tion, guillotinement, cannonading and universal war and earthquake, that such century with its practices had ended.

serve.

Ended; for decidedly that course of procedure will no longer Parliament will absolutely, with whatever effort, have to lift itself out of those deep ruts of donothing routine; and learn to say, on all sides, something more edifying than Laissez-faire. If Parliament cannot learn it, what is to become of Parliament ? The toiling millions of England ask of their English Parliament foremost of all, Canst thou govern us or not? Parliament with its privileges is strong; but Necessity and the Laws of Nature are stronger than it. If Parliament cannot do this thing, Parliament we prophesy will do some other thing and things which, in the strangest and not the happiest way, will forward its being done, not much to the advantage of Parliament probably! Done, one way or other, the thing must be. In these complicated times, with Cash Payment as the sole nexus between man and man, the Toiling Classes of mankind declare, in their confused but most emphatic way, to the Untoiling, that they will be governed; that they must-under penalty of Chartisms, Thuggeries, Rick-burnings, and even blacker things than those. Vain also is it to think that the misery of one class, of the great universal under class, can be isolated, and kept apart and peculiar, down in that class. By infallible contagion, evident enough to reflection, evident even to Political Economy that will reflect, the misery of the lowest spreads upwards and upwards till it reaches the very highest; till all has grown miserable, palpably false and wrong; and poor drudges hungering on meal-husks and boiled grass' do, by circuitous but sure methods, bring kings' heads to the block! Cash Payment the sole nexus; and there are so many things which cash will not pay! Cash is a great all power in Heaven, nor even on Earth.

6

miracle; yet it has not 'Supply and demand'

'demands' are there,

we will honour also; and yet how many entirely indispensable, which have to go elsewhere than to the shops, and produce quite other than cash, before they can get their supply! On the whole, what astonishing payments does cash make in this world! Of your Samuel Johnson furnished with fourpence halfpenny a-day,' and solid lodging at nights on the paved streets, as his payment, we do not speak ;-not in the

way of complaint: it is a world-old business for the like of him, that same arrangement or a worse; perhaps the man, for his own uses, had need even of that and of no better. Nay is not Society, busy with its Talfourd Copyright Bill and the like, struggling to do something effectual for that man;-enacting with all industry that his own creation be accounted his own manufacture, and continue unstolen, on his own market-stand, for so long as sixty years? Perhaps Society is right there; for discrepancies on that side too may become excessive. All men are not patient docile Johnsons; some of them are half-mad inflammable Rousseaus. Such, in peculiar times, you may drive too far. In France, for example, Society was not destitute of cash; Society contrived to pay Philippe d'Orleans not yet Egalité three hundred thousand a-year and odd, for driving cabriolets through the streets of Paris and other work done: but in cash, encouragement, arrangement, recompense or recognition of any kind, it had nothing to give this same half-mad Rousseau for his work done; whose brain in consequence, too much enforced' for a weak brain, uttered hasty sparks, Contrat Social and the like, which proved not so quenchable again! In regard to that species of men too, who knows whether Laissez-faire itself (which is Sergeant Talfourd's Copyright Bill continued to eternity instead of sixty years) will not turn out insufficient, and have to cease, one day?—

Alas, in regard to so very many things, Laissez-faire ought partly to endeavour to cease! But in regard to poor Sanspotatoe peasants, Trades-Union craftsmen, Chartist cotton-spinners, the time has come when it must either cease or a worse thing straightway begin, a thing of tinder-boxes, vitriol-bottles, second-hand pistols, a visibly insupportable thing in the eyes of all.

CHAPTER VIII.

FOR in very truth it is come indispensable in it.

NEW ERAS.

a 'new Era;' a new Practice has beOne has heard so often of new eras,

new and newest eras, that the word has grown rather empty of late. Yet new eras do come; there is no fact surer than that they have come more than once. And always with a change of era, with a change of intrinsic conditions, there had to be a change of practice and outward relations brought about,-if not peaceably, then by violence; for brought about it had to be, there could no rest come till then. How many eras and epochs, not noted at the moment;-which indeed is the blessedest condition of epochs, that they come quietly, making no proclamation of themselves, and are only visible long after a Cromwell Rebellion, a French Revolution, striking on the Horologe of Time,' to tell all mortals what o'clock it has become, are too expensive, if one could help it —

In a strange rhapsodic History of the Teuton Kindred (Geschichte der Teutschen Sippschaft),' not yet translated into our language, we have found a Chapter on the Eras of England, which, were there room for it, would be instructive in this place. We shall crave leave to excerpt some pages; partly as a relief from the too near vexations of our own rather sorrowful Era; partly as calculated to throw, more or less obliquely, some degree of light on the meanings of that. The Author is anonymous; but we have heard him called the Herr Professor Sauerteig, and indeed think we know him under that name:

Who shall say what work and works this England has yet 'to do? For what purpose this land of Britain was created, set like a jewel in the encircling blue of Ocean; and this Tribe of

'Saxons, fashioned in the depths of Time, "on the shores of the 'Black Sea" or elsewhere, "out of Harzgebirge rock" or what6 ever other material, was sent travelling hitherward? No man can say it was for a work, and for works, incapable of announce'ment in words. Thou seest them there, these works; part of them stand done, and visible to the eye; even these thou canst 'not name: how much less the others still matter of prophecy 'only! They live and labour there, these twenty million Saxon 'men; they have been born into this mystery of life out of the 'darkness of Past Time :-how changed now since the first Fa'ther and first Mother of them set forth, quitting the Tribe of Theuth, with passionate farewell, under questionable auspices; on 'scanty bullock-cart, if they had even bullocks and a cart; with 'axe and hunting-spear, to subdue a portion of our common Planet! 'This Nation now has cities and seedfields, has spring-vans, dray'waggons, Long-acre carriages, nay railway trains; has coined'money, exchange-bills, laws, books, war-fleets, spinning-jennies, 'warehouses and West-India Docks see what it has built and 'done, what it can and will yet build and do! These umbrageous 'pleasure-woods, green meadows, shaven stubble-fields, smooth'sweeping roads; these high-domed cities, and what they hold and 'bear; this mild Good-morrow which the stranger bids thee, 'equitable, nay forbearant if need were, judicially calm and law. 'observing towards thee a stranger, what work has it not cost? 'How many brawny arms, generation after generation, sank down 'wearied; how many noble hearts, toiling while life lasted, and 'wise heads that wore themselves dim with scanning and discern'ing, before this waste Whitecliff, Albion so-called, with its other 'Cassiterides Tin Islands, became a BRITISH EMPIRE! The stream ' of World-History has altered its complexion; Romans are dead 'out, English are come in. The red broad mark of Romanhood, stamped ineffaceably on that Chart of Time, has disappeared 'from the present, and belongs only to the past. England plays 'its part; England too has a mark to leave, and we will hope none of the least significant. Of a truth, whosoever had, with 'the bodily eye, seen Hengst and Horsa mooring on the mud'beach of Thanet, on that spring morning of the Year 449; and 'then, with the spiritual eye, looked forward to New York, Cal

'cutta, Sidney Cove, across the ages and the oceans; and thought 'what Wellingtons, Washingtons, Shakspears, Miltons, Watts, Arkwrights, William Pitts and Davie Crocketts had to issue from 'that business, and do their several taskwords so,—he would have 'said, those leather-boats of Hengst's had a kind of cargo in them! 'A genealogic Mythus superior to any in the old Greek, to almost 'any in the old Hebrew itself; and not a Mythus either, but every 'fibre of it fact. An Epic Poem was there, and all manner of 'poems; except that the Poet has not yet made his appearance.'

'Six centuries of obscure endeavour,' continues Sauerteig, 'which to read Historians, you would incline to call mere obscure 'slaughter, discord, and misendeavour; of which all that the human memory, after a thousand readings, can remember, is that 'it resembled, what Milton names it, the "flocking and fighting of kites and crows:" this, in brief, is the history of the Hep'tarchy or Seven Kingdoms. Six centuries; a stormy springtime, if there ever was one, for a Nation. Obscure fighting of 'kites and crows, however, was not the History of it; but was 'only what the dim Historians of it saw good to record. Were 'not forests felled, bogs drained, fields made arable, towns built, 'laws made, and the Thought and Practice of men in many ways 'perfected? Venerable Bede had got a language which he could now not only speak, but spell and put on paper: think what ' lies in that. Bemurmured by the German sea-flood swinging 'slow with sullen roar against those hoarse Northumbrian rocks, 'the venerable man set down several things in a legible manner. 'Or was the smith idle, hammering only war-tools? He had 'learned metallurgy, stithy-work in general; and made plough'shares withal, and adzes and mason-hammers. Castra, Caesters 'or Chesters, Dons, Tons (Zauns, Inclosures or Towns), not a few, 'did they not stand there; of burnt brick, of timber, of lath-and( clay; sending up the peaceable smoke of hearths? England 'had a History then too; though no Historian to write it. Those ""flockings and fightings," sad inevitable necessities, were the ex'pensive tentative steps towards some capability of living and 'working in concert: experiments they were, not always con'clusive, to ascertain who had the might over whom, the right ' over whom.