CARLYLE'S RADICALISM.

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ships the genuine hero, the true and universal man, will infallibly come to despise the old clothes and arbitrary distinctions upon which the aristocratic system rests, to which every aristocratic system inevitably runs, and to see that it is the republic alone which is ultimately sincere.

Carlyle is no old-time monarchist. That a nation should yield itself up to the law of heredity, and take for its leader whoever happens to turn up in lineal descent, seems to him of all things most irrational. Beau Brummel and the Regent are one to him. If he is not a democrat in the ordinary sense of the term, it is not because he is a conservative, any more than Bonaparte was a conservative. "The attempt," he says, "to chain the future under the past, by eternal creeds, eternal forms of government, and the like, and to say to Providence : Hitherto shalt thou come, but no farther! is a wholly insane attempt; and for man himself, could it prosper, the frightfulest of all enchantments, a very life-in-death." His philippics against democracy are no pleas for any existing aristocracy, no Tory can take heart from them. The principles of his Utopia, if genuinely applied, would, as Mr. Conway has remarked, make ordinary conservatives glad enough to accept those of Mill in preference. Of the "divine right of kings" he makes short work. The Cromwells are the only men who have any "divine rights" that he knows of, as against both "sham nobility" and the "igno

rant populace." Carlyle is a violent radical, and would give the power at any and every time, irrespective of kings, lords, or any statutory dignities, to whoever proves that he has brains, "the tools to him who can use them." How the tools are to be turned over to him does not much matter, seems hardly worth talking about to Carlyle. It is as with the old Greek philosophers, an exhortation to put the wise men at the head of the state, with no suggestion of any wise method for getting them there. Witness Socrates in the Protogoras, for instance, or the Gorgias.1

1 Carlyle's political views are essentially Plato's, and were directly influenced by his study of Plato. "I remember when Emerson first came to see me, that he had a great deal to say about Plato that was very attractive, and I began to look up Plato; but, amid the endless dialectical hair-splitting, was generally compelled to shut up the book, and say, 'How does all this concern me at all?' But later on I have read Plato with much pleasure, finding him an elevated soul, spreading a pure atmosphere around one as he reads. And I find him there pouring his scorn on the Athenian democracy — ‘ the charming government, full of variety and disorder, dispensing equality alike to equals and unequals' — and hating that set quite as cordially as the writer of the Latter-Day Pamphlets hates the like of it now, expressed in a sunny, genial way, indeed, instead of the thunder and lightning with which the pamphlet man was forced to utter it. Let Cleon, the shoemaker, make good shoes, and no man will honor him more than I. Let Cleon go about pretending to be legislator, conductor of the world, and the best thing one can do for Cleon is to remand him to his work, and, were it possible, under penalties. And I demand nothing more for Cleon or Cuffee

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POLITICAL reform.

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It is, of course, easy enough to say that the offices of Downing Street are full of stupid men, but it is another thing to show a method that will forever keep wise men there. Carlyle suggests two things to reform the political evils. The first is what he suggests for every evil: "Reform thyself, be thyself a man abler to be governed;" bother yourself less about "this or that mode of electing," and "produce a few men worth electing ;' - which is all very well, but is beside the mark. His second and definite proposal is, premising the crown, he would have premised anything that was in existence, - that the crown have the power to appoint cabinet officers who do not represent constituencies in Parliament, and also have power to appoint a certain number of members to Parliament itself. Crown here means, chiefly and practically, prime minister. Whether the prime minister himself should be a "people's member," or appointed at the pleasure of the crown, Carlyle does not seem to think worth discussing, and he seems to forget which is astounding in one with his knowledge of history—that he is describing substantially the very condition which existed in England before Wilkes and Pitt. "For the sake of my

than I should be prepared to assert concerning the momentarily successful of such who have managed to get titles and high places. In that kind, for example, his imperial majesty, Napoleon Third – - an intensified pig, as, indeed, must some day appear."

democratic friends," says Carlyle, “let me ask if this proposal is not the very essence of whatever truth there is in 'Democracy' — this, that the ablest man be chosen, in whatever rank he is found? All that Democracy ever meant lies there : the attainment of a truer and truer aristocracy, or government again by the best." But was government by the best" helped on by allowing the Georges to appoint members to Parliament instead of having Manchester and Birmingham elect them? Does not Carlyle himself respond to Pitt's refusal to help Burns, because "literature will take care of itself," with a savage "Yes, and of you, too, if you don't mind it"? What security has he that worse men than Pitt or their royal masters would select the Burnses for Parliament, if they had the power? "With us foolish sons of Adam," says Carlyle somewhere," this is ever the way: some evil that lies nearest us, be it a chronic sickness, or but a smoky chimney, is ever the acme and sum-total of all evils, the black hydra that shuts us out from the promised land." And Carlyle himself, angered by certain democratic loquacity and vulgarity, is betrayed into unconscious praise of the system which obtained in England before the Reform Bill, and into urging as a general principle what might perhaps work well for a generation, with Victoria for queen and Robert Peel for minister, but which history has proved over and over again to lead surely and quickly to tyranny and every abomination.

THE APPEAL TO HISTORY.

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He is betrayed into the most violent and one-sided appeals to history. "What a strange feeling for this and the other premier," Castlereagh, for in

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stance 'to find himself Chief Governor of England, upon his moderately-sized new soul the old battle-harness of an Oliver Cromwell, an Edward Longshanks, a William Conqueror!" But what if, instead of Castlereagh, he had said Chatham, or Pitt, or Canning, or Gladstone, or for Cromwell and Edward and William had substituted any one of two Charleses, or two Jameses, or four Georges? Let him compare the English kings with English ministers from 1688 to this hour, and compare the ministers of the party which has emphasized appointment with those who have laid stress upon the people. When has there been the most sincerity and the most accomplishment?

We may feel the sting of Carlyle's throw at a state in which Jesus and Judas have equal weight; but, while remembering that the ballot is but one of a thousand means by which a man may make his weight felt in a democracy, and that, with the strong man, it is the slightest thing, it is sufficient to answer Carlyle that, as yet, the choice has not often been between a state in which Jesus and Judas have equal weight and one in which Judas hangs himself, but one in which Judas carries the bag and plays the master.

Every political system aims ostensibly to put the tools of government into the hands of those who