Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850Various
General
Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Vol. 67, No. 416, June 1850
Various
England -- Periodicals; Scotland -- Periodicals
Why, the misery and indigence which they seek
to relieve, is not the result of mere idleness, dissipation, or
profligacy--it arises from over-competition in one department of
industry, occasioned by the utter want of profitable employment in
another. There would be no need of industrial regiments to cultivate
the soil, if its cultivation were allowed to be remunerative. But to
set our pauper population at work upon anything which will not repay
private enterprise is mere delusion. We have said this much upon a
topic of the greatest interest, and the utmost importance, because
we are convinced that many persons, who are fully impressed with the
magnitude of the evil, have mistaken the remedy from the want of a
due consideration of the causes from whence that evil has arisen. It
is, however, a subject too large for incidental discussion, and we
shall probably return to it on a future occasion, when we can state
our views without reference to the whimsical vagaries of Mr Carlyle.
So then, the Noblest having made his speech, and wound up with
a significant hint of flogging and pistoling every one of the
unfortunate serfs who shall fail to wield the hoe with becoming
alacrity, what next? Nothing more, in so far as the interests of the
working classes are concerned; at least nothing tangible. Perhaps it
would be absurd to expect anything more. The man who can propound
a scheme to rid us of pauperism, with all its concomitant misery,
would be a greater benefactor to the commonwealth, and to the human
race, than a thousand Howards in one. Mr Carlyle is perhaps the most
strenuous advocate for work that we ever encountered. He would have
made a first-rate taskmaster under the old Egyptian economy. He is,
with great reason, indignant at the state to which our West Indian
Colonies have been reduced by means of Exeter Hall emancipation,
and he scouts emancipation itself as a gross delusion of the fiend.
It is to be regretted that his views have been so late of ripening.
Time was, when a fair and common-sense protest, advanced by a Liberal
philosopher, against the absurdity of attempting to change the hue
of the Ethiopian by a single momentary scrubbing, might have been
of some actual use: now, it is in vain to recommend a protracted
application of the tub. The Noblest, when Mr Carlyle has discovered
him and put him forward, will hardly achieve his ends by using the
following language, even supposing that he wielded the lightning, and
were able to put his threats into execution.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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