rays of light making the darkness less dense in the deepest vales of ignorance. All questions of church and state, religion and politics, were publicly discussed. Increased freedom and toleration were to be seen all around them. Compared with the English people, the French saw themselves the most pitiable slaves; the actual cultivator of the soil pay ing, according to Alison, nine times as much as the English laborer, or eleven twelfths of all he could produce. Multitudes could not have land to cultivate even upon such terms. Game must not be disturbed, for how could the seigneur have his hunting grounds curtailed! Long miles of fertile land must lie fallow, lest the partridges should be disturbed. Better that French people should starve, than that the French lord should be restricted in his pleasures. Many a French father and mother, sallow and emaciated, hope driven from their hearts, despair seated their countenances, must see their children lie unclad and unfed upon their bed of weeds, while around the manorhouse of their lord spiritual, the multitude of hunting dogs were well kenneled and in the best condition. Here was enough and to spare, but the crumbs were denied the starving tenant. The horse and the hound were sleek and fat, but the human worker was naked and destitute. Contrasts like these were to be seen all over France. Industry dying of hunger-idleness rev eling in plenty; and this luxurious idleness maintained by this starving industry-the price of being gov. erned! There was a necessity that the hands should strike work, when the stomach was denied nourishment.

There were those in the nation among the higher orders who saw with alarm the injustice and the guilt of this state of things. A few among the noblesse and clergy were for lightening the taxes of the la

borer by taxing their own class. But no proposition of this kind was favorably received. When stern necessity drove them to this course, every other expedient having been tried in vain, and the whole machinery of government come to a dead stand for the want of money, it proved the torch which lighted all the combustible materials of the na tion.

But the suffering from actual want among the lowest of the French people was not the only cause of revolutionary acts. Not a class in France was satisfied with its condition. The supercilious bearing of the old nobility could not be borne by the new peers. Men of ability and worth were indignant that every avenue to advancement was closed against them because their ancestors centuries before were not lords of the land. Birth took the precedence of talent, learning, enterprise and wealth. The king and the court were chagrined that the horn of plenty should not still shower its blessings upon them. The seigneurs were indignant at the very idea that they should help defray the expenses of the government. Unprivileged capitalists determined they would no longer be burdened with the expense of supporting so much useless dignity. Philosophers barely endured the present, sustained by the hope of a millennium of equality and benevolence. All were dissatisfied with the existing state of things. The times had changed. France had changed. But still in no particular had her civil, religious, or political garments been altered. So rotten that they were ready to fall off at the first breeze, those whose business it was had made no provision for new and better apparel.

Sansculottic in every sense, when the breeze did come, as come it must unless nature suspended her laws, 'the whole French nation went spinning into night and orcus.'

Over the scenes which followed

upon the manifestation of revolutionary principles, Carlyle remarks there has been shrieking enough; and he classes them among the most frightful our planet has witnessed. Not only during the 'Reign of Terror' was wretchedness and agony found in France, but "history, looking back over this France through long times, back to Turgot's time for instance, when dumb drudgery staggered up to its king's palace, and in wide expanse of sallow faces, squalor and winged raggedness, presented hieroglyphically its petition of grievances; and for answer got hanged on a 'new gallows forty feet high-confesses mournfully that there is no period to be met with, in which the general twenty five millions of France suffered less than in this period which they name the 'Reign of Terror!' But it was not the dumb millions that suffered here; it was the speak ing thousands, and hundreds, and units; who shrieked, and published, and made the world ring with their wail, as they could and should: that is the grand peculiarity. The fright fullest births of time are never the loud-speaking ones, for these soon die; they are the silent ones, which can live from century to century! Anarchy, hateful as death, is abhorrent to the whole nature of man; and so must itself soon die.""Wherefore let all men know what of depth and of height is still revealed in man; and, with fear and wonder, with just sympathy and just antipathy, with clear eye and open heart, contemplate it and appropriate it; and draw innumerable inferences from it. This inference, for example, among the first: that if the gods of this lower world will sit on their glittering thrones, indolent as Epicurus's gods, with the living chaos of ignorance and hunger weltering uncared for at their feet, and smooth parasites preaching peace, peace, when there is no peace,' then the dark chaos, it would

seem, will rise, has risen, and, O heavens! has it not tanned their skins into breeches for itself? That there be no second Sansculottism in our earth for a thousand years, let us understand well what the first was; and let rich and poor of us go and do otherwise."*

The ideas expressed in these two paragraphs are continually kept in view throughout this history. The millions of France had for centuries been among the most loyal of European men. They would have continued so had not the objects of their devotion changed. It had become impossible for France to live any longer as she had lived. Changes which should have been gradually and wisely going forward in the laws and institutions of the nation, must now be made suddenly. The upper powers had neglected their duties; they still refused relief when a whole suffering nation instinctively cried for help; their indolence and sumptuousness made them hateful in the eyes of the people; and—for nature's laws must be obeyed-the people, broken loose from all the ties which for centuries had bound them, blindly, foolishly and wickedly, as they ever will and must, undertook the work of revolution. But at bottom the guilt of the whole lies at the door of those who occupied the stations of authority. It was a long and most difficult thing for the millions of France to work themselves into a revolutionary state. It never could have taken place, it never would have been thought of, had there been any perceptible approximation to right and justice in the spiritual and temporal guides of the nation.

The Past and Present, as we have said, is a warning to England to avoid the doom of France. Mr. Alison, in the forty first chapter of his History of Europe, has strongly

* Vol. III, book x, chap. 6.

predicted the destruction of England. His prediction seems to be founded upon the undue ascendency of popular power in connection with the enormous debt of the nation. Yet, (consistently or not with his general reasoning, we will not stop to inquire,) he rejoices that in this 'western democratic world, there will survive one hundred and fifty millions of men who will speak the English language, read English authors, and glory in English descent.' Mr. Carlyle does not thus despair of England. Hope predominates that she will be saved, though as by fire.' If we rightly understand these two distinguished authors, they do not materially differ about the abstract principles upon which England should be governed, although they would differ widely respecting the particular measures which should be adopted.

But our business is with the Past and Present.

No

What are called the popular tendencies in Europe, or England in particular, are no cause for alarm in the mind of Mr. Carlyle, though he has no sympathy with those who cry so loud for an extension of the elective franchise and measures of that kind. His faith is in the native loyalty of the human heart. pitch to which the mass of a nation can be elevated will necessarily extinguish this loyalty. Were every man to be instructed not only to the extent of reading, but to a capacity of forming some intelligible opinion upon moral and political questions, it would endanger no laws and institutions founded in justice and equity. No righteous ruler, lawgiver, judge, or spiritual guide whatever, need fear the scrutiny of such a nation of free, intelligent men. Ignorance is a protection only to injustice and wrong. Let the governors spiritual and temporal be wiser and better than the governed, and the more elevated the people, the more safety and glory to the governors. Vol. II.

5

Nor does Mr. Carlyle lament the passing away of the old feudal forms in which England was once comfortably habited. He admires the spirit of many of the ancient barons, and finds much to applaud in the faith and institutions of the past. He brings up a scene of the twelfth century, not for any paradisiacal aspect of it, but to show how, the right man holding the helm, the ship of state (or monastery) can be steered safely through a troubled sea. Abbot Sampson placed at the head of affairs at St. Edmundsbury, finds difficulties, solecisms, wrongs, and injustice enough to encounter and to remedy; in doing which he becomes prematurely gray, so laborious and perplexing was the task. That there were difficulties to be met, and that Sampson valiantly met them and triumphed is the very reason why Carlyle takes this period to illustrate his own. From the toll-gate up to the crown every thing was out of joint. The rich refused to pay the lawful tax for cutting convent grains. The collector entered the houses of the poor, and for want of the tax, he snatched a stool, kettle, even the house-door, and the old woman gave him chase with shrieks and brandished distaffs. Royal authority demanded yearly a certain amount of eels, when no eels could be caught, -worse than making bricks without straw. Sampson found a sad deficit in St. Edmund's exchequer, comparable, almost, considering their circumstances, to the present debt of England.

The monks of the monastery were lazy and vicious; they would not keep their accounts straight, nor do any of their temporal or spiritual work as they should. They actually rose in rebellion and threatened to murder their abbot. The feudal knights tributary to St. Edmundsbury "were of unjust and greedy temper," and cheated him out of his fees. Kings, earls, barons and Jews

continually vex him with unjust demands. But the heroic Sampson, as far as his rule extended, reduced every thing to order. He triumphed because he was just. From the meanest monk up to the king, he was respected and feared.

Carlyle commends many things which pertained to those feudal times.* If there was fighting to be done, the earls and barons joined in it with their vassals, for whom they had a kind regard, and for whom they provided bread and protection. In return they were loved and loyally obeyed. Rather than see a laborer starve they would have shared with him the last morsel in their castles. Without doubt we can find periods in the days of feudalism when there was less physical suffering in England than at present; periods when the relation between governors and governed was happier than at present. But the connection between them was after all, as Carlyle declares, of the "brass-collar kind," and few .in England, wretched as they may be, would wish to return to this condition.

What, according to our author, is the disease of England, and what the remedy?

It is the peculiar view Carlyle takes of the subject, rather than any new facts which he produces, which makes us see England tottering upon the verge of a fearful precipice. There she is, sitting upon her seagirt island, her arms encircling the globe; the strongest, the most mag. nificent, the richest nation on the face of the earth. Behold her navy, her army, her possessions in every clime, her cities, her iron roads, temples, palaces, her edifices of every kind-her science, art, litera ture, and living intellect and wis

* In a late number of Blackwood's Magazine, it is stated that a greater proportion of the higher than of the lower classes of England perished in the wars with Napoleon.

dom; what a spectacle of splendor and greatness! Hear the puffing of her engines, the noise of her hammers, the buzz of her spindles, the rattling of her carriages! Surely England is in sound working order. Behold her queen, her court, her nobility, her clergy, her capitalists! She is the sovereign, or the protector, or the creditor, of almost all the nations of the earth. Her canvas whitens every sea; the roar of her cannon resounds on every shore. Talk of England's disease?—of her approaching death? Does not every pulse beat with vigor and health? England sinking under a load of debt? To whom? She is indebted only to her own citizens. Will they destroy her whose wealth is all bound up in her existence? Is Ireland about to take her life? All that the Irish ask, is, the privilege of making laws and administering justice among themselves; on which condition they will remain loyal to the English crown. Has England so dense a population that food can not be found for all? She can transport her surplus millions to her fertile colonies, or to the rich and unpeopled lands of our western country. Do her corn-laws threaten to undermine her prosperity, or to unsettle the loyalty of her people? Can she not repeal them? taxes! But she can diminish them so that they shall not bear with crushing weight on the laboring classes. No symptom of fatal disease can be detected in this way. Philosophically speaking, the dan ger does not lie in her want of natural ability. Her disease is of a moral nature. What will, not what can England do? Carlyle looks at the moral state of the nation, and only suggests quite incidentally any specific remedial measures of an outward character; for which some reviewers have censured him. Yet he every where proposes the only remedy for the evil of which he complains. He has little confi

Her

dence in any party measure to relieve the evil from which the great est danger is to be apprehended. He repeatedly says he has no Morrison's pill (referring to parliamentary acts and the like) for curing the maladies of society. "Unluckily the heavens themselves, in their rich pharmacopoeia, contain none such. There will no 'thing' be done that will cure you. There will a radical, universal alteration of your regimen and way of life take place; there will a most agonizing divorce between you and your chimeras, luxuries, and falsities, take place; a most toilsome, all but impossible return to nature, and her veracities, and her integrities, take place; that so the inner fountains of life may again begin, like eternal. light-fountains, to irra. diate and purify your bloated, swollen, foul existence, drawing nigh, as at present, to nameless death. Either death or else all this will take place. Judge, if with such diagnosis, any Morrison's pill is like to be discoverable." This perhaps is as specific a statement of the case as is given in the book; as delicate also, for more uncourtly epithets and comparisons were rarely ever used. As a preacher, John Knox was politeness itself compared with Carlyle. The Scotch generally, we believe, never select soft words when they can find others; but Carlyle in the work before us is almost outlandish. He sometimes quotes, yet every reader knows the quotation consists of the commas only. What the lords spiritual and the lords temporal, 'the working and unworking aristocracies' in England will say to see themselves symbolized in the fables of golden Midas with his long ears, and of the Dead Sea apes chattering upon the trees, we are a little curious to know. Other feelings than those of disgust will be likely to attend the perusal of the Past and Present; for Carlyle knows how to say such

things, blunt as he is in the use of single epithets. He deals much in fables, and gives them a depth of meaning of which the authors never dreamed.

Yet the above quotation, to one who has not read the book, will give no definite idea of the threatening evils of England and their remedy, as they lie in the mind of the author. Nor will any amount of quotations short of several entire chapters. Though England looks so fair and vigorous outwardly, Carlyle, who seems to know her inner, spiritual life, sees a moral gangrene upon every function of her system. To say that the aristocracy are unjust, unmerciful, implacable, abominable, damnable, out and out in league with the devil, in all their management of England, sounds tame and insipid after reading some of these chapters. He does not seem to have the feeling which came over him on one occasion in speaking of similar characters in France that God would think twice before he damned such men.' He sees nothing right or just, much less heroic and godlike, in any of the social, moral, or political relations of the various classes of the realm. One thing he honors in England-the labor which has made her physically great. This in itself he thinks noble-England's true epic.' But this compared with some other things, he deems honorable in quite a secondary degree. The nobles of England present to his mind a most despicable spectacle. Rest ing secure upon their yellow parchments, they claim the land as theirs ; they made it, or at least their fathers fought or gambled for it, and gave it to them to be used as seemeth them good. They are also England's law-makers and governors. The government they inherited with the land from their fathers, back to the time whereof the memory of man runneth not to the contrary. With this, in itself considered, Car