A
Scottish Poet, "proud of his name and country," can apply
fervently to "Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt," and
become a gauger of beer-barrels, and tragic immortal broken-
hearted Singer; the stifled echo of his melody audible through
long centuries, one other note in "that sacred Miserere"
that rises up to Heaven, out of all times and lands.
Scottish Poet, "proud of his name and country," can apply
fervently to "Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt," and
become a gauger of beer-barrels, and tragic immortal broken-
hearted Singer; the stifled echo of his melody audible through
long centuries, one other note in "that sacred Miserere"
that rises up to Heaven, out of all times and lands.
Thomas Carlyle
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now them: the terror and horror they inspire is but the
ote of preparation for the truth they are to teach; a mere
raste of terror if that be not learned. Inferences enough;
lost didactic, practically applicable in all departments of
English things! One inference, but one inclusive of all, shall
ontent us here; this namely: That Laissez-faire has as good
s done its part in a great many provinces; that in the
irovince of the Working Classes, Laissez-faire having passed
ts New Poor-Law, has reached the suicidal point, and now,
s felo-de-se, lies dying there, in torchlight meetings and such-
ike; that, in brief, a government of the under classes by the
ipper on a principle of Let-alone is no longer possible m
Cngland in these days. This is the one inference inclusive
if all. For there can be no acting or doing of any kind, till
t be recognised that there is a thing to be done; the thing
>nce recognised, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible,
rhe Working Classes cannot any longer go on without govern-
nent; without being actually guided and governed; England
annot subsist in peace till, by some means or other, some
guidance and government for them is found.
For, alas, on us too the rude truth has come home. Wrap-
pages and speciosities all worn off, the haggard naked fact
ipeakstous: Are these millions taught? Are these millions
juided? We have a Church, the venerable embodiment of
in idea which may well call itself divine; which our fathers
or long ages, feeling it to be divine, have been embodying
is we see: it is a Church well furnished with equipments and
ippurtenances; educated in universities; rich in money;
>et on high places that it may be conspicuous to all, honoured
3f all. We have an Aristocracy of landed wealth and
:ommercial wealth, in whose hands lies the law-making and
the law-administering; an Aristocracy rich, powerful, long
tecure in its place; an Aristocracy with more faculty put
:ree into its hands than was ever before, in any country or
time, put into the hands of any class of men. This Church
answers: Yes, the people are taught. This Aristocracy,
astonishment in every feature, answers: Yes, surely the
people are guided! Do we not pass what Acts of Parliament
are needful; as many as thirty-nine for the shooting of the
partridges alone? Are there not treadmills, gibbets; even
hospitals, poor-rates, New Poor-Law? So answers Church;
so answers Aristocracy, astonishment in every feature.
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? 198 Carlyle's Essays
Fact, in the mean while, takes his lucifer-box, sets fire t
wheat-stacks; sheds an all-too dismal light on several thing;
Fact searches for his third-rate potato, not in the meekes
humour, six-and-thirty weeks each year; and does not fin,
it. Fact passionately joins Messiah Thom of Canterbury
and has himself shot for a new fifth-monarchy brought ii
by Bedlam. Fact holds his fustian-jacket Femgericht ii
Glasgow City. Fact carts his Petition over London streets
begging that you would simply have the goodness to gran
him universal suffrage and "the five points," by way o
remedy. These are not symptoms of teaching and guiding
Nay, at bottom, is it not a singular thing this of Laissez
faire, from the first origin of it? As good as an abdication
on the part of governors; an admission that they are hence
forth incompetent to govern, that they are not there tc
govern at all, but to do--one knows not what! The universa
demand of Laissez-faire by a people from its governors o'i
upper classes, is a soft-sounding demand; but it is only one
step removed from the fatalist. "Laissez-faire," exclaims
a sardonic German writer, " What is this universal cry fo'
Laissez-faire? Does it mean that human affairs requin
no guidance; that wisdom and forethought cannot guidd
them better than folly and accident? Alas, does it notl
mean: 'Such guidance is worse than none! Leave us alone
of your guidance; eat your wages, and sleep! '" And now
if guidance have grown indispensable, and the sleep continue;
what becomes of the sleep and its wages ? --In those entirely
surprising circumstances to which the Eighteenth Century
had brought us, in the time of Adam Smith, Laissez-fairi
was a reasonable cry;--as indeed, in all circumstances, for a
wise governor there will be meaning in the principle of itj
To wise governors you will cry: "See what you will, and will
not, let alone. " To unwise governors, to hungry Greeks
throttling down hungry Greeks on the floor of a St. Stephen's
you will cry: "Let all things alone; for Heaven's sake
meddle ye with nothing! "
How Laissez-faire may adjust itself in other provinces wt
say not: but we do venture to say, and ask whether event
everywhere, in world - history and parish - history, in al
manner of dialects are not saying it, That in regard to th,
lower orders of society, and their governance and guidance
the principle of Laissez-faire has terminated, and is no longe^
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pplicable at all, in this Europe of ours, still less in this
)ngland of ours. Not misgovernment, nor yet no-govern-
lent; only government will now serve. What is the
leaning of the " five points," if we will understand them?
Vhat are all popular commotions and maddest bellowings,
rom Peterloo to the Place-de-Greve itself? Bellowings,
^articulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain;
0 the ear of wisdom they are inarticulate prayers: "Guide
tie, govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot guide
nyself! " Surely of all "rights of man," this right of the
jnorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or
orcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.
Mature herself ordains it from the first; Society struggles
owards perfection by enforcing and accomplishing it more
jid more. If Freedom have any meaning, it means enjoy-
nent of this right, wherein all other rights are enjoyed. It
5 a sacred right and duty, on both sides; and the summary
if all social duties whatsoever between the two. Why does
;he one toil with his hands, if the other be not to toil, still
nore unweariedly, with heart and head? The brawny
raftsman finds it no child's-play to mould his unpliant
nigged masses; neither is guidance of men a dilettantism:
what it becomes when treated as a dilettantism, we may see!
The wild horse bounds homeless through the wilderness, is
lot led to stall and manger; but neither does he toil for you,
3ut for himself only.
Democracy, we are well aware, what is called "self-
;overnment " of the multitude by the multitude, is in words
;he thing everywhere passionately clamoured for at present,
democracy makes rapid progress in these latter times, and
! ver more rapid, in a perilous accelerative ratio; towards |
lemocracy, and that only, the progress of things is every-
where tending as to the final goal and winning-post. So
Jiink, so clamour the multitudes everywhere. And yet all
nen may see, whose sight is good for much, that in demo-
:racy can lie no finality; that with the completest winning
)f democracy there is nothing yet won,--except emptiness,
ind the free chance to win! Democracy is, by the nature
)f it, a self-cancelling business; and gives in the long-run
1 net result of zero. Where no government is wanted, save
:hat of the parish-constable, as in America with its boundless
nil, every man being able to find work and recompense for
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? 200 Carlyle's Essays
himself, democracy may subsist; not elsewhere, except
briefly, as a swift transition towards something other anc
farther. Democracy never yet, that we heard of, was able
to accomplish much work, beyond that same cancelling oi
itself. Rome and Athens are themes for the schools; un-
exceptionable for that purpose. In Rome and Athens, as
elsewhere, if we look practically, we shall find that it was not
by loud voting and debating of many, but by wise insight
and ordering of a few that the work was done. So is it ever
so will it ever be.
The French Convention was a Parliament elected "by
the five points," with ballot-boxes, universal suffrages, and
what not, as perfectly as Parliament can hope to be in this
world; and had indeed a pretty spell of work to do, and did
it. The French Convention had to cease from being a free
Parliament, and become more arbitrary than any Sultan
Bajazet, before it could so much as subsist. It had to purgt
out its argumentative Girondins, elect its Supreme Committee
of Salut, guillotine into silence and extinction all that gain-
said it, and rule and work literally by the sternest despotism
ever seen in Europe, before it could rule at all. Napoleon
was not president of a republic; Cromwell tried hard to rule
in that way, but found that he could not. These, "the
armed soldiers of democracy," had to chain democracy
under their feet, and become despots over it, before they
could work out the earnest obscure purpose of democracy,
itself!
Democracy, take it where you will in our Europe, is found
but as a regulated method of rebellion and abrogation; it
abrogates the old arrangement of things; and leaves, as
we say, zero and vacuity for the institution of a new arrange-
ment. It is the consummation of No-government and
Laissez-faire. It may be natural for our Europe at present;
but cannot be the ultimatum of it. Not towards the impossi-
bility, "self-government" of a multitude by a multitude;
but towards some possibility, government by the wisest,
does bewildered Europe struggle. The blessedest possibility:
not misgovernment, not Laissez-faire, but veritable govern-
ment! Cannot one discern too, across all democratic turbu-
lence, clattering of ballot-boxes and infinite sorrowful jangle,
needful or not, that this at bottom is the wish and prayer of
all human hearts, everywhere and at all times: "Give me
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a leader; a true leader, not a false sham-leader; a true
1 leader, that he may guide me on the true way, that I may be
loyal to him, that I may swear fealty to him and follow him,
and feel that it is well with me! " The relation of the taught
to the teacher, of the loyal subject to his guiding king, is,
under one shape or another, the vital element of human
Society; indispensable to it, perennial in it; without which,
as a body reft of its soul, it falls down into death, and with
horrid noisome dissolution passes away and disappears.
But verily in these times, with their new stern Evangel,
that Speciosities which are not Realities can no longer be,
all Aristocracies, Priesthoods, Persons in Authority, are
called upon to consider. What is an Aristocracy? A
corporation of the Best, of the Bravest. To this joyfully,
with heart-loyalty, do men pay the half of their substance,
'to equip and decorate their Best, to lodge them in palaces,
set them high over all. For it is of the nature of men, in
every time, to honour and love their Best; to know no limit
in honouring them. Whatsoever Aristocracy is still a
corporation of the Best, is safe from all peril, and the land
it rules is a safe and blessed land. Whatsoever Aristocracy
does not even attempt to be that, but only to wear the clothes
of that, is not safe; neither is the land it rules in safe! For
this now is our sad lot, that we must find a real Aristocracy,
that an apparent Aristocracy, how plausible soever, has
become inadequate for us. One way or other, the world will
absolutely need to be governed; if not by this class of men,
then by that. One can predict, without gift of prophecy,
that the era of routine is nearly ended. Wisdom and faculty
alone, faithful, valiant, ever-zealous, not pleasant but pain-
ful, continual effort will suffice. Cost what it may, by one
means or another, the toiling multitudes of this perplexed,
over-crowded Europe must and will find governors. "Laissez-
faire, Leave them to do"? The thing they will do, if so left,
is too frightful to think of! It has been done once, in sight
of the whole earth, in these generations: can it need to be
done a second time?
For a Priesthood, in like manner, whatsoever its titles, pos-
sessions, professions, there is but one question: Does it teach
and spiritually guide this people, yea or no? If yea, then is
all well. But if no, then let it strive earnestly to alter, for as
II 704 o
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? 202 Carlyle's Essays
yet there is nothing well! Nothing, we say: and indeed is
not this that we call spiritual guidance properly the soul of the
whole, the life and eyesight of the whole? The world asks of
its Church in these times, more passionately than of any other
Institution any question, " Canst thou teach us or not? "--A
Priesthood in France, when the world asked, "What canst
thou do for us? " answered only, aloud and ever louder,
"Are we not of God? Invested with all power? "--till at
length France cut short this controversy too, in what frightful
way we know. To all men who believed in the Church, to all
men who believed in God and the soul of man, there was no
issue of the French Revolution half so sorrowful as that.
France cast out its benighted blind Priesthood into destruc-
tion; yet with what a loss to France also! A solution of
continuity, what we may well call such; and this where con-
tinuity is so momentous: the New, whatever it may be,
cannot now grow out of the Old, but is severed sheer asunder
from the Old,--how much lies wasted in that gap! That one
whole generation of thinkers should be without a religion to
believe, or even to contradict; that Christianity, in thinking
France, should as it were fade away so long into a remote
extraneous tradition, was one of the saddest facts connected
with the future of that country. Look at such Political and
Moral Philosophies, St. -Simonisms, Robert-Macairisms, and
the "Literature of Desperation "! Kingship was perhaps
but a cheap waste, compared with this of the Priestship;
under which France still, all but unconsciously, labours;
and may long labour, remediless the while. Let others
consider it, and take warning by it! France is a pregnant
example in all ways. Aristocracies that do not govern,
Priesthoods that do not teach; the misery of that, and the
misery of altering that,--are written in Belshazzar fire-letters
on the history of France.
Or does the British reader, safe in the assurance that
"England is not France," call all this unpleasant doctrine
of ours ideology, perfectibility, and a vacant dream? Does
the British reader, resting on the faith that what has been
these two generations was from the beginning, and will be
to the end, assert to himself that things are already as they
can be, as they must be; that on the whole, no Upper Classes
did ever "govern" the Lower, in this sense of governing?
Believe it not, O British reader! Man is man everywhere;
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? Chartism
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dislikes to have "sensible species" and "ghosts of defunct
'bodies " foisted on him, in England even as in France.
How much the Upper Classes did actually, in any the most
perfect Feudal time, return to the Under by way of recom-
pense, in government, guidance, protection, we will not
undertake to specify here. In Charity-Balls, Soup-Kitchens,
in Quarter-Sessions, Prison-Discipline and Treadmills, we
can well believe the old Feudal Aristocracy not to have
> surpassed the new. Yet we do say that the old Aristocracy
were the governors of the Lower Classes, the guides of the
Lower Classes; and even, at bottom, that they existed as
an Aristocracy because they were found adequate for that.
Not by Charity-Balls and Soup-Kitchens; not so; far other-
wise! But it was their happiness that, in struggling for their
own objects, they had to govern the Lower Classes, even in
this sense of governing. For, in one word, Cash Payment
had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to
man; it was something other than money that the high then
expected from the low, and could not live without getting
from the low. Not as buyer and seller alone, of land or what
else it might be, but in many senses still as soldier and captain,
as clansman and head, as loyal subject and guiding king, was
the low related to the high. With the supreme triumph of
Cash, a changed time has entered; there must a changed
Aristocracy enter. We invite the British reader to meditate
earnestly on these things.
Another thing, which the British reader often reads and
hears in this time, is worth his meditating for a moment:
That Society "exists for the protection of property. " To
which it is added, that the poor man also has property,
namely, his "labour," and the fifteen-pence or three-and-
sixpence a-day he can get for that. True enough, O friends,
, " for protecting properly ;" most true: and indeed, if you
will once sufficiently enforce that Eighth Commandment, the
whole " rights of man " are well cared for; I know no better
definition of the rights of man. Thou shalt not steal, thou shall
not be stolen from: what a Society were that; Plato's Repub-
lic, More's Utopia mere emblems of it! Give every man what
is his, the accurate price of what he has done and been, no
man shall any more complain, neither shall the earth suffer
any more. For the protection of property, in very truth,
and for that alone!
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? 204 Carlyle's Essays
And now what is thy property? That parchment title-
deed, that purse thou buttonest in thy breeches-pocket? Is
that thy valuable property? Unhappy brother, most poor
insolvent brother, I without parchment at all, with purse
oftenest in the flaccid state, imponderous, which will not fling
against the wind, have quite other property than that! I
have the miraculous breath of Life in me, breathed into my
nostrils by Almighty God. I have affections, thoughts, a
god-given capability to be and do; rights, therefore,--the
right for instance to thy love if I love thee, to thy guidance
if I obey thee: the strangest rights, whereof in church-pulpits
one still hears something, though almost unintelligible now;
rights stretching high into Immensity, far into Eternity!
Fifteen-pence a-day; three - and - sixpence a-day; eight
hundred pounds and odd a-day, dost thou call that my
property? I value that little; little all I could purchase
with that. For truly, as is said, what matters it? In torn
boots, in soft-hung carriages-and-four, a man gets always to
his journey's end. Socrates walked barefoot, or in wooden
shoes, and yet arrived happily. They never asked him,
What shoes or conveyance? never, What wages hadst thou?
but simply, What work didst thou? --Property, 0 brother?
"Of my very body I have but a life-rent. " As for this flaccid
purse of mine, 'tis something, nothing; has been the slave
of pickpockets, cutthroats, Jew-brokers, gold-dust robbers;
'twas his, 'tis mine;--'tis thine, if thou care much to steal it.
But my soul, breathed into me by God, my Me and what
capability is there; that is mine, and I will resist the stealing
of it. I call that mine and not thine; I will keep that, and
do what work I can with it: God has given it me, the Devil
shall not take it away! Alas, my friends, Society exists and
has existed for a great many purposes, not so easy to specify!
Society, it is understood, does not in any age prevent a
man from being what he can be. A sooty African can become
a Toussaint L'Ouverture, a murderous Three-fingered Jack,
let the yellow West Indies say to it what they will.
A
Scottish Poet, "proud of his name and country," can apply
fervently to "Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt," and
become a gauger of beer-barrels, and tragic immortal broken-
hearted Singer; the stifled echo of his melody audible through
long centuries, one other note in "that sacred Miserere"
that rises up to Heaven, out of all times and lands. What I
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? Chartism
can be thou decidedly wilt not hinder me from being. Nay
even for being what I could be, I have the strangest claims on
thee,--not convenient to adjust at present! Protection of
breeches-pocket property? 0 reader, to what shifts is poor
Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of
herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole
nexus of man to man! On the whole, we will advise Society
not to talk at all about what she exists for; but rather with
her whole industry to exist, to try how she can keep existing!
That is her best plan. She may depend upon it, if she ever,
by cruel chance, did come to exist only for protection of
breeches-pocket property, she would lose very soon the gift
of protecting even that, and find her career in our lower
world on the point of terminating! --
For the rest, that in the most perfect Feudal Ages, the
Ideal of Aristocracy nowhere lived in vacant serene purity as
an Ideal, but always as a poor imperfect Actual, little heeding
or not knowing at all that an Ideal lay in it,--this too we will
cheerfully admit. Imperfection, it is known, cleaves to human
things; far is the ideal departed from, in most times; very
far! And yet so long as an Ideal (any soul of Truth) does,
in never so confused a manner, exist and work within the
Actual, it is a tolerable business. Not so, when the Ideal has
entirely departed, and the Actual owns to itself that it has no
Idea, no soul of Truth any longer: at that degree of imperfec-
tion human things cannot continue living; they are obliged
to alter or expire, when they attain to that. Blotches and /
diseases exist on the skin and deeper, the,heart continuing
whole; but it is another matter when the heart itself becomes
diseased; when there is no heart, but a monstrous gangrene
pretending to exist there as heart!
On the whole, O reader, thou wilt find everywhere that
things which have had an existence among men have first of
all had to have a truth and worth in them, and were not sem-
blances but realities. Nothing not a reality ever yet got men
to pay bed and board to it for long. Look at Mahometanism
itself! Dalai-Lamaism, even Dalai-Lamaism, one rejoices to
discover, may be worth its victuals in this world; not a
quackery but a sincerity; not a nothing but a something!
The mistake of those who believe that fraud, force, injustice,
whatsoever untrue thing, howsoever cloaked and decorated,
was ever or can ever be the principle of man's relations to
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? 206 Carlyle's Essays
man, is great and the greatest. It is the error of the infidel;
in whom the truth as yet is not. It is an error pregnant with
mere errors and miseries; an error fatal, lamentable, to be
abandoned by all men.
CHAPTER VII
i NOT LAISSEZ-FAIRE
How an Aristocracy, in these present times and circumstances,
could, if never so well disposed, set about governing the
Under Class? What they should do; endeavour or attempt
to do? That is even the question of questions:--the ques-
tion which they have to solve; which it is our utmost function
at present to tell them, lies there for solving, and must and
will be solved.
Insoluble we cannot fancy it. One select class Society has
furnished with wealth, intelligence, leisure, means outward
and inward for governing; another huge class, furnished by
Society with none of those things, declares that it must be
governed: Negative stands fronting Positive; if Negative
and Positive cannot unite,--it will be worse for both! Let the
faculty and earnest constant effort of England combine round
this matter; let it once be recognised as a vital matter.
Innumerable things our Upper Classes and Lawgivers might
"do; " but the preliminary of all things, we must repeat, is
to know that a thing must needs be done. We lead them
here to the shore of a boundless continent; ask them,
Whether they do not with their own eyes see it, see strange
symptoms of it, lying huge, dark, unexplored, inevitable;
full of hope, but also full of difficulty, savagery, almost of
despair? Let them enter; they must enter; Time and
Necessity have brought them hither; where they are is no
continuing! Let them enter; the first step once taken, the
next will have become clearer, all future steps will become
possible. It is a great problem for all of us; but for them-
selves, we may say, more than for any. On them chiefly,
as the expected solvers of it, will the failure of a solution first
fall. One way or other there must and will be a solution.
True, these matters lie far, very far indeed, from the " usual
habits of Parliament," in late times; from the routine course
of any Legislative or Administrative body of men that exists
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? Chartism 207
among us. Too true! And that is even the thing we complain
of: had the mischief been looked into as it gradually rose, it
would not have attained this magnitude. That self-cancelling
Donothingism and Laissez-faire should have got so ingrained
into our Practice, is the source of all these miseries. It is too
true that Parliament, for the matter of near a century now,
has been able to undertake the adjustment of almost one thing
alone, of itself and its own interests; leaving other interests
to rub along very much as they could and would. True, this
was the practice of the whole Eighteenth Century; and
struggles still to prolong itself into the Nineteenth,--which,
however, is no longer the time for it!
Those Eighteenth-century Parliaments, one may hope, will
become a curious object one day. Are not these same
"Memoirs " of Horace Walpole, to an unparliamentary eye,
already a curious object? One of the clearest-sighted men
of the Eighteenth Century writes down his Parliamentary
observation of it there; a determined despiser and merciless
dissector of cant; a liberal withal, one who will go all lengths
for the "glorious revolution," and resist Tory principles to
the death: he writes, with an indignant elegiac feeling, how
Mr. This, who had voted so and then voted so, and was the
son of this and the brother of that, and had such claims to
the fat appointment, was nevertheless scandalously postponed
to Mr. That;--whereupon are not the affairs of this nation
in a bad way? How hungry Greek meets hungry Greek on
the floor of St. Stephen's, and wrestles him and throttles him
till he has to cry, Hold! the office is thine! --of this does
Horace write. --One must say, the destinies of nations do not
always rest entirely on Parliament. One must say, it is a
wonderful affair that science of " government," as practised
in the Eighteenth Century of the Christian era, and still
struggling to practise itself. One must say, it was a lucky
century that could get it so practised: a century which had
inherited richly from its predecessors; and also which did,
not unnaturally, bequeath to its successors a French Revolu-
tion, general overturn, and reign of terror;--intimating, in
most audible thunder, conflagration, guillotinement, can-
nonading and universal war and earthquake, that such
century with its practices had ended.
Ended;--for decidedly that course of procedure will no
longer serve. Parliament will absolutely, with whatever
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? 208 Carlyle's Essays
effort, have to lift itself out of those deep ruts of donothing
routine; and learn to say, on all sides, something more edify-
ing than Laissez-faire. If Parliament cannot learn it, what
is to become of Parliament? The toiling millions of England
ask of their English Parliament foremost of all, Canst thou
govern us or not? Parliament with its privileges is strong;
but Necessity and the Laws of Nature are stronger than it.
If Parliament cannot do this thing, Parliament we prophesy
will do some other thing and things which, in the strangest
and not the happiest way, will forward its being done,--not
much to the advantage of Parliament probably! Done, one
way or other, the thing must be. In these complicated times,
with Cash Payment as the sole nexus between man and man,
the Toiling Classes of mankind declare, in their confused but
must emphatic way, to the Untoiling, that they will be
governed; that they must,--under penalty of Chartisms,
Thuggeries, Rickburnings, and even blacker things than those.
Vain also is it to think that the misery of one class, of the
great universal under class, can be isolated, and kept apart
and peculiar, down in that class. By infallible contagion,
evident enough to reflection, evident even to Political
Economy that will reflect, the misery of the lowest spreads
upwards and upwards till it reaches the very highest; till all
has grown miserable, palpably false and wrong; and poor
drudges hungering "on meal-husks and boiled grass" do,
by circuitous but sure methods, bring kings' heads to the
block!
Cash Payment the sole nexus; and there are so many things
which cash will not pay! Cash is a great miracle; yet it
has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth. "Supply
and demand" we will honour also; and yet how many
"demands " are there, entirely indispensable, which have to
go elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than
cash, before they can get their supply! On the whole, what
astonishing payments does cash make in this world! Of
your Samuel Johnson, furnished with " fourpence-halfpenny
a-day," and solid lodging at nights on the paved streets, as
his payment, we do not speak;--not in the way of complaint:
it is a world-old business for the like of him, that same arrange-
ment or a worse; perhaps the man, for his own uses, had need
even of that, and of no better. Nay is not Society, busy with
its Talfourd Copyright Bill and the like struggling to do
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? Chartism
something effectual for that man;--enacting with all industry
that his own creation be accounted his own manufacture, and
continue unstolen, on his own market-stand, for so long as
sixty years? Perhaps Society is right there; for discre-
pancies on that side too may become excessive. All men are
not patient docile Johnsons; some of them are half-mad
inflammable Rousseaus. Such, in peculiar times, you may
drive too far. Society in France, for example, was not
destitute of cash: Society contrived to pay Philippe d'Orleans
not yet Egalite three hundred thousand a-year and odd, for
driving cabriolets through the streets of Paris and other work
done; but in cash, encouragement, arrangement, recompense
or recognition of any kind, it had nothing to give this same
half-mad Rousseau for his work done; whose brain in conse-
quence, too " much enforced " for a weak brain, uttered hasty
sparks, Contrat Social and the like, which proved not so
quenchable again! In regard to that species of men too, who
knows whether Laissez-faire itself (which is Serjeant Talfourd's
Copyright Bill continued to eternity instead of sixty years)
will not turn out insufficient, and have to cease, one day? --
Alas, in regard to so very many things, Laissez-faire ought
partly to endeavour to cease! But in regard to poor Sans-
potato peasants, Trades-Union craftsmen, Chartist cotton-
spinners, the time has come when it must either cease or a
worse thing straightway begin,--a thing of tinder-boxes,
'vitriol-bottles, secondhand pistols, a visibly insupportable
thing in the eyes of all.
CHAPTER VIII
NEW ERAS
For in very truth it is a "new Era;" a new Practice has
become indispensable in it. One has heard so often of new
eras, new and newest eras, that the word has grown rather
empty of late. Yet new eras do come; there is no fact surer
than that they have come more than once. And always with
a change of era, with a change of intrinsic conditions, there
has to be a change of practice and outward relations brought
about,--if not peaceably, then by violence; for brought about
it has to be, there could no rest come till then. How many
eras and epochs, not noted at the moment;--which indeed is
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? 21 o Carlyle's Essays
the blessedest condition of epochs, that they come quietly,'
making no proclamation of themselves, and are only visible
long after: a Cromwell Rebellion, a French Revolution,
"striking on the Horologe of Time," to tell all mortals what
o'clock it has become, are too expensive, if one could help it! --
In a strange rhapsodic "History of the Teuton Kindred
(Geschichte der Teutschen Sippschqft)," not yet translated into
our language, we have found a Chapter on the Eras of Eng-
land, which, were there room for it, would be instructive in
this place. We shall crave leave to excerpt some pages;
partly as a relief from the too near vexations of our own
rather sorrowful Era; partly as calculated to throw, more or
less obliquely, some degree of light on the meanings of that.
The Author is anonymous: but we have heard him called
the Herr Professor Sauerteig, and indeed think we know him
under that name:
"Who shall say what work and works this England has yet
to do? For what purpose this land of Britain was created,
set like a jewel in the encircling blue of Ocean; and this Tribe
of Saxons, fashioned in the depths of Time,' on the shores of
the Black Sea ' or elsewhere,' out of Harzgebirge rock' or
whatever other material, was sent travelling hitherward?
No man can say: it was for a work, and for works, incapable
of announcement in words. Thou seest them there; part
of them stand done, and visible to the eye; even these thou
canst not name: how much less the others still matter of
prophecy only! --They live and labour there, these twenty
million Saxon men; they have been born into this mystery
of life out of the darkness of Past Time:--how changed now
since the first Father and first Mother of them set forth,
quitting the tribe of Theuth, with passionate farewell, under
questionable auspices; on scanty bullock-cart, if they had
even bullocks and a cart; with axe and hunting-spear, to
subdue a portion of our common Planet! This Nation now
has cities and seedfields, has spring-vans, dray-wagons,
Long-Acre carriages, nay railway trains; has coined-money,
exchange-bills, laws, books, war-fleets, spinning-jennies, ware-
houses and West-India Docks: see what it has built and done,
what it can and will yet build and do! These umbrageous
pleasure-woods, green meadows, shaven stubblefields, smooth-
sweeping roads; these high-domed cities, and what they hold
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21 I
and bear; this mild Good-morrow which the stranger bids
thee, equitable, nay forbearant if need were, judicially calm
and law-observing towards thee a stranger, what work has
it not cost? How many brawny arms, generation after
generation, sank down wearied; how many noble hearts, toil-
ing while life lasted, and wise heads that wore themselves
dim with scanning and discerning, before this waste White-
cliff, Albion so-called, with its other Cassiterides Tin Islands,
became a British Empire! The stream of World-History
has altered its complexion; Romans are dead out, English
are come in. The red broad mark of Romanhood, stamped
ineffaceably on that Cart of Time, has disappeared from the
present, and belongs only to the past. England plays its
part; England too has a mark to leave, and we will hope none
of the least significant. Of a truth, whosoever had; with the
bodily eye, seen Hengst and Horsa mooring on the mud-beach
r of Thanet, on that spring morning of the Year 449; and then,
with the spiritual eye, looked forward to New York. Calcutta,
Sidney Cove, across the ages and the oceans; and thought
what Wellingtons, Washingtons, Shakspeares, Miltons, Watts,
Arkwrights, William Pitts and Davie Crocketts had to issue
from that business, and do their several taskworks so,--he
would have said, those leather-boats of Hengst's had a kind
of cargo in them! A genealogic Mythus superior to any in
the old Greek, to almost any in the old Hebrew itself; and
not a Mythus either, but every fibre of it fact. An Epic Poem
was there, and all manner of poems; except that the Poet
has not yet made his appearance. "
"Six centuries of obscure endeavour," continues Sauerteig,
"which to read Historians, you would incline to call mere
obscure slaughter, discord, and misendeavour; of which all
that the human memory, after a thousand readings, can
remember, is that it resembled, what Milton names it, the
'flocking and fighting of kites and crows:' this, in brief,
is the history of the Heptarchy or Seven Kingdoms. Six
centuries; a stormy springtime, if there ever was one, for a
Nation. Obscure fighting of kites and crows, however, was
not the History of it; but was only what the dim Historians
of it saw good to record. Were not forests felled, bogs
drained, fields made arable, towns built, laws made, and the
Thought and Practice of men in many ways perfected?
Venerable Bede had got a language which he could now not
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? 2I 2
Carlyle's Essays
only speak, but spell and put on paper: think what lies in
that. Bemurmured by the German sea-flood swinging slow
with sullen roar against those hoarse Northumbrian rocks,
the venerable man set down several things in a legible
manner. Or was the smith idle, hammering only wartools?
He had learned metallurgy, stithy-work in general; and
made ploughshares withal, and adzes and mason-hammers.
Castra, Caesters or Chesters, Dons, Tons (Zauns, Enclosures
or Towns), not a few, did they not stand there; of burnt brick,
of timber, of lath-and-clay; sending up the peaceable smoke
of hearths? England had a History then too; though no
Historian to write it. Those 'flockings and fightings,' sad
inevitable necessities, were the expensive tentative steps
towards some capability of living and working in concert:
experiments they were, not always conclusive, to ascertain
who had the might over whom, the right over whom. "
"M. Thierry has written an ingenious Book, celebrating
with considerable pathos the fate of the Saxons fallen under
that fierce-hearted Conqucestor, Acquirer or Conqueror, as he
is named. M. Thierry professes to have a turn for looking at
that side of things: the fate of the Welsh too moves him; of
the Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them
into the mountainous nooks of the West, whither they were
not worth following. Noble deeds, according to M. Thierry,
were done by these unsuccessful men, heroic sufferings under-
gone; which it is a pious duty to rescue from forgetfulness.
True, surely! A tear at least is due to the unhappy: it is
right and fit that there should be a man to assert that lost
cause too, and see what can still be made of it. Most right:
--and yet, on the whole, taking matters on that great scale,
what can we say but that the cause which pleased the gods
has in the end to please Cato also? Cato cannot alter it;
Cato will find that he cannot at bottom wish to alter it.
"Might and Right do differ frightfully from hour to hour;
but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to be
identical. Whose land was this of Britain? God's who made
it, His and no other's it was and is. Who of God's creatures
had right to live in it? The wolves and bisons? Yes they,
till one with a better right showed himself. The Celt,
'aboriginal savage of Europe,' as a snarling antiquary names
him, arrived, pretending to have a better right; and did
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213
accordingly, not without pain to the bisons, make good the
same. He had a better right to that piece of God's land;
namely a better might to turn it to use;--a might to settle
himself there, at least, and try what use he could turn it to.
The bisons disappeared; the Celts took possession, and tilled.
Forever, was it to be? Alas, Forever is not a category that
can establish itself in this world of Time. A world of Time,
by the very definition of it, is a world of mortality and
mutability, of Beginning and Ending.
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197
now them: the terror and horror they inspire is but the
ote of preparation for the truth they are to teach; a mere
raste of terror if that be not learned. Inferences enough;
lost didactic, practically applicable in all departments of
English things! One inference, but one inclusive of all, shall
ontent us here; this namely: That Laissez-faire has as good
s done its part in a great many provinces; that in the
irovince of the Working Classes, Laissez-faire having passed
ts New Poor-Law, has reached the suicidal point, and now,
s felo-de-se, lies dying there, in torchlight meetings and such-
ike; that, in brief, a government of the under classes by the
ipper on a principle of Let-alone is no longer possible m
Cngland in these days. This is the one inference inclusive
if all. For there can be no acting or doing of any kind, till
t be recognised that there is a thing to be done; the thing
>nce recognised, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible,
rhe Working Classes cannot any longer go on without govern-
nent; without being actually guided and governed; England
annot subsist in peace till, by some means or other, some
guidance and government for them is found.
For, alas, on us too the rude truth has come home. Wrap-
pages and speciosities all worn off, the haggard naked fact
ipeakstous: Are these millions taught? Are these millions
juided? We have a Church, the venerable embodiment of
in idea which may well call itself divine; which our fathers
or long ages, feeling it to be divine, have been embodying
is we see: it is a Church well furnished with equipments and
ippurtenances; educated in universities; rich in money;
>et on high places that it may be conspicuous to all, honoured
3f all. We have an Aristocracy of landed wealth and
:ommercial wealth, in whose hands lies the law-making and
the law-administering; an Aristocracy rich, powerful, long
tecure in its place; an Aristocracy with more faculty put
:ree into its hands than was ever before, in any country or
time, put into the hands of any class of men. This Church
answers: Yes, the people are taught. This Aristocracy,
astonishment in every feature, answers: Yes, surely the
people are guided! Do we not pass what Acts of Parliament
are needful; as many as thirty-nine for the shooting of the
partridges alone? Are there not treadmills, gibbets; even
hospitals, poor-rates, New Poor-Law? So answers Church;
so answers Aristocracy, astonishment in every feature.
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? 198 Carlyle's Essays
Fact, in the mean while, takes his lucifer-box, sets fire t
wheat-stacks; sheds an all-too dismal light on several thing;
Fact searches for his third-rate potato, not in the meekes
humour, six-and-thirty weeks each year; and does not fin,
it. Fact passionately joins Messiah Thom of Canterbury
and has himself shot for a new fifth-monarchy brought ii
by Bedlam. Fact holds his fustian-jacket Femgericht ii
Glasgow City. Fact carts his Petition over London streets
begging that you would simply have the goodness to gran
him universal suffrage and "the five points," by way o
remedy. These are not symptoms of teaching and guiding
Nay, at bottom, is it not a singular thing this of Laissez
faire, from the first origin of it? As good as an abdication
on the part of governors; an admission that they are hence
forth incompetent to govern, that they are not there tc
govern at all, but to do--one knows not what! The universa
demand of Laissez-faire by a people from its governors o'i
upper classes, is a soft-sounding demand; but it is only one
step removed from the fatalist. "Laissez-faire," exclaims
a sardonic German writer, " What is this universal cry fo'
Laissez-faire? Does it mean that human affairs requin
no guidance; that wisdom and forethought cannot guidd
them better than folly and accident? Alas, does it notl
mean: 'Such guidance is worse than none! Leave us alone
of your guidance; eat your wages, and sleep! '" And now
if guidance have grown indispensable, and the sleep continue;
what becomes of the sleep and its wages ? --In those entirely
surprising circumstances to which the Eighteenth Century
had brought us, in the time of Adam Smith, Laissez-fairi
was a reasonable cry;--as indeed, in all circumstances, for a
wise governor there will be meaning in the principle of itj
To wise governors you will cry: "See what you will, and will
not, let alone. " To unwise governors, to hungry Greeks
throttling down hungry Greeks on the floor of a St. Stephen's
you will cry: "Let all things alone; for Heaven's sake
meddle ye with nothing! "
How Laissez-faire may adjust itself in other provinces wt
say not: but we do venture to say, and ask whether event
everywhere, in world - history and parish - history, in al
manner of dialects are not saying it, That in regard to th,
lower orders of society, and their governance and guidance
the principle of Laissez-faire has terminated, and is no longe^
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pplicable at all, in this Europe of ours, still less in this
)ngland of ours. Not misgovernment, nor yet no-govern-
lent; only government will now serve. What is the
leaning of the " five points," if we will understand them?
Vhat are all popular commotions and maddest bellowings,
rom Peterloo to the Place-de-Greve itself? Bellowings,
^articulate cries as of a dumb creature in rage and pain;
0 the ear of wisdom they are inarticulate prayers: "Guide
tie, govern me! I am mad and miserable, and cannot guide
nyself! " Surely of all "rights of man," this right of the
jnorant man to be guided by the wiser, to be, gently or
orcibly, held in the true course by him, is the indisputablest.
Mature herself ordains it from the first; Society struggles
owards perfection by enforcing and accomplishing it more
jid more. If Freedom have any meaning, it means enjoy-
nent of this right, wherein all other rights are enjoyed. It
5 a sacred right and duty, on both sides; and the summary
if all social duties whatsoever between the two. Why does
;he one toil with his hands, if the other be not to toil, still
nore unweariedly, with heart and head? The brawny
raftsman finds it no child's-play to mould his unpliant
nigged masses; neither is guidance of men a dilettantism:
what it becomes when treated as a dilettantism, we may see!
The wild horse bounds homeless through the wilderness, is
lot led to stall and manger; but neither does he toil for you,
3ut for himself only.
Democracy, we are well aware, what is called "self-
;overnment " of the multitude by the multitude, is in words
;he thing everywhere passionately clamoured for at present,
democracy makes rapid progress in these latter times, and
! ver more rapid, in a perilous accelerative ratio; towards |
lemocracy, and that only, the progress of things is every-
where tending as to the final goal and winning-post. So
Jiink, so clamour the multitudes everywhere. And yet all
nen may see, whose sight is good for much, that in demo-
:racy can lie no finality; that with the completest winning
)f democracy there is nothing yet won,--except emptiness,
ind the free chance to win! Democracy is, by the nature
)f it, a self-cancelling business; and gives in the long-run
1 net result of zero. Where no government is wanted, save
:hat of the parish-constable, as in America with its boundless
nil, every man being able to find work and recompense for
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? 200 Carlyle's Essays
himself, democracy may subsist; not elsewhere, except
briefly, as a swift transition towards something other anc
farther. Democracy never yet, that we heard of, was able
to accomplish much work, beyond that same cancelling oi
itself. Rome and Athens are themes for the schools; un-
exceptionable for that purpose. In Rome and Athens, as
elsewhere, if we look practically, we shall find that it was not
by loud voting and debating of many, but by wise insight
and ordering of a few that the work was done. So is it ever
so will it ever be.
The French Convention was a Parliament elected "by
the five points," with ballot-boxes, universal suffrages, and
what not, as perfectly as Parliament can hope to be in this
world; and had indeed a pretty spell of work to do, and did
it. The French Convention had to cease from being a free
Parliament, and become more arbitrary than any Sultan
Bajazet, before it could so much as subsist. It had to purgt
out its argumentative Girondins, elect its Supreme Committee
of Salut, guillotine into silence and extinction all that gain-
said it, and rule and work literally by the sternest despotism
ever seen in Europe, before it could rule at all. Napoleon
was not president of a republic; Cromwell tried hard to rule
in that way, but found that he could not. These, "the
armed soldiers of democracy," had to chain democracy
under their feet, and become despots over it, before they
could work out the earnest obscure purpose of democracy,
itself!
Democracy, take it where you will in our Europe, is found
but as a regulated method of rebellion and abrogation; it
abrogates the old arrangement of things; and leaves, as
we say, zero and vacuity for the institution of a new arrange-
ment. It is the consummation of No-government and
Laissez-faire. It may be natural for our Europe at present;
but cannot be the ultimatum of it. Not towards the impossi-
bility, "self-government" of a multitude by a multitude;
but towards some possibility, government by the wisest,
does bewildered Europe struggle. The blessedest possibility:
not misgovernment, not Laissez-faire, but veritable govern-
ment! Cannot one discern too, across all democratic turbu-
lence, clattering of ballot-boxes and infinite sorrowful jangle,
needful or not, that this at bottom is the wish and prayer of
all human hearts, everywhere and at all times: "Give me
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201
a leader; a true leader, not a false sham-leader; a true
1 leader, that he may guide me on the true way, that I may be
loyal to him, that I may swear fealty to him and follow him,
and feel that it is well with me! " The relation of the taught
to the teacher, of the loyal subject to his guiding king, is,
under one shape or another, the vital element of human
Society; indispensable to it, perennial in it; without which,
as a body reft of its soul, it falls down into death, and with
horrid noisome dissolution passes away and disappears.
But verily in these times, with their new stern Evangel,
that Speciosities which are not Realities can no longer be,
all Aristocracies, Priesthoods, Persons in Authority, are
called upon to consider. What is an Aristocracy? A
corporation of the Best, of the Bravest. To this joyfully,
with heart-loyalty, do men pay the half of their substance,
'to equip and decorate their Best, to lodge them in palaces,
set them high over all. For it is of the nature of men, in
every time, to honour and love their Best; to know no limit
in honouring them. Whatsoever Aristocracy is still a
corporation of the Best, is safe from all peril, and the land
it rules is a safe and blessed land. Whatsoever Aristocracy
does not even attempt to be that, but only to wear the clothes
of that, is not safe; neither is the land it rules in safe! For
this now is our sad lot, that we must find a real Aristocracy,
that an apparent Aristocracy, how plausible soever, has
become inadequate for us. One way or other, the world will
absolutely need to be governed; if not by this class of men,
then by that. One can predict, without gift of prophecy,
that the era of routine is nearly ended. Wisdom and faculty
alone, faithful, valiant, ever-zealous, not pleasant but pain-
ful, continual effort will suffice. Cost what it may, by one
means or another, the toiling multitudes of this perplexed,
over-crowded Europe must and will find governors. "Laissez-
faire, Leave them to do"? The thing they will do, if so left,
is too frightful to think of! It has been done once, in sight
of the whole earth, in these generations: can it need to be
done a second time?
For a Priesthood, in like manner, whatsoever its titles, pos-
sessions, professions, there is but one question: Does it teach
and spiritually guide this people, yea or no? If yea, then is
all well. But if no, then let it strive earnestly to alter, for as
II 704 o
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? 202 Carlyle's Essays
yet there is nothing well! Nothing, we say: and indeed is
not this that we call spiritual guidance properly the soul of the
whole, the life and eyesight of the whole? The world asks of
its Church in these times, more passionately than of any other
Institution any question, " Canst thou teach us or not? "--A
Priesthood in France, when the world asked, "What canst
thou do for us? " answered only, aloud and ever louder,
"Are we not of God? Invested with all power? "--till at
length France cut short this controversy too, in what frightful
way we know. To all men who believed in the Church, to all
men who believed in God and the soul of man, there was no
issue of the French Revolution half so sorrowful as that.
France cast out its benighted blind Priesthood into destruc-
tion; yet with what a loss to France also! A solution of
continuity, what we may well call such; and this where con-
tinuity is so momentous: the New, whatever it may be,
cannot now grow out of the Old, but is severed sheer asunder
from the Old,--how much lies wasted in that gap! That one
whole generation of thinkers should be without a religion to
believe, or even to contradict; that Christianity, in thinking
France, should as it were fade away so long into a remote
extraneous tradition, was one of the saddest facts connected
with the future of that country. Look at such Political and
Moral Philosophies, St. -Simonisms, Robert-Macairisms, and
the "Literature of Desperation "! Kingship was perhaps
but a cheap waste, compared with this of the Priestship;
under which France still, all but unconsciously, labours;
and may long labour, remediless the while. Let others
consider it, and take warning by it! France is a pregnant
example in all ways. Aristocracies that do not govern,
Priesthoods that do not teach; the misery of that, and the
misery of altering that,--are written in Belshazzar fire-letters
on the history of France.
Or does the British reader, safe in the assurance that
"England is not France," call all this unpleasant doctrine
of ours ideology, perfectibility, and a vacant dream? Does
the British reader, resting on the faith that what has been
these two generations was from the beginning, and will be
to the end, assert to himself that things are already as they
can be, as they must be; that on the whole, no Upper Classes
did ever "govern" the Lower, in this sense of governing?
Believe it not, O British reader! Man is man everywhere;
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203
dislikes to have "sensible species" and "ghosts of defunct
'bodies " foisted on him, in England even as in France.
How much the Upper Classes did actually, in any the most
perfect Feudal time, return to the Under by way of recom-
pense, in government, guidance, protection, we will not
undertake to specify here. In Charity-Balls, Soup-Kitchens,
in Quarter-Sessions, Prison-Discipline and Treadmills, we
can well believe the old Feudal Aristocracy not to have
> surpassed the new. Yet we do say that the old Aristocracy
were the governors of the Lower Classes, the guides of the
Lower Classes; and even, at bottom, that they existed as
an Aristocracy because they were found adequate for that.
Not by Charity-Balls and Soup-Kitchens; not so; far other-
wise! But it was their happiness that, in struggling for their
own objects, they had to govern the Lower Classes, even in
this sense of governing. For, in one word, Cash Payment
had not then grown to be the universal sole nexus of man to
man; it was something other than money that the high then
expected from the low, and could not live without getting
from the low. Not as buyer and seller alone, of land or what
else it might be, but in many senses still as soldier and captain,
as clansman and head, as loyal subject and guiding king, was
the low related to the high. With the supreme triumph of
Cash, a changed time has entered; there must a changed
Aristocracy enter. We invite the British reader to meditate
earnestly on these things.
Another thing, which the British reader often reads and
hears in this time, is worth his meditating for a moment:
That Society "exists for the protection of property. " To
which it is added, that the poor man also has property,
namely, his "labour," and the fifteen-pence or three-and-
sixpence a-day he can get for that. True enough, O friends,
, " for protecting properly ;" most true: and indeed, if you
will once sufficiently enforce that Eighth Commandment, the
whole " rights of man " are well cared for; I know no better
definition of the rights of man. Thou shalt not steal, thou shall
not be stolen from: what a Society were that; Plato's Repub-
lic, More's Utopia mere emblems of it! Give every man what
is his, the accurate price of what he has done and been, no
man shall any more complain, neither shall the earth suffer
any more. For the protection of property, in very truth,
and for that alone!
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? 204 Carlyle's Essays
And now what is thy property? That parchment title-
deed, that purse thou buttonest in thy breeches-pocket? Is
that thy valuable property? Unhappy brother, most poor
insolvent brother, I without parchment at all, with purse
oftenest in the flaccid state, imponderous, which will not fling
against the wind, have quite other property than that! I
have the miraculous breath of Life in me, breathed into my
nostrils by Almighty God. I have affections, thoughts, a
god-given capability to be and do; rights, therefore,--the
right for instance to thy love if I love thee, to thy guidance
if I obey thee: the strangest rights, whereof in church-pulpits
one still hears something, though almost unintelligible now;
rights stretching high into Immensity, far into Eternity!
Fifteen-pence a-day; three - and - sixpence a-day; eight
hundred pounds and odd a-day, dost thou call that my
property? I value that little; little all I could purchase
with that. For truly, as is said, what matters it? In torn
boots, in soft-hung carriages-and-four, a man gets always to
his journey's end. Socrates walked barefoot, or in wooden
shoes, and yet arrived happily. They never asked him,
What shoes or conveyance? never, What wages hadst thou?
but simply, What work didst thou? --Property, 0 brother?
"Of my very body I have but a life-rent. " As for this flaccid
purse of mine, 'tis something, nothing; has been the slave
of pickpockets, cutthroats, Jew-brokers, gold-dust robbers;
'twas his, 'tis mine;--'tis thine, if thou care much to steal it.
But my soul, breathed into me by God, my Me and what
capability is there; that is mine, and I will resist the stealing
of it. I call that mine and not thine; I will keep that, and
do what work I can with it: God has given it me, the Devil
shall not take it away! Alas, my friends, Society exists and
has existed for a great many purposes, not so easy to specify!
Society, it is understood, does not in any age prevent a
man from being what he can be. A sooty African can become
a Toussaint L'Ouverture, a murderous Three-fingered Jack,
let the yellow West Indies say to it what they will.
A
Scottish Poet, "proud of his name and country," can apply
fervently to "Gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt," and
become a gauger of beer-barrels, and tragic immortal broken-
hearted Singer; the stifled echo of his melody audible through
long centuries, one other note in "that sacred Miserere"
that rises up to Heaven, out of all times and lands. What I
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can be thou decidedly wilt not hinder me from being. Nay
even for being what I could be, I have the strangest claims on
thee,--not convenient to adjust at present! Protection of
breeches-pocket property? 0 reader, to what shifts is poor
Society reduced, struggling to give still some account of
herself, in epochs when Cash Payment has become the sole
nexus of man to man! On the whole, we will advise Society
not to talk at all about what she exists for; but rather with
her whole industry to exist, to try how she can keep existing!
That is her best plan. She may depend upon it, if she ever,
by cruel chance, did come to exist only for protection of
breeches-pocket property, she would lose very soon the gift
of protecting even that, and find her career in our lower
world on the point of terminating! --
For the rest, that in the most perfect Feudal Ages, the
Ideal of Aristocracy nowhere lived in vacant serene purity as
an Ideal, but always as a poor imperfect Actual, little heeding
or not knowing at all that an Ideal lay in it,--this too we will
cheerfully admit. Imperfection, it is known, cleaves to human
things; far is the ideal departed from, in most times; very
far! And yet so long as an Ideal (any soul of Truth) does,
in never so confused a manner, exist and work within the
Actual, it is a tolerable business. Not so, when the Ideal has
entirely departed, and the Actual owns to itself that it has no
Idea, no soul of Truth any longer: at that degree of imperfec-
tion human things cannot continue living; they are obliged
to alter or expire, when they attain to that. Blotches and /
diseases exist on the skin and deeper, the,heart continuing
whole; but it is another matter when the heart itself becomes
diseased; when there is no heart, but a monstrous gangrene
pretending to exist there as heart!
On the whole, O reader, thou wilt find everywhere that
things which have had an existence among men have first of
all had to have a truth and worth in them, and were not sem-
blances but realities. Nothing not a reality ever yet got men
to pay bed and board to it for long. Look at Mahometanism
itself! Dalai-Lamaism, even Dalai-Lamaism, one rejoices to
discover, may be worth its victuals in this world; not a
quackery but a sincerity; not a nothing but a something!
The mistake of those who believe that fraud, force, injustice,
whatsoever untrue thing, howsoever cloaked and decorated,
was ever or can ever be the principle of man's relations to
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? 206 Carlyle's Essays
man, is great and the greatest. It is the error of the infidel;
in whom the truth as yet is not. It is an error pregnant with
mere errors and miseries; an error fatal, lamentable, to be
abandoned by all men.
CHAPTER VII
i NOT LAISSEZ-FAIRE
How an Aristocracy, in these present times and circumstances,
could, if never so well disposed, set about governing the
Under Class? What they should do; endeavour or attempt
to do? That is even the question of questions:--the ques-
tion which they have to solve; which it is our utmost function
at present to tell them, lies there for solving, and must and
will be solved.
Insoluble we cannot fancy it. One select class Society has
furnished with wealth, intelligence, leisure, means outward
and inward for governing; another huge class, furnished by
Society with none of those things, declares that it must be
governed: Negative stands fronting Positive; if Negative
and Positive cannot unite,--it will be worse for both! Let the
faculty and earnest constant effort of England combine round
this matter; let it once be recognised as a vital matter.
Innumerable things our Upper Classes and Lawgivers might
"do; " but the preliminary of all things, we must repeat, is
to know that a thing must needs be done. We lead them
here to the shore of a boundless continent; ask them,
Whether they do not with their own eyes see it, see strange
symptoms of it, lying huge, dark, unexplored, inevitable;
full of hope, but also full of difficulty, savagery, almost of
despair? Let them enter; they must enter; Time and
Necessity have brought them hither; where they are is no
continuing! Let them enter; the first step once taken, the
next will have become clearer, all future steps will become
possible. It is a great problem for all of us; but for them-
selves, we may say, more than for any. On them chiefly,
as the expected solvers of it, will the failure of a solution first
fall. One way or other there must and will be a solution.
True, these matters lie far, very far indeed, from the " usual
habits of Parliament," in late times; from the routine course
of any Legislative or Administrative body of men that exists
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? Chartism 207
among us. Too true! And that is even the thing we complain
of: had the mischief been looked into as it gradually rose, it
would not have attained this magnitude. That self-cancelling
Donothingism and Laissez-faire should have got so ingrained
into our Practice, is the source of all these miseries. It is too
true that Parliament, for the matter of near a century now,
has been able to undertake the adjustment of almost one thing
alone, of itself and its own interests; leaving other interests
to rub along very much as they could and would. True, this
was the practice of the whole Eighteenth Century; and
struggles still to prolong itself into the Nineteenth,--which,
however, is no longer the time for it!
Those Eighteenth-century Parliaments, one may hope, will
become a curious object one day. Are not these same
"Memoirs " of Horace Walpole, to an unparliamentary eye,
already a curious object? One of the clearest-sighted men
of the Eighteenth Century writes down his Parliamentary
observation of it there; a determined despiser and merciless
dissector of cant; a liberal withal, one who will go all lengths
for the "glorious revolution," and resist Tory principles to
the death: he writes, with an indignant elegiac feeling, how
Mr. This, who had voted so and then voted so, and was the
son of this and the brother of that, and had such claims to
the fat appointment, was nevertheless scandalously postponed
to Mr. That;--whereupon are not the affairs of this nation
in a bad way? How hungry Greek meets hungry Greek on
the floor of St. Stephen's, and wrestles him and throttles him
till he has to cry, Hold! the office is thine! --of this does
Horace write. --One must say, the destinies of nations do not
always rest entirely on Parliament. One must say, it is a
wonderful affair that science of " government," as practised
in the Eighteenth Century of the Christian era, and still
struggling to practise itself. One must say, it was a lucky
century that could get it so practised: a century which had
inherited richly from its predecessors; and also which did,
not unnaturally, bequeath to its successors a French Revolu-
tion, general overturn, and reign of terror;--intimating, in
most audible thunder, conflagration, guillotinement, can-
nonading and universal war and earthquake, that such
century with its practices had ended.
Ended;--for decidedly that course of procedure will no
longer serve. Parliament will absolutely, with whatever
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? 208 Carlyle's Essays
effort, have to lift itself out of those deep ruts of donothing
routine; and learn to say, on all sides, something more edify-
ing than Laissez-faire. If Parliament cannot learn it, what
is to become of Parliament? The toiling millions of England
ask of their English Parliament foremost of all, Canst thou
govern us or not? Parliament with its privileges is strong;
but Necessity and the Laws of Nature are stronger than it.
If Parliament cannot do this thing, Parliament we prophesy
will do some other thing and things which, in the strangest
and not the happiest way, will forward its being done,--not
much to the advantage of Parliament probably! Done, one
way or other, the thing must be. In these complicated times,
with Cash Payment as the sole nexus between man and man,
the Toiling Classes of mankind declare, in their confused but
must emphatic way, to the Untoiling, that they will be
governed; that they must,--under penalty of Chartisms,
Thuggeries, Rickburnings, and even blacker things than those.
Vain also is it to think that the misery of one class, of the
great universal under class, can be isolated, and kept apart
and peculiar, down in that class. By infallible contagion,
evident enough to reflection, evident even to Political
Economy that will reflect, the misery of the lowest spreads
upwards and upwards till it reaches the very highest; till all
has grown miserable, palpably false and wrong; and poor
drudges hungering "on meal-husks and boiled grass" do,
by circuitous but sure methods, bring kings' heads to the
block!
Cash Payment the sole nexus; and there are so many things
which cash will not pay! Cash is a great miracle; yet it
has not all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth. "Supply
and demand" we will honour also; and yet how many
"demands " are there, entirely indispensable, which have to
go elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than
cash, before they can get their supply! On the whole, what
astonishing payments does cash make in this world! Of
your Samuel Johnson, furnished with " fourpence-halfpenny
a-day," and solid lodging at nights on the paved streets, as
his payment, we do not speak;--not in the way of complaint:
it is a world-old business for the like of him, that same arrange-
ment or a worse; perhaps the man, for his own uses, had need
even of that, and of no better. Nay is not Society, busy with
its Talfourd Copyright Bill and the like struggling to do
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? Chartism
something effectual for that man;--enacting with all industry
that his own creation be accounted his own manufacture, and
continue unstolen, on his own market-stand, for so long as
sixty years? Perhaps Society is right there; for discre-
pancies on that side too may become excessive. All men are
not patient docile Johnsons; some of them are half-mad
inflammable Rousseaus. Such, in peculiar times, you may
drive too far. Society in France, for example, was not
destitute of cash: Society contrived to pay Philippe d'Orleans
not yet Egalite three hundred thousand a-year and odd, for
driving cabriolets through the streets of Paris and other work
done; but in cash, encouragement, arrangement, recompense
or recognition of any kind, it had nothing to give this same
half-mad Rousseau for his work done; whose brain in conse-
quence, too " much enforced " for a weak brain, uttered hasty
sparks, Contrat Social and the like, which proved not so
quenchable again! In regard to that species of men too, who
knows whether Laissez-faire itself (which is Serjeant Talfourd's
Copyright Bill continued to eternity instead of sixty years)
will not turn out insufficient, and have to cease, one day? --
Alas, in regard to so very many things, Laissez-faire ought
partly to endeavour to cease! But in regard to poor Sans-
potato peasants, Trades-Union craftsmen, Chartist cotton-
spinners, the time has come when it must either cease or a
worse thing straightway begin,--a thing of tinder-boxes,
'vitriol-bottles, secondhand pistols, a visibly insupportable
thing in the eyes of all.
CHAPTER VIII
NEW ERAS
For in very truth it is a "new Era;" a new Practice has
become indispensable in it. One has heard so often of new
eras, new and newest eras, that the word has grown rather
empty of late. Yet new eras do come; there is no fact surer
than that they have come more than once. And always with
a change of era, with a change of intrinsic conditions, there
has to be a change of practice and outward relations brought
about,--if not peaceably, then by violence; for brought about
it has to be, there could no rest come till then. How many
eras and epochs, not noted at the moment;--which indeed is
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? 21 o Carlyle's Essays
the blessedest condition of epochs, that they come quietly,'
making no proclamation of themselves, and are only visible
long after: a Cromwell Rebellion, a French Revolution,
"striking on the Horologe of Time," to tell all mortals what
o'clock it has become, are too expensive, if one could help it! --
In a strange rhapsodic "History of the Teuton Kindred
(Geschichte der Teutschen Sippschqft)," not yet translated into
our language, we have found a Chapter on the Eras of Eng-
land, which, were there room for it, would be instructive in
this place. We shall crave leave to excerpt some pages;
partly as a relief from the too near vexations of our own
rather sorrowful Era; partly as calculated to throw, more or
less obliquely, some degree of light on the meanings of that.
The Author is anonymous: but we have heard him called
the Herr Professor Sauerteig, and indeed think we know him
under that name:
"Who shall say what work and works this England has yet
to do? For what purpose this land of Britain was created,
set like a jewel in the encircling blue of Ocean; and this Tribe
of Saxons, fashioned in the depths of Time,' on the shores of
the Black Sea ' or elsewhere,' out of Harzgebirge rock' or
whatever other material, was sent travelling hitherward?
No man can say: it was for a work, and for works, incapable
of announcement in words. Thou seest them there; part
of them stand done, and visible to the eye; even these thou
canst not name: how much less the others still matter of
prophecy only! --They live and labour there, these twenty
million Saxon men; they have been born into this mystery
of life out of the darkness of Past Time:--how changed now
since the first Father and first Mother of them set forth,
quitting the tribe of Theuth, with passionate farewell, under
questionable auspices; on scanty bullock-cart, if they had
even bullocks and a cart; with axe and hunting-spear, to
subdue a portion of our common Planet! This Nation now
has cities and seedfields, has spring-vans, dray-wagons,
Long-Acre carriages, nay railway trains; has coined-money,
exchange-bills, laws, books, war-fleets, spinning-jennies, ware-
houses and West-India Docks: see what it has built and done,
what it can and will yet build and do! These umbrageous
pleasure-woods, green meadows, shaven stubblefields, smooth-
sweeping roads; these high-domed cities, and what they hold
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21 I
and bear; this mild Good-morrow which the stranger bids
thee, equitable, nay forbearant if need were, judicially calm
and law-observing towards thee a stranger, what work has
it not cost? How many brawny arms, generation after
generation, sank down wearied; how many noble hearts, toil-
ing while life lasted, and wise heads that wore themselves
dim with scanning and discerning, before this waste White-
cliff, Albion so-called, with its other Cassiterides Tin Islands,
became a British Empire! The stream of World-History
has altered its complexion; Romans are dead out, English
are come in. The red broad mark of Romanhood, stamped
ineffaceably on that Cart of Time, has disappeared from the
present, and belongs only to the past. England plays its
part; England too has a mark to leave, and we will hope none
of the least significant. Of a truth, whosoever had; with the
bodily eye, seen Hengst and Horsa mooring on the mud-beach
r of Thanet, on that spring morning of the Year 449; and then,
with the spiritual eye, looked forward to New York. Calcutta,
Sidney Cove, across the ages and the oceans; and thought
what Wellingtons, Washingtons, Shakspeares, Miltons, Watts,
Arkwrights, William Pitts and Davie Crocketts had to issue
from that business, and do their several taskworks so,--he
would have said, those leather-boats of Hengst's had a kind
of cargo in them! A genealogic Mythus superior to any in
the old Greek, to almost any in the old Hebrew itself; and
not a Mythus either, but every fibre of it fact. An Epic Poem
was there, and all manner of poems; except that the Poet
has not yet made his appearance. "
"Six centuries of obscure endeavour," continues Sauerteig,
"which to read Historians, you would incline to call mere
obscure slaughter, discord, and misendeavour; of which all
that the human memory, after a thousand readings, can
remember, is that it resembled, what Milton names it, the
'flocking and fighting of kites and crows:' this, in brief,
is the history of the Heptarchy or Seven Kingdoms. Six
centuries; a stormy springtime, if there ever was one, for a
Nation. Obscure fighting of kites and crows, however, was
not the History of it; but was only what the dim Historians
of it saw good to record. Were not forests felled, bogs
drained, fields made arable, towns built, laws made, and the
Thought and Practice of men in many ways perfected?
Venerable Bede had got a language which he could now not
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? 2I 2
Carlyle's Essays
only speak, but spell and put on paper: think what lies in
that. Bemurmured by the German sea-flood swinging slow
with sullen roar against those hoarse Northumbrian rocks,
the venerable man set down several things in a legible
manner. Or was the smith idle, hammering only wartools?
He had learned metallurgy, stithy-work in general; and
made ploughshares withal, and adzes and mason-hammers.
Castra, Caesters or Chesters, Dons, Tons (Zauns, Enclosures
or Towns), not a few, did they not stand there; of burnt brick,
of timber, of lath-and-clay; sending up the peaceable smoke
of hearths? England had a History then too; though no
Historian to write it. Those 'flockings and fightings,' sad
inevitable necessities, were the expensive tentative steps
towards some capability of living and working in concert:
experiments they were, not always conclusive, to ascertain
who had the might over whom, the right over whom. "
"M. Thierry has written an ingenious Book, celebrating
with considerable pathos the fate of the Saxons fallen under
that fierce-hearted Conqucestor, Acquirer or Conqueror, as he
is named. M. Thierry professes to have a turn for looking at
that side of things: the fate of the Welsh too moves him; of
the Celts generally, whom a fiercer race swept before them
into the mountainous nooks of the West, whither they were
not worth following. Noble deeds, according to M. Thierry,
were done by these unsuccessful men, heroic sufferings under-
gone; which it is a pious duty to rescue from forgetfulness.
True, surely! A tear at least is due to the unhappy: it is
right and fit that there should be a man to assert that lost
cause too, and see what can still be made of it. Most right:
--and yet, on the whole, taking matters on that great scale,
what can we say but that the cause which pleased the gods
has in the end to please Cato also? Cato cannot alter it;
Cato will find that he cannot at bottom wish to alter it.
"Might and Right do differ frightfully from hour to hour;
but give them centuries to try it in, they are found to be
identical. Whose land was this of Britain? God's who made
it, His and no other's it was and is. Who of God's creatures
had right to live in it? The wolves and bisons? Yes they,
till one with a better right showed himself. The Celt,
'aboriginal savage of Europe,' as a snarling antiquary names
him, arrived, pretending to have a better right; and did
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213
accordingly, not without pain to the bisons, make good the
same. He had a better right to that piece of God's land;
namely a better might to turn it to use;--a might to settle
himself there, at least, and try what use he could turn it to.
The bisons disappeared; the Celts took possession, and tilled.
Forever, was it to be? Alas, Forever is not a category that
can establish itself in this world of Time. A world of Time,
by the very definition of it, is a world of mortality and
mutability, of Beginning and Ending.
