without praise, and nearly without
bread, fulfilling his task as your horses drag your carts, hopeless,
and spurned of all; these are the men by whom England lives; but they
are not the nation; they are only the body and nervous force of it,
acting still from old habit in a convulsive perseverance, while the
mind is gone. Our National wish and purpose are to be amused; our
National religion is the performance of church ceremonies, and
preaching of soporific truths (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at
work, while we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amusement is
fastening on us as a feverous disease of parched throat and wandering
eyes--senseless, dissolute, merciless. How literally that word
_Dis_-Ease; the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expresses the
entire moral state of our English Industry and its Amusements!

39. When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their
work, as the color-petals out of a fruitful flower;--when they are
faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become steady,
deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural pulse of the
body. But now, having no true business, we pour our whole masculine
energy into the false business of money-making; and having no true
emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for us to play with,
not innocently, as children with dolls, but guiltily and darkly, as the
idolatrous Jews with their pictures on cavern walls, which men had to
dig to detect. The justice we do not execute, we mimic in the novel
and on the stage; for the beauty we destroy in nature, we substitute
the metamorphosis of the pantomime, and (the human nature of us
imperatively requiring awe and sorrow of some kind) for the noble grief
we should have borne with our fellows, and the pure tears we should
have wept with them, we gloat over the pathos of the police court, and
gather the night-dew of the grave.

40. It is difficult to estimate the true significance of these things;
the facts are frightful enough;--the measure of national fault involved
in them is, perhaps, not as great as it would at first seem. We
permit, or cause, thousands of deaths daily, but we mean no harm; we
set fire to houses, and ravage peasants' fields; yet we should be sorry
to find we had injured anybody. We are still kind at heart; still
capable of virtue, but only as children are. Chalmers, at the end of
his long life, having had much power with the publi