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of shooting one another, had the cunning to make these poor blockheads shoot." It is not conservatism nor anything insular that writes to Goethe: "Let nations, as individuals, only know each other, and mutual jealousy will change to mutual helpfulness; and instead of natural enemies, as neighboring countries too often are, we shall all be natural friends." Above all, it is not with the aristocratic heart, but with the democratic heart, that Carlyle approaches that one great question of our modern politics, the question of Work and the Workingman. "To us individually," he wrote, as long ago as 1840, "the condition of the working classes appears, and has for many years appeared, to be the most ominous of all practical matters whatever ; matter, in regard to which, if something be not done, something will do itself one day, and in a fashion that will please nobody. . According

to the newspapers, 'the chimera of Chartism' has been put down. It is indeed the chimera' of Chartism which has been 'put down ;' but the living essence of Chartism has not been put down. Chartism means the bitter discontent, grown fierce and mad, the wrong condition of the working classes of England. It is a new name for a thing which has had many names, and which will yet have many." To this question of the condition of the working classes Carlyle has devoted more thought, during the last forty years, than to almost anything else. He could not escape from it. "He thinks

it the only question for wise men," wrote Emerson, "instead of art, and fine fancies, and poetry, and such things, to address themselves to the problem of society." "The real poem for a man at present," he said to Cooper, "is to make a bit of cosmos out of the horrible practical chaos round us.” He has spoken on this subject in ways not common nor fragrant to the House of Lords. What wisdom might be brought from his pages for the present Irish troubles, yet what sweeping revolutions involved! How directly he puts his finger on England's sore spot in the first page of Past and Present: "England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want in every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows ; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers, understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, and the willingest our earth ever had; these men are here; the work they have done, the fruit they have realized is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us: and behold, some baleful fiat, as of enchantment, has gone forth, saying, 'Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it.' On the poor workers such fiat falls first, in its rudest shape." "A man willing to work, and unable to find work," he says again, "is perhaps the saddest sight that

ye

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" and

fortune's inequality exhibits under this sun; to an American friend he said, "The best thing that I know of your country is, that there a man may have bread for his labor." "A fair day's wages for a fair day's work," - this he declares to be "the everlasting right of man. Indisputable as gospels, as arithmetical multiplication-tables, it must and will have itself fulfilled." Empty stomachs, by the million, over against full granaries; diligent bare backs, by the million, over against your unsalable spun shirts; we may depend upon it, he tells us, that wherever such a state of things exists, it will in time be righted with a vengeance; an empty stomach and a bare back cannot respect dignities beyond a certain point. This, I say, with all the deep sympathy with the Manchester insurrectionists, is not in the tone of the House of Lords; it is the talk of the democrat.1 For Eng

1 M. Taine remarks that Carlyle saw nothing but evil in the French Revolution." This is very far from the truth. The French Revolution was to Carlyle a truth, if indeed a "truth clad in hell-fire." "Over all Europe," he says, speak ing of the condition of things which the Revolution rose against, “the reign of earnestness had wholly dwindled into that of Dilettantism. The voice of a certain modern 'closetlogic,' which called itself, and could not but call itself, Philosophy, had gone forth, saying, Let there be darkness, and there was darkness. No Divinity any longer dwelt in the world; and as men cannot do without a Divinity, a sort of terrestrial upholstery one had been got together, and named TASTE, with medallic virtuosi and picture cognoscenti, and enlightened let ter and belles-lettres men enough for priests. To which wor

land, Carlyle proposes wholesale emigration. Sometimes he adopts the very language of Socialism: "The question arises, Whether, in some ulterior, perhaps some not far-distant stage of this 'Chivalry of Labor,' your master-worker may not find it possible, and needful, to grant his workers permanent interest in his enterprise and theirs, so that it become, in practical result, what in essential fact and justice it ever is, a joint enterprise; all men, from the chief master down to the lowest overseer and operative, economically as well as loyally concerned for it? Which question I do not answer. The answer, near or else far, is perhaps, Yes; and yet one knows the difficulties." His opinions in this field did not grow more conservative as he grew older; and it was part of his view, at the last,

ship, with its stunted formularies and hungry results, must the earnest mind, like the hollow and shallow one, adjust itself as best might be. To a new man, no doubt, the earth is always new, never wholly without interest. Knowledge, were it only that of dead languages, or of dead actions, the foreign tradition of what others had acquired and done, was still to be searched after; fame might be enjoyed, if procurable; above all, the culinary and brewing arts remained in pristine completeness, their results could be relished with pristine vigor. Life lumbered along, better or worse, in pitiful discontent, not yet in decisive desperation, as through a dim day of languor, sultry and sunless. Already, too, on the horizon might be seen clouds, might be heard murmurs, which by and by proved themselves of an electric character, and were to cool and clear that same sultriness in wondrous deluges." Passages like this might be multiplied almost indefinitely from Carlyle's writings.

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that private proprietorship in land should be abolished. In Past and Present, indeed, he said: "Properly speaking, the land belongs to these two : to the almighty God; and to all his children of men that have ever worked well on it, or that shall ever work well on it."

The ends which Carlyle aims at through his "despotism" are the ends of democracy. If he would have strong government, it is not as the aristocrat would have it, to support himself, but because he believes that by a strong government the interests of the working classes will be best served. It is no real despotism at all for which he pleads, that scarcely ought to require saying. "Freedom," he says, we must and will have, — this is indispensable; not nomad's or ape's freedom, but Man's Freedom. How to reconcile Despotism with Freedom! Well, is that such a mystery? Do you not already know the way? It is to make your Despotism just: rigorous as Destiny, but just, too, as Destiny and its Laws. The Laws of God: all men obey these, and have no Freedom at all but in obeying them."

His strong government, his despotism, his aristocracy of talent, all come to this, that we shall put the wisest men in office and keep them there. We shall perfectly succeed in this when the millennium comes; and meantime we must italicize against Carlyle his own "approximation," and be as patient as we can, sure only of this, that salvation does not