Thomas Carlyle
“Captains of Industry” (From Past and Present, 1843)
“If I believed that Mammonism with its adjuncts was to continue
henceforth the one serious principle of our existence, I should
reckon it idle to solicit remedial measures from any Government,
the disease being insusceptible of remedy. Government can do
much, but it can in no wise do all. Government, as the most
conspicuous object in Society, is called upon to give signal of
what shall be done; and, in many ways, to preside over, further,
and command the doing of it. But the Government cannot do, by
all its signalling and commanding, what the Society is radically
indisposed to do.
In the long-run every Government is the exact
symbol of its People, with their wisdom and unwisdom; we have to
say, Like People like Government.
The main substance of this
immense Problem of Organising Labour, and first of all of
Managing the Working Classes, will, it is very clear, have to be
solved by those who stand practically in the middle of it; by
those who themselves work and preside over work. Of all that can
be enacted by any Parliament in regard to it, the germs must
already lie potentially extant in those two Classes, who are to
obey such enactment. A Human Chaos in which there is no light,
you vainly attempt to irradiate by light shed on it: order never
can arise there.
But it is my firm conviction that the ‘Hell of England’ will
cease to be that of ‘not making money;’ that we shall get a
nobler Hell and a nobler Heaven! I anticipate light in the
Human Chaos, glimmering, shining more and more; under manifold
true signals from without That light shall shine. Our deity no
longer being Mammon,– O Heavens, each man will then say to
himself: “Why such deadly haste to make money? I shall not go
to Hell, even if I do not make money! There is another Hell, I
am told!” Competition, at railway-speed, in all branches of
commerce and work will then abate: good felt-hats for the head,
in every sense, instead of seven-feet lath-and-plaster hats on
wheels, will then be discoverable! Bubble-periods, with their
panics and commercial crises, will again become infrequent;
steady modest industry will take the place of gambling
speculation. To be a noble Master, among noble Workers, will
again be the first ambition with some few; to be a rich Master
only the second. How the Inventive Genius of England, with the
whirr of its bobbins and billy-rollers shoved somewhat into the
backgrounds of the brain, will contrive and devise, not cheaper
produce exclusively, but fairer distribution of the produce at
its present cheapness! By degrees, we shall again have a Society
with something of Heroism in it, something of Heaven’s Blessing
on it; we shall again have, as my German friend asserts,
‘instead of Mammon-Feudalism with unsold cotton-shirts and
Preservation of the Game, noble just Industrialism and Government
by the Wisest!’
It is with the hope of awakening here and there a British man to
know himself for a man and divine soul, that a few words of
parting admonition, to all persons to whom the Heavenly Powers
have lent power of any kind in this land, may now be addressed.
And first to those same Master-Workers, Leaders of Industry; who
stand nearest, and in fact powerfulest, though not most
prominent, being as yet in too many senses a Virtuality rather
than an Actuality.
The Leaders of Industry, if Industry is ever to be led, are
virtually the Captains of the World; if there be no nobleness in
them, there will never be an Aristocracy more. But let the
Captains of Industry consider: once again, are they born of
other clay than the old Captains of Slaughter; doomed forever to
be no Chivalry, but a mere gold-plated Doggery,– what the
French well name Canaille, ‘Doggery’ with more or less gold
carrion at its disposal? Captains of Industry are the true
Fighters, henceforth recognisable as the only true ones:
Fighters against Chaos, Necessity and the Devils and Jotuns; and
lead on Mankind in that great, and alone true, and universal
warfare; the stars in their courses fighting for them, and all
Heaven and all Earth saying audibly, Well-done! Let the Captains
of Industry retire into their own hearts, and ask solemnly, If
there is nothing but vulturous hunger, for fine wines, valet
reputation and gilt carriages, discoverable there? Of hearts
made by the Almighty God.
I will not believe such a thing. Deep-hidden under wretchedest
god-forgetting Cants, Epicurisms, Dead-Sea Apisms; forgotten as
under foulest fat Lethe mud and weeds, there is yet, in all
hearts born into this God’s-World, a spark of the Godlike
slumbering. Awake, O nightmare sleepers; awake, arise, or be
forever fallen! This is not playhouse poetry; it is sober fact.
Our England, our world cannot live as it is. It will connect
itself with a God again, or go down with nameless throes and
fire-consummation to the Devils. Thou who feelest aught of such
a Godlike stirring in thee, any faintest intimation of it as
through heavy-laden dreams, follow it, I conjure thee. Arise,
save thyself, be one of those that save thy country.”
erringarabesque 