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separately, and styled by him "the precursor to Latter-Day Pamphlets." Strictly speaking, it should be considered a sequel to them, as it attempts to point out a practical solution, although upon a small scale, of the problem mooted in them. At the opening of the first of the "Latter-Day Pamphlets," entitled "The Present Time," Carlyle raises his doleful jeremiad :

EVIL DAYS.

"Few of the generations of men have seen more impressive days, days of endless calamity, disruption, dislocation, confusion worse confounded; if they are not days of endless hope, too, then are they days of endless despair. There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all. That human beings in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine, and proceed with any steadiness or continuance there: this small hope is not now a tenable one. These days of universal death must be days of universal new birth, if the ruin is not to be total and final."

The following is essentially Carlyle's own "Summary" of this pamphlet on "The Present Time," we only omitting a portion of the topics, and introducing a few words to connect the sentences:

EUROPE IN 1850.

"There is now a would-be reforming Pope, and a huge unreformable Popedom. The European explosion is boundless and uncontrollable; all kings are conscious that they are but play-actors. In France there is a wel

tering mob, presided over by M. de Lamartine, the first stump-orator of the world, standing for a time on the highest stump. Democracy is an inevitable fact of the days we live in. But mere democracy for ever is impossible, since the universe itself is a monarchy, a hierarchy, and it is the everlasting privilege of the foolish to be governed by the wise. There is a new sacrament of divorce called 'emancipation' and 'enfranchisement,' as of the West Indian blacks and Irish whites; but the fate of emancipated helplessness is sooner or later tragically inevitable. British industrial existence is fast becoming one huge poison-swamp of reeking pestilence. British liberty is only constituted anarchy. England never needed kings as much as now; but the new commander or king is not discoverable by popular clamor or by universal suffrage. The few wise men will have to take and keep command of the innumerable foolish."

He goes on to affirm that the organization of industry can not be brought about "by isolated men and their vague efforts. Government is everywhere called upon to give the initiative." He imagines the case that there were somehow to be raised up a "Chief Governor of England worthy of that high name "-call him the Prime Minister, if one pleases-and proposes for him a speech to be delivered to "the floods of Irish and other Beggars, the able-bodied Jack-alls, nomadic or stationary, and the general assembly, out-door and in-door, of the Pauper Populations of these Realms." Of this proposed speech we quote, with curtailments, some paragraphs:

SELF-GOVERNMENT.

"Vagrant Jack-alls, foolish most of you, criminal many of you, miserable all! the sight of you fills me with astonishment and despair. What to do with you I know not. One thing I have at last discovered: that you can not be left to roam abroad in this misguided manner, stumbling over the precipices, and loading ever heavier the fatal chain upon those who might be able to stand. I at last perceive that all this that has been sung and spoken for a long while about enfranchisement, emancipation, freedom, suffrage, civil and religious liberty over the world, is little other than temporary jargon, made up of sense and nonsense-sense in small quantities and nonsense in very large.

"Self-government is not for emancipated horses, nor for you. Algiers, Brazil, or Dahomey hold nothing in them so authentically slaves as you are. Only as recognized captives, as unfortunate fallen brothers, requiring that I should command you, and if need were control and compel you, can there be henceforth a relation be-tween us. Ask me not for Indian-meal. You shall be compelled to earn it first. Here is work for you. Strike into it with manlike, soldier-like obedience, heartiness, according to the methods here prescribed. Wages follow for you without difficulty, all manner of just remuneration; and at length emancipation itself follows. Refuse to strike into it, shirk the heavy labor, disobey the rules-I will endeavor to incite you; if still in vain, I will at last shoot you, and make God's earth-the forlorn hope in God's battle-free of you."

But how shall this able Chief Governor be found? How shall any people know him if he

exists? How shall any man be assured that he himself is the wise man, or even one of the few wise men appointed by Heaven "to take and keep command of the innumerable foolish"? And how, if he were so assured, shall he make good his Divine appointment?

Upon these vital questions the oracle is mute. It announces in every form of iteration and reiteration that the whole head is sick and the whole heart is faint; or points out the wounds and bruises and putrefying sores, but does not point us to the healer. At most, there is the hope that in the far future, somehow and somewhere, there is to be a change: "Surely this ignoble sluggishness, skeptical torpor, indifference to all that does not bear upon Mammon and his interests, is not the natural state of human creatures, and it is not doomed to be their final one." But to us of the present time, whom the matter so pressingly concerns, the closing words of the oracle are :

THE ENNUI OF THE PRESENT.

"Unfortunate creatures! You are fed, clothed, lodged, as men never were before; such wealth of material means as is now yours was never dreamed of by man before; and to do any noble deed with all this mountain of implements is for ever denied you. Only ignoble, expensive, and unfruitful things can you now do; nobleness has vanished from the sphere where you live. The way of it is lost; the possibility of it becomes incredible. We must try to do without it, I am told. Well,

rejoice in your upholsteries and cookeries, then, if so be they will make you happy. Let the varieties of them be continual and innumerable. Mount into your railways, whirl from place to place at the rate of fifty, or, if you like, of five hundred miles an hour, you can not escape from that inexorable, all-encircling ocean-moan of ennui. No: if you mount to the stars, and do yachtvoyages under the belts of Jupiter, or stalk deer on the ring of Saturn, it would still begirdle you. You can not escape from it; you can but change your place in it, without solacement except one moment's. That prophetic Sermon from the Deeps will continue with you till you wisely interpret it and do it, or else till the Crack of Doom swallow it and you. Adieu: au revoir."

"The Nigger Question," called the "precursor to Latter-Day Pamphlets," is in Carlyle's worst manner. The fault of it lies far deeper than its eccentricities of styl, in its bitter, jeering spirit. One could wish that it had never been exhumed from the magazine in which it first appeared. But Carlyle will not have it so. He reproduced it in a separate form, and twenty years later perpetuated it in his "Collected Works." It purports to be a speech delivered before the council for organizing a "Universal Abolition-of-Pain Association," the council having "decided that the Negro Question, as lying at the bottom, was the first to be handled, and if possible settled." The speech begins, we keeping his words, only with considerable abridgments:

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