Latter Day Pamphlets
T >>
Thomas Carlyle >> Latter Day Pamphlets
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17
Reward and punishment? Alas, alas, I must say you reward and
punish pretty much alike! Your dignities, peerages, promotions,
your kingships, your brazen statues erected in capital and county
towns to our select demigods of your selecting, testify loudly
enough what kind of heroes and hero-worshippers you are. Woe to
the People that no longer venerates, as the emblem of God
himself, the aspect of Human Worth; that no longer knows what
human worth and unworth is! Sure as the Decrees of the Eternal,
that People cannot come to good. By a course too clear, by a
necessity too evident, that People will come into the hands of
the unworthy; and either turn on its bad career, or stagger
downwards to ruin and abolition. Does the Hebrew People
prophetically sing "Ou' clo'!" in all thoroughfares, these
eighteen hundred years in vain?
To reward men according to their worth: alas, the perfection of
this, we know, amounts to the millennium! Neither is perfect
punishment, according to the like rule, to be attained,--nor
even, by a legislator of these chaotic days, to be too zealously
attempted. But when he does attempt it,--yes, when he summons
out the Society to sit deliberative on this matter, and consult
the oracles upon it, and solemnly settle it in the name of God;
then, if never before, he should try to be a little in the right
in settling it!--In regard to reward of merit, I do not bethink
me of any attempt whatever, worth calling an attempt, on the part
of modern Governments; which surely is an immense oversight on
their part, and will one day be seen to have been an altogether
fatal one. But as to the punishment of crime, happily this
cannot be quite neglected. When men have a purse and a skin,
they seek salvation at least for these; and the Four Pleas of the
Crown are a thing that must and will be attended to. By
punishment, capital or other, by treadmilling and blind rigor, or
by whitewashing and blind laxity, the extremely disagreeable
offences of theft and murder must be kept down within limits.
And so you take criminal caitiffs, murderers, and the like, and
hang them on gibbets "for an example to deter others." Whereupon
arise friends of humanity, and object. With very great reason,
as I consider, if your hypothesis be correct. What right have
you to hang any poor creature "for an example"? He can turn
round upon you and say, "Why make an 'example' of me, a merely
ill-situated, pitiable man? Have you no more respect for
misfortune? Misfortune, I have been told, is sacred. And yet
you hang me, now I am fallen into your hands; choke the life out
of me, for an example! Again I ask, Why make an example of me,
for your own convenience alone?"--All "revenge" being out of the
question, it seems to me the caitiff is unanswerable; and he and
the philanthropic platforms have the logic all on their side.
The one answer to him is: "Caitiff, we hate thee; and discern
for some six thousand years now, that we are called upon by the
whole Universe to do it. Not with a diabolic but with a divine
hatred. God himself, we have always understood, 'hates sin,'
with a most authentic, celestial, and eternal hatred. A hatred,
a hostility inexorable, unappeasable, which blasts the scoundrel,
and all scoundrels ultimately, into black annihilation and
disappearance from the sum of things. The path of it as the path
of a flaming sword: he that has eyes may see it, walking
inexorable, divinely beautiful and divinely terrible, through the
chaotic gulf of Human History, and everywhere burning, as with
unquenchable fire, the false and death-worthy from the true and
life-worthy; making all Human History, and the Biography of every
man, a God's Cosmos in place of a Devil's Chaos. So is it, in
the end; even so, to every man who is a man, and not a mutinous
beast, and has eyes to see. To thee, caitiff, these things were
and are, quite incredible; to us they are too awfully
certain,--the Eternal Law of this Universe, whether thou and
others will believe it or disbelieve. We, not to be partakers in
thy destructive adventure of defying God and all the Universe,
dare not allow thee to continue longer among us. As a palpable
deserter from the ranks where all men, at their eternal peril,
are bound to be: palpable deserter, taken with the red band
fighting thus against the whole Universe and its Laws, we--send
thee back into the whole Universe, solemnly expel thee from our
community; and will, in the name of God, not with joy and
exultation, but with sorrow stern as thy own, hang thee on
Wednesday next, and so end."
Other ground on which to deliberately slay a disarmed fellow-man
I can see none. Example, effects upon the public mind, effects
upon this and upon that: all this is mere appendage and
accident; of all this I make no attempt to keep
account,--sensible that no arithmetic will or can keep account of
it; that its "effects," on this hand and on that, transcend all
calculation. One thing, if I can calculate it, will include all,
and produce beneficial effects beyond calculation, and no ill
effect at all, anywhere or at any time: What the Law of the
Universe, or Law of God, is with regard to this caitiff? That,
by all sacred research and consideration, I will try to find out;
to that I will come as near as human means admit; that shall be
my exemplar and "example;" all men shall through me see that, and
be profited _beyond_ calculation by seeing it.
What this Law of the Universe, or Law made by God, is? Men at
one time read it in their Bible. In many Bibles, Books, and
authentic symbols and monitions of Nature and the World (of Fact,
that is, and of Human Speech, or Wise Interpretation of Fact),
there are still clear indications towards it. Most important it
is, for this and for some other reasons, that men do, in some
way, get to see it a little! And if no man could now see it by
any Bible, there is written in the heart of every man an
authentic copy of it direct from Heaven itself: there, if he
have learnt to decipher Heaven's writing, and can read the sacred
oracles (a sad case for him if he altogether cannot), every born
man may still find some copy of it.
"Revenge," my friends! revenge, and the natural hatred of
scoundrels, and the ineradicable tendency to _revancher_ oneself
upon them, and pay them what they have merited: this is
forevermore intrinsically a correct, and even a divine feeling in
the mind of every man. Only the excess of it is diabolic; the
essence I say is manlike, and even godlike,--a monition sent to
poor man by the Maker himself. Thou, poor reader, in spite of
all this melancholy twaddle, and blotting out of Heaven's
sunlight by mountains of horsehair and officiality, hast still a
human heart. If, in returning to thy poor peaceable
dwelling-place, after an honest hard day's work, thou wert to
find, for example, a brutal scoundrel who for lucre or other
object of his, had slaughtered the life that was dearest to thee;
thy true wife, for example, thy true old mother, swimming in her
blood; the human scoundrel, or two-legged wolf, standing over
such a tragedy: I hope a man would have so much divine rage in
his heart as to snatch the nearest weapon, and put a conclusion
upon said human wolf, for one! A palpable messenger of Satan,
that one; accredited by all the Devils, to be put an end to by
all the children of God. The soul of every god-created man
flames wholly into one divine blaze of sacred wrath at sight of
such a Devil's-messenger; authentic firsthand monition from the
Eternal Maker himself as to what is next to be done. Do it, or
be thyself an ally of Devil's-messengers; a sheep for two-legged
human wolves, well deserving to be eaten, as thou soon wilt
be!
My humane friends, I perceive this same sacred glow of divine
wrath, or authentic monition at first hand from God himself, to
be the foundation for all Criminal Law, and Official
horsehair-and-bombazine procedure against Scoundrels in this
world. This first-hand gospel from the Eternities, imparted to
every mortal, this is still, and will forever be, your sanction
and commission for the punishment of human scoundrels. See well
how you will translate this message from Heaven and the
Eternities into a form suitable to this World and its Times. Let
not violence, haste, blind impetuous impulse, preside in
executing it; the injured man, invincibly liable to fall into
these, shall not himself execute it: the whole world, in person
of a Minister appointed for that end, and surrounded with the due
solemnities and caveats, with bailiffs, apparitors, advocates,
and the hushed expectation of all men, shall do it, as under the
eye of God who made all men. How it shall be done? this is ever
a vast question, involving immense considerations. Thus Edmund
Burke saw, in the Two Houses of Parliament, with King,
Constitution, and all manner of Civil-Lists, and Chancellors'
wigs and Exchequer budgets, only the "method of getting twelve
just men put into a jury-box:" that, in Burke's view, was the
summary of what they were all meant for. How the judge will do
it? Yes, indeed:--but let him see well that he does do it: for
it is a thing that must by no means be left undone! A sacred
gospel from the Highest: not to be smothered under horsehair and
bombazine, or drowned in platform froth, or in any wise omitted
or neglected, without the most alarming penalties to all
concerned!
Neglect to treat the hero as hero, the penalties--which are
inevitable too, and terrible to think of, as your Hebrew friends
can tell you--may be some time in coming; they will only
gradually come. Not all at once will your thirty thousand
Needlewomen, your three million Paupers, your Connaught fallen
into potential Cannibalism, and other fine consequences of the
practice, come to light;--though come to light they will; and
"Ou' clo'!" itself may be in store for you, if you persist
steadily enough. But neglect to treat even your declared
scoundrel as scoundrel, this is the last consummation of the
process, the drop by which the cup runs over; the penalties of
this, most alarming, extensive, and such as you little dream of,
will straightway very rapidly come. Dim oblivion of Right and
Wrong, among the masses of your population, will come; doubts as
to Right and Wrong, indistinct notion that Right and Wrong are
not eternal, but accidental, and settled by uncertain votings and
talkings, will come. Prurient influenza of Platform Benevolence,
and "Paradise to All-and-sundry," will come. In the general
putrescence of your "religions," as you call them, a strange new
religion, named of Universal Love, with Sacraments mainly
of--_Divorce_, with Balzac, Sue and Company for Evangelists, and
Madame Sand for Virgin, will come,--and results fast following
therefrom which will astonish you very much!
"The terrible anarchies of these years," says Crabbe, in his
_Radiator_, "are brought upon us by a necessity too visible. By
the crime of Kings,--alas, yes; but by that of Peoples too. Not
by the crime of one class, but by the fatal obscuration, and all
but obliteration of the sense of Right and Wrong in the minds and
practices of every class. What a scene in the drama of Universal
History, this of ours! A world-wide loud bellow and bray of
universal Misery; _lowing_, with crushed maddened heart, its
inarticulate prayer to Heaven:--very pardonable to me, and in
some of its transcendent developments, as in the grand French
Revolution, most respectable and ever-memorable. For Injustice
reigns everywhere; and this murderous struggle for what they call
'Fraternity,' and so forth has a spice of eternal sense in it,
though so terribly disfigured! Amalgam of sense and nonsense;
eternal sense by the grain, and temporary nonsense by the square
mile: as is the habit with poor sons of men. Which pardonable
amalgam, however, if it be taken as the pure final sense, I must
warn you and all creatures, is unpardonable, criminal, and fatal
nonsense;--with which I, for one, will take care not to concern
myself!
"_Dogs should not be taught to eat leather_, says the old adage:
no;--and where, by general fault and error, and the inevitable
nemesis of things, the universal kennel is set to diet upon
_leather_; and from its keepers, its 'Liberal Premiers,' or
whatever their title is, will accept or expect nothing else, and
calls it by the pleasant name of progress, reform, emancipation,
abolition-principles, and the like,--I consider the fate of said
kennel and of said keepers to be a thing settled. Red republic
in Phrygian nightcap, organization of labor _a la_ Louis Blanc;
street-barricades, and then murderous cannon-volleys _a la_
Cavaignac and Windischgratz, follow out of one another, as
grapes, must, new wine, and sour all-splitting vinegar do:
vinegar is but _vin-aigre_, or the self-same 'wine' grown
_sharp_! If, moreover, I find the Worship of Human Nobleness
abolished in any country, and a _new_ astonishing
Phallus-Worship, with universal Balzac-Sand melodies and litanies
in treble and in bass, established in its stead, what can I
compute but that Nature, in horrible throes, will repugn against
such substitution,--that, in short, the astonishing new
Phallus-Worship, with its finer sensibilities of the heart, and
'great satisfying loves,' with its sacred kiss of peace for
scoundrel and hero alike, with its all-embracing Brotherhood, and
universal Sacrament of Divorce, will have to take itself away
again!"
The Ancient Germans, it appears, had no scruple about public
executions; on the contrary, they thought the just gods
themselves might fitly preside over these; that these were a
solemn and highest act of worship, if justly done. When a German
man had done a crime deserving death, they, in solemn general
assembly of the tribe, doomed him, and considered that Fate and
all Nature had from the beginning doomed him, to die with
ignominy. Certain crimes there were of a supreme nature; him
that had perpetrated one of these, they believed to have declared
himself a prince of scoundrels. Him once convicted they laid
hold of, nothing doubting; bore him, after judgment, to the
deepest convenient Peat-bog; plunged him in there, drove an oaken
frame down over him, solemnly in the name of gods and men:
"There, prince of scoundrels, that is what we have had to think
of thee, on clear acquaintance; our grim good-night to thee is
that! In the name of all the gods lie there, and be our
partnership with thee dissolved henceforth. It will be better
for us, we imagine!"
My friends, after all this beautiful whitewash and humanity and
prison-discipline; and such blubbering and whimpering, and soft
Litany to divine and also to quite other sorts of Pity, as we
have had for a century now,--give me leave to admonish you that
that of the Ancient Germans too was a thing inexpressibly
necessary to keep in mind. If that is not kept in mind, the
universal Litany to Pity is a mere universal nuisance, and torpid
blasphemy against the gods. I do not much respect it, that
purblind blubbering and litanying, as it is seen at present; and
the litanying over scoundrels I go the length of disrespecting,
and in some cases even of detesting. Yes, my friends, scoundrel
is scoundrel: that remains forever a fact; and there exists not
in the earth whitewash that can make the scoundrel a friend of
this Universe; he remains an enemy if you spent your life in
whitewashing him. He won't whitewash; this one won't. The one
method clearly is, That, after fair trial, you dissolve
partnership with him; send him, in the name of Heaven, whither
_he_ is striving all this while and have done with him. And, in
a time like this, I would advise you, see likewise that you be
speedy about it! For there is immense work, and of a far
hopefuler sort, to be done _elsewhere_.
Alas, alas, to see once the "prince of scoundrels," the Supreme
Scoundrel, him whom of all men the gods liked worst, solemnly
laid hold of, and hung upon the gallows in sight of the people;
what a lesson to all the people! Sermons might be preached; the
Son of Thunder and the Mouth of Gold might turn their periods now
with some hope; for here, in the most impressive way, is a divine
sermon acted. Didactic as no spoken sermon could be. Didactic,
devotional too;--in awed solemnity, a recognition that Eternal
Justice rules the world; that at the call of this, human pity
shall fall silent, and man be stern as his Master and Mandatory
is!--Understand too that except upon a basis of even such rigor,
sorrowful, silent, inexorable as that of Destiny and Doom, there
is no true pity possible. The pity that proves so possible and
plentiful without that basis, is mere _ignavia_ and cowardly
effeminacy; maudlin laxity of heart, grounded on blinkard dimness
of head--contemptible as a drunkard's tears.
To see our Supreme Scoundrel hung upon the gallows, alas, that is
far from us just now! There is a worst man in England,
too,--curious to think of,--whom it would be inexpressibly
advantageous to lay hold of, and hang, the first of all. But we
do not know him with the least certainty, the least approach even
to a guess,--such buzzards and dullards and poor children of the
Dusk are we, in spite of our Statistics, Unshackled Presses, and
Torches of Knowledge;--not eagles soaring sunward, not brothers
of the lightnings and the radiances we; a dim horn-eyed,
owl-population, intent mainly on the catching of mice! Alas, the
supreme scoundrel, alike with the supreme hero, is very far from
being known. Nor have we the smallest apparatus for dealing with
either of them, if he were known. Our supreme scoundrel sits, I
conjecture, well-cushioned, in high places, at this time; rolls
softly through the world, and lives a prosperous gentleman;
instead of sinking him in peat-bogs, we mount the brazen image of
him on high columns: such is the world's temporary judgment
about its supreme scoundrels; a mad world, my masters. To get
the supreme scoundrel always accurately the first hanged, this,
which presupposes that the supreme hero were always the first
promoted, this were precisely the millennium itself, clear
evidence that the millennium had come: alas, we must forbear
hope of this. Much water will run by before we see this.
And yet to quit all aim towards it; to go blindly floundering
along, wrapt up in clouds of horsehair, bombazine, and sheepskin
officiality, oblivious that there exists such an aim; this is
indeed fatal. In every human law there must either exist such an
aim, or else the law is not a human but a diabolic one.
Diabolic, I say: no quantity of bombazine, or lawyers' wigs,
three-readings, and solemn trumpeting and bow-wowing in high
places or in low, can hide from me its frightful infernal
tendency;--bound, and sinking at all moments gradually to
Gehenna, this "law;" and dragging down much with it! "To decree
_injustice_ by a _law_:" inspired Prophets have long since seen,
what every clear soul may still see, that of all Anarchies and
Devil-worships there is none like this; that this is the
"Throne of Iniquity" set up in the name of the Highest, the human
Apotheosis of Anarchy itself. "_Quiet_ Anarchy," you exultingly
say? Yes; quiet Anarchy, which the longer it sits "quiet" will
have the frightfuler account to settle at last. For every doit
of the account, as I often say, will have to be settled one day,
as sure as God lives. Principal, and compound interest
rigorously computed; and the interest is at a terrible rate per
cent in these cases! Alas, the aspect of certain beatified
Anarchies, sitting "quiet;" and of others in a state of infernal
explosion for sixty years back: this, the one view our Europe
offers at present, makes these days very sad.--
My unfortunate philanthropic friends, it is this long-continued
oblivion of the soul of law that has reduced the Criminal
Question to such a pass among us. Many other things have come,
and are coming, for the same sad reason, to a pass! Not the
supreme scoundrel have our laws aimed at; but, in an uncertain
fitful manner, at the inferior or lowest scoundrel, who robs
shop-tills and puts the skin of mankind in danger. How can
Parliament get through the Criminal Question? Parliament,
oblivious of Heavenly Law, will find itself in hopeless _reductio
ad absurdum_ in regard to innumerable other questions,--in regard
to all questions whatsoever by and by. There will be no
existence possible for Parliament on these current terms.
Parliament, in its law-makings, must really try to attain some
vision again of what Heaven's Laws are. A thing not easy to do;
a thing requiring sad sincerity of heart, reverence, pious
earnestness, valiant manful wisdom;--qualities not overabundant
in Parliament just now, nor out of it, I fear.
Adieu, my friends. My anger against you is gone; my sad
reflections on you, and on the depths to which you and I and all
of us are sunk in these strange times, are not to be uttered at
present. You would have saved the Sarawak Pirates, then? The
Almighty Maker is wroth that the Sarawak cut-throats, with their
poisoned spears, are away? What must his wrath be that the
thirty thousand Needlewomen are still here, and the question of
"prevenient grace" not yet settled! O my friends, in sad
earnest, sad and deadly earnest, there much needs that God would
mend all this, and that we should help him to mend it!--And
don't you think, for one thing, "Farmer Hodge's horses" in the
Sugar Islands are pretty well "emancipated" now? My clear
opinion farther is, we had better quit the Scoundrel-province of
Reform; better close that under hatches, in some rapid summary
manner, and go elsewhither with our Reform efforts. A whole
world, for want of Reform, is drowning and sinking; threatening
to swamp itself into a Stygian quagmire, uninhabitable by any
noble-minded man. Let us to the well-heads, I say; to the chief
fountains of these waters of bitterness; and there strike home
and dig! To puddle in the embouchures and drowned outskirts,
and ulterior and ultimate issues and cloacas of the affair: what
profit can there be in that? Nothing to be saved there; nothing
to be fished up there, except, with endless peril and spread of
pestilence, a miscellany of broken waifs and dead dogs! In the
name of Heaven, quit that!
[April 1, 1850.] No. III. DOWNING STREET.
From all corners of the wide British Dominion there rises one
complaint against the ineffectuality of what are nicknamed our
"red-tape" establishments, our Government Offices, Colonial
Office, Foreign Office and the others, in Downing Street and the
neighborhood. To me individually these branches of human
business are little known; but every British citizen and
reflective passer-by has occasion to wonder much, and inquire
earnestly, concerning them. To all men it is evident that the
social interests of one hundred and fifty Millions of us depend
on the mysterious industry there carried on; and likewise that
the dissatisfaction with it is great, universal, and continually
increasing in intensity,--in fact, mounting, we might say, to the
pitch of settled despair.
Every colony, every agent for a matter colonial, has his tragic
tale to tell you of his sad experiences in the Colonial Office;
what blind obstructions, fatal indolences, pedantries,
stupidities, on the right and on the left, he had to do battle
with; what a world-wide jungle of red-tape, inhabited by doleful
creatures, deaf or nearly so to human reason or entreaty, he had
entered on; and how he paused in amazement, almost in despair;
passionately appealed now to this doleful creature, now to that,
and to the dead red-tape jungle, and to the living Universe
itself, and to the Voices and to the Silences;--and, on the
whole, found that it was an adventure, in sorrowful fact, equal
to the fabulous ones by old knights-errant against dragons and
wizards in enchanted wildernesses and waste howling solitudes;
not achievable except by nearly superhuman exercise of all the
four cardinal virtues, and unexpected favor of the special
blessing of Heaven. His adventure achieved or found
unachievable, he has returned with experiences new to him in the
affairs of men. What this Colonial Office, inhabiting the head
of Downing Street, really was, and had to do, or try doing, in
God's practical Earth, he could not by any means precisely get
to know; believes that it does not itself in the least precisely
know. Believes that nobody knows;--that it is a mystery, a kind
of Heathen myth; and stranger than any piece of the old
mythological Pantheon; for it practically presides over the
destinies of many millions of living men.
Such is his report of the Colonial Office: and if we oftener
hear such a report of that than we do of the Home Office, Foreign
Office or the rest,--the reason probably is, that Colonies excite
more attention at present than any of our other interests. The
Forty Colonies, it appears, are all pretty like rebelling just
now; and are to be pacified with constitutions; luckier
Constitutions, let us hope, than some late ones have been. Loyal
Canada, for instance, had to quench a rebellion the other year;
and this year, in virtue of its constitution, it is called upon
to pay the rebels their damages; which surely is a rather
surprising result, however constitutional!--Men have rents and
moneys dependent in the Colonies; Emigration schemes, Black
Emancipations, New-Zealand and other schemes; and feel and
publish more emphatically what their Downing-Street woes in these
respects have been.
Pages:
1 |
2 |
3 |
4 |
5 |
6 | 7 |
8 |
9 |
10 |
11 |
12 |
13 |
14 |
15 |
16 |
17