Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
addressing you. The best-combined sample of whatsoever divine qualities
are in this big People, the consummate flower of all that they have done
and been, the ultimate product of the Destinies, and English man of men,
arrived at last in the fulness of time, is--who think you? Ye worlds,
the Ithuriel javelin by which, with all these heroisms and accumulated
energies old and new, the English People means to smite and pierce, is
this poor tailor's-bodkin, hardly adequate to bore an eylet-hole, who
now has the honor to"--Good Heavens, if it were not that men generally
are very much of the canary-bird, here, are reflections sufficient to
annihilate any man, almost before starting!
But to us also it ought to be a very strange reflection! This, then,
is the length we have brought it to, with our constitutioning, and
ballot-boxing, and incessant talk and effort in every kind for so
many centuries back; this? The golden flower of our grand alchemical
projection, which has set the world in astonishment so long, and been
the envy of surrounding nations, is--what we here see. To be governed by
his Lordship, and guided through the undiscovered paths of Time by this
respectable degree of human faculty. With our utmost soul's travail we
could discover, by the sublimest methods eulogized by all the world, no
abler Englishman than this?
Really it should make us pause upon the said sublime methods, and ask
ourselves very seriously, whether, notwithstanding the eulogy of all
the world, they can be other than extremely astonishing methods, that
require revisal and reconsideration very much indeed! For the kind of
"man" we get to govern us, all conclusions whatsoever centre there, and
likewise all manner of issues flow infallibly therefrom. "Ask well, who
is your Chief Governor," says one: "for around him men like to him will
infallibly gather, and by degrees all the world will be made in his
image." "He who is himself a noble man, has a chance to know the
nobleness of men; he who is not, has none. And as for the poor
Public,--alas, is not the kind of 'man' you set upon it the liveliest
symbol of its and your veracity and victory and blessedness, or
unveracity and misery and cursedness; the general summation and
practical outcome of all else whatsoever in the Public and in you?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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