WHAT IS WRONG . WITH ENGLAND ?
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] Slit,—As you say, we came through the demoralization of the Nineteenth Century and if we have the will we shall come through our present distress. Your readers may like to have that former time made vivid for them by Carlyle's memorable words in Past and Present :- " The condition of England, on which many pamphlets are now in the course of publication, and many thoughts unpublished aro going on in every reflective head, is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, over seen in this world. England is full of wealth, of multifarious produces, supply for human want in every kind ; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows waving with yellow harvests : thick-studded with workshops. industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest and the willingest our Earth ever had ; these men are here; work they have done, the fruit they have realised is here, abunant, exuberanton every hand of us : and behold, some baleful fiat as of Enchantment has gone forth, saying, ' Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master- idlers ; none of you can touch it. no man of you shall be the better for it ; this is enchanted fruit ! ' On the poor workers such fiat falls first, in its rudest shape ; but on the rich master-workers too it falls ; neither can the rich master-idlers, nor any richest or highest man escape, but all are like to be brought low with it, and made ' poor' enough, in the money sense or a far fataler one. " Of these successful skilful workers some two millions, it is now counted, sit in Workhouses, Poor-law Prisons - or have out-door relief ' flung over the wall to them—the workhouse Bastille being filled to bursting, and the strong Poor-law broken asunder by a stronger. They sit there, these many months now ; their hope of deliverance as yet small. In workhouses, pleasantly so-named, because work cannot be done in them. Twelve-hundred-thousand workers in England alone ; their cunning right-hand lamed, lying idle in their sorrowful bosom ; their hopes, outlooks, share of this fair world, shut-in by narrow walls. They sit there, pent up, as in a kind of horrid enchantment ; glad to be imprisoned and enchanted, that they may not perish starved."
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