Supply-and-demand? One begins to be weary of such work. Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of applause it is the Gospel of Despair! Man is a Patent Digester, then only give him Freetrade, Free digesting-room; and each of us digest what he can come at, leaving the rest to Fate! My unhappy brethren of the Working Mammon. ism, my unhappier brethren of the Idle Dilettantism, no world was ever held together in that way for long. A world of mere Patent Digesters will soon have nothing to digest; such world ends, and by Law of Nature must end, in “over-population;" in howling universal famine, “impossibility," and suicidal madness, as of endless dog-kennels run rabid. Supplyand-demand shall do its full part, and Free trade shall be free as air; thou of the shot-belts, see thou forbid it not, with those paltry, worse than "Mammonish" swindleries and Sliding-scales of thine, which are seen to be swindleries for all thy canting, which in times like ours are very scandalous to see! And Trade never so well freed, and all Tariffs settled or abolished, and Supply-and-demand in full operation-let us all know that we have yet done nothing; that we have merely cleared the ground for doing.

Yes, were the Corn-laws ended to-morrow, there is nothing yet ended; there is only room made for all manner of things beginning. The Corn-laws gone, and Trade made free, it is as good as certain this paralysis of industry will pass away. We shall have another period of commercial enterprise, of victory and prosperity; during which it is likely much money will again be made, and all the people may, by the extant methods, still for a space of years be kept alive and physically fed. The strangling band of Famine will be loosened from our necks; we shall have room again to breathe; time to bethink ourselves, to repent and consider! A precious and thriceprecious space of years; wherein to struggle as for life in reforming our foul ways; in alleviating, instructing, regulating our people; seeking, as for life, that something like spiritual food be imparted them, some real governance and guidance be provided them! It will be a priceless time. For our new period or paroxysin of commercial prosperity will and can, on the old methods of "Competition and Devil take the hindmost," prove but a paroxysm: a new paroxysm-likely enough, if we do not use it better, to be our last. In this, of itself, is no salvation. If our Trade in twenty years, "flourishing" as never Trade flourished, could double itself; yet then also, by the old Laissez-faire method, our Population is doubled: we shall then be as we are, only twice as many of us, twice and ten times as unmanageable! All this dire misery, therefore; all this of our poor Workhouse Workmen, of our Chartisms, Trades-strikes, Corn-laws, Toryisms, and the general down-break of Laissez-faire in these days-may we not regard it as a voice from the dumb bosom of Nature, saying to us, Behold! Supply-and-demand is not the one Law of Nature; Cash-payment is not the sole nexus of man with man-how far from it! Deep, far deeper than Supply-and-demand, are Laws, Obligations sacred as Man's Life itself: these also, if you will continue to do work, you shall now learn and obey. He that will learn them, behold Nature is on his side; he shall yet work and prosper with noble rewards. He that will not learn them, Nature is against him he shall not be able to do work in Nature's empire-not in hers. Perpetual mutiny, contention, hated, isolation, execration shall wait on his footsteps, till all men discern that the thing which he attains, however golden it look or be, is not success, but the want of success.

Supply-and-demand- alas! For what noble work was there ever yet any audible "demand" in that poor sense? The man of Macedonia, speaking in vision to an Apostle Paul, "Come over and help us," did not specify what rate of wages he would give! Or was the Christian Religion itself accomplished by Prize-Essays, Bridgewater Bequests, and a "minimum of Four thousand five hundred a year?" No demand that I heard of was

made then, audible in any Labour-market, Manchester Chamber of Commerce, or other the like emporium and hiring establishment; silent were all these from any whisper of such demand; powerless were all these to "supply " it, had the demand been in thunder and earthquake, with gold Eldorados and Mahometan Paradises for the reward. Ah me, into what waste latitudes, in this Time-Voyage, have we wandered; like Adventurous Sindbads; where the men go about as if by galvanism, with meaningless glaring eyes, and have no soul, but only a beaver-faculty and stomach! The haggard despair of Cotton-factory, Coal-mine operatives, Chandos Farm-labourin these days, is painful to behold; but not so painful, hideous to the inner sense, as that brutish god-forgetting Profit-and-Loss Philosophy and Life-theory which we hear jangled on all hands of us, in senate-houses, spouting-clubs, leading-articles, pulpits, and platforms, everywhere as the Últimate Gospel and candid Plain-English of Man's Life, from the throats and pens and thoughts of all but all men!

ers,

Enlightened Philosophies, like Moliere Doctors, will tell you : "Enthusiasms, Self-sacrifice, Heaven, Hell, and such-like: yes, all that was true enough for old stupid times; all that used to be true: but we have changed all that, nous avons changé tout cela!" Well; if the heart be got round now into the right side, and the liver to the left; if man have no heroism in him deeper than the wish to eat, and in his soul there dwell now no Infinite of Hope and Awe, and no divine Silence can become imperative because it is not Sinai Thunder, and no tie will bind if it be not that of Tyburn gallows-ropes-then verily you have changed all that; and for it, and for you, and for me, behold, the Abyss and nameless Annihilation is ready. So scandalous a beggarly Universe deserves, indeed, nothing else; I cannot say I would save it from Annihilation. Vacuum, and the serene Blue, will be much handsomer; easier too for all of us. I, for one, decline living as a Patent-Digester. Patent-Digester, Spinning-Mule, Mayfair Clothes-Horse: many thanks, but your Chaos-ships will have the goodness to excuse me !

CHAPTER X.

PLUGSON OF UNDERSHOT.

ONE thing I do know: Never, on this Earth, was the relation of man to man long carried on by Cash-Payment alone. If at any time a philosophy of Laissez-faire, Competition, and Supply-and-demand .start up as the exponent of human relations, expect that it will soon end.

Such philosophies will arise: for man's philosophies are usually the "supplement of his practice," some ornamental Logic-varnish, some outer skin of Articulate Intelligence, with which he strives to render his dumb Instinctive Doings presentable when they are done. Such philosophies will arise; be preached as Mainmon-Gospels, the ultimate Evangel of the World; be believed, with what is called belief, with much superficial blus. ter, with a kind of shallow satisfaction real in its way: but they are ominous gospels! They are the sure, and even swift, forerunner of great changes. Expect that the old System of Society is done, is dying and fallen into do tage, when it begins to rave in that fashion. Most Systems that I have watched the death of, for the last three thousand years, have gone just so. The Ideal, the True and Noble that was in them having faded out, and nothing now remaining but naked Egoism, vulturous Greediness, they cannot live; they are bound and inexorably ordained by the oldest Destinies, Mothers of the Universe, to die. Curious enough: they thereupon, as I have pretty generally noticed, devise some light comfortable kind of "wineand-walnuts philosophy" for themselves, this of Supply-and-demand or another; and keep saying, during hours of mastication and rumination,

1

which they call hours of meditation: " Soul, take thy ease, it is all well that thou art a vulture-soul;" and pangs of dissolution come upon them, oftenest before they are aware!

Cash-payinent never was or could, except for a few years, be the unionbond of man to man. Cash never yet paid one man fully his deserts to another; nor could it, nor can it, now or henceforth to the end of the world. I invite his Grace of Castle-Rackrent to reflect on this; does he think that a Land Aristocracy when it becomes a Land Auctioneership can have long to live? Or that Sliding-scales will increase the vital stamina of it? The indomitable Plugson too, of the respected Firm of Plugson, Hunks, and Company, in St. Dolly Undershot, is invited to reflect on this; for to him also it will be new, perhaps even newer. Book-keeping by double entry is admirable, and records several things in an exact manner. But the Mother-Destinies also keep their Tablets; in Heaven's Chancery also there goes on a recording; and things, as my Moslem friends say, are "written on the iron leaf."

Your Grace and Plugson, it is like, go to Church occasionally: did you never in vacant moments, with perhaps a dull parson droning to you, glance into your New Testament, and the cash-account stated four times over, by a kind of quadruple entry-in the Four Gospels there? I consider that a cash-account and balance-statement of work done and wages paid worth attending to Precisely such, though on a smaller scale, go on at all moments under this Sun; and the statement and balance of them in the Plugson Ledgers and on the Tablets of Heaven's Chancery are discrepant exceedingly; which ought really to teach, and to have long since taught, an indomitable common-sense Plugson of Undershot, much more an unattackable uncommon-sense Grace of Rackrent, a thing or two! In brief, we shall have to dismiss the Cash-Gospel rigorously into its own place; we shall have to know, on the threshold, that either there is some infinitely deeper Gospel, subsidiary, explanatory and daily and hourly corrective, to the Cash one; or else that the Cash one itself and all others are fast travelling!

For all human things do require to have an Ideal in them; to have some Soul in them, as we said, were it only to keep the Body unputrefied. And wonderful it is to see how the Ideal or Soul, place it in what ugliest Body you may, will irradiate said Body with its own nobleness; will gradually, incessantly mould, modify, new-form or reform said ugliest Body, and make it at last beautiful, and to a certain degree divine! Oh, if you could dethrone that Brute-god Mammon, and put a Spirit-god in his place! One way or other, he must and will have to be dethroned

Fighting, for example, as I often say to myself, Fighting with steel murdertools is surely a much uglier operation than Working, take it how you will. Yet even of Fighting, in religious Abbot Samson's days, see what a Feudalism there had grown-a "glorious Chivalry," inuch besung down to the present day. Was not that one of the "impossiblest" things? Under the sky is no uglier spectacle than two men with clenched teeth and hell-fire eyes hacking one another's flesh; converting precious living bodies and priceless living souls into nameless masses of putrescence, useful only for turnip-manure. How did a Chivalry ever come out of that; how anything that was not hideous, scandalous, infernal? It will be a question worth considering by and by.

I remark, for the present, only two things: first, that the Fighting itself was not, as we rashly suppose it, a Fighting without cause, but more or less with cause. Man is created to fight; he is perhaps best of all definable as a born soldier; his life "a battle and a march" under the right General. It is for ever indispensable for a man to fight: now with Necessity, with Barrenness, Scarcity, with Puddles, Bogs, tangled Forests, unkempt Cotton;

now also with the hallucinations of his poor fellow Men. Hallucinatory visions rise in the head of my poor fellow-man; make him claim over me rights which are not his. All fighting, as we noticed long ago, is the dusty conflict of strengths each thinking itself the strongest, or, in other words, the justest; of Mights which do in the long-run, and for ever will in this just Universe in the long-run, mean Rights. In conflict the perishable part of them, beaten sufficiently, flies off into dust: this process ended, appears the imperishable, the true, and exact.

And now let us remark a second thing: how, in these baleful operations, a noble devout-hearted Chevalier will comfort himself, and an ignoble godless Bucanier and Choctaw Indian. Victory is the aim of each. But deep in the heart of the noble man it lies for ever legible, that, as an Invisible Just God made him, so will and must God's Justice and this only, were it never so invisible, ultimately prosper in all controversies and enterprises and battles whatsoever. When ar. Influence; ever-present-like a Soul in the rudest Caliban of a body; like a ray of Heaven, and illuminative creative FiatLux, in the wastest terrestrial Chaos! Blessed divine Influence; traceable even in the horror of Battlefields and garments rolled in blood: how it ennobles even the Battlefield; and, in place of a Choctaw Massacre, makes it a Field of Honour ! A Battlefield too is great. Considered well, it is a kind of Quintessence of Labour; Labour distilled into its utmost concentration; the significance of years of it compressed into an hour. Here too thou shalt be strong, and not in muscle only, if thou wouldst prevail. Here too thou shalt be strong of heart, noble of soul: thou shalt dread no pain or death, thou shalt not love ease or life; in rage, thou shalt remember mercy, justice; thou shalt be a Knight and not a Choctaw, if thou wouldst prevail ! It is the rule of all battles, against hallucinating fellow Men, against unkempt Cotton, or whatsoever battles they may be which a man in this world has to fight.

Howel Davies dyes the West Indian Seas with blood, piles his decks with plunder, approves himself the expertest Seaman, the daringest Sea-fighter: but he gains no lasting victory-lasting victory is not possible for him. Not, had he fleets larger than the combined British Navy all united with him in bucaniering. He, once for all, cannot prosper in his duel. He strikes down his man: yes; but his man, or his man's representative, has no notion to lie struck down; neither, though slain ten times, will he keep so lying; nor has the Universe any notion to keep him so lying! On the contrary, the Universe and he have, at all moments, all manner of motives to start up again, and desperately fight again. Your Napoleon is flung out, at last, to St. Helena; the latter end of him sternly compensating the beginning. The Bucanier strikes down a man, a hundred or a million men: but what profits it? He has one enemy never to be struck down; nay, two enemies : Mankind and the Maker of Men. On the great scale or on the small, in fighting of men or fighting of difficulties, I will not embark my venture with Howel Davies: it is not the Bucanier-it is the Hero only that can gain victory, that can do more than seem to succeed. These things will deserve meditating; for they apply to all battle and soldiership, all struggle and effort whatsoever in this Fight of Life. It is a poor Gospel, Cash-Gospel, or whatever name it have, that does not, with clear tone, uncontradictable, carrying conviction to all hearts, for ever keep men in mind of these things.

Unhappily, my indomitable friend Plugson of Undershot has, in a great degree, forgotten them; as, alas, all the world has; as, alas, our very Dukes and Soul-Overseers have, whose special trade it was to remember them! Hence these tears-Plugson, who has indomitably spun Cotton merely to gain thousands of pounds, I have to call as yet a Bucanier and Choctaw; till there come something better, still more indomitable from hir

His hundred Thousand-pound Notes, if there be nothing other, are to me but as the hundred Scalps in a Choctaw wigwam. The blind Plugson: he was a Captain of Industry, born member of the Ultimate genuine Aristocracy of this Universe, could he have known it! These thousand men that span and toiled round him, they were a regiment whom he had enlisted, man by man; to make war on a very genuine enemy: Barrenness of back, and disobedient Cotton-fibre, which will not, unless forced to it, consent to cover bare backs. Here is a most genuine enemy, over whom all creatures will wish him victory. He enlisted his thousand men; said to them, "Come, brothers, let us have a dash at Cotton!" They follow with cheerful shout; they gam such a victory over Cotton as the Earth has to adinire and clap hands at: but, alas, it is yet only of the Bucanier or Choctaw sort-as good as no victory! Foolish Plugson of St. Dorcas Undershot: does he hope to become illustrious by hanging up the scalps in his wigwam, the hundred thousands at his banker's, and saying. Behold my scalps? Why, Plugson, even thy own host is all in mutiny: Cotton is conquered; but the "bare backs "-are worse covered than ever! Indomitable Plugson, thou must cease to be a Choctaw; thou and others; thou thyself, if no other! Did William the Norman Bastard, or any of his Taillefers, Ironcutters, manage so? Ironcutter, at the end of the campaign, did not turn off his thousand fighters, but said to them: "Noble fighters, this is the land we have gained; be I Lord in it-what we will call Law-ward, maintainer and keeper of Heaven's Laws: be I Law-ward, or in brief orthoepy Lord in it, and be ye Loyal Men around me in it; and we will stand by one another, as soldiers around a captain, for again we shall have need of one another!" Plugson, bucanier-like, says to them: “Noble spinners, this is the Hundred Thousand we have gained, wherein I mean to dwell and plant vineyards; the hundred thousand is mine, the three and sixpence daily was yours: adieu, noble spinners; drink my health with this groat each, which I give you over and above!" The entirely unjust Captain of Industry, say I; not Chevalier, but Bucanier! "Commercial Law" does indeed acquit him; asks, with wide eyes, What else? So too Howel Davies asks, Was it not according to the strictest Bucanier Custom? Did I depart in any jat or tittle from the Laws of the Bucaniers ?

After all, money, as they say, is miraculous. Plugson wanted victory; as Chevaliers and Bucaniers, and all men alike do. He found money recognised, by the whole world with one assent, as the true symbol, exact equivalent and synonym of victory; and here we have him, a grim-browed, indomitable Bucanier, coming home to us with a " victory," which the whole world is ceasing to clap hands at! The whole world, taught somewhat impressively, is beginning to recognise that such victory is but half a victory; and that now, if it please the Powers, we must-have the other half!

Money is miraculous. What miraculous facilities has it yielded, will it yield us; but also what never-imagined confusions, obscurations has it brought in; down almost to total extinction of the moral-sense in large masses of mankind! "Protection of property," of what is "mine," means with most men protection of money, the thing which, had I a thousand padlocks over it, is least of all mine; is, in a manner, scarcely worth calling mine! The symbol shall be held sacred, defended everywhere with tipstaves, ropes, and gibbits; the thing signified shall be composedly cast to the dogs. A human being who has worked with human beings clears all scores with them, cuts himself with triumphant completeness for ever loose from them, by paying down certain shillings and pounds. Was it not the wages I promised you? There they are, to the last sixpence-according to the Laws of the Bucaniers! Yes, indeed; and at such times it becomes imperatively necessary to ask all persons, bucaniers and others, Whether these same respectable Laws of the Bucaniers are written on God's eternal