Ay, respectable gentlemen and ladies, I will confess all to you--you shall
have, if you enjoy it, a fresh opportunity for indulging that supreme
pleasure which the press daily affords you of insulting the classes
whose powers most of you know as little as you do their sufferings. Yes;
the Chartist poet is vain, conceited, ambitious, uneducated, shallow,
inexperienced, envious, ferocious, scurrilous, seditious, traitorous.--Is
your charitable vocabulary exhausted? Then ask yourselves, how often have
you yourself honestly resisted and conquered the temptation to any one of
these sins, when it has come across you just once in a way, and not as they
came to me, as they come to thousands of the working men, daily and hourly,
"till their torments do, by length of time, become their elements"? What,
are we covetous too? Yes! And if those who have, like you, still covet
more, what wonder if those who have nothing covet something? Profligate
too? Well, though that imputation as a generality is utterly calumnious,
though your amount of respectable animal enjoyment per annum is a hundred
times as great as that of the most self-indulgent artizan, yet, if you had
ever felt what it is to want, not only every luxury of the senses, but even
bread to eat, you would think more mercifully of the man who makes up by
rare excesses, and those only of the limited kinds possible to him, for
long intervals of dull privation, and says in his madness, "Let us eat and
drink, for to-morrow we die!" We have our sins, and you have yours. Ours
may be the more gross and barbaric, but yours are none the less damnable;
perhaps all the more so, for being the sleek, subtle, respectable,
religious sins they are. You are frantic enough, if our part of the press
calls you hard names, but you cannot see that your part of the press
repays it back to us with interest. _We_ see those insults, and feel them
bitterly enough; and do not forget them, alas! soon enough, while they pass
unheeded by your delicate eyes as trivial truisms. Horrible, unprincipled,
villanous, seditious, frantic, blasphemous, are epithets, of course, when
applied to--to how large a portion of the English people, you will some day
discover to your astonishment. When will that come, and how? In thunder,
and storm, and garments rolled in blood? Or like the dew on the mown grass,
and the clear shining of the sunlight after April rain?