in favour of the palpably unjust will then abridge itself within limits. Vain jargon, on Hustings, in Parliaments, or whenever else, when here and there a man has vision for the essential God's-Truth of the things jargoned of, will become very vain indeed. The silence of here and there such a man, how eloquent in answer to such jargon! Such jargon, frightened at its own gaunt echo, will unspeakably abate; nay, for a while, may almost in a manner disappear-the wise answering it in silence, and even the simple taking cue from them to hoot it down wherever heard. It will be a blessed time; and many "things" will become doable—and, when the brains are out, an absurdity will die? Not easily again shall a Corn-law argue ten years for itself; and still talk and argue, when impartial persons have to say, with a sigh, that, for so long back, they have heard no "argument" advanced for it but such as might make the angels, and almost the very jackasses, weep!

Wholly a blessed time: when jargon might abate, and here and there some genuine speech begin. When to the noble opened heart, as to such heart they alone do, all noble things began to grow visible; and the difference between just and unjust, between true and false, between work and sham-work, between speech and jargon, was once more what to our r happier Fathers it used to be, infinite-as between a Heavenly thing and an Infernal: the one a thing which you were not to do, which you were wise not to attempt doing; which it were better for you to have a millstone tied round your neck, and be cast into the sea, than concern yourself with doing! Brothers, it will not be a Morrison's Pill or remedial measure that will bring all this about for us.

And yet, very literally, till, in some shape or the other, it be brought about, we remain cureless; till it begin to be brought about, the cure does not begin. For Nature and Fact, not Redtape and Semblance, are to this hour the basis of man's life; and on those, through never such strata of these, man and his life and all his interests do, sooner or later, infallibly come to rest-and to be supported or be swallowed according as they agree with those. The question is asked of them, not How do you agree with Downing-street and accredited Semblance? but How do you agree with God's Universe and the actual Reality of things? This Universe has its Laws. If we walk according to the Law, the Law-maker will befriend us; if not, not. Alas, by no Reform-bill, Ballot-box, Five-point Charter, by no boxes or bills or charters, can you perform this alchemy: "Given a world of Knaves to produce an Honesty from their united action!" It is a distillation, once for all, not possible. You pass it through alembic after alembic, it comes out still a Dishonesty, with a new dress on it, a new colour to it. While we ourselves continued valets, how can any hero come to govern us? We are governed, very infallibly, by the "sham-hero," whose name is Quack, whose work and governance is Plausibility, and also is Falsity and Fatuity; to which Nature says, and must say when it comes to her to speak, eternally No! Nations cease to be befriended of the Law-maker, when they walk not according to the Law. The Sphinx-question remains unsolved by them, becomes ever more insoluble.

If thou ask again, therefore, on the Morrison's-Pill hypothesis, What is to be done? allow me to reply: By thee, for the present, almost nothing. Thou there, the thing for thee to do is, if possible, to cease to be a hollow sounding-shell of hearsays, egoisms, purblind dilettantisms; and become, were it on the infinitely small scale, a faithful discerning soul. Thou shalt descend into thy inner man, and see if there be any traces of a soul there; till then there can be nothing done! Oh, brother, we must, if possible, resuscitate some soul and conscience in us, exchange our dilettantisms for sincerities, our dead hearts of stone for living hearts of flesh. Then shall we discern, not one thing, but, in clearer or dimmer sequence, a whole end

calls; and, by the governing Powers and Impotences of this England, wa are forbidden to obey. It is impossible, they tell us!' There was something that reminded me of Dante's Hell in the look of all this; and I rode swiftly away.'

So many hundred thousand sit in workhouses: and other hundred thousands have not yet got even workhouses: and in thrifty Scotland itself, in Glasgow or Edinburgh City, in their dark lanes, hidden from all but the eye of God, and of rare Benevolence the minister of God, there are scenes of wo and destitution and desolation, such as, one may hope, the Sun never saw before in the most barbarous regions where men dwelt. Competent witnesses, the brave and humane Dr Alison, who speaks what he knows, whose noble Healing Art in his charitable hands becomes once more a truly sacred one, report these things for us: these things are not of this year or of last year, have no reference to our present state of commercial stagnation, but only to the common state. Not in sharp fever fits, but in chronic gangrene of this kind is Scotland suffering. A Poor-law, any and every Poor-law, it may be observed, is but a temporary measure; an anodyne, not a remedy: Rich and Poor, when once the naked facts of their condition have come into collision, cannot long subsist together on a mere Poor-law. True enough: and yet human beings cannot be left to die! Scotland too, till something better come, must have a Poor-law, if Scotland is not to be a byword among the nations. Oh, what a waste is there; of noble and thrice-noble national virtues; peasant Stoicisms, Heroisms; valiant manful habits, soul of a nation's worth, which all the metal of Potosi cannot purchase back to which the metal of Potosi, and all you can buy with it, is dross and dust!

Why dwell on this aspect of the matter! It is too indisputable, not doubtful now to any one. Descend where you will into the lower class, in town or country, by what avenue you will, by Factory Inquiries, Agricultural Inquiries, by Revenue Returns, by Mining-Labourer Committees, by opening your own eyes and looking, the same sorrowful result discloses itself: you have to admit that the working body of this rich English Nation has sunk, or is fast sinking, into a state to which, all sides of it considered, there was literally never any parallel. At Stockport assizes-and this too has no reference to the present state of trade, being of date prior to that-a mother and a father are arraigned and found guilty of poisoning three of their children, to defraud a "burial society" of some £3 88. due on the death of each child: they are arraigned, found guilty; and the official authorities, it is whispered, hint that perhaps the case is not solitary, that perhaps you had better not probe farther into that department of things. This is in the autumn of 1841; the crime itself is of the previous year or season. "Bratal savages, degraded Irish," mutters the idle reader of newspapers, hardly lingering on this incident. Yet it is an incident worth lingering on; the depravity, savagery, and degraded Irishism being never so well admitted. In the British land a human Mother and Father, of white skin, and professing the Christian religion, had done this thing; they, with their Irishism and necessity and savagery, had been driven to do it. Such instances are like the highest mountain apex emerged into view, under which lies a whole mountain region and land not yet emerged. A human Mother and Father had said to themselves, What shall we do to escape starvation? We are deep sunk here in our dark cellar, and help is far. Yes, in the Ugolino Hunger-tower stern things happen; best-loved little Gaddo fallen dead on his Father's knees! The Stockport Mother and Father think and hint. Our poor little starvelling Tom, who cries all day for victuals, who will see only evil and not good in this world: if he were out of misery at once; he well dead, and the rest of us perhaps kept alive? It is thought, and hinted; at last it is done. And now Tom being killed, and all spent

and eaten, is it poor little starvelling Jack that must go, or poor little starvelling Will? What an inquiry of ways and means!

In starved sieged cities, in the uttermost doomed ruin of old Jerusalem fallen under the wrath of God, it was prophesied and said, "The hands of the pitiful women have sodden their own children." The stern Hebrew imagination could conceive no blacker gulf of wretchedness; that was the ultimatum of degraded god-punished man. And we here, in modern England, exuberant with supply of all kinds, besieged by nothing if it be not by invisible enchantments, are we reaching that? How come these things? Wherefore are they, wherefore should they be?

Nor are they of the St. Ives Workhouses, of the Glasgow lanes, and Stockport cellars, the only unblessed amoung us. This successful industry of England, with its plethoric wealth, has as yet made nobody rich; it is an enchanted wealth, and belongs yet to nobody. We might ask, Which of us has it enriched? We can spend thousands where we once spent hundreds; but can purchase nothing good with them. In Poor and Rich, instead of noble thrift and plenty, there is idle luxury alternating with mean scarcity and inability. We have sumptuous garnitures for our Life, but have forgotten to live in the middle of them. It is an enchanted wealth; no man of us can yet touch it. The class of men who feel that they are truly better off by means of it, let them give us their name !

Many men eat finer cookery, drink dearer liquors-with what advantage they can report, and their doctors can: but in the heart of them, if we go out of the dyspeptic stomach, what increase of blessedness is there? Are they better, beautifuller, stronger, braver? Are they even what they call "happier?" Do they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in this God's Earth; do more things and human faces look with satisfaction on them? Not so. Human faces gloom discordantly, disloy ally on one another. Things, if it be not mere cotton and iron things, are growing disobedient to man. The Master-worker is enchanted, for the present, like his Workhouse Workman; clamours, in vain hitherto, for a very simple sort of "Liberty:" the liberty" to buy where he finds it cheapest, to sell where he finds it dearest." With guineas jingling in every pocket, he was no whit richer; but now the very guineas threatening to vanish, he feels that he is poor indeed. Poor Master-worker! And the Master-unworker, is not he in a still fataller situation? Pausing amid his game-preserves with awful eye-as he well may! Coercing fifty-pound tenants; coercing, bribing, cajoling; doing what he likes with his own. His mouth full of loud futilities, and arguments to prove the excellence of his Corn-law; and in his heart the blackest misgiving, a desperate halfconsciousness that his excellent Corn-law is indefensible, that his loud arguments for it are of a kind to strike men too literally dumb. To whom, then, is this wealth of England wealth? Who is it that it blesses; makes happier, wiser, beautifuller, in any way better? Who has got hold of it, to make it fetch and carry for him like a true servant, not like a false mock-servant; to do him any real service whatsoever? As yet no one. We have more riches than any nation ever had before; we have less good of them than any nation ever had before. Our successful industry is hitherto unsuccessful; a strange success if we stop here! In the midst of plethoric plenty the people perish; with gold walls and full barns no man feels himself safe or satisfied. Workers, Master-workers, Unworkers, all men come to a pause; stand fixed, and cannot farther. Fatal paralysis spreading inward, from the extremities, in St. Ives Workhouses, in Stockport cellars, through all limbs, as if toward the heart itself. Have we actually got enchanted, then; accursed by some god?

Midas longed for gold, and insulted the Olympians. He got gold, so that whatsoever he touched became gold-and he, with his long ears, was little the better for it. Midas had misjudged the celestail music-tones; Midas

had insulted Apollo and the gods: the gods gave him his wish, and a pair of long ears, which also were a good appendage to it. What a truth in

these old fables!

CHAPTER II.

THE SPHINX.

How true, for example, is that other old fable of the Sphinx, who sat by the way-side, propounding her riddle to the passengers, which if they could not answer, she destroyed them! Such a Sphinx is this Life of ours to all men and societies of men. Nature, like the Sphinx, is of womanly celestial loveliness and tenderness; the face and boson of a goddess, but ending in claws and the body of a lioness. There is in her a celestial beauty-which means celestial order, pliancy to wisdom; but there is also a darkness, a ferocity, fatality, which are infernal. She is a goddess, but one not yet disimprisoned; one still half imprisoned-the inarticulate, lovely still incased in the inarticulate, chaotic. How true! And does she not profound her riddles to us! Of each man she asks daily, in mild voice, yet with a terrible significance, "Knowest thou the meaning of this Day? What thou canst do To-day, wisely attempt to do?" Nature, Universe, Destiny, Existence, howsoever we name this grand unnameable Fact in the midst of which we live and struggle, is as a heavenly bride and conquest to the wise and brave, to them who can desern her behests and do them; a destroying fiend to them who cannot. Answer her riddle, it is well with thee. Answer it not, pass on regarding it not, it will answer itself; the solution for thee is a thing of teeth and claws; Nature is a dumb lioness, deaf to thy pleadings, fiercely devouring. Thou art not now her victorious bridegroom; thou art her mangled victim, scattered on the precipices, as a slave, found treacherous, recreant, ought to be and must.

With nations it is as with individuals can they read the riddle of Destiny? This English Nation, will it get to know the meaning of its strange new Today? Is there sense enough extant, discoverable anywhere or anyhow, in our united twenty-seven million heads to discern the same; valour enough in our twenty seven million hearts to dare and do the bidding thereof? It will be seen! The secret of gold Midas, which he with his long ears never could discover, was, that he had offended the Supreme Powers; that he had parted company with the eternal inner Facts of this Universe, and followed the outer Appearances thereof; and so was arrived here. Properly it is the secret of all unhappy men and unhappy nations. Had they known Nature's right truth, Nature's right truth would have made them free. They have become enchanted; stagger spell-hound, reeling on the brink of huge peril, because they were not wise enough. They have forgotten the right Inner True, and taken up with the Outer Sham-true. They answer the Sphinx's question wrong. Foolish men cannot answer it aright! Foolish men mistake transitory semblance for eternal fact, and go astray more and more.

Foolish men imagine that, because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice, but an accidental one here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death! In the centre of the world-whirlwind, verily now as in the oldest days, dwells and speaks a God. The great soul of the world is just. Oh, brother, can it be needful now, at this late epoch of experience, after eighteen centuries of Christian preaching for one thing, to remind thee of such a fact; which all manner of Mahometans, old Pagan Romans, Jews, Scythians and heathen Greeks, and, indeed, more or less all men that God made, have managed at one time to see into; nay, which thou thyself, till "redtape" strangled the inner life of thee, hadst once some inkling of. That there is justice here below; and even at bottom,