Parliament, Aristocracy, Millocracy, or
Member of the Governing Class, condemn with much triumph this small
specimen of 'remedial measures;' or ask again, with the least anger,
of this Editor, What is to be done, How that alarming problem of the
Working Classes is to be managed? Editors are not here, foremost of
all, to say How. A certain Editor thanks the gods that nobody pays him
three hundred thousand pounds a year, two hundred thousand, twenty
thousand, or any similar sum of cash for saying How;--that his wages
are very different, his work somewhat fitter for him. An Editor's
stipulated work is to apprise _thee_ that it must be done. The 'way to
do it,'--is to try it, knowing that thou shalt die if it be not done.
There is the bare back, there is the web of cloth; thou shalt cut me a
coat to cover the bare back, thou whose trade it is. 'Impossible?'
Hapless Fraction, dost thou discern Fate there, half unveiling herself
in the gloom of the future, with her gibbet-cords, her steel-whips,
and very authentic Tailor's Hell; waiting to see whether it is
'possible'? Out with thy scissors, and cut that cloth or thy own
windpipe!

FOOTNOTES:

[28] Goethe, _Wilhelm Meister_.

CHAPTER IV.

CAPTAINS OF INDUSTRY.

If I believed that Mammonism with its adjuncts was to continue
henceforth the one serious principle of our existence, I should reckon
it idle to solicit remedial measures from any Government, the disease
being insusceptible of remedy. Government can do much, but it can in
no wise do all. Government, as the most conspicuous object in Society,
is called upon to give signal of what shall be done; and, in many
ways, to preside over, further, and command the doing of it. But the
Government cannot do, by all its signaling and commanding, what the
Society is radically indisposed to do. In the long-run every
Government is the exact symbol of its People, with their wisdom and
unwisdom; we have to say, Like People like Government.--The main
substance of this immense Problem of Organising Labour, and first of
all of Managing the Working Classes, will, it is very clear, have to
be solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it; by those
who themselves work and preside over work. Of all that can be enacted
by any Parliament in regard to it, the germs must already lie
potentially extant in those two Classes, who are to obey such
enactment. A Human Chaos _in_ which there is no light, you vainly
attempt to i