ightway, while the hours yet are!

Truly they are strange results to which this of leaving all to
'Cash;' of quietly shutting up the God's Temple, and gradually
opening wide-open the Mammon's Temple, with 'Laissez-faire, and
Every man for himself,'--have led us in these days! We have
Upper, speaking Classes, who indeed do 'speak' as never man spake
before; the withered flimsiness, the godless baseness and
barrenness of whose Speech might of itself indicate what kind of
Doing and practical Governing went on under it! For Speech is
the gaseous element out of which most kinds of Practice and
Performance, especially all kinds of moral Performance, condense
themselves, and take shape; as the one is, so will the other be.
Descending, accordingly, into the Dumb Class in its Stockport
Cellars and Poor-Law Bastilles, have we not to announce that they
also are hitherto unexampled in the History of Adam's Posterity?

Life was never a May-game for men: in all times the lot of the
dumb millions born to toil was defaced with manifold sufferings,
injustices, heavy burdens, avoidable and unavoidable; not play
at all, but hard work that made the sinews sore, and the heart
sore. As bond-slaves, _villani, bordarii, sochemanni,_ nay
indeed as dukes, earls and kings, men were oftentimes made weary
of their life; and had to say, in the sweat of their brow and of
their soul, Behold it is not sport, it is grim earnest, and our
back can bear no more! Who knows not what massacrings and
harryings there have been; grinding, long-continuing, unbearable
injustices,--till the heart had to rise in madness, and some _"Eu
Sachsen, nimith euer sachses,_ You Saxons, out with your gully-
knives then!" You Saxons, some 'arrestment,' partial 'arrestment
of the Knaves and Dastards' has become indispensable!--The page
of Dryasdust is heavy with such details.

And yet I will venture to believe that in no time, since the
beginnings of Society, was the lot of those same dumb millions of
toilers so entirely unbearable as it is even in the days now
passing over us. It is not to die, or even to die of hunger,
that makes a man wretched; many men have died; all men must
die,--the last exit of us all is in a Fire-Chariot of Pain. But
it is to live miserable we know not why; to work sore and yet
gain nothing; to be heart-worn, weary, yet isolated, unrelated,
girt in with a cold universal Laissez-faire: it is to die slowly
all our life long, impri