We are right willing and able to work; and on the Planet Earth is plenty of work and wages for a million times as many.
We ask, If you mean to lead us towards work; to try to lead us, -- by ways new, never yet heard of till this new unheard-of Time?
Or if you declare that you cannot lead us?
And expect that we are to remain quietly unled, and in a composed manner perish of starvation?
What is it you expect of us?
What is it you mean to do with us ?" This question, I say, has been put in the hearing of all Britain; and will be again put, and ever again, till some answer be given it.
Unhappy Workers, unhappier Idlers, unhappy men and women of this actual England! We are yet very far from an answer, and there will be no existence for us without finding one.

"A fair 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.