Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
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!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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