Page:The farm labourer in 1872.djvu/6

"True, it must be owned, we, for the present with our Mammon Gospel, have come to strange conclusions. We call it a Society, and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation. Our life is not a mutual helpfulness, but rather cloaked under due laws of war, named fair competition, and so forth, it is a mutual hostility. We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings; we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man … Cash-payment never was, or could, except for a few years be, the union bond of man to man—cash never yet paid one man his deserts to another, nor could it, nor can it now or henceforth, to the end of the world."—Carlyle's 'Past and Present.'