Page:Chartism.djvu/74

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CHAP. VII. NOT LAISSEZ-FAIRE.
67

payments does cash make in this world! Of your Samuel Johnson furnished with 'fourpence halfpenny a-day,' and solid lodging at nights on the paved streets, as his payment, we do not speak;—not in the way of complaint: it is a world-old business for the like of him, that same arrangement or a worse; perhaps the man, for his own uses, had need even of that and of no better. Nay is not Society, busy with its Talfourd Copyright Bill and the like, struggling to do something effectual for that man;—enacting with all industry that his own creation be accounted his own manufacture, and continue unstolen, on his own market-stand, for so long as sixty years? Perhaps Society is right there; for discrepancies on that side too may become excessive. All men are not patient docile Johnsons; some of them are half-mad inflammable Rousseaus. Such, in peculiar times, you may drive too far. Society in France, for example, was not destitute of cash: Society contrived to pay Philippe d'Orleans not yet Egalité three hundred thousand a-year and odd, for driving cabriolets through the streets of Paris and other work done: but in cash, encouragement, arrangement, recompense or recognition of any kind, it had nothing to give this same half-mad Rousseau for his work done; whose brain in consequence, too 'much enforced' for a weak brain, uttered hasty sparks, Contrat Social and the like, which proved not so quenchable again! In regard to that species of men too, who knows whether Laissez-faire itself (which is Sergeant Talfourd's Copyright Bill continued to eternity instead of sixty years) will