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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle
+
+***************************************************************
+THERE IS AN IMPROVED EDITION OF THIS TITLE WITH LINKED TABLE OF
+CONTENTS WHICH MAY BE VIEWED AS EBOOK (# 26159) at https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/26159
+***********************************************************^***
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+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Past and Present
+
+Author: Thomas Carlyle
+
+Release Date: September 27, 2004 [EBook #13534]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PAST AND PRESENT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Jake Jaqua
+
+
+
+
+PAST AND PRESENT
+            By Thomas Carlyle
+
+Appreciation by Ralph Waldo Emerson
+
+
+First published 1843
+
+
+
+THOMAS CARLYLE, born in 1795 at Ecclefechan, the son of a
+stonemason.  Educated at Edinburgh University.  Schoolmaster for
+a short time, but decided on a literary career, visiting Paris
+and London.  Retired in 1828 to Dumfriesshire to write.  In 1834
+moved to Cheyne Row, Chelsea, and died there in 1881.
+
+
+
+
+
+INTRODUCTION
+  Being an appreciation from "The Dial" (July 1843)
+            by Ralph Waldo Emerson
+
+
+Here is Carlyle's new poem, his _Iliad_ of English woes, to
+follow his poem on France, entitled the _History of the French
+Revolution._  In its first aspect it is a political tract, and
+since Burke, since Milton, we have had nothing to compare with
+it.  It grapples honestly with the facts lying before all men,
+groups and disposes them with a master's mind, and, with a heart
+full of manly tenderness, offers his best counsel to his
+brothers.  Obviously it is the book of a powerful and
+accomplished thinker, who has looked with naked eyes at the
+dreadful political signs in England for the last few years,  has
+conversed much on these topics with such wisemen of all ranks and
+parties as are drawn to a scholar's house, until, such daily and
+nightly meditation has grown into a great connection, if not a
+system of thoughts;  and the topic of English politics becomes
+the best vehicle for the expression of his recent thinking,
+recommended to him by the desire to give some timely counsels,
+and to strip the worst mischiefs of their plausibility.  It is a
+brave and just book, and not a semblance.  "No new truth," say
+the critics on all sides.  Is it so?  Truth is very old, but the
+merit of seers is not to invent but to dispose objects in their
+right places, and he is the commander who is always in the mount,
+whose eye not only sees details, but throws crowds of details
+into their right arrangement and a larger and juster totality
+than  any other.  The book makes great approaches to true
+contemporary history, a very rare success, and firmly holds up to
+daylight the absurdities still tolerated in the English and
+European system.  It is such an appeal to the conscience and
+honour of England as cannot be forgotten, or be feigned to be
+forgotten.  It has the merit which belongs to every honest book,
+that it was self-examining before it was eloquent, and so hits
+all other men, and, as the country people say of good preaching,
+"comes bounce down into every pew."  Every reader shall carry
+away something.  The scholar shall read and write, the farmer and
+mechanic shall toil, with new resolution, nor forget the book
+when they resume their labour.
+
+Though no theocrat, and more than most philosophers, a believer
+in political systems, Mr. Carlyle very fairly finds the calamity
+of the times, not in bad bills of Parliament, nor the remedy in
+good bills, but the vice in false and superficial aims of the
+people, and the remedy in honesty and insight.  Like every work
+of genius, its great value is in telling such simple truths.  As
+we recall the topics, we are struck with force given to the plain
+truths;  the picture of the English nation all sitting enchanted,
+the poor, enchanted so that they cannot work, the rich, enchanted
+so that they cannot enjoy, and are rich in vain;  the exposure of
+the progress of fraud into all arts and social activities;  the
+proposition that the labourer must have a greater share in his
+earnings;  that the principle of permanence shall be admitted
+into all contracts of mutual service;  that the state shall
+provide at least schoolmaster's education for all the citizens;
+the exhortation to the workman that he shall respect the work and
+not the wages;  to the scholar that he shall be there for light;
+to the idle, that no man shall sit idle;  the picture of Abbot
+Samson, the true governor, who "is not there to expect reason and
+nobleness of others, he is there to give them of his own reason
+and nobleness;"  the assumption throughout the book, that a new
+chivalry and nobility, namely the dynasty of labour, is replacing
+the old nobilities.   These things strike us with a force which
+reminds us of the morals of the Oriental or early Greek masters,
+and of no modern book.  Truly in these things is great reward.
+It is not by sitting so at a grand distance and calling the human
+race _larvae,_ that men are to be helped, nor by helping the
+depraved after their own foolish fashion;  but by doing
+unweariedly the particular work we were born to do.  Let no man
+think himself absolved because he does a generous action and
+befriends the poor, but let him see whether he so holds his
+property that a benefit goes from it to all.  A man's diet should
+be what is simplest and readiest to be had, because it is so
+private a good.  His house should be better, because that is for
+the use of hundreds, perhaps of thousands, and is the property of
+the traveler.  But his speech is a perpetual and public
+instrument;  let that always side with the race and yield neither
+a lie nor a sneer.  His manners,--let them be hospitable and
+civilising, so that no Phidias or Raphael shall have taught
+anything better in canvas or stone;  and his acts should be
+representative of the human race, as one who makes them rich in
+his having, and poor in his want.
+
+It requires great courage in a man of letters to handle the
+contemporary practical questions;  not because he then has all
+men for his rivals, but because of the infinite entanglements of
+the problem, and the waste of strength in gathering unripe
+fruits.  The task is superhuman;  and the poet knows well that a
+little time will do more than the most puissant genius.  Time
+stills the loud noise of opinions, sinks the small, raises the
+great, so that the true emerges without effort and in perfect
+harmony to all eyes;  but the truth of the present hour, except
+in particulars and single relations, is unattainable.  Each man
+can very well know his own part of duty, if he will;  but to
+bring out the truth for beauty, and as literature, surmounts the
+powers of art.  The most elaborate history of today will have the
+oddest dislocated look in the next generation.  The historian of
+today is yet three ages off.  The poet cannot descend into the
+turbid present without injury to his rarest gifts.  Hence that
+necessity of isolation which genius has always felt.  He must
+stand on his glass tripod, if he would keep his electricity.
+
+But when the political aspects are so calamitous that the
+sympathies of the man overpower the habits of the poet, a higher
+than Literary inspiration may succour him.  It is a costly proof
+of character, that the most renowned scholar of England should
+take his reputation in his hand and should descend into the ring;
+and he has added to his love whatever honour his opinions may
+forfeit.  To atone for this departure from the vows of the
+scholar and his eternal duties to this secular charity, we have
+at least this gain, that here is a message which those to whom it
+was addressed cannot choose but hear.  Though they die, they must
+listen.  It is plain that whether by hope or by fear, or were it
+only by delight in this panorama of brilliant images; all the
+great classes of English society must read, even those whose
+existence it proscribes.  Poor Queen Victoria--poor Sir Robert
+Peel--poor Primate and Bishops--poor Dukes and Lords!  There is
+no help in place or pride or in looking another way;  a grain of
+wit is more penetrating than the lightning of the night-storm,
+which no curtains or shutters will keep out.  Here is a book
+which will be read, no thanks to anybody but itself.  What pains,
+what hopes, what vows, shall come of the reading!  Here is a book
+as full of treason as an egg is full of meat, and every lordship
+and worship and high form and ceremony of English conservatism
+tossed like a football into the air, and kept in the air, with
+merciless kicks and rebounds, and yet not a word is punishable by
+statute.  The wit has eluded all official zeal;  and yet these
+dire jokes, these cunning thrusts, this darning sword of Cherubim
+waved high in air, illuminates the whole horizon, and shows to
+the eyes of the universe every wound it inflicts.  Worst of all
+for the party attacked, it bereaves them beforehand of all
+sympathy, by anticipating the plea of poetic and humane
+conservatism, and impressing the reader with the conviction that
+the satirist himself has the truest love for everything old and
+excellent in English land and institutions, and a genuine respect
+for the basis of truth in those whom he exposes.
+
+We are at some loss how to state what strikes us as the fault of
+this remarkable book, for the variety and excellence of the
+talent displayed in it is pretty sure to leave all special
+criticism in the wrong.  And we may easily fail in expressing the
+general objection which we feel.  It appears to us as a certain
+disproportion in the picture, caused by the obtrusion of the
+whims of the painter.  In this work, as in his former labours,
+Mr. Carlyle reminds us of a sick giant.  His humours are
+  expressed with so much force of constitution that his
+fancies are more attractive and more credible than the sanity of
+duller men.  But the habitual exaggeration of the tone wearies
+whilst it stimulated.
+
+It is felt to be so much deduction from the universality of the
+picture.  It is not serene sunshine, but everything is seen in
+lurid   storm lights.  Every object attitudinises, to the very
+mountains and stars almost, under the refraction of this
+wonderful humorist;  and instead of the common earth and sky, we
+have a Martin's Creation or Judgment Day.  A crisis has always
+arrived which requires a _deus ex machina._  One can hardly
+credit, whilst under the spell of this magician, that the world
+always had the same bankrupt look, to foregoing ages as to us--as
+of a failed world just re-collecting its old withered forces to
+begin again and try to do a little business.  It was perhaps
+inseparable from the attempt to write a book of wit and
+imagination on English politics, that a certain local emphasis
+and love of effect, such as is the vice of preaching, should
+appear, producing on the reader a feeling of forlornness by the
+excess of value attributed to circumstances.  But the splendour
+of wit cannot out--dazzle the calm daylight, which always shows
+every individual man in balance with his age, and able to work
+out his own salvation from all the follies of that, and no such
+glaring contrasts or severalties in that or this.  Each age has
+its own follies, as its majority is made up of foolish young
+people;  its superstitions appear no superstitions to itself;
+and if you should ask the contemporary, he would tell you, with
+pride or with regret (according as he was practical or poetic),
+that he had none.  But after a short time, down go its follies
+and weakness and the memory of them;  its virtues alone remain,
+and its limitation assumes the poetic form of a beautiful
+superstition, as the dimness of our sight clothes the objects in
+the horizon with mist and colour.  The revelation of Reason is
+this of the un-changeableness of the fate of humanity under all
+its subjective aspects;  that to the cowering it always cowers,
+to the daring it opens great avenues.  The ancients are only
+venerable to us because distance has destroyed what was trivial;
+as the sun and stars affect us only grandly, because we cannot
+reach to their smoke and surfaces and say, Is that all?
+
+And yet the gravity of the times, the manifold and increasing
+dangers of the English State, may easily excuse some over-
+colouring of the picture;  and we at this distance are not so far
+removed from any of the specific evils, and are deeply
+participant in too many, not to share the gloom and thank the
+love and the courage of the counselor.  This book is full of
+humanity, and nothing is more excellent in this as in all Mr.
+Carlyle's works than the attitude of the writer.  He has the
+dignity of a man of letters, who knows what belongs to him, and
+never deviates from his sphere;  a continuer of the great line of
+scholars, and sustains their office in the highest credit and
+honour.  If the good heaven have any good word to impart to this
+unworthy generation, here is one scribe qualified and clothed for
+its occasion.  One excellence he has in an age of Mammon and of
+criticism, that he never suffers the eye of his wonder to close.
+Let who will be the dupe of trifles, he cannot keep his eye oft
+from that gracious Infinite which embosoms us.
+
+As a literary artist he has great merits, beginning with the main
+one that he never wrote one dull line.  How well-read, how
+adroit, what thousand arts in his one art of writing;  with his
+expedient for expressing those unproven opinions which he
+entertains but will not endorse, by summoning one of his men of
+straw from the cell,--and the respectable Sauerteig, or
+Teufelsdrockh, or Dryasdust, or Picturesque Traveler, says what
+is put into his mouth, and disappears.  That morbid temperament
+has given his rhetoric a somewhat bloated character;  a luxury to
+many imaginative and learned persons, like a showery south-wind
+with its sunbursts and rapid chasing of lights and glooms over
+the landscape, and yet its offensiveness to multitudes of
+reluctant lovers makes us often wish some concession were
+possible on the part of the humorist.  Yet it must not be
+forgotten that in all his fun of castanets, or playing of tunes
+with a whip-lash like some renowned charioteers,--in all this
+glad and needful venting of his redundant spirits, he does yet
+ever and anon, as if catching the glance of one wise man in the
+crowd, quit his tempestuous key, and lance at him in clear level
+tone the very word, and then with new glee return to his game.
+He is like a lover or an outlaw who wraps up his message in a
+serenade, which is nonsense to the sentinel, but salvation to the
+ear for which it is meant.  He does not dodge the question, but
+gives sincerity where it is due.
+
+One word more respecting this remarkable style.  We have in
+literature few specimens of magnificence.  Plato is the purple
+ancient, and Bacon and Milton the moderns of the richest strains.
+Burke sometimes reaches to that exuberant fullness, though
+deficient in depth.  Carlyle in his strange, half mad way, has
+entered the Field of the Cloth of Gold, and shown a vigour and
+wealth of resource which has no rival in the tourney play of
+these times--the indubitable champion of England.  Carlyle is the
+first domestication of the modern system, with its infinity of
+details, into style.  We have been civilising very fast, building
+London and Paris, and now planting New England and India, New
+Holland and Oregon--and it has not appeared in literature;  there
+has been no analogous expansion and recomposition in books.
+Carlyle's style is the first emergence of all this wealth and
+labour with which the world has gone with child so long.  London
+and Europe, tunneled, graded corn-lawed, with trade-nobility, and
+East and West Indies for dependencies, and America, with the
+Rocky Hills in the horizon, have never before been conquered in
+literature.  This is the first invasion and conquest.  How like
+an air-balloon or bird of Jove does he seem to float over the
+continent, and stooping here and there pounce on a fact as a
+symbol which was never a symbol before.  This is the first
+experiment, and something of rudeness and haste must be pardoned
+to so great an achievement.  It will be done again and again,
+sharper, simpler;  but fortunate is he who did it first, though
+never so giant-like and fabulous.  This grandiose character
+pervades his wit and his imagination.  We have never had anything
+in literature so like earthquakes as the laughter of Carlyle.  He
+"shakes with his mountain mirth."  It is like the laughter of the
+Genii in the horizon.  These jokes shake down Parliament-house
+and Windsor Castle, Temple and Tower, and the future shall echo
+the dangerous peals.  The other particular of magnificence is in
+his rhymes.  Carlyle is a poet who is altogether too burly in his
+frame and habit to submit to the limits of metre.  Yet he is full
+of rhythm, not only in the perpetual melody of his periods, but
+in the burdens, refrains, and returns of his sense and music.
+Whatever thought or motto has once appeared to him fraught with
+meaning, becomes an omen to him henceforward, and is sure to
+return with deeper tones and weightier import, now as threat, now
+as confirmation, in gigantic reverberation, as if the hills, the
+horizon, and the next ages returned the sound.
+
+
+
+BIBLIOGRAPHY
+
+Life of Schiller (Lond. Mag., 1823-4), 1825, 1845.  (Supplement
+published in the People's Edition, 1873)  Wilhelm Meister's
+Apprenticeship, 1824.  Elements of Geometry and Trigonometry
+(from the French of Legendre), 1824.  German Romance, 1827.
+Sartor Resartus (Fraser's Mag., 1833-4), 1835 (Boston) 1838.
+French Revolution, 1837,1839.  Critical and Miscellaneous Essays,
+1839, 1840, 1847, 1857.  (In these were reprinted Articles from
+Edinburgh Review, Foreign Review, Foreign Quarterly Review,
+Fraser's Magazine, Westminster Review, New Monthly Magazine,
+London and Westminster Review, Keepsake, Proceedings of the
+Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Times.)  Chartism, 1840.
+Heroes, Hero-worship, and the Heroic in History, 1841.  Past and
+Present, 1843.  Oliver Cromwell's Letters and Speeches;  with
+Elucidations, 1845.  Thirty-five Unpublished Letters of Oliver
+Cromwell, 1847 (Fraser).  Original Discourses on the Negro
+Question (Fraser, 1849), 1853.  Latter-day Pamphlets, 1850.  Life
+of John Sterling, 1851.  History of Friedrich II. of Prussia,
+1858-65.  Inaugural Address at Edinburgh, 1866.  Shooting
+Niagara; and After? 1867 (from Macmillan).  The Early Kings of
+Norway;  also an Essay on the Portraits of John Knox, 1875.
+
+There were also contributions to Brewster's Edinburgh
+Encyclopaedia, vols. xiv. xv., and xvi.;  to New Edinburgh
+Review, 1821, 1822;  Fraser's Magazine, 1830, 1831;  The Times,
+19 June, 1844 (Mazzini);  28 November, 1876;  5 May, 1877;
+Examiner, 1848;  Spectator 1848.
+
+First Collected Edition of Works, 1857-58 (16 vols.)
+
+Reminiscences (ed. J.A. Froude), 1881;  (ed. C.E. Norton, 1887,
+and preprinted in Everyman's Library;  1932, with an added
+article on Professor John Wilson--"Christopher North")
+Reminiscences of my Irish journey in 1849, 1882.  Last Words of
+Thomas Carlyle, 1882 (ed. by J.C.A.)  Last Words of Thomas
+Carlyle, 1892.  Rescued Essays (ed. P. Newberry) 1892.
+Historical Sketches of Notable Persons and Events in the Reign of
+James I. and Charles I. (ed. A. Carlyle), 1898.
+
+Sir Leslie Stephen's article on Carlyle in the Dictionary of
+National Biography gives a list of his occasional writings which
+have never been collected or reprinted.
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+Book I--Proem
+
+I. Midas.
+II. The Sphinx
+III. Manchester Insurrection
+IV. Morrison's Pill
+V. Aristocracy of Talent
+VI. Hero-Worship
+
+
+Book II--The Ancient Monk
+
+I. Jocelin of Brakelond
+II. St. Edmundsbury
+III. Landlord Edmund
+IV. Abbot Hugo
+V. Twelfth Century
+VI. Monk Samson
+VII. The Canvassing
+VIII. The Election
+IX. Abbot Samson
+X. Government
+XI. The Abbot's Ways
+XII. The Abbot's Troubles
+XIII. In Parliament
+XIV. Henry of Essex
+XV.  Practical-Devotional
+XVI St. Edmund
+XVII  The Beginnings
+
+
+Book III--The Modern Worker
+
+I. Phenomena,
+II. Gospel of Mammonism
+III. Gospel of Dilettantism
+XV. Happy
+V. The English
+VI. Two Centuries
+VII. Over-Production
+VIII. Unworking Aristocracy
+IX. Working Aristocracy
+X. Plugson of Undershot
+XI. Labour
+XII  Reward
+XIII. Democracy
+XIV  Sir Jabesh Windbag
+XV. Morrison Again
+
+Book IV--Horoscope
+
+I. Aristocracies
+II. Bribery Committee
+III. The One Institution
+IV Captains of Industry
+V. Permanence
+VI. The Landed
+VII. The Gifted
+VIII  The Didactic
+
+Summary
+
+
+
+
+Book I--Proem
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+Midas
+
+
+The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the
+course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on
+in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most
+ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this
+world.  England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce,
+supply for human want in every kind;  yet England is dying of
+inanition.  With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and
+grows;  waving with yellow harvests;  thick-studded with
+workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of
+workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest and the
+willingest our Earth ever had;  these men are here;  the work
+they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abundant,
+exuberant on every hand of us:  and behold, some baleful fiat as
+of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers,
+ye master-workers, ye master-idlers;  none of you can touch it,
+no man of you shall be the better for it;  this is enchanted
+fruit!"  On the poor workers such fiat falls first, in its rudest
+shape;  but on the rich masterworkers too it falls;  neither can
+the rich master-idlers, nor any richest or highest man escape,
+but all are like to be brought low with it, and made 'poor'
+enough, in the money-sense or a far fataller one.
+
+Of these successful skillful workers some two millions, it is now
+counted, sit in Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons;  or have 'out-door
+relief' flung over the wall to them,--the workhouse Bastille
+being filled to bursting, and the strong Poor-law broken asunder
+by a stronger.*  They sit there, these many months now;  their
+hope of deliverance as yet small.  In workhouses, pleasantly so
+named, because work cannot be done in them.  Twelve hundred
+thousand workers in England alone; their cunning right-hand
+lamed, lying idle in their sorrowful bosom;  their hopes,
+outlooks, share of this fair world, shut in by narrow walls.
+They sit there, pent up, as in a kind of horrid enchantment;
+glad to be imprisoned and enchanted, that they may not perish
+starved.  The picturesque Tourist, in a sunny autumn day,
+through this bounteous realm of England, describes the Union
+Workhouse on his path.  'Passing by the Workhouse of St. Ives
+in Huntingdonshire, on a bright day last autumn,' says the
+picturesque Tourist, 'I saw sitting on wooden benches, in front
+of their Bastille and within their ringwall and its railings,
+some half-hundred or more of these men.  Tall robust figures,
+young mostly or of middle age;  of honest countenance, many of
+them thoughtful and even intelligent-looking men.  They sat
+there, near by one another;  but in a kind of torpor, especially
+in a silence, which was very striking.  In silence:  for, alas,
+what word was to be said?  An Earth all lying round, crying, Come
+and till me, come and reap me;--yet we here sit enchanted!  In
+the eyes and brows of these men hung the gloomiest expression,
+not of anger, but of grief and shame and manifold inarticulate
+distress and weariness;  they returned my glance with a glance
+that seemed to say, "Do not look at us.  We sit enchanted here,
+we know not why.  The Sun shines and the Earth calls;  and, by
+the governing Powers and Impotences of this England, we are
+forbidden to obey.  It is impossible, they tell us!"  There was
+something that reminded me of Dante's Hell in the look of all
+this;  and I rode swiftly away.
+
+---------
+* The Return of Paupers for England and Wales, at Ladyday, 1842,
+is, "In-door 221,687, Out-door 1,207,402, Total 1,429,089."--
+(_Official Report_)
+---------
+
+So many hundred thousands sit in workhouses:  and other hundred
+thousands have not yet got even workhouses;  and in thrifty
+Scotland itself, in Glasgow or Edinburgh City, in their
+dark lanes, hidden from all but the eye of God, and of rare
+Benevolence the minister of God, there are scenes of woe and
+destitution and desolation, such as, one may hope, the Sun never
+saw before in the most barbarous regions where men dwelt.
+Competent witnesses, the brave and humane Dr. Alison, who speaks
+what he knows, whose noble Healing Art in his charitable hands
+becomes once more a truly sacred one, report these things for us:
+these things are not of this year, or of last year, have no
+reference to our present state of commercial stagnation, but only
+to the common state.  Not in sharp fever-fits, but in chronic
+gangrene of this kind is Scotland suffering.  A Poor-law, any and
+every Poor-law, it may be observed, is but a temporary measure;
+an anodyne, not a remedy:  Rich and Poor, when once the naked
+facts of their condition have come into collision, cannot long
+subsist together on a mere Poor-law.  True enough:--and yet,
+human beings cannot be left to die!  Scotland too, till something
+better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not to be a
+byword among the nations.  O, what a waste is there;  of noble
+and thrice-noble national virtues;  peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms;
+valiant manful habits, soul of a Nation's worth,--which all the
+metal of Potosi cannot purchase back;  to which the metal of
+Potosi, and all you can buy with _it,_ is dross and dust!
+
+Why dwell on this aspect of the matter?  It is too indisputable,
+not doubtful now to any one.  Descend where you will into the
+lower class, in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by
+Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by
+Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking,
+the same sorrowful result discloses itself:  you have to admit
+that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk or is
+fast sinking into a state, to which, all sides of it considered,
+there was literally never any parallel.  At Stockport Assizes,--
+and this too has no reference to the present state of trade,
+being of date prior to that,--a Mother and a Father are arraigned
+and found guilty of poisoning three of their children, to defraud
+a 'burial-society' of some _31.8s._ due on the death of each
+child:  they are arraigned, found guilty;  and the official
+authorities, it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not
+solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe farther into that
+department of things.  This is in the autumn of 1841;  the crime
+itself is of the previous year or season.  "Brutal savages,
+degraded Irish," mutters the idle reader of Newspapers;  hardly
+lingering on this incident.  Yet it is an incident worth
+lingering on;  the depravity, savagery and degraded Irishism
+being never so well admitted.  In the British land, a human
+Mother and Father, of white skin and professing the Christian
+religion, had done this thing;  they, with their Irishism and
+necessity and savagery, had been driven to do it.  Such instances
+are like the highest mountain apex emerged into view;  under
+which lies a whole mountain region and land, not yet emerged.  A
+human Mother and Father had said to themselves, What shall we do
+to escape starvation?  We are deep sunk here, in our dark cellar;
+and help is far.--Yes, in the Ugolino Hungertower stern things
+happen;  best-loved little Gaddo fallen dead on his Father's
+knees!--The Stockport Mother and Father think and hint:  Our poor
+little starveling Tom, who cries all day for victuals, who will
+see only evil and not good in this world:  if he were out of
+misery at once;  he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps kept
+alive?  It is thought, and hinted;  at last it is done.  And now
+Tom being killed, and all spent and eaten, Is it poor little
+starveling Jack that must go, or poor little starveling Will?--
+What an inquiry of ways and means!
+
+In starved sieged cities, in the uttermost doomed ruin of old
+Jerusalem fallen under the wrath of God, it was prophesied and
+said, 'The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own
+children.'  The stern Hebrew imagination could conceive no
+blacker gulf of wretchedness;  that was the ultimatum of degraded
+god-punished man.  And we here, in modern England, exuberant with
+supply of all kinds, besieged by nothing if it be not by
+invisible Enchantments, are we reaching that?--How come these
+things?  Wherefore are they, wherefore should they be?
+
+
+Nor are they of the St. Ives workhouses, of the Glasgow lanes,
+and Stockport cellars, the only unblessed among us.  This
+successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth, has as
+yet made nobody rich;  it is an enchanted wealth, and belongs yet
+to nobody.  We might ask, Which of us has it enriched?  We can
+spend thousands where we once spent hundreds;  but can purchase
+nothing good with them.  In Poor and Rich, instead of noble
+thrift and plenty, there is idle luxury alternating with mean
+scarcity and inability.  We have sumptuous garnitures for our
+Life, but have forgotten to _live_ in the middle of them.  It is
+an enchanted wealth;  no man of us can yet touch it.  The class
+of men who feel that they are truly better off by means of it,
+let them give us their name!
+
+Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors,--with what
+advantage they can report, and their Doctors can:  but in the
+heart of them, if we go out of the dyspeptic stomach, what
+increase of blessedness is there?  Are they better, beautifuller,
+stronger, braver?  Are they even what they call 'happier?  Do
+they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in
+this God's Earth;  do more things and human faces look with
+satisfaction on them?  Not so.  Human faces gloom discordantly,
+disloyally on one another.  Things, if it be not mere cotton and
+iron things, are growing disobedient to man.  The Master Worker
+is enchanted, for the present, like his Workhouse Workman;
+clamours, in vain hitherto, for a very simple sort of 'Liberty:'
+the liberty 'to buy where he finds it cheapest, to sell where he
+finds it dearest.'  With guineas jingling in every pocket, he was
+no whit richer;  but now, the very guineas threatening to vanish,
+he feels that he is poor indeed.  Poor Master Worker!  And the
+Master Unworker, is not he in a still fataller situation?
+Pausing amid his game-preserves, with awful eye,--as he well may!
+Coercing fifty-pound tenants;  coercing, bribing, cajoling;
+doing what he likes with his own.  His mouth full of loud
+futilities, and arguments to prove the excellence of his
+Corn-law;*  and in his heart the blackest misgiving, a desperate
+half-consciousness that his excellent Corn-law is indefensible,
+that his loud arguments for it are of a kind to strike men too
+literally _dumb._
+
+-------------
+[* Digital transcriber note:  The "corn-law" that Carlyle
+repeatedly refers to was an English sliding-scale tariff on
+grain, which kept the price of bread artificially inflated.]
+-------------
+
+To whom, then, is this wealth of England wealth?  Who is it that
+it blesses;  makes happier, wiser, beautifuller, in any way
+better?  Who has got hold of it, to make it fetch and carry for
+him, like a true servant, not like a false mock-servant;  to do
+him any real service whatsoever?  As yet no one.  We have more
+riches than any Nation ever had before;  we have less good of
+them than any Nation ever had before.  Our successful industry is
+hitherto unsuccessful;  a strange success, if we stop here!  In
+the midst of plethoric plenty, the people perish;  with gold
+walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or satisfied.
+Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers, all men, come to a pause;
+stand fixed, and cannot farther.  Fatal paralysis spreading
+inwards, from the extremities, in St. Ives workhouses, in
+Stockport cellars, through all limbs, as if towards the heart
+itself.  Have we actually got enchanted, then;  accursed by
+some god?--
+
+Midas longed for gold, and insulted the Olympians.  He got gold,
+so that whatsoever he touched became gold,--and he, with his long
+ears, was little the better for it.  Midas had misjudged the
+celestial music-tones;  Midas had insulted Apollo and the gods:
+the gods gave him his wish, and a pair of long ears, which also
+were a good appendage to it.  What a truth in these old Fables!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+The Sphinx
+
+
+How true, for example, is that other old Fable of the Sphinx, who
+sat by the wayside, propounding her riddle to the passengers,
+which if they could not answer she destroyed them!  Such a Sphinx
+is this Life of ours, to all men and societies of men.  Nature,
+like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness and
+tenderness;  the face and bosom of a goddess, but ending in claws
+and the body of a lioness.  There is in her a celestial beauty,--
+which means celestial order, pliancy to wisdom;  but there is
+also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal.
+She is a goddess, but one not yet disimprisoned;  one still
+half-imprisoned,--the inarticulate, lovely still encased in the
+inarticulate, chaotic.  How true!  And does she not propound her
+riddles to us?  Of each man she asks daily, in mild voice, yet
+with a terrible significance, "Knowest thou the meaning of this
+Day?  What thou canst do Today;  wisely attempt to do?"  Nature,
+Universe, Destiny, Existence, howsoever we name this grand
+unnameable Fact in the midst of which we live and struggle, is as
+a heavenly bride and conquest to the wise and brave, to them who
+can discern her behests and do them;  a destroying fiend to them
+who cannot.  Answer her riddle, it is well with thee.  Answer it
+not, pass on regarding it not, it will answer itself;  the
+solution for thee is a thing of teeth and claws;  Nature is a
+dumb lioness, deaf to thy pleadings, fiercely devouring.  Thou
+art not now her victorious bridegroom;  thou art her mangled
+victim, scattered on the precipices, as a slave found treacherous,
+recreant, ought to be and must.
+
+With Nations it is as with individuals:  Can they rede the riddle
+of Destiny?  This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning
+of _its_ strange new Today?  Is there sense enough extant,
+discoverable anywhere or anyhow, in our united twenty-seven
+million heads to discern the same;  valour enough in our
+twenty-seven million hearts to dare and do the bidding thereof?
+It will be seen!--
+
+The secret of gold Midas, which he with his long ears never could
+discover, was, That he had offended the Supreme Powers;--that he
+had parted company with the eternal inner Facts of this Universe,
+and followed the transient outer Appearances thereof;  and so was
+arrived _here._  Properly it is the secret of all unhappy men and
+unhappy nations.  Had they known Nature's right truth, Nature's
+right truth would have made them free.  They have become
+enchanted;  stagger spell-bound, reeling on the brink of huge
+peril, because they were not wise enough.  They have forgotten
+the right Inner True, and taken up with the Outer Sham-true.
+They answer the Sphinx's question wrong.  Foolish men cannot
+answer it aright!  Foolish men mistake transitory semblance for
+eternal fact, and go astray more and more.
+
+Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is
+delayed, there is no justice, but an accidental one, here below.
+Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two,
+some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death!
+In the centre of the world-whirlwind, verily now as in the oldest
+days, dwells and speaks a God.  The great soul of the world is
+_just._  O brother, can it be needful now, at this late epoch of
+experience, after eighteen centuries of Christian preaching for
+one thing, to remind thee of such a fact;  which all manner of
+Mahometans, old Pagan Romans, Jews, Scythians and heathen Greeks,
+and indeed more or less all men that God made, have managed at
+one time to see into;  nay which thou thyself, till 'redtape'
+strangled the inner life of thee, hadst once some inkling of:
+That there is justice here below;  and even, at bottom, that
+there is nothing else but justice!  Forget that, thou hast
+forgotten all.  Success will never more attend thee:  how can it
+now?  Thou hast the whole Universe against thee.  No more
+success:  mere sham-success, for a day and days;  rising ever
+higher,--towards its Tarpeian Rock.  Alas, how, in thy soft-hung
+Longacre vehicle, of polished leather to the bodily eye, of
+redtape philosophy, of expediencies, clubroom moralities,
+Parliamentary majorities to the mind's eye, thou beautifully
+rollest:  but knowest thou whitherward?  It is towards the
+_road's end._  Old use-and-wont;  established methods, habitudes,
+once true and wise;  man's noblest tendency, his perseverance,
+and man's ignoblest, his inertia;  whatsoever of noble and
+ignoble Conservatism there is in men and Nations, strongest
+always in the strongest men and Nations:  all this is as a road
+to thee, paved smooth through the abyss,--till all this _end._
+Till men's bitter necessities can endure thee no more.  Till
+Nature's patience with thee is done;  and there is no road or
+footing any farther, and the abyss yawns sheer--
+
+Parliament and the Courts of Westminster are venerable to me;
+how venerable;  grey with a thousand years of honourable age!
+For a thousand years and more, Wisdom and faithful Valour,
+struggling amid much Folly and greedy Baseness, not without most
+sad distortions in the struggle, have built them up;  and they
+are as we see.  For a thousand years, this English Nation has
+found them useful or supportable;  they have served this English
+Nation's want;  _been_ a road to it through the abyss of Time.
+They are venerable, they are great and strong.  And yet it is
+good to remember always that they are not the venerablest, nor
+the greatest, nor the strongest!  Acts of Parliament are
+venerable;  but if they correspond not with the writing on the
+Adamant Tablet, what are they?  Properly their one element of
+venerableness, of strength or greatness, is, that they at all
+times correspond therewith as near as by human possibility they
+can.  They are cherishing destruction in their bosom every hour
+that they continue otherwise.
+
+Alas, how many causes that can plead well for themselves in the
+Courts of Westminster;  and yet in the general Court of the
+Universe, and free Soul of Man, have no word to utter!
+Honourable Gentlemen may find this worth considering, in times
+like ours.  And truly, the din of triumphant Law-logic, and all
+shaking of horse-hair wigs and learned-sergeant gowns having
+comfortably ended, we shall do well to ask ourselves withal, What
+says that high and highest Court to the verdict?  For it is the
+Court of Courts, that same;  where the universal soul of Fact and
+very Truth sits President;--and thitherward, more and more
+swiftly, with a really terrible increase of swiftness, all causes
+do in these days crowd for revisal,--for confirmation, for
+modification, for reversal with costs.  Dost thou know that
+Court;  hast thou had any Law-practice there?  What, didst thou
+never enter;  never file any petition of redress, reclaimer,
+disclaimer or demurrer, written as in thy heart's blood, for thy
+own behoof or another's;  and silently await the issue?  Thou
+knowest not such a Court?  Hast merely heard of it by faint
+tradition as a thing that was or had been?  Of thee, I think, we
+shall get little benefit.
+
+For the gowns of learned-sergeants are good:  parchment records,
+fixed forms, and poor terrestrial justice, with or without
+horse-hair, what sane man will not reverence these?  And yet,
+behold, the man is not sane but insane, who considers these alone
+as venerable.  Oceans of horse-hair, continents of parchment, and
+learned-sergeant eloquence, were it continued till the learned
+tongue wore itself small in the indefatigable learned mouth,
+cannot make unjust just.  The grand question still remains, Was
+the judgment just?  If unjust, it will not and cannot get harbour
+for itself, or continue to have footing in this Universe, which
+was made by other than One Unjust.  Enforce it by never such
+statuting, three readings, royal assents;  blow it to the four
+winds with all manner of quilted trumpeters and pursuivants, in
+the rear of them never so many gibbets and hangmen, it will not
+stand, it cannot stand.  From all souls of men, from all ends of
+Nature, from the Throne of God above, there are voices bidding
+it:  Away, away!  Does it take no warning;  does it stand, strong
+in its three readings, in its gibbets and artillery-parks?  The
+more woe is to it, the frightfuller woe.  It will continue
+standing, for its day, for its year, for its century, doing
+evil all the while;  but it has One enemy who is Almighty:
+dissolution, explosion, and the everlasting Laws of Nature
+incessantly advance towards it;  and the deeper its rooting, more
+obstinate its continuing, the deeper also and huger will its ruin
+and overturn be.
+
+In this God's-world, with its wild-whirling eddies and mad
+foam-oceans, where men and nations perish as if without law, and
+judgment for an unjust thing is sternly delayed, dost thou think
+that there is therefore no justice?  It is what the fool hath
+said in his heart.  It is what the wise, in all times, were wise
+because they denied, and knew forever not to be.  I tell thee
+again, there is nothing else but justice.  One strong thing I
+find here below:  the just thing, the true thing.  My friend, if
+thou hadst all the artillery of Woolwich trundling at thy back in
+support of an unjust thing;  and infinite bonfires visibly
+waiting ahead of thee, to blaze centuries long for thy victory on
+behalf of it,--I would advise thee to call halt, to fling down
+thy baton, and say, "In God's name, No!"  Thy 'success?'  Poor
+devil, what will thy success amount to?  If the thing is unjust,
+thou hast not succeeded;  no, not though bonfires blazed
+from North to South, and bells rang, and editors wrote
+leading-articles, and the just thing lay trampled out of sight,
+to all mortal eyes an abolished and annihilated thing.  Success?
+In few years, thou wilt be dead and dark,--all cold, eyeless,
+deaf;  no blaze of bonfires, ding-dong of bells or leading-articles
+visible or audible to thee again at all forever:  What kind of
+success is that!--
+
+It is true all goes by approximation in this world;  with any not
+insupportable approximation we must be patient.  There is a noble
+Conservatism as well as an ignoble.  Would to Heaven, for the
+sake of Conservatism itself, the noble alone were left, and the
+ignoble, by some kind severe hand, were ruthlessly lopped away,
+forbidden ever more to skew itself!  For it is the right and
+noble alone that will have victory in this struggle;  the rest is
+wholly an obstruction, a postponement and fearful imperilment of
+the victory.  Towards an eternal centre of right and nobleness,
+and of that only, is all this confusion tending.  We already know
+whither it is all tending;  what will have victory, what will
+have none!  The Heaviest will reach the centre.  The Heaviest,
+sinking through complex fluctuating media and vortices, has its
+deflexions, its obstructions, nay at times its resiliences, its
+reboundings;  whereupon some blockhead shall be heard jubilating,
+"See, your Heaviest ascends!"--but at all moments it is moving
+centreward, fast as is convenient for it;  sinking, sinking; and,
+by laws older than the World, old as the Maker's first Plan of
+the World, it has to arrive there.
+
+Await the issue.  In all battles, if you await the issue, each
+fighter has prospered according to his right.  His right and his
+might, at the close of the account, were one and the same.  He
+has fought with all his might, and in exact proportion to all his
+right he has prevailed.  His very death is no victory over him.
+He dies indeed;  but his work lives, very truly lives.  A heroic
+Wallace, quartered on the scaffold, cannot hinder that his
+Scotland become, one day, a part of England:  but he does hinder
+that it become, on tyrannous unfair terms, a part of it;
+commands still, as with a god's voice, from his old Valhalla and
+Temple of the Brave, that there be a just real union as of
+brother and brother, not a false and merely semblant one as of
+slave and master.  If the union with England be in fact one of
+Scotland's chief blessings, we thank Wallace withal that it was
+not the chief curse.  Scotland is not Ireland:  no, because brave
+men rose there, and said, "Behold, ye must not tread us down like
+slaves;  and ye shall not,--and cannot!"  Fight on, thou brave
+true heart, and falter not, through dark fortune and through
+bright.  The cause thou fightest for, so far as it is true, no
+farther, yet precisely so far, is very sure of victory.  The
+falsehood alone of it will be conquered, will be abolished, as it
+ought to be:  but the truth of it is part of Nature's own Laws,
+cooperates with the World's eternal Tendencies, and cannot
+be conquered.
+
+The _dust_ of controversy, what is it but the _falsehood_ flying
+off from all manner of conflicting true forces, and making such a
+loud dust-whirlwind,--that so the truths alone may remain, and
+embrace brother-like in some true resulting-force!  It is ever
+so.  Savage fighting Heptarchies:  their fighting is an
+ascertainment, who has the right to rule over whom;  that out of
+such waste-bickering Saxondom a peacefully cooperating England
+may arise.  Seek through this Universe;  if with other than owl's
+eyes, thou wilt find nothing nourished there, nothing kept in
+life, but what has right to nourishment and life.  The rest, look
+at it with other than owl's eyes, is not living;  is all dying,
+all as good as dead!  Justice was ordained from the foundations
+of the world;  and will last with the world and longer.
+
+
+From which I infer that the inner sphere of Fact, in this present
+England as elsewhere, differs infinitely from the outer sphere
+and spheres of Semblance.  That the Temporary, here as elsewhere,
+is too apt to carry it over the Eternal.  That he who dwells in
+the temporary Semblances, and does not penetrate into the eternal
+Substance, will _not_ answer the Sphinx-riddle of Today, or of
+any Day.  For the substance alone is substantial;  that is the
+law of Fact:  if you discover not that, Fact, who already knows
+it, will let you also know it by and by!
+
+What is justice? that, on the whole, is the question of the
+Sphinx to us. The law of Fact is, that justice must and will be
+done.  The sooner the better;  for the Time grows stringent,
+frightfully pressing!  "What is justice?" ask many, to whom cruel
+Fact alone will be able to prove responsive.  It is like jesting
+Pilate asking, What is Truth?  Jesting Pilate had not the
+smallest chance to ascertain what was Truth.  He could not have
+known it, had a god shewn it to him.  Thick serene opacity,
+thicker than amaurosis, veiled those smiling eyes of his to
+Truth;  the inner _retina_ of them was gone paralytic, dead.  He
+looked at Truth;  and discerned her not, there where she stood.
+"What is justice?"  The clothed embodied justice that sits in
+Westminster Hall, with penalties, parchments, tipstaves, is very
+visible.  But the unembodied justice, whereof that other is
+either an emblem, or else is a fearful indescribability, is not
+so visible!  For the unembodied Justice is of Heaven;  a Spirit,
+and Divinity of Heaven,--invisible to all but the noble and pure
+of soul.  The impure ignoble gaze with eyes, and she is not
+there.  They will prove it to you by logic, by endless Hansard
+Debatings, by bursts of Parliamentary eloquence.  It is not
+consolatory to behold!  For properly, as many men as there are in
+a Nation who _can_ withal see Heaven's invisible Justice, and
+know it to be on Earth also omnipotent, so many men are there who
+stand between a Nation and perdition.  So many, and no more.
+Heavy-laden England, how many hast thou in this hour?  The
+Supreme Power sends new and ever new, all _born_ at least with
+hearts of flesh and not of stone;--and heavy Misery itself, once
+heavy enough, will prove didactic!--
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+Manchester Insurrection
+
+
+Blusterowski, Colacorde, and other Editorial prophets of the
+Continental Democratic Movement, have in their leading-articles
+shewn themselves disposed to vilipend the late Manchester
+Insurrection, as evincing in the rioters an extreme backwardness
+to battle;  nay as betokening, in the English People itself,
+perhaps a want of the proper animal-courage indispensable in
+these ages.  A million hungry operative men started up, in utmost
+paroxysm of desperate protest against their lot;  and, ask
+Colacorde and company, How many shots were fired?  Very few in
+comparison!  Certain hundreds of drilled soldiers sufficed to
+suppress this million-headed hydra's and tread it down, without
+the smallest appeasement or hope of such, into its subterranean
+settlements again, there to reconsider itself.  Compared
+with our revolts in Lyons, in Warsaw and elsewhere, to say
+nothing of incomparable Paris City past or present, what a
+lamblike Insurrection!--
+
+The present Editor is not here, with his readers, to vindicate
+the character of Insurrections;  nor does it matter to us whether
+Blusterowski and the rest may think the English a courageous
+people or not courageous.  In passing, however, let us mention
+that, to our view, this was not an unsuccessful Insurrection;
+that as Insurrections go, we have not heard lately of any that
+succeeded so well.
+
+A million of hungry operative men, as Blusterowski says, rose
+all up, came all out into the streets, and--stood there.  What
+other could they do?  Their wrongs and griefs were bitter,
+insupportable, their rage against the same was just:  but who are
+they that cause these wrongs, who that will honestly make effort
+to redress them?  Our enemies are we know not who or what;  our
+friends are we know not where!  How shall we attack any one,
+shoot or be shot by any one?  O, if the accursed invisible
+Nightmare, that is crushing out the life of us and ours, would
+take a shape;  approach us like the Hyrcanian tiger, the Behemoth
+of Chaos, the Archfiend himself;  in any shape that we could see,
+and fasten on!--A man can have himself shot with cheerfulness;
+but it needs first that he see clearly for what.  Shew him the
+divine face of justice, then the diabolic monster which is
+eclipsing that:  he will fly at the throat of such monster, never
+so monstrous, and need no bidding to do it.  Woolwich grapeshot
+will sweep clear all streets, blast into invisibility so many
+thousand men:  but if your Woolwich grapeshot be but eclipsing
+Divine justice, and the God's-radiance itself gleam recognisable
+athwart such grapeshot,--then, yes then is the time come for
+fighting and attacking.  All artillery-parks have become weak,
+and are about to dissipate:  in the God's-thunder, their poor
+thunder slackens, ceases;  finding that it is, in all senses of
+the term, a _brute_ one!--
+
+That the Manchester Insurrection stood still, on the streets,
+with an indisposition to fire and bloodshed, was wisdom for it
+even as an Insurrection.  Insurrection, never so necessary, is a
+most sad necessity;  and governors who wait for that to instruct
+them, are surely getting into the fatallest courses,--proving
+themselves Sons of Nox and Chaos, of blind Cowardice, not of
+seeing Valour!  How can there be any remedy in insurrection?  It
+is a mere announcement of the disease,--visible now even to Sons
+of Night.  Insurrection usually 'gains' little;  usually wastes
+how much!  One of its worst kinds of waste, to say nothing of the
+rest, is that of irritating and exasperating men against each
+other, by violence done;  which is always sure to be injustice
+done, for violence does even justice unjustly.
+
+Who shall compute the waste and loss, the obstruction of every
+sort, that was produced in the Manchester region by Peterloo
+alone!  Some thirteen unarmed men and women cut down,--the number
+of the slain and maimed is very countable:  but the treasury of
+rage, burning hidden or visible in all hearts ever since, more or
+less perverting the effort and aim of all hearts ever since, is
+of unknown extent.  "How ye came among us, in your cruel armed
+blindness, ye unspeakable County Yeomanry, sabres flourishing,
+hoofs prancing, and slashed us down at your brute pleasure;
+deaf, blind to all _our_ claims and woes and wrongs;  of quick
+sight and sense to your own claims only!  There lie poor sallow
+workworn weavers, and complain no more now;  women themselves are
+slashed and sabred, howling terror fills the air;  and ye ride
+prosperous, very victorious,--ye unspeakable:  give us sabres
+too, and then come-on a little!"  Such are Peterloos.  In
+all hearts that witnessed Peterloo, stands written, as in
+fire-characters, or smoke-characters prompt to become fire again,
+a legible balance-account of grim vengeance;  very unjustly
+balanced, much exaggerated, as is the way with such accounts;
+but payable readily at sight, in full with compound interest!
+Such things should be avoided as the very pestilence.  For men's
+hearts ought not to be set against one another;  but set _with_
+one another, and all against the Evil Thing only.  Men's souls
+ought to be left to see clearly;  not jaundiced, blinded, twisted
+all awry, by revenge, mutual abhorrence, and the like.  An
+Insurrection that can announce the disease, and then retire with
+no such balance-account opened anywhere, has attained the highest
+success possible for it.
+
+And this was what these poor Manchester operatives, with all the
+darkness that was in them and round them, did manage to perform.
+They put their huge inarticulate question, "What do you mean to
+do with us?" in a manner audible to every reflective soul in this
+kingdom;  exciting deep pity in all good men, deep anxiety in all
+men whatever;  and no conflagration or outburst of madness came
+to cloud that feeling anywhere, but everywhere it operates
+unclouded.  All England heard the question:  it is the first
+practical form of our Sphinx-riddle.  England will answer it;
+or, on the whole, England will perish;--one does not yet expect
+the latter result!
+
+For the rest, that the Manchester Insurrection could yet discern
+no radiance of Heaven on any side of its horizon;  but feared
+that all lights, of the O'Connor or other sorts, hitherto
+kindled, were but deceptive fish-oil transparencies, or bog
+will-o'-wisp lights, and no dayspring from on high:  for this
+also we will honour the poor Manchester Insurrection, and augur
+well of it.  A deep unspoken sense lies in these strong men,--
+inconsiderable, almost stupid, as all they can articulate of it
+is.  Amid all violent stupidity of speech, a right noble instinct
+of what is doable and what is not doable never forsakes them:
+the strong inarticulate men and workers, whom _Fact_ patronises;
+of whom, in all difficulty and work whatsoever, there is good
+augury!  This work too is to be done:  Governors and Governing
+Classes that _can_ articulate and utter, in any measure, what the
+law of Fact and Justice is, may calculate that here is a Governed
+Class who will listen.
+
+And truly this first practical form of the Sphinx-question,
+inarticulately and so audibly put there, is one of the most
+impressive ever asked in the world.  "Behold us here, so many
+thousands, millions, and increasing at the rate of fifty every
+hour.  We are right willing and able to work;  and on the Planet
+Earth is plenty of work and wages for a million times as many.
+We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work;  to try to lead us,
+--by ways new, never yet heard of till this new unheard-of Time?
+Or if you declare that you cannot lead us?  And expect that we
+are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner perish of
+starvation?  What is it you expect of us?  What is it you mean to
+do with us?"  This question, I say, has been put in the hearing
+of all Britain;  and will be again put, and ever again, till some
+answer be given it.
+
+Unhappy Workers, unhappier Idlers, unhappy men and women of this
+actual England!  We are yet very far from an answer, and there
+will be no existence for us without finding one.  "A fair
+day's-wages for a fair day's-work:"  it is as just a demand as
+Governed men ever made of Governing.  It is the everlasting
+right of man.  Indisputable as Gospels, as arithmetical
+multiplication-tables:  it must and will have itself fulfilled;
+--and yet, in these times of ours, with what enormous difficulty,
+next-door to impossibility!  For the times are really strange;
+of a complexity intricate with all the new width of the
+ever-widening world;  times here of half-frantic velocity of
+impetus, there of the deadest-looking stillness and paralysis;
+times definable as shewing two qualities, Dilettantism and
+Mammonism;--most intricate obstructed times!  Nay, if there
+were not a Heaven's radiance of justice, prophetic, clearly
+of Heaven, discernible behind all these confused worldwide
+entanglements, of Landlord interests, Manufacturing interests,
+Tory-Whig interests, and who knows what other interests,
+expediencies, vested interests, established possessions,
+inveterate Dilettantisms, Midas-eared Mammonisms,--it would
+seem to everyone a flat impossibility, which all wise men
+might as well at once abandon.  If you do not know eternal
+justice from momentary Expediency, and understand in your
+heart of hearts how justice, radiant, beneficent, as the
+all-victorious Light-element, is also in essence, if need be,
+an all-victorious _Fire_-element, and melts all manner of vested
+interests, and the hardest iron cannon, as if they were soft wax,
+and does ever in the long-run rule and reign, and allows nothing
+else to rule and reign,--you also would talk of impossibility!
+But it is only difficult, it is not impossible.  Possible?  It
+is, with whatever difficulty, very clearly inevitable.
+
+Fair day's-wages for fair-day's-work! exclaims a sarcastic man;
+alas, in what corner of this Planet, since Adam first awoke on
+it, was that ever realised?  The day's-wages of John Milton's
+day's-work, named _Paradise Lost_ and _Milton's Works,_ were Ten
+Pounds paid by instalments, and a rather close escape from death
+on the gallows.  Consider that:  it is no rhetorical flourish;
+it is an authentic, altogether quiet fact,--emblematic, quietly
+documentary of a whole world of such, ever since human history
+began.  Oliver Cromwell quitted his farming;  undertook a
+Hercules' Labour and lifelong wrestle with that Lernean
+Hydracoil, wide as England, hissing heaven-high through its
+thousand crowned, coroneted, shovel-hatted quackheads;  and he
+did wrestle with it, the truest and terriblest wrestle I have
+heard of;  and he wrestled it, and mowed and cut it down a good
+many stages, so that its hissing is ever since pitiful in
+comparison, and one can walk abroad in comparative peace from
+it;--and his wages, as I understand, were burial under the
+gallows-tree near Tyburn Turnpike, with his head on the gable of
+Westminster Hall, and two centuries now of mixed cursing and
+ridicule from all manner of men.  His dust lies under the
+Edgeware Road, near Tyburn Turnpike, at this hour;  and his
+memory is--Nay, what matters what his memory is?  His memory, at
+bottom, is or yet shall be as that of a god:  a terror and horror
+to all quacks and cowards and insincere persons;  an everlasting
+encouragement, new memento, battleword, and pledge of victory to
+all the brave.  It is the natural course and history of the
+Godlike, in every place, in every time.  What god ever carried it
+with the Tenpound Franchisers;  in Open Vestry, or with any
+Sanhedrim of considerable standing?  When was a god found
+agreeable to everybody?  The regular way is to hang, kill,
+crucify your gods, and execrate and trample them under your
+stupid hoofs for a century or two;  till you discover that they
+are gods,--and then take to braying over them, still in a very
+long-eared manner!--So speaks the sarcastic man;  in his wild
+way, very mournful truths.
+
+Day's-wages for day's-work? continues he:  The Progress of Human
+Society consists even in this same.  The better and better
+apportioning of wages to work.  Give me this, you have given me
+all.  Pay to every man accurately what he has worked for, what he
+has earned and done and deserved,--to this man broad lands and
+honours, to that man high gibbets and treadmills:  what more have
+I to ask?  Heaven's Kingdom, which we daily pray for, _has_ come;
+God's will is done on Earth even as it is in Heaven!  This _is_
+the radiance of celestial justice;  in the light or in the fire
+of which all impediments, vested interests, and iron cannon, are
+more and more melting like wax, and disappearing from
+the pathways of men.  A thing ever struggling forward;
+irrepressible, advancing inevitable;  perfecting itself, all
+days, more and more,--never to be _perfect_ till that general
+Doomsday, the ultimate Consummation, and Last of earthly Days.
+
+True, as to 'perfection' and so forth, answer we;  true enough!
+And yet withal we have to remark, that imperfect Human Society
+holds itself together, and finds place under the Sun, in virtue
+simply of some _approximation_ to perfection being actually made
+and put in practice.  We remark farther, that there are
+supportable approximations, and then likewise insupportable.
+With some, almost with any, supportable approximation men are
+apt, perhaps too apt, to rest indolently patient, and say, It
+will do.  Thus these poor Manchester manual workers mean only, by
+day's-wages for day's-work, certain coins of money adequate to
+keep them living;--in return for their work, such modicum of
+food, clothes and fuel as will enable them to continue their work
+itself!  They as yet clamour for no more;  the rest, still
+inarticulate, cannot yet shape itself into a demand at all, and
+only lies in them as a dumb wish;  perhaps only, still more
+inarticulate, as a dumb, altogether unconscious want.  _This_ is
+the supportable approximation they would rest patient with, That
+by their work they might be kept alive to work more!--_This_ once
+grown unattainable, I think, your approximation may consider
+itself to have reached the insupportable stage;  and may prepare,
+with whatever difficulty, reluctance and astonishment, for one of
+two things, for changing or perishing!  With the millions no
+longer able to live, how can the units keep living?  It is too
+clear the Nation itself is on the way to suicidal death.
+
+Shall we say then, The world has retrograded in its talent of
+apportioning wages to work, in late days?  The world had always a
+talent of that sort, better or worse.  Time was when the mere
+_hand_worker needed not announce his claim to the world by
+Manchester Insurrections!--The world, with its Wealth of Nations,
+Supply-and-demand and such like, has of late days been terribly
+inattentive to that question of work and wages.  We will not say,
+the poor world has retrograded even here:  we will say rather,
+the world has been rushing on with such fiery animation to get
+work and ever more work done, it has had no time to think of
+dividing the wages; and has merely left them to be scrambled for
+by the Law of the Stronger, law of Supply-and-demand, law of
+Laissez-faire, and other idle Laws and Un-laws,--saying, in its
+dire haste to get the work done, That is well enough!
+
+And now the world will have to pause a little, and take up that
+other side of the problem, and in right earnest strive for some
+solution of that.  For it has become pressing.  What is the use
+of your spun shirts?  They hang there by the million unsaleable;
+and here, by the million, are diligent bare backs that can get no
+hold of them.  Shirts are useful for covering human backs;
+useless otherwise, an unbearable mockery otherwise.  You have
+fallen terribly behind with that side of the problem!  Manchester
+Insurrections, French Revolutions, and thousandfold phenomena
+great and small, announce loudly that you must bring it forward a
+little again.  Never till now, in the history of an Earth which
+to this hour nowhere refuses to grow corn if you will plough it,
+to yield shirts if you will spin and weave in it, did the mere
+manual two-handed worker (however it might fare with other
+workers) cry in vain for such "wages" as _he_ means by "fair
+wages," namely food and warmth!  The Godlike could not and cannot
+be paid;  but the Earthly always could.  Gurth, a mere swineherd,
+born thrall of Cedric the Saxon, tended pigs in the wood, and did
+get some parings of the pork.  Why, the four-footed worker has
+already got all that this two-handed one is clamouring for!  How
+often must I remind you?  There is not a horse in England, able
+and willing to work, but _has_ due food and lodging;  and goes
+about sleek-coated, satisfied in heart.  And you say, It is
+impossible.  Brothers, I answer, if for you it be impossible,
+what is to become of you?  It is impossible for us to believe it
+to be impossible.  The human brain, looking at these sleek
+English horses, refuses to believe in such impossibility for
+English men.  Do you depart quickly;  clear the ways soon, lest
+worse befall.  We for our share do purpose, with full view of the
+enormous difficulty, with total disbelief in the impossibility,
+to endeavour while life is in us, and to die endeavouring, we and
+our sons, till we attain it or have all died and ended.
+
+Such a Platitude of a World, in which all working horses could be
+well fed, and innumerable working men should die starved, were it
+not best to end it;  to have done with it, and restore it once
+for all to the _Jotuns,_ Mud-giants, Frost-giants and Chaotic
+Brute-gods of the Beginning?  For the old Anarchic Brute-gods it
+may be well enough, but it is a Platitude which Men should be
+above countenancing by their presence in it.  We pray you, let
+the word _impossible_ disappear from your vocabulary in this
+matter.  It is of awful omen;  to all of us, and to yourselves
+first of all.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+Morrison's Pill
+
+
+What is to be done, what would you have us do? asks many a one,
+with a tone of impatience, almost of reproach;  and then, if you
+mention some one thing, some two things, twenty things that might
+be done, turns round with a satirical tehee, and, "These are your
+remedies!"  The state of mind indicated by such question, and
+such rejoinder, is worth reflecting on.
+
+It seems to be taken for granted, by these interrogative
+philosophers, that there is some 'thing,' or handful of 'things,'
+which could be done;  some Act of Parliament, 'remedial measure
+or the like, which could be passed, whereby the social malady
+were fairly fronted, conquered, put an end to;  so that, with
+your remedial measure in your pocket, you could then go on
+triumphant, and be troubled no farther.  "You tell us the evil,"
+cry such persons, as if justly aggrieved, "and do not tell us how
+it is to be cured!"
+
+How it is to be cured?  Brothers, I am sorry I have got
+no Morrison's Pill for curing the maladies of Society.  It
+were infinitely handier if we had a Morrison's Pill, Act of
+Parliament, or remedial measure, which men could swallow, one
+good time, and then go on in their old courses, cleared from all
+miseries and mischiefs!  Unluckily we have none such;  unluckily
+the Heavens themselves, in their rich pharmacopoeia, contain none
+such.  There will no 'thing' be done that will cure you.  There
+will a radical universal alteration of your regimen and way of
+life take place;  there will a most agonising divorce between you
+and your chimeras, luxuries and falsities, take place;  a most
+toilsome, all but 'impossible' return to Nature, and her
+veracities, and her integrities, take place:  that so the inner
+fountains of life may again begin, like eternal Light-fountains,
+to irradiate and purify your bloated, swollen, foul existence,
+drawing nigh, as at present, to nameless death!  Either death or
+else all this will take place.  Judge if, with such diagnosis,
+any Morrison's Pill is like to be discoverable!
+
+But the Life-fountain within you once again set flowing,
+what innumerable 'things,' whole sets and classes and continents
+of 'things,' year after year, and decade after decade, and
+century after century, will then be doable and done!  Not
+Emigration, Education, Corn-Law Abrogation, Sanitary Regulation,
+Land Property-Tax;  not these alone, nor a thousand times as much
+as these.  Good Heavens, there will then be light in the inner
+heart of here and there a man, to discern what is just, what is
+commanded by the Most High God, what _must_ be done, were it
+never so 'impossible.'  Vain jargon in favour of the palpably
+unjust will then abridge itself within limits.  Vain jargon, on
+Hustings, in Parliaments or wherever else, when here and there a
+man has vision for the essential God's-Truth of the things
+jargoned of, will become very vain indeed.  The silence of here
+and there such a man, how eloquent in answer to such jargon!
+Such jargon, frightened at its own gaunt echo, will unspeakably
+abate;  nay, for a while, may almost in a manner disappear,--the
+wise answering it in silence, and even the simple taking cue from
+them to hoot it down wherever heard.  It will be a blessed time;
+and many 'things' will become doable,--and when the brains are
+out, an absurdity will die!  Not easily again shall a Corn-Law
+argue ten years for itself;  and still talk and argue, when
+impartial persons have to say with a sigh that, for so long back,
+they have heard no 'argument' advanced for it but such as might
+make the angels and almost the very jackasses weep!--
+
+Wholly a blessed time:  when jargon might abate, and here and
+there some genuine speech begin.  When to the noble opened heart,
+as to such heart they alone do, all noble things began to grow
+visible;  and the difference between just and unjust, between
+true and false, between work and sham-work, between speech and
+jargon, was once more, what to our happier Fathers it used to be,
+_infinite,_--as between a Heavenly thing and an Infernal:  the
+one a thing which you were _not_ to do, which you were wise not
+to attempt doing;  which it were better for you to have a
+millstone tied round your neck, and be cast into the sea, than
+concern yourself with doing!--Brothers, it will not be a
+Morrison's Pill, or remedial measure, that will bring all this
+about for us.
+
+
+And yet, very literally, till, in some shape or other, it be
+brought about, we remain cureless;  till it begin to be brought
+about, the cure does not begin.  For Nature and Fact, not Redtape
+and Semblance, are to this hour the basis of man's life;  and on
+those, through never such strata of these, man and his life and
+all his interests do, sooner or later, infallibly come to rest,--
+and to be supported or be swallowed according as they agree with
+those.  The question is asked of them, not, How do you agree with
+Downing-streets and accredited Semblance? but, How do you agree
+with God's Universe and the actual Reality of things?  This
+Universe _has_ its Laws.  If we walk according to the Law, the
+Law-Maker will befriend us;  if not, not.  Alas, by no Reform
+Bill, Ballot-box, Five-point Charter, by no boxes or bills or
+charters, can you perform this alchemy:  'Given a world of Knaves
+to produce an Honesty from their united action!'  It is a
+distillation, once for all, not possible.  You pass it through
+alembic after alembic, it comes out still a Dishonesty, with a
+new dress on it, a new colour to it.  'While we ourselves
+continue valets, how can any hero come to govern us?'  We are
+governed, very infallibly, by the 'sham-hero,'--whose name is
+Quack, whose work and governance is Plausibility, and also is
+Falsity and Fatuity;  to which Nature says, and must say when it
+comes to _her_ to speak, eternally No!  Nations cease to be
+befriended of the Law-Maker, when they walk _not_ according to
+the Law.  The Sphinx-question remains unsolved by them, becomes
+ever more insoluble.
+
+If thou ask again, therefore, on the Morrison's-Pill hypothesis,
+What is to be done? allow me to reply:  By thee, for the present,
+almost nothing.  Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if
+possible, to cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays,
+egoisms, purblind dilettantisms;  and become, were it on the
+infinitely small scale, a faithful discerning soul.  Thou shalt
+descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a
+_soul_ there;  till then there can be nothing done!  O brother,
+we must if possible resuscitate some soul and conscience in us,
+exchange our dilettantisms for sincerities, our dead hearts of
+stone for living hearts of flesh.  Then shall we discern, not one
+thing, but, in clearer or dimmer sequence, a whole endless host
+of things that can be done.  _Do_ the first of these;  do it;
+the second will already have become clearer, doabler;  the
+second, third and three-thousandth will then have begun to be
+possible for us.  Not any universal Morrison's Pill shall we
+then, either as swallowers or as venders, ask after at all;  but
+a far different sort of remedies:  Quacks shall no more have
+dominion over us, but true Heroes and Healers!
+
+
+Will not that be a thing worthy of 'doing;'  to deliver ourselves
+from quacks, sham-heroes;  to deliver the whole world more and
+more from such?  They are the one bane of the world.  Once clear
+the world of them, it ceases to be a Devil's-world, in all fibres
+of it wretched, accursed;  and begins to be a God's-world,
+blessed, and working hourly towards blessedness.  Thou for one
+wilt not again vote for any quack, do honour to any edge-gilt
+vacuity in man's shape:  cant shall be known to thee by the sound
+of it;--thou wilt fly from cant with a shudder never felt before;
+as from the opened litany of Sorcerers' Sabbaths, the true Devil-
+worship of this age, more horrible than any other blasphemy,
+profanity or genuine blackguardism elsewhere audible among men.
+It is alarming to witness,--in its present completed state!  And
+Quack and Dupe, as we must ever keep in mind, are upper-side and
+under of the selfsame substance;  convertible personages:  turn
+up your dupe into the proper fostering element, and he
+himself can become a quack;  there is in him the due prurient
+insincerity, open voracity for profit, and closed sense for
+truth, whereof quacks too, in all their kinds, are made.
+
+Alas, it is not to the hero, it is to the sham-hero that, of
+right and necessity, the valet-world belongs.  'What is to be
+done?'  The reader sees whether it is like to be the seeking and
+swallowing of some 'remedial measure!'
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+Aristocracy of Talent
+
+
+When an individual is miserable, what does it most of all behove
+him to do?  To complain of this man or of that, of this thing or
+of that?  To fill the world and the street with lamentation,
+objurgation?  Not so at all;  the reverse of so.  All moralists
+advise him not to complain of any person or of any thing, but of
+himself only.  He is to know of a truth that being miserable he
+has been unwise, he.  Had he faithfully followed Nature and her
+Laws, Nature, ever true to her Laws, would have yielded fruit and
+increase and felicity to him:  but he has followed other than
+Nature's Laws;  and now Nature, her patience with him being
+ended, leaves him desolate;  answers with very emphatic
+significance to him:  No.  Not by this road, my son;  by another
+road shalt thou attain well-being:  this, thou perceivest is the
+road to ill-being;  quit this!--So do all moralists advise:  that
+the man penitently say to himself first of all, Behold I was not
+wise enough;  I quitted the laws of Fact, which are also called
+the Laws of God, and mistook for them the laws of Sham and
+Semblance, which are called the Devil's Laws;  therefore
+am I here!
+
+Neither with Nations that become miserable is it fundamentally
+otherwise.  The ancient guides of Nations, Prophets, Priests, or
+whatever their name, were well aware of this;  and, down to a
+late epoch, impressively taught and inculcated it.  The modern
+guides of Nations, who also go under a great variety of names,
+journalists, Political Economists, Politicians, Pamphleteers,
+have entirely forgotten this, and are ready to deny this.  But it
+nevertheless remains eternally undeniable:  nor is there any
+doubt but we shall all be taught it yet, and made again to
+confess it:  we shall all be striped and scourged till we do
+learn it;  and shall at last either get to know it, or be striped
+to death in the process.  For it is undeniable!  When a Nation is
+unhappy, the old Prophet was right and not wrong in saying to it:
+Ye have forgotten God, ye have quitted the ways of God, or ye
+would not have been unhappy.  It is not according to the laws of
+Fact that ye have lived and guided yourselves, but according to
+the laws of Delusion, Imposture, and wilful and unwilful
+_Mistake_ of Fact;  behold therefore the Unveracity is worn out;
+Nature's long-suffering with you is exhausted;  and ye are here!
+
+Surely there is nothing very inconceivable in this, even to the
+Journalist, to the Political Economist, Modern Pamphleteer, or
+any two-legged animal without feathers!  If a country finds
+itself wretched, sure enough that country has been _mis_guided:
+it is with the wretched Twenty-seven Millions, fallen wretched,
+as with the Unit fallen wretched:  they as he have quitted the
+course prescribed by Nature and the Supreme Powers, and so are
+fallen into scarcity, disaster, infelicity;  and pausing to
+consider themselves, have to lament and say, Alas, we were not
+wise enough.  We took transient superficial Semblance for
+everlasting central Substance;  we have departed far away from
+the _Laws_ of this Universe, and behold now lawless Chaos and
+inane Chimera is ready to devour us!--'Nature in late centuries,'
+says Sauerteig, 'was universally supposed to be dead;  an old
+eight-day clock, made many thousand years ago, and still ticking,
+but dead as brass,--which the Maker, at most, sat looking at, in
+a distant, singular, and indeed incredible manner:  but now I am
+happy to observe, she is everywhere asserting herself to be not
+dead and brass at all, but alive and miraculous, celestial-
+infernal, with an emphasis that will again penetrate the thickest
+head of this Planet by and by!--
+
+Indisputable enough to all mortals now, the guidance of this
+country has not been sufficiently wise:  men too foolish have
+been set to the guiding and governing of it, and have guided it
+hither;  we must find wiser,--_wiser,_ or else we perish!  To
+this length of insight all England has now advanced;  but as yet
+no farther.  All England stands wringing its hands, asking
+itself, nigh desperate, What farther?  Reform Bill proves to be a
+failure;  Benthamee Radicalism, the gospel of 'Enlightened
+Selfishness,' dies out, or dwindles into Five-point Chartism,
+amid the tears and hootings of men:  what next are we to hope or
+try?  Five-point Charter, Freetrade;  Church-extension, Sliding-
+scale;  what, in Heaven's name, are we next to attempt, that we
+sink not in inane Chimera, and be devoured of Chaos?--The case is
+pressing, and one of the most complicated in the world.  A God's-
+message never came to thicker-skinned people;  never had a God's-
+message to pierce through thicker integuments, into heavier ears.
+It is Fact, speaking once more, in miraculous thunder-voice, from
+out of the centre of the world;--how unknown its language to the
+deaf and foolish many;  how distinct, undeniable, terrible and
+yet beneficent, to the hearing few:  Behold, ye shall grow wiser,
+or ye shall die!  Truer to Nature's Fact, or inane Chimera will
+swallow you;  in whirlwinds of fire, you and your Mammonisms,
+Dilettantisms, your Midas-eared philosophies, double-barreled
+Aristocracies, shall disappear!--Such is the God's-message to
+_us,_ once more; in these modern days.
+
+We must have more Wisdom to govern us, we must be governed by the
+Wisest, we must have an Aristocracy of Talent! cry many.  True,
+most true;  but how to get it?  The following extract from our
+young friend of the _Houndsditch Indicator_ is worth perusing:
+'At this time,' says he, 'while there is a cry everywhere,
+articulate or inarticulate, for an "Aristocracy of Talent," a
+Governing Class namely which did govern, not merely which took
+the wages of governing, and could not with all our industry be
+kept from misgoverning, corn-lawing, and playing the very deuce
+with us,--it may not be altogether useless to remind some of the
+greener-headed sort what a dreadfully difficult affair the
+getting of such an Aristocracy is!  Do you expect, my friends,
+that your indispensable Aristocracy of Talent is to be enlisted
+straightway, by some sort of recruitment aforethought, out of the
+general population;  arranged in supreme regimental order;  and
+set to rule over us?  That it will be got sifted, like wheat out
+of chaff, from the Twenty-seven Million British subjects;  that
+any Ballot-box, Reform Bill, or other Political Machine, with
+Force of Public Opinion never so active on it, is likely to
+perform said process of sifting?  Would to Heaven that we had a
+sieve;  that we could so much as fancy any kind of sieve, wind-
+fanners, or ne-plus-ultra of machinery, devisable by man, that
+would do it!
+
+'Done nevertheless, sure enough, it must be;  it shall and will
+be.  We are rushing swiftly on the road to destruction;  every
+hour bringing us nearer, until it be, in some measure, done.  The
+doing of it is not doubtful;  only the method and the costs!  Nay
+I will even mention to you an infallible sifting-process whereby
+he that has ability will be sifted out to rule among us, and that
+same blessed Aristocracy of Talent be verily, in an approximate
+degree, vouchsafed us by and by:  an infallible sifting-process;
+to which, however, no soul can help his neighbour, but each must,
+with devout prayer to Heaven, endeavour to help himself.  It is,
+O friends, that all of us, that many of us, should acquire the
+true eye for talent, which is dreadfully wanting at present!  The
+true _eye_ for talent presupposes the true reverence for it,--O
+Heavens, presupposes so many things!
+
+'For example, you Bobus Higgins, Sausage-maker on the great
+scale, who are raising such a clamour for this Aristocracy of
+Talent, what is it that you do, in that big heart of yours,
+chiefly in very fact pay reverence to?  Is it to talent,
+intrinsic manly worth of any kind, you unfortunate Bobus?  The
+manliest man that you saw going in a ragged coat, did you ever
+reverence him;  did you so much as know that he was a manly man
+at all, till his coat grew better?  Talent!  I understand you to
+be able to worship the fame of talent, the power, cash, celebrity
+or other success of talent;  but the talent itself is a thing you
+never saw with eyes.  Nay what is it in yourself that you
+are proudest of, that you take most pleasure in surveying
+meditatively in thoughtful moments?  Speak now, is it the bare
+Bobus stript of his very name and shirt, and turned loose upon
+society, that you admire and thank Heaven for;  or Bobus with
+his cash-accounts and larders dropping fatness, with his
+respectabilities, warm garnitures, and pony-chaise, admirable in
+some measure to certain of the flunkey species?  Your own degree
+of worth and talent, is it of _infinite_ value to you;  or only
+of finite,--measurable by the degree of currency, and conquest of
+praise or pudding, it has brought you to?  Bobus, you are in a
+vicious circle, rounder than one of your own sausages;  and will
+never vote for or promote any talent, except what talent or sham-
+talent has already _got_ itself voted for!'--We here cut short
+the _Indicator;_ all readers perceiving whither he now tends.
+
+
+'More Wisdom' indeed:  but where to find more Wisdom?  We have
+already a Collective Wisdom, after its kind,--though 'class-
+legislation,' and another thing or two, affect it somewhat!  On
+the whole, as they say, Like people like priest;  so we may say,
+Like people like king.  The man gets himself appointed and
+elected who is ablest--to be appointed and elected.  What can the
+incorruptiblest _Bobuses_ elect, if it be not some _Bobissimus,_
+should they find such?
+
+Or, again, perhaps there is not, in the whole Nation, Wisdom
+enough, 'collect' it as we may, to make an adequate Collective!
+That too is a case which may befall:  a ruined man staggers down
+to ruin because there was not wisdom enough in him;  so, clearly
+also, may Twenty-seven Million collective men!--But indeed one of
+the infalliblest fruits of Unwisdom in a Nation is that it cannot
+get the use of what Wisdom is actually in it:  that it is not
+governed by the wisest it has, who alone have a divine right to
+govern in all Nations;  but by the sham-wisest, or even by the
+openly not-so-wise if they are handiest otherwise!  This is the
+infalliblest result of Unwisdom;  and also the balefullest,
+immeasurablest,--not so much what we can call a poison-_fruit,_
+as a universal death-disease, and poisoning of the whole tree.
+For hereby are fostered, fed into gigantic bulk, all manner of
+Unwisdoms, poison-fruits;  till, as we say, the life-tree
+everywhere is made a upas-tree, deadly Unwisdom overshadowing all
+things;  and there is done what lies in human skill to stifle all
+Wisdom everywhere in the birth, to smite our poor world barren of
+Wisdom,--and make your utmost Collective Wisdom, were it
+collected and elected by Rhadamanthus, AEacus and Minos, not to
+speak of drunken Tenpound Franchisers with their ballot-boxes, an
+inadequate Collective!  The Wisdom is not now there:  how will
+you 'collect' it?  As well wash Thames mud, by improved methods,
+to find more gold in it.
+
+Truly, the first condition is indispensable, That Wisdom be
+there:  but the second is like unto it, is properly one with it:
+these two conditions act and react through every fibre of them,
+and go inseparably together.  If you have much Wisdom in your
+Nation, you will get it faithfully collected;  for the wise love
+Wisdom, and will search for it as for life and salvation.  If you
+have little Wisdom, you will get even that little ill-collected,
+trampled under foot, reduced as near as possible to annihilation;
+for fools do not love Wisdom;  they are foolish, first of all,
+because they have never loved Wisdom,--but have loved their own
+appetites, ambitions, their coroneted coaches, tankards of heavy-
+wet.  Thus is your candle lighted at both ends, and the progress
+towards consummation is swift.  Thus is fulfilled that saying in
+the Gospel:  To him that hath shall be given;  and from him that
+hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.  Very
+literally, in a very fatal manner, that saying is here fulfilled.
+
+Our 'Aristocracy of Talent' seems at a considerable distance yet;
+does it not, O Bobus?
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+Hero-Worship
+
+
+To the present Editor, not less than to Bobus, a Government of
+the Wisest, what Bobus calls an Aristocracy of Talent, seems the
+one healing remedy:  but he is not so sanguine as Bobus with
+respect to the means of realizing it.  He thinks that we have at
+once missed realising it, and come to need it so pressingly,
+by departing far from the inner eternal Laws and taking up
+with the temporary outer semblances of Laws.  He thinks that
+'enlightened Egoism,' never so luminous, is not the rule by
+which man's life can be led.  That 'Laissez-faire,' 'Supply-and-
+demand,' 'Cash-payment for the sole nexus,' and so forth, were
+not, are not, and will never be, a practicable Law of Union for a
+Society of Men.  That Poor and Rich, that Governed and Governing,
+cannot long live together on any such Law of Union.  Alas, he
+thinks that man has a soul in him, _different_ from the stomach
+in any sense of this word;  that if said soul be asphyxied, and
+lie quietly forgotten, the man and his affairs are in a bad way.
+He thinks that said soul will have to be resuscitated from its
+asphyxia;  that if it prove irresuscitable, the man is not long
+for this world.  In brief, that Midas-eared Mammonism, double-
+barreled Dilettantism, and their thousand adjuncts and corollaries,
+are not the Law by which God Almighty has appointed this his
+Universe to go.  That, once for all, these are not the Law:
+and then farther that we shall have to return to what is
+the Law,--not by smooth flowery paths, it is like, and with
+'tremendous cheers' in our throat;  but over steep untrodden
+places, through stormclad chasms, waste oceans, and the bosom of
+tornadoes;  thank Heaven, if not through very Chaos and the
+Abyss!  The resuscitating of a soul that has gone to asphyxia is
+no momentary or pleasant process, but a long and terrible one.
+
+
+To the present Editor 'Hero-worship,' as he has elsewhere named
+it, means much more than an elected Parliament, or stated
+Aristocracy, of the Wisest;  for, in his dialect, it is the
+summary, ultimate essence, and supreme practical perfection of
+all manner of 'worship,' and true worships and noblenesses
+whatsoever.  Such  blessed  Parliament and, were it once in
+perfection, blessed Aristocracy of the Wisest, god-honoured and
+man-honoured, he does look for, more and more perfected,--as the
+topmost blessed practical apex of a whole world reformed from
+sham-worship, informed anew with worship, with truth and
+blessedness!  He thinks that Hero-worship, done differently in
+every different epoch of the world, is the soul of all social
+business among men;  that the doing of it well, or the doing of
+it ill, measures accurately what degree of well-being or of ill-
+being there is in the world's affairs.  He thinks that we, on the
+whole, do our Hero-worship worse than any Nation in this world
+ever did it before:  that the Burns an Exciseman, the Byron a
+Literary Lion, are intrinsically, all things considered, a baser
+and falser phenomenon than the Odin a God, the Mahomet a Prophet
+of God.  It is this Editor's clear opinion, accordingly, that we
+must learn to do our Hero-worship better;  that to do it better
+and better, means the awakening of the Nation's soul from its
+asphyxia, and the return of blessed life to us,--Heaven's blessed
+life, not Mammon's galvanic accursed one.  To resuscitate the
+Asphyxied, apparently now moribund, and in the last agony if not
+resuscitated:  such and no other seems the consummation.
+
+'Hero-worship,' if you will,--yes, friends;  but, first of all,
+by being ourselves of heroic mind.  A whole world of Heroes;  a
+world not of Flunkeys, where no Hero-King _can_ reign:  that is
+what we aim at!  We, for our share, will put away all Flunkeyism,
+Baseness, Unveracity from us;  we shall then hope to have
+Noblenesses and Veracities set over us;  never till then.  Let
+Bobus and Company sneer, "That is your Reform!"  Yes, Bobus, that
+is our Reform;  and except in that, and what will follow out of
+that, we have no hope at all.  Reform, like Charity, O Bobus,
+must begin at home.  Once well at home, how will it radiate
+outwards, irrepressible, into all that we touch and handle, speak
+and work;  kindling ever new light, by incalculable contagion,
+spreading in geometric ratio, far and wide,--doing good only,
+wheresoever it spreads, and not evil.
+
+By Reform Bills, Anti-Corn-Law Bills, and thousand other bills
+and methods, we will demand of our Governors, with emphasis, and
+for the first time not without effect, that they cease to be
+quacks, or else depart;  that they set no quackeries and
+blockheadisms anywhere to rule over us, that they utter or act no
+cant to us,--that it will be better if they do not.  For we shall
+now know quacks when we see them;  cant, when we hear it, shall
+be horrible to us!  We will say, with the poor Frenchman at the
+Bar of the Convention, though in wiser style than he, and 'for
+the space' not 'of an hour' but of a lifetime:  _"Je demande
+l'arrestation des coquins et des laches."_  'Arrestment of the
+knaves and dastards:'  ah, we know what a work that is;  how long
+it will be before _they_ are all or mostly got 'arrested:'--but
+here is one;  arrest him, in God's name;  it is one fewer!  We
+will, in all practicable ways, by word and silence, by act
+and refusal to act, energetically demand arrestment,--_"le
+demande cette arrestation-la!"_--and by degrees infallibly
+attain it.  Infallibly:  for light spreads;  all human
+souls, never so bedarkened, love light;  light once kindled
+spreads, till all is luminous;--till the cry, "_Arrest_ your
+knaves and dastards rises imperative from millions of hearts, and
+rings and reigns from sea to sea.  Nay, how many of them may we
+not 'arrest' with our own hands, even now;  we!  Do not
+countenance them, thou there:  turn away from their lackered
+sumptuosities, their belauded sophistries, their serpent
+graciosities, their spoken and acted cant, with a sacred horror,
+with an _Apage Satanas._--Bobus and Company, and all men will
+gradually join us.  We demand arrestment of the knaves and
+dastards, and begin by arresting our own poor selves out of that
+fraternity.  There is no other reform conceivable.  Thou and I,
+my friend, can, in the most flunkey world, make, each of us,
+_one_ non-flunkey, one hero, if we like:  that will be two heroes
+to begin with:--Courage! even that is a whole world of heroes to
+end with, or what we poor Two can do in furtherance thereof!
+
+Yes, friends:  Hero-kings and a whole world not unheroic, there
+lies the port and happy haven, towards which, through all these
+stormtost seas, French Revolutions, Chartisms, Manchester
+Insurrections, that make the heart sick in these bad days, the
+Supreme Powers are driving us.  On the whole, blessed be the
+Supreme Powers, stern as they are!  Towards that haven will we, O
+friends;  let all true men, with what of faculty is in them, bend
+valiantly, incessantly, with thousandfold endeavour, thither,
+thither!  There, or else in the Ocean-abysses, it is very clear
+to me, we shall arrive.
+
+
+Well;  here truly is no answer to the Sphinx-question;  not the
+answer a disconsolate Public, inquiring at the College of Health,
+was in hopes of!  A total change of regimen, change of constitution
+and existence from the very centre of it;  a new body to be got,
+with resuscitated soul,--not without convulsive travail-throes;
+as all birth and new-birth presupposes travail!  This is sad news
+to a disconsolate discerning Public, hoping to have got off by
+some Morrison's Pill, some Saint-John's corrosive mixtures and
+perhaps a little blistery friction on the back!--We were prepared
+to part with our Corn-Law, with various Laws and Unlaws:  but
+this, what is this?
+
+Nor has the Editor forgotten how it fares with your ill-boding
+Cassandras in Sieges of Troy.  Imminent perdition is not usually
+driven away by words of warning.  Didactic Destiny has other
+methods in store;  or these would fail always.  Such words
+should, nevertheless, be uttered, when they dwell truly in the
+soul of any man.  Words are hard, are importunate;  but how much
+harder the importunate events they foreshadow!  Here and there a
+human soul may listen to the words,--who knows how many human
+souls? whereby the importunate events, if not diverted and
+prevented, will be rendered _less_ hard.  The present Editor's
+purpose is to himself full of hope.
+
+For though fierce travails, though wide seas and roaring gulfs
+lie before us, is it not something if a Loadstar, in the eternal
+sky, do once more disclose itself;  an everlasting light, shining
+through all cloud-tempests and roaring billows, ever as we emerge
+from the trough of the sea:  the blessed beacon, far off on the
+edge of far horizons, towards which we are to steer incessantly
+for life?  Is it not something;  O Heavens, is it not all?  There
+lies the Heroic Promised Land;  under that Heaven's-light, my
+brethren, bloom the Happy Isles,--there, O there!  Thither
+will we;
+
+     There dwells the great Achilles whom we knew.*
+
+-------------
+* Tennyson's _Poems_ (Ulysses)
+-----------
+
+There dwell all Heroes, and will dwell:  thither, all ye heroic-
+minded!--The Heaven's Loadstar once clearly in our eye, how will
+each true man stand truly to _his_ work in the ship;  how, with
+undying hope, will all things be fronted, all be conquered.  Nay,
+with the ship's prow once turned in that direction, is not all,
+as it were, already well?  Sick wasting misery has become noble
+manful effort with a goal in our eye.  'The choking Nightmare
+chokes us no longer;  for we _stir_ under it;  the Nightmare has
+already fled.'--
+
+Certainly, could the present Editor instruct men how to know
+Wisdom, Heroism, when they see it, that they might do reverence
+to it only, and loyally make it ruler over them,--yes, he were
+the living epitome of all Editors, Teachers, Prophets, that
+now teach and prophesy;  he were an _Apollo_-Morrison, a
+Trismegistus! and _effective_ Cassandra!  Let no Able Editor hope
+such things.  It is to be expected the present laws of copyright,
+rate of reward per sheet, and other considerations, will save him
+from that peril.  Let no Editor hope such things:  no;--and yet
+let all Editors aim towards such things, and even towards such
+alone!  One knows not what the meaning of editing and writing is,
+if even this be not it.
+
+Enough, to the present Editor it has seemed possible some
+glimmering of light, for here and there a human soul, might lie
+in these confused Paper-Masses now intrusted to him;  wherefore
+he determines to edit the same.  Out of old Books, new Writings,
+and much Meditation not of yesterday, he will endeavour to select
+a thing or two;  and from the Past, in a circuitous way,
+illustrate the Present and the Future.  The Past is a dim
+indubitable fact:  the Future too is one, only dimmer;  nay
+properly it is the same fact in new dress and development.  For
+the Present holds in it both the whole Past and the whole
+Future;--as the LIFE-TREE IGDRASIL, wide-waving, many-toned, has
+its roots down deep in the Death-kingdoms, among the oldest dead
+dust of men, and with its boughs reaches always beyond the stars;
+and in all times and places is one and the same Life-tree!
+
+
+
+
+Book II--The Ancient Monk
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+Jocelin of Brakelond
+
+
+We will, in this Second Portion of our Work, strive to penetrate
+a little, by means of certain confused Papers, printed and other,
+into a somewhat remote Century; and to look face to face on it,
+in hope of perhaps illustrating our own poor Century thereby.  It
+seems a circuitous way;  but it may prove a way nevertheless.
+For man has ever been a striving, struggling, and, in spite of
+wide-spread calumnies to the contrary, a veracious creature:  the
+Centuries too are all lineal children of one another;  and often,
+in the portrait of early grandfathers, this and the other
+enigmatic feature of the newest grandson shall disclose itself,
+to mutual elucidation.  This Editor will venture on such a thing.
+
+Besides, in Editors' Books, and indeed everywhere else in the
+world of Today, a certain latitude of movement grows more and
+more becoming for the practical man.  Salvation lies not in tight
+lacing, in these times;--how far from that, in any province
+whatsoever!  Readers and men generally are getting into strange
+habits of asking all persons and things, from poor Editors' Books
+up to Church Bishops and State Potentates, not, By what
+designation are thou called;  in what wig and black triangle dost
+thou walk abroad?  Heavens, I know thy designation and black
+triangle well enough!  But, in God's name, what _art_ thou?  Not
+Nothing, sayest thou!  Then if not, How much and what?  This is
+the thing I would know;  and even _must_ soon know, such a pass
+am I come to!--What weather-symptoms,--not for the poor Editor of
+Books alone!  The Editor of Books may understand withal that if,
+as is said, 'many kinds are permissible,' there is one kind not
+permissible, 'the kind that has nothing in it, _le genre
+ennuyeux;'_  and go on his way accordingly.
+
+A certain Jocelinus de Brakelonda, a natural-born Englishman, has
+left us an extremely foreign Book,* which the labours of the
+Camden Society have brought to light in these days.  Jocelin's
+Book, the 'Chronicle,' or private Boswellean Notebook, of
+Jocelin, a certain old St. Edmundsbury Monk and Boswell, now
+seven centuries old, how remote is it from us;  exotic,
+extraneous;  in all ways, coming from far abroad!  The language
+of it is not foreign only but dead:  Monk-Latin lies across not
+the British Channel, but the ninefold Stygian Marshes, Stream of
+Lethe, and one knows not where!  Roman Latin itself, still
+alive for us in the Elysian Fields of Memory, is domestic
+in comparison.  And then the ideas, life-furniture, whole
+workings and ways of this worthy Jocelin;  covered deeper than
+Pompeii with the lava-ashes and inarticulate wreck of seven
+hundred years!
+
+----------
+* _Chronica Jocelini de Brakelonda, de rebus gestis Samsonis
+Abbatis Monasterii Sancti Edmundi: nunc primum typis mandata,
+curante Johanne Gage Rokewood._  (Camden Society, London, 1840)
+----------
+
+Jocelin of Brakelond cannot be called a conspicuous literary
+character;  indeed few mortals that have left so visible a work,
+or footmark, behind them can be more obscure.  One other of those
+vanished Existences, whose work has not yet vanished;--almost a
+pathetic phenomenon, were not the whole world full of such!  The
+builders of Stonehenge, for example:--or alas, what say we,
+Stonehenge and builders?  The writers of the _Universal Review_
+and _Homer's Iliad;_  the paviers of London streets;--sooner
+or later, the entire Posterity of Adam!  It is a pathetic
+phenomenon;  but an irremediable, nay, if well meditated, a
+consoling one.
+
+By his dialect of Monk-Latin, and indeed by his name, this
+Jocelin seems to have been a Norman Englishman;  the surname de
+Brakelonda indicates a native of St. Edmundsbury itself,
+_Brakelond_ being the known old name of a street or quarter in
+that venerable Town.  Then farther, sure enough, our Jocelin was
+a Monk of St. Edmundsbury Convent;  held some _'obedientia,'_
+subaltern officiality there, or rather, in succession several;
+was, for one thing, 'chaplain to my Lord Abbot, living beside him
+night and day for the space of six years;'--which last, indeed,
+is the grand fact of Jocelin's existence, and properly the origin
+of this present Book, and of the chief meaning it has for us now.
+He was, as we have hinted, a kind of born _Boswell,_ though an
+infinitesimally small one;  neither did he altogether want his
+_Johnson_ even there and then.  Johnsons are rare;  yet, as has
+been asserted, Boswels perhaps still rarer,--the more is the pity
+on both sides!  This Jocelin, as we can discern well, was an
+ingenious and ingenuous, a cheery-hearted, innocent, yet withal
+shrewd, noticing, quick-wilted man;  and from under his monk's
+cowl has looked out on that narrow section of the world in a
+really _human_ manner;  not in any _simial,_ canine, ovine, or
+otherwise inhuman manner,--afflictive to all that have humanity!
+The man is of patient, peaceable, loving, clear-smiling nature;
+open for this and that.  A wise simplicity is in him;  much
+natural sense;  a _veracity_ that goes deeper than words.
+Veracity:  it is the basis of all;  and, some say, means genius
+itself;  the prime essence of all genius whatsoever.  Our
+Jocelin, for the rest, has read his classical manuscripts, his
+Virgilius, his Flaccus, Ovidius Naso;  of course still more, his
+Homilies and Breviaries, and if not the Bible, considerable
+extracts of the Bible.  Then also he has a pleasant wit;  and
+loves a timely joke, though in mild subdued manner:  very amiable
+to see.  A learned grown man, yet with the heart of a good
+child;  whose whole life indeed has been that of a child,--St.
+Edmundsbury Monastery a larger kind of cradle for him, in which
+his whole prescribed duty was to _sleep_ kindly, and love his
+mother well!  This is the Biography of Jocelin;  'a man of
+excellent religion,' says one of his contemporary Brother Monks,
+_'eximiae religionis, potens sermone et opere.'_
+
+For one thing, he had learned to write a kind of Monk or Dog-
+Latin, still readable to mankind;  and, by good luck for us, had
+bethought him of noting down thereby what things seemed notablest
+to him.  Hence gradually resulted a _Chronica Jocelini;_  new
+Manuscript in the _Liber Albus_ of St. Edmundsbury.  Which
+Chronicle, once written in its childlike transparency, in its
+innocent good-humour, not without touches of ready pleasant wit
+and many kinds of worth, other men liked naturally to read:
+whereby it failed not to be copied, to be multiplied, to be
+inserted in the _Liber Albus;_  and so surviving Henry the
+Eighth, Putney Cromwell, the Dissolution of Monasteries, and all
+accidents of malice and neglect for six centuries or so, it got
+into the _Harleian Collection,_--and has now therefrom, by Mr.
+Rokewood of the Camden Society, been deciphered into clear print;
+and lies before us, a dainty thin quarto, to interest for a few
+minutes whomsoever it can.
+
+Here too it will behove a just Historian gratefully to say that
+Mr. Rokewood, Jocelin's Editor, has done his editorial function
+well.  Not only has he deciphered his crabbed Manuscript into
+clear print;  but he has attended, what his fellow editors are
+not always in the habit of doing, to the important truth that the
+Manuscript so deciphered ought to have a meaning for the reader.
+Standing faithfully by his text, and printing its very errors in
+spelling, in grammar or otherwise, he has taken care by some note
+to indicate that they are errors, and what the correction of them
+ought to be.  Jocelin's Monk-Latin is generally transparent, as
+shallow limpid water.  But at any stop that may occur, of which
+there are a few, and only a very few, we have the comfortable
+assurance that a meaning does lie in the passage, and may by
+industry be got at;  that a faithful editor's industry had
+already got at it before passing on.  A compendious useful
+Glossary is given;  nearly adequate to help the uninitiated
+through:  sometimes one wishes it had been a trifle larger;
+but, with a Spelman and Ducange at your elbow, how easy to have
+made it far too large!  Notes are added, generally brief;
+sufficiently explanatory of most points.  Lastly, a copious
+correct Index;  which no such Book should want, and which
+unluckily very few possess.  And so, in a word, the _Chronicle of
+Jocelin_ is, as it professes to be, unwrapped from its thick
+cerements, and fairly brought forth into the common daylight, so
+that he who runs, and has a smattering of grammar, may read.
+
+We have heard so much of Monks;  everywhere, in real and
+fictitious History, from Muratori Annals to Radcliffe Romances,
+these singular two-legged animals, with their rosaries and
+breviaries, with their shaven crowns, hair-cilices, and vows of
+poverty, masquerade so strangely through our fancy;  and they are
+in fact so very strange an extinct species of the human family,--
+a veritable Monk of Bury St. Edmunds is worth attending to, if by
+chance made visible and audible.  Here he is;  and in his hand a
+magical speculum, much gone to rust indeed, yet in fragments
+still clear;  wherein the marvelous image of his existence does
+still shadow itself, though fitfully, and as with an intermittent
+light!  Will not the reader peep with us into this singular
+_camera lucida,_ where an extinct species, though fitfully, can
+still be seen alive?  Extinct species, we say;  for the live
+specimens which still go about under that character are too
+evidently to be classed as spurious in Natural History:  the
+Gospel of Richard Arkwright once promulgated, no Monk of the old
+sort is any longer possible in this world.  But fancy a deep-
+buried Mastodon, some fossil Megatherion, Ichthyosaurus, were
+to begin to speak from amid its rock-swathings, never so
+indistinctly!  The most extinct fossil species of Men or Monks
+can do, and does, this miracle,--thanks to the Letters of the
+Alphabet, good for so many things.
+
+Jocelin, we said, was somewhat of a Boswell;  but unfortunately,
+by Nature, he is none of the largest, and distance has now
+dwarfed him to an extreme degree.  His light is most feeble,
+intermittent, and requires the intensest kindest inspection;
+otherwise it will disclose mere vacant haze.  It must be owned,
+the good Jocelin, spite of his beautiful childlike character, is
+but an altogether imperfect 'mirror' of these old-world things!
+The good man, he looks on us so clear and cheery, and in his
+neighbourly soft-smiling eyes we see so well our _own_ shadow,--
+we have a longing always to cross-question him, to force from him
+an explanation of much.  But no;  Jocelin, though he talks with
+such clear familiarity, like a next-door neighbour, will not
+answer any question:  that is the peculiarity of him, dead these
+six hundred and fifty years, and quite deaf to us, though still
+so audible!  The good man, he cannot help it, nor can we.
+
+But truly it is a strange consideration this simple one, as we go
+on with him, or indeed with any lucid simple-hearted soul like
+him:  Behold therefore, this England of the Year 1200 was no
+chimerical vacuity or dreamland, peopled with mere vaporous
+Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera, and Doctrines of the Constitution, but
+a green solid place, that grew corn and several other things.
+The Sun shone on it;  the vicissitude of seasons and human
+fortunes.  Cloth was woven and worn;  ditches were dug,
+furrowfields ploughed, and houses built.  Day by day all men and
+cattle rose to labour, and night by night returned home weary to
+their several lairs.  In wondrous Dualism, then as now, lived
+nations of breathing men;  alternating, in all ways, between
+Light and Dark;  between joy and sorrow, between rest and toil,
+between hope, hope reaching high as Heaven, and fear deep as very
+Hell.  Not vapour Fantasms, Rymer's Foedera at all!  Coeur-de-
+Lion was not a theatrical popinjay with greaves and steelcap on
+it, but a man living upon victuals,--_not_ imported by Peel's
+Tariff.  Coeur-de-Lion came palpably athwart this Jocelin at St.
+Edmundsbury;  and had almost peeled the sacred gold _'Feretrum,'_
+or St. Edmund Shrine itself, to ransom him out of the Danube Jail.
+
+These clear eyes of neighbour Jocelin looked on the bodily
+presence of King John;  the very John _Sansterre,_ or Lackland,
+who signed _Magna Charta_ afterwards in Runnymead.  Lackland,
+with a great retinue, boarded once, for the matter of a
+fortnight, in St. Edmundsbury Convent;  daily in the very
+eyesight, palpable to the very fingers of our Jocelin:  O
+Jocelin, what did he say, what did he do;  how looked he, lived
+he;--at the very lowest, what coat or breeches had he on?
+Jocelin is obstinately silent.  Jocelin marks down what interests
+_him;_  entirely deaf to _us._  With Jocelin's eyes we discern
+almost nothing of John Lackland.  As through a glass darkly, we
+with our own eyes and appliances, intensely looking, discern at
+most:  A blustering, dissipated, human figure, with a kind of
+blackguard quality air, in cramoisy velvet, or other uncertain
+texture, uncertain cut, with much plumage and fringing;  amid
+numerous other human figures of the like;  riding abroad with
+hawks;  talking noisy nonsense;--tearing out the bowels of St.
+Edmundsbury Convent (its larders namely and cellars) in the most
+ruinous way, by living at rack and manger there.  Jocelin notes
+only, with a slight subacidity of manner, that the King's
+Majesty, _Dominus Rex,_ did leave, as gift for our St. Edmund
+Shrine, a handsome enough silk cloak,--or rather pretended to
+leave, for one of his retinue borrowed it of us, and we never got
+sight of it again;  and, on the whole, that the _Dominus Rex,_ at
+departing, gave us 'thirteen _sterlingii,'_ one shilling and one
+penny, to say a mass for him;  and so departed,--like a shabby
+Lackland as he was!  'Thirteen pence sterling,' this was what the
+Convent got from Lackland, for all the victuals he and his had
+made away with.  We of course said our mass for him, having
+covenanted to do it,--but let impartial posterity judge with what
+degree of fervour!
+
+And in this manner vanishes King Lackland;  traverses swiftly our
+strange intermittent magic-mirror, jingling the shabby thirteen
+pence merely;  and rides with his hawks into Egyptian night
+again.  It is Jocelin's manner with all things;  and it is men's
+manner and men's necessity.  How intermittent is our good
+Jocelin;  marking down, without eye to _us,_ what _he_ finds
+interesting!  How much in Jocelin, as in all History, and indeed
+in all Nature, is at once inscrutable and certain;  so dim, yet
+so indubitable;  exciting us to endless considerations.  For King
+Lackland was there, verily he;  and did leave these _tredecim
+sterlingii_ if nothing more, and did live and look in one way
+or the other, and a whole world was living and looking along
+with him!  There, we say, is the grand peculiarity;  the
+immeasurable one;  distinguishing, to a really infinite degree,
+the poorest historical Fact from all Fiction whatsoever.  Fiction,
+'Imagination,' 'Imaginative Poetry,' &c. &c., except as the
+vehicle for truth, or _fact_ of some sort,--which surely a man
+should first try various other ways of vehiculating, and
+conveying safe,--what is it?  Let the Minerva and other Presses
+respond!--But it is time we were in St. Edmundsbury Monastery,
+and Seven good Centuries off.  If indeed it be possible, by any
+aid of Jocelin, by any human art, to get thither, with a reader
+or two still following us?
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+St. Edmundsbury
+
+
+The _Burg,_ Bury, or 'Berry' as they call it, of St. Edmund is
+still a prosperous brisk Town;  beautifully diversifying, with
+its clear brick houses, ancient clean streets, and twenty or
+fifteen thousand busy souls, the general grassy face of Suffolk;
+looking out right pleasantly, from its hill-slope, towards the
+rising Sun:  and on the eastern edge of it, still runs, long,
+black and massive, a range of monastic ruins;  into the wide
+internal spaces of which the stranger is admitted on payment of
+one shilling.  Internal spaces laid out, at present, as a botanic
+garden.  Here stranger or townsman, sauntering at his leisure
+amid these vast grim venerable ruins, may persuade himself that
+an Abbey of St. Edmundsbury did once exist;  nay there is
+no doubt of it:  see here the ancient massive Gateway, of
+architecture interesting to the eye of Dilettantism;  and farther
+on, that other ancient Gateway, now about to tumble, unless
+Dilettantism, in these very months, can subscribe money to cramp
+it and prop it!
+
+Here, sure enough, is an Abbey;  beautiful in the eye of
+Dilettantism.  Giant Pedantry also will step in, with its huge
+_Dugdale_ and other enormous _Monasticons_ under its arm, and
+cheerfully apprise you.  That this was a very great Abbey, owner
+and indeed creator of St. Edmund's Town itself, owner of wide
+lands and revenues;  nay that its lands were once a county of
+themselves;  that indeed King Canute or Knut was very kind to it;
+and gave St. Edmund his own gold crown off his head, on one
+occasion:  for the rest, that the Monks were of such and such a
+genus, such and such a number;  that they had so many Carucates
+of land in this hundred, and so many in that;  and then farther
+that the large Tower or Belfry was built by such a one, and the
+smaller Belfry was built by &c. &c.--Till human nature can stand
+no more of it;  till human nature desperately take refuge in
+forgetfulness, almost in flat disbelief of the whole business,
+Monks, Monastery, Belfries, Carucates and all!  Alas, what
+mountains of dead ashes, wreck and burnt bones, does assiduous
+Pedantry dig up from the Past Time, and name it History, and
+Philosophy of History;  till, as we say, the human soul sinks
+wearied and bewildered;  till the Past Time seems all one
+infinite incredible grey void, without sun, stars, hearth-fires,
+or candle-light;  dim offensive dust-whirlwinds filling universal
+Nature;  and over your Historical Library, it is as if all the
+Titans had written for themselves:  DRY RUBBISH SHOT HERE!
+
+
+And yet these grim old walls are not a dilettantism and dubiety;
+they are an earnest fact.  It was a most real and serious purpose
+they were built for!  Yes, another world it was, when these black
+ruins, white in their new mortar and fresh chiseling, first saw
+the sun as walls, long ago.  Gauge not, with thy dilettante
+compasses, with that placid dilettante simper, the Heaven's-
+Watchtower of our Fathers, the fallen God's-Houses, the Golgotha
+of true Souls departed!
+
+Their architecture, belfries, land-carucates?  Yes,--and that is
+but a small item of the matter.  Does it never give thee pause,
+this other strange item of it, that men then had a _soul,_--not
+by hearsay alone, and as a figure of speech;  but as a truth that
+they knew, and practically went upon!  Verily it was another
+world then.  Their Missals have become incredible, a sheer
+platitude, sayest thou?  Yes, a most poor platitude;  and even,
+if thou wilt, an idolatry and blasphemy, should any one persuade
+_thee_ to believe them, to pretend praying by them.  But yet it
+is pity we had lost tidings of our souls:--actually we shall
+have to go in quest of them again, or worse in all ways will
+befall!  A certain degree of soul, as Ben Jonson reminds us, is
+indispensable to keep the very body from destruction of the
+frightfullest sort;  to 'save us,' says he, 'the expense of
+_salt.'_  Ben has known men who had soul enough to keep their
+body and five senses from becoming carrion, and save salt:--men,
+and also Nations.  You may look in Manchester Hunger-mobs and
+Corn-law Commons Houses, and various other quarters, and
+say whether either soul or else salt is not somewhat wanted
+at present!--
+
+Another world, truly:  and this present poor distressed world
+might get some profit by looking wisely into it, instead of
+foolishly.  But at lowest, O dilettante friend, let us know
+always that it was a world, and not a void infinite of grey haze
+with fantasms swimming in it.  These old St. Edmundsbury walls, I
+say, were not peopled with fantasms;  but with men of flesh and
+blood, made altogether as we are.  Had thou and I then been, who
+knows but we ourselves had taken refuge from an evil Time, and
+fled to dwell here, and meditate on an Eternity, in such fashion
+as we could?  Alas, how like an old osseous fragment, a broken
+blackened shin-bone of the old dead Ages, this black ruin looks
+out, not yet covered by the soil;  still indicating what a once
+gigantic Life lies buried there!  It is dead now, and dumb;  but
+was alive once, and spake.  For twenty generations, here was the
+earthly arena where painful living men worked out their life-
+wrestle,--looked at by Earth, by Heaven and Hell.  Bells tolled
+to prayers;  and men, of many humours, various thoughts, chanted
+vespers, matins;--and round the little islet of their life rolled
+forever (as round ours still rolls, though we are blind and deaf)
+the illimitable Ocean, tinting all things with _its_ eternal hues
+and reflexes;  making strange prophetic music!  How silent now;
+all departed, clean gone.  The World-Dramaturgist has written:
+_Exeunt._  The devouring Time-Demons have made away with it all:
+and in its stead, there is either nothing;  or what is worse,
+offensive universal dustclouds, and grey eclipse of Earth and
+Heaven, from 'dry rubbish shot here!'--
+
+
+Truly, it is no easy matter to get across the chasm of Seven
+Centuries, filled with such material.  But here, of all helps, is
+not a Boswell the welcomest;  even a small Boswell?  Veracity,
+true simplicity of heart, how valuable are these always!  He that
+speaks what _is_ really in him, will find men to listen, though
+under never such impediments.  Even gossip, springing free and
+cheery from a human heart, this too is a kind of veracity and
+_speech;_--much preferable to pedantry and inane grey haze!
+Jocelin is weak and garrulous, but he is human.  Through the thin
+watery gossip of our Jocelin, we do get some glimpses of that
+deep-buried Time;  discern veritably, though in a fitful
+intermittent manner, these antique figures and their life-method,
+face to face!  Beautifully, in our earnest loving glance, the old
+centuries melt from opaque to partially translucent, transparent
+here and there;  and the void black Night, one finds, is but the
+summing up of innumerable peopled luminous _Days._  Not parchment
+Chartularies, Doctrines of the Constitution, O Dryasdust;  not
+altogether, my erudite friend!--
+
+Readers who please to go along with us into this poor _Jocelini
+Chronica_ shall wander inconveniently enough, as in wintry
+twilight, through some poor stript hazel-grove, rustling with
+foolish noises, and perpetually hindering the eyesight;  but
+across which, here and there, some real human figure is seen
+moving:  very strange;  whom we could hail if he would answer;--
+and we look into a pair of eyes deep as our own, _imaging_ our
+own, but all unconscious of us;  to whom we for the time are
+become as spirits and invisible!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+Landlord Edmund
+
+
+Some three centuries or so had elapsed since _Beodric's-worth_*
+became St. Edmund's _Stow,_ St. Edmund's _Town_ and Monastery,
+before Jocelin entered himself a Novice there.  'It was,' says
+he, 'the year after the Flemings were defeated at Fornham St.
+Genevieve.'
+
+-------------
+* Dryasdust puzzles and pokes for some biography of this Beodric;
+and repugns to consider him a mere East-Anglian Person of
+Condition, not in need of a biography,--whose [script] _weorth_
+or _worth,_ that is to say, _Growth,_ Increase, or as we should
+now name it, _Estate,_ that same Hamlet and wood Mansion, now St.
+Edmund's Bury, originally was.  For, adds our erudite Friend, the
+Saxon [script], equivalent to the German _werden,_ means to
+_grow,_ to _become;_  traces of which old vocable are still found
+in the North-country dialects, as, 'What is _word_ of him?
+meaning 'What is become of him?' and the like.  Nay we in modern
+English still say, 'Woe _worth_ the hour' (Woe _befall_ the
+hour), and speak of the _'Weird_ Sisters;'  not to mention the
+innumerable other names of places still ending in _weorth_ or
+_worth._  And indeed, our common noun _worth,_ in the sense of
+_value,_ does not this mean simply, What a thing has _grown_ to,
+What a man has _grown_ to, How much he amounts to,--by the
+Threadneedle-street standard or another!
+--------------
+
+Much passes away into oblivion:  this glorious victory over
+the Flemings at Fornham has, at the present date, greatly
+dimmed itself out of the minds of men.  A victory and battle
+nevertheless it was, in its time:  some thrice-renowned Earl of
+Leicester, not of the De Montfort breed, (as may be read in
+Philosophical and other Histories, could any human memory retain
+such things,) had quarreled with his sovereign, Henry Second of
+the name;  had been worsted, it is like, and maltreated, and
+obliged to fly to foreign parts;  but had rallied there into new
+vigour;  and so, in the year 1173, returns across the German Sea
+with a vengeful army of Flemings.  Returns, to the coast of
+Suffolk;  to Framlingham Castle, where he is welcomed;  westward
+towards St. Edmundsbury and Fornham Church, where he is met by
+the constituted authorities with _posse comitatus;_  and swiftly
+cut in pieces, he and his, or laid by the heels;  on the right
+bank of the obscure river Lark,--as traces still existing
+will verify.
+
+For the river Lark, though not very discoverably, still runs or
+stagnates in that country;  and the battle-ground is there;
+serving at present as a pleasure-ground to his Grace of
+Newcastle.  Copper pennies of Henry II are still found there;--
+rotted out from the pouches of poor slain soldiers, who had not
+had _time_ to buy liquor with them.  In the river Lark itself was
+fished up, within man's memory, an antique gold ring;  which fond
+Dilettantism can almost believe may have been the very ring
+Countess Leicester threw away, in her flight, into that same Lark
+river or ditch.*  Nay, few years ago, in tearing out an enormous
+superannuated ash-tree, now grown quite corpulent, bursten,
+superfluous, but long a fixture in the soil, and not to be
+dislodged without revolution,--there was laid bare, under its
+roots, 'a circular mound of skeletons wonderfully complete,' all
+radiating from a centre, faces upwards, feet inwards;  a
+'radiation' not of Light, but of the Nether Darkness rather;  and
+evidently the fruit of battle;  for 'many of the heads were
+cleft, or had arrow-holes in them.  The Battle of Fornham,
+therefore, is a fact, though a forgotten one;  no less obscure
+than undeniable,--like so many other facts.
+
+----------
+*Lyttelton's _History of Henry II._ (2nd Edition), v. 169, &c.
+----------
+
+Like the St. Edmund's Monastery itself!  Who can doubt, after
+what we have said, that there was a Monastery here at one time?
+No doubt at all there was a Monastery here;  no doubt, some three
+centuries prior to this Fornham Battle, there dwelt a man in
+these parts, of the name of Edmund, King, Landlord, Duke or
+whatever his title was, of the Eastern Counties;--and a very
+singular man and landlord he must have been.
+
+For his tenants, it would appear, did not complain of him in the
+least;  his labourers did not think of burning his wheatstacks,
+breaking into his game-preserves;  very far the reverse of all
+that.  Clear evidence, satisfactory even to my friend Dryasdust,
+exists that, on the contrary, they honoured, loved, admired this
+ancient Landlord to a quite astonishing degree,--and indeed at
+last to an immeasurable and inexpressible degree;  for, finding
+no limits or utterable words for their sense of his worth, they
+took to beatifying and adoring him!  'Infinite admiration,' we
+are taught, 'means worship.'
+
+Very singular,--could we discover it!  What Edmund's specific
+duties were;  above all, what his method of discharging them with
+such results was, would surely be interesting to know;  but are
+_not_ very discoverable now.  His Life has become a poetic, nay a
+religious _Mythus;_  though, undeniably enough, it was once a
+prose Fact, as our poor lives are;  and even a very rugged
+unmanageable one.  This landlord Edmund did go about in leather
+shoes, with _femoralia_  and bodycoat of some sort on him;  and
+daily had his breakfast to procure;  and daily had contradictory
+speeches, and most contradictory facts not a few, to reconcile
+with himself.  No man becomes a Saint in his sleep.  Edmund, for
+instance, instead of _reconciling_ those same contradictory facts
+and speeches to himself;  which means _subduing,_ and, in a
+manlike and godlike manner, conquering them to himself,--might
+have merely thrown new contention into them, new unwisdom into
+them, and so been conquered _by_ them;  much the commoner case!
+In that way he had proved no 'Saint,' or Divine-looking Man, but
+a mere Sinner, and unfortunate, blameable, more or less Diabolic-
+looking man!  No landlord Edmund becomes infinitely admirable in
+his sleep.
+
+With what degree of wholesome rigour his rents were collected we
+hear not.  Still less by what methods he preserved his game,
+whether by 'bushing' or how,--and if the partridge-seasons were
+'excellent,' or were indifferent.  Neither do we ascertain what
+kind of Corn-bill he passed, or wisely-adjusted Sliding-scale:--
+but indeed there were few spinners in those days;  and the
+nuisance of spinning, and other dusty labour, was not yet so
+glaring a one.
+
+How then, it may be asked, did this Edmund rise into favour;
+become to such astonishing extent a recognised Farmer's Friend?
+Really, except it were by doing justly and loving mercy, to an
+unprecedented extent, one does not know.  The man, it would seem,
+'had walked,' as they say, 'humbly with God;'  humbly and
+valiantly with God;  struggling to make the Earth heavenly, as he
+could:  instead of walking sumptuously and pridefully with
+Mammon, leaving the Earth to grow hellish as it liked.  Not
+sumptuously with Mammon?  How then could he 'encourage trade,'--
+cause Howel and James, and many wine-merchants to bless him, and
+the tailor's heart (though in a very short-sighted manner) to
+sing for joy?  Much in this Edmund's Life is mysterious.
+
+That he could, on occasion, do what he liked with his own is,
+meanwhile, evident enough.  Certain Heathen Physical-Force Ultra-
+Chartists, 'Danes' as they were then called, coming into his
+territory with their 'five points,' or rather with their five-
+and-twenty thousand _points_ and edges too, of pikes namely and
+battleaxes;  and proposing mere Heathenism, confiscation,
+spoliation, and fire and sword,--Edmund answered that he would
+oppose to the utmost such savagery.  They took him prisoner;
+again required his sanction to said proposals.  Edmund again
+refused.  Cannot we kill you? cried they.--Cannot I die? answered
+he.  My life, I think, is my own to do what I like with!  And he
+died, under barbarous tortures, refusing to the last breath;  and
+the Ultra-Chartist Danes _lost_ their propositions;--and went
+with their 'points' and other apparatus, as is supposed, to the
+Devil, the Father of them.  Some say, indeed, these Danes were
+not Ultra-Chartists, but Ultra-Tories, demanding to reap where
+they had not sown, and live in this world without working, though
+all the world should starve for it;  which likewise seems a
+possible hypothesis.  Be what they might, they went, as we say,
+to the Devil;  and Edmund doing what he liked with his own, the
+Earth was got cleared of them.
+
+Another version is, that Edmund on this and the like occasions
+stood by his order;  the oldest, and indeed only true order of
+Nobility known under the stars, that of just Men and Sons of God,
+in opposition to Unjust and Sons of Belial,--which latter indeed
+are _second_-oldest, but yet a very unvenerable order.  This,
+truly, seems the likeliest hypothesis of all.  Names and
+appearances alter so strangely, in some half-score centuries;
+and all fluctuates chameleon-like, taking now this hue, now that.
+Thus much is very plain, and does not change hue:  Landlord
+Edmund was seen and felt by all men to have done verily a man's
+part in this life-pilgrimage of his;  and benedictions, and
+outflowing love and admiration from the universal heart, were his
+meed.  Well-done!  Well-done! cried the hearts of all men.  They
+raised his slain and martyred body;  washed its wounds with fast-
+flowing universal tears;  tears of endless pity, and yet of a
+sacred joy and triumph.  The beautifullest kind of tears,--indeed
+perhaps the beautifullest kind of thing:  like a sky all flashing
+diamonds and prismatic radiance;  all weeping, yet shone on by
+the everlasting Sun:--and _this_ is not a sky, it is a Soul and
+living Face!  Nothing liker the _Temple of the Highest,_ bright
+with some real effulgence of the Highest, is seen in this world.
+
+O, if all Yankee-land follow a small good 'Schnuspel the
+distinguished Novelist' with blazing torches, dinner-invitations,
+universal hep-hep-hurrah, feeling that he, though small, is
+something;  how might all Angle-land once follow a hero-martyr
+and great true Son of Heaven!  It is the very joy of man's heart
+to admire, where he can;  nothing so lifts him from all his mean
+imprisonments, were it but for moments, as true admiration.  Thus
+it has been said, 'all men, especially all women, are born
+worshipers;'  and will worship, if it be but possible.  Possible
+to worship a Something, even a small one;  not so possible a mere
+loud-blaring Nothing!  What sight is more pathetic than that of
+poor multitudes of persons met to gaze at King's Progresses,'
+Lord Mayor's Shews, and other gilt-gingerbread phenomena of the
+worshipful sort, in these times;  each so eager to worship;
+each, with a dim fatal sense of disappointment, finding that he
+cannot rightly here!  These be thy gods, O Israel?  And thou art
+so _willing_ to worship,--poor Israel!
+
+In this manner, however, did the men of the Eastern Counties take
+up the slain body of their Edmund, where it lay cast forth in the
+village of Hoxne;  seek out the severed head, and reverently
+reunite the same.  They embalmed him with myrrh and sweet spices,
+with love, pity, and all high and awful thoughts;  consecrating
+him with a very storm of melodious adoring admiration, and sun-
+dyed showers of tears;--joyfully, yet with awe (as all deep joy
+has something of the awful in it), commemorating his noble deeds
+and godlike walk and conversation while on Earth.  Till, at
+length, the very Pope and Cardinals at Rome were forced to hear
+of it;  and they, summing up as correctly as they well could,
+with _Advocatus-Diaboli_ pleadings and their other forms of
+process, the general verdict of mankind, declared:  That he had,
+in very fact, led a hero's life in this world;  and being now
+_gone,_ was gone as they conceived to God above, and reaping his
+reward _there._  Such, they said, was the best judgment they
+could form of the case;--and truly not a bad judgment.
+Acquiesced in, zealously adopted, with full assent of 'private
+judgment,' by all mortals.
+
+
+The rest of St. Edmund's history, for the reader sees he has now
+become a _Saint,_ is easily conceivable.  Pious munificence
+provided him a _loculus,_ a _feretrum_ or shrine;  built for him
+a wooden chapel, a stone temple, ever widening and growing by new
+pious gifts;--such the overflowing heart feels it a blessedness
+to solace itself by giving.  St. Edmund's Shrine glitters now
+with diamond flowerages, with a plating of wrought gold.  The
+wooden chapel, as we say, has become a stone temple.  Stately
+masonries, longdrawn arches, cloisters, sounding aisles buttress
+it, begirdle it far and wide.  Regimented companies of men, of
+whom our Jocelin is one, devote themselves, in every generation,
+to meditate here on man's Nobleness and Awfulness, and celebrate
+and shew forth the same, as they best can,--thinking they will do
+it better here, in presence of God the Maker, and of the so Awful
+and so Noble made by Him.  In one word, St. Edmund's Body has
+raised a Monastery round it.  To such length, in such manner, has
+the Spirit of the Time visibly taken body, and crystallised
+itself here.  New gifts, houses, farms, _katalla_*--come ever in.
+King Knut, whom men call Canute, whom the Ocean-tide would not be
+forbidden to wet,--we heard already of this wise King, with his
+crown and gifts;  but of many others, Kings, Queens, wise men and
+noble loyal women, let Dryasdust and divine Silence be the
+record!  Beodric's-Worth has become St. Edmund's _Bury;_--and
+lasts visible to this hour.  All this that thou now seest, and
+namest Bury Town, is properly the Funeral Monument of Saint or
+Landlord Edmund.  The present respectable Mayor of Bury may be
+said, like a Fakeer (little as he thinks of it), to have his
+dwelling in the extensive, many-sculptured Tombstone of St.
+Edmund;  in one of the brick niches thereof dwells the present
+respectable Mayor of Bury.
+
+---------
+* Goods, properties; what we now call _chattels,_ and still more
+singularly _cattle,_ says my erudite friend!
+---------
+
+Certain Times do crystallise themselves in a magnificent manner;
+and others, perhaps, are like to do it in rather a shabby one!--
+But Richard Arkwright too will have his Monument, a thousand
+years hence:  all Lancashire and Yorkshire, and how many other
+shires and countries, with their machineries and industries, for
+his monument!  A true _pyr_amid or _'flame_-mountain,' flaming
+with steam fires and useful labour over wide continents, usefully
+towards the Stars, to a certain height;--how much grander than
+your foolish Cheops Pyramids or Sakhara clay ones!  Let us withal
+be hopeful, be content or patient.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+Abbot Hugo
+
+
+It is true, all things have two faces, a light one and a dark.
+It is true, in three centuries much imperfection accumulates;
+many an Ideal, monastic or other, shooting forth into practice as
+it can, grows to a strange enough Reality;  and we have to ask
+with amazement, Is this your Ideal!  For, alas, the Ideal always
+has to grow in the Real, and to seek out its bed and board there,
+often in a very sorry way.  No beautifullest Poet is a Bird-of-
+Paradise, living on perfumes;  sleeping in the aether with
+outspread wings.  The Heroic, _independent_ of bed and board, is
+found in Drury Lane Theatre only;  to avoid disappointments, let
+us bear this in mind.
+
+By the law of Nature, too, all manner of Ideals have their fatal
+limits and lot;  their appointed periods, of youth, of maturity
+or perfection, of decline, degradation, and final death and
+disappearance.  There is nothing born but has to die.  Ideal
+monasteries, once grown real, do seek bed and board in this
+world;  do find it more and more successfully;  do get at length
+too intent on finding it, exclusively intent on that.  They are
+then like diseased corpulent bodies fallen idiotic, which merely
+eat and sleep;  _ready_ for 'dissolution,' by a Henry the Eighth
+or some other.  Jocelin's St. Edmundsbury is still far from this
+last dreadful state:  but here too the reader will prepare
+himself to see an Ideal not sleeping in the nether like a bird-
+of-paradise, but roosting as the common woodfowl do, in an
+imperfect, uncomfortable, more or less contemptible manner!--
+
+
+Abbot Hugo, as Jocelin, breaking at once into the heart of the
+business, apprises us, had in those days grown old, grown rather
+blind, and his eyes were somewhat darkened, _aliquantulum
+caligaverunt oculi ejus._  He dwelt apart very much, in his
+_Talamus_ or peculiar Chamber;  got into the hands of flatterers,
+a set of mealy-mouthed persons who strove to make the passing
+hour easy for him,--for him easy, and for themselves profitable;
+accumulating in the distance mere mountains of confusion.  Old
+Dominus Hugo sat inaccessible in this way, far in the interior,
+wrapt in his warm flannels and delusions;  inaccessible to all
+voice of Fact; and bad grew ever worse with us.  Not that our
+worthy old _Dominus Abbas_ was inattentive to the divine offices,
+or to the maintenance of a devout spirit in us or in himself;
+but the Account-Books of the Convent fell into the frightfullest
+state, and Hugo's annual Budget grew yearly emptier, or filled
+with futile expectations, fatal deficit, wind and debts!
+
+His one worldly care was to raise ready money;  sufficient for
+the day is the evil thereof.  And how he raised it:  From
+usurious insatiable Jews;  every fresh Jew sticking on him like a
+fresh horseleech, sucking his and our life out;  crying
+continually, Give, Give!  Take one example instead of scores.
+Our _Camera_ having fallen into ruin, William the Sacristan
+received charge to repair it;  strict charge, but no money;
+Abbot Hugo would, and indeed could, give him no fraction
+of money.  The _Camera_ in ruins, and Hugo penniless and
+inaccessible, Willelmus Sacrista borrowed Forty Mares (some
+Seven-and-twenty Pounds) of Benedict the Jew, and patched up our
+Camera again.  But the means of repaying him?  There were no
+means.  Hardly could _Sacrista, Cellerarius, or any public
+officer, get ends to meet, on the indispensablest scale, with
+their shrunk allowances:  ready money had vanished.
+
+Benedict's Twenty-seven pounds grew rapidly at compound-interest;
+and at length, when it had amounted to One hundred pounds, he, on
+a day of settlement, presents the account to Hugo himself.  Hugo
+already owed him another One hundred of his own;  and so here it
+has become Two hundred!  Hugo, in a fine frenzy, threatens to
+depose the Sacristan, to do this and do that;  but, in the mean
+while, How to quiet your insatiable Jew?  Hugo, for this couple
+of hundreds, grants the Jew his bond for Four hundred payable at
+the end of four years.  At the end of four years there is, of
+course, still no money;  and the Jew now gets a bond for Eight
+hundred and eighty pounds, to be paid by installments, Four-score
+pounds every year.  Here was a way of doing business!
+
+Neither yet is this insatiable Jew satisfied or settled with:  he
+had papers against us of 'small debts fourteen years old;'  his
+modest claim amounts finally to 'Twelve hundred pounds besides
+interest;'--and one hopes he never got satisfied in this world;
+one almost hopes he was one of those beleaguered Jews who hanged
+themselves in York Castle shortly afterwards, and had his usances
+and quittances and horseleech papers summarily set fire to!  For
+approximate justice will strive to accomplish itself;  if not in
+one way, then in another.  Jews, and also Christians and
+Heathens, who accumulate in this manner, though furnished with
+never so many parchments, do, at times, 'get their grinder-teeth
+successively pulled out of their head, each day a new grinder,
+till they consent to disgorge again.  A sad fact,--worth
+reflecting on.
+
+
+Jocelin, we see, is not without secularity:  Our _Dominus Abbas_
+was intent enough on the divine offices;  but then his Account-
+Books--?--One of the things that strike us most, throughout, in
+Jocelin's Chronicle, and indeed in Eadmer's _Anselm,_ and other
+old monastic Books, written evidently by pious men, is this, That
+there is almost no mention whatever of 'personal religion' in
+them;  that the whole gist of their thinking and speculation
+seems to be the 'privileges of our order,' 'strict exaction of
+our dues,' 'God's honour' (meaning the honour of our Saint), and
+so forth.  Is not this singular?  A body of men, set apart for
+perfecting and purifying their own souls, do not seem disturbed
+about that in any measure:  the 'Ideal' says nothing about its
+idea;  says much about finding bed and board for itself!  How
+is this?
+
+Why, for one thing, bed and board are a matter very apt to come
+to speech:  it is much easier to _speak_ of them than of ideas;
+and they are sometimes much more pressing with some!  Nay, for
+another thing, may not this religious reticence, in these devout
+good souls, be perhaps a merit, and sign of health in them?
+Jocelin, Eadmer, and such religious men, have as yet nothing of
+'Methodism;'  no Doubt or even root of Doubt.  Religion is not a
+diseased self-introspection, an agonising inquiry:  their duties
+are clear to them, the way of supreme good plain, indisputable,
+and they are traveling on it.  Religion lies over them like an
+all-embracing heavenly canopy, like an atmosphere and life-
+element, which is not spoken of, which in all things is
+presupposed without speech.  Is not serene or complete Religion
+the highest aspect of human nature;  as serene Cant, or complete
+No-religion, is the lowest and miserablest?  Between which two,
+all manner of earnest Methodisms, introspections, agonising
+inquiries, never so morbid, shall play their respective parts,
+not without approbation.
+
+
+But let any reader fancy himself one of the Brethren in St.
+Edmundsbury Monastery under such circumstances!  How can a Lord
+Abbot, all stuck over with horse-leeches of this nature, front
+the world?  He is fast losing his life-blood, and the Convent
+will be as one of Pharaoh's lean kine.  Old monks of experience
+draw their hoods deeper down;  careful what they say:  the monk's
+first duty is obedience.  Our Lord the King, hearing of such
+work, sends down his Almoner to make investigations:  but what
+boots it?  Abbot Hugo assembles us in Chapter;  asks, "If there
+is any complaint?"  Not a soul of us dare answer, "Yes,
+thousands!" but we all stand silent, and the Prior even says that
+things are in a very comfortable condition.  Whereupon old Abbot
+Hugo, turning to the royal messenger, says, "You see!"--and the
+business terminates in that way.  I, as a brisk-eyed, noticing
+youth and novice, could not help asking of the elders, asking of
+Magister Samson in particular:  Why he, well-instructed and a
+knowing man, had not spoken out, and brought matters to a
+bearing?  Magister Samson was Teacher of the Novices, appointed
+to breed us up to the rules, and I loved him well.  _"Fili mi,"_
+answered Samson, "the burnt child shuns the fire.  Dost thou not
+know, our Lord the Abbot sent me once to Acre in Norfolk, to
+solitary confinement and bread and water, already?  The Hinghams,
+Hugo and Robert, have just got home from banishment for speaking.
+This is the hour of darkness:  the hour when flatterers rule and
+are believed.  _Videat Dominus,_ let the Lord see, and judge."
+
+In very truth, what could poor old Abbot Hugo do?  A frail old
+man;  and the Philistines were upon him,--that is to say, the
+Hebrews.  He had nothing for it but to shrink away from them;
+get back into his warm flannels, into his warm delusions again.
+Happily, before it was quite too late, he bethought him of
+pilgriming to St. Thomas of Canterbury.  He set out, with a fit
+train, in the autumn days of the year 1180;  near Rochester City,
+his mule threw him, dislocated his poor kneepan, raised incurable
+inflammatory fever;  and the poor old man got his dismissal from
+the whole coil at once.  St. Thomas a Becket, though in a
+circuitous way, had _brought_ deliverance!  Neither Jew usurers,
+nor grumbling monks, nor other importunate despicability of men
+or mud-elements afflicted Abbot Hugo any more;  but he dropt his
+rosaries, closed his account-books, closed his old eyes, and lay
+down into the long sleep.  Heavy-laden hoary old Dominus Hugo,
+fare thee well.
+
+One thing we cannot mention without a due thrill of horror:
+namely, that, in the empty exchequer of Dominus Hugo, there was
+not found one penny to distribute to the Poor that they might
+pray for his soul!  By a kind of godsend, Fifty shillings did, in
+the very nick of time, fall due, or seem to fall due, from one of
+his Farmers (the _Firmarius_ de Palegrava), and he paid it, and
+the Poor had it;  though, alas, this too only _seemed_ to fall
+due, and we had it to pay again afterwards.  Dominus Hugo's
+apartments were plundered by his servants, to the last portable
+stool, in a few minutes after the breath was out of his body.
+Forlorn old Hugo, fare thee well forever.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+Twelfth Century
+
+
+Our Abbot being dead, the _Dominus Rex,_ Henry II, or Ranulf de
+Glanvill _Justiciarius_ of England for him, set Inspectors or
+Custodiars over us;--not in any breathless haste to appoint a new
+Abbot, our revenues coming into his own Scaccarium, or royal
+Exchequer, in the meanwhile.  They proceeded with some rigour,
+these Custodiars;  took written inventories, clapt-on seals,
+exacted everywhere strict tale and measure:  but wherefore should
+a living monk complain?  The living monk has to do his devotional
+drill-exercise;  consume his allotted _pitantia,_ what we
+call _pittance,_ or ration of victual;  and possess his soul
+in patience.
+
+Dim, as through a long vista of Seven Centuries, dim and very
+strange looks that monk-life to us;  the ever-surprising
+circumstance this, That it is a _fact_ and no dream, that we see
+it there, and gaze into the very eyes of it!  Smoke rises daily
+from those culinary chimney-throats;  there are living human
+beings there, who chant, loud-braying, their matins, nones,
+vespers;  awakening echoes, not to the bodily ear alone.  St.
+Edmund's Shrine, perpetually illuminated, glows ruddy through
+the Night, and through the Night of Centuries withal;  St.
+Edmundsbury Town paying yearly Forty pounds for that express end.
+Bells clang out;  on great occasions, all the bells.  We have
+Processions, Preachings, Festivals, Christmas Plays, _Mysteries_
+shewn in the Churchyard, at which latter the Townsfolk sometimes
+quarrel.  Time was, Time is, as Friar Bacon's Brass Head
+remarked;  and withal Time will be.  There are three Tenses,
+_Tempora,_ or Times;  and there is one Eternity;  and as for us,
+
+     'We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!'
+
+Indisputable, though very dim to modern vision, rests on its hill-
+slope that same _Bury,_ _Stow,_ or Town of St. Edmund;  already a
+considerable place, not without traffic, nay manufactures, would
+Jocelin only tell us what.  Jocelin is totally careless of
+telling:  but, through dim fitful apertures, we can see
+_Fullones,_ 'Fullers,' see cloth-making;  looms dimly going,
+dye-vats, and old women spinning yarn.  We have Fairs too,
+_Nundinae,_ in due course;  and the Londoners give us much
+trouble, pretending that they, as a metropolitan people, are
+exempt from toll.  Besides there is Field-husbandry, with
+perplexed settlement of Convent rents:  comricks pile themselves
+within burgh, in their season;  and cattle depart and enter;  and
+even the poor weaver has his cow,--'dung-heaps' lying quiet at
+most doors (_ante foras,_ says the incidental Jocelin), for the
+Town has yet no improved police.  Watch and ward nevertheless we
+do keep, and have Gates,--as what Town must not;  thieves so
+abounding;  war, _werra,_ such a frequent thing!  Our thieves, at
+the Abbot's judgment bar, deny;  claim wager of battle;  fight,
+are beaten, and _then_ hanged.  'Ketel, the thief,' took this
+course;  and it did nothing for him,--merely brought us, and
+indeed himself, new trouble!
+
+Every way a most foreign Time.  What difficulty, for example, has
+our Cellerarius to collect the _repselver,_ 'reaping silver,' or
+penny, which each householder is by law bound to pay for cutting
+down the Convent grain!  Richer people pretend that it is
+commuted, that it is this and the other;  that, in short, they
+will not pay it.  Our _Cellerarius_ gives up calling on the rich.
+In the houses of the poor, our _Cellerarius_ finding, in like
+manner, neither penny nor good promise, snatches, without
+ceremony, what _vadium_ (pledge, _wad_) he can come at:  a joint-
+stool, kettle, nay the very house-door, _'hostium;'_  and old
+women, thus exposed to the unfeeling gaze of the public, rush out
+after him with their distaffs and the angriest shrieks:
+_'vetulae exibant cum colis suis,'_ says Jocelin, 'minantes
+et exprobrantes.'_
+
+What a historical picture, glowing visible, as St. Edmund's
+Shrine by night, after Seven long Centuries or so!  _Vetulae cum
+colis:_  My venerable ancient spinning grandmothers,--ah, and ye
+too have to shriek, and rush out with your distaffs;  and become
+Female Chartists, and scold all evening with void doorway;--and
+in old Saxon, as we in modern, would fain demand some Five-point
+Charter, could it be fallen in with, the Earth being too
+tyrannous!--Wise Lord Abbots, hearing of such phenomena, did in
+time abolish or commute the reap-penny, and one nuisance was
+abated.  But the image of these justly offended old women, in
+their old wool costumes, with their angry features, and spindles
+brandished, lives forever in the historical memory.  Thanks to
+thee, Jocelin Boswell.  Jerusalem was taken by the Crusaders, and
+again lost by them;  and Richard Coeur-de-Lion 'veiled his face'
+as he passed in sight of it:  but how many other things went on,
+the while!
+
+Thus, too, our trouble with the Lakenheath eels is very great.
+King Knut, namely, or rather his Queen who also did herself
+honour by honouring St. Edmund, decreed by authentic deed yet
+extant on parchment, that the Holders of the Town Fields, once
+Beodric's, should, for one thing, go yearly and catch us four
+thousand eels in the marsh-pools of Lakenheath.  Well, they went,
+they continued to go;  but, in later times, got into the way of
+returning with a most short account of eels.  Not the due six-
+score apiece;  no, Here are two-score, Here are twenty, ten,--
+sometimes, Here are none at all;  Heaven help us, we _could_
+catch no more, they were not there!  What is a distressed
+_Cellerarius_ to do?  We agree that each Holder of so many acres
+shall pay one penny yearly, and let go the eels as too slippery.
+But alas, neither is this quite effectual:  the Fields, in my
+time, have got divided among so many hands, there is no catching
+of them _either_;  I have known our Cellarer get seven and twenty
+pence formerly, and now it is much if he get ten pence farthing
+(_vix decem denarios et obolum_).  And then their sheep, which
+they are bound to fold nightly in our pens, for the manure's
+sake;  and, I fear, do not always fold:  and their _aver-
+pennies,_ and their _avragiums,_ and their _foder-corns,_ and
+mill-and-market dues!  Thus, in its undeniable but dim manner,
+does old St. Edmundsbury spin and till, and laboriously keep its
+pot boiling, and St. Edmund's Shrine lighted, under such
+conditions and averages as it can.
+
+
+How much is still alive in England;  how much has not yet come
+into life!  A Feudal Aristocracy is still alive, in the prime of
+life;  superintending the cultivation of the land, and less
+consciously the distribution of the produce of the land, the
+adjustment of the quarrels of the land;  judging, soldiering,
+adjusting;  everywhere governing the people,--so that even a
+Gurth born thrall of Cedric lacks not his due parings of the pigs
+he tends.  Governing;--and, alas, also game-preserving, so that a
+Robert Hood, a William Scarlet and others have, in these days,
+put on Lincoln coats, and taken to living, in some universal-
+suffrage manner, under the greenwood tree!
+
+How silent, on the other hand, lie all Cotton-trades and such
+like;  not a steeple-chimney yet got on end from sea to sea!
+North of the Humber, a stern Willelmus Conquestor burnt the
+Country, finding it unruly, into very stern repose.  Wild fowl
+scream in those ancient silences, wild cattle roam in those
+ancient solitudes;  the scanty sulky Norse-bred population all
+coerced into silence,--feeling that, under these new Norman
+Governors, their history has probably as good as _ended._  Men
+and Northumbrian Norse populations know little what has ended,
+what is but beginning!  The Ribble and the Aire roll down, as yet
+unpolluted by dyers' chemistry;  tenanted by merry trouts and
+piscatory otters;  the sunbeam and the vacant wind's-blast alone
+traversing those moors.  Side by side sleep the coal-strata and
+the iron-strata for so many ages;  no Steam-Demon has yet risen
+smoking into being.  Saint Mungo rules in Glasgow;  James Watt
+still slumbering in the deep of Time.  _Mancunium,_ Manceaster,
+what we now call Manchester, spins no cotton,--if it be not
+_wool_ 'cottons,' clipped from the backs of mountain sheep.  The
+Creek of the Mersey gurgles, twice in the four-and-twenty hours,
+with eddying brine, clangorous with sea-fowl; and is a _Lither_-
+Pool, a _lazy_ or sullen Pool, no monstrous pitchy City, and
+Seahaven of the world!  The Centuries are big;  and the birth-
+hour is coming, not yet come.  _Tempus ferax, tempus edax rerum._
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+Monk Samson
+
+
+Within doors, down at the hill-foot, in our Convent here, we are
+a peculiar people,--hardly conceivable in the Arkwright Corn-Law
+ages, of mere Spinning-Mills and Joe-Mantons!  There is yet no
+Methodism among us, and we speak much of Secularities:  no
+Methodism;  our Religion is not yet a horrible restless Doubt,
+still less a far horribler composed Cant;  but a great heaven-
+high Unquestionability, encompassing, interpenetrating the whole
+of Life.  Imperfect as we may be, we are here, with our litanies,
+shaven crowns, vows of poverty, to testify incessantly and
+indisputably to every heart, That this Earthly Life, and
+its riches and possessions, and good and evil hap, are not
+intrinsically a reality at all, but _are_ a shadow of realities
+eternal, infinite;  that this Time-world, as an air-image,
+fearfully _emblematic,_ plays and flickers in the grand still
+mirror of Eternity;  and man's little Life has Duties that are
+great, that are alone great, and go up to Heaven and down to
+Hell.  This, with our poor litanies, we testify and struggle
+to testify.
+
+Which, testified or not, remembered by all men, or forgotten by
+all men, does verily remain the fact, even in Arkwright Joe
+Manton ages!  But it is incalculable, when litanies have grown
+obsolete;  when _fodercorns,_ _avragiums,_ and all human dues and
+reciprocities have been fully changed into one great due of _cash
+payment;_  and man's duty to man reduces itself to handing him
+certain metal coins, or covenanted money-wages, and then shoving
+him out of doors;  and man's duty to God becomes a cant, a doubt,
+a dim inanity, a 'pleasure of virtue' or such like;  and the
+thing a man does infinitely fear (the real _Hell_ of a man) is
+'that he do not make money and advance himself,'--I say, it is
+incalculable what a change has introduced itself everywhere into
+human affairs!  How human affairs shall now circulate everywhere
+not healthy life-blood in them, but, as it were, a detestable
+copperas banker's ink;  and all is grown acrid, divisive,
+threatening dissolution;  and the huge tumultuous Life of Society
+is galvanic, devil-ridden, too truly possessed by a devil!  For,
+in short, Mammon _is_ not a god at all;  but a devil, and even a
+very despicable devil.  Follow the Devil faithfully, you are sure
+enough to _go_ to the Devil:  whither else _can_ you go?--In such
+situations, men look back with a kind of mournful recognition
+even on poor limited Monk-figures, with their poor litanies;  and
+reflect, with Ben Jonson, that soul is indispensable, some degree
+of soul, even to save you the expense of salt!--
+
+For the rest, it must be owned, we Monks of St. Edmundsbury are
+but a limited class of creatures, and seem to have a somewhat
+dull life of it.  Much given to idle gossip;  having indeed no
+other work, when our chanting is over.  Listless gossip, for most
+part, and a mitigated slander;  the fruit of idleness, not of
+spleen.  We are dull, insipid men, many of us;  easy-minded;
+whom prayer and digestion of food will avail for a life.  We have
+to receive all strangers in our Convent, and lodge them gratis;
+such and such sorts go by rule to the Lord Abbot and his special
+revenues;  such and such to us and our poor Cellarer, however
+straitened.  Jews themselves send their wives and little ones
+hither in war-time, into our _Pitanceria;_  where they abide
+safe, with due _pittances,_--for a consideration.  We have the
+fairest chances for collecting news.  Some of us have a turn for
+reading Books;  for meditation, silence;  at times we even write
+Books.  Some of us can preach, in English-Saxon, in Norman
+French, and even in Monk-Latin;  others cannot in any language or
+jargon, being stupid.
+
+Failing all else, what gossip about one another!  This is a
+perennial resource.  How one hooded head applies itself to the
+ear of another, and whispers--_tacenda._  Willelmus Sacrista, for
+instance, what does he nightly, over in that Sacristy of his?
+Frequent bibations, _'frequentes bibationes et quaedam tacenda,'_
+--eheu!  We have _'tempora minutionis,'_ stated seasons of
+bloodletting, when we are all let blood together;  and then
+there is a general free-conference, a sanhedrim of clatter.  For
+all our vow of poverty, we can by rule amass to the extent of
+'two shillings;'  but it is to be given to our necessitous
+kindred, or in charity.  Poor Monks!  Thus too a certain
+Canterbury Monk was in the habit of 'slipping, _clanculo_ from
+his sleeve,' five shillings into the hand of his mother, when she
+came to see him, at the divine offices, every two months.  Once,
+slipping the money clandestinely, just in the act of taking
+leave, he slipt it not into her hand but on the floor, and
+another had it;  whereupon the poor Monk, coming to know it,
+looked mere despair for some days;  till, Lanfranc the noble
+Archbishop, questioning his secret from him, nobly made the sum
+_seven_ shillings, and said, Never mind!
+
+
+One Monk of a taciturn nature distinguishes himself among these
+babbling ones:  the name of him Samson;  he that answered
+Jocelin, "_Fili mi,_ a burnt child shuns the fire." They call him
+'Norfolk _Barrator,'_ or litigious person;  for indeed, being of
+grave taciturn ways, he is not universally a favourite;  he has
+been in trouble more than once.  The reader is desired to mark
+this Monk.  A personable man of seven-and-forty;  stout-made,
+stands erect as a pillar;  with bushy eyebrows, the eyes of him
+beaming into you in a really strange way;  the face massive,
+grave, with 'a very eminent nose;'  his head almost bald, its
+auburn remnants of hair, and the copious ruddy beard, getting
+slightly streaked with grey.  This is Brother Samson;  a man
+worth looking at.
+
+He is from Norfolk, as the nickname indicates;  from Tottington
+in Norfolk, as we guess;  the son of poor parents there.  He has
+told me, Jocelin, for I loved him much, That once in his ninth
+year he had an alarming dream;--as indeed we are all somewhat
+given to dreaming here.  Little Samson, lying uneasily in his
+crib at Tottington, dreamed that he saw the Arch Enemy in person,
+just alighted in front of some grand building, with outspread
+bat-wings, and stretching forth detestable clawed hands to grip
+him, little Samson, and fly off with him:  whereupon the little
+dreamer shrieked desperate to St. Edmund for help, shrieked and
+again shrieked;  and St. Edmund, a reverend heavenly figure, did
+come,--and indeed poor little Samson's mother, awakened by his
+shrieking, did come;  and the Devil and the Dream both fled away
+fruitless.  On the morrow, his mother, pondering such an awful
+dream, thought it were good to take him over to St. Edmund's own
+Shrine, and pray with him there.  See, said little Samson at
+sight of the Abbey-Gate;  see, mother, this is the building I
+dreamed of!  His poor mother dedicated him to St. Edmund,--left
+him there with prayers and tears:  what better could she do?  The
+exposition of the dream, Brother Samson used to say, was this:
+_Diabolus_ with outspread bat-wings shadowed forth the pleasures
+of this world, _voluptates hujus saeculi,_ which were about to
+snatch and fly away with me, had not St. Edmund flung his arms
+round me, that is to say, made me a monk of his.  A monk,
+accordingly, Brother Samson is;  and here to this day where his
+mother left him.  A learned man, of devout grave nature;  has
+studied at Paris, has taught in the Town Schools here, and done
+much else;  can preach in three languages, and, like Dr. Caius,
+'has had losses' in his time.  A thoughtful, firm-standing man;
+much loved by some, not loved by all;  his clear eyes flashing
+into you, in an almost inconvenient way!
+
+Abbot Hugo, as we said, has his own difficulties with him;  Abbot
+Hugo had him in prison once, to teach him what authority was, and
+how to dread the fire in future.  For Brother Samson, in the time
+of the Antipopes, had been sent to Rome on business;  and,
+returning successful, was too late,--the business had all misgone
+in the interim!  As tours to Rome are still frequent with us
+English, perhaps the reader will not grudge to look at the method
+of traveling thither in those remote ages.  We happily have, in
+small compass, a personal narrative of it.  Through the clear
+eyes and memory of Brother Samson, one peeps direct into the very
+bosom of that Twelfth Century, and finds it rather curious.  The
+actual _Papa,_ Father, or universal President of Christendom, as
+yet not grown chimerical, sat there;  think of that only!
+Brother Samson went to Rome as to the real Light-fountain of this
+lower world;  we now--!--But let us hear Brother Samson, as to
+his mode of traveling:
+
+'You know what trouble I had for that Church of Woolpit;  how I
+was despatched to Rome in the time of the Schism between Pope
+Alexander and Octavian;  and passed through Italy at that season,
+when all clergy carrying letters for our Lord Pope Alexander were
+laid hold of, and some were clapt in prison, some hanged;  and
+some, with nose and lips cut off, were sent forward to our Lord
+the Pope, for the disgrace and confusion of him (_in dedecus et
+confusionem ejus_).  I, however, pretended to be Scotch, and
+putting on the garb of a Scotchman, and taking the gesture of
+one, walked along;  and when anybody mocked at me, I would
+brandish my staff in the manner of that weapon they call
+_gaveloc,_* uttering comminatory words after the way of the
+Scotch.  To those that met and questioned me who I was, I made no
+answer but:  _Ride, ride Rome;  turne Cantwereberei._ ** Thus did
+I, to conceal myself and my errand, and get safer to Rome under
+the guise of a Scotchman.
+
+----------
+* Javelin, missile pike.  _Gaveloc_ is still the Scotch name for
+_crowbar._
+
+** Does this mean, "Rome forever;  Canterbury _not"_ (which
+claims an unjust Supremacy _over_ us)!  Mr. Rokewood is silent.
+Dryasdust would perhaps explain it,--in the course of a week or
+two of talking;  did one dare to question him!
+----------
+
+'Having at last obtained a Letter from our Lord the Pope
+according to my wishes, I turned homewards again.  I had to pass
+through a certain strong town on my road;  and lo, the soldiers
+thereof surrounded me, seizing me, and saying:  "This vagabond
+(_iste solivagus_), who pretends to be Scotch, is either a spy,
+or has Letters from the false Pope Alexander."  And whilst they
+examined every stitch and rag of me, my leggings (_caligas_),
+breeches, and even the old shoes that I carried over my shoulder
+in the way of the Scotch,--I put my hand into the leather scrip I
+wore, wherein our Lord the Pope's Letter lay, close by a little
+jug (_ciffus_) I had for drinking out of;  and the Lord God so
+pleasing, and St. Edmund, I got out both the Letter and the jug
+together;  in such a way that, extending my arm aloft, I held the
+Letter hidden between jug and hand:  they saw the jug, but the
+Letter they saw not.  And thus I escaped out of their hands in
+the name of the Lord.  Whatever money I had they took from me;
+wherefore I had to beg from door to door, without any payment
+(_sine omni expensa_) till I came to England again.  But hearing
+that the Woolpit Church was already given to Geoffry Ridell, my
+soul was struck with sorrow because I had laboured in vain.
+
+'Coming home, therefore, I sat me down secretly under the Shrine
+of St. Edmund, fearing lest our Lord Abbot should seize and
+imprison me, though I had done no mischief;  nor was there a monk
+who durst speak to me, nor a laic who durst bring me food except
+by stealth.
+
+Such resting and welcoming found Brother Samson, with his worn
+soles, and strong heart!  He sits silent, revolving many
+thoughts, at the foot of St. Edmund's Shrine.  In the wide Earth,
+if it be not Saint Edmund, what friend or refuge has he?  Our
+Lord Abbot, hearing of him, sent the proper officer to lead him
+down to prison, clap 'foot-gyves on him' there.  Another poor
+official furtively brought him a cup of wine;  bade him "be
+comforted in the Lord."  Samson utters no complaint;  obeys in
+silence.  'Our Lord Abbot, taking counsel of it, banished me to
+Acre, and there I had to stay long.'
+
+Our Lord Abbot next tried Samson with promotions;  made him
+Subsacristan, made him Librarian, which he liked best of all,
+being passionately fond of Books:  Samson, with many thoughts in
+him, again obeyed in silence;  discharged his offices to
+perfection, but never thanked our Lord Abbot,--seemed rather as
+if looking into him, with those clear eyes of his.  Whereupon
+Abbot Hugo said, _Se nunquam vidisse,_ he had never seen such a
+man;  whom no severity would break to complain, and no kindness
+soften into smiles or thanks:--a questionable kind of man!
+
+
+In this way, not without troubles, but still in an erect clear-
+standing manner, has Brother Samson reached his forty-seventh
+year;  and his ruddy beard is getting slightly grizzled.  He is
+endeavouring, in these days, to have various broken things
+thatched in;  nay perhaps to have the Choir itself completed, for
+he can bear nothing ruinous.  He has gathered 'heaps of lime and
+sand;'  has masons, slaters working, he and _Warinus monachus
+noster,_ who are joint keepers of the Shrine;  paying out the
+money duly,--furnished by charitable burghers of St. Edmundsbury,
+they say.  Charitable burghers of St. Edmundsbury?  To me Jocelin
+it seems rather, Samson and Warinus, whom he leads, have privily
+hoarded the oblations at the Shrine itself, in these late
+years of indolent dilapidation, while Abbot Hugo sat wrapt
+inaccessible;  and are struggling, in this prudent way, to have
+the rain kept out!--Under what conditions, sometimes, has Wisdom
+to struggle with Folly;  get Folly persuaded to so much as thatch
+out the rain from itself!  For, indeed, if the Infant govern
+the Nurse, what dexterous practice on the Nurse's part will
+not be necessary!
+
+It is regret to us that, in these circumstances, our Lord the
+King's Custodiars, interfering, prohibited all building or
+thatching from whatever source;  and no Choir shall be completed,
+and Rain and Time, for the present, shall have their way.
+Willelmus Sacrista, he of 'the frequent bibations and some things
+not to be spoken of;'  he, with his red nose, I am of opinion,
+had made complaint to the Custodiars;  wishing to do Samson an
+ill turn:--Samson his _Sub_-sacristan, with those clear eyes,
+could not be a prime favourite of his!  Samson again obeys
+in silence.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+The Canvassing
+
+
+Now, however, come great news to St. Edmundsbury:  That there is
+to be an Abbot elected;  that our interlunar obscuration is to
+cease;  St. Edmund's Convent no more to be a doleful widow, but
+joyous and once again a bride!  Often in our widowed state had we
+prayed to the Lord and St. Edmund, singing weekly a matter of
+'one-and-twenty penitential Psalms, on our knees in the Choir,'
+that a fit Pastor might be vouchsafed us.  And, says Jocelin, had
+some known what Abbot we were to get, they had not been so
+devout, I believe!--Bozzy Jocelin opens to mankind the floodgates
+of authentic Convent gossip;  we listen, as in a Dionysius' Ear,
+to the inanest hubbub, like the voices at Virgil's Horn-Gate of
+Dreams.  Even gossip, seven centuries off, has significance.
+List, list, how like men are to one another in all centuries:
+
+_`Dixit quidam de quodam,_ A certain person said of a certain
+person, "He, that _Frater,_ is a good monk, _probabilis persona;_
+knows much of the order and customs of the church;  and though
+not so perfect a philosopher as some others, would make a very
+good Abbot.  Old Abbot Ording, still famed among us, knew little
+of letters.  Besides, as we read in Fables, it is better to
+choose a log for king, than a serpent, never so wise, that will
+venomously hiss and bite his subjects."--"Impossible!" answered
+the other:  "How can such a man make a sermon in the chapter, or
+to the people on festival days, when he is without letters?  How
+can he have the skill to bind and to loose, he who does not
+understand the Scriptures?  How--?"'
+
+And then `another said of another, _alius de alio,_ "That
+_Frater_ is a _homo literatus,_ eloquent, sagacious;  vigorous
+in discipline;  loves the Convent much, has suffered much for
+its sake."  To which a third party answers, "From all your
+great clerks good Lord deliver us!  From Norfolk barrators, and
+surly persons, That it would please thee to preserve us, We
+beseech thee to hear us, good Lord!"'  Then `another _quidam_
+said of another _quodam,_ "That _Frater_ is a good manager
+(_husebondus_);"  but was swiftly answered, "God forbid that a
+man who can neither read nor chant, nor celebrate the divine
+offices, an unjust person withal, and grinder of the faces of the
+poor, should ever be Abbot!"'  One man, it appears, is nice in
+his victuals.  Another is indeed wise;  but apt to slight
+inferiors;  hardly at the pains to answer, if they argue with him
+too foolishly.  And so each _aliquis_ concerning his _aliquo,_--
+through whole pages of electioneering babble.  `For,' says
+Jocelin, `So many men, as many minds.  Our Monks at time of
+blood-letting, _tempore minutionis,_' holding their sanhedrim of
+babble, would talk in this manner:  Brother Samson, I remarked,
+never said anything;  sat silent, sometimes smiling;  but he took
+good note of what others said, and would bring it up, on
+occasion, twenty years after.  As for me Jocelin, I was of
+opinion that `some skill in Dialectics, to distinguish true from
+false,' would be good in an Abbot.  I spake, as a rash Novice in
+those days, some conscientious words of a certain benefactor of
+mine;  `and behold, one of those sons of Belial' ran and reported
+them to him, so that he never after looked at me with the same
+face again!  Poor Bozzy!--
+
+Such is the buzz and frothy simmering ferment of the general mind
+and no-mind;  struggling to `make itself up,' as the phrase is,
+or ascertain what _it_ does really want:  no easy matter, in most
+cases.  St. Edmundsbury, in that Candlemas season of the year
+1182, is a busily fermenting place.  The very clothmakers sit
+meditative at their looms;  asking, Who shall be Abbot?  The
+_sochemanni_ speak of it, driving their ox-teams afield;  the old
+women with their spindles:  and none yet knows what the days will
+bring forth.
+
+
+The Prior, however, as our interim chief, must proceed to work;
+get ready 'Twelve Monks,' and set off with them to his Majesty at
+Waltham, there shall the election be made.  An election, whether
+managed directly by ballot-box on public hustings, or indirectly
+by force of public opinion, or were it even by open alehouses,
+landlords' coercion, popular club-law, or whatever electoral
+methods, is always an interesting phenomenon.  A mountain
+tumbling in great travail, throwing up dustclouds and absurd
+noises, is visibly there;  uncertain yet what mouse or monster it
+will give birth to.
+
+Besides it is a most important social act;  nay, at bottom, the
+one important social act.  Given the men a People choose, the
+People itself, in its exact worth and worthlessness, is given.  A
+heroic people chooses heroes, and is happy;  a valet or flunkey
+people chooses sham-heroes, what are called quacks, thinking them
+heroes, and is not happy.  The grand summary of a man's spiritual
+condition, what brings out all his herohood and insight, or all
+his flunkeyhood and horn-eyed dimness, is this question put to
+him, What man dost thou honour?  Which is thy ideal of a man;  or
+nearest that?  So too of a People:  for a People too, every
+People, _speaks_ its choice,--were it only by silently obeying,
+and not revolting,--in the course of a century or so.  Nor are
+electoral methods, Reform Bills and such like, unimportant.  A
+People's electoral methods are, in the long-run, the express
+image of its electoral _talent;_  tending and gravitating
+perpetually, irresistibly, to a conformity with that:  and are,
+at all stages, very significant of the People.  Judicious
+readers, of these times, are not disinclined to see how
+Monks elect their Abbot in the Twelfth Century:  how the St.
+Edmundsbury mountain manages its midwifery;  and what mouse or
+man the outcome is.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+The Election
+
+
+Accordingly our Prior assembles us in Chapter;  and, we adjuring
+him before God to do justly, nominates, not by our selection, yet
+with our assent, Twelve Monks, moderately satisfactory.  Of whom
+are Hugo Third-Prior, Brother Dennis a venerable man, Walter the
+_Medicus,_ Samson _Subsacrista,_ and other esteemed characters,--
+though Willelmus _Sacrista,_ of the red nose, too is one.  These
+shall proceed straightway to Waltham;  elect the Abbot as they
+may and can.  Monks are sworn to obedience;  must not speak too
+loud, under penalty of foot-gyves, limbo, and bread and water:
+yet monks too would know what it is they are obeying.  The St.
+Edmundsbury Community has no hustings, ballot-box, indeed no open
+voting:  yet by various vague manipulations, pulse-feelings, we
+struggle to ascertain what its virtual aim is, and succeed better
+or worse.
+
+This question, however, rises;  alas, a quite preliminary
+question:  Will the _Dominus Rex_ allow us to choose freely?  It
+is to be hoped!  Well, if so, we agree to choose one of our own
+Convent.  If not, if the _Dominus Rex_ will force a stranger on
+us, we decide on demurring, the Prior and his Twelve shall demur:
+we can appeal, plead, remonstrate;  appeal even to the Pope, but
+trust it will not be necessary.  Then there is this other
+question, raised by Brother Samson:  What if the Thirteen should
+not themselves be able to agree?  Brother Samson _Subsacrista,_
+one remarks, is ready oftenest with some question, some
+suggestion, that has wisdom in it.  Though a servant of servants,
+and saying little, his words all tell, having sense in them;
+it seems by his light mainly that we steer ourselves in this
+great dimness.
+
+What if the Thirteen should not themselves be able to agree?
+Speak, Samson, and advise.--Could not, hints Samson, Six of our
+venerablest elders be chosen by us, a kind of electoral
+committee, here and now:  of these, `with their hand on the
+Gospels, with their eye on the _Sacrosancta,'_ we take oath that
+they will do faithfully;  let these, in secret and as before God,
+agree on Three whom they reckon fittest;  write their names in a
+Paper, and deliver the same sealed, forthwith, to the Thirteen:
+one of those Three the Thirteen shall fix on, if permitted.  If
+not permitted, that is to say, if the _Dominus Rex_ force us to
+demur,--the Paper shall be brought back unopened, and publicly
+burned, that no man's secret bring him into trouble.
+
+So Samson advises, so we act;  wisely, in this and in other
+crises of the business.  Our electoral committee, its eye on the
+Sacrosancta,_ is soon named, soon sworn;  and we striking up the
+Fifth Psalm, _'Verba mea,_
+
+     `Give ear unto my words, O Lord,
+     My meditation weigh,'
+
+march out chanting, and leave the Six to their work in the
+Chapter here.  Their work, before long, they announce as
+finished:  they, with their eye on the Sacrosancta, imprecating
+the Lord to weigh and witness their meditation, have fixed on
+Three Names, and written them in this Sealed Paper.  Let Samson
+Subsacrista, general servant of the party, take charge of it.  On
+the morrow morning, our Prior and his Twelve will be ready to get
+under way.
+
+This then is the  ballot-box and electoral winnowing-machine they
+have at St. Edmundsbury: a mind fixed on the Thrice Holy, an
+appeal to God on high to witness their meditation:  by far the
+best, and indeed the only good electoral winnowing-machine,--If
+men have souls in them.  Totally worthless, it is true, and even
+hideous and poisonous, if men have no souls.  But without soul,
+alas what winnowing-machine in human elections, can be of
+avail?  We cannot get along without soul;  we stick fast, the
+mournfullest spectacle;  and salt itself will not save us!
+
+
+On the morrow morning, accordingly, our Thirteen set forth;  or
+rather our Prior and Eleven;  for Samson, as general servant of
+the party, has to linger, settling many things.  At length he too
+gets upon the road;  and, 'carrying the sealed Paper in a leather
+pouch hung round his neck;  and _froccum bajulans in ulnis'_
+(thanks to thee Bozzy Jocelin), 'his frock-skirts looped over his
+elbow,' skewing substantial stern-works, tramps stoutly along.
+Away across the Heath, not yet of Newmarket  and horse-jockeying;
+across your Fleam-dike and Devil's-dike, no longer useful as a
+Mercian East-Anglian boundary or bulwark:  continually towards
+Waltham, and the Bishop of Winchester's House there, for his
+Majesty is in that.  Brother Samson, as purse-bearer, has the
+reckoning always, when there is one, to pay;  'delays are
+numerous,' progress none of the swiftest.
+
+But, in the solitude of the Convent, Destiny thus big and in her
+birthtime, what gossiping, what babbling, what dreaming of
+dreams!  The secret of the Three our electoral elders alone know:
+some Abbot we shall have to govern us;  but which Abbot, O which!
+One Monk discerns in a vision of the night-watches, that we shall
+get an Abbot of our own body, without needing to demur:  a
+prophet appeared to him clad all in white, and said, "Ye shall
+have one of yours, and he will rage among you like a wolf,
+_saeviet ut lupus."_  Verily!--then which of ours?  Another Monk
+now dreams:  he has seen clearly which;  a certain Figure taller
+by head and shoulders than the other two, dressed in alb and
+_pallium,_ and with the attitude of one about to fight;--which
+tall Figure a wise Editor would rather not name at this stage of
+the business!  Enough that the vision is true:  that Saint Edmund
+himself, pale and awful, seemed to rise from his Shrine, with
+naked feet, and say audibly, "He, _ille,_ shall veil my feet;"
+which part of the vision also proves true.  Such guessing,
+visioning, dim perscrutation of the momentous future:  the very
+clothmakers, old women, all townsfolk speak of it, 'and more than
+once it is reported in St. Edmundsbury, This one is elected;  and
+then, This one and That other.'  Who knows?
+
+
+But now, sure enough, at Waltham 'on the Second Sunday of
+Quadragesima,' which Dryasdust declares to mean the 22d day of
+February, year 1182, Thirteen St. Edmundsbury Monks are, at last,
+seen processioning towards the Winchester Manorhouse;  and in
+some high Presence-chamber, and Hall of State, get access to
+Henry II in all his glory.  What a Hall,--not imaginary in the
+least, but entirely real and indisputable, though so extremely
+dim to us;  sunk in the deep distances of Night!  The Winchester
+Manorhouse has fled bodily, like a Dream of the old Night;  not
+Dryasdust himself can skew a wreck of it.  House and people,
+royal and episcopal, lords and varlets, where are they?  Why
+_there,_ I say, Seven Centuries off;  sunk so far in the Night,
+there they _are;_  peep through the blankets of the old Night,
+and thou wilt seel King Henry himself is visibly there, a vivid,
+noble-looking man, with grizzled beard, in glittering uncertain
+costume, with earls round him, and bishops and dignitaries, in
+the like.  The Hall is large, and has for one thing an altar near
+it,--chapel and altar adjoining it;  but what gilt seats, carved
+tables, carpeting of rush-cloth, what arras-hangings, and a huge
+fire of logs:--alas, it has Human Life in it;  and is not that
+the grand miracle, in what hangings or costume soever?--
+
+The _Dominus Rex,_ benignantly receiving our Thirteen with their
+obeisance, and graciously declaring that he will strive to act
+for God's honour, and the Church's good, commands, 'by the Bishop
+of Winchester and Geoffrey the Chancellor,'--_Galfrides
+Cancellarius,_ Henry's and the Fair Rosamond's authentic Sons
+present here!--commands, "That they, the said Thirteen, do now
+withdraw, and fix upon Three from their own Monastery."  A work
+soon done;  the Three hanging ready round Samson's neck, in that
+leather pouch of his.  Breaking the seal, we find the names,--
+what think _ye_ of it, ye higher dignitaries, thou indolent
+Prior, thou Willelmus _Sacrista_ with the red bottle-nose?--the
+names, in this order:  of Samson _Subsacrista,_ of Roger the
+distressed Cellarer, of Hugo _Tertius-Prior._
+
+The higher dignitaries, all omitted here, 'flush suddenly red in
+the face;'  but have nothing to say.  One curious fact and
+question certainly is, How Hugo Third-Prior, who was of the
+electoral committee, came to nominate _himself_ as one of the
+Three?  A curious fact, which Hugo Third-Prior has never yet
+entirely explained;  that I know of!--However, we return, and
+report to the King our Three names;  merely altering the order;
+putting Samson last, as lowest of all.  The King, at recitation
+of our Three, asks us:  "Who are they?  Were they born in my
+domain?  Totally unknown to me!  You must nominate three others."
+Whereupon Willelmus Sacrista says, "Our Prior must be named,
+_quia caput nostrum est,_ being already our head."  And the Prior
+responds, "Willelmus Sacrista is a fit man, _bonus vir est,"_--
+for all his red nose.  Tickle me Toby, and I'll tickle thee!
+Venerable Dennis too is named;  none in his conscience can say
+nay.  There are now Six on our List.  "Well," said the King,
+"they have done it swiftly, they!  _Deus est cum eis."_  The
+Monks withdraw again;  and Majesty revolves, for a little, with
+his _Pares_ and _Episcopi,_ Lords or _'Law-wards'_* and Soul-
+Overseers, the thoughts of the royal breast.  The Monks wait
+silent in an outer room.
+
+--------
+* or "Lawyers"--digital editor
+--------
+
+
+In short while, they are next ordered, To add yet another three;
+but not from their own Convent;  from other Convents, "for the
+honour of my kingdom."  Here,--what is to be done here?  We will
+demur, if need be!  We do name three, however, for the nonce:
+the Prior of St. Faith's, a good Monk of St. Neot's, a good Monk
+of St. Alban's;  good men all;  all made abbots and dignitaries
+since, at this hour.  There are now Nine upon our List.  What the
+thoughts of the Dominus Rex may be farther?  The Dominus Rex,
+thanking graciously, sends out word that we shall now strike off
+three.  The three strangers are instantly struck off.  Willelmus
+Sacrista adds, that he will of his own accord decline,--a touch
+of grace and respect for the _Sacrosancta,_ even in Willelmus!
+The King then orders us to strike off a couple more;  then yet
+one more:  Hugo Third-Prior goes, and Roger _Cellerarius,_ and
+venerable Monk Dennis;--and now there remain on our List two
+only, Samson Subsacrista and the Prior.
+
+Which of these two?  It were hard to say,--by Monks who may get
+themselves foot-gyved and thrown into limbo, for speaking!  We
+humbly request that the Bishop of Winchester and Geoffrey the
+Chancellor may again enter, and help us to decide.  "Which do you
+want?" asks the Bishop.  Venerable Dennis made a speech,
+'commending the persons of the Prior and Samson;  but always in
+the corner of his discourse, in _angulo sui sermonis,_ brought
+Samson in.'  "I see!" said the Bishop:  "We are to understand
+that your Prior is somewhat remiss;  that you want to have him
+you call Samson for Abbot."  "Either of them is good," said
+venerable Dennis, almost trembling;  "but we would have the
+better, if it pleased God."  "Which of the two _do_ you want?"
+inquires the Bishop pointedly.  "Samson!" answered Dennis;
+"Samson!" echoed all of the rest that durst speak or echo
+anything:  and Samson is reported to the King accordingly.  His
+Majesty, advising of it for a moment, orders that Samson be
+brought in with the other Twelve.
+
+The King's Majesty, looking at us somewhat sternly, then says:
+"You present to me Samson;  I do not know him:  had it been your
+Prior, whom I do know, I should have accepted him:  however, I
+will now do as you wish.  But have a care of yourselves.  By the
+true eyes of God, _per veros oculos Dei,_ if you manage badly, I
+will be upon you!"  Samson, therefore, steps forward, kisses the
+King's feet;  but swiftly rises erect again, swiftly turns
+towards the altar, uplifting with the other Twelve, in clear
+tenor-note, the Fifty-first Psalm, _'Miserere mei Deus,_
+
+     'After thy loving-kindness, Lord,
+     Have mercy upon _me;'_
+
+with firm voice, firm step and head, no change in his countenance
+whatever.  "By God's eyes," said the King, "that one, I think,
+will govern the Abbey well."  By the same oath (charged to your
+Majesty's account), I too am precisely of that opinion!  It is
+some while since I fell in with a likelier man anywhere than this
+new Abbot Samson.  Long life to him, and may the Lord _have_
+mercy on him as Abbot!
+
+
+Thus, then, have the St. Edmundsbury Monks, without express
+ballot-box or other good winnowing-machine, contrived to
+accomplish the most important social feat a body of men can do,
+to winnow out the man that is to govern them:  and truly one sees
+not that, by any winnowing-machine whatever, they could have done
+it better.  O ye kind Heavens, there is in every Nation and
+Community, a _fittest,_ a wisest, bravest, best;  whom could we
+find and make King over us, all were in very truth well;--the
+best that God and Nature had permitted _us_ to make it!  By what
+art discover him?  Will the Heavens in their pity teach us no
+art;  for our need of him is great!
+
+Ballot-boxes, Reform Bills, winnowing-machines:  all these are
+good, or are not so good;--alas, brethren, how _can_ these, I
+say, be other than inadequate, be other than failures, melancholy
+to behold?  Dim all souls of men to the divine, the high and
+awful meaning of Human Worth and Truth, we shall never, by all
+the machinery in Birmingham, discover the True and Worthy.  It is
+written, 'if we are ourselves valets, there shall exist no hero
+for us;  we shall not know the hero when we see him;'--we
+shall take the quack for a hero;  and cry, audibly through
+all ballot-boxes and machinery whatsoever, Thou art he;  be
+thou King over us!
+
+What boots it?  Seek only deceitful Speciosity, godlike Reality
+will be forever far from you.  The Quack shall be legitimate
+inevitable King of you;  no earthly machinery able to exclude the
+Quack.  Ye shall be born thralls of the Quack, and suffer under
+him, till you hearts are near broken, and no French Revolution or
+Manchester Insurrection, or partial or universal volcanic
+combustions and explosions;  never so many, can do more than
+'change the _figure_ of your Quack;'  the essence of him
+remaining, for a time and times.--"How long, O Prophet?" say
+some, with a rather melancholy sneer.  Alas, ye _un_prophetic,
+ever till this come about:  Till deep misery, if nothing softer
+will, have driven you out of your Speciosites _into_ your
+Sincerities;  and you find there either is a Godlike in the
+world, or else ye are an unintelligible madness;  that there is a
+God, as well as a Mammon and a Devil, and a Genius of Luxuries
+and canting Dilettantisms and Vain Shows!  How long that will be,
+compute for yourselves.  My unhappy brothers!--
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+Abbot Samson
+
+
+So then the bells of St. Edmundsbury clang out one and all, and
+in church and chapel the organs go:  Convent and Town, and all
+the west side of Suffolk, are in gala;  knights, viscounts,
+weavers, spinners, the entire population, male and female, young
+and old, the very sockmen with their chubby infants,--out to have
+a holiday, and see the Lord Abbot arrive!  And there is
+'stripping barefoot' of the Lord Abbot at the Gate, and solemn
+leading of him in to the High Altar and Shrine;  with sudden
+'silence of all the bells and organs,' as we kneel in deep prayer
+there;  and again with outburst of all the bells and organs, and
+loud _Te Deum_ from the general human windpipe;  and speeches by
+the leading viscount, and giving of the kiss of brotherhood;  the
+whole wound up with popular games, and dinner within doors of
+more than a thousand strong, _plus quam mille comedentibus in
+gaudio magno._
+
+In such manner is the selfsame Samson once again returning
+to us, welcomed on _this_ occasion.  He that went away with his
+frock-skirts looped over his arm, comes back riding high;
+suddenly made one of the dignitaries of this world.  Reflective
+readers will admit that here was a trial for a man.  Yesterday a
+poor mendicant, allowed to possess not above two shillings of
+money, and without authority to bid a dog run for him, this man
+today finds himself a _Dominus Abbas,_ mitred Peer of Parliament,
+Lord of manorhouses, farms, manors, and wide lands;  a man with
+'Fifty Knights under him,' and dependent swiftly obedient
+multitudes of men.  It is a change greater than Napoleon's;  so
+sudden withal.  As if one of the Chandos daydrudges had, on
+awakening some morning, found that he overnight was become Duke!
+Let Samson with his clear-beaming eyes see into that, and discern
+it if he can.  We shall now get the measure of him by a new scale
+of inches, considerably more rigorous than the former was.  For
+if a noble soul is rendered tenfold beautifuller by victory and
+prosperity, springing now radiant as into his own due element and
+sunthrone;  an ignoble one is rendered tenfold and hundredfold
+uglier, pitifuller.  Whatsoever vices, whatsoever weaknesses were
+in the man, the parvenu will shew us them enlarged, as in the
+solar microscope, into frightful distortion.  Nay, how many mere
+seminal principles of vice, hitherto all wholesomely kept latent,
+may we now see unfolded, as in the solar hothouse, into growth,
+into huge universally-conspicuous luxuriance and development!
+
+
+But is not this, at any rate, a singular aspect of what political
+and social capabilities, nay let us say what depth and opulence
+of true social vitality, lay in those old barbarous ages, That
+the fit Governor could be met with under such disguises, could be
+recognised and laid hold of under such?  Here he is discovered
+with a maximum of two shillings in his pocket, and a leather
+scrip round his neck;  trudging along the highway, his frock-
+skirts looped over his arm.  They think this is he nevertheless,
+the true Governor;  and he proves to be so.  Brethren, have we no
+need of discovering true Governors, but will sham ones forever do
+for us?  These were absurd superstitious blockheads of Monks;
+and we are enlightened Tenpound Franchisers, without taxes on
+knowledge!  Where, I say, are our superior, are our similar or at
+all comparable discoveries?  We also have eyes, or ought to have;
+we have hustings, telescopes;  we have lights, link-lights and
+rushlights of an enlightened free Press, burning and dancing
+everywhere, as in a universal torch-dance;  singeing your
+whiskers as you traverse the public thoroughfares in town and
+country.  Great souls, true Governors, go about under all manner
+of disguises now as then.  Such telescopes, such enlightenment,--
+and such discovery!  How comes it, I say;  how comes it?  Is it
+not lamentable;  is it not even, in some sense, amazing?
+
+Alas, the defect, as we must often urge and again urge, is less a
+defect of telescopes than of some eyesight.  Those superstitious
+blockheads of the Twelfth Century had no telescopes, but they had
+still an eye:  not ballot-boxes;  only reverence for Worth,
+abhorrence of Unworth.  It is the way with all barbarians.  Thus
+Mr. Sale informs me, the old Arab Tribes would gather in
+liveliest _gaudeamus,_ and sing, and kindle bonfires, and wreathe
+crowns of honour, and solemnly thank the gods that, in their
+Tribe too, a Poet had shewn himself.  As indeed they well might;
+for what usefuller, I say not nobler and heavenlier thing could
+the gods, doing their very kindest, send to any Tribe or Nation,
+in any time or circumstances?  I declare to thee, my afflicted
+quack-ridden brother, in spite of thy astonishment, it is very
+lamentable!  We English find a Poet, as brave a man as has been
+made for a hundred years or so anywhere under the Sun;  and do we
+kindle bonfires, thank the gods?  Not at all.  We, taking due
+counsel of it, set the man to gauge ale-barrels in the Burgh of
+Dumfries;  and pique ourselves on our 'patronage of genius.'
+
+Genius, Poet:  do we know what these words mean?  An inspired
+Soul once more vouchsafed us, direct from Nature's own great
+fire-heart, to see the Truth, and speak it, and do it;  Nature's
+own sacred voice heard once more athwart the dreary boundless
+element of hearsaying and canting, of twaddle and poltroonery, in
+which the bewildered Earth, nigh perishing, has _lost its way._
+Hear once more, ye bewildered benighted mortals;  listen once
+again to a voice from the inner Light-sea and Flame-sea, Nature's
+and Truth's own heart;  know the Fact of your Existence what it
+is, put away the Cant of it which it is not;  and knowing, do,
+and let it be well with you!--
+
+George the Third is Defender of something we call 'the Faith' in
+those years;  George the Third is head charioteer of the
+Destinies of England, to guide them through the gulf of French
+Revolutions, American Independences;  and Robert Burns is Gauger
+of ale in Dumfries.  It is an Iliad in a nutshell.  The
+physiognomy of a world now verging towards dissolution, reduced
+now to spasms and death-throes, lies pictured in that one fact,--
+which astonishes nobody, except at me for being astonished at it.
+The fruit of long ages of confirmed Valethood, entirely confirmed
+as into a Law of Nature;  cloth-worship and quack-worship:
+entirely _confirmed_ Valethood,--which will have to unconfirm
+itself again;  God knows, with difficulty enough!--
+
+Abbot Samson had found a Convent all in dilapidation;  rain
+beating through it, material rain and metaphorical, from all
+quarters of the compass.  Willelmus Sacrista sits drinking
+nightly, and doing mere _tacenda._  Our larders are reduced to
+leanness, Jew Harpies and unclean creatures our purveyors;  in
+our basket is no bread.  Old women with their distaffs rush out
+on a distressed Cellarer in shrill Chartism.  'You cannot stir
+abroad but Jews and Christians pounce upon you with unsettled
+bonds;'  debts boundless seemingly as the National Debt of
+England.  For four years our new Lord Abbot never went abroad but
+Jew creditors and Christian, and all manner of creditors, were
+about him;  driving him to very despair.  Our Prior is remiss;
+our Cellarers, officials are remiss, our monks are remiss:  what
+man is not remiss?  Front this, Samson, thou alone art there to
+front it;  it is thy task to front and fight this, and to die or
+kill it.  May the Lord have mercy on thee!
+
+To our antiquarian interest in poor Jocelin and his Convent,
+where the whole aspect of existence, the whole dialect, of
+thought, of speech, of activity, is so obsolete, strange, long-
+vanished, there now superadds itself a mild glow of human
+interest for Abbot Samson;  a real pleasure, as at sight of man's
+work, especially of governing, which is man's highest work, done
+_well._  Abbot Samson had no experience in governing;  had served
+no apprenticeship to the trade of governing,--alas, only the
+hardest apprenticeship to that of obeying.  He had never in any
+court given _vadium_ or _plegium,_ says Jocelin;  hardly ever
+seen a court, when he was set to preside in one.  But it is
+astonishing, continues Jocelin, how soon he learned the ways of
+business;  and, in all sort of affairs, became expert beyond
+others.  Of the many persons offering him their service 'he
+retained one Knight skilled in taking _vadia_ and _plegia;'_  and
+within the year was himself well skilled.  Nay, by and by, the
+Pope appoints him Justiciary in certain causes;  the King one of
+his new Circuit judges:  official Osbert is heard saying, "That
+Abbot is one of your shrewd ones, _disputator est;_  if he go on
+as he begins, he will cut out every lawyer of us!"
+
+Why not?  What is to hinder this Samson from governing?  There is
+in him what far transcends all apprenticeships;  in the man
+himself there exists a model of governing, something to govern
+by!  There exists in him a heart-abhorrence of whatever is
+incoherent, pusillanimous, unveracious,--that is to say, chaotic,
+_un_governed;  of the Devil, not of God.  A man of this kind
+cannot help governing!  He has the living ideal of a governor in
+him;  and the incessant necessity of struggling to unfold the
+same out of him.  Not the Devil or Chaos, for any wages, will he
+serve;  no, this man is the born servant of Another than them.
+Alas, how little avail all apprenticeships, when there is in your
+governor himself what we may well call _nothing_ to govern by:
+nothing;--a general grey twilight, looming with shapes of
+expediencies, parliamentary traditions, division-lists, election-
+funds, leading-articles;  this, with what of vulpine alertness
+and adroitness soever, is not much!
+
+But indeed what say we, apprenticeship?  Had not this Samson
+served, in his way, a right good apprenticeship to governing;
+namely, the harshest slave-apprenticeship to obeying!  Walk this
+world with no friend in it but God and St. Edmund, you will
+either fall into the ditch, or learn a good many things.  To
+learn obeying is the fundamental art of governing.  How much
+would many a Serene Highness have learned, had he traveled
+through the world with water-jug and empty wallet, _sine omni
+expensa;_  and, at his victorious return, sat down not to
+newspaper-paragraphs and city-illuminations, but at the foot of
+St. Edmund's Shrine to shackles and bread and water!  He that
+cannot be servant of many, will never be master, true guide and
+deliverer of many;--that is the meaning of true mastership.  Had
+not the Monk-life extraordinary 'political capabilities' in it;
+if not imitable by us, yet enviable?  Heavens, had a Duke of
+Logwood, now rolling sumptuously to his place in the Collective
+Wisdom, but himself happened to plough daily, at one time, on
+seven-and-sixpence a week, with no out-door relief,--what a
+light, unquenchable by logic and statistic and arithmetic, would
+it have thrown on several things for him!
+
+In all cases, therefore, we will agree with the judicious Mrs.
+Glass:  'First catch your hare!'  First get your man;  all is
+got:  he can learn to do all things, from making boots, to
+decreeing judgments, governing communities;  and will do them
+like a man.  Catch your no-man,--alas, have you not caught the
+terriblest Tartar in the world!  Perhaps all the terribler, the
+quieter and gentler he looks.  For the mischief that one
+blockhead, that every blockhead does, in a world so feracious,
+teeming with endless results as ours, no ciphering will sum up.
+The quack bootmaker is considerable;  as corn-cutters can
+testify, and desperate men reduced to buckskin and list-shoes.
+But the quack priest, quack high-priest, the quack king!  Why do
+not all just citizens rush, half-frantic, to stop him, as they
+would a conflagration?  Surely a just citizen _is_ admonished by
+God and his own Soul, by all silent and articulate voices of this
+Universe, to do what in _him_ lies towards relief of this poor
+blockhead-quack, and of a world that groans under him.  Runs
+swiftly;  relieve him,--were it even by extinguishing him!  For
+all things have grown so old, tinder-dry, combustible;  and he is
+more ruinous than conflagration.  Sweep him _down,_ at least;
+keep him strictly within the hearth:  he will then cease to be
+conflagration;  he will then become useful, more or less, as
+culinary fire.  Fire is the best of servants;  but what a master!
+This poor blockhead too is born for uses:  why, elevating him to
+mastership, will you make a conflagration, a parish-curse or
+world-curse of him?
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+Government
+
+
+How Abbot Samson, giving his new subjects seriatim the kiss of
+fatherhood in the St. Edmundsbury chapterhouse, proceeded with
+cautious energy to set about reforming their disjointed
+distracted way of life;  how he managed with his Fifty rough
+_Milites_ (Feudal Knights), with his lazy Farmers, remiss
+refractory Monks, with Pope's Legates, Viscounts, Bishops, Kings;
+how on all sides he laid about him like a man, and putting
+consequence on premiss, and everywhere the saddle on the right
+horse, struggled incessantly to educe organic method out of
+lazily fermenting wreck,--the careful reader will discern, not
+without true interest, in these pages of Jocelin Boswell.  In
+most antiquarian quaint costume, not of garments alone, but of
+thought, word, action, outlook and position, the substantial
+figure of a man with eminent nose, bushy brows and clear-flashing
+eyes, his russet beard growing daily greyer, is visible, engaged
+in true governing of men.  It is beautiful how the chrysalis
+governing-soul, shaking off its dusty slough and prison, starts
+forth winged, a true royal soul!  Our new Abbot has a right
+honest unconscious feeling, without insolence as without fear or
+flutter, of what he is and what others are.  A courage to quell
+the proudest, an honest pity to encourage the humblest.  Withal
+there is a noble reticence in this Lord Abbot:  much vain
+unreason he hears;  lays up without response.  He is not there to
+expect reason and nobleness of others;  he is there to give them
+of his own reason and nobleness.  Is he not their servant, as we
+said, who can suffer from them, and for them;  bear the burden
+their poor spindle-limbs totter and stagger under;  and in virtue
+_thereof_ govern them, lead them out of weakness into strength,
+out of defeat into victory!
+
+
+One of the first Herculean Labours Abbot Samson undertook, or the
+very first, was to institute a strenuous review and radical
+reform of his economics.  It is the first labour of every
+governing man, from _Paterfamilias_ to _Dominus Rex._  To get the
+rain thatched out from you is the preliminary of whatever
+farther, in the way of speculation or of action, you may mean to
+do.  Old Abbot Hugo's budget, as we saw, had become empty, filled
+with deficit and wind.  To see his account-books clear, be
+delivered from those ravening flights of Jew and Christian
+creditors, pouncing on him like obscene harpies wherever he
+shewed face, was a necessity for Abbot Samson.
+
+On the morrow after his instalment, he brings in a load of money-
+bonds, all duly stamped, sealed with this or the other Convent
+Seal:  frightful, unmanageable, a bottomless confusion of Convent
+finance.  There they are;--but there at least they all are;  all
+that shall be of them.  Our Lord Abbot demands that all the
+official seals in use among us be now produced and delivered to
+him.  Three-and-thirty seals turn up;  are straightway broken,
+and shall seal no more:  the Abbot only, and those duly
+authorised by him shall seal any bond.  There are but two ways of
+paying debt:  increase of industry in raising income, increase of
+thrift in laying it out.  With iron energy, in slow but steady
+undeviating perseverance, Abbot Samson sets to work in both
+directions.  His troubles are manifold:  cunning _milites,_
+unjust bailiffs, lazy sockmen, he an inexperienced Abbot;
+relaxed lazy monks, not disinclined to mutiny in mass:  but
+continued vigilance, rigorous method, what we call 'the eye of
+the master,' work wonders.  The clear-beaming eyesight of Abbot
+Samson, steadfast, severe, all-penetrating,--it is like _Fiat
+luxe_ in that inorganic waste whirlpool;  penetrates gradually to
+all nooks, and of the chaos makes a _kosmos_ or ordered world!
+
+He arranges everywhere, struggles unweariedly to arrange, and
+place on some intelligible footing, the 'affairs and dues,
+_res ac redditus,'_ of his dominion.  The Lakenheath eels
+cease to breed squabbles between human beings;  the penny of
+_reap-silver_ to explode into the streets the Female Chartism of
+St. Edmundsbury.  These and innumerable greater things.
+Wheresoever Disorder may stand or lie, let it have a care;  here
+is the man that has declared war with it, that never will make
+peace with it.  Man is the Missionary of Order;  he is the
+servant not of the Devil and Chaos, but of God and the Universe!
+Let all sluggards and cowards, remiss, false-spoken, unjust, and
+otherwise diabolic persons have a care:  this is a dangerous man
+for them.  He has a mild grave face;  a thoughtful sternness, a
+sorrowful pity:  but there is a terrible flash of anger in him
+too;  lazy monks often have to murmur, _"Saevit ut lupus,_ He
+rages like a wolf;  was not our Dream true!"  "To repress and
+hold-in such sudden anger he was continually careful," and
+succeeded well:--right, Samson;  that it may become in thee as
+noble central heat, fruitful, strong, beneficent;  not blaze out,
+or the seldomest possible blaze out, as wasteful volcanoism to
+scorch and consume!
+
+
+"We must first creep, and gradually learn to walk," had Abbot
+Samson said of himself, at starting.  In four years he has become
+a great walker;  striding prosperously along;  driving much
+before him.  In less than four years, says Jocelin, the Convent
+Debts were all liquidated:  the harpy Jews not only settled
+with, but banished, bag and baggage, out of the _Bannaleuca_
+(Liberties, _Banlieue_) of St. Edmundsbury,--so has the King's
+Majesty been persuaded to permit.  Farewell to _you,_ at any
+rate;  let us, in no extremity, apply again to you!  Armed men
+march them over the borders, dismiss them under stern penalties,
+--sentence of excommunication on all that shall again harbour them
+here:  there were many dry eyes at their departure.
+
+New life enters everywhere, springs up beneficent, the Incubus of
+Debt once rolled away.  Samson hastes not;  but neither does he
+pause to rest.  This of the Finance is a life-long business with
+him;--Jocelin's anecdotes are filled to weariness with it.  As
+indeed to Jocelin it was of very primary interest.
+
+But we have to record also, with a lively satisfaction, that
+spiritual rubbish is as little tolerated in Samson's Monastery as
+material.  With due rigour, Willelmus Sacrista, and his bibations
+and _tacenda_ are, at the earliest opportunity, softly, yet
+irrevocably put an end to.  The bibations, namely, had to end;
+even the building where they used to be carried on was razed from
+the soil of St. Edmundsbury, and 'on its place grow rows of
+beams:'  Willelmus himself, deposed from the Sacristry and all
+offices, retires into obscurity, into absolute taciturnity
+unbroken thenceforth to this hour.  Whether the poor Willelmus
+did not still, by secret channels, occasionally get some slight
+wetting of vinous or alcoholic liquor,--now grown, in a manner,
+indispensable to the poor man?  Jocelin hints not;  one knows not
+how to hope, what to hope!  But if he did, it was in silence and
+darkness;  with an ever-present feeling that teetotalism was his
+only true course.
+
+Drunken dissolute Monks are a class of persons who had better
+keep out of Abbot Samson's way.  _Saevit ut lupus;_ was not the
+Dream true! murmured many a Monk.  Nay Ranulf de Glanville,
+Justiciary in Chief, took umbrage at him, seeing these strict
+ways;  and watched farther with suspicion:  but discerned
+gradually that there was nothing wrong, that there was much the
+opposite of wrong.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+The Abbot's Ways
+
+
+Abbot Samson shewed no extraordinary favour to the Monks who had
+been his familiars of old;  did not promote them to offices,--
+_nisi essent idonei,_ unless they chanced to be fit men!  Whence
+great discontent among certain of these, who had contributed to
+make him Abbot:  reproaches, open and secret, of his being
+'ungrateful, hard-tempered, unsocial, a Norfolk _barrator_
+and _paltenerius.'_
+
+Indeed, except it were for _idonei,_ 'fit men,' in all kinds, it
+was hard to say for whom Abbot Samson had much favour.  He loved
+his kindred well, and tenderly enough acknowledged the poor part
+of them;  with the rich part, who in old days had never
+acknowledged him, he totally refused to have any business.  But
+even the former he did not promote into offices;  finding none of
+them _idonei._  'Some whom he thought suitable he put into
+situations in his own household, or made keepers of his country
+places:  if they behaved ill, he dismissed them without hope of
+return.  In his promotions, nay almost in his benefits, you would
+have said there was a certain impartiality.  'The official person
+who had, by Abbot Hugo's order, put the fetters on him at his
+return from Italy, was now supported with food and clothes to the
+end of his days at Abbot Samson's expense.'
+
+Yet he did not forget benefits;  far the reverse, when an
+opportunity occurred of paying them at his own cost.  How pay
+them at the public cost;--how, above all, by _setting fire_ to
+the public, as we said;  clapping 'conflagrations' on the public,
+which the services of blockheads, _non-idonei,_ intrinsically
+are!  He was right willing to remember friends, when it could be
+done.  Take these instances:  'A certain chaplain who had
+maintained him at the Schools of Paris by the sale of holy water,
+_quaestu aquae benedictae;_--to this good chaplain he did give a
+vicarage, adequate to the comfortable sustenance of him.  'The
+Son of Elias, too, that is, of old Abbot Hugo's Cupbearer, coming
+to do homage for his Father's land, our Lord Abbot said to him in
+full court:  "I have, for these seven years, put off taking thy
+homage for the land which Abbot Hugo gave thy Father, because
+that gift was to the damage of Elmswell, and a questionable one:
+but now I must profess myself overcome;  mindful of the kindness
+thy Father did me when I was in bonds;  because he sent me a cup
+of the very wine his master had been drinking, and bade me be
+comforted in God."'
+
+'To Magister Walter, son of Magister William de Dice, who wanted
+the vicarage of Chevington, he answered:  "Thy Father was Master
+of the Schools;  and when I was an indigent _clericus,_ he
+granted me freely and in charity an entrance to his School, and
+opportunity of learning;  wherefore I now, for the sake of God,
+grant to thee what thou askest."'  Or lastly, take this good
+instance,--and a glimpse, along with it, into long-obsolete
+times:  'Two _Milites_ of Risby, Willelm and Norman, being
+adjudged in Court to come under his mercy, _in misericordia
+ejus,'_ for a certain very considerable fine of twenty shillings,
+'he thus addressed them publicly on the spot:  "When I was a
+Cloister-monk, I was once sent to Durham on business of our
+Church;  and coming home again, the dark night caught me at
+Risby, and I had to beg a lodging there.  I went to Dominus
+Norman's, and he gave me a flat refusal.  Going then to Dominus
+Willelm's, and begging hospitality, I was by him honourably
+received.  The twenty shillings therefore of _mercy,_ I, without
+mercy, will exact from Dominus Norman;  to Dominus Willelm, on
+the other hand, I, with thanks, will wholly remit the said sum."'
+Men know not always to whom they refuse lodgings;  men have
+lodged Angels unawares!--
+
+
+It is clear Abbot Samson had a talent;  he had learned to judge
+better than Lawyers, to manage better than bred Bailiffs:--a
+talent shining out indisputable, on whatever side you took him.
+'An eloquent man he was,' says Jocelin, 'both in French and
+Latin;  but intent more on the substance and method of what was
+to be said, than on the ornamental way of saying it.  He could
+read English Manuscripts very elegantly, _elegantissime:_  he was
+wont to preach to the people in the English tongue, though
+according to the dialect of Norfolk, where he had been brought
+up;  wherefore indeed he had caused a Pulpit to be erected in our
+Church both for ornament of the same, and for the use of his
+audiences.'  There preached he, according to the dialect of
+Norfolk:  a man worth going to hear.
+
+That he was a just clear-hearted man, this, as the basis of all
+true talent, is presupposed.  How can a man, without clear vision
+in his heart first of all, have any clear vision in the head?  It
+is impossible!  Abbot Samson was one of the justest of judges;
+insisted on understanding the case to the bottom, and then
+swiftly decided without feud or favour.  For which reason,
+indeed, the Dominus Rex, searching for such men, as for hidden
+treasure and healing to his distressed realm, had made him one of
+the new Itinerant judges,--such as continue to this day.  "My
+curse on that Abbot's court," a suitor was heard imprecating,
+_"Maledicta sit curia istius Abbatis,_ where neither gold nor
+silver can help me to confound my enemy!"  And old friendships
+and all connexions forgotten, when you go to seek an office from
+him!  "A kinless loon," as the Scotch said of Cromwell's new
+judges,--intent on mere indifferent fair-play!
+
+Eloquence in three languages is good;  but it is not the best.
+To us, as already hinted, the Lord Abbot's eloquence is less
+admirable than his ineloquence, his great invaluable 'talent of
+silence!'  _'"Deus, Deus,"_ said the Lord Abbot to me once, when
+he heard the Convent were murmuring at some act of his, "I have
+much need to remember that Dream they had of me, that I was to
+rage among them like a wolf.  Above all earthly things I dread
+their driving me to do it.  How much do I hold in, and wink at;
+raging and shuddering in my own secret mind, and not outwardly at
+all!"  He would boast to me at other times:  "This and that I
+have seen, this and that I have heard;  yet patiently stood it."
+He had this way, too, which I have never seen in any other man,
+that he affectionately loved many persons to whom he never or
+hardly ever shewed a countenance of love.  Once on my venturing
+to expostulate with him on the subject, he reminded me of
+Solomon:  "Many sons I have;  it is not fit that I should smile
+on them."  He would suffer faults, damage from his servants, and
+know what he suffered, and not speak of it;  but I think the
+reason was, he waited a good time for speaking of it, and in a
+wise way amending it.  He intimated, openly in chapter to us all,
+that he would have no eavesdropping:  "Let none," said he, "come
+to me secretly accusing another, unless he will publicly stand to
+the same;  if he come otherwise, I will openly proclaim the name
+of him.  I wish, too, that every Monk of you have free access to
+me, to speak of your needs or grievances when you will."'
+
+The kinds of people Abbot Samson liked worst were these three:
+_`Mendaces, ebriosi, verbosi,_ Liars, drunkards, and wordy or
+windy persons;'--not good kinds, any of them!  He also much
+condemned 'persons given to murmur at their meat or drink,
+especially Monks of that disposition.  We remark, from the very
+first, his strict anxious order to his servants to provide
+handsomely for hospitality, to guard 'above all things that there
+be no shabbiness in the matter of meat and drink;  no look of
+mean parsimony, in _novitate mea,_ at the beginning of my
+Abbotship;'  and to the last he maintains a due opulence of table
+and equipment for others:  but he is himself in the highest
+degree indifferent to all such things.
+
+'Sweet milk, honey, and other naturally sweet kinds of food, were
+what he preferred to eat:  but he had this virtue,' says Jocelin,
+'he never changed the dish (_ferculum_) you set before him, be
+what it might.  Once when I, still a novice, happened to be
+waiting table in the refectory, it came into my head' (rogue that
+I was!) `to try if this were true;  and I thought I would place
+before him a _ferculum_ that would have displeased any other
+person, the very platter being black and broken.  But he, seeing
+it, was as one that saw it not:  and now some little delay taking
+place, my heart smote me that I had done this;  and so, snatching
+up the platter (_discus_), I changed both it and its contents for
+a better, and put down that instead;  which emendation he was
+angry at, and rebuked me for,'--the stoical monastic man!  'For
+the first seven years he had commonly four sorts of dishes on his
+table;  afterwards only three, except it might be presents, or
+venison from his own parks, or fishes from his ponds.  And if, at
+any time, he had guests living in his house at the request of
+some great person, or of some friend, or had public messengers,
+or had harpers (_citharoedos_), or any one of that sort, he took
+the first opportunity of shifting to another of his Manor-houses,
+and so got rid of such superfluous individuals,'--very prudently,
+I think.
+
+As to his parks, of these, in the general repair of buildings,
+general improvement and adornment of the St. Edmund Domains, 'he
+had laid out several, and stocked them with animals, retaining a
+proper huntsman with hounds:  and, if any guest of great quality
+were there, our Lord Abbot with his Monks would sit in some
+opening of the woods, and see the dogs run;  but he himself never
+meddled with hunting, that I saw.'
+
+
+'In an opening of the woods;'--for the country was still dark
+with wood in those days;  and Scotland itself still rustled
+shaggy and leafy, like a damp black American Forest, with cleared
+spots and spaces here and there.  Dryasdust advances several
+absurd hypotheses as to the insensible but almost total
+disappearance of these woods;  the thick wreck of which now lies
+as peat, sometimes with huge heart-of-oak timber logs imbedded in
+it, on many a height and hollow.  The simplest reason doubtless
+is, that by increase of husbandry, there was increase of cattle;
+increase of hunger for green spring food;  and so, more and more,
+the new seedlings got yearly eaten out in April;  and the old
+trees, having only a certain length of life in them, died
+gradually, no man heeding it, and disappeared into _peat._
+
+A sorrowful waste of noble wood and umbrage!  Yes,--but a
+very common one;  the course of most things in this world.
+Monachism itself, so rich and fruitful once, is now all rotted
+into peat;  lies sleek and buried,--and a most feeble bog-grass
+of Dilettantism all the crop we reap from it!  That also was
+frightful waste;  perhaps among the saddest our England ever saw.
+Why will men destroy noble Forests, even when in part a nuisance,
+in such reckless manner;  turning loose four-footed cattle and
+Henry-the-Eighths into them!  The fifth part of our English soil,
+Dryasdust computes, lay consecrated to 'spiritual uses,' better
+or worse;  solemnly set apart to foster spiritual growth and
+culture of the soul, by the methods then known:  and now--
+it too, like the four-fifths, fosters what?  Gentle shepherd,
+tell me what!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+The Abbot's Troubles
+
+
+The troubles of Abbot Samson, as he went along in this
+abstemious, reticent, rigorous way, were more than tongue can
+tell.  The Abbot's mitre once set on his head, he knew rest no
+more.  Double, double, toil and trouble;  that is the life of all
+governors that really govern:  not the spoil of victory, only the
+glorious toil of battle can be theirs.  Abbot Samson found all
+men more or less headstrong, irrational, prone to disorder;
+continually threatening to prove ungovernable.
+
+His lazy Monks gave him most trouble.  'My heart is tortured,'
+said he, 'till we get out of debt, _cor meum cruciatum est.'_
+Your heart, indeed;--but not altogether ours!  By no devisable
+method, or none of three or four that he devised, could Abbot
+Samson get these Monks of his to keep their accounts straight;
+but always, do as he might, the Cellerarius at the end of the
+term is in a coil, in a flat deficit,--verging again towards debt
+and Jews.  The Lord Abbot at last declares sternly he will keep
+our accounts too himself;  will appoint an officer of his own to
+see our Cellerarius keep them.  Murmurs thereupon among us:  Was
+the like ever heard?  Our Cellerarius a cipher;  the very
+Townsfolk know it:  _subsannatio et derisio sumus,_ we have
+become a laughingstock to mankind.  The Norfolk barrator
+and paltener!
+
+And consider, if the Abbot found such difficulty in the mere
+economic department, how much in more complex ones, in spiritual
+ones perhaps!  He wears a stern calm face;  raging and gnashing
+teeth, _fremens_ and _frendens,_ many times, in the secret of his
+mind.  Withal, however, there is noble slow perseverance in him;
+a strength of 'subdued rage' calculated to subdue most things:
+always, in the long-run, he contrives to gain his point.
+
+
+Murmurs from the Monks, meanwhile, cannot fail;  ever deeper
+murmurs, new grudges accumulating.  At one time, on slight cause,
+some drop making the cup run over, they burst into open mutiny:
+the Cellarer will not obey, prefers arrest on bread and water to
+obeying;  the Monks thereupon strike work;  refuse to do the
+regular chanting of the day, at least the younger part of them
+with loud clamour and uproar refuse:--Abbot Samson has withdrawn
+to another residence, acting only by messengers:  the awful
+report circulates through St. Edmundsbury that the Abbot is in
+danger of being murdered by the Monks with their knives!  How
+wilt thou appease this, Abbot Samson?  Return;  for the Monastery
+seems near catching fire!
+
+Abbot Samson returns;  sits in his _Thalamus_ or inner room,
+hurls out a bolt or two of excommunication:  lo, one disobedient
+Monk sits in limbo, excommunicated, with foot-shackles on him,
+all day;  and three more our Abbot has gyved 'with the lesser
+sentence, to strike fear into the others!'  Let the others think
+with whom they have to do.  The others think;  and fear enters
+into them.  'On the morrow morning we decide on humbling
+ourselves before the Abbot, by word and gesture, in order to
+mitigate his mind.  And so accordingly was done.  He, on the
+other side, replying with much humility, yet always alleging his
+own justice and turning the blame on us, when he saw that we were
+conquered, became himself conquered.  And bursting into tears,
+_perfusus lachrymis,_ he swore that he had never grieved so much
+for anything in the world as for this, first on his own account,
+and then secondly and chiefly for the public scandal which had
+gone abroad, that St. Edmund's Monks were going to kill their
+Abbot.  And when he had narrated how he went away on purpose till
+his anger should cool, repeating this word of the philosopher, "I
+would have taken vengeance on thee, had not I been angry," he
+arose weeping, and embraced each and all of us with the kiss of
+peace.  He wept;  we all wept:'--what a picture!  Behave better,
+ye remiss Monks, and thank Heaven for such an Abbot;  or know at
+least that ye must and shall obey him.
+
+
+Worn down in this manner, with incessant toil and tribulation,
+Abbot Samson had a sore time of it;  his grizzled hair and beard
+grew daily greyer.  Those Jews, in the first four years, had
+'visibly emaciated him:'  Time, Jews, and the task of Governing,
+will make a man's beard very grey!  'In twelve years,' says
+Jocelin, 'our Lord Abbot had grown wholly white as snow, _totus
+efficitur albus sicut nix.'_  White, atop, like the granite
+mountains:--but his clear-beaming eyes still look out, in their
+stern clearness, in their sorrow and pity;  the heart within him
+remains unconquered.
+
+Nay sometimes there are gleams of hilarity too;  little snatches
+of encouragement granted even to a Governor.  'Once my Lord Abbot
+and I, coming down from London through the Forest, I inquired of
+an old woman whom we came up to, Whose wood this was, and of what
+manor;  who the master, who the keeper?'--All this I knew very
+well beforehand, and my Lord Abbot too, Bozzy that I was!  But
+'the old woman answered, The wood belonged to the new Abbot of
+St. Edmund's, was of the manor of Harlow, and the keeper of it
+was one Arnald.  How did he behave to the people of the manor? I
+asked farther.  She answered that he used to be a devil
+incarnate, _daemon vivus_, an enemy of God, and flayer of the
+peasants' skins,'--skinning them like live eels, as the manner of
+some is:  but that now he dreads the new Abbot, knowing him to be
+a wise and sharp man, and so treats the people reasonably,
+_tractat homines pacifice.'_  Whereat the Lord Abbot _factus est
+hilaris,_--could not but take a triumphant laugh for himself;
+and determines to leave that Harlow manor yet unmeddled with, for
+a while.
+
+A brave man, strenuously fighting, fails not of a little triumph,
+now and then, to keep him in heart.  Everywhere we try at least
+to give the adversary as good as he brings;  and, with swift
+force or slow watchful manoeuvre, extinguish this and the other
+solecism, leave one solecism less in God's Creation;  and so
+_proceed_ with our battle, not slacken or surrender in it!  The
+Fifty feudal Knights;  for example, were of unjust greedy temper,
+and cheated us, in the Installation-day, of ten knights'-fees;--
+but they know now whether that has profited them aught, and I
+Jocelin know.  Our Lord Abbot for the moment had to endure it,
+and say nothing;  but he watched his time.
+
+Look also how my Lord of Clare, coming to claim his undue 'debt'
+in the Court at Witham, with barons and apparatus, gets a Rowland
+for his Oliver!  Jocelin shall report:  'The Earl, crowded round
+(_constipatus_) with many barons and men at arms, Earl Alberic
+and others standing by him, said, "That his bailiffs had given
+him to understand they were wont annually to receive for his
+behoof, from the Hundred of Risebridge and the bailiffs thereof,
+a sum of five shillings, which sum was now unjustly held back;"
+and he alleged farther that his predecessors had been infeft, at
+the Conquest, in the lands of Alfric son of Wisgar, who was Lord
+of that Hundred, as may be read in Domesday Book by all persons.
+--The Abbot, reflecting for a moment, without stirring from his
+place, made answer:  "A wonderful deficit, my Lord Earl, this
+that thou mentionest!  King Edward gave to St. Edmund that entire
+Hundred, and confirmed the same with his Charter;  nor is there
+any mention there of those five shillings.  It will behove thee
+to say, for what service, or on what ground, thou exactest those
+five shillings."  Whereupon the Earl, consulting with his
+followers, replied, That he had to carry the Banner of St. Edmund
+in war-time, and for this duty the five shillings were his.  To
+which the Abbot:  "Certainly, it seems inglorious, if so great a
+man, Earl of Clare no less, receive so small a gift for such a
+service.  To the Abbot of St. Edmund's it is no unbearable burden
+to give five shillings.  But Roger Earl Bigot holds himself duly
+seised, and asserts that he by such seisin has the office of
+carrying St. Edmund's Banner;  and he did carry it when the Earl
+of Leicester and his Flemings were beaten at Fornham.  Then again
+Thomas de Mendham says that the right is his.  When you have made
+out with one another, that this right is thine, come then and
+claim the five shillings, and I will promptly pay them!"
+Whereupon the Earl said, He would speak with Earl Roger his
+relative;  and so the matter _cepit dilationem,'_ and lies
+undecided to the end of the world.  Abbot Samson answers by word
+or act, in this or the like pregnant manner, having justice on
+his side, innumerable persons:  Pope's Legates, King's Viscounts,
+Canterbury Archbishops, Cellarers, _Sochemanni;_--and leaves many
+a solecism extinguished.
+
+On the whole, however, it is and remains sore work.  'One time,
+during my chaplaincy, I ventured to say to him:  _"Domane,_ I
+heard thee, this night after matins, wakeful, and sighing deeply,
+_valde suspirantem,_ contrary to thy usual wont."  He answered:
+"No wonder.  Thou, son Jocelin, sharest in my good things, in
+food and drink, in riding and such like;  but thou little
+thinkest concerning the management of House and Family, the
+various and arduous businesses of the Pastoral Care, which harass
+me, and make my soul to sigh and be anxious."  Whereto I, lifting
+up my hands to Heaven:  "From such anxiety, Omnipotent Merciful
+Lord deliver me!"--I have heard the Abbot say, If he had been as
+he was before he became a Monk, and could have anywhere got five
+or six mares of income,' some three pound ten of yearly revenue,
+'whereby to support himself in the schools, he would never have
+been Monk nor Abbot.  Another time he said with an oath, If he
+had known what a business it was to govern the Abbey, he would
+rather have been Almoner, how much rather Keeper of the Books,
+than Abbot and Lord.  That latter office he said he had always
+longed for, beyond any other.  _Quis talia crederet,'_ concludes
+Jocelin, 'Who can believe such things?'
+
+Three pound ten, and a life of Literature, especially of quiet
+Literature, without copyright, or world-celebrity of literary-
+gazettes,--yes, thou brave Abbot Samson, for thyself it had been
+better, easier, perhaps also nobler!  But then, for thy
+disobedient Monks, unjust Viscounts;  for a Domain of St. Edmund
+overgrown with Solecisms, human and other, it had not been so
+well.  Nay neither could _thy_ Literature, never so quiet, have
+been easy.  Literature, when noble, is not easy;  but only when
+ignoble.  Literature too is a quarrel, and internecine duel, with
+the whole World of Darkness that lies without one and within
+one;--rather a hard fight at times, even with the three pound ten
+secure.  Thou, there where thou art, wrestle and duel along,
+cheerfully to the end;  and make no remarks!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+In Parliament
+
+
+Of Abbot Samson's public business we say little, though that also
+was great.  He had to judge the people as justice Errant, to
+decide in weighty arbitrations and public controversies;  to
+equip his _milites,_ send them duly in war-time to the King;--
+strive every way that the Commonweal, in his quarter of it, take
+no damage.
+
+Once, in the confused days of Lackland's usurpation, while Coeur-
+de-Lion was away, our brave Abbot took helmet himself, having
+first excommunicated all that should favour Lackland;  and led
+his men in person to the siege of _Windleshora_, what we now call
+Windsor;  where Lackland had entrenched himself, the centre of
+infinite confusions;  some Reform Bill, then as now, being
+greatly needed.  There did Abbot Samson 'fight the battle of
+reform,'--with other ammunition, one hopes, than 'tremendous
+cheering' and such like!  For these things he was called 'the
+magnanimous Abbot'
+
+He also attended duly in his place in Parliament _de arduis
+regni;_  attended especially, as in _arduissimo,_ when 'the news
+reached London that King Richard was a captive in Germany.'  Here
+'while all the barons sat to consult,' and many of them looked
+blank enough, 'the Abbot started forth, _prosiliit coram
+omnibus,_ in his place in Parliament, and said, That _he_ was
+ready to go and seek his Lord the King, either clandestinely by
+subterfuge (_in tapinagio_), or by any other method;  and search
+till he found him, and got certain notice of him;  he for one!
+By which word,' says Jocelin, 'he acquired great praise for
+himself,'--unfeigned commendation from the Able Editors of
+that age.
+
+By which word;--and also by which _deed:_  for the Abbot actually
+went 'with rich gifts to the King in Germany;'  Usurper Lackland
+being first rooted out from Windsor, and the King's peace
+somewhat settled.
+
+As to these 'rich gifts,' however, we have to note one thing:  In
+all England, as appeared to the Collective Wisdom, there was not
+like to be treasure enough for ransoming King Richard;  in which
+extremity certain Lords of the Treasury, _Justiciarii ad
+Scaccarium,_ suggested that St. Edmund's Shrine, covered with
+thick gold, was still untouched.  Could not it, in this
+extremity, be peeled off, at least in part;  under condition, of
+course, of its being replaced, when times mended?  The Abbot,
+starting plumb up, _se erigens,_ answered:  "Know ye for certain,
+that I will in no wise do this thing;  nor is there any man who
+could force me to consent thereto.  But I will open the doors of
+the Church:  Let him that likes enter;  let him that dares come
+forward!"  Emphatic words, which created a sensation round the
+woolsack.  For the Justiciaries of the _Scaccarium_ answered,
+'with oaths, each for himself:  "I won't come forward, for my
+share;  nor will I, nor I!  The distant and absent who offended
+him, Saint Edmund has been known to punish fearfully;  much more
+will he those close by, who lay violent hands on his coat, and
+would strip it off!"  These things being said, the Shrine was not
+meddled with, nor any ransom levied for it.
+
+For Lords of the Treasury have in all times their impassable
+limits, be it by 'force of public opinion' or otherwise;  and in
+those days a Heavenly Awe overshadowed and encompassed, as it
+still ought and must, all earthly Business whatsoever.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+Henry of Essex
+
+
+Of St. Edmund's fearful avengements have they not the
+remarkablest instance still before their eyes?  He that will go
+to Reading Monastery may find there, now tonsured into a mournful
+penitent Monk, the once proud Henry Earl of Essex;  and discern
+how St. Edmund punishes terribly, yet with mercy! This Narrative
+is too significant to be omitted as a document of the Time.  Our
+Lord Abbot, once on a visit at Reading, heard the particulars
+from Henry's own mouth;  and thereupon charged one of his monks
+to write it down;--as accordingly the Monk has done, in ambitious
+rhetorical Latin;  inserting the same, as episode, among
+Jocelin's garrulous leaves.  Read it here;  with ancient yet with
+modern eyes.
+
+
+Henry Earl of Essex, standard-bearer of England, had high places
+and emoluments;  had a haughty high soul, yet with various flaws,
+or rather with one many-branched flaw and crack, running through
+the texture of it.  For example, did he not treat Gilbert de
+Cereville in the most shocking manner?  He cast Gilbert into
+prison;  and, with chains and slow torments, wore the life out of
+him there.  And Gilbert's crime was understood to be only that of
+innocent Joseph:  the Lady Essex was a Potiphar's Wife, and had
+accused poor Gilbert!  Other cracks, and branches of that
+widespread flaw in the Standard-bearer's soul we could point out:
+but indeed the main stem and trunk of all is too visible in this,
+That he had no right reverence for the Heavenly in Man,--that far
+from shewing due reverence to St. Edmund, he did not even shew
+him common justice.  While others in the Eastern Counties were
+adorning and enlarging with rich gifts St. Edmund's resting-
+place, which had become a city of refuge for many things, this
+Earl of Essex flatly defrauded him, by violence or quirk of law,
+of five shillings yearly, and converted said sum to his own poor
+uses!  Nay, in another case of litigation, the unjust Standard
+bearer, for his own profit, asserting that the cause belonged not
+to St. Edmund's Court, but to _his_ in Lailand Hundred, 'involved
+us in travelings and innumerable expenses, vexing the servants of
+St. Edmund for a long tract of time:  In short, he is without
+reverence for the Heavenly, this Standard-bearer;  reveres only
+the Earthly, Gold-coined;  and has a most morbid lamentable flaw
+in the texture of him.  It cannot come to, good.
+
+Accordingly, the same flaw, or St.-Vitus' _tic,_ manifests itself
+ere long in another way.  In the year 1157, he went with his
+Standard to attend King Henry, our blessed Sovereign (whom _we_
+saw afterwards at Waltham), in his War with the Welsh.  A
+somewhat disastrous War;  in which while King Henry and his force
+were struggling to retreat Parthian-like, endless clouds of
+exasperated Welshmen hemming them in, and now we had come to the
+'difficult pass of Coleshill,' and as it were to the nick of
+destruction,--Henry Earl of Essex shrieks out on a sudden
+(blinded doubtless by his inner flaw, or 'evil genius' as some
+name it), That King Henry is killed, That all is lost,--and
+flings down his Standard to shift for itself there!  And,
+certainly enough, all _had_ been lost, had all men been as he;--
+had not brave men, without such miserable jerking _tic-
+douloureux_ in the souls of them, come dashing up, with blazing
+swords and looks, and asserted That nothing was lost yet, that
+all must be regained yet.  In this manner King Henry and his
+force got safely retreated, Parthian-like, from the pass of
+Coleshill and the Welsh War.*  But, once home again, Earl Robert
+de Montfort, a kinsman of this Standard-bearer's, rises up in the
+King's Assembly to declare openly that such a man is unfit for
+bearing English Standards, being in fact either a special
+traitor, or something almost worse, a coward namely, or universal
+traitor.  Wager of Battle in consequence;  solemn Duel, by the
+King's appointment, 'in a certain Island of the Thames-stream at
+Reading, _apud Radingas,_ short way from the Abbey there.  King,
+Peers, and an immense multitude of people, on such scaffoldings
+and heights as they can come at, are gathered round, to see what
+issue the business will take.  The business takes this bad issue,
+in our Monk's own words faithfully rendered:
+
+----------
+*See Lyttelton's _Henry II.,_ ii: 384.
+----------
+
+'And it came to pass, while Robert de Montfort thundered on him
+manfully (_viriliter intonasset_) with hard and frequent strokes,
+and a valiant beginning promised the fruit of victory, Henry of
+Essex, rather giving way, glanced round on all sides;  and lo, at
+the rim of the horizon, on the confines of the River and land, he
+discerned the glorious King and Martyr Edmund, in shining armour,
+and as if hovering in the air;  looking towards him with severe
+countenance, nodding his head with a mien and motion of austere
+anger.  At St. Edmund's hand there stood also another Knight,
+Gilbert de Cereville, whose armour was not so splendid, whose
+stature was less gigantic;  casting vengeful looks at him.  This
+he seeing with his eyes, remembered that old crime brings new
+shame.  And now wholly desperate, and changing reason into
+violence, he took the part of one blindly attacking, not
+skillfully defending.  Who while he struck fiercely was more
+fiercely struck;  and so, in short, fell down vanquished, and it
+was thought, slain.  As he lay there for dead, his kinsmen,
+Magnates of England, besought the King, that the Monks of Reading
+might have leave to bury him.  However, he proved not to be dead,
+but got well again among them;  and now, with recovered health,
+assuming the Regular Habit, he strove to wipe out the stain of
+his former life, to cleanse the long week of his dissolute
+history by at least a purifying sabbath, and cultivate the
+studies of Virtue into fruits of eternal Felicity:
+
+
+Thus does the Conscience of man project itself athwart whatsoever
+of knowledge or surmise, of imagination, understanding, faculty,
+acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him;  and, like
+light through coloured glass, paint strange pictures 'on the rim
+of the horizon' and elsewhere!  Truly, this same 'sense of the
+Infinite nature of Duty' is the central part of all with us;  a
+ray as of Eternity and Immortality, immured in dusky many-
+coloured Time, and its deaths and births.  Your 'coloured glass'
+varies so much from century to century;--and, in certain money-
+making, game-preserving centuries, it gets so terribly opaque!
+Not a Heaven with cherubim surrounds you then, but a kind of
+vacant leaden-coloured Hell.  One day it will again cease to be
+opaque, this 'coloured glass.'  Nay, may it not become at once
+translucent and uncoloured?  Painting no Pictures more for us,
+but only the everlasting Azure itself?  That will be a right
+glorious consummation!--
+
+Saint Edmund from the horizon's edge, in shining armour,
+threatening the misdoer in his hour of extreme need:  it is
+beautiful, it is great and true.  So old, yet so modern, actual;
+true yet for every one of us, as for Henry the Earl and Monk!  A
+glimpse as of the Deepest in Man's Destiny, which is the same for
+all times and ages.  Yes, Henry my brother, there in thy extreme
+need, thy soul _is lamed;_  and behold thou canst not so much as
+fight!  For justice and Reverence _are_ the everlasting central
+Law of this Universe;  and to forget them, and have all the
+Universe against one, God and one's own Self for enemies, and
+only the Devil and the Dragons for friends, is not that a
+'lameness' like few?  That some shining armed St. Edmund hang
+minatory on thy horizon, that infinite sulphur-lakes hang
+minatory, or do not now hang,--this alters no whit the eternal
+fact of the thing.  I say, thy soul is lamed, and the God and all
+Godlike in it marred:  lamed, paralytic, tending towards baleful
+eternal death, whether thou know it or not;--nay hadst thou never
+known it, that surely had been worst of all!--
+
+Thus, at any rate, by the heavenly Awe that overshadows earthly
+Business, does Samson, readily in those days, save St. Edmund's
+Shrine, and innumerable still more precious things.
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+Practical--Devotional
+
+
+Here indeed, perhaps, by rule of antagonisms, may be the place to
+mention that, after King Richard's return, there was a liberty of
+tourneying given to the fighting men of England:  that a
+Tournament was proclaimed in the Abbot's domain, 'between
+Thetford and St. Edmundsbury,'--perhaps in the Euston region, on
+Fakenham Heights, midway between these two localities:  that it
+was publicly prohibited by our Lord Abbot;  and nevertheless was
+held in spite of him,--and by the parties, as would seem,
+considered 'a gentle and free passage of arms.'
+
+Nay, next year, there came to the same spot four-and-twenty young
+men, sons of Nobles, for another passage of arms;  who, having
+completed the same, all rode into St. Edmundsbury to lodge for
+the night.  Here is modesty!  Our Lord Abbot, being instructed of
+it, ordered the Gates to be closed;  the whole party shut in.
+The morrow was the Vigil of the Apostles Peter and Paul;  no
+outgate on the morrow.  Giving their promise not to depart
+without permission, those four-and-twenty young bloods dieted all
+that day (_manducaverunt_) with the Lord Abbot, waiting for trial
+on the morrow.  'But after dinner,'--mark it, posterity!--'the
+Lord Abbot retiring into his _Thalamus,_ they all started up, and
+began caroling and singing (_carolare et cantare_); sending
+into the Town for wine;  drinking, and afterwards howling
+(_ululantes_);--totally depriving the Abbot and Convent of their
+afternoon's nap;  doing all this in derision of the Lord Abbot,
+and spending in such fashion the whole day till evening, nor
+would they desist at the Lord Abbot's order!  Night coming on,
+they broke the bolts of the Town-Gates, and went off by
+violence!'  Was the like ever heard of?  The roysterous young
+dogs;  caroling, howling, breaking the Lord Abbot's sleep,--after
+that sinful chivalry cock-fight of theirs!  They too are a
+feature of distant centuries, as of near ones.  St. Edmund on the
+edge of your horizon, or whatever else there, young scamps, in
+the dandy state, whether cased in iron or in whalebone, begin
+to caper and carol on the green Earth!  Our Lord Abbot
+excommunicated most of them;  and they gradually came in
+for repentance.
+
+Excommunication is a great recipe with our Lord Abbot;  the
+prevailing purifier in those ages.  Thus when the Townsfolk and
+Monks-menials quarreled once at the Christmas Mysteries in St.
+Edmund's Churchyard, and 'from words it came to cuffs, and from
+cuffs to cuttings and the effusion of blood,'--our Lord Abbot
+excommunicates sixty of the rioters, with bell, book and candle
+(_accensis candelis_), at one stroke.  Whereupon they all come
+suppliant, indeed nearly naked, 'nothing on but their breeches,
+_omnino nudi praeter femoralia,_ and prostrate themselves at the
+Church-door.'  Figure that!
+
+In fact, by excommunication or persuasion, by impetuosity of
+driving or adroitness in leading, this Abbot, it is now becoming
+plain everywhere, is a man that generally remains master at last.
+He tempers his medicine to the malady, now hot, now cool;
+prudent though fiery, an eminently practical man.  Nay sometimes
+in his adroit practice there are swift turns almost of a
+surprising nature!  Once, for example, it chanced that Geoffrey
+Riddell Bishop of Ely, a Prelate rather troublesome to our Abbot,
+made a request of him for timber from his woods towards certain
+edifices going on at Glemsford.  The Abbot, a great builder
+himself, disliked the request;  could not however give it a
+negative.  While he lay, therefore, at his Manorhouse of Melford
+not long after, there comes to him one of the Lord Bishop's men
+or monks, with a message from his Lordship, "That he now begged
+permission to cut down the requisite trees in Elmswell Wood," so
+said the monk:  Elm_swell,_ where there are no trees but scrubs
+and shrubs, instead of Elm_set,_ our true _nemus,_ and high-
+towering oak-wood, here on Melford Manor!  Elmswell?  The Lord
+Abbot, in surprise, inquires privily of Richard his Forester;
+Richard answers that my Lord of Ely has already had his
+_carpentarii_ in Elmset, and marked out for his own use all the
+best trees in the compass of it.  Abbot Samson thereupon answers
+the monk:  "Elmswell?  Yes surely, be it as my Lord Bishop
+wishes."  The successful monk, on the morrow morning, hastens
+home to Ely;  but, on the morrow morning, 'directly after mass,'
+Abbot Samson too was busy!  The successful monk, arriving at Ely,
+is rated for a goose and an owl;  is ordered back to say that
+Elmset was the place meant.  Alas, on arriving at Elmset, he
+finds the Bishop's trees, they 'and a hundred more,' all felled
+and piled, and the stamp of St. Edmund's Monastery burnt into
+them,--for roofing of the great tower we are building there!
+Your importunate Bishop must seek wood for Glemsford edifices in
+some other _nemus_ than this.  A practical Abbot!
+
+We said withal there was a terrible flash of anger in him:
+witness his address to old Herbert the Dean, who in a too thrifty
+manner has erected a wind-mill for himself on his glebe-lands at
+Haberdon.  On the morrow, after mass, our Lord Abbot orders the
+Cellerarius to send off his carpenters to demolish the said
+structure _brevi manu,_ and lay up the wood in safe keeping.  Old
+Dean Herbert, hearing what was toward, comes tottering along
+hither, to plead humbly for himself and his mill.  The Abbot
+answers:  "I am obliged to thee as if thou hadst cut off both my
+feet!  By God's face, _per os Dei,_ I will not eat bread till
+that fabric be torn in pieces.  Thou art an old man, and shouldst
+have known that neither the King nor his Justiciary dare change
+aught within the Liberties, without consent of Abbot and Convent:
+and thou hast presumed on such a thing?  I tell thee, it will not
+be without damage to my mills;  for the Townsfolk will go to thy
+mill, and grind their corn (_bladum suum_) at their own good
+pleasure;  nor can I hinder them, since they are free men.  I
+will allow no new mills on such principle.  Away, away;  before
+thou gettest home again, thou wilt see what thy mill has grown
+to!"--The very reverend, the old Dean totters home again, in all
+haste;  tears the mill in pieces by his own _carpentarii_, to
+save at least the timber;  and Abbot Samson's workmen, coming up,
+find the ground already clear of it.
+
+
+Easy to bully down poor old rural Deans, and blow their windmills
+away:  but who is the man that dare abide King Richard's anger;
+cross the Lion in his path, and take him by the whiskers!  Abbot
+Samson too;  he is that man, with justice on his side.  The case
+was this.  Adam de Cokefield, one of the chief feudatories of St.
+Edmund, and a principal man in the Eastern Counties, died,
+leaving large possessions, and for heiress a daughter of three
+months;  who by clear law, as all men know, became thus Abbot
+Samson's ward;  whom accordingly he proceeded to dispose of to
+such person as seemed fittest.  But now King Richard has another
+person in view, to whom the little ward and her great possessions
+were a suitable thing.  He, by letter, requests that Abbot Samson
+will have the goodness to give her to this person.  Abbot Samson,
+with deep humility, replies that she is already given.  New
+letters from Richard, of severer tenor;  answered with new deep
+humilities, with gifts and entreaties, with no promise of
+obedience.  King Richard's ire is kindled;  messengers arrive at
+St. Edmundsbury, with emphatic message to obey or tremble!  Abbot
+Samson, wisely silent as to the King's threats, makes answer:
+"The King can send if he will, and seize the ward:  force and
+power he has to do his pleasure, and abolish the whole Abbey.  I
+never can be bent to wish this that he seeks, nor shall it by me
+be ever done.  For there is danger lest such things be made a
+precedent of, to the prejudice of my successors.  _Videat
+Altissimus,_ Let the Most High look on it.  Whatsoever thing
+shall befall I will patiently endure."
+
+Such was Abbot Samson's deliberate decision.  Why not?  Coeur-de-
+Lion is very dreadful, but not the dreadfulest.  _Videat
+Altissimus._ I reverence Coeur-de-Lion to the marrow of my bones,
+and will in all right things be _homo suus;_  but it is not,
+properly speaking, with terror, with any fear at all.  On the
+whole, have I not looked on the face of 'Satan with outspread
+wings;'  steadily into Hellfire these seven-and-forty years;--and
+was not melted into terror even at that, such the Lord's goodness
+to me? Coeur-de-Lion!
+
+Richard swore tornado oaths, worse than our armies in Flanders,
+To be revenged on that proud Priest.  But in the end he
+discovered that the Priest was right;  and forgave him, and even
+loved him.  'King Richard wrote, soon after, to Abbot Samson,
+That he wanted one or two of the St. Edmundsbury dogs, which he
+heard were good.  Abbot Samson sent him dogs of the best;
+Richard replied by the present of a ring, which Pope Innocent the
+Third had given him.  Thou brave Richard, thou brave Samson!
+Richard too, I suppose, 'loved a man,' and knew one when he
+saw him.
+
+No one will accuse our Lord Abbot of wanting worldly wisdom, due
+interest in worldly things.  A skillful man;  full of cunning
+insight, lively interests;  always discerning the road to his
+object, be it circuit, be it short-cut, and victoriously
+traveling forward thereon.  Nay rather it might seem, from
+Jocelin's Narrative, as if he had his eye all but exclusively
+directed on terrestrial matters, and was much too secular for a
+devout man.  But this too, if we examine it, was right.  For it
+is in the world that a man, devout or other, has his life to
+lead, his work waiting to be done.  The basis of Abbot Samson's,
+we shall discover, was truly religion, after all.  Returning from
+his dusty pilgrimage, with such welcome as we saw, 'he sat down
+at the foot of St. Edmund's Shrine.'  Not a talking theory that;
+no, a silent practice:  Thou St. Edmund with what lies in thee,
+thou now must help me, or none will!
+
+This also is a significant fact:  the zealous interest our Abbot
+took in the Crusades.  To all noble Christian hearts of that era,
+what earthly enterprise so noble?  'When Henry II., having taken
+the cross, came to St. Edmund's, to pay his devotions before
+setting out, the Abbot secretly made for himself a cross of linen
+cloth:  and, holding this in one hand and a threaded needle in
+the other, asked leave of the King to assume it!'  The King could
+not spare Samson out of England;--the King himself indeed never
+went.  But the Abbot's eye was set on the Holy Sepulchre, as on
+the spot of this Earth where the true cause of Heaven was
+deciding itself.  'At the retaking of Jerusalem by the Pagans,
+Abbot Samson put on a cilice and hair-shirt, and wore under-
+garments of hair-cloth ever after;  he abstained also from flesh
+and fleshmeats (_carne et carneis_) thenceforth to the end of his
+life.'  Like a dark cloud eclipsing the hopes of Christendom,
+those tidings cast their shadow over St. Edmundsbury too:  Shall
+Samson Abbas take pleasure while Christ's Tomb is in the hands of
+the Infidel?  Samson, in pain of body, shall daily be reminded of
+it, admonished to grieve for it.
+
+The great antique heart:  how like a child's in its simplicity,
+like a man's in its earnest solemnity and depth!  Heaven lies
+over him wheresoever he goes or stands on the Earth;  making all
+the Earth a mystic Temple to him, the Earth's business all a kind
+of worship.  Glimpses of bright creatures flash in the common
+sunlight;  angels yet hover doing God's messages among men:  that
+rainbow was set in the clouds by the hand of God!  Wonder,
+miracle encompass the man;  he lives in an element of miracle;
+Heaven's splendour over his head, Hell's darkness under his feet.
+A great Law of Duty, high as these two Infinitudes, dwarfing all
+else, annihilating all else,--making royal Richard as small as
+peasant Samson, smaller if need be!--The 'imaginative faculties?'
+'Rude poetic ages?'  The 'primeval poetic element?'  O for God's
+sake, good reader, talk no more of all that!  It was not a
+Dilettantism this of Abbot Samson.  It was a Reality, and it is
+one.  The garment only of it is dead;  the essence of it lives
+through all Time and all Eternity!
+
+
+And truly, as we said above, is not this comparative silence of
+Abbot Samson as to his religion, precisely the healthiest sign of
+him and of it?  'The Unconscious is the alone Complete.' Abbot
+Samson all along a busy working man, as all men are bound to be,
+his religion, his worship was like his daily bread to him;--which
+he did not take the trouble to talk much about;  which he merely
+ate at stated intervals, and lived and did his work upon!  This
+is Abbot Samson's Catholicism of the Twelfth Century;--something
+like the _Ism_ of all true men in all true centuries, I fancy!
+Alas, compared with any of the _Isms_ current in these poor days,
+what a thing!  Compared with the respectablest, morbid,
+struggling Methodism, never so earnest;  with the respectablest,
+ghastly, dead or galvanised Dilettantism, never so spasmodic!
+
+Methodism with its eye forever turned on its own navel;  asking
+itself with torturing anxiety of Hope and Fear, "Am I right, am I
+wrong?  Shall I be saved, shall I not be damned?"--what is this,
+at bottom, but a new phasis of _Egoism,_ stretched out into the
+Infinite;  not always the heavenlier for its infinitude!
+Brother, so soon as possible, endeavour to rise above all that.
+"Thou art wrong;  thou art like to be damned:"  consider that as
+the fact, reconcile thyself even to that, if thou be a man;--then
+first is the devouring Universe subdued under thee, and from the
+black murk of midnight and noise of greedy Acheron;  dawn as of
+an everlasting morning, how far above all Hope and all Fear,
+springs for thee, enlightening thy steep path, awakening in thy
+heart celestial Memnon's music!
+
+But of our Dilettantisms, and galvanised Dilettantisms;  of
+Puseyism--O Heavens, what shall we say of Puseyism, in comparison
+to Twelfth-Century Catholicism?  Little or nothing;  for indeed
+it is a matter to strike one dumb.
+
+     The Builder of this Universe was wise,
+     He plann'd all souls, all systems, planets, particles:
+     The Plan He shap'd His Worlds and Aeons by
+     Was--Heavens!--Was thy small Nine-and-thirty Articles?
+
+That certain human souls, living on this practical Earth, should
+think to save themselves and a ruined world by noisy theoretic
+demonstrations and laudations of _the_ Church, instead of some
+unnoisy, unconscious, but _practical,_ total, heart-and-soul
+demonstration of _a_ Church:  this, in the circle of revolving
+ages, this also was a thing we were to see.  A kind of
+penultimate thing, precursor of very strange consummations;  last
+thing but one?  If there is no atmosphere, what will it serve a
+man to demonstrate the excellence of lungs?  How much profitabler
+when you can, like Abbot Samson, breathe;  and go along your way!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XVI
+
+St. Edmund
+
+
+Abbot Samson built many useful, many pious edifices;  human
+dwellings, churches, church-steeples, barns;--all fallen now and
+vanished, but useful while they stood.  He built and endowed 'the
+Hospital of Babwell;'  built 'fit houses for the St. Edmundsbury
+Schools:  Many are the roofs once 'thatched with reeds' which he
+'caused to be covered with tiles;'  or if they were churches,
+probably 'with lead.'  For all ruinous incomplete things,
+buildings or other, were an eye-sorrow to the man.  We saw his
+'great tower of St. Edmund's;'  or at least the roof-timbers of
+it, lying cut and stamped in Elmset Wood.  To change combustible
+decaying reed-thatch into tile or lead, and material, still more,
+moral wreck into rain-tight order, what a comfort to Samson!
+
+
+One of the things he could not in any wise but rebuild was the
+great Altar, aloft on which stood the Shrine itself;  the great
+Altar, which had been damaged by fire, by the careless rubbish
+and careless candle of two somnolent Monks, one night,--the
+Shrine escaping almost as if by miracle!  Abbot Samson read his
+Monks a severe lecture:  "A Dream one of us had, that he saw St.
+Edmund naked and in lamentable plight.  Know ye the
+interpretation of that Dream?  St. Edmund proclaims himself
+naked, because ye defraud the naked Poor of your old clothes, and
+give with reluctance what ye are bound to give them of meat and
+drink:  the idleness moreover and negligence of the Sacristan and
+his people is too evident from the late misfortune by fire.  Well
+might our Holy Martyr seem to be cast out from his Shrine, and
+say with groans that he was stript of his garments, and wasted
+with hunger and thirst!"
+
+This is Abbot Samson's interpretation of the Dream;--
+diametrically the reverse of that given by the Monks themselves,
+who scruple not to say privily, "It is we that are the naked and
+famished limbs of the Martyr;  we whom the Abbot curtails of all
+our privileges, setting his own official to control our very
+Cellarer!"  Abbot Samson adds, that this judgment by fire has
+fallen upon them for murmuring about their meat and drink.
+
+Clearly enough, meanwhile, the Altar, whatever the burning of it
+mean or foreshadow, must needs be reedified.  Abbot Samson
+reedifies it, all of polished marble;  with the highest stretch
+of art and sumptuosity, reembellishes the Shrine for which it is
+to serve as pediment.  Nay farther, as had ever been among his
+prayers, he enjoys, he sinner, a glimpse of the glorious Martyr's
+very Body in the process;  having solemnly opened the Loculus,
+Chest or sacred Coffin, for that purpose.  It is the culminating
+moment of Abbot Samson's life.  Bozzy Jocelin himself rises into
+a kind of Psalmist solemnity on this occasion;  the laziest monk
+'weeps' warm tears, as _Te Deum_ is sung.
+
+Very strange;--how far vanished from us in these unworshiping
+ages of ours!  The Patriot Hampden, best beatified man we have,
+had lain in like manner some two centuries in his narrow home,
+when certain dignitaries of us, 'and twelve grave-diggers with
+pulleys,' raised him also up, under cloud of night;  cut off his
+arm with penknifes, pulled the scalp off his head,--and otherwise
+worshiped our Hero Saint in the most amazing manner!  Let the
+modern eye look earnestly on that old midnight hour in St.
+Edmundsbury Church, shining yet on us, ruddy-bright, through the
+depths of seven hundred years;  and consider mournfully what our
+Hero-worship once was, and what it now is!  We translate with all
+the fidelity we can:
+
+'The Festival of St. Edmund now approaching, the marble blocks
+are polished, and all things are in readiness for lifting of the
+Shrine to its new place.  A fast of three days was held by all
+the people, the cause and meaning thereof being publicly set
+forth to them.  The Abbot announces to the Convent that all must
+prepare themselves for transferring of the Shrine, and appoints
+time and way for the work.  Coming therefore that night to
+matins, we found the great Shrine (_feretrum magnum_) raised upon
+the Altar, but empty;  covered all over with white doeskin
+leather, fixed to the wood with silver nails;  but one panel of
+the Shrine was left down below, and resting thereon, beside its
+old column of the Church, the Loculus with the Sacred Body yet
+lay where it was wont.  Praises being sung, we all proceeded to
+commence our disciplines (_ad disciplinas suscipiendas_).  These
+finished, the Abbot and certain with him are clothed in their
+albs;  and, approaching reverently, set about uncovering the
+Loculus.  There was an outer cloth of linen, enwrapping the
+Loculus and all; this we found tied on the upper side with
+strings of its own:  within this was a cloth of silk, and then
+another linen cloth, and then a third;  and so at last the
+Loculus was uncovered, and seen resting on a little tray of wood,
+that the bottom of it might not be injured by the stone.  Over
+the breast of the Martyr, there lay, fixed to the surface of the
+Loculus, a Golden Angel about the length of a human foot;
+holding in one hand a golden sword, and in the other a banner:
+under this there was a hole in the lid of the Loculus, on which
+the ancient servants of the Martyr had been wont to lay their
+hands for touching the Sacred Body.  And over the figure of the
+Angel was this verse inscribed:
+
+     _Martiris ecce zoma servat Michaelis agalma_ *
+
+At the head and foot of the Loculus were iron rings whereby it
+could be lifted.
+
+--------------
+* This is the Martyr's Garment, which Michael's Image guards.
+--------------
+
+'Lifting the Loculus and Body, therefore, they carried it to the
+Altar;  and I put-to my sinful hand to help in carrying, though
+the Abbot had commanded that none should approach except called.
+And the Loculus was placed in the Shrine;  and the panel it had
+stood on was put in its place, and the Shrine for the present
+closed.  We all thought that the Abbot would shew the Loculus to
+the people;  and bring out the Sacred Body again, at a certain
+period of the Festival.  But in this we were woefully mistaken,
+as the sequel shews.
+
+'For in the fourth holiday of the Festival, while the Convent
+were all singing _Completorium,_ our Lord Abbot spoke privily
+with the Sacristan and Walter the Medicus;  and order was taken
+that twelve of the Brethren should be appointed against midnight,
+who were strong for carrying the panel-planks of the Shrine, and
+skillful in unfixing them, and putting them together again.  The
+Abbot then said that it was among his prayers to look once upon
+the Body of his Patron;  and that he wished the Sacristan and
+Walter the Medicus to be with him.  The Twelve appointed Brethren
+were these:  The Abbot's two Chaplains, the two Keepers of the
+Shrine, the two Masters of the Vestry;  and six more, namely, the
+Sacristan Hugo, Walter the Medicus, Augustin, William of Dice,
+Robert, and Richard.  I, alas, was not of the number.
+
+'The Convent therefore being all asleep, these Twelve, clothed in
+their albs, with the Abbot, assembled at the Altar;  and opening
+a panel of the Shrine, they took out the Loculus;  laid it on a
+table, near where the Shrine used to be;  and made ready for
+unfastening the lid, which was joined and fixed to the Loculus
+with sixteen very long nails.  Which when, with difficulty, they
+had done, all except the two forenamed associates are ordered to
+draw back.  The Abbot and they two were alone privileged to look
+in.  The Loculus was so filled with the Sacred Body that you
+could scarcely put a needle between the head and the wood, or
+between the feet and the wood:  the head lay united to the body,
+a little raised with a small pillow.  But the Abbot, looking
+close, found now a silk cloth veiling the whole Body, and then a
+linen cloth of wondrous whiteness;  and upon the head was spread
+a small linen cloth, and then another small and most fine silk
+cloth, as if it were the veil of a nun.  These coverings being
+lifted off, they found now the Sacred Body all wrapt in linen;
+and so at length the lineaments of the same appeared.  But here
+the Abbot stopped;  saying he durst not proceed farther, or look
+at the sacred flesh naked.  Taking the head between his hands, he
+thus spake groaning:  "Glorious Martyr, holy Edmund, blessed be
+the hour when thou wert born.  Glorious Martyr, turn it not to my
+perdition that I have so dared to touch thee, I miserable and
+sinful;  thou knowest my devout love, and the intention of my
+mind."  And proceeding, he touched the eyes;  and the nose, which
+was very massive and prominent (_valde grossum et valde
+eminentem_);  and then he touched the breast and arms;  and
+raising the left arm he touched the fingers, and placed his own
+fingers between the sacred fingers.  And proceeding he found the
+feet standing stiff up, like the feet of a man dead yesterday;
+and he touched the toes, and counted them (_tangendo numeravit_).
+
+'And now it was agreed that the other Brethren should be called
+forward to see the miracles;  and accordingly those ten now
+advanced, and along with them six others who had stolen in
+without the Abbot's assent, namely, Walter of St. Alban's, Hugh
+the Infirmirarius, Gilbert brother of the Prior, Richard of
+Henham, Jocellus our Cellarer, and Turstan the Little;  and all
+these saw the Sacred Body, but Turstan alone of them put forth
+his hand, and touched the Saint's knees and feet.  And that there
+might be abundance of witnesses, one of our Brethren, John of
+Dice, sitting on the roof of the Church, with the servants of the
+Vestry, and looking through, clearly saw all these things.
+
+
+What a scene;  shining luminous effulgent, as the lamps of St.
+Edmund do, through the dark Night;  John of Dice, with vestrymen,
+clambering on the roof to look through;  the Convent all asleep,
+and the Earth all asleep,--and since then, Seven Centuries of
+Time mostly gone to sleep!  Yes, there, sure enough, is the
+martyred Body of Edmund landlord of the Eastern Counties, who,
+nobly doing what he liked with his own, was slain three hundred
+years ago:  and a noble awe surrounds the memory of him, symbol
+and promoter of many other right noble things.
+
+But have not we now advanced to strange new stages of Hero-
+worship, now in the little Church of Hampden, with our penknives
+out, and twelve grave-diggers with pulleys?  The manner of men's
+Hero-worship, verily it is the innermost fact of their existence,
+and determines all the rest,--at public hustings, in private
+drawing-rooms, in church, in market, and wherever else.  Have
+true reverence, and what indeed is inseparable therefrom,
+reverence the right man, all is well;  have sham-reverence, and
+what also follows, greet with it the wrong man, then all is ill,
+and there is nothing well.  Alas, if Hero-worship become
+Dilettantism, and all except Mammonism be a vain grimace, how
+much, in this most earnest Earth, has gone and is evermore going
+to fatal destruction, and lies wasting in quiet lazy ruin, no man
+regarding it!  Till at length no heavenly _Ism_ any longer coming
+down upon us, _Isms_ from the other quarter have to mount up.
+For the Earth, I say, is an earnest place;  Life is no grimace,
+but a most serious fact.  And so, under universal Dilettantism
+much having been stript bare, not the souls of men only, but
+their very bodies and bread-cupboards having been stript bare,
+and life now no longer possible,--all is reduced to desperation,
+to the iron law of Necessity and very Fact again;  and to temper
+Dilettantism, and astonish it, and burn it up with infernal fire,
+arises Chartism, _Bare-backism,_ Sansculottism so-called!  May
+the gods, and what of unworshiped heroes still remain among us,
+avert the omen.--
+
+
+But however this may be, St. Edmund's Loculus, we find, has the
+veils of silk and linen reverently replaced, the lid fastened
+down again with its sixteen ancient nails;  is wrapt in a new
+costly covering of silk, the gift of Hubert Archbishop of
+Canterbury:  and through the sky-window John of Dice sees it
+lifted to its place in the Shrine, the panels of this latter duly
+refixed, fit parchment documents being introduced withal;--and
+now John and his vestrymen can slide down from the roof, for all
+is over, and the Convent wholly awakens to matins.  'When we
+assembled to sing matins,' says Jocelin, 'and understood what had
+been done, grief took hold of all that had not seen these things,
+each saying to himself, "Alas, I was deceived." Matins over, the
+Abbot called the Convent to the great Altar;  and briefly
+recounting the matter, alleged that it had not been in his power,
+nor was it permissible or fit, to invite us all to the sight of
+such things.  At hearing of which, we all wept, and with tears
+sang _Te Deum laudamus;_  and hastened to toll the bells in
+the Choir.
+
+Stupid blockheads, to reverence their St. Edmund's dead Body in
+this manner?  Yes, brother;--and yet, on the whole, who knows how
+to reverence the Body of a Man?  It is the most reverend
+phenomenon under this Sun.  For the Highest God dwells visible in
+that mystic unfathomable Visibility, which calls itself "I" on
+the Earth.  'Bending before men,' says Novalis, 'is a reverence
+done to this Revelation in the Flesh.  We touch Heaven when we
+lay our hand on a human Body.'  And the Body of one Dead;--a
+temple where the Hero-soul once was and now is not:  Oh, all
+mystery, all pity, all mute awe and wonder;  Supernaturalism
+brought home to the very dullest;  Eternity laid open, and the
+nether Darkness and the upper Light-Kingdoms;--do conjoin there,
+or exist nowhere!  Sauerteig used to say to me, in his peculiar
+way:  "A Chancery Lawsuit;  justice, nay justice in mere money,
+denied a man, for all his pleading, till twenty, till forty years
+of his Life are gone seeking it:  and a Cockney Funeral, Death
+reverenced by hatchments, horsehair, brass-lacker, and
+unconcerned bipeds carrying long poles and bags of black
+silk:--are not these two reverences, this reverence for Death
+and that reverence for Life, a notable pair of reverences among
+you English?"
+
+Abbot Samson, at this culminating point of his existence, may,
+and indeed must, be left to vanish with his Life-scenery from the
+eyes of modern men.  He had to run into France, to settle with
+King Richard for the military service there of his St.
+Edmundsbury Knights;  and with great labour got it done.  He had
+to decide on the dilapidated Coventry Monks;  and with great
+labour, and much pleading and journeying, got them reinstated;
+dined with them all, and with the 'Masters of the Schools of
+Oxneford,'--the veritable Oxford _Caput_ sitting there at dinner,
+in a dim but undeniable manner, in the City of Peeping Tom!  He
+had, not without labour, to controvert the intrusive Bishop of
+Ely, the intrusive Abbot of Cluny.  Magnanimous Samson, his life
+is but a labour and a journey;  a bustling and a justling, till
+the still Night come.  He is sent for again, over sea, to advise
+King Richard touching certain Peers of England, who had taken the
+Cross, but never followed it to Palestine;  whom the Pope is
+inquiring after.  The magnanimous Abbot makes preparation for
+departure;  departs, and--And Jocelin's Boswellean Narrative,
+suddenly shorn through by the scissors of Destiny, ends.  There
+are no words more;  but a black line, and leaves of blank paper.
+Irremediable:  the miraculous hand that held all this theatric-
+machinery suddenly quits hold;  impenetrable Time-Curtains rush
+down;  in the mind's eye all is again dark, void;  with loud
+dinning in the mind's ear, our real-phantasmagory of St.
+Edmundsbury plunges into the bosom of the Twelfth Century again,
+and all is over.  Monks, Abbot, Hero-worship, Government,
+Obedience, Coeur-de-Lion and St. Edmund's Shrine, vanish like
+Mirza's Vision;  and there is nothing left but a mutilated black
+Ruin amid green botanic expanses, and oxen, sheep and dilettanti
+pasturing in their places.
+
+
+
+Chapter XVII
+
+The Beginnings
+
+
+What a singular shape of a Man;  shape of a Time, have we in this
+Abbot Samson and his history;  how strangely do modes, creeds,
+formularies, and the date and place of a man's birth, modify the
+figure of the man!
+
+Formulas too, as we call them, have a _reality_ in Human Life.
+They are real as the very _skin_ and _muscular tissue_ of a Man's
+Life;  and a most blessed indispensable thing, so long as they
+have _vitality_ withal, and are a living skin and tissue to him!
+No man, or man's life, can go abroad and do business in the world
+without skin and tissues.  No;  first of all, these have to
+fashion themselves,--as indeed they spontaneously and inevitably
+do.  Foam itself, and this is worth thinking of, can harden into
+oyster-shell;  all living objects do by necessity form to
+themselves a skin.
+
+And yet, again, when a man's Formulas become _dead;_  as all
+Formulas, in the progress of living growth, are very sure to do!
+When the poor man's integuments, no longer nourished from within,
+become dead skin, mere adscititious leather and callosity,
+wearing thicker and thicker, uglier and uglier;  till no _heart_
+any longer can be felt beating through them, so thick, callous,
+calcified are they;  and all over it has now grown mere calcified
+oystershell, or were it polished mother-of-pearl, inwards almost
+to the very heart of the poor man:--yes then, you may say, his
+usefulness once more is quite obstructed;  once more, he cannot
+go abroad and do business in the world;  it is time that
+_he_ take to bed, and prepare for departure, which cannot now
+be distant!
+
+_Ubi homines sunt modi sunt._  Habit is the deepest law of human
+nature.  It is our supreme strength;  if also, in certain
+circumstances, our miserablest weakness.--From Stoke to Stowe is
+as yet a field, all pathless, untrodden:  from Stoke where I
+live, to Stowe where I have to make my merchandises, perform my
+businesses, consult my heavenly oracles, there is as yet no path
+or human footprint;  and I, impelled by such necessities, must
+nevertheless undertake the journey.  Let me go once, scanning my
+way with any earnestness of outlook, and successfully arriving,
+my footprints are an invitation to me a second time to go by the
+same way.  It is easier than any other way:  the industry of
+'scanning' lies already invested in it for me;  I can go this
+time with less of scanning, or without scanning at all.  Nay the
+very sight of my footprints, what a comfort for me;  and in a
+degree, for all my brethren of mankind!  The footprints are
+trodden and retrodden;  the path wears ever broader, smoother,
+into a broad highway, where even wheels can run;  and many travel
+it;--till--till the Town of Stowe disappear from that locality
+(as towns have been known to do), or no merchandising, heavenly
+oracle, or real business any longer exist for one there:  then
+why should anybody travel the way?--Habit is our primal,
+fundamental law;  Habit and Imitation, there is nothing more
+perennial in us than these two.  They are the source of all
+Working and all Apprenticeship, of all Practice and all Learning,
+in this world.
+
+Yes, the wise man too speaks, and acts, in Formulas;  all men do
+so.  In general the more completely cased with Formulas a man may
+be, the safer, happier is it for him.  Thou who, in an All of
+rotten Formulas, seemest to stand nigh bare, having indignantly
+shaken off the superannuated rags and unsound callosities of
+Formulas,--consider how thou too art still clothed!  This English
+Nationality, whatsoever from uncounted ages is genuine and a fact
+among thy native People, and their words and ways:  all this, has
+it not made for thee a skin or second-skin, adhesive actually as
+thy natural skin?  This thou hast not stript off, this thou wilt
+never strip off:  the humour that thy mother gave thee has to
+shew itself through this.  A common, or it may be an uncommon
+Englishman thou art:  but good Heavens, what sort of Arab,
+Chinaman, Jew-Clothesman, Turk, Hindoo, African Mandingo, wouldst
+_thou_ have been, thou with those mother-qualities of thine!
+
+It strikes me dumb to look over the long series of faces, such as
+any full Church, Courthouse, London-Tavern Meeting, or miscellany
+of men will shew them.  Some score or two of years ago, all these
+were little red-coloured pulpy infants;  each of them capable of
+being kneaded, baked into any social form you chose:  yet see now
+how they are fixed and hardened,--into artisans, artists, clergy,
+gentry, learned sergeants, unlearned dandies, and can and shall
+now be nothing else henceforth!
+
+Mark on that nose the colour left by too copious port and viands;
+to which the profuse cravat with exorbitant breastpin, and the
+fixed, forward, and as it were menacing glance of the eyes
+correspond.  That is a 'Man of Business;'  prosperous
+manufacturer, house-contractor, engineer, law-manager;  his eye,
+nose, cravat have, in such work and fortune, got such a
+character:  deny him not thy praise, thy pity.  Pity him too, the
+Hard-handed, with bony brow, rudely combed hair, eyes looking out
+as in labour, in difficulty and uncertainty;  rude mouth, the
+lips coarse, loose, as in hard toil and lifelong fatigue they
+have got the habit of hanging:--hast thou seen aught more
+touching than the rude intelligence, so cramped, yet energetic,
+unsubduable, true, which looks out of that marred visage?  Alas,
+and his poor wife, with her own hands, washed that cotton
+neckcloth for him, buttoned that coarse shirt, sent him forth
+creditably trimmed as she could.  In such imprisonment lives he,
+for his part;  man cannot now deliver him:  the red pulpy infant
+has been baked and fashioned so.
+
+Or what kind of baking was it that this other brother-mortal got,
+which has baked him into the genus Dandy?  Elegant Vacuum;
+serenely looking down upon all Plenums and Entities, as low and
+poor to his serene Chimeraship and _Non_entity laboriously
+attained!  Heroic Vacuum;  inexpugnable, while purse and present
+condition of society hold out;  curable by no hellebore.  The
+doom of Fate was, Be thou a Dandy!  Have thy eye-glasses, opera-
+glasses, thy Long-Acre cabs with white-breeched tiger, thy
+yawning impassivities, pococurantisms;  fix thyself in Dandyhood,
+undeliverable;  it is thy doom.
+
+And all these, we say, were red-coloured infants;  of the same
+pulp and stuff, few years ago;  now irretrievably shaped and
+kneaded as we see!  Formulas?  There is no mortal extant, out of
+the depths of Bedlam, but lives all skinned, thatched, covered
+over with Formulas;  and is, as it were, held in from delirium
+and the Inane by his Formulas!  They are withal the most
+beneficent, indispensable of human equipments:  blessed he who
+has a skin and tissues, so it be a living one, and the heart-
+pulse everywhere discernible through it.  Monachism, Feudalism,
+with a real King Plantagenet, with real Abbots Samson, and their
+other living realities, how blessed!--
+
+
+Not without a mournful interest have we surveyed this authentic
+image of a Time now wholly swallowed.  Mournful reflections crowd
+on us;  and yet consolatory.  How many brave men have lived
+before Agamemnon!  Here is a brave governor Samson, a man fearing
+God, and fearing nothing else;  of whom as First Lord of the
+Treasury, as King, Chief Editor, High Priest, we could be so glad
+and proud;  of whom nevertheless Fame has altogether forgotten to
+make mention!  The faint image of him, revived in this hour, is
+found in the gossip of one poor Monk, and in Nature nowhere else.
+Oblivion had so nigh swallowed him altogether, even to the echo
+of his ever having existed.  What regiments and hosts and
+generations of such has Oblivion already swallowed!  Their
+crumbled dust makes up the soil our life-fruit grows on.  Said I
+not, as my old Norse Fathers taught me, The Life-tree Igdrasil,
+which waves round thee in this hour, whereof thou in this hour
+art portion, has its roots down deep in the oldest Death-
+Kingdoms;  and grows;  the Three Nornas, or _Times,_ Past,
+Present, Future, watering it from the Sacred Well!
+
+For example, who taught thee to _speak?_  From the day when two
+hairy-naked or fig-leaved Human Figures began, as uncomfortable
+dummies, anxious no longer to be dumb, but to impart themselves
+to one another;  and endeavoured, with gaspings, gesturings, with
+unsyllabled cries, with painful pantomime and interjections, in a
+very unsuccessful manner,--up to the writing of this present
+copyright Book, which also is not very successful!  Between that
+day and this, I say, there has been a pretty space of time;  a
+pretty spell of work, which _somebody_ has done!  Thinkest thou
+there were no poets till Dan Chaucer?  No heart burning with a
+thought, which it could not hold, and had no word for;  and
+needed to shape and coin a word for,--what thou callest a
+metaphor, trope, or the like?  For every word we have, there was
+such a man and poet.  The coldest word was once a glowing new
+metaphor, and bold questionable originality.  'Thy very
+ATTENTION, does it not mean an _attentio,_ a STRETCHING-TO?'
+Fancy that act of the mind, which all were conscious of, which
+none had yet named,--when this new 'poet' first felt bound and
+driven to name it!  His questionable originality, and new glowing
+metaphor, was found adoptable, intelligible;  and remains our
+name for it to this day.
+
+
+Literature:--and look at Paul's Cathedral, and the Masonries and
+Worships and Quasi-Worships that are there;  not to speak of
+Westminster Hall and its wigs!  Men had not a hammer to begin
+with, not a syllabled articulation:  they had it all to make;--
+and they have made it.  What thousand thousand articulate, semi-
+articulate, earnest-stammering _Prayers_ ascending up to Heaven,
+from hut and cell, in many lands, in many centuries, from the
+fervent kindled souls of innumerable men, each struggling to pour
+itself forth incompletely as it might, before the incompletest
+_Liturgy_ could be compiled!  The Liturgy, or adoptable and
+generally adopted Set of Prayers and Prayer-Method, was what we
+can call the Select Adoptabilities, 'Select Beauties' well-edited
+(by Oecumenic Councils and other Useful-Knowledge Societies) from
+that wide waste imbroglio of Prayers already extant and
+accumulated, good and bad.  The good were found adoptable by men;
+were gradually got together, well-edited, accredited:  the bad,
+found inappropriate, unadoptable, were gradually forgotten,
+disused and burnt.  It is the way with human things.  The first
+man who, looking with opened soul on this August Heaven and
+Earth, this Beautiful and Awful, which we name Nature, Universe
+and such like, the essence of which remains forever UNNAMEABLE;
+he who first, gazing into this, fell on his knees awestruck, in
+silence as is likeliest,--he, driven by inner necessity, the
+'audacious original' that he was, had done a thing, too, which
+all thoughtful hearts saw straightway to be an expressive,
+altogether adoptable thing!  To bow the knee was ever since the
+attitude of supplication.  Earlier than any spoken Prayers,
+_Litanias,_ or Leitourgias;_   the beginning of all Worship,--
+which needed but a beginning, so rational was it.  What a poet
+he!  Yes, this bold original was a successful one withal.  The
+wellhead this one, hidden in the primeval dusks and distances,
+from whom as from a Nile-source all _Forms of Worship_ flow:--
+such a Nile-river (somewhat muddy and malarious now!) of Forms of
+Worship sprang there, and flowed, and flows, down to Puseyism,
+Rotatory Calabash, Archbishop Laud at St. Catherine Creed's, and
+perhaps lower!
+
+Things rise, I say, in that way.  The _Iliad_ Poem, and indeed
+most other poetic, especially epic things, have risen as the
+Liturgy did.  The great _Iliad_ in Greece, and the small _Robin
+Hood's Garland_ in England, are each, as I understand, the well-
+edited 'Select Beauties' of an immeasurable waste imbroglio of
+Heroic Ballads in their respective centuries and countries.
+Think what strumming of the seven-stringed heroic lyre, torturing
+of the less heroic fiddle-catgut, in Hellenic Kings' Courts, and
+English wayside Public Houses;  and beating of the studious
+Poetic brain, and gasping here too in the semi-articulate
+windpipe of Poetic men, before the Wrath of a Divine Achilles,
+the Prowess of a Will Scarlet or Wakefield Pinder, could be
+adequately sung!  Honour to you, ye nameless great and greatest
+ones, ye long-forgotten brave!
+
+Nor was the Statute _De Tallagio non concedendo,_ nor any
+Statute, Law-method, Lawyer's-wig, much less were the Statute-
+Book and Four Courts, with Coke upon Lyttleton and Three Estates
+of Parliament in the rear of them, got together without human
+labour,--mostly forgotten now!  From the time of Cain's slaying
+Abel by swift head-breakage, to this time of killing your man in
+Chancery by inches, and slow heart-break for forty years,--there
+too is an interval!  Venerable justice herself began by Wild-
+justice;  all Law is as a tamed furrowfield, slowly worked out,
+and rendered arable, from the waste jungle of Club-Law.  Valiant
+Wisdom tilling and draining;  escorted by owl-eyed Pedantry, by
+owlish and vulturish and many other forms of Folly;--the valiant
+husbandman assiduously tilling;  the blind greedy enemy _too_
+assiduously sowing tares!  It is because there is yet in
+venerable wigged justice some wisdom, amid such mountains of
+wiggeries and folly, that men have not cast her into the River;
+that she still sits there, like Dryden's Head in the _Battle of
+the Books,_--a huge helmet, a huge mountain of greased parchment,
+of unclean horsehair, first striking the eye;  and then in the
+innermost corner, visible at last, in size as a hazelnut, a real
+fraction of God's justice, perhaps not yet unattainable to some,
+surely still indispensable to all;--and men know not what to do
+with her!  Lawyers were not all pedants, voluminous voracious
+persons;  Lawyers too were poets, were heroes,--or their Law had
+been past the Nore long before this time.  Their Owlisms,
+Vulturisms, to an incredible extent, will disappear by and by,
+their Heroisms only remaining, and the helmet be reduced to
+something like the size of the head, we hope!--
+
+It is all work and forgotten work, this peopled, clothed,
+articulate-speaking, high-towered, wide-acred World.  The hands
+of forgotten brave men have made it a World for us;  they,--
+honour to them;  they, in _spite_ of the idle and the dastard.
+This English Land, here and now, is the summary of what was found
+of wise, and noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the
+generations of English Men.  Our English Speech is speakable
+because there were Hero-Poets of our blood and lineage;
+speakable in proportion to the number of these.  This Land of
+England has its conquerors, possessors, which change from epoch
+to epoch, from day to day;  but its real conquerors, creators,
+and eternal proprietors are these following, and their
+representatives if you can find them:  All the Heroic Souls that
+ever were in England, each in their degree;  all the men that
+ever cut a thistle, drained a puddle out of England, contrived a
+wise scheme in England, did or said a true and valiant thing in
+England.  I tell thee, they had not a hammer to begin with;  and
+yet Wren built St. Paul's:  not an articulated syllable;  and yet
+there have come English Literatures, Elizabethan Literatures,
+Satanic-School, Cockney-School, and other Literatures;--once
+more, as in the old time of the _Leitourgia,_ a most waste
+imbroglio, and world-wide jungle and jumble;  waiting terribly to
+be 'well-edited,' and 'well-burnt!'  Arachne started with
+forefinger and thumb, and had not even a distaff;  yet thou seest
+Manchester, and Cotton Cloth, which will shelter naked backs, at
+two-pence an ell.
+
+Work?  The quantity of done and forgotten work that lies silent
+under my feet in this world, and escorts and attends me, and
+supports and keeps me alive, wheresoever I walk or stand,
+whatsoever I think or do, gives rise to reflections!  Is it not
+enough, at any rate, to strike the thing called 'Fame' into total
+silence for a wise man?  For fools and unreflective persons, she
+is and will be very noisy, this 'Fame,' and talks of her
+'immortals' and so forth:  but if you will consider it, what is
+she?  Abbot Samson was not nothing because nobody _said_ anything
+of him.  Or thinkest thou, the Right Honourable Sir Jabesh
+Windbag can be made something by Parliamentary Majorities and
+Leading Articles?  Her 'immortals!' Scarcely two hundred years
+back can Fame recollect articulately at all;  and there she but
+maunders and mumbles.  She manages to recollect a Shakspeare or
+so;  and prates, considerably like a goose, about him;--and in
+the rear of that, onwards to the birth of Theuth, to Hengst's
+Invasion, and the bosom of Eternity, it was all blank;  and the
+respectable Teutonic Languages, Teutonic Practices, Existences
+all came of their own accord, as the grass springs, as the trees
+grow;  no Poet, no work from the inspired heart of a Man needed
+there;  and Fame has not an articulate word to say about it!  Or
+ask her, What, with all conceivable appliances and mnemonics,
+including apotheosis and human sacrifices among the number, she
+carries in her head with regard to a Wodan, even a Moses, or
+other such?  She begins to be uncertain as to what they were,
+whether spirits or men of mould,--gods, charlatans;  begins
+sometimes to have a misgiving that they were mere symbols, ideas
+of the mind;  perhaps nonentities, and Letters of the Alphabet!
+She is the noisiest, inarticulately babbling, hissing, screaming,
+foolishest, unmusicalest of fowls that fly;  and needs no
+'trumpet,' I think, but her own enormous goose-throat,--measuring
+several degrees of celestial latitude, so to speak.  Her 'wings,'
+in these days, have grown far swifter than ever;  but her goose-
+throat hitherto seems only larger;  louder and foolisher than
+ever.  _She_ is transitory, futile, a goose-goddess:--if she were
+not transitory, what would become of us!  It is a chief comfort
+that she forgets us all;  all, even to the very Wodans;  and
+grows to consider us, at last, as probably nonentities and
+Letters of the Alphabet.
+
+Yes, a noble Abbot Samson resigns himself to Oblivion too;  feels
+it no hardship, but a comfort;  counts it as a still resting-
+place, from much sick fret and fever and stupidity, which in the
+night-watches often made his strong heart sigh.  Your most sweet
+voices, making one enormous goose-voice, O Bobus and Company, how
+can they be a guidance for any Son of Adam?  In _silence_ of you
+and the like of you, the 'small still voices' will speak to him
+better;  in which does lie guidance.
+
+My friend, all speech and rumour is shortlived, foolish, untrue.
+Genuine WORK alone, what thou workest faithfully, that is eternal,
+as the Almighty Founder and World-Builder himself.  Stand thou
+by that;  and let 'Fame' and the rest of it go prating.
+
+    "Heard are the Voices,
+     Heard are the Sages,
+     The Worlds and the Ages:
+     "Choose well, your choice is
+     Brief and yet endless.
+
+     Here eyes do regard you,
+     In Eternity's stillness;
+     Here is all fulness,
+     Ye brave, to reward you;
+     Work, and despair not."
+                          --Goethe
+
+
+
+
+Book III--The Modern Worker
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+Phenomena
+
+
+But, it is said, our religion is gone:  we no longer believe in
+St. Edmund, no longer see the figure of him 'on the rim of the
+sky,' minatory or confirmatory!  God's absolute Laws, sanctioned
+by an eternal Heaven and an eternal Hell, have become Moral
+Philosophies, sanctioned by able computations of Profit and
+Loss, by weak considerations of Pleasures of Virtue and the
+Moral Sublime.
+
+It is even so.  To speak in the ancient dialect, we 'have
+forgotten God;'--in the most modern dialect and very truth of the
+matter, we have taken up the Fact of this Universe as it _is
+not._  We have quietly closed our eyes to the eternal Substance
+of things, and opened them only to the Shews and Shams of things.
+We quietly believe this Universe to be intrinsically a great
+unintelligible PERHAPS;  extrinsically, clear enough, it is a
+great, most extensive Cattlefold and Workhouse, with most
+extensive Kitchen-ranges, Dining-tables,--whereat he is wise who
+can find a place!  All the Truth of this Universe is uncertain;
+only the profit and loss of it, the pudding and praise of it, are
+and remain very visible to the practical man.
+
+There is no longer any God for us!  God's Laws are become a
+Greatest-Happiness Principle, a Parliamentary Expediency:  the
+Heavens overarch us only as an Astronomical Time-keeper;  a butt
+for Herschel-telescopes to shoot science at, to shoot
+sentimentalities at:--in our and old Jonson's dialect, man has
+lost the _soul_ out of him;  and now, after the due period,--
+begins to find the want of it!  This is verily the plague-spot;
+centre of the universal Social Gangrene, threatening all modern
+things with frightful death.  To him that will consider it, here
+is the stem, with its roots and taproot, with its world-wide
+upas-boughs and accursed poison-exudations, under which the world
+lies writhing in atrophy and agony.  You touch the focal-centre
+of all our disease, of our frightful nosology of diseases, when
+you lay your hand on this.  There is no religion;  there is no
+God;  man has lost his soul, and vainly seeks antiseptic salt.
+Vainly:  in killing Kings, in passing Reform Bills, in French
+Revolutions, Manchester Insurrections, is found no remedy.  The
+foul elephantine leprosy, alleviated for an hour, reappears in
+new force and desperateness next hour.
+
+For actually this is _not_ the real fact of the world;  the world
+is not made so, but otherwise!--Truly, any Society setting out
+from this No-God hypothesis will arrive at a result or two.  The
+Unveracities, escorted, each Unveracity of them by its
+corresponding Misery and Penalty;  the Phantasms, and Fatuities,
+and ten-years Corn-Law Debatings, that shall walk the Earth at
+noonday,--must needs be numerous!  The Universe _being_
+intrinsically a Perhaps, being too probably an 'infinite Humbug,'
+why should any minor Humbug astonish us?  It is all according to
+the order of Nature;  and Phantasms riding with huge clatter
+along the streets, from end to end of our existence, astonish
+nobody.  Enchanted St. Ives' Workhouses and Joe-Manton
+Aristocracies;  giant Working Mammonism near strangled in the
+partridge-nets of giant-looking Idle Dilettantism,--this, in all
+its branches, in its thousand thousand modes and figures, is a
+sight familiar to us.
+
+
+The Popish Religion, we are told, flourishes extremely in these
+years;  and is the most vivacious-looking religion to be met with
+at present.  _"Elle a trois cents ans dans le ventre,"_ counts M.
+Jouffroy;  _"c'est pourquoi je la respecte!"_--The old Pope of
+Rome, finding it laborious to kneel so long while they cart him
+through the streets to bless the people on _Corpus-Christi_ Day,
+complains of rheumatism;  whereupon his Cardinals consult;--
+construct him, after some study, a stuffed cloaked figure, of
+iron and wood, with wool or baked hair;  and place it in a
+kneeling posture.  Stuffed figure, or rump of a figure;  to this
+stuffed rump he, sitting at his ease on a lower level, joins, by
+the aid of cloaks and drapery, his living head and outspread
+hands:  the rump with its cloaks kneels, the Pope looks, and
+holds his hands spread;  and so the two in concert bless the
+Roman population on _Corpus-Christi_ Day, as well as they can.
+
+I have considered this amphibious Pope, with the wool-and-iron
+back, with the flesh head and hands;  and endeavoured to
+calculate his horoscope.  I reckon him the remarkablest Pontiff
+that has darkened God's daylight, or painted himself in the human
+retina, for these several thousand years.  Nay, since Chaos first
+shivered, and 'sneezed,' as the Arabs say, with the first shaft
+of sunlight shot through it, what stranger product was there of
+Nature and Art working together?  Here is a Supreme Priest who
+believes God to be--What in the name of God _does_ he believe God
+to be?--and discerns that all worship of God is a scenic
+phantasmagory of wax-candles, organ-blasts, Gregorian Chants,
+mass-brayings, purple monsignori, wool-and-iron rumps,
+artistically spread out,--to save the ignorant from worse.
+
+O reader, I say not who are Belial's elect.  This poor amphibious
+Pope too gives loaves to the Poor;  has in him more good latent
+than he is himself aware of.  His poor Jesuits, in the late
+Italian Cholera, were, with a few German Doctors, the only
+creatures whom dastard terror had not driven mad:  they descended
+fearless into all gulfs and bedlams;  watched over the pillow of
+the dying, with help, with counsel and hope;  shone as luminous
+fixed stars, when all else had gone out in chaotic night:  honour
+to them!  This poor Pope,--who knows what good is in him?  In a
+Time otherwise too prone to forget, he keeps up the mournfulest
+ghastly memorial of the Highest, Blessedest, which once was;
+which, in new fit forms, will again partly have to be.  Is he not
+as a perpetual death's-head and cross-bones, with their
+_Resurgam,_ on the grave of a Universal Heroism,--grave of a
+Christianity?  Such Noblenesses, purchased by the world's best
+heart's-blood, must not be lost;  we cannot afford to lose them,
+in what confusions soever.  To all of us the day will come, to a
+few of us it has already come, when no mortal, with his heart
+yearning for a 'Divine Humility,' or other 'Highest form of
+Valour,' will need to look for it in death's-heads, but will see
+it round him in here and there a beautiful living head.
+
+Besides, there is in this poor Pope, and his practice of the
+Scenic Theory of Worship, a frankness which I rather honour.  Not
+half and half, but with undivided heart does _he_ set about
+worshiping by stage-machinery;  as if there were now, and could
+again be, in Nature no other.  He will ask you, What other?
+Under this my Gregorian Chant, and beautiful wax-light
+Phantasmagory, kindly hidden from you is an Abyss, of black
+Doubt, Scepticism, nay Sansculottic Jacobinism;  an Orcus that
+has no bottom.  Think of that.  'Groby Pool _is_ thatched with
+pancakes,'--as Jeannie Deans's Innkeeper defied it to be!  The
+Bottomless of Scepticism, Atheism, Jacobinism, behold, it is
+thatched over, hidden from your despair, by stage-properties
+judiciously arranged.  This stuffed rump of mine saves not me
+only from rheumatism, but you also from what other _isms!_  In
+this your Life-pilgrimage Nowhither, a fine Squallacci marching-
+music, and Gregorian Chant, accompanies you, and the hollow Night
+of Orcus is well hid!
+
+Yes truly, few men that worship by the rotatory Calabash of the
+Calmucks do it in half so great, frank or effectual a way.
+Drury-lane, it is said, and that is saying much, may learn from
+him in the dressing of parts, in the arrangement of lights and
+shadows.  He is the greatest Play-actor that at present draws
+salary in this world.  Poor Pope;  and I am told he is fast
+growing bankrupt too;  and will, in a measurable term of years (a
+great way _within_ the 'three hundred'), not have a penny to make
+his pot boil!  His old rheumatic back will then get to rest;  and
+himself and his stage-properties sleep well in Chaos forevermore.
+
+
+Or, alas, why go to Rome for Phantasms walking the streets?
+Phantasms, ghosts, in this midnight hour, hold jubilee, and
+screech and jabber;  and the question rather were, What high
+Reality anywhere is yet awake?  Aristocracy has become Phantasm-
+Aristocracy, no longer able to _do_ its work, not in the least
+conscious that it has any work longer to do.  Unable, totally
+careless to _do_ its work;  careful only to clamour for the
+_wages_ of doing its work,--nay for higher, and _palpably_ undue
+wages, and Corn-Laws and _increase_ of rents;  the old rate of
+wages not being adequate now!  In hydra-wrestle, giant
+_'Millo_cracy' so-called, a real giant, though as yet a blind one
+and but half-awake, wrestles and wrings in choking nightmare,
+'like to be strangled in the partridge-nets of Phantasm-
+Aristocracy,' as we said, which fancies itself still to be a
+giant.  Wrestles, as under nightmare, till it do awaken;  and
+gasps and struggles thousandfold, we may say, in a truly painful
+manner, through all fibres of our English Existence, in these
+hours and years!  Is our poor English Existence wholly becoming a
+Nightmare;  full of mere Phantasms?--
+
+The Champion of England, cased in iron or tin, rides into
+Westminster Hall, 'being lifted into his saddle with little
+assistance,' and there asks, If in the four quarters of the
+world, under the cope of Heaven, is any man or demon that dare
+question the right of this King?  Under the cope of Heaven no man
+makes intelligible answer,--as several men ought already to have
+done.  Does not this Champion too know the world;  that it is a
+huge Imposture, and bottomless Inanity, thatched over with bright
+cloth and other ingenious tissues?  Him let us leave there,
+questioning all men and demons.
+
+Him we have left to his destiny;  but whom else have we found?
+From this the highest apex of things, downwards through all
+strata and breadths, how many fully awakened Realities have we
+fallen in with:--alas, on the contrary, what troops and
+populations of Phantasms, not God-Veracities but Devil-Falsities,
+down to the very lowest stratum,--which now, by such
+superincumbent weight of Unveracities, lies enchanted in St.
+Ives' Workhouses, broad enough, helpless enough!  You will walk
+in no public thoroughfare or remotest byway of English Existence
+but you will meet a man, an interest of men, that has given up
+hope in the Everlasting, True, and placed its hope in the
+Temporary, half or wholly False.  The Honourable Member complains
+unmusically that there is 'devil's-dust' in Yorkshire cloth.
+Yorkshire cloth,--why, the very Paper I now write on is made, it
+seems, partly of plaster-lime well-smoothed, and obstructs my
+writing!  You are lucky if you can find now any good Paper,--any
+work really _done;_  search where you will, from highest Phantasm
+apex to lowest Enchanted basis!
+
+Consider, for example, that great Hat seven-feet high, which now
+perambulates London Streets;  which my Friend Sauerteig regarded
+justly as one of our English notabilities;  "the topmost point as
+yet," said he, "would it were your culminating and returning
+point, to which English Puffery has been observed to reach!"--The
+Hatter in the Strand of London, instead of making better felt-
+hats than another, mounts a huge lath-and-plaster Hat, seven-feet
+high, upon wheels;  sends a man to drive it through the streets;
+hoping to be saved _thereby._  He has not attempted to _make_
+better hats, as he was appointed by the Universe to do, and as
+with this ingenuity of his he could very probably have done;  but
+his whole industry is turned to persuade us that he has made
+such!  He too knows that the Quack has become God.  Laugh not at
+him, O reader;  or do not laugh only.  He has ceased to be comic;
+he is fast becoming tragic.  To me this all-deafening blast of
+Puffery, of poor Falsehood grown necessitous, of poor Heart-
+Atheism fallen now into Enchanted Workhouses, sounds too surely
+like a Doom's-blast!  I have to say to myself in old dialect:
+"God's blessing is not written on all this, His curse is written
+on all this!"  Unless perhaps the Universe be a chimera;--some
+old totally deranged eightday clock, dead as brass;  which
+the Maker, if there ever was any Maker, has long ceased to
+meddle with?--To my Friend Sauerteig this poor seven-feet
+Hat-manufacturer, as the topstone of English Puffery, was
+very notable.
+
+Alas, that we natives note him little, that we view him as a
+thing of course, is the very burden of the misery.  We take it
+for granted, the most rigorous of us, that all men who have made
+anything are expected and entitled to make the loudest possible
+proclamation of it;  call on a discerning public to reward them
+for it.  Every man his own trumpeter;  that is, to a really
+alarming extent, the accepted rule.  Make loudest possible
+proclamation of your Hat:  true proclamation if that will do;  if
+that will not do, then false proclamation,--to such extent of
+falsity as will serve your purpose;  as will not seem too false
+to be credible!--I answer, once for all, that the fact is not so.
+Nature requires no man to make proclamation of his doings and
+hat-makings;  Nature forbids all men to make such.  There is not
+a man or hat-maker born into the world but feels, at first, that
+he is degrading himself if he speak of his excellencies and
+prowesses, and supremacy in his craft:  his inmost heart says to
+him, "Leave thy friends to speak of these;  if possible, thy
+enemies to speak of these;  but at all events, thy friends!"  He
+feels that he is already a poor braggart;  fast hastening to be a
+falsity and speaker of the Untruth.
+
+Nature's Laws, I must repeat, are eternal:  her small still
+voice, speaking from the inmost heart of us, shall not, under
+terrible penalties, be disregarded.  No one man can depart from
+the truth without damage to himself;  no one million of men;  no
+Twenty-seven Millions of men.  Shew me a Nation fallen everywhere
+into this course, so that each expects it, permits it to others
+and himself, I will shew you a Nation traveling with one assent
+on the broad way.  The broad way, however many Banks of England,
+Cotton-Mills and Duke's Palaces it may have!  Not at happy
+Elysian fields, and everlasting crowns of victory, earned by
+silent Valour, will this Nation arrive;  but at precipices,
+devouring gulfs, if it pause not.  Nature has appointed happy
+fields, victorious laurel-crowns;  but only to the brave and
+true:  _Un_nature, what we call Chaos, holds nothing in it but
+vacuities, devouring gulfs.  What are Twenty-seven Millions, and
+their unanimity?  Believe them not:  the Worlds and the Ages, God
+and Nature and All Men say otherwise.
+
+'Rhetoric all this?'  No, my brother, very singular to say, it is
+Fact all this.  Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer.  Forgotten in
+these days, it is old as the foundations of the Universe, and
+will endure till the Universe cease.  It is forgotten now;  and
+the first mention of it puckers thy sweet countenance into a
+sneer:  but it will be brought to mind again,--unless indeed the
+Law of Gravitation chance to cease, and men find that they can
+walk on vacancy.  Unanimity of the Twenty-seven Millions will do
+nothing:  walk not thou with them;  fly from them as for thy
+life.  Twenty-seven Millions traveling on such courses, with gold
+jingling in every pocket, with vivats heaven-high, are
+incessantly advancing, let me again remind thee, towards the
+_firm-land's end,_--towards the end and extinction of what
+Faithfulness, Veracity, real Worth, was in their way of life.
+Their noble ancestors have fashioned for them a 'life-road!'--in
+how many thousand senses, this!  There is not an old wise Proverb
+on their tongue, an honest Principle articulated in their hearts
+into utterance, a wise true method of doing and despatching any
+work or commerce of men, but helps yet to carry them forward.
+Life is still possible to them, because all is not yet Puffery,
+Falsity, Mammon-worship and Unnature;  because somewhat is yet
+Faithfulness, Veracity and Valour.  With a certain very
+considerable finite quantity of Unveracity and Phantasm, social
+life is still possible;  not with an infinite quantity!  Exceed
+your certain quantity, the seven-feet Hat, and all things upwards
+to the very Champion cased in tin, begin to reel and flounder,--
+in Manchester Insurrections, Chartisms, Sliding-scales;  the Law
+of Gravitation not forgetting to act.  You advance incessantly
+towards the land's end;  you are, literally enough, 'consuming
+the way.'  Step after step, Twenty-seven Million unconscious
+men;--till you are at the land's end;  till there is not
+Faithfulness enough among you any more:  and the next step now is
+lifted _not_ over land, but into air, over ocean-deeps and
+roaring abysses:--unless perhaps the Law of Gravitation have
+forgotten to act?
+
+O, it is frightful when a whole Nation, as our Fathers used to
+say, has 'forgotten God;'  has remembered only Mammon, and what
+Mammon leads to!  When your self-trumpeting Hatmaker is the
+emblem of almost all makers, and workers, and men, that make
+anything,--from soul-overseerships, body-overseerships, epic
+poems, acts of parliament, to hats and shoe-blacking!  Not one
+false man but does uncountable mischief:  how much, in a
+generation or two, will Twenty-seven Millions, mostly false,
+manage to accumulate?  The sum of it, visible in every street,
+marketplace, senate-house, circulating-library, cathedral,
+cotton-mill, and union-workhouse, fills one _not_ with a
+comic feeling!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+Gospel of Mammonism
+
+
+Reader, even Christian Reader as thy title goes, hast thou any
+notion of Heaven and Hell?  I rather apprehend, not.  Often as
+the words are on our tongue, they have got a fabulous or
+semifabulous character for most of us, and pass on like a kind of
+transient similitude, like a sound signifying little.
+
+Yet it is well worth while for us to know, once and always, that
+they are not a similitude, nor a fable nor semi-fable;  that they
+are an everlasting highest fact!  "No Lake of Sicilian or other
+sulphur burns now anywhere in these ages," sayest thou?  Well,
+and if there did not!  Believe that there does not;  believe it
+if thou wilt, nay hold by it as a real increase, a rise to higher
+stages, to wider horizons and empires.  All this has vanished, or
+has not vanished;  believe as thou wilt as to all this.  But that
+an Infinite of Practical Importance, speaking with strict
+arithmetical exactness, an _Infinite,_ has vanished or can vanish
+from the Life of any Man:  this thou shalt not believe!  O
+brother, the Infinite of Terror, of Hope, of Pity, did it not at
+any moment disclose itself to thee, indubitable, unnameable?
+Came it never, like the gleam of preternatural eternal Oceans,
+like the voice of old Eternities, far-sounding through thy heart
+of hearts?  Never?  Alas, it was not thy Liberalism then;  it was
+thy Animalism!  The Infinite is more sure than any other fact.
+But only men can discern it;  mere building beavers, spinning
+arachnes, much more the predatory vulturous and vulpine species,
+do not discern it well!--
+
+'The word Hell,' says Sauerteig, 'is still frequently in use
+among the English People:  but I could not without difficulty
+ascertain what they meant by it.  Hell generally signifies the
+Infinite Terror, the thing a man is infinitely afraid of, and
+shudders and shrinks from, struggling with his whole soul to
+escape from it.  There is a Hell therefore, if you will consider,
+which accompanies man, in all stages of his history, and
+religious or other development:  but the Hells of men and Peoples
+differ notably.  With Christians it is the infinite terror of
+being found guilty before the just Judge.  With old Romans, I
+conjecture, it was the terror not of Pluto, for whom probably
+they cared little, but of doing unworthily, doing unvirtuously,
+which was their word for un_man_fully.  And now what is it, if
+you pierce through his Cants, his oft-repeated Hearsays, what he
+calls his Worships and so forth,--what is it that the modern
+English soul does, in very truth, dread infinitely, and
+contemplate with entire despair?  What is his Hell;  after all
+these reputable, oft-repeated Hearsays, what is it?  With
+hesitation, with astonishment, I pronounce it to be:  The terror
+of "Not succeeding;"  of not making money, fame, or some other
+figure in the world,--chiefly of not making money!  Is not that a
+somewhat singular Hell?
+
+Yes, O Sauerteig, it is very singular.  If we do not 'succeed,'
+where is the use of us?  We had better never have been born.
+"Tremble intensely," as our friend the Emperor of China says:
+_there_ is the black Bottomless of Terror;  what Sauerteig calls
+the 'Hell of the English!'--But indeed this Hell belongs
+naturally to the Gospel of Mammonism, which also has its
+corresponding Heaven.  For there is one Reality among so many
+Phantasms;  about one thing we are entirely in earnest:  The
+making of money.  Working Mammonism does divide the world with
+idle game-preserving Dilettantism:--thank Heaven that there is
+even a Mammonism, anything we are in earnest about!  Idleness is
+worst, Idleness alone is without hope:  work earnestly at
+anything, you will by degrees learn to work at almost all things.
+There is endless hope in work, were it even work at making money.
+
+True, it must be owned, we for the present, with our Mammon-
+Gospel, have come to strange conclusions.  We call it a Society;
+and go about professing openly the totalest separation,
+isolation.  Our life is not a mutual helpfulness;  but rather,
+cloaked under due laws-of-war, named 'fair competition' and so
+forth, it is a mutual hostility.  We have profoundly forgotten
+everywhere that _Cash-payment_ is not the sole relation of human
+beings;  we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and
+liquidates all engagements of man.  "My starving workers?"
+answers the rich Mill-owner:  "Did not I hire them fairly in the
+market?  Did I not pay them, to the last sixpence, the sum
+covenanted for?  What have I to do with them more?"--Verily
+Mammon-worship is a melancholy creed.  When Cain, for his own
+behoof, had killed Abel, and was questioned, "Where is thy
+brother" he too made answer, "Am I my brother's keeper?"  Did I
+not pay my brother _his_ wages, the thing he had merited from me?
+
+O sumptuous Merchant-Prince, illustrious game-preserving Duke, is
+there no way of 'killing' thy brother but Cain's rude way!  'A
+good man by the very look of him, by his very presence with us as
+a fellow wayfarer in this Life-pilgrimage, _promises_ so much:'
+woe to him if he forget all such promises, if he never know that
+they were given!  To a deadened soul, seared with the brute
+Idolatry of Sense, to whom going to Hell is equivalent to not
+making money, all 'promises,' and moral duties, that cannot be
+pleaded for in Courts of Requests, address themselves in vain.
+Money he can be ordered to pay, but nothing more.  I have not
+heard in all Past History, and expect not to hear in all Future
+History, of any Society anywhere under God's Heaven supporting
+itself on such Philosophy.  The Universe is not made so;  it is
+made otherwise than so.  The man or nation of men that thinks it
+is made so, marches forward nothing doubting, step after step;
+but marches--whither we know!  In these last two centuries of
+Atheistic Government (near two centuries now, since the blessed
+restoration of his Sacred Majesty, and Defender of the Faith,
+Charles Second), I reckon that we have pretty well exhausted what
+of 'firm earth' there was for us to march on;--and are now, very
+ominously, shuddering, reeling, and let us hope trying to recoil,
+on the cliff's edge!--
+
+For out of this that we call Atheism come so many other _isms_
+and falsities, each falsity with its misery at its heels!--A SOUL
+is not like wind (_spiritus,_ or breath) contained within a
+capsule;  the ALMIGHTY MAKER is not like a Clockmaker that once,
+in old immemorial ages, having _made_ his Horologe of a Universe,
+sits ever since and sees it go!  Not at all.  Hence comes
+Atheism;  come, as we say, many other _isms;_  and as the sum of
+all, comes Valetism, the _reverse_ of Heroism;  sad root of all
+woes whatsoever.  For indeed, as no man ever saw the above-said
+wind-element enclosed within its capsule, and finds it at bottom
+more deniable than conceivable;  so too he finds, in spite of
+Bridgewater Bequests, your Clockmaker Almighty an entirely
+questionable affair, a deniable affair;--and accordingly denies
+it, and along with it so much else.  Alas, one knows not what and
+how much else!  For the faith in an Invisible, Unnameable,
+Godlike, present everywhere in all that we see and work and
+suffer, is the essence of all faith whatsoever;  and that once
+denied, or still worse, asserted with lips only, and out of bound
+prayerbooks only, what other thing remains believable?  That Cant
+well-ordered is marketable Cant;  that Heroism means gas-lighted
+Histrionism;  that seen with 'clear eyes' (as they call Valet-
+eyes), no man is a Hero, or ever was a Hero, but all men are
+Valets and Varlets.  The accursed practical quintessence of all
+sorts of Unbelief!  For if there be now no Hero, and the Histrio
+himself begin to be seen into, what hope is there for the seed of
+Adam here below?  We are the doomed everlasting prey of the
+Quack;  who, now in this guise, now in that, is to filch us, to
+pluck and eat us, by such modes as are convenient for him.  For
+the modes and guises I care little.  The Quack once inevitable,
+let him come swiftly, let him pluck and eat me;--swiftly, that I
+may at least have done with him;  for in his Quack-world I can
+have no wish to linger.  Though he slay me, yet will I despise
+him.  Though he conquer nations, and have all the Flunkeys of the
+Universe shouting at his heels, yet will I know well that _he_ is
+an Inanity;  that for him and his there is no continuance
+appointed, save only in Gehenna and the Pool.  Alas, the Atheist
+world, from its utmost summits of Heaven and Westminster Hall,
+downwards through poor sevenfeet Hats and 'Unveracities fallen
+hungry,' down to the lowest cellars and neglected hunger-dens of
+it, is very wretched.
+
+One of Dr. Alison's Scotch facts struck us much.*     A poor
+Irish Widow, her husband having died in one of the Lanes of
+Edinburgh, went forth with her three children, bare of all
+resource, to solicit help from the Charitable Establishments of
+that City.  At this Charitable Establishment and then at that she
+was refused;  referred from one to the other, helped by none;--
+till she had exhausted them all;  till her strength and heart
+failed her:  she sank down in typhus-fever;  died, and infected
+her Lane with fever, so that 'seventeen other persons' died of
+fever there in consequence.  The humane Physician asks thereupon,
+as with a heart too full for speaking, Would it not have been
+_economy_ to help this poor Widow?  She took typhus-fever, and
+killed seventeen of you!--Very curious.  The forlorn Irish Widow
+applies to her fellow-creatures, as if saying, "Behold I am
+sinking, bare of help:  ye must help me!  I am your sister, bone
+of your bone;  one God made us:  ye must help me!"  They answer,
+"No;  impossible:  thou art no sister of ours."  But she proves
+her sisterhood;  her typhus-fever kills _them:_  they actually
+were her brothers, though denying it!  Had man ever to go lower
+for a proof?
+
+------------
+* _Observations on the Management of the Poor in Scotland:_ By
+William Pulteney Alison, M.D. (Edinburgh, 1840)
+------------
+
+For, as indeed was very natural in such case, all government of
+the Poor by the Rich has long ago been given over to Supply-and-
+demand, Laissez-faire and such like, and universally declared to
+be 'impossible.'  "You are no sister of ours;  what shadow of
+proof is there?  Here are our parchments, our padlocks, proving
+indisputably our money-safes to be _ours,_ and you to have no
+business with them.  Depart!  It is impossible!"--Nay, what
+wouldst thou thyself have us do? cry indignant readers.  Nothing,
+my friends,--till you have got a soul for yourselves again.  Till
+then all things are 'impossible.'  Till then I cannot even bid
+you buy, as the old Spartans would have done, two-pence worth of
+powder and lead, and compendiously shoot to death this poor Irish
+Widow:  even that is 'impossible' for you.  Nothing is left but
+that she prove her sisterhood by dying, and infecting you with
+typhus.  Seventeen of you lying dead will not deny such proof
+that she was flesh of your flesh;  and perhaps some of the living
+may lay it to heart.
+
+'Impossible:'  of a certain two-legged animal with feathers, it
+is said if you draw a distinct chalk-circle round him, he sits
+imprisoned, as if girt with the iron ring of Fate;  and will die
+there, though within sight of victuals,--or sit in sick misery
+there, and be fatted to death.  The name of this poor two-legged
+animal is--Goose;  and they make of him, when well fattened,
+_Pate de foie gras,_ much prized by some!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+Gospel of Dilettantism
+
+
+But after all, the Gospel of Dilettantism, producing a Governing
+Class who do not govern, nor understand in the least that they
+are bound or expected to govern, is still mournfuler than that of
+Mammonism.  Mammonism, as we said, at least works;  this goes
+idle.  Mammonism has seized some portion of the message of Nature
+to man;  and seizing that, and following it, will seize and
+appropriate more and more of Nature's message:  but Dilettantism
+has missed it wholly.  'Make money:'  that will mean withal, 'Do
+work in order to make money.'  But, 'Go gracefully idle in
+Mayfair,' what does or can that mean?  An idle, game-preserving
+and even corn-Jawing Aristocracy, in such an England as ours:
+has the world, if we take thought of it, ever seen such a
+phenomenon till very lately?  Can it long continue to see such?
+
+Accordingly the impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice, and
+Saynothingism in Speech, which we have to witness on that side of
+our affairs, is altogether amazing.  A Corn-Law demonstrating
+itself openly, for ten years or more, with 'arguments' to make
+the angels, and some other classes of creatures, weep!  For men
+are not ashamed to rise in Parliament and elsewhere, and speak
+the things they do _not_ think.  'Expediency,' 'Necessities of
+Party,' &c. &c.!  It is not known that the Tongue of Man is a
+sacred organ;  that Man himself is definable in Philosophy as an
+'Incarnate _Word;'_  the Word not there, you have no Man there
+either, but a Phantasm instead!  In this way it is that
+Absurdities may live long enough,--still walking, and talking for
+themselves, years and decades after the brains are quite out!
+How are 'the knaves and dastards' ever to be got 'arrested' at
+that rate?--
+
+"No man in this fashionable London of yours," friend Sauerteig
+would say, "speaks a plain word to me.  Every man feels bound to
+be something more than plain;  to be pungent withal, witty,
+ornamental.  His poor fraction of sense has to be perked into
+some epigrammatic shape, that it may prick into me;--perhaps
+(this is the commonest) to be topsyturvied, left standing on its
+head, that I may remember it the better!  Such grinning inanity
+is very sad to the soul of man.  Human faces should not grin on
+one like masks;  they should look on one like faces!  I love
+honest laughter, as I do sunlight;  but not dishonest:  most
+kinds of dancing too;  but the St.-Vitus kind not at all!  A
+fashionable wit, ach Himmel, if you ask, Which, he or a Death's-
+head, will be the cheerier company for me? pray send _not_ him!"
+
+Insincere Speech, truly, is the prime material of insincere
+Action.  Action hangs, as it were, _dissolved_ in Speech, in
+Thought whereof Speech is the shadow;  and precipitates itself
+therefrom.  The kind of Speech in a man betokens the kind of
+Action you will get from him.  Our Speech, in these modern days,
+has become amazing.  Johnson complained, "Nobody speaks in
+earnest, Sir;  there is no serious conversation."  To us all
+serious speech of men, as that of Seventeenth-Century Puritans,
+Twelfth-Century Catholics, German Poets of this Century, has
+become jargon, more or less insane.  Cromwell was mad and a
+quack;  Anselm, Becket, Goethe, _ditto ditto._
+
+
+Perhaps few narratives in History or Mythology are more
+significant than that Moslem one, of Moses and the Dwellers by
+the Dead Sea.  A tribe of men dwelt on the shores of that same
+Asphaltic Lake;  and having forgotten, as we are all too prone to
+do, the inner facts of Nature, and taken up with the falsities
+and outer semblances of it, were fallen into sad conditions,--
+verging indeed towards a certain far deeper Lake.  Whereupon it
+pleased kind Heaven to send them the Prophet Moses, with an
+instructive word of warning, out of which might have sprung
+'remedial measures' not a few.  But no:  the men of the Dead Sea
+discovered, as the valet-species always does in heroes or
+prophets, no comeliness in Moses;  listened with real tedium to
+Moses, with light grinning, or with splenetic sniffs and sneers,
+affecting even to yawn;  and signified, in short, that they found
+him a humbug, and even a bore.  Such was the candid theory these
+men of the Asphalt Lake formed to themselves of Moses, That
+probably he was a humbug, that certainly he was a bore.
+
+Moses withdrew;  but Nature and her rigorous veracities did not
+withdraw.  The men of the Dead Sea, when we next went to visit
+them, were all 'changed into Apes;'* sitting on the trees there,
+grinning now in the most _un_affected manner;  gibbering and
+chattering _complete_ nonsense;  finding the whole Universe now a
+most indisputable Humbug!  The Universe has _become_ a Humbug to
+these Apes who thought it one!  There they sit and chatter, to
+this hour:  only, I think, every Sabbath there returns to them a
+bewildered half-consciousness, half-reminiscence;  and they sit,
+with their wizened smoke-dried visages, and such an air of
+supreme tragicality as Apes may;  looking out, through those
+blinking smoke-bleared eyes of theirs, into the wonderfulest
+universal smoky Twilight and undecipherable disordered Dusk of
+Things;  wholly an Uncertainty, Unintelligibility, they and it;
+and for commentary thereon, here and there an unmusical chatter
+or mew:--truest, tragicalest Humbug conceivable by the mind of
+man or ape!  They made no use of their souls;  and so have lost
+them.  Their worship on the Sabbath now is to roost there, with
+unmusical screeches, and half-remember that they had souls.
+
+Didst thou never, O Traveler, fall in with parties of this tribe?
+Meseems they are grown somewhat numerous in our day.
+
+---------
+* Sale's _Koran_ (_Introduction_).
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+Happy
+
+
+All work, even cotton-spinning, is noble;  work is alone noble:
+be that here said and asserted once more.  And in like manner too
+all dignity is painful;  a life of ease is not for any man, nor
+for any god.  The life of all gods figures itself to us as a
+Sublime Sadness--earnestness of Infinite Battle against Infinite
+Labour.  Our highest religion is named the 'Worship of Sorrow.'
+For the son of man there is no noble crown, well worn, or even
+ill worn, but is a crown of thorns!--These things, in spoken
+words, or still better, in felt instincts alive in every heart,
+were once well known.
+
+Does not the whole wretchedness, the whole _Atheism_ as I call
+it, of man's ways, in these generations, shadow itself for us in
+that unspeakable Life-philosophy of his:  The pretension to be
+what he calls 'happy?'  Every pitifulest whipster that walks
+within a skin has his head filled with the notion that he is,
+shall be, or by all human and divine laws ought to be, 'happy.'
+His wishes, the pitifulest whipster's, are to be fulfilled for
+him;  his days, the pitifulest whipster's, are to flow on in
+ever-gentle current of enjoyment, impossible even for the gods.
+The prophets preach to us, Thou shalt be happy;  thou shalt love
+pleasant things, and find them.  The people clamour, Why have we
+not found pleasant things?
+
+We construct our theory of Human Duties, not on any Greatest-
+Nobleness Principle, never so mistaken;  no, but on a Greatest-
+Happiness Principle.  'The word _Soul_ with us, as in some
+Slavonic dialects, seems to be synonymous with _Stomach._  We
+plead and speak, in our Parliaments and elsewhere, not as from
+the Soul, but from the Stomach;--wherefore, indeed, our pleadings
+are so slow to profit.  We plead not for God's justice;  we are
+not ashamed to stand clamouring and pleading for our own
+'interests,' our own rents and trade-profits;  we say, They are
+the 'interests' of so many;  there is such an intense desire for
+them in us!  We demand Free-Trade, with much just vociferation
+and benevolence, That the poorer classes, who are terribly ill-
+off at present, may have cheaper New-Orleans bacon.  Men ask on
+Free-trade platforms, How can the indomitable spirit of
+Englishmen be kept up without plenty of bacon?  We shall become a
+ruined Nation!--Surely, my friends, plenty of bacon is good and
+indispensable:  but, I doubt, you will never get even bacon by
+aiming only at that.  You are men, not animals of prey, well-used
+or ill-used!  Your Greatest-Happiness Principle seems to me fast
+becoming a rather unhappy one.--What if we should cease babbling
+about 'happiness,' and leave _it_ resting on its own basis, as it
+used to do!
+
+A gifted Byron rises in his wrath;  and feeling too surely that
+he for his part is not 'happy,' declares the same in very violent
+language, as a piece of news that may be interesting.  It
+evidently has surprised him much.  One dislikes to see a man and
+poet reduced to proclaim on the streets such tidings:  but on the
+whole, as matters go, that is not the most dislikable.  Byron
+speaks the _truth_ in this matter.  Byron's large audience
+indicates how true it is felt to be.
+
+'Happy,' my brother?  First of all, what difference is it whether
+thou art happy or not!  Today becomes Yesterday so fast, all
+Tomorrows become Yesterdays;  and then there is no question
+whatever of the 'happiness,' but quite another question.  Nay,
+thou hast such a sacred pity left at least for thyself, thy very
+pains once gone over into Yesterday become joys to thee.
+Besides, thou knowest not what heavenly blessedness and
+indispensable sanative virtue was in them;  thou shalt only know
+it after many days, when thou art wiser!--A benevolent old
+Surgeon sat once in our company, with a Patient fallen sick by
+gourmandising, whom he had just, too briefly in the Patient's
+judgment, been examining.  The foolish Patient still at intervals
+continued to break in on our discourse, which rather promised to
+take a philosophic turn:  "But I have lost my appetite," said he,
+objurgatively, with a tone of irritated pathos;  "I have no
+appetite;  I can't eat!"--"My dear fellow," answered the Doctor
+in mildest tone, "it isn't of the slightest consequence;"--and
+continued his philosophical discoursings with us!
+
+Or does the reader not know the history of that Scottish iron
+Misanthrope?  The inmates of some town-mansion, in those Northern
+parts, were thrown into the fearfulest alarm by indubitable
+symptoms of a ghost inhabiting the next house, or perhaps even
+the partition-wall! Ever at a certain hour, with preternatural
+gnarring, growling and screeching, which attended as running
+bass, there began, in a horrid, semi-articulate, unearthly voice,
+this song:  "Once I was hap-hap-happy, but now I'm _mees_-erable!
+Clack-clack-clack, gnarr-r-r, whuz-z:  Once I was hap-hap-happy,
+but now I'm _mees_-erable!"--Rest, rest, perturbed spirit;--or
+indeed, as the good old Doctor said:  My dear fellow, it isn't of
+the slightest consequence!  But no;  the perturbed spirit could
+not rest;  and to the neighbours, fretted, affrighted, or at
+least insufferably bored by him, it _was_ of such consequence
+that they had to go and examine in his haunted chamber.  In his
+haunted chamber, they find that the perturbed spirit is an
+unfortunate--Imitator of Byron?  No, is an unfortunate rusty
+Meat-jack, gnarring and creaking with rust and work;  and this,
+in Scottish dialect, is _its_ Byronian musical Life-philosophy,
+sung according to ability!
+
+
+Truly, I think the man who goes about pothering and uproaring for
+his 'happiness,'--pothering, and were it ballot-boxing, poem-
+making, or in what way soever fussing and exerting himself,--he
+is not the man that will help us to 'get our knaves and dastards
+arrested!'  No;  he rather is on the way to increase the number,
+--by at least one unit and _his_ tail!  Observe, too, that this is
+all a modern affair;  belongs not to the old heroic times, but to
+these dastard new times.  'Happiness our being's end and aim' is
+at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in
+the world.
+
+The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking
+much about was, happiness enough to get his work done.  Not "I
+can't eat!" but "I can't work!" that was the burden of all wise
+complaining among men.  It is, after all, the one unhappiness of
+a man.  That he cannot work;  that he cannot get his destiny as a
+man fulfilled.  Behold, the day is passing swiftly over, our life
+is passing swiftly over;  and the night cometh, wherein no man
+can work.  The night once come, our happiness, our unhappiness,--
+it is all abolished;  vanished, clean gone;  a thing that has
+been:  'not of the slightest consequence' whether we were happy
+as eupeptic Curtis, as the fattest pig of Epicurus, or unhappy as
+job with potsherds, as musical Byron with Giaours and
+sensibilities of the heart;  as the unmusical Meat-jack with hard
+labour and rust!  But our work,--behold that is not abolished,
+that has not vanished:  our work, behold, it remains, or the want
+of it remains;--for endless Times and Eternities, remains;  and
+that is now the sole question with us forevermore!  Brief
+brawling Day, with its noisy phantasms, its poor paper-crowns
+tinsel-gilt, is gone;  and divine everlasting Night, with her
+star-diadems, with her silences and her veracities, is come!
+What hast thou done, and how?  Happiness, unhappiness:  all that
+was but the _wages_ thou hadst;  thou hast spent all that, in
+sustaining thyself hitherward;  not a coin of it remains with
+thee, it is all spent, eaten:  and now thy work, where is thy
+work?  Swift, out with it, let us see thy work!
+
+
+Of a truth, if man were not a poor hungry dastard, and even
+much of a blockhead withal, he would cease criticising his
+victuals to such extent;  and criticise himself rather, what
+he does with his victuals!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+The English
+
+
+And yet, with all thy theoretic platitudes, what a depth of
+practical sense in thee, great England!  A depth of sense, of
+justice, and courage;  in which, under all emergencies and world-
+bewilderments, and under this most complex of emergencies we now
+live in, there is still hope, there is still assurance!
+
+The English are a dumb people.  They can do great acts, but not
+describe them.  Like the old Romans, and some few others, _their_
+Epic Poem is written on the Earth's surface:  England her Mark!
+It is complained that they have no artists:  one Shakspeare
+indeed;  but for Raphael only a Reynolds;  for Mozart nothing but
+a Mr. Bishop:  not a picture, not a song.  And yet they did
+produce one Shakspeare:  consider how the element of Shakspearean
+melody does lie imprisoned in their nature;  reduced to unfold
+itself in mere Cotton-mills, Constitutional Governments, and such
+like;--all the more interesting when it does become visible, as
+even in such unexpected shapes it succeeds in doing!  Goethe
+spoke of the Horse, how impressive, almost affecting it was that
+an animal of such qualities should stand obstructed so;  its
+speech nothing but an inarticulate neighing, its handiness mere
+_hoof_iness, the fingers all constricted, tied together, the
+fingernails coagulated into a mere hoof, shod with iron.  The
+more significant, thinks he, are those eye-flashings of the
+generous noble quadruped;  those prancings, curvings of the neck
+clothed with thunder.
+
+
+A Dog of Knowledge has _free_ utterance;  but the Warhorse is
+almost mute, very far from free!  It is even so.  Truly, your
+freest utterances are not by any means always the best:  they are
+the worst rather;  the feeblest, trivialest;  their meaning
+prompt, but small, ephemeral.  Commend me to the silent English,
+to the silent Romans.  Nay, the silent Russians too I believe to
+be worth something:  are they not even now drilling, under much
+obloquy, an immense semi-barbarous half-world from Finland to
+Kamtschatka, into rule, subordination, civilisation,--really in
+an old Roman fashion; speaking no word about it;  quietly hearing
+all manner of vituperative Able Editors speak!  While your ever-
+talking, ever-gesticulating French, for example, what are they at
+this moment drilling?--Nay, of all animals, the freest of
+utterance, I should judge, is the genus Simia:_  go into the
+Indian woods, say all Travelers, and look what a brisk, adroit,
+unresting Ape-population it is!
+
+
+The spoken Word, the written Poem, is said to be an epitome of
+the man;  how much more the done Work.  Whatsoever of morality
+and of intelligence;  what of patience, perseverance,
+faithfulness, of method, insight, ingenuity, energy;  in a word,
+whatsoever of Strength the man had in him will lie written in the
+Work he does.  To work:  why, it is to try himself against
+Nature, and her everlasting unerring Laws;  these will tell a
+true verdict as to the man.  So much of virtue and of faculty did
+_we_ find in him;  so much and no more!  He had such capacity of
+harmonising himself with _me_ and my unalterable ever-veracious
+Laws;  of cooperating and working as _I_ bade him;--and has
+prospered, and has not prospered, as you see!--Working as great
+Nature bade him:  does not that mean virtue of a kind;  nay, of
+all kinds?  Cotton can be spun and sold, Lancashire operatives
+can be got to spin it, and at length one has the woven webs and
+sells them, by following Nature's regulations in that matter:  by
+not following Nature's regulations, you have them not.  You have
+them not;--there is no Cotton-web to sell:  Nature finds a bill
+against you;  your 'Strength' is not Strength, but Futility!  Let
+faculty be honoured, so far as it is faculty.  A man that can
+succeed in working is to me always a man.
+
+How one loves to see the burly figure of him, this thick-skinned,
+seemingly opaque, perhaps sulky, almost stupid Man of Practice,
+pitted against some light--adroit Man of Theory, all equipt with
+clear logic, and able anywhere to give you Why for Wherefore! The
+adroit Man of Theory, so light of movement, clear of utterance,
+with his bow full-bent and quiver full of arrow-arguments,--
+surely he will strike down the game, transfix everywhere the
+heart of the matter;  triumph everywhere, as he proves that he
+shall and must do?  To your astonishment, it turns out oftenest
+No.  The cloudy-browed, thick-soled, opaque Practicality, with no
+logic-utterance, in silence mainly, with here and there a low
+grunt or growl, has in him what transcends all logic-utterance:
+a Congruity with the Unuttered!  The Speakable, which lies atop,
+as a superficial film, or outer skin, is his or is not his:  but
+the Doable, which reaches down to the World's centre, you find
+him there!
+
+The rugged Brindleys has little to say for himself;  the rugged
+Brindley, when difficulties accumulate on him, retires silent,
+'generally to his bed;'  retires 'sometimes for three days
+together to his bed, that he may be in perfect privacy there,'
+and ascertain in his rough head how the difficulties can be
+overcome.  The ineloquent Brindley, behold he _has_ chained seas
+together;  his ships do visibly float over valleys, invisibly
+through the hearts of mountains;  the Mersey and the Thames, the
+Humber and the Severn have shaken hands:  Nature most audibly
+answers, Yea!  The man of Theory twangs his full-bent bow:
+Nature's Fact ought to fall stricken, but does not:  his logic-
+arrow glances from it as from a scaly dragon, and the obstinate
+Fact keeps walking its way.  How singular!  At bottom, you will
+have to grapple closer with the dragon;  take it home to you, by
+real faculty, not by seeming faculty;  try whether you are
+stronger or it is stronger.  Close with it, wrestle it:  sheer
+obstinate toughness of muscle;  but much more, what we call
+toughness of heart, which will mean persistance hopeful and even
+desperate, unsubduable patience, composed candid openness,
+clearness of mind:  all this shall be 'strength' in wrestling
+your dragon;  the whole man's real strength is in this work, we
+shall get the measure of him here.
+
+Of all the Nations in the world at present we English are the
+stupidest in speech, the wisest in action.  As good as a 'dumb'
+Nation, I say, who cannot speak, and have never yet spoken,--
+spite of the Shakspeares and Miltons who skew us what
+possibilities there are!--O Mr. Bull, I look in that surly face
+of thine with a mixture of pity and laughter, yet also with
+wonder and veneration.  Thou complainest not, my illustrious
+friend;  and yet I believe the heart of thee is full of sorrow,
+of unspoken sadness, seriousness,--profound melancholy (as some
+have said) the basis of thy being.  Unconsciously, for thou
+speakest of nothing, this great Universe is great to thee.  Not
+by levity of floating, but by stubborn force of swimming, shalt
+thou make thy way.  The Fates sing of thee that thou shalt many
+times be thought an ass and a dull ox, and shalt with a god-like
+indifference believe it.  My friend,--and it is all untrue,
+nothing ever falser in point of fact!  Thou art of those great
+ones whose greatness the small passer-by does not discern.  Thy
+very stupidity is wiser than their wisdom.  A grand _vis
+inertiae_ is in thee;  how many grand qualities unknown to small
+men!  Nature alone knows thee, acknowledges the bulk and strength
+of thee:  thy Epic, unsung in words, is written in huge
+characters on the face of this Planet,--sea-moles, cotton-trades,
+railways, fleets and cities, Indian Empires, Americas, New-
+Hollands;  legible throughout the Solar System!
+
+But the dumb Russians too, as I said, they, drilling all wild
+Asia and wild Europe into military rank and file, a terrible yet
+hitherto a prospering enterprise, are still dumber.  The old
+Romans also could not _speak,_ for many centuries:--not till the
+world was theirs;  and so many speaking Greekdoms, their logic-
+arrows all spent, had been absorbed and abolished.  The logic-
+arrows, how they glanced futile from obdurate thick-skinned
+Facts;  Facts to be wrestled down only by the real vigour of
+Roman thews!--As for me, I honour, in these loud-babbling days,
+all the Silent rather.  A grand Silence that of Romans;--nay the
+grandest of all, is it not that of the gods!  Even Triviality,
+Imbecility, that can sit silent, how respectable is it in
+comparison!  The 'talent of silence' is our fundamental one.
+Great honour to him whose Epic is a melodious hexameter Iliad;
+not a jingling Sham-Iliad, nothing true in it but the hexameters
+and forms merely.  But still greater honour, if his Epic be a
+mighty Empire slowly built together, a mighty Series of Heroic
+Deeds,--a mighty Conquest over Chaos;  _which_ Epic the 'Eternal
+Melodies' have, and must have, informed and dwelt in, as it sung
+itself!  There is no mistaking that latter Epic.  Deeds are
+greater than Words.  Deeds have such a life, mute but undeniable,
+and grow as living trees and fruit-trees do;  they people the
+vacuity of Time, and make it green and worthy.  Why should the
+oak prove logically that it ought to grow, and will grow?  Plant
+it, try it;  what gifts of diligent judicious assimilation and
+secretion it has, of progress and resistance, of _force_ to grow,
+will then declare themselves.  My much-honoured, illustrious,
+extremely inarticulate Mr. Bull!--
+
+Ask Bull his spoken opinion of any matter,--oftentimes the force
+of dulness can no farther go.  You stand silent, incredulous, as
+over a platitude that borders on the Infinite.  The man's
+Churchisms, Dissenterisms, Puseyisms, Benthamisms, College
+Philosophies, Fashionable Literatures, are unexampled in this
+world.  Fate's prophecy is fulfilled;  you call the man an ox and
+an ass.  But set him once to work,--respectable man!  His spoken
+sense is next to nothing, nine-tenths of it palpable _nonsense:_
+but his unspoken sense, his inner silent feeling of what is true,
+what does agree with fact, what is doable and what is not
+doable,--this seeks its fellow in the world.  A terrible worker;
+irresistible against marshes, mountains, impediments, disorder,
+in civilisation;  everywhere vanquishing disorder, leaving it
+behind him as method and order.  He 'retires to his bed three
+days,' and considers!
+
+Nay withal, stupid as he is, our dear John,--ever, after infinite
+tumblings, and spoken platitudes innumerable from barrelheads and
+parliament-benches, he does settle down somewhere about the just
+conclusion;  you are certain that his jumblings and tumblings
+will end, after years or centuries, in the stable equilibrium.
+Stable equilibrium, I say;  centre-of-gravity lowest;--not the
+unstable, with centre-of-gravity highest, as I have known it done
+by quicker people!  For indeed, do but jumble and tumble
+sufficiently, you avoid that worst fault, of settling with your
+centre-of-gravity highest;  your centre-of-gravity is certain to
+come lowest, and to stay there.  If slowness, what we in our
+impatience call 'stupidity,' be the price of stable equilibrium
+over unstable, shall we grudge a little slowness?  Not the least
+admirable quality of Bull is, after all, that of remaining
+insensible to logic;  holding out for considerable periods, ten
+years or more, as in this of the Corn-Laws, after all arguments
+and shadow of arguments have faded away from him, till the very
+urchins on the street titter at the arguments he brings.  Logic,
+--[Greek] the 'Art of Speech,'--does indeed speak so and so;
+clear enough:  nevertheless Bull still shakes his head;  will see
+whether nothing else _illogical,_ not yet 'spoken,' not yet able
+to be 'spoken,' do not lie in the business, as there so often
+does!--My firm belief is, that, finding himself now enchanted,
+hand-shackled, foot-shackled, in Poor-Law Bastilles and
+elsewhere, he will retire three days to his bed, and _arrive_ at
+a conclusion or two!  His three-years total stagnation of trade,
+alas, is not that a painful enough 'lying in bed to consider
+himself?'  Poor Bull!
+
+Bull is a born Conservative;  for this too I inexpressibly honour
+him.  All great Peoples are conservative;  slow to believe in
+novelties;  patient of much error in actualities;  deeply and
+forever certain of the greatness that is in LAW, in Custom once
+solemnly established, and now long recognised as just and final.
+--True, O Radical Reformer, there is no Custom that can, properly
+speaking, be final;  none.  And yet thou seest _Customs_ which,
+in all civilised countries, are accounted final;  nay, under the
+Old Roman name of _Mores,_ are accounted _Morality,_ Virtue, Laws
+of God Himself.  Such, I assure thee, not a few of them are;
+such almost all of them once were.  And greatly do I respect the
+solid character,--a blockhead, thou wilt say;  yes, but a well-
+conditioned blockhead, and the best-conditioned,--who esteems all
+'Customs once solemnly acknowledged' to be ultimate, divine, and
+the rule for a man to walk by, nothing doubting, not inquiring
+farther.  What a time of it had we, were all men's life and trade
+still, in all parts of it, a problem, a hypothetic seeking, to be
+settled by painful Logics and Baconian Inductions!  The Clerk in
+Eastcheap cannot spend the day in verifying his Ready-Reckoner;
+he must take it as verified, true and indisputable;  or his Book-
+keeping by Double Entry will stand still.  "Where is your Posted
+Ledger?" asks the Master at night.--"Sir," answers the other, "I
+was verifying my Ready-Reckoner, and find some errors.  The
+Ledger is--!"--Fancy such a thing!
+
+True, all turns on your Ready-Reckoner being moderately correct,
+--being _not_ insupportably incorrect!  A Ready-Reckoner which has
+led to distinct entries in your Ledger such as these:
+_'Creditor_ an English People by fifteen hundred years of good
+Labour;  and _Debtor_ to lodging in enchanted Poor-Law Bastilles:
+_Creditor_ by conquering the largest Empire the Sun ever saw;
+and _Debtor_ to Donothingism and "Impossible" written on all
+departments of the government thereof:  _Creditor_ by mountains
+of gold ingots earned;  and _Debtor_ to No Bread purchasable by
+them:'--_such_ Ready-Reckoner, methinks, is beginning to be
+suspect;  nay is ceasing, and has ceased, to be suspect!  Such
+Ready-Reckoner is a Solecism in Eastcheap;  and must, whatever be
+the press of business, and will and shall be rectified a little.
+Business can go on no longer with _it._  The most Conservative
+English People, thickest-skinned, most patient of Peoples, is
+driven alike by its Logic and its Unlogic, by things 'spoken,'
+and by things not yet spoken or very speakable, but only felt and
+very unendurable, to be wholly a Reforming People.  Their Life as
+it is has ceased to be longer possible for them.
+
+Urge not this noble silent People;  rouse not the Berserkir-rage
+that lies in them!  Do you know their Cromwells, Hampdens, their
+Pyms and Bradshaws?  Men very peaceable, but men that can be made
+very terrible!  Men who, like their old Teutsch Fathers in
+Agrippa's days, 'have a soul that despises death;'  to whom
+'death,' compared with falsehoods and injustices, is light;--'in
+whom there is a range unconquerable by the immortal gods!'
+Before this, the English People have taken very preternatural-
+looking Spectres by the beard;  saying virtually:  "And if thou
+_wert_ 'preternatural?'  Thou with thy 'divine-rights' grown
+diabolic wrongs?  Thou,--not even 'natural;'  decapitable;
+totally extinguishable!"--Yes, just so godlike as this People's
+patience was, even so godlike will and must its impatience be.
+Away, ye scandalous Practical Solecisms, children actually of the
+Prince of Darkness;  ye have near broken our hearts;  we can and
+will endure you no longer.  Begone, we say;  depart, while the
+play is good!  By the Most High God, whose sons and born
+missionaries true men are, ye shall not continue here!  You and
+we have become incompatible;  can inhabit one house no longer.
+Either you must go, or we.  Are ye ambitious to try _which_ it
+shall be?
+
+O my Conservative friends, who still specially name and struggle
+to approve yourselves 'Conservative,' would to Heaven I could
+persuade you of this world-old fact, than which Fate is not
+surer, That Truth and justice alone are _capable_ of being
+'conserved' and preserved!  The thing which is unjust, which is
+not according to God's Law, will you, in a God's Universe, try to
+conserve that?  It is so old, say you?  Yes, and the hotter haste
+ought _you,_ of all others, to be in to let it grow no older!  If
+but the faintest whisper in your hearts intimate to you that it
+is not fair,--hasten, for the sake of Conservatism itself, to
+probe it rigorously, to cast it forth at once and forever if
+guilty.  How will or can you preserve _it,_ the thing that is not
+fair?  'Impossibility' a thousandfold is marked on that.  And ye
+call yourselves Conservatives, Aristocracies:--ought not honour
+and nobleness of mind, if they had departed from all the Earth
+elsewhere, to find their last refuge with you?  Ye unfortunate!
+
+The bough that is dead shall be cut away, for the sake of the
+tree itself.  Old?  Yes, it is too old.  Many a weary winter has
+it swung and creaked there, and gnawed and fretted, with its dead
+wood, the organic substance and still living fibre of this good
+tree;  many a long summer has its ugly naked brown defaced the
+fair green umbrage;  every day it has done mischief, and that
+only:  off with it, for the tree's sake, if for nothing more;
+let the Conservatism that would preserve cut _it_ away.  Did no
+wood-forester apprise you that a dead bough with its dead root
+left sticking there is extraneous, poisonous;  is as a dead iron
+spike, some horrid rusty ploughshare driven into the living
+substance;--nay is far worse;  for in every windstorm
+('commercial crisis' or the like), it frets and creaks, jolts
+itself to and fro, and cannot lie quiet as your dead iron
+spike would!
+
+If I were the Conservative Party of England (which is another
+bold figure of speech), I would not for a hundred thousand pounds
+an hour allow those Corn-Laws to continue!  Potosi and Golconda
+put together would not purchase my assent to them.  Do you count
+what treasuries of bitter indignation they are laying up for you
+in every just English heart?  Do you know what questions, not as
+to Corn-prices and Sliding-scales alone, they are _forcing_ every
+reflective Englishman to ask himself?  Questions insoluble, or
+hitherto unsolved;  deeper than any of our Logic-plummets
+hitherto will sound:  questions deep enough,--which it were
+better that we did not name even in thought!  You are forcing us
+to think of them, to begin uttering them.  The utterance of them
+is begun;  and where will it be ended, think you?  When two
+millions of one's brother-men sit in Workhouses, and five
+millions, as is insolently said, 'rejoice in potatoes,' there are
+various things that must be begun, let them end where they can.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+Two Centuries
+
+The Settlement effected by our 'Healing Parliament' in the Year
+of Grace 1660, though accomplished under universal acclamations
+from the four corners of the British Dominions, turns out to have
+been one of the mournfulest that ever took place in this land of
+ours.  It called and thought itself a Settlement of brightest
+hope and fulfilment, bright as the blaze of universal tar-barrels
+and bonfires could make it:  and we find it now, on looking back
+on it with the insight which trial has yielded, a Settlement as
+of despair.  Considered well, it was a settlement to govern
+henceforth without God, with only some decent Pretence of God.
+
+Governing by the Christian Law of God had been found a thing of
+battle, convulsion, confusion, an infinitely difficult thing:
+wherefore let us now abandon it, and govern only by so much of
+God's Christian Law as--as may prove quiet and convenient for us.
+What is the end of Government?  To guide men in the way wherein
+they should go;  towards their true good in this life, the portal
+of infinite good in a life to come?  To guide men in such way,
+and ourselves in such way, as the Maker of men, whose eye is upon
+us, will sanction at the Great Day?--Or alas, perhaps at bottom
+_is_ there no Great Day, no sure outlook of any life to come;
+but only this poor life, and what of taxes, felicities, Nell-
+Gwyns and entertainments, we can manage to muster here?  In that
+case, the end of Government will be, To suppress all noise and
+disturbance, whether of Puritan preaching, Cameronian psalm-
+singing, thieves'-riot, murder, arson, or what noise soever, and
+--be careful that supplies do not fail!  A very notable
+conclusion, if we will think of it;  and not without an abundance
+of fruits for us.  Oliver Cromwell's body hung on the Tyburn-
+gallows, as the type of Puritanism found futile, inexecutable,
+execrable,--yes, that gallows-tree has been a fingerpost into
+very strange country indeed.  Let earnest Puritanism die;  let
+decent Formalism, whatsoever cant it be or grow to, live!  We
+have had a pleasant journey in that direction;  and are--arriving
+at our inn?
+
+To support the Four Pleas of the Crowns and keep Taxes coming in:
+in very sad seriousness, has not this been, ever since, even in
+the best times, almost the one admitted end and aim of
+Government?  Religion, Christian Church, Moral Duty;  the fact
+that man had a soul at all;  that in man's life there was any
+eternal truth or justice at all,--has been as good as left
+quietly out of sight.  Church indeed,--alas, the endless talk and
+struggle we have had of High-Church, Low-Church, Church-
+Extension, Church-in-Danger:  we invite the Christian reader to
+think whether it has not been a too miserable screech-owl
+phantasm of talk and struggle, as for a 'Church,'--which one had
+rather not define at present!
+
+But now in these godless two centuries, looking at England and
+her efforts and doings, if we ask, What of England's doings the
+Law of Nature had accepted, Nature's King had actually furthered
+and pronounced to have truth in them,--where is our answer?
+Neither the 'Church' of Hurd and Warburton, nor the Anti-church
+of Hume and Paine;  not in any shape the Spiritualism of England:
+all this is already seen, or beginning to be seen, for what it
+is;  a thing that Nature does _not_ own.  On the one side is
+dreary Cant, with a _reminiscence_ of things noble and divine;
+on the other is but acrid Candour, with a _prophecy_ of things
+brutal, infernal.  Hurd and Warburton are sunk into the sere and
+yellow leaf;  no considerable body of true-seeing men looks
+thitherward for healing:  the Paine-and-Hume Atheistic theory, of
+'things well let alone,' with Liberty, Equality and the like, is
+also in these days declaring itself naught, unable to keep the
+world from taking fire.
+
+The theories and speculations of both these parties, and, we may
+say, of all intermediate parties and persons, prove to be things
+which the Eternal Veracity did not accept;  things superficial,
+ephemeral, which already a near Posterity, finding them already
+dead and brown-leafed, is about to suppress and forget.  The
+Spiritualism of England, for those godless years, is, as it were,
+all forgettable.  Much has been written:  but the perennial
+Scriptures of Mankind have had small accession:  from all English
+Books, in rhyme or prose, in leather binding or in paper
+wrappage, how many verses have been added to these?  Our most
+melodious Singers have sung as from the throat outwards:  from
+the inner Heart of Man, from the great Heart of Nature, through
+no Pope or Philips, has there come any tone.  The Oracles have
+been dumb.  In brief, the Spoken Word of England has not been
+true.  The Spoken Word of England turns out to have been trivial;
+of short endurance;  not valuable, not available as a Word,
+except for the passing day.  It has been accordant with
+transitory Semblance;  discordant with eternal Fact.  It has been
+unfortunately not a Word, but a Cant;  a helpless involuntary
+Cant, nay too often a cunning voluntary one:  either way, a very
+mournful Cant;  the Voice not of Nature and Fact, but of
+something other than these.
+
+With all its miserable shortcomings, with its wars,
+controversies, with its trades-unions, famine-insurrections,--it
+is her Practical Material Work alone that England has to shew for
+herself!  This, and hitherto almost nothing more;  yet actually
+this.  The grim inarticulate veracity of the English People,
+unable to speak its meaning in words, has turned itself silently
+on things;  and the dark powers of Material Nature have answered:
+Yes, this at least is true, this is not false!  So answers
+Nature.  Waste desert-shrubs of the Tropical swamps have become
+Cotton-trees;  and here, under my furtherance, are verily woven
+shirts,--hanging unsold, undistributed, but capable to be
+distributed, capable to cover the bare backs of my children of
+men.  Mountains, old as the Creation, I have permitted to be
+bored through:  bituminous fuel-stores, the wreck of forests that
+were green a million years ago,--I have opened them from my
+secret rock-chambers, and they are yours, ye English.  Your huge
+fleets, steamships, do sail the sea:  huge Indias do obey you;
+from huge _New_ Englands and Antipodal Australias, comes profit
+and traffic to this Old England of mine!  So answers Nature.  The
+Practical Labour of England is _not_ a chimerical Triviality:  it
+is a Fact, acknowledged by all the Worlds;  which no man and no
+demon will contradict.  It is, very audibly, though very
+inarticulately as yet, the one God's Voice we have heard in these
+two atheistic centuries.
+
+
+And now to observe with what bewildering obscurations and
+impediments all this as yet stands entangled, and is yet
+intelligible to no man!  How, with our gross Atheism, we hear it
+not to be the Voice of God to us, but regard it merely as a Voice
+of earthly Profit-and-Loss.  And have a Hell in England,--the
+Hell of not making money.  And coldly see the all-conquering
+valiant Sons of Toil sit enchanted, by the million, in their
+Poor-Law Bastille, as if this were Nature's Law;--mumbling to
+ourselves some vague janglement of Laissez-faire, Supply-and-
+demand, Cash-payment the one nexus of man to man:  Free-trade,
+Competition, and Devil take the hindmost, our latest Gospel
+yet preached!
+
+As if, in truth, there were no God of Labour;  as if godlike
+Labour and brutal Mammonism were convertible terms.  A serious,
+most earnest Mammonism grown Midas-eared;  an unserious
+Dilettantism, earnest about nothing, grinning with inarticulate
+incredulous incredible jargon about all things, as the
+_enchanted_ Dilettanti do by the Dead Sea!  It is mournful
+enough, for the present hour;  were there not an endless hope in
+it withal.  Giant LABOUR, truest emblem there is of God the
+World-Worker, Demiurgus, and Eternal Maker;  noble LABOUR, which
+is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the highest
+throne,--staggering hitherto like a blind irrational giant,
+hardly allowed to have his common place on the street-pavements;
+idle Dilettantism, Dead-Sea Apism, crying out, "Down with him, he
+is dangerous!"
+
+Labour must become a seeing rational giant, with a soul in the
+body of him, and take his place on the throne of things,--leaving
+his Mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the lower steps of
+said throne.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+Over-Production
+
+
+But what will reflective readers say of a Governing Class, such
+as ours, addressing its Workers with an indictment of
+'Overproduction!'  Over-production:  runs it not so?  "Ye
+miscellaneous, ignoble manufacturing individuals, ye have
+produced too much!  We accuse you of making above two-hundred
+thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind.  Your trousers
+too, which you have made, of fustian, of cassimere, of Scotch-
+plaid, of jane, nankeen and woollen broadcloth, are they not
+manifold?  Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the human
+foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with--Nay, what say we
+hats or shoes?  You produce gold-watches, jewelleries, silver-
+forks and epergnes, commodes, chiffoniers, stuffed sofas--
+Heavens, the Commercial Bazaar and multitudinous Howel-and-
+Jameses cannot contain you.  You have produced, produced;--he
+that seeks your indictment, let him look around.  Millions of
+shirts, and empty pairs of breeches, hang there in judgment
+against you.  We accuse you of over-producing:  you are
+criminally guilty of producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes and
+commodities, in a frightful overabundance.  And now there is a
+glut, and your operatives cannot be fed!"
+
+Never surely, against an earnest Working Mammonism was there
+brought, by Game-preserving aristocratic Dilettantism, a stranger
+accusation, since this world began.  My lords and gentlemen,--
+why, it was _you_ that were appointed, by the fact and by the
+theory of your position on the Earth, to 'make and administer
+Laws,'--that is to say, in a world such as ours, to guard against
+'gluts;'  against honest operatives, who had done their work,
+remaining unfed!  I say, _you_ were appointed to preside over the
+Distribution and Apportionment of the Wages of Work done;  and to
+see well that there went no labourer without his hire, were it of
+money-coins, were it of hemp gallows-ropes:  that function was
+yours, and from immemorial time has been;  yours, and as yet no
+other's.  These poor shirt-spinners have forgotten much, which by
+the virtual unwritten law of their position they should have
+remembered:  but by any written recognised law of their position,
+what have they forgotten?  They were set to make shirts.  The
+Community with all its voices commanded them, saying, "Make
+shirts;"--and there the shirts are!  Too many shirts?  Well, that
+is a novelty, in this intemperate Earth, with its nine-hundred
+millions of bare backs!  But the Community commanded you, saying,
+"See that the shirts are well apportioned, that our Human Laws be
+emblem of God's Laws;"--and where is the apportionment?  Two
+million shirtless or ill-shirted workers sit enchanted in
+Workhouse Bastilles, five million more (according to some) in
+Ugolino Hunger-cellars;  and for remedy, you say, what say you?--
+"Raise _our_ rents!"  I have not in my time heard any stranger
+speech, not even on the Shores of the Dead Sea.  You continue
+addressing those poor shirt-spinners and over-producers, in
+really a _too_ triumphant manner:
+
+"Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse us of
+overproduction?  We take the Heavens and the Earth to witness
+that we have produced nothing at all.  Not from us proceeds this
+frightful _over_plus of shirts.  In the wide domains of created
+Nature, circulates no shirt or thing of our producing.  Certain
+fox-brushes nailed upon our stable-door, the fruit of fair
+audacity at Melton Mowbray;  these we have produced, and they are
+openly nailed up there.  He that accuses us of producing, let him
+shew himself, let him name what and when.  We are innocent of
+producing;--ye ungrateful, what mountains of things have we not,
+on the contrary, had to 'consume,' and make away with!  Mountains
+of those your heaped manufactures, wheresoever edible or
+wearable, have they not disappeared before us, as if we had the
+talent of ostriches, of cormorants, and a kind of divine faculty
+to eat?  Ye ungrateful!--and did you not grow under the shadow of
+our wings?  Are not your filthy mills built on these fields of
+ours;  on this soil of England, which belongs to--whom think you?
+And we shall not offer you our own wheat at the price that
+pleases us, but that partly pleases you?  A precious notion!
+What would become of you, if we chose, at any time, to decide on
+growing no wheat more?"
+
+Yes, truly, here is the ultimate rock-basis of all Corn-Laws;
+whereon, at the bottom of much arguing, they rest, as securely as
+they can:  What would become of you, if we decided, some day, on
+growing no more wheat at all? If we chose to grow only partridges
+henceforth, and a modicum of wheat for our own uses?  Cannot we
+do what we like with our own?--Yes, indeed!  For my share, if I
+could melt Gneiss Rock, and create Law of Gravitation;  if I
+could stride out to the Doggerbank, some morning, and striking
+down my trident there into the mudwaves, say, "Be land, be
+fields, meadows, mountains and fresh-rolling streams!" by Heaven,
+I should incline to have the letting of _that_ land in
+perpetuity, and sell the wheat of it, or burn the wheat of it,
+according to my own good judgment!  My Corn-Lawing friends, you
+affright me.
+
+
+To the 'Millo-cracy' so-called, to the Working Aristocracy,
+steeped too deep in mere ignoble Mammonism, and as yet all
+unconscious of its noble destinies, as yet but an irrational or
+semirational giant, struggling to awake some soul in itself,--the
+world will have much to say, reproachfully, reprovingly,
+admonishingly.  But to the Idle Aristocracy, what will the world
+have to say?  Things painful and not pleasant!
+
+To the man who _works,_ who attempts, in never so ungracious
+barbarous a way, to get forward with some work, you will hasten
+out with furtherances, with encouragements, corrections;  you
+will say to him:  "Welcome, thou art ours;  our care shall be of
+thee."  To the idler, again, never so gracefully going idle,
+coming forward with never so many parchments, you will not hasten
+out;  you will sit still, and be disinclined to rise.  You will
+say to him:  "Not welcome, O complex Anomaly;  would thou hadst
+staid out of doors:  for who of mortals knows what to do with
+thee?  Thy parchments:  yes, they are old, of venerable
+yellowness;  and we too honour parchment, old-established
+settlements, and venerable use and wont.  Old parchments in very
+truth:--yet on the whole, if thou wilt remark, they are young to
+the Granite Rocks, to the Groundplan of God's Universe!  We
+advise thee to put up thy parchments;  to go home to thy place,
+and make no needless noise whatever.  Our heart's wish is to save
+thee:  yet there as thou art, hapless Anomaly, with nothing but
+thy yellow parchments, noisy futilities, and shotbelts and fox-
+brushes, who of gods or men can avert dark Fate?  Be counselled,
+ascertain if no work exist for thee on God's Earth;  if thou find
+no commanded-duty there but that of going gracefully idle?  Ask,
+inquire earnestly, with a half-frantic earnestness;  for the
+answer means Existence or Annihilation to thee.  We apprise thee
+of the world-old fact, becoming sternly disclosed again in these
+days, That he who cannot work in this Universe cannot get existed
+in it:  had he parchments to thatch the face of the world, these,
+combustible fallible sheepskin, cannot avail him.  Home, thou
+unfortunate;  and let us have at least no noise from thee!"
+
+Suppose the unfortunate Idle Aristocracy, as the unfortunate
+Working one has done, were to 'retire three days to _its_ bed,'
+and consider itself there, what o'clock it had become?--
+
+How have we to regret not only that men have 'no religion,' but
+that they have next to no reflection;  and go about with heads
+full of mere extraneous noises, with eyes wide-open but
+visionless,--for most part, in the somnambulist state!
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+Unworking Aristocracy
+
+
+It is well said, 'Land is the right basis of an Aristocracy;'
+whoever possesses the Land, he, more emphatically than any other,
+is the Governor, Viceking of the people on the Land.  It is in
+these days as it was in those of Henry Plantagenet and Abbot
+Samson;  as it will in all days be.  The Land is _Mother_ of us
+all;  nourishes, shelters, gladdens, lovingly enriches us all;
+in how many ways, from our first wakening to our last sleep on
+her blessed mother-bosom, does she, as with blessed mother-arms,
+enfold us all!
+
+The Hill I first saw the Sun rise over, when the Sun and I and
+all things were yet in their auroral hour, who can divorce me
+from it?  Mystic, deep as the world's centre, are the roots I
+have struck into my Native Soil;  no _tree_ that grows is rooted
+so.  From noblest Patriotism to humblest industrial Mechanism;
+from highest dying for your country, to lowest quarrying and
+coal-boring for it, a Nation's Life depends upon its Land.  Again
+and again we have to say, there can be no true Aristocracy but
+must possess the Land.
+
+Men talk of 'selling' Land.  Land, it is true, like Epic Poems
+and even higher things, in such a trading world, has to be
+presented in the market for what it will bring, and as we say be
+'sold:'  but the notion of 'selling,' for certain bits of metal,
+the _Iliad_ of Homer, how much more the _Land_ of the World-
+Creator, is a ridiculous impossibility!  We buy what is saleable
+of it;  nothing more was ever buyable.  Who can, or could, sell
+it to us?  Properly speaking, the Land belongs to these two:  To
+the Almighty God;  and to all His Children of Men that have ever
+worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on it.  No
+generation of men can or could, with never such solemnity and
+effort, sell Land on any other principle:  it is not the property
+of any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations
+that have worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall
+work on it.  Again, we hear it said, The soil of England, or of
+any country, is properly worth nothing, except the labour
+bestowed on it:  This, speaking even in the language of
+Eastcheap, is not correct.  The rudest space of country equal in
+extent to England, could a whole English Nation, with all their
+habitudes, arrangements, skills, with whatsoever they do carry
+within the skins of them, and cannot be stript of, suddenly take
+wing, and alight on it,--would be worth a very considerable
+thing!  Swiftly, within year and day, this English Nation, with
+its multiplex talents of ploughing, spinning, hammering, mining,
+road-making and trafficking, would bring a handsome value out of
+such a space of country.  On the other hand, fancy what an
+English Nation, once 'on the wing,' could have done with itself,
+had there been simply no soil, not even an inarable one, to
+alight on?  Vain all its talents for ploughing, hammering, and
+whatever else;  there is no Earth-room for this Nation with its
+talents:  this Nation will have to keep hovering on the wing,
+dolefully shrieking to and fro;  and perish piecemeal;  burying
+itself, down to the last soul of it, in the waste unfirmamented
+seas.  Ah yes, soil, with or without ploughing, is the gift of
+God.  The soil of all countries belongs evermore, in a very
+considerable degree, to the Almighty Maker!  The last stroke of
+labour bestowed on it is not the making of its value, but only
+the increasing thereof.
+
+It is very strange, the degree to which these truisms are
+forgotten in our days;  how, in the ever-whirling chaos of
+Formulas, we have quietly lost sight of Fact,--which it is so
+perilous not to keep forever in sight!  Fact, if we do not see
+it, will make us _feel_ it by and by!--From much loud controversy
+and Corn-Law debating there rises, loud though inarticulate, once
+more in these years, this very question among others, Who made
+the Land of England?  Who made it, this respectable English Land,
+wheat-growing, metalliferous, carboniferous, which will let
+readily hand over head for seventy millions or upwards, as it
+here lies:  who did make it?--"We!" answer the much-_consuming_
+Aristocracy;  "We!" as they ride in, moist with the sweat of
+Melton Mowbray:  "It is we that made it; or are the heirs,
+assigns and representatives of those who did!"--My brothers, You?
+Everlasting honour to you, then;  and Corn-Laws as many as you
+will, till your own deep stomachs cry Enough, or some voice of
+human pity for our famine bids you Hold!  Ye are as gods, that
+can create soil.  Soil-creating gods there is no withstanding.
+They have the might to sell wheat at what price they list;  and
+the right, to all lengths, and famine-lengths,--if they be
+pitiless infernal gods!  Celestial gods, I think, would stop
+short of the famine-price;  but no infernal nor any kind of god
+can be bidden stop!--Infatuated mortals, into what questions are
+you driving every thinking man in England?
+
+I say, you did _not_ make the Land of England;  and, by the
+possession of it, you _are_ bound to furnish guidance and
+governance to England!  That is the law of your position on this
+God's-Earth;  an everlasting act of Heaven's Parliament, not
+repealable in St. Stephen's or elsewhere!  True government and
+guidance;  not no-government and Laissez-faire;  how much less,
+misgovernment and Corn-Law!  There is not an imprisoned Worker
+looking out from these Bastilles but appeals, very audibly in
+Heaven's High Courts, against you, and me, and every one who is
+not imprisoned, "Why am I here?"  His appeal is audible in
+Heaven;  and will become audible enough on Earth too, if it
+remain unheeded here.  His appeal is against you, foremost of
+all;  you stand in the front-rank of the accused;  you, by the
+very place you hold, have first of all to answer him and Heaven!
+
+
+What looks maddest, miserablest in these mad and miserable Corn-
+Laws is independent altogether of their 'effect on wages,' their
+effect on 'increase of trade,' or any other such effect:  it is
+the continual maddening proof they protrude into the faces of all
+men, that our Governing Class, called by God and Nature and the
+inflexible law of Fact, either to do something towards governing,
+or to die and be abolished,--have not yet learned even to sit
+still, and do no mischief!  For no Anti-Corn-Law League yet asks
+more of them than this;--Nature and Fact, very imperatively,
+asking so much more of them.  Anti-Corn-Law League asks not, Do
+something;  but, Cease your destructive misdoing, Do ye nothing!
+
+Nature's message will have itself obeyed:  messages of mere Free-
+Trade, Anti-Corn-Law League and Laissez-faire, will then need
+small obeying!--Ye fools, in name of Heaven, work, work, at the
+Ark of Deliverance for yourselves and us, while hours are still
+granted you!  No:  instead of working at the Ark, they say, "We
+cannot get our hands kept rightly warm;"  and _sit obstinately
+burning the planks._  No madder spectacle at present exhibits
+itself under this Sun.
+
+
+The Working Aristocracy;  Mill-owners, Manufacturers, Commanders
+of Working Men:  alas, against them also much shall be brought in
+accusation;  much,--and the freest Trade in Corn, total abolition
+of Tariffs, and uttermost 'Increase of Manufactures' and
+'Prosperity of Commerce,' will permanently mend no jot of it.
+The Working Aristocracy must strike into a new path;  must
+understand that money alone is _not_ the representative either of
+man's success in the world, or of man's duties to man;  and
+reform their own selves from top to bottom, if they wish England
+reformed.  England will not be habitable long, unreformed.
+
+The Working Aristocracy--Yes, but on the threshold of all this,
+it is again and again to be asked, What of the Idle Aristocracy?
+Again and again, what shall we say of the Idle Aristocracy, the
+Owners of the Soil of England;  whose recognised function is that
+of handsomely consuming the rents of England, shooting the
+partridges of England, and as an agreeable amusement (if the
+purchase-money and other conveniences serve), dilettante-ing in
+Parliament and Quarter-Sessions for England?  We will say
+mournfully, in the presence of Heaven and Earth,--that we stand
+speechless, stupent, and know not what to say!  That a class of
+men entitled to live sumptuously on the marrow of the earth;
+permitted simply, nay entreated, and as yet entreated in vain, to
+do nothing at all in return, was never heretofore seen on the
+face of this Planet.  That such a class is transitory,
+exceptional, and, unless Nature's Laws fall dead, cannot
+continue.  That it has continued now a moderate while;  has, for
+the last fifty years, been rapidly attaining its state of
+perfection.  That it will have to find its duties and do them;
+or else that it must and will cease to be seen on the face of
+this Planet, which is a Working one, not an Idle one.
+
+Alas, alas, the Working Aristocracy, admonished by Trades-unions,
+Chartist conflagrations, above all by their own shrewd sense kept
+in perpetual communion with the fact of things, will assuredly
+reform themselves, and a working world will still be possible:--
+but the fate of the Idle Aristocracy, as one reads its horoscope
+hitherto in Corn-Laws and such like, is an abyss that fills one
+with despair.  Yes, my rosy fox-hunting brothers, a terrible
+_Hippocratic look_ reveals itself (God knows, not to my joy)
+through those fresh buxom countenances of yours.  Through your
+Corn-Law Majorities, Sliding-Scales, Protecting-Duties, Bribery-
+Elections and triumphant Kentish-fires a thinking eye discerns
+ghastly images of ruin, too ghastly for words;  a handwriting as
+of MENE, MENE? Men and brothers, on your Sliding-scale you seem
+sliding, and to have slid,--you little know whither!  Good God!
+did not a French Donothing Aristocracy, hardly above half a
+century ago, declare in like manner, and in its featherhead
+believe in like manner, "We cannot exist, and continue to dress
+and parade ourselves, on the just rent of the soil of France;
+but we must have farther payment than rent of the soil, we must
+be exempted from taxes too,"--we must have a Corn-Law to extend
+our rent?  This was in 1789:  in four years more--Did you look
+into the Tanneries of Meudon, and the long-naked making for
+themselves breeches of human skins!  May the merciful Heavens
+avert the omen;  may we be wiser, that so we be less wretched.
+
+
+A High Class without duties to do is like a tree planted on
+precipices;  from the roots of which all the earth has been
+crumbling.  Nature owns no man who is not a Martyr withal.  Is
+there a man who pretends to live luxuriously housed up;  screened
+from all work, from want, danger, hardship, the victory over
+which is what we name work;--he himself to sit serene, amid down-
+bolsters and appliances, and have all his work and battling done
+by other men?  And such man calls himself a _noble_-man?  His
+fathers worked for him, he says;  or successfully gambled for
+him:  here _he_ sits;  professes, not in sorrow but in pride,
+that he and his have done no work, time out of mind.  It is the
+law of the land, and is thought to be the law of the Universe,
+that he, alone of recorded men, shall have no task laid on him,
+except that of eating his cooked victuals, and not flinging
+himself out of window.  Once more I will say, there was no
+stranger spectacle ever shewn under this Sun.  A veritable fact
+in our England of the Nineteenth Century.  His victuals he does
+eat:  but as for keeping in the inside of the window,--have not
+his friends, like me, enough to do?  Truly, looking at his Corn-
+Laws, Game-Laws, Chandos-Clauses, Bribery-Elections and much
+else, you do shudder over the tumbling and plunging he makes,
+held back by the lappelles and coatskirts;  only a thin fence of
+window-glass before him,--and in the street mere horrid iron
+spikes!  My sick brother, as in hospital-maladies men do, thou
+dreamest of Paradises and Eldorados, which are far from thee.
+'Cannot I do what I like with my own?'  Gracious Heaven, my
+brother, this that thou seest with those sick eyes is no firm
+Eldorado, and Corn-Law Paradise of Donothings, but a dream of thy
+own fevered brain.  It is a glass-window, I tell thee, so many
+stories from the street;  where are iron spikes and the law
+of gravitation!
+
+What is the meaning of nobleness, if this be 'noble?'  In a
+valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful making others
+suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.  The chief of men is he
+who stands in the van of men;  fronting the peril which frightens
+back all others;  which, if it be not vanquished, will devour the
+others.  Every noble crown is, and on Earth will forever be, a
+crown of thorns.  The Pagan Hercules, why was he accounted a
+hero?  Because he had slain Nemean Lions, cleansed Augean
+Stables, undergone Twelve Labours only not too heavy for a god.
+In modern, as in ancient and all societies, the Aristocracy, they
+that assume the functions of an Aristocracy, doing them or not,
+have taken the post of honour;  which is the post of difficulty,
+the post of danger,--of death, if the difficulty be not overcome.
+_Il faut payer de sa vie._  Why was our life given us, if not
+that we should manfully give it?  Descend, O Donothing Pomp;
+quit thy down-cushions;  expose thyself to learn what wretches
+feel, and how to cure it!  The Czar of Russia became a dusty
+toiling shipwright;  worked with his axe in the Docks of Saardam;
+and his aim was small to thine.  Descend thou:  undertake this
+horrid 'living chaos of Ignorance and Hunger' weltering round thy
+feet;  say, "I will heal it, or behold I will die foremost in
+it."  Such is verily the law.  Everywhere and everywhen a man has
+to _'pay_ with his life;'  to do his work, as a soldier does, at
+the expense of life.  In no Piepowder earthly Court can you sue
+an Aristocracy to do its work, at this moment:  but in the Higher
+Court, which even it calls 'Court of Honour,' and which is the
+Court of Necessity withal, and the eternal Court of the Universe,
+in which all Fact comes to plead, and every Human Soul is an
+apparitor,--the Aristocracy is answerable, and even now
+answering, _there._
+
+
+Parchments?  Parchments are venerable:  but they ought at all
+times to represent, as near as they by possibility can, the
+writing of the Adamant Tablets;  otherwise they are not so
+venerable!  Benedict the Jew in vain pleaded parchments;  his
+usuries were too many.  The King said, "Go to, for all thy
+parchments, thou shalt pay just debt;  down with thy dust, or
+observe this tooth-forceps!"  Nature, a far juster Sovereign, has
+far terribler forceps.  Aristocracies, actual and imaginary,
+reach a time when parchment pleading does not avail them.  "Go
+to, for all thy parchments, thou shalt pay due debt!" shouts the
+Universe to them, in an emphatic manner.  They refuse to pay,
+confidently pleading parchment:  their best grinder-tooth, with
+horrible agony, goes out of their jaw.  Wilt thou pay now?  A
+second grinder, again in horrible agony, goes:  a second, and a
+third, and if need be, all the teeth and grinders, and the life
+itself with them;--and _then_ there is free payment, and an
+anatomist-subject into the bargain!
+
+Reform Bills, Corn-Law Abrogation Bills, and then Land-Tax Bill,
+Property-Tax Bill, and still dimmer list of _etceteras;_  grinder
+after grinder:---my lords and gentlemen, it were better for
+you to arise, and begin doing your work, than sit there and
+plead parchments!
+
+
+We write no Chapter on the Corn-Laws, in this place;  the Corn-
+Laws are too mad to have a Chapter.  There is a certain
+immorality, when there is not a necessity, in speaking about
+things finished;  in chopping into small pieces the already
+slashed and slain.  When the brains are out, why does not a
+Solecism die!  It is at its own peril if it refuse to die;  it
+ought to make all conceivable haste to die, and get itself
+buried!  The trade of Anti-Corn-Law Lecturer in these days, still
+an indispensable, is a highly tragic one.
+
+The Corn-Laws will go, and even soon go:  would we were all as
+sure of the Millennium as they are of going!  They go swiftly in
+these present months;  with an increase of velocity, an ever-
+deepening, ever-widening sweep of momentum, truly notable.  It is
+at the Aristocracy's own damage and peril, still more than at any
+other's whatsoever, that the Aristocracy maintains them;--at a
+damage, say only, as above computed, of a 'hundred thousand
+pounds an hour!'  The Corn-Laws keep all the air hot:  fostered
+by their fever-warmth, much that is evil, but much also, how
+much that is good and indispensable, is rapidly coming to life
+among us!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+Working Aristocracy
+
+
+A poor Working Mammonism getting itself 'strangled in the
+partridge-nets of an Unworking Dilettantism,' and bellowing
+dreadfully, and already black in the face, is surely a disastrous
+spectacle!  But of a Midas-eared Mammonism, which indeed at
+bottom all pure Mammonisms are, what better can you expect?  No
+better;--if not this, then something other equally disastrous, if
+not still more disastrous.  Mammonisms, grown asinine, have to
+become human again, and rational;  they have, on the whole, to
+cease to be Mammonisms, were it even on compulsion, and pressure
+of the hemp round their neck!--My friends of the Working
+Aristocracy, there are now a great many things which you also, in
+your extreme need, will have to consider.
+
+
+The Continental people, it would seem, are 'exporting our
+machinery, beginning to spin cotton and manufacture for
+themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that!'
+Sad news indeed;  but irremediable;--by no means the saddest
+news.  The saddest news is, that we should find our National
+Existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling
+manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other
+People.  A most narrow stand for a great Nation to base itself
+on!  A stand which, with all the Corn-Law Abrogations
+conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.
+
+My friends, suppose we quitted that stand;  suppose we came
+honestly down from it, and said:  "This is our minimum of
+cottonprices.  We care not, for the present, to make cotton any
+cheaper.  Do you, if it seem so blessed to you, make cotton
+cheaper.  Fill your lungs with cotton-fuzz, your hearts with
+copperas-fumes, with rage and mutiny;  become ye the general
+gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!"--I admire a Nation which
+fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other Nations, to
+the end of the world.  Brothers, we will cease to _under_sell
+them;  we will be content to _equal_-sell them;  to be happy
+selling equally with them!  I do not see the use of underselling
+them.  Cotton-cloth is already two-pence a yard or lower;  and
+yet bare backs were never more numerous among us.  Let inventive
+men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving how
+cotton can be made cheaper;  and try to invent, a little, how
+cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier
+divided among us!  Let inventive men consider, Whether the Secret
+of this Universe, and of Man's Life there, does, after all, as we
+rashly fancy it, consist in making money?  There is One God,
+just, supreme, almighty:  but is Mammon the name of him?--With a
+Hell which means 'Failing to make money,' I do not think there is
+any Heaven possible that would suit one well;  nor so much as an
+Earth that can be habitable long!  In brief, all this Mammon-
+Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and
+Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest
+Gospels ever preached on Earth;  or altogether the shabbiest.
+Even with Dilettante partridge-nets, and at a horrible
+expenditure of pain, who shall regret to see the entirely
+transient, and at best somewhat despicable life strangled out of
+_it?_  At the best, as we say, a somewhat despicable, unvenerable
+thing, this same 'Laissez-faire;'  and now, at the worst, fast
+growing an altogether detestable one!
+
+"But what is to be done with our manufacturing population, with
+our agricultural, with our ever-increasing population?" cry
+many.--Aye, what?  Many things can be done with them, a hundred
+things, and a thousand things,--had we once got a soul, and begun
+to try.  This one thing, of doing for them by 'underselling all
+people,' and filling our own bursten pockets and appetites by the
+road;  and turning over all care for any 'population,' or human
+or divine consideration except cash only, to the winds, with a
+"Laissez-faire" and the rest of it:  this is evidently not the
+thing.  'Farthing cheaper per yard:'  no great Nation can stand
+on the apex of such a pyramid;  screwing itself higher and
+higher;  balancing itself on its great-toe!  Can England not
+subsist without being _above_ all people in working?  England
+never deliberately purposed such a thing.  If England work better
+than all people, it shall be well.  England, like an honest
+worker, will work as well as she can;  and hope the gods may
+allow her to live on that basis.  Laissez-faire and much else
+being once well dead, how many 'impossibles' will become
+possible!  They are 'impossible,' as cotton-cloth at two-pence an
+ell was--till men set about making it.  The inventive genius of
+great England will not forever sit patient with mere wheels and
+pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers whirring in the head
+of it.  The inventive genius of England is not a Beaver's, or a
+Spinner's or Spider's genius:  it is a _Man's_ genius, I hope,
+with a God over him!
+
+Supply-and-demand?  One begins to be weary of such work.  Leave
+all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of
+applause:--it is the Gospel of Despair!  Man is a Patent-
+Digester, then:  only give him Free Trade, Free digesting-room;
+and each of us digest what he can come at, leaving the rest to
+Fate!  My unhappy brethren of the Working Mammonism, my unhappier
+brethren of the Idle Dilettantism, no world was ever held
+together in that way for long.  A world of mere Patent-Digesters
+will soon have nothing to digest:  such world ends, and by Law of
+Nature must end, in 'over-population;'  in howling universal
+famine, 'impossibility,' and suicidal madness, as of endless dog-
+kennels run rabid.  Supply-and-demand shall do its full part, and
+Free Trade shall be free as air;--thou of the shotbelts, see thou
+forbid it not, with those paltry, _worse_ than 'Mammonish'
+swindleries and Sliding-scales of thine, which are seen to be
+swindleries for all thy canting, which in times like ours are
+very scandalous to see!  And Trade never so well freed, and all
+Tariffs settled or abolished, and Supply-and-demand in full
+operation,--let us all know that we have yet done nothing;  that
+we have merely cleared the ground for doing.
+
+Yes, were the Corn-Laws ended tomorrow, there is nothing yet
+ended;  there is only room made for all manner of things
+beginning.  The Corn-Laws gone, and Trade made free, it is as
+good as certain this paralysis of industry will pass away.  We
+shall have another period of commercial enterprise, of victory
+and prosperity;  during which, it is likely, much money will
+again be made, and all the people may, by the extant methods,
+still for a space of years, be kept alive and physically fed.
+The strangling band of Famine will be loosened from our necks;
+we shall have room again to breathe;  time to bethink ourselves,
+to repent and consider!  A precious and thrice-precious space of
+years;  wherein to struggle as for life in reforming our foul
+ways;  in alleviating, instructing, regulating our people;
+seeking, as for life, that something like spiritual food be
+imparted them, some real governance and guidance be provided
+them!  It will be a priceless time.  For our new period or
+paroxysm of commercial prosperity will and can, on the old
+methods of 'Competition and Devil take the hindmost,' prove but a
+paroxysm:  a new paroxysm,--likely enough, if we do not use it
+better, to be our _last._  In this, of itself, is no salvation.
+If our Trade in twenty years, 'flourishing' as never Trade
+flourished, could double itself;  yet then also, by the old
+Laissez-faire method, our Population is doubled:  we shall
+then be as we are, only twice as many of us, twice and ten
+times as unmanageable!
+
+
+All this dire misery, therefore; all this of our poor Workhouse
+Workmen, of our Chartisms, Trades-strikes, Corn-Laws, Toryisms,
+and the general downbreak of Laissez-faire in these days,--may we
+not regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom of Nature, saying to
+us:  Behold!  Supply-and-demand is not the one Law of Nature;
+Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man,--how far from
+it!  Deep, far deeper than Supply-and-demand, are Laws,
+Obligations sacred as Man's Life itself:  these also, if you will
+continue to do work, you shall now learn and obey.  He that will
+learn them, behold Nature is on his side, he shall yet work and
+prosper with noble rewards.  He that will not learn them, Nature
+is against him;  he shall not be able to do work in Nature's
+empire,--not in hers.  Perpetual mutiny, contention, hatred,
+isolation, execration shall wait on his footsteps, till all men
+discern that the thing which he attains, however golden it look
+or be, is not success, but the want of success.
+
+Supply-and-demand,--alas!  For what noble work was there ever yet
+any audible 'demand' in that poor sense?  The man of Macedonia,
+speaking in vision to an Apostle Paul, "Come over and help us,"
+did not specify what rate of wages he would give!  Or was the
+Christian Religion itself accomplished by Prize-Essays,
+Bridgewater Bequests, and a 'minimum of Four thousand five
+hundred a year?''  No demand that I heard of was made then,
+audible in any Labour-market, Manchester Chamber of Commerce, or
+other the like emporium and hiring establishment;  silent were
+all these from any whisper of such demand;--powerless were all
+these to 'supply' it, had the demand been in thunder and
+earthquake, with gold Eldorados and Mahometan Paradises for the
+reward.  Ah me, into what waste latitudes, in this Time-Voyage,
+have we wandered;  like adventurous Sindbads;--where the men go
+about as if by galvanism, with meaningless glaring eyes, and have
+no soul, but only a beaver-faculty and stomach!  The haggard
+despair of Cotton-factory, Coal-mine operatives, Chandos Farm-
+labourers, in these days, is painful to behold;  but not so
+painful, hideous to the inner sense, as the brutish god-
+forgetting Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, and Life-theory, which we
+hear jangled on all hands of us, in senate-houses, spouting-
+clubs, leading-articles, pulpits and platforms, everywhere as the
+Ultimate Gospel and candid Plain-English of Man's Life, from the
+throats and pens and thoughts of all but all men!--
+
+Enlightened Philosophies, like Moliere Doctors, will tell you:
+"Enthusiasms, Self-sacrifice, Heaven, Hell and such like:  yes,
+all that was true enough for old stupid times;  all that used to
+be true:  but we have changed all that, _nous avons change tout
+cela!"_  Well; if the heart be got round now into the right side,
+and the liver to the left;  if man have no heroism in him deeper
+than the wish to eat, and in his soul there dwell now no Infinite
+of Hope and Awe, and no divine Silence can become imperative
+because it is not Sinai Thunder, and no tie will bind if it be
+not that of Tyburn gallows-ropes,--then verily you have changed
+all that;  and for it, and for you, and for me, behold the Abyss
+and nameless Annihilation is ready.  So scandalous a beggarly
+Universe deserves indeed nothing else;  I cannot say I would save
+it from Annihilation.  Vacuum, and the serene Blue, will be much
+handsomer;  easier too for all of us.  I, for one, decline living
+as a Patent-Digester.  Patent-Digester, Spinning-Mule, Mayfair
+Clothes-Horse:  many thanks, but your Chaosships will have the
+goodness to excuse me!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+Plugson of Undershot
+
+
+One thing I do know:  Never, on this Earth, was the relation of
+man to man long carried on by Cash-payment alone.  If, at any
+time, a philosophy of Laissez-faire, Competition and Supply-and-
+demand, start up as the exponent of human relations, expect that
+it will soon end.
+
+Such philosophies will arise:  for man's philosophies are usually
+the 'supplement of his practice;'  some ornamental Logic-varnish,
+some outer skin of Articulate Intelligence, with which he strives
+to render his dumb Instinctive Doings presentable when they are
+done.  Such philosophies will arise;  be preached as Mammon-
+Gospels, the ultimate Evangel of the World;  be believed, with
+what is called belief, with much superficial bluster, and a kind
+of shallow satisfaction real in its way:--but they are ominous
+gospels!  They are the sure, and even swift, forerunner of great
+changes.  Expect that the old System of Society is done, is dying
+and fallen into dotage, when it begins to rave in that fashion.
+Most Systems that I have watched the death of, for the last three
+thousand years, have gone just so.  The Ideal, the True and Noble
+that was in them having faded out, and nothing now remaining but
+naked Egoism, vulturous Greediness, they cannot live;  they are
+bound and inexorably ordained by the oldest Destinies, Mothers of
+the Universe, to die.  Curious enough:  they thereupon, as I have
+pretty generally noticed, devise some light comfortable kind of
+'wine-and-walnuts philosophy' for themselves, this of Supply-and-
+demand or another;  and keep saying, during hours of mastication
+and rumination, which they call hours of meditation:  "Soul, take
+thy ease, it is all _well_ that thou art a vulture-soul;"
+--and pangs of dissolution come upon them, oftenest before they
+are aware!
+
+Cash-payment never was, or could except for a few years be, the
+union-bond of man to man.  Cash never yet paid one man fully his
+deserts to another;  nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth
+to the end of the world.  I invite his Grace of Castle-Rackrent
+to reflect on this;--does he think that a Land Aristocracy when
+it becomes a Land Auctioneership can have long to live?  Or that
+Sliding-scales will increase the vital stamina of it?  The
+indomitable Plugson too, of the respected Firm of Plugson, Hunks
+and Company, in St. Dolly Undershot, is invited to reflect on
+this;  for to him also it will be new, perhaps even newer.
+Bookkeeping by double entry is admirable, and records several
+things in an exact manner.  But the Mother-Destinies also keep
+their Tablets;  in Heaven's Chancery also there goes on a
+recording;  and things, as my Moslem friends say, are 'written on
+the iron leaf.'
+
+Your Grace and Plugson, it is like, go to Church occasionally:
+did you never in vacant moments, with perhaps a dull parson
+droning to you, glance into your New Testament, and the cash-
+account stated four times over, by a kind of quadruple entry,--in
+the Four Gospels there?  I consider that a cash-account, and
+balance-statement of work done and wages paid, worth attending
+to.  Precisely _such,_ though on a smaller scale, go on at all
+moments under this Sun;  and the statement and balance of them in
+the Plugson Ledgers and on the Tablets of Heaven's Chancery are
+discrepant exceedingly;--which ought really to teach, and to have
+long since taught, an indomitable common-sense Plugson of
+Undershot, much more an unattackable _un_common-sense Grace of
+Rackrent, a thing or two!--In brief, we shall have to dismiss the
+Cash-Gospel rigorously into its own place:  we shall have to
+know, on the threshold, that either there is some infinitely
+deeper Gospel, subsidiary, explanatory and daily and hourly
+corrective, to the Cash one;  or else that the Cash one itself
+and all others are fast traveling!
+
+
+For all human things do require to have an Ideal in them;  to
+have some Soul in them, as we said, were it only to keep the Body
+unputrefied.  And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul,
+place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body
+with its own nobleness;  will gradually, incessantly, mould,
+modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last
+beautiful, and to a certain degree divine!--O, if you could
+dethrone that Brute-god Mammon, and put a Spirit-god in his
+place!  One way or other, he must and will have to be dethroned.
+Fighting, for example, as I often say to myself, Fighting with
+steel murder-tools is surely a much uglier operation than
+Working, take it how you will.  Yet even of Fighting, in
+religious Abbot Samson's days, see what a Feudalism there had
+grown,--a 'glorious Chivalry,' much besung down to the present
+day.  Was not that one of the 'impossiblest' things?  Under the
+sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth, and
+hellfire eyes, hacking one another's flesh;  converting precious
+living bodies, and priceless living souls, into nameless masses
+of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure.  How did a
+Chivalry ever come out of that;  how anything that was not
+hideous, scandalous, infernal?  It will be a question worth
+considering by and by.
+
+I remark, for the present, only two things:  first, that the
+Fighting itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a Fighting
+without cause, but more or less with cause.  Man is created to
+fight;  he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier;
+his life 'a battle and a march,' under the right General.  It is
+forever indispensable for a man to fight:  now with Necessity,
+with Barrenness, Scarcity, with Puddles, Bogs, tangled Forests,
+unkempt Cotton;--now also with the hallucinations of his poor
+fellow Men.  Hallucinatory visions rise in the head of my poor
+fellow man;  make him claim over me rights which are not his.
+All Fighting, as we noticed long ago, is the dusty conflict of
+strengths each thinking itself the strongest, or, in other words,
+the justest;--of Mights which do in the long-run, and forever
+will in this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights.  In
+conflict the perishable part of them, beaten sufficiently, flies
+off into dust:  this process ended, appears the imperishable, the
+true and exact.
+
+And now let us remark a second thing:  how, in these baleful
+operations, a noble devout-hearted Chevalier will comfort
+himself, and an ignoble godless Bucanier and Chactaw Indian.
+Victory is the aim of each.  But deep in the heart of the noble
+man it lies forever legible, that, as an Invisible just God made
+him, so will and must God's justice and this only, were it never
+so invisible, ultimately prosper in all controversies and
+enterprises and battles whatsoever.  What an Influence;  ever-
+present,--like a Soul in the rudest Caliban of a body;  like a
+ray of Heaven, and illuminative creative _Fiat-Lux,_ in the
+wastest terrestrial Chaos!  Blessed divine Influence, traceable
+even in the horror of Battlefields and garments rolled in blood:
+how it ennobles even the Battlefield;  and, in place of a Chactaw
+Massacre, makes it a Field of Honour!  A Battlefield too is
+great.  Considered well, it is a kind of Quintessence of Labour;
+Labour distilled into its utmost concentration;  the significance
+of years of it compressed into an hour.  Here too thou shalt be
+strong, and not in muscle only, if thou wouldst prevail.  Here
+too thou shalt be strong of heart, noble of soul;  thou shalt
+dread no pain or death, thou shalt not love ease or life;  in
+rage, thou shalt remember mercy, justice;--thou shalt be a Knight
+and not a Chactaw, if thou wouldst prevail!  It is the rule of
+all battles, against hallucinating fellow Men, against unkempt
+Cotton, or whatsoever battles they may be which a man in this
+world has to fight.
+
+Howel Davies' dyes the West Indian Seas with blood, piles his
+decks with plunder;  approves himself the expertest Seaman, the
+daringest Seafighter:  but he gains no lasting victory, lasting
+victory is not possible for him.  Not, had he fleets larger than
+the combined British Navy all united with him in bucaniering.
+He, once for all, cannot prosper in his duel.  He strikes down
+his man:  yes;  but his man, or his man's representative, has no
+notion to lie struck down;  neither, though slain ten times, will
+he keep so lying;--nor has the Universe any notion to keep him so
+lying!  On the contrary, the Universe and he have, at all
+moments, all manner of motives to start up again, and desperately
+fight again.  Your Napoleon is flung out, at last, to St. Helena;
+the latter end of him sternly compensating the beginning.  The
+Bucanier strikes down a man, a hundred or a million men:  but
+what profits it?  He has one enemy never to be struck down;  nay
+two enemies:  Mankind and the Maker of Men.  On the great scale
+or on the small, in fighting of men or fighting of difficulties,
+I will not embark my venture with Howel Davies:  it is not the
+Bucanier, it is the Hero only that can gain victory, that can do
+more than seem to succeed.  These things will deserve meditating;
+for they apply to all battle and soldiership, all struggle and
+effort whatsoever in this Fight of Life.  It is a poor Gospel,
+Cash-Gospel or whatever name it have, that does not, with clear
+tone, uncontradictable, carrying conviction to all hearts,
+forever keep men in mind of these things.
+
+Unhappily, my indomitable friend Plugson of Undershot has, in a
+great degree, forgotten them;--as, alas, all the world has;  as,
+alas, our very Dukes and Soul-Overseers have, whose special trade
+it was to remember them!  Hence these tears.--Plugson, who has
+indomitably spun Cotton merely to gain thousands of pounds, I
+have to call as yet a Bucanier and Chactaw;  till there come
+something better, still more indomitable from him.  His hundred
+Thousand-pound Notes, if there be nothing other, are to me but as
+the hundred Scalps in a Chactaw wigwam.  The blind Plugson:  he
+was a Captain of Industry, born member of the Ultimate genuine
+Aristocracy of this Universe, could he have known it!  These
+thousand men that span and toiled round him, they were a regiment
+whom he had enlisted, man by man;  to make war on a very genuine
+enemy:  Bareness of back, and disobedient Cotton-fibre, which
+will not, unless forced to it, consent to cover bare backs.  Here
+is a most genuine enemy;  over whom all creatures will wish him
+victory.  He enlisted his thousand men;  said to them, "Come,
+brothers, let us have a dash at Cotton!"  They follow with
+cheerful shout;  they gain such a victory over Cotton as the
+Earth has to admire and clap hands at:  but, alas, it is yet only
+of the Bucanier or Chactaw sort,--as good as no victory!  Foolish
+Plugson of St. Dolly Undershot:  does he hope to become
+illustrious by hanging up the scalps in his wigwam, the hundred
+thousands at his banker's, and saying, Behold my scalps?  Why,
+Plugson, even thy own host is all in mutiny:  Cotton is
+conquered;  but the 'bare backs'--are worse covered than ever!
+Indomitable Plugson, thou must cease to be a Chactaw;  thou and
+others;  thou thyself, if no other!
+
+Did William the Norman Bastard, or any of his Taillefers,
+_Ironcutters,_ manage so?  Ironcutter, at the end of the
+campaign, did not turn off his thousand fighters, but said to
+them:  "Noble fighters, this is the land we have gained;  be I
+Lord in it,--what we will call _Law-ward,_ maintainer and
+_keeper_ of Heaven's _Laws:_  be I _Law-ward,_ or in brief
+orthoepy _Lord_ in it, and be ye Loyal Men around me in it;  and
+we will stand by one another, as soldiers round a captain, for
+again we shall have need of one another!"  Plugson, bucanier-
+like, says to them:  "Noble spinners, this is the Hundred
+Thousand we have gained, wherein I mean to dwell and plant
+vineyards;  the hundred thousand is mine, the three and sixpence
+daily was yours:  adieu, noble spinners;  drink my health with
+this groat each, which I give you over and above!"  The entirely
+unjust Captain of Industry, say I;  not Chevalier, but Bucanier!
+'Commercial Law' does indeed acquit him;  asks, with wide eyes,
+What else?  So too Howel Davies asks, Was it not according to the
+strictest Bucanier Custom?  Did I depart in any jot or tittle
+from the Laws of the Bucaniers?
+
+After all, money, as they say, is miraculous.  Plugson wanted
+victory;  as Chevaliers and Bucaniers, and all men alike do.  He
+found money recognised, by the whole world with one assent, as
+the true symbol, exact equivalent and synonym of victory;--and
+here we have him, a grim-browed, indomitable Bucanier, coming
+home to us with a 'victory,' which the whole world is _ceasing_
+to clap hands at!  The whole world, taught somewhat impressively,
+is beginning to recognise that such victory is but half a
+victory;  and that now, if it please the Powers, we must--have
+the other half!
+
+Money is miraculous.  What miraculous facilities has it yielded,
+will it yield us;  but also what never-imagined confusions,
+obscurations has it brought in;  down almost to total extinction
+of the moral-sense in large masses of mankind!  'Protection of
+property,' of what is _'mine,'_ means with most men protection of
+money,--the thing which, had I a thousand padlocks over it, is
+least of all _mine;_  is, in a manner, scarcely worth calling
+mine!  The symbol shall be held sacred, defended everywhere with
+tipstaves, ropes and gibbets;  the thing signified shall be
+composedly cast to the dogs.  A human being who has worked with
+human beings clears all scores with them, cuts himself with
+triumphant completeness forever loose from them, by paying down
+certain shillings and pounds.  Was it not the wages I promised
+you?  There they are, to the last sixpence,--according to the
+Laws of the Bucaniers!--Yes, indeed;--and, at such times, it
+becomes imperatively necessary to ask all persons, bucaniers and
+others, Whether these same respectable Laws of the Bucaniers are
+written on God's eternal Heavens at all, on the inner Heart of
+Man at all;  or on the respectable Bucanier Logbook merely, for
+the convenience of bucaniering merely?  What a question;--whereat
+Westminster Hall shudders to its driest parchment;  and on the
+dead wigs each particular horsehair stands on end!
+
+The Laws of Laissez-faire, O Westminster, the laws of industrial
+Captain and industrial Soldier, how much more of idle Captain and
+industrial Soldier, will need to be remodelled, and modified, and
+rectified in a hundred and a hundred ways,--and _not_ in the
+Sliding-scale direction, but in the totally opposite one!  With
+two million industrial Soldiers already sitting in Bastilles, and
+five million pining on potatoes, methinks Westminster cannot
+begin too soon!--A man has other obligations laid on him, in
+God's Universe, than the payment of cash:  these also
+Westminster, if it will continue to exist and have board-wages,
+must contrive to take some charge of:--by Westminster or by
+another, they must and will be taken charge of;  be, with
+whatever difficulty, got articulated, got enforced, and to a
+certain approximate extent, put in practice.  And, as I say, it
+cannot be too soon!  For Mammonism, left to itself, has become
+Midas-eared;  and with all its gold mountains, sits starving for
+want of bread:  and Dilettantism with its partridge-nets, in this
+extremely earnest Universe of ours, is playing somewhat too high
+a game.  'A man by the very look of him promises so much:'  yes;
+and by the rent-roll of him does he promise nothing?--
+
+
+Alas, what a business will this be, which our Continental
+friends, groping this long while somewhat absurdly about it and
+about it, call 'Organisation of Labour;'--which must be taken out
+of the hands of absurd windy persons, and put into the hands of
+wise, laborious, modest and valiant men, to begin with it
+straightway:  to proceed with it, and succeed in it more and
+more, if Europe, at any rate if England, is to continue habitable
+much longer.  Looking at the kind of most noble Corn-Law Dukes or
+Practical _Duces_ we have, and also of right reverend Soul-
+Overseers, Christian Spiritual _Duces_ 'on a minimum of four
+thousand five hundred,' one's hopes are a little chilled.
+Courage, nevertheless;  there are many brave men in England!  My
+indomitable Plugson,--nay is there not even in thee some hope?
+Thou art hitherto a Bucanier, as it was written and prescribed
+for thee by an evil world:  but in that grim brow, in that
+indomitable heart which _can_ conquer Cotton, do there not
+perhaps lie other ten times nobler conquests?
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XI
+
+Labour
+
+
+For there is a perennial nobleness, and even sacredness, in Work.
+Were he never so benighted, forgetful of his high calling, there
+is always hope in a man that actually and earnestly works:  in
+Idleness alone is there perpetual despair.  Work, never so
+Mammonish, mean, is in communication with Nature;  the real
+desire to get Work done will itself lead one more and more to
+truth, to Nature's appointments and regulations, which are truth.
+The latest Gospel in this world is, Know thy work and do it.
+'Know thyself:'  long enough has that poor 'self' of thine
+tormented thee;  thou wilt never get to 'know' it, I believe!
+Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself;  thou art an
+unknowable individual:  know what thou canst work at;  and work
+at it, like a Hercules!  That will be thy better plan.
+
+It has been written, 'an endless significance lies in Work;'  a
+man perfects himself by working.  Foul jungles are cleared away,
+fair seedfields rise instead, and stately cities;  and withal the
+man himself first ceases to be a jungle and foul unwholesome
+desert thereby.  Consider how, even in the meanest sorts of
+Labour, the whole soul of a man is composed into a kind of real
+harmony, the instant he sets himself to work!  Doubt, Desire,
+Sorrow, Remorse, Indignation, Despair itself, all these like
+helldogs lie beleaguering the soul of the poor dayworker, as of
+every man:  but he bends himself with free valour against his
+task, and all these are stilled, all these shrink murmuring far
+off into their caves.  The man is now a man.  The blessed glow
+of Labour in him, is it not as purifying fire, wherein all
+poison is burnt up, and of sour smoke itself there is made
+bright blessed flame!
+
+Destiny, on the whole, has no other way of cultivating us.  A
+formless Chaos, once set it _revolving,_ grows round and ever
+rounder;  ranges itself, by mere force of gravity, into strata,
+spherical courses;  is no longer a Chaos, but a round compacted
+World.  What would become of the Earth, did she cease to revolve?
+In the poor old Earth, so long as she revolves, all inequalities,
+irregularities disperse themselves;  all irregularities are
+incessantly becoming regular.  Hast thou looked on the Potter's
+wheel,--one of the venerablest objects;  old as the Prophet
+Ezechiel and far older?  Rude lumps of clay, how they spin
+themselves up, by mere quick whirling, into beautiful circular
+dishes.  And fancy the most assiduous Potter, but without his
+wheel;  reduced to make dishes, or rather amorphous botches, by
+mere kneading and baking!  Even such a Potter were Destiny, with
+a human soul that would rest and lie at ease, that would not work
+and spin!  Of an idle unrevolving man the kindest Destiny, like
+the most assiduous Potter without wheel, can bake and knead
+nothing other than a botch;  let her spend on him what expensive
+colouring, what gilding and enamelling she will, he is but a
+botch.  Not a dish;  no, a bulging, kneaded, crooked, shambling,
+squint-cornered, amorphous botch,--a mere enamelled vessel of
+dishonour!  Let the idle think of this.
+
+Blessed is he who has found his work;  let him ask no other
+blessedness.  He has a work, a life-purpose;  he has found it,
+and will follow it!  How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn
+by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence,
+like an ever-deepening river there, it runs and flows;--draining
+off the sour festering water, gradually from the root of the
+remotest grass-blade;  making, instead of pestilential swamp, a
+green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream.  How blessed
+for the meadow itself, let the stream and _its_ value be great or
+small!  Labour is Life:  from the inmost heart of the Worker
+rises his god-given Force, the sacred celestial Life-essence
+breathed into him by Almighty God;  from his inmost heart awakens
+him to all nobleness,--to all knowledge, 'self-knowledge' and
+much else, so soon as Work fitly begins.  Knowledge?  The
+knowledge that will hold good in working, cleave thou to that;
+for Nature herself accredits that, says Yea to that.  Properly
+thou hast no other knowledge but what thou hast got by working:
+the rest is yet all a hypothesis of knowledge;  a thing to be
+argued of in schools, a thing floating in the clouds, in endless
+logic-vortices, till we try it and fix it.  'Doubt, of whatever
+kind, can be ended by Action alone.'
+
+
+And again, hast thou valued Patience, Courage, Perseverance,
+Openness to light;  readiness to own thyself mistaken, to do
+better next time?  All these, all virtues, in wrestling with the
+dim brute Powers of Fact, in ordering of thy fellows in such
+wrestle, there and elsewhere not at all, thou wilt continually
+learn.  Set down a brave Sir Christopher in the middle of black
+ruined Stoneheaps, of foolish unarchitectural Bishops, redtape
+Officials, idle Nell-Gwyn Defenders of the Faith;  and see
+whether he will ever raise a Paul's Cathedral out of all that,
+yea or no!  Rough, rude, contradictory are all things and
+persons, from the mutinous masons and Irish hodmen, up to the
+idle Nell-Gwyn Defenders, to blustering redtape Officials,
+foolish unarchitectural Bishops.  All these things and persons
+are there not for Christopher's sake and his Cathedral's;  they
+are there for their own sake mainly!  Christopher will have to
+conquer and constrain all these,--if he be able.  All these are
+against him.  Equitable Nature herself, who carries her
+mathematics and architectonics not on the face of her, but deep
+in the hidden heart of her,--Nature herself is but partially for
+him; will be wholly against him, if he constrain her not!  His
+very money, where is it to come from?  The pious munificence of
+England lies far-scattered, distant, unable to speak, and say, "I
+am here;"--must be spoken to before it can speak.  Pious
+munificence, and all help, is so silent, invisible like the gods;
+impediment, contradictions manifold are so loud and near!  O
+brave Sir Christopher, trust thou in those, notwithstanding, and
+front all these;  understand all these;  by valiant patience,
+noble effort, insight, by man's strength, vanquish and compel all
+these,--and, on the whole, strike down victoriously the last
+topstone of that Paul's Edifice;  thy monument for certain
+centuries, the stamp 'Great Man' impressed very legibly on
+Portland-stone there!--Yes, all manner of help, and pious
+response from Men or Nature, is always what we call silent;
+cannot speak or come to light, till it be seen, till it be spoken
+to.  Every noble work is at first impossible.  In very truth, for
+every noble work the possibilities will lie diffused through
+Immensity;  inarticulate, undiscoverable except to faith.  Like
+Gideon thou shalt spread out thy fleece at the door of thy tent;
+see whether under the wide arch of Heaven there be any bounteous
+moisture, or none.  Thy heart and life-purpose shall be as a
+miraculous Gideon's fleece, spread out in silent appeal to
+Heaven;  and from the kind Immensities, what from the poor unkind
+Localities and town and country Parishes there never could,
+blessed dew-moisture to suffice thee shall have fallen!
+
+Work is of a religious nature:--work is of a _brave_ nature;
+which it is the aim of all religion to be.  'All work of man is
+as the swimmer's:'  a waste ocean threatens to devour him;  if he
+front it not bravely, it will keep its word.  By incessant wise
+defiance of it, lusty rebuke and buffet of it, behold how it
+loyally supports him, bears him as its conqueror along.  'It
+is so,' says Goethe, with all things that man undertakes in
+this world.'
+
+Brave Sea-captain, Norse Sea-king,--Columbus, my hero, royalest
+Sea-king of all!  It is no friendly environment this of thine, in
+the waste deep waters;  around thee mutinous discouraged souls,
+behind thee disgrace and ruin, before thee the unpenetrated veil
+of Night.  Brother, these wild water-mountains, bounding from
+their deep bases (ten miles deep, I am told), are not entirely
+there on thy behalf!  Meseems _they_ have other work than
+floating thee forward:--and the huge Winds, that sweep from Ursa
+Major to the Tropics and Equators, dancing their giant-waltz
+through the kingdoms of Chaos and Immensity, they care little
+about filling rightly or filling wrongly the small shoulder-of-
+mutton sails in this cockle-skiff of thine!  Thou art not among
+articulate-speaking friends, my brother;  thou art among
+immeasurable dumb monsters, tumbling, howling wide as the world
+here.  Secret, far off, invisible to all hearts but thine, there
+lies a help in them:  see how thou wilt get at that.  Patiently
+thou wilt wait till the mad Southwester spend itself, saving
+thyself by dexterous science of defence, the while;  valiantly,
+with swift decision, wilt thou strike in, when the favouring
+East, the Possible, springs up.  Mutiny of men thou wilt sternly
+repress;  weakness, despondency, thou wilt cheerily encourage:
+thou wilt swallow down complaint, unreason, weariness, weakness
+of others and thyself;--how much wilt thou swallow down!  There
+shall be a depth of Silence in thee, deeper than this Sea, which
+is but ten miles deep:  a Silence unsoundable;  known to God
+only.  Thou shalt be a Great Man.  Yes, my World-Soldier, thou of
+the World Marine-service,--thou wilt have to be _greater_ than
+this tumultuous unmeasured World here round thee is:  thou, in
+thy strong soul, as with wrestler's arms, shalt embrace it,
+harness it down;  and make it bear thee on,--to new Americas, or
+whither God wills!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XII
+
+Reward
+
+
+'Religion,' I said;  for properly speaking, all true Work is
+Religion:  and whatsoever Religion is not Work may go and dwell
+among the Brahmins, Antinomians, Spinning Dervishes, or where it
+will;  with me it shall have no harbour.  Admirable was that of
+the old Monks, _'Laborare est Orare,_ Work is Worship.'
+
+Older than all preached Gospels was this unpreached,
+inarticulate, but ineradicable, forever-enduring Gospel:  Work,
+and therein have well-being.  Man, Son of Earth and of Heaven,
+lies there not, in the innermost heart of thee, a Spirit of
+active Method, a Force for Work;--and burns like a painfully
+smouldering fire, giving thee no rest till thou unfold it, till
+thou write it down in beneficent Facts around thee!  What is
+immethodic, waste, thou shalt make methodic, regulated, arable;
+obedient and productive to thee.  Wheresoever thou findest
+Disorder, there is thy eternal enemy;  attack him swiftly, subdue
+him;  make Order of him, the subject not of Chaos, but of
+Intelligence, Divinity and Thee!  The thistle that grows in thy
+path, dig it out, that a blade of useful grass, a drop of
+nourishing milk, may grow there instead.  The waste cotton-shrub,
+gather its waste white down, spin it, weave it;  that, in place
+of idle litter, there may be folded webs, and the naked skin of
+man be covered.
+
+But above all, where thou findest Ignorance, Stupidity, Brute-
+mindedness,--yes, there, with or without Church-tithes and
+Shovel-hat, with or without Talfourd-Mahon Copyrights, or were it
+with mere dungeons and gibbets and crosses, attack it, I say;
+smite it wisely, unweariedly, and rest not while thou livest and
+it lives;  but smite, smite, in the name of God!  The Highest
+God, as I understand it, does audibly so command thee;  still
+audibly, if thou have ears to hear.  He, even He, with his
+_un_spoken voice, awfuler than any Sinai thunders or syllabled
+speech of Whirlwinds;  for the SILENCE of deep Eternities, of
+Worlds from beyond the morning-stars, does it not speak to thee?
+The unborn Ages;  the old Graves, with their long-mouldering
+dust, the very tears that wetted it now all dry,--do not these
+speak to thee, what ear hath not heard?  The deep Death-kingdoms,
+the Stars in their never-resting courses, all Space and all Time,
+proclaim it to thee in continual silent admonition.  Thou too, if
+ever man should, shalt work while it is called Today.  For the
+Night cometh, wherein no man can work.
+
+All true Work is sacred;  in all true Work, were it but true
+hand-labour, there is something of divineness.  Labour, wide as
+the Earth, has its summit in Heaven.  Sweat of the brow;  and up
+from that to sweat of the brain, sweat of the heart;  which
+includes all Kepler calculations, Newton meditations, all
+Sciences, all spoken Epics, all acted Heroisms, Martyrdoms,--up
+to that 'Agony of bloody sweat,' which all men have called
+divine!  O brother, if this is not 'worship,' then I say, the
+more pity for worship;  for this is the noblest thing yet
+discovered under God's sky.  Who art thou that complainest of thy
+life of toil?  Complain not.  Look up, my wearied brother;  see
+thy fellow Workmen there, in God's Eternity;  surviving there,
+they alone surviving:  sacred Band of the Immortals, celestial
+Bodyguard of the Empire of Mankind.  Even in the weak Human
+Memory they survive so long, as saints, as heroes, as gods;  they
+alone surviving;  peopling, they alone, the unmeasured solitudes
+of Time!  To thee Heaven, though severe, is _not_ unkind;  Heaven
+is kind,--as a noble Mother;  as that Spartan Mother, saying
+while she gave her son his shield, "With it, my son, or upon it!"
+Thou too shalt return _home_ in honour;  to thy far-distant Home,
+in honour;  doubt it not,--if in the battle thou keep thy shield!
+Thou, in the Eternities and deepest Death-kingdoms, art not an
+alien;  thou everywhere art a denizen!  Complain not;  the very
+Spartans did not _complain._
+
+And who art thou that braggest of thy life of Idleness;
+complacently shewest thy bright gilt equipages;  sumptuous
+cushions;  appliances for folding of the hands to mere sleep?
+Looking up, looking down, around, behind or before, discernest
+thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any _idle_ hero, saint, god,
+or even devil?  Not a vestige of one.  In the Heavens, in the
+Earth, in the Waters, under the Earth, is none like unto thee.
+Thou art an original figure in this Creation;  a denizen in
+Mayfair alone, in this extraordinary Century or Half-Century
+alone!  One monster there is in the world:  the idle man. What is
+his 'Religion?'  That Nature is a Phantasm, where cunning,
+beggary or thievery may sometimes find good victual.  That God is
+a lie;  and that Man and his Life are a lie.--Alas, alas, who of
+us _is_ there that can say, I have worked?  The faithfulest of us
+are unprofitable servants;  the faithfulest of us know that best.
+The faithfulest of us may say, with sad and true old Samuel,
+"Much of my life has been trifled away!"  But he that has, and
+except 'on public occasions' professes to have, no function but
+that of going idle in a graceful or graceless manner;  and of
+begetting sons to go idle;  and to address Chief Spinners and
+Diggers, who at least _are_ spinning and digging, "Ye scandalous
+persons who produce too much"--My Corn-Law friends, on what
+imaginary still richer Eldorados, and true iron-spikes with law
+of gravitation, are ye rushing!
+
+
+As to the Wages of Work there might innumerable things be said;
+there will and must yet innumerable things be said and spoken, in
+St. Stephen's and out of St. Stephen's;  and gradually not a few
+things be ascertained and written, on Law-parchment, concerning
+this very matter:--'Fair day's-wages for a fair day's-work' is
+the most unrefusable demand!  Money-wages 'to the extent of
+keeping your worker alive that he may work more;'  these, unless
+you mean to dismiss him straightway out of this world, are
+indispensable alike to the noblest Worker and to the least noble!
+
+One thing only I will say here, in special reference to the
+former class, the noble and noblest;  but throwing light on all
+the other classes and their arrangements of this difficult
+matter:  The 'wages' of every noble Work do yet lie in Heaven or
+else Nowhere.  Not in Bank-of-England bills, in Owen's Labour-
+bank, or any the most improved establishment of banking and
+money-changing, needest thou, heroic soul, present thy account of
+earnings.  Human banks and labour-banks know thee not;  or know
+thee after generations and centuries have passed away, and thou
+art clean gone from 'rewarding,'--all manner of bank-drafts,
+shoptills, and Downing-street Exchequers lying very invisible, so
+far from thee!  Nay, at bottom, dost thou need any reward?  Was
+it thy aim and life-purpose to be filled with good things for thy
+heroism;  to have a life of pomp and ease, and be what men call
+'happy,' in this world, or in any other world?  I answer for thee
+deliberately, No.  The whole spiritual secret of the new epoch
+lies in this, that thou canst answer for thyself, with thy whole
+clearness of head and heart, deliberately, No.
+
+My brother, the brave man has to give his Life away.  Give it, I
+advise thee;--thou dost not expect to _sell_ thy Life in an
+adequate manner?  What price, for example, would content thee?
+The just price of thy LIFE to thee,--why, God's entire Creation
+to thyself, the whole Universe of Space, the whole Eternity of
+Time, and what they hold:  that is the price which would content
+thee;  that, and if thou wilt be candid, nothing short of that!
+It is thy all;  and for it thou wouldst have all.  Thou art an
+unreasonable mortal;--or rather thou art a poor _infinite_
+mortal, who, in thy narrow clay-prison here, _seemest_ so
+unreasonable!  Thou wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy
+Life, in a satisfactory manner.  Give it, like a royal heart;
+let the price be Nothing:  thou _hast_ then, in a certain sense,
+got All for it!  The heroic man,--and is not every man, God be
+thanked, a potential hero?--has to do so, in all times and
+circumstances.  In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic,
+he will have to say, as Burns said proudly and humbly of his
+little Scottish Songs, little dewdrops of Celestial Melody in an
+age when so much was unmelodious:  "By Heaven, they shall either
+be invaluable or of no value;  I do not need your guineas for
+them!"  It is an element which should, and must, enter deeply
+into all settlements of wages here below.  They never will be
+'satisfactoy' otherwise;  they cannot, O Mammon Gospel, they
+never can!  Money for my little piece of work 'to the extent that
+will allow me to keep working;'  yes, this,--unless you mean that
+I shall go my ways _before_ the work is all taken out of me:  but
+as to 'wages'--!--
+
+On the whole, we do entirely agree with those old Monks,
+_Laborare est Orare._  In a thousand senses, from one end of it
+to the other, true Work is Worship.  He that works, whatsoever be
+his work, he bodies forth the form of Things Unseen;  a small
+Poet every Worker is.  The idea, were it but of his poor Delf
+Platter, how much more of his Epic Poem, is as yet 'seen,'
+halfseen, only by himself;  to all others it is a thing unseen,
+impossible;  to Nature herself it is a thing unseen, a thing
+which never hitherto was;--very 'impossible,' for it is as yet a
+No-thing!  The Unseen Powers had need to watch over such a man;
+he works in and for the Unseen.  Alas, if he look to the Seen
+Powers only, he may as well quit the business;  his No-thing will
+never rightly issue as a Thing, but as a Deceptivity, a Sham-
+thing,--which it had better not do!
+
+Thy No-thing of an Intended Poem, O Poet who hast looked merely
+to reviewers, copyrights, booksellers, popularities, behold it
+has not yet become a Thing;  for the truth is not in it!  Though
+printed, hot-pressed, reviewed, celebrated, sold to the twentieth
+edition:  what is all that?  The Thing, in philosophical
+uncommercial language, is still a No-thing, mostly semblance, and
+deception of the sight;--benign Oblivion incessantly gnawing at
+it, impatient till chaos to which it belongs do reabsorb it!--
+
+He who takes not counsel of the Unseen and Silent, from him will
+never come real visibility and speech.  Thou must descend to the
+_Mothers,_ to the _Manes,_ and Hercules-like long suffer and
+labour there, wouldst thou emerge with victory into the sunlight.
+As in battle and the shock of war,--for is not this a battle?--
+thou too shalt fear no pain or death, shalt love no ease or life;
+the voice of festive Lubberlands, the noise of greedy Acheron
+shall alike lie silent under thy victorious feet.  Thy work, like
+Dante's, shall 'make thee lean for many years.'  The world and
+its wages, its criticisms, counsels, helps, impediments, shall be
+as a waste ocean-flood;  the chaos through which thou art to swim
+and sail.  Not the waste waves and their weedy gulf-streams,
+shalt thou take for guidance:  thy star alone,--'Se to segui tua
+stella!'  Thy star alone, now clear-beaming over Chaos, nay now
+by fits gone out, disastrously eclipsed:  this only shalt thou
+strive to follow.  O, it is a business, as I fancy, that of
+weltering your way through Chaos and the murk of Hell!  Green-
+eyed dragons watching you, three-headed Cerberuses,--not without
+sympathy of their sort!  "Eccovi l'uom ch'e stato all'Inferno."
+For in fine, as Poet Dryden says, you do walk hand in hand with
+sheer Madness, all the way,--who is by no means pleasant company!
+You look fixedly into Madness, and her undiscovered, boundless,
+bottomless Night-empire;  that you may extort new Wisdom out of
+it, as an Eurydice from Tartarus.  The higher the Wisdom, the
+closer was its neighbourhood and kindred with mere Insanity;
+literally so;--and thou wilt, with a speechless feeling, observe
+how highest Wisdom, struggling up into this world, has oftentimes
+carried such tinctures and adhesions of Insanity still cleaving
+to it hither!
+
+All Works, each in their degree, are a making of Madness sane;--
+truly enough a religious operation;  which cannot be carried on
+without religion.  You have not work otherwise;  you have eye-
+service, greedy grasping of wages, swift and ever swifter
+manufacture of semblances to get hold of wages.  Instead of
+better felt-hats to cover your head, you have bigger lath-and-
+plaster hats set traveling the streets on wheels.  Instead of
+heavenly and earthly Guidance for the souls of men, you have
+'Black or White Surplice' Controversies, stuffed hair-and-leather
+Popes;--terrestrial _Law-wards,_ Lords and Law-bringers,
+'organising Labour' in these years, by passing Corn-Laws.  With
+all which, alas, this distracted Earth is now full, nigh to
+bursting.  Semblances most smooth to the touch and eye;  most
+accursed nevertheless to body and soul.  Semblances, be they of
+Sham-woven Cloth or of Dilettante Legislation, which are _not_
+real wool or substance, but Devil's-dust, accursed of God and
+man!  No man has worked, or can work, except religiously;  not
+even the poor day-labourer, the weaver of your coat, the sewer of
+your shoes.  All men, if they work not as in a Great Taskmaster's
+eye, will work wrong, work unhappily for themselves and you.
+
+
+Industrial work, still under bondage to Mammon, the rational soul
+of it not yet awakened, is a tragic spectacle.  Men in the
+rapidest motion and self-motion;  restless, with convulsive
+energy, as if driven by Galvanism, as if possessed by a Devil;
+tearing asunder mountains,--to no purpose, for Mammonism is
+always Midas-eared!  This is sad, on the face of it.  Yet
+courage:  the beneficent Destinies, kind in their sternness, are
+apprising us that this cannot continue.  Labour is not a devil,
+even while encased in Mammonism;  Labour is ever an imprisoned
+god, writhing unconsciously or consciously to escape out of
+Mammonism!  Plugson of Undershot, like Taillefer of Normandy,
+wants victory;  how much happier will even Plugson be to have a
+Chivalrous victory than a Chactaw one.  The unredeemed ugliness
+is that of a slothful People.  Shew me a People energetically
+busy;  heaving, struggling, all shoulders at the wheel;  their
+heart pulsing, every muscle swelling, with man's energy and
+will;--I Shew you a People of whom great good is already
+predicable;  to whom all manner of good is yet certain, if their
+energy endure.  By very working, they will learn;  they have,
+Antaeus-like, their foot on Mother Fact:  how can they but learn?
+
+The vulgarest Plugson of a Master-Worker, who can command Workers
+and get work out of them, is already a considerable man.  Blessed
+and thrice-blessed symptoms I discern of Master-Workers who are
+not vulgar men;  who are Nobles, and begin to feel that they must
+act as such:  all speed to these, they are England's hope at
+present!  But in this Plugson himself, conscious of almost no
+nobleness whatever, how much is there!  Not without man's
+faculty, insight, courage, hard energy, is this rugged figure.
+His words none of the wisest;  but his actings cannot be
+altogether foolish.  Think, how were it, stoodst thou suddenly in
+his shoes!  He has to command a thousand men.  And not imaginary
+commanding;  no, it is real, incessantly practical.  The evil
+passions of so many men (with the Devil in them, as in all of us)
+he has to vanquish;  by manifold force of speech and of silence,
+to repress or evade.  What a force of silence, to say nothing of
+the others, is in Plugson!  For these his thousand men he has to
+provide raw-material, machinery, arrangement, house-room;  and
+ever at the week's end, wages by due sale.  No Civil-List, or
+Goulburn-Baring Budget has he to fall back upon, for paying of
+his regiment;  he has to pick his supplies from this confused
+face of the whole Earth and Contemporaneous History, by his
+dexterity alone.  There will be dry eyes if he fail to do it!--He
+exclaims, at present, 'black in the face,' near strangled with
+Dilettante Legislation:  "Let me have elbow-room, throat-room,
+and I will not fail!  No, I will spin yet, and conquer like a
+giant:  what 'sinews of war' lie in me, untold resources towards
+the Conquest of this Planet, if instead of hanging me, you
+husband them, and help me!"--My indomitable friend, it is _true;_
+and thou shalt and must be helped.
+
+This is not a man I would kill and strangle by Corn-Laws, even if
+I could!  No, I would fling my Corn-Laws and Shotbelts to the
+Devil;  and try to help this man.  I would teach him, by noble
+precept and law-precept, by noble example most of all, that
+Mammonism was not the essence of his or of my station in God's
+Universe;  but the adscititious excrescence of it;  the gross,
+terrene, godless embodiment of it;  which would have to become,
+more or less, a godlike one.  By noble _real_ legislation, by
+true _noble's_-work, by unwearied, valiant, and were it wageless
+effort, in my Parliament and in my Parish, I would aid,
+constrain, encourage him to effect more or less this blessed
+change.  I should know that it would have to be effected;  that
+unless it were in some measure effected, he and I and all of us,
+I first and soonest of all, were doomed to perdition!--Effected
+it will be;  unless it were a Demon that made this Universe;
+which I, for my own part, do at no moment, under no form, in the
+least believe.
+
+May it please your Serene Highnesses, your Majesties, Lordships
+and Law-wardships, the proper Epic of this world is not now 'Arms
+and the Man;'  how much less, 'Shirt-frills and the Man:'  no, it
+is now 'Tools and the Man:'  that, henceforth to all time is now
+our Epic;--and you, first of all others, I think, were wise to
+take note of that!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIII
+
+Democracy
+
+
+If the Serene Highnesses and Majesties do not take note of that,
+then, as I perceive, _that_ will take note of itself!  The time
+for levity, insincerity, and idle babble and play-acting, in all
+kinds, is gone by;  it is a serious, grave time.  Old long-vexed
+questions, not yet solved in logical words or parliamentary laws,
+are fast solving themselves in facts, somewhat unblessed to
+behold!  This largest of questions, this question of Work and
+Wages, which ought, had we heeded Heaven's voice, to have begun
+two generations ago or more, cannot be delayed longer without
+hearing Earth's voice.  'Labour' will verily need to be somewhat
+'organised,' as they say,--God knows with what difficulty.  Man
+will actually need to have his debts and earnings a little better
+paid by man;  which, let Parliaments speak of them or be silent
+of them, are eternally his due from man, and cannot, without
+penalty and at length not without death-penalty, be withheld.
+How much ought to cease among us straightway;  how much ought to
+begin straightway, while the hours yet are!
+
+Truly they are strange results to which this of leaving all to
+'Cash;'  of quietly shutting up the God's Temple, and gradually
+opening wide-open the Mammon's Temple, with 'Laissez-faire, and
+Every man for himself,'--have led us in these days!  We have
+Upper, speaking Classes, who indeed do 'speak' as never man spake
+before;  the withered flimsiness, the godless baseness and
+barrenness of whose Speech might of itself indicate what kind of
+Doing and practical Governing went on under it!  For Speech is
+the gaseous element out of which most kinds of Practice and
+Performance, especially all kinds of moral Performance, condense
+themselves, and take shape;  as the one is, so will the other be.
+Descending, accordingly, into the Dumb Class in its Stockport
+Cellars and Poor-Law Bastilles, have we not to announce that they
+also are hitherto unexampled in the History of Adam's Posterity?
+
+Life was never a May-game for men:  in all times the lot of the
+dumb millions born to toil was defaced with manifold sufferings,
+injustices, heavy burdens, avoidable and unavoidable;  not play
+at all, but hard work that made the sinews sore, and the heart
+sore.  As bond-slaves, _villani, bordarii, sochemanni,_ nay
+indeed as dukes, earls and kings, men were oftentimes made weary
+of their life;  and had to say, in the sweat of their brow and of
+their soul, Behold it is not sport, it is grim earnest, and our
+back can bear no more!  Who knows not what massacrings and
+harryings there have been;  grinding, long-continuing, unbearable
+injustices,--till the heart had to rise in madness, and some _"Eu
+Sachsen, nimith euer sachses,_ You Saxons, out with your gully-
+knives then!"  You Saxons, some 'arrestment,' partial 'arrestment
+of the Knaves and Dastards' has become indispensable!--The page
+of Dryasdust is heavy with such details.
+
+And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the
+beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of
+toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now
+passing over us.  It is not to die, or even to die of hunger,
+that makes a man wretched;  many men have died;  all men must
+die,--the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain.  But
+it is to live miserable we know not why;  to work sore and yet
+gain nothing;  to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated,
+girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire:  it is to die slowly
+all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite
+Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull!
+This is and remains forever intolerable to all men whom God
+has made.  Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms,
+Revolts of Three Days?  The times, if we will consider them,
+are really unexampled.
+
+Never before did I hear of an Irish Widow reduced to 'prove her
+sisterhood by dying of typhus-fever and infecting seventeen
+persons,'--saying in such undeniable way, "You see, I was your
+sister!"  Sisterhood, brotherhood was often forgotten;  but not
+till the rise of these ultimate Mammon and Shotbelt Gospels, did
+I ever see it so expressly denied.  If no pious Lord or _Law-
+ward_ would remember it, always some pious Lady (_'Hlaf-dig,'_
+Benefactress, _'Loaf-giveress,'_ they say she is,--blessings on
+her beautiful heart!) was there, with mild mother-voice and hand,
+to remember it;  some pious thoughtful _Elder,_ what we now call
+'Prester,' _Presbyter_ or 'Priest,' was there to put all men in
+mind of it, in the name of the God who had made all.
+
+Not even in Black Dahomey was it ever, I think, forgotten to the
+typhus-fever length.  Mungo Park, resourceless, had sunk down to
+die under the Negro Village-Tree, a horrible White object in the
+eyes of all.  But in the poor Black Woman, and her daughter who
+stood aghast at him, whose earthly wealth and funded capital
+consisted of one small calabash of rice, there lived a heart
+richer than _'Laissez-faire:'_  they, with a royal munificence,
+boiled their rice for him;  they sang all night to him, spinning
+assiduous on their cotton distaffs, as he lay to sleep:  "Let us
+pity the poor white man;  no mother has he to fetch him milk, no
+sister to grind him corn!"  Thou poor black Noble One,--thou
+_Lady_ too:  did not a God make thee too;  was there not in thee
+too something of a God!--
+
+
+Gurth born thrall of Cedric the Saxon has been greatly pitied by
+Dryasdust and others.  Gurth with the brass collar round his
+neck, tending Cedric's pigs in the glades of the wood, is not
+what I call an exemplar of human felicity:  but Gurth, with the
+sky above him, with the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage
+round him, and in him at least the certainty of supper and social
+lodging when he came home;  Gurth to me seems happy, in
+comparison with many a Lancashire and Buckinghamshire man, of
+these days, not born thrall of anybody!  Gurth's brass collar did
+not gall him:  Cedric _deserved_ to be his Master.  The pigs were
+Cedric's, but Gurth too would get his parings of them.  Gurth had
+the inexpressible satisfaction of feeling himself related
+indissolubly, though in a rude brass-collar way, to his fellow-
+mortals in this Earth.  He had superiors, inferiors, equals.--
+Gurth is now 'emancipated' long since;  has what we call
+'Liberty.'  Liberty, I am told, is a Divine thing.  Liberty when
+it becomes the 'Liberty to die by starvation' is not so divine!
+
+Liberty?  The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in
+his finding out, or being forced to find out the right path, and
+to walk thereon.  To learn, or to be taught, what work he
+actually was able for;  and then, by permission, persuasion, and
+even compulsion, to set about doing of the same!  That is his
+true blessedness, honour, 'liberty' and maximum of wellbeing:  if
+liberty be not that, I for one have small care about liberty.
+You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices;  you
+violate his liberty, you that are wise;  and keep him, were it in
+strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices!  Every stupid, every
+cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpable madman:  his true
+liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every wiser man,
+could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way,
+lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him
+to go a little righter.  O if thou really art my _Senior,_
+Seigneur, my _Elder,_ Presbyter or Priest,--if thou art in very
+deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to
+'conquer' me, to command me!  If thou do know better than I what
+is good and right, I conjure thee in the name of God, force me to
+do it;  were it by never such brass collars, whips and handcuffs,
+leave me not to walk over precipices!  That I have been called,
+by all the Newspapers, a 'free man' will avail me little, if my
+pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck.  O that the Newspapers
+had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet
+voices to name me, and I had attained not death, but life!--
+Liberty requires new definitions.
+
+A conscious abhorrence and intolerance of Folly, of Baseness;
+Stupidity, Poltroonery and all that brood of things, dwells deep
+in some men:  still deeper in others an unconscious abhorrence
+and intolerance, clothed moreover by the beneficent Supreme
+Powers in what stout appetites, energies, egoisms so-called, are
+suitable to it;--these latter are your Conquerors, Romans,
+Normans Russians, Indo-English;  Founders of what we call
+Aristocracies:  Which indeed have they not the most 'divine
+right' to found;--being themselves very truly [greek], BRAVEST,
+BEST; and conquering generally a confused rabble of WORST, or at
+lowest;  clearly enough, of WORSE?  I think their divine right,
+tried, with affirmatory verdict, in the greatest Law-Court known
+to me, was good!  A class of men who are dreadfully exclaimed
+against by Dryasdust;  of whom nevertheless beneficent Nature has
+oftentimes had need;  and may, alas, again have need.
+
+When, across the hundredfold poor scepticisms, trivialisms, and
+constitutional cobwebberies of Dryasdust, you catch any
+glimpse of a William the Conqueror, a Tancred of Hauteville or
+such like,--do you not discern veritably some rude outline of a
+true God-made King;  whom not the Champion of England cased in
+tin, but all Nature and the Universe were calling to the throne?
+It is absolutely necessary that he get thither.  Nature does not
+mean her poor Saxon children to perish, of obesity, stupor or
+other malady, as yet:  a stern Ruler and Line of Rulers therefore
+is called in,--a stern but most beneficent _Perpetual House-
+Surgeon_ is called in, by Nature, and even the appropriate fees
+are provided for him!  Dryasdust talks lamentably about Hereward
+and the Fen Counties;  fate of Earl Waltheof;  Yorkshire and the
+North reduced to ashes;  all which is undoubtedly lamentable.
+But even Dryasdust apprises me of one fact:  'A child;  in this
+William's reign, might have carried a purse of gold from end to
+end of England.  My erudite friend, it is a fact which outweighs
+a thousand!  Sweep away thy constitutional, sentimental and other
+cobwebberies;  look eye to eye, if thou still have any eye, in
+the face of this big burly William Bastard:  thou wilt see a
+fellow of most flashing discernment, of most strong lionheart;--
+in whom, as it were, within a frame of oak and iron, the gods
+have planted the soul of 'a man of genius!'  Dost thou call that
+nothing?  I call it an immense thing!--Rage enough was in this
+Willelmus Conquestor, rage enough for his occasions;--and yet the
+essential element of him, as of all such men, is not scorching
+_fire,_ but shining illuminative _light._  Fire and light are
+strangely interchangeable;  nay, at bottom, I have found them
+different forms of the same most godlike 'elementary substance'
+in our world:  a thing worth stating in these days.  The
+essential element of this Conquestor is, first of all, the most
+sun-eyed perception of what is really what on this God's-Earth;--
+which, thou wilt find, does mean at bottom 'Justice,' and
+'Virtues' not a few:  _Conformity_ to what the Maker has seen
+good to make;  that, I suppose, will mean Justice and a Virtue
+or two?--
+
+Dost thou think Willelmus Conquestor would have tolerated ten
+years' jargon, one hour's jargon, on the propriety of killing
+Cotton-manufactures by partridge Corn-Laws?  I fancy, this was
+not the man to knock out of his night's-rest with nothing but a
+noisy bedlamism in your mouth!  "Assist us still better to bush
+the partridges;  strangle Plugson who spins the shirts?"--_"Par
+la Splendeur de Dieu!"_--Dost thou think Willelmus Conquestor, in
+this new time, with Steam-engine Captains of Industry on one hand
+of him, and Joe-Manton Captains of Idleness on the other, would
+have doubted which _was_ really the BEST;  which did deserve
+strangling, and which not?
+
+I have a certain indestructible regard for Willelmus Conquestor.
+A resident House-Surgeon, provided by Nature for her beloved
+English People, and even furnished with the requisite 'fees,' as
+I said;  for he by no means felt himself doing Nature's work,
+this Willelmus, but his own work exclusively!  And his own work
+withal it was;  informed _'par la Splendeur de Dieu.'_--I say, it
+is necessary to get the work out of such a man, however harsh
+that be!  When a world, not yet doomed for death, is rushing down
+to ever-deeper Baseness and Confusion, it is a dire necessity of
+Nature's to bring in her ARISTOCRACIES, her BEST, even by
+forcible methods.  When their descendants or representatives
+cease entirely to _be_ the Best, Nature's poor world will very
+soon rush down again to Baseness;  and it becomes a dire
+necessity of Nature's to cast them out.  Hence French
+Revolutions, Five-point Charters, Democracies, and a mournful
+list of _Etceteras,_ in these our afflicted times.
+
+To what extent Democracy has now reached, how it advances
+irresistible with ominous, ever-increasing speed, he that will
+open his eyes on any province of human affairs may discern.
+Democracy is everywhere the inexorable demand of these ages,
+swiftly fulfilling itself.  From the thunder of Napoleon battles,
+to the jabbering of Open-vestry in St. Mary Axe, all things
+announce Democracy.  A distinguished man, whom some of my readers
+will hear again with pleasure, thus writes to me what in these
+days he notes from the Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo, where our
+London fashions seem to be in full vogue.  Let us hear the Herr
+Teufelsdrockh again, were it but the smallest word!
+
+'Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern
+you, and contented putting up with the want of them,--alas, thou
+too, _mein Lieber,_ seest well how close it is of kin to
+_Atheism,_ and other sad _Isms:_ he who discovers no God
+whatever, how shall he discover Heroes, the visible Temples of
+God?--Strange enough meanwhile it is, to observe with what
+thoughtlessness, here in our rigidly Conservative Country, men
+rush into Democracy with full cry.  Beyond doubt, his Excellenz
+the Titular-Herr Ritter Kauderwalsch von Pferdefuss-Quacksalber,
+he our distinguished Conservative Premier himself, and all but
+the thicker-headed of his Party, discern Democracy to be
+inevitable as death, and are even desperate of delaying it much!
+
+'You cannot walk the streets without beholding Democracy announce
+itself:  the very Tailor has become, if not properly
+Sansculottic, which to him would be ruinous, yet a Tailor
+unconsciously symbolising, and prophesying with his scissors, the
+reign of Equality.  What now is our fashionable coat?  A thing of
+superfinest texture, of deeply meditated cut;  with Malineslace
+cuffs;  quilted with gold;  so that a man can carry, without
+difficulty, an estate of land on his back?  _Keineswegs,_ By no
+manner of means!  The Sumptuary Laws have fallen into such a
+state of desuetude as was never before seen.  Our fashionable
+coat is an amphibium between barn-sack and drayman's doublet.
+The cloth of it is studiously coarse;  the colour a speckled
+sootblack or rust-brown grey;--the nearest approach to a
+Peasant's.  And for shape,--thou shouldst see it!  The last
+consummation of the year now passing over us is definable as
+Three Bags:  a big bag for the body, two small bags for the arms,
+and by way of collar a hem!  The first Antique Cheruscan who, of
+felt-cloth or bear's-hide, with bone or metal needle, set about
+making himself a coat, before Tailors had yet awakened out of
+Nothing,--did not he make it even so?  A loose wide poke for
+body, with two holes to let out the arms;  this was his original
+coat:  to which holes it was soon visible that two small loose
+pokes, or sleeves, easily appended, would be an improvement.
+
+'Thus has the Tailor-art, so to speak, overset itself, like most
+other things;  changed its centre-of-gravity;  whirled suddenly
+over from zenith to nadir.  Your Stulz, with huge Somerset,
+vaults from his high shopboard down to the depths of primal
+savagery,--carrying much along with him!  For I will invite thee
+to reflect that the Tailor, as topmost ultimate froth of Human
+Society, is indeed swift-passing, evanescent, slippery to
+decipher;  yet significant of much, nay of all.  Topmost
+evanescent froth, he is churned up from the very lees, and from
+all intermediate regions of the liquor.  The general outcome he,
+visible to the eye, of what men aimed to do, and were obliged and
+enabled to do, in this one public department of symbolising
+themselves to each other by covering of their skins.  A smack of
+all Human Life lies in the Tailor:  its wild struggles towards
+beauty, dignity, freedom, victory;  and how, hemmed in by Sedan
+and Huddersfield, by Nescience, Dulness, Prurience, and other sad
+necessities and laws of Nature, it has attained just to this:
+Grey Savagery of Three Sacks with a hem!
+
+'When the very Tailor verges towards Sansculottism, is it not
+ominous?  The last Divinity of poor mankind dethroning himself;
+sinking _his_ taper too, flame downmost, like the Genius of Sleep
+or of Death;  admonitory that Tailor-time shall be no more!--For
+little as one could advise Sumptuary Laws at the present epoch,
+yet nothing is clearer than that where ranks do actually exist,
+strict division of costumes will also be enforced;  that if we
+ever have a new Hierarchy and Aristocracy, acknowledged veritably
+as such, for which I daily pray Heaven, the Tailor will reawaken;
+and be, by volunteering and appointment, consciously and
+unconsciously, a safeguard of that same.'--Certain farther
+observations, from the same invaluable pen, on our never-ending
+changes of mode, our 'perpetual nomadic and even ape-like
+appetite for change and mere change' in all the equipments of our
+existence, and the 'fatal revolutionary character' thereby
+manifested, we suppress for the present.  It may be admitted that
+Democracy, in all meanings of the word, is in full career;
+irresistible by any Ritter Kauderwalsch or other Son of Adam, as
+times go.  'Liberty' is a thing men are determined to have.
+
+
+But truly, as I had to remark in the meanwhile, 'the liberty of
+not being oppressed by your fellow man' is an indispensable, yet
+one of the most insignificant fractional parts of Human Liberty.
+No man oppresses thee, can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go,
+without reason shewn.  True;  from all men thou art emancipated:
+but from Thyself and from the Devil--?  No man, wiser, unwiser,
+can make thee come or go:  but thy own futilities, bewilderments,
+thy false appetites for Money, Windsor Georges and such like?  No
+man oppresses thee, O free and independent Franchiser:  but does
+not this stupid Porter-pot oppress thee?  No Son of Adam can bid
+thee come or go;  but this absurd Pot of Heavy-wet, this can and
+does!  Thou art the thrall not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy
+own brutal appetites, and this scoured dish of liquor.  And thou
+pratest of thy liberty?  Thou entire blockhead!
+
+Heavy-wet and gin:  alas, these are not the only kinds of
+thraldom.  Thou who walkest in a vain shew, looking out with
+ornamental dilettante sniff and serene supremacy at all Life and
+all Death;  and amblest jauntily;  perking up thy poor talk into
+crotchets, thy poor conduct into fatuous somnambulisms;--and art
+as an 'enchanted Ape' under God's sky, where thou mightest have
+been a man, had proper Schoolmasters and Conquerors, and
+Constables with cat-o'-nine tails, been vouchsafed thee:  dost
+thou call that 'liberty?'  Or your unreposing Mammon-worshipper,
+again, driven, as if by Galvanisms, by Devils and Fixed-Ideas,
+who rises early and sits late, chasing the impossible;  straining
+every faculty 'to fill himself with the east wind '--how merciful
+were it, could you, by mild persuasion or by the severest tyranny
+so-called, check him in his mad path, turn him into a wiser one!
+All painful tyranny, in that case again, were but mild 'surgery;'
+the pain of it cheap, as health and life, instead of galvanism
+and fixed-idea, are cheap at any price.
+
+Sure enough, of all paths a man could strike into, there is, at
+any given moment, a _best path_ for every man;  a thing which,
+here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do;--which
+could he be but led or driven to do, he were then doing 'like a
+man,' as we phrase it;  all men and gods agreeing with him, the
+whole Universe virtually exclaiming Well-done to him!  His
+success, in such case, were complete;  his felicity a maximum.
+This path, to find this path and walk in it, is the one thing
+needful for him.  Whatsoever forwards him in that, let it come to
+him even in the shape of blows and spurnings, is liberty:
+whatsoever hinders him, were it wardmotes, open-vestries,
+pollbooths, tremendous cheers, rivers of heavy-wet, is slavery.
+
+The notion that a man's liberty consists in giving his vote at
+election-hustings, and saying, "Behold now I too have my twenty-
+thousandth part of a Talker in our National Palaver;  will not
+all the gods be good to me?"--is one of the pleasantest!  Nature
+nevertheless is kind at present;  and puts it into the heads of
+many, almost of all.  The liberty especially which has to
+purchase itself by social isolation, and each man standing
+separate from the other, having 'no business with him' but a
+cash-account:  this is such a liberty as the Earth seldom saw;--
+as the Earth will not long put up with, recommend it how you may.
+This liberty turns out, before it have long continued in action,
+with all men flinging up their caps round it, to be, for the
+Working Millions a liberty to die by want of food;  for the Idle
+Thousands and Units, alas, a still more fatal liberty to live in
+want of work;  to have no earnest duty to do in this God's-World
+any more.  What becomes of a man in such predicament?  Earth's
+Laws are silent;  and Heaven's speak in a voice which is not
+heard.  No work, and the ineradicable need of work, give rise to
+new very wondrous life-philosophies, new very wondrous life-
+practices!  Dilettantism, Pococurantism, Beau-Brummelism, with
+perhaps an occasional, half-mad, protesting burst of Byronism,
+establish themselves:  at the end of a certain period,--if you go
+back to 'the Dead Sea,' there is, say our Moslem friends, a very
+strange 'Sabbath-day' transacting itself there!--Brethren, we
+know but imperfectly yet, after ages of Constitutional
+Government, what Liberty is and Slavery is.
+
+Democracy, the chase of Liberty in that direction, shall go its
+full course;  unrestrainable by him of Pferdefuss-Quacksalber, or
+any of _his_ household.  The Toiling Millions of Mankind, in most
+vital need and passionate instinctive desire of Guidance, shall
+cast away False-Guidance;  and hope, for an hour, that No-
+Guidance will suffice them:  but it can be for an hour only.  The
+smallest item of human Slavery is the oppression of man by his
+Mock-Superiors;  the palpablest, but I say at bottom the
+smallest.  Let him shake off such oppression, trample it
+indignantly under his feet;  I blame him not, I pity and commend
+him.  But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well shaken off, the
+grand problem yet remains to solve:  That of finding government
+by your Real-Superiors!  Alas, how shall we ever learn the
+solution of that, benighted, bewildered, sniffing, sneering,
+godforgetting unfortunates as we are?  It is a work for
+centuries;  to be taught us by tribulations, confusions,
+insurrections, obstructions;  who knows if not by conflagration
+and despair!  It is a lesson inclusive of all other lessons;  the
+hardest of all lessons to learn.
+
+One thing I do know:  Those Apes chattering on the branches by
+the Dead Sea never got it learned;  but chatter there to this
+day.  To them no Moses need come a second time;  a thousand
+Moseses would be but so many painted Phantasms, interesting
+Fellow-Apes of new strange aspect,--whom they would 'invite to
+dinner,' be glad to meet with in lion-soirees.  To them the voice
+of Prophecy, of heavenly monition, is quite ended.  They chatter
+there, all Heaven shut to them, to the end of the world.  The
+unfortunates!  O, what is dying of hunger, with honest tools in
+your hand, with a manful purpose in your heart, and much real
+labour lying round you done, in comparison?  You honestly quit
+your tools;  quit a most muddy confused coil of sore work, short
+rations, of sorrows, dispiritments and contradictions, having now
+honestly done with it all;--and await, not entirely in a
+distracted manner, what the Supreme Powers, and the Silences and
+the Eternities may have to say to you.
+
+A second thing I know:  This lesson will have to be learned,--
+under penalties!  England will either learn it, or England also
+will cease to exist among Nations.  England will either learn to
+reverence its Heroes, and discriminate them from its Sham-Heroes
+and Valets and gaslighted Histrios;  and to prize them as the
+audible God's-voice, amid all inane jargons and temporary market-
+cries, and say to them with heart-loyalty, "Be ye King and
+Priest, and Gospel and Guidance for us:"  or else England will
+continue to worship new and ever-new forms of Quackhood,--and so,
+with what resiliences and reboundings matters little, go down to
+the Father of Quacks!  Can I dread such things of England?
+Wretched, thick-eyed, gross-hearted mortals, why will ye worship
+lies, and 'Stuffed Clothes-suits, created by the ninth-parts of
+men!'  It is not your purses that suffer;  your farm-rents, your
+commerces, your mill-revenues, loud as ye lament over these;  no,
+it is not these alone, but a far deeper than these:  it is your
+Souls that lie dead, crushed down under despicable Nightmares,
+Atheisms, Brain-fumes;  and are not Souls at all, but mere
+succedanea for _salt_ to keep your bodies and their appetites
+from putrefying!  Your cotton-spinning and thrice-miraculous
+mechanism, what is this too, by itself, but a larger kind of
+Animalism?  Spiders can spin, Beavers can build and shew
+contrivance;  the Ant lays up accumulation of capital, and has,
+for aught I know, a Bank of Antland.  If there is no soul in man
+higher than all that, did it reach to sailing on the cloud-rack
+and spinning sea-sand;  then I say, man is but an animal, a more
+cunning kind of brute:  he has no soul, but only a succedaneum
+for salt.  Whereupon, seeing himself to be truly of the beasts
+that perish, he ought to admit it, I think;--and also straightway
+universally kill himself;  and so, in a manlike manner, at least,
+_end,_ and wave these bruteworlds _his_ dignified farewell!--
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XIV
+
+Sir Jabesh Windbag
+
+
+Oliver Cromwell, whose body they hung on their Tyburn Gallows
+because he had found the Christian Religion inexecutable in this
+country, remains to me by far the remarkablest Governor we have
+had here for the last five centuries or so.  For the last five
+centuries, there has been no Governor among us with anything like
+similar talent;  and for the last two centuries, no Governor, we
+may say, with the possibility of similar talent,--with an idea in
+the heart of him capable of inspiring similar talent, capable of
+coexisting therewith.  When you consider that Oliver believed in
+a God, the difference between Oliver's position and that of any
+subsequent Governor of this Country becomes, the more you reflect
+on it, the more immeasurable!
+
+Oliver, no volunteer in Public Life, but plainly a ballotted
+soldier strictly ordered thither, enters upon Public Life;
+comports himself there like a man who carried his own life itself
+in his hand;  like a man whose Great Commander's eye was always
+on him.  Not without results.  Oliver, well-advanced in years,
+finds now, by Destiny and his own Deservings, or as he himself
+better phrased it, by wondrous successive 'Births of Providence,'
+the Government of England put into his hands.  In senate-house
+and battle-field, in counsel and in action, in private and in
+public, this man has proved himself a man:  England and the voice
+of God, through waste awful whirlwinds and environments, speaking
+to his great heart, summon him to assert formally, in the way of
+solemn Public Fact and as a new piece of English Law, what
+informally and by Nature's eternal Law needed no asserting, That
+he, Oliver, was the Ablest-Man of England, the King of England;
+that he, Oliver, would undertake governing England.  His way of
+making this same 'assertion,' the one way he had of making it,
+has given rise to immense criticism:  but the assertion itself in
+what way soever 'made,' is it not somewhat of a solemn one,
+somewhat of a tremendous one!
+
+And now do but contrast this Oliver with my right honourable
+friend Sir Jabesh Windbag, Mr. Facing-both-ways, Viscount
+Mealymouth, Earl of Windlestraw, or what other Cagliostro,
+Cagliostrino, Cagliostraccio, the course of Fortune and
+Parliamentary Majorities has constitutionally guided to that
+dignity, any time during these last sorrowful hundred-and-fifty
+years!  Windbag, weak in the faith of a God, which he believes
+only at Church on Sundays, if even then;  strong only in the
+faith that Paragraphs and Plausibilities bring votes;  that Force
+of Public Opinion, as he calls it, is the primal Necessity of
+Things, and highest God we have:--Windbag, if we will consider
+him, has a problem set before him which may be ranged in the
+impossible class.  He is a Columbus minded to sail to the
+indistinct country of NOWHERE, to the indistinct country of
+WHITHERWARD, by the _friendship_ of those same waste-tumbling
+Water-Alps and howling waltz of All the Winds;  not by conquest
+of them and in spite of them, but by friendship of them, when
+once _they_ have made up their mind!  He is the most original
+Columbus I ever saw.  Nay, his problem is not an impossible one:
+he will infallibly _arrive_ at that same country of NOWHERE;  his
+indistinct Whitherward will be a _Thither_ward!  In the Ocean
+Abysses and Locker of Davy Jones, there certainly enough do he
+and _his_ ship's company, and all their cargo and navigatings, at
+last find lodgement.
+
+Oliver knew that his America lay THERE, Westward Ho;--and it was
+not entirely by _friendship_ of the Water-Alps, and yeasty insane
+Froth-Oceans, that he meant to get thither!  He sailed
+accordingly;  had compass-card, and Rules of Navigation,--older
+and greater than these Froth-Oceans, old as the Eternal God!  Or
+again, do but think of this.  Windbag in these his probable five
+years of office has to prosper and get Paragraphs:  the
+Paragraphs of these five years must be his salvation, or he is a
+lost man;  redemption nowhere in the Worlds or in the Times
+discoverable for him.  Oliver too would like his Paragraphs;
+successes, popularities in these five years are not undesirable
+to him:  but mark, I say, this enormous circumstance:  _after_
+these five years are gone and done, comes an Eternity for Oliver!
+Oliver has to appear before the Most High judge:  the utmost flow
+of Paragraphs, the utmost ebb of them, is now, in strictest
+arithmetic, verily no matter at all;  its exact value _zero;_  an
+account altogether erased!  Enormous;--which a man, in these
+days, hardly fancies with an effort!  Oliver's Paragraphs are all
+done, his battles, division-lists, successes all summed:  and now
+in that awful unerring Court of Review, the real question first
+rises, Whether he has succeeded at all;  whether he has not been
+defeated miserably forevermore?  Let him come with world-wide
+_Io-Paens,_ these avail him not.  Let him come covered over with
+the world's execrations, gashed with ignominious death-wounds,
+the gallows-rope about his neck:  what avails that?  The word
+is, Come thou brave and faithful;  the word is, Depart thou
+quack and accursed!
+
+O Windbag, my right honourable friend, in very truth I pity thee.
+I say, these Paragraphs, and low or loud votings of thy poor
+fellow-blockheads of mankind, will never guide thee in any
+enterprise at all.  Govern a country on such guidance?  Thou
+canst not make a pair of shoes, sell a pennyworth of tape, on
+such.  No, thy shoes are vamped up falsely to meet the market;
+behold, the leather only _seemed_ to be tanned;  thy shoes melt
+under me to rubbishy pulp, and are not veritable mud-defying
+shoes, but plausible vendible similitudes of shoes,--thou
+unfortunate, and I!  O my right honourable friend, when the
+Paragraphs flowed in, who was like Sir Jabesh?  On the swelling
+tide he mounted;  higher, higher, triumphant, heaven-high.  But
+the Paragraphs again ebbed out, as unwise Paragraphs needs must:
+Sir Jabesh lies stranded, sunk and forever sinking in ignominious
+ooze;  the Mud-nymphs, and ever-deepening bottomless Oblivion,
+his portion to eternal time.  'Posterity?'  Thou appealest to
+Posterity, thou?  My right honourable friend, what will Posterity
+do for thee!  The voting of Posterity, were it continued through
+centuries in thy favour, will be quite inaudible, extra-forensic,
+without any effect whatever.  Posterity can do simply nothing for
+a man;  nor even seem to do much, if the man be not brainsick.
+Besides, to tell thee truth, the bets are a thousand to one,
+Posterity will not hear of thee, my right honourable friend!
+Posterity, I have found, has generally his own Windbags
+sufficiently trumpeted in all market-places, and no leisure to
+attend to ours.  Posterity, which has made of Norse Odin a
+similitude, and of Norman William a brute monster, what will or
+can it make of English Jabesh?  O Heavens, 'Posterity!'
+
+"These poor persecuted Scotch Covenanters," said I to my inquiring
+Frenchman, in such stinted French as stood at command, _"ils
+s'en appelaient a"_--_"A la Posterite,"_ interrupted he, helping
+me out.--_"Ah, Monsieur, non, mille fois non!_  They appealed to
+the Eternal God;  not to Posterity at all!  _C'etait different."_
+
+
+
+
+Chapter XV
+
+Morrison Again
+
+
+Nevertheless, O Advanced Liberal, one cannot promise thee any
+'New Religion,' for some time;  to say truth, I do not think we
+have the smallest chance of any!  Will the candid reader, by way
+of closing this Book Third, listen to a few transient remarks on
+that subject?
+
+Candid readers have not lately met with any man who had less
+notion to interfere with their Thirty-Nine, or other Church-
+Articles;  wherewith, very helplessly as is like, they may have
+struggled to form for themselves some not inconceivable
+hypothesis about this Universe, and their own Existence there.
+Superstition, my friend, is far from me;  Fanaticism, for any
+_Fanum_ likely to arise soon on this Earth, is far.  A man's
+Church-Articles are surely articles of price to him;  and in
+these times one has to be tolerant of many strange 'Articles,'
+and of many still stranger 'No-articles,' which go about
+placarding themselves in a very distracted manner,--the numerous
+long placard-poles, and questionable infirm paste-pots,
+interfering with one's peaceable thoroughfare sometimes!
+
+Fancy a man, moreover, recommending his fellow men to believe in
+God, that so Chartism might abate, and the Manchester Operatives
+be got to spin peaceably!  The idea is more distracted than any
+placard-pole seen hitherto in a public thoroughfare of men! My
+friend, if thou ever do come to believe in God, thou wilt find
+all Chartism, Manchester riot, Parliamentary incompetence,
+Ministries of Windbag, and the wildest Social Dissolutions, and
+the burning up of this entire Planet, a most small matter in
+comparison.  Brother, this Planet, I find, is but an
+inconsiderable sandgrain in the continents of Being:  this
+Planet's poor temporary interests, thy interests and my interests
+there, when I look fixedly into that eternal Light-Sea and Flame-
+Sea with _its_ eternal interests, dwindle literally into Nothing;
+my speech of it is--silence for the while.  I will as soon think
+of making Galaxies and Star Systems to guide little herring-
+vessels by, as of preaching Religion that the Constable may
+continue possible.  O my Advanced-Liberal friend, this new second
+progress, of proceeding 'to invent God,' is a very strange one!
+Jacobinism unfolded into Saint-Simonism bodes innumerable blessed
+things;  but the thing itself might draw tears from a Stoic!--As
+for me, some twelve or thirteen New Religions, heavy Packets,
+most of them unfranked, having arrived here from various parts of
+the world, in a space of six calendar months, I have instructed
+my invaluable friend the Stamped Postman to introduce no more of
+them, if the charge exceed one penny.
+
+
+Henry of Essex, duelling in that Thames Island, near to Reading
+Abbey, had a religion.  But was it in virtue of his seeing armed
+Phantasms of St. Edmund 'on the rim of the horizon,' looking
+minatory on him?  Had that, intrinsically, anything to do with
+his religion at all?  Henry of Essex's religion was the Inner
+Light or Moral Conscience of his own soul;  such as is vouchsafed
+still to all souls of men;--which Inner Light shone here 'through
+such intellectual and other media' as there were;  producing
+'Phantasms,' Kircherean Visual-Spectra, according to
+circumstances!  It is so with all men.  The clearer my Inner
+Light may shine, through the _less_ turbid media;  the _fewer_
+Phantasms it may produce,--the gladder surely shall I be, and not
+the sorrier!  Hast thou reflected, O serious reader, Advanced-
+Liberal or other, that the one end, essence, use of all religion
+past, present and to come, was this only:  To keep that same
+Moral Conscience or Inner Light of ours alive and shining--which
+certainly the 'Phantasms' and the 'turbid media' were not
+essential for!  All religion was here to remind us, better or
+worse, of what we already know better or worse, of the quite
+_infinite_ difference there is between a Good man and a Bad;  to
+bid us love infinitely the one, abhor and avoid infinitely the
+other,--strive infinitely to _be_ the one, and not to be the
+other.  'All religion issues in due Practical Hero-worship:  He
+that has a soul unasphyxied will never want a religion;  he that
+has a soul asphyxied, reduced to a succedaneum for salt, will
+never find any religion, though you rose from the dead to preach
+him one.
+
+But indeed, when men and reformers ask for 'a religion,' it is
+analogous to their asking, 'What would you have us to do?' and
+such like.  They fancy that their religion too shall be a kind of
+Morrison's Pill, which they have only to swallow once, and all
+will be well.  Resolutely once gulp down your Religion, your
+Morrison's Pill, you have it all plain sailing now;  you can
+follow your affairs, your no-affairs, go along money-hunting,
+pleasure-hunting, dilettanteing, dangling, and miming and
+chattering like a Dead-Sea Ape:  your Morrison will do your
+business for you.  Men's notions are very strange!--Brother, I
+say there is not, was not, nor will ever be, in the wide circle
+of Nature, any Pill or Religion of that character.  Man cannot
+afford thee such;  for the very gods it is impossible.  I advise
+thee to renounce Morrison;  once for all, quit hope of the
+Universal Pill.  For body, for soul, for individual or society,
+there has not any such article been made.  _Non extat._  In
+Created Nature it is not, was not, will not be.  In the void
+imbroglios of Chaos only, and realms of Bedlam, does some shadow
+of it hover, to bewilder and bemock the poor inhabitants _there._
+
+Rituals, Liturgies, Creeds, Hierarchies: all this is not
+religion;  all this, were it dead as Odinism, as Fetishism, does
+not kill religion at all!  It is Stupidity alone, with never so
+many rituals, that kills religion.  Is not this still a World?
+Spinning Cotton under Arkwright and Adam Smith;  founding Cities
+by the Fountain of Juturna, on the Janiculum Mount;  tilling
+Canaan under Prophet Samuel and Psalmist David, man is ever man;
+the missionary of Unseen Powers;  and great and victorious, while
+he continues true to his mission;  mean, miserable, foiled, and
+at last annihilated and trodden out of sight and memory, when he
+proves untrue.  Brother, thou art a Man, I think;  thou are not a
+mere building Beaver, or two-legged Cotton-Spider;  thou hast
+verily a Soul in thee, asphyxied or otherwise!  Sooty
+Manchester,--it too is built on the infinite Abysses;
+overspanned by the skyey Firmaments;  and there is birth in it,
+and death in it;--and it is every whit as wonderful, as fearful,
+unimaginable, as the oldest Salem or Prophetic City.  Go or
+stand, in what time, in what place we will, are there not
+Immensities, Eternities over us, around us, in us:
+
+     'Solemn before us,
+     Veiled, the dark Portal,
+     Goal of all mortal:--
+     Stars silent rest o'er us,
+     Graves under us silent'
+
+Between _these_ two great Silences, the hum of all our spinning
+cylinders, Trades-Unions, Anti-Corn-Law Leagues and Carlton Clubs
+goes on.  Stupidity itself ought to pause a little, and consider
+that.  I tell thee, through all thy Ledgers, Supply-and-demand
+Philosophies, and daily most modern melancholy Business and Cant,
+there does shine the presence of a Primeval Unspeakable;  and
+thou wert wise to recognise, not with lips only, that same!
+
+The Maker's Laws, whether they are promulgated in Sinai Thunder,
+to the ear or imagination, or quite otherwise promulgated, are
+the Laws of God;  transcendant, everlasting, imperatively
+demanding obedience from all men.  This, without any thunder, or
+with never so much thunder, thou, if there be any soul left in
+thee, canst know of a truth.  The Universe, I say, is made by
+Law;  the great Soul of the World is just and not unjust.  Look
+thou, if thou have eyes or soul left, into this great shoreless
+Incomprehensible:  in the heart of its tumultuous Appearances,
+Embroilments, and mad Time-vortexes, is there not, silent,
+eternal, an All-just, an All-beautiful;  sole Reality and
+ultimate controlling Power of the whole?  This is not a figure of
+speech;  this is a fact.  The fact of Gravitation known to all
+animals, is not surer than this inner Fact, which may be known to
+all men.  He who knows this, it will sink, silent, awful,
+unspeakable, into his heart.  He will say with Faust:  "Who
+_dare_ name HIM?"  Most rituals or 'namings' he will fall in with
+at present, are like to be 'namings'--which shall be nameless!
+In silence, in the Eternal Temple, let him worship, if there be
+no fit word.  Such knowledge, the crown of his whole spiritual
+being, the life of his life, let him keep and sacredly walk by.
+He has a religion.  Hourly and daily, for himself and for the
+whole world, a faithful, unspoken, but not ineffectual prayer
+rises, "Thy will be done."  His whole work on Earth is an
+emblematic spoken or acted prayer, Be the will of God done on
+Earth,--not the Devil's will, or any of the Devil's servants'
+wills!  He has a religion, this man;  an everlasting Loadstar
+that beams the brighter in the Heavens, the darker here on Earth
+grows the night around him.  Thou, if thou know not this, what
+are all rituals, liturgies, mythologies, mass-chantings, turnings
+of the rotatory calabash?  They are as nothing;  in a good many
+respects they are as _less._  Divorced from this, getting half-
+divorced from this, they are a thing to fill one with a kind of
+horror;  with a sacred inexpressible pity and fear.  The most
+tragical thing a human eye can look on.  It was said to the
+Prophet, "Behold, I will shew thee worse things than these:
+women weeping to Thammuz."  That was the acme of the Prophet's
+vision,--then as now.
+
+Rituals, Liturgies, Credos, Sinai Thunder:  I know more or less
+the history of these;  the rise, progress, decline and fall of
+these.  Can thunder from all the thirty-two azimuths, repeated
+daily for centuries of years, make God's Laws more godlike to me?
+Brother, No.  Perhaps I am grown to be a man now;  and do not
+need the thunder and the terror any longer!  Perhaps I am above
+being frightened;  perhaps it is not Fear, but Reverence alone,
+that shall now lead me!--Revelations, Inspirations?  Yes:  and
+thy own god-created Soul;  dost thou not call that a
+`revelation?'  Who made THEE?  Where didst Thou come from?  The
+Voice of Eternity, if thou be not a blasphemer and poor asphyxied
+mute, speaks with that tongue of thine!  _Thou_ art the latest
+Birth of Nature;  it is 'the Inspiration of the Almighty' that
+giveth thee understanding!  My brother, my brother!--
+
+Under baleful Atheisms, Mammonisms, Joe-Manton Dilettantisms,
+with their appropriate Cants and Idolisms, and whatsoever
+scandalous rubbish obscures and all but extinguishes the soul of
+man,--religion now is;  its Laws, written if not on stone tables,
+yet on the Azure of Infinitude, in the inner heart of God's
+Creation, certain as Life, certain as Death!  I say the Laws are
+there, and thou shalt not disobey them.  It were better for thee
+not.  Better a hundred deaths than yes.  Terrible 'penalties'
+withal, if thou still need 'penalties,' are there for disobeying.
+Dost thou observe, O redtape Politician, that fiery infernal
+Phenomenon, which men name FRENCH REVOLUTION, sailing, unlooked-
+for, unbidden;  through thy inane Protocol Dominion:--far-seen,
+with splendour not of Heaven?  Ten centuries will see it.  There
+were Tanneries at Meudon for human skins.  And Hell, very truly
+Hell, had power over God's upper Earth for a season.  The
+cruelest Portent that has risen into created Space these ten
+centuries:  let us hail it, with awestruck repentant hearts, as
+the voice once more of a God, though of one in wrath.  Blessed be
+the God's-voice;  for _it_ is true, and Falsehoods have to cease
+before it!  But for that same preternatural quasi-infernal
+Portent;  one could not know what to make of this wretched world,
+in these days' at all.  The deplorablest quack-ridden, and now
+hunger-ridden, downtrodden Despicability and _Flebile Ludibrium,_
+of redtape Protocols, rotatory Calabashes, Poor-Law Bastilles:
+who is there that could think of _its_ being fated to continue?--
+
+Penalties enough, my brother!  This penalty inclusive of all:
+Eternal Death to thy own hapless Self, if thou heed no other.
+Eternal Death, I say,--with many meanings old and new, of which
+let this single one suffice us here:  The eternal impossibility
+for thee to _be_ aught but a Chimera, and swift-vanishing
+deceptive Phantasm, in God's Creation;--swift-vanishing, never to
+reappear:  why should it reappear!  Thou hadst one chance, thou
+wilt never have another.  Everlasting ages will roll on, and no
+other be given thee.  The foolishest articulate-speaking soul now
+extant, may not he say to himself:  "A whole Eternity I waited to
+be born;  and now I have a whole Eternity waiting to see what I
+will do when born!"  This is not Theology, this is Arithmetic.
+And thou but half-discernest this;  thou but half-believest it?
+Alas, on the shores of the Dead Sea on Sabbath, there goes on
+a Tragedy!--
+
+But we will leave this of 'Religion;'  of which, to say truth, it
+is chiefly profitable in these unspeakable days to keep silence.
+Thou needest no 'New Religion;'  nor art thou like to get any.
+Thou hast already more 'religion' than thou makest use of.  This
+day, thou knowest ten commanded duties, seest in thy mind ten
+things which should be done, for one that thou doest!  Do one of
+them;  this of itself will skew thee ten others which can and
+shall be done.  "But my future fate?"  Yes, thy future fate,
+indeed?  Thy future fate, while thou makest _it_ the chief
+question, seems to me--extremely questionable!  I do not think it
+can be good.  Norse Odin, immemorial centuries ago, did not he,
+though a poor Heathen, in the dawn of Time, teach us that, for
+the Dastard there was and could be no good fate;  no harbour
+anywhere, save down with Hela, in the pool of Night!  Dastards,
+Knaves, are they that lust for Pleasure, that tremble at Pain.
+For this world and for the next, Dastards are a class of
+creatures made to be 'arrested;'  they are good for nothing else,
+can look for nothing else.  A greater than Odin has been here.  A
+greater than Odin has taught us--not a greater Dastardism, I
+hope!  My brother, thou must pray for a _soul;_  struggle, as
+with life-and-death energy, to get back thy soul!  Know that
+'religion' is no Morrison's Pill from without, but a reawakening
+of thy own Self from within:--and, above all, leave me alone of
+thy 'religions' and 'new religions' here and elsewhere!  I am
+weary of this sick croaking for a Morrison's-Pill religion;  for
+any and for every such.  I want none such;  and discern all such
+to be impossible.  The resuscitation of old liturgies fallen
+dead;  much more, the manufacture of new liturgies that will
+never be alive:  how hopeless Stylitisms, eremite fanaticisms and
+fakeerisms;  spasmodic agonistic posturemakings, and narrow,
+cramped, morbid, if forever noble wrestlings:  all this is not a
+thing desirable to me.  It is a thing the world _has_ done once,
+--when its beard was not grown as now!
+
+
+And yet there is, at worst, one Liturgy which does remain forever
+unexceptionable:  that of _Praying_ (as the old Monks did withal)
+_by Working._  And indeed the Prayer which accomplished itself in
+special chapels at stated hours, and went not with a man, rising
+up from all his Work and Action, at all moments sanctifying the
+same,--what was it ever good for?  'Work is Worship:'  yes, in a
+highly considerable sense,--which, in the present state of all
+'worship,' who is there that can unfold!  He that understands it
+well, understands the Prophecy of the whole Future;  the last
+Evangel, which has included all others.  Its cathedral the Dome
+of Immensity,--hast thou seen it? coped with the star-galaxies;
+paved with the green mosaic of land and ocean;  and for altar,
+verily, the Star-throne of the Eternal!  Its litany and psalmody
+the noble acts, the heroic work and suffering, and true Heart-
+utterance of all the Valiant of the Sons of Men.  Its choir-music
+the ancient Winds and Oceans, and deep-toned, inarticulate, but
+most speaking voices of Destiny and History,--supernal ever as of
+old.  Between two great Silences:
+
+     'Stars silent rest o  o'er us,
+     Graves under us silent!'
+
+Between which two great Silences, do not, as we said, all human
+Noises, in the naturalest times, most preternaturally march
+and roll?--
+
+I will insert this also, in a lower strain, from Sauerteig's
+_Aesthetische Springwurzel._   'Worship?' says he:  'Before that
+inane tumult of Hearsay filled men's heads, while the world lay
+yet silent, and the heart true and open, many things were
+Worship! To the primeval man whatsoever good came, descended on
+him (as, in mere fact, it ever does) direct from God;  whatsoever
+duty lay visible for him, this a Supreme God had prescribed.  To
+the present hour I ask thee, Who else?  For the primeval man, in
+whom dwelt Thought, this Universe was all a Temple;  Life
+everywhere a Worship.
+
+'What Worship, for example, is there not in mere Washing!
+Perhaps one of the most moral things a man, in common cases, has
+it in his power to do.  Strip thyself, go into the bath, or were
+it into the limpid pool and running brook, and there wash and be
+clean;  thou wilt step out again a purer and a better man.  This
+consciousness of perfect outer pureness, that to thy skin there
+now adheres no foreign speck of imperfection, how it radiates in
+on thee, with cunning symbolic influences, to thy very soul!
+Thou hast an increase of tendency towards all good things
+whatsoever.  The oldest Eastern Sages, with joy and holy
+gratitude, had felt it so,--and that it was the Maker's gift and
+will.  Whose else is it?  It remains a religious duty, from
+oldest times, in the East.--Nor could Herr Professor Strauss,
+when I put the question, deny that for us at present it is still
+such here in the West!  To that dingy fuliginous Operative,
+emerging from his soot-mill, what is the first duty I will
+prescribe, and offer help towards?  That he clean the skin of
+him.  _Can_ he pray, by any ascertained method?  One knows not
+entirely:--but with soap and a sufficiency of water, he can wash.
+Even the dull English feel something of this;  they have a
+saying, "Cleanliness is near of kin to Godliness:"--yet never, in
+any country, saw I operative men worse washed, and, in a climate
+drenched with the softest cloud-water, such a scarcity of
+baths!'--Alas, Sauerteig, our 'operative men' are at present
+short even of potatoes:  what 'duty' can you prescribe to them!
+
+Or let us give a glance at China.  Our new friend, the Emperor
+there, is Pontiff of three hundred million men;  who do all live
+and work, these many centuries now;  authentically patronised by
+Heaven so far;  and therefore must have some 'religion' of a
+kind. T his Emperor-Pontiff has, in fact, a religious belief of
+certain Laws of Heaven;  observes, with a religious rigour, his
+'three thousand punctualities,' given out by men of insight, some
+sixty generations since, as a legible transcript of the same,--
+the Heavens do seem to say, not totally an incorrect one.  He has
+not much of a ritual, this Pontiff-Emperor;  believes, it is
+likest, with the old Monks, that 'Labour is Worship.'  His most
+public Act of Worship, it appears, is the drawing solemnly at a
+certain day, on the green bosom of our Mother Earth, when the
+Heavens, after dead black winter, have again with their vernal
+radiances awakened her, a distinct red Furrow with the Plough,--
+signal that all the Ploughs of China are to begin ploughing and
+worshipping!  It is notable enough.  He, in sight of the Seen and
+Unseen Powers, draws his distinct red Furrow there;  saying, and
+praying, in mute symbolism, so many most eloquent things!
+
+If you ask this Pontiff, "Who made him?  What is to become of him
+and us?" he maintains a dignified reserve;  waves his hand and
+pontiff-eyes over the unfathomable deep of Heaven, the 'Tsien,'
+the azure kingdoms of Infinitude;  as if asking, "is it doubtful
+that we are right _well_ made?  Can aught that is _wrong_ become
+of us?"--He and his three hundred millions (it is their chief
+'punctuality') visit yearly the Tombs of their Fathers;  each man
+the Tomb of his Father and his Mother:  alone there, in silence,
+with what of 'worship' or of other thought there may be, pauses
+solemnly each man;  the divine Skies all silent over him;  the
+divine Graves, and this divinest Grave, all silent under him;
+the pulsings of his own soul, if he have any soul, alone audible.
+Truly it may be a kind of worship!  Truly, if a man cannot get
+some glimpse into the Eternities, looking through this portal,--
+through what other need he try it?
+
+Our friend the Pontiff-Emperor permits cheerfully, though with
+contempt, all manner of Buddhists, Bonzes, Talapoins and such
+like, to build brick Temples, on the voluntary principle;  to
+worship with what of chantings, paper-lanterns and tumultuous
+brayings, pleases them;  and make night hideous, since they find
+some comfort in so doing.  Cheerfully, though with contempt.  He
+is a wiser Pontiff than many persons think!  He is as yet the one
+Chief Potentate or Priest in this Earth who has made a distinct
+systematic attempt at what we call the ultimate result of all
+religion, _'Practical_ Hero-worship:'  he does incessantly, with
+true anxiety, in such way as he can, search and sift (it would
+appear) his whole enormous population for the Wisest born among
+them;  by which Wisest, as by born Kings, these three hundred
+million men are governed.  The Heavens, to a certain extent, do
+appear to countenance him.  These three hundred millions actually
+make porcelain, souchong tea, with innumerable other things;  and
+fight, under Heaven's flag, against Necessity;--and have fewer
+Seven-Years Wars, Thirty-Years Wars, French-Revolution Wars, and
+infernal fightings with each other, than certain millions
+elsewhere have!
+
+
+Nay, in our poor distracted Europe itself, in these newest times,
+have there not religious voices risen,--with a religion new and
+yet the oldest;  entirely indisputable to all hearts of men?
+Some I do know, who did not call or think themselves 'Prophets,'
+far enough from that;  but who were, in very truth, melodious
+Voices from the eternal Heart of Nature once again;  souls
+forever venerable to all that have a soul.  A French Revolution
+is one phenomenon;  as complement and spiritual exponent thereof,
+a Poet Goethe and German Literature is to me another.  The old
+Secular or Practical World, so to speak, having gone up in fire,
+is not here the prophecy and dawn of a new Spiritual World,
+parent of far nobler, wider, new Practical Worlds?  A Life of
+Antique devoutness, Antique veracity and heroism, has again
+become possible, is again _seen_ actual there, for the most
+modern man.  A phenomenon, as quiet as it is, comparable for
+greatness to no other!  'The great event for the world is, now as
+always, the arrival in it of a new Wise Man.'  Touches there are,
+be the Heavens ever thanked, of new Sphere-melody;  audible once
+more, in the infinite jargoning discords and poor scrannel-
+pipings of the thing called Literature;--priceless there, as the
+voice of new Heavenly Psalms!  Literature, like the old Prayer-
+Collections of the first centuries, were it 'well selected from
+and burnt,' contains precious things.  For Literature, with all
+its printing-presses, puffing-engines and shoreless deafening
+triviality, is yet 'the Thought of Thinking Souls.'  A sacred
+'religion,' if you like the name, does live in the heart of that
+strange froth-ocean, not wholly froth, which we call Literature;
+and will more and more disclose itself therefrom;--not now as
+scorching Fire:  the red smoky scorching Fire has purified itself
+into white sunny Light.  Is not Light grander than Fire?  It is
+the same element in a state of purity.
+
+My ingenuous readers, we will march out of this Third Book with a
+rhythmic word of Goethe's on our tongue;  a word which perhaps
+has already sung itself, in dark hours and in bright, through
+many a heart.  To me, finding it devout yet wholly credible and
+veritable, full of piety yet free of cant;  to me joyfully
+finding much in it, and joyfully missing so much in it, this
+little snatch of music, by the greatest German Man, sounds like a
+stanza in the grand _Road-Song_ and _Marching-Song_ of our great
+Teutonic Kindred, wending, wending, valiant and victorious,
+through the undiscovered Deeps of Time!  He calls it _Mason-
+Lodge,_--not Psalm or Hymn:
+
+     The Mason's ways are
+     A type of Existence,
+     And his persistance
+     Is as the days are
+     Of men in this world.
+
+     The Future hides in it
+     Good hap and sorrow;
+     We press still thorow,
+     Nought that abides in it
+     Daunting us,--onward.
+
+     And solemn before us,
+     Veiled, the dark Portal,
+     Goal of all mortal:--
+     Stars silent rest o'er us,
+     Graves under us silent.
+
+     While earnest thou gazest,
+     Comes boding of terror,
+     Comes phantasm and error,
+     Perplexes the bravest
+     With doubt and misgiving.
+
+     But heard are the Voices,--
+     Heard are the Sages,
+     The Worlds and the Ages:
+     "Choose well, your choice is
+     Brief and yet endless:
+
+     Here eyes do regard you,
+     In Eternity's stilness;
+     Here is all fulness,
+     Ye brave, to reward you;
+     Work, and despair not."
+
+
+
+
+Book IV--Horoscope
+
+
+
+Chapter I
+
+Aristocracies
+
+
+To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so
+impossible, had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled;
+effaced, and what is worse, defaced!  The Past cannot be seen;
+the Past, looked at through the medium of 'Philosophical History'
+in these times, cannot even be _not_ seen:  it is misseen;
+affirmed to have existed,--and to have been a godless
+Impossibility.  Your Norman Conquerors, true royal souls, crowned
+kings as such, were vulturous irrational tyrants:  your Becket
+was a noisy egoist and hypocrite;  getting his brains spilt on
+the floor of Canterbury Cathedral, to secure the main chance,--
+somewhat uncertain how!  "Enthusiasm," and even "honest
+Enthusiasm,"--yes, of course:
+
+     'The Dog, to gain his private ends,
+     _Went_ mad, and bit the Man!'--
+
+For in truth, the eye sees in all things 'what it brought with it
+the means of seeing.'  A godless century, looking back on
+centuries that were godly, produces portraitures more miraculous
+than any other.  All was inane discord in the Past;  brute Force
+bore rule everywhere;  Stupidity, savage Unreason, fitter for
+Bedlam than for a human World!  Whereby indeed it becomes
+sufficiently natural that the like qualities, in new sleeker
+habiliments, should continue in our time to rule.  Millions
+enchanted in Bastille Workhouses;  Irish Widows proving their
+relationship by typhus-fever:  what would you have?  It was ever
+so, or worse.  Man's History, was it not always even this:  The
+cookery and eating up of imbecile Dupedom by successful
+Quackhood;  the battle, with various weapons, of vulturous Quack
+and Tyrant against vulturous Tyrant and Quack?  No God was in the
+Past Time;  nothing but.  Mechanisms and Chaotic Brute-gods:--how
+shall the poor 'Philosophic Historian,' to whom his own century
+is all godless, see any God in other centuries?
+
+Men believe in Bibles, and disbelieve in them:  but of all Bibles
+the frightfulest to disbelieve in is this 'Bible of Universal
+History.'  This is the Eternal Bible and God's-Book, 'which every
+born man,' till once the soul and eyesight are distinguished in
+him, 'can and must, with his own eyes, see the God's-Finger
+writing!'  To discredit this, is an _infidelity_ like no other.
+Such infidelity you would punish, if not by fire and faggot,
+which are difficult to manage in our times, yet by the most
+peremptory order, To hold its peace till it got something wiser
+to say.  Why should the blessed Silence be broken into noises, to
+communicate only the like of this?  If the Past have no God's-
+Reason in it, nothing but Devil's-Unreason, let the Past be
+eternally forgotten:  mention it no more;--we whose ancestors
+were all hanged, why should we talk of ropes!
+
+It is, in brief, not true that men ever lived by Delirium,
+Hypocrisy, Injustice, or any form of Unreason, since they came to
+inhabit this Planet.  It is not true that they ever did, or ever
+will, live except by the reverse of these.  Men will again be
+taught this.  Their acted History will then again be a Heroism;
+their written History, what it once was, an Epic.  Nay, forever
+it is either such;  or else it virtually is--Nothing.  Were it
+written in a thousand volumes, the Unheroic of such volumes
+hastens incessantly to be forgotten;  the net content of an
+Alexandrian Library of Unheroics is, and will ultimately shew
+itself to be, _zero._  What man is interested to remember _it,_
+have not all men, at all times, the liveliest interest to forget
+it?--'Revelations,' if not celestial, then infernal, will teach
+us that God is;  we shall then, if needful, discern without
+difficulty that He has always been!  The Dryasdust Philosophisms
+and enlightened Scepticisms of the Eighteenth Century, historical
+and other, will have to survive for a while with the
+Physiologists, as a memorable _Nightmare-Dream._  All this
+haggard epoch, with its ghastly Doctrines, and death's-head
+Philosophies 'teaching by example' or otherwise, will one day
+have become, what to our Moslem friends their godless ages are,
+'the Period of Ignorance.
+
+
+If the convulsive struggles of the last Half-Century have taught
+poor struggling convulsed Europe any truth, it may perhaps be
+this as the essence of innumerable others:  That Europe requires
+a real Aristocracy, a real Priesthood, or it cannot continue to
+exist.  Huge French Revolutions, Napoleonisms, then Bourbonisms
+with their corollary of Three Days, finishing in very unfinal
+Louis-Philippisms:  all this ought to be didactic!  All this may
+have taught us, That False Aristocracies are insupportable;
+that No-Aristocracies, Liberty-and-Equalities are impossible;
+that True Aristocracies are at once indispensable and not
+easily attained.
+
+Aristocracy and Priesthood, a Governing Class and a Teaching
+Class:  these two, sometimes separate, and endeavouring to
+harmonise themselves, sometimes conjoined as one, and the King a
+Pontiff-King:--there did no Society exist without these two vital
+elements, there will none exist.  It lies in the very nature of
+man:  you will visit no remotest village in the most republican
+country of the world, where virtually or actually you do not find
+these two powers at work.  Man, little as he may suppose it, is
+necessitated to obey superiors.  He is a social being in virtue
+of this necessity;  nay he could not be gregarious otherwise.  He
+obeys those whom he esteems better than himself, wiser, braver;
+and will forever obey such;  and even be ready and delighted to
+do it.
+
+The Wiser, Braver:  these, a Virtual Aristocracy everywhere and
+everywhen, do in all Societies that reach any articulate shape,
+develop themselves into a ruling class, an Actual Aristocracy,
+with settled modes of operating, what are called laws and even
+_private-laws_ or privileges, and so forth;  very notable to look
+upon in this world.--Aristocracy and Priesthood, we say, are
+sometimes united.  For indeed the Wiser and the Braver are
+properly but one class;  no wise man but needed first of all to
+be a brave man, or he never had been wise.  The noble Priest was
+always a noble Aristos to begin with, and something more to end
+with.  Your Luther, your Knox, your Anselm, Becket, Abbot Samson,
+Samuel Johnson, if they had not been brave enough, by what
+possibility could they ever have been wise?--If, from accident or
+forethought, this your Actual Aristocracy have got discriminated
+into Two Classes, there can be no doubt but the Priest Class is
+the more dignified;  supreme over the other, as governing head is
+over active hand.  And yet in practice again, it is likeliest the
+reverse will be found arranged;--a sign that the arrangement is
+already vitiated;  that a split is introduced into it, which will
+widen and widen till the whole be rent asunder.
+
+In England, in Europe generally, we may say that these two
+Virtualities have unfolded themselves into Actualities, in by far
+the noblest and richest manner any region of the world ever saw.
+A spiritual Guideship, a practical Governorship, fruit of the
+grand conscious endeavours, say rather of the immeasurable
+unconscious instincts and necessities of men, have established
+themselves;  very strange to behold.  Everywhere, while so much
+has been forgotten, you find the King's Palace, and the
+Viceking's Castle, Mansion, Manorhouse;  till there is not an
+inch of ground from sea to sea but has both its King and
+Viceking, long due series of Viceking, its Squire, Earl, Duke or
+whatever the title of him,--to whom you have given the land that
+he may govern you in it.
+
+More touching still, there is not a hamlet where poor peasants
+congregate, but by one means and another a Church-Apparatus has
+been got together,--roofed edifice, with revenues and belfries;
+pulpit, reading-desk, with Books and Methods:  possibility, in
+short, and strict prescription, That a man stand there and speak
+of spiritual things to men.  It is beautiful;--even in its great
+obscuration and decadence, it is among the beautifulest, most
+touching objects one sees on the Earth.  This Speaking Man has
+indeed, in these times, wandered terribly from the point;  has,
+alas, as it were totally lost sight of the point:  yet, at
+bottom, whom have we to compare with him?  Of all public
+functionaries boarded and lodged on the Industry of Modern
+Europe, is there one worthier of the board he has?  A man even
+professing, and never so languidly making still some endeavour,
+to save the souls of men:  contrast him with a man professing to
+do little but shoot the partridges of men!  I wish he could find
+the point again, this Speaking One;  and stick to it with
+tenacity, with deadly energy;  for there is need of him yet!  The
+Speaking Function, this of Truth coming to us with a living
+voice, nay in a living shape, and as a concrete practical
+exemplar:  this, with all our Writing and Printing Functions, has
+a perennial place.  Could he but find the point again,--take the
+old spectacles off his nose, and looking up discover, almost in
+contact with him, what the _real_ Satanas, and soul-devouring,
+world-devouring _Devil,_ now is!  Original Sin and such like are
+bad enough, I doubt not:  but distilled Gin, dark Ignorance,
+Stupidity, dark Corn-Law, Bastille and Company, what are they!
+_Will_ he discover our new real Satan, whom he has to fight;  or
+go on droning through his old nose-spectacles about old extinct
+Satans;  and never see the real one, till he _feel_ him at his
+own throat and ours?  That is a question, for the world!  Let us
+not intermeddle with it here.
+
+Sorrowful, phantasmal as this same Double Aristocracy of Teachers
+and Governors now looks, it is worth all men's while to know that
+the purport of it is and remains noble and most real.  Dryasdust,
+looking merely at the surface, is greatly in error as to those
+ancient Kings.  William Conqueror, William Rufus or Redbeard,
+Stephen Curthose himself, much more Henry Beauclerc and our brave
+Plantagenet Henry:  the life of these men was not a vulturous
+Fighting;  it was a valorous Governing,--to which occasionally
+Fighting did, and alas must yet, though far seldomer now,
+superadd itself as an accident, a distressing impedimental
+adjunct.  The fighting too was indispensable, for ascertaining
+who had the might over whom, the right over whom.  By much hard
+fighting, as we once said, 'the unrealities, beaten into dust,
+flew gradually off;'  and left the plain reality and fact, "Thou
+stronger than I;  thou wiser than I;  thou king, and subject I,"
+in a somewhat clearer condition.
+
+Truly we cannot enough admire, in those Abbot-Samson and William-
+Conqueror times, the arrangement they had made of their Governing
+Classes.  Highly interesting to observe how the sincere insight,
+on their part, into what did, of primary necessity, behove to be
+accomplished, had led them to the way of accomplishing it, and in
+the course of time to get it accomplished!  No imaginary
+Aristocracy would serve their turn;  and accordingly they
+attained a real one.  The Bravest men, who, it is ever to be
+repeated and remembered, are also on the whole the Wisest,
+Strongest, every way Best, had here, with a respectable degree of
+accuracy, been got selected;  seated each on his piece of
+territory, which was lent him, then gradually given him, that
+he might govern it.  These Vicekings, each on his portion of
+the common soil of England, with a Head King over all, were
+a 'Virtuality perfected into an Actuality' really to an
+astonishing extent.
+
+For those were rugged stalwart ages;  full of earnestness, of a
+rude God's-truth:--nay, at any rate, their _quilting_ was so
+unspeakably _thinner_ than ours;  Fact came swiftly on them, if
+at any time they had yielded to Phantasm!  'The Knaves and
+Dastards' had to be 'arrested' in some measure;  or the world,
+almost within year and day, found that it could not live.  The
+Knaves and Dastards accordingly were got arrested.  Dastards upon
+the very throne had to be got arrested, and taken off the
+throne,--by such methods as there were;  by the roughest method,
+if there chanced to be no smoother one!  Doubtless there was much
+harshness of operation, much severity;  as indeed government and
+surgery are often somewhat severe.  Gurth born thrall of Cedric,
+it is like;  got cuffs as often as pork-parings, if he
+misdemeaned himself;  but Gurth did belong to Cedric:  no human
+creature then went about connected with nobody;  left to go his
+ways into Bastilles or worse, under _Laissez-faire;_  reduced to
+prove his relationship by dying of typhus-fever!--Days come when
+there is no King in Israel, but every man is his own king, doing
+that which is right in his own eyes;--and tarbarrels are burnt to
+'Liberty,' 'Tenpound Franchise' and the like, with considerable
+effect in various ways!--
+
+That Feudal Aristocracy, I say, was no imaginary one.  To a
+respectable degree, its _Jarls,_ what we now call Earls, were
+_Strong-Ones_ in fact as well as etymology;  its Dukes _Leaders,_
+its Lords _Law-wards._  They did all the Soldiering and Police of
+the country, all the judging, Law-making, even the Church-
+Extension;  whatsoever in the way of Governing, of Guiding and
+Protecting could be done.  It was a Land Aristocracy;  it managed
+the Governing of this English People, and had the reaping of the
+Soil of England in return.  It is, in many senses, the Law of
+Nature, this same Law of Feudalism;--no right Aristocracy but a
+Land one!  The curious are invited to meditate upon it in these
+days.  Soldiering, Police and Judging, Church-Extension, nay real
+Government and Guidance, all this was actually _done_ by the
+Holders of the Land in return for their Land.  How much of it is
+now done by them;  done by anybody?  Good Heavens, "Laissez-
+faire, Do ye nothing, eat your wages and sleep," is everywhere
+the passionate half-wise cry of this time;  and they will not so
+much as do nothing, but must do mere Corn-Laws!  We raise Fifty-
+two millions, from the general mass of us, to get our Governing
+done,--or, alas, to get ourselves persuaded that it is done:  and
+the 'peculiar burden of the Land' is to pay, not all this, but to
+pay, as I learn, one twenty-fourth part of all this.  Our first
+Chartist Parliament, or Oliver _Redivivus,_ you would say, will
+know where to lay the new taxes of England!--Or, alas, taxes?  If
+we made the Holders of the Land pay every shilling still of the
+expense of Governing the Land, what were all that?  The Land, by
+mere hired Governors, cannot be got governed.  You cannot hire
+men to govern the Land:  it is by a mission not contracted for in
+the Stock-Exchange, but felt in their own hearts as coming out of
+Heaven, that men can govern a Land.  The mission of a Land
+Aristocracy is a sacred one, in both the senses of that old word.
+The footing it stands on, at present, might give rise to thoughts
+other than of Corn-Laws!--
+
+But truly a 'Splendour of God,' as in William Conqueror's rough
+oath, did dwell in those old rude veracious ages;  did inform,
+more and more, with a heavenly nobleness, all departments of
+their work and life.  Phantasms could not yet walk abroad in mere
+Cloth Tailorage;  they were at least Phantasms 'on the rim of the
+horizon,' pencilled there by an eternal Light-beam from within.
+A most 'practical' Hero-worship went on, unconsciously or half-
+consciously, everywhere.  A Monk Samson, with a maximum of two
+shillings in his pocket, could, without ballot-box, be made a
+Viceking of, being seen to be worthy.  The difference between a
+good man and a bad man was as yet felt to be, what it forever is,
+an immeasurable one.  Who _durst_ have elected a Pandarus Dog-
+draught, in those days, to any office, Carlton Club, Senatorship,
+or place whatsoever?  It was felt that the arch Satanas and no
+other had a clear right of property in Pandarus;  that it were
+better for you to have no hand in Pandarus, to keep out of
+Pandarus his neighbourhood!  Which is, to this hour, the mere
+fact;  though for the present, alas, the forgotten fact.  I think
+they were comparatively blessed times those, in their way!
+'Violence,' 'war,' 'disorder:'  well, what is war, and death
+itself, to such a perpetual life-in-death, and 'peace and peace
+where there is no peace!'  Unless some Hero-worship, in its new
+appropriate form, can return, this world does not promise to be
+very habitable long.
+
+Old Anselm, exiled Archbishop of Canterbury, one of the purest-
+minded 'men of genius,' was traveling to make his appeal to Rome
+against King Rufus,--a man of rough ways, in whom the 'inner
+Light-beam' shone very fitfully.  It is beautiful to read, in
+Monk Eadmer, how the Continental populations welcomed and
+venerated this Anselm, as no French population now venerates
+Jean-Jacques or giant-killing Voltaire;  as not even an American
+population now venerates a Schnuspel the distinguished Novelist!
+They had, by phantasy and true insight, the intensest conviction
+that a God's Blessing dwelt in this Anselm,--as is my conviction
+too.  They crowded round, with bent knees and enkindled hearts,
+to receive his blessing, to hear his voice, to see the light of
+his face.  My blessings on them and on him!--But the notablest
+was a certain necessitous or covetous Duke of Burgundy, in
+straitened circumstances we shall hope,--who reflected that in
+all likelihood this English Archbishop, going towards Rome to
+appeal, must have taken store of cash with him to bribe the
+Cardinals.  Wherefore he of Burgundy, for his part, decided to
+lie in wait and rob him.  'In an open space of a wood,' some
+'wood' then green and growing, eight centuries ago, in Burgundian
+Land,--this fierce Duke, with fierce steel followers, shaggy,
+savage, as the Russian Bear, dashes out on the weak old Anselm;
+who is riding along there, on his small quiet-going pony;
+escorted only by Eadmer and another poor Monk on ponies;  and,
+except small modicum of roadmoney, not a gold coin in his
+possession.  The steelclad Russian Bear emerges, glaring:  the
+old whitebearded man starts not,--paces on unmoved, looking into
+him with those clear old earnest eyes, with that venerable
+sorrowful time-worn face;  of whom no man or thing need be
+afraid, and who also is afraid of no created man or thing.  The
+fire-eyes of his Burgundian Grace meet these clear eye-glances,
+convey them swift to his heart:  he bethinks him that probably
+this feeble, fearless, hoary Figure has in it something of the
+Most High God;  that probably he shall be damned if he meddle
+with it,--that, on the whole, he had better not.  He plunges, the
+rough savage, from his warhorse, down to his knees;  embraces the
+feet of old Anselm:  he too begs his blessing;  orders men to
+escort him, guard him from being robbed, and under dread
+penalties see him safe on his way.  _Per os Dei,_ as his Majesty
+was wont to ejaculate!
+
+Neither is this quarrel of Rufus and Anselm, of Henry and Becket,
+uninstructive to us.  It was, at bottom, a great quarrel.  For,
+admitting that Anselm was full of divine blessing, he by no means
+included in him all forms of divine blessing:--there were far
+other forms withal, which he little dreamed of;  and William
+Redbeard was unconsciously the representative and spokesman of
+these.  In truth, could your divine Anselm, your divine Pope
+Gregory have had their way, the results had been very notable.
+Our Western World had all become a European Thibet, with one
+Grand Lama sitting at Rome;  our one honourable business that of
+singing mass, all day and all night.  Which would not in the
+least have suited us!  The Supreme Powers willed it not so.
+
+It was as if King Redbeard unconsciously, addressing Anselm,
+Becket and the others, had said:  "Right Reverend, your Theory of
+the Universe is indisputable by man or devil.  To the core of our
+heart we feel that this divine thing, which you call Mother
+Church, does fill the whole world hitherto known, and is and
+shall be all our salvation and all our desire.  And yet--and yet
+--Behold, though it is an unspoken secret, the world is _wider_
+than any of us think, Right Reverend!  Behold, there are yet
+other immeasurable Sacrednesses in this that you call Heathenism,
+Secularity!  On the whole I, in an obscure but most rooted
+manner, feel that I cannot comply with you.  Western Thibet and
+perpetual mass-chanting,--No. I am, so to speak, in the family-
+way;  with child, of I know not what,--certainly of something far
+different from this!  I have--_Per os Dei,_ I have Manchester
+Cotton-trades, Bromwicham Iron-trades, American Commonwealths,
+Indian Empires, Steam Mechanisms and Shakspeare Dramas, in my
+belly;  and cannot do it, Right Reverend!"--So accordingly it was
+decided: and Saxon Becket spilt his life in Canterbury Cathedral,
+as Scottish Wallace did on Tower-Hill, and as generally a noble
+man and martyr has to do,--not for nothing;  no, but for a divine
+something, other than _he_ had altogether calculated.  We will
+now quit this of the hard, organic, but limited Feudal Ages;  and
+glance timidly into the immense Industrial Ages, as yet all
+inorganic, and in a quite pulpy condition, requiring desperately
+to harden themselves into some organism!
+
+
+Our Epic having now become _Tools and the Man,_ it is more than
+usually impossible to prophesy the Future.  The boundless Future
+does lie there, predestined, nay already extant though unseen;
+hiding, in its Continents of Darkness, 'good hap and sorrow:'
+but the supremest intelligence of man cannot prefigure much of
+it:--the united intelligence and effort of All Men in all coming
+generations, this alone will gradually prefigure it, and figure
+and form it into a seen fact!  Straining our eyes hitherto, the
+utmost effort of intelligence sheds but some most glimmering
+dawn, a little way into its dark enormous Deeps:  only huge
+outlines loom uncertain on the sight;  and the ray of prophecy,
+at a short distance, expires.  But may we not say, here as
+always, Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof!  To shape the
+whole Future is not our problem;  but only to shape faithfully a
+small part of it, according to rules already known.  It is
+perhaps possible for each of us, who will with due earnestness
+inquire, to ascertain clearly what he, for his own part, ought to
+do:  this let him, with true heart, do, and continue doing.  The
+general issue will, as it has always done, rest well with a
+Higher Intelligence than ours.
+
+One grand 'outline,' or even two, many earnest readers may
+perhaps, at this stage of the business, be able to prefigure for
+themselves,--and draw some guidance from.  One prediction, or
+even two, are already possible.  For the Life-tree Igdrasil, in
+all its new developments, is the selfsame world-old Life-tree:
+having found an element or elements there, running from the very
+roots of it in Hela's Realms, in the Well of Mimer and of the
+Three Nornas or TIMES, up to this present hour of it in our own
+hearts, we conclude that such will have to continue.  A man has,
+in his own soul, an Eternal;  can read something of the Eternal
+there, if he will look!  He already knows what will continue;
+what cannot, by any means or appliance whatsoever, be made
+to continue!
+
+One wide and widest 'outline' ought really, in all ways, to be
+becoming clear to us;  this namely:  That a 'Splendour of God,'
+in one form or other, will have to unfold itself from the heart
+of these our Industrial Ages too;  or they will never get
+themselves 'organised;'  but continue chaotic, distressed,
+distracted evermore, and have to perish in frantic suicidal
+dissolution.  A second 'outline' or prophecy, narrower, but also
+wide enough, seems not less certain:  That there will again _be_
+a King in Israel;  a system of Order and Government;  and every
+man shall, in some measure, see himself constrained to do that
+which is right in the King's eyes.  This too we may call a sure
+element of the Future;  for this too is of the Eternal;--this too
+is of the Present, though hidden from most;  and without it no
+fibre of the Past ever was.  An actual new Sovereignty,
+Industrial Aristocracy, real not imaginary Aristocracy, is
+indispensable and indubitable for us.
+
+But what an Aristocracy;  on what new, far more complex and
+cunningly devised conditions than that old Feudal fighting one!
+For we are to bethink us that the Epic verily is not _Arms and
+the Man,_ but _Tools and the Man,_--an infinitely wider kind of
+Epic.  And again we are to bethink us that men cannot now be
+bound to men by _brass-collars,_--not at all:  that this brass-
+collar method, in all figures of it, has vanished out of Europe
+forevermore!  Huge Democracy, walking the streets everywhere in
+its Sack Coat, has asserted so much;  irrevocably, brooking no
+reply!  True enough, man _is_ forever the 'born thrall' of
+certain men, born master of certain other men, born equal of
+certain others, let him acknowledge the fact or not.  It is
+unblessed for him when he cannot acknowledge this fact;  he is in
+the chaotic state, ready to perish, till he do get the fact
+acknowledged.  But no man is, or can henceforth be, the brass-
+collar thrall of any man;  you will have to bind him by other,
+far nobler and cunninger methods.  Once for all, he is to be
+loose of the brass-collar, to have a scope as wide as his
+faculties now are:--will he not be all the usefuler to you, in
+that new state?  Let him go abroad as a trusted one, as a free
+one;  and return home to you with rich earnings at night!  Gurth
+could only tend pigs;  this one will build cities, conquer waste
+worlds.--How, in conjunction with inevitable Democracy,
+indispensable Sovereignty is to exist:  certainly it is the
+hugest question ever heretofore propounded to Mankind!  The
+solution of which is work for long years and centuries.  Years
+and centuries, of one knows not what complexion;--blessed or
+unblessed, according as they shall, with earnest valiant effort,
+make progress therein, or, in slothful unveracity and
+dilettantism, only talk of making progress.  For either progress
+therein, or swift and ever swifter progress towards dissolution,
+is henceforth a necessity.
+
+
+It is of importance that this grand reformation were begun;  that
+Corn-Law Debatings and other jargon, little less than delirious
+in such a time, had fled far away, and left us room to begin!
+For the evil has grown practical, extremely conspicuous;  if it
+be not seen and provided for, the blindest fool will have to feel
+it ere long.  There is much that can wait;  but there is
+something also that cannot wait.  With millions of eager Working
+Men imprisoned in 'Impossibility' and Poor-Law Bastilles, it is
+time that some means of dealing with them were trying to become
+'possible!'  Of the Government of England, of all articulate-
+speaking functionaries, real and imaginary Aristocracies, of me
+and of thee, it is imperatively demanded, "How do you mean to
+manage these men?  Where are they to find a supportable
+existence?  What is to become of them,--and of you!"
+
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+Bribery Committee
+
+
+In the case of the late Bribery Committee, it seemed to be the
+conclusion of the soundest practical minds that Bribery could not
+be put down;  that Pure Election was a thing we had seen the last
+of, and must now go on without, as we best could.  A conclusion
+not a little startling;  to which it requires a practical mind of
+some seasoning to reconcile yourself at once!  It seems, then, we
+are henceforth to get ourselves constituted Legislators not
+according to what merit we may have, or even what merit we may
+seem to have, but according to the length of our purse, and our
+frankness, impudence and dexterity in laying out the contents of
+the same.  Our theory, written down in all books and law-books,
+spouted forth from all barrel-heads, is perfect purity of
+Tenpound Franchise, absolute sincerity of question put and answer
+given;--and our practice is irremediable bribery;  irremediable,
+unpunishable, which you will do more harm than good by attempting
+to punish!  Once more, a very startling conclusion indeed;
+which, whatever the soundest practical minds in parliament
+may think of it, invites all British men to meditations of
+various kinds.
+
+A Parliament, one would say, which proclaims itself elected and
+eligible by bribery, tells the Nation that is governed by it a
+piece of singular news.  Bribery:  have we reflected what bribery
+is?  Bribery means not only length of purse, which is neither
+qualification nor the contrary for legislating well;  but it
+means dishonesty, and even impudent dishonesty;--brazen
+insensibility to lying and to making others lie;  total oblivion,
+and flinging overboard, for the nonce, of any real thing you can
+call veracity, morality;  with dexterous putting on the cast-
+clothes of that real thing, and strutting about in them!  What
+Legislating can you get out of a man in that fatal situation?
+Nonce that will profit much, one would think!  A Legislator who
+has left his veracity lying on the door threshold, he, why verily
+_he_--ought to be sent out to seek it again!
+
+Heavens, what an improvement, were there once fairly, in Downing-
+street, an Election-Office opened, with a Tariff of Boroughs!
+Such and such a population, amount of property-tax, ground-
+rental, extent of trade;  returns two Members, returns one
+Member, for so much money down:  Ipswich so many thousands,
+Nottingham so many,--as they happened, one by one, to fall into
+this new Downing-street Schedule A!  An incalculable improvement,
+in comparison:  for now at least you have it fairly by length of
+purse, and leave the dishonesty, the impudence, the unveracity
+all handsomely aside.  Length of purse and desire to be a
+Legislator ought to get a man into Parliament, not with, but if
+possible _without_ the unveracity, the impudence and the
+dishonesty!  Length of purse and desire, these are, as intrinsic
+qualifications, correctly equal to zero;  but they are not yet
+less than zero,--as the smallest addition of that latter sort
+will make them!
+
+And is it come to this?  And does our venerable Parliament
+announce itself elected and eligible in this manner?  Surely such
+a Parliament promulgates strange horoscopes of itself.  What is
+to become of a Parliament elected or eligible in this manner?
+Unless Belial and Beelzebub have got possession of the throne of
+this Universe, such Parliament is preparing itself for new
+Reform-bills.  We shall have to try it by Chartism, or any
+conceivable _ism,_ rather than put up with this!  There is
+already in England 'religion' enough to get six hundred and
+fifty-eight Consulting Men brought together who do _not_ begin
+work with a lie in their mouth.  Our poor old Parliament,
+thousands of years old, is still good for something, for several
+things;--though many are beginning to ask, with ominous anxiety,
+in these days:  For what thing?  But for whatever thing and
+things Parliament be good, indisputably it must start with other
+than a lie in its mouth!  On the Whole, a Parliament working with
+a lie in its mouth, will have to take itself away.  To no
+Parliament or thing, that one has heard of, did this Universe
+ever long yield harbour on that footing.  At all hours of the day
+and night, some Chartism is advancing, some armed Cromwell is
+advancing, to apprise such Parliament:  "Ye are no Parliament.
+In the name of God,--go!"
+
+In sad truth, once more, how is our whole existence, in these
+present days, built on Cant, Speciosity, Falsehood, Dilettantism;
+with this one serious Veracity in it:  Mammonism!  Dig down where
+you will, through the Parliament-floor or elsewhere, how
+infallibly do you, at spade's depth below the surface, come upon
+this universal _Liars_-rock substratum!  Much else is ornamental;
+true on barrel-heads, in pulpits, hustings, Parliamentary
+benches;  but this is forever true and truest:  "Money does bring
+money's worth;  Put money in your purse."  Here, if nowhere else,
+is the human soul still in thorough earnest;  sincere with a
+prophet's sincerity:  and 'the Hell of the English,' as Sauerteig
+said, 'is the infinite terror of Not getting on, especially of
+Not making money.'  With results!
+
+
+To many persons the horoscope of Parliament is more interesting
+than to me:  but surely all men with souls must admit that
+sending members to Parliament by bribery is an infamous solecism;
+an act entirely immoral, which no man can have to do with, more
+or less, but he will soil his fingers more or less.  No Carlton
+Clubs, Reform Clubs, nor any sort of clubs or creatures, or of
+accredited opinions or practices, can make a Lie Truth, can make
+Bribery a Propriety.  The Parliament should really either punish
+and put away Bribery, or legalise it by some Office in Downing-
+street.  As I read the Apocalypses, a Parliament that can do
+neither of these things is not in a good way.--And yet, alas,
+what of Parliaments and their Elections?  Parliamentary Elections
+are but the topmost ultimate outcome of an electioneering which
+goes on at all hours, in all places, in every meeting of two or
+more men.  It is _we_ that vote wrong, and teach the poor ragged
+Freemen of Boroughs to vote wrong.  We pay respect to those
+worthy of no respect.
+
+Is not Pandarus Dogdraught a member of select clubs, and admitted
+into the drawingrooms of men?  Visibly to all persons he is of
+the offal of Creation;  but he carries money in his purse, due
+lacker on his dog-visage, and it is believed will not steal
+spoons.  The human species does not with one voice, like the
+Hebrew Psalmist, 'shun to sit' with Dogdraught, refuse totally to
+dine with Dogdraught;  men called of honour are willing enough to
+dine with him, his talk being lively, and his champagne
+excellent.  We say to ourselves, "The man is in good society,"--
+others have already voted for him;  why should not I?  We
+_forget_ the indefeasible right of property that Satan has in
+Dogdraught,--we are not afraid to be near Dogdraught!  It is we
+that vote wrong;  blindly, nay with falsity prepense!  It is we
+that no longer know the difference between Human Worth and Human
+Unworth;  or feel that the one is admirable and alone admirable,
+the other detestable, damnable!  How shall _we_ find out a Hero
+and Viceking Samson with a maximum of two shillings in his
+pocket?  We have no chance to do such a thing.  We have got out
+of the Ages of Heroism, deep into the Ages of Flunkeyism,--and
+must return or die.  What a noble set of mortals are we, who,
+because there is no Saint Edmund threatening us at the rim of the
+horizon, are not afraid to be whatever, for the day and hour, is
+smoothest for us!
+
+And now, in good sooth, why should an indigent discerning Freeman
+give his vote without bribes?  Let us rather honour the poor man
+that he does discern clearly wherein lies, for him, the true
+kernel of the matter.  What is it to the ragged grimy Freeman of
+a Tenpound-Franchise Borough, whether Aristides Rigmarole Esq. of
+the Destructive, or the Hon. Alcides Dolittle of the Conservative
+Party be sent to Parliament;--much more, whether the two-
+thousandth part of them be sent, for that is the amount of his
+faculty in it?  Destructive or Conservative, what will either of
+them destroy or conserve of vital moment to this Freeman?  Has he
+found either of them care, at bottom, a sixpence for him or his
+interests, or those of his class or of his cause, or of any class
+or cause that is of much value to God or to man?  Rigmarole and
+Dolittle have alike cared for themselves hitherto;  and for their
+own clique, and self-conceited crotchets,--their greasy dishonest
+interests of pudding, or windy dishonest interests of praise;
+and not very perceptibly for any other interest whatever.
+Neither Rigmarole nor Dolittle will accomplish any good or any
+evil for this grimy Freeman, like giving him a five-pound note,
+or refusing to give it him.  It will be smoothest to vote
+according to value received.  That is the veritable fact;  and he
+indigent, like others that are not indigent, acts conformably
+thereto.
+
+Why, reader, truly, if they asked thee or me, Which way we meant
+to vote?--were it not our likeliest answer:  Neither way!  I, as
+a Tenpound Franchiser, will receive no bribe;  but also I will
+not vote for either of these men.  Neither Rigmarole nor Dolittle
+shall, by furtherance of mine, go and make laws for this country.
+I will have no hand in such a mission. How dare I!  If other men
+cannot be got in England, a totally other sort of men, different
+as light is from dark, as star-fire is from street-mud, what is
+the use of votings, or of Parliaments in England?  England ought
+to resign herself;  there is no hope or possibility for England.
+If England cannot get her Knaves and Dastards 'arrested,' in
+some degree, but only get them 'elected,' what is to become
+of England?
+
+I conclude, with all confidence, that England will verily have to
+put an end to briberies on her Election Hustings and elsewhere,
+at what cost soever;--and likewise that we, Electors and
+Eligibles, one and all of us, for our own behoof and hers, cannot
+too soon begin, at what cost soever, to put an end to
+_bribeabilities_ in ourselves.  The death-leprosy, attacked in
+this manner, by purifying lotions from without, and by rallying
+of the vital energies and purities from within, will probably
+abate somewhat!  It has otherwise no chance to abate.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+The One Institution
+
+
+What our Government can do in this grand Problem of the Working
+Classes of England?  Yes, supposing the insane Corn-Laws totally
+abolished, all speech of them ended, and 'from ten to twenty
+years of new possibility to live and find wages' conceded us in
+consequence:  What the English Government might be expected to
+accomplish or attempt towards rendering the existence of our
+Labouring Millions somewhat less anomalous, somewhat less
+impossible, in the years that are to follow those 'ten or
+twenty,' if either 'ten' or 'twenty' there be?
+
+It is the most momentous question.  For all this of the Corn-Law
+Abrogation, and what can follow therefrom, is but as the shadow
+on King Hezekiah's Dial:  the shadow has gone back twenty years;
+but will again, in spite of Free-Trades and Abrogations, travel
+forward its old fated way.  With our present system of individual
+Mammonism, and Government by Laissez-faire, this Nation cannot
+live.  And if, in the priceless interim, some new life and
+healing be not found, there is no second respite to be counted
+on.  The shadow on the Dial advances thenceforth without pausing.
+What Government can do?  This that they call 'Organising of
+Labour' is, if well understood, the Problem of the whole Future,
+for all who will in future pretend to govern men.  But our first
+preliminary stage of it, How to deal with the Actual Labouring
+Millions of England? this is the imperatively pressing Problem of
+the Present, pressing with a truly fearful intensity and
+imminence in these very years and days.  No Government can longer
+neglect it:  once more, what can our Government do in it?
+
+
+Governments are of various degrees of activity:  some, altogether
+Lazy Governments, in 'free countries' as they are called, seem in
+these times almost to profess to do, if not nothing, one knows
+not at first what.  To debate in Parliament, and gain majorities;
+and ascertain who shall be, with a toil hardly second to Ixion's,
+the Prime Speaker and Spoke-holder, and keep the Ixion's-Wheel
+going, if not forward, yet round?  Not altogether so:--much, to
+the experienced eye, is not what it seems!  Chancery and certain
+other Law-Courts seem nothing;  yet in fact they are, the worst
+of them, something:  chimneys for the devilry and contention of
+men to escape by;--a very considerable something!--Parliament too
+has its tasks, if thou wilt look;  fit to wear out the lives of
+toughest men.  The celebrated Kilkenny Cats, through their
+tumultuous congress, cleaving the ear of Night, could they be
+said to do nothing?  Hadst thou been of them, thou hadst seen!
+The feline heart laboured, as with steam up-to the bursting
+point;  and death-doing energy nerved every muscle:  they had a
+work there;  and did it!  On the morrow, two tails were found
+left, and peaceable annihilation;  a neighbourhood _delivered_
+from despair.
+
+Again, are not Spinning-Dervishes an eloquent emblem, significant
+of much?  Hast thou noticed him, that solemn-visaged Turk, the
+eyes shut;  dingy wool mantle circularly hiding his figure;--
+bell-shaped;  like a dingy bell set spinning on the _tongue_ of
+it?  By centrifugal force the dingy wool mantle heaves itself;
+spreads more and more, like upturned cup widening into upturned
+saucer:  thus spins he, to the praise of Allah and advantage of
+mankind, fast and faster, till collapse ensue, and sometimes
+death!--
+
+A Government such as ours, consisting of from seven to eight
+hundred Parliamentary Talkers, with their escort of Able Editors
+and Public Opinion;  and for head, certain Lords and Servants of
+the Treasury, and Chief Secretaries and others, who find
+themselves at once Chiefs and No-Chiefs, and often commanded
+rather than commanding,--is doubtless a most complicate entity,
+and none of the alertest for getting on with business!  Clearly
+enough, if the Chiefs be not self-motive and what we call men,
+but mere patient lay-figures without self-motive principle, the
+Government will not move anywhither;  it will tumble
+disastrously, and jumble, round its own axis, as for many years
+past we have seen it do.--And yet a self-motive man who is not a
+lay-figure, place him in the heart of what entity you may, will
+make it move more or less!  The absurdest in Nature he will make
+a little _less_ absurd;  he.  The unwieldiest he will make to
+move;--that is the use of his existing there.  He will at least
+have the manfulness to depart out of it, if not; to say:  "I
+cannot move in thee, and be a man;  like a wretched drift-log
+dressed in man's clothes and minister's clothes, doomed to a lot
+baser than belongs to man, I will not continue with thee,
+tumbling aimless on the Mother of Dead Dogs here:--Adieu!"
+
+For, on the whole, it is the lot of Chiefs everywhere, this same.
+No Chief in the most despotic country but was a Servant withal;
+at once an absolute commanding General, and a poor Orderly-
+Sergeant, ordered by the very men in the ranks,--obliged to
+collect the vote of the ranks too, in some articulate or
+inarticulate shape, and weigh well the same.  The proper name of
+all Kings is Minister, Servant.  In no conceivable Government can
+a lay-figure get forward!  _This_ Worker, surely he above all
+others has to 'spread out his Gideon's Fleece,' and collect the
+monitions of Immensity;  the poor Localities, as we said, and
+parishes of Palace-yard or elsewhere, having no due monition in
+them.  A Prime Minister, even here in England, who shall dare
+believe the heavenly omens, and address himself like a man and
+hero to the great dumb-struggling heart of England;  and speak
+out for it, and act out for it, the God's-justice it is writhing
+to get uttered and perishing for want of,--yes, he too will see
+awaken round him, in passionate burning all-defiant loyalty, the
+heart of England, and such a 'support' as no Division-List or
+Parliamentary Majority was ever yet known to yield a man!  Here
+as there, now as then, he who can and dare trust the heavenly
+Immensities, all earthly Localities are subject to him.  We will
+pray for such a Man and First-Lord;--yes, and far better, we will
+strive and incessantly make ready, each of us, to be worthy to
+serve and second such a First-Lord!  We shall then be as good
+as sure of his arriving;  sure of many things, let him arrive
+or not.
+
+
+Who can despair of Governments that passes a Soldiers'
+Guardhouse, or meets a redcoated man on the streets!  That a body
+of men could be got together to kill other men when you bade
+them:  this, _a priori,_ does it not seem one of the impossiblest
+things?  Yet look, behold it: in the stolidest of Donothing
+Governments, that impossibility is a thing done.  See it there,
+with buff-belts, red coats on its back;  walking sentry at
+guardhouses, brushing white breeches in barracks;  an
+indisputable palpable fact.  Out of grey Antiquity, amid all
+finance-difficulties, _scaccarium_-tallies, ship-monies, coat-
+and-conduct monies, and vicissitudes of Chance and Time, there,
+down to the present blessed hour, it is.
+
+Often, in these painfully decadent and painfully nascent Times,
+with their distresses, inarticulate gaspings and
+'impossibilities;'  meeting a tall Lifeguardsmans in his snow-
+white trousers, or seeing those two statuesque Lifeguardsmen in
+their frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their coal-
+black sleek-fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at the Horse-
+Guards,'--it strikes one with a kind of mournful interest, how,
+in such universal down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost
+all old institutions, this oldest Fighting Institution is still
+so young!  Fresh-complexioned, firm-limbed, six feet by the
+standard, this fighting-man has verily been got up, and can
+fight.  While so much has not yet got into being;  while so much
+has gone gradually out of it, and become an empty Semblance or
+Clothes-suit;  and highest king's-cloaks, mere chimeras parading
+under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest eye,
+unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier kind of scarecrow's-
+blanket,--here still is a reality!
+
+The man in horsehair wig advances, promising that he will get me
+'justice:'  he takes me into Chancery Law-Courts, into decades,
+half-centuries of hubbub, of distracted jargon;  and does get
+me--disappointment, almost desperation;  and one refuge:  that of
+dismissing him and his 'justice' altogether out of my head.  For
+I have work to do;  I cannot spend my decades in mere arguing
+with other men about the exact wages of my work:  I will work
+cheerfully with no wages, sooner than with a ten-years gangrene
+or Chancery Lawsuit in my heart!  He of the horsehair wig is a
+sort of failure;  no substance, but a fond imagination of the
+mind.  He of the shovel-hat, again, who comes forward professing
+that he will save my soul--O ye Eternities, of him in this place
+be absolute silence!--But he of the red coat, I say, is a success
+and no failure!  He will veritably, if he get orders, draw out a
+long sword and kill me.  No mistake there.  He is a fact and not
+a shadow.  Alive in this Year Forty-three, able and willing to do
+his work.  In dim old centuries, with William Rufus, William of
+Ipres, or far earlier, he began;  and has come down safe so far.
+Catapult has given place to cannon, pike has given place to
+musket, iron mail-shirt to coat of red cloth, saltpetre ropematch
+to percussion cap;  equipments, circumstances have all changed,
+and again changed:  but the human battle-engine, in the inside of
+any or of each of these, ready still to do battle, stands there,
+six feet in standard size.  There are Pay-Offices, Woolwich
+Arsenals, there is a Horse-Guards, War-Office, Captain-General;
+persuasive Sergeants, with tap of drum, recruit in market-towns
+and villages;--and, on the whole, I say, here is your actual
+drilled fightingman;  here are your actual Ninety-thousand of
+such, ready to go into any quarter of the world and fight!
+
+Strange, interesting, and yet most mournful to reflect on.  Was
+this, then, of all the things mankind had some talent for, the
+one thing important to learn well, and bring to perfection;  this
+of, successfully killing one another?  Truly you have learned it
+well, and carried the business to a high perfection.  It is
+incalculable what, by arranging, commanding and regimenting, you
+can make of men.  These thousand straight-standing firm-set
+individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance,
+retreat;  and are, for your behoof, a magazine charged with fiery
+death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity:  few
+months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they?
+Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers,
+thievish valets;  an entirely broken population, fast tending
+towards the treadmill.  But the persuasive sergeant came;  by tap
+of drum enlisted, or formed lists of them, took heartily to
+drilling them;--and he and you have made them this!  Most potent,
+effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm
+combining and commanding among men.  Let no man despair of
+Governments who looks on these two sentries at the Horse-Guards,
+and our United-Service Clubs!  I could conceive an Emigration
+Service, a Teaching Service, considerable varieties of United and
+Separate Services, of the due thousands strong, all effective as
+this Fighting Service is;  all doing _their_ work, like it;--
+which work, much more than fighting, is henceforth the necessity
+of these New Ages we are got into!  Much lies among us,
+convulsively, nigh desperately _struggling to be born._
+
+But mean Governments, as mean-limited individuals do, have stood
+by the physically indispensable;  have realised that and nothing
+more.  The Soldier is perhaps one of the most difficult things to
+realise;  but Governments, had they not realised him, could not
+have existed:  accordingly he is here.  O Heavens, if we saw an
+army ninety-thousand strong, maintained and fully equipt, in
+continual real action and battle against Human Starvation,
+against Chaos, Necessity, Stupidity, and our real 'natural
+enemies,' what a business were it!  Fighting and molesting not
+'the French,' who, poor men, have a hard enough battle of their
+own in the like kind, and need no additional molesting from us;
+but fighting and incessantly spearing down and destroying
+Falsehood, Nescience, Delusion, Disorder, and the Devil and his
+Angels!  Thou thyself, cultivated reader, hast done something in
+that alone true warfare;  but, alas, under what circumstances was
+it?  Thee no beneficent drill-sergeant, with any effectiveness,
+would rank in line beside thy fellows;  train, like a true
+didactic artist, by the wit of all past expedience, to do thy
+soldiering;  encourage thee when right, punish thee when wrong,
+and everywhere with wise word-of-command say, Forward on this
+hand, Forward on that!  Ah, no:  thou hadst to learn thy small-
+sword and platoon exercise where and how thou couldst;  to all
+mortals but thyself it was indifferent whether thou shouldst ever
+learn it.  And the rations, and shilling a day, were they
+provided thee,--reduced as I have known brave Jean-Pauls,
+learning their exercise, to live on 'water _without_ the bread?'
+The rations;  or any furtherance of promotion to corporalship,
+lance-corporalship, or due cato'-nine tails, with the slightest
+reference to thy deserts, were not provided.  Forethought, even
+as of a pipe-clayed drill-sergeant, did not preside over thee.
+To corporalship, lance-corporalship, thou didst attain;  alas,
+also to the halberts and cat:  but thy rewarder and punisher
+seemed blind as the Deluge:  neither lancecorporalship, nor
+even drummer's cat, because both appeared delirious, brought
+thee due profit.
+
+It was well, all this, we know;--and yet it was not well!  Forty
+soldiers, I am told, will disperse the largest Spitalfields mob:
+forty to ten-thousand, that is the proportion between drilled and
+undrilled.  Much there is which cannot yet be organised in this
+world;  but somewhat also which can, somewhat also which must.
+When one thinks, for example, what Books are becoming for us,
+what Operative Lancashires are become;  what a Fourth Estate, and
+innumerable Virtualities not yet got to be Actualities are become
+and becoming,--one sees Organisms enough in the dim huge Future;
+and 'United Services' quite other than the redcoat one;  and
+much, even in these years, struggling to be born!
+
+
+Of Time-Bill, Factory-Bill and other such Bills the present
+Editor has no authority to speak.  He knows not, it is for others
+than he to know, in what specific ways it may be feasible to
+interfere, with Legislation, between the Workers and the Master-
+Workers;--knows only and sees, what all men are beginning to see,
+that Legislative interference, and interferences not a few are
+indispensable;  that as a lawless anarchy of supply-and-demand,
+on market-wages alone, this province of things cannot longer be
+left.  Nay interference has begun:  there are already Factory
+Inspectors,--who seem to have no _lack_ of work.  Perhaps there
+might be Mine-Inspectors too:--might there not be Furrowfield
+Inspectors withal, and ascertain for us how on seven and sixpence
+a week a human family does live!  Interference has begun;  it
+must continue, must extensively enlarge itself, deepen and
+sharpen itself.  Such things cannot longer be idly lapped in
+darkness, and suffered to go on unseen:  the Heavens do see them;
+the curse, not the blessing of the Heavens is on an Earth that
+refuses to see them.
+
+Again, are not Sanitary Regulations possible for a Legislature?
+The old Romans had their Aediles;  who would, I think, in direct
+contravention to supply-and-demand, have rigorously seen rammed
+up into total abolition many a foul cellar in our Southwarks,
+Saint-Gileses, and dark poison-lanes;  saying sternly, "Shall a
+Roman man dwell there?"  The Legislature, at whatever cost of
+consequences, would have had to answer, "God forbid!"--The
+Legislature, even as it now is, could order all dingy
+Manufacturing Towns to cease from their soot and darkness;  to
+let in the blessed sunlight, the blue of Heaven, and become clear
+and clean;  to burn their coal-smoke, namely, and make flame of
+it.  Baths, free air, a wholesome temperature, ceilings twenty
+feet high, might be ordained by Act of Parliament, in all
+establishments licensed as Mills.  There are such Mills already
+extant;--honour to the builders of them! The Legislature can say
+to others:  Go ye and do likewise;  better if you can.
+
+Every toiling Manchester, its smoke and soot all burnt, ought it
+not, among so many world-wide conquests, to have a hundred acres
+or so of free greenfield, with trees on it, conquered, for its
+little children to disport in;  for its all-conquering workers to
+take a breath of twilight air in?  You would say so!  A willing
+Legislature could say so with effect.  A willing Legislature
+could say very many things!  And to whatsoever 'vested interest,'
+or such like, stood up, gainsaying merely, "I shall lose
+profits,"--the willing Legislature would answer, "Yes, but my
+sons and daughters will gain health, and life, and a soul."--
+"What is to become of our Cotton-trade?" cried certain Spinners,
+when the Factory-Bill was proposed;  "What is to become of our
+invaluable Cotton-trade?"  The Humanity of England answered
+steadfastly:  "Deliver me these rickety perishing souls of
+infants, and let your Cotton-trade take its chance.  God Himself
+commands the one thing;  not God especially the other thing.  We
+cannot have prosperous Cotton-trades at the expense of keeping
+the Devil a partner in them!"--
+
+Bills enough, were the Corn-Law Abrogation Bill once passed, and
+a Legislature willing!  Nay this one Bill, which lies yet
+unenacted, a right Education Bill, is not this of itself the sure
+parent of innumerable wise Bills,--wise regulations, practical
+methods and proposals, gradually ripening towards the state of
+Bills?  To irradiate with intelligence, that is to say, with
+order, arrangement and all blessedness, the Chaotic,
+Unintelligent:  how, except by educating, _can_ you-accomplish
+this?  That thought, reflection, articulate utterance and
+understanding be awakened in these individual million heads,
+which are the atoms of your Chaos:  there is no other way of
+illuminating any Chaos!  The sum-total of intelligence that is
+found in it, determines the extent of order that is possible for
+your Chaos,--the feasibility and rationality of what your Chaos
+will dimly demand from you, and will gladly obey when proposed by
+you!  It is an exact equation;  the one accurately measures the
+other.--If the whole English People, during these 'twenty years
+of respite,' be not educated, with at least schoolmaster's
+educating, a tremendous responsibility, before God and men, will
+rest somewhere!  How dare any man, especially a man calling
+himself minister of God, stand up in any Parliament or place,
+under any pretext or delusion, and for a day or an hour forbid
+God's Light to come into the world, and bid the Devil's Darkness
+continue in it one hour more!  For all light and science, under
+all shapes, in all degrees of perfection, is of God;  all
+darkness, nescience, is of the Enemy of God.  'The schoolmaster's
+creed is somewhat awry?'  Yes, I have found few creeds entirely
+correct;  few light-beams shining white, pure of admixture:  but
+of all creeds and religions now or ever before known, was not
+that of thoughtless thriftless Animalism, of Distilled Gin, and
+Stupor and Despair, unspeakably the least orthodox?  We will
+exchange it even with Paganism, with Fetishism;  and, on the
+whole, must exchange it with something.
+
+An effective 'Teaching Service' I do consider that there must be;
+some Education Secretary, Captain-General of Teachers, who will
+actually contrive to get us _taught._  Then again, why should
+there not be an 'Emigration Service,' and Secretary, with
+adjuncts, with funds, forces, idle Navy-ships, and ever-
+increasing apparatus;  in fine an _effective system_ of
+Emigration;  so that, at length, before our twenty years of
+respite ended, every honest willing Workman who found England too
+strait, and the 'Organisation of Labour' not yet sufficiently
+advanced, might find likewise a bridge built to carry him into
+new Western Lands, there to 'organise' with more elbow-room some
+labour for himself?  There to be a real blessing, raising new
+corn for us, purchasing new webs and hatchets from us;  leaving
+us at least in peace;--instead of staying here to be a Physical-
+Force Chartist, unblessed and no blessing!  Is it not scandalous
+to consider that a Prime Minister could raise within the year, as
+I have seen it done, a Hundred and Twenty Millions Sterling to
+shoot the French;  and we are stopt short for want of the
+hundredth part of that to keep the English living?  The bodies of
+the English living;  and the souls of the English living:--these
+two 'Services,' an Education Service and an Emigration Service,
+these with others will actually have to be organised!
+
+A free bridge for Emigrants:  why, we should then be on a par
+with America itself, the most favoured of all lands that have no
+government;  and we should have, besides, so many traditions and
+mementos of priceless things which America has cast away.  We
+could proceed deliberately to 'organise Labour,' not doomed to
+perish unless we effected it within year and day;--every willing
+Worker that proved superfluous, finding a bridge ready for him.
+This verily will have to be done;  the Time is big with this.
+Our little Isle is grown too narrow for us;  but the world is
+wide enough yet for another Six Thousand Years.  England's sure
+markets will be among new Colonies of Englishmen in all quarters
+of the Globe.  All men trade with all men, when mutually
+convenient;  and are even bound to do it by the Maker of men.
+Our friends of China, who guiltily refused to trade, in these
+circumstances,--had we not to argue with them, in cannon-shot at
+last, and convince them that they ought to trade!  'Hostile
+Tariffs' will arise, to shut us out;  and then again will fall,
+to let us in:  but the Sons of England, speakers of the English
+language were it nothing more, will in all times have the
+ineradicable predisposition to trade with England.  Mycale was
+the _Pan-Ionian,_ rendezvous of all the Tribes of Ion, for old
+Greece:  why should not London long continue the _All-Saxon-
+home,_ rendezvous of all the 'Children of the Harz-Rock,'
+arriving, in select samples, from the Antipodes and elsewhere, by
+steam and otherwise, to the 'season' here!--What a Future;  wide
+as the world, if we have the heart and heroism for it,--which, by
+Heaven's blessing, we shall:
+
+'Keep not standing fixed and rooted,
+Briskly venture, briskly roam;
+Head and hand, where'er thou foot it,
+And stout heart are still at home.
+
+In what land the sun does visit,
+Brisk are we, whate'er betide:
+To give space for wandering is it
+That the world was made so wide?' *
+
+--------
+* Goethe, _Wilhelm Meister_
+--------
+
+Fourteen hundred years ago, it was by a considerable 'Emigration
+Service,' never doubt it, by much enlistment, discussion and
+apparatus, that we ourselves arrived in this remarkable Island,--
+and got into our present difficulties among others!
+
+
+It is true the English Legislature, like the English People, is
+of slow temper; essentially conservative.  In our wildest periods
+of reform, in the Long Parliament itself, you notice always the
+invincible instinct to hold fast by the Old;  to admit the
+minimum of New;  to expand, if it be possible, some old habit or
+method, already found fruitful, into new growth for the new need.
+It is an instinct worthy of all honour;  akin to all strength and
+all wisdom.  The Future hereby is not dissevered from the Past,
+but based continuously on it;  grows with all the vitalities of
+the Past, and is rooted down deep into the beginnings of us.  The
+English Legislature is entirely repugnant to believe in 'new
+epochs.'  The English Legislature does not occupy itself with
+epochs;  has, indeed, other business to do than looking at the
+Time-Horologe and hearing it tick!  Nevertheless new epochs do
+actually come;  and with them new imperious peremptory
+necessities;  so that even an English Legislature has to look up,
+and admit, though with reluctance, that the hour has struck.  The
+hour having struck, let us not say 'impossible:'--it will have to
+be possible!  'Contrary to the habits of Parliament, the habits
+of Government?'  Yes:  but did any Parliament or Government ever
+sit in a Year Forty-three before?  One of the most original,
+unexampled years and epochs;  in several important respects,
+totally unlike any other!  For Time, all-edacious and all-
+feracious, does run on:  and the Seven Sleepers, awakening hungry
+after a hundred years, find that it is not their old nurses who
+can now give them suck!
+
+For the rest, let not any Parliament, Aristocracy, Millocracy, or
+Member of the Governing Class, condemn with much triumph this
+small specimen of 'remedial measures;' or ask again, with the
+least anger, of this Editor, What is to be done, How that
+alarming problem of the Working Classes is to be managed?
+Editors are not here, foremost of all, to say How.  A certain
+Editor thanks the gods that nobody pays him three hundred
+thousand pounds a year, two hundred thousand, twenty thousand, or
+any similar sum of cash for saying How;--that his wages are very
+different, his work somewhat fitter for him.  An Editor's
+stipulated work is to apprise thee that it must be done.  The
+'way to do it,' is to try it, knowing that thou shalt die if it
+be not done.  There is the bare back, there is the web of cloth;
+thou shalt cut me a coat to cover the bare back, thou whose trade
+it is.  'Impossible?'  Hapless Fraction, dost thou discern Fate
+there, half unveiling herself in the gloom of the future, with
+her gibbet-cords, her steel-whips, and very authentic Tailor's
+Hell;  waiting to see whether it is 'possible?'  Out with thy
+scissors, and cut that cloth or thy own windpipe!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+Captains of Industry
+
+
+If I believed that Mammonism with its adjuncts was to continue
+henceforth the one serious principle of our existence, I should
+reckon it idle to solicit remedial measures from any Government,
+the disease being insusceptible of remedy.  Government can do
+much, but it can in no wise do all.  Government, as the most
+conspicuous object in Society, is called upon to give signal of
+what shall be done;  and, in many ways, to preside over, further,
+and command the doing of it.  But the Government cannot do, by
+all its signalling and commanding, what the Society is radically
+indisposed to do.--In the long-run every Government is the exact
+symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom;  we have to
+say, Like People like Government.--The main substance of this
+immense Problem of Organising Labour, and first of all of
+Managing the Working Classes, will, it is very clear, have to be
+solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it;  by
+those who themselves work and preside over work.  Of all that can
+be enacted by any Parliament in regard to it, the germs must
+already lie potentially extant in those two Classes, who are to
+obey such enactment.  A Human Chaos in which there is no light,
+you vainly attempt to irradiate by light shed on it:  order never
+can arise there.
+
+But it is my firm conviction that the 'Hell of England' will
+_cease_ to be that of 'not making money;'  that we shall get a
+nobler Hell and a nobler Heaven!  I anticipate light _in_ the
+Human Chaos, glimmering, shining more and more;   under manifold
+true signals from without That light shall shine.  Our deity no
+longer being Mammon,--O Heavens, each man will then say to
+himself:  "Why such deadly haste to make money?  I shall not go
+to Hell, even if I do not make money!  There is another Hell, I
+am told!"  Competition, at railway-speed, in all branches of
+commerce and work will then abate:--good felt-hats for the head,
+in every sense, instead of seven-feet lath-and-plaster hats on
+wheels, will then be discoverable!  Bubble-periods, with their
+panics and commercial crises, will again become infrequent;
+steady modest industry will take the place of gambling
+speculation.  To be a noble Master, among noble Workers, will
+again be the first ambition with some few;  to be a rich Master
+only the second.  How the Inventive Genius of England, with the
+whirr of its bobbins and billy-rollers shoved somewhat into the
+backgrounds of the brain, will contrive and devise, not cheaper
+produce exclusively, but fairer distribution of the produce at
+its present cheapness!  By degrees, we shall again have a Society
+with something of Heroism in it, something of Heaven's Blessing
+on it;  we shall again have, as my German friend asserts,
+'instead of Mammon-Feudalism with unsold cotton-shirts and
+Preservation of the Game, noble just Industrialism and Government
+by the Wisest!'
+
+It is with the hope of awakening here and there a British man to
+know himself for a man and divine soul, that a few words of
+parting admonition, to all persons to whom the Heavenly Powers
+have lent power of any kind in this land, may now be addressed.
+And first to those same Master-Workers, Leaders of Industry;  who
+stand nearest, and in fact powerfulest, though not most
+prominent, being as yet in too many senses a Virtuality rather
+than an Actuality.
+
+
+The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are
+virtually the Captains of the World;  if there be no nobleness in
+them, there will never be an Aristocracy more.  But let the
+Captains of Industry consider:  once again, are they born of
+other clay than the old Captains of Slaughter;  doomed forever to
+be no Chivalry, but a mere gold-plated _Doggery,_--what the
+French well name _Canaille,_ 'Doggery' with more or less gold
+carrion at its disposal?  Captains of Industry are the true
+Fighters, henceforth recognisable as the only true ones:
+Fighters against Chaos, Necessity and the Devils and Jotuns;  and
+lead on Mankind in that great, and alone true, and universal
+warfare;  the stars in their courses fighting for them, and all
+Heaven and all Earth saying audibly, Well-done!  Let the Captains
+of Industry retire into their own hearts, and ask solemnly, If
+there is nothing but vulturous hunger, for fine wines, valet
+reputation and gilt carriages, discoverable there?  Of hearts
+made by the Almighty God.
+
+I will not believe such a thing.  Deep-hidden under wretchedest
+god-forgetting Cants, Epicurisms, Dead-Sea Apisms;  forgotten as
+under foulest fat Lethe mud and weeds, there is yet, in all
+hearts born into this God's-World, a spark of the Godlike
+slumbering.  Awake, O nightmare sleepers;  awake, arise, or be
+forever fallen!  This is not playhouse poetry;  it is sober fact.
+Our England, our world cannot live as it is.  It will connect
+itself with a God again, or go down with nameless throes and
+fire-consummation to the Devils.  Thou who feelest aught of such
+a Godlike stirring in thee, any faintest intimation of it as
+through heavy-laden dreams, follow it, I conjure thee.  Arise,
+save thyself, be one of those that save thy country.
+
+Bucaniers, Chactaw Indians, whose supreme aim in fighting is that
+they may get the scalps, the money, that they may amass scalps
+and money:  out of such came no Chivalry, and never will!  Out of
+such came only gore and wreck, infernal rage and misery;
+desperation quenched in annihilation.  Behold it, I bid thee,
+behold there, and consider!  What is it that thou have a hundred
+thousand-pound bills laid up in thy strong-room, a hundred scalps
+hung up in thy wigwam?  I value not them or thee.  Thy scalps and
+thy thousand-pound bills are as yet nothing, if no nobleness from
+within irradiate them;  if no Chivalry, in action, or in embryo
+ever struggling towards birth and action, be there.
+
+Love of men cannot be bought by cash-payment;  and without love,
+men cannot endure to be together.  You cannot lead a Fighting
+World without having it regimented, chivalried:  the thing, in a
+day, becomes impossible;  all men in it, the highest at first,
+the very lowest at last, discern consciously, or by a noble
+instinct, this necessity.  And can you any more continue to lead
+a Working World unregimented, anarchic?  I answer, and the
+Heavens and Earth are now answering, No!  The thing becomes not
+'in a day' impossible;  but in some two generations it does.
+Yes, when fathers and mothers, in Stockport hunger-cellars, begin
+to eat their children, and Irish widows have to prove their
+relationship by dying of typhus-fever;  and amid Governing
+'Corporations of the Best and Bravest,' busy to preserve their
+game by 'bushing,' dark millions of God's human creatures start
+up in mad Chartisms, impracticable Sacred-Months, and Manchester
+Insurrections;--and there is a virtual Industrial Aristocracy as
+yet only half-alive, spellbound amid money-bags and ledgers;  and
+an actual Idle Aristocracy seemingly near dead in somnolent
+delusions, in trespasses and double-barrels;  'sliding,' as on
+inclined-planes, which every new year they _soap_ with new
+Hansard's-jargon under God's sky, and so are 'sliding' ever
+faster, towards a 'scale' and balance-scale whereon is written
+_Thou art found Wanting:_--in such days, after a generation or
+two, I say, it does become, even to the low and simple, very
+palpably impossible!  No Working World, any more than a Fighting
+World, can be led on without a noble Chivalry of Work, and laws
+and fixed rules which follow out of that,--far nobler than any
+Chivalry of Fighting was.  As an anarchic multitude on mere
+Supply-and-demand, it is becoming inevitable that we dwindle in
+horrid suicidal convulsion, and self-abrasion, frightful to the
+imagination, into _Chactaw_ Workers.  With wigwam and scalps,--
+with palaces and thousand-pound bills;  with savagery,
+depopulation, chaotic desolation!  Good Heavens, will not one
+French Revolution and Reign of Terror suffice us, but must there
+be two?  There will be two if needed;  there will be twenty if
+needed;  there will be precisely as many as are needed.  The Laws
+of Nature will have themselves fulfilled.  That is a thing
+certain to me.
+
+Your gallant battle-hosts and work-hosts, as the others did, will
+need to be made loyally yours;  they must and will be regulated,
+methodically secured in their just share of conquest under you;--
+joined with you in veritable brotherhood, sonhood, by quite other
+and deeper ties than those of temporary day's wages!  How would
+mere redcoated regiments, to say nothing of chivalries, fight for
+you, if you could discharge them on the evening of the battle, on
+payment of the stipulated shillings,--and they discharge you on
+the morning of it!  Chelsea Hospitals, pensions, promotions,
+rigorous lasting covenant on the one side and on the other, are
+indispensable even for a hired fighter.  The Feudal Baron, much
+more,--how could he subsist with mere temporary mercenaries round
+him, at sixpence a day;  ready to go over to the other side, if
+sevenpence were offered?  He could not have subsisted;--and his
+noble instinct saved him from the necessity of even trying!  The
+Feudal Baron had a Man's Soul in him;  to which anarchy, mutiny,
+and the other fruits of temporary mercenaries, were intolerable:
+he had never been a Baron otherwise, but had continued a Chactaw
+and Bucanier.  He felt it precious, and at last it became
+habitual, and his fruitful enlarged existence included it as a
+necessity, to have men round him who in heart loved him;  whose
+life he watched over with rigour yet with love;  who were
+prepared to give their life for him, if need came.  It was
+beautiful;  it was human!  Man lives not otherwise, nor can live
+contented, anywhere or anywhen.  Isolation is the sum-total of
+wretchedness to man.  To be cut off, to be left solitary:  to
+have a world alien, not your world;  all a hostile camp for you;
+not a home at all, of hearts and faces who are yours, whose you
+are!  It is the frightfulest enchantment;  too truly a work of
+the Evil One.  To have neither superior, nor inferior, nor equal,
+united manlike to you.  Without father, without child, without
+brother.  Man knows no sadder destiny.  'How is each of us,'
+exclaims Jean Paul, 'so lonely, in the wide bosom of the All!'
+Encased each as in his transparent 'ice-palace;'  our brother
+visible in his, making signals and gesticulations to us;--
+visible, but forever unattainable:  on his bosom we shall never
+rest, nor he on ours.  It was not a God that did this; no!
+
+Awake, ye noble Workers, warriors in the one true war:  all this
+must be remedied.  It is you who are already half-alive, whom I
+will welcome into life;  whom I will conjure in God's name to
+shake off your enchanted sleep, and live wholly!  Cease to count
+scalps, gold-purses;  not in these lies your or our salvation.
+Even these, if you count only these, will not long be left.  Let
+bucaniering be put far from you;  alter, speedily abrogate all
+laws of the bucaniers, if you would gain any victory that shall
+endure.  Let God's justice, let pity, nobleness and manly valour,
+with more gold-purses or with fewer, testify themselves in this
+your brief Life-transit to all the Eternities, the Gods and
+Silences.  It is to you I call;  for ye are not dead, ye are
+already half-alive:  there is in you a sleepless dauntless
+energy, the prime-matter of all nobleness in man.  Honour to you
+in your kind.  It is to you I call:  ye know at least this, That
+the mandate of God to His creature man is:  Work!  The future
+Epic of the World rests not with those that are near dead, but
+with those that are alive, and those that are coming into life.
+
+Look around you.  Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in
+confusion, destitution;  on the eve of fiery wreck and madness!
+They will not march farther for you, on the sixpence a day and
+supply-and-demand principle:  they will not;  nor ought they, nor
+can they.  Ye shall reduce them to order, begin reducing them.
+To order, to just subordination;  noble loyalty in return for
+noble guidance.  Their souls are driven nigh mad;  let yours be
+sane and ever saner.  Not as a bewildered bewildering mob;  but
+as a firm regimented mass, with real captains over them, will
+these men march any more.  All human interests, combined human
+endeavours, and social growths in this world, have, at a certain
+stage of their development, required organising:  and Work, the
+grandest of human interests, does now require it.
+
+God knows, the task will be hard:  but no noble task was ever
+easy.  This task will wear away your lives, and the lives of your
+sons and grandsons:  but for what purpose, if not for tasks like
+this, were lives given to men?  Ye shall cease to count your
+thousand-pound scalps, the noble of you shall cease!  Nay the
+very scalps, as I say, will not long be left if you count only
+these.  Ye shall cease wholly to be barbarous vulturous Chactaws,
+and become noble European Nineteenth-Century Men.  Ye shall know
+that Mammon, in never such gigs and flunky 'respectabilities,' is
+not the alone God;  that of himself he is but a Devil, and even
+a Brute-god.
+
+Difficult? Yes, it will be difficult.  The short-fibre cotton;
+that too was difficult.  The waste cotton-shrub, long useless,
+disobedient, as the thistle by the wayside,--have ye not
+conquered it;  made it into beautiful bandana webs; white woven
+shirts for men;  bright-tinted air-garments wherein flit
+goddesses?  Ye have shivered mountains asunder, made the hard
+iron pliant to you as soft putty:  the Forest-giants, Marsh-
+jotuns bear sheaves of golden grain;  Aegir the Sea-demon himself
+stretches his back for a sleek highway to you, and on Firehorses
+and Windhorses ye career.  Ye are most strong.  Thor red-bearded,
+with his blue sun-eyes, with his cheery heart and strong thunder-
+hammer, he and you have prevailed.  Ye are most strong, ye Sons
+of the icy North, of the far East,--far marching from your rugged
+Eastern Wildernesses, hitherward from the grey Dawn of Time!  Ye
+are Sons of the _Jotun_-land;  the land of Difficulties
+Conquered.  Difficult?  You must try this thing.  Once try it
+with the understanding that it will and shall have to be done.
+Try it as ye try the paltrier thing, making of money!  I will bet
+on you once more, against all Jotuns, Tailor-gods, Double-
+barrelled Law-wards, and Denizens of Chaos whatsoever!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+Permanence
+
+
+Standing on the threshold, nay as yet outside the threshold, of a
+'Chivalry of Labour,' and an immeasurable Future which it is to
+fill with fruitfulness and verdant shade;  where so much has not
+yet come even to the rudimental state, and all speech of positive
+enactments were hasardous in those who know this business only by
+the eye,--let us here hint at simply one widest universal
+principle, as the basis from which all organisation hitherto has
+grown up among men, and all henceforth will have to grow:  The
+principle of Permanent Contract instead of Temporary.
+
+
+Permanent not Temporary:--you do not hire the mere redcoated
+fighter by the day, but by the score of years' Permanence,
+persistance is the first condition of all fruitfulness in the
+ways of men.  The 'tendency to persevere,' to persist in spite of
+hindrances, discouragements and 'impossibilities:'  it is this
+that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak;
+the civilised burgher from the nomadic savage,--the Species Man
+from the Genus Ape!  The Nomad has his very house set on wheels;
+the Nomad, and in a still higher degree the Ape, are all for
+'liberty;'  the privilege to flit continually is indispensable
+for them.  Alas, in how many ways, does our humour, in this
+swift-rolling self-abrading Time, shew itself nomadic, apelike;
+mournful enough to him that looks on it with eyes!  This humour
+will have to abate;  it is the first element of all fertility in
+human things, that such 'liberty' of apes and nomads do by
+freewill or constraint abridge itself, give place to a better.
+The civilised man lives not in wheeled houses.  He builds stone
+castles, plants lands, makes lifelong marriage-contracts;--has
+long-dated hundred-fold possessions, not to be valued in the
+money-market;  has pedigrees, libraries, law-codes;  has memories
+and hopes, even for this Earth, that reach over thousands of
+years.  Life-long marriage-contracts:  how much preferable were
+year-long or month-long--to the nomad or ape!
+
+Month-long contracts please me little, in any province where
+there can by possibility be found virtue enough for more.  Month-
+long contracts do not answer well even with your house-servants;
+the liberty on both sides to change every month is growing very
+apelike, nomadic;--and I hear philosophers predict that it will
+alter, or that strange results will follow:  that wise men,
+pestered with nomads, with unattached ever-shifting spies and
+enemies rather than friends and servants, will gradually,
+weighing substance against semblance, with indignation, dismiss
+such, down almost to the very shoeblack, and say, "Begone;  I
+will serve myself rather, and have peace!"  Gurth was hired for
+life to Cedric, and Cedric to Gurth.  O Anti-Slavery Convention,
+loud-sounding long-eared Exeter-Hall--But in thee too is a kind
+of instinct towards justice, and I will complain of nothing.
+Only, black Quashee over the seas being once sufficiently
+attended to, wilt thou not perhaps open thy dull sodden eyes to
+the 'sixty-thousand valets in London itself who are yearly
+dismissed to the streets, to be what they can, when the season
+ends;'--or to the hunger-stricken, pallid, _yellow_-coloured
+'Free Labourers' in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Buckinghamshire, and
+all other shires!  These Yellow-coloured, for the present, absorb
+all my sympathies:  if I had a Twenty Millions, with Model-Farms
+and Niger Expeditions, it is to these that I would give it!
+Quashee has already victuals, clothing;  Quashee is not dying of
+such despair as the yellow-coloured pale man's.  Quashee, it must
+be owned, is hitherto a kind of blockhead.  The Haiti Duke of
+Marmalade, educated now for almost half a century, seems to have
+next to no sense in him.  Why, in one of those Lancashire
+Weavers, dying of hunger, there is more thought and heart, a
+greater arithmetical amount of misery and desperation, than in
+whole gangs of Quashees.  It must be owned, thy eyes are of the
+sodden sort;  and with thy emancipations, and thy twenty-
+millionings and long-eared clamourings, thou, like Robespierre
+with his pasteboard _Etre Supreme,_ threatenest to become a bore
+to us, _Avec ton Etre Supreme tu commences m'embeter!--
+
+In a Printed Sheet of the assiduous, much-abused, and truly
+useful Mr. Chadwick's, containing queries and responses from far
+and near, as to this great question, 'What is the effect of
+Education on workingmen, in respect of their value as mere
+workers?' the present Editor, reading with satisfaction a
+decisive unanimous verdict as to Education, reads with
+inexpressible interest this special remark, put in by way of
+marginal incidental note, from a practical manufacturing Quaker,
+whom, as he is anonymous, we will call Friend Prudence.  Prudence
+keeps a thousand workmen;  has striven in all ways to attach them
+to him;  has provided conversational soirees;  playgrounds, bands
+of music for the young ones;  went even 'the length of buying
+them a drum:'  all which has turned out to be an excellent
+investment.  For a certain person, marked here by a black stroke,
+whom we shall name Blank, living over the way,--he also keeps
+somewhere about a thousand men;  but has done none of these
+things for them, nor any other thing, except due payment of the
+wages by supply-and-demand.  Blank's workers are perpetually
+getting into mutiny, into broils and coils:  every six months,
+we suppose, Blank has a strike;  every one month, every day
+and every hour, they are fretting and obstructing the short-sighted
+Blank;  pilfering from him, wasting and idling for him, omitting
+and committing for him.  "I would not," says Friend Prudence,
+"exchange my workers for his _with seven thousand pounds to boot."_
+
+------------
+*Report on the Training of Pauper Children (1841), p. 18.
+------------
+
+Right, O honourable Prudence;  thou art wholly in the right:
+Seven thousand pounds even as a matter of profit for this world,
+nay for the mere cash-market of this worrd!  And as a matter of
+profit not for this world only, but for the other world and all
+worlds, it outweighs the Bank of England!--Can the sagacious
+reader descry here, as it were the outmost inconsiderable
+rockledge of a universal rock-foundation, deep once more as the
+Centre of the World, emerging so, in the experience of this good
+Quaker, through the Stygian mud-vortexes and general Mother of
+Dead Dogs, whereon, for the present, all swags and insecurely
+hovers, as if ready to be swallowed?
+
+
+Some Permanence of Contract is already almost possible;  the
+principle of Permanence, year by year, better seen into and
+elaborated, may enlarge itself, expand gradually on every side
+into a system.  This once secured, the basis of all good results
+were laid.  Once permanent, you do not quarrel with the first
+difficulty on your path, and quit it in weak disgust;  you
+reflect that it cannot be quitted, that it must be conquered, a
+wise arrangement fallen on with regard to it.  Ye foolish Wedded
+Two, who have quarrelled, between whom the Evil Spirit has
+stirred up transient strife and bitterness, so that
+'incompatibility' seems almost nigh, ye are nevertheless the Two
+who, by long habit, were it by nothing more, do best of all
+others suit each other:  it is expedient for your own two foolish
+selves, to say nothing of the infants, pedigrees and public in
+general, that ye agree again;  that ye put away the Evil
+Spirit, and wisely on both hands struggle for the guidance of
+a Good Spirit!
+
+The very horse that is permanent, how much kindlier do his rider
+and he work, than the temporary one, hired on any hack principle
+yet known!  I am for permanence in all things, at the earliest
+possible moment, and to the latest possible.  Blessed is he that
+continueth where he is.  Here let us rest, and lay out
+seedfields;  here let us learn to dwell.  Here, even here, the
+orchards that we plant will yield us fruit;  the acorns will be
+wood and pleasant umbrage, if we wait.  How much grows
+everywhere, if we do but wait!  Through the swamps we will shape
+causeways, force purifying drains;  we will learn to thread the
+rocky inaccessibilities;  and beaten tracks, worn smooth by mere
+traveling of human feet, will form themselves.  Not a difficulty
+but can transfigure itself into a triumph;  not even a deformity
+but, if our own soul have imprinted worth on it, will grow dear
+to us.  The sunny plains and deep indigo transparent skies of
+Italy are all indifferent to the great sick heart of a Sir Walter
+Scott:  on the back of the Apennines, in wild spring weather, the
+sight of bleak Scotch firs, and snow-spotted heath and
+desolation, brings tears into his eyes.*
+
+-----------
+*Lockhart's _Life of Scott_
+-----------
+
+O unwise mortals that forever change and shift, and say, Yonder,
+not Here!  Wealth richer than both the Indies lies everywhere for
+man, if he will endure.  Not his oaks only and his fruit-trees,
+his very heart roots itself wherever he will abide;--roots
+itself, draws nourishment from the deep fountains of Universal
+Being!  Vagrant Sam-Slicks, who rove over the Earth doing
+'strokes of trade,' what wealth have they?  Horseloads, shiploads
+of white or yellow metal:  in very sooth, what are these?  Slick
+rests nowhere, he is homeless.  He can build stone or marble
+houses;  but to continue in them is denied him.  The wealth of a
+man is the number of things which he loves and blesses, which he
+is loved and blessed by!  The herdsman in his poor clay shealing,
+where his very cow and dog are friends to him, and not a cataract
+but carries memories for him, and not a mountain-top but nods old
+recognition:  his life, all encircled as in blessed mother's-
+arms, is it poorer than Slick's with the ass-loads of yellow
+metal on his back?  Unhappy Slick!  Alas, there has so much grown
+nomadic, apelike, with us:  so much will have, with whatever
+pain, repugnance and 'impossibility,' to alter itself, to fix
+itself again,--in some wise way, in any not delirious way!
+
+
+A question arises here:  Whether, in some ulterior, perhaps some
+not far-distant stage of this 'Chivalry of Labour,' your Master-
+Worker may not find it possible, and needful, to grant his
+Workers permanent _interest_ in his enterprise and theirs?  So
+that it become, in practical result, what in essential fact and
+justice it ever is, a joint enterprise;  all men, from the Chief
+Master down to the lowest Overseer and Operative, economically as
+well as loyally concerned for it?--Which question I do not
+answer.  The answer, near or else far, is perhaps, Yes;--and yet
+one knows the difficulties.  Despotism is essential in most
+enterprises;  I am told, they do not tolerate 'freedom of debate'
+on board a Seventy-four!  Republican senate and _plebiscita_
+would not answer well in Cotton-Mills.  And yet observe there
+too:  Freedom, not nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom;
+this is indispensable.  We must have it, and will have it!  To
+reconcile Despotism with Freedom:--well, is that such a mystery?
+Do you not already know the way?  It is to make your Despotism
+_just._  Rigorous as Destiny;  but just too, as Destiny and its
+Laws.  The Laws of God:  all men obey these, and have no
+'Freedom' at all but in obeying them.  The way is already known,
+part of the way;--and courage and some qualities are needed for
+walking on it!
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+The Landed
+
+
+A man with fifty, with five hundred, with a thousand pounds a
+day, given him freely, without condition at all,--on condition,
+as it now runs, that he will sit with his hands in his pockets
+and do no mischief, pass no Corn-Laws or the like,--he too, you
+would say, is or might be a rather strong Worker!  He is a Worker
+with such tools as no man in this world ever before had.  But in
+practice, very astonishing, very ominous to look at, he proves
+not a strong Worker;--you are too happy if he will prove but a
+No-worker, do nothing, and not be a Wrong-worker.
+
+You ask him, at the year's end:  "Where is your three-hundred
+thousand pound;  what have you realised to us with that?"  He
+answers, in indignant surprise:  "Done with it?  Who are you that
+ask?  I have eaten it;  I and my flunkeys, and parasites, and
+slaves two-footed and four-footed, in an ornamental manner;  and
+I am here alive by it;  _I_ am realised by it to you!"--It is, as
+we have often said, such an answer as was never before given
+under this Sun.  An answer that fills me with boding
+apprehension, with foreshadows of despair.  O stolid Use-and-wont
+of an atheistic Half-century, O Ignavia, Tailor-godhood, soul-
+killing Cant, to what passes art thou bringing us!--Out of the
+loud-piping whirlwind, audibly to him that has ears, the Highest
+God is again announcing in these days:  "Idleness shall not be."
+God has said it, man cannot gainsay.
+
+Ah, how happy were it, if he this Aristocrat Worker would, in
+like manner, see _his_ work and do it!  It is frightful seeking
+another to do it for him.  Guillotines, Meudon Tanneries, and
+half-a-million men shot dead, have already been expended in that
+business;  and it is yet far from done.  This man too is
+something;  nay he is a great thing.  Look on him there:  a man
+of manful aspect;  something of the 'cheerfulness of pride' still
+lingering in him.  A free air of graceful stoicism, of easy
+silent dignity sits well on him;  in his heart, could we reach
+it, lie elements of generosity, self-sacrificing justice, true
+human valour.  Why should he, with such appliances, stand an
+incumbrance in the Present;  perish disastrously out of the
+Future!  From no section of the Future would we lose these noble
+courtesies, impalpable yet all-controlling;  these dignified
+reticences, these kingly simplicities;--lose aught of what the
+fruitful Past still gives us token of, memento of, in this man.
+Can we not save him:--can he not help us to save him!  A brave
+man he too;  had not undivine Ignavia, Hearsay, Speech without
+meaning,--had not Cant, thousandfold Cant within him and around
+him, enveloping him like choke-damp, like thick Egyptian
+darkness, thrown his soul into asphyxia, as it were extinguished
+his soul;  so that he sees not, hears not, and Moses and all the
+Prophets address him in vain.
+
+Will he awaken, be alive again, and have a soul;  or is this
+death-fit very death?  It is a question of questions, for himself
+and for us all!  Alas, is there no noble work for this man too?
+Has he not thick-headed ignorant boors;  lazy, enslaved farmers;
+weedy lands?  Lands!  Has he not weary heavy-laden ploughers of
+land;  immortal souls of men, ploughing, ditching, day-drudging;
+bare of back, empty of stomach, nigh desperate of heart;  and
+none peaceably to help them but he, under Heaven?  Does he find,
+with his three hundred thousand pounds, no noble thing trodden
+down in the thoroughfares, which it were godlike to help up?  Can
+he do nothing for his Burns but make a Gauger of him;  lionise
+him, bedinner him, for a foolish while;  then whistle him down
+the wind, to desperation and bitter death?--His work too is
+difficult, in these modern, far-dislocated ages.  But it may be
+done;  it may be tried;--it must be done.
+
+A modern Duke of Weimar, not a god he either, but a human duke,
+levied, as I reckon, in rents and taxes and all incomings
+whatsoever, less than several of our English Dukes do in rent
+alone.  The Duke of Weimar, with these incomings, had to govern,
+judge, defend, every way administer _his_ Dukedom.  He does all
+this as few others did:  and he improves lands besides all this,
+makes river-embankments, maintains not soldiers only but
+Universities and Institutions;--and in his Court were these four
+men:  Wieland, Herder, Schiller, Goethe.  Not as parasites, which
+was impossible;  not as table-wits and poetic Katerfeltoes;  but
+as noble Spiritual Men working under a noble Practical Man.
+Shielded by him from many miseries;  perhaps from many
+shortcomings, destructive aberrations.  Heaven had sent, once
+more, heavenly Light into the world;  and this man's honour was
+that he gave it welcome.  A new noble kind of Clergy, under an
+old but still noble kind of King!  I reckon that this one Duke of
+Weimar did more for the Culture of his Nation than all the
+English Dukes and _Duces_ now extant, or that were extant since
+Henry the Eighth gave them the Church Lands to eat, have done for
+theirs!--I am ashamed, I am alarmed for my English Dukes:  what
+word have I to say?
+
+_If_ our Actual Aristocracy, appointed 'Best-and-Bravest,' will
+be wise, how inexpressibly happy for us!  If not,--the voice of
+God from the whirlwind is very audible to me.  Nay, I will thank
+the Great God, that He has said, in whatever fearful ways, and
+just wrath against us, "Idleness shall be no more!"  Idleness?
+The awakened soul of man, all but the asphyxied soul of man,
+turns from it as from worse than death.  It is the life-in-death
+of Poet Coleridge.  That fable of the Dead-Sea Apes ceases to be
+a fable.  The poor Worker starved to death is not the saddest of
+sights.  He lies there, dead on his shield;  fallen down into the
+bosom of his old Mother;  with haggard pale face, sorrow-worn,
+but stilled now into divine peace, silently appeals to the
+Eternal God and all the Universe,--the most silent, the most
+eloquent of men.
+
+Exceptions,--ah yes, thank Heaven, we know there are exceptions.
+Our case were too hard, were there not exceptions, and partial
+exceptions not a few, whom we know, and whom we do not know.
+Honour to the name of Ashley,--honour to this and the other
+valiant Abdiel, found faithful still;  who would fain, by work
+and by word, admonish their Order not to rush upon destruction!
+These are they who will, if not save their Order, postpone the
+wreck of it;--by whom, under blessing of the Upper Powers, 'a
+quiet euthanasia spread over generations, instead of a swift
+torture-death concentred into years,' may be brought about for
+many things.  All honour and success to these.  The noble man can
+still strive nobly to save and serve his Order;--at lowest, he
+can remember the precept of the Prophet:  "Come out of her, my
+people;  come out of her!"
+
+
+To sit idle aloft, like living statues, like absurd Epicurus'-
+gods, in pampered isolation, in exclusion from the glorious
+fateful battlefield of this God's-World:  it is a poor life for a
+man, when all Upholsterers and French-Cooks have done their
+utmost for it!--Nay, what a shallow delusion is this we have all
+got into.  That any man should or can keep himself apart from
+men, have 'no business' with them, except a cash-account
+business!'  It is the silliest tale a distressed generation of
+men ever took to telling one another.  Men cannot live isolated:
+we _are_ all bound together, for mutual good or else for mutual
+misery, as living nerves in the same body.  No highest man can
+disunite himself from any lowest.  Consider it.  Your poor
+'Werter blowing out his distracted existence because Charlotte
+will not have the keeping thereof:'  this is no peculiar phasis;
+it is simply the highest expression of a phasis traceable
+wherever one human creature meets another!  Let the meanest
+crookbacked Thersites teach the supremest Agamemnon that he
+actually does not reverence him, the supremest Agamemnon's eyes
+flash fire responsive;  a real pain, and partial insanity, has
+seized Agamemnon.  Strange enough:  a many-counselled Ulysses is
+set in motion by a scoundrel-blockhead;  plays tunes, like a
+barrel-organ, at the scoundrel-blockhead's touch,--has to snatch,
+namely, his sceptre cudgel, and weal the crooked back with bumps
+and thumps!  Let a chief of men reflect well on it.  Not in
+having 'no business' with men, but in having no unjust business
+with them, and in _having_ all manner of true and just business,
+can either his or their blessedness be found possible, and this
+waste world become, for both parties, a home and peopled garden.
+
+Men do reverence men.  Men do worship in that 'one temple of the
+world,' as Novalis calls it, the Presence of a Man!  Hero-
+worship, true and blessed, or else mistaken, false and accursed,
+goes on everywhere and everywhen.  In this world there is one
+godlike thing, the essence of all that was or ever will be of
+godlike in this world:  the veneration done to Human Worth by the
+hearts of men.  Hero-worship, in the souls of the heroic, of the
+clear and wise,--it is the perpetual presence of Heaven in our
+poor Earth:  when it is not there, Heaven is veiled from us;  and
+all is under Heaven's ban and interdict, and there is no worship,
+or worthship, or worth or blessedness in the Earth any more!--
+
+
+Independence, 'lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye'--alas, yes,
+he is a lord we have got acquainted with in these late times:  a
+very indispensable lord, for spurning off with due energy
+innumerable sham-superiors, Tailor-made:  honour to him, entire
+success to him!  Entire success is sure to him.  But he must not
+stop there, at that small success, with his eagle-eye.  He has
+now a second far greater success to gain:  to seek out his real
+superiors, whom not the Tailor but the Almighty God has made
+superior to him, and see a little what he will do with these!
+Rebel against these also?  Pass by with minatory eagle-glance,
+with calm-sniffing mockery, or even without any mockery or sniff,
+when these present themselves?  The lion-hearted will never dream
+of such a thing.  Forever far be it from him!  His minatory
+eagle-glance will veil itself in softness of the dove:  his lion-
+heart will become a lamb's;  all is just indignation changed into
+just reverence, dissolved in blessed floods of noble humble love,
+how much heavenlier than any pride, nay, if you will, how much
+prouder!  I know him, this lion-hearted, eagle-eyed one;  have
+met him, rushing on, 'with bosom bare,' in a very distracted
+dishevelled manner, the times being hard;--and can say, and
+guarantee on my life, That in him is no rebellion;  that in him
+is the reverse of rebellion, the needful preparation for
+obedience.  For if you do mean to obey God-made superiors, your
+first step is to sweep out the Tailormade ones;  order them,
+under penalties, to vanish, to make ready for vanishing!
+
+Nay, what is best of all, he cannot rebel, if he would.
+Superiors whom God has made for us we cannot order to withdraw!
+Not in the least.  No Grand-Turk himself, thickest-quilted
+tailor-made Brother of the Sun and Moon can do it:  but an Arab
+Man, in cloak of his own clouting;  with black beaming eyes, with
+flaming sovereign-heart direct from the centre of the Universe;
+and also, I am told, with terrible 'horse-shoe vein' of swelling
+wrath in his brow, and lightning (if you will not have it as
+light) tingling through every vein of him,--he rises;  says
+authoritatively:  "Thickest-quilted Grand-Turk, tailor-made
+Brother of the Sun and Moon, No:--_I_ withdraw not;  thou shalt
+obey me or withdraw!"  And so accordingly it is:  thickest-
+quilted Grand-Turks and all their progeny, to this hour,
+obey that man in the remarkablest manner;  preferring _not_
+to withdraw.
+
+O brother, it is an endless consolation to me, in this
+disorganic, as yet so quack-ridden, what you may well call hag-
+ridden and hell-ridden world, to find that disobedience to the
+Heavens, when they send any messenger whatever, is and remains
+impossible.  It cannot be done;  no Turk grand or small can do
+it.  'Skew the dullest clodpole,' says my invaluable German
+friend, 'shew the haughtiest featherhead, that a soul higher than
+himself is here;  were his knees stiffened into brass, he must
+down and worship.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+The Gifted
+
+
+Yes, in what tumultuous huge anarchy soever a Noble human
+Principle may dwell and strive, such tumult is in the way of
+being calmed into a fruitful sovereignty.  It is inevitable.  No
+Chaos can continue chaotic with a soul in it.  Besouled with
+earnest human Nobleness, did not slaughter, violence and fire-
+eyed fury, grow into a Chivalry;  into a blessed Loyalty of
+Governor and Governed?  And in Work, which is of itself noble,
+and the only true fighting, there shall be no such possibility?
+Believe it not;  it is incredible;  the whole Universe
+contradicts it.  Here too the Chactaw Principle will be
+subordinated;  the Man Principle will, by degrees, become
+superior, become supreme.
+
+I know Mammon too;  Banks-of-England, Credit-Systems, worldwide
+possibilities of work and traffic;  and applaud and admire them.
+Mammon is like Fire;  the usefulest of all servants, if the
+frightfulest of all masters!  The Cliffords, Fitzadelms and
+Chivalry Fighters 'wished to gain victory,' never doubt it:  but
+victory, unless gained in a certain spirit, was no victory;
+defeat, sustained in a certain spirit, was itself victory.  I say
+again and again, had they counted the scalps alone, they had
+continued Chactaws, and no Chivalry or lasting victory had been.
+And in Industrial Fighters and Captains is there no nobleness
+discoverable?  To them, alone of men, there shall forever be no
+blessedness but in swollen coffers?  To see beauty, order,
+gratitude, loyal human hearts around them, shall be of no moment;
+to see fuliginous deformity, mutiny, hatred and despair, with the
+addition of half a million guineas, shall be better?  Heaven's
+blessedness not there;  Hell's cursedness, and your half-million
+bits of metal, a substitute for that!  Is there no profit in
+diffusing Heaven's blessedness, but only in gaining gold?--If so,
+I apprise the Mill-owner and Millionaire, that he too must
+prepare for vanishing;  that neither is _he_ born to be of the
+sovereigns of this world;  that he will have to be trampled and
+chained down in whatever terrible ways, and brass-collared safe,
+among the born thralls of this worrd!  We cannot have _Canailles_
+and Doggeries that will not make some Chivalry of themselves:
+our noble Planet is impatient of such;  in the end, totally
+intolerant of such!
+
+For the Heavens, unwearying in their bounty, do send other souls
+into this world, to whom yet, as to their forerunners, in Old
+Roman, in Old Hebrew and all noble times, the omnipotent guinea
+is, on the whole, an impotent guinea.  Has your half-dead
+avaricious Corn-Law Lord, your half-alive avaricious Cotton-Law
+Lord, never seen one such?  Such are, not one, but several;  are,
+and will be, unless the gods have doomed this world to swift dire
+ruin.  These are they, the elect of the world;  the born
+champions, strong men, and liberatory Samsons of this poor world:
+whom the poor Delilah-world will not always shear of their
+strength and eyesight, and set to grind in darkness at _its_ poor
+gin-wheel!  Such souls are, in these days, getting somewhat out
+of humour with the world.  Your very Byron, in these days, is at
+least driven mad;  flatly refuses fealty to the world.  The world
+with its injustices, its golden brutalities, and dull yellow
+guineas, is a disgust to such souls:  the ray of Heaven that is
+in them does at least pre-doom them to be very miserable here.
+Yes:--and yet all misery is faculty misdirected, strength that
+has not yet found its way.  The black whirlwind is mother of the
+lightning.  No _smoke,_ in any sense, but can become flame and
+radiance!  Such soul, once graduated in Heaven's stern
+University, steps out superior to your guinea.
+
+Dost thou know, O sumptuous Corn-Lord, Cotton-Lord, O mutinous
+Trades-Unionist, gin-vanquished, undeliverable;  O much-enslaved
+World,--this man is not a slave with thee!  None of thy
+promotions is necessary for him.  His place is with the stars of
+Heaven:  to thee it may be momentous, to him it is indifferent,
+whether thou place him in the lowest hut, or forty feet higher at
+the top of thy stupendous high tower, while here on Earth.  The
+joys of Earth that are precious, they depend not on thee and thy
+promotions.  Food and raiment, and, round a social hearth, souls
+who love him, whom he loves:  these are already his.  He wants
+none of thy rewards;  behold also, he fears none of thy
+penalties.  Thou canst not answer even by killing him:  the case
+of Anaxarchus thou canst kill;  but the self of Anaxarchus, the
+word or act of Anaxarchus, in no wise whatever.  To this man
+death is not a bugbear;  to this man life is already as earnest
+and awful, and beautiful and terrible, as death.
+
+Not a May-game is this man's life;  but a battle and a march, a
+warfare with principalities and powers.  No idle promenade
+through fragrant orange-groves and green flowery spaces, waited
+on by the choral Muses and the rosy Hours:  it is a stern
+pilgrimage through burning sandy solitudes, through regions of
+thick-ribbed ice.  He walks among men;  loves men, with
+inexpressible soft pity,--as they _cannot_ love him:  but his
+soul dwells in solitude, in the uttermost parts of Creation.  In
+green oases by the palm-tree wells, he rests a space;  but anon
+he has to journey forward, escorted by the Terrors and the
+Splendours, the Archdemons and Archangels.  All Heaven, all
+Pandemonium are his escort.  The stars keen-glancing, from the
+Immensities, send tidings to him;  the graves, silent with their
+dead, from the Eternities.  Deep calls for him unto Deep.
+
+Thou, O World, how wilt thou secure thyself against this man?
+Thou canst not hire him by thy guineas;  nor by thy gibbets and
+law-penalties restrain him.  He eludes thee like a Spirit.  Thou
+canst not forward him, thou canst not hinder him.  Thy penalties,
+thy poverties, neglects, contumelies:  behold, all these are good
+for him.  Come to him as an enemy;  turn from him as an unfriend;
+only do not this one thing,--infect him not with thy own
+delusion:  the benign Genius, were it by very death, shall guard
+him against this!--What wilt thou do with him?  He is above thee,
+like a god.  Thou, in thy stupendous three-inch pattens, art
+under him.  He is thy born king, thy conqueror and supreme
+lawgiver:  not all the guineas and cannons, and leather and
+prunella, under the sky can save thee from him.  Hardest
+thickskinned Mammon-world, ruggedest Caliban shall obey him, or
+become not Caliban but a cramp.  Oh, if in this man, whose eyes
+can flash Heaven's lightning, and make all Calibans into a cramp,
+there dwelt not, as the essence of his very being, a God's
+justice, human Nobleness, Veracity and Mercy,--I should tremble
+for the world.  But his strength, let us rejoice to understand,
+is even this:  The quantity of Justice, of Valour and Pity that
+is in him.  To hypocrites and tailored quacks in high places, his
+eyes are lightning;  but they melt in dewy pity softer than a
+mother's to the downpressed, maltreated;  in his heart, in his
+great thought, is a sanctuary for all the wretched.  This world's
+improvement is forever sure.
+
+'Man of Genius?'  Thou hast small notion, meseems, O Mecaenas
+Twiddledee, of what a Man of Genius is!  Read in thy New
+Testament and elsewhere,--if, with floods of mealymouthed
+inanity, with miserable froth-vortices of Cant now several
+centuries old, thy New Testament is not all bedimmed for thee.
+_Canst_ thou read in thy New Testament at all?  The Highest Man
+of Genius, knowest thou him;  Godlike and a God to this hour?
+His crown a Crown of Thorns?  Thou fool, with _thy_ empty
+Godhoods, Apotheoses _edgegilt;_  the Crown of Thorns made into a
+poor jewel-room crown, fit for the head of blockheads;  the
+bearing of the Cross changed to a riding in the Long-Acre Gig!
+Pause in thy mass-chantings, in thy litanyings, and Calmuck
+prayings by machinery;  and pray, if noisily, at least in a
+more human manner.  How with thy rubrics and dalmatics, and
+clothwebs and cobwebs, and with thy stupidities and grovelling
+baseheartedness, hast thou hidden the Holiest into all
+but invisibility!--
+
+'Man of Genius:'  O Mecaenas Twiddledee, hast thou any notion
+what a Man of Genius is?  Genius is 'the inspired gift of God.'
+It is the clearer presence of God Most High in a man.  Dim,
+potential in all men;  in this man it has become clear, actual.
+So says John Milton, who ought to be a judge;  so answer him the
+Voices of all Ages and all Worlds.  Wouldst thou commune with
+such a one,--_be_ his real peer then:  does that lie in thee?
+Know thyself and thy real and thy apparent place, and know him
+and his real and his apparent place, and act in some noble
+conformity therewith.  What!  The star-fire of the Empyrean shall
+eclipse itself, and illuminate magic-lanterns to amuse grown
+children?  He, the god-inspired, is to twang harps for thee, and
+blow through scrannel-pipes;  soothe thy sated soul with visions
+of new, still wider Eldorados, Houri Paradises, richer Lands of
+Cockaigne?  Brother, this is not he;  this is a counterfeit, this
+twangling, jangling, vain, acrid, scrannel-piping man.  Thou dost
+well to say with sick Saul, "It is naught, such harping!"--and in
+sudden rage grasp thy spear, and try if thou canst pin such a one
+to the wall.  King Saul was mistaken in his man, but thou art
+right in thine.  It is the due of such a one:  nail him to the
+wall, and leave him there.  So ought copper shillings to be
+nailed on counters;  copper geniuses on walls, and left there for
+a sign!--
+
+I conclude that the Men of Letters too may become a 'Chivalry,'
+an actual instead of a virtual Priesthood, with result
+immeasurable,--so soon as there is nobleness in themselves for
+that.  And, to a certainty, not sooner!  Of intrinsic Valetisms
+you cannot, with whole Parliaments to help you, make a Heroism.
+Doggeries never so gold-plated, Doggeries never so escutcheoned,
+Doggeries never so diplomaed, bepuffed, gas-lighted, continue
+Doggeries, and must take the fate of such.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+The Didactic
+
+
+Certainly it were a fond imagination to expect that any preaching
+of mine could abate Mammonism;  that Bobus of Houndsditch will
+love his guineas less, or his poor soul more, for any preaching
+of mine!  But there is one Preacher who does preach with effect,
+and gradually persuade all persons:  his name is Destiny, is
+Divine Providence, and his Sermon the inflexible Course of
+Things.  Experience does take dreadfully high school-wages;  but
+he teaches like no other!
+
+I revert to Friend Prudence the good Quaker's refusal of 'seven
+thousand pounds to boot.'  Friend Prudence's practical conclusion
+will, by degrees, become that of all rational practical men
+whatsover.  On the present scheme and principle, Work cannot
+continue.  Trades' Strikes, Trades' Unions, Chartisms;  mutiny,
+squalor, rage and desperate revolt, growing ever more desperate,
+will go on their way.  As dark misery settles down on us, and our
+refuges of lies fall in pieces one after one, the hearts of men,
+now at last serious, will turn to refuges of truth.  The eternal
+stars shine out again, so soon as it is dark _enough._
+
+Begirt with desperate Trades' Unionism and Anarchic Mutiny, many
+an Industrial _Law-ward,_ by and by, who has neglected to make
+laws and keep them, will be heard saying to himself:  "Why have I
+realised five hundred thousand pounds?  I rose early and sat
+late, I toiled and moiled, and in the sweat of my brow and of my
+soul I strove to gain this money, that I might become
+conspicuous, and have some honour among my fellow-creatures.  I
+wanted them to honour me, to love me.  The money is here, earned
+with my best lifeblood:  but the honour?  I am encircled with
+squalor, with hunger, rage, and sooty desperation.  Not honoured,
+hardly even envied;  only fools and the flunkey-species so much
+as envy me.  I am conspicuous,--as a mark for curses and
+brickbats.  What good is it?  My five hundred scalps hang here in
+my wigwam:  would to Heaven I had sought something else than the
+scalps;  would to Heaven I had been a Christian Fighter, not a
+Chactaw one!  To have ruled and fought not in a Mammonish but in
+a Godlike spirit;  to have had the hearts of the people bless me,
+as a true ruler and captain of my people;  to have felt my own
+heart bless me, and that God above instead of Mammon below was
+blessing me,--this had been something.  Out of my sight, ye
+beggarly five hundred scalps of banker's-thousands:  I will try
+for something other, or account my life a tragical futility!"
+
+Friend Prudence's 'rock-ledge,' as we called it, will gradually
+disclose itself to many a man;  to all men.  Gradually, assaulted
+from beneath and from above, the Stygian mud-deluge of Laissez-
+faire, Supply-and-demand, Cash-payment the one Duty, will abate
+on all hands;  and the everlasting mountain-tops, and secure
+rock-foundations that reach to the centre of the world, and rest
+on Nature's self, will again emerge, to found on, and to build
+on.  When Mammon-worshippers here and there begin to be God-
+worshippers, and bipeds-of-prey become men, and there is a Soul
+felt once more in the huge-pulsing elephantine mechanic Animalism
+of this Earth, it will be again a blessed Earth.
+
+"Men cease to regard money?" cries Bobus of Houndsditch:  "What
+else do all men strive for?  The very Bishop informs me that
+Christianity cannot get on without a minimum of Four thousand
+five hundred in its pocket.  Cease to regard money?  That will be
+at Doomsday in the afternoon!"--O Bobus, my opinion is somewhat
+different.  My opinion is, that the Upper Powers have not yet
+determined on destroying this Lower World.  A respectable, ever-
+increasing minority, who do strive for something higher than
+money, I with confidence anticipate;  ever-increasing, till there
+be a sprinkling of them found in all quarters, as salt of the
+Earth' once more.  The Christianity that cannot get on without a
+minimum of Four thousand five hundred, will give place to
+something better that can.  Thou wilt not join our small
+minority, thou?  Not till Doomsday in the afternoon?  Well;
+_then,_ at least, thou wilt join it, thou and the majority
+in mass!
+
+But truly it is beautiful to see the brutish empire of Mammon
+cracking everywhere;  giving sure promise of dying, or of being
+changed.  A strange, chill, almost ghastly dayspring strikes up
+in Yankeeland itself:  my Transcendental friends announce there,
+in a distinct, though somewhat lankhaired, ungainly manner, that
+the Demiurgus Dollar is dethroned;  that new unheard-of
+Demiurgusships, Priesthoods, Aristocracies, Growths and
+Destructions, are already visible in the grey of coming Time.
+Chronos is dethroned by Jove;  Odin by St. Olaf:  the Dollar
+cannot rule in Heaven forever.  No;  I reckon, not.  Socinian
+Preachers quit their pulpits in Yankeeland, saying, "Friends,
+this is all gone to a coloured cobweb, we regret to say!"--and
+retire into the fields to cultivate onion-beds, and live frugally
+on vegetables.  It is very notable.  Old godlike Calvinism
+declares that its old body is now fallen to tatters, and done;
+and its mournful ghost, disembodied, seeking new embodiment,
+pipes again in the winds;--a ghost and spirit as yet, but
+heralding new Spirit-worlds, and better Dynasties than the
+Dollar one.
+
+Yes, here as there, light is coming into the world;  men love not
+darkness, they do love light.  A deep feeling of the eternal
+nature of justice looks out among us everywhere,--even through
+the dull eyes of Exeter Hall;  an unspeakable religiousness
+struggles, in the most helpless manner, to speak itself, in
+Puseyisms and the like.  Of our Cant, all condemnable, how much
+is not condemnable without pity;  we had almost said, without
+respect!  The inarticulate worth and truth that is in England
+goes down yet to the Foundations.
+
+Some 'Chivalry of Labour,' some noble Humanity and practical
+Divineness of Labour, will yet be realised on this Earth.  Or why
+_will;_  why do we pray to Heaven, without setting our own
+shoulder to the wheel?  The Present, if it will have the Future
+accomplish, shall itself commence.  Thou who prophesiest, who
+believest, begin thou to fulfil.  Here or nowhere, now equally as
+at any time!  That outcast help-needing thing or person, trampled
+down under vulgar feet or hoofs, no help 'possible' for it, no
+prize offered for the saving of it,--canst not thou save it,
+then, without prize?  Put forth thy hand, in God's name;  know
+that 'impossible,' where Truth and Mercy and the everlasting
+Voice of Nature order, has no place in the brave man's
+dictionary.  That when all men have said "Impossible," and
+tumbled noisily elsewhither, and thou alone art left, then first
+thy time and possibility have come.  It is for thee now:  do thou
+that, and ask no man's counsel, but thy own only and God's.
+Brother, thou hast possibility in thee for much:  the possibility
+of writing on the eternal skies the record of a heroic life.
+That noble downfallen or yet unborn 'Impossibility,' thou canst
+lift it up, thou canst, by thy soul's travail, bring it into
+clear being.  That loud inane Actuality, with millions in its
+pocket, too 'possible' that, which rolls along there, with
+quilted trumpeters blaring round it, and all the world escorting
+it as mute or vocal flunkey,--escort it not thou;  say to it,
+either nothing, or else deeply in thy heart:  "Loud-blaring
+Nonentity, no force of trumpets, cash, Long-Acre art, or
+universal flunkeyhood of men, makes thee an Entity;  thou art a
+_Non_entity, and deceptive Simulacrum, more accursed than thou
+seemest.  Pass on in the Devil's name, unworshipped by at least
+one man, and leave the thoroughfare clear!"
+
+Not on Ilion's or Latium's plains;  on far other plains and
+places henceforth can noble deeds be now done.  Not on Ilion's
+plains;  how much less in Mayfair's drawingrooms!  Not in victory
+over poor brother French or Phrygians;  but in victory over
+Frost-jotuns, Marsh-giants, over demons of Discord, Idleness,
+Injustice, Unreason, and Chaos come again.  None of the old Epics
+is longer possible.  The Epic of French and Phrygians was
+comparatively a small Epic:  but that of Flirts and Fribbles,
+what is that?  A thing that vanishes at cock-crowing,--that
+already begins to scent the morning air!  Game-preserving
+Aristocracies, let them 'bush' never so effectually, cannot
+escape the Subtle Fowler.  Game seasons will be excellent, and
+again will be indifferent, and by and by they will not be at all.
+The Last Partridge of England, of an England where millions of
+men can get no corn to eat, will be shot and ended.
+Aristocracies with beards on their chins will find other work to
+do than amuse themselves with trundling-hoops.
+
+But it is to you, ye Workers, who do already work, and are as
+grown men, noble and honourable in a sort, that the whole world
+calls for new work and nobleness.  Subdue mutiny, discord,
+widespread despair, by manfulness, justice, mercy and wisdom.
+Chaos is dark, deep as Hell;  let light be, and there is instead
+a green flowery World.  O, it is great, and there is no other
+greatness.  To make some nook of God's Creation a little
+fruitfuler, better, more worthy of God;  to make some human
+hearts a little wiser, manfuler, happier,--more blessed, less
+accursed!  It is work for a God.  Sooty Hell of mutiny and
+savagery and despair can, by man's energy, be made a kind of
+Heaven;  cleared of its soot, of its mutiny, of its need to
+mutiny;  the everlasting arch of Heaven's azure overspanning _it_
+too, and its cunning mechanisms and tall chimney-steeples, as a
+birth of Heaven;  God and all men looking on it well pleased.
+
+Unstained by wasteful deformities, by wasted tears or heart's-
+blood of men, or any defacement of the Pit, noble fruitful
+Labour, growing ever nobler, will come forth,--the grand sole
+miracle of Man;  whereby Man has risen from the low places of
+this Earth, very literally, into divine Heavens.  Ploughers,
+Spinners, Builders;  Prophets, Poets, Kings;  Brindleys and
+Goethes, Odins and Arkwrights;  all martyrs, and noble men, and
+gods are of one grand Host:  immeasurable;  marching ever forward
+since the Beginnings of the World.  The enormous, all-conquering,
+flame-crowned Host, noble every soldier in it;  sacred, and alone
+noble.  Let him who is not of it hide himself;  let him tremble
+for himself.  Stars at every button cannot make him noble;
+sheaves of Bath-garters, nor bushels of Georges;  nor any other
+contrivance but manfully enlisting in it, valiantly taking place
+and step in it.  O Heavens, will he not bethink himself;  he too
+is so needed in the Host!  It were so blessed, thrice-blessed,
+for himself and for us all!  In hope of the Last Partridge, and
+some Duke of Weimar among our English Dukes, we will be patient
+yet a while.
+
+     The Future hides in it
+     Gladness and sorrow;
+     We press still thorow,
+     Nought that abides in it
+     Daunting us,--onward.
+
+
+THE END
+
+-------------------
+
+
+Summary
+
+
+Book I--Proem
+
+Chap. I  _Midas_
+
+The condition of England one of the most ominous ever seen in
+this world:  Full of wealth in every kind, yet dying of
+inanition;  Workhouses, in which no work cane be done.
+Destitution in Scotland.  Stockport Assizes.  England's
+unprofitable success:  Human faces glooming discordantly on one
+another.  Midas longed for gold, and the gods gave it him.
+
+
+Chap. II.  _The Sphinx_
+
+The grand unnamable Sphinx-riddle, which each man is called upon
+to solve.  Notions of the foolish concerning justice and
+judgment.  Courts of Westminster, and the general High Court of
+the Universe.  The one strong thing, the just thing, the true
+thing.  A noble Conservatism, as well as an ignoble.  In all
+battles of men each fighter, in the end, prospers according to
+his right:  Wallace of Scotland.  Fact and Semblance.  What is
+justice?  As many men as there are in a Nation who can _see_
+Heaven's justice, so many are there who stand between it
+and perdition.
+
+
+Chap. III.  _Manchester Insurrection_
+
+Peterloo not an unsuccessful Insurrection.  Governors who wait
+for Insurrection to instruct them, getting into the fatalest
+courses.  Unspeakable County Yeomanry.  Poor Manchester
+operatives, and their huge inarticulate question:  Unhappy
+Workers, unhappier idlers, of this actual England!  Fair day's-
+wages for fair day's-work:  Milton's 'wages;'  Cromwell's.  Pay
+to each man what he has earned and done and deserved;  what more
+have we to ask?  Some not _in_supportable approximation
+indispensable and inevitable.
+
+
+Chap. IV.  _Morrison's Pill_
+
+A state of mind worth reflecting on.  No Morrison's Pill for
+curing the maladies of Society:  Universal alteration of regimen
+and way of life:  Vain jargon giving place to some genuine Speech
+again.  If we walk according to the Law of this Universe, the
+Law-Maker will befriend us;  if not, not.  Quacks, sham heroes,
+the one bane of the world.  Quack and Dupe, upper side and under
+of the selfsame substance.
+
+
+Chap. V.  _Aristocracy of Talent_
+
+All misery the fruit of unwisdom:  Neither with individuals nor
+with Nations is it fundamentally otherwise.  Nature in late
+centuries universally supposed to be dead;  but now everywhere
+asserting herself to be alive and miraculous.  That guidance of
+this country not sufficiently wise.  Aristocracy of talent, or
+government by the Wisest, a dreadfully difficult affair to get
+started.  The true _eye_ for talent;  and the flunky eye for
+respectabilities, warm garnitures and
+larders dropping fatness:  Bobus and Bobissimus.
+
+
+Chap. VI.  _Hero-worship_
+
+Enlightened Egoism, never so luminous, not the rule by which
+man's life can be led:  A _soul,_ different from a stomach in any
+sense of the word.  Hero-worship done differently in every
+different epoch of the world.  Reform, like Charity, must begin
+at home.  Arrestment of the knaves and dastards, beginning by
+arresting our own poor selves out of that fraternity.  The
+present Editor's purpose to himself full of hope.  A Loadstar
+in the eternal sky:  glimmering of light, for here and there
+a human soul.
+
+
+Book II--The Ancient Monk
+
+
+Chap. I.  _Jocelin of Brakelond_
+
+How the Centuries stand lineally related to each other.  The one
+Book not permissible, the kind that has nothing in it.  Jocelin's
+'Chronicle,' a private Boswellean Note-book, now seven centuries
+old.  How Jocelin, from under his monk's cowl, looked out on that
+narrow section of the world in a really _human_ manner:  A wise
+simplicity in him;  a _veracity_ that goes deeper than words.
+Jocelin's Monk-Latin;  and Mr. Rokewood's editorial helpfulness
+and fidelity.  A veritable Monk of old Bury St. Edmunds worth
+attending to.  This England of ours, of the year 1200:  Coeur-de-
+Lion:  King Lackland, and his thirteenpenny mass.  The poorest
+historical Fact, and the grandest imaginative Fiction.
+
+
+Chap. II.  _St. Edmundsbury_
+
+St. Edmund's Bury, a prosperous brisk Town:  Extensive ruins of
+the Abbey still visible.  Assiduous Pedantry, and its rubbish-
+heaps called 'History.'  Another world it was, when those black
+ruins first saw the sun as walls.  At lowest, O dilettante
+friend, let us know always that it _was_ a world.  No easy matter
+to get across the chasm of Seven Centuries:  Of all helps; a
+Boswell, even a small Boswell, the welcomest.
+
+
+Chap. III.  _Landlord Edmund_
+
+'Battle of Fornham,' a fact, though a forgotten one.  Edmund,
+Landlord of the Eastern Counties:  A very singular kind of
+'landlord.'  How he came to be 'sainted.'  Seen and felt to have
+done verily a man's part in this life pilgrimage of his.  How
+they took up the slain body of their Edmund, and reverently
+embalmed it.  Pious munificence, ever growing by new pious gifts.
+Certain Times do crystallise themselves in a magnificent manner;
+others in a rather shabby one.
+
+
+Chap. IV.  _Abbot Hugo_
+
+All things have two faces, a light one and dark:  The Ideal has
+to grow in the Real, and to seek its bed and board there, often
+in a very sorry manner.  Abbot Hugo, grown old and feeble.  Jew
+debts and Jew creditors.  How approximate justice strives to
+accomplish itself.  In the old monastic Books almost no Mention
+whatever of 'personal religion.'  A poor Lord Abbot, all stuck-
+over with horse-leeches:  A 'royal commission of inquiry,' to no
+purpose.  A monk's first duty, obedience.  Magister Samson,
+Teacher of the Novices.  The Abbot's providential death.
+
+
+Chap. V.  _Twelfth Century_
+
+Inspectors of Custodiars;  the King not in any breathless haste
+to appoint a new Abbot.  Dim and very strange looks that monk-
+life to us.  Our venerable ancient spinning grandmothers,
+shrieking, and rushing out with their distaffs.  Lakenheath eels
+too slippery to be caught.  How much is alive in England, in that
+Twelfth Century;  how much, not yet come into life.  Feudal
+Aristocracy;  Willelmus conquaestor:  Not a steeple-chimney yet
+got on end from sea to sea.
+
+
+Chap. VI.  _Monk Samson_
+
+Monk-Life and Monk-Religion:  A great heaven-high
+Unquestionability, encompassing, interpenetrating all human
+Duties.  Our modern Arkwright Joe-Manton ages:  All human dues
+and reciprocities, changed into one great due of 'cash-payment'
+The old monks but a limited class of creatures, with a somewhat
+dull life of it.  One Monk of a taciturn nature distinguishes
+himself among those babling ones.  A Son of poor Norfolk parents.
+Little Samson's awful dream:  His poor Mother dedicates him to
+St. Edmund.  He grows to be a learned man, of devout grave
+nature.  Sent to Rome on business;  and returns _too_ successful:
+Method of traveling thither in those days.  His tribulations at
+home:  Strange conditions under which Wisdom has sometimes to
+struggle with folly.
+
+
+Chap. VII.  _The Canvassing_
+
+A new Abbot to be elected.  Even gossip, seven centuries off, has
+significance.  The Prior with Twelve Monks, to wait on his
+Majesty at Waltham.  An 'election' the on important social act:
+Given the Man a People choose, the worth and worthlessness of the
+People itself is given.
+
+Chap. VIII.  _The Election_
+
+Electoral methods and manipulations.  Brother Samson ready
+oftenest with some question, some suggestion that his wisdom in
+it.  The Thirteen off to Waltham, to choose their Abott:  In the
+solitude of the Convent, Destiny thus big and in her birthtime,
+what gossiping, babbling, dreaming of dreams!  King Henry II in
+his high Presence-chamber.  Samson chosen Abbot:  the King's
+royal acceptation.  St. Edmundsbury Monks, without express ballot
+box or other winnowing machine.  In every nation and Community
+there is at all times _a fittest,_ wisest, bravest, best.  Human
+Worth and human Worthlessness.
+
+
+Chap. IX.  _Abbot Samson_
+
+The Lord Abbot's arrival at St. Edmundsbury:  The self-same
+Samson yesterday a poor mendicant, this day, finds himself a
+_Dominus Abbas_ and mitred Peer of Parliament.  Depth and
+opulence of true social vitality in those old barbarous ages.
+True Governors go about under all manner of disguises now as
+then.  Genius, Poet;  what these words mean.  George the Third,
+head charioteer of England;  and Robert Burns, gauger of ale in
+Dumfries.  How Abbot Samson found a Convert all in dilapidation.
+His life-long harsh apprenticeship to governing, namely obeying.
+First get your Man;  all is got.  Danger of blockheads.
+
+
+Chap. X.  _Government_
+
+Beautiful, how the chrysalis governing-soul, shaking off its
+dusty slough and prison, starts forth winged, a true royal soul!
+One first labour, to institute a strenuous review and radical
+reform of his economics.  Wheresoever Disorder may stand or lie,
+let it have a care;  here is a man that has declared war with it.
+In less than four years the Convent debts are all liquidated, and
+the harpy Jews banished from St. Edmundsbury.  New life springs
+beneficent everywhere:  Spiritual rubbish as little tolerated
+as material.
+
+
+Chap. XI.  _The Abbot's Ways_
+
+Reproaches, open and secret, of ingratitude, unsociability;
+Except for 'fit men' in all kinds, hard to say for whom Abbot
+Samson had much favour.  Remembrance of benefits.  An eloquent
+man, but intent more on substance than on ornament.  A just clear
+heart the basis of all true talent.  One of the justest of
+judges;  His invaluable 'talent of silence.'  Kind of people he
+liked worst.  Hospitality and stocism.  The country in those days
+still dark with noble wood and umbrage;  How the old trees
+gradually died out, no man heeding it.  Monachism itself, so rich
+and fruitful once, now all rotted into _peat._  Devastations of
+four-footed cattle and Henry-the-Eighths.
+
+
+Chap. XII.  _The Abbot's Troubles_
+
+The troubles of Abbot Samson more than tongue can tell.  Not the
+spoil of victory, only the glorious toil of battle, can be theirs
+who really govern.  An insurrection of the Monks:  Behave better,
+ye remiss Monks, and thank Heaven for such an Abbot.  Worn down
+with incessant toil and tribulation:  Gleams of hilarity too;
+little snatches of encouragement granted even to a Governor.  How
+my Lord of Clare, coming to claim his _un_due 'debt,' gets a
+Roland for his Oliver.  A Life of Literature, noble and ignoble.
+
+
+Chap. XIII.  _In Parliament_
+
+Confused days of Lackland's usurpation, while Coeur-de-Lion was
+away:  Our brave Abbot took helmet himself, excommunicating all
+who should favour Lackland.  Kind Richard a captive in Germany.
+St. Edmund's Shrine not meddled with:  A heavenly Awe
+overshadowed and encompassed, as it still ought and must, all
+earthly Business whatsoever.
+
+
+Chap. XIV.  _Henry of Essex_
+
+How St. Edmund punished terribly, yet with mercy;  A Naratice
+significant of the time.  Henry Earl of Essex, standard-bearer of
+England:  No right reverence for the Heavenly in Man.  A traitor
+or coward.  Solemn Duel, by the King's appointment.  An evil
+Conscience doth make cowards of us all.
+
+
+Chap. XV.  _Practical-Devotional_
+
+A Tournament proclaimed and held in the Abbot's domain, in spite
+of him.  Roystering young dogs brought to reason.  The Abbot a
+man that generally remains master at last:  The importunate
+Bishop of Ely outwitted.  A man that dare abide King Richard's
+anger, with justice on his side.  Thou brave Richard, thou brave
+Samson!  The basis of Abbot Samson's life truly religion.  His
+zealous interest in the Crusades.  The great antique heart, like
+a child's in its simplicity, like a man's in its earnest
+solemnity and depth.  His comparative silence as to his religion
+precisely the healthiest sign of him and it.  Methodism,
+dilettantism, Puseyism.
+
+
+Chap. XVI.  _St. Edmund_
+
+Abbot Samson built many useful, many pious edifices:  All
+ruinous, incomplete things an eye-sorrow to him.  Rebuilding the
+great Altar:  A glimpse of the glorious Martyr's very Body.  What
+a scene;  how far vanished from us, in these unworshipping ages
+of ours!  The manner of men's Hero-worship, verily the innermost
+fact of their existence, determining all the rest.  On the whole,
+who knows how to reverence the Body of man?  Abbot Samson, at the
+culminating point of his existence:  Our real-phantasmagory of
+St. Edmundsbury plunges into the bosom of the Twelfth Century
+again, and all is over.
+
+
+Chap. XVII.  _The Beginnings_
+
+Formulas the very skin and muscular tissue of a Man's Life:
+Living Formulas and dead.  Habit the deepest law of human nature.
+A pathway through the pathless.  Nationalities.  Pulpy infancy,
+kneaded, baked into any form you choose:  The Man of business;
+the hard-handed Labourer;  the genus Dandy.  No Mortal out of the
+depths of Bedlam but lives by Formulas.  The hosts and
+generations of brave men Oblivion has swallowed:  Their crumbled
+dust, the soil our life-fruit grows on.  Invention of Speech;
+Forms of Worship;  Methods of Justice.  This English Land, here
+and now, the summary of what was wise and noble, and accordant
+with God's Truth, in all the generations of English Men.  The
+thing called 'Fame.'
+
+
+
+Book III.--The Modern Worker
+
+
+Chap. I.  _Phenomena_
+
+How men have 'forgotten God;'  taken the Fact of this Universe as
+it is _not;_  God's Laws become a Greatest-happiness Principle, a
+Parliamentary Expediency.  Man has lost the _soul_ out of him,
+and begins to find the want of it.  The old Pope of Rome, with
+his stuffed dummy to do the kneeling for him.  Few men that
+worship by the rotatory Calabash, do it in half so great, frank
+or effectual a way.  Our Aristocracy no longer able to _do_ its
+work, and not in the least conscious that it has any work to do.
+The Champion of England 'lifted into his saddle.'  The hatter in
+the Strand, mounting a huge lath-and-plaster Hat.  Our noble
+ancestors have fashioned for us, in how many thousand sense, a
+'life-road;'  and we their sons are madly, literally enough,
+'consuming the way.'
+
+
+Chap. II.  _Gospel of Mammonism_
+
+Heaven and Hell, often as the words are on our tongue, got to be
+fabulous or semi-fabulous for most of us.  The real 'Hell' of the
+English.  Cash-payment, _not_ the sole or even chief relation of
+human beings.  Practical Atheism, and its despicable fruits.  One
+of Dr. Alison's melancholy facts:  A poor Irish widow, in the
+Lanes of Endinburgh, _proving_ her sisterhood.  Until we get a
+human _soul_ within us, all things are _im_possible:  Infatuated
+geese, with feathers and without.
+
+
+Chap. III.  _Gospel of Dilettantism_
+
+Mammonism at least works;  but 'Go gracefully idle in Mayfair,'
+what does or can that mean?--Impotent, insolent Donothingism in
+Practice and Saynothingism in Speech.  No man now speaks a plain
+word:  Insincere Speech the prime material of insincere Action.
+Moslem parable of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead sea:  The
+Universe _become_ a Humbug to the Apes that thought it one.
+
+
+Chap. IV.  _Happy_
+
+All work noble;  and every noble crown a crown of thorns.  Man's
+pitiful pretension to be what he calls "happy;"  His Greatest-
+Happiness Principle fast becoming a rather unhappy one.  Byron's
+large audience.  A philosophical Doctor:  A disconsolate Meat-
+jack, gnarring and creaking with rust and work.  The only
+'happiness' a brave man ever troubled himself much about, the
+happiness to get his work done.
+
+
+Chap. V.  _The English_
+
+With all thy theoretic platitudes, what a depth of practical
+sense in thee, great England!  A dumb people, who can do great
+acts, but not describe them.  The noble Warhorse, and the Dog of
+Knowledge:  The freest utterances not by any means the best.  The
+done Work, much more than the spoken Word, an epitome of the man.
+The Man of Practice, and the Man of Theory:  Ineloquent Brindley.
+The English, of all Nations the stupidest in speech, the wisest
+in action:  Sadness and seriousness:  Unconsciously this great
+Universe is great to them.  The silent Romans.  John Bull's
+admirable insensibility to Logic.  All great Peoples
+conservative.  Kind of Ready-Reckoner a Solecism in East-cheap.
+Berserkir rage.  Truth and Justice alone _capable_ of being
+'conserved.'  Bitter indignation engendered by the Corn-Laws in
+every just English heart.
+
+
+Chap. VI.  _Two Centuries_
+
+The 'Settlement' of the year 1660 one of the mournfulest that
+ever took place in this land of ours.  The true end of Government
+to guide men in the way they should go:  The true good of this
+life, the portal of infinite good in the life to come.  Oliver
+Cromwell's body hung on the Tyburn gallows, the type of
+Puritanism found futil, inexecutable, execrable.  The
+Spiritualism of England, for two godless centuries, utterly
+forgettable:  Her practical material Work alone memorable.
+Bewildering obscurations and impediments:  Valiant Sons of Toil
+enchanted, by the million, in their Poor-Law Bastille.  Giant
+Labour yet to be King of this Earth.
+
+
+Chap. VII.  _Over-Production_
+
+An idle Governing Class addressing its Workers with an indictment
+of 'Over-production.'  Duty of justly apportioning the Wages
+of Work done.  A game-preserving Aristocracy, guiltless of
+producing or apportioning anything.  Owning the soil of England.
+The Working Aristocracy steeped in ignoble Mammonism:  The Idle
+Aristocracy, with its yellow parchments and pretentious futilities.
+
+
+Chap. VIII.  _Unworking Aristocracy_
+
+Our Land the _Mother_ of us all:  No true Aristocracy but must
+possess the Land.  Men talk of 'selling' Land:  Whom it belongs
+to.  Our much-consuming Aristocracy:  By the law of their
+position bound to furnish guidance and governance.  Man and
+miserable Corn-Laws.  The Working Aristocracy, and its terrible
+New-Work:  The Idle Aristocracy, and its horoscope of despair.  A
+High Class without duties to do, like a tree planted on
+precipices.  In a valiant suffering for others, not in a slothful
+making others suffer for us, did nobleness ever lie.  The pagan
+Hercules;  the Czar of Russia.  Parchments, venerable and not
+venerable.  Benedict the Jew, and his usuries.  No Chapter on the
+Corn-Laws:  The Corn-Laws too mad to have a Chapter.
+
+
+Chap. IX.  _Working Aristocracy_
+
+Many things for the Working Aristocracy, in their exteme need, to
+consider.  A national Existence supposed to depend on 'selling
+cheaper' than any other People.  Let inventive men try to invent
+a little how cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat
+justlier divided.  Many 'imposibilities' will have to become
+possible.  Supply-and-demand:  For what noble work was there ever
+yet any audible 'demand' in that poor sense?
+
+
+Chap. X.  _Plugson of Undershot_
+
+Man's Philosophies usually the 'supplement of his practice:'
+Symptoms of social death.  Cash-Payment:  The Plugson Ledger, and
+the Tablets of heaven's Chancery, discrepant exceedingly.  All
+human things do require to have an Ideal in them.  How murderous
+fighting became a 'glorious Chivalry.'  Noble devout-hearted
+Chevaliers.  Ignoble Bucaniers and Chactaw Indians:  Howel
+Davies, Napoleon flung out, at last, to St. Helena;  the latter
+end of him sternly compensating for the beginning.  The
+indomitable Plugson, as yet a Bacanier and Chactaw.  William
+Conqueror and his Norman followers.  Organisation of Labour:
+Courage, there are yet many brave men in England!
+
+
+Chap. XI.  _Labour_
+
+A perennial nobleness and even sacredness in Work.  Significance
+of the Potter's Wheel.  Blessed is he who has found his Work;
+let him ask no other blessedness.  A brave Sir Christopher, and
+his Paul's Cathedral:  Every noble work at first 'impossible.'
+Columbus royalest Sea-king of all:  a depth of Silence, deeper
+than the Sea;  a silence unsoundable;  known to God only.
+
+
+Chap. XII.  _Reward_
+
+Work is worship:  Labour, wide as the earth, has its summit in
+Heaven.  One monster there is in the world, the idle man.  'Fair
+day's-wages for a fair day's-work,' the most unrefusable demand.
+The 'wages' of every noble Work in Heaven, or else Nowhere:  The
+brave man has to _give_ his Life away.  He that works bodies
+forth the form of Things Unseen.  Strange mystic affinity of
+Wisdom and Insanity:  All Work, in its degree, a making of
+Madness sane.  Labour not a devil, even when encased in
+Mammonism:  The unredeemed ugliness, a slothful People.  The
+vulgarist Plugson of a Master-Worker, not a man to strangle by
+Corn-Laws and Shotbelts.
+
+
+Chap. XIII.  _Democracy_
+
+Man must actually have his debts and earnings a little better
+paid by man.  At no time was the lot of the dumb millions of
+toilers so entirely unbearable as now.  Sisterhood, brotherhood
+often forgotten, but never before so expressly denied.  Mungo
+Park and his poor Black Benefactress.  Gurth, born thrall of
+Cedric the Saxon:  Liberty a divine thing;  but 'liberty to die
+by starvation' not so divine.  Nature's Aristocracies.  William
+Conqueror, a resident House-Surgeon provided by nature for her
+beloved English People.  Democracy, the despair of finding Heroes
+to govern us, and contented putting-up with the want of them.
+The very Tailor unconsciously symbolising the reign of Equality.
+Wherever ranks do actually exist, strict division of costumes
+will also be enforced.  Freedom from oppression, an indispensable
+yet most insignificant portion of Human Liberty.  A _best path_
+does exist for every man;  a thing which, here and now, it
+were of all things _wisest_ for him to do.  Mock Superiors and
+Real Superiors.
+
+
+Chap. XIV.  _Sir Jabesh Windbag_
+
+Oliver Cromwell, the remarkablest Governor we have had for the
+last five centuries or so:  No vulunteer in Public Life, but
+plainly a balloted soldier:  The Government of England put into
+his hands.  Windbag, weak in the faith of a God;  strong only in
+the faith that Paragraphs and Plausibilities bring votes.  Five
+years of popularity or unpopularity;  and _after_ those five
+years, an Eternity.  Oliver has to appear before the Most High
+Judge:  Windbag, appealing to 'Posterity.'
+
+
+Chap. XV.  _Morison Again_
+
+New Religions:  This new stage of progress, proceeding 'to invent
+God,' a very strange one indeed.  Religion, the Inner Light or
+Moral Conscience of a man's soul.  Infinite difference between a
+Good man and a Bad.  The Great soul of the World, just and not
+unjust:  Faithful, unspoken, but not ineffectual 'prayer.'
+Penalities:  The French Revolution;  cruelest Portent that has
+risen into created Space these ten centuries.  Man needs no "New
+Religion;"  nor is like to get it:  spiritual Dastardism, and
+sick folly.  One Liturgy which does remain forever
+unexceptionable, that of _Praying by Working._  Sauerteig on the
+symbolic influences of Washing.  Chinese Pontiff-Emperor and his
+significant 'punctualities.'  Goethe and German Literature.  The
+great event for the world, now as always, the arrival in it of a
+new Wise Man.  Goethe's _Mason-Lodge._
+
+
+
+Book IV.--Horoscope
+
+
+Chap. I.  _Aristocracies_
+
+To predict the Future, to manage the Present, would not be so
+impossible, had not the Past been so sacrilegiously mishandled:
+a godless century, looking back to centuries that were godly.  A
+new real Aristocracy and Priesthood.  The noble Priest always a
+noble _Aristos_ to begin with, and something more to end with.
+Modern Preachers, and the _real_ Satanas that now is.  Abbot-
+Samson and William-Conqueror times.  The mission of a Land
+Aristocracy a _sacred_ one, in both senses of that old word.
+Truly a 'Splendor of God' did dwell in those old rude veracious
+ages.  Old Anselm traveling to Rome, to appeal against King
+Rufus.  Their quarrel at bottom a great quarrel.  The boundless
+future, predestined, nay already extant though unseen.  Our
+Epic, not _Arms and the Man,_ but _Tools and the Man;_  an
+infinitely wider kind of Epic.  Important that our grand
+Reformation were begun.
+
+
+Chap. II.  _Bribery Committee_
+
+Our theory, perfect purity of Tenpound Franchise;  our practice,
+irremediable bribery.  Bribery, indicative not only of length of
+purse, but of brazen dishonesty:  Proposed improvements.  A
+parliament, starting with a lie in its mouth, promulgates strage
+horoscopes of itself.  Respect paid to those worthy of no
+respect:  Pandarus Dogdraught.  The indigent discerning Freeman;
+and the kind of men he is called upon to vote for.
+
+
+Chap.  III.  _The One Institution_
+
+The 'Organisation of Labour,' if well understood, the Problem of
+the whole Future.  Governments of various degrees of utility.
+Kilkenny Cats;  spinning-Dervishes;  Parliamentary eloquence.  A
+prime-Minister who would dare believe the heavenly omens.  Who
+can despair of Governments, that passes a Soldier's Guardhouse?--
+Incalculable what, by arranging, commanding and regimenting, can
+be made of men.  Organisms enough in the dim huge Future;  and
+'United Services' quite other than the red-coat one.  Legislative
+interference between Workers and master-Workers increasingly
+indispensable.  Sanitary Reform:  People's Parks:  A right
+Education Bill, and effective Teaching Service.  Free bridge for
+emigrants:  England's sure markets among her colonies.  London
+the _All-Saxon-Home,_ rendezvous of all the 'Children of the
+Harz-Rock.'  The English essentially conservative:  Always the
+invincible instinct to hold fast by the Old, to admit the
+_minimum_ of New.  Yet new epochs do actually come;  and
+with them new peremptory necessities.  A certain Editor's
+stipulated work.
+
+
+Chap. IV.  _Captains of Industry_
+
+Government can do much, but it can in nowise do all.  Fall of
+Mammon:  to be a noble Master among noble Workers, will again be
+the first ambition with some few.  The Leaders of Industry,
+virtually the Captains of the world:  doggeries and Chivalries.
+Isolation, the sum-total of wretchedness to man.  All social
+growths in the world have required organising;  and work, the
+grandest of human interests, does now require it.
+
+
+Chap. V.  _Permanence_
+
+The 'tendency to persevere,' to persist in spite of hindrances,
+discouragements and 'impossibilities,' that which distinguishes
+the Species Man from the Genus Ape.  Month-long contracts, and
+Exeter-Hall purblindness. A practical manufacturing Quaker's care
+for his workmen.  Blessing of permanent Contract:  Permanence in
+all things, at the earliest possible moment, and to the latest
+possible.  Vagrant Sam-Slicks.  The wealth of a man the number of
+things he loves and blesses, which he is loved and blessed by.
+The Worker's _interest_ in the enterprise with which he is
+connected.  How to reconcile Despotism with Freedom.
+
+
+Chap. VI.  _The Landed_
+
+A man with fifty, with five hundred, with a thousand pounds a
+day, given him freely, without condition at all, might be a
+rather strong Worker:  The sad reality, very ominous to look at.
+Will he awaken, be alive again;  or is this death-fit very
+death?--Goeth's Duke of Weimar.  Doom of Idleness.  To sit idle
+aloft, like absurd Epicurus'-gods, a poor life for a man.
+Independence 'lord of the lion-heart and eagle-eye:'  Rejection
+of sham Superiors, the needful preparation for obedience to
+_real_ Superiors.
+
+
+Chap. VII  _The gifted_
+
+Tumultuous anarchy calmed by noble effort into fruitful
+sovereignty.  Mammon, like Fire, the usefulest of servants, if
+the frightfulest of masters.  Souls to whom the omnipotent guinea
+is, on the whole, an impotent guinea:  Not a May-game is this
+man's life;  but a battle and stern pilgrimage:  God's justice,
+human Nobleness, Veracity and Mercy, the essence of his very
+being.  What a man of Genius is.  The Highest 'Man of Genius.'
+Genius, the clearer presence of God Most High in a man.  Of
+intrinsic Valetism you cannot, with whole Parliaments to help
+you, make a heroism.
+
+Chap. VIII.  _The Didactic_
+
+One preacher who does preach with effect, and gradually persuade
+all persons.  Repentant Captains of Industry:  A Chactaw Fighter
+becomes a Christian Fighter.  Doomsday in the afternoon.  The
+'Christianity' that cannot get on without a minimum of Four-
+thousand-five-hundred, will give place to something better that
+can.  Beautiful to see the brutish empire of Mammon cracking
+everywhere:  A strange, chill, almost ghastly dayspring in
+Yankeeland itself.  Here as there, Light is coming into the
+world.  Whoso believes, let him begin to fulfil:  'Impossible,'
+where Truth and Mercy and the everlasting Voice of Nature order,
+can have no place in the brave man's dictionary.  Not on Ilion's
+or Latium's plains;  on far other plains and places henceforth
+can noble deeds be done.  The last Partridge of England shot and
+ended:  Aristocracies with beards on their chins.  O, it is
+great, and there is no other greatness:  To make some nook of
+god's Creation a little fruitfuler;  to make some human hearts a
+little wiser, manfuler, happier:  It is work for a God!
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Past and Present, by Thomas Carlyle
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