Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
Permanent not Temporary:--you do not hire the mere redcoated
fighter by the day, but by the score of years' Permanence,
persistance is the first condition of all fruitfulness in the
ways of men. The 'tendency to persevere,' to persist in spite of
hindrances, discouragements and 'impossibilities:' it is this
that in all things distinguishes the strong soul from the weak;
the civilised burgher from the nomadic savage,--the Species Man
from the Genus Ape! The Nomad has his very house set on wheels;
the Nomad, and in a still higher degree the Ape, are all for
'liberty;' the privilege to flit continually is indispensable
for them. Alas, in how many ways, does our humour, in this
swift-rolling self-abrading Time, shew itself nomadic, apelike;
mournful enough to him that looks on it with eyes! This humour
will have to abate; it is the first element of all fertility in
human things, that such 'liberty' of apes and nomads do by
freewill or constraint abridge itself, give place to a better.
The civilised man lives not in wheeled houses. He builds stone
castles, plants lands, makes lifelong marriage-contracts;--has
long-dated hundred-fold possessions, not to be valued in the
money-market; has pedigrees, libraries, law-codes; has memories
and hopes, even for this Earth, that reach over thousands of
years. Life-long marriage-contracts: how much preferable were
year-long or month-long--to the nomad or ape!
Month-long contracts please me little, in any province where
there can by possibility be found virtue enough for more. Month-
long contracts do not answer well even with your house-servants;
the liberty on both sides to change every month is growing very
apelike, nomadic;--and I hear philosophers predict that it will
alter, or that strange results will follow: that wise men,
pestered with nomads, with unattached ever-shifting spies and
enemies rather than friends and servants, will gradually,
weighing substance against semblance, with indignation, dismiss
such, down almost to the very shoeblack, and say, "Begone; I
will serve myself rather, and have peace!" Gurth was hired for
life to Cedric, and Cedric to Gurth. O Anti-Slavery Convention,
loud-sounding long-eared Exeter-Hall--But in thee too is a kind
of instinct towards justice, and I will complain of nothing.
Only, black Quashee over the seas being once sufficiently
attended to, wilt thou not perhaps open thy dull sodden eyes to
the 'sixty-thousand valets in London itself who are yearly
dismissed to the streets, to be what they can, when the season
ends;'--or to the hunger-stricken, pallid, _yellow_-coloured
'Free Labourers' in Lancashire, Yorkshire, Buckinghamshire, and
all other shires! These Yellow-coloured, for the present, absorb
all my sympathies: if I had a Twenty Millions, with Model-Farms
and Niger Expeditions, it is to these that I would give it!
Quashee has already victuals, clothing; Quashee is not dying of
such despair as the yellow-coloured pale man's.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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