these times, to be
proclaimed
aloud that for the idle man
there is no place in this England of ours.
there is no place in this England of ours.
Thomas Carlyle
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inexpressibly useful were true insight into it; a genuine
understanding by the upper classes of society what it is that
the under classes intrinsically mean; a clear interpretation
> of the thought which at heart torments these wild inarticulate
souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb
creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them! Some-
thing they do mean; some true thing withal, in the centre
of their confused hearts,--for they are hearts created by
Heaven too: to the Heaven it is clear what thing; to us not
clear. Would that it were! Perfect clearness on it were
equivalent to remedy of it. For, as is well said, all battle
is misunderstanding y did the parties know one another, the
battle would cease. /. . No man at bottom means injustice;
it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that
he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in
the wonderfulest way, by natural dimness and selfishness;
getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest,
till at length it become all but irrecognisable; yet still the
image of a right. j, Could a man own to himself that the thing
he fought for was wrong, contrary to fairness and the law of
reason, he would own also that it thereby stood condemned
and hopeless; he could fight for it no longer. Nay inde-
pendently of right, could the contending parties get but
accurately to discern one another's might and strength to
contend, the one would peaceably yield to the other and
to Necessity; the contest in this case too were over. No
African expedition now, as in the days of Herodotus, is
fitted out against the South-wind. One expedition was satis-
factory in that department. The South-wind Simoom con-
tinues blowing occasionally, hatefcil as ever, maddening as
ever; but one expedition was enough. Do we not all submit
to Death? The highest sentence of the law, sentence of
death, is passed on all of us by the fact of birth; yet we live
patiently under it, patiently undergo it when the hour comes.
Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of
these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a
confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.
What are the rights, what are the mights of the discon-
tented Working Classes in England at this epoch? He were
an CEdipus, and deliverer from sad social pestilence, who could
resolve us fully! For we may say beforehand, The struggle
that divides the upper and lower in society over Europe, and
II 704 M
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? 170 Carlyle's Essays
more painfully and notably in England than elsewhere, this
too is a struggle which will end and adjust itself as all other
struggles do and have done, by making the right clear and
the might clear; not otherwise than by that. Meantime, the
questions, Why are the Working Classes discontented; what
is their condition, economical, moral, in their houses and
their hearts, as it is in reality and as they figure it to them-
selves to be; what do they complain of; what ought they,
and ought they not to complain of? --these are measurable
questions; on some of these any common mortal, did he but
turn his eyes to them, might throw some light. Certain
researches and considerations of ours on the matter, since
no one else will undertake it, are now to be made public. The
researches have yielded us little, almost nothing; but the
considerations are of old date, and press to have utterance.
We are not without hope that our general notion of the
business, if we can get it uttered at all, will meet some assent
from many candid men.
CHAPTER II
STATISTICS
A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.
We have looked into various statistic works, Statistic-
Society Reports, Poor-Law Reports, Reports and Pamphlets
not a few, with a sedulous eye to this question of the Working
Classes and their general condition in England; we grieve .
to say, with as good as no result whatever. Assertion swal-
lows assertion; according to the old Proverb, " as the statist
thinks, the bell clinks "! Tables are like cobwebs, like the
sieve of the Danaides; beautifully reticulated, orderly to
look upon, but which will hold no conclusion. Tables are
abstractions, and the object a most concrete one, so difficult
to read the essence of. There are innumerable circumstances;
and one circumstance left out may be the vital one on which
all turned. Statistics is a science which ought to be honour-
able, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is
not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than
others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on. Con-
clusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a
head that already understands and knows. Vain to send
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the purblind and blind to the shore of a Pactolus never so
golden: these find only gravel; the seer and finder alone
picks up gold grains there. And now the purblind offering
* you, with asseveration and protrusive importunity, his
basket of gravel as gold, what steps are to be taken with
him? --Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually,
and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be
feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go:
"A judicious man," says he, " looks at Statistics, not to get
knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance
- foisted on him. " With what serene conclusiveness a member
of some Useful-Knowledge Society stops your mouth with
a figure of arithmetic! To him it seems he has there ex-
tracted the elixir of the matter, on which now nothing more
can be said. It is needful that you look into his said ex-
tracted elixir; and ascertain, alas, too probably, not without
a sigh, that it is wash and vapidity, good only for the gutters.
Twice or three times have we heard the lamentations and
prophecies of a humane Jeremiah, mourner for the poor,
cut short by a statistic fact of the most decisive nature:
How can the condition of the poor be other than good, be
other than better; has not the average duration of life in
England, and therefore among the most numerous class in
England, been proved to have increased? Our Jeremiah had
to admit that, if so, it was an astounding fact; whereby all
that ever he, for his part, had observed on other sides of the
matter, was overset without remedy. If life last longer, life
) must be less worn upon, by outward suffering, by inward
discontent, by hardship of any kind; the general condition of
the poor must be bettering instead of worsening. So was our
Jeremiah cut short. And now for the "proof "? Readers
who are curious in statistic proofs may see it drawn out with
all solemnity, in a Pamphlet" published by Charles Knight and
Company," 1--and perhaps himself draw inferences from it.
> Northampton Tables, compiled by Dr. Price " from registers
of the Parish of All Saints from 1735 to 1780;" Carlisle
Tables, ? collected by Dr. Heysham from observation of
Carlisle City for eight years, "the calculations founded on
them " conducted by another Doctor; incredible " document
considered satisfactory by men of science in France: ",--alas,
1 An Essay on the Means of Insurance against the Casualties of, etc. ,
etc. London, Charles Knight and Company, 1836. Price 2s.
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? 172 Carlyle's Essays
is it not as if some zealous scientific son of Adam had proved
the deepening of the Ocean, by survey, accurate or cursory,
of two mud-plashes on the coast of the Isle of Dogs? "Not
to get knowledge, but to save yourself from having ignorance
foisted on you "!
The condition of the working-man in this country, what it
is and has been, whether it is improving or retrograding,--
is a question to which from statistics hitherto no solution
can be got. Hitherto, after many tables and statements, one
is still left mainly to what he can ascertain by his own eyes,
looking at the concrete phenomenon for himself. There is
no other method; and yet it is a most imperfect method.
Each man expands his own hand-breadth of observation to
the limits of the general whole; more or less, each man must
take what he himself has seen and ascertained for a sample
of all that is seeable and ascertainable. Hence discrepancies,
controversies wide-spread, long-continued; which there is
at present no means or hope of satisfactorily ending. When
Parliament takes up " the Condition-of-England question,"
as it will have to do one day, then indeed much may be
amended! Inquiries wisely gone into, even on this most
complex matter, will yield results worth something, not
nothing. But it is a most complex matter; on which,
whether for the past or the present, Statistic Inquiry, with
its limited means, with its short vision and headlong extensive
dogmatism, as yet too often throws not light, but error worse
than darkness.
What constitutes the well-being of a man? Many things;'
of which the wages he gets, and the bread he buys with them,
are but one preliminary item. Grant, however, that the
wages were the whole; that once knowing the wages and
the price of bread, we know all; then what are the wages?
Statistic Inquiry, in its present unguided condition, cannot
tell. The average rate of day's wages is not correctly
ascertained for any portion of this country; not only not
for half-centuries, it is not even ascertained anywhere for
decades or years: far from instituting comparisons with the
past, the present itself is unknown to us. And then, given
the average of wages, what is the constancy of employment;
what is the difficulty of finding employment; the fluctuation
from season to season, from year to year? Is it constant,
calculable wages; or fluctuating, incalculable, more or less
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of the nature of gambling? This secondary circumstance,
of quality in wages, is perhaps even more important than the
primary one of quantity. Farther we ask, Can the labourer,
by thrift and industry, hope to rise to mastership; or is
such hope cut off from him? How is he related to his em-
ployer; by bonds of friendliness and mutual help; or by
hostility, opposition, and chains of mutual necessity alone?
In a word, what degree of contentment can a human creature
be supposed to enjoy in that position? With hunger preying
on him, his contentment is likely to be small! But even with
abundance, his discontent, his real misery may be great.
The labourer's feelings, his notion of being justly dealt with
or unjustly; his wholesome composure, frugality, prosperity
in the one case, his acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking,
and gradual ruin in the other,--how shall figures of arith-
metic represent all this? So much is still to be ascertained;
much of it by no means easy to ascertain! Till, among the
"Hill Cooly" and "Dog-cart" questions, there arise in
Parliament and extensively out of it" a Condition-of-England
question," and quite a new set of inquirers and methods,
little of it is likely to be ascertained.
One fact on this subject, a fact which arithmetic is capable
of representing, we have often considered would be worth
all the rest: Whether the labourer, whatever his wages are,
is saving money? Laying up money, he proves that his
condition, painful as it may be without and within, is not yet
desperate; that he looks forward to a better day coming, and
is still resolutely steering towards the same; that all the
lights and darknesses of his lot are united under a blessed
radiance of hope,--the last, first, nay one may say the sole
blessedness of man. Is the habit of saving increased and
increasing, or the contrary? Where the present writer has
been able to look with his own eyes, it is decreasing, and in
many quarters all but disappearing. Statistic science turns
up her Savings-Bank Accounts, and answers, "Increasing
rapidly. " Would that one could believe it! But the Danaides'-
sieve character of such statistic reticulated documents is
too manifest. A few years ago, in regions where thrift, to
one's own knowledge, still was, Savings-Banks were not; the
labourer lent his money to some farmer, of capital, or supposed
to be of capital,--and has too often lost it since; or he bought
a cow with it, bought a cottage with it; nay hid it under his
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? 174 Carlyle's Essays
thatch: the Savings-Banks books then exhibited mere blank
and zero. That they swell yearly now, if such be the fact,
indicates that what thrift exists does gradually resort more
and more thither rather than else-whither; but the question,
Is thrift increasing? runs through the reticulation, and is as
water spilt on the ground, not to be gathered here.
These are inquiries on which, had there been a proper
"Condition-of-England question," some light would have
been thrown, before "torch-meetings" arose to illustrate
them! Far as they lie out of the course of Parliamentary
routine, they should have been gone into, should have been
glanced at, in one or the other fashion. A Legislature making
laws for the Working Classes, in total uncertainty as to these
things, is legislating in the dark; not wisely, nor to good
issues. The simple fundamental question, Can the labouring
man in this England of ours, who is willing to labour, find
work, and subsistence by his work? is matter of mere con-
jecture and assertion hitherto; not ascertainable by authentic
evidence: the Legislature, satisfied to legislate in the dark,
has not yet sought any evidence on it. They pass their
New Poor-Law Bill, without evidence as to all this. Perhaps
their New Poor-Law Bill is itself only intended as an experi-
mentum cruets to ascertain all this? Chartism is an answer,
seemingly not in the affirmative.
CHAPTER III
NEW POOR-LAW
To read the Reports of the Poor-Law Commissioners, if
one had faith enough, would be a pleasure to the friend of
humanity. One sole recipe seems to have been needful for
the woes of England: "refusal of out-door relief. " England
lay in sick discontent, writhing powerless on its fever-bed,
dark, nigh desperate, in wastefulness, want, improvidence,
and eating care, till like Hyperion down the eastern steeps,
the Poor-Law Commissioners arose, and said, Let there be
workhouses, and bread of affliction and water of affliction
there! It was a simple invention; as all truly great inven-
tions are. And see, in any quarter, instantly as the walls of
the workhouse arise, misery and necessity fly away, out of
sight,--out of being, as is fondly hoped, and dissolve into
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the inane; industry, frugality, fertility, rise of wages,
peace on earth and goodwill towards men do,--in the Poor-
Law Commissioners' Reports,--infallibly, rapidly or not so
rapidly, to the joy of all parties, supervene. It was a con-
summation devoutly to be wished. We have looked over
these four annual Poor-Law Reports with a variety of re-
flections; with no thought that our Poor-Law Commissioners
are the inhuman men their enemies accuse them of being;
with a feeling of thankfulness rather that there do exist men
of that structure too; with a persuasion deeper and deeper
that Nature, who makes nothing to no purpose, has not
made either them or their Poor-Law Amendment Act in vain.
We7 hope to prove that they and it were an indispensable
element, harsh but salutary, in the progress of things.
That this Poor-law Amendment Act meanwhile should be,
as we sometimes hear it named, the "chief glory" of a
Reform Cabinet, betokens, one would imagine, rather a
scarcity of glory there. To say to the poor, Ye shall eat the
bread of affliction and drink the water of affliction, and be
very miserable while here, required not so much a stretch of /
heroic faculty in any sense, as due toughness of bowels. If
paupers are made miserable, paupers will needs 'decline in
multitude. It is a secret known to all rat-catchers: stop up
the granary-crevices, afflict with continual mewing, alarm,
and going-off of traps, your " chargeable labourers " disappear,
and cease from the establishment. A still briefer method
is that of arsenic; perhaps even a milder, where otherwise
permissible. Rats and paupers can be abolished; the human s
faculty was from of old adequate to grind them down, slowly
or at once, and needed no ghost or Reform Ministry to teach
it. Furthermore when one hears of "all the labour of the
country being absorbed into employment" by this new
system of affliction, when labour complaining of want can
find no audience, one cannot but pause. That misery and
unemployed labour should " disappear " in that case is natural
enough; should go out of sight,--but out of existence?
What we do know is, that " the rates are diminished," as they
cannot well help being; that no statistic tables as yet report
much increase of deaths by starvation: this we do know,
and not very conclusively anything mors than this. If this
be absorption of all the labour of the country, then all the
labour of the country is absorbed.
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? 176 Carlyle's Essays
To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here
only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated, and in some
permissible manner made away with, and swept out of sight,
is not an amiable faith. That the arrangements of good and
ill success in this perplexed scramble of a world, which a
blind goddess was always thought to preside over, are in fact
the work of a seeing goddess or god, and require only not to
be meddled with: what stretch of heroic faculty or inspiration
of genius was needed to teach one that? To button your
pockets and stand still, is no complex recipe. Laissez faire,
laissez passer I Whatever goes on, ought it not to go on;
"the widow picking nettles for her children's dinner; and
the perfumed seigneur delicately lounging in the CEil-de-
Bceuf, who has an alchemy whereby he will extract from her
the third nettle, and name it rent and law "? What is
written and enacted, has it not black-on-white to show for
itself? Justice is justice; but all attorney's parchment is of
the nature of Targum or sacred-parchment. In brief, ours
is a world requiring only to be well let alone. Scramble
along, thou insane scramble of a world, with thy pope's
tiaras, king's mantles and beggar's gabardines, chivalry-
ribbons and plebeian gallows-ropes, where a Paul shall die
on the gibbet and a Nero sit fiddling as imperial Caesar; thou
art all right, and shalt scramble even so; and whoever in the
press is trodden down, has only to lie there and be trampled
broad:--Such at bottom seems to be the chief social principle,
if principle it haye, which the Poor-Law Amendment Act has
the merit of courageously asserting, in opposition to many
things. A chief social principle which this present writer,
for one, will by no manner of means believe in, but pronounce
at all fit times to be false, heretical and damnable, if ever
aught was!
And yet, as we said, Nature makes nothing in. vain i_ not
even a Poor-Law Amendment Act. For withal we are far
from joining in the outcry raised against these poor Poor-
Law Commissioners, as if they were tigers in men's shape;
as if their Amendment Act were a mere monstrosity and
horror, deserving instant abrogation. They are not tigers;
they are men filled with an idea of a theory: their Amend-
ment Act, heretical and damnable as a whole truth, is ortho-
dox and laudable as a half-truth; and was imperatively
required to be put in practice. To create men filled with a
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theory, that refusal of outdoor-relief was the one thing needful:
Nature had no readier way of getting out-door relief refused.
In fact, if we look at the old Poor-Law, in its assertion of the
opposite social principle, that Fortune's awards are not those
of Justice, we shall find it to have become still more unsup-
portable, demanding, if England was not destined for speedy
anarchy, to be done away with.
Any law, however well meant as a law, which has become
a bounty on unthrift, idleness, bastardy and beer-drinking,
must be put an end to. In all ways it needs, especially in
?
these times, to be proclaimed aloud that for the idle man
there is no place in this England of ours. He that will not
work, and save according to his means, let him go else-
whither; let him know that for him the law has made no soft
provision, but a hard and stern one; that by the Law of Nature,
which the Law of England would vainly contend against
in the long-run, he is doomed either to quit these habits, or
miserably be extruded from this Earth, which is made on
principles different from these. He that will not work
according to his faculty, let him perish according to his
necessity: there is no law juster than that. Would to Heaven
one could preach it abroad into the hearts of all sons and
daughters of Adam, for it is a law applicable to all; and
bring it to bear, with practical obligation strict as the Poor-
Law Bastille, on all! We had then, in good truth, a " perfect
constitution of society; " and " God's fair Earth and Task-
garden, where whosoever is not working must be begging or
stealing," were then actually what always, through so many
changes and struggles, it is endeavouring to become.
That this law of " No work no recompense" should first
of all be enforced on the manual worker, and brought strin-
gently home to him and his numerous class, while so many
other classes and persons still go loose from it, was natural to
the case. Let it be enforced there, and rigidly made good.
It behoves to be enforced everywhere, and rigidly made good;
--alas, not by such simple methods as "refusal of out-door
relief," but by far other and costlier ones; which too, however,
a bountiful Providence is not unfurnished with, nor, in these
latter generations (if we will understand their convulsions and
confusions), sparing to apply. Work is the mission of man
in this Earth. A day is ever struggling forward, a day will
arrive in some approximate degree, when he who has no work
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? 178 Carlyle's Essays
to do, by whatever name he may be named, will not find it
good to show himself in our quarter of the Solar System; but
may go and look out elsewhere, If there be any Idle Planet
discoverable? --Let the honest working man rejoice that such
law, the first of Nature, has been made good on him; and
hope that, by and by, all else will be made good. It is the
beginning of all. We define the harsh New Poor-Law to be
withal a "protection of the thrifty labourer against the
thriftless and dissolute;" a thing inexpressibly important;
a AaZ/-result, detestable, if you will, when looked upon as
the whole result; yet without which the whole result is for-
ever unattainable. Let wastefulness, idleness, drunkenness,
improvidence take the fate which God has appointed them;
that their opposites may also have a chance for their fate.
Let the Poor-Law Administrators be considered as useful
labourers whom Nature has furnished with a whole theory
of the universe, that they might accomplish an indispensable
fractional practice there, and prosper in it in spite of much
contradiction.
We will praise the New Poor-Law, farther, as the probable
preliminary of some general charge to be taken of the lowest
classes by the higher. Any general charge whatsoever,,
rather than a conflict of charges, varying from parish to
parish; the emblem of darkness, of unreadable confusion.
Supervisal by the central government, in what spirit soever
executed, is supervisal from a centre. By degrees the object
will become clearer, as it is at once made thereby universally
conspicuous. By degrees true vision of it will become
attainable, will be universally attained; whatsoever order
regarding it is just and wise, as grounded on the truth of it,
will then be capable of being taken. Let us welcome the
New Poor-Law as the harsh beginning of much, the harsh
ending of much! Most harsh and barren lies the new
ploughers' fallow-field, the crude subsoil all turned up, which
never saw the sun; which as yet grows no herb; which has
"out-door relief" for no one. Yet patience: innumerable
weeds and corruptions lie safely turned down and extin-
guished under it; this same crude subsoil is the first step
of all true husbandry; by Heaven's blessing and the skyey
influences, fruits that are good and blessed will yet come of it.
For, in truth, the claim of the poor labourer is something
quite other than that'' Statute of the Forty-third of Elizabeth"
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will ever fulfil for him. Not to be supported by roundsmen
systems, by never so liberal parish doles, or lodged in free
and easy workhouses when distress overtakes him; not for
'this, however in words he may clamour for it; not for this,
but for something far different does the heart of him struggle.
It is "for justice" that he struggles; for " just wages,"--
not in money alone! An ever-toiling inferior, he would fain
(though as yet he knows it not) find for himself a superior
that should lovingly and wisely govern: is not that too the
"just wages " of his service done? It is for a manlike place
? and relation, in this world where he sees himself a man, that
he struggles. At bottom, may we not say, it is even for this,
That guidance and government, which he cannot give himself,
which in our so complex world he can no longer do without,
might be afforded him? The thing he struggles for is one
which no Forty-third of Elizabeth is in any condition to
furnish him, to put him on the road towards getting. Let
him quit the Forty-third of Elizabeth altogether; and rejoice
that the Poor-Law Amendment Act has, even by harsh
methods and against his own will, forced him away from it.
That was a broken reed to lean on, if there ever was one; and
did but run into his lamed right-hand. Let him cast it far
from him, that broken reed, and look to quite the opposite
point of the heavens for help. His unlamed right-hand, with
the cunning industry that lies in it, is not this defined to be
"the sceptre of our Planet"? He that can work is a born
king of something; is in communion with Nature, is master
of a thing or things, is a priest and king of Nature so far. He
that can work at nothing is but a usurping king, be his
trappings what they may; he is the born slave of all things.
Let a man honour his craftmanship, his can-do; and know
that his rights of man have no concern at all with the Forty-
third of Elizabeth.
CHAPTER IV
FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD
The New Poor-Law is an announcement, sufficiently distinct,
that whosoever will not work ought not to live. Can the poor
man that is willing to work, always find work, and live by
his work? Statistic Inquiry, as we say, has no answer to
give. Legislation presupposes the answer--to be in the
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? 180 Carlyle's Essays
affirmative. A large- postulate; which should have been
made a proposition of; which should have been demonstrated,
made indubitable to all persons! A man willing to work,
and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that
Fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun. Burns ex-
presses feelingly what thoughts it gave him: a poor man
seeking work; seeking leave to toil that he might be fed and
sheltered! That he might but be put on a level with the
four-footed workers of the Planet which is his! There is not
a horse willing to work but can get food and shelter in re-
quital; a thing this two-footed worker has to seek for, to
solicit occasionally in vain. He is nobody's two-footed
worker; he is not even anybody's slave. And yet he is a
too-footed worker; it is currently reported there is an
immortal soul in him, sent down out of Heaven into the
Earth; and one beholds him seeking for this! --Nay what will
a wise Legislature say, if it turn out that he cannot find it;
that the answer to their postulate proposition is not affirmative
but negative?
There is one fact which Statistic Science has communicated,
and a most astonishing one; the inference from which is
pregnant as to this matter. Ireland has near seven millions
of working people, the third unit of whom, it appears by
Statistic Science, has not for thirty weeks each year as many
third-rate potatoes as will suffice him. It is a fact perhaps
the most eloquent that was ever written down in any lan-
guage, at any date of the world's history. Was change and
reformation needed in Ireland? Has Ireland been governed
and guided in a " wise and loving" manner? A government
and guidance of white European men which has issued in
perennial hunger of potatoes to the third man extant,--
ought to drop a veil over its face, and walk out of court under
conduct of proper officers; saying no word; excepting now
of a surety sentence either to change or die. All men, we
must repeat, were made by God, and have immortal souls in
them. The Sanspotato is of the selfsame stuff as the super-
finest Lord Lieutenant. Not an individual Sanspotato
human scarecrow but had a Life given him out of Heaven,
with Eternities depending on it; for once and no second
time. With Immensities in him, over him and round him;
with feelings which a Shakspeare's speech would not utter;
with desires illimitable as the Autocrat's of all the Russias!
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Him various thrice-honoured persons, things and institutions
have long been teaching,, long been guiding, governing: and
it is to perpetual scarcity of third-rate potatoes, and to what
depends thereon, that he has been taught and guided. Figure
thyself, O high-minded, clear-headed, clean-burnished reader,
clapt by enchantment into the torn coat and waste hunger-
lair of that same root-devouring brother man! --
Social anomalies are things to be defended, things to be
amended; and in all places and things, short of the Pit itself,
there js_. SQme admixture of worth and good. Room for
, extenuation, for pity, for patience! And yet when the
general result has come to the length of perennial starvation,
argument, extenuating logic, pity and patience on that sub-
ject may be considered as drawing to a close. It may be
considered that such arrangement of things will have to
terminate. That it has all just men for its natural enemies.
That all just men, of what outward colour soever in Politics
or otherwise, will say: This cannot last, Heaven disowns it,
Earth is against it; Ireland will be burnt into a black unpeopled
field of ashes rather than this should last. --The woes of
Ireland, or " justice to Ireland," is not the chapter we have
to write at present. It is a deep matter, an abysmal one,
which no plummet of ours will sound. For the oppression
has gone far farther than into the economics of Ireland;
inwards to her very heart and soul. The Irish National
character is degraded, disordered; till this recover itself,
nothing is yet recovered. Immethodic, headlong, violent,
'mendacious: what can you make of the wretched Irishman?
"A finer people never lived," as the Irish lady said to us;
"only they have two faults, they do generally lie and steal:
barring these "--! A people that knows not to speak the
truth, and to act the truth, such people has departed from
even the possibility of well-being. Such people works no
longer on Nature and Reality; works now on Phantasm,
-Simulation, Nonentity; the result it arrives at is naturally
not a thing but no-thing,--defect even of potatoes. Scarcity,
futility, confusion, distraction must be perennial there. Such
a people circulates not order but disorder, through every vein
of it;--and the cure, if it is to be a cure, must begin at the
heart: not in his condition only but in himself must the Patient
be all changed. Poor Ireland! And yet let no true Irishman,
who believes and sees all this, despair by reason of it. Cannot
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? 182 Carlylc's Essays
he too do something to withstand the unproductive falsehood,
there as it lies accursed around him, and change it into truth,
which is fruitful and blessed? Every mortal can and shall
himself be a true man: it is a great thing, and the parent
of great things;--as from a single acorn the whole earth might
in the end be peopled with oaks! Every mortal can do some-
thing: this let him faithfully do, and leave with assured
heart the issue to a Higher Power!
We English pay, even now, the bitter smart of long centu-
ries of injustice to our neighbour Island. Injustice, doubt
it not, abounds; or Ireland would not be miserable. The
Earth is good, bountifully sends food and increase; if man's
unwisdom did not intervene and forbid. It was an evil day
when Strigul first meddled with that people. He could not
extirpate them: could they but have agreed together, and
extirpated him! Violent men there have been, and merciful;
unjust rulers, and just; conflicting in a great element of
violence, these five wild centuries now; and the violent and
unjust have carried it, and we are come to this. England is
guilty towards Ireland; and reaps at last, in full measure,
the fruit of fifteen generations of wrong-doing.
But the thing we had to state here was our inference from
that mournful fact of the third Sanspotato,--coupled with this
other well-known fact that the Irish speak a partially intelli-
gible dialect of English, and their fare across by steam is four-
pence sterling! Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our
towns. The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity,
restlessness, unreason, misery and mockery, salute you on all
highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls
past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his
tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the
v sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and
laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can
be done by mere strength of hand and back; for wages that
will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condi-
ment; he lodges to his mind in any pighutch or doghutch,
roosts in outhouses; and wears a suit of tatters, the getting
off and on of which is said to be a difficult operation, trans-
acted only in festivals and the hightides of the calendar.
The Saxon man if he cannot work on these terms, finds no
work. He too may be ignorant; but he has not sunk from
decent manhood to squalid apehood: he cannot continue
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? Chartism 18 3
there. American forests lie untilled across the ocean; the
uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength, but by the opposite
of strength, drives out the Saxon native, takes possession in
'his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason,
in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made
nucleus of degradation and disorder. Whosoever struggles,
swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how
the human being can exist not swimming but sunk. Let
him sink; he is not the worst of men; not worse than this
man. We have quarantines against pestilence; but there is
? no pestilence like that; and against it what quarantine is
possible? It is lamentable to look upon. This soil of
Britain, these Saxon men have cleared it, made it arable,
fertile and a home for them; they and their fathers have done
that. Under the sky there exists no force of men who with
arms in their hands could drive them out of it; all force of
men with arms these Saxons would seize, in their grim way,
and fling (Heaven's justice and their own Saxon humour
aiding them) swiftly into the sea. But behold, a force of men
armed only with rags, ignorance and nakedness; and the
Saxon owners, paralysed by invisible magic of paper formula,
have to fly far, and hide themselves in Transatlantic forests.
"Irish repeal"? "Would to God," as Dutch William said,
"you were King of Ireland, and could take yourself and it
three thousand miles off,"--there to repeal it!
And yet these poor Celtiberian Irish brothers, what can
they help it? They cannot stay at home, and starve. It is
just and natural that they come hither as a curse to us.
Alas, for them too it is not a luxury. It is not a straight or
joyful way of avenging their sore wrongs this; but a most
sad circuitous one. Yet a way it is, and an effectual way. The
time has come when the Irish population must either be
improved a little, or else exterminated. Plausible manage-
ment, adapted to this hollow outcry or to that, will no longer
do; it must be management grounded on sincerity and fact,
to which the truth of things will respond--by an actual
beginning of improvement to these wretched brother-men.
In a state of perennial ultra-savage famine, in the midst of
civilisation, they cannot continue. For that the Saxon
British will ever submit to sink along with them to such a
state, we assume as impossible. There is in these latter,
thank God, an ingenuity which is not false; a methodic spirit,
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? 184 Carlyle's Essays
of insight, of perseverant well-doing; a rationality and
veracity which Nature with her truth does not disown;--
withal there is a " Berserkir rage " in the heart of them, which
will prefer all things, including destruction and self-destruc-
tion, to that. Let no man awaken it, this same Berserkir
rage! Deep-hidden it lies, far down in the centre, like genial
central-fire, with stratum after stratum of arrangement,
traditionary method, composed productiveness, all built
above it, vivified and rendered fertile by it: justice, clearness,
silence, perseverance, unhasting unresting diligence, hatred
of disorder, hatred of injustice, which is the worst disorder,
characterise this people; their inward fire we say, as all such
fire should be, is hidden at the centre. Deep-hidden; but
awakenable, but immeasurable;--let no man awaken it!
With this strong silent people have the noisy vehement Irish
now at length got common cause made. Ireland, now for the
first time, in such strange circuitous way, does find itself
embarked in the same boat with England, to sail together,
or to sink together; the wretchedness of Ireland, slowly but
inevitably,has crept over to us,and become our own wretched-
ness. The Irish population must get itself redressed and
saved, for the sake of the English if for nothing else.
Alas, that it should, on both sides, be poor toiling men that
pay the smart for unruly Striguls, Henrys, Macdermots, and
O'Donoghues! The strong have eaten sour grapes, and the
teeth of the weak are set on edge. "Curses," says the
Proverb, " are like chickens, they return always home. "
But now, on the whole, it seems to us, English Statistic
Science, with floods of the finest peasantry in the world
streaming in on us daily, may fold up her Danaides reticula-
tions on this matter of the Working Classes; and conclude,
what every man who will take the statistic spectacles off his
nose, and look, may discern in town or country: That the
condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approxi-
mates more and more to that of the Irish competing with them
in all markets; that whatsoever labour, to which mere
strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done
not at the English price, but at an approximation to the Irish
price: at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior
to scarcity of third-rate potatoes for thirty weeks yearly;
superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat,
sinking nearer to an equality with that. Half-a-million
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? Chartism 185
handloom weavers, working fifteen hours a-day, in perpetual
inability to procure thereby enough of the coarsest food;
English farm-labourers at nine shillings and at seven shillings
a-week; Scotch farm-labourers who, "in districts the half
of whose husbandry is that of cows, taste no milk, can procure
no milk: " all these things are credible to us; several of them
are known to us by the best evidence, by eyesight. With all
this it is consistent that the wages of " skilled labour," as it is
called, should in many cases be higher than they ever were:
the giant Steamengine in a giant English Nation will here
create violent demand for labour, and will there annihilate
demand. But, alas, the great portion of labour is not skilled:
the millions are and must be skilless, where strength alone is
wanted; ploughers, delvers, borers; hewers of wood and
drawers of water; menials of the Steamengine, only the chief
menials and immediate body-servants of which require skill.
English Commerce stretches its fibres over the whole earth;
sensitive literally, nay quivering in convulsion, to the farthest
influences of the earth.
? Chartism
169
inexpressibly useful were true insight into it; a genuine
understanding by the upper classes of society what it is that
the under classes intrinsically mean; a clear interpretation
> of the thought which at heart torments these wild inarticulate
souls, struggling there, with inarticulate uproar, like dumb
creatures in pain, unable to speak what is in them! Some-
thing they do mean; some true thing withal, in the centre
of their confused hearts,--for they are hearts created by
Heaven too: to the Heaven it is clear what thing; to us not
clear. Would that it were! Perfect clearness on it were
equivalent to remedy of it. For, as is well said, all battle
is misunderstanding y did the parties know one another, the
battle would cease. /. . No man at bottom means injustice;
it is always for some obscure distorted image of a right that
he contends: an obscure image diffracted, exaggerated, in
the wonderfulest way, by natural dimness and selfishness;
getting tenfold more diffracted by exasperation of contest,
till at length it become all but irrecognisable; yet still the
image of a right. j, Could a man own to himself that the thing
he fought for was wrong, contrary to fairness and the law of
reason, he would own also that it thereby stood condemned
and hopeless; he could fight for it no longer. Nay inde-
pendently of right, could the contending parties get but
accurately to discern one another's might and strength to
contend, the one would peaceably yield to the other and
to Necessity; the contest in this case too were over. No
African expedition now, as in the days of Herodotus, is
fitted out against the South-wind. One expedition was satis-
factory in that department. The South-wind Simoom con-
tinues blowing occasionally, hatefcil as ever, maddening as
ever; but one expedition was enough. Do we not all submit
to Death? The highest sentence of the law, sentence of
death, is passed on all of us by the fact of birth; yet we live
patiently under it, patiently undergo it when the hour comes.
Clear undeniable right, clear undeniable might: either of
these once ascertained puts an end to battle. All battle is a
confused experiment to ascertain one and both of these.
What are the rights, what are the mights of the discon-
tented Working Classes in England at this epoch? He were
an CEdipus, and deliverer from sad social pestilence, who could
resolve us fully! For we may say beforehand, The struggle
that divides the upper and lower in society over Europe, and
II 704 M
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? 170 Carlyle's Essays
more painfully and notably in England than elsewhere, this
too is a struggle which will end and adjust itself as all other
struggles do and have done, by making the right clear and
the might clear; not otherwise than by that. Meantime, the
questions, Why are the Working Classes discontented; what
is their condition, economical, moral, in their houses and
their hearts, as it is in reality and as they figure it to them-
selves to be; what do they complain of; what ought they,
and ought they not to complain of? --these are measurable
questions; on some of these any common mortal, did he but
turn his eyes to them, might throw some light. Certain
researches and considerations of ours on the matter, since
no one else will undertake it, are now to be made public. The
researches have yielded us little, almost nothing; but the
considerations are of old date, and press to have utterance.
We are not without hope that our general notion of the
business, if we can get it uttered at all, will meet some assent
from many candid men.
CHAPTER II
STATISTICS
A witty statesman said, you might prove anything by figures.
We have looked into various statistic works, Statistic-
Society Reports, Poor-Law Reports, Reports and Pamphlets
not a few, with a sedulous eye to this question of the Working
Classes and their general condition in England; we grieve .
to say, with as good as no result whatever. Assertion swal-
lows assertion; according to the old Proverb, " as the statist
thinks, the bell clinks "! Tables are like cobwebs, like the
sieve of the Danaides; beautifully reticulated, orderly to
look upon, but which will hold no conclusion. Tables are
abstractions, and the object a most concrete one, so difficult
to read the essence of. There are innumerable circumstances;
and one circumstance left out may be the vital one on which
all turned. Statistics is a science which ought to be honour-
able, the basis of many most important sciences; but it is
not to be carried on by steam, this science, any more than
others are; a wise head is requisite for carrying it on. Con-
clusive facts are inseparable from inconclusive except by a
head that already understands and knows. Vain to send
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? Chartism
the purblind and blind to the shore of a Pactolus never so
golden: these find only gravel; the seer and finder alone
picks up gold grains there. And now the purblind offering
* you, with asseveration and protrusive importunity, his
basket of gravel as gold, what steps are to be taken with
him? --Statistics, one may hope, will improve gradually,
and become good for something. Meanwhile, it is to be
feared the crabbed satirist was partly right, as things go:
"A judicious man," says he, " looks at Statistics, not to get
knowledge, but to save himself from having ignorance
- foisted on him. " With what serene conclusiveness a member
of some Useful-Knowledge Society stops your mouth with
a figure of arithmetic! To him it seems he has there ex-
tracted the elixir of the matter, on which now nothing more
can be said. It is needful that you look into his said ex-
tracted elixir; and ascertain, alas, too probably, not without
a sigh, that it is wash and vapidity, good only for the gutters.
Twice or three times have we heard the lamentations and
prophecies of a humane Jeremiah, mourner for the poor,
cut short by a statistic fact of the most decisive nature:
How can the condition of the poor be other than good, be
other than better; has not the average duration of life in
England, and therefore among the most numerous class in
England, been proved to have increased? Our Jeremiah had
to admit that, if so, it was an astounding fact; whereby all
that ever he, for his part, had observed on other sides of the
matter, was overset without remedy. If life last longer, life
) must be less worn upon, by outward suffering, by inward
discontent, by hardship of any kind; the general condition of
the poor must be bettering instead of worsening. So was our
Jeremiah cut short. And now for the "proof "? Readers
who are curious in statistic proofs may see it drawn out with
all solemnity, in a Pamphlet" published by Charles Knight and
Company," 1--and perhaps himself draw inferences from it.
> Northampton Tables, compiled by Dr. Price " from registers
of the Parish of All Saints from 1735 to 1780;" Carlisle
Tables, ? collected by Dr. Heysham from observation of
Carlisle City for eight years, "the calculations founded on
them " conducted by another Doctor; incredible " document
considered satisfactory by men of science in France: ",--alas,
1 An Essay on the Means of Insurance against the Casualties of, etc. ,
etc. London, Charles Knight and Company, 1836. Price 2s.
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? 172 Carlyle's Essays
is it not as if some zealous scientific son of Adam had proved
the deepening of the Ocean, by survey, accurate or cursory,
of two mud-plashes on the coast of the Isle of Dogs? "Not
to get knowledge, but to save yourself from having ignorance
foisted on you "!
The condition of the working-man in this country, what it
is and has been, whether it is improving or retrograding,--
is a question to which from statistics hitherto no solution
can be got. Hitherto, after many tables and statements, one
is still left mainly to what he can ascertain by his own eyes,
looking at the concrete phenomenon for himself. There is
no other method; and yet it is a most imperfect method.
Each man expands his own hand-breadth of observation to
the limits of the general whole; more or less, each man must
take what he himself has seen and ascertained for a sample
of all that is seeable and ascertainable. Hence discrepancies,
controversies wide-spread, long-continued; which there is
at present no means or hope of satisfactorily ending. When
Parliament takes up " the Condition-of-England question,"
as it will have to do one day, then indeed much may be
amended! Inquiries wisely gone into, even on this most
complex matter, will yield results worth something, not
nothing. But it is a most complex matter; on which,
whether for the past or the present, Statistic Inquiry, with
its limited means, with its short vision and headlong extensive
dogmatism, as yet too often throws not light, but error worse
than darkness.
What constitutes the well-being of a man? Many things;'
of which the wages he gets, and the bread he buys with them,
are but one preliminary item. Grant, however, that the
wages were the whole; that once knowing the wages and
the price of bread, we know all; then what are the wages?
Statistic Inquiry, in its present unguided condition, cannot
tell. The average rate of day's wages is not correctly
ascertained for any portion of this country; not only not
for half-centuries, it is not even ascertained anywhere for
decades or years: far from instituting comparisons with the
past, the present itself is unknown to us. And then, given
the average of wages, what is the constancy of employment;
what is the difficulty of finding employment; the fluctuation
from season to season, from year to year? Is it constant,
calculable wages; or fluctuating, incalculable, more or less
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? Chartism
173
of the nature of gambling? This secondary circumstance,
of quality in wages, is perhaps even more important than the
primary one of quantity. Farther we ask, Can the labourer,
by thrift and industry, hope to rise to mastership; or is
such hope cut off from him? How is he related to his em-
ployer; by bonds of friendliness and mutual help; or by
hostility, opposition, and chains of mutual necessity alone?
In a word, what degree of contentment can a human creature
be supposed to enjoy in that position? With hunger preying
on him, his contentment is likely to be small! But even with
abundance, his discontent, his real misery may be great.
The labourer's feelings, his notion of being justly dealt with
or unjustly; his wholesome composure, frugality, prosperity
in the one case, his acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking,
and gradual ruin in the other,--how shall figures of arith-
metic represent all this? So much is still to be ascertained;
much of it by no means easy to ascertain! Till, among the
"Hill Cooly" and "Dog-cart" questions, there arise in
Parliament and extensively out of it" a Condition-of-England
question," and quite a new set of inquirers and methods,
little of it is likely to be ascertained.
One fact on this subject, a fact which arithmetic is capable
of representing, we have often considered would be worth
all the rest: Whether the labourer, whatever his wages are,
is saving money? Laying up money, he proves that his
condition, painful as it may be without and within, is not yet
desperate; that he looks forward to a better day coming, and
is still resolutely steering towards the same; that all the
lights and darknesses of his lot are united under a blessed
radiance of hope,--the last, first, nay one may say the sole
blessedness of man. Is the habit of saving increased and
increasing, or the contrary? Where the present writer has
been able to look with his own eyes, it is decreasing, and in
many quarters all but disappearing. Statistic science turns
up her Savings-Bank Accounts, and answers, "Increasing
rapidly. " Would that one could believe it! But the Danaides'-
sieve character of such statistic reticulated documents is
too manifest. A few years ago, in regions where thrift, to
one's own knowledge, still was, Savings-Banks were not; the
labourer lent his money to some farmer, of capital, or supposed
to be of capital,--and has too often lost it since; or he bought
a cow with it, bought a cottage with it; nay hid it under his
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? 174 Carlyle's Essays
thatch: the Savings-Banks books then exhibited mere blank
and zero. That they swell yearly now, if such be the fact,
indicates that what thrift exists does gradually resort more
and more thither rather than else-whither; but the question,
Is thrift increasing? runs through the reticulation, and is as
water spilt on the ground, not to be gathered here.
These are inquiries on which, had there been a proper
"Condition-of-England question," some light would have
been thrown, before "torch-meetings" arose to illustrate
them! Far as they lie out of the course of Parliamentary
routine, they should have been gone into, should have been
glanced at, in one or the other fashion. A Legislature making
laws for the Working Classes, in total uncertainty as to these
things, is legislating in the dark; not wisely, nor to good
issues. The simple fundamental question, Can the labouring
man in this England of ours, who is willing to labour, find
work, and subsistence by his work? is matter of mere con-
jecture and assertion hitherto; not ascertainable by authentic
evidence: the Legislature, satisfied to legislate in the dark,
has not yet sought any evidence on it. They pass their
New Poor-Law Bill, without evidence as to all this. Perhaps
their New Poor-Law Bill is itself only intended as an experi-
mentum cruets to ascertain all this? Chartism is an answer,
seemingly not in the affirmative.
CHAPTER III
NEW POOR-LAW
To read the Reports of the Poor-Law Commissioners, if
one had faith enough, would be a pleasure to the friend of
humanity. One sole recipe seems to have been needful for
the woes of England: "refusal of out-door relief. " England
lay in sick discontent, writhing powerless on its fever-bed,
dark, nigh desperate, in wastefulness, want, improvidence,
and eating care, till like Hyperion down the eastern steeps,
the Poor-Law Commissioners arose, and said, Let there be
workhouses, and bread of affliction and water of affliction
there! It was a simple invention; as all truly great inven-
tions are. And see, in any quarter, instantly as the walls of
the workhouse arise, misery and necessity fly away, out of
sight,--out of being, as is fondly hoped, and dissolve into
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? Chartism
175
the inane; industry, frugality, fertility, rise of wages,
peace on earth and goodwill towards men do,--in the Poor-
Law Commissioners' Reports,--infallibly, rapidly or not so
rapidly, to the joy of all parties, supervene. It was a con-
summation devoutly to be wished. We have looked over
these four annual Poor-Law Reports with a variety of re-
flections; with no thought that our Poor-Law Commissioners
are the inhuman men their enemies accuse them of being;
with a feeling of thankfulness rather that there do exist men
of that structure too; with a persuasion deeper and deeper
that Nature, who makes nothing to no purpose, has not
made either them or their Poor-Law Amendment Act in vain.
We7 hope to prove that they and it were an indispensable
element, harsh but salutary, in the progress of things.
That this Poor-law Amendment Act meanwhile should be,
as we sometimes hear it named, the "chief glory" of a
Reform Cabinet, betokens, one would imagine, rather a
scarcity of glory there. To say to the poor, Ye shall eat the
bread of affliction and drink the water of affliction, and be
very miserable while here, required not so much a stretch of /
heroic faculty in any sense, as due toughness of bowels. If
paupers are made miserable, paupers will needs 'decline in
multitude. It is a secret known to all rat-catchers: stop up
the granary-crevices, afflict with continual mewing, alarm,
and going-off of traps, your " chargeable labourers " disappear,
and cease from the establishment. A still briefer method
is that of arsenic; perhaps even a milder, where otherwise
permissible. Rats and paupers can be abolished; the human s
faculty was from of old adequate to grind them down, slowly
or at once, and needed no ghost or Reform Ministry to teach
it. Furthermore when one hears of "all the labour of the
country being absorbed into employment" by this new
system of affliction, when labour complaining of want can
find no audience, one cannot but pause. That misery and
unemployed labour should " disappear " in that case is natural
enough; should go out of sight,--but out of existence?
What we do know is, that " the rates are diminished," as they
cannot well help being; that no statistic tables as yet report
much increase of deaths by starvation: this we do know,
and not very conclusively anything mors than this. If this
be absorption of all the labour of the country, then all the
labour of the country is absorbed.
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? 176 Carlyle's Essays
To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here
only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated, and in some
permissible manner made away with, and swept out of sight,
is not an amiable faith. That the arrangements of good and
ill success in this perplexed scramble of a world, which a
blind goddess was always thought to preside over, are in fact
the work of a seeing goddess or god, and require only not to
be meddled with: what stretch of heroic faculty or inspiration
of genius was needed to teach one that? To button your
pockets and stand still, is no complex recipe. Laissez faire,
laissez passer I Whatever goes on, ought it not to go on;
"the widow picking nettles for her children's dinner; and
the perfumed seigneur delicately lounging in the CEil-de-
Bceuf, who has an alchemy whereby he will extract from her
the third nettle, and name it rent and law "? What is
written and enacted, has it not black-on-white to show for
itself? Justice is justice; but all attorney's parchment is of
the nature of Targum or sacred-parchment. In brief, ours
is a world requiring only to be well let alone. Scramble
along, thou insane scramble of a world, with thy pope's
tiaras, king's mantles and beggar's gabardines, chivalry-
ribbons and plebeian gallows-ropes, where a Paul shall die
on the gibbet and a Nero sit fiddling as imperial Caesar; thou
art all right, and shalt scramble even so; and whoever in the
press is trodden down, has only to lie there and be trampled
broad:--Such at bottom seems to be the chief social principle,
if principle it haye, which the Poor-Law Amendment Act has
the merit of courageously asserting, in opposition to many
things. A chief social principle which this present writer,
for one, will by no manner of means believe in, but pronounce
at all fit times to be false, heretical and damnable, if ever
aught was!
And yet, as we said, Nature makes nothing in. vain i_ not
even a Poor-Law Amendment Act. For withal we are far
from joining in the outcry raised against these poor Poor-
Law Commissioners, as if they were tigers in men's shape;
as if their Amendment Act were a mere monstrosity and
horror, deserving instant abrogation. They are not tigers;
they are men filled with an idea of a theory: their Amend-
ment Act, heretical and damnable as a whole truth, is ortho-
dox and laudable as a half-truth; and was imperatively
required to be put in practice. To create men filled with a
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theory, that refusal of outdoor-relief was the one thing needful:
Nature had no readier way of getting out-door relief refused.
In fact, if we look at the old Poor-Law, in its assertion of the
opposite social principle, that Fortune's awards are not those
of Justice, we shall find it to have become still more unsup-
portable, demanding, if England was not destined for speedy
anarchy, to be done away with.
Any law, however well meant as a law, which has become
a bounty on unthrift, idleness, bastardy and beer-drinking,
must be put an end to. In all ways it needs, especially in
?
these times, to be proclaimed aloud that for the idle man
there is no place in this England of ours. He that will not
work, and save according to his means, let him go else-
whither; let him know that for him the law has made no soft
provision, but a hard and stern one; that by the Law of Nature,
which the Law of England would vainly contend against
in the long-run, he is doomed either to quit these habits, or
miserably be extruded from this Earth, which is made on
principles different from these. He that will not work
according to his faculty, let him perish according to his
necessity: there is no law juster than that. Would to Heaven
one could preach it abroad into the hearts of all sons and
daughters of Adam, for it is a law applicable to all; and
bring it to bear, with practical obligation strict as the Poor-
Law Bastille, on all! We had then, in good truth, a " perfect
constitution of society; " and " God's fair Earth and Task-
garden, where whosoever is not working must be begging or
stealing," were then actually what always, through so many
changes and struggles, it is endeavouring to become.
That this law of " No work no recompense" should first
of all be enforced on the manual worker, and brought strin-
gently home to him and his numerous class, while so many
other classes and persons still go loose from it, was natural to
the case. Let it be enforced there, and rigidly made good.
It behoves to be enforced everywhere, and rigidly made good;
--alas, not by such simple methods as "refusal of out-door
relief," but by far other and costlier ones; which too, however,
a bountiful Providence is not unfurnished with, nor, in these
latter generations (if we will understand their convulsions and
confusions), sparing to apply. Work is the mission of man
in this Earth. A day is ever struggling forward, a day will
arrive in some approximate degree, when he who has no work
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? 178 Carlyle's Essays
to do, by whatever name he may be named, will not find it
good to show himself in our quarter of the Solar System; but
may go and look out elsewhere, If there be any Idle Planet
discoverable? --Let the honest working man rejoice that such
law, the first of Nature, has been made good on him; and
hope that, by and by, all else will be made good. It is the
beginning of all. We define the harsh New Poor-Law to be
withal a "protection of the thrifty labourer against the
thriftless and dissolute;" a thing inexpressibly important;
a AaZ/-result, detestable, if you will, when looked upon as
the whole result; yet without which the whole result is for-
ever unattainable. Let wastefulness, idleness, drunkenness,
improvidence take the fate which God has appointed them;
that their opposites may also have a chance for their fate.
Let the Poor-Law Administrators be considered as useful
labourers whom Nature has furnished with a whole theory
of the universe, that they might accomplish an indispensable
fractional practice there, and prosper in it in spite of much
contradiction.
We will praise the New Poor-Law, farther, as the probable
preliminary of some general charge to be taken of the lowest
classes by the higher. Any general charge whatsoever,,
rather than a conflict of charges, varying from parish to
parish; the emblem of darkness, of unreadable confusion.
Supervisal by the central government, in what spirit soever
executed, is supervisal from a centre. By degrees the object
will become clearer, as it is at once made thereby universally
conspicuous. By degrees true vision of it will become
attainable, will be universally attained; whatsoever order
regarding it is just and wise, as grounded on the truth of it,
will then be capable of being taken. Let us welcome the
New Poor-Law as the harsh beginning of much, the harsh
ending of much! Most harsh and barren lies the new
ploughers' fallow-field, the crude subsoil all turned up, which
never saw the sun; which as yet grows no herb; which has
"out-door relief" for no one. Yet patience: innumerable
weeds and corruptions lie safely turned down and extin-
guished under it; this same crude subsoil is the first step
of all true husbandry; by Heaven's blessing and the skyey
influences, fruits that are good and blessed will yet come of it.
For, in truth, the claim of the poor labourer is something
quite other than that'' Statute of the Forty-third of Elizabeth"
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? Chartism
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will ever fulfil for him. Not to be supported by roundsmen
systems, by never so liberal parish doles, or lodged in free
and easy workhouses when distress overtakes him; not for
'this, however in words he may clamour for it; not for this,
but for something far different does the heart of him struggle.
It is "for justice" that he struggles; for " just wages,"--
not in money alone! An ever-toiling inferior, he would fain
(though as yet he knows it not) find for himself a superior
that should lovingly and wisely govern: is not that too the
"just wages " of his service done? It is for a manlike place
? and relation, in this world where he sees himself a man, that
he struggles. At bottom, may we not say, it is even for this,
That guidance and government, which he cannot give himself,
which in our so complex world he can no longer do without,
might be afforded him? The thing he struggles for is one
which no Forty-third of Elizabeth is in any condition to
furnish him, to put him on the road towards getting. Let
him quit the Forty-third of Elizabeth altogether; and rejoice
that the Poor-Law Amendment Act has, even by harsh
methods and against his own will, forced him away from it.
That was a broken reed to lean on, if there ever was one; and
did but run into his lamed right-hand. Let him cast it far
from him, that broken reed, and look to quite the opposite
point of the heavens for help. His unlamed right-hand, with
the cunning industry that lies in it, is not this defined to be
"the sceptre of our Planet"? He that can work is a born
king of something; is in communion with Nature, is master
of a thing or things, is a priest and king of Nature so far. He
that can work at nothing is but a usurping king, be his
trappings what they may; he is the born slave of all things.
Let a man honour his craftmanship, his can-do; and know
that his rights of man have no concern at all with the Forty-
third of Elizabeth.
CHAPTER IV
FINEST PEASANTRY IN THE WORLD
The New Poor-Law is an announcement, sufficiently distinct,
that whosoever will not work ought not to live. Can the poor
man that is willing to work, always find work, and live by
his work? Statistic Inquiry, as we say, has no answer to
give. Legislation presupposes the answer--to be in the
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? 180 Carlyle's Essays
affirmative. A large- postulate; which should have been
made a proposition of; which should have been demonstrated,
made indubitable to all persons! A man willing to work,
and unable to find work, is perhaps the saddest sight that
Fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun. Burns ex-
presses feelingly what thoughts it gave him: a poor man
seeking work; seeking leave to toil that he might be fed and
sheltered! That he might but be put on a level with the
four-footed workers of the Planet which is his! There is not
a horse willing to work but can get food and shelter in re-
quital; a thing this two-footed worker has to seek for, to
solicit occasionally in vain. He is nobody's two-footed
worker; he is not even anybody's slave. And yet he is a
too-footed worker; it is currently reported there is an
immortal soul in him, sent down out of Heaven into the
Earth; and one beholds him seeking for this! --Nay what will
a wise Legislature say, if it turn out that he cannot find it;
that the answer to their postulate proposition is not affirmative
but negative?
There is one fact which Statistic Science has communicated,
and a most astonishing one; the inference from which is
pregnant as to this matter. Ireland has near seven millions
of working people, the third unit of whom, it appears by
Statistic Science, has not for thirty weeks each year as many
third-rate potatoes as will suffice him. It is a fact perhaps
the most eloquent that was ever written down in any lan-
guage, at any date of the world's history. Was change and
reformation needed in Ireland? Has Ireland been governed
and guided in a " wise and loving" manner? A government
and guidance of white European men which has issued in
perennial hunger of potatoes to the third man extant,--
ought to drop a veil over its face, and walk out of court under
conduct of proper officers; saying no word; excepting now
of a surety sentence either to change or die. All men, we
must repeat, were made by God, and have immortal souls in
them. The Sanspotato is of the selfsame stuff as the super-
finest Lord Lieutenant. Not an individual Sanspotato
human scarecrow but had a Life given him out of Heaven,
with Eternities depending on it; for once and no second
time. With Immensities in him, over him and round him;
with feelings which a Shakspeare's speech would not utter;
with desires illimitable as the Autocrat's of all the Russias!
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? Chartism
181
Him various thrice-honoured persons, things and institutions
have long been teaching,, long been guiding, governing: and
it is to perpetual scarcity of third-rate potatoes, and to what
depends thereon, that he has been taught and guided. Figure
thyself, O high-minded, clear-headed, clean-burnished reader,
clapt by enchantment into the torn coat and waste hunger-
lair of that same root-devouring brother man! --
Social anomalies are things to be defended, things to be
amended; and in all places and things, short of the Pit itself,
there js_. SQme admixture of worth and good. Room for
, extenuation, for pity, for patience! And yet when the
general result has come to the length of perennial starvation,
argument, extenuating logic, pity and patience on that sub-
ject may be considered as drawing to a close. It may be
considered that such arrangement of things will have to
terminate. That it has all just men for its natural enemies.
That all just men, of what outward colour soever in Politics
or otherwise, will say: This cannot last, Heaven disowns it,
Earth is against it; Ireland will be burnt into a black unpeopled
field of ashes rather than this should last. --The woes of
Ireland, or " justice to Ireland," is not the chapter we have
to write at present. It is a deep matter, an abysmal one,
which no plummet of ours will sound. For the oppression
has gone far farther than into the economics of Ireland;
inwards to her very heart and soul. The Irish National
character is degraded, disordered; till this recover itself,
nothing is yet recovered. Immethodic, headlong, violent,
'mendacious: what can you make of the wretched Irishman?
"A finer people never lived," as the Irish lady said to us;
"only they have two faults, they do generally lie and steal:
barring these "--! A people that knows not to speak the
truth, and to act the truth, such people has departed from
even the possibility of well-being. Such people works no
longer on Nature and Reality; works now on Phantasm,
-Simulation, Nonentity; the result it arrives at is naturally
not a thing but no-thing,--defect even of potatoes. Scarcity,
futility, confusion, distraction must be perennial there. Such
a people circulates not order but disorder, through every vein
of it;--and the cure, if it is to be a cure, must begin at the
heart: not in his condition only but in himself must the Patient
be all changed. Poor Ireland! And yet let no true Irishman,
who believes and sees all this, despair by reason of it. Cannot
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? 182 Carlylc's Essays
he too do something to withstand the unproductive falsehood,
there as it lies accursed around him, and change it into truth,
which is fruitful and blessed? Every mortal can and shall
himself be a true man: it is a great thing, and the parent
of great things;--as from a single acorn the whole earth might
in the end be peopled with oaks! Every mortal can do some-
thing: this let him faithfully do, and leave with assured
heart the issue to a Higher Power!
We English pay, even now, the bitter smart of long centu-
ries of injustice to our neighbour Island. Injustice, doubt
it not, abounds; or Ireland would not be miserable. The
Earth is good, bountifully sends food and increase; if man's
unwisdom did not intervene and forbid. It was an evil day
when Strigul first meddled with that people. He could not
extirpate them: could they but have agreed together, and
extirpated him! Violent men there have been, and merciful;
unjust rulers, and just; conflicting in a great element of
violence, these five wild centuries now; and the violent and
unjust have carried it, and we are come to this. England is
guilty towards Ireland; and reaps at last, in full measure,
the fruit of fifteen generations of wrong-doing.
But the thing we had to state here was our inference from
that mournful fact of the third Sanspotato,--coupled with this
other well-known fact that the Irish speak a partially intelli-
gible dialect of English, and their fare across by steam is four-
pence sterling! Crowds of miserable Irish darken all our
towns. The wild Milesian features, looking false ingenuity,
restlessness, unreason, misery and mockery, salute you on all
highways and byways. The English coachman, as he whirls
past, lashes the Milesian with his whip, curses him with his
tongue; the Milesian is holding out his hat to beg. He is the
v sorest evil this country has to strive with. In his rags and
laughing savagery, he is there to undertake all work that can
be done by mere strength of hand and back; for wages that
will purchase him potatoes. He needs only salt for condi-
ment; he lodges to his mind in any pighutch or doghutch,
roosts in outhouses; and wears a suit of tatters, the getting
off and on of which is said to be a difficult operation, trans-
acted only in festivals and the hightides of the calendar.
The Saxon man if he cannot work on these terms, finds no
work. He too may be ignorant; but he has not sunk from
decent manhood to squalid apehood: he cannot continue
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? Chartism 18 3
there. American forests lie untilled across the ocean; the
uncivilised Irishman, not by his strength, but by the opposite
of strength, drives out the Saxon native, takes possession in
'his room. There abides he, in his squalor and unreason,
in his falsity and drunken violence, as the ready-made
nucleus of degradation and disorder. Whosoever struggles,
swimming with difficulty, may now find an example how
the human being can exist not swimming but sunk. Let
him sink; he is not the worst of men; not worse than this
man. We have quarantines against pestilence; but there is
? no pestilence like that; and against it what quarantine is
possible? It is lamentable to look upon. This soil of
Britain, these Saxon men have cleared it, made it arable,
fertile and a home for them; they and their fathers have done
that. Under the sky there exists no force of men who with
arms in their hands could drive them out of it; all force of
men with arms these Saxons would seize, in their grim way,
and fling (Heaven's justice and their own Saxon humour
aiding them) swiftly into the sea. But behold, a force of men
armed only with rags, ignorance and nakedness; and the
Saxon owners, paralysed by invisible magic of paper formula,
have to fly far, and hide themselves in Transatlantic forests.
"Irish repeal"? "Would to God," as Dutch William said,
"you were King of Ireland, and could take yourself and it
three thousand miles off,"--there to repeal it!
And yet these poor Celtiberian Irish brothers, what can
they help it? They cannot stay at home, and starve. It is
just and natural that they come hither as a curse to us.
Alas, for them too it is not a luxury. It is not a straight or
joyful way of avenging their sore wrongs this; but a most
sad circuitous one. Yet a way it is, and an effectual way. The
time has come when the Irish population must either be
improved a little, or else exterminated. Plausible manage-
ment, adapted to this hollow outcry or to that, will no longer
do; it must be management grounded on sincerity and fact,
to which the truth of things will respond--by an actual
beginning of improvement to these wretched brother-men.
In a state of perennial ultra-savage famine, in the midst of
civilisation, they cannot continue. For that the Saxon
British will ever submit to sink along with them to such a
state, we assume as impossible. There is in these latter,
thank God, an ingenuity which is not false; a methodic spirit,
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? 184 Carlyle's Essays
of insight, of perseverant well-doing; a rationality and
veracity which Nature with her truth does not disown;--
withal there is a " Berserkir rage " in the heart of them, which
will prefer all things, including destruction and self-destruc-
tion, to that. Let no man awaken it, this same Berserkir
rage! Deep-hidden it lies, far down in the centre, like genial
central-fire, with stratum after stratum of arrangement,
traditionary method, composed productiveness, all built
above it, vivified and rendered fertile by it: justice, clearness,
silence, perseverance, unhasting unresting diligence, hatred
of disorder, hatred of injustice, which is the worst disorder,
characterise this people; their inward fire we say, as all such
fire should be, is hidden at the centre. Deep-hidden; but
awakenable, but immeasurable;--let no man awaken it!
With this strong silent people have the noisy vehement Irish
now at length got common cause made. Ireland, now for the
first time, in such strange circuitous way, does find itself
embarked in the same boat with England, to sail together,
or to sink together; the wretchedness of Ireland, slowly but
inevitably,has crept over to us,and become our own wretched-
ness. The Irish population must get itself redressed and
saved, for the sake of the English if for nothing else.
Alas, that it should, on both sides, be poor toiling men that
pay the smart for unruly Striguls, Henrys, Macdermots, and
O'Donoghues! The strong have eaten sour grapes, and the
teeth of the weak are set on edge. "Curses," says the
Proverb, " are like chickens, they return always home. "
But now, on the whole, it seems to us, English Statistic
Science, with floods of the finest peasantry in the world
streaming in on us daily, may fold up her Danaides reticula-
tions on this matter of the Working Classes; and conclude,
what every man who will take the statistic spectacles off his
nose, and look, may discern in town or country: That the
condition of the lower multitude of English labourers approxi-
mates more and more to that of the Irish competing with them
in all markets; that whatsoever labour, to which mere
strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, will be done
not at the English price, but at an approximation to the Irish
price: at a price superior as yet to the Irish, that is, superior
to scarcity of third-rate potatoes for thirty weeks yearly;
superior, yet hourly, with the arrival of every new steamboat,
sinking nearer to an equality with that. Half-a-million
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? Chartism 185
handloom weavers, working fifteen hours a-day, in perpetual
inability to procure thereby enough of the coarsest food;
English farm-labourers at nine shillings and at seven shillings
a-week; Scotch farm-labourers who, "in districts the half
of whose husbandry is that of cows, taste no milk, can procure
no milk: " all these things are credible to us; several of them
are known to us by the best evidence, by eyesight. With all
this it is consistent that the wages of " skilled labour," as it is
called, should in many cases be higher than they ever were:
the giant Steamengine in a giant English Nation will here
create violent demand for labour, and will there annihilate
demand. But, alas, the great portion of labour is not skilled:
the millions are and must be skilless, where strength alone is
wanted; ploughers, delvers, borers; hewers of wood and
drawers of water; menials of the Steamengine, only the chief
menials and immediate body-servants of which require skill.
English Commerce stretches its fibres over the whole earth;
sensitive literally, nay quivering in convulsion, to the farthest
influences of the earth.
