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presses thee, O free and independent Franchiser! but does not this stupid porter-pot oppress thee? no son of Adam can bid thee come and go; but this absurd pot of heavy-wet, this can and does! Thou art the thrall, not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites, and this scoured dish of liquor; and thou protest of thy 'liberty,' thou catire blockhead!"-P. 292.

We should hardly think of entering with Mr Carlyle into a controversy upon the corn-laws, or on schemes of emigration, or any disputed point of political economy. He brings to bear upon these certain primitive moral views and feelings which are but very remotely applicable in the resolution of these knotty problems. We should almost as soon think of inviting the veritable Diogenes himself, should he roll up in his tub to our door, to a discussion upon our commercial system. Our Diogenes Teufelsdrockh looks upon these matters in a quite peculiar manner; observe, for example, the glance he takes at our present mercantile difficulties, which, doubtless, is not without its own value, nor undeserving of all consideration.

"The continental people, it would seem, are 'exporting our machinery, beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that!' Sad news, indeed, but irremediable-by no The saddest means the saddest news.

news is, that we should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other people-a most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself on; a stand which, with all the corn-law abrogations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.

"My friends, suppose we quitted that stand; suppose we came honestly down from it, and said "This is our minimum of cotton prices; we care not, for the present, to make cotton any cheaper. Do you, if it seems so blessed to you, make cotton cheaper. Fill your lungs with cotton fug, your hearts with copperas fumes, with rage and mutiny; become ye the general gnomes of Europe, slaves of the lamp!' I admire a nation which fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other nations to the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease undersell them; we will be content to equalsell them: to be happy selling equal

to

ly with them. I do not see the use of underselling them; cotton cloth is already twopence a yard or lower, and yet bare backs were never more numerous Let inventive men cease amongst us.

to spend their existence incessantly contriving how cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent, a little, how cotton, at its present cheapness, could be somewhat juster divided amongst us! Let inventive men consider whether the secret of this universe, and of man's life there, does after all, as we rashly fancy it, consist in making money? There is one God-just, supreme, almighty: but is Mammon the name of him?

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"But what is to be done with our manufacturing population, with our agricultural, with our ever-increasing population?-cry many.-Ay, what? Many things can be done with them, a hundred things, a thousand things—had we once got a soul and begun to try. This one thing of doing for them by 'underselling all people,' and filling our own bursten pockets by the road; and turning over all care for any 'population,' or human or divine consideration, except cash only, to the winds, with a 'Laissez-faire' and the rest of it; this is evidently not the thing. Farthing cheaper per yard;' no great nation can stand on the apex of such a pyramid; screwing itself higher and higher: balancing itself on its great-toe! Can England not subsist without being above all people in working? England never deliberately proposed such a thing. If England work better than all people, it shall be well. England, like an honest worker, will work as well as she can; and hope the gods may allow her to live on that basis. Laissez-faire and much else being once dead, how many impossibles' will become possible! They are 'impossible' as cotton-cloth at twopence an ell was-till men set about making it. The inventive genius of great England will not for ever sit patient with mere wheels and pinions, bobbins, straps, and billy-rollers whirring in the head of it. The inventive genius of England is not a beaver's, or a spinner's, or a spider's genius: it is a man's genius, I hope, with a God over him!"-P. 246.

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have produced too much. We accuse you of making above two hundred thousand shirts for the bare backs of mankind. Your trousers too, which you have made of fustian, of cassimere, of Scotch plaid, of jane, nankeen, and woollen broadcloth, are they not manifold? Of hats for the human head, of shoes for the human foot, of stools to sit on, spoons to eat with-Nay, what say we of hats and shoes? You produce gold watches, jewelleries, silver forks and épergnes, commodes, chiffoniers, stuffed sofas-Heavens, the Commercial Bazar and multitudinous Howel and James cannot contain you! You have produced, produced; he that seeks your indictment, let him look around. Millions of shirts and empty pairs of breeches hang there in judgment against you. We accuse you of over-producing; you are criminally guilty of producing shirts, breeches, hats, shoes, and commodities in a frightful over-abundance. And now there is a glut, and your operatives cannot be fed."

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"Never, surely, against an earnest working mammonism was there brought by game-preserving aristocratic dilettantism, a stranger accusation since this world began. My Lords and Gentlemen -why it was you that were appointed, by the fact and by the theory of your position on the earth, to make and administer laws. That is to say, in a world such as ours, to guard against

gluts,' against honest operatives who had done their work remaining unfed ! I say, you were appointed to preside over the distribution and apointment of the wages of work done; and to see well that there went no labourer without his hire, were it of money coins, were it of hemp gallows-ropes: that formation was yours, and from immemorial time has been yours, and as yet no other's. These poor shirt-spinners have forgotten much, which by the virtual unwritten law of their position they should have remembered; but by any written recognized law of their position, what have they forgotten? They were set to make shirts. The community, with all its voices commanded them, saying, 'make shirts; '—and there the shirts are! Too many shirts? Well, that is a novelty, in this intemperate earth, with its nine hundred millions of bare backs! But the community commanded you, saying, 'See that the shirts are well apportioned, that our human laws be emblems of God's law; and where is the apportionment? Two millions shirtless, or ill-shirted workers sit enchanted in work-house Bastiles, five millions

more (according to some) in Ugoline hunger-cellars; and for remedy, you say what say you? Raise our rents!' I have not in my time heard any stranger speech, not even on the shores of the Dead Sea. You continue addressing these poor shirt-spinners and over-producers in really a too triumphant

manner.

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"Will you bandy accusations, will you accuse us of over-production? We take the heavens and the earth to witness, that we have produced nothing at all. Not from us proceeds this frightful overplus of shirts. In the wide domains of created nature, circulates nothing of our producing. Certain foxbrushes nailed upon our stable-door, the fruit of fair audacity at Melton Mowbray; these we have produced, and they are openly nailed up there. that accuses us of producing, let him show himself, let him name what and when. We are innocent of producing, -ye ungrateful, what mountains of things have we not, on the contrary, had to consume, and make away with! Mountains of those your heaped manufactures, wheresoever edible or wearable, have they not disappeared before us, as if we had the talent of ostriches, of cormorants, and a kind of divine faculty to eat? Ye ungrateful!—and did you not grow under the shadow of our wings? Are not your filthy mills built on these fields of ours; on this soil of England, which belongs to-whom think you? And we shall not offer you our own wheat at the price that pleases us, but that partly pleases you? A precious notion! What would become of you, if we chose at any time to decide on growing no wheat more?"

An amusing-caustic-exaggeration, more like a portion of a clever satire on man and society, than a sincere discussion of political evils and for Mr Carlyle's own sake, to express remedies; and not intended, we trust,

his real belief in the true causes of the evils of society. If we could suppose that this piece of extravagant and one-sided invective were meant to be seriously taken, as embodying Mr Carlyle's social and political creed, we should scarcely find words strong enough to reprobate its false and mischievous tendency.

We have already said, that we regard the chief value of Mr Carlyle's writings to consist in the tone of mind which the individual reader acquires from their perusal ;-manly, energetic, enduring, with high resolves and

self-forgetting effort; and we here again, at the close of our paper, revert to this remark: Past and Pre

sent, has not, and could not have, the same wild power which Sartor Resartus possessed, in our opinion, over the feelings of the reader; but it contains passages which look the same way, and breathe the same spirit. We will quote one or two of these, and then conclude our notice. Their effect will not be injured, we may observe, by our brief manner of quotation. Speak ing of "the man who goes about pothering and uproaring for his happiness," he says:—

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"Observe, too, that this is all a modern affair; belongs not to the old heroic times, but to these dastard new times. Happiness, our being's end and aim,' is at bottom, if we will count well, not yet two centuries old in the world. The only happiness a brave man ever troubled himself with asking much about was, happiness enough to get his work done. Not, I can't eat!' but, I can't work!' that was the burden of all wise complaining among men. It is, after all, the one unhappiness of a man-that he cannot work that he cannot get his destiny as a man fulfilled."

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"The latest Gospel in this world, is, know thy work and do it. Know thyself;' long enough has that poor 'self' of thine tormented thee; thou wilt never get to know' it, I believe! Think it not thy business, this of knowing thyself; thou art an unknowable individual; know what thou canst work at; and work at it like a Hercules! That will be thy better plan."

"Blessed is he who has found his work; let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work, a life-purpose; he has found it, and will follow it! How, as a free-flowing channel, dug and torn by noble force through the sour mud-swamp of one's existence, like an ever-deepening river, there it runs and flows;draining off the sour festering water gradually from the root of the remotest grass-blade; making, instead of pestilential swamp, a green fruitful meadow with its clear-flowing stream. How blessed for the meadow itself, let the stream and its value be great or small. Labour is life!"

"Who art thou that complainest of thy life of toil? Complain not. Look up, my wearied brother; see thy fellow workmen there, in God's eternity-surviving there they alone survivingsacred band of the Immortals. Even in the weak human memory they survive so long as saints, as heroes, as gods; they alone surviving-peopling, they alone, the immeasured solitudes of time! To thee, Heaven, though severe, is not unkind. Heaven is kind, as a noble mother as that Spartan mother, saying, as she gave her son his shield, 'with it, my son, or upon it !'

"And who art thou that braggest of thy life of idleness; complacently showest thy bright gilt equipages; sumptuous cushions; appliances for the folding of the hands to more sleep? Looking up, looking down, around, behind, or before, discernest thou, if it be not in Mayfair alone, any idle hero, saint, god, or even devil? Not a vestige of one. In the heavens, in the earth, in the waters under the earth, is none like unto thee.' Thou art an original figure in this creation, a denizen in Mayfair alone. One monster there is in the world: the idle man. What is his religion?' That nature is a phantasm, where cunning, beggary, or thievery, may sometimes find good victual."

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"The wages' of every noble work do yet lie in heaven, or else nowhere. Nay, at bottom dost thou need any reward? Was it thy aim and life-purpose, to be filled with good things for thy heroism; to have a life of pomp and ease, and be what men call happy' in this world, or in any other world? I answer for thee, deliberately, no?

* * **

"The brave man has to give his life away. Give it, I advise thee-thou dost not expect to sell thy life in an adequate manner? What price, for example, would content thee? Thou 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!"

Well said! we again repeat, O Diogenes Teufelsdrock!

Edinburgh: Printed by Ballantyne and Hughes, Paul's Work.

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CHAPTERS OF TURKISH HISTORY. No. X. THE SECOND SIEGE

of Vienna,

173

EXHIBITIONS,

188

MARSTON; OR, THE MEMOIRS OF A STATESMAN, PART III.,

207

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ADVENTURES IN LOUISIANA. THE BLOCKHOUSE,

COMMERCIAL POLICY-EUROPE,

234

243

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WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, 45, GEORGE STREET; AND 22, PALL-MALL, LONDON.

To whom Communications (post-paid) may be addressed.

BOLD ALSO BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.

PRINTED BY BALLANTYNE AND HUGHES, EDINBURGH.

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