Originally published in Howitt's Journal (William Lovett) vol.1 #12 (20 Mar 1847).
Sixty Years Hence. A Novel. By the Author of the "White Slave." 3 vols. London: T.C. Newby.
There are men, and wise men too, who fancy that they can discover, in the present state of things, unmistakeable signs of an onward and upward progression; who think that science, knowledge. and religion, are all working together, with the great chain of events, to produce an ultimate amount of general happiness and well being, of which, as yet, we only vaguely dream. Whether we may expect that any full accomplishment of their hopes will be reached in sixty years, is hard to say; at all events it may reasonably be expected that, in sixty years, the world will have advanced in better knowledge and endeavour, at least in the same ratio it has done within that time past.
Steam, gas, and electricity, have done something for us within the last ten years, to say nothing of the growing intelligence of the people, which is one of the most encouraging signs of the times. In half a century, prospectively, what may not steam and electricity, to say nothing of yet other mighty and undiscovered agents, effect; whilst the power of the people—a power based. on true knowledge, on an improved state of morals, on temperance, sanatory reform, and a living conviction of the true greatness and worth of humanity, even in the meanest of its children—-will give to the coming half century such a moral impetus and stability as no former time can furnish any example of.
There is in these volumes a great deal of power, but with all this there certainly never was a more unsatisfactory work written. The plot is uncertain and confused; the characters, many of them strongly marked, are full of activity, without achieving anything to the reader's satisfaction. The few characters which have a higher tone and promise about them, seem imperfect conceptions, and leave the reader in utter disappointment. Every coming page fills him with the belief of some great purpose about to be revealed, but it never comes. At the same time, however, that he is startled, surprised, and often displeased, there is a strange fascination about the work, which leads him on; he cannot lay it down; he thinks that a writer with so much natural power, and who has brought together such an array of agents and machinery, will assuredly repay him at last. But no! the breathless reader, in the end, is obliged to be satisfied with this reflection, that if the book be a true prophet of the future, then, that bad as things are now, they are heavenly in comparison with what they will be sixty years hence, in the unhappy days of our great grandchildren; that tyrannical and cruel as hereditary power may be now, it is nothing to the fierce iron rule of the golden king of those days, the echoing sound of whose approaching footsteps is now within our ears; that strange as was the story of Mr. Cross and his insect creation, it is nothing to what galvanism will do sixty years hence. The Egyptian plague of flies, frogs, and other vermin, will be mere jests, in comparison with the achievements of one malicious old man, who will then pour out his phial of cruelly-contagious and ever-multiplying atomic life into the water—and thenceforward all waters shall contain the certain, ineradicable seed of cureless disease.
The history of all this is fantastically horrible; it haunts the mind like a nightmare; from the waters the earth becomes plagued with murrain, of which we have a faint idea in the present potato blight; grass and corn are infected, and from these it is conveyed to the beast of the field; lastly from him to man: and the work ends by the coarse, vulgar, money-king of the world dying raging mad, the omnipotent murrain having attacked his brain; and this, the reader is left to believe, is the beginning of the end of the world, he being but the first victim of a universal death.
Of the political portion of the book, which is extremely clever, we say nothing, because that certainly is less original than the author's anticipated discoveries in science; whether they be the infusion of the vital fluid from the finger ends, or the wholesale destruction of armies by the concentrated current of the electric fluid drawn from the clouds by the hand of one man, or the propagation of this loathsome murrain which is to destroy the world, and in describing which, as we said before, the author shows a master's hand. We have not space for extract, but we refer the reader to the last chapter of the second volume, after which he will not readily dislodge "the insect" from his imagination.
So much for the fate of the world, according to this author, sixty years hence. The moral of this strange book is, that the mammon-worship of the present day may bring England, nay, even the whole world, to utter rain. And so it might, perhaps, were it not that, with this mammon-worship, we have, in the great heart of the nation, a conservative, healthy current of moral life, which will circulate from the lesser to the greater streams till it permeates the whole of existence, like the atomic poison of which the author speaks; but of this higher-and divine influence he makes no mention, and this it is which will be our safeguard and our salvation.
The Labourer. A Monthly Magazine, of Politics, Literature, and Poetry. Edited by Feargus O'Connor, Esq., and Ernest Jones, Esq., Barristers-at-law. London: Northern Star Office, etc.; Manchester: Abel Heywood. Nos. I. and II.
It is surely a sign, and an auspicious sign, of the times, that that portion of the Chartist body termed the physical force Chartists, have issued a monthly magazine, not under the title of the Fighter, but of the Labourer. The employment which they now give to their physical force is such as must meet with the approbation of all good men. It is in labour, in co-operation, and in the purchase of land. In an account of the movements of the National Association of United Trades, Mr. Robson laid down principles of popular action which might be adopted by any co-operative society; namely: 1st. The necessity of union; 2d. Union gives to sectional movements the necessary strength; 3d. The inefficacy of useless strikes as a means of meeting the appliances at the disposal of the master class; 4th. The necessity of the people taking their own affairs into their own hands; 5th. The profit made by masters in consequence of the non-existence of co-operative action; 6th. The striking difference between the old system, that sets men on strikes, and the new, which sets them on work; 7th. Self-employment the only means of procuring a fair day's wage for a fair day's work; 8th. The value of exposing the state of their funds; 9th. The necessity of employing those hands not required in the artificial labour market in the cultivation of the land for themselves; 10th. Reciprocity.
Now, these are all sound doctrines, in-true keeping with the spirit of the times; and show that we are every day growing more alike in opinion, spite of our names and badges of party.
The Magazine details the progress of the Land Association of the body; traces the history of the Insurrections of the People. Mr. Ernest Jones, whose poetic powers have drawn high commendation from high quarters of very opposite opinions, has a powerful ballad, opening the second number, called The Factory Town, and descriptive of the evils of the factory system. There are also tales of great merit, and particularly one, called The Romance of a People, the scene of which is Poland, and which seems intended to embody the miseries and wrongs of that violated country. The Magazine, altogether, does great credit to its conductors; and, as an organ of the co-operative principle, and of the enlightenment of the people, we wish it every success.
Plea to Power and Parliament for the Working Classes. By R.A. Slaney, Esq., late M.P. for Shrewsbury. London: Longman & Co.
A very useful little compendium of the condition of the people, and of what is in progress, and also what ought to be in progress, for amending it. It embraces the topics of the Factories and Mines; Education, and Health of Towns; societies for insurance against illness, and want of work; injustice of combination laws; means of popular exercise and recreation—parks, and public-walks, etc.; policy of establishing a board of commission for watching over the welfare of the people—that Government should not attempt to check, encourage, or regulate population, but should afford protection, and real education to the working classes, and they will regulate themselves. There is much wisdom here in a little compass.
Opium in China. By R. Montgomery Martin.
This is extracted from Mr. Martin's work, "China, Political, Commercial, and Social." We only notice it here to wish that it may be widely read. It opens up that fearful system of guilt which we are pursuing in China, of guilt against God and man, and at the same time, of most stupid impolicy, dosing the poor Chinese with opium, instead of clothing them—four hundred millions!—with our manufactures. We shall, ere long, go at length into this matter, and make free use of this valuable pamphlet.
Three Lectures on the Moral Elevation of the People. By Thomas Beggs. London: Brittain, Paternoster Row.
When we see what a flood of moral and intellectual intelligence is being now daily poured upon the public mind, we feel that there ought to be striking and happy effects from it. In this pamphlet there is of itself a mass of sound information on the condition of the people, which could not have been brought together except by much reading, and more actual mingling with the multitude. The perusal has made us rejoice that such men as Mr. Beggs find their proper places in the social economy, and are thus able to do God's work on the earth while it is day with them. Mr. Beggs, as the secretary of the Temperance Society, occupies a post for which he is evidently most thoroughly fitted and designed. We have read these lectures with a peculiar pleasure. Their morality is so sound, their feeling is so genuine, and their eloquence—the eloquence of a sad knowledge and a generous zeal—is so pure and penetrating. Our space allows us to do little more than to recommend them to the public, which we do most cordially; yet we must not omit to indicate the great variety of matters with which they deal: temperance; causes of pauperization, of physical deterioration; education of and for the people; health of towns, with the statistics of crime and population in them; our moral responsibilities towards the people, etc.
We admire the honest boldness with which Mr. Beggs probes the wounds of our social system, and takes to task our pseudo-philanthropy. The following passage presents a fearful picture, and calls sternly upon our sense of duty:—
"It strikes me dumb," says Thomas Carlyle, "to look over the long series of faces that any full church, court-house, or tavern meeting, or miscellany of men will show them. Some score or two years ago all these were little red pulpy infants, capable of being kneaded into any social form you chose—yet you now see them fixed and hardened into artizans, artists, clergy, gentry, learned sergeants, and unlearned dandies, and can and shall be nothing else henceforth." This is not a new, but a striking thought, enunciated by a mind deeply versed in the philosophy of society. Not only do we see a new generation springing up from the plastic hand of nature, ready to receive any impression that circumstances or education may stamp upon it, but we find it transmitting still worse deterioration to that which has to succeed it—stamping physical as well as moral degradation upon posterity in a downward ratio. Over vast tracts of country we scarcely find a trace of the "human face divine;" so worn in countenance, form, feature, expression, that we might doubt whether they were of the same species with the well organised and noble of the race. The lofty lineaments of a better nature gradually fade away, until nothing is left but the attributes of the idiot or the fiend. Still there is the alarming thought, the overwhelming horror of which can never be contemplated without a shudder, that they possess the awful power to perpetuate a race, equally stunted as themselves. In the midst of wretchedness, and guilt, and want, and disease, this fearful power of reproduction remains to them, and scourges society for its injury and neglect. The spark of humanity is almost extinct. They become a pauper-creating class. Our psuedo-charity forbids them to die; we provide for them the hospital and the poor-house—devise means by which their houseless and homeless lot may be rendered tolerable; and thus new swarms of outcasts, new hordes of savages, throng our highways and threaten our safety; vice becomes more and more loathsome—deformity more fantastic, and fiends might mock at this frightful accompaniment to our boasted civilization. Thousands dying that one may riot, and hosts of men grovelling in sordid huts that one may squander wealth away in a palace.
One of the principal causes of this fearful immorality will be found in the total want of physical comforts, the exposure to cold, hunger, and nakedness, amongst our labouring population, and the incessant competition with each other for the privilege to toil, and by that means earn the scantiest subsistence. This state of wretchedness is produced in the first instance by the retention of laws which contravene the laws of God, restrict the markets open to our industry by prohibitory duties and imposts, and augment the price of food by making it scarce.
Again, he treats the monstrous over labour in factories and shops with the feeling of a man and a poet:—
In a pamphlet published by Dr. Grindrod, the author of "Bacchus," there is an amount of fact perfectly appalling:— Children almost leaving the mother's breast to labour; and beginning at an early age their struggles for existence. And this in Christian England, who vaunts loudly her pre-eminence, and of being foremost in civilization. This fearful immolation still goes on. Then again, our attention has been called to the late hours that our youth have to remain in shops, warehouses, and other establishments. This is the same thing in another form, and can only be subdued by the energy, boldness, and perseverance, of the thoughtful part of the community—men with heads to think, and hearts to feel and act. One half hour's thought on the subject, must convince any reasonable mind that the system is pernicious in a moral point of view. Training up a race of men, with blunted sensibilities, and stunted perceptions; confined for long hours in shops, where there is the most impure air, with little or no exercise; their very occupations wearisome—and not only so, but highly prejudicial to the proper cultivation of the higher sentiments. It is a system of slavery of the most fatal kind; it forbids any strength of feeling—any development of masculine sentiment—and, in point of selection, is less enviable than the occupation of the man who breaks stones. Give me but a crust; let me have the opportunity of softening it in the brook, that dances amongst the flowers; let me feel around me the bracing air, and see above me the open sky; then, conscious that the crust is earned by hard but honest industry, I can rejoice to feel myself a man, with free thoughts, and unrestricted mind. Let me be this; let me travel on in rags and poverty, instead of being the cringing and foppish youth who is learning a trade, a slave to every capricious customer and thoughtless idler who makes shopping a business, and seems to have studied every mode of annoyance. And yet this is the way in which many, nay, great part of our youth, are rising up: the mind never awakened to higher objects than the frivolities of dress, or the rounds of dissipation. The body as well as mind enervated, you see them thronging our public thorough-fares, indebted for their appearance to the arts of the man milliner: quite familiar with the slang of the tavern, and regular attendants at free-and-easies; puffing their cigars, and mimicking all the follies of men of fashion. These things are going on around us: and to expect from such a hot bed of folly, ignorance, and imbecility, any other result than a race of men, depraved in taste, vitiated in heart, and feeble in understanding, and, consequently, practising all the "little tricks of little men," is to expect, that the harvest can be gathered when the seed-time has been neglected.
He points out the remedy in shorter hours of labour, and in the provision of healthy recreations, and the opening of lecture-halls and reading-rooms. Mr. Beggs is quite awake also to the necessity and ameliorating Powers of co-operation.
The principles of co-operation, when more properly understood, will enable the working classes to do much of which at present they have no clear conception. If they want a Library, what is to prevent 500 men uniting together for the purpose, each man bringing a book;—there are 500 volumes as a stock, and each man has the opportunity of reading 499 for the one contributed. This hint will suffice to suggest a thousand ways in which co-operation would secure very desirable ends. Much is in the power of temperance societies with regard to this agency; libraries, reading-rooms, class-rooms, schools, and concerts, are all means of creating counter attractions to the public-house; and would not only do that, but would supersede the coffee-shops, which have become-in scarcely an inferior degree as bad as the jerry shop: drinking coffee, smoking, clubbing for suppers, gaming, loose conversation, &c., are the disgraces of the hotels, and inflict severe injury on the temperance societies. These bodies have hitherto had a very contracted view of their own sphere of labour; they must take up more comprehensive ground.
Mr. Beggs concludes his Lectures with a piece of true eloquence—that of the heart. We have laboured like Mr. Beggs; we have suffered like him calumny; we have occasionally seen that obliquity of human nature which has led us almost to despair and to desist;—but better hopes have again prevailed, and we have gone on, "sadder but wiser," in that path of popular exertion, where, if we are often destined to find least where we hoped most, we also find most where we hoped least. We acknowledge to him a debt in a gloomy hour, for the noble expression of the true faith in humanity which glows through this passage:—
Do we expect any alteration in the civil or political policy of our country?—we must have an educated people. Governments are the result, and not the cause, of the moral sentiments which may prevail. The intelligence of the people will be the great agent in political changes. That will achieve more than all the party struggles for power that take place in our times, Without a people thoroughly free—free from the thraldom of vice and prejudice—free institutions can neither exist, nor confer happiness upon the governed. Look at America—her institutions are in advance of the popular intelligence; and there we have to deplore the sad effect of ignorance and selfishness. Amongst a people where we have the first great experiment of free government, we have to deplore the existence of slavery, sitting grinning in horrible mockery in the midst of her republican institutions. America will no doubt retrieve her faded honour yet, and form a bright page for European statesmen to peruse. This assurance is founded upon the growing intelligence of her best citizens; the spirit of inquiry which is active there; and the restless and quenchless desire for freedom which animates all hearts on the other side of the Atlantic. Educate the people of England, and we shall be able to stamp upon them a character as an as any in the world. But above all, let us look to the young. It is to young England we must look for the spirits that are to raise up the character of our country, and make her truly a leader among the nations of the earth. It is they who have to engage in the struggle for liberty, and knowledge, and fame; and combat, in the confidence of high hope, the last remains of feudal power. Make the people an intelligent, an educated, a sober race, and they must have free institutions. It is impossible for despotism to sway its sceptre over men with hearts throbbing with holy desires, whose arms are nerved to maintain the truth, and plant its standard where waves and winds may dash over it in vain. I wish I could inspire every heart with the desire to raise himself. As I look upon the meagre and wan children of toil around me, thronging our public thoroughfares, and listlessly lounging about, I feel a renewed desire to labour in this cause. I know what an early love of knowledge can do. I have felt it. The thirst is within me unsubdued and unslaked. To this early desire I ascribe all that is now valuable to me. I would not barter the knowledge I possess,—endeared to me as it is by the recollection that it has been acquired by many sacrifices of needful rest, by some self-denial,and at the expense of many privations,—I would not barter it for all that wealth or title could bestow. I would not allude to this but as an encouragement to others. There are thousands now languishing, with high capabilities, who may perhaps pass through life, with the spark within never fanned into a flame.
Perseverance—faith—hope—charity, are the watchwords. I have never felt a greater faith in the ultimate triumph of man's spiritual nature over his mere animal instincts than I do now. I have had my discouragements and despondencies, but I have always felt revived when I have reflected upon the capabilities of man. I never lost faith in humanity, In the midst of vexation, annoyance, and disappointment, that faith has survived; and whatever value may be attached to my labours, is attributable to that undying faith in the power of good. Since I first felt it my duty to join the total abstinence society, I have not been an idle or cold-hearted supporter. I have been called upon to occupy a more prominent position than I ever intended. I have not escaped calumny. It was not to be expected I should. I have often had my motives impugned; and in that I shared the common lot of men who labour for the public good. I knew this at the outset. I had too much experience of the world ever to expect that I should be exempt from the fate of better men than myself. These things never affected me for one moment, nor have they ever extorted from me one quailing word Until they can rob me of the settled conviction that has cheered me through many labours and difficulties—that a man's happiness arises from that which is within him, and not that which surrounds him; until they can take from me the satisfaction that awaits honest endeavour; they can never affect me. One thing I wish to say in conclusion:—that our labours ought to be in proportion to the difficulties we have to surmount. Working on in the field of human progress, our reward will be in the consciousness that our duty is done, and the hope that it is not done in vain.