wandering banditti; obey, work, suffer, abstain, as all
of us have had to do: so shall you be useful in God's creation, so shall
you be helped to gain a manful living for yourselves; not otherwise than
so. Industrial Regiments [_Here numerous persons, with big wigs many
of them, and austere aspect, whom I take to be Professors of the Dismal
Science, start up in an agitated vehement manner: but the Premier
resolutely beckons them down again_]--Regiments not to fight the French
or others, who are peaceable enough towards us; but to fight the Bogs
and Wildernesses at home and abroad, and to chain the Devils of the Pit
which are walking too openly among us.

"Work, for you? Work, surely, is not quite undiscoverable in an Earth
so wide as ours, if we will take the right methods for it! Indigent
friends, we will adopt this new relation (which is _old_ as the world);
this will lead us towards such. Rigorous conditions, not to be violated
on either side, lie in this relation; conditions planted there by God
Himself; which woe will betide us if we do not discover, gradually more
and more discover, and conform to! Industrial Colonels, Workmasters,
Task-masters, Life-commanders, equitable as Rhadamanthus and inflexible
as he: such, I perceive, you do need; and such, you being once put under
law as soldiers are, will be discoverable for you. I perceive, with
boundless alarm, that I shall have to set about discovering such,--I,
since I am at the top of affairs, with all men looking to me. Alas, it
is my new task in this New Era; and God knows, I too, little other than
a red-tape Talking-machine, and unhappy Bag of Parliamentary Eloquence
hitherto, am far behind with it! But street-barricades rise everywhere:
the hour of Fate has come. In Connemara there has sprung a leak, since
the potato died; Connaught, if it were not for Treasury-grants and
rates-in-aid, would have to recur to Cannibalism even now, and Human
Society would cease to pretend that it existed there. Done this thing
must be. Alas, I perceive that if I cannot do it, then surely I shall
die, and perhaps shall not have Christian burial! But I already raise
near upon Ten Millions for feeding you in idleness, my nomadic friends;
work, under due regulations, I really might try to get of--[_Here
arises indescribable uproar, no longer repressible, from all manner
of Economists, Emancipationists, Constitutionalists, and miscellaneous
Professors of the Dismal Science, pretty nume