thing! Rage enough was in this Willelmus Conquestor, rage enough for his occasions; and yet the essential element of him, as of all such men, is not scorching fire, but shining, illuminative light. Fire and light are strangely interchangeable; nay, at bottom I have found them different forms of the same most godlike elementary substance in our world: a thing worth stating in these days. The essential element of Conquestor is, first of all, the most sun-eyed perception of what is really what on this God's-Earth; which, thou wilt find, does mean at bottom "Justice," and virtues not a few : conformity to what the Maker has seen good to make; that, I suppose, will mean Justice and a Virtue or two? Dost thou think Willelmus Conquestor would have tolerated ten years' jargon, one hour's jargon, on the propriety of killing Cotton-manufacturers by partridge Corn-laws? I fancy this was not the man to knock out of his night's-rest with nothing but a noisy bedlamism in your mouth! "Assist us still better to bush the partridges; strangle Plugson who spins the shirts?" "Par la splendeur de Dieu!" Dost thou think Willelmus Conquestor, in this new Time, with Steam-engine Captains of Industry on one hand of him, and Joe-Manton Captains of Idleness on the other, would have doubted which was really the BEST; which did deserve strangling, and which not? I have a certain indestructible regard for Willelmus Conquestor. A resident House-Surgeon, provided by Nature for her beloved English People, and even furnished with the requisite "fees," as I said-for he by no means felt himself doing Nature's work, this Willelmus, but his own work exclusively. And his own work withal it was: "Par la splendeur de Dieu." I say it is necessary to get the work out of such a man, however harsh that be! When a world not yet doomed for death, is rushing down to ever deeper Baseness and confusion, it is a dire Necessity of Nature's to bring in her ARISTOCRACIES, her BEST, even by forcible methods. When their descendants or representatives cease entirely to be the Best, Nature's poor world will very soon rush down again to Baseness-and it becomes a dire Necessity of Nature's to cast them out! Hence French Revolutions, Fivepoint Charters, Democracies, and a mournful list of Et ceteras in these our afflicted times. To what extent Democracy has now reached, how it advances irresistible with ominous, ever-increasing speed, he that will open his eyes on any province of human affairs may discern. Democracy is everywhere the inexorable demand of these ages, swiftly fulfilling itself. From the thunder of Napoleon battles to the jabbering of open-vestry in St. Mary Axe, all things announce Democracy. A distinguished man, whom some of my readers will hear again with pleasure, thus writes to me what in these days he notes from the Wahngasse of Weissnichtwo, where our London fashions seem to be in full vogue. Let us hear the Herr Teufelsdröckh again, were it but the smallest word! 66 Democracy, which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you, and contented putting up with the want of them-alas, thou too, mein Liber, seest well how close it is of Kin to Atheism and other sad Isms: he who discovers no God whatever, how shall he discover Heroes the visible Temples of God? Strange enough meanwhile it is, to observe with what thoughtlessness, here in our rigidly Conservative Country, men rush into Democracy with full cry. Beyond doubt his Excellenz, the Titular-Herr Ritter Kauderwälsch von Pferdefuss Quacksalber, he our distinguished Conservative Premier himself, and all but the thicker-headed of his Party, discern Democracy to be inevitable as Death, and are even desperate of delaying it much! "You cannot walk the streets without beholding Democracy announce itself: the very Tailor has become, if not properly Sansculottie, which to him would be ruinous, yet a Tailor unconsciously symbolizing, and prophe sying with his scissors, the reign of Equality. What now is our fashionable coat? A thing of superfinest texture, of deeply meditated cut; with Malinnes-lace cuffs; quilted with gold; so that a man can carry, without difficulty, an estate of land on his back? Keineswegs, by no manner of means! The Sumptuary Laws have fallen into such a state of desuetude as was never before seen. Our fashionable coat is an amphibium between barnsack and drayman's doublet. The cloth of it is studiously coarse; the colour a speckled soot-black or rust-brown gray; the nearest approach to a Peasant's. And for shape-thou shouldst see it! The last consummation of the year now passing over us is definable as Three Bags: a big bag for the body, two small bags for the arms, and, by way of coflar, a hem! The first Antique Cheruscan who, of felt-cloth or bear's hide, with bone or metal needle, set about making himself a coat, before Tailors had yet awakened out of Nothing-did he not make it even so? A loose wide poke for body, with two holes to let out the arms; this was his original coat; to which holes it was soon visible that two small loose pokes or sleeves, easily appended, would be an improvement. "Thus has the Tailor-art, so to speak, overset itself, like most other things; changed its centre-of-gravity, whirled suddenly from zenith to nadir. Your Stutx, with huge somerset, vaults from his high shop-board down to the depths of primeval savagery-carrying much along with him! For I will invite thee to reflect that the Tailor, as topmost ultimate froth of Human Society, is indeed swift passing, evanescent, slippery to decipher; yet significant of much, nay, of all. Topmost evanescent froth, he is churned up from the very lees, and from all intermediate regions of the liquor. The general outcome he, visible to the eye; of what men aimed to do, and were obliged and enabled to do, in this one public department of symbolizing themselves to each other by covering of their skins. A smack of all Human Life lies in the Tailor: its wild struggles toward beauty, dignity, freedom, victory; and how, hemmed in by Sedan and Hudders-field, by Nescience, Dullness, Prurience, and other sad necessities and laws of Nature, it has attained just to this: Gray Savagery of Three Sacks, with a hem! "When the very Tailor verges toward Sansculottism, is it not ominous? The last Divinity of poor Mankind dethroning himself; sinking his taper too, flame downmost, like the Genius of Sleep or of Death; admonitory that Tailor-time shall be no more! For, little as one could advise Sumptuary laws at the present epoch, yet nothing is clearer than that when ranks do actually exist, strict division of costume will also be enforced; that if we ever have a new Hierarchy and Aristocracy, acknowledged veritably as such, for which I daily pray Heaven the Tailor will reawaken; and be, by volunteering and appointment, consciously and unconsciously, a safeguard of that same." ,, Certain farther observations, from the same invaluable pen, on our never-ending changes of mode, our "perpetual Nomadic and Ape-like appetite for change and mere change," in all the equipments of our existence, and the "fatal revolutionary character" thereby manifested, we suppress for the present. It may be admitted that Democracy, in all meanings of the word, is in full career; irresistible by any Ritter Kauderwälsch or other son of Adam as times go. Liberty is a thing men are determined to have! But truly, as we have meanwhile to remark, "the liberty of not being oppressed by your fellow-men" is an indispensable, yet one of the most. insignificant fractional parts of Human Liberty. No man oppresses thee, can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go, without reason shown. True; from all men thou art emancipated: but from Thyself and from the Devil? No men, wiser or unwiser, can make thee come or go: but thy own futilities, bewilderments, thy false appetite for Money, Windsor Georges, and such like? No man oppresses thee, O free and independent Franchiser: but does not this stupid Porter-pot oppress thee? No son of Adam can bid thee come or go; but this absurd Pct of Heavy-wet, this can and does! Thoa art the thrall, not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites and this scoured dish of liquor. And thou pratest of thy "liberty?" Thou entire blockhead! Heavy-wet and gin: alas, these are not the only kinds of thraldom. Thou who walkest in a vain show, looking out with ornamental dilettante sniff and serene supremacy, at all Life and all Death; and amblest jauntily; perking up thy poor talk into crotchets, thy poor conduct into fatuous somnambulisms; and art as an "enchanted Ape" under God's sky, where thou mightest have been a man, had proper Schoolmasters and Conquerors, and Constables withcat-o'-nine-tails, been vouchsafed thee: dost thou eall that "liberty ?" Or your unreposing Mammon-worshipper, again driven as if by Galvanisms, by Devils and Fixed-Ideas, who rises early and sits late chasing the impossible; straining every faculty to "fill himself with the east wind," -how merciful were it, could you, by mild persuasion or by the severest tyranny so-called, check him in his mad path, turn him into a wiser one! All painful tyranny, in that case again, were but "mild surgery;" the pain of it cheap, as health and life, instead of galvanism and fixed-idea, is cheap at any price. Sure enough, Of all paths a man could strike into, there is at any given moment a best path for every man; a thing which, here and now, it were of all things wisest for him to do; which could he be but led or driven to do, he were then doing “like a man," as we phrase it; all men and gods agreeing with him, the whole Universe virtually exclaiming, Well-done to him! His success in such case were complete; his felicity a maximum. This path, to find this path and walk in it, is the one thing needful for him. Whatsoever forward him in that, let it come to him even in the shape of blows and spurnings, is liberty: whatsoever hinders him, were it ward-motes, openvestries, poll-booths, tremendous cheers, rivers of heavy-wet, is slavery. The notion, that a man's liberty consists in giving his vote at electionhustings, and saying, "Behold, now I too have my twenty-thousandth part of a Talker in our National Palaver; will not all the gods be good to me?" is one of the pleasantest! Nature, nevertheless, is kind at present; and puts it into heads of many, almost of all. The liberty especially which has to purchase itself by social isolation, and each man standing separate from the other, having "no business with him" but a cash account; this is such a liberty as the Earth seldom saw; as the Earth will not long put up with, recommend it how you may. This liberty turns out, before it have long continued in action, with all men flinging up their caps round it, to be for the Working Millions a liberty to die for the want of food; for the Idle Thousands and Units, alas, a still more fatal liberty to live in want of work; to have no earnest duty to do in this God's-world any more. What becomes of a man in such a predicament? Earth's Laws are silent; and Heaven's speak in a voice which is not heard. No work, and the ineradicable need of work, give rise to new very wondrous life-philosophies, new very wondrous life-practises! Dilettantism, Pococurantism, Beau Brummelism, with perhaps an occasional half-mad, protesting burst of Byronism, establish themselves: at the end of a certain period-if you go back to "the Dead Sea," there is, say our Moslem friends, a very strange "Sabbathday" transacting itself there! Brethren, we know but imperfectly yet, after ages of Constitutional Government, what liberty is and Slavery is. Democracy, the chase of Liberty in that direction, shall go its full course; unrestrainable by him of Pferdefuss-Quacksalber, or any of his household. The Toiling Millions of Mankind, in most vital need and passionate instinctive desire of Guidance, shall cast away False-Guidance; and hope, for an hour, that No-Guidance will suffice them; but it can be for an hour only. The smallest item of human Slavery is the oppression of man by his Mock-Superiors; the palpablest, but, I say, at bottom the smallest. Let him shake off such oppression, trample it indignantly under his feet; I blame him not, I pity and commend him. But oppression by your Mock-Superiors well shaken off, the grand problem yet remains to solve: That of finding government by your Real-Superiors! Alas, how shall we ever learn the solution of that, benighted, bewildered, sniffing, sneering, god-forgetting unfortunates as we are? It is a work for centuries; to be taught us by tribulations, confusions, insurrections, obstructions; who knows if not by conflagration and despair! It is a lesson inclusive of all other lessons; the hardest of all lessons to learn. One thing I do know: Those Apes chattering on the branches by the Dead Sea never got it learned; but chatter there to this day. To them no Moses need come a second time; a thousand Moseses would be but so many painted Phantasms, interesting Fellow-apes of new strange aspect-whom they would "invite to dinner," be glad to meet with in Lion-Soirees. To them the voice of Prophecy, of heavenly monition is quite ended. They chatter there, all Heaven shut to them, to the end of the world. The unfortunates! Oh, what is dying of hunger, with honest tools in your hand, with a manful purpose in your heart, and much real labour lying round you done, in comparison? You honestly quit your tools; quit a most muddy confused coil of sore work, short rations, of sorrows, dispiritments, and contradictions, having now honestly done with it all; and await, not entirely in a distracted manner, what the Supreme Powers, and the Silences, and the Eternities may have to say to you. A second thing I know, this lesson will have to be learned-under penalties! England will either learn it, or England will also cease to exist among nations. England will either learn to reverence its heroes, and discriminate them from its Sham-Heroes and Valets, and gaslighted Histrios; and to prize them as the audible God's-voice amid all inane jargons and temporary market-cries, and say to them, with heart-loyalty, "Be ye King and Priest and Gospel and Guidance for us :" or else England will continue to worship new and ever new forms of Quackhood-and so, with what resiliences and reboundings matters little, go down to the Father of Quacks! Can I dread such things of England! Wretched thick-eyed, gross-hearted mortals, why will ye worship Lies, and "stuffed clothes-suits created by the ninth-parts of men!" It is not your purses that suffer; your farm-rents, your commerces, your mill-revenues, loud as ye lament over these; no, it is not these alone, but a far deeper than these: it is your Souls that lie dead, crushed down under despicable Nightmares, Atheisms, Brain-fumes and are not Souls at all, but mere succedanea for sult to keep your bodies and their appetites from putrefying! Your Cotton-spinning and thrice miraculous mechanism, what is this too, by itself, but a larger kind of Animalisın? Spiders can spin, Beavers can build and show contrivance: the Ant lays up accumulation of capital, and has, for aught I know, a Bank of Antland. there is no soul in man higher than all that, did it reach to sailing on the cloud-rack and spinning sea-sand: then, I say, man is but an animal, a more cunning kind of brute: he has no soul, but only a succedaneum for salt. Wherefore seeing himself to be truly of the beasts that perish-he ought to admit it, I think, and also straightway universally kill himself: and so, in a manlike manner, at least end, and wave these brute-worlds his dignified farewell! : If CHAPTER XIV. SIR JABESH WINDBAG. OLIVER CROMWELL, whose body they hung on their Tyburn Gallows because he had found the Christian Religion inexecutable in this country, remains to me by far the remarkablest Governor we have had here for the last five centuries or so. For the last five centuries there has been no Governor among us with anything like similar talent; and for the last two centuries, no Governor, we may say, with the possibility of similar talent -with an idea in the heart of him, capable of inspiring similar talent, capable of coexisting therewith. When you consider that Oliver believed in a God, the difference between Oliver's position and that of any subsequent Governor of this country becomes, the more you reflect on it, the more immeasurable ! Oliver, no volunteer in Public Life, but plainly a balloted soldier strictly ordered thither, enters upon Public Life, comports himself there like a man who carried his own life itself in his hand; like a man whose Great Commander's eye was always on him. Not without results. Oliver, well advanced in years, finds now, by Destiny and his own Deservings, or, as he himself better phrased it, by wondrous successive" Births of Providence," the Government of England put into his hands. In senate house and battle-field, in counsel and in action, in private and in public, this man had proved himself a man: England and the voice of God, through waste awful whirlwinds and environments, speaking to his great heart, summon him to assert formally, in the way of solemn Public Fact and as a new piece of English Law, what informally and by Nature's eternal Law needed no asserting, That he, Oliver, was the Ablest-Man of England, the King of England; that he, Oliver, would undertake governing England. His way of making this same "assertion," the one way he had of making it, has given rise to immense criticism: but the assertion itself in what way 80ever made," is it not somewhat of a solemn one, somewhat of a tremendous one! 66 And now do but contrast this Oliver with my right honourable friend Sir. Jabesh Windbag, Mr. Facing both-ways, Viscount Mealymouth, Eart of Windlestraw, or what other Cagliostro, Cagliostrino, Cagliostraccio, the course of Fortune, and Parliamentary Majorities has constitutionally guided to that dignity, any time during these last sorrowful hundred and fifty years! Windbag, weak in the faith of a God, which he believes only at church on Sundays, if even then; strong only in the faith that Paragraphs and Plausibilities bring votes: that Force of Public Opinion, as he calls it, is the primal Necessity of Things, and highest God we have: Windbag, if we will consider him, has a problem set before him which may be ranged in the impossible class. He is a Columbus minded to sail to the indistinct country of NowHERE, to the indistimet country of WHITHERWARD, by the friendship of those same waste-tumbling Water-Alps and howling waltz of all the Winds; not by conquest of them and in spite of them, but by friendship of them, when once they have made up their mind! He is the most original Columbus I ever saw. Nay, his problem is not an impossible one : he will infallibly arrive at that same country of NowHERE; his indistinct Whitherward will be a Thither-ward! In the ocean abysses and locker of Davy Jones-there certainly enough do he and his ship's company, and all their cargo and navigatings, at last find lodgement. Oliver knew that his America lay THERE, Westward Ho-and it was not entirely by friendship of the Water-Alps and yeasty insane Froth-Oceans that he meant to get thither! He sailed accordingly; had compass-card and rules of Navigation--older and greater than these Froth-Oceans, old as the Eternal God! Or again, do bat think of this. Windbag, in these |