CHAPTER VI.
Laissez-faire.
From all which enormous events, with truths old and new embodied in them, what innumerable practical inferences are to be drawn! Events are written lessons, glaring in huge hieroglyphic picture-writing, that all may read and know them: the terror and horror they inspire is but the note of preparation for the truth they are to teach; a mere waste of terror if that be not learned. Inferences enough; most didactic, practically applicable in all departments of English things! One inference, but one inclusive of all, shall content us here; this namely: That Laissez-faire has as good as done its part in a great many provinces; that in the province of the Working Classes, Laissez-faire having passed its New Poor-Law, has reached the suicidal point, and now, as felo-de-se, lies dying there, in torchlight meetings and such like; that, in brief, a government of the under classes by the upper on a principle of Let alone is no longer possible in England in these days. This is the one inference inclusive of all. For there can be no acting or doing of any kind, till it be recognised that there is a thing to be done; the thing once recognised, doing in a thousand shapes becomes possible. The Working Classes cannot any longer go on without government; without being actually guided and governed; England cannot subsist in peace till, by
