Past and Present: Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.Carlyle, Thomas
Philosophy
Past and Present: Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.
Carlyle, Thomas
Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
Unhappy Workers, unhappier Idlers, unhappy men and women of this
actual England. We are yet very far from an answer, and there will be
no existence for us without finding one. "A fair day's-wages for a
fair day's-work:" it is as just a demand as Governed men ever made of
Governing. It is the everlasting right of man. Indisputable as
Gospels, as arithmetical multiplication-tables: it must and will have
itself fulfilled;--and yet, in these times of ours, with what enormous
difficulty, next-door to impossibility! For the times are really
strange; of a complexity intricate with all the new width of the
ever-widening world; times here of half-frantic velocity of impetus,
there of the deadest-looking stillness and paralysis; times definable
as showing two qualities, Dilettantism and Mammonism;--most intricate
obstructed times! Nay, if there were not a Heaven's radiance of
Justice, prophetic, clearly of Heaven, discernible behind all these
confused world-wide entanglements, of Landlord interests,
Manufacturing interests, Tory-Whig interests, and who knows what other
interests, expediencies, vested interests, established possessions,
inveterate Dilettantisms, Midas-eared Mammonisms,--it would seem to
every one a flat impossibility, which all wise men might as well at
once abandon. If you do not know eternal Justice from momentary
Expediency, and understand in your heart of hearts how Justice,
radiant, beneficent, as the all-victorious Light-element, is also in
essence, if need be, an all-victorious _Fire_-element, and melts all
manner of vested interests, and the hardest iron cannon, as if they
were soft wax, and does ever in the long-run rule and reign, and
allows nothing else to rule and reign,--you also would talk of
impossibility! But it is only difficult, it is not impossible.
Possible? It is, with whatever difficulty, very clearly inevitable.
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