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gration, the employment of our soldiers in works of industry, the introduction of order and efficiency into all departments of the public service. Well, what do we now behold? The Crown names no members of Parliament, the Ministers are still directly responsible to the House; but the impartation of the elements of knowledge to the whole people has been assumed as a duty by Government. Our soldiers are not employed, during peace, in building harbors of refuge or draining morasses, but the stagnation and idleness of the olden times have been broken up, and the autumn manœuvres give our soldiers something to do. The whole Volunteer movement might, with not much straining, be represented as the carrying out of a suggestion thrown out in these pamphlets; for the Volunteers are soldiers who do their work as well as their soldiering; but it has been carried out by popular impulse, not by Government orders. Our ships of war have not, as Carlyle proposed, been employed in carrying emigrants to the colonies, but emigration has proceeded on a large scale, and has been placed under Government superintendence, and partially assisted, if not by the Home Government, then by the Colonial authorities. There is still, we may be pretty sure, in the departments of the Civil Service less efficiency than would have satisfied Cromwell; but something has been done in the way of balking favoritism, declining "the Queen's bad bargains," and securing that those who prove themselves, on terms as fair as can be arranged, better men than those whom they vanquish in open competition, shall become servants of the State. While these and a multitude of other reforms have been taking place, the great fact of democracy, signalized by Carlyle, has been so far recognized and accepted that immense additions have been made to the national constituency, and that the property qualification for members of Parliament has been abolished. The general result has been that the pauperism, which appalled Carlyle in 1849, has dwindled into compara

tive insignificance; that political sedition has become a reminiscence of middle-aged gentlemen, who require to explain to their sons and daughters what the Five Points of the Charter meant; that, as Macaulay said, there is no more fear of a revolution in England than of the falling of the moon; and that two working-class members of Parliament receive deferential audience from the House when they explain to it the wants and claims of the multitude. Is not this better than if an attempt of a highly artificial kind had been made to turn the history of England into a new channel, and to have recourse to the traditions and habitudes of more or less despotic monarchy ?

Even if the deliberate acceptance and resolute, though gradual, effectuation of the democratic principle in our Government had been attended with far different and less favorable results, we should still have to inquire whether the failure had or had not been due to the inadequate performance of political duty by men who ought to have been the guides of the people. Mr. Carlyle sneers, and all Carlylian anti-Liberals join him in sneering, at the privilege of sending the ten-thousandth part of a member to Parliament. Can anything, they ask, be done by so small a power as that? I answer, Yes. How many million rootlets suck in the moisture from the ground that goes to support the oak whose shadow has been widening for a thousand years? Can you measure with your finest instruments the infinitesimal part of the work done by each of those million rootlets? Yet if each of these rootlets thought its part too small to be performed, would the shadow have grown for a thousand years? When every unit in the millions of free men constituting a great free State does his political duty, there will be no danger in democracy. Mr. Ruskin, the most brilliant of all the Carlylian anti-Liberals, announces, in what seems a boastful tone, that he never in his life voted for a member of Parliament. If that had been the habit of Eng

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lishmen when John Hampden rode from county to county addressing the electors of the Long Parliament, would not the old oak of England's greatness have long since withered away? I am sure I shall reflect with satisfaction on my death-bed that I did my poor best, in the cold spring of 1874, to put a good member into the House of Commons and to keep a less good out.

CHAPTER X.

HIS VIEW OF HOWARD AND PHILANTHROPY.

OTHING in the Latter-day Pamphlets; nothing perhaps in Carlyle's writings, has occasioned more discussion than his depreciatory notice of John Howard, his scornful denunciation of what may be vaguely but intelligibly styled the philanthropic movement, and his insistence upon severe methods in the treatment of criminals. Here, again, there is vital and vivid truth in what he says, but here also that truth can be discerned, and can be made practically useful, only when it is separated from the un-truth with which it is associated.

Bitter as is the contempt with which he ultimately dismisses philanthropists—“You may go down!"-he begins with what seems an important act of fairness. He distinguishes between them and a still more culpable and contemptible class of persons. "One large body," he says, "of the intelligent and influential accepts the social iniquities, or whatever you may call them, and the miseries consequent thereupon; accepts them, admits them to be extremely miserable, pronounces them entirely inevitable, incurable except by Heaven, and eats its pudding with as little thought of them as possible." This indifferent, do-nothing class he dismisses as incorrigible and ignoble. Philanthropists form "the select small minority," in whom public spirit and human pity survive. Among them it is that soldiers for "the Good Cause" are to be found. This fact, one would think, entitles them to considerable respect. But Mr. Carlyle has no respect for them whatever. Instead of treating them as soldiers of the good cause who wish to be shown how to fight, he permits his anger to master him to such an extent

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THE SELECT SMALL MINORITY."

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that he positively, though, to all appearance, unconsciously, cancels his own distinct concession as to their human pity and public spirit. Unless he has been meaning that these sentiments are genuine, he virtually affirms that the "select minority" are more blameworthy and despicable than the apathetic majority; for the latter are unimpeachably sincere in their indifference; and sincere apathy is better than hypocritic philanthropy. It follows, therefore, that he explicitly contradicts himself when, after a few pages of fierce reprimand, he thus addresses philanthropists: "You mistake in every way, my friends. The fact is, you fancy yourselves men of virtue, benevolence, what not; and you are not even men of sincerity and honest sense." This may, however, be treated as a slip of the pen or the memory-a thing to which prophets are liable; or, at lowest, we may grant to Carlyle that there are degrees of honesty and sincerity, that the motives of good men are mixed, and that even select minorities and soldiers of the good cause are not absolutely sincere.

The point on which it is essential to insist is that a “sentiment of public spirit," energetic enough to look for employment in works of beneficence, and a pity vivacious enough to seek relief in helping the wretched, are so precious, and, indeed, so rare, that it is thriftless to sneer at them. Mr. Carlyle admits the minority in whom these things are found to be small, and it is a minority that has all the powers of the world, the flesh, and the devil in league against it. The instinct of society is to let things alone, to permit nothing to ruffle the cruel serenity of its pleasures, to vote every one a bore who dwells upon any scheme for human improvement one moment longer than is necessary for the purposes of small talk. The force which drags us ever down toward lethargy and indifference is, in its colossal potency, like that force of the earth's gravitation, against which the thin spear-points of a million. blades as they pierce the ground in spring, and the leaves and