edom! The free men, if you could have understood it,
they are the wise men; the patient, self-denying, valiant; the Nobles
of the World; who can discern the Law of this Universe, what it is, and
piously _obey_ it; these, in late sad times, having cast you loose, you
are fallen captive to greedy sons of profit-and-loss; to bad and ever to
worse; and at length to Beer and the Devil. Algiers, Brazil or Dahomey
hold nothing in them so authentically _slave_ as you are, my indigent
incompetent friends!

"Good Heavens, and I have to raise some eight or nine millions annually,
six for England itself, and to wreck the morals of my working population
beyond all money's worth, to keep the life from going out of you: a
small service to you, as I many times bitterly repeat! Alas, yes; before
high Heaven I must declare it such. I think the old Spartans, who would
have killed you instead, had shown more 'humanity,' more of manhood,
than I thus do! More humanity, I say, more of manhood, and of sense for
what the dignity of man demands imperatively of you and of me and of us
all. We call it charity, beneficence, and other fine names, this brutish
Workhouse Scheme of ours; and it is but sluggish heartlessness, and
insincerity, and cowardly lowness of soul. Not 'humanity' or manhood,
I think; perhaps _ape_hood rather,--paltry imitancy, from the teeth
outward, of what our heart never felt nor our understanding ever saw;
dim indolent adherence to extraneous and extinct traditions; traditions
now really about extinct; not living now to almost any of us, and still
haunting with their spectralities and gibbering _ghosts_ (in a truly
baleful manner) almost all of us! Making this our struggling 'Twelfth
Hour of the Night' inexpressibly hideous!--

"But as for you, my indigent incompetent friends, I have to repeat with
sorrow, but with perfect clearness, what is plainly undeniable, and is
even clamorous to get itself admitted, that you are of the nature of
slaves,--or if you prefer the word, of _nomadic, and now even vagrant
and vagabond, servants that can find no master on those terms_;
which seems to me a much uglier word. Emancipation? You have been
'emancipated' with a vengeance! Foolish souls, I say the whole world
cannot emancipate you. Fealty to ignorant Unruliness, to gluttonous
sluggish Improvidence, to the Beer-pot and the Devil, who is there that
can emancipate a man in that predicament? Not a whole Reform Bill, a
whole French Revolut