The Horse,poor dumb four-footed fellow,he too has his private feelings,his affections,gratitudes;and deserves good usage;human master,without crime,shall treat him unjustly either,or recklessly lay on the whip where it is needed:--I am sure if I could make him "happy,"I should be willing to grant a small vote (in addition to the late twenty millions)for that object!
Him too you occasionally tyrannize over;and with bad result to yourselves,among others;using the leather in a tyrans unnecessary manner;withholding,or scantily furnishing,the oats and ventilated stabling that are due.Rugged horse-subduers,one fears they are a little tyrans at times."Am I a horse,and half-brother?"--To remedy which,so far as remediable,fancy--the horses all "emancipated;"restored to their primeval right of property in the grass of this Globe:turned out to graze in an independent supply-and-demand manner!So long as grass lasts,I dare say they are very happy,or think themselves so.And Farmer Hodge sallying forth,on a dry spring morning,with a sieve of oats in his hand,and agony of eager expectation in his heart,is he happy?Help me to plough this day,Black Dobbin:oats in full measure if thou wilt."Hlunh,-thank!"sts Black Dobbin;he prefers glorious liberty and the grass.
Bay Darby,wilt thou perhaps?"Hlunh!"--Gray Joan,then,my beautiful broad-bottomed mare,--O Heaven,she too answers Hlunh!
A quadruped of them will plough a stroke for me.Corn-crops are ended in this world!--For the sake,if of Hodge,then of Hodge's horses,one prays this benevolent practice might cease,and a new and better one try to begin.Small kindness to Hodge's horses to emancipate them!The fate of all emancipated horses is,sooner or later,inevitable.To have in this habitable Earth grass to eat,--in Black Jamaica gradually e,as in White Connemara already e;--to roam aimless,wasting the seedfields of the world;and be hunted home to Chaos,by the due watch-dogs and due hell-dogs,with such horrors of forsaken wretchedness as were never seen before!These things are sport;they are terribly true,in this country at this hour.
Between our Black West Indies and our White Ireland,between these two extremes of lazy refusal to work,and of famishing inability to find any work,what a world have we made of it,with our fierce Mammon-worships,and our benevolent philanderings,and idle godless senses of one kind and aher!
Supply-and-demand,Leave-it-alone,Voluntary Principle,Time will mend it:--till British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral;a hideous living Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive;such a Curtius'gulf,communicating with the Nether Deeps,as the Sun never saw till .These scenes,which the Morning Chronicle is bringing home to all minds of men,--thanks to it for a service such as Newspapers have seldom done,--ought to excite unspeakable reflections in every mind.Thirty thousand outcast Needlewomen working themselves swiftly to death;three million Paupers rotting in forced idleness,helping said Needlewomen to die:these are but items in the sad ledger of despair.
Thirty thousand wretched women,sunk in that putrefying well of abominations;they have oozed in upon London,from the universal Stygian quagmire of British industrial life;are accumulated in the well of the concern,to that extent.British charity is smitten to the heart,at the laying bare of such a scene;passionately undertakes,by emous subion of money,or by other emous effort,to redress that individual horror;as Iand all men hope it may.But,alas,what next?This general well and cesspool once baled clean out to-day,will begin before night to fill itself anew.The universal Stygian quagmire is still there;opulent in women ready to be ruined,and in men ready.
Towards the same sad cesspool will these waste currents of human ruin ooze and gravitate as heretofore;except in draining the universal quagmire itself there is remedy."And for that,what is the method?"cry many in an angry manner.To whom,for the present,I answer only,"'emancipation,'it would seem,my friends;the cutting loose of human ties,something far the reverse of that!"Many things have been written about shirtmaking;but here perhaps is the saddest thing of all,written anywhere till ,that I k of.Shirts by the thirty thousand are made at twopence-halfpenny each;and in the mean while needlewoman,distressed or other,can be procured in London by any housewife to give,for fair wages,fair help in sewing.Ask any thrifty house-mother,high or low,and she will answer.In high houses and in low,there is the same answer:real needlewoman,"distressed"or other,has been found attainable in any of the houses I frequent.Imaginary needlewomen,who demand considerable wages,and have a deepish appetite for beer and viands,I hear of everywhere;but their sewing proves too often a distracted puckering and botching;sewing,only the fallacious hope of it,a fond imagination of the mind.Good sempstresses are to be hired in every village;and in London,with its famishing thirty thousand,at all,or hardly,--Is government beautiful in human business?To such length has the Leave-alone principle carried it,by way of organizing labor,in this affair of shirtmaking.Let us hope the Leave-alone principle has got its apotheosis;and taken wing towards higher regions than ours,to deal henceforth with a class of affairs more appropriate for it!
