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
Permanent not Temporary:--you do not hire the mere redcoated fighter
by the day, but by the score of years! Permanence, persistence 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, show 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. Lifelong 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.
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