THE ONE INSTITUTION.
What our Government can do in this
grand Problem of the Working Classes of England?
Yes, supposing the insane Corn-Laws totally abolished,
all speech of them ended, and ’from ten to twenty
years of new possibility to live and find wages’
conceded us in consequence: What the English
Government might be expected to accomplish or attempt
towards rendering the existence of our Labouring Millions
somewhat less anomalous, somewhat less impossible,
in the years that are to follow those ‘ten or
twenty,’ if either ‘ten’ or ‘twenty’
there be?
It is the most momentous question.
For all this of the Corn-Law Abrogation, and what
can follow therefrom, is but as the shadow on King
Hezekiah’s Dial: the shadow has gone back
twenty years; but will again, in spite of Free-Trades
and Abrogations, travel forward its old fated
way. With our present system of individual Mammonism,
and Government by Laissez-faire, this Nation
cannot live. And if, in the priceless interim,
some new life and healing be not found, there is no
second respite to be counted on. The shadow on
the Dial advances thenceforth without pausing.
What Government can do? This that they call ‘Organising
of Labour’ is, if well understood, the Problem
of the whole Future, for all who will in future pretend
to govern men. But our first preliminary stage
of it, How to deal with the Actual Labouring Millions
of England? this is the imperatively pressing Problem
of the Present, pressing with a truly fearful intensity
and imminence in these very years and days. No
Government can longer neglect it: once more,
what can our Government do in it?
Governments are of very various degrees
of activity: some, altogether Lazy Governments,
in ‘free countries’ as they are called,
seem in these times almost to profess to do, if not
nothing, one knows not at first what. To debate
in Parliament, and gain majorities; and ascertain
who shall be, with a toil hardly second to Ixion’s,
the Prime Speaker and Spoke-holder, and keep the Ixion’s-Wheel
going, if not forward, yet round? Not altogether
so: much, to the experienced eye, is not
what it seems! Chancery and certain other Law-Courts
seem nothing; yet in fact they are, the worst of them,
something: chimneys for the devilry and contention
of men to escape by; a very considerable
something! Parliament too has its tasks, if thou
wilt look; fit to wear-out the lives of toughest men.
The celebrated Kilkenny Cats, through their tumultuous
congress, cleaving the ear of Night, could they be
said to do nothing? Hadst thou been of them, thou
hadst seen! The feline Heart laboured, as with
steam up to the bursting point; and death-doing
energy nerved every muscle: they had a work there;
and did it! On the morrow, two tails were found
left, and peaceable annihilation; a neighbourhood
delivered from despair.
Again, are not Spinning-Dervishes
an eloquent emblem, significant of much? Hast
thou noticed him, that solemn-visaged Turk, the eyes
shut; dingy wool mantle circularly hiding his figure; bell-shaped;
like a dingy bell set spinning on the tongue
of it? By centrifugal force the dingy wool mantle
heaves itself; spreads more and more, like upturned
cup widening into upturned saucer: thus spins
he, to the praise of Allah and advantage of mankind,
fast and faster, till collapse ensue, and sometimes
death!
A Government such as ours, consisting
of from seven to eight hundred Parliamentary Talkers,
with their escort of Able Editors and Public Opinion;
and for head, certain Lords and Servants of the Treasury,
and Chief Secretaries and others, who find themselves
at once Chiefs and No-Chiefs, and often commanded
rather than commanding, is doubtless a
most complicate entity, and none of the alertest for
getting on with business! Clearly enough, if
the Chiefs be not self-motive and what we call men,
but mere patient lay-figures without self-motive principle,
the Government will not move anywhither; it will tumble
disastrously, and jumble, round its own axis, as for
many years past we have seen it do. And
yet a self-motive man who is not a lay-figure, place
him in the heart of what entity you may, will make
it move more or less! The absurdest in Nature
he will make a little less absurd, he.
The unwieldiest he will make to move; that
is the use of his existing there. He will at
least have the manfulness to depart out of it, if
not; to say: “I cannot move in thee, and
be a man; like a wretched drift-log dressed in man’s
clothes and minister’s clothes, doomed to a
lot baser than belongs to man, I will not continue
with thee, tumbling aimless on the Mother of Dead
Dogs here: Adieu!”
For, on the whole, it is the lot of
Chiefs everywhere, this same. No Chief in the
most despotic country but was a Servant withal; at
once an absolute commanding General, and a poor Orderly-Sergeant,
ordered by the very men in the ranks, obliged
to collect the vote of the ranks too, in some articulate
or inarticulate shape, and weigh well the same.
The proper name of all Kings is Minister, Servant.
In no conceivable Government can a lay-figure get
forward! This Worker, surely he above all others
has to ‘spread out his Gideon’s Fleece,’
and collect the monitions of Immensity; the poor Localities,
as we said, and Parishes of Palace-yard or elsewhere,
having no due monition in them. A Prime Minister,
even here in England, who shall dare believe the heavenly
omens, and address himself like a man and hero to
the great dumb-struggling heart of England; and speak
out for it, and act out for it, the God’s-Justice
it is writhing to get uttered and perishing for want
of, yes, he too will see awaken round him,
in passionate burning all-defiant loyalty, the heart
of England, and such a ‘support’ as no
Division-List or Parliamentary Majority was ever yet
known to yield a man! Here as there, now as then,
he who can and dare trust the heavenly Immensities,
all earthly Localities are subject to him. We
will pray for such a Man and First-Lord; yes,
and far better, we will strive and incessantly make
ready, each of us, to be worthy to serve and second
such a First-Lord! We shall then be as good as
sure of his arriving; sure of many things, let him
arrive or not.
Who can despair of Governments that
passes a Soldier’s Guard-house, or meets a redcoated
man on the streets! That a body of men could be
got together to kill other men when you bade them:
this, a priori, does it not seem one of the
impossiblest things? Yet look, behold it:
in the stolidest of Donothing Governments, that impossibility
is a thing done. See it there, with buff belts,
red coats on its back; walking sentry at guard-houses,
brushing white breeches in barracks; an indisputable
palpable fact. Out of gray Antiquity, amid all
finance-difficulties, scaccarium-tallies, ship-moneys,
coat-and-conduct moneys, and vicissitudes of Chance
and Time, there, down to the present blessed hour,
it is.
Often, in these painfully decadent
and painfully nascent Times, with their distresses,
inarticulate gaspings and ‘impossibilities;’
meeting a tall Lifeguardsman in his snow-white trousers,
or seeing those two statuesque Lifeguardsmen in their
frowning bearskins, pipe-clayed buckskins, on their
coal-black sleek-fiery quadrupeds, riding sentry at
the Horse-Guards, it strikes one with a
kind of mournful interest, how, in such universal
down-rushing and wrecked impotence of almost all old
institutions, this oldest Fighting Institution is still
so young! Fresh-complexioned, firm-limbed, six
feet by the standard, this fighting-man has verily
been got up, and can fight. While so much has
not yet got into being; while so much has gone gradually
out of it, and become an empty Semblance or Clothes-suit;
and highest king’s-cloaks, mere chimeras parading
under them so long, are getting unsightly to the earnest
eye, unsightly, almost offensive, like a costlier
kind of scarecrow’s-blanket, here
still is a reality!
The man in horsehair wig advances,
promising that he will get me ‘justice:’
he takes me into Chancery Law-Courts, into decades,
half-centuries of hubbub, of distracted jargon; and
does get me disappointment, almost
desperation; and one refuge: that of dismissing
him and his ‘justice’ altogether out of
my head. For I have work to do; I cannot spend
my decades in mere arguing with other men about the
exact wages of my work: I will work cheerfully
with no wages, sooner than with a ten-years gangrene
or Chancery Lawsuit in my heart! He of the horsehair
wig is a sort of failure; no substance, but a fond
imagination of the mind. He of the shovel-hat,
again, who comes forward professing that he will save
my soul O ye Eternities, of him in this
place be absolute silence! But he of the
red coat, I say, is a success and no failure!
He will veritably, if he get orders, draw out a long
sword and kill me. No mistake there. He is
a fact and not a shadow. Alive in this Year Forty-three,
able and willing to do his work. In dim
old centuries, with William Rufus, William of Ipres,
or far earlier, he began; and has come down safe so
far. Catapult has given place to cannon, pike
has given place to musket, iron mail-shirt to coat
of red cloth, saltpetre ropematch to percussion-cap;
equipments, circumstances have all changed, and again
changed: but the human battle-engine in the inside
of any or of each of these, ready still to do battle,
stands there, six feet in standard size. There
are Pay-Offices, Woolwich Arsenals, there is a Horse-Guards,
War-Office, Captain-General; persuasive Sergeants,
with tap of drum, recruit in market-towns and villages; and,
on the whole, I say, here is your actual drilled fighting-man;
here are your actual Ninety-thousand of such, ready
to go into any quarter of the world and fight!
Strange, interesting, and yet most
mournful to reflect on. Was this, then, of all
the things mankind had some talent for, the one thing
important to learn well, and bring to perfection; this
of successfully killing one another? Truly you
have learned it well, and carried the business to
a high perfection. It is incalculable what, by
arranging, commanding and regimenting, you can make
of men. These thousand straight-standing firmset
individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel,
advance, retreat; and are, for your behoof, a magazine
charged with fiery death, in the most perfect condition
of potential activity: few months ago, till the
persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform
ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers,
thievish valets; an entirely broken population, fast
tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive
sergeant came; by tap of drum enlisted, or formed
lists of them, took heartily to drilling them; and
he and you have made them this! Most potent, effectual
for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm combining
and commanding among men. Let no man despair
of Governments who looks on these two sentries at
the Horse-Guards and our United-Service Clubs!
I could conceive an Emigration Service, a Teaching
Service, considerable varieties of United and Separate
Services, of the due thousands strong, all effective
as this Fighting Service is; all doing their
work, like it; which work, much more than
fighting, is henceforth the necessity of these New
Ages we are got into! Much lies among us, convulsively,
nigh desperately struggling to be born.
But mean Governments, as mean-limited
individuals do, have stood by the physically indispensable;
have realised that and nothing more. The Soldier
is perhaps one of the most difficult things to realise;
but Governments, had they not realised him, could
not have existed: accordingly he is here.
O Heavens, if we saw an army ninety-thousand strong,
maintained and fully equipt, in continual real action
and battle against Human Starvation, against Chaos,
Necessity, Stupidity, and our real ‘natural
enemies,’ what a business were it! Fighting
and molesting not ‘the French,’ who, poor
men, have a hard enough battle of their own in the
like kind, and need no additional molesting from us;
but fighting and incessantly spearing down and destroying
Falsehood, Nescience, Delusion, Disorder, and the Devil
and his Angels! Thou thyself, cultivated reader,
hast done something in that alone true warfare; but,
alas, under what circumstances was it? Thee no
beneficent drill-sergeant, with any effectiveness,
would rank in line beside thy fellows; train, like
a true didactic artist, by the wit of all past experience,
to do thy soldiering; encourage thee when right, punish
thee when wrong, and everywhere with wise word-of-command
say, Forward on this hand, Forward on that! Ah,
no: thou hadst to learn thy small-sword and platoon
exercise where and how thou couldst; to all mortals
but thyself it was indifferent whether thou shouldst
ever learn it. And the rations, and shilling a
day, were they provided thee, reduced as
I have known brave Jean-Pauls, learning their exercise,
to live on ‘water without the bread’?
The rations; or any furtherance of promotion to corporalship,
lance-corporalship, or due cat-o’-nine tails,
with the slightest reference to thy deserts, were
not provided. Forethought, even as of a pipe-clayed
drill-sergeant, did not preside over thee. To
corporalship, lance-corporalship, thou didst attain;
alas, also to the halberts and cat: but thy rewarder
and punisher seemed blind as the Deluge: neither
lance-corporalship, nor even drummer’s cat, because
both appeared delirious, brought thee due profit.
It was well, all this, we know; and
yet it was not well! Forty soldiers, I am told,
will disperse the largest Spitalfields mob: forty
to ten-thousand, that is the proportion between drilled
and undrilled. Much there is which cannot yet
be organised in this world; but somewhat also which
can, somewhat also which must. When one thinks,
for example, what Books are become and becoming for
us, what Operative Lancashires are become; what a
Fourth Estate, and innumerable Virtualities not yet
got to be Actualities are become and becoming, one
sees Organisms enough in the dim huge Future; and
‘United Services’ quite other than the
redcoat one; and much, even in these years, struggling
to be born!
Of Time-Bill, Factory-Bill and other
such Bills the present Editor has no authority to
speak. He knows not, it is for others than he
to know, in what specific ways it may be feasible
to interfere, with Legislation, between the Workers
and the Master-Workers; knows only and
sees, what all men are beginning to see, that Legislative
interference, and interferences not a few are indispensable;
that as a lawless anarchy of supply-and-demand, on
market-wages alone, this province of things cannot
longer be left. Nay interference has begun:
there are already Factory Inspectors, who
seem to have no lack of work. Perhaps
there might be Mine-Inspectors too: might
there not be Furrowfield Inspectors withal, and ascertain
for us how on seven and sixpence a week a human family
does live! Interference has begun; it must continue,
must extensively enlarge itself, deepen and sharpen
itself. Such things cannot longer be idly lapped
in darkness, and suffered to go on unseen: the
Heavens do see them; the curse, not the blessing of
the Heavens is on an Earth that refuses to see them.
Again, are not Sanitary Regulations
possible for a Legislature? The old Romans had
their AEdiles; who would, I think, in direct contravention
to supply-and-demand, have rigorously seen rammed up
into total abolition many a foul cellar in our Southwarks,
Saint-Gileses, and dark poison-lanes; saying sternly,
“Shall a Roman man dwell there?” The Legislature,
at whatever cost of consequences, would have had to
answer, “God forbid!” The Legislature,
even as it now is, could order all dingy Manufacturing
Towns to cease from their soot and darkness; to let-in
the blessed sunlight, the blue of Heaven, and become
clear and clean; to burn their coal-smoke, namely,
and make flame of it. Baths, free air, a wholesome
temperature, ceilings twenty feet high, might be ordained,
by Act of Parliament, in all establishments licensed
as Mills. There are such Mills already extant; honour
to the builders of them! The Legislature can say
to others: Go ye and do likewise; better if you
can.
Every toiling Manchester, its smoke
and soot all burnt, ought it not, among so many world-wide
conquests, to have a hundred acres or so of free greenfield,
with trees on it, conquered, for its little children
to disport in; for its all-conquering workers to take
a breath of twilight air in? You would say so!
A willing Legislature could say so with effect.
A willing Legislature could say very many things!
And to whatsoever ‘vested interest,’ or
suchlike, stood up, gainsaying merely, “I shall
lose profits,” the willing Legislature
would answer, “Yes, but my sons and daughters
will gain health, and life, and a soul.” “What
is to become of our Cotton-trade?” cried certain
Spinners, when the Factory Bill was proposed; “What
is to become of our invaluable Cotton-trade?”
The Humanity of England answered steadfastly:
“Deliver me these rickety perishing souls of
infants, and let your Cotton-trade take its chance.
God Himself commands the one thing; not God especially
the other thing. We cannot have prosperous Cotton-trades
at the expense of keeping the Devil a partner in them!”
Bills enough, were the Corn-Law Abrogation
Bill once passed, and a Legislature willing!
Nay this one Bill, which lies yet unenacted, a right
Education Bill, is not this of itself the sure parent
of innumerable wise Bills, wise regulations,
practical methods and proposals, gradually ripening
towards the state of Bills? To irradiate with
intelligence, that is to say, with order, arrangement
and all blessedness, the Chaotic, Unintelligent:
how, except by educating, can you accomplish
this? That thought, reflection, articulate utterance
and understanding be awakened in these individual million
heads, which are the atoms of your Chaos: there
is no other way of illuminating any Chaos! The
sum-total of intelligence that is found in it, determines
the extent of order that is possible for your Chaos, the
feasibility and rationality of what your Chaos will
dimly demand from you, and will gladly obey when proposed
by you! It is an exact equation; the one accurately
measures the other. If the whole English
People, during these ‘twenty years of respite,’
be not educated, with at least schoolmaster’s
educating, a tremendous responsibility, before God
and men, will rest somewhere! How dare any man,
especially a man calling himself minister of God, stand
up in any Parliament or place, under any pretext or
delusion, and for a day or an hour forbid God’s
Light to come into the world, and bid the Devil’s
Darkness continue in it one hour more! For all
light and science, under all shapes, in all degrees
of perfection, is of God; all darkness, nescience,
is of the Enemy of God. ’The schoolmaster’s
creed is somewhat awry?’ Yes, I have found few
creeds entirely correct; few light-beams shining white,
pure of admixture: but of all creeds and religions
now or ever before known, was not that of thoughtless
thriftless Animalism, of Distilled Gin, and Stupor
and Despair, unspeakably the least orthodox?
We will exchange it even with Paganism, with
Fetishism; and, on the whole, must exchange it with
something.
An effective ‘Teaching Service’
I do consider that there must be; some Education Secretary,
Captain-General of Teachers, who will actually contrive
to get us taught. Then again, why should
there not be an ‘Emigration Service,’
and Secretary, with adjuncts, with funds, forces,
idle Navy-ships, and ever-increasing apparatus; in
fine an effective system of Emigration; so
that, at length, before our twenty years of respite
ended, every honest willing Workman who found England
too strait, and the ‘Organisation of Labour’
not yet sufficiently advanced, might find likewise
a bridge built to carry him into new Western Lands,
there to ‘organise’ with more elbow-room
some labour for himself? There to be a real blessing,
raising new corn for us, purchasing new webs and hatchets
from us; leaving us at least in peace; instead
of staying here to be a Physical-Force Chartist, unblessed
and no blessing! Is it not scandalous to consider
that a Prime Minister could raise within the year,
as I have seen it done, a Hundred and Twenty Millions
Sterling to shoot the French; and we are stopt short
for want of the hundredth part of that to keep the
English living? The bodies of the English living,
and the souls of the English living: these
two ‘Services,’ an Education Service and
an Emigration Service, these with others will actually
have to be organised!
A free bridge for Emigrants:
why, we should then be on a par with America itself,
the most favoured of all lands that have no government;
and we should have, besides, so many traditions and
mementos of priceless things which America has cast
away. We could proceed deliberately to ‘organise
Labour,’ not doomed to perish unless we effected
it within year and day; every willing Worker
that proved superfluous, finding a bridge ready for
him. This verily will have to be done; the Time
is big with this. Our little Isle is grown too
narrow for us; but the world is wide enough yet for
another Six Thousand Years. England’s sure
markets will be among new Colonies of Englishmen in
all quarters of the Globe. All men trade with
all men, when mutually convenient; and are even bound
to do it by the Maker of men. Our friends of
China, who guiltily refused to trade, in these circumstances, had
we not to argue with them, in cannon-shot at last,
and convince them that they ought to trade! ‘Hostile
Tariffs’ will arise, to shut us out; and then
again will fall, to let us in: but the Sons of
England, speakers of the English language were it nothing
more, will in all times have the ineradicable predisposition
to trade with England. Mycale was the Pan-Ionian,
rendezvous of all the Tribes of Ion, for old Greece;
why should not London long continue the All-Saxon-home,
rendezvous of all the ‘Children of the Harz-Rock,’
arriving, in select samples, from the Antipodes and
elsewhere, by steam and otherwise, to the ‘season’
here! What a Future; wide as the world,
if we have the heart and heroism for it, which,
by Heaven’s blessing, we shall:
’Keep not standing fixed
and rooted,
Briskly venture, briskly roam;
Head and hand, where’er
thou foot it,
And stout heart are still
at home.
In what land the sun does
visit,
Brisk are we, whate’er
betide:
To give space for wandering
is it
That the world was made so
wide.’
Fourteen hundred years ago, it was
by a considerable ’Emigration Service,’
never doubt it, by much enlistment, discussion and
apparatus, that we ourselves arrived in this remarkable
Island, and got into our present difficulties
among others!
It is true the English Legislature,
like the English People, is of slow temper; essentially
conservative. In our wildest periods of reform,
in the Long Parliament itself, you notice always the
invincible instinct to hold fast by the Old; to admit
the minimum of New; to expand, if it be possible,
some old habit or method, already found fruitful,
into new growth for the new need. It is an instinct
worthy of all honour; akin to all strength and all
wisdom. The Future hereby is not dissevered from
the Past, but based continuously on it; grows with
all the vitalities of the Past, and is rooted down
deep into the beginnings of us. The English Legislature
is entirely repugnant to believe in ‘new epochs.’
The English Legislature does not occupy itself with
epochs; has, indeed, other business to do than looking
at the Time-Horologe and hearing it tick! Nevertheless
new epochs do actually come; and with them new imperious
peremptory necessities; so that even an English Legislature
has to look up, and admit, though with reluctance,
that the hour has struck. The hour having struck,
let us not say ’impossible:’ it
will have to be possible! ’Contrary to
the habits of Parliament, the habits of Government?’
Yes: but did any Parliament or Government ever
sit in a Year Forty-three before? One of the
most original, unexampled years and epochs; in several
important respects totally unlike any other!
For Time, all-edacious and all-feracious, does run
on: and the Seven Sleepers, awakening hungry
after a hundred years, find that it is not their old
nurses who can now give them suck!
For the rest, let not any Parliament,
Aristocracy, Millocracy, or Member of the Governing
Class, condemn with much triumph this small specimen
of ‘remedial measures;’ or ask again, with
the least anger, of this Editor, What is to be done,
How that alarming problem of the Working Classes is
to be managed? Editors are not here, foremost
of all, to say How. A certain Editor thanks the
gods that nobody pays him three hundred thousand pounds
a year, two hundred thousand, twenty thousand, or
any similar sum of cash for saying How; that
his wages are very different, his work somewhat fitter
for him. An Editor’s stipulated work is
to apprise thee that it must be done. The
’way to do it,’ is to try it,
knowing that thou shalt die if it be not done.
There is the bare back, there is the web of cloth;
thou shalt cut me a coat to cover the bare back, thou
whose trade it is. ‘Impossible?’
Hapless Fraction, dost thou discern Fate there, half
unveiling herself in the gloom of the future, with
her gibbet-cords, her steel-whips, and very authentic
Tailor’s Hell; waiting to see whether it is
‘possible’? Out with thy scissors,
and cut that cloth or thy own windpipe!