Heavens
at all, on the inner Heart of Man at all; or on the respectable
Bucanier Logbook merely, for the convenience of bucaniering merely?
What a question;--whereat Westminster Hall shudders to its driest
parchment; and on the dead wigs each particular horsehair stands on
end!

The Laws of Laissez-faire, O Westminster, the laws of industrial
Captain and industrial Soldier, how much more of idle Captain and
industrial Soldier, will need to be remodelled, and modified, and
rectified in a hundred and a hundred ways,--and _not_ in the
Sliding-scale direction, but in the totally opposite one! With two
million industrial Soldiers already sitting in Bastilles, and five
million pining on potatoes, methinks Westminster cannot begin too
soon!--A man has other obligations laid on him, in God's Universe,
than the payment of cash: these also Westminster, if it will continue
to exist and have board-wages, must contrive to take some charge
of:--by Westminster or by another, they must and will be taken charge
of; be, with whatever difficulty, got articulated, got enforced, and
to a certain approximate extent put in practice. And, as I say, it
cannot be too soon! For Mammonism, left to itself, has become
Midas-eared; and with all its gold mountains, sits starving for want
of bread: and Dilettantism with its partridge-nets, in this extremely
earnest Universe of ours, is playing somewhat too high a game. 'A man
by the very look of him promises so much:' yes; and by the rent-roll
of him does he promise nothing?--

* * * * *

Alas, what a business will this be, which our Continental friends,
groping this long while somewhat absurdly about it and about it, call
'Organisation of Labour;'--which must be taken out of the hands of
absurd windy persons, and put into the hands of wise, laborious,
modest and valiant men, to begin with it straightway; to proceed with
it, and succeed in it more and more, if Europe, at any rate if
England, is to continue habitable much longer. Looking at the kind of
most noble Corn-Law Dukes or Practical _Duces_ we have, and also of
right reverend Soul-Overseers, Christian Spiritual _Duces_ 'on a
minimum of four thousand five hundred,' one's hopes are a little
chilled. Courage, nevertheless; there are many brave men in England!
My indomitable Plugson,--nay is there not even in thee some hope? Thou
art hitherto a Bucanier, as it was written and prescribed for thee by
an evil world: