Latter Day Pamphlets
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Thomas Carlyle >> Latter Day Pamphlets
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Truly if there be not something inarticulate among us, not yet
uttered but pressing towards utterance, which is much wiser than
anything we have lately articulated or brought into word or
action, our outlooks are rather lamentable. The great majority
of the powerful and active-minded, sunk in egoistic scepticisms,
busied in chase of lucre, pleasure, and mere vulgar objects,
looking with indifference on the world's woes, and passing
carelessly by on the other side; and the select minority, of whom
better might have been expected, bending all their strength to
cure them by methods which can only make bad worse, and in the
end render cure hopeless. A blind loquacious pruriency of
indiscriminate Philanthropism substituting itself, with much
self-laudation, for the silent divinely awful sense of Right and
Wrong;--testifying too clearly that here is no longer a divine
sense of Right and Wrong; that, in the smoke of this universal,
and alas inevitable and indispensable revolutionary fire, and
burning up of worn-out rags of which the world is full, our
life-atmosphere has (for the time) become one vile London fog,
and the eternal loadstars are gone out for us! Gone out;--yet
very visible if you can get above the fog; still there in their
place, and quite the same as they always were! To whoever does
still know of loadstars, the proceedings, which expand themselves
daily, of these sublime philanthropic associations, and
"universal sluggard-and-scoundrel protection-societies," are a
perpetual affliction. With their emancipations and abolition
principles, and reigns of brotherhood and new methods of love,
they have done great things in the White and in the Black World,
during late years; and are preparing for greater.
In the interest of human reform, if there is ever to be any
reform, and return to prosperity or to the possibility of
prospering, it is urgent that the nonsense of all this (and it is
mostly nonsense, but not quite) should be sent about its business
straightway, and forbidden to deceive the well-meaning souls
among us any more. Reform, if we will understand that divine
word, cannot begin till then. One day, I do know, this, as is
the doom of all nonsense, will be drummed out of the world, with
due placard stuck on its back, and the populace flinging dead
cats at it: but whether soon or not, is by no means so certain.
I rather guess, _not_ at present, not quite soon. Fraternity, in
other countries, has gone on, till it found itself unexpectedly
manipulating guillotines by its chosen Robespierres, and become a
fraternity like Cain's. Much to its amazement! For in fact it
is not all nonsense; there is an infinitesimal fraction of sense
in it withal; which is so difficult to disengage;--which must be
disengaged, and laid hold of, before Fraternity can vanish.
But to our subject,--the Model Prison, and the strange theory of
life now in action there. That, for the present, is my share in
the wide adventure of Philanthropism; the world's share, and how
and when it is to be liquidated and ended, rests with the Supreme
Destinies.
Several months ago, some friends took me with them to see one of
the London Prisons; a Prison of the exemplary or model kind. An
immense circuit of buildings; cut out, girt with a high
ring-wall, from the lanes and streets of the quarter, which is a
dim and crowded one. Gateway as to a fortified place; then a
spacious court, like the square of a city; broad staircases,
passages to interior courts; fronts of stately architecture all
round. It lodges some thousand or twelve hundred prisoners,
besides the officers of the establishment. Surely one of the
most perfect buildings, within the compass of London. We looked
at the apartments, sleeping-cells, dining-rooms, working-rooms,
general courts or special and private: excellent all, the
ne-plus-ultra of human care and ingenuity; in my life I never saw
so clean a building; probably no Duke in England lives in a
mansion of such perfect and thorough cleanness.
The bread, the cocoa, soup, meat, all the various sorts of food,
in their respective cooking-places, we tasted: found them of
excellence superlative. The prisoners sat at work, light work,
picking oakum, and the like, in airy apartments with glass roofs,
of agreeable temperature and perfect ventilation; silent, or at
least conversing only by secret signs: others were out, taking
their hour of promenade in clean flagged courts: methodic
composure, cleanliness, peace, substantial wholesome comfort
reigned everywhere supreme. The women in other apartments, some
notable murderesses among them, all in the like state of methodic
composure and substantial wholesome comfort, sat sewing: in long
ranges of wash-houses, drying-houses and whatever pertains to the
getting-up of clean linen, were certain others, with all
conceivable mechanical furtherances, not too arduously working.
The notable murderesses were, though with great precautions of
privacy, pointed out to us; and we were requested not to look
openly at them, or seem to notice them at all, as it was found to
"cherish their vanity" when visitors looked at them. Schools too
were there; intelligent teachers of both sexes, studiously
instructing the still ignorant of these thieves.
From an inner upper room or gallery, we looked down into a range
of private courts, where certain Chartist Notabilities were
undergoing their term. Chartist Notability First struck me very
much; I had seen him about a year before, by involuntary accident
and much to my disgust, magnetizing a silly young person; and had
noted well the unlovely voracious look of him, his thick oily
skin, his heavy dull-burning eyes, his greedy mouth, the dusky
potent insatiable animalism that looked out of every feature of
him: a fellow adequate to animal-magnetize most things, I did
suppose;--and here was the post I now found him arrived at. Next
neighbor to him was Notability Second, a philosophic or literary
Chartist; walking rapidly to and fro in his private court, a
clean, high-walled place; the world and its cares quite excluded,
for some months to come: master of his own time and spiritual
resources to, as I supposed, a really enviable extent. What
"literary man" to an equal extent! I fancied I, for my own part,
so left with paper and ink, and all taxes and botherations shut
out from me, could have written such a Book as no reader will
here ever get of me. Never, O reader, never here in a mere house
with taxes and botherations. Here, alas, one has to snatch one's
poor Book, bit by bit, as from a conflagration; and to think and
live, comparatively, as if the house were not one's own, but
mainly the world's and the devil's. Notability Second might have
filled one with envy.
The Captain of the place, a gentleman of ancient Military or
Royal-Navy habits, was one of the most perfect governors;
professionally and by nature zealous for cleanliness,
punctuality, good order of every kind; a humane heart and yet a
strong one; soft of speech and manner, yet with an inflexible
rigor of command, so far as his limits went: "iron hand in a
velvet glove," as Napoleon defined it. A man of real worth,
challenging at once love and respect: the light of those mild
bright eyes seemed to permeate the place as with an
all-pervading vigilance, and kindly yet victorious illumination;
in the soft definite voice it was as if Nature herself were
promulgating her orders, gentlest mildest orders, which however,
in the end, there would be no disobeying, which in the end there
would be no living without fulfilment of. A true "aristos," and
commander of men. A man worthy to have commanded and guided
forward, in good ways, twelve hundred of the best common-people
in London or the world: he was here, for many years past, giving
all his care and faculty to command, and guide forward in such
ways as there were, twelve hundred of the worst. I looked with
considerable admiration on this gentleman; and with considerable
astonishment, the reverse of admiration, on the work he had here
been set upon.
This excellent Captain was too old a Commander to complain of
anything; indeed he struggled visibly the other way, to find in
his own mind that all here was best; but I could sufficiently
discern that, in his natural instincts, if not mounting up to the
region of his thoughts, there was a continual protest going on
against much of it; that nature and all his inarticulate
persuasion (however much forbidden to articulate itself) taught
him the futility and unfeasibility of the system followed here.
The Visiting Magistrates, he gently regretted rather than
complained, had lately taken his tread-wheel from him, men were
just now pulling it down; and how he was henceforth to enforce
discipline on these bad subjects, was much a difficulty with him.
"They cared for nothing but the tread-wheel, and for having their
rations cut short:" of the two sole penalties, hard work and
occasional hunger, there remained now only one, and that by no
means the better one, as he thought. The "sympathy" of visitors,
too, their "pity" for his interesting scoundrel-subjects, though
he tried to like it, was evidently no joy to this practical mind.
Pity, yes: but pity for the scoundrel-species? For those who
will not have pity on themselves, and will force the Universe and
the Laws of Nature to have no "pity on" them? Meseems I could
discover fitter objects of pity!
In fact it was too clear, this excellent man had got a field for
his faculties which, in several respects, was by no means the
suitable one. To drill twelve hundred scoundrels by "the method
of kindness," and of abolishing your very tread-wheel,--how could
any commander rejoice to have such a work cut out for him? You
had but to look in the faces of these twelve hundred, and
despair, for most part, of ever "commanding" them at all.
Miserable distorted blockheads, the generality; ape-faces,
imp-faces, angry dog-faces, heavy sullen ox-faces; degraded
underfoot perverse creatures, sons of _in_docility, greedy
mutinous darkness, and in one word, of STUPIDITY, which is the
general mother of such. Stupidity intellectual and stupidity
moral (for the one always means the other, as you will, with
surprise or not, discover if you look) had borne this progeny:
base-natured beings, on whom in the course of a maleficent
subterranean life of London Scoundrelism, the Genius of Darkness
(called Satan, Devil, and other names) had now visibly impressed
his seal, and had marked them out as soldiers of Chaos and of
him,--appointed to serve in _his_ Regiments, First of the line,
Second ditto, and so on in their order. Him, you could perceive,
they would serve; but not easily another than him. These were the
subjects whom our brave Captain and Prison-Governor was
appointed to command, and reclaim to _other_ service, by "the
method of love," with a tread-wheel abolished.
Hopeless forevermore such a project. These abject, ape, wolf,
ox, imp and other diabolic-animal specimens of humanity, who of
the very gods could ever have commanded them by love? A collar
round the neck, and a cart-whip flourished over the back; these,
in a just and steady human hand, were what the gods would have
appointed them; and now when, by long misconduct and neglect,
they had sworn themselves into the Devil's regiments of the line,
and got the seal of Chaos impressed on their visage, it was very
doubtful whether even these would be of avail for the unfortunate
commander of twelve hundred men! By "love," without hope except
of peaceably teasing oakum, or fear except of a temporary loss of
dinner, he was to guide these men, and wisely constrain
them,--whitherward? No-whither: that was his goal, if you will
think well of it; that was a second fundamental falsity in his
problem. False in the warp and false in the woof, thought one of
us; about as false a problem as any I have seen a good man set
upon lately! To guide scoundrels by "love;" that is a false woof,
I take it, a method that will not hold together; hardly for the
flower of men will love alone do; and for the sediment and
scoundrelism of men it has not even a chance to do. And then to
guide any class of men, scoundrel or other, _No-whither_, which
was this poor Captain's problem, in this Prison with oakum for
its one element of hope or outlook, how can that prosper by
"love" or by any conceivable method? That is a warp wholly
false. Out of which false warp, or originally false condition to
start from, combined and daily woven into by your false woof, or
methods of "love" and such like, there arises for our poor
Captain the falsest of problems, and for a man of his faculty the
unfairest of situations. His problem was, not to command good
men to do something, but bad men to do (with superficial
disguises) nothing.
On the whole, what a beautiful Establishment here fitted up for
the accommodation of the scoundrel-world, male and female! As I
said, no Duke in England is, for all rational purposes which a
human being can or ought to aim at, lodged, fed, tended, taken
care of, with such perfection. Of poor craftsmen that pay rates
and taxes from their day's wages, of the dim millions that toil
and moil continually under the sun, we know what is the lodging
and the tending. Of the Johnsons, Goldsmiths, lodged in their
squalid garrets; working often enough amid famine, darkness,
tumult, dust and desolation, what work _they_ have to do:--of
these as of "spiritual backwoodsmen," understood to be
preappointed to such a life, and like the pigs to killing, "quite
used to it," I say nothing. But of Dukes, which Duke, I could
ask, has cocoa, soup, meat, and food in general made ready, so
fit for keeping him in health, in ability to do and to enjoy?
Which Duke has a house so thoroughly clean, pure and airy; lives
in an element so wholesome, and perfectly adapted to the uses of
soul and body as this same, which is provided here for the
Devil's regiments of the line? No Duke that I have ever known.
Dukes are waited on by deleterious French cooks, by perfunctory
grooms of the chambers, and expensive crowds of eye-servants,
more imaginary than real: while here, Science, Human Intellect
and Beneficence have searched and sat studious, eager to do their
very best; they have chosen a real Artist in Governing to see
their best, in all details of it, done. Happy regiments of the
line, what soldier to any earthly or celestial Power has such a
lodging and attendance as you here? No soldier or servant direct
or indirect of God or of man, in this England at present. Joy to
you, regiments of the line. Your Master, I am told, has his
Elect, and professes to be "Prince of the Kingdoms of this
World;" and truly I see he has power to do a good turn to those
he loves, in England at least. Shall we say, May _he_, may the
Devil give you good of it, ye Elect of Scoundrelism? I will
rather pass by, uttering no prayer at all; musing rather in
silence on the singular "worship of God," or practical "reverence
done to Human Worth" (which is the outcome and essence of all
real "worship" whatsoever) among the Posterity of Adam at this
day.
For all round this beautiful Establishment, or Oasis of Purity,
intended for the Devil's regiments of the line, lay continents of
dingy poor and dirty dwellings, where the unfortunate not _yet_
enlisted into that Force were struggling manifoldly,--in their
workshops, in their marble-yards and timber-yards and tan-yards,
in their close cellars, cobbler-stalls, hungry garrets, and poor
dark trade-shops with red-herrings and tobacco-pipes crossed in
the window,--to keep the Devil out-of-doors, and not enlist with
him. And it was by a tax on these that the Barracks for the
regiments of the line were kept up. Visiting Magistrates,
impelled by Exeter Hall, by Able-Editors, and the Philanthropic
Movement of the Age, had given orders to that effect. Rates on
the poor servant of God and of her Majesty, who still serves both
in his way, painfully selling red-herrings; rates on him and his
red-herrings to boil right soup for the Devil's declared Elect!
Never in my travels, in any age or clime, had I fallen in with
such Visiting Magistrates before. Reserved they, I should
suppose, for these ultimate or penultimate ages of the world,
rich in all prodigies, political, spiritual,--ages surely with
such a length of ears as was never paralleled before.
If I had a commonwealth to reform or to govern, certainly it
should not be the Devil's regiments of the line that I would
first of all concentrate my attention on! With them I should be
apt so make rather brief work; to them one would apply the besom,
try to sweep _them_, with some rapidity into the dust-bin, and
well out of one's road, I should rather say. Fill your
thrashing-floor with docks, ragweeds, mugworths, and ply your
flail upon them,--that is not the method to obtain sacks of
wheat. Away, you; begone swiftly, _ye_ regiments of the line:
in the name of God and of His poor struggling servants, sore put
to it to live in these bad days, I mean to rid myself of you with
some degree of brevity. To feed you in palaces, to hire captains
and schoolmasters and the choicest spiritual and material
artificers to expend their industries on you, No, by the Eternal!
I have quite other work for that class of artists;
Seven-and-twenty Millions of neglected mortals who have not yet
quite declared for the Devil. Mark it, my diabolic friends, I
mean to lay leather on the backs of you, collars round the necks
of you; and will teach you, after the example of the gods, that
this world is _not_ your inheritance, or glad to see you in it.
You, ye diabolic canaille, what has a Governor much to do with
you? You, I think, he will rather swiftly dismiss from his
thoughts,--which have the whole celestial and terrestrial for
their scope, and not the subterranean of scoundreldom alone.
You, I consider, he will sweep pretty rapidly into some Norfolk
Island, into some special Convict Colony or remote domestic
Moorland, into some stone-walled Silent-System, under hard
drill-sergeants, just as Rhadamanthus, and inflexible as he, and
there leave you to reap what you have sown; he meanwhile turning
his endeavors to the thousand-fold immeasurable interests of men
and gods,--dismissing the one extremely contemptible interest of
scoundrels; sweeping that into the cesspool, tumbling that over
London Bridge, in a very brief manner, if needful! Who are you,
ye thriftless sweepings of Creation, that we should forever be
pestered with you? Have we no work to do but drilling Devil's
regiments of the line?
If I had schoolmasters, my benevolent friend, do you imagine I
would set them on teaching a set of unteachables, who as you
perceive have already made up their mind that black is
white,--that the Devil namely is the advantageous Master to serve
in this world? My esteemed Benefactor of Humanity, it shall be
far from me. Minds open to that particular conviction are not
the material I like to work upon. When once my schoolmasters
have gone over all the other classes of society from top to
bottom; and have no other soul to try with teaching, all being
thoroughly taught,--I will then send them to operate on _these_
regiments of the line: then, and, assure yourself, never till
then. The truth is, I am sick of scoundreldom, my esteemed
Benefactor; it always was detestable to me; and here where I find
it lodged in palaces and waited on by the benevolent of the
world, it is more detestable, not to say insufferable to me than
ever.
Of Beneficence, Benevolence, and the people that come together to
talk on platforms and subscribe five pounds, I will say nothing
here; indeed there is not room here for the twentieth part of
what were to be said of them. The beneficence, benevolence, and
sublime virtue which issues in eloquent talk reported in the
Newspapers, with the subscription of five pounds, and the feeling
that one is a good citizen and ornament to society,--concerning
this, there were a great many unexpected remarks to be made; but
let this one, for the present occasion, suffice:--
My sublime benevolent friends, don't you perceive, for one thing,
that here is a shockingly unfruitful investment for your capital
of Benevolence; precisely the worst, indeed, which human
ingenuity could select for you? "Laws are unjust, temptations
great," &c. &c.: alas, I know it, and mourn for it, and
passionately call on all men to help in altering it. But
according to every hypothesis as to the law, and the temptations
and pressures towards vice, here are the individuals who, of all
the society, have yielded to said pressure. These are of the
worst substance for enduring pressure! The others yet stand and
make resistance to temptation, to the law's injustice; under all
the perversities and strangling impediments there are, the rest
of the society still keep their feet, and struggle forward,
marching under the banner of Cosmos, of God and Human Virtue;
these select Few, as I explain to you, are they who have fallen
to Chaos, and are sworn into certain regiments of the line. A
superior proclivity to Chaos is declared in these, by the very
fact of their being here! Of all the generation we live in,
these are the worst stuff. These, I say, are the Elixir of the
Infatuated among living mortals: if you want the worst
investment for your Benevolence, here you accurately have it. O
my surprising friends! Nowhere so as here can you be certain
that a given quantity of wise teaching bestowed, of benevolent
trouble taken, will yield zero, or the net _Minimum_ of return.
It is sowing of your wheat upon Irish quagmires; laboriously
harrowing it in upon the sand of the seashore. O my astonishing
benevolent friends!
Yonder, in those dingy habitations, and shops of red herring and
tobacco-pipes, where men have not yet quite declared for the
Devil; there, I say, is land: here is mere sea-beach. Thither
go with your benevolence, thither to those dingy caverns of the
poor; and there instruct and drill and manage, there where some
fruit may come from it. And, above all and inclusive of all,
cannot you go to those Solemn human Shams, Phantasm Captains, and
Supreme Quacks that ride prosperously in every thoroughfare; and
with severe benevolence, ask them, What they are doing here?
They are the men whom it would behoove you to drill a little, and
tie to the halberts in a benevolent manner, if you could! "We
cannot," say you? Yes, my friends, to a certain extent you can.
By many well-known active methods, and by all manner of passive
methods, you can. Strive thitherward, I advise you; thither,
with whatever social effort there may lie in you! The well-head
and "consecrated" thrice-accursed chief fountain of all those
waters of bitterness,--it is they, those Solemn Shams and Supreme
Quacks of yours, little as they or you imagine it! Them, with
severe benevolence, put a stop to; them send to their Father, far
from the sight of the true and just,--if you would ever see a
just world here!
What sort of reformers and workers are you, that work only on the
rotten material? That never think of meddling with the material
while it continues sound; that stress it and strain it with new
rates and assessments, till once it has given way and declared
itself rotten; whereupon you snatch greedily at it, and say, Now
let us try to do some good upon it! You mistake in every way, my
friends: the fact is, you fancy yourselves men of virtue,
benevolence, what not; and you are not even men of sincerity and
honest sense. I grieve to say it; but it is true. Good from you,
and your operations, is not to be expected. You may go down!
Howard is a beautiful Philanthropist, eulogized by Burke, and in
most men's minds a sort of beatified individual. How glorious,
having finished off one's affairs in Bedfordshire, or in fact
finding them very dull, inane, and worthy of being quitted and
got away from, to set out on a cruise, over the Jails first of
Britain; then, finding that answer, over the Jails of the
habitable Globe! "A voyage of discovery, a circum-navigation of
charity; to collate distresses, to gauge wretchedness, to take
the dimensions of human misery:" really it is very fine.
Captain Cook's voyage for the Terra Australis, Ross's, Franklin's
for the ditto Borealis: men make various cruises and voyages in
this world,--for want of money, want of work, and one or the
other want,--which are attended with their difficulties too, and
do not make the cruiser a demigod. On the whole, I have myself
nothing but respect, comparatively speaking, for the dull solid
Howard, and his "benevolence," and other impulses that set him
cruising; Heaven had grown weary of Jail-fevers, and other the
like unjust penalties inflicted upon scoundrels,--for scoundrels
too, and even the very Devil, should not have _more_ than their
due;--and Heaven, in its opulence, created a man to make an end
of that. Created him; disgusted him with the grocer business;
tried him with Calvinism, rural ennui, and sore bereavement in
his Bedfordshire retreat;--and, in short, at last got him set to
his work, and in a condition to achieve it. For which I am
thankful to Heaven; and do also,--with doffed hat, humbly salute
John Howard. A practical solid man, if a dull and even dreary;
"carries his weighing-scales in his pocket:" when your jailer
answers, "The prisoner's allowance of food is so and so; and we
observe it sacredly; here, for example, is a ration."--" Hey! A
ration this?" and solid John suddenly produces his
weighing-scales; weighs it, marks down in his tablets what the
actual quantity of it is. That is the art and manner of the man.
A man full of English accuracy; English veracity, solidity,
simplicity; by whom this universal Jail-commission, not to be
paid for in money but far otherwise, is set about, with all the
slow energy, the patience, practicality, sedulity and sagacity
common to the best English commissioners paid in money and not
expressly otherwise.
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