will increase!" Yes, let them diminish the supply: but who are they? They are twenty-four millions of human individuals, scattered over a hundred and eighteen thousand square miles of space and more; weaving, delving, hammering, joinering; each unknown to his neighbor; each distinct within his own skin. They are not a kind of character that can take a resolution, and act on it, very readily. Smart Sally in our alley proves all too fascinating to brisk Tom in yours: can Tom be called on to make pause, and calculate the demand for labor in the British Empire first? Nay, if Tom did renounce his highest blessedness of life, and struggle and conquer like a Saint Francis of Assisi, what would it profit him or us? Seven millions of the finest peasantry do not renounce, but proceed all the more briskly; and with blue-visaged Hibernians instead of fair Saxon Tomsons and Sallysons, the latter end of that country is worse than the beginning. O wonderful Malthusian prophets! Millenniums are undoubtedly coming, must come one way or the other: but will it be, think you, by twenty millions of working people simultaneously striking work in that department; passing, in universal trades-union, a resolution not to beget any more till the labor-market become satisfactory? By Day and Night! they were indeed irresistible so; not to be compelled by law or war; might make their own terms with the richer classes, and defy the world!

A shade more rational is that of those other benefactors of the species, who counsel that in each parish, in some central locality, instead of the Parish Clergyman, there might be established some Parish Exterminator; or say a Reservoir of Arsenic, kept up at the public expense, free to all parishioners; for which Church the rates probably would not be grudged.Ah, it is bitter jesting on such a subject. One's heart is sick to look at the dreary chaos, and valley of Jehoshaphat, scattered with the limbs and souls of one's fellow-men; and no divine voice, only creaking of hungry vultures, inarticulate bodeful ravens, horn-eyed parrots that do articulate, proclaiming, Let these bones live!

Dante's Divina Commedia is called the mournfulest of books:

transcendent mistemper of the noblest soul; utterance of a boundless, godlike, unspeakable, implacable sorrow and protest against the world. But in Holywell Street, not long ago, we bought, for threepence, a book still mournfuler: the Pamphlet of one 66 Marcus," ," whom his poor Chartist editor and republisher calls the "Demon Author." This Marcus Pamphlet was the book alluded to by Stephens the Preacher Chartist, in one of his harangues: it proves to be no fable that such a book existed; here it lies, "Printed by John Hill, Black-horse Court, Fleet Street, and now reprinted for the instruction of the laborer, by William Dugdale, Holywell Street, Strand," the exasperated Chartist editor who sells it you for threepence. We have read Marcus; but his sorrow is not divine. We hoped he would turn out to have been in sport: ah no, it is grim earnest with him; grim as very death. Marcus is not a demon author at all: he is a benefactor of the species in his own kind; has looked intensely on the world's woes, from a Benthamee-Malthusian watch-tower, under a Heaven dead as iron; and does now, with much long-windedness, in a drawling, snuffling, circuitous, extremely dull, yet at bottom handfast and positive manner, recommend that all children of working people, after the third, be disposed of by "painless extinction." Charcoal-vapor and other methods exist. The mothers would consent, might be made to consent. Three children might be left living; or perhaps, for Marcus's calculations are not yet perfect, two and a half. There might be "beautiful cemeteries with colonnades and flower-pots," in which the patriot infanticide matrons might delight to take their evening walk of contemplation; and reflect what patriotesses they were, what a cheerful flowery world it was.

Such is the scheme of Marcus; this is what he, for his share, could devise to heal the world's woes. A benefactor of the species, clearly recognizable as such: the saddest scientific mortal we have ever in this world fallen in with; sadder even than poetic Dante. His is a no-godlike sorrow; sadder than the godlike. The Chartist editor, dull as he, calls him demon author, and a man set on by the Poor-Law Commissioners. What a black, godless, waste-struggling world, in this once

merry England of ours, do such pamphlets and such editors betoken! Laissez-faire and Malthus, Malthus and Laissezfaire: ought not these two at length to part company? Might we not hope that both of them had as good as delivered their message now, and were about to go their ways?

For all this of the "painless extinction," and the rest, is in a world where Canadian Forests stand unfelled, boundless Plains and Prairies unbroken with the plough; on the west and on the east green desert spaces never yet made white with corn; and to the overcrowded little western nook of Europe, our Terrestrial Planet, nine-tenths of it yet vacant or tenanted by nomades, is still crying, Come and till me, come and reap me! And in an England with wealth, and means for moving, such as no nation ever before had. With ships; with warships rotting idle, which, but bidden move and not rot, might bridge all oceans. With trained men, educated to pen and practise, to administer and act; briefless Barristers, chargeless Clergy, taskless Scholars, languishing in all court-houses, hiding in obscure garrets, besieging all antechambers, in passionate want of simply one thing, Work; -with as many Half-pay Officers of both Services, wearing themselves down in wretched tedium, as might lead an Emigrant host larger than Xerxes' was! Laissez-faire and Malthus positively must part company. Is it not as if this swelling, simmering, never-resting Europe of ours stood, once more, on the verge of an expansion without parallel; struggling, struggling like a mighty tree again about to burst in the embrace of summer, and shoot forth broad frondent boughs which would fill the whole earth? A disease; but the noblest of all, -as of her who is in pain and sore travail, but travails that she may be a mother, and say, Behold, there is a new Man born!

"True thou Gold-Hofrath," exclaims an eloquent satirical German of our acquaintance, in that strange Book of his,' "True thou Gold-Hofrath: too crowded indeed! Meanwhile what portion of this inconsiderable Terraqueous Globe have ye actually tilled and delved, till it will grow no more? How thick stands your population in the Pampas and Savannas of 1 Sartor Resartus, Library Edition, p. 223

America; round ancient Carthage, and in the interior of Africa; on both slopes of the Altaic chain, in the central Platform of Asia; in Spain, Greece, Turkey, Crim Tartary, the Curragh of Kildare? One man, in one year, as I have understood it, if you lend him earth, will feed himself and nine others. Alas, where now are the Hengsts and Alarics of our still-glowing, still-expanding Europe; who, when their home is grown too narrow, will enlist and, like fire-pillars, guide onwards those superfluous masses of indomitable living Valor; equipped, not now with the battle-axe and war-chariot, but with the steamengine and ploughshare? Where are they? Preserving their Game!"

PETITION ON THE COPYRIGHT BILL.1

[1839.]

To the Honorable the Commons of England in Parliament assembled, the Petition of Thomas Carlyle, a Writer of Books,

Humbly showeth,

That your petitioner has written certain books, being incited thereto by various innocent or laudable considerations, chiefly by the thought that said books might in the end be found to be worth something.

That your petitioner had not the happiness to receive from Mr. Thomas Tegg, or any Publisher, Republisher, Printer, Bookseller, Bookbuyer, or other the like man or body of men, any encouragement or countenance in writing of said books, or to discern any chance of receiving such; but wrote them by effort of his own and the favor of Heaven.

That all useful labor is worthy of recompense; that all honest labor is worthy of the chance of recompense; that the giving and assuring to each man what recompense his labor has actually merited, may be said to be the business of all Legislation, Polity, Government and Social Arrangement whatsoever among men; a business indispensable to attempt, impossible to accomplish accurately, difficult to accomplish without inaccuracies that become enormous, insupportable, and the parent of Social Confusions which never altogether end.

That your petitioner does not undertake to say what recompense in money this labor of his may deserve; whether it deserves any recompense in money, or whether money in any quantity could hire him to do the like.

That this his labor has found hitherto, in money or money's worth, small recompense or none; that he is by no means sure

1 The EXAMINER, April 7, 1839.