Classification of the Pamphlets.

15

something may be advanced or suggested fairly contradictory of what he has said. Even where one differs most strongly from Mr. Carlyle, and feels almost constrained to fall out with him absolutely and finally as a teacher of what seems to be false, cruel, and mischievous, there is still, we are well aware, one consideration that ought to operate in making one ponder the difference long before expressing it, and in inducing one, if one must express it, to do so as modestly as possible. This is the consideration of Mr. Carlyle's real greatness of intellect, which renders it almost a matter of certainty that you cannot conceive or express any notion in connexion with any of the topics he has formally handled, that he has not himself conceived or expressed before you with far greater clearness and force, and a far more exact appreciation of its real significance and worth. In arguing with such a man-that is, in presenting considerations to his mind that appear to militate against his conclusions-one runs no small risk of committing that unhappy kind of error of which sending coal to Newcastle is a familiar instance. Nevertheless, one must in the end always fall back upon one's own conviction and sentiment; and the throb of the poorest heart, if only it be genuine, or the tear of the meanest eye, if only it drop at the bidding of emotion, is of avail, to an extent not to be arithmetically determined, against the proudest conclusions of the most intellectual of men. Considering what complexities, not only of substance and conformation, but also of quality and disposition, there are in the minds of human beings, one can see that there may be present in the least of existing individuals in a community, some wish, thought, phantasy, or feeling, purely special and idiosyncratic, yet divinely entitled, nay, and in the course of things, destined to modify and even reverse or stultify the generalizations of the greatest. There is a value in the really felt No of the poorest of God's creatures; for it may represent some portion of the "Absolute Fact of Things" not represented in the Yes of the most gifted.

On glancing at the Pamphlets as a whole, a rough distinction presents itself between such of them as refer to temporary political and social interests, and such of them as more properly relate to the spiritual condition of the individual. In the former class, still proceeding but in a rough way, (for it is one of Mr. Carlyle's characteristics, that he drives the shuttle unceasingly between the spiritual and the social, inextricably involving the Immensities with the Minutia, Ego with Everything, and Heaven with Earth,) we would, for our part, reckon the five tracts entitled respectively The Present Time, Model Prisons, Downing Street, The New Downing Street, and Parliaments; in the second

class, we would reckon the remaining three, entitled respectively Stump-Orator, Hudson's Statue, and Jesuitism. We shall select a topic or two for comment, first out of the one class, and then out of the other.

And first, occupying a conspicuous place among Mr. Carlyle's various exhortations on the subject of Social Reform, is his specific recommendation with regard to the immediate treatment of our overgrown pauperism. His counsels and opinions on this matter are most explicitly stated in the conclusion of the first pamphlet, where he introduces an imaginary discourse addressed from a conceivable Prime Minister to the entire pauper population of these realms. The most important passages of that discourse are the following:—

"Vagrant lackalls, foolish most of you, criminal many of you, miserable all; the sight of you fills me with astonishment and despair. What to do with you, I know not; long have I been meditating, and it is hard to tell. Here are some three millions of you, as I count: so many of you fallen sheer over into the abysses of open beggary; and, fearful to think, every new item that falls is loading so much more the chain that drags the others over. On the edge of the precipice hang uncounted millions; increasing, I am told, at the rate of 1200 a-day. *** One thing, after much meditating, I have at last discovered, and now know for some time back: That you cannot be left to roam abroad in this unguided manner, stumbling over the precipices, and loading ever heavier the fatal chain upon those who might be able to stand; that this of locking you up in temporary idle Workhouses, when you stumble, and subsisting you on Indian meal, till you can sally forth again on fresh roamings, and fresh stumblings, and ultimate descent to the Devil; that this is not the plan; and that it never was, or could out of England have been supposed to be, much as I have prided myself upon it! * * Good heavens! and I have to raise some eight or nine millions annually, six for England itself, and to wreck the morals of my working population beyond all money's worth, to keep the life from going out of you: a small service to you as I many times bitterly repeat! Alas, yes; before high Heaven I must declare it such I think the old Spartans, who would have killed you instead, had shown more humanity,' more of manhood, than I thus do! More humanity, I say, more of manhood, and of sense for what the dignity of man demands imperatively of you and of me and of us all. We call it charity, beneficence, and other fine names, this brutish Workhouse scheme of ours; and it is but sluggish heartlessness, and insincerity, and cowardly lowness of soul. I have to repeat with sorrow, but with perfect clearness, what is plainly undeniable, and is ever clamorous to get itself admitted, that you are of the nature of slaves, or, if you prefer the word, of nomadic, and now even vagrant and vagabond, servants that can find no master on these terms; which seems to me a much uglier word. Emancipation!

*

*

*

*

* *

*

You have been 'emancipated' with a vengeance! Foolish souls, I say the whole world cannot emancipate you. Fealty to ignorant unruliness, to gluttonous sluggish improvidence, to the Beer-pot and the Devil, who is there that can emancipate a man in that predicament? Your want of wants, I say, is that you be commanded in this world, not being able to command yourselves. Know, therefore, that it shall be so with you. Nomadism, I give you notice, has ended; needful permanency, soldier-like obedience, and the opportunity and necessity of hard steady labour for your living, have begun. Know that the idle Workhouse is shut against you henceforth; you cannot enter there at will nor leave it at will; you shall enter a quite other refuge, under conditions strict as soldiering, and not leave till I have done with you. He that prefers the glorious (or perhaps even the rebellious inglorious) career of freedom,' let him prove that he can travel there, and be the master of himself; and right good speed to him. He who has proved that he cannot travel there, or be the master of himself, let him, in the name of all the gods, become a servant, and accept the just rules of servitude! Arise, enlist in my Irish, my Scotch, and English Regiments of the New Era'-which I have been concocting, day and night, during these three grouse-seasons, (taking earnest incessant counsel with all manner of industrial notabilities and men of insight, on the matter,) and have now brought to a kind of preparation for incipiency, thank Heaven! Enlist there, ye poor wandering banditti; obey, work, suffer, abstain, as all of us have had to do: so shall you be useful in God's creation, so shall you be helped to gain a manful living for yourselves; not otherwise than so. Industrial Regiments-Regiments not to fight the French or others, who are peaceable enough towards us; but to fight the Bogs and Wildernesses at home and abroad, and to chain the Devils of the Pit which are walking too openly among us. Work for you? Work, surely, is not undiscoverable in an earth so wide as ours, if we will take the right methods for it! * Enlist, stand drill; become, from a nomadic Banditti of Idleness, Soldiers of Industry! I will lead you to the Irish Bogs, to the vacant desolations of Connaught now falling into cannibalism; to mistilled Connaught, to ditto Munster, Leinster, Ulster, I will lead you: to the English fox-covers, furze-grown Commons, New Forests, Salisbury Plains, likewise to the Scotch hillsides and bare rushy slopes, which as yet feed only sleep, moist uplands, thousands of square miles in extent, which are destined yet to grow green crops, and fresh butter and milk and beef without limit, (wherein no foreigner can compete with us,') were the Glasgow sewers once opened on them, and you with your Colonels carried thither. In the Three Kingdoms, or in the Forty Colonies, depend upon it, you shall be led to your work!"-The Present Time, pp. 46-55.

Here, certainly, is distinctness and precision enough. What Mr. Carlyle would do with the pauperism of the country is, according to the foregoing extract, substantially this :-He would abolish the whole systein of our existing Poor-laws, new or old,

VOL. XIV.

NO. XXVII.

B

with their aids and appliances of rates, unions, boards of guardians, and Workhouses; gradually, perhaps, but still thoroughly, he would sweep the country clean of all these things-the accumulated rubbish and solidification of English stupidity, combined with occasional deposits of English sense and ingenuity, since the days of Elizabeth: then, casting loose, for the moment, the three millions of individuals, whose maintenance is at present, at an annual expense of eight or nine millions sterling to the rest of the community, guaranteed upon the said system of institutions, he would permit such of them as chose and were ready, to reenter society on the footing of independent citizens paying their own way; and the rest he would treat really, if not nominally, as serfs of the State, bound to go where the State sent them, and to do the State's bidding, just as soldiers are: and, lastly, as soldiers are submitted to a regular drill and organisation, having sergeants, lieutenants, captains, colonels, and generals over them, so would he divide the mass of paupers that would thus be at the public disposal into bands or regiments, each duly officered and appointed, and differing from ordinary regiments only in this, that whereas ordinary regiments are marched from place to place against human foes, these new regiments would be employed in purely industrial or productive services, and chiefly, for the time being at least, in the agricultural labour of reclaiming waste lands at home-one regiment, for example, being sent off under its colonel and his subalterns to the Bog of Allen; a second receiving orders to go to Salisbury Plain and tear a bit of it into fertility; and a third, with some Smith of Deanston at its head, being posted, with similar injunctions, on some lone sheepwalk in Sutherland or Dumfriesshire.

This is a favourite idea of Mr. Carlyle's. He has urged it again and again in his various recent publications, and only repeats it in the pamphlet before us. Nor is the idea peculiar to himself. That the limit of the agricultural resources of this country is by no means yet nearly reached; that, not to mention the vast increase of produce that might be extracted by better and more laborious husbandry from the lands already under cultivation, there are thousands of thousands of acres now lying waste in these islands from which rich harvests might be raised, capable of maintaining a large excess of population above what now exists, or is likely soon to exist-is an idea extremely familiar to the popular common sense, and incessantly used by those that appeal to that tribunal. "I could employ all the unemployed men in Scotland north of the Dee," said a Chartist speaker, with great effect, once in our hearing. "Talk of emigration!" is a common saying "the best and cheapest emigration would be to the waste lands of Ireland, were that but rendered practicable." In

short, to seek to extinguish pauperism by directing pauper labour in considerable masses full against the soil, aye and until the soil take the sustenance of that labour completely on itself, is a notion with which at the present moment the public mind, with the exception perhaps of that small but most impenetrable portion of it wherein the executive lies, is quite surcharged. Moreover, the very form of that notion most congenial to Mr. Carlyle, that, namely, in which the analogy of a military organisation is used to suggest and represent the most effective mode of accomplishing the object in view,-is one that has been previously illustrated and recommended times without number. It is essentially, in fact, a conception of modern Socialism. Ever since the time of Fourier, the phrase "Industrial Armies," and the whole idea implied in it of the application of the military method of organisation, or of something like it, to the general business of production, whether agricultural or manufacturing, have been commonplaces among the more able and thoughtful Socialists; and by Fourier himself, as well as by various of his followers, the idea has been worked out with a degree of detail and speciality foreign to the intellectual habits of Mr. Carlyle.

What is peculiar to Mr. Carlyle, however, in addition to the amazing force and acceptability which his extraordinary union of sagacity with descriptive power enables him to give to this notion, is the element of moral sternness with which,-standing apart herein from the so-called Socialists, as he likes to do from all bodies of men whatever that seek shelter under the umbrella of a dogmatic denomination,-he takes care to invest it. There is no talk with him of that "attractive labour" or "travail attrayant" of which Fourier makes so much; no promises of independence, freedom from restriction, equality, and a voice in the election of office-bearers, such as allure one in Louis Blanc's scheme of the Ateliers Nationaux. On the contrary, offering his scheme of Agricultural Regiments only as a scheme for the treatment of that outcast portion of society which has already fallen over into a state of pauperism, (what his opinion may be on the higher question of a reconstruction of all society universally on some such principle of industrial organisation, is a matter as yet left obscure,) he carefully abstains from all poetic delineations of its beauty or pleasantness, and insists rather on the fact of its necessity, and the possibility of its severe efficiency. Stepping forward among the "vagrant Lackalls" not as a kind and smiling philanthropist, telling them that they are his fellows and brethren, and that they have been thrown out of their rights by the mal-arrangements of a false and imperfect civilisation, but as a hard and even haughty disciplinarian who views them chiefly as the victims of their own de