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