be bored through; bituminous
fuel-stores, the wreck of forests that were green a million years
ago,--I have opened them from my secret rock-chambers, and they are
yours, ye English. Your huge fleets, steamships, do sail the sea; huge
Indias do obey you; from huge _New_ Englands and Antipodal Australias
comes profit and traffic to this Old England of mine!" So answers
Nature. The Practical Labour of England is _not_ a chimerical
Triviality: it is a Fact, acknowledged by all the Worlds; which no man
and no demon will contradict. It is, very audibly, though very
inarticulately as yet, the one God's Voice we have heard in these two
atheistic centuries.

* * * * *

And now to observe with what bewildering obscurations and impediments
all this as yet stands entangled, and is yet intelligible to no man!
How, with our gross Atheism, we hear it not to be the Voice of God to
us, but regard it merely as a Voice of earthly Profit-and-Loss. And
have a Hell in England,--the Hell of not making money. And coldly see
the all-conquering valiant Sons of Toil sit enchanted, by the million,
in their Poor-Law Bastille, as if this were Nature's Law;--mumbling to
ourselves some vague janglement of Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand,
Cash-payment the one nexus of man to man: Free-trade, Competition, and
Devil take the hindmost, our latest Gospel yet preached!

As if, in truth, there were no God of Labour; as if godlike Labour and
brutal Mammonism were convertible terms. A serious, most earnest
Mammonism grown Midas-eared; an unserious Dilettantism, earnest about
nothing, grinning with inarticulate incredulous incredible jargon
about all things, as the _enchanted_ Dilettanti do by the Dead Sea! It
is mournful enough, for the present hour; were there not an endless
hope in it withal. Giant Labour, truest emblem there is of God
the World-Worker, Demiurgus, and Eternal Maker; noble Labour,
which is yet to be the King of this Earth, and sit on the highest
throne,--staggering hitherto like a blind irrational giant, hardly
allowed to have his common place on the street-pavements; idle
Dilettantism. Dead-Sea Apism crying out, "Down with him; he is
dangerous!"

Labour must become a seeing rational giant, with a _soul_ in the body
of him, and take his place on the throne of things,--leaving his
Mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the lower steps of said
throne.

CHAPTER VII.

OVER-PRODUCTION.

But wha