



Produced by Stacy Brown, Thierry Alberto and the Online
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THOMAS CARLYLE'S

COLLECTED WORKS.


LIBRARY EDITION.
_IN THIRTY VOLUMES._


VOL. XIII.
PAST AND PRESENT.


LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL (LIMITED),
11 HENRIETTA STREET, COVENT GARDEN.




PAST AND PRESENT.

BY

THOMAS CARLYLE.



    Ernst ist das Leben.
                         SCHILLER.

[1843.]




CONTENTS.


BOOK I.

PROEM.

 CHAP.                             PAGE

    I. Midas                          3

   II. The Sphinx                    10

  III. Manchester Insurrection       19

   IV. Morrison's Pill               29

    V. Aristocracy of Talent         34

   VI. Hero-Worship                  41


BOOK II.

THE ANCIENT MONK.

    I. Jocelin of Brakelond          51

   II. St. Edmundsbury               60

  III. Landlord Edmund               65

   IV. Abbot Hugo                    73

    V. Twelfth Century               79

   VI. Monk Samson                   84

  VII. The Canvassing                92

 VIII. The Election                  96

   IX. Abbot Samson                 105

    X. Government                   112

   XI. The Abbot's Ways             117

  XII. The Abbot's Troubles         124

 XIII. In Parliament                131

  XIV. Henry of Essex               134

   XV. Practical-Devotional         139

  XVI. St. Edmund                   148

 XVII. The Beginnings               157


BOOK III.

THE MODERN WORKER.

    I. Phenomena                    171

   II. Gospel of Mammonism          181

  III. Gospel of Dilettantism       188

   IV. Happy                        192

    V. The English                  197

   VI. Two Centuries                208

  VII. Over-Production              213

 VIII. Unworking Aristocracy        218

   IX. Working Aristocracy          228

    X. Plugson of Undershot         235

   XI. Labour                       244

  XII. Reward                       250

 XIII. Democracy                    260

  XIV. Sir Jabesh Windbag           275

   XV. Morrison again               280


BOOK IV.

HOROSCOPE.

    I. Aristocracies                297

   II. Bribery Committee            312

  III. The One Institution          318

   IV. Captains of Industry         333

    V. Permanence                   341

   VI. The Landed                   348

  VII. The Gifted                   355

 VIII. The Didactic                 361


Summary and Index              371, 383




BOOK I.

PROEM




CHAPTER I.

MIDAS.


The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the
course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished are going on in
every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous,
and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in this world. England is
full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in
every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty
the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests;
thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen
millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest
and the willingest our Earth ever had; these men are here; the work
they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abundant,
exuberant on every hand of us: and behold, some baleful fiat as of
Enchantment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers, ye
master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of
you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!" On the poor
workers such fiat falls first, in its rudest shape; but on the rich
master-workers too it falls; neither can the rich master-idlers, nor
any richest or highest man escape, but all are like to be brought low
with it, and made 'poor' enough, in the money sense or a far fataler
one.

Of these successful skilful workers some two millions it is now
counted, sit in Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons; or have 'out-door
relief' flung over the wall to them,--the workhouse Bastille being
filled to bursting, and the strong Poor-law broken asunder by a
stronger.[1] They sit there, these many months now; their hope of
deliverance as yet small. In workhouses, pleasantly so-named, because
work cannot be done in them. Twelve-hundred-thousand workers in
England alone; their cunning right-hand lamed, lying idle in their
sorrowful bosom; their hopes, outlooks, share of this fair world,
shut-in by narrow walls. They sit there, pent up, as in a kind of
horrid enchantment; glad to be imprisoned and enchanted, that they may
not perish starved. The picturesque Tourist, in a sunny autumn day,
through this bounteous realm of England, descries the Union Workhouse
on his path. 'Passing by the Workhouse of St. Ives in Huntingdonshire,
on a bright day last autumn,' says the picturesque Tourist, 'I saw
sitting on wooden benches, in front of their Bastille and within their
ring-wall and its railings, some half-hundred or more of these men.
Tall robust figures, young mostly or of middle age; of honest
countenance, many of them thoughtful and even intelligent-looking men.
They sat there, near by one another; but in a kind of torpor,
especially in a silence, which was very striking. In silence: for,
alas, what word was to be said? An Earth all lying round, crying, Come
and till me, come and reap me;--yet we here sit enchanted! In the eyes
and brows of these men hung the gloomiest expression, not of anger,
but of grief and shame and manifold inarticulate distress and
weariness; they returned my glance with a glance that seemed to say,
"Do not look at us. We sit enchanted here, we know not why. The Sun
shines and the Earth calls; and, by the governing Powers and
Impotences of this England, we are forbidden to obey. It is
impossible, they tell us!" There was something that reminded me of
Dante's Hell in the look of all this; and I rode swiftly away.'

So many hundred thousands sit in workhouses: and other hundred
thousands have not yet got even workhouses; and in thrifty Scotland
itself, in Glasgow or Edinburgh City, in their dark lanes, hidden from
all but the eye of God, and of rare Benevolence the minister of God,
there are scenes of woe and destitution and desolation, such as, one
may hope, the Sun never saw before in the most barbarous regions where
men dwelt. Competent witnesses, the brave and humane Dr. Alison, who
speaks what he knows, whose noble Healing Art in his charitable hands
becomes once more a truly sacred one, report these things for us:
these things are not of this year, or of last year, have no reference
to our present state of commercial stagnation, but only to the common
state. Not in sharp fever-fits, but in chronic gangrene of this kind
is Scotland suffering. A Poor-law, any and every Poor-law, it may be
observed, is but a temporary measure; an anodyne, not a remedy: Rich
and Poor, when once the naked facts of their condition have come into
collision, cannot long subsist together on a mere Poor-law. True
enough:--and yet, human beings cannot be left to die! Scotland too,
till something better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not
to be a byword among the nations. O, what a waste is there; of noble
and thrice-noble national virtues; peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms;
valiant manful habits, soul of a Nation's worth,--which all the metal
of Potosi cannot purchase back; to which the metal of Potosi, and all
you can buy with _it_, is dross and dust!

Why dwell on this aspect of the matter? It is too indisputable, not
doubtful now to any one. Descend where you will into the lower class,
in Town or Country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries,
Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Labourer
Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful
result discloses itself: you have to admit that the working body of
this rich English Nation has sunk or is fast sinking into a state, to
which, all sides of it considered, there was literally never any
parallel. At Stockport Assizes,--and this too has no reference to the
present state of trade, being of date prior to that,--a Mother and a
Father are arraigned and found guilty of poisoning three of their
children, to defraud a 'burial-society' of some _3l. 8s._ due on the
death of each child: they are arraigned, found guilty; and the
official authorities, it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is
not solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe farther into that
department of things. This is in the autumn of 1841; the crime itself
is of the previous year or season. "Brutal savages, degraded Irish,"
mutters the idle reader of Newspapers; hardly lingering on this
incident. Yet it is an incident worth lingering on; the depravity,
savagery and degraded Irishism being never so well admitted. In the
British land, a human Mother and Father, of white skin and professing
the Christian religion, had done this thing; they, with their Irishism
and necessity and savagery, had been driven to do it. Such instances
are like the highest mountain apex emerged into view; under which lies
a whole mountain region and land, not yet emerged. A human Mother and
Father had said to themselves, What shall we do to escape starvation?
We are deep sunk here, in our dark cellar; and help is far.--Yes, in
the Ugolino Hungertower stern things happen; best-loved little Gaddo
fallen dead on his Father's knees!--The Stockport Mother and Father
think and hint: Our poor little starveling Tom, who cries all day for
victuals, who will see only evil and not good in this world: if he
were out of misery at once; he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps
kept alive? It is thought, and hinted; at last it is done. And now Tom
being killed, and all spent and eaten, Is it poor little starveling
Jack that must go, or poor little starveling Will?--What a committee
of ways and means!

In starved sieged cities, in the uttermost doomed ruin of old
Jerusalem fallen under the wrath of God, it was prophesied and said,
'The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children.' The
stern Hebrew imagination could conceive no blacker gulf of
wretchedness; that was the ultimatum of degraded god-punished man. And
we here, in modern England, exuberant with supply of all kinds,
besieged by nothing if it be not by invisible Enchantments, are we
reaching that?--How come these things? Wherefore are they, wherefore
should they be?

       *       *       *       *       *

Nor are they of the St. Ives workhouses, of the Glasgow lanes, and
Stockport cellars, the only unblessed among us. This successful
industry of England, with its plethoric wealth, has as yet made nobody
rich; it is an enchanted wealth, and belongs yet to nobody. We might
ask, Which of us has it enriched? We can spend thousands where we once
spent hundreds; but can purchase nothing good with them. In Poor and
Rich, instead of noble thrift and plenty, there is idle luxury
alternating with mean scarcity and inability. We have sumptuous
garnitures for our Life, but have forgotten to _live_ in the middle of
them. It is an enchanted wealth; no man of us can yet touch it. The
class of men who feel that they are truly better off by means of it,
let them give us their name!

Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors,--with what
advantage they can report, and their Doctors can: but in the heart of
them, if we go out of the dyspeptic stomach, what increase of
blessedness is there? Are they better, beautifuler, stronger, braver?
Are they even what they call 'happier'? Do they look with satisfaction
on more things and human faces in this God's-Earth; do more things and
human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so. Human faces gloom
discordantly, disloyally on one another. Things, if it be not mere
cotton and iron things, are growing disobedient to man. The Master
Worker is enchanted, for the present, like his Workhouse Workman,
clamours, in vain hitherto, for a very simple sort of 'Liberty:' the
liberty 'to buy where he finds it cheapest, to sell where he finds it
dearest.' With guineas jingling in every pocket, he was no whit
richer; but now, the very guineas threatening to vanish, he feels that
he is poor indeed. Poor Master Worker! And the Master Unworker, is not
he in a still fataler situation? Pausing amid his game-preserves, with
awful eye,--as he well may! Coercing fifty-pound tenants; coercing,
bribing, cajoling; 'doing what he likes with his own.' His mouth full
of loud futilities, and arguments to prove the excellence of his
Corn-law; and in his heart the blackest misgiving, a desperate
half-consciousness that his excellent Corn-law is _in_defensible, that
his loud arguments for it are of a kind to strike men too literally
_dumb_.

To whom, then, is this wealth of England wealth? Who is it that it
blesses; makes happier, wiser, beautifuler, in any way better? Who has
got hold of it, to make it fetch and carry for him, like a true
servant, not like a false mock-servant; to do him any real service
whatsoever? As yet no one. We have more riches than any Nation ever
had before; we have less good of them than any Nation ever had
before. Our successful industry is hitherto unsuccessful; a strange
success, if we stop here! In the midst of plethoric plenty, the people
perish; with gold walls, and full barns, no man feels himself safe or
satisfied. Workers, Master Workers, Unworkers, all men, come to a
pause; stand fixed, and cannot farther. Fatal paralysis spreading
inwards, from the extremities, in St. Ives workhouses, in Stockport
cellars, through all limbs, as if towards the heart itself. Have we
actually got enchanted, then; accursed by some god?--

       *       *       *       *       *

Midas longed for gold, and insulted the Olympians. He got gold, so
that whatsoever he touched became gold,--and he, with his long ears,
was little the better for it. Midas had misjudged the celestial
music-tones; Midas had insulted Apollo and the gods: the gods gave him
his wish, and a pair of long ears, which also were a good appendage to
it. What a truth in these old Fables!

FOOTNOTES:

[1] The Return of Paupers for England and Wales, at Ladyday 1842, is,
'In-door 221,687, Out-door 1,207,402, Total 1,429,089.' _Official
Report._




CHAPTER II.

THE SPHINX.


How true, for example, is that other old F