Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account