"Vagrant Lackalls,I at last perceive,all this that has been sung and spoken,for a long while,about enfranchisement,emancipation,freedom,suffrage,civil and religious liberty over the world,is little other than sad temporary jargon,brought upon us by a stern necessity,--but ordered by a sterner to take itself away again a little.Sad temporary jargon,I say:made up of sense and sense,--sense in small quantities,and sense in very large;--and,if taken for the whole or permanent truth of human things,it is better than fatal infinite sense eternally untrue .All men,I think,will soon have to quit this,to consider this as a thing pretty well achieved;and to look out towards aher thing much more needing achievement at the time that is.
"All men will have to quit it,I believe.But to you,my indigent friends,the time for quitting it has palpably arrived!
To talk of glorious self-government,of suffrages and hustings,and the fight of freedom and such like,is a vain thing in your case.By all human definitions and conceptions of the said fight of freedom,you for your part have lost it,and can fight more.Glorious self-government is a glory for you,for Hodge's emancipated horses,you.I say,You,for your part,have tried it,and failed .Left to walk your own road,the will-o'-wisps beguiled you,your short sight could descry the pitfalls;the deadly tumult and press has whirled you hither and thither,regardless of your struggles and your shrieks;and here at last you lie;fallen flat into the ditch,drowning there and dying,unless the others that are still standing please to pick you up.The others that still stand have their own difficulties,I can tell you!--But you,by imperfect energy and redundant appetite,by doing too little work and drinking too much beer,you (I bid you observe)have proved that you can do it!You lie there plainly in the ditch.And I am to pick you up again,on these mad terms;help you ever again,as with our best heart's-blood,to do what,once for all,the gods have made impossible?To load the fatal chain with your perpetual staggerings and sprawlings;and ever again load it,till we all lie sprawling?My indigent incompetent friends,Iwill !K that,whoever may be 'sons of freedom,'you for your part are and can be such.'free'you,I think,whoever may be free.You palpably are fallen captive,--caitiff ,as they once named it:--you do,silently but eloquently,demand,in the name of mercy itself,that some genuine command be taken of you.
"Yes,my indigent incompetent friends;some genuine practical command.Such,--if I rightly interpret those mad Chartisms,Repeal Agitations,Red Republics,and other delirious inarticulate howlings and bellowings which all the populations of the world utter,evidently cries of pain on their and your part,--is the demand which you,Captives,make of all men that are Captive,but are still Free.Free men,--alas,had you ever any ion who the free men were,who the -free,the incapable of freedom!The free men,if you could have understood it,they are the wise men;the patient,self-denying,valiant;the les of the World;who can discern the Law of this Universe,what it is,and piously obey it;these,in late sad times,having cast you loose,you are fallen captive to greedy sons of profit-and-loss;to bad and ever to worse;and at length to Beer and the Devil.Algiers,Brazil or Dahomey hold hing in them so authentically slave as you are,my indigent incompetent friends!
"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.
'Humanity'or manhood,I think;perhaps ape hood rather,--paltry imitancy,from the teeth outward,of what our heart never felt our understanding ever saw;dim indolent adherence to extraneous and extinct traditions;traditions really about extinct;living to almost any of us,and still haunting with their spectralities and gibbering ghosts (in a truly baleful manner)almost all of us!Making this our struggling 'Twelfth Hour of the Night'inexpressibly hideous!-"But as for you,my indigent incompetent friends,I have to repeat with sorrow,but with perfect clearness,what is plainly undeniable,and is even clamorous to get itself admitted,that you are of the nature of slaves,--or if you prefer the word,of adic,and even vagrant and vagabond,servants that can find master on those terms ;which seems to me a much uglier word.Emancipation?You have been 'emancipated'with a vengeance!Foolish souls,I say the whole world can emancipate you.Fealty to igant Unruliness,to gluttos sluggish Improvidence,to the Beer-pot and the Devil,who is there that can emancipate a man in that predicament?a whole Reform Bill,a whole French Revolution executed for his behoof alone:hing but God the Maker can emancipate him,by making him anew.
"To forward which glorious consummation,will it be well,Oindigent friends,that you,fallen flat there,shall henceforth learn to take advice of others as to the methods of standing?