mingham or out of it a machine of such value? 'Good Heavens ! 'a white European Man, standing on his two legs, with his two 'five-fingered Hands at his shackle-bones, and miraculous Head on his shoulders, is worth something considerable, one would 'say!' The stupid black African man brings money in the market; the much stupider four-footed horse brings money :-it is we that have not yet learned the art of managing our white European man! The controversies on Malthus and the Population Principle,' 'Preventive Check' and so forth, with which the public ear has been deafened for a long while, are indeed sufficiently mournful. Dreary, stolid, dismal, without hope for this world or the next, is all that of the preventive check and the denial of the preventive check. Anti-Malthusians quoting their Bible against palpable facts, are not a pleasant spectacle. On the other hand, how often have we read in Malthusian benefactors of the species: The 'working people have their condition in their own hands: let them 'diminish the supply of labourers, and of course the demand and 'the remuneration will increase!' Yes, let them diminish the supply but who are they? They are twenty-four millions of human individuals, scattered over a hundred and eighteen thousand square miles of space and more; weaving, delving, hammering, joinering; each unknown to his neighbour; each distinct within his own skin. They are not a kind of character that can take a resolution, and act on it, very readily. Smart Sally in our alley proves all-too fascinating to brisk Tom in yours: can Tom be called on to make pause, and calculate the demand for labour in the British Empire first? Nay, if Tom did renounce his highest blessedness of life, and struggle and conquer like a Saint Francis of Assisi, what would it profit him or us? Seven millions of the finest peasantry do not renounce, but proceed all the more briskly; and with blue-visaged Hibernians instead of fair Saxon Tomsons, and Sallysons, the latter end of that country is worse than the beginning. O wonderful Malthusian prophets! Millenniums are undoubtedly coming, must come one way or the other: but will it be, think you, by twenty millions of working people simultaneously striking work in that department; passing, in universal trades-union, a resolution not to beget any more till the labour market become satisfactory? By Day and Night! they were indeed irresistibly so; not to be compelled by law or war; might make their own terms with the richer classes, and defy the world! A shade more rational is that of those other benefactors of the species, who counsel that in each parish, in some central locality, instead of the Parish Clergyman, there might be established some Parish Exterminator; or say a Reservoir of Arsenic, kept up at the public expense, free to all parishioners; for which Church the rates probably would not be grudged.—Ah, it is bitter jesting on such a subject. One's heart is sick to look at the dreary chaos, and valley of Jehosaphat, scattered with the limbs and souls of one's fellow-men; and no divine voice, only creaking of hungry vultures, inarticulate bodeful ravens, horn-eyed parrots that do articulate, proclaiming, Let these bones live!-Dante's Divina Commedia is called the mournfullest of books: transcendant mistemper of the noblest soul; utterance of a boundless, godlike, unspeakable, implacable sorrow and protest against the world. But in Holywell Street, not long ago, we bought, for three-pence, a book still mournfuller: the Pamphlet of one " Marcus," whom his poor Chartist editor and republisher calls the "Demon Author." This Marcus Pamphlet was the book alluded to by Stephens the Preacher Chartist, in one of his harangues: it proves to be no fable that such a book existed; here it lies, 'Printed by John 'Hill, Black-horse Court, Fleet Street, and now reprinted for the 'instruction of the labourer, by William Dugdale, Holywell Street, 'Strand,' the exasperated Chartist editor who sells it you for threepence. We have read Marcus; but his sorrow is not divine. We hoped he would turn out to have been in sport: ah no, it is grim earnest with him; grim as very death. Marcus is not a demon author at all: he is a benefactor of the species in his own kind; has looked intensely on the world's woes, from a Benthamee Malthusian watch-tower, under a Heaven dead as iron; and does now, with much longwindedness, in a drawling, snuffling, circuitous, extremely dull, yet at bottom handfast and positive manner, recommend that all children of working people, after the third, be disposed of by painless extinction.' Charcoal-vapour and other methods exist. The mothers would consent, might be made to consent. Three children might be left living; or perhaps, for Marcus's calculations are not yet perfect, two and a half. There might be beautiful cemeteries with colonnades and flower-pots,' in which the patriot infanticide matrons might delight to tako their evening walk of contemplation; and reflect what patriotesses they were, what a cheerful flowery world it was. Such is the scheme of Marcus; this is what he, for his share, could devise to heal the world's woes. A benefactor of the species, clearly recognisable as such; the saddest scientific mortal we have ever in this world fallen in with; sadder even than poetic Dante. His is a nogod-like sorrow; sadder than the godlike. The Chartist editor, dull as he, calls him demon author, and a man set on by the Poor-Law Commissioners. What a black, godless, wastestruggling world, in this once merry England of ours, do such pamphlets and such editors betoken! Laissez-faire and Malthus, Malthus and Laissez-faire: ought not these two at length to part company? Might we not hope that both of them had as good as delivered their message now, and were about to go their ways? For all this of the painless extinction,' and the rest, is in a world where Canadian Forests stand unfelled, boundless Plains and Prairies unbroken with the plough; on the west and on the east, green desert spaces never yet made white with corn; and to the overcrowded little western nook of Europe, our Terrestrial Planet, nine-tenths of it yet vacant or tenanted by nomades, is still crying, Come and till me, come and reap me! And in an England with wealth, and means for moving, such as no nation ever before had. With ships; with war-ships rotting idle, which, but bidden move and not rot, might bridge all oceans. With trained men, educated to pen and practice, to administer and act; briefless Barristers, chargeless Clergy, taskless Scholars, languishing in all court-houses, hiding in obscure garrets, besieging all antechambers, in passionate want of simply one thing, Work with as many Half-pay Officers of both Services, wearing themselves down in wretched tedium, as might lead an Emigrant host larger than Xerxes' was! Laissez-faire and Malthus positively must part company. Is it not as if this swelling, simmering, never-resting Europe of ours stood, once more, on the verge of an expansion without parallel: struggling, struggling like a mighty tree again about to burst in the embrace of summer, and shoot forth broad frondent boughs which would fill the whole earth? A disease but the noblest of all,-as of her who is in pain and sore travail, but travails that she may be a mother, and say, Behold, there is a new Man born! True thou Gold-Hofrath,' exclaims an eloquent satirical German of our acquaintance, in that strange Book of his,* True thou Gold-Hofrath too crowded indeed! Meanwhile what portion ' of this inconsiderable Terraqueous Globe have ye actually tilled ' and delved, till it will grow no more? How thick stands your 'population in the Pampas and Savannas of America; round 'ancient Carthage, and in the interior of Africa; on both slopes ' of the Altaic chain, in the central Platform of Asia; in Spain, 'Greece, Turkey, Crim Tartary, the Curragh of Kildare? One 'man, in one year, as I have understood it, if you lend him earth, 'will feed himself and nine others. Alas, where now are the 'Hengsts and Alarics of our still glowing, still expanding Europe; 'who, when their home is grown too narrow, will enlist and, like 'fire-pillars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomit'able living Valour; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and 'war-chariot, but with the steamengine and ploughshare? Where are they?-Preserving their Game!' * Sartor Resartus, b. iii. c. 4. THE END. |