wilt never sell thy Life, or any part of thy Life, in a satisfactory manner. Give it, like a royal heart; let the price be Nothing: thou hast then, in a certain sense, got All for it! The heroic man, - and is not every man, God be thanked, a potential hero? has to do so, in all times and circumstances. In the most heroic age, as in the most unheroic, he will have to say, as Burns said proudly and humbly of his little Scottish Songs, little dewdrops of Celestial Melody in an age when so much was unmelodious: "By Heaven, they shall either be invaluable or of no value; I do not need your guineas for them!" It is an element which should, and must, enter deeply into all settlements of wages here below. They never will be "satisfactory" otherwise; they cannot, O Mammon Gospel, they never can! Money for my little piece of work "to the extent that will allow me to keep working;" yes, this, unless you mean that I shall go my ways before the work is all taken out of me: but as to "wages"! — CHAPTER XIII DEMOCRACY . . . Life was never a May-game for men: in all times the lot of the dumb millions born to toil was defaced with manifold sufferings, injustices, heavy burdens, avoidable and unavoidable; not play at all, but hard work that made the sinews sore and the heart sore. As bond-slaves, villani, bordarii, sochemanni,1 nay indeed as dukes, earls and kings, men were oftentimes made weary of their life; and had to say, in the sweat of their brow and of their soul, Behold, it is not sport, it is grim earnest, and our back can bear no more! Who knows not what massacrings and harryings there have been; grinding, long-continuing, unbearable injustices, till the heart had to rise in madness, and some “Eu Sachsen, nimith euer sachses, You Saxons, out with your gully-knives, then!" You Saxons, some "arrestment," partial "arrestment of 1 Persons holding land under the feudal system and owing certain kinds of menial service to their lords. the Knaves and Dastards" has become indispensable! — The page of Dryasdust is heavy with such details. And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger, that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must die, the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated, girt-in with a cold universal Laissezfaire: it is to die slowly all our life long, imprisoned in a deaf, dead, Infinite Injustice, as in the accursed iron belly of a Phalaris' Bull! 2 This is and remains for ever intolerable to all men whom God has made. Do we wonder at French Revolutions, Chartisms, Revolts of Three Days? The times, if we will consider them, are really unexampled. Never before did I hear of an Irish Widow reduced to "prove her sisterhood by dying of typhus-fever and infecting seventeen persons,' saying in such undeniable "You way, see, I was your sister!" Sisterhood, brotherhood, was often forgotten; but not till the rise of these ultimate Mammon and Shotbelt Gospels did I ever see it so expressly denied. If no pious Lord or Law-ward would remember it, always some pious Lady ("Hlaf dig," Benefactress, "Loaf-giveress," 3 1 Cf. Past and Present, i. 6: "We will say with the poor Frenchman at the Bar of the Convention: 'Je demands l'arrestation des coquins et des lâches." Ah, we know what a work that is; how long it will be before they are all or mostly got "arrested": - but here is one; arrest him in God's name; it is one fewer! . . . We can begin by arresting our own poor selves out of that fraternity of knaves and dastards. There is no other reform conceivable. Thou and I, my friend, can, in the most flunky world, make, each of us, one non-flunky, one hero, if we like: that will be two heroes to begin with!” 2 Phalaris. Tyrant of Agrigentum, notorious for hs cruelty - especially for his human sacrifices in a heated brazen bull. 3 Referring to the liberal revolution of 1830 in France, which took place July 28, 29, and 30. 4 Carlyle is often inaccurate in his etymology. Lord is the Old English hlaf-weard, loaf-keeper; Lady, the O. E. hlaf-dıg, loaf-kneader. they say she is, - blessings on her beautiful heart!) was there, with mild mother-voice and hand, to remember it; some pious thoughtful Elder, what we now call "Prester," Presbyter or "Priest," was there to put all men in mind of it, in the name of the God who had made all. Not even in Black Dahomey was it ever, I think, forgotten to the typhus-fever length. Mungo Park,1 resourceless, had sunk down to die under the Negro Village-Tree, a horrible White object in the eyes of all. But in the poor Black Woman, and her daughter who stood aghast at him, whose earthly wealth and funded capital consisted of one small calabash of rice, there lived a heart richer than “Laissezfaire:" they, with a royal munificence, boiled their rice for him; they sang all night to him, spinning assiduous on their cotton distaffs, as he lay to sleep: "Let us pity the poor white man; no mother has he to fetch him milk, no sister to grind him corn!" Thou poor black Noble One, — thou Lady too: did not a God make thee too; was there not in thee too something of a God! - Gurth, born thrall of Cedric the Saxon,2 has been greatly pitied by Dryasdust and others. Gurth, with the brass collar round his neck, tending Cedric's pigs in the glades of the wood, is not what I call an exemplar of human felicity: but Gurth, with the sky above him, with the free air and tinted boscage and umbrage round him, and in him at least the certainty of supper and social lodging when he came home; Gurth to me seems happy, in comparison with many a Lancashire and Buckinghamshire man, of these days, not born thrall of anybody! Gurth's brass collar did not gall him: Cedric deserved to be his Master. The pigs were Cedric's, but Gurth too would get his parings of them. Gurth had the inexpressible satisfaction of feeling himself related indissolubly, though in a rude brass-collar way, to his fellowmortals in this Earth. He had superiors, inferiors, equals. 1 Mungo Park (1771-1806). Famous African explorer, author of Travels in the Interior of Africa, 1799. 2 In Sir Walter Scott's Ivanhoe. Gurth is now "emancipated" long since; has what we call "Liberty." Liberty, I am told, is a Divine thing. Liberty when it becomes the "Liberty to die by starvation" is not so divine! Liberty? The true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path, and to walk thereon. To learn, or to be taught, what work he actually was able for; and then by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set about doing of the same! That is his true blessedness, honour, "liberty" and maximum of wellbeing: if liberty be not that, I for one have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise; and keep him, were it in strait-waistcoats, away from the precipices! Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man is but a less palpable madman: his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every wiser man, could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way, lay hold of him when he was going wrong, and order and compel him to go a little righter. O, if thou really art my Senior, Seigneur, my Elder, Presbyter or Priest, if thou art in very deed my Wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to "conquer" me, to command me! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, I conjure thee in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never such brass collars, whips and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices! That I have been called, by all the Newspapers, a "free man" will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that the Newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not death, but life! Liberty requires new definitions. APPENDIX A Selections from Emerson's The Transcendentalist, a lecture read in Boston in 1842: "What is popularly called Transcendentalism among us is Idealism; Idealism as it appears in 1842. As thinkers, mankind have ever divided into two sects, Materialists and Idealists; the first class founding on experience, the second on consciousness; the first class beginning to think from the data of the senses, the second class perceive that the senses are not final, and say, The senses give us representations of things; but what are the things, themselves, they cannot tell. . . . The Materialist, secure in the certainty of sensation, mocks at fine-spun theories, at star-gazers and dreamers, and believes that his life is solid, and that he at least takes nothing for granted, but knows where he stands and what he does. Yet how easy is it to show him that he also is a phantom walking and working amid phantoms, and that he need only ask a question or two beyond his daily questions, to find his solid universe growing dim and impalpable before his sense." The sturdy capitalist, no matter how deep and square on blocks of Quincy granite he lays the foundation of his banking-house or exchange, must set it, at last, not on a cube corresponding to its structure, but on a mass of unknown materials and solidity, red-hot or white-hot perhaps at the core, which rounds off to an almost perfect sphericity, and lies floating in soft air, and goes spinning away, dragging both bank and banker with it at the rate of thousands of miles the hour, he knows not whither, a bit of bullet, now glimmering, now darkling through a small cubic space on the edge of an unimaginable pit of emptiness. B Extract from Carlyle's Life of Sterling, Chapter 4: Perhaps it was not the express set of arrangements in this or in any extant University that could essentially forward him, but only the implied and silent ones; less in the prescribed "Course of Study," which seems to lead nowhither, than in the generous (not ungenerous) rebellion against such prescribed course. . . . Nor can the unwisest "Prescribed Course |