elpless involuntary
Cant, nay too often a cunning voluntary one: either way, a very
mournful Cant; the Voice not of Nature and Fact, but of
something other than these.

With all its miserable shortcomings, with its wars,
controversies, with its trades-unions, famine-insurrections,--it
is her Practical Material Work alone that England has to shew for
herself! This, and hitherto almost nothing more; yet actually
this. The grim inarticulate veracity of the English People,
unable to speak its meaning in words, has turned itself silently
on things; and the dark powers of Material Nature have answered:
Yes, this at least is true, this is not false! So answers
Nature. Waste desert-shrubs of the Tropical swamps have become
Cotton-trees; and here, under my furtherance, are verily woven
shirts,--hanging unsold, undistributed, but capable to be
distributed, capable to cover the bare backs of my children of
men. Mountains, old as the Creation, I have permitted to be
bored through: bituminous fuel-stores, the wreck of forests that
were green a million years ago,--I have opened them from my
secret rock-chambers, and they are yours, ye English. Your huge
fleets, steamships, do sail the sea: huge Indias do obey you;
from huge _New_ Englands and Antipodal Australias, comes profit
and traffic to this Old England of mine! So answers Nature. The
Practical Labour of England is _not_ a chimerical Triviality: it
is a Fact, acknowledged by all the Worlds; which no man and no
demon will contradict. It is, very audibly, though very
inarticulately as yet, the one God's Voice we have heard in these
two atheistic centuries.

And now to observe with what bewildering obscurations and
impediments all this as yet stands entangled, and is yet
intelligible to no man! How, with our gross Atheism, we hear it
not to be the Voice of God to us, but regard it merely as a Voice
of earthly Profit-and-Loss. And have a Hell in England,--the
Hell of not making money. And coldly see the all-conquering
valiant Sons of Toil sit enchanted, by the million, in their
Poor-Law Bastille, as if this were Nature's Law;--mumbling to
ourselves some vague janglement of Laissez-faire, Supply-and-
demand, Cash-payment the one nexus of man to man: Free-trade,
Competition, and Devil take the hindmost, our latest Gospel
yet preached!

As if, in truth, there were no God of Labour; as if godlike
Labour and brutal Mammonism were convertible terms. A seri