Liberty, shuddering to
interfere with the rights of capital, takes six or eight millions
of money annually to feed the idle laborer whom it dare not
employ. For British Liberty we live over poisonous cesspools,
gully-drains, and detestable abominations; and omnipotent London
cannot sweep the dirt out of itself. British Liberty
produces--what? Floods of Hansard Debates every year, and
apparently little else at present. If these are the results of
British Liberty, I, for one, move we should lay it on the shelf a
little, and look out for something other and farther. We have
achieved British Liberty hundreds of years ago; and are fast
growing, on the strength of it, one of the most absurd
populations the Sun, among his great Museum of Absurdities, looks
down upon at present."
Curious enough: the model of the world just now is England and
her Constitution; all Nations striving towards it: poor France
swimming these last sixty years in seas of horrid dissolution and
confusion, resolute to attain this blessedness of free voting, or
to die in chase of it. Prussia too, solid Germany itself, has
all broken out into crackling of musketry, loud pamphleteering
and Frankfort parliamenting and palavering; Germany too will
scale the sacred mountains, how steep soever, and, by talisman of
ballot-box, inhabit a political Elysium henceforth. All the
Nations have that one hope. Very notable, and rather sad to the
humane on-looker. For it is sadly conjectured, all the Nations
labor somewhat under a mistake as to England, and the causes of
her freedom and her prosperous cotton-spinning; and have much
misread the nature of her Parliament, and the effect of
ballot-boxes and universal suffrages there.
What if it were because the English Parliament was from the
first, and is only just now ceasing to be, a Council of actual
Rulers, real Governing Persons (called Peers, Mitred Abbots,
Lords, Knights of the Shire, or howsoever called), actually
_ruling_ each his section of the country,--and possessing (it
must be said) in the lump, or when assembled as a Council,
uncommon patience, devoutness, probity, discretion and good
fortune,--that the said Parliament ever came to be good for
much? In that case it will not be easy to "imitate" the English
Parliament; and the ballot-box and suffrage will be the mere bow
of Robin Hood, which it is given to very few to bend, or shoot
with to any perfection. And if the Peers become mere big
Capitalists, Railway Directors, gigantic Hucksters, Kings of
Scrip, _without_ lordly quality, or other virtue except cash; and
the Mitred Abbots change to mere Able-Editors, masters of
Parliamentary Eloquence, Doctors of Political Economy, and such
like; and all _have_ to be elected by a universal-suffrage
ballot-box,--I do not see how the English Parliament itself will
long continue sea-worthy! Nay, I find England in her own big
dumb heart, wherever you come upon her in a silent meditative
hour, begins to have dreadful misgivings about it.
The model of the world, then, is at once unattainable by the
world, and not much worth attaining? England, as I read the
omens, is now called a second time to "show the Nations how to
live;" for by her Parliament, as chief governing entity, I fear
she is not long for this world! Poor England must herself again,
in these new strange times, the old methods being quite worn out,
"learn how to live." That now is the terrible problem for
England, as for all the Nations; and she alone of all, not _yet_
sunk into open Anarchy, but left with time for repentance and
amendment; she, wealthiest of all in material resource, in
spiritual energy, in ancient loyalty to law, and in the qualities
that yield such loyalty,--she perhaps alone of all may be able,
with huge travail, and the strain of all her faculties, to
accomplish some solution. She will have to try it, she has now
to try it; she must accomplish it, or perish from her place in
the world!
England, as I persuade myself, still contains in it many
_kings_; possesses, as old Rome did, many men not needing
"election" to command, but eternally elected for it by the Maker
Himself. England's one hope is in these, just now. They are
among the silent, I believe; mostly far away from platforms and
public palaverings; not speaking forth the image of their
nobleness in transitory words, but imprinting it, each on his own
little section of the world, in silent facts, in modest valiant
actions, that will endure forevermore. They must sit silent no
longer. They are summoned to assert themselves; to act forth,
and articulately vindicate, in the teeth of howling multitudes,
of a world too justly _maddened_ into all manner of delirious
clamors, what of wisdom they derive from God. England, and the
Eternal Voices, summon them; poor England never so needed them as
now. Up, be doing everywhere: the hour of crisis has verily
come! In all sections of English life, the god-made _king_ is
needed; is pressingly demanded in most; in some, cannot longer,
without peril as of conflagration, be dispensed with. He,
wheresoever he finds himself, can say, "Here too am I wanted;
here is the kingdom I have to subjugate, and introduce God's Laws
into,--God's Laws, instead of Mammon's and M'Croudy's and the Old
Anarch's! Here is my work, here or nowhere."--Are there many
such, who will answer to the call, in England? It turns on that,
whether England, rapidly crumbling in these very years and
months, shall go down to the Abyss as her neighbors have all
done, or survive to new grander destinies _without_ solution of
continuity! Probably the chief question of the world at
present.
The true "commander" and king; he who knows for himself the
divine Appointments of this Universe, the Eternal Laws ordained
by God the Maker, in conforming to which lies victory and
felicity, in departing from which lies, and forever must lie,
sorrow and defeat, for each and all of the Posterity of Adam in
every time and every place; he who has sworn fealty to these, and
dare alone against the world assert these, and dare not with the
whole world at his back deflect from these;--he, I know too well,
is a rare man. Difficult to discover; not quite discoverable, I
apprehend, by manoeuvring of ballot-boxes, and riddling of the
popular clamor according to the most approved methods. He is not
sold at any shop I know of,--though sometimes, as at the sign of
the Ballot-box, he is advertised for sale. Difficult indeed to
discover: and not very much assisted, or encouraged in late
times, to discover _himself_;--which, I think, might be a kind of
help? Encouraged rather, and commanded in all ways, if he be
wise, to _hide_ himself, and give place to the windy Counterfeit
of himself; such as the universal suffrages can recognize, such
as loves the most sweet voices of the universal suffrages!--O
Peter, what becomes of such a People; what can become?
Did you never hear, with the mind's ear as well, that fateful
Hebrew Prophecy, I think the fatefulest of all, which sounds
daily through the streets, "Ou' clo! Ou' clo!"--A certain
People, once upon a time, clamorously voted by overwhelming
majority, "Not _he_; Barabbas, not he! _Him_, and what he is, and
what be deserves, we know well enough: a reviler of the Chief
Priests and sacred Chancery wigs; a seditious Heretic,
physical-force Chartist, and enemy of his country and mankind:
To the gallows and the cross with him! Barabbas is our man;
Barabbas, we are for Barabbas!" They got Barabbas:--have you
well considered what a fund of purblind obduracy, of opaque
_flunkyism_ grown truculent and transcendent; what an eye for the
phylacteries, and want of eye for the eternal noblenesses; sordid
loyalty to the prosperous Semblances, and high-treason against
the Supreme Fact, such a vote betokens in these natures? For it
was the consummation of a long series of such; they and their
fathers had long kept voting so. A singular People; who could
both produce such divine men, and then could so stone and crucify
them; a People terrible from the beginning!--Well, they got
Barabbas; and they got, of course, such guidance as Barabbas and
the like of him could give them; and, of course, they stumbled
ever downwards and devilwards, in their truculent stiffnecked
way; and--and, at this hour, after eighteen centuries of sad
fortune, they prophetically sing "Ou' clo!" in all the cities of
the world. Might the world, at this late hour, but take note of
them, and understand their song a little!
Yes, there are some things the universal suffrage can
decide,--and about these it will be exceedingly useful to consult
the universal suffrage: but in regard to most things of
importance, and in regard to the choice of men especially, there
is (astonishing as it may seem) next to no capability on the part
of universal suffrage.--I request all candid persons, who have
never so little originality of mind, and every man has a little,
to consider this. If true, it involves such a change in our now
fashionable modes of procedure as fills me with astonishment and
alarm. _If_ popular suffrage is not the way of ascertaining what
the Laws of the Universe are, and who it is that will best guide
us in the way of these,--then woe is to us if we do not take
another method. Delolme on the British Constitution will not
save us; deaf will the Parcae be to votes of the House, to
leading articles, constitutional philosophies. The other
method--alas, it involves a stopping short, or vital change of
direction, in the glorious career which all Europe, with shouts
heaven-high, is now galloping along: and that, happen when it
may, will, to many of us, be probably a rather surprising
business!
One thing I do know, and can again assert with great confidence,
supported by the whole Universe, and by some two hundred
generations of men, who have left us some record of themselves
there, That the few Wise will have, by one method or another, to
take command of the innumerable Foolish; that they must be got to
take it;--and that, in fact, since Wisdom, which means also Valor
and heroic Nobleness, is alone strong in this world, and one wise
man is stronger than all men unwise, they can be got. That they
must take it; and having taken, must keep it, and do their God's
Message in it, and defend the same, at their life's peril,
against all men and devils. This I do clearly believe to be the
backbone of all Future Society, as it has been of all Past; and
that without it, there is no Society possible in the world. And
what a business _this_ will be, before it end in some degree of
victory again, and whether the time for shouts of triumph and
tremendous cheers upon it is yet come, or not yet by a great way,
I perceive too well! A business to make us all very serious
indeed. A business not to be accomplished but by noble manhood,
and devout all-daring, all-enduring loyalty to Heaven, such as
fatally _sleeps_ at present,--such as is not _dead_ at present
either, unless the gods have doomed this world of theirs to die!
A business which long centuries of faithful travail and heroic
agony, on the part of all the noble that are born to us, will not
end; and which to us, of this "tremendous cheering" century, it
were blessedness very great to see successfully begun. Begun,
tried by all manner of methods, if there is one wise Statesman or
man left among us, it verily must be;--begun, successfully or
unsuccessfully, we do hope to see it!
In all European countries, especially in England, one class of
Captains and commanders of men, recognizable as the beginning of
a new real and not imaginary "Aristocracy," has already in some
measure developed itself: the Captains of Industry;--happily the
class who above all, or at least first of all, are wanted in this
time. In the doing of material work, we have already men among
us that can command bodies of men. And surely, on the other
hand, there is no lack of men needing to be commanded: the sad
class of brother-men whom we had to describe as "Hodge's
emancipated horses," reduced to roving famine,--this too has in
all countries developed itself; and, in fatal geometrical
progression, is ever more developing itself, with a rapidity
which alarms every one. On this ground, if not on all manner of
other grounds, it may be truly said, the "Organization of Labor"
(_not_ organizable by the mad methods tried hitherto) is the
universal vital Problem of the world.
To bring these hordes of outcast captainless soldiers under due
captaincy? This is really the question of questions; on the
answer to which turns, among other things, the fate of all
Governments, constitutional and other,--the possibility of their
continuing to exist, or the impossibility. Captainless,
uncommanded, these wretched outcast "soldiers," since they
cannot starve, must needs become banditti,
street-barricaders,--destroyers of every Government that _cannot_
put them under captains, and send them upon enterprises, and in
short render life human to them. Our English plan of Poor Laws,
which we once piqued ourselves upon as sovereign, is evidently
fast breaking down. Ireland, now admitted into the Idle
Workhouse, is rapidly bursting it in pieces. That never was a
"human" destiny for any honest son of Adam; nowhere but in
England could it have lasted at all; and now, with Ireland sharer
in it, and the fulness of time come, it is as good as ended.
Alas, yes. Here in Connemara, your crazy Ship of the State,
otherwise dreadfully rotten in many of its timbers I believe, has
sprung a leak: spite of all hands at the pump, the water is
rising; the Ship, I perceive, will founder, if you cannot stop
this leak!
To bring these Captainless under due captaincy? The anxious
thoughts of all men that do think are turned upon that question;
and their efforts, though as yet blindly and to no purpose, under
the multifarious impediments and obscurations, all point
thitherward. Isolated men, and their vague efforts, cannot do
it. Government everywhere is called upon,--in England as loudly
as elsewhere,--to give the initiative. A new strange task of
these new epochs; which no Government, never so
"constitutional," can escape from undertaking. For it is vitally
necessary to the existence of Society itself; it must be
undertaken, and succeeded in too, or worse will follow,--and, as
we already see in Irish Connaught and some other places, will
follow soon. To whatever thing still calls itself by the name of
Government, were it never so constitutional and impeded by
official impossibilities, all men will naturally look for help,
and direction what to do, in this extremity. If help or
direction is not given; if the thing called Government merely
drift and tumble to and fro, no-whither, on the popular vortexes,
like some carcass of a drowned ass, constitutionally put "at the
top of affairs," popular indignation will infallibly accumulate
upon it; one day, the popular lightning, descending forked and
horrible from the black air, will annihilate said supreme
carcass, and smite it home to its native ooze again!--Your
Lordship, this is too true, though irreverently spoken: indeed
one knows not how to speak of it; and to me it is infinitely sad
and miserable, spoken or not!--Unless perhaps the Voluntary
Principle will still help us through? Perhaps this Irish leak,
in such a rotten distressed condition of the Ship, with all the
crew so anxious about it, will be kind enough to stop of
itself?--
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