ment all but universal, to make use of language with respect to three millions of British paupers, whose interest in the property of the country is a vested and traditional right, such as Fletcher did not dare to apply even to the handful of Scottish vagabonds that were the subjects of his problem. There is not a word in Fletcher about the "beneficent whip;" and he even proposes that it should be enacted that, when his scheme should be carried into effect, the use of the name Slave as applied to the parties concerned, should be strictly forbidden. "I regard not names," he said, "but things; and the misapplication of names has confounded everything." And here probably Mr. Carlyle would agree with him. Let but his notion of Industrial Regiments of paupers be carried out, and he would probably regard

a matter of indifference whether they should be called State-serfs, or by some name more flattering and honourable.

There are, of course, two opposite quarters from which Mr. Carlyle's scheme is liable to attack. On the one hand, the Economists, to use a term which has now begun to pass current as distinctive of a certain class of writers, are sure to ply against it all their established maxims and forms of thought. They will say, in the first place, that, by handing over to Government so large a share in the general business of production, as would be involved in the industrial superintendence and maintenance of three millions of paupers, there would be traversed one of the fundamental doctrines of their science-that, namely, which assigns the whole care and direction of national industry to the happy and spontaneous operation throughout the community of the natural law of supply and demand. That the State should constitute itself a master of industry by engaging to find work and wages for any number of individuals whatever, seems to them a ruinous return to ancient ideas of government, and a retrograde step in civilisation. The force of this argument, however, which one saw repeated times without number against the so far similar scheme of Ateliers Nationaux propounded by Louis Blanc, appears now to be fast waning. For one thing, of whatever avail it is against Mr. Carlyle's scheme, or against that of Louis Blanc as applied to England, of exactly as much avail is it against the existing system of Poor-Laws, which it is the design. of such schemes to supersede. In the English Poor-Law system, the Government occupies precisely the position of a contractor to the community for the most economical management of the labour of all the national paupers ; and what Mr. Carlyle proposes is essentially nothing more than a better mode, as he thinks, for fulfilling the contract. Moreover there has recently sprung up such a force of opinion contradictory of the established maxim of Laissez-faire, or at least of this special application of it, and

men of so high consideration for talent and character have recently fulminated protests against it, that it begins now to be surmised even among Economists themselves, that the principle of demand and supply, so far from being the last word that science can give respecting the methods of directing labour, will turn out to be but a provisional expression of a convenient truth, and a point of departure for other and larger notions, wherein, not by retrogression, but only by persistent progress, some of the ancient practices of government will again be recognised as legitimate. In short, this particular argument against Mr. Carlyle's scheme is fast getting drowned in an ocean of popular contempt and impatience. More likely to impress people is the argument of its alleged impracticability. Three millions of paupers squatted among the mosses and on the hill-sides of the country, armed with spades and pickaxes, accompanied (for surely Mr. Carlyle would be more benevolent in this respect than the Poor-Law Commissioners) with their wives and children, and kept in drill by a hierarchy of semi-military functionaries, receiving their orders from the Secretary of State's office-this is a picture at the contemplation of which the British mind shudders. All the standing armies in the world would be nothing to this. If, during the railway mania, there were frequent qualms as to the probable results to society of the accumulation in encampments throughout the country, of such masses of half-heathen navvies, many of them Orsons in physical strength, and all of them fond of fighting; if even now a rumour of the atrocious injustice of the truck-system wafts sometimes into the heart of British civilisation the horrid idea what a fund of lurid fury the iron districts of England and Wales might at any moment vomit forth—in what a state of trepidation, it may be said, should we necessarily live, if we had three millions of fustian-jackets under drill among the hills, ready to rise at an instant, were they enraged, and only a scattered regiment or two of red-coats at command to put them down! Fancy, it may be said, the effect upon one regiment of such State-serfs, of a whipping too severely administered by some unpopular colonel; or the effect upon all the regiments simultaneously of some harsh general order from the Secretary of State. What Sicilian slave-insurrections might we not have? what conquests of our best generals, and of our sturdiest police inspectors, by some band of determined paupers broken loose under the leadership of some Brummagem Spartacus? True, in the case of the army, all these objections have been practically overcome, so that there thousands of men are kept orderly and manageable with ease; but how, it might be asked, in the case of the new army of serfs, should we be able to extemporize such a set of rules and traditions, old as Hengst and the Heptarchy,

as that by which the army coheres and has being? And then, in the interim, it might be said, what stupidity, what blundering, what accumulations of abuse worse than were ever presented under the operation of the old poor-law itself? Look, it might be said, to the French Revolution of 1848. There precisely such a scheme as that of Mr. Carlyle was put into temporary practice. When Paris was full of men out of work, a M. Emile Thomas appeared and proposed to brigade them into industrial regiments under the command of students from the Central School of Arts and Sciences, and to employ them on certain great public works in and around the city. His plan was eagerly accepted; about a hundred thousand men were actually brigaded; works were devised, and regiments posted at the spots where they were to be executed; and the result was such three months of idleness, singing, buffoonery, and disquietude, as were before seen in Paris, and as it required a master-stroke of executive audacity to bring to an end. And such, the Economists would probably say, would be the inevitable consequence of any attempt in this country to carry out Mr. Carlyle's scheme.

never

We cannot say that we wholly agree with them. The Parisian experiment of M. Emile Thomas we hold to have been not a fair trial of the scheme, but a piece of monstrous French bungling and clap-trap, not to be seriously adduced as a precedent at all. And as for the supposed danger of organizing, after the manner proposed by Mr. Carlyle, all the lawless elements now dispersed through the community and weakened by the dispersion-this danger, we conceive, would lie only in the chance that society would maintain a false and unjust relationship to the portion of itself it had thus detached away into the moors and hills; and might even thus, by serving as an indication of something more profoundly wrong than is usually believed in our social arrangements, become a means of enlightening us as to our true path in the future, and of speeding on unknown ulterior developments. As, in the insurrection of Spartacus, there was a motive and a stimulus among the ancient Romans to considerations of policy not likely otherwise to have occurred to them; so the presence among us of three millions of human beings visibly depending on us for guidance and support, and visibly capable of crushing or overpowering us if we do not give it them, may be the very thing necessary to convince us of the wretchedly ephemeral nature of some of our cherished conclusions respecting the constitution of society, and to create the requisite impetus by which we shall be borne along the next, and some golden step it may be, in the historic evolution. We do not, therefore, feel any extreme degree of sympathy with this argument in terrorem. More powerful to our mind, from the

economic point of view, are those arguments against Mr. Carlyle's scheme, which consist in the general assertion that he has not exhibited its harmony with those specific doctrines of economic science by which its working is intellectually begirt and conditioned. That such a gigantic innovation as Mr. Carlyle proposes on all our established modes of procedure, would necessarily produce a tremor and derangement pervading all British society, is clearly undeniable; and Mr. Carlyle, it may be said, is bound to trace out, as far as may be, beforehand the probable curve and direction of this derangement, as that would be determined by some of the more important of the known laws of Political Economy, and particularly by these three—the Malthusian principle of population; the law that industry is limited by capital; and the law that the rate of increase in agricultural production is one of diminishing proportion to the capital and labour expended in procuring it.

"The waters shall wax, the woods shall wene;

Hill and moss shall be torn in;

But the bannock will never be braider,"

are the words of Thomas the Rhymer; and little as Mr. Carlyle cares for M'Crowdy, this remarkable coincidence between that modern gentleman's doctrines and the old saw of the Scottish seer might have deserved to attract his attention. That, if he set himself to it, Mr. Carlyle would be able to fortify his scheme even on the consideration of its economical bearings, is extremely likely. It is not ignorance of Political Economy, (for he has read, he says, "some barrowfuls" of treatises on that science in his time,) but rather willing contempt for it, that causes him to ignore the necessity of attempting any express conciliation between the scheme he offers and the current maxims of the economists. Still, considering that these maxims, minute and partial as they may appear, really do express certain existing conditions to which every scheme of social reform must submit itself under pain of failure, one cannot but desire such a conciliation, were it but by way of argumentative anticipation; and all the more so that some leading economists of larger and more revolutionary views than their fellows, appear to regard any extensive application of the notion of industrial regiments to the extinction of pauperism as conclusively forbidden by their science, and to incline, on that account, rather to push on the public mind to other means of accomplishing the same end, as, for example, to the scheme of Peasant Proprietorship.

The objections of the Socialists to Mr. Carlyle's scheme would, of course, be radically different from those of the Economists. On the whole, it is true, they would regard it as a step

in the right direction. That the State should assume to itself the supreme administration of the business of national production, is the known view of at least one class among the Socialists, that represented by M. Louis Blanc; and that the State is bound to find work and subsistence for all that cannot otherwise procure it, is a settled tenet in the creed of Socialists of all sects. That a scheme, therefore, of the nature of Mr. Carlyle's should be carried into effect; that on any terms whatever, the State should charge itself with the industrial management of three millions of destitute individuals, would be matter for unmingled satisfaction to the whole Socialist world. But, looking at the scheme as propounded by its author, they would pronounce it a Socialist idea advanced in an aristocratic spirit. Mr. Carlyle, they would say, is a man destitute of the true and characteristic sentiment of Socialism-that sentiment, namely, which delights in contemplating all mankind as equally units in a terrestrial point of view, and of which the French phrases Liberty and Equality are the much-abused expressions: he is a man accustomed rather to that solitary extra-terrestrial point of view, from which the moral inequalities of things are seen more distinctly to come out, and familiarity with which is apt to generate, in a noble man of strict temperament, a spirit of intolerance, despotism, and rigorous compulsion; and hence, while his project for the remedy of pauperism is essentially a coincidence with Socialism, he has put it forth in the language not of a genuine and sentimental equalitarian, but of an old Greek Tuρavvos, or resolute modern slave-owner, doing the right thing, but kicking you while he does it. But for all this, as we have said, the Socialists would welcome any attempt to put his scheme in force. All that talk about "the whip" and "shooting" with which it was according to the nature of Mr. Carlyle's genius to clothe the statement of his scheme, would come to nothing, they would say, in the tear, and wear of actual experience. Once let the three millions of fustian-jackets be abroad among the morasses and hills, and all the colonels in the world, and all the cobwebs of borrowed military forms that could be invented to back them, would not guarantee society against the vast proletarian influence that would be thus concentrated and made visible;-the peace might indeed be kept and the stipulated work done; but the total effect would be as if society, tired of its slow rate of progress hitherto, had thrown the least timorous and least interested portion of its strength into the advanced guard, and thus shod itself, so to speak, with a democratic ploughshare, fast to cleave the future. Hence it partly is, as we conceive, that of almost all existing political parties, those who like Mr. Carlyle's recent appearances best are the Socialists and extreme Republi