第129章 A PRACTICAL CONCLUSION.(13)

Forty soldiers,I am told,will disperse the largest Spitalfields mob;forty to ten thousand,that is the proportion between drilled and undrilled.Much there is which cannot yet be organised in this world,but somewhat also which can--somewhat also which must.When one thinks,for example,what books are become and becoming for us,what operative Lancashires are become;what a Fourth Estate and innumerable virtualities not yet got to be actualities are become and becoming,one sees organisms enough in the dim huge future,and 'United Services'

quite other than the redcoat one;and much,even in these years,struggling to be born!""An effective 'Teaching Service,'I do consider that there must be;some education secretary,captain-general of teachers,who will actually contrive to get us taught.Then again,why should there not be an 'Emigration Service,'and secretary with adjuncts,with funds,forces,idle navy ships,and ever-increasing apparatus,in fine an effective system of emigration,so that at length before our twenty years of respite ended,every honest willing workman who found England too strait,and the 'organisation of labour'not yet sufficiently advanced,might find likewise a bridge built to carry him into new western lands,there to 'organise'with more elbow room some labour for himself?There to be a real blessing,raising new corn for us,purchasing new webs and hatchets from us;leaving us at least in peace;instead of staying here to be a physical-force Chartist,unblessed and no blessing!Is it not scandalous to consider that a Prime Minister could raise within the year,as I have seen it done,a hundred and twenty millions sterling to shoot the French;and we are stopped short for want of the hundredth part of that to keep the English living?

The bodies of the English living,and the souls of the English living,these two 'Services,'an Education Service and an Emigration Service,these with others,will have actually to be organised.

"A free bridge for emigrants!Why,we should then be on a par with America itself,the most favoured of all lands that have no government;and we should have,besides,so many traditions and mementos of priceless things which America has cast away.We could proceed deliberately to organise labour not doomed to perish unless we effected it within year and day every willing worker that proved superfluous,finding a bridge ready for him.This verily will have to be done;the time is big with this.Our little Isle is grown too narrow for us;but the world is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.

England's sure markets will be among new colonies of Englishmen in all quarters of the Globe.All men trade with all men when mutually convenient,and are even bound to do it by the Maker of Men.

Our friends of China,who guiltily refused to trade in these circumstances--had we not to argue with them,in cannon-shot at last,and convince them that they ought to trade?'Hostile tariffs'will arise to shut us out,and then,again,will fall,to let us in;but the sons of England--speakers of the English language,were it nothing more--will in all times have the ineradicable predisposition to trade with England.Mycale was the Pan-Ionian--rendezvous of all the tribes of Ion--for old Greece;why should not London long continue the All Saxon Home,rendezvous of all the 'Children of the Harz-Rock,'

arriving,in select samples,from the Antipodes and elsewhere by steam and otherwise,to the 'season'here?What a future!Wide as the world,if we have the heart and heroism for it,which,by Heaven's blessing,we shall.

"Keep not standing fixed and rooted,Briskly venture,briskly roam;Head and hand,where'er thou foot it,And stout heart are still at home.

In what land the sun does visit Brisk are we,what e'er betide;To give space for wandering is it That the world was made so wide.

"Fourteen hundred years ago it was a considerable 'Emigration Service,'

never doubt it,by much enlistment,discussion,and apparatus that we ourselves arrived in this remarkable island,and got into our present difficulties among others.""The main substance of this immense problem of organising labour,and first of all of managing the working classes,will,it is very clear,have to be solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it,by those who themselves work and preside over work.Of all that can be enacted by any Parliament in regard to it,the germs must already lie potentially extant in those two classes who are to obey such enactment.

A human chaos in which there is no light,you vainly attempt to irradiate by light shed on it;order never can arise there."

"Look around you.Your world-hosts are all in mutiny,in confusion,destitution;on the eve of fiery wreck and madness.They will not march farther for you,on the sixpence a day and supply-and-demand principle:

they will not;nor ought they;nor can they.Ye shall reduce them to order;begin reducing them to order,to just subordination;noble loyalty in return for noble guidance.Their souls are driven nigh mad;let yours be sane and ever saner.Not as a bewildered bewildering mob,but as a firm regimented mass,with real captains over them,will these men march any more.All human interests,combined human endeavours,and social growth in this world have,at a certain stage of their development,required organising and work,the grandest of human interests,does not require it.

"God knows the task will be hard,but no noble task was ever easy.