"Strange, interesting, and yet most mournful to reflect on. Was this, then, of all the things mankind had some talent for, the one thing important to learn well, and bring to perfection—this of successfully killing one another? Truly you have learned it well, and carried the business to a high perfection. It is incalculable what, by arranging, commanding, and regimenting, you can make of men. These thousand straight-standing, firm-set individuals, who shoulder arms, who march, wheel, advance, retreat, and are, for your behoof, a magazine charged with fiery death, in the most perfect condition of potential activity; few months ago, till the persuasive sergeant came, what were they? Multiform ragged losels, runaway apprentices, starved weavers, thievish valets—an entirely broken population, fast tending towards the treadmill. But the persuasive sergeant came; by tap of drum enlisted, or formed lists of them, took heartily to drilling them; and he and you have made them this! Most potent, effectual for all work whatsoever, is wise planning, firm combining, and commanding among men. Let no man despair of Governments who look on these two sentries at the Horse Guards!"—P. 349.
Passages there are in the work which a political agitator might be glad enough to seize on; but, upon the whole, it is very little that Radicalism or Chartism obtain from Mr Carlyle. No political party would choose him for its champion, or find in him a serviceable ally. Observe how he demolishes the hope of those who expect, by new systems of election, to secure some incomparably pure and wise body of legislators—some aristocracy of talent!
"We must have more wisdom to govern us, we must be governed by the wisest, we must have an aristocracy of talent! cry many. True, most true; but how to get it? The following extract from our young friend of the Houndsditch Indicator is worth perusing—'At this time,' says he, 'while there is a cry every where, articulate or inarticulate, for an aristocracy of talent, a governing class, namely, what did govern, not merely which took the wages of governing, and could not with all our industry be kept from misgoverning, corn-lawing, and playing the very deuce, with us—it may not be altogether useless to remind some of the greener-headed sort what a dreadfully difficult affair the getting of such an aristocracy is! Do you expect, my friends, that your indispensable aristocracy of talent is to be enlisted straightway, by some sort of recruitment aforethought, out of the general population; arranged in supreme regimental order; and set to rule over us? That it will be got sifted, like wheat out of chaff, from the twenty-seven million British subjects; that any ballot-box, reform-bill, or other political machine, with force of public opinion ever so active on it, is likely to perform said process of sifting? Would to heaven that we had a sieve; that we could so much as fancy any kind of sieve, wind-fanners, or ne plus ultra of machinery, devisable by man that would do it!
"'Done, nevertheless, sure enough, it must be; it shall, and will be. We are rushing swiftly on the road to destruction; every hour bringing us nearer, until it be, in some measure, done. The doing of it is not doubtful; only the method or the costs! Nay, I will even mention to you an infallible sifting-process, whereby he that has ability will be sifted out to rule amongst us, and that same blessed aristocracy of talent be verily, in an approximate degree, vouchsafed us by-and-by; an infallible sifting-process; to which, however, no soul can help his neighbour, but each must, with devout prayer to heaven, help himself. It is, O friends! that all of us, that many of us, should acquire the true eye for talent, which is dreadfully wanting at present.
"'For example, you, Bobus Higgins, sausage-maker on the great scale, who are raising such a clamour for this aristocracy of talent, what is it that you do, in that big heart of yours, chiefly in very fact pay reverence to? Is it to talent, intrinsic manly worth of any kind, you unfortunate Bobus? The manliest man that you saw going in a ragged coat, did you ever reverence him; did you so much as know that he was a manly man at all, till his coat grew better? Talent! I understand you to be able to worship the fame of talent, the power, cash, celebrity, or other success of talent; but the talent itself is a thing you never saw with eyes. Nay, what is it in yourself that you are proudest of, that you take most pleasure in surveying, meditatively, in thoughtful moments? Speak now, is it the bare Bobus, stript of his very name and shirt, and turned loose upon society, that you admire and thank heaven for; or Bobus, with his cash-accounts, and larders dropping fatness, with his respectabilities, warm garnitures, and pony chaise, admirable in some measure to certain of the flunkey species? Your own degree of worth and talent, is it of infinite value to you; or only of finite—measurable by the degree of currency, and conquest of praise or pudding, it has brought you to? Bobus, you are in a vicious circle, rounder than one of your own sausages; and will never vote for or promote any talent, except what talent or sham-talent has already got itself voted for!'—We here cut short the Indicator; all readers perceiving whither he now tends."—P. 39.
In the chapter, also, on Democracy, we have notions expressed upon liberty which would make little impression—would be very distasteful to any audience assembled for the usual excitement of political oratory.
"Liberty! the true liberty of a man, you would say, consisted in his finding out, or being forced to find out, the right path, and to walk thereon—to learn or to be taught what work he actually was able for, and then, by permission, persuasion, and even compulsion, to set about doing the same! That is his true blessedness, honour, 'liberty,' and maximum of well-being,—if liberty be not that, I for one have small care about liberty. You do not allow a palpable madman to leap over precipices; you violate his liberty, you that are wise, and keep him, were it in strait waist-coat, away from the precipices! Every stupid, every cowardly and foolish man, is but a less palpable madman; his true liberty were that a wiser man, that any and every wiser man, could, by brass collars, or in whatever milder or sharper way, lay hold of him when he is going wrong, and order and compel him to go a little righter. O! if thou really art my senior—seigneur, my elder—Presbyter or priest,—if thou art in very deed my wiser, may a beneficent instinct lead and impel thee to 'conquer' me, to command me! If thou do know better than I what is good and right, I conjure thee, in the name of God, force me to do it; were it by never such brass collars, whips, and handcuffs, leave me not to walk over precipices! That I have been called by all the newspapers a 'free man,' will avail me little, if my pilgrimage have ended in death and wreck. O that the newspapers had called me slave, coward, fool, or what it pleased their sweet voices to name me, and I had attained not death but life! Liberty requires new definitions."—P. 285.
"But truly, as I had to remark in the meanwhile, the 'liberty of not being oppressed by your fellow-man,' is an indispensable, yet one of the most insignificant fractional parts of human liberty. No man oppresses thee—can bid thee fetch or carry, come or go, without reason shown. True; from all men thou art emancipated, but from thyself and from the devil! No man, wiser, unwiser, can make thee come or go; but thy own futilities, bewilderments, thy false appetites for money—Windsor Georges and such like! No man oppresses thee, O free and independent Franchiser! but does not this stupid porter-pot oppress thee? no son of Adam can bid thee come and go; but this absurd pot of heavy-wet, this can and does! Thou art the thrall, not of Cedric the Saxon, but of thy own brutal appetites, and this scoured dish of liquor; and thou protest of thy 'liberty,' thou entire blockhead!"—P. 292.
We should hardly think of entering with Mr Carlyle into a controversy upon the corn-laws, or on schemes of emigration, or any disputed point of political economy. He brings to bear upon these certain primitive moral views and feelings which are but very remotely applicable in the resolution of these knotty problems. We should almost as soon think of inviting the veritable Diogenes himself, should he roll up in his tub to our door, to a discussion upon our commercial system. Our Diogenes Teufelsdrockh looks upon these matters in a quite peculiar manner; observe, for example, the glance he takes at our present mercantile difficulties, which, doubtless, is not without its own value, nor undeserving of all consideration.
"The continental people, it would seem, are 'exporting our machinery, beginning to spin cotton, and manufacture for themselves, to cut us out of this market and then out of that!' Sad news, indeed, but irremediable—by no means the saddest news. The saddest news is, that we should find our national existence, as I sometimes hear it said, depend on selling manufactured cotton at a farthing an ell cheaper than any other people—a most narrow stand for a great nation to base itself on; a stand which, with all the corn-law abrogations conceivable, I do not think will be capable of enduring.