Many doctors have you had,my poor friend;but I perceive it is the Water-Cure alone that will help you:a complete course of scavengerism is the thing you need!A new and veritable heart-divorce of England from the Babylonish woman,who is Jesuitism and Unveracity,and dwells at Rome ,but under your own e and everywhere;whom,and her foul worship of Phantasms and Devils,poor England had once divorced,with a divine heroism forgotten yet,and well worth remembering :a clearing-out of Church and State from the unblessed host of Phantasms which have too long nestled thick there,under those astonishing "Defenders of the Faith,"--Defenders of the Hypocrisies,the spiritual Vampires and obscene Nightmares,under which England lies in syncope;--this is what you need;and if you can get it,you must die,my poor friend!
Like people,like priest.Priest,King,Home Office,all manner of establishments and offices among a people bear a striking resemblance to the people itself.It is because Bull has been eating so much dirt that his Home Offices have got into such a shockingly dirty condition,--the old pavements of them quite gone out of sight and out of memory,and hing but mountains of long-accumulated dung in which the poor cattle are sprawling and tumbling.Had his own life been pure,had his own daily conduct been grounding itself on the clear pavements or actual beliefs and veracities,would he have let his Home Offices come to such a pass?in Downing Street only,but in all other thoroughfares and arenas and spiritual or physical departments of his existence,running water and Herculean scavengerism have become indispensable,unless the poor man is to choke in his own exuviae,and die the sorrowfulest death.
If the State could once get back to the real sight of its essential function,and with religious resolution begin doing that,and putting away its multifarious imaginary functions,and indignantly casting out these as mere dung and insalubrious horror and abomination (which they are),what a promise of reform were there!The British Home Office,surely this and its kindred Offices exist,if they will think of it,that life and work may continue possible,and may become impossible,for British men.If hoable existence,or existence on human terms at all,have become impossible for millions of British men,how can the Home Office or any other Office long exist?With thirty thousand Needlewomen,a Connaught fallen into potential cannibalism,and the Idle Workhouse everywhere bursting,and declaring itself an inhumanity and stupid ruis brutality much longer to be tolerated among rational human creatures,it is time the State were bethinking itself.
So soon as the State attacks that tremendous cloaca of Pauperism,which will choke the world if it be attacked,the State will find its real functions very different indeed from what it had long supposed them!The State is a reality,and a dramaturgy;it exists here to render existence possible,existence desirable and le,for the State's subjects.The State,as it gets into the track of its real work,will find that same expand into whole continents of new unexpected,most blessed activity;as its dramatic functions,declared superfluous,more and more fall inert,and go rushing like huge torrents of extinct exuviae,dung and rubbish,down to the Abyss forever.O Heaven,to see a State that knew a little why it was there,and on what ground,in this Year 1850,it could pretend to exist,in so extremely earnest a world as ours is growing!The British State,if it will be the crown and keystone of our British Social Existence,must get to recognize,with a veracity very long unkn to it,what the real objects and indispensable necessities of our Social Existence are.Good Heavens,it is prevenient grace,or the color of the Bishop's nightmare,that is pinching us;it is the impossibility to get along any farther for mountains of accumulated dung and falsity and horror;the total closing-up of le aims from every man,--of any aim at all,from many men,except that of rotting out in Idle Workhouses an existence below that of beasts!