pride, would all be alike impossible, but for those whom you scorn
or forget. The policeman, who is walking up and down the black lane
all night to watch the guilt you have created there; and may have
his brains beaten out, and be maimed for life, at any moment, and
never be thanked; the sailor wrestling with the sea's rage; the
quiet student poring over his book or his vial; the common worker,
without praise, and nearly without bread, fulfilling his task as
your horses drag your carts, hopeless, and spurned of all: these
are the men by whom England lives; but they are not the nation; they
are only the body and nervous force of it, acting still from old
habit in a convulsive perseverance, while the mind is gone. Our
National wish and purpose are only to be amused; our National
religion is the performance of church ceremonies, and preaching of
soporific truth (or untruths) to keep the mob quietly at work, while
we amuse ourselves; and the necessity for this amusement is
fastening on us, as a feverous disease of parched throat and
wandering eyes--senseless, dissolute, merciless. How literally that
word DIS-Ease, the Negation and impossibility of Ease, expresses the
entire moral state of our English Industry and its Amusements!

When men are rightly occupied, their amusement grows out of their
work, as the colour-petals out of a fruitful flower;--when they are
faithfully helpful and compassionate, all their emotions become
steady, deep, perpetual, and vivifying to the soul as the natural
pulse to the body. But now, having no true business, we pour our
whole masculine energy into the false business of money-making; and
having no true emotion, we must have false emotions dressed up for
us to play with, not innocently, as children with dolls, but
guiltily and darkly, as the idolatrous Jews with their pictures on
cavern walls, which men had to dig to detect. The justice we do not