The Sun.
London, England, 1867-09-21 00:00:00

AIR. CARLYLE
PARES ND 43,...„,c4Ars ,;,•11
The Nation publishes a letter from J. F. Kirk, of
Dorchester, Massachusetts, condeisLning the language of
the extract from the Nation we gave in -a late Lassuin
which Mr. Carlyle for his article in AfaCtflan't Vagarne,
entitled " Shtting Niagara," is termed "a foolish and
conceited -ol&ttin," and his denunciation of Democracy
called "pure rigmarole." Mr. Kirk says—" Its author's
views are familiar to me ; and I have sometimes taken the
freedom—more readily accorded by men of his tempera-
ment than by many of a suaver utterance—to combat there
in conversation. That was, however, several years ago.
Since then a constant perusal of the Nation—of its fre-
quent and elaborate exposures of the corruptions with
which our political system is encrusted—has done much to
induce a conviction that unless Democracy, as established
iu America, undergoes sonic early and great modification,
it must end where all demoralised systems have hitherto
ended, in convulsion and overthrow.
The Nation replies in a very powerful article.
following are its strictur,.s on Mr. Carl,) le :
"Mr. Carlyle has for many years back acted as the
apostle of brute force. He has employed all the weight
of authority which ho acquired by such compositions as
'Seder li,3sartes' and Past and Present' in defence of the
absolute subjection of everybody and everything to the
strong hand. He has laboured with all his resources to
convert the civilised world to the belief that the exercise
of power furnishes its own justification, that the sole duty
of weakness is to submit, and that the only true civilisers
and elevators of mankind are the sword and the whip, and
that anybody who maintains that the helpless have rights
is a knave or a fool. Nobody can have watched the course
of opinion in England and America during the last ten
years without seeing that he has been instrumental in con-
verting large numbers of influential men into what we
cannot help calling enemies of the heman race. He fur-
nished the pro-slavery school of philosophers at the South
with most of the ammunition with which they for years
bombarded 'free society'—with the arguments by which
they sought to show that slavery is tho divinely ordained
condition of the labourer. Nor were his disciples confined
to the South. They swarm at this moment in the choicest
circles of Philadelphia, New York, and Boston.
" In England his influence has been still more marked
and malefic. He helped not only to extinguish the gene-
rous enthusiasm far Maim rights which crowned the
labours of Clarkson and Wilberforce with rejoicing, but to
supply the new commercial school, which holds that the
chief end of men is to furnish profits for capital, with a
philosophical disguise for their unscrupulous greed. The
results of his work were fully revealed when the war broke
out here. We say deliberately that, for the almost devilish
outburst of sympathy with the Confederacy which was
witnessed in the middle and upper classes in England
during the first years of the war—sympathy which no
crimes or atrocities and no avowals of iniquitous inten-
tions seemed sufficient to check—Mr. Carlyle more than
any one man is responsible. The success of the North
silenced and cowed that party as far as this country is
concerned. But it did not loosen a single article in their
creed.

The

" We honestly confess that, right or wrong, we believe it
would have been better for the world and for himself if
Mr. Carlyle never had written a line than that ho should
write as he is writing now. We flatter ourselves that, as
there was much noble thinking done before ho was born,
there would have been enough noble thinking to carry
humanity on to its goal if Mr. Carlyle had never appeared.
Providence has not left the race dependent on any ono
teacher; and Providence could hardly have furnished a
better illustration of the danger of pinning our faith on
any teacher, however wise or illustrious, than by permit-
ting Thomas Carlyle to become in his old age the apostle
of violence, the despiser and reviler of those whom God
has left dependent for their happiness and security on the
justice and humanity of their more richly gifted fellows.
" We do not know what the end of Democracy will be
here or elsewhere. If it does not succeed in supplying
better Government than the world has got from Mr. Car-
lyle's heroes, during the last fifteen hundred years, we
sincerely hope it may perish utterly. We care very little
for forms of government. The end of all government is
the perfection of the individual man, and it is because wo
see in democracy with all its shortcomings and corruptions
afar better promise of human development than the Charleses,
Napoleons, or the Fredericks, or the Rob Roys, or the Eyres
have ever held out, that are willing to labour and wait for
its success. In the meantime we hare the consolation of
knowing that the world can hardly be worse governed in
the future than it hasbeen in the past."
The Round Table on this subject observes, in an article
entitled "Carlyle on Cacocracy :"—" War to the hilt with
the insolence and the anarchy of the people is what Carlyle
looks for, yet no living man has given, on paper, greater
provocation to popular insolence and anarchy than he. In
this the wrong is so palpable that there is no stimulus to
set it right. Vulgarity, low aspirations, and mean pur-
suits must, from the nature of things, be the characteris-
tics of the greater part of the absulutely necessary portions
of the community. To them it falls to do the work that
must be dons in the world that the world's existence may
be preserved. It is the lot of man, from which few of us
are in every sense exempt, to eat bread in the sweat of his
brow, yet bread-and-butter pursuits, as such, are essen-
tially vulgar. A nation of shopkeepers, as one of Mr.
Carlyle's heroes called Mr. Carlyle's country, may be but
a vulgar and inglorious thing; yet for a residence, in re-
spect of order, it is vastly preferable to a land of his men who
do things, or to his ideal fur the present age, a community
wherein a hundred thousand adult men 'defend their island
against all corners, and beneficently keep steady to their
work a million of niggers on the lower ranges." The
vulgar herd that excite Mr. Carlyle's gorge, even if they
were not needed in the community, would be by no means
a bad element to have in it. Their steady, plodding
attention to daily details—petty and mean details, perhaps,
yet the very ones whose suns constitutes national pros-
perity and whose derangement means financial convulsion
—regulates things necessary to be regulated, yet which
Mr. Carlyle's heroes would turn from with a noble scorn
—so much that, of the two, the vulgar, narrow-minded
horde are rather the more stable and essential element in
the life of a peaceful nation. But because the circle to
which Mr. Carlyle would confine the ruling power is too
narrowly circumscribed, it by no means fellows that to is
in error about the consequences of that apprehended
annihilation of all political barriers which fill him with
such gloomy forebodings. These should be judged by
themselves. And as it is very plain that American
Democracy was the phantom which haunted him as he
wrote, we may snake the application direct, and ask our-
selves whether in very truth he has overrated its dangers.
Long before our civil war it became evident that we
had floated into rapids and ware being hurried resistlessly
somewhither. To Mr. Carlyle, and those who think with
him, it seemed inevitable that we should shoot Niagara
into extinction. There were not wanting many even
among ourselves to speculate on the form which our
gathered digjecia tnenibra might assume. The most san-
guine of us held that now at last, when danger nerved us
to exert our latent strength, we should make a mighty
effort, gain the bank, and emerge upon firm ground, taught
to shun Niagara for evermore. Neither judged truly.
We escaped the plunge, indeed, for the time, but we gained
no shore. Our respite was a whirlpool, where, spent,
nerveless, torn, bleeding, blind, and giddy, we are swept
on aimlessly, waiting for a fate we cannot discern, and call-
ing in by way of help new supplies of the already resist-
less stream that brought us where we are. Nothing could
be more dismal than our present condition—the Constitution,
once the object of an idolatrous faith, shivered in fragments,
an object of scorn; no single statesman in office, none even
in Congress; incompetence in power, dishonesty in places
of trust, venality in places of influence, alleged treason
everywhere, clear-sighted patriotism and definite purpose
nowhere; disfranchised freedmen and enfranchised slaves
imbecility and recklessness exalted by every ballot-box
parity joined with capacity, not only uncalled to high posi-
tion, but hopelessly precluded from getting there; punish-
ment of crime suspended, respect for law ended, trust in
the Government lost even by itself ; worse than all, apathy
and stupor in the hearts of all who discern these things
and groan in spirit without dreaming of ending them.
. . . Clap-trap, deceit, ignorance, log-rolling, Ornery
meetings, nominating conventions—all the paraphernalia
of the sans culotte supremacy are things that the real
American nation, its legitimate rulers—its iiptcrrot
in the simplest, plainest sense—can more easily sweep
from the face of their land than they can bring
themselves to capitulate to an abjectness of degra-
dation like that of the vile Republic on our Southern
border. For a while longer we may allow the roughs
and gaol-birds to 'appropriate the polls, vapid wind-
bags to fill our ears from the halls of Congress, soulless
corporations to overshadow whole states and fill legisla-
tures with their tools. Roughs and millionaires—the
KaKtCrOt and rXoinrol —may still for a time pre-
serve the power that comes of their coalition. Always,
probably, there will be among us, as in every commer-
cial nation, people to govern by their wealth—
trXOVTOKpaTELP j—but that a class should govern by
its unfitness, its badness—that the ,canto-rot should
make to themselves cacocracy ; for which operation
in the days of Lirecian Republics there was not even
a name—this can never be brought to pass. It is as
well that we should be borne on swiftly to the struggle
that is to save us from the abyss—that Johnsons, Brown-
lows, Stevenses, and Wades should be multiplied; that
American men should be driven from the polls to make
room for slaves by birth or slaves by nature ; that every
unseemly thing should be exalted, and every provision of
nature distorted; that the utter intolerableness of it all
should appear beyond possibility of concealment—so that,
seeing the foulness of this bastard democracy, we may ex-
tricate ourselves from its current, and save ourselves and
our country from the wreck."

RICCIOTTI GARIBALDI.---ON Thursday afternoon
Ricciotti Garibaldi, the son of the Italian patriot, arrived
in Edinburgh from Dundee, where he has been staying
fur several days. He was visited at the Edinburgh Hotel
in the course of the evening by a number of gentlemen
who sympathise with the Italian cause, with whom he dis-
cussed the question of the future of that country. In the
evening he dined with Mr. Harrison, chairman of the
Chamber of Commerce. We understand he purposes to
leave Edinburgh this afternoon.--Scotsman.