Europe, slaves of the lamp!"--I admire a Nation which
fancies it will die if it do not undersell all other Nations, to
the end of the world. Brothers, we will cease to _under_sell
them; we will be content to _equal_-sell them; to be happy
selling equally with them! I do not see the use of underselling
them. Cotton-cloth is already two-pence a yard or lower; and
yet bare backs were never more numerous among us. Let inventive
men cease to spend their existence incessantly contriving how
cotton can be made cheaper; and try to invent, a little, how
cotton at its present cheapness could be somewhat justlier
divided among us! Let inventive men consider, Whether the Secret
of this Universe, and of Man's Life there, does, after all, as we
rashly fancy it, consist in making money? There is One God,
just, supreme, almighty: but is Mammon the name of him?--With a
Hell which means 'Failing to make money,' I do not think there is
any Heaven possible that would suit one well; nor so much as an
Earth that can be habitable long! 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 on Earth; 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.--Aye, 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.