Permanence
Standing on the threshold, nay as yet outside the threshold, of a
'Chivalry of Labour,' and an immeasurable Future which it is to
fill with fruitfulness and verdant shade; where so much has not
yet come even to the rudimental state, and all speech of positive
enactments were hasardous in those who know this business only by
the eye,--let us here hint at simply one widest universal
principle, as the basis from which all organisation hitherto has
grown up among men, and all henceforth will have to grow: The
principle of Permanent Contract instead of Temporary.
Permanent not Temporary:--you do not hire the mere redcoated
fighter by the day, but by the score of years' Permanence,
persistance 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, shew 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. Life-long 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. Quashee, it must
be owned, is hitherto a kind of blockhead. The Haiti Duke of
Marmalade, educated now for almost half a century, seems to have
next to no sense in him. Why, in one of those Lancashire
Weavers, dying of hunger, there is more thought and heart, a
greater arithmetical amount of misery and desperation, than in
whole gangs of Quashees. It must be owned, thy eyes are of the
sodden sort; and with thy emancipations, and thy twenty-
millionings and long-eared clamourings, thou, like Robespierre
with his pasteboard _Etre Supreme,_ threatenest to become a bore
to us, _Avec ton Etre Supreme tu commences m'embeter!--
In a Printed Sheet of the assiduous, much-abused, and truly
useful Mr. Chadwick's, containing queries and responses from far
and near, as to this great question, 'What is the effect of
Education on workingmen, in respect of their value as mere
workers?' the present Editor, reading with satisfaction a
decisive unanimous verdict as to Education, reads with
inexpressible interest this special remark, put in by way of
marginal incidental note, from a practical manufacturing Quaker,
whom, as he is anonymous, we will call Friend Prudence. Prudence
keeps a thousand workmen; has striven in all ways to attach them
to him; has provided conversational soirees; playgrounds, bands
of music for the young ones; went even 'the length of buying
them a drum:' all which has turned out to be an excellent
investment. For a certain person, marked here by a black stroke,
whom we shall name Blank, living over the way,--he also keeps
somewhere about a thousand men; but has done none of these
things for them, nor any other thing, except due payment of the
wages by supply-and-demand. Blank's workers are perpetually
getting into mutiny, into broils and coils: every six months,
we suppose, Blank has a strike; every one month, every day
and every hour, they are fretting and obstructing the short-sighted
Blank; pilfering from him, wasting and idling for him, omitting
and committing for him. "I would not," says Friend Prudence,
"exchange my workers for his _with seven thousand pounds to boot."_
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*Report on the Training of Pauper Children (1841), p. 18.
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Right, O honourable Prudence; thou art wholly in the right:
Seven thousand pounds even as a matter of profit for this world,
nay for the mere cash-market of this worrd! And as a matter of
profit not for this world only, but for the other world and all
worlds, it outweighs the Bank of England!--Can the sagacious
reader descry here, as it were the outmost inconsiderable
rockledge of a universal rock-foundation, deep once more as the
Centre of the World, emerging so, in the experience of this good
Quaker, through the Stygian mud-vortexes and general Mother of
Dead Dogs, whereon, for the present, all swags and insecurely
hovers, as if ready to be swallowed?
Some Permanence of Contract is already almost possible; the
principle of Permanence, year by year, better seen into and
elaborated, may enlarge itself, expand gradually on every side
into a system. This once secured, the basis of all good results
were laid. Once permanent, you do not quarrel with the first
difficulty on your path, and quit it in weak disgust; you
reflect that it cannot be quitted, that it must be conquered, a
wise arrangement fallen on with regard to it. Ye foolish Wedded
Two, who have quarrelled, between whom the Evil Spirit has
stirred up transient strife and bitterness, so that
'incompatibility' seems almost nigh, ye are nevertheless the Two
who, by long habit, were it by nothing more, do best of all
others suit each other: it is expedient for your own two foolish
selves, to say nothing of the infants, pedigrees and public in
general, that ye agree again; that ye put away the Evil
Spirit, and wisely on both hands struggle for the guidance of
a Good Spirit!
The very horse that is permanent, how much kindlier do his rider
and he work, than the temporary one, hired on any hack principle
yet known! I am for permanence in all things, at the earliest
possible moment, and to the latest possible. Blessed is he that
continueth where he is. Here let us rest, and lay out
seedfields; here let us learn to dwell. Here, even here, the
orchards that we plant will yield us fruit; the acorns will be
wood and pleasant umbrage, if we wait. How much grows
everywhere, if we do but wait! Through the swamps we will shape
causeways, force purifying drains; we will learn to thread the
rocky inaccessibilities; and beaten tracks, worn smooth by mere
traveling of human feet, will form themselves. Not a difficulty
but can transfigure itself into a triumph; not even a deformity
but, if our own soul have imprinted worth on it, will grow dear
to us. The sunny plains and deep indigo transparent skies of
Italy are all indifferent to the great sick heart of a Sir Walter
Scott: on the back of the Apennines, in wild spring weather, the
sight of bleak Scotch firs, and snow-spotted heath and
desolation, brings tears into his eyes.*
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*Lockhart's _Life of Scott_
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O unwise mortals that forever change and shift, and say, Yonder,
not Here! Wealth richer than both the Indies lies everywhere for
man, if he will endure. Not his oaks only and his fruit-trees,
his very heart roots itself wherever he will abide;--roots
itself, draws nourishment from the deep fountains of Universal
Being! Vagrant Sam-Slicks, who rove over the Earth doing
'strokes of trade,' what wealth have they? Horseloads, shiploads
of white or yellow metal: in very sooth, what are these? Slick
rests nowhere, he is homeless. He can build stone or marble
houses; but to continue in them is denied him. The wealth of a
man is the number of things which he loves and blesses, which he
is loved and blessed by! The herdsman in his poor clay shealing,
where his very cow and dog are friends to him, and not a cataract
but carries memories for him, and not a mountain-top but nods old
recognition: his life, all encircled as in blessed mother's-
arms, is it poorer than Slick's with the ass-loads of yellow
metal on his back? Unhappy Slick! Alas, there has so much grown
nomadic, apelike, with us: so much will have, with whatever
pain, repugnance and 'impossibility,' to alter itself, to fix
itself again,--in some wise way, in any not delirious way!
A question arises here: Whether, in some ulterior, perhaps some
not far-distant stage of this 'Chivalry of Labour,' your Master-
Worker may not find it possible, and needful, to grant his
Workers permanent _interest_ in his enterprise and theirs? So
that it become, in practical result, what in essential fact and
justice it ever is, a joint enterprise; all men, from the Chief
Master down to the lowest Overseer and Operative, economically as
well as loyally concerned for it?--Which question I do not
answer. The answer, near or else far, is perhaps, Yes;--and yet
one knows the difficulties. Despotism is essential in most
enterprises; I am told, they do not tolerate 'freedom of debate'
on board a Seventy-four! Republican senate and _plebiscita_
would not answer well in Cotton-Mills. And yet observe there
too: Freedom, not nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom;
this is indispensable. We must have it, and will have it! To
reconcile Despotism with Freedom:--well, is that such a mystery?
Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism
_just._ Rigorous as Destiny; but just too, as Destiny and its
Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no
'Freedom' at all but in obeying them. The way is already known,
part of the way;--and courage and some qualities are needed for
walking on it!