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"Your gallant battle-hosts and work-hosts will need to be made loyally yours; they must and will be regulated, methodically secured in their just share of conquest under you;-joined with you in veritable Brotherhood, Sonhood, by quite other and deeper ties than those of temporary day's wages! How would mere red-coated regiments, to say nothing of chivalries, fight for you if you could discharge them on the evening of battle, on payment of the stipulated shillings, and they discharge you on the morning of it! Chelsea Hospitals, pensions, promotions, rigorous lasting covenants on the one side and on the other, are indispensable even for a hired fighter. The Feudal Baron, how could he subsist with mere temporary mercenaries round him at sixpence a day ready to go over to the other side if sevenpence were offered? . . .

"Awake, ye noble workers, warriors in the one true war. Look around you. Your world-hosts are all in mutiny, in confusion, in destitution; on the eve of fiery wreck and madness! They will not march further for you, on the sixpence a day and supply-and-demand principle: they will not; nor ought they; nor can they. Ye shall reduce them to order; begin reducing them. To order, just subordination; noble loyalty in return for noble guidance. Their souls are driven nigh mad; let yours be sane and ever saner. Not as a bewildered, bewildering mob; but as a firm regimented mass, with real captains over them, will these men march any more. All human interests, combined human endeavors, and social growths in the world have, at a certain stage in their development, required organizing: and Work, the grandest of human interests, does now require it."

And this, in the brief chapter entitled "Permanence," put quite hypothetically, as though too dubious to be fully declared; and yet it is a thing which a few Captains of Industry have found quite practicable; a thing which we imagine many more must not long hence find not only practicable, but absolutely indispensable :

A FREE DESPOTISM.

"A question arises here: Whether in some ulterior, perhaps some not far-distant stage of this 'Chivalry of Labor,' your Master-Worker may not find it necessary and possible to grant his Worker's interest in his enterprise and theirs? so that it becomes in practical result what in essential fact and justice it ever is, a joint enterprise; all men, from the Chief Master down to the lowest Overseer and Operative, economically as well as loyally concerned for it?-Which question I do not answer. The answer, near or else far, is perhaps 'Yes'; and yet one knows the difficulties. Despotism is essential in most enterprises; I am told they do not tolerate 'freedom of debate' on board a Seventy-four; Republican Senate and Plebiscita would not answer well in Cotton-Mills. And yet observe there too: Freedom, not nomad's or ape's Freedom, but man's Freedom; this is indispensable. We must have it, and will have it. To reconcile Despotism with Freedom! Well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just rigorous as Destiny, but just, too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no Freedom at all but in obeying them. The way is already known, part of the way; and courage and some qualities are needed for walking on it!"

No new teaching this, but very old, and as true as old. The kingdom of heaven is such a despotism-a despotism not arbitrary, but founded upon those eternal principles of right which stand as laws not merely to the subjects, but, with all reverence be it said, as Wordsworth has said, to the infinite being and majesty of the Supreme Ruler himself. The essential problem of a state-call it what you will, kingdom, or commonwealth, or republic-is to find or have found for it a chief ruler who can and will be in some good measure such a despot, call him what you will-king, protector, or president; or, if you please, the Parliament or the Congress.

VII.

LETTERS AND SPEECHES OF OLIVER CROMWELL.

THE Life of Oliver Cromwell yet remains to be written. Carlyle's "Letters and Speeches of Cromwell," with its running commentary upon them, is the nearest present approximation to such a Life. This work was published in 1845, two years after the appearance of "Past and Present." We have already noted the almost apologetic manner in which in 1840, in his "Heroes and Hero-Worship," he ventures the opinion that Cromwell was 66 not a knave and a liar, but a genu

inely honest man." But at this time he had no adequate conception of the great Lord Protector. This is the aspect which he presented to Carlyle when he was composing those Lectures: "The great savage Baresark: he could write no euphuistic Monarchy of Man; did not speak, did not work with glib regularity; has no straight story to tell for himself anywhere. But he stood bare, not cased in euphuistic coat of mail; he grappled like a giant, face to face, heart to heart, with the naked truth of things! That, after all, is the sort of man for one. I plead guilty to valuing such a man beyond all other sorts of men. Smoothshaven Respectabilities not a few one finds, that are not good for much. Small thanks to a man for keeping his hands clean, who would not touch the work but with gloves on."

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Now, "Respectability," even in the lower sense in which Carlyle here uses the word, is a very good thing; at least it involves the absence of some very bad things; and "clean hands are not at all undesirable. Carlyle's father was a man whom no one would style other than respectable. England, in the times when Cromwell lived, had no more respectable men than the three great Johns: John Hampden, John Eliot, and John Milton. John Wesley and his brother Charles were eminently respectable men; George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were in every way respectable. A more respectable man than the

Apostle Paul, measured by any standard, never trod the earth. We imagine that Thomas Carlyle would not thank any one who should describe him as any other than the very "respectable" person which he has always been, from Kirkcaldy School, through Craigenputtoch, to Cheyne Row, where, if he did not "keep a gig,” he at least kept a horse for riding.

And when, after some four years of acquaintanceship at second or third hand with Cromwell, Carlyle came to know him better, he found him to be a very “respectable" sort of a man; so respectable, indeed, that it was not at all probable that he would like to be seen in company with sundry royal personages Stuarts, Guelphs, and the like. A question was mooted touching which Carlyle shall speak: "Being myself questioned in reference to the new Houses of Parliament, ‘Shall Cromwell have a statue there?' I had to answer with sorrowful dubiety: 'Cromwell? Side by side with a sacred Charles the Second, sacred George the Fourth, and the other sacred Charleses, Jameses, Georges, and Defenders of the Faith-I am afraid he wouldn't like it! Let us decide provisionally, No.""

of love.

The preparing of these volumes of Cromwell's "Letters and Speeches" was with Carlyle a labor He wished to clear the memory of Oliver from the obloquy which had been cast upon it, by presenting the authentic utterances of the man

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