Working Aristocracy
A poor Working Mammonism getting itself 'strangled in the
partridge-nets of an Unworking Dilettantism,' and bellowing
dreadfully, and already black in the face, is surely a disastrous
spectacle! But of a Midas-eared Mammonism, which indeed at
bottom all pure Mammonisms are, what better can you expect? No
better;--if not this, then something other equally disastrous, if
not still more disastrous. Mammonisms, grown asinine, have to
become human again, and rational; they have, on the whole, to
cease to be Mammonisms, were it even on compulsion, and pressure
of the hemp round their neck!--My friends of the Working
Aristocracy, there are now a great many things which you also, in
your extreme need, will have to consider.
The Continental people, it would seem, are 'exporting our
machinery, beginning to spin cotton and manufacture for
themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that!'
Sad news indeed; but irremediable;--by no means the saddest
news. The saddest news is, that we should find our National
Existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling
manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other
People. A most narrow stand for a great Nation to base itself
on! A stand which, with all the Corn-Law Abrogations
conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.
My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came
honestly down from it, and said: "This is our minimum of
cottonprices. We care not, for the present, to make cotton any
cheaper. Do you, if it seem so blessed to you, make cotton
cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton-fuzz, your hearts with
copperas-fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the general
gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!"--I admire a Nation which
fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other Nations, to
the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to _under_sell
them; we will be content to _equal_-sell them; to be happy
selling equally with them! I do not see the use of underselling
them. Cotton-cloth is already two-pence a yard or lower; and
yet bare backs were never more numerous among us. Let inventive
men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving how
cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent, a little, how
cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier
divided among us! Let inventive men consider, Whether the Secret
of this Universe, and of Man's Life there, does, after all, as we
rashly fancy it, consist in making money? There is One God,
just, supreme, almighty: but is Mammon the name of him?--With a
Hell which means 'Failing to make money,' I do not think there is
any Heaven possible that would suit one well; nor so much as an
Earth that can be habitable long! In brief, all this Mammon-
Gospel, of Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and
Devil take the hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest
Gospels ever preached on Earth; or altogether the shabbiest.
Even with Dilettante partridge-nets, and at a horrible
expenditure of pain, who shall regret to see the entirely
transient, and at best somewhat despicable life strangled out of
_it?_ At the best, as we say, a somewhat despicable, unvenerable
thing, this same 'Laissez-faire;' and now, at the worst, fast
growing an altogether detestable one!
"But what is to be done with our manufacturing population, with
our agricultural, with our ever-increasing population?" cry
many.--Aye, what? Many things can be done with them, a hundred
things, and a thousand things,--had we once got a soul, and begun
to try. This one thing, of doing for them by 'underselling all
people,' and filling our own bursten pockets and appetites by the
road; and turning over all care for any 'population,' or human
or divine consideration except cash only, to the winds, with a
"Laissez-faire" and the rest of it: this is evidently not the
thing. 'Farthing cheaper per yard:' no great Nation can stand
on the apex of such a pyramid; screwing itself higher and
higher; balancing itself on its great-toe! Can England not
subsist without being _above_ all people in working? England
never deliberately purposed such a thing. If England work better
than all people, it shall be well. England, like an honest
worker, will work as well as she can; and hope the gods may
allow her to live on that basis. Laissez-faire and much else
being once well dead, how many 'impossibles' will become
possible! They are 'impossible,' as cotton-cloth at two-pence an
ell was--till men set about making it. The inventive genius of
great England will not forever sit patient with mere wheels and
pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers whirring in the head
of it. The inventive genius of England is not a Beaver's, or a
Spinner's or Spider's genius: it is a _Man's_ genius, I hope,
with a God over him!
Supply-and-demand? One begins to be weary of such work. Leave
all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of
applause:--it is the Gospel of Despair! Man is a Patent-
Digester, then: only give him Free Trade, Free digesting-room;
and each of us digest what he can come at, leaving the rest to
Fate! My unhappy brethren of the Working Mammonism, my unhappier
brethren of the Idle Dilettantism, no world was ever held
together in that way for long. A world of mere Patent-Digesters
will soon have nothing to digest: such world ends, and by Law of
Nature must end, in 'over-population;' in howling universal
famine, 'impossibility,' and suicidal madness, as of endless dog-
kennels run rabid. Supply-and-demand shall do its full part, and
Free Trade shall be free as air;--thou of the shotbelts, see thou
forbid it not, with those paltry, _worse_ than 'Mammonish'
swindleries and Sliding-scales of thine, which are seen to be
swindleries for all thy canting, which in times like ours are
very scandalous to see! And Trade never so well freed, and all
Tariffs settled or abolished, and Supply-and-demand in full
operation,--let us all know that we have yet done nothing; that
we have merely cleared the ground for doing.
Yes, were the Corn-Laws ended tomorrow, there is nothing yet
ended; there is only room made for all manner of things
beginning. The Corn-Laws gone, and Trade made free, it is as
good as certain this paralysis of industry will pass away. We
shall have another period of commercial enterprise, of victory
and prosperity; during which, it is likely, much money will
again be made, and all the people may, by the extant methods,
still for a space of years, be kept alive and physically fed.
The strangling band of Famine will be loosened from our necks;
we shall have room again to breathe; time to bethink ourselves,
to repent and consider! A precious and thrice-precious space of
years; wherein to struggle as for life in reforming our foul
ways; in alleviating, instructing, regulating our people;
seeking, as for life, that something like spiritual food be
imparted them, some real governance and guidance be provided
them! It will be a priceless time. For our new period or
paroxysm of commercial prosperity will and can, on the old
methods of 'Competition and Devil take the hindmost,' prove but a
paroxysm: a new paroxysm,--likely enough, if we do not use it
better, to be our _last._ In this, of itself, is no salvation.
If our Trade in twenty years, 'flourishing' as never Trade
flourished, could double itself; yet then also, by the old
Laissez-faire method, our Population is doubled: we shall
then be as we are, only twice as many of us, twice and ten
times as unmanageable!
All this dire misery, therefore; all this of our poor Workhouse
Workmen, of our Chartisms, Trades-strikes, Corn-Laws, Toryisms,
and the general downbreak of Laissez-faire in these days,--may we
not regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom of Nature, saying to
us: Behold! Supply-and-demand is not the one Law of Nature;
Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man,--how far from
it! Deep, far deeper than Supply-and-demand, are Laws,
Obligations sacred as Man's Life itself: these also, if you will
continue to do work, you shall now learn and obey. He that will
learn them, behold Nature is on his side, he shall yet work and
prosper with noble rewards. He that will not learn them, Nature
is against him; he shall not be able to do work in Nature's
empire,--not in hers. Perpetual mutiny, contention, hatred,
isolation, execration shall wait on his footsteps, till all men
discern that the thing which he attains, however golden it look
or be, is not success, but the want of success.
Supply-and-demand,--alas! For what noble work was there ever yet
any audible 'demand' in that poor sense? The man of Macedonia,
speaking in vision to an Apostle Paul, "Come over and help us,"
did not specify what rate of wages he would give! Or was the
Christian Religion itself accomplished by Prize-Essays,
Bridgewater Bequests, and a 'minimum of Four thousand five
hundred a year?'' No demand that I heard of was made then,
audible in any Labour-market, Manchester Chamber of Commerce, or
other the like emporium and hiring establishment; silent were
all these from any whisper of such demand;--powerless were all
these to 'supply' it, had the demand been in thunder and
earthquake, with gold Eldorados and Mahometan Paradises for the
reward. Ah me, into what waste latitudes, in this Time-Voyage,
have we wandered; like adventurous Sindbads;--where the men go
about as if by galvanism, with meaningless glaring eyes, and have
no soul, but only a beaver-faculty and stomach! The haggard
despair of Cotton-factory, Coal-mine operatives, Chandos Farm-
labourers, in these days, is painful to behold; but not so
painful, hideous to the inner sense, as the brutish god-
forgetting Profit-and-Loss Philosophy, and Life-theory, which we
hear jangled on all hands of us, in senate-houses, spouting-
clubs, leading-articles, pulpits and platforms, everywhere as the
Ultimate Gospel and candid Plain-English of Man's Life, from the
throats and pens and thoughts of all but all men!--
Enlightened Philosophies, like Moliere Doctors, will tell you:
"Enthusiasms, Self-sacrifice, Heaven, Hell and such like: yes,
all that was true enough for old stupid times; all that used to
be true: but we have changed all that, _nous avons change tout
cela!"_ Well; if the heart be got round now into the right side,
and the liver to the left; if man have no heroism in him deeper
than the wish to eat, and in his soul there dwell now no Infinite
of Hope and Awe, and no divine Silence can become imperative
because it is not Sinai Thunder, and no tie will bind if it be
not that of Tyburn gallows-ropes,--then verily you have changed
all that; and for it, and for you, and for me, behold the Abyss
and nameless Annihilation is ready. So scandalous a beggarly
Universe deserves indeed nothing else; I cannot say I would save
it from Annihilation. Vacuum, and the serene Blue, will be much
handsomer; easier too for all of us. I, for one, decline living
as a Patent-Digester. Patent-Digester, Spinning-Mule, Mayfair
Clothes-Horse: many thanks, but your Chaosships will have the
goodness to excuse me!