[STEWART] THOMAS CARLYLE 23 



structed the steam-engine, fashioned the Lancashire canals, drained 

 the Lincoln fens, built Menai Bridge and Waterloo Bridge, all belonged 

 to those ranks which had so far been politically insignificant. Brindley 

 was the son of a Midland collier. Hargreaves was a handloom weaver. 

 Watt got his first notion of mechanical dexterity as he watched his 

 father planing at a carpenter's bench. No great sagacity was needed 

 to see that men who were doing so much for the nation's progress 

 would not long submit to be ruled by those who were merely pre- 

 serving game. 



Thus two social classes confronted each other in rivalry for public 

 domination, united only by a common resolve to keep the toiling 

 multitudes subservient. As George Meredith would have put it: 

 "There were names historic, and names mushroomic; names, which 

 the Conqueror might have called on his muster roll, names that had 

 been clearly tossed into the upper stratum of civilised life by a mill- 

 wheel or an office stool." But, alas, there were other names too, 

 names of which hardly any man dared to make mention, but which 

 everyone knew to be reckonable by millions, names notable neither 

 in history nor in mechanical invention, but very notable indeed for a 

 sustained patience in suffering, and a slow-growing but all the more 

 inexorable resolve that — in Carlyle's later words — if something were 

 not done something would before long do itself, and in a manner that 

 would please nobody. "With the working people again," wrote ous 

 prophet in dealing with eighteenth century France, "it is not so well 

 .... Unlucky! For there are from twenty to twenty-five millions 

 of them. Every unit of whom has his own heart and sorrows, stands 

 covered there with his own skin, and if you prick him he will bleed." 

 Was this explosion that of an anti-democrat ? Just the same warning 

 was issued in Past and Present to the England of Carlyle's own day. 



As the vice of the landed gentry had been idleness, so — as he saw 

 it — the vice of the middle class was Mammon worship, the glorification 

 of wealth, the denial of any sort of human relationship between them- 

 selves and their work-people, the acknowledgment of nothing more 

 than a "cash nexus." "Working Mammonism," indeed, he once said, 

 "is better than idle Dilletantism." But both were bad enough. 

 Uniting the two in a common denunciation, he fastens, as his custom 

 was, derisive names to them, to the latter "His Grace of Rack-rent," 

 and to the former "Plugson, Hunks, and Company, of Undershot." 



This disregard in practice of any duty from employer to workman, 

 except tha tof getting as much as he could extort in work for as little 

 as he could escape with paying, grounded itself upon the economic 

 doctrine of laissez-faire. The notion was that the state exists for no 



