We publish below several extracts from a work intituled ' Latter Day Pamphlets,' edited by Thomas Carlyle of London, along with certain remarks of the London Times of 26th December.
' In the days that are now passing over us even fools are arrested to ask the meaning of them ; few of the generations of men have seen more impressive days. Days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded ; if they are not days of endless hope too, then they are days of utter despair. For it is not a small hope that will suffice, the ruin being clearly, either in action or in prospect, universal. There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all ! That human things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there— this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final. It is a time to make the dullest man consider and ask himself,— Whence he came ? Whither he is bound ?— a veritable ' New Era,' to the foolish as well as to the wise.'
What Mr. Carlyle had in his mind when he wrote thus, presently appears. It was the outbreak of Republicanism in 1848. Well might any but a very cool observer of that astonishing movement imagine that ' Doomsday was come ; ' that ' since the irruption of the northern barbarians there had been nothing like it ; ' and that ' the state everywhere throughout Europe had coughed its last in street musketry.' But we now see the breadth and depth of the movement, and perceive that it was immeasurably inferior in importance and significance to several which have occurred since the overthrow of the Roman Empire — far below the first French Revolution, further still below the Reformation. The fact was that Europe had been vaccinated by the Jacobins, and would not take Sansculottism again. A second advent of ' the Mountain ' was a thing morally impossible. And now that the smoke of the barricades has cleared away we see clearly that the movement was confined to the capitals or great cities, and that even there it was a revolt rather than a revolution. No great political, much less any great social change, has been produced.
There has been no overthrow of a privileged class or substitution of a free for an arbitrary government, such as resulted from the first French revolution. Of the monarchs that were temporarily expelled, the majority have either returned to their seats of government in person, or devolved their power, diminished only in name, to a younger and more vigorous successor. One monarchy alone has been completely overthrown ; and in this instance a constitutional King has been followed by an unconstitutional and even absolute President. The ' State ' has not 'coughed its last,' and Doomsday is indefinitely adjourned.
So again, far from its being impossible that ' things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine,' there is but too much reason to apprehend that by a natural though lamentable reaction they will re turn into an an older and sorrier routine than ever. The first effect of the insurrection has been a great increase in the force of standing armies— an element which certainly is not favourable to political progress. The next effect may, perhaps, be a European war, which, whatever may be its result, is sure to suspend all liberal movements, to exalt the power of the sword, and to impoverish and crush the people. And what is more important still, absolutism both civil and religious, is everywhere deriving dangerous strength from the natural fears of the peaceable and the rich. France is an evident instance. Germany is equally so. In Italy a winking Madonna consecrates the victory of a reinstated Pope. Even in England men who have windows and tills to guard begin to talk too lightly of their liberty ; and the greatest theological movement of the day, which Mr. Carlyle, seeing only from a distance, takes for the smallest, is radically absolutist in civil matters as well as in spiritual. Every where the tide is running against freedom.
Of the social evils of England Mr. Carlyle takes a view no less exaggerated than his view of the political situation of Europe : —
' Between our black West Indies and our white Ireland, between these two extremes of lazy refusal to work and of famishing inability to find any work, what a world have we made of it with our fierce Mammon worships and our benevolent philanderings, and idle godless nonsenses of one kind and another! Supply and demand — Leave it alone; — Voluntary principle,— Time will mend it: — 'till British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge prison swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral ; a hideous living Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive ; such a Curtius' gulf, communicating with the nether deeps, as the sun never saw till now.' Those scenes, which the Morning Chronicle is bringing home to all minds of men — thanks to it for service such as newspapers have seldom done — ought to excite unspeakable reflections in every mind. Thirty thousand outcast needlewomen working themselves swiftly to death ; three million paupers rotting in forced idleness, helping said needlewomen to die ; these are but items in the sad ledger of despair.'
We do not wish the prophet to prophesy smooth things to us; but we wish him to prophesy true things ; otherwise he will produce either incredulity, despair, or a vague impression that something extraordinary must be done— which is very fatal to all practical reform. To write so wildly on the subject is just the way to relax real effort and increase the amount of indolent sentimentalism and ineffectual rhetoric. And surely, for a social philosopher, who is bound to base his conclusions upon facts, Mr. Carlyle has the strangest mode of obtaining his information. His notions of the industrial classes, generally, seem to be derived from certain highly seasoned pictures of the very worst class of a metropolis ; that is, the very cesspool of civilized society. Is this sensible ? And might it not be well to look a little into ' Mac-Crowdy's ' statistics and the ' Dismal Science'? Of the existence of the ' thirty thousand outcast needle women ' we yet seek proof. Pauperism is a terrible evil— one which deserves and is receiving the best attention of our best men. If Mr. Carlyle has anything practical to say upon the subject, he will be gladly heard ; but before he can say anything practical he must learn the cause of the evil which is to he cured. It does not arise from 'benevolent philanderings, and idle godless nonsenses,' nor from 'mammon-worship' either; but from certain causes naturally incident to society in an old and overpeopled country, which it is the province of the ' Dismal Science ' to investigate and correct. And as to the Morning Chronicle reports, and the 30,000 needlewomen, Mr. Carlyle would here be nearer the mark if he directed the sword of his satire against luxury, which draws all this vice and misery in its train. But luxury is a disease of the body social, and Mr. Carlyle's fixed faith and fixed idea is that, all our evils result from want of intellect in the head.
The two offices upon which Mr. Carlyle especially fixes are the Foreign and the Colonial. And he is right here. But the reasons which he gives are wrong. The reason why these offices are in worse odour than the rest, is not that they are particularly deep in 'owl-droppings,' or that the clerks in them are not men of genius and ' brothers of the radiances and the lightnings,' or that the Colonial-office does not leave the colonies alone and turn its undivided attention to the Irish, or that the Foreign-office does not take up the potato rot and cease to 'protocol' and mix itself in the affairs of Europe. The Colonial-office is in bad odour, partly owing to the spirit which at present rules it, partly from the inherent difficulty of governing distant dependencies, especially when the Government is representative and the dependencies are not represented. And the Foreign-office is in bad odour, partly and principally because Lord Palmerston is Foreign Minister, and partly because just now there is a great call for economy, and people are very anxious to find good reasons for putting down ambassadors.
The Colonial-office Mr. Carlyle proposes to reform by turning it to its proper function of organizing Irish labour. Under the Foreign-office he proposes, with some witty politicians, to ' put a live coal.' We have had no continental interests worth caring for since the time of Oliver Cromwell. As we have certain cottons and hardwares to sell, and Portugal oranges to buy, we may need ' some kind of consul.' Ambassadors are to be 'sent on great occasions ; otherwise we may correspond with foreign Potentates through the cheap medium of the penny post. This scheme for reforming the Foreign-office is not original ; but the scheme for reforming the Colonial-office quite makes amends.
The task of reforming Downing-street in general was destined by Mr. Carlyle for our lost Sir Robert Peel. But who that ever studied the character of that lamented statesman can hear without a smile of his 'privately resolving to go one day into that stable of King Augis (Augeas) which appals human hearts, so rich is it high piled with the droppings of 200 years, and, Hercules-like, to load 1000 night waggons from it, and turn running water into it, and swash and shovel at it, and never leave it till the antique pavement and the real basis of the matter show itself clear again ;' or of his asking himself, in the character of 'the reforming Hercules, what work is now necessary, not in form and by traditionary use and wont, but in very fact, for the vital interests of the British nation, to be done here,'
But of course the great remedy is Hero worship,— to choose ourselves a Lama, or from six to a dozen of them after the example of the people of Thibet, who have ' seen into the heart of the matter ;' to get the divinest men into Downing-street in place of the present Parvuluses and Zeros; who might just as well be elected without so much cost and trouble by throwing an orange skin into St. James'-street and taking the man it hit ; and generally to increase ' the reverence for Human Intellect or God's Light and the detestation of Human Stupidity or the Devil's Darkness.' As a practical suggestion to set us going in this scheme of universal reform— which otherwise, now that Sir Robert Peel is gone, would be rather vague— Mr. Carlyle proposes that the Crown should be empowered to nominate part of the Ministry to seats in the House of Commons, without constituencies, of which he speaks in the most disparaging and anti-democratic terms. This again is not original. But it is original to imagine that such an arrangement would open the Cabinet to ' the whole British nation, learned, unlearned, professional, practical, speculative, and miscellaneous,' and that if it had been in force 50 years ago, instead of having ' meagre Pitt' for First Minister, we might have had ' the thundergod,' Robert Burns.
Britannia and Trades' Advocate (Hobart Town, Tas. ), May 1851 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article225557511
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