Latter Day Pamphlets
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Thomas Carlyle >> Latter Day Pamphlets
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Dismiss that hope, your Lordship! Let all real and imaginary
Governors of England, at the pass we have arrived at, dismiss
forever that fallacious fatal solace to their do-nothingism: of
itself, too clearly, the leak will never stop; by human skill and
energy it must be stopped, or there is nothing but the sea-bottom
for us all! A Chief Governor of England really ought to
recognize his situation; to discern that, doing nothing, and
merely drifting to and fro, in however constitutional a manner,
he is a squanderer of precious moments, moments that perhaps are
priceless; a truly alarming Chief Governor. Surely, to a Chief
Governor of England, worthy of that high name,--surely to him, as
to every living man, in every conceivable situation short of the
Kingdom of the Dead--there is _something_ possible; some plan of
action other than that of standing mildly, with crossed arms,
till he and we--sink? Complex as his situation is, he, of all
Governors now extant among these distracted Nations, has, as I
compute, by far the greatest possibilities. The Captains, actual
or potential, are there, and the million Captainless: and such
resources for bringing them together as no other has. To these
outcast soldiers of his, unregimented roving banditti for the
present, or unworking workhouse prisoners who are almost uglier
than banditti; to these floods of Irish Beggars, Able-bodied
Paupers, and nomadic Lackalls, now stagnating or roaming
everywhere, drowning the face of the world (too truly) into an
untenantable swamp and Stygian quagmire, has the Chief Governor
of this country no word whatever to say? Nothing but "Rate in
aid," "Time will mend it," "Necessary business of the Session;"
and "After me the Deluge"? A Chief Governor that can front his
Irish difficulty, and steadily contemplate the horoscope of Irish
and British Pauperism, and whitherward it is leading him and us,
in this humor, must be a--What shall we call such a Chief
Governor? Alas, in spite of old use and wont,--little other than
a tolerated Solecism, growing daily more intolerable! He
decidedly ought to have some word to say on this matter,--to be
incessantly occupied in getting something which he could
practically say!--Perhaps to the following, or a much finer
effect?
_Speech of the British Prime-Minister to the floods of Irish and
other Beggars, the able-bodied Lackalls, nomadic or stationary,
and the general assembly, outdoor and indoor, of the Pauper
Populations of these Realms_.
"Vagrant Lackalls, foolish most of you, criminal many of you,
miserable all; the sight of you fills me with astonishment and
despair. What to do with you I know not; long have I been
meditating, and it is hard to tell. Here are some three millions
of you, as I count: so many of you fallen sheer over into the
abysses of open Beggary; and, fearful to think, every new unit
that falls is _loading_ so much more the chain that drags the
others over. On the edge of the precipice hang uncounted
millions; increasing, I am told, at the rate of 1200 a day. They
hang there on the giddy edge, poor souls, cramping themselves
down, holding on with all their strength; but falling, falling
one after another; and the chain is getting _heavy_, so that ever
more fall; and who at last will stand? What to do with you? The
question, What to do with you? especially since the potato died,
is like to break my heart!
"One thing, after much meditating, I have at last discovered, and
now know for some time back: That you cannot be left to roam
abroad in this unguided manner, stumbling over the precipices,
and loading ever heavier the fatal _chain_ upon those who might
be able to stand; that this of locking you up in temporary Idle
Workhouses, when you stumble, and subsisting you on Indian meal,
till you can sally forth again on fresh roamings, and fresh
stumblings, and ultimate descent to the devil;--that this is
_not_ the plan; and that it never was, or could out of England
have been supposed to be, much as I have prided myself upon it!
"Vagrant Lackalls, I at last perceive, all this that has been
sung and spoken, for a long while, about enfranchisement,
emancipation, freedom, suffrage, civil and religious liberty over
the world, is little other than sad temporary jargon, brought
upon us by a stern necessity,--but now ordered by a sterner to
take itself away again a little. Sad temporary jargon, I say:
made up of sense and nonsense,--sense in small quantities, and
nonsense in very large;--and, if taken for the whole or permanent
truth of human things, it is no better than fatal infinite
nonsense eternally _untrue_. All men, I think, will soon have to
quit this, to consider this as a thing pretty well achieved; and
to look out towards another thing much more needing achievement
at the time that now is.
"All men will have to quit it, I believe. But to you, my
indigent friends, the time for quitting it has palpably arrived!
To talk of glorious self-government, of suffrages and hustings,
and the fight of freedom and such like, is a vain thing in your
case. By all human definitions and conceptions of the said fight
of freedom, you for your part have lost it, and can fight no
more. Glorious self-government is a glory not for you, not for
Hodge's emancipated horses, nor you. No; I say, No. You, for
your part, have tried it, and _failed_. Left to walk your own
road, the will-o'-wisps beguiled you, your short sight could not
descry the pitfalls; the deadly tumult and press has whirled you
hither and thither, regardless of your struggles and your
shrieks; and here at last you lie; fallen flat into the ditch,
drowning there and dying, unless the others that are still
standing please to pick you up. The others that still stand have
their own difficulties, I can tell you!--But you, by imperfect
energy and redundant appetite, by doing too little work and
drinking too much beer, you (I bid you observe) have proved that
you cannot do it! You lie there plainly in the ditch. And I am
to pick you up again, on these mad terms; help you ever again, as
with our best heart's-blood, to do what, once for all, the gods
have made impossible? To load the fatal _chain_ with your
perpetual staggerings and sprawlings; and ever again load it,
till we all lie sprawling? My indigent incompetent friends, I
will not! Know that, whoever may be 'sons of freedom,' you for
your part are not and cannot be such. Not 'free' you, I think,
whoever may be free. You palpably are fallen
captive,--_caitiff_, as they once named it:--you do, silently but
eloquently, demand, in the name of mercy itself, that some
genuine command be taken of you.
"Yes, my indigent incompetent friends; some genuine practical
command. Such,--if I rightly interpret those mad Chartisms,
Repeal Agitations, Red Republics, and other delirious
inarticulate howlings and bellowings which all the populations of
the world now utter, evidently cries of pain on their and your
part,--is the demand which you, Captives, make of all men that
are not Captive, but are still Free. Free men,--alas, had you
ever any notion who the free men were, who the not-free, the
incapable of freedom! The free men, if you could have understood
it, they are the wise men; the patient, self-denying, valiant;
the Nobles of the World; who can discern the Law of this
Universe, what it is, and piously _obey_ it; these, in late sad
times, having cast you loose, you are fallen captive to greedy
sons of profit-and-loss; to bad and ever to worse; and at length
to Beer and the Devil. Algiers, Brazil or Dahomey hold nothing
in them so authentically _slave_ as you are, my indigent
incompetent friends!
"Good Heavens, and I have to raise some eight or nine millions
annually, six for England itself, and to wreck the morals of my
working population beyond all money's worth, to keep the life
from going out of you: a small service to you, as I many times
bitterly repeat! Alas, yes; before high Heaven I must declare it
such. I think the old Spartans, who would have killed you
instead, had shown more 'humanity,' more of manhood, than I thus
do! More humanity, I say, more of manhood, and of sense for what
the dignity of man demands imperatively of you and of me and of
us all. We call it charity, beneficence, and other fine names,
this brutish Workhouse Scheme of ours; and it is but sluggish
heartlessness, and insincerity, and cowardly lowness of soul.
Not 'humanity' or manhood, I think; perhaps _ape_hood
rather,--paltry imitancy, from the teeth outward, of what our
heart never felt nor our understanding ever saw; dim indolent
adherence to extraneous and extinct traditions; traditions now
really about extinct; not living now to almost any of us, and
still haunting with their spectralities and gibbering _ghosts_
(in a truly baleful manner) almost all of us! Making this our
struggling 'Twelfth Hour of the Night' inexpressibly
hideous!-
"But as for you, my indigent incompetent friends, I have to
repeat with sorrow, but with perfect clearness, what is plainly
undeniable, and is even clamorous to get itself admitted, that
you are of the nature of slaves,--or if you prefer the word, of
_nomadic, and now even vagrant and vagabond, servants that can
find no master on those terms_; which seems to me a much uglier
word. Emancipation? You have been 'emancipated' with a
vengeance! Foolish souls, I say the whole world cannot emancipate
you. Fealty to ignorant Unruliness, to gluttonous sluggish
Improvidence, to the Beer-pot and the Devil, who is there that
can emancipate a man in that predicament? Not a whole Reform
Bill, a whole French Revolution executed for his behoof alone:
nothing but God the Maker can emancipate him, by making him
anew.
"To forward which glorious consummation, will it not be well, O
indigent friends, that you, fallen flat there, shall henceforth
learn to take advice of others as to the methods of standing?
Plainly I let you know, and all the world and the worlds know,
that I for my part mean it so. Not as glorious unfortunate sons
of freedom, but as recognized captives, as unfortunate fallen
brothers requiring that I should command you, and if need were,
control and compel you, can there henceforth be a relation
between us. Ask me not for Indian meal; you shall be compelled
to earn it first; know that on other terms I will not give you
any. Before Heaven and Earth, and God the Maker of us all, I
declare it is a scandal to see _such_ a life kept in you, by the
sweat and heart's-blood of your brothers; and that, if we cannot
mend it, death were preferable! Go to, we must get out of
this--unutterable coil of nonsenses, constitutional,
philanthropical, &c., in which (surely without mutual hatred, if
with less of 'love' than is supposed) we are all strangling one
another! Your want of wants, I say, is that you be _commanded_
in this world, not being able to command yourselves. Know
therefore that it shall be so with you. Nomadism, I give you
notice, has ended; needful permanency, soldier-like obedience,
and the opportunity and the necessity of hard steady labor for
your living, have begun. Know that the Idle Workhouse is shut
against you henceforth; you cannot enter there at will, nor leave
at will; you shall enter a quite other Refuge, under conditions
strict as soldiering, and not leave till I have done with you.
He that prefers the glorious (or perhaps even the rebellious
_in_glorious) 'career of freedom,' let him prove that he can
travel there, and be the master of himself; and right good speed
to him. He who has proved that he cannot travel there or be the
master of himself,--let him, in the name of all the gods, become
a servant, and accept the just rules of servitude!
"Arise, enlist in my Irish, my Scotch and English 'Regiments of
the New Era,'--which I have been concocting, day and night,
during these three Grouse-seasons (taking earnest incessant
counsel, with all manner of Industrial Notabilities and men of
insight, on the matter), and have now brought to a kind of
preparation for incipiency, thank Heaven! Enlist there, ye poor
wandering banditti; obey, work, suffer, abstain, as all of us
have had to do: so shall you be useful in God's creation, so
shall you be helped to gain a manful living for yourselves; not
otherwise than so. Industrial Regiments [_Here numerous persons,
with big wigs many of them, and austere aspect, whom I take to be
Professors of the Dismal Science, start up in an agitated
vehement manner: but the Premier resolutely beckons them down
again_]--Regiments not to fight the French or others, who are
peaceable enough towards us; but to fight the Bogs and
Wildernesses at home and abroad, and to chain the Devils of the
Pit which are walking too openly among us.
"Work, for you? Work, surely, is not quite undiscoverable in an
Earth so wide as ours, if we will take the right methods for it!
Indigent friends, we will adopt this new relation (which is _old_
as the world); this will lead us towards such. Rigorous
conditions, not to be violated on either side, lie in this
relation; conditions planted there by God Himself; which woe will
betide us if we do not discover, gradually more and more
discover, and conform to! Industrial Colonels, Workmasters,
Task-masters, Life-commanders, equitable as Rhadamanthus and
inflexible as he: such, I perceive, you do need; and such, you
being once put under law as soldiers are, will be discoverable
for you. I perceive, with boundless alarm, that I shall have to
set about discovering such,--I, since I am at the top of affairs,
with all men looking to me. Alas, it is my new task in this New
Era; and God knows, I too, little other than a red-tape
Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence
hitherto, am far behind with it! But street-barricades rise
everywhere: the hour of Fate has come. In Connemara there has
sprung a leak, since the potato died; Connaught, if it were not
for Treasury-grants and rates-in-aid, would have to recur to
Cannibalism even now, and Human Society would cease to pretend
that it existed there. Done this thing must be. Alas, I
perceive that if I cannot do it, then surely I shall die, and
perhaps shall not have Christian burial! But I already raise
near upon Ten Millions for feeding you in idleness, my nomadic
friends; work, under due regulations, I really might try to get
of--[_Here arises indescribable uproar, no longer repressible,
from all manner of Economists, Emancipationists,
Constitutionalists, and miscellaneous Professors of the Dismal
Science, pretty numerously scattered about; and cries of "Private
enterprise," "Rights of Capital," "Voluntary Principle,"
"Doctrines of the British Constitution," swollen by the general
assenting hum of all the world, quite drown the Chief Minister
for a while. He, with invincible resolution, persists; obtains
hearing again_:]
"Respectable Professors of the Dismal Science, soft you a little.
Alas, I know what you would say. For my sins, I have read much
in those inimitable volumes of yours,--really I should think,
some barrowfuls of them in my time,--and, in these last forty
years of theory and practice, have pretty well seized what of
Divine Message you were sent with to me. Perhaps as small a
message, give me leave to say, as ever there was such a noise
made about before. Trust me, I have not forgotten it, shall
never forget it. Those Laws of the Shop-till are indisputable to
me; and practically useful in certain departments of the
Universe, as the multiplication-table itself. Once I even tried
to sail through the Immensities with them, and to front the big
coming Eternities with them; but I found it would not do. As the
Supreme Rule of Statesmanship, or Government of Men,--since this
Universe is not wholly a Shop,--no. You rejoice in my improved
tariffs, free-trade movements and the like, on every hand; for
which be thankful, and even sing litanies if you choose. But
here at last, in the Idle-Workhouse movement,--unexampled yet on
Earth or in the waters under the Earth,--I am fairly brought to a
stand; and have had to make reflections, of the most alarming,
and indeed awful, and as it were religious nature! Professors of
the Dismal Science, I perceive that the length of your tether is
now pretty well run; and that I must request you to talk a little
lower in future. By the side of the shop-till,--see, your small
'Law of God' is hung up, along with the multiplication-table
itself. But beyond and above the shop-till, allow me to say, you
shall as good as hold your peace. Respectable Professors, I
perceive it is not now the Gigantic Hucksters, but it is the
Immortal Gods, yes they, in their terror and their beauty, in
their wrath and their beneficence, that are coming into play in
the affairs of this world! Soft you a little. Do not you
interrupt me, but try to understand and help me!--
--"Work, was I saying? My indigent unguided friends, I should
think some work might be discoverable for you. Enlist, stand
drill; become, from a nomadic Banditti of Idleness, Soldiers of
Industry! I will lead you to the Irish Bogs, to the vacant
desolations of Connaught now falling into Cannibalism, to
mistilled Connaught, to ditto Munster, Leinster, Ulster, I will
lead you: to the English fox-covers, furze-grown Commons, New
Forests, Salisbury Plains: likewise to the Scotch Hill-sides,
and bare rushy slopes, which as yet feed only sheep,--moist
uplands, thousands of square miles in extent, which are destined
yet to grow green crops, and fresh butter and milk and beef
without limit (wherein no 'Foreigner can compete with us'), were
the Glasgow sewers once opened on them, and you with your
Colonels carried thither. In the Three Kingdoms, or in the Forty
Colonies, depend upon it, you shall be led to your work!
"To each of you I will then say: Here is work for you; strike
into it with manlike, soldier-like obedience and heartiness,
according to the methods here prescribed,--wages follow for you
without difficulty; all manner of just remuneration, and at
length emancipation itself follows. Refuse to strike into it;
shirk the heavy labor, disobey the rules,--I will admonish and
endeavor to incite you; if in vain, I will flog you; if still in
vain, I will at last shoot you,--and make God's Earth, and the
forlorn-hope in God's Battle, free of you. Understand it, I
advise you! The Organization of Labor"--[_Left speaking_, says
our reporter.]
"Left speaking:" alas, that he should have to "speak" so much!
There are things that should be done, not spoken; that till the
doing of them is begun, cannot well be spoken. He may have to
"speak" seven years yet, before a spade be struck into the Bog of
Allen; and then perhaps it will be too late!-
You perceive, my friends, we have actually got into the "New Era"
there has been such prophesying of: here we all are, arrived at
last;--and it is by no means the land flowing with milk and honey
we were led to expect! Very much the reverse. A terrible _new_
country this: no neighbors in it yet, that I can see, but
irrational flabby monsters (philanthropic and other) of the giant
species; hyenas, laughing hyenas, predatory wolves; probably
_devils_, blue (or perhaps blue-and-yellow) devils, as St.
Guthlac found in Croyland long ago. A huge untrodden haggard
country, the "chaotic battle-field of Frost and Fire;" a country
of savage glaciers, granite mountains, of foul jungles, unhewed
forests, quaking bogs;--which we shall have our own ados to make
arable and habitable, I think! We must stick by it, however;--of
all enterprises the impossiblest is that of getting out of it,
and shifting into another. To work, then, one and all; hands to
work!
[March 1, 1850.] No. II. MODEL PRISONS.
The deranged condition of our affairs is a universal topic among
men at present; and the heavy miseries pressing, in their rudest
shape, on the great dumb inarticulate class, and from this, by a
sure law, spreading upwards, in a less palpable but not less
certain and perhaps still more fatal shape on all classes to the
very highest, are admitted everywhere to be great, increasing and
now almost unendurable. How to diminish them,--this is every
man's question. For in fact they do imperatively need
diminution; and unless they can be diminished, there are many
other things that cannot very long continue to exist beside them.
A serious question indeed, How to diminish them!
Among the articulate classes, as they may be called, there are
two ways of proceeding in regard to this. One large body of the
intelligent and influential, busied mainly in personal affairs,
accepts the social iniquities, or whatever you may call them, and
the miseries consequent thereupon; accepts them, admits them to
be extremely miserable, pronounces them entirely inevitable,
incurable except by Heaven, and eats its pudding with as little
thought of them as possible. Not a very noble class of citizens
these; not a very hopeful or salutary method of dealing with
social iniquities this of theirs, however it may answer in
respect to themselves and their personal affairs! But now there
is the select small minority, in whom some sentiment of public
spirit and human pity still survives, among whom, or not
anywhere, the Good Cause may expect to find soldiers and
servants: their method of proceeding, in these times, is also
very strange. They embark in the "philanthropic movement;" they
calculate that the miseries of the world can be cured by bringing
the philanthropic movement to bear on them. To universal public
misery, and universal neglect of the clearest public duties, let
private charity superadd itself: there will thus be some balance
restored, and maintained again; thus,--or by what conceivable
method? On these terms they, for their part, embark in the
sacred cause; resolute to cure a world's woes by rose-water;
desperately bent on trying to the uttermost that mild method. It
seems not to have struck these good men that no world, or thing
here below, ever fell into misery, without having first fallen
into folly, into sin against the Supreme Ruler of it, by adopting
as a law of conduct what was not a law, but the reverse of one;
and that, till its folly, till its sin be cast out of it, there
is not the smallest hope of its misery going,--that not for all
the charity and rose-water in the world will its misery try to go
till then!
This is a sad error; all the sadder as it is the error chiefly of
the more humane and noble-minded of our generation; among whom,
as we said, or elsewhere not at all, the cause of real Reform
must expect its servants. At present, and for a long while past,
whatsoever young soul awoke in EnGland with some disposition
towards generosity and social heroism, or at lowest with some
intimation of the beauty of such a disposition,--he, in whom the
poor world might have looked for a Reformer, and valiant mender
of its foul ways, was almost sure to become a Philanthropist,
reforming merely by this rose-water method. To admit that the
world's ways are foul, and not the ways of God the Maker, but of
Satan the Destroyer, many of them, and that they must be mended
or we all die; that if huge misery prevails, huge cowardice,
falsity, disloyalty, universal Injustice high and low, have still
longer prevailed, and must straightway try to cease prevailing:
this is what no visible reformer has yet thought of doing: All
so-called "reforms" hitherto are grounded either on openly
admitted egoism (cheap bread to the cotton-spinner, voting to
those that have no vote, and the like), which does not point
towards very celestial developments of the Reform movement; or
else upon this of remedying social injustices by indiscriminate
contributions of philanthropy, a method surely still more
unpromising. Such contributions, being indiscriminate, are but a
new injustice; these will never lead to reform, or abolition of
injustice, whatever else they lead to!
Not by that method shall we "get round Cape Horn," by never such
unanimity of voting, under the most approved Phantasm Captains!
It is miserable to see. Having, as it were, quite lost our way
round Cape Horn, and being sorely "admonished" by the Iceberg and
other dumb councillors, the pilots,--instead of taking to their
sextants, and asking with a seriousness unknown for a long while,
What the Laws of wind and water, and of Earth and of Heaven
are,--decide that now, in these new circumstances, they will, to
the worthy and unworthy, serve out a double allowance of grog.
In this way they hope to do it,--by steering on the old wrong
tack, and serving out more and more, copiously what little _aqua
vitae_ may be still on board! Philanthropy, emancipation, and
pity for human calamity is very beautiful; but the deep oblivion
of the Law of Right and Wrong; this "indiscriminate mashing up of
Right and Wrong into a patent treacle" of the Philanthropic
movement, is by no means beautiful; this, on the contrary, is
altogether ugly and alarming.
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