advantage they can report, and their Doctors can: but in the
heart of them, if we go out of the dyspeptic stomach, what
increase of blessedness is there? Are they better, beautifuller,
stronger, braver? Are they even what they call 'happier? Do
they look with satisfaction on more things and human faces in
this God's Earth; do more things and human faces look with
satisfaction on them? Not so. Human faces gloom discordantly,
disloyally on one another. Things, if it be not mere cotton and
iron things, are growing disobedient to man. The Master Worker
is enchanted, for the present, like his Workhouse Workman;
clamours, in vain hitherto, for a very simple sort of 'Liberty:'
the liberty 'to buy where he finds it cheapest, to sell where he
finds it dearest.' With guineas jingling in every pocket, he was
no whit richer; but now, the very guineas threatening to vanish,
he feels that he is poor indeed. Poor Master Worker! And the
Master Unworker, is not he in a still fataller situation?
Pausing amid his game-preserves, with awful eye,--as he well may!
Coercing fifty-pound tenants; coercing, bribing, cajoling;
doing what he likes with his own. His mouth full of loud
futilities, and arguments to prove the excellence of his
Corn-law;* and in his heart the blackest misgiving, a desperate
half-consciousness that his excellent Corn-law is indefensible,
that his loud arguments for it are of a kind to strike men too
literally _dumb._

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[* Digital transcriber note: The "corn-law" that Carlyle
repeatedly refers to was an English sliding-scale tariff on
grain, which kept the price of bread artificially inflated.]
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