The deranged condition of our affairs is a universal topic among men at present;and the heavy miseries pressing,in their rudest shape,on the great dumb inarticulate class,and from this,by a sure law,spreading upwards,in a less palpable but less certain and perhaps still more fatal shape on all classes to the very highest,are admitted everywhere to be great,increasing and almost unendurable.How to diminish them,--this is every man's question.For in fact they do imperatively need diminution;and unless they can be diminished,there are many other things that can very long continue to exist beside them.
A serious question indeed,How to diminish them!
Among the articulate classes,as they may be called,there are two ways of proceeding in regard to this.One large body of the intelligent and influential,busied mainly in personal affairs,accepts the social iniquities,or whatever you may call them,and the miseries consequent thereupon;accepts them,admits them to be extremely miserable,pronces them entirely inevitable,incurable except by Heaven,and eats its pudding with as little thought of them as possible.a very le class of citizens these;a very hopeful or salutary method of dealing with social iniquities this of theirs,however it may answer in respect to themselves and their personal affairs!But there is the select small miity,in whom some sentiment of public spirit and human pity still survives,among whom,or anywhere,the Good Cause may expect to find soldiers and servants:their method of proceeding,in these times,is also very strange.They embark in the "philanthropic movement;"they calculate that the miseries of the world can be cured by bringing the philanthropic movement to bear on them.To universal public misery,and universal neglect of the clearest public duties,let private charity superadd itself:there will thus be some balance restored,and maintained again;thus,--or by what conceivable method?On these terms they,for their part,embark in the sacred cause;resolute to cure a world's woes by rose-water;desperately bent on trying to the uttermost that mild method.It seems to have struck these good men that world,or thing here below,ever fell into misery,without having first fallen into folly,into sin against the Supreme Ruler of it,by adopting as a law of conduct what was a law,but the reverse of one;and that,till its folly,till its sin be cast out of it,there is the smallest hope of its misery going,--that for all the charity and rose-water in the world will its misery try to go till then!
This is a sad error;all the sadder as it is the error chiefly of the more humane and le-minded of our generation;among whom,as we said,or elsewhere at all,the cause of real Reform must expect its servants.At present,and for a long while past,whatsoever young soul awoke in EnGland with some disposition towards generosity and social heroism,or at lowest with some intimation of the beauty of such a disposition,--he,in whom the poor world might have looked for a Reformer,and valiant mender of its foul ways,was almost sure to become a Philanthropist,reforming merely by this rose-water method.To admit that the world's ways are foul,and the ways of God the Maker,but of Satan the Destroyer,many of them,and that they must be mended or we all die;that if huge misery prevails,huge cowardice,falsity,disloyalty,universal Injustice high and low,have still longer prevailed,and must straightway try to cease prevailing:this is what visible reformer has yet thought of doing:All so-called "reforms"hitherto are grounded either on openly admitted egoism (cheap bread to the cotton-spinner,voting to those that have vote,and the like),which does point towards very celestial developments of the Reform movement;or else upon this of remedying social injustices by indiscriminate contributions of philanthropy,a method surely still more unpromising.Such contributions,being indiscriminate,are but a new injustice;these will never lead to reform,or abolition of injustice,whatever else they lead to by that method shall we "get round Cape Horn,"by never such unanimity of voting,under the most approved Phantasm Captains!
It is miserable to see.Having,as it were,quite lost our way round Cape Horn,and being sorely "admonished"by the Iceberg and other dumb councillors,the pilots,--instead of taking to their sextants,and asking with a seriousness unkn for a long while,What the Laws of wind and water,and of Earth and of Heaven are,--decide that ,in these new circumstances,they will,to the worthy and unworthy,serve out a double allowance of grog.
In this way they hope to do it,--by steering on the old wrong tack,and serving out more and more,copiously what little aqua vitae may be still on board!Philanthropy,emancipation,and pity for human calamity is very beautiful;but the deep oblivion of the Law of Right and Wrong;this "indiscriminate mashing up of Right and Wrong into a patent treacle"of the Philanthropic movement,is by means beautiful;this,on the contrary,is altogether ugly and alarming.