Laws fall dead, cannot
continue. That it has continued now a moderate while; has, for
the last fifty years, been rapidly attaining its state of
perfection. That it will have to find its duties and do them;
or else that it must and will cease to be seen on the face of
this Planet, which is a Working one, not an Idle one.

Alas, alas, the Working Aristocracy, admonished by Trades-unions,
Chartist conflagrations, above all by their own shrewd sense kept
in perpetual communion with the fact of things, will assuredly
reform themselves, and a working world will still be possible:--
but the fate of the Idle Aristocracy, as one reads its horoscope
hitherto in Corn-Laws and such like, is an abyss that fills one
with despair. Yes, my rosy fox-hunting brothers, a terrible
_Hippocratic look_ reveals itself (God knows, not to my joy)
through those fresh buxom countenances of yours. Through your
Corn-Law Majorities, Sliding-Scales, Protecting-Duties, Bribery-
Elections and triumphant Kentish-fires a thinking eye discerns
ghastly images of ruin, too ghastly for words; a handwriting as
of MENE, MENE? Men and brothers, on your Sliding-scale you seem
sliding, and to have slid,--you little know whither! Good God!
did not a French Donothing Aristocracy, hardly above half a
century ago, declare in like manner, and in its featherhead
believe in like manner, "We cannot exist, and continue to dress
and parade ourselves, on the just rent of the soil of France;
but we must have farther payment than rent of the soil, we must
be exempted from taxes too,"--we must have a Corn-Law to extend
our rent? This was in 1789: in four years more--Did you look
into the Tanneries of Meudon, and the long-naked making for
themselves breeches of human skins! May the merciful Heavens
avert the omen; may we be wiser, that so we be less wretched.

A High Class without duties to do is like a tree planted on
precipices; from the roots of which all the earth has been
crumbling. Nature owns no man who is not a Martyr withal. Is
there a man who pretends to live luxuriously housed up; screened
from all work, from want, danger, hardship, the victory over
which is what we name work;--he himself to sit serene, amid down-
bolsters and appliances, and have all his work and battling done
by other men? And such man calls himself a _noble_-man? His
fathers worked for him, he says; or successfully gambled for
him: here _he_ sits; professes, not in sorrow