In brief, all this Mammon-Gospel, of
Supply-and-demand, Competition, Laissez-faire, and Devil take the
hindmost, begins to be one of the shabbiest Gospels ever preached; or
altogether the shabbiest. Even with Dilettante partridge-nets, and at
a horrible expenditure of pain, who shall regret to see the entirely
transient, and at best somewhat despicable life strangled out of _it_?
At the best, as we say, a somewhat despicable, unvenerable thing, this
same 'Laissez-faire;' and now, at the _worst_, fast growing an
altogether detestable one!

"But what is to be done with our manufacturing population, with our
agricultural, with our ever-increasing population?" cry many.--Ay,
what? Many things can be done with them, a hundred things, and a
thousand things,--had we once got a soul, and begun to try. This one
thing, of doing for them by 'underselling all people,' and filling our
own bursten pockets and appetites by the road; and turning over all
care for any 'population,' or human or divine consideration except
cash only, to the winds, with a "Laissez-faire" and the rest of it:
this is evidently not the thing. Farthing cheaper per yard? No great
Nation can stand on the apex of such a pyramid; screwing itself higher
and higher; balancing itself on its great-toe! Can England not subsist
without being _above_ all people in working? England never
deliberately purposed such a thing. If England work better than all
people, it shall be well. England, like an honest worker, will work as
well as she can; and hope the gods may allow her to live on that
basis. Laissez-faire and much else being once well dead, how many
'impossibles' will become possible! They are impossible, as
cotton-cloth at two-pence an ell was--till men set about making it.
The inventive genius of great England will not forever sit patient
with mere wheels and pinions, bobbins, straps and billy-rollers
whirring in the head of it. The inventive genius of England is not a
Beaver's, or a Spinner's or Spider's genius: it is a _Man's_ genius, I
hope, with a God over him!

Laissez-faire, Supply-and-demand,--one begins to be weary of all that.
Leave all to egoism, to ravenous greed of money, of pleasure, of
applause:--it is the Gospel of Despair! Man _is_ a Patent-Digester,
then: only give him Free Trade, Free digesting-room; and each of us
digest what he can come at, leaving the rest to Fate! My unhappy
brethren of the Working Mammonism, my unhappier brethren of the Idle