Latter Day Pamphlets
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Thomas Carlyle >> Latter Day Pamphlets
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Were the state of poor sallow English ploughers and weavers, what
we may call the Sallow or Yellow Emancipation interest, as much
in object with Exeter-Hall Philanthropists as that of the Black
blockheads now all emancipated, and going at large without work,
or need of working, in West-India clover (and fattening very much
in it, one delights to hear), then perhaps the Home Office, its
huge virtual task better understood, and its small actual
performance better seen into, might be found still more
deficient, and behind the wants of the age, than the Colonial
itself is.
How it stands with the Foreign Office, again, one still less
knows. Seizures of Sapienza, and the like sudden appearances of
Britain in the character of Hercules-Harlequin, waving, with big
bully-voice, her huge sword-of-sharpness over field-mice, and in
the air making horrid circles (horrid catherine-wheels and
death-disks of metallic terror from said huge sword), to see how
they will like it,--do from time to time astonish the world, in a
not pleasant manner. Hercules-Harlequin, the Attorney
Triumphant, the World's Busybody: none of these are parts this
Nation has a turn for; she, if you consulted her, would rather
not play these parts, but another! Seizures of Sapienza,
correspondences with Sotomayor, remonstrances to Otho King of
Athens, fleets hanging by their anchor in behalf of the Majesty
of Portugal; and in short the whole, or at present very nearly
the whole, of that industry of protocolling, diplomatizing,
remonstrating, admonishing, and "having the honor to be,"--has
sunk justly in public estimation to a very low figure.
For in fact, it is reasonably asked, What vital interest has
England in any cause now deciding itself in foreign parts? Once
there was a Papistry and Protestantism, important as life eternal
and death eternal; more lately there was an interest of Civil
Order and Horrors of the French Revolution, important at least as
rent-roll and preservation of the game; but now what is there?
No cause in which any god or man of this British Nation can be
thought to be concerned. Sham-kingship, now recognized and even
self-recognized everywhere to be sham, wrestles and struggles
with mere ballot-box Anarchy: not a pleasant spectacle to
British minds. Both parties in the wrestle professing earnest
wishes of peace to us, what have we to do with it except answer
earnestly, "Peace, yes certainly," and mind our affairs
elsewhere. The British Nation has no concern with that
indispensable sorrowful and shameful wrestle now going on
everywhere in foreign parts. The British Nation already, by
self-experience centuries old, understands all that; was lucky
enough to transact the greater part of that, in noble ancient
ages, while the wrestle had not yet become a shameful one, but on
both sides of it there was wisdom, virtue, heroic nobleness
fruitful to all time,--thrice-lucky British Nation! The British
Nation, I say, has nothing to learn there; has now quite another
set of lessons to learn, far ahead of what is going on there.
Sad example there, of what the issue is, and how inevitable and
how imminent, might admonish the British Nation to be speedy with
its new lessons; to bestir itself, as men in peril of
conflagration do, with the neighboring houses all on fire! To
obtain, for its own very pressing behoof, if by possibility it
could, some real Captaincy instead of an imaginary one: to
remove resolutely, and replace by a better sort, its own peculiar
species of teaching and guiding histrios of various name, who
here too are numerous exceedingly, and much in need of gentle
removal, while the play is still good, and the comedy has not yet
become _tragic_; and to be a little swift about it withal; and so
to escape the otherwise inevitable evil day! This Britain might
learn: but she does not need a protocolling establishment, with
much "having the honor to be," to teach it her.
No:--she has in fact certain cottons, hardwares and such like to
sell in foreign parts, and certain wines, Portugal oranges,
Baltic tar and other products to buy; and does need, I suppose,
some kind of Consul, or accredited agent, accessible to British
voyagers, here and there, in the chief cities of the Continent:
through which functionary, or through the penny-post, if she had
any specific message to foreign courts, it would be easy and
proper to transmit the same. Special message-carriers, to be
still called Ambassadors, if the name gratified them, could be
sent when occasion great enough demanded; not sent when it did
not. But for all purposes of a resident ambassador, I hear
persons extensively and well acquainted among our foreign
embassies at this date declare, That a well-selected _Times_
reporter or "own correspondent" ordered to reside in foreign
capitals, and keep his eyes open, and (though sparingly) his pen
going, would in reality be much more effective;--and surely we
see well, he would come a good deal cheaper! Considerably
cheaper in expense of money; and in expense of falsity and
grimacing hypocrisy (of which no human arithmetic can count the
ultimate cost) incalculably cheaper! If this is the fact, why
not treat it as such? If this is so in any measure, we had
better in that measure admit it to be so! The time, I believe,
has come for asking with considerable severity, How far is it so?
Nay there are men now current in political society, men of weight
though also of wit, who have been heard to say, "That there was
but one reform for the Foreign Office,--to set a live coal under
it," and with, of course, a fire-brigade which could prevent the
undue spread of the devouring element into neighboring houses,
let that reform it! In such odor is the Foreign Office too, if
it were not that the Public, oppressed and nearly stifled with a
mere infinitude of bad odors, neglects this one,--in fact, being
able nearly always to avoid the street where it is, _escapes_
this one, and (except a passing curse, once in the quarter or so)
as good as forgets the existence of it.
Such, from sad personal experience and credited prevailing rumor,
is the exoteric public conviction about these sublime
establishments in Downing Street and the neighborhood, the
esoteric mysteries of which are indeed still held sacred by the
initiated, but believed by the world to be mere Dalai-Lama pills,
manufactured let not refined lips hint how, and quite
_un_salvatory to mankind. Every one may remark what a hope
animates the eyes of any circle, when it is reported or even
confidently asserted, that Sir Robert Peel has in his mind
privately resolved to go, one day, into that stable of King
Augeas, which appalls human hearts, so rich is it, high-piled
with the droppings of two hundred years; and Hercules-like to
load a thousand night-wagons from it, and turn running water into
it, and swash and shovel at it, and never leave it till the
antique pavement, and real basis of the matter, show itself clean
again! In any intelligent circle such a rumor, like the first
break of day to men in darkness, enlightens all eyes; and each
says devoutly, "_Faxitis_, O ye righteous Powers that have pity
on us! All England grateful, with kindling looks, will rise in
the rear of him, and from its deepest heart bid him good
speed!"
For it is universally felt that some _esoteric_ man, well
acquainted with the mysteries and properties good and evil of the
administrative stable, is the fittest to reform it, nay can alone
reform it otherwise than by sheer violence and destruction, which
is a way we would avoid; that in fact Sir Robert Peel is, at
present, the one likely or possible man to reform it. And
secondly it is felt that "reform" in that Downing-Street
department of affairs is precisely the reform which were worth
all others; that those administrative establishments in Downing
Street are really the Government of this huge ungoverned Empire;
that to clean out the dead pedantries, unveracities, indolent
somnolent impotences, and accumulated dung-mountains there, is
the beginning of all practical good whatsoever. Yes, get down
once again to the actual _pavement_ of that; ascertain what the
thing is, and was before dung accumulated in it; and what it
should and may, and must, for the life's sake of this Empire,
henceforth become: here clearly lies the heart of the whole
matter. Political reform, if this be not reformed, is naught and
a mere mockery.
What England wants, and will require to have, or sink in nameless
anarchies, is not a Reformed Parliament, meaning thereby a
Parliament elected according to the six or the four or any other
number of "points" and cunningly devised improvements in hustings
mechanism, but a Reformed Executive or Sovereign Body of Rulers
and Administrators,--some improved method, innumerable
improvements in our poor blind methods, of getting hold of these.
Not a better Talking-Apparatus, the best conceivable
Talking-Apparatus would do very little for us at present;--but an
infinitely better Acting-Apparatus, the benefits of which would
be invaluable now and henceforth. The practical question puts
itself with ever-increasing stringency to all English minds: Can
we, by no industry, energy, utmost expenditure of human
ingenuity, and passionate invocation of the Heavens and Earth,
get to attain some twelve or ten or six men to manage the affairs
of this nation in Downing Street and the chief posts elsewhere,
who are abler for the work than those we have been used to, this
long while? For it is really a heroic work, and cannot be done
by histrios, and dexterous talkers having the honor to be: it is
a heavy and appalling work; and, at the starting of it
especially, will require Herculean men; such mountains of pedant
exuviae and obscene owl-droppings have accumulated in those
regions, long the habitation of doleful creatures; the old
_pavements_, the natural facts and real essential functions of
those establishments, have not been seen by eyes for these two
hundred years last past! Herculean men acquainted with the
virtues of running water, and with the divine necessity of
getting down to the clear pavements and old veracities; who
tremble before no amount of pedant exuviae, no loudest shrieking
of doleful creatures; who tremble only to live, themselves, like
inane phantasms, and to leave their life as a paltry
_contribution_ to the guano mountains, and not as a divine
eternal protest against them!
These are the kind of men we want; these, the nearest possible
approximation to these, are the men we must find and have, or go
bankrupt altogether; for the concern as it is will evidently not
hold long together. How true is this of Crabbe: "Men sit in
Parliament eighty-three hours per week, debating about many
things. Men sit in Downing Street, doing protocols, Syrian
treaties, Greek questions, Portuguese, Spanish, French, Egyptian
and AEthiopian questions; dexterously writing despatches, and
having the honor to be. Not a question of them is at all
pressing in comparison with the English question. Pacifico the
miraculous Gibraltar Jew has been hustled by some populace in
Greece:--upon him let the British Lion drop, very rapidly indeed,
a constitutional tear. Radetzky is said to be advancing upon
Milan;--I am sorry to hear it, and perhaps it does deserve a
despatch, or friendly letter, once and away: but the Irish
Giant, named of Despair, is advancing upon London itself, laying
waste all English cities, towns and villages; that is the
interesting Government despatch of the day! I notice him in
Piccadilly, blue-visaged, thatched in rags, a blue child on each
arm; hunger-driven, wide-mouthed, seeking whom he may devour:
he, missioned by the just Heavens, too truly and too sadly their
'divine missionary' come at last in this authoritative manner,
will throw us all into Doubting Castle, I perceive! That is the
phenomenon worth protocolling about, and writing despatches upon,
and thinking of with all one's faculty day and night, if one
wishes to have the honor to be--anything but a Phantasm Governor
of England just now! I entreat your Lordship's all but undivided
attention to that Domestic Irish Giant, named of Despair, for a
great many years to come. Prophecy of him there has long been;
but now by the rot of the potato (blessed be the just gods, who
send us either swift death or some beginning of cure at last!),
he is here in person, and there is no denying him, or
disregarding him any more; and woe to the public watchman that
ignores him, and sees Pacifico the Gibraltar Jew instead!"
What these strange Entities in Downing Street intrinsically are;
who made them, why they were made; how they do their function;
and what their function, so huge in appearance, may in net-result
amount to,--is probably known to no mortal. The unofficial mind
passes by in dark wonder; not pretending to know. The official
mind must not blab;--the official mind, restricted to its own
square foot of territory in the vast labyrinth, is probably
itself dark, and unable to blab. We see the outcome; the
mechanism we do not see. How the tailors clip and sew, in that
sublime sweating establishment of theirs, we know not: that the
coat they bring us out is the sorrowfulest fantastic mockery of a
coat, a mere intricate artistic network of traditions and
formalities, an embroiled reticulation made of web-listings and
superannuated thrums and tatters, endurable to no grown Nation as
a coat, is mournfully clear!--
Two kinds of fundamental error are supposable in such a set of
Offices; these two, acting and reacting, are the vice of all
inefficient Offices whatever.--_First_, that the work, such as it
may be, is ill done in these establishments. That it is delayed,
neglected, slurred over, committed to hands that cannot do it
well; that, in a word, the questions sent thither are not wisely
handled, but unwisely; not decided truly and rapidly, but with
delays and wrong at last: which is the principal character, and
the infallible result, of an insufficient Intellect being set to
decide them. Or _second_, what is still fataler, the work done
there may itself be quite the wrong kind of work. Not the kind
of supervision and direction which Colonies, and other such
interests, Home or Foreign, do by the nature of them require from
the Central Government; not that, but a quite other kind! The
Sotomayor correspondence, for example, is considered by many
persons not to be mismanaged merely, but to be a thing which
should never have been managed at all; a quite superfluous
concern, which and the like of which the British Government has
almost no call to get into, at this new epoch of time. And not
Sotomayor only, nor Sapienza only, in regard to that Foreign
Office, but innumerable other things, if our witty friend of the
"live coal" have reason in him! Of the Colonial Office, too, it
is urged that the questions they decide and operate upon are, in
very great part, questions which they never should have meddled
with, but almost all of which should have been decided in the
Colonies themselves,--Mother Country or Colonial Office reserving
its energy for a quite other class of objects, which are terribly
neglected just now.
These are the two vices that beset Government Offices; both of
them originating in insufficient Intellect,--that sad
insufficiency from which, directly or indirectly, all evil
whatsoever springs! And these two vices act and react, so that
where the one is, the other is sure to be; and each encouraging
the growth of the other, both (if some cleaning of the Augeas
stable have not intervened for a long while) will be found in
frightful development. You cannot have your work well done, if
the work be not of a right kind, if it be not work prescribed by
the law of Nature as well as by the rules of the office.
Laziness, which lies in wait round all human labor-offices, will
in that case infallibly leak in, and vitiate the doing of the
work. The work is but idle; if the doing of it will but pass,
what need of more? The essential problem, as the rules of office
prescribe it for you, if Nature and Fact say nothing, is that
your work be got to pass; if the work itself is worth nothing, or
little or an uncertain quantity, what more can gods or men
require of it, or, above all, can I who am the doer of it
require, but that it be got to pass?
And now enters another fatal effect, the mother of ever-new
mischiefs, which renders well-doing or improvement impossible,
and drives bad everywhere continually into worse. The work being
what we see, a stupid subaltern will do as well as a gifted one;
the essential point is, that he be a quiet one, and do not bother
me who have the driving of him. Nay, for this latter object, is
not a certain height of intelligence even dangerous? I want no
mettled Arab horse, with his flashing glances, arched, neck and
elastic step, to draw my wretched sand-cart through the streets;
a broken, grass-fed galloway, Irish garron, or painful ass with
nothing in the belly of him but patience and furze, will do it
safelier for me, if more slowly. Nay I myself, am I the worse for
being of a feeble order of intelligence; what the irreverent
speculative, world calls barren, red-tapish, limited, and even
intrinsically dark and small, and if it must be said,
stupid?--To such a climax does it come in all Government and
other Offices, where Human Stupidity has once introduced itself
(as it will everywhere do), and no Scavenger God intervenes. The
work, at first of some worth, is ill done, and becomes of less
worth and of ever less, and finally of none: the worthless work
can now _afford_ to be ill done; and Human Stupidity, at a
double geometrical ratio, with frightful expansion grows and
accumulates,--towards the unendurable.
The reforming Hercules, Sir Robert Peel or whoever he is to be,
that enters Downing Street, will ask himself this question first
of all, What work is now necessary, not in form and by
traditionary use and wont, but in very fact, for the vital
interests of the British Nation, to be done here? The second
question, How to get it well done, and to keep the best hands
doing it well, will be greatly simplified by a good answer to
that. Oh for an eye that could see in those hideous mazes, and a
heart that could dare and do! Strenuous faithful scrutiny, not
of what is _thought_ to be what in the red-tape regions, but of
what really is what in the realms of Fact and Nature herself;
deep-seeing, wise and courageous eyes, that could look through
innumerable cobweb veils, and detect what fact or no-fact lies at
heart of them,--how invaluable these! For, alas, it is long
since such eyes were much in the habit of looking steadfastly at
any department of our affairs; and poor commonplace creatures,
helping themselves along, in the way of makeshift, from year to
year, in such an element, do wonderful works indeed. Such
creatures, like moles, are safe only underground, and their
engineerings there become very daedalean. In fact, such
unfortunate persons have no resource but to become what we call
Pedants; to ensconce themselves in a safe world of habitudes, of
applicable or inapplicable traditions; not coveting, rather
avoiding the general daylight of common-sense, as very extraneous
to them and their procedure; by long persistence in which course
they become Completed Pedants, hidebound, impenetrable, able to
_defy_ the hostile extraneous element; an alarming kind of men,
Such men, left to themselves for a century or two, in any
Colonial, Foreign, or other Office, will make a terrible affair
of it!
For the one enemy we have in this Universe is Stupidity, Darkness
of Mind; of which darkness, again, there are many sources, every
_sin_ a source, and probably self-conceit the chief source.
Darkness of mind, in every kind and variety, does to a really
tragic extent abound: but of all the kinds of darkness, surely
the Pedant darkness, which asserts and believes itself to be
light, is the most formidable to mankind! For empires or for
individuals there is but one class of men to be trembled at; and
that is the Stupid Class, the class that cannot see, who alas are
they mainly that will not see. A class of mortals under which as
administrators, kings, priests, diplomatists, &c., the interests
of mankind in every European country have sunk overloaded, as
under universal nightmare, near to extinction; and indeed are at
this moment convulsively writhing, decided either to throw off
the unblessed superincumbent nightmare, or roll themselves and it
to the Abyss. Vain to reform Parliament, to invent ballot-boxes,
to reform this or that; the real Administration, practical
Management of the Commonwealth, goes all awry; choked up with
long-accumulated pedantries, so that your appointed workers have
been reduced to work as moles; and it is one vast boring and
counter-boring, on the part of eyeless persons irreverently
called stupid; and a daedalean bewilderment, writing "impossible"
on all efforts or proposals, supervenes.
The State itself, not in Downing Street alone but in every
department of it, has altered much from what it was in past
times; and it will again have to alter very much, to alter I
think from top to bottom, if it means to continue existing in the
times that are now coming and come!
The State, left to shape itself by dim pedantries and traditions,
without distinctness of conviction, or purpose beyond that of
helping itself over the difficulty of the hour, has become,
instead of a luminous vitality permeating with its light all
provinces of our affairs, a most monstrous agglomerate of
inanities, as little adapted for the actual wants of a modern
community as the worst citizen need wish. The thing it is doing
is by no means the thing we want to have done. What we want!
Let the dullest British man endeavor to raise in his mind this
question, and ask himself in sincerity what the British Nation
wants at this time. Is it to have, with endless jargoning,
debating, motioning and counter-motioning, a settlement effected
between the Honorable Mr. This and the Honorable Mr. That, as to
their respective pretensions to ride the high horse? Really it
is unimportant which of them ride it. Going upon past experience
long continued now, I should say with brevity, "Either of
them--Neither of them." If our Government is to be a
No-Government, what is the matter who administers it? Fling an
orange-skin into St. James's Street; let the man it hits be your
man. He, if you breed him a little to it, and tie the due
official bladders to his ankles, will do as well as another this
sublime problem of balancing himself upon the vortexes, with the
long loaded-pole in his hands; and will, with straddling painful
gestures, float hither and thither, walking the waters in that
singular manner for a little while, as well as his foregoers did,
till he also capsize, and be left floating feet uppermost; after
which you choose another.
What an immense pother, by parliamenting and palavering in all
corners of your empire, to decide such a question as that! I
say, if that is the function, almost any human creature can learn
to discharge it: fling out your orange-skin again; and save an
incalculable labor, and an emission of nonsense and falsity, and
electioneering beer and bribery and balderdash, which is terrible
to think of, in deciding. Your National Parliament, in so far as
it has only that question to decide, may be considered as an
enormous National Palaver existing mainly for imaginary purposes;
and certain, in these days of abbreviated labor, to get itself
sent home again to its partridge-shootings, fox-huntings, and
above all, to its rat-catchings, if it could but understand the
time of day, and know (as our indignant Crabbe remarks) that "the
real Nimrod of this era, who alone does any good to the era, is
the rat-catcher!"
The notion that any Government is or can be a No-Government,
without the deadliest peril to all noble interests of the
Commonwealth, and by degrees slower or swifter to all ignoble
ones also, and to the very gully-drains, and thief
lodging-houses, and Mosaic sweating establishments, and at last
without destruction to such No-Government itself,--was never my
notion; and I hope it will soon cease altogether to be the
world's or to be anybody's. But if it be the correct notion, as
the world seems at present to flatter itself, I point out
improvements and abbreviations. Dismiss your National Palaver;
make the _Times_ Newspaper your National Palaver, which needs no
beer-barrels or hustings, and is _cheaper_ in expense of money
and of falsity a thousand and a million fold; have an economical
red-tape drilling establishment (it were easier to devise such a
thing than a right _Modern University_);--and fling out your
orange-skin among the graduates, when you want a new Premier.
A mighty question indeed! Who shall be Premier, and take in hand
the "rudder of government," otherwise called the "spigot of
taxation;" shall it be the Honorable Felix Parvulus, or the Right
Honorable Felicissimus Zero? By our electioneerings and Hansard
Debatings, and ever-enduring tempest of jargon that goes on
everywhere, we manage to settle that; to have it declared, with
no bloodshed except insignificant blood from the nose in
hustings-time, but with immense beershed and inkshed and
explosion of nonsense, which darkens all the air, that the Right
Honorable Zero is to be the man. That we firmly settle; Zero,
all shivering with rapture and with terror, mounts into the high
saddle; cramps himself on, with knees, heels, hands and feet; and
the horse gallops--whither it lists. That the Right Honorable
Zero should attempt controlling the horse--Alas, alas, he,
sticking on with beak and claws, is too happy if the horse will
only gallop any-whither, and not throw him. Measure, polity,
plan or scheme of public good or evil, is not in the head of
Felicissimus; except, if he could but devise it, some measure
that would please his horse for the moment, and encourage him to
go with softer paces, godward or devilward as it might be, and
save Felicissimus's leather, which is fast wearing. This is
what we call a Government in England, for nearly two centuries
now.
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