Let us now suppose that Mr Carlyle has succeeded in his quest after capable men--that he has fairly bolted his Noblest, like an overgrown badger, from the hole in which he lies presently concealed, and has surrounded him with a staff of the Nobler, including, we presume, the author of the Latter-day Pamphlets. Noblest and Nobler must now go to work in serious earnest, taking some order with the flabby monsters, laughing hyænas, predatory wolves, and blue, or blue and yellow devils, which abound in this New Era. What is the first step to be adopted? We find it in No. I.
We have transcribed already the commencement of the speech to be made by the new British Minister to the assembled paupers--let us hear a few sentences--
"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 Beerpot and the Devil, who is there that can emancipate a man in that predicament? Not a whole Reform Bill, a whole French Revolution executed for his behoof alone."
In this style, Noblest proceeds for a page or two, haranguing the unlucky paupers upon the principle that poverty is crime; taunting them with previous doles of Indian meal and money, and informing them that the Workhouses are thenceforward inexorably shut. Finally, he announces that they are to be embodied into industrial regiments, with proper officers; and marched off "to the Irish Bogs, to the vacant desolations of Connaught now falling into Cannibalism, to mis-tilled Connaught, to ditto Munster, Leinster, Ulster, I will lead you; to the English fox covers, furze-grown Commons, New Forests, Salisbury Plains; likewise to the Scotch Hillsides, and bare rushy slopes which as yet feed only sheep." All these are to be tilled by the slave regiments under the following penalties for recusancy. "Refuse to strike into it; shirk the heavy labour, disobey the rules--I will admonish and endeavour to incite you; if in vain, I will flog you; if still in vain, I will at last shoot you,--and make God's Earth, and the forlorn-hope in God's Battle, free of you. Understand it, I advise you!" O rare Thomas Carlyle!