Search -
The Works of Charles Kingsley ...: Alton Locke, v.I and II
The Works of Charles Kingsley Alton Locke vI and II Author:Charles Kingsley Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHEAP CLOTHES AND NASTY KING RYENCE, says the legend of Prince Arthur, wore a paletot trimmed with kings' beards. In the first French Revolution (so Carlyle a... more »ssures us) there were at Meudon tanneries of human skins. Mammon, at once tyrant and revolutionary, follows both these noble examples — in a more respectable way, doubtless, for Mammon hates cruelty; bodily pain is his devil — the worst evil which he, in his effeminacy, can conceive. So he shrieks benevolently when a drunken soldier is flogged; but he trims his paletots, and adorns his legs, with the flesh of men and the skins of women, with degradation, pestilence, heathendom, and despair; and then chuckles self-complacently over the smallness of his tailors' bills. Hypocrite ! — straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel! What is flogging, or hanging, King Ryence's paletot or the tanneries of Meudon, to the slavery, starvation, waste of life, year-long imprisonment in dungeons narrower and fouler than those of the Inquisition, which goes on among thousands of free English clothes-makers at this day? " The man is mad," says Mammon, smiling supercilious pity. Yes, Mammon; mad as Paulbefore Festus; and for much the same reason, too. Much learning has made us mad. From two articles in the " Morning Chronicle " of Friday, 14th December, and Tuesday, i8th December, on the Condition of the Working Tailors, we learnt too much to leave us altogether masters of ourselves. But there is method in our madness; we can give reasons for it — satisfactory to ourselves, perhaps also to Him who made us, and you, and all tailors likewise. Will you, freshly bedizened, you and your footmen, from Nebuchadnezzar and Co.'s " Emporium of Fashion," hear a little about how your finery is made? You are always calling out for facts, and have a fir...« less