day's-wages for a fair day's-work:" it is as just a demand as
Governed men ever made of Governing. It is the everlasting
right of man. Indisputable as Gospels, as arithmetical
multiplication-tables: it must and will have itself fulfilled;
--and yet, in these times of ours, with what enormous difficulty,
next-door to impossibility! For the times are really strange;
of a complexity intricate with all the new width of the
ever-widening world; times here of half-frantic velocity of
impetus, there of the deadest-looking stillness and paralysis;
times definable as shewing two qualities, Dilettantism and
Mammonism;--most intricate obstructed times! Nay, if there
were not a Heaven's radiance of justice, prophetic, clearly
of Heaven, discernible behind all these confused worldwide
entanglements, of Landlord interests, Manufacturing interests,
Tory-Whig interests, and who knows what other interests,
expediencies, vested interests, established possessions,
inveterate Dilettantisms, Midas-eared Mammonisms,--it would
seem to everyone a flat impossibility, which all wise men
might as well at once abandon. If you do not know eternal
justice from momentary Expediency, and understand in your
heart of hearts how justice, radiant, beneficent, as the
all-victorious Light-element, is also in essence, if need be,
an all-victorious _Fire_-element, and melts all manner of vested
interests, and the hardest iron cannon, as if they were soft wax,
and does ever in the long-run rule and reign, and allows nothing
else to rule and reign,--you also would talk of impossibility!
But it is only difficult, it is not impossible. Possible? It
is, with whatever difficulty, very clearly inevitable.

Fair day's-wages for fair-day's-work! exclaims a sarcastic man;