Our domestic peace,we can but perceive,as good as keeps itself.Here and there a select Equitable Person,appointed by the Public for that end,clad in ermine,and backed by certain companies of blue Police,is amply adequate,without immoderate outlay in money or otherwise,to keep down the few exceptional individuals of the scoundrel kind;who,we observe,by the nature of them,are always weak and inconsiderable.And as to foreign peace,really all Europe,especially with so many railroads,public journals,printed books,penny-post,bills of exchange,and continual intercourse and mutual dependence,is more and more becoming (so to speak)one Parish;the Parishioners of which being,as we ourselves are,in immense majority peaceable hard-working people,could,if they were moderately well guided,have almost disposition to quarrel.Their ecoic interests are one,"To buy in the cheapest market,and sell in the dearest;"their faith,any religious faith they have,is one,"To annihilate shams--by all methods,street-barricades included."Why should they quarrel?The Czar of Russia,in the Eastern parts of the Parish,may have other ions;but he ks too well he must keep them to himself.He,if he meddled with the Western parts,and attempted anywhere to crush or disturb that sacred Democratic Faith of theirs,is aware there would rise from a hundred and fifty million human throats such a Hymn of the Marseillaise as was never heard before;and England,France,Germany,Poland,Hungary,and the Nine Kingdoms,hurling themselves upon him in never-imagined fire of vengeance,would swiftly reduce his Russia and him to a strange situation!
Wherefore he forbears,--and being a person of some sense,will long forbear.In spite of editorial prophecy,the Czar of Russia does disturb our night's rest.And with the other parts of the Parish our dreams and our thoughts are of anything but of fighting,or of the smallest need to fight.
For keeping of the peace,a thing highly desirable to us ,we strive to be grateful to your Lordship.Intelligible to us,also,your Lordship's reluctance to get out of the old routine.
But we beg to say farther,that peace by itself has feet to stand upon,and would suit us even if it had.Keeping of the peace is the function of a policeman,and but a small fraction of that of any Government,King or Chief of men.Are all men bound,and the Chief of men in the name of all,to do properly this:To see,so far as human effort under pain of eternal reprobation can,God's Kingdom incessantly advancing here below,and His will done on Earth as it is in Heaven?On Sundays your Lordship ks this well;forgot it on week-days.I assure you it is forevermore a fact.That is the immense divine and never-ending task which is laid on every man,and with unspeakable increase of emphasis on every Government or Commonwealth of men.Your Lordship,that is the basis upon which peace and all else depends!That basis once well lost,there is peace capable of being kept,--the only peace that could then be kept is that of the churchyard.Your Lordship may depend on it,whatever thing takes upon it the name of Sovereign or Government in an English Nation such as this will have to get out of that old routine;and set about keeping something very different from the peace,in these days!
Truly it is high time that same beautiful ion of Government should take itself away.The world is daily rushing towards wreck,while that lasts.If your Government is to be a Constituted Anarchy,what issue can it have?Our one interest in such Government is,that it would be kind egh to cease and go its ways,before the inevitable arrive.The question,Who is to float atop whither upon the popular vertexes,and act that sorry character,"carcass of the drowned ass upon the mud-deluge"?is by means an important one for almost anybody,--hardly even for the drowned ass himself.Such drowned ass ought to ask himself,If the function is a sublime one?For him too,though he looks sublime to the vulgar and floats atop,a private situation,down out of sight in his natural ooze,would be a luckier one.
Crabbe,speaking of constitutional philosophies,faith in the ballot-box and such like,has this indignant passage:"If any voice of deliverance or resuscitation reach us,in this our low and all but lost estate,sunk almost beyond plummet's sounding in the mud of Lethe,and oblivious of all le objects,it will be an intimation that we must put away all this abominable sense,and understand,once more,that Constituted Anarchy,with however many ballot-boxes,caucuses,and hustings beer-barrels,is a continual offence to gods and men.That to be governed by small men is only a misfortune,but it is a curse and a sin;the effect,and alas the cause also,of all manner of curses and sins.That to profess subjection to phantasms,and pretend to accept guidance from fractional parts of tailors,is what Smelfungus in his rude dialect calls it,'a damned lie ,'and hing other.A lie which,by long use and wont,we have grown accustomed to,and do the least feel to be a lie,having spoken and done it continually everywhere for such a long time past;--but has Nature grown to accept it as a veracity,think you,my friend?Have the Parcae fallen asleep,because you wanted to make money in the City?Nature at all moments ks well that it is a lie;and that,like all lies,it is cursed and damned from the beginning.
"Even so,ye indigent millionnaires,and miserable bankrupt populations rolling in gold,--whose e-of-hand will go to any length in Threadneedle Street,and to whom in Heaven's Bank the stern answer is,'effects!'Bankrupt,I say;and Californias and Eldorados will save us.And every time we speak such lie,or do it or look it,as we have been incessantly doing,and many of us with clear consciousness,for about a hundred and fifty years ,Nature marks down the exact penalty against us.