Yet a way

way of avenging their sore wrongs this; but a most sad circuitous one. it is, and an effectual way. The time has come when the Irish population must either be improved a little, or else exterminated. Plausible management, adapted to this hollow outcry or to that, will no longer do; it must be management grounded on sincerity and fact, to which the truth of things will respond-by an actual beginning of improvement to these wretched brother-men. In a state of perennial ultra-savage famine, in the midst of civilization, they cannot continue. For that the Saxon British will ever submit to sink along with them to such a state, we assume as impossible. There is in these latter, thank God, an ingenuity which is not false; a methodic spirit, of insight, of perseverant well-doing; a rationality and veracity which Nature with her truth does not disown;-withal there is a 'Berserkirrage' in the heart of them, which will prefer all things, including destruction and self-destruction, to that. Let no man awaken it, this same Berserkir-rage! Deephidden it lies, far down in the centre, like genial central-fire, with stratum after stratum of arrangement, traditionary method, composed productiveness, all built above it, vivified and rendered fertile by it: justice, clearness, silence, perseverance, unhasting unresting diligence, hatred of disorder, hatred of injustice, which is the worst disorder, characterize this people; their inward fire we say, as all such fire should be, is hidden at the centre. Deep-hidden; but awakenable, but immeasurable ;-let no man awaken it! With this strong silent people have the noisy vehement Irish now at length got common cause made. Ireland, now for the first time in such strange circuitous way, does find itself embarked in the same boat with England, to sail together; the wretchedness of Ireland, slowly but inevitably, has crept over to us, and become our own wretchedness. The Irish population must get itself redressed and saved, for the sake of the English if for nothing else. Alas, that it should, on both sides, be poor toiling men that pay the smart for unruly Striguls, Henrys, Macdermots, and O'Donoghues! The strong have eaten sour grapes, and the teeth of the weak are set on edge. Curses,' says the Proverb, ' are like chickens, they return always home." "

This is the consequence of the injustice of England, who is now reaping the bitter fruits of her fifteen generations of wrong-doing.

It is evident, then, to whoever will look into the matter, that the condition of the English laborer approximates more closely to that -of the Irish brought in competition with him; and that whatever labor, to which strength with little skill will suffice, is to be done, must be done at the Irish and not the English price. It is, therefore, not difficult to believe that there are in England half a million of handloom weavers, working fifteen hours a day, and yet unable to procure a sufficiency of the coarsest food; or that laborers upon farms, in a country of paper-money prices, are working for nine or seven shillings per week, and that other laborers, in districts the half of whose husbandry is cows, taste no milk, and can procure no milk. Nor is the suffering confined to the lower classes of workmen, to the unskilled millions who have nothing to depend upon but their muscles, and who are most likely to be affected by the slightest changes in the demand for labor. Mr. Carlyle tells us that the best paid laborers are those who are most frequently engaged in the popular disturbances.

"So much can observation altogether unstatistic, looking only at a Drogheda or Dublin steamboat, ascertain for itself. Another thing, likewise ascertainable on this vast obscure matter, excites a superficial surprise, but only a superficial one: That it is the best paid workmen who, by strikes, trades-unions, Chartism, and

the like, complain most. No doubt of it! The best-paid workmen are they alone that can so complain! How shall he, the handloom weaver, who in the day that is passing over him has to find food for the day, strike work? If he strike work, he starves within the week. He is past complaint!—The fact itself, however, is one which, if we consider it, leads us into still deeper regions of the malady. Wages, it would appear, are no index of well-being to the working man: without proper wages there can be no well-being: but with them also there may be none. Wages of working men differ greatly in different quarters of this country: according to the researches or the guess of Mr. Symmons, an intelligent humane inquirer, they vary in the ratio of not less than three to one. Cotton-spinners, as we learn, are generally well paid, while employed; their wages, one week with another, wives and children all working, amount to sums which, if well laid out, were fully adequate to comfortable living. And yet, alas, there seems little question that reasonable well-being is as much a stranger in their households as in any. At the cold hearth of the evertoiling, ever-hungering weaver, dwells at least some equability, fixation as if in perennial ice hope never comes; but also irregular impatience is absent. Of outward things these others have or might have enough, but of all inward things there is the fatallest lack. Economy does not exist among them; their trade now in plethoric prosperity, anon extenuated into inanition and ‘Short-time,' is of the nature of gambling; they live by it like gamblers, now in luxurious superfluity, now in starvation. Black mutinous discontent devours them; simply the miserablest feeling, that can inhabit the heart of man. English commerce, with its world-wide convulsive fluctuations, with its immeasurable Proteus steam-dæmon, makes all paths uncertain for them, all life a bewilderment; sobriety, steadfastness, peaceable continuance, the first blessing of man, are not theirs.

"It is in Glasgow among that class of operatives that Number 60,' in his dark room, pays down the price of blood. Be it with reason or with unreason, too surely they do in verity find the time all out of joint; this world for them no home, but a dingy prison-house, of reckless unthrift, rebellion, rancor, indignation against themselves and against all men. Is it a green flowery world, with azure everlasting sky stretched over it, the work and government of a God; or a murky-simmering Tophet, of copperas-fumes, cotton-fuz, gin-riot, wrath and toil, created by a dæmon governed by a Dæmon? The sum of their wretchedness, merited and unmerited welters, huge, dark and baleful, like a Dantean Hell, visible there in the staticts of Gin justly named the most authentic incarnation of the Infernal Principle in our times, too indisputable an incarnation; Gin the black throat into which wretchedness of every sort consummating itself by calling on delirium to help it, whirls down ; abdication of the power to think or resolve, as too painful now, on the part of men whose lot of all others would require thought and resolution; liquid madness sold at ten-pence the quartern, all the products of which are and must be, like its origin, mad, miserable, ruinous, and that only! If from this black unluminous unheeded inferno, and prison-house of souls in pain, there were to flash up, from time to time, some dismal wide-spread glare of Chartism or the like, notable to all, claiming remedy from all are we to regard it as more baleful than the quiet state, or rather as not so baleful? Ireland is in chronic atrophy these five centuries; the disease of nobler England, identified now with that of Ireland, becomes acute, has crisis, and will be cured or kill."

But after all it is, perhaps, not so much the actual suffering, inflicted upon the working classes, which so strongly moves them, as the felt injustice of most of the arrangements of society. It is that feeling of wrong which is more insupportable than even death itself. The English people look around them, and find that they are not in that position to which they are of right entitled, they find themselves the

victims of laws operating unequally, of institutions, made not to protect but to oppress them, and with that keen sense of right so deeply implanted in the human heart, are for ever protesting against the unnatural state to which they have been confined. On this point, the subjoined extract is full of meaning:

"It is not what a man outwardly has or wants that constitutes the happiness or misery of him. Nakedness, hunger, distress of all kinds, death itself have been cheerfully suffered, when the heart was right. It is the feeling of injustice that is insupportable to all men. The brutallest black African cannot bear that he should be used unjustly. No man can bear it, or ought to bear it. A deeper law than any parchment-law whatsoever, a law written direct by the hand of God in the inmost being of man, incessantly protests against it. What is injustice? Another name for disorder, for unveracity, unreality; a thing which veracious created Nature, even because it is not chaos and a waste-whirling baseless phantasm, rejects and disowns. It is not the outward pain of injustice; that, were it even the flaying of the back with knotted scourges, the severing of the head with guillotines, is comparatively a small matter. The real smart is the soul's pain and stigma, the hurt inflicted on the moral self. The rudest clown must draw himself up "into attitude of battle, and resistance to the death, if such be offered him. He cannot live under it; his own soul aloud, and all the universe with silent continual beckonings, says it cannot be. He must revenge himself; revancher himself, make himself good again —that so meum may be mine, tuum thine, and each party standing clear on his own basis, order be restored. There is sometning infinitely respectable in this, and we may say universally respected; it is the common stamp of manhood vindicating itself in all of us, the basis of whatever is worthy in all of us, and through superficial diversities, the same in all.

"As disorder, insane by the nature of it, is the hatefulest of things to man, who lives by sanity and order, so injustice is the worst evil, some call it the only evil, in this world. All men submit to toil, to disappointment, to unhappiness; it is their lot here; but in all hearts, inextinguishable by sceptic logic, by sorrow, perversion, or despair itself, there is a small still voice intimating that it is not the final lot; that wild, waste, incoherent as it looks, a God presides over it; that it is not an injustice but a justice. Force itself, the hopelessness of resistance, has doubtless a composing effect;—against inanimate Simooms, and much other infliction of the like sort, we have found it suffice to produce complete composure. Yet one would say, a permanent injustice even from an Infinite Power would prove unendurable by If men had lost belief in a God, their only resource against a blind No-God, of Necessity and Mechanism, that held them like a hideous World-Steamengine, like a hideous Phalaris' Bull, imprisoned in its own iron belly, would be, with or without hope, revolt. They could, as Novalis says, by a simultaneous universal act of suicide,' depart out of the World-Steamengine; and end, if not in victory, yet in invincibility, and unsubduable protest that such World-Steamengine was a failure and a stupidity."

men.

It is this injustice, or rather this infidelity to nature and truth, which forms the single intolerable evil of the English people, and which causes their sense of it to manifest itself in wild revolts and conflagrations. It has expelled from their breasts their customary loyal obedience to those placed above them; it has superinduced a decay of religious faith, and filled them with a virulent revengeful humor against their upper classes. Their conviction is hourly growing deeper that they are unfairly dealt with, and that their position in society is de

termined not by right but by necessity and force. The unquiet bitter feeling which is spreading among them is the same which a few years back gave birth to that frightful explosion of all the social elements, the French Revolution. With whatever horror we regard that event, says our author, it has come to be granted that there were many meanings in it, but this meaning as the ground of all; that it was the revolt of the oppressed lower classes against the oppressing or neglecting upper classes; not a French revolt only; but a European revolt, full of stern monition to all European nations. "These Chartisms," he adds, "Radicalisms, Reform Bill, Tithe Bill, and infinite other discrepancy, and acrid argument and jargon that there is yet to be, are our French Revolution. God grant, that we with our better methods may be able to transact it with argument alone."

6

"The French Revolution, now that we have sufficiently execrated its horrors and crimes, is found to have had withal a great meaning in it. As indeed, what great thing ever happened in this world, a world understood always to be made and governed by a Providence and Wisdom, not by an Unwisdom, without meaning somewhat? It was a tolerably audible voice of proclamation, and universal oyez ; to all people, this of three-and-twenty years' close fighting, sieging, conflagrating, with a million or two of men shot dead: the world ought to know by this time that it was verily meant in earnest, that same phenomenon, and had its own reasons for appearing there! Which, accordingly, the world begins now to do. The French Revolution is seen, or begins everywhere to be seen, 'as the crowning phenomenon of our modern time;' 'the inevitable stern end of much; the fearful, but also wonderful, indispensable and sternly beneficent beginning of much.' He who would understand the struggling convulsive unrest of European society, in any and every country, at this day, may read it in broad glaring lines there, in that the most convulsive phenomenon of the last thousand years. Europe lay pining, obstructed, moribund; quack-ridden, hag-ridden-is there a hag, or spectre of the Pit, so baleful, hideous as your accredited quack, were he never so close-shaven, mild-spoken, plausible to himself and others? Quack-ridden; in that one word lies all misery whatsoever. Speciosity in all departments usurps the place of reality, thrusts reality away; instead of performance, there is appearance of performance. The quack is a falsehood incarnate; and speaks, and makes, and does mere falsehoods, which Nature with her veracity has to disown. As chief priest, as chief governor, he stands there, entrusted with much. The husbandman of 'Time's Seedfield;' he is the world's hired sower, hired and solemnly appointed to sow the kind true earth with wheat this year, that next year all men may have bread. He, miserable mortal, deceiving and self-deceiving, sows it, as we said, not with corn but with chaff; the world nothing doubting, harrows it in, pays him his wages, dismisses him with blessing, and-next year there has no corn sprung. Nature has disowned the chaff, declined growing chaff, and behold now there is no bread! It becomes necessary, in such case, to do several things; not soft things some of them, but hard."

These are the fearful processes, the author proceeds to argue, by which man establishes not so much his rights as his mights. What is meant by this distinction, we may observe by the way, passes our understanding. It occurs in his history of the French Revolution, as well as in this work, but the precise force of it we have not been able to ascertain. That he does not deny the doctrine of human rights is evident from all his writings, though he says they are little worth as

certaining in comparison with the mights of man, that they vary not a little according to place and time, that they depend very much upon what a mans convictions of them are, and that the "accurate final rights of man lie in the far depths of the ideal." Of all which we have not the remotest conception. He adds:

"And yet that there is verily a 'rights of man' let no mortal doubt. An ideal of right does dwell in all men, in all arrangements, pactions and procedures of men : it is to this ideal of right, more and more developing itself as it is more and more approximated to, that human society for ever tends and struggles. We say also that any given thing either is unjust or else just; however obscure the arguings and strugglings on it be, the thing is itself in there as it lies, infallibly enough, is the one or the other. To which let us add only this, last article of faith, the alpha and omega of all faith among men, That nothing which is unjust can hope to continue in this world. A faith true in all times, more or less forgotten in most, but altogether frightfully brought to remembrance again in ours! Lyons fusilladings, Nantes noyadings, reigns of terror, and such other universal battle-thunder and explosion; these, if we will understand them, were but a new irrefragable preaching abroad of that. It would appear that Speciosities which are not realities cannot any longer inhabit this world. It would appear that the unjust thing has no friend in the Heaven, and a majority against it on the earth; nay, that it has at bottom all men for its enemies; that it may take shelter in this fallacy and then in that, but will be hunted from fallacy to fallacy till it find no fallacy to shelter in any more, but must march and go elsewhither ;-that, in a word, it ought to prepare incessantly for - decent departure, before indecent departure, ignominious drumming out, nay, savage smiting out and burning out, overtake it! Alas, was that such new tidings? Is it not from of old indubitable, that untruth, injustice which is but acted untruth, has no power to continue in this true universe of ours? The tidings was world-old, or older, as old as the Fall of Lucifer and yet in that epoch unhappily it was new tidings, unexpected, incredible; and there had to be such earthquakes and shakings of the nations before it could be listened to, and laid to heart even slightly! Let us lay it to heart, let us know it well, that new shakings be not needed. Known and laid to heart it must everywhere be, beforce peace can pretend to come. This seems

:

to us the secret of our convulsed era; this which is so easily written, which is and has been and will be so hard to bring to pass. All true men, high and low, each in his sphere, are consciously or unconsciously bringing it to pass; all false and halftrue men are fruitlessly spending themselves to hinder it from coming to pass."

In these extracts our readers are furnished with Mr. Carlyle's view of the nature of the complaints of the English people, with glimpses as to their causes, and the probability of their leading to terrible revolutions. In the remaining portion of the book, he sets about considering in the same immethodical but impressive manner the remedies for such deep-seated and wide-spread discontent. His first inference from all the facts, is that the doctrine of Laissez-Faire, or let alone is no longer of possible application in England; that the working classes cannot get on without actual government—that the church and the aristocracy must teach and guide them, since democracy, to which all things seem to be tending more or less rapidly, is the mere abdication of government, which will not do, as matters now are, with the abused, ignorant and tumultuous populace. Lest we may be supposed to have mistaken Mr. Carlyle in the utterance of these extra