Let us look at England for a moment, as she is to-day. She has built magnificent temples dedicated to her great god all over England: at Birmingham and Manchester, at Glasgow and Paisley; at Birkenhead and Liverpool, at Preston and Salford, at Leeds and Nottingham--and where not? England has become a great workshop in which the god of trade is ministered to.
Her land? Yes, it is beautiful, but her _yeoman have disappeared_--all have been drawn into the maw of the manufacturing monster. Forty millions of people now has England, and only some seven per cent. of them raise the food they eat. And how do the rest get their food? It is quite simple: by selling to other nations the things they make, and bringing back the food which other nations make.
It has been the boast of England that she had a larger population to the square mile--389 human bodies--than any other land except one, and more great cities than any other land but the "far Cathay"--if even she be an exception.
That "inspired idiot" Goldsmith once sang in his pretty, sentimental way,
Ill fares the land to hastening ills a prey, Where wealth accumulates and men decay: Princes and lords may flourish or may fade; A breath can make them as a breath has made: But a bold peasantry, their country's pride, When once destroyed, can never be supplied.
"Bold peasantry," "stalwart yeomen," "hard-handed farmers"--what preposterous phrases these seem now when we have the immense advantages of "cheap labor"!
And we here in America--we too? But of us, anon, anon.
Great factories, great halls, great shops, abound--abound and magnify that English land, so that a glamour has come over mankind, and moon-faced idiots in all lands have cried, "Behold the glory of England. Let us do likewise." Those great cities have glorified themselves and have glorified England, and who has cared to look deeper down into the mire? Have we seen these men and women, childhood and age, reeking in squalor and vile with filth in the purlieus of every temple? Have we looked into the slums of Liverpool and Glasgow, of Edinburgh and Newcastle, to see men and women, childhood and age, in all their divinity--or their damnation? Is all lovely--is it indeed? Is this "progress"? Is it civilization? Is it Christianity? Of course it is, all three.