Macaulay on James Mill's Essay on Government

A good swingeing review fulfills the need for righteous indignation against that family of whited sepulchers the Mills, daddy James and son John Stuart. Mill père was the larger more slow moving target of young Thomas Babington Macaulay’s essay in the Edinburgh Review of 1829. The occasion for this birching was the publication of On Government. Whereas the book itself is worthless, the review is priceless and a model of sustained mockery and reductio.

But we do not see that, by reasoning a priori on such subjects as these, it is possible to advance one single step. We know that every man has some desires which he can gratify only by hurting his neighbours, and some which he can gratify only by pleasing them. Mr. Mill has chosen to look only at one-half of human nature, and to reason on the motives which impel men to oppress and despoil others, as if they were the only motives by which men could possibly be influenced. We have already shown that, by taking the other half of the human character, and reasoning on it as if it were the whole, we can bring out a result diametrically opposite to that at which Mr. Mill has arrived. We can, by such a process, easily prove that any form of government is good, or that all government is superfluous.

James did not reply which John Stuart thought a mistake and sought retrospective payback in the publication year of Macaulay’s volumes 3 & 4 History of England(1855). He referred to him as:

an intellectual dwarf—rounded off and stunted, full grown broad and short, without a germ of principle of further growth in his whole being.

That’s not nice. It causes harm unguided by principle and it’s hurtful and gives rise to mirth and a hope of a delightful literary feud. What Macaulay found objectionable and self contradictory in the Essay on Government was the universal emphasis on plunder being the chief desire and aim of all classes of society. That’s obvious nonsense of course but understandable when one remembers that Mill presided over India House the head office of the East India Company. With them the white man’s burden was all the swag they could carry. In later days the imperialist Macaulay worried that American democracy would enable the poor to plunder the rich and very likely bring the defense of property through a strong military government.

In his final paragraph on the Benthamite sect:

But, on the whole, they might have chosen worse. They may as well be Utilitarians as jockeys or dandies. And, though quibbling about self-interest and motives, and objects of desire, and the greatest happiness of the greatest number, is but a poor employment for a grown man, it certainly hurts the health less than hard drinking and the fortune less than high play; it is not much more laughable than phrenology, and is immeasurably more humane than cock-fighting.

Find the fun at:
Macaulay on Mill

Henry Sidgwick's Esoteric Morality

Was Henry Sidgwick a twister by which I mean a low, dishonest fellow given to schemes and strategems? Yes, I would answer but a principled one.

It appears to me, therefore, that the cases in which practical doubts are likely to arise, as to whether exceptions should be permitted from ordinary rules on Utilitarian principles, will mostly be those which I discussed in the first paragraph of this section: where the exceptions are not claimed for a few individuals, on the mere ground of their probable fewness, but either for persons generally under exceptional circumstances, or for a class of persons defined by exceptional qualities of intellect, temperament, or character. In such cases the Utilitarian may have no doubt that in a community consisting generally of enlightened Utilitarians, these grounds for exceptional ethical treatment would be regarded as valid; still he may, as I have said, doubt whether the more refined and complicated rule which recognises such exceptions is adapted for the community in which he is actually living; and whether the attempt to introduce it is not likely to do more harm by weakening current morality than good by improving its quality. Supposing such a doubt to arise, either in a case of this kind, or in one of the rare cases discussed in the preceding paragraph, it becomes necessary that the Utilitarian should consider carefully the extent to which his advice or example are likely to influence persons to whom they would be dangerous: and it is evident that the result of this consideration may depend largely on the degree of publicity which he gives to either advice or example. Thus, on Utilitarian principles, it may be right to do and privately recommend, under certain circumstances, what it would not be right to advocate openly; it may be right to teach openly to one set of persons what it would be wrong to teach to others; it may be conceivably right to do, if it can be done with comparative secrecy, what it would be wrong to do in the face of the world; and even, if perfect secrecy can be reasonably expected, what it would be wrong to recommend by private advice or example. These conclusions are all of a paradoxical character: there is no doubt that the moral consciousness of a plain man broadly repudiates the general notion of an esoteric morality, differing from that popularly taught; and it would be commonly agreed that an action which would be bad if done openly is not rendered good by secrecy. We may observe, however, that there are strong utilitarian reasons for maintaining generally this latter common opinion; for it is obviously advantageous, generally speaking, that acts which it is expedient to repress by social disapprobation should become known, as otherwise the disapprobation cannot operate; so that it seems inexpedient to support by any moral encouragement the natural disposition of men in general to conceal their wrong doings; besides that the concealment would in most cases have importantly injurious effects on the agent’s habits of veracity. Thus the Utilitarian conclusion, carefully stated, would seem to be this; that the opinion that secrecy may render an action right which would not otherwise be so should itself be kept comparatively secret; and similarly it seems expedient that the doctrine that esoteric morality is expedient should itself be kept esoteric. Or if this concealment be difficult to maintain, it may be desirable that Common Sense should repudiate the doctrines which it is expedient to confine to an enlightened few.

(from The Methods of Ethics)


His student and later brother-in-law Arthur Balfour as Prime Minister followed this crooked line in relation to Irish Home Rule. Henry was in agreement with him and would have had his ear. This is the same Balfour who promulgated the Declaration which gave Zionists a carte blanche. But that was after Henry’s time. When reading that esoteric morality dodge which has the true Platonic stink I begin to feel doubts coming on about Sidgwick’s busting of subscription, to the 39 Articles that is, which you had to aver to be granted a fellowship. Leslie Stephen renounced his fellowship in 1865 due to religious doubts. Charles Darwin bowled him out. As I recall from Noel Annan’s intellectual biography he had to survive on scraps thereafter and went on to literary journalism after a time. In 1869 Sidgwick renounced his fellowship and all its works and pomps but retained a lectureship. In 1871 the requirement of subscription was dropped. Was Sidgwick the precipitating factor? Had he perhaps an inkling that it about to collapse under the weight of hypocrisy? This was a beautiful moment to make a Socratic gesture and write an Apology. His book The Ethics of Conformity and Subscription was written in 1870: a noble document full of nice distinctions and sublime casuistry.

In regards to colonial policy the plain man’s common sense of the time required no special understanding. One simply had to accept the white man’s burden “without a pedantic adhesion to the forms of civilized judicial procedure”.

Carlyle and Mill on Forced Labour and Indian Indentured Labour

I’ve written before on Carlyle’s Negro Question that ranting rantipole document in which various rebarbative remedies are proffered to solve the plight of the sugar plantations in the West Indies. The former slaves you see had taken to growing pumpkins, his metaphor for subsistence farming, on the uplands. Sure beats cuttin’ cane. No, wrote T.C. they should be pressed to really work the land for high value crops because if they don’t they forfeit the right to occupy it. They are not taking out of it the good that God put into it. (One notes that similar dispossession was justified in South Africa and Israel etc. We made something of this land which was being wasted by ..... T.C. was a supporter of mass immigration.) If they don’t then the West Indies will become another Ireland unable to sustain a growing population. The dismal science, his name for the political economy of the day, held that there should be no interference with the market or classic laissez faire. In the end things would sort themselves out. Both at home and abroad Carlyle was for active intervention when things became stagnant.

His pressed labour was not a novel proposition. In Africa all the colonial powers used it. The French corvee system in Algeria is well known, railways and roads were built with it. The British used it. Workfare is a form of it if you look at from a certain angle i.e. as a cure for laziness especially that of blacks. Compulsory training or withdrawal of social welfare is another strategy which does not compete with paid labour. The idea mutates like a virus.

Naturally the anti-slavery groups were incensed by this return to quasi slavery. John Stuart Mill was one of their spokesmen. He wrote a counter pamphlet against The Negro Question. I have always felt that Mill was a hypocrite considering his high position in the East India Company. He retired from it in 1858. I have been reading about Indian indentured labour during his period at India House. What is remarkable is that no one asks how Mill justified this transfer of Indians to the West Indies to work the sugar plantationd using a pittance which to a poverty stricken populace might be a lure. How did Mill square that circle? (Note the irony of the replacement of pure chattel slavery with bond slavery, that ongoing Indian running sore.)

It is, perhaps, hardly necessary to say that this doctrine is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties. We are not speaking of children, or of young persons below the age which the law may fix as that of manhood or womanhood. Those who are still in a state to require being taken care of by others, must be protected against their own actions as well as against external injury. For the same reason, we may leave out of consideration those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage. The early difficulties in the way of spontaneous progress are so great, that there is seldom any choice of means for overcoming them; and a ruler full of the spirit of improvement is warranted in the use of any expedients that will attain an end, perhaps otherwise unattainable. Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improvement, and the means justified by actually effecting that end. Liberty, as a principle, has no application to any state of things anterior to the time when mankind have become capable of being improved by free and equal discussion.

(from Liberty by John Stuart Mill)

His mind was clouded by imperialist racist colonial presumptions which are still current. That they were obvious in the case of Carlyle whose demand that something, anything, be done amounted to decerebrate flailing makes Mill a smoother fraud but not I suggest a better man.

some links:indian indentured labour

impeialist Mill

Mill on Liberty

Mill and Carlyle debate and articles

documentary movie on how britain reinvented slavery

The Letter and Memorials of Jane Welsh Carlyle

Mrs.C: - Bout’ ye Mr.C
Mr.C: - Can’t complain Mrs.C.
Mrs.C: - Try harder Mr. C.
Mr.C: - Now is desolation made more desolate and the treacherous phare of mine enemy has brought me to the rocks and ruin.
Mrs.C: - How so Mr.C?
Mr.C: - This toast stinks of smoking sea coal. Can they not light the fire in the range earlier to get good hot embers before the toast is plied to it. This is Stygian. Besides I didn’t get a wink of sleep last night. There was a cat running up and down the garden wall. And the porridge. Have we run out of good East Lothian oats?
Mrs.C: - The history of Frederick the Great of Prussia has laid waste to this house. Twelve years on it and only 5 books written. One more will complete it and finish me.

That last sentence nor any like it was never uttered before Mr. C(arlyle). She, Jean Welsh Carlyle, always referred to him as such in her many letters in which the complexity of ministration to her husband was mentioned. As Frederick waxed she waned. In the end he had a posthumous victory and Thomas Carlyle only became aware of her suffering after she died. This knowledge came to him through the reading of her journal. However others realized this and made sure that she had regular spells of time away from him to recover. John Stewart Collis in his book on their marriage The Carlyles maintains that fond absence was the glue that kept them together. So she married a genius and that is what she got dyspepsia, insomnia, moaning in the gloaming with a lassie by my side and all. Her letters were not a valve for venting but genuine warm communication with her friends and family.

In the opening letter of Vol.3 J.W.C.

My dear Miss Barnes,—How nice of you to have written me a letter,' all out of your own head' (as the children say), and,'how very nice of you to have remarked the forget-me-not, and read a meaning in it! It was certainly with intention I tied up some forget-me-nots along with my farewell roses ; but I was far from sure of your recognising the intention, and at the same time not young enough to make it plainer. Sentiment, you see, is not well looked on by the present generation of women; there is a growing taste for fastness, or, still worse, for strong-mindedness ! so a discreet woman (like me) will beware always of putting her sentiment (when she has any) in evidence—will rather leave it—as in the forget-me-not case—to be divined through sympathy; and failing the sympathy, to escape notice.
And you are actually going to get married! you ! already ! And you expect me to congratulate you ! or ' perhaps not.' I admire the judiciousness of that 'perhaps not.' Frankly, my dear, I wish you all happiness in the new life that is opening to you ; and you are marrying under good auspices, since your father approves of the marriage. But congratulation on such occasions seems to me a tempting of Providence. The triumphal-procession-air which, in our manners and customs, is given to marriage at the outset—that singing of Te Deum before the battle has begun—has, ever since I could reflect, struck me as somewhat senseless and somewhat impious. If ever one is to pray—if ever one is to feel grave and anxious—if ever one is to shrink from vain show and vain babble—surely it is just on the occasion of two human beings binding themselves to one another, for better and for worse, till death part them; just on that occasion which it is customary to celebrate only with rejoicings, and congratulations, and trousseaux, and white ribbon! Good God !

Frederick the Great was casting his curse on her marriage. Thomas Carlyle in a note to Letter 214 writes:

In October, after getting home, there was a determined" onslaught made on ' Frederick,' an attempt (still in the way of youth—16 rather than 60!) to vanquish by sheer force the immense masses of incondite or semi-condite rubbish which had "accumulated on ' Frederick,' that is, to let the printer straightway drive me through it!—a most fond and foolish notion, which indeed I myself partly knew, durst I have confessed it, to be foolish and even impossible! But this was the case all along; I never once said to myself, 4 All those chaotic mountains, wide as the world, high as the stars, dismal as Lethe, Styx, and Phlegethon, did mortal ever see the like of it for size and for quality in the rubbish way? All this thou wilt have to take into thee, to roast and smelt in the furnace of thy own poor soul till thou fairly smelt the grains of gold out of it!' No, though dimly knowing all this, I durst not openly know it (indeed, how could I otherwise ever have undertaken such a subject ?) ; and I had got far on with the unutterable enterprise, before I did clearly admit that such was verily proving, and would, on to the finis, prove to have been the terrible part of this affair, affair which I must now conquer tale quale, or else perish! This first attempt of October-February, 1859 —-1860 (after dreadful tugging at the straps), was given up by her serious advices, which I could not but admit to be true as well as painful and humiliating! November 1860 had arrived before there was any further printing: nothing thenceforth but silent pulling at a dead lift, which lasted four or five years more.
My darling must have suffered much in all this; how much! I sometimes thought how cruel it was on her, to whom ‘Frederick' was literally nothing except through me, so cruel, alas, alas, and yet inevitable ! Never once in her deepest misery did she hint, by word or sign, what she too was suffering under that score ; me only did she ever seem to pity in it, the heroic, the thrice noble, and wholly loving soul!

It is a curious fact that three Victorian sage writers, Ruskin, Mill and Carlyle, with more remedies than Boots the Chemist, had serious trouble in the trousers department. All the rest of us have to do is hang them up on a convenient nail. Meanwhile back in Vienna.....

Find Vol.3 at letters J.W.C.

Thomas Carlyle and the Negro Question

My previous post on this topic is
negro question
Carlyle's Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question.


Today I was reading in the blog of a Carlyle scholar who criticises the use of the term 'nigger' in the work of Thomas Carlyle. He is aware that there is a certain anachronism involved, but he insists that by the start of the 19th. century things were changing and polite society represented by such as John Stuart Mill used the term 'negro'. There is an irony there in that Mill and his father worked in India House the H.Q. of the colonial plunder and the swag that was the white man's burden. One recalls too that Mill fils took a dim view of helping the Irish during the Famine. Offering this whited sepulchre as an example of probity is ironic.

However the fierceness of Carlyle's scorn in his Discourse on the Negro Question and his apparent support of slavery as superior to anarchic idleness has an unlikely supporter in Leslie Stephen. Writing on Carlyle's Ethics.

It shocks one to find an open advocacy of slavery for black Quashee. But we must admit, and admit for the reasons given by Carlyle, that even slavery may be better than sheer anarchy and barbarism; that, historically speaking, the system of slavery represents a necessary stage in civilisation ; and therefore that the simple abolition of slavery—a recognition of unconditional " right" without reference to the possession of the instincts necessary for higher kinds of society—might be disguised cruelty. The error was in the hasty assumption that his Quashee was, in fact, in this degraded state; and the haste to accept this disheartening belief was but too characteristic. That liberty might mean barbarism was true; that it actually did mean it in certain given cases was a rash assumption too much in harmony with his ordinary aversion to the theorists of his time.

Stephen's father Sir Joseph was the Colonial Undersecretary of State and a noted abolitionist. More irony there. A brother was a legal aide to the Council of State in Delhi. Compartments were hermetically sealed, one from the other.

Text for the Day:

Cleanse your hands, ye sinners; and purify your hearts, ye double minded.

May i add that I understand perfectly that a young academic would want to draw a cordon sanitaire around Carlyle on this question

Mill on the Irish Question / Carlyle on the Negro Question

((cogged from Henry Farrell/Crooked Timber))
Millian Liberalism

But the Irish peasant: what of him? Is he a similar paragon of industry, providence, self-reliance, and the other virtues of that mythological creation, “a stout peasantry?” Listen to Mr. Foster—listen to the “Times Commissioner,” and he will tell you that the Irish peasant, while he has his sufficient meal of bad, watery potatoes, will not stir two steps from the door of his turf hut to gain either comfort or luxury at the cost of half an hour’s exertion; that when a boat is found for him by his own parish priest, and a thousand herrings may be caught in one day, neither the prize can tempt nor the priest persuade him to make use of the opportunity; or he perhaps goes once, and brings home a week’s subsistence; but, declaring it too much trouble ever to go again, loiters at home and asks a passing traveller for money. Such are said to be the people to whom the Times wishes the Legislature to declare, that they need not take any trouble to feed themselves, for it will make the landlords feed them. … Because the Irish are indolent, unenterprising, careless of the future, doing nothing for themselves, and demanding everything from other people; because, being freemen, they want the characteristic virtues of freemen, it is proposed to create a fit soil for the growth of those virtues by placing them in the position of slaves!

…………

The entire population of the country are coming upon us to be fed. And we are called upon to decide instantaneously whether we will or will not undertake the office. There is no retreating, no putting off. The burden of Irish destitution is now to be borne by us. Ireland can no longer suffer alone. We must take our full share of the evil, or put an end to it. For a few weeks or months longer we have the choice which. Wait a year, and we may have it no longer. Wait a year, and the mind of the Irish population may be so thoroughly pauperised, that to be supported by other people may be the only mode of existence they will consent to. There may be a Jacquerie, or another ninety-eight, in defence of the rights of sturdy beggary. It may require a hundred thousand armed men to make the Irish people submit to the common destiny of working in order to live.

When it came to consider the Irish Question Mill was no more enlightened than Thomas Carlyle if you take the standard view of his Discourse on the Negro Question. I have reservations about the justice of that and note that his compassion increased as the suffering came closer to home.
cf: Discourse
Mill was exercised by the plight of the West Indian colonies
and the exploitation of ex-slaves. His retort that pumpkins are every bit as good as spices, a high value cash crop Carlyle recommended that the ex-slaves grow; would not have gone down well with the masters of the East India Company, his employers, for whom spice was a source of massive profit.

Zizek whose normal turgid ebullience I can leave seems to be mostly right here:
refugees and global capitalism

Heroes and Hero Worship by Thomas Carlyle

A few days ago on his blog The Victorian Sage
Victorian Sage
Mark Wallace revealed that Huff Po U.K. had mentioned Thomas Carlyle in an introduction to a prospective mens’ month. I felt that the impugning of featuring only male heros in his book Heroes and Hero Worship was waving the bien pensant flag. You Bad Victorian, me Good New Man sort of thing – the breast beating of the Beta New Man as opposed to the breast beating of the Alpha Male Silverback Victorian. Mark in his reply made the point that any mention of Heroes might open up new vistas. He mentioned also the category of the Man of Letters favoured by Carlyle which has led me to read that chapter initially delivered as a lecture entitled The Hero as Man of Letters.

Is it a tract for our times? That’s an interesting question and one fraught with the possibility of being cut off at the gulch by a hashtag posse. Carlyle's early struggles had an heroic quality. There were no networks that he could use. His father was not that sort of Mason. Heroes tend to be one off individuals defined by their own power. How free of ethnic and class considerations can they be? Carlyle’s black humour and his scorn had a Celtic tinge to it. The merry cackling of Jane and Tom in Chelsea over Harriet and John Stuart must have been great crack yet it has to be admitted that Mill’s Utilitarianism is the order of our day with its implicit standardisation and its cult of happiness . The call to Work, to suffer and to grow in power seems demented compared to that.

Bentham and by implication Mill receive a swingeing chastisement:

The other day speaking, without prior purpose that way, of Bentham's theory of man and man's life, I chanced to call it a more beggarly one than Mahomet's. I am bound to say, now when it is once uttered, that such is my deliberate opinion. Not that one would mean offence against the man Jeremy Bentham, or those who respect and believe him. Bentham himself, and even the creed of Bentham, seems to me comparatively worthy of praise. It is a determinate being what all the world, in a cowardly half-and-half manner, was tending to be. Let us have the crisis; we shall either have death or the cure. I call this gross, steam-engine Utilitarianism an approach towards new Faith. It was a laying-down of cant; a saying to oneself: "Well then, this world is a dead iron machine, the god of it Gravitation and selfish Hunger; let us see what, by checking and balancing, and good adjustment of tooth and pinion, can be made of it!" Benthamism has something complete, manful, in such fearless committal of itself to what it finds true; you may call it Heroic, though a Heroism with its eyes put out! It is the culminating point, and fearless ultimatum, of what lay in the half-and-half state, pervading man's whole existence in that Eighteenth Century. It seems to me, all deniers of Godhood, and all lip-believers of it, are bound to be Benthamites, if they have courage and honesty. Benthamism is an eyeless Heroism: the Human Species, like a hapless blinded Samson grinding in the Philistine Mill, clasps convulsively the pillars of its Mill; brings huge ruin down, but ultimately deliverance withal. Of Bentham I meant to say no harm.

But this I do say, and would wish all men to know and lay to heart, that he who discerns nothing but Mechanism in the Universe has in the fatalest way missed the secret of the Universe altogether. That all Godhood should vanish out of men's conception of this Universe seems to me precisely the most brutal error,—I will not disparage Heathenism by calling it a Heathen error,—that men could fall into. It is not true; it is false at the very heart of it. A man who thinks so will think wrong about all things in the world; this original sin will vitiate all other conclusions he can form. One might call it the most lamentable of Delusions,—not forgetting Witchcraft itself! Witchcraft worshipped at least a living Devil; but this worships a dead iron Devil; no God, not even a Devil! Whatsoever is noble, divine, inspired, drops thereby out of life. There remains everywhere in life a despicable caput-mortuum; the mechanical hull, all soul fled out of it. How can a man act heroically? The "Doctrine of Motives" will teach him that it is, under more or less disguise, nothing but a wretched love of Pleasure, fear of Pain; that Hunger, of applause, of cash, of whatsoever victual it may be, is the ultimate fact of man's life. Atheism, in brief;—which does indeed frightfully punish itself. The man, I say, is become spiritually a paralytic man; this godlike Universe a dead mechanical steam-engine, all working by motives, checks, balances, and I know not what; wherein, as in the detestable belly of some Phalaris'-Bull of his own contriving, he the poor Phalaris sits miserably dying!

My final quote from Heroes refers to the Man of Letters but might just as well apply to anyone, man or woman, and in any century, who has not found ‘the path with heart’:

His fatal misery was the spiritual paralysis, so we may name it, of the Age in which his life lay; whereby his life too, do what he might, was half paralyzed! The Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century; in which little word there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one could specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith,—an age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formally abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. The "age of miracles" had been, or perhaps had not been; but it was not any longer. An effete world; wherein Wonder, Greatness, Godhood could not now dwell;—in one word, a godless world!

Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question by Thomas Carlyle

To understand Thomas Carlyle and ‘the Negro question’ his attitude to work is central. In the alienated world of most of us that word signifies turning up, doing your bit and collecting your ‘green gauges’. Our man felt it to be a sacred duty that joined his energy to the force that flows through all things. Well yes but didn’t he have a wife that had an income and a father that waited calmly while he flailed about trying to establish himself? Indeed but considering that he was nearly 40 by the time he achieved any sort of reputation with The French Revolution I think that his high ground was righteous. Add to this the deep horror of the burning of the first half of ‘French’ by Harriet Taylor’s maid. (H.T. was the inamorata, as it were, of John Stuart Mill the ‘unheimlich’ as T.C. dubbed him) How do you burn that much manuscript to start a fire? Where were you H.T. on the night in question?

He rewrote it from memory that being his only copy and achieved his overnight success. Work then is not the curse of the drinking classes it is more - “It is a better thing to travel hopefully than to arrive and the true success is to labour”. (Robert Louis Stevenson)The great enemy of work is the ‘dismal science’ or economics. This brings me to the uncanny position that the anonymous author of the Wikipedia entry on Occasional Discourse on the Negro Question
Discourse
has a better understanding of it than Harold Bloom in his introduction to a series of essays on Carlyle. In the first publication it was known as ‘the Negro Question’, in later editions Carlyle got thick due to Blooming misunderstanding and called it ‘the Nigger Question’.

The discourse is introduced to us as the work of one Phelin M’Quirk a journalist who has skipped his digs leaving it after him to be sold in lieu. Phelin represents the distillation of the common racism of the day and the attitudes of the average ignoramus. Bits of Carlyle break through but that is the preamble to the piece. As the wikiman says in later editions he got contrary and left out the preamble and substituted ‘nigger’ which is sheer anachronism to be appalled by.

If you don’t see as Bloom doesn’t that Oliver Cromwell under all the pumpkins is atrabilious celtic humour then go back to Swift and reacquaint yourself with A Modest Proposel.

A bit of the great Protector’s own life lies there; beneath those pumpkins is a bit of the life that was Oliver Cromwell’s.

A Roundhead and a Pumpkinhead too that flickers demonically on the porch of the Irish Mind. (Keep it goin’ Mikey, don’t stall the digger) Which bring me to Carlyle’s trip by open car through the Emerald Isle of the previous year. He saw a starving country exporting food workless and forbidden to work except for work relief paid for in Indian Meal or Yalla Buck. Thus the number of roads from nowhere to nowhere known in Irish as Bóthar na Mine (Meal Road). It was all down to the laissez faire, the leave alone the market forces of the dismal science. All would be well in the meliorist opinion of the Victorian. A bit of thinning of the Irish crop was providential. Applying the rational choice theory of the day to the West Indies where the sugar trade was failing due to the freeing of the slaves Carlyle could see that for them to choose to grow ‘pumpkins’ on upland farms was much more attractive than working for the man cutting cane. If more free blacks were imported then you would only get a replication of the Irish situation with too much labour and not enough work as conceived by the dismal science. Jimmy Rabbitte of The Commitments reprised the Carlyleean view:

Jimmy Rabbitte: Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud.

What do you call a Northsider in a suit?
The defendant.

Mind you in Roddy Doyle’s book Jimmy used a more abrasive term; political correction came in brown envelopes then.

But I digress. Carlyle in that ‘Discourse’ and in his Latter Day Pamphlets saw the pious fable in continuous advancement. The main beams of the floor of the Polity had rotted and the floor was barely suspended by the beam-ends:

The front wall of your wretched old crazy dwelling, long denounced by you to no purpose, having at last fairly folded itself over, and fallen prostrate into the street, the floors, as may happen, will still hang on by the mere beam-ends, and coherency of old carpentry, though in a sloping direction, and depend there till certain poor rusty nails and worm-eaten dovetailings give way:—but is it cheering, in such circumstances, that the whole household burst forth into celebrating the new joys of light and ventilation, liberty and picturesqueness of position, and thank God that now they have got a house to their mind? My dear household, cease singing and psalmodying; lay aside your fiddles, take out your work-implements, if you have any; for I can say with confidence the laws of gravitation are still active, and rusty nails, worm-eaten dovetailings, and secret coherency of old carpentry, are not the best basis for a household!—In the lanes of Irish cities, I have heard say, the wretched people are sometimes found living, and perilously boiling their potatoes, on such swing-floors and inclined planes hanging on by the joist-ends; but I did not hear that they sang very much in celebration of such lodging.

(from The Present Day essay in Latter Day Pamphlets publ.1850)

Carlyle whose parents were barely literate had pride in good work well done at a fair rate. The father was a stone mason and farmer. People like them were wandering about as beggars and it appalled him that industrial workers in England had a greater infant mortality rate than slaves in the Americas whom the great and the good i.e. Exeter House, were campaigning about. Mill whose family battened off the Indian colony particularly must have struck him as a whited sepulchre. Even today debt slavery is rampant in India and it is passed on through the generations

The ‘Occasional Discourse’ is the exasperated saeva indignatio cry of a man sick of bien pensant waffle. I have yet to read Taylor and Mill’s response to it. All texts mentioned are available on Gutenberg Project.