them_, with
some rapidity into the dust-bin, and well out of one's road, I should
rather say. Fill your thrashing-floor with docks, ragweeds, mugworths,
and ply your flail upon them,--that is not the method to obtain sacks
of wheat. Away, you; begone swiftly, _ye_ regiments of the line: in the
name of God and of His poor struggling servants, sore put to it to
live in these bad days, I mean to rid myself of you with some degree of
brevity. To feed you in palaces, to hire captains and schoolmasters
and the choicest spiritual and material artificers to expend their
industries on you, No, by the Eternal! I have quite other work for that
class of artists; Seven-and-twenty Millions of neglected mortals who
have not yet quite declared for the Devil. Mark it, my diabolic friends,
I mean to lay leather on the backs of you, collars round the necks of
you; and will teach you, after the example of the gods, that this world
is _not_ your inheritance, or glad to see you in it. You, ye diabolic
canaille, what has a Governor much to do with you? You, I think, he
will rather swiftly dismiss from his thoughts,--which have the whole
celestial and terrestrial for their scope, and not the subterranean of
scoundreldom alone. You, I consider, he will sweep pretty rapidly into
some Norfolk Island, into some special Convict Colony or remote
domestic Moorland, into some stone-walled Silent-System, under hard
drill-sergeants, just as Rhadamanthus, and inflexible as he, and there
leave you to reap what you have sown; he meanwhile turning his endeavors
to the thousand-fold immeasurable interests of men and gods,--dismissing
the one extremely contemptible interest of scoundrels; sweeping that
into the cesspool, tumbling that over London Bridge, in a very brief
manner, if needful! Who are you, ye thriftless sweepings of Creation,
that we should forever be pestered with you? Have we no work to do but
drilling Devil's regiments of the line?

If I had schoolmasters, my benevolent friend, do you imagine I would set
them on teaching a set of unteachables, who as you perceive have already
made up their mind that black is white,--that the Devil namely is the
advantageous Master to serve in this world? My esteemed Benefactor
of Humanity, it shall be far from me. Minds open to that particular
conviction are not the material I like to work upon. When once my
schoolmasters have gone over all the other classes of society from
top to bottom; and have no other sou