CARLYLE'S LATTER DAY PAMPHLETS.

 We publish below several extracts from a work intituled ' Latter Day Pamphlets,' edited by Thomas Carlyle of London, along with certain remarks of the London Times of 26th December.

' In the days that are now passing over us even fools are arrested to ask the meaning of them ; 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 they are days of utter despair. For it is not a small hope that will suffice, the ruin being clearly, either in action or in prospect, universal. There must be a new world if there is to be any world at all ! That human things 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. It is a time to make the dullest man consider and ask himself,— Whence he came ? Whither he is bound ?— a veritable ' New Era,' to the foolish as well as to the wise.'

 What Mr. Carlyle had in his mind when he wrote thus, presently appears. It was the outbreak of Republicanism in 1848. Well might any but a very cool observer of that astonishing movement imagine that ' Doomsday was come ; ' that ' since the irruption of the northern barbarians there had been nothing like it ; ' and that ' the state everywhere throughout Europe had coughed its last in street musketry.' But we now see the breadth and depth of the movement, and perceive that it was immeasurably inferior in importance and significance to several which have occurred since the overthrow of the Roman Empire — far below the first French Revolution, further still below the Reformation. The fact was that Europe had been vaccinated by the Jacobins, and would not take Sansculottism again. A second advent of ' the Mountain ' was a thing morally impossible. And now that the smoke of the barricades has cleared away we see clearly that the movement was confined to the capitals or great cities, and that even there it was a revolt rather than a revolution. No great political, much less any great social change, has been produced. 

There has been no overthrow of a privileged class or substitution of a free for an arbitrary government, such as resulted from the first French revolution. Of the monarchs that were temporarily expelled, the majority have either returned to their seats of government in person, or devolved their power, diminished only in name, to a younger and more vigorous successor. One monarchy alone has been completely overthrown ; and in this instance a constitutional King has been followed by an unconstitutional and even absolute President. The ' State ' has not 'coughed its last,' and Doomsday is indefinitely adjourned.

 So again, far from its being impossible that ' things in our Europe can ever return to the old sorry routine,' there is but too much reason to apprehend that by a natural though lamentable reaction they will re turn into an an older and sorrier routine than ever. The first effect of the insurrection has been a great increase in the force of standing armies— an element which certainly is not favourable to political progress. The next effect may, perhaps, be a European war, which, whatever may be its result, is sure to suspend all liberal movements, to exalt the power of the sword, and to impoverish and crush the people. And what is more important still, absolutism both civil and religious, is everywhere deriving dangerous strength from the natural fears of the peaceable and the rich. France is an evident instance. Germany is equally so. In Italy a winking Madonna consecrates the victory of a reinstated Pope. Even in England men who have windows and tills to guard begin to talk too lightly of their liberty ; and the greatest theological movement of the day, which Mr. Carlyle, seeing only from a distance, takes for the smallest, is radically absolutist in civil matters as well as in spiritual. Every where the tide is running against freedom.

 Of the social evils of England Mr. Carlyle takes a view no less exaggerated than his view of the political situation of Europe : —

 ' Between our black West Indies and our white Ireland, between these two extremes of lazy refusal to work and of famishing inability to find any work, what a world have we made of it with our fierce Mammon worships and our benevolent philanderings, and idle godless nonsenses of one kind and another! Supply and demand — Leave it alone; — Voluntary principle,— Time will mend it: — 'till British industrial existence seems fast becoming one huge prison swamp of reeking pestilence physical and moral ; a  hideous living Golgotha of souls and bodies buried alive ; such a Curtius' gulf, communicating with the  nether deeps, as the sun never saw till now.' Those scenes, which the Morning Chronicle is bringing home to all minds of men — thanks to it for service such as newspapers have seldom done — ought to excite unspeakable reflections in every mind. Thirty thousand outcast needlewomen working themselves swiftly to death ; three million paupers rotting in forced idleness, helping said needlewomen to die ; these are but items in the sad ledger of despair.'

 We do not wish the prophet to prophesy smooth things to us; but we wish him to prophesy true things ; otherwise he will produce either incredulity, despair, or a vague impression that something extraordinary must be done— which is very fatal to all practical reform. To write so wildly on the subject is just the way to relax real effort and increase the amount of indolent sentimentalism and ineffectual rhetoric. And surely, for a social philosopher, who is bound to base his conclusions upon facts, Mr. Carlyle has the strangest mode of obtaining his information. His notions of the industrial classes, generally, seem to be derived from certain highly seasoned pictures of the very worst class of a metropolis ; that is, the very cesspool of civilized society. Is this sensible ? And might it not be well to look a little into ' Mac-Crowdy's ' statistics and the ' Dismal Science'? Of the existence of the ' thirty thousand outcast needle women ' we yet seek proof. Pauperism is a terrible evil— one which deserves and is receiving the best attention of our best men. If Mr. Carlyle has anything practical to say upon the subject, he will be gladly heard ; but before he can say anything practical he must learn the cause of the evil which is to he cured. It does not arise from 'benevolent philanderings, and idle godless nonsenses,' nor from 'mammon-worship' either; but from certain causes naturally incident to society in an old and overpeopled country, which it is the province of the ' Dismal Science ' to investigate and correct. And as to the Morning Chronicle reports, and the 30,000 needlewomen, Mr. Carlyle would here be nearer the mark if he directed the sword of his satire against luxury, which draws all this vice and misery in its train. But luxury is a disease of the body social, and Mr. Carlyle's fixed faith and fixed idea is that, all our evils result from want of intellect in the head.

 The two offices upon which Mr. Carlyle especially fixes are the Foreign and the Colonial. And he is right here. But the reasons which he gives are wrong. The reason why these offices are in worse odour than the rest, is not that they are particularly deep in 'owl-droppings,' or that the clerks in them are not men of genius and ' brothers of the radiances and the lightnings,' or that the Colonial-office does not leave the colonies alone and turn its undivided attention to the Irish, or that the Foreign-office does not take up the potato rot and cease to 'protocol' and mix itself in the affairs of Europe. The Colonial-office is in bad odour, partly owing to the spirit which at present rules it, partly from the inherent difficulty of governing distant dependencies, especially when the Government is representative and the dependencies are not represented. And the Foreign-office is in bad odour, partly and principally because Lord Palmerston is Foreign Minister, and partly because just now there is a great call for economy, and people are very anxious to find good reasons for putting down ambassadors.

 The Colonial-office Mr. Carlyle proposes to reform by turning it to its proper function of organizing Irish labour. Under the Foreign-office he proposes, with some witty politicians, to ' put a live coal.' We have had no continental interests worth caring for since the time of Oliver Cromwell. As we have certain cottons and hardwares to sell, and Portugal oranges to buy, we may need ' some kind of consul.' Ambassadors are to be 'sent on great occasions ; otherwise we may correspond with foreign Potentates through the cheap medium of the penny post. This scheme for reforming the Foreign-office is not original ; but the scheme for reforming the Colonial-office quite makes amends.

 The task of reforming Downing-street in general was destined by Mr. Carlyle for our lost Sir Robert Peel. But who that ever studied the character of that lamented statesman can hear without a smile of his 'privately resolving to go one day into that stable of King Augis (Augeas) which appals human hearts, so rich is it high piled with the droppings of 200 years, and, Hercules-like, to load 1000 night waggons from it, and turn running water into it, and swash and shovel at it, and never leave it till the antique pavement and the real basis of the matter show itself clear again ;' or of his asking himself, in the character of 'the reforming Hercules, what work is now necessary, not in form and by traditionary use and wont, but in very fact, for the vital interests of the British nation, to be done here,'

 But of course the great remedy is Hero worship,— to choose ourselves a Lama, or from six to a dozen of them after the example of the people of Thibet, who have ' seen into the heart of the matter ;' to get the divinest men into Downing-street in place of the present Parvuluses and Zeros; who might just as well be elected without so much cost and trouble by throwing an orange skin into St. James'-street and taking the man it hit ; and generally to increase ' the reverence for Human Intellect or God's Light and the detestation of Human Stupidity or the Devil's Darkness.' As a practical suggestion to set us going in this scheme of universal reform— which otherwise, now that Sir Robert Peel is gone, would be rather vague— Mr. Carlyle proposes that the Crown should be empowered to nominate part of the Ministry to seats in the House of Commons, without constituencies, of which he speaks in the most disparaging and anti-democratic terms. This again is not original. But it is original to imagine that such an arrangement would open the Cabinet to ' the whole British nation, learned, unlearned, professional, practical, speculative, and miscellaneous,' and that if it had been in force 50 years ago, instead of having ' meagre Pitt' for First Minister, we might have had ' the thundergod,' Robert Burns.

Britannia and Trades' Advocate (Hobart Town, Tas. ), May 1851 http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article225557511

GOVERNMENT BY THE WISE.

 The Workers' Educational Association, whose purposes and methods were discussed in these columns last Thursday, may be said to represent one of the two competing ideals which have divided political thinkers since the days of Plato. It is true that neither ideal has ever come within measurable distance of realisation; but it is also true that neither of them has even been wholly suppressed; in the darkest times they have lived at least in the souls of such as see visions and dream glorious dreams of the perfect State. The first of these two ideas—the notion which is at the core of the above mentioned Association—is the idea that the many, to be fit for self-government, make themselves wise; and the opposing idea—expounded graciously and blandly by Plato, and with thunderous emphasis by Carlyle—is the idea that the many can never by the nature of things be fit for self-government, and that the secret of political perfection is to entrust the task of government to the wise few. The former is the idea of an enlightened democracy; the latter is the idea of a bureaucracy of saints and sages. The distinction is clear-cut, and it divides into two classes the imaginary commonwealths which have been painted by various inspired dreamers. For instance, the the "News from Nowhere" of William Morris is a poetic and persuasive picture of a community which has grown wise and good, and which is perfectly capable of managing its own affairs; and Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" sketches, in vague outline, a similar happy state of things. In Plato's "Republic," on the other hand, and in the "Modern Utopia" of Mr. H. G. Wells, we are presented with pictures of a community governed by its philosophers. Shelley and William Morris, in short, believe in democracy, for which Mr. Wells can find no words too placidly contemptuous. He believes, with all his heart, in the principle of aristocracy—not a feudal aristocracy of birth, not a Nietzschean aristocracy of virile and violent persons, but an aristocracy of brains and character. In the world-state of the Wells Utopia the whole of the responsible business of government is in the hands of a "Samurai" class—a class which consists of all who are capable of living the pure, the austere, the minutely regular, the exclusively rational, the bodily and spiritually ennobling existence laid down for them by the "Rule" of their order. It is strange to find in so modern a writer as Mr. Wells—a writer, too, who has so often poured contempt on the study of Greek—so close an echo of Plato. Mr. Wells is perhaps a little unfortunate in the name—"Samurai"—which he gives to his ruling class: for the real Samurai, those heroes of Japan whose fellowship will stand throughout succeeding time among the world's grandest memories of moral achievement, lived in an age of faith and feudalism: we, on the contrary, are living in an age of doubt and democracy; and it is the problems of our own age that we are called upon to face. There is no reason to believe that Mr. Wells's vision, or anything like it, will ever be realised; it is highly improbable that any of the dominant nations will ever again acquiesce, for any long time, in the concentration of all political power in the hands of a class, however wise and good that class may be. The nations have tasted blood; they have assimilated the democratic idea. The democratic idea, once fully grasped, is only abjured by a people in the degradation of decay; yet to be able to produce a whole class of pure, austere, devoted, self-sacrificing governors, an entire bureaucracy of saints and sages, a people must be in a condition very far from decadence. The conception of the "Samurai," in fact, contradicts itself. Only a sound race could bring forth these thousands of splendid personalities; only a failing race would submit to their dominion. The fact is that Mr. Wells, like many other writers less brilliant than himself, falls into the mistake of treating democracy as a human plan—like, say, some particular nostrum for some particular malady—which has been made the subject of experiment and has been found useless or too dangerous. They speak of democracy as if it were a political device, like party government for example.

But democracy is not a mere piece of political machinery, it is a part of the material of politics. It is an instinct that comes to communities with growth, as puberty comes to individuals. Mr. Wells finds no difficulty whatever in proving to his own satisfaction that democracy is irrational and absurd; he repeats his demonstration, with a rather wearisome iteration, in half a dozen of his books. He finds it quite easy to show how much better the world would go on if only the people would leave government to the great of heart and strong of will. In like manner M. Emile Faguet, one of the wittiest and most brilliant of modern Frenchmen, has made in a book entitled "The Cult of Incompetence"—a slashing attack on democracy as he sees it in the France of to-day; his main thesis being, that whenever you catch a glimpse of democracy in action you invariably find it, distrusting ability and tending to put power in the hands of the inefficient mediocrity. Nothing could be more skilful than M. Faguet's manner of showing how incompetence in one field of government—the legislature—leads to incompetence every where else, till at last the whole body politic is saturated with inefficiency; how a country which begins by entrusting the duties of Prime Minister to mediocrity ends by entrusting the duties of rural postman to a paralytic. And M. Faguet's solution is the same as that of Mr.. Wells—an aristocracy of wise men; government by the philosophers. It is hopelessly impracticable. A healthy nation trusts its instincts—and, it may be added, distrusts its philosophers. And since no sane person will deny the peremptory need of wisdom in the work of governance, and since government by the wise few is incompatible with the democratic instinct of twentieth-century humanity, it seems to follow that the other idea—the idea of bringing wisdom to the many—is the only alternative, unless democracy is destined to lead the human race into the abyss. If it be objected that wisdom cannot be acquired, we may reply that at least knowledge, which is the basis of wisdom, can be acquired; and that is why such enterprises as the Workers' Educational Association deserve every support, and why the success of such enterprises must be reckoned among the hopefullest signs of the times.

West Australian (Perth, WA ), July 1913,

http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article26879439

"Twelve Types,"

 by G. K. Chesterton (London: A. L. Humphreys).

One of the most brilliant of living essayists of the younger school is Mr. G. K. Chesterton. In airiness and ease the flights of literary fancy he has brought together under the above title may not compare with Andrew Lang's best efforts, or with Stevenson's, which, perhaps, they more nearly resemble. But Mr. Chesterton yields to no recent writer in originality and suggestiveness, and if the twelve types he has selected for critical study are not likely to be unfamiliar to any person at all decently read, the author may fairly claim to have introduced the reader to a mode of treatment which is certainly not common. It would be extraordinary if essays dealing with such diverse characters as Savonarola, Charles II., St. Francis of Assisi, Pope, Byron, Sir Walter Scott, Carlyle, Charlotte Bronte, William Morris, Robert Louis Stevenson, Rostand, and Tolstoi were equal to one another in power throughout, but there is not one from which the reader will not draw some profit and pleasure, or which does not bear the stamp of a thoughtful and vigorous mind. Thus Mr. Chesterton takes Savonarola out of the category of theologians pure and simple. The great teacher of Italy, we are told, "was making war against no trivial human sins, but against godless and thankless quiescence, against getting used to happiness, the mystic sin by which all creation fall. He was preaching that severity which is the sign manual of youth and hope. He lived at a time when, following eagerly, though blindly, the phantom of an extinct civilisation, the citizens of Florence had gathered about them the little fragments of what might seem a Greek city—its architecture and sculpture, its Platonic banquets, and Aristophanic revelry. He set himself to combat the profligacy of a day when men were parodying the old liturgies with the borrowed phrases of Pagan philosophy, or polluting Italian morals, with exotic mysteries, which could scarcely be whispered in a confessional. He transformed a vicious and effeminate people into an austere and simple society; he replaced tyranny by the most popular institutions; and he governed Florence without giving any orders, and without having as much as a single soldier under him. "Men like Savonarola," says Mr. Chesterton, "are the witnesses to the tremendous psychological fact at the back of all our brains, but for which no name has ever been found, that ease is the worst enemy of happiness, and civilisation potentially the end of man."

The misfortune, which Mr. Chesterton does not seem to see, is that men, like Savonarola in the effort to spiritualise society, are apt to think that human virtue is bound up with conformity to the standard of an idyllic past. Savonarola, like the Puritans of England, craved for an earthly commonwealth, of which Christ should be King. The younger and more impressible citizens of Florence were constituted a moral police, who enforced sumptuary laws in the streets, or entered fearlessly into private houses. Country merrymakings assumed the form of devotional processions, or meetings, where crucifixes and pictures were something more than religious ornaments. The marriage feast had nothing left of a secular character—it was purely sacramental, and (as Gibbon tells us was the case among the early Christians of Rome) often followed by vows of chastity between husband and wife. Savonarola, indeed, looked forward to the day when such unions would cease altogether, and Florence become one vast monastery. Presently, the irresistible logic of his convictions carried him yet another step backwards towards a visionary past. All the secular progress of his day, the first promise of the new morning of thought, was anathema, and must be shut out of the church. So a pyre was erected in the great square of the city, and upon it the noblest works of the greatest masters laid—the dangerous love poems of Petrarch, the impure novels of Boccaccio, and the fresh flowers and voluptuous forms of the pictures where Venus and Cupid had supplanted the saints. Perhaps Europe has never since witnessed the deliberate offering up of so costly a holocaust; and yet not one of the governing party shrank from the sacrifice. But Savonarola's triumph was of short duration. His Commonwealth vanished before the touch of time, just as that did which was founded by the English Puritans, and which was intended by many of its founders less as an assertion of the political rights of the people than as an expression of mediæval religion in its highest form.

The attempt to impose upon a nation the ordinances of a self-denying asceticism is foredoomed to failure, whether it be made by a Savonarola in the interests of religion, or by a John Ruskin in the interests of art. For a buried past there is no day of resurrection, and we can no more recall the blank cheerlessness of a time when the aesthetic sense was undeveloped than we can think of stopping the industrial machinery because it is pleasanter to breathe the ambrosial air of glade and meadow than the blackened and dust-laden atmosphere of a city. The aim of the true reformer should be not to abolish but to make the best of our civilisation. It can hardly be said that William Morris, to whom Mr. Chesterton devotes one of the most impressive of his essays, had a full grasp of the problem. For his "glorious, if not conquering, fight against the elaborate and deliberate ugliness of the most self-conscious of centuries," he merits nothing but praise. His limitation is chiefly apparent in his inability to apprehend anything excepting by his one sense —that of beauty. What charmed him in the noble legends and the noble fancies with which he dealt in his poetry, was the way in which they lent themselves to the purposes of art—their beauty as beauty. Reading his verse is like living in the dreamland of a syren's isle, a place where it is always afternoon. Fair women and brave men pass before us in stately show, and we seem to see them in the half-light of some cloistered isle. It is all a piece of tapestry—a splendid collection of detached episodes. The mediæval era was to Morris an age of gold; as though selfishness and misery did not exist then as much as, perhaps more than, now. He appeared to think a child-like simplicity indispensable to virtuous living. His socialism was not a protest against an unjust distribution of wealth, but merely a sense of beauty working in an economic medium. He saw that the masses are not, and under existing conditions cannot be ruled by artistic perceptions. He saw that unless those conditions were radically changed, and the means were provided for ensuring to all who would work the means of a decent livelihood, his passionate appeals to handicraftsmen to show themselves artists in every stroke of their work, must fall upon deaf ears. He spoke in a dialect strange to the ears not merely of political economists, but of ordinary men, and the result is that his prophetic message has largely miscarried. What will preserve his memory, Mr. Chesterton thinks, are his services as a reformer of the aesthetic taste of his countrymen:—

If ever the gradual and genuine movement of our time towards beauty—not backwards, but forwards—does truly come about, Morris will be the first prophet of it. Poet of the childhood of nations, craftsman in the new honesties of art, prophet of a merrier and wiser life, his full-blooded enthusiasm will be remembered when human life has once more assumed flamboyant colors, and proved that this painful greenish grey of the aesthetic twilight in which we now live is, in spite of all the pessimists, not of the greyness of death, but the greyness of dawn.

The falsehood of extremes was never more strikingly exemplified than in the teachings of Carlyle and Tolstoi, which furnish material for two of Mr. Chesterton's most instructive essays. The blunder of both writers was identical, though it led them to opposite conclusions. The means by which a principle is asserted are gradually confused with the principle itself, until at last they become inextinguishable. Carlyle saw that righteousness was furthered by earnestness, and in dwelling upon the need for earnestness he got at last to look upon it as an end in itself, so that to his mind to be earnest was to be righteous. Earnestness is another name for strength of character, which expressed in action usually takes the form of force. It is easy to understand that a mind carried away as Carlyle's was, would gradually come to see virtue in tyranny and vice in subjection, and so we find Carlyle defending negro slavery and extolling despotism. "In an "Occasional discourse on the nigger question," published in "Fraser's Magazine" in 1849, we find him urging sharp measures to compel Quashee, "up to the ears in pumpkin," to labor for the enrichment of the white planter in the West Indies. Governor Eyre who, in the mild language of Mr. Justice Blackburn, had adopted the "unreasonable course" of keeping up martial law in Jamaica for a period of thirty days after an armed insurrection had been put down, taking during that period, as Mill said, "hundreds of innocent lives by military violence," and flogging men and women in batches, becomes in the eyes of Carlyle "a just, humane, and valiant man." Democracy, as one might expect, is to such a mind "utterly evil," and the proper position of the masses is one of enslavement to the "best man," who should have the power to "beat them" if they will not toil, and shoot them if they still refuse. The error which Carlyle made springs from a defect in his logical faculty, which, as Bagehot showed, is by no means uncommon. For as, according to the lastnamed authority, there are people constitutionally incapable of belief where their reason is unconvinced, and thereby compelled through "the make of their mind" to remain outside ecclesiastical organisations, so there are minds on which no argument based on mere logic can make any impression. The same infirmity is exhibited in another way by Tolstoi. Wrong is inevitably associated with force, therefore force is wrong — so wrong that resistance, even to wrongdoing, becomes a vice. "The theory of Christian duty enunciated by Tolstoi," says Mr. Chesterton, "is that we should never conquer by force, but always, if we can, conquer by persuasion." Interpreting the Scriptures in the light of the ordinary dictionary, and assuming that "resist" means withstand, that "not" means negation, denial, refusal, or prohibition, and that "evil" means something injurious, pernicious, having bad qualities of a moral kind, the Tolstoians have come to believe that the famous exhortation, "resist not evil," means that no step should be taken to prevent mischief or wrong being done. That people can be found in thousands attaching an everyday meaning to the language of Christ, and rejecting the interpretations which it undergoes in the pulpit, is to Mr. Chesterton the most Tremendous tribute ever paid in the world's history to the vitality of an ancient creed. Compared with this, it would be a small thing if the Red Sea were cloven asunder, or the sun did stand still at midday. We are faced with the phenomenon that a ste of revolutionists whose contempt for all the ideals of family and nation would evoke horror in a thieves' kitchen, who can rid themselves of those elementary instincts of the man and the gentleman which cling to the very bones of our civilization, cannot rid themselves of the influence of two or three remote Oriental anecdotes written in corrupt Greek. The fact, when realised, has about it something stunning and hypnotic. The most convinced rationalist is in its presence suddenly stricken with a strange and ancient vision, sees the immense sceptical cosmogonies of this age as dreams going the way of a thousand forgotten heresies, and believes for a moment that the dark sayings handed down through eighteen centuries may indeed, contain in themselves the revolutions of which we have only begun to dream.

No church, says Mr. Chesterton, could keep its congregation together if it offered the tribute Tolstoi pays to Christianity. "The Christianity of Tolstoi is, when we come to consider it, one of the most thrilling and dramatic incidents in our modern civilisation. It represents a tribute to the Christian religion more sensational than the breaking of seals or the falling of stars." This is not the place to discuss the accuracy or otherwise of Tolstoi's interpretation of the Gospels; but a word may be said as to the strange meaning Tolstoi and Carlyle attach to the term "force." It is regarded by both as in itself a moral or an immoral quality, whereas it is, of course, entirely without ethical significance. Where a child is killed by a blow from an axe the same degree of force may have been employed, whether the blow be accidental or deliberate. To form an opinion as to the culpability of the deed we have to look behind the force to the state of mind which directed its use, and where intention is absent, there is no culpability. If force as force were immoral, morality would require the stoppage of all human exertion, muscular or other. If, however, intention be everything, then force might justly be used to prevent the commission of a wrong, and we should be justified in effecting the "conquest" of an intending murderer by something more than persuasion. The inference deduced from so much of Carlyle's teaching that all force is right is, however, no more defensible than Tolstoi's doctrine of inflexible non-resistence. The force that would have stayed an Armenian massacre hardly comes within the same category as that employed by Carlyle's favorite hero when he plunged Europe into war in order to effect the wanton subjugation of Silesia.

Advertiser (Adelaide, SA :), 20 December 1902, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article4908823

ARISTOCRACY AND EVOLUTION

The gist of Mr. Mallock's new book, "Aristocracy and Evolution," is to justify the present order of society by showing how the great man is himself a vera causa of progress and not merely the instrument of his society, that unless the great man is rewarded and encouraged his stimulus to progress will be lost, and that collectivism or socialism by attempting to eliminate the great man is suicidal or impossible. Of course we have at the beginning to clear our minds of any notion of the great man as popularly conceived. Though Carlyle has made one of his most widely-known books out of a series of lectures on Heroes, it is not any such persons who form the humbler Valhalla of Mr. Mallock's aristocracy. There King Hudson may be enthroned, but not Dante, Mohammed, Shakespeare. Emerson, like his friend, has created a gallery of eminent men; he calls them Representative Men, and with Plato, Napoleon, Goethe, Montaigne, and the others they do indeed bulk large in the historical memory.  All those personages are expressly excluded from Mr. Mallock's pages ; he has nothing to do with them. Those who have read Mr. Bryce's book on the American Commonwealth will not he likely to forget the introductory paragraph to his chapter on creative intellectual power, where he describes the little street in the city of Florence where on either side are the statues of glorious Florentines of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries Dante, Giotto, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Petrarch, Ghiberti, Michael Angelo. They are great men, and ever must be, but they are not the kind of great men which, according to the new student, it is the function of our social order to nourish.

What is this vital and vitalising product of society ? Let Mr. Mallock describe him :—"What we here mean by a great man is merely a man who is superior to the majority in his power of producing some given class of result, whereas the average man and the stupid are not superior to the majority in their powers of producing any." Again :—" The greatest poets will be classed as ordinary men, whilst the inventor of machinery for making good boots cheaply will be classed as a great man."  So we go on to learn that this greatness which is the theme of Mr. Mallock's book, this greatness to which he applies the name of aristocracy, is or may be independent of social charm or cultivation, of private goodness or wisdom, of altruistic or romantic passion. The great man may be a boor in manners, a Bœotian in everything save the faculty of business, but if he is great there he is great indeed. In short, Mr. Mallock's aristocrat is merely a man who employs other men in large numbers and concerted undertakings to his own enrichment. He may be a Sir Henry Bessemer who revolutionises the steel manufacture, or the inventor of machinery for making good boots cheaply. He is equally the cause of true social progress, and the order of society rests upon the perpetual succession of such great men. If ever under the mischievous influence of collectivist ideas these great men are denied those rewards which inspire them to exercise their mission then society would perish. The ultimate rewards are rather more lofty than would be expected from the heroes here described. Wealth is the concrete object of the great man's existence, but the reasons why wealth is sought are not the pleasures of the senses, but the pleasures of the mind and imagination, of power, of self realisation, and of social honour. All that conflicts with this harmony of society in which the great man leads masses of ordinary or stupid men into enterprises which provide them with subsistence and himself with these refined pleasures, all that disturbs this harmony is accordingly anathema. Therefore equalised education is dangerous ; it develops wants in the average man which could never be generally satisfied under any social arrangements, and it developes the talents of a certain class of exceptional men who are naturally incomplete, and who the more fully they were developed would only become more mischievous both to their possessors and to society. Likewise the socialistic agitator is mischievous. Socialism is defined by Mr. Mallock as "the embodiment of the results of indiscriminate education on talents which are exceptional, but at the same time inefficient."

Such are the outlines of the new counterblast to Socialism. It is, after all, an academic piece of reasoning, because to argue against popular education, the self-organisation of labour, and other facts of the present social system is to waste time. There they are, the fruit of vast and long-continued effort ; there they will remain. So, to pick out the industrial and commercial survivors of the struggle for the spoils of life, and elevate them into the last precious residuum of our social organism, is to make the argument ludicrous. They are described best in Carlyle's phrase, captains of industry, valuable, indispensable perhaps in a mercantile sense, but not the great men who mould the ideas, the aspirations of men, and by their personal influence make history—are history. No one can underrate the work of a great contractor like Thomas Brassey, a great inventor like Edison, a great systematiser like Lipton, a great speculator like Hooley. Undoubtedly these men are an integral part of the social machinery of our time : their influence is enormous, they marshal armies of labour in all parts of the world, and they enrich the comfort of human life in the same measure that they reward themselves with monumental fortunes. But so for a time do the failed great men of that order, the Jabez Balfours or the Italian nobles who came so badly to grief over the reconstruction of Rome in the present decade. To say that these men represent all that there is of progress in its material sense is to ignore the mass of humanity who consume their goods, perform their labours, occupy their building suburbs, and give them the stimulus and the reward of their enterprise. Mr. Mallock does not deny this interaction, but he insists that there would be no progress if these men could not see before them the rewards expressed in terms of wealth which they at present command. So far as socialism threatens these rewards Socialism threatens the appearance of great men and their beneficent material activities.

Such is his contention, but here he is arguing against the non-existent. Bellamy, who died the other day, imagined a civilisation in which all these incentives to individual exertion were taken away, and he convinced himself that such a civilisation might some day come about. But that is all in the dark. We have the order of social life from which Mr. Mallock derives all his desirable great men, and the complex of their energies and rewards, but who believes that our present stage of social evolution is either the best or the final one ?

Sydney Morning Herald (NSW ), 4 June 1898, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article14131775

DECLINE OF CARLYLE.

"In the last fifteen years or so the sales of Carlyle have fallen off more completely than those of any other notable Victorian author, more even that those of Ruskin, which I should think must be a good second in the decline. You ask what I think is the reason. I think it is because Carlyle was a prophet, most of whose prophecies have failed to come off. And then, again, he was tremendously obsessed by German ideals which the war sentiment scattered.
 "Carlyle first came to Chapman and Hall in 1843. Forster, who had been one of the regular visitors to Cheyne-row during the nine years or so that the Carlyles had been living there, was responsible for the introduction. When he came he was very depressed, for 'Sartor Resartus' had been a failure, and 'The French Revolution' had brought him more honor than money, and he came with 'Past and Present' in a discontented and suspicious mood.
"At first he was far from a profitable investment for the firm. 'My books,' he protested, and these are his own words, 'were not, and never will be, popular. I do not think my literary income has been above £200 a year in spite of my continued  diligence day by day.' He had continual arguments, with Edward Chapman over a uniform collected edition of his works which he wanted to see put on the market, but in which Chapman, at the time, did not believe.
 'In the end the collected edition was published, and I think it must have been about the sixties or the seventies that Carlyle really began to sell, and for forty years or so he enjoyed very big sales. To-day, Carlyle sells hardly at all. We have been running a complete edition of his works with an introduction by H. D. Traill, and it just goes on selling, but that is about all. 'The French Revolution will always be read because, however much its style may be out of the fashion of the times, its wonderful portrait gallery of types of character, and the vigor of its narrative, will never be surpassed as a picture of that particular era."

Critics' Condemnation.

  'The decline of interest in Carlyle's works has been evident to literary critics for years past. The late Sir Edmund Gosse, reviewing Mr. Augustus Ralli's "Guide to Carlyle," published in 1920 in two volumes at 42/, wrote: — can hardly be questioned that no one of the great Victorians has declined in influence so steadily and shows so little evidence of being restored to favor as the once almost omnipotent author of 'Heroes and Hero Worship.' He at all events is a hero whose shrine is abundantly neglected to-day. Whether we regret it or not, the fact has to be faced that there was something in the texture of Carlyle's mind, in the character of his expressed thought, which soon destroyed its attraction and stimulus. A large portion of his writing has ceased to be interesting; his pages create fatigue and impatience in youthful readers, who read only because there persists a tradition that they must be read. . . . There was no pleasing Carlyle, and if he was wearisome as a preacher he was futile as a prophet. He failed altogether to read the signs of the future aright: he underrated mechanism, and had no conception of its value in the reduction of human distress; he professed to hope for the race, but he started in a determination to be disappointed. What is to be thought of a political watchman of the night who could see nothing in Lord Beaconsfield in 1875 except 'a cursed old Jew, not worth his weight in cold bacon'? What is to be thought of a military observer who declared the Prussian army to be the ultimate expression of good government in its 'victory over chaos' ?"
 Mr. David Alec Wilson, who died a few weeks ago, and to whom some reference has already been made in these columns, set himself the task of attempting to restore Carlyle to public favor by means of a panoramic biograph of the "Sage of Chelsea," in six volumes. When the fourth volume, which bore the sub-title "Carlyle at His Zenith," was published in 1927 Mr. Ellis Huberts, in reviewing the book in the "New Statesman," wrote:— "This volume might have been called 'Carlyle at His Nadir' or 'The Hero Worshipper in Search of a Hero'— for it is a record of the time in his life when he was given, as it were, his last chance to examine seriously his own prejudice, his own principles, and refused to take it. He avoided more and more not only the society of those with whom he disagreed, but he encouraged in himself (or did nothing to discourage) the habit of summary and severe judgment on men whom he could not understand movements he had not studied, and great historical events, such as the rise of Jesuitism, of which he did not even pretend to grasp the significance. . . . It never seems to have entered his head that some people would not argue with him because they found him so opinionated, so truculent, so unreasonable, and at bottom so really stupid, that they refused to waste their time."

 A False Prophet.

Mr. Norwood Young published in 1927 a study of the "Sage of Chelsea" entitled "Carlyle: His Rise and Fall," in which he wrote in a chapter summarising "the man and his work": — "When one remembers that he wrote, as he talked, at random contradicting himself swiftly, without perceiving it or caring that many of his confident assertions were inspired by opposition to the last remark he had heard, by dislike, of any opinion that was common, by fear of becoming associated with fools— for he abandoned views he had forced upon the public as soon as he found that they were generally accepted; that he merely repeated, or exaggerated, what he had learned in his youth at Ecclefechan, the reputation he obtained for profundity and wisdom is one of the curiosities of history. His merit fell as his fame rose. He was a mediæeval peasant, full of the superstitions which when he was born, at the end of the eighteenth century, were still to be found in nurseries and wig-wams. Carlyle's manner of propounding his primitive beliefs was so dictatorial and so impressive that people lost the use of their faculties in listening. When once a man has acquired a reputation for depth, every remark he makes will be considered deep. . . The character he obtained us a moral teacher is one of the perversities of reputation; for he thought and taught that physical force is proof of moral worth. He was a moral teacher who knew nothing of moral force. His views on Labor have been strangely misinterpreted. 'More truly than Ruskin,' says a modern admirer, 'is Carlyle the parent of British Socialism and the forerunner of the Labor movement.' According to a disciple of Karl Marx, 'Almost all English Socialists have received their first decisive impetus towards socialism from the writings of Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin and Henry George.' And yet what Carlyle desired was a Government with an aristocratic land owner at the head, endowed with absolute power. There would be no elections, no Parliament, no free press, no trade unions, no strikes, no doles. Labor would he drilled in regiments, and compelled to work on pain of flogging, and even death. In prisons the treadmill, and the spirit of the treadmill, would be introduced. Ignoring all this, Labor claims him as a champion because when he was himself poor he spoke in moving terms of the sorrows of the class to which he belonged . . .
 "As a political teacher he has been ignored. We have not gone back to the feudal system; we have not reintroduced slavery, either of blacks or whites; we have not reduced Parliament to the role of an advisory council of the Crown, without executive power; we have not chosen from the landed aristocracy a dictator, with assistant despots of the Front-de-Boeuf type. On the other hand, the political franchise, which he condemned altogether, has been made universal. The trade union regulation of work is precisely opposite to the governing and drilling of labor by employers which he desired. The doles to the unemployed, which he denounced, have reached a total which he would have regarded with dismay. Freedom of the press continues. Public opinion is not ignored. Instead of the drastic coercion which Carlyle desired to visit Ireland— 'a hearty horsewhip over that back of yours' — we have given Ireland her freedom. We have not accepted Carlyle's opinion that international treaties are 'shadows,' 'diplomatic pack-thread,' 'sheep-skin'; nor do we suppose, as he did, that honor and honesty are 'punctilious.' We have not been converted to his view that necessity knows no law, nor do we decline with him to consider what is morally right."

Age (Melbourne, Vic.), 24 June 1933, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article203811031

CÆSAR'S COLUMN.

A Review by the Editor.

This little book is the last addition to the Political Romance Library, and is well worthy of perusal by all students of social economics. Following in the same line as Edward Bellamy, its author takes a leap into tho end of the next century, and presents us with a vividly-painted picture of the condition of the world at that time. The evident object of the work is to present a direct contrast to the state of perfect contentment depicted in Looking Backwards Bellamy assumes that the present tendency to true social conditions will continue until it leads to the creation of a universal brotherhood, fraught with the elements of the highest human ideal of happiness. Boisgilbert bases his line of thought on a rejection of these premises, and reveals the condition of humanity when the present social conditions have reached a climax. The one is the creator of a fanciful Utopia of contentment, the other of a Hell out-helling all the Scriptural and poetical descriptions of the final residence of the damned.

To which of these forecasts can we give credence? A close study of the premises assumed by both authors can only lead to any satisfactory reply to this query,— is the tendency towards reform powerful enough to counteract the baneful influence of the worship of Mammon, and the decline of our standard of morality ? If it is, then Bellamy is a prophet breathing good-will to all mankind. But if, on the other hand, the almighty dollar is as potent as the author of Cæsar's Column assumes, then the legitimate issue of our present social life must ultimately be the return to barbarism which he has so powerfully described. As far as we can judge, from a close study of the past ten years of human history, the tendency of the age is strongly in the direction of development towards perfect social conditions. Since Thomas Carlyle first began his crusade against the corruption, hypocrisy, and injustice which controlled our social life, there has been a great awakening amongst men in every condition. Rich and poor, great and small, learned and ignorant, have all become conscious of the great problem, and this awakening, fostered as it is by the greatest intellects of modern time, must lead to that complete change in society to which dire necessity directs us.

Cæsar's Column opens with the usual references to the future triumphs of human ingenuity. The arts and sciences, mechanical inventions, and utilization of natural forces, have reached that stage of perfection which only at present exists in the imagination of the dreamer. Everything that we can now conceive of for the perfection of making the best of life is achieved, and there is no new mundane field into which the human intellect can penetrate. The romance, which occupies the most prominent place in the book, is well written, and could satisfy the craving of the fashionable novel-reader for sensationalism. Interwoven with it, however, are some terrible truths, that must make the most trivial reader pause and think.

The first great contention of the writer is, that present social conditions if continued must lead to the complete destruction of all moral perceptions. The only known God will be mammon ; the only worship, sensual gratification ; and the only tie of human sympathy, the desire to co-operate against any intrusion on vested interests. Women in every stage of life will traffic their virtue to the highest bidders. Men will sell every virtue for the increase of their possessions; corruption will control justice. All that is now covertly indulged in, and regarded by our present accommodating codes of morality, as vice, will be dressed in the robes of virtue and paraded before the gaze of a people hopelessly lost. Withal, there will be preserved the outward form of Government, and the administration of justice. A fair exterior will cover a mass of putrid corruption to which no healing remedy can be applied. The story is so arranged as to expose all this, while still sustaining its own direct interest. In one chapter the hero is introduced to a meeting of a secret cabinet in New York, which controls the destinies of the American nation. Its members hold no official positions, but simply by the mighty influence of their weapon, "Bribery," they rule the country in a way that would make the greatest despot of this age regret the inopportuneness of his birth.

The army, the navy, the nominal legislature, the courts of justice, and the press are only institutions working the august will of the cabinet of moneyed princes. There is no conception of honor, no trace of human nobility, no flash of human love, but a world controlled by greed, selfishness, craft, and sensuality.

In another chapter we are introduced to a place of "worship," and are entertained by a parson of the period. The sermon is a repetition of what has been openly seen in every street, "Live for gratification, and pay unceasing homage to the reigning God." In other passages, various phases of what we would, in this day, call "fashionable society," are pourtrayed with a vividness that fascinates the reader. The "canaille," the common people, are hated and despised, and every precaution is taken to prevent the inevitable eruptions of the gathering volcano upon which society is erected.

With equal power the author depicts the condition of the masses of the people. Education is still nominally within the reach of all. The semblance of popular representation is still preserved, but both are only institutions, which aggravate the misery of those for whom they exist. Life is one round of toil and suffering from the cradle to the grave. There is no gaiety, no sign of happiness, no sparkle of hope, no evidence of intelligence. Every man, every child, and every woman not in travail, is merely a wheel in the great machinery of production, and from day to day they perform their little part until physical incapacity condemns them to rejection and starvation. There does not exist in them even a hope of better things. The only semblance of humanity they possess is hatred against those whom they preserve in the enjoyment of luxury. There are no strikes, no social agitations, no attempts to evolve into a better state of society. The situation is accepted as inevitable, and the suffering masses dumbly wait for the coming of the pending conflagration which promises them release or death.

This constant association with injustice and suffering destroys all semblance of humanity, and the same depravity, corruption, and brutishness, which is seen in the higher circles of life, is again revealed, intensified by the absence of all of the screens that wealth can create.

Society is thus pictured as we see it at the present day, only its evils are carried to their furthest limit. Two great divisions exist. The one, comprising a minority, has absolute control over all means for the production of wealth. The other, the majority, exists only to preserve the idlers in a state of affluence, and knows nothing of the faintest happiness in life. We have not reached this extremity so powerfully forecast in this book, but undoubtedly the continuation of the existing order of things must bring us to it ultimately. One of the finest passages in the book is that which describes the mass meeting of workmen in the underground cellar. A great concourse of hopeless, determined men are assembled, and addresses, suggesting various remedies, are delivered. Forbearance, appeals for mercy, evolution into higher things, are all suggested, but with out any heartfelt response. A Christian minister teaches the doctrine of patience and necessity, with which we, in these days, are tolerably familiar, and has a very uncomplimentary reception. Only one sentiment finds universal favour, and that is summarised in the word, "destruction."

There is no remedy, no compromise, and the only salvation lies in a revolution, and a triumph of the spirit of vengeance. A vast secret organisation, including the whole of the world's sufferers, is in existence, stealthily it is extending its power, Committees of Management are in the very camp of the enemy, and day by day the net of destruction is being woven around the only half-awakened victims of the coming struggle. The end comes, by one great act of bribery on the part of the supreme committee of the avengers. The greatest means of resistance in possession of the despots of America is enlisted in the rebellion, and the reign of terror begins. Destruction is the watchword, civilisation is destroyed, and humanity drifts back into barbarism. A monument is raised by Cæsar Lomelini, the leader of the revolution, built of the bodies of a quarter of a million of the people's oppressors cemented together. On it is the inscription, "Erected by the Brotherhood of Destruction, in commemoration of the death and burial of modern civilisation." All the good people in the story, of course, are comfortably provided for. They escape in an air ship, and, finally, settling in a mountainous region, located in Central Africa, live long and die happy.

The book, of course, flavours of exaggeration, but only sufficiently to emphasise the great work it contains. In America there is undoubtedly a tendency towards a moneyed autocracy, which is even more dangerous than the influence of aristocracy as seen in Europe. With the latter a semblance of humanity is preserved, while the former destroys the only hope of a peaceful solution of social difficulties. For when bribery controls a country, those who are most concerned in a change in social conditions become traitors to their own interests. The glamour of the gold destroys the manhood of all to whom it is offered, and thus, amongst the people themselves, the confidence necessary to united action is destroyed. In Europe, however, this modern enemy to progress is not yet so potent, and there is, with its absence, as much, if not a greater, chance of reform than is seen in America with its boasted democracy.

Cæser's Column will accomplish a good work by directing attention to the dark side of the future's possibilities, and we recommend all our readers to obtain a copy of the work.

Bowral Free Press and Berrima District Intelligencer (NSW), 2 December 1891, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article118287870

WHICH IS THE IGNORANT PARTY ?

AN INTERESTING COMPARISON OF CLAIMS AND DEEDS.

 It is stated by many conscious and unconscious enemies of the truth, and or social and political evolution, that the aims and objects of the Labor party are the conceptions of ignorant or vicious people. That statement is untrue and unjust.
 It is unfair to many women and men in whose minds are blended all the elements of true religion under whatsoever name it may go, and who have made it the principal business of their lives to search out the facts of their and economic existence, and it a humorless libel on the greatest teachers and writers of all the ages and all the worlds.
The ideals of the great phase of society's development, known as the Labor movement, are not of yesterday, nor of many yesterdays. They are the natural accompaniment of society's necessity for self-protection and mutual aid, and have been ever present in all minds capable of directing the course of the community, the better to ensure its survival, since the dawn of instinct and the communal sense. In every stage of biology and natural history they may be observed, and up to the machinery age of mankind's history, when the first day of private ownership of the capital for the production of common necessities introduced that taint which is to-day crystallised in the forces opposed to the Labor platform.
 The ideals of the Labor movement are common to the works of all the poets, dramatists, novelists, artists, and teachers our political Philistines affect to revere, and today sound the grandest protest against our unnatural governmental system. Not only so, but scores of the most inspired and impassioned utterances of the mighty thinkers might stand as finer expressions of the very planks of the platform of the Labor party, and they still burn with a lambent flame that will light the people down the centuries.
 When glory and grandeur dwelt in Greece and Rome the aspirations of our abused reformers of to-day were, already flourishing in Euripides, Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates ; and met with the same treatment from the enemies of progress then as they do now.
Socrates went abroad in the thoroughfares, in all weathers, talking who would listen, and instilling into all a love of justice, and of truth ; of quacks and pretenders he was the sworn foe, and cared not what enmity he provoked if he could persuade the people to think and to do what was right. "He was so pious," said Xenophon in his "Memorabilia," "that he did nothing without the sanction of the gods; so just, that he never wronged anyone, even in the slightest degree."
 But that sort of man said unpleasant things of the powers that were. He criticised the social and governmental systems, and said things that hurt the upper classes, who persecuted him unto death, and executed him, even as they would, if they could, the reformers in this year of Our Lord, between whom and Socrates, Carlyle saw but little difference. That same Conservatism which Socrates fought, and which we fight, Carlyle denounced as "a portentous embodied sham, accursed of God, and doomed to destruction, as all lies are."
 Euripides, the Greek dramatist, and his predecessor, Sophocles, said many things that might have fallen from the lips of Labor men, so that across the years the bond of faith exists between the hopes of the modern, and the beliefs of the ancient, thinkers.
 When we consider the giant intellects of recent generations, the confirmation is made of our contention that behind the modern movement for the emancipation of the workers, and the moralisation of the rich, stand in splendid mental array the grandest minds of humanity. The Labor party has built its objective on the teachings of such men as Ruskin, of whose, words, in his "King's Treasuries," let us take a few :—
 

"A great nation, for instance, does not spend its entire national wits for a couple of months in weighing evidence of a single ruffian having done a single murder, and for a couple of years see its own children murder such other by their thousands or, ten thousands a day, considering only what the effect is likely to be on the price of cotton, and caring nowise to determine which side of battle is in the wrong. Neither does a great nation send its poor little boys to gaol for stealing six walnuts, and allow its bankrupts to steal their hundreds of thousands with a bow, and its bankers, rich with poor men's savings, to close their doors 'under circumstances over which they have no control,' with a 'by your leave,' and large landed estates to be bought by men who have made their money by going with armed steamers up and down the China Seas, selling opium at the cannon's mouth . . . .
"Neither does a great nation allow the lives of its innocent poor to be parched out of them by fog fever, and rotted out of them by dunghill plague, for the sake of sixpence a life extra per week to its landlords . . .
 "And, lastly, a great nation does not mock Heaven and its powers by pretending belief in a revelation which asserts the love of money to be the root of all evil, and declaring at the same time that it is actuated, and intends to be actuated, in all chief national deeds and by no other love."

Could a Labor man deliver any more partisan reproach at the evils of class-constructed judiciary or land monopoly, or landlordism, or social hypocrisy ?
And Ruskin was one of England's greatest philosophers, and our would-be cultivated opponents pretend to admire him. Is he by himself? Is he the only heretical demagogue who dares assail the citadel of respectable political hypocrites and ignoramuses ? Besides him stand Carlyle, Kelvin, Sir Oliver Lodge, Darwin, Wallace, Sydney Olivier, Swift (whoever delivered such sabre cuts at England's old nobility as are to be found in the pages of "Gulliver's Travels"), Lecky, Draper, Bunyan, Lord Avebury, and, nearer, Blatchford, Blind, Mrs, and Mr. Sidney Webb, Thorold Rogers, Professor Bikerton, Morrison Davidson, and, in other lands, Havelock, Ellis, Mills, Gronlund, Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, the gentle Comte, and their fellow-supermen !
 It would require much printer's ink to give half the wealth of thought we have inherited from these few philosophers alone, but hear what comfortable words Thomas Carlyle, of Ecclefechan, hath to say:—

"Men talk of 'selling' land. Land, it is true, like epic poems and even higher things, in such a trading world, has to be presented in the market for what it will bring, and, as we say, be 'sold,' but the notion for selling, for certain bits of metal, the 'Iliad' of Homer, how much the land of the World Creator, is a ridiculous impossibility . . .
 "Properly speaking, the land belongs to these two: to the Almighty God and to all His children of men that have ever worked well upon it, or that shall ever work well on it. No generation of men can, or could, with never such solemnity or effect, sell land on any other principle. It is not the property of any generation, we say, but that of all the past generations that have ever worked on it, and of all the future ones that shall work on it."

Would that quotation better support the result of the government we have known, whereby 720 people "own" half the alienated lands of New South Wales, or the wish of the Labor party that it should be leased to all who need and desire it? Why, did Labor say half so much, it would be called "confiscator." And yet Liberalism does know well that Carlyle was no mob orator, but one of Britain's grandest sons. Listen yet more.
I say, you did not make the land of England . . . True government and guidance ; not no-government and laissez-fair ; how much less mis-government and corn-law! "There is not an imprisoned worker looking out from these Bastilles but appeals, very audibly, in Heaven's high courts, against you, and me, and everyone who is not imprisoned, 'Why am I here?' His appeal is audible in Heaven, and will become audible enough on earth too, if it remain unheeded here. His appeal is against you foremost of all. You stand in the front rank of the accused, you by the very place you hold, have first of all to answer him and Heaven ! . . .
 "Nature and Fact asks not, Do something, but, Cease your destructive misdoing. Do ye nothing."

 Surely this was an unpretty thing for Carlyle to say to the "Liberals" of his time. Would he be against, or for, the Labor party in to-day? And Carlyle is not generally called ignorant. Yet again :—
 

"My starving workers," answered the rich mill owner, "did not I hire them fairly in the market? Did I not pay them to the last sixpence, the sum covenanted for? What have I to do with them more?" "Verily mammon worship is a melancholy creed, when Cain, for his own behoof, had killed Abel and was questioned, "Where is thy brother!" he too made answer, "Am I my brother's keeper?" Did I not pay my brother his wages, the thing he had merited from me?"

 Do these sayings not point what side the Ecclefechan savant was on ? And whoso reads his "Bribery Committee" will conclude his thoughts might not have been strictly confined to his own day :—
 "Pure election was a thing we had seen the last of . . .a conclusion not a little startling. . . . It seems, then, we are henceforth to get ourselves constituted legisators, not according to what merit we may have, but according to the length of our purse, and our frankness, impudence, and dexterity in laying out the contents of the same."
 The Labor purse, alas ! is not the long one, and Carlyle knew it ! And to finish : —

"Giant Labor, truest emblem there is of God, the World-maker, Demiurgus and Eternal Maker; noble labor, which is yet to be king of this earth, and sit on the highest throne, staggering hitherto like a blind, irrational giant, hardly allowed to have his common place on the street pavements, idle dilletantism, Dead Sea-apism, crying out. "Down with him ! He is dangerous " Labor must become a seeing, rational giant, with a soul in the body of him, and take his place on the throne of things, leaving his mammonism, and several other adjuncts, on the lower steps of said throne."

 Ignorant? Mob orator? Demagogue? Perhaps there is a doubt!
 Thus in parting from the philosophers, the earnest inquirer admits that, welded and embodied with the aims of Labor, are the truest science of Haeckel, Darwin, and Wallace, for with clearest understanding this party has recognised that only that nation best developed in mind, body, and morals is fittest to survive, and that poverty, ignorance, and vice tend backward. Only they have shown by action that they believe slum-herds to be a danger and brothels a disadvantage. Labor is the one organised political force which has seriously read its Lord Avebury and its Havelock Ellis, and discussed eugenics as an objective factor in social religion and national policy. If the word eugenics and the appellation eugenist becomes part of the stock vocabulary of politicians, it will assuredly be due to the "ignorant" party which introduced it at Labor conferences, for only they—so far as this country is concerned—have realised, with Galton, the supremely religious project of making nobler people.
And now let us have a look at the novelists and writers. Again we hold the cards. Dickens, Thackeray, Meredith, Blatchford, George Eliot, Maxwell, Gray, Kingsley, Blackmore, Marryat, Wells, Jerome, Mark Twain, Emerson, Lowell, Sinclair, London, Bellamy, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Hawthorne, Zola, Alexandre Dumas, Victor Hugo, Maxim Gorki, Tolstoi— where shall we stop?
 Every genius of them voiced the hope and aspiration of a free people, of sympathy, for the poor and ignorant, hatred of the tyranny of the rich and of vice, its fruit. Take the firstnamed and consider, "Hard Times." His Thomas Gradgrind and Josiah Bounderby are of the clearest types and sweetest satires yet given of your "Liberal" partisan.
 

"They were ruined when they were required to send laboring children to school ; they were ruined when inspectors were appointed to look into their works; they were ruined when such inspectors considered it doubtful whether they were quite justified in chopping people up with their machinery: they were utterly undone when it was hinted that perhaps they need not always make quite so much smoke. . . . Another prevalent fiction was very popular in Coke Town. It took the form of a threat. Whenever a Coketowner felt he was ill-used—that is to say, whenever he was not left entirely alone, and it was proposed to hold him accountable for some of his acts—he was sure to come out with the awful menace that he would sooner pitch his property into the Atlantic.' This had terrified the Home Secretary within an inch of his life on several occasions. However, the Coketowners were so patriotic after all that they never pitched their property into the Atlantic yet, but, on the contrary, had been patriotic enough to take mighty good care of it."

So it would appear that the "driving away capital" tarradiddle was heard many years ago, and Dickens' words are quite as apposite in the days of his centenary as when he wrote them, and every Labor journal has employed the same satire.
 All his works likewise abound in recognition of the virtues of the lowly and cauterisings of the vices and hypocrisies of those who call themselves the upper classes. Similarly Thackeray, who gave us "Vanity Fair" with Becky Sharp and Hawdon Crawley—everlasting pictures; who castigated the idle rich in Lord Deuceace, Old Crabs, and Lady Griffin, and who taught us the proverb, "An Englishman would sooner be kicked by a lord than not noticed by him."
 A few words from Robert Blatchford, one of the most lovable humanists the world has known; the Socialist whose brain the anti-socialists use when their own fails, and then we must read the poets.

 "What are the things," said he, "that matter to wise and manly men? Health, and liberty, fresh air, clean water, wholesome food, and knowledge and art and useful human work. What are the things that matter most of all? Good women, sweet children, friendship, and love. These are the things that matter. And none of these things are dear. There would be health and freedom and water and air and food for all, if only we were wise enough to know what things do matter and what things do not. . . . Nature is bounteous, and there is room in the world for all. With society organised upon a reasonable and humane basis, it would be easy to create wealth enough to make the general welfare sure."

 This is the writer who, said G. K. Chesterton, is perhaps the greatest exponent of style in English prose. These are some of our precursors and sponsors, and there are scores we cannot quote nor even name, for want of space; these are the rocks on which builded, and in all the masterpieces of our language it is difficult to find one wherein the privileges of the rich are proposed against the rights of the worker.
 And the poet, is he against us? The thing is unthinkable ! Fancy a poet dedicating an ode to a Dividend or writing a sonnet to my lady's 3 per cent. ! Imagine the poet,

A soul above earth; a mind,
 Skilled in the characters that form mankind.

 inditing a prelude to a watered-stock balance-sheet with an epilogue on beauties of shirts, at 4/6 the dozen.
 No, the sordidness of the money loving and money-hoarding class has never inspired a great thought, but the injustices heaped upon the workers, the claims of the poor, the larger hope for freedom, the instinct of mutual aid, and race preservation by its means, have raised many a genius to ecstatic heights.
Elizabeth Browning's "Cry of the Children" and Tom Hood's "Song of the Shirt" and "The Bridge of Sighs" have immortality that requires no quotation, and they stirred the public conscience as no bank director may, work he never so wisely.
 Shakespeare's heroes were, almost to a man, of the people; his kings and aristocrats he made disreputable. Milton was still more a poet of the lowly, and showed no admiration for emperors, Byron and Shelley were rigorously republican, and wrote burning lines in defence of democracy. Whittier, the Quaker poet, wrote stanzas in admiration of the worker and of the democratic ballot, which should be quoted on every Labor rostrum, and he despised the rich. He hated slavery, which the "Liberals" of his day desired.
 William Morris, the grand Socialist artist and poet, and designer, whose ideas are in every artistically furnished home to-day, who loved the people so that he gave his life and fortune for them, who led them in the streets, and was persecuted for it, whose grandeur of character and conception frightened the Liberals of England; the writer of "News from Nowhere" and "The Earthly Paradise," stands firm in our ranks.
Swinburne, whose "Songs Before Sunrise" rang with the aims of the Labor movement in every line; whose passionate periods won him the love of the people and of the literary world, and excluded him from the laureateship, only because it is the gift of the rich, he is ours.
 The three Rossettis were essentially on our side, in their poetic and artistic concepts; they could not have been otherwise, for the sordid to them was hateful.
 And let us cross the Pacific, where in burning emotion they hoped they had birthed a free nation, only to find it taken from them by the wealthy few.
 Would ever a "Liberal" have the temerity to quote Lowell's "Parable" in support of his cause? 

Have ye founded your thrones and altars then
On the bodies and souls of living men.
 And think ye that building shall endure
 Which shelters the noble and crushes the poor?

 Then Christ sought out an artisan,
 A low-browed, stunted, haggard man,
 These He set in the midst of them.
 And as they drew back their garment hem
For fear of defilement, "Lo, here," said He,
 The images ye have made of Me."

 Lowell has given us some of the most soul-stirring polemics on the political and social system moulded by the "Liberals" of every age, for none can say that Labor Government has had a hand in making this vast horrid sins of industrial and social life; these have existed long, and Labor is not yet come to its own. He said:—

 Hearing afar the vandal's trumpet hoarse,
 That shakes old systems with a thunder fit,
 The time is ripe, and rotten ripe, for change;
 Then let it come: I have no dread of what
 Is called for by the instinct of mankind;
 Nor think I that God's earth will fall apart 
Because we tear a parchment more or less.

He said the time was rotten ripe for change! Change from what? Lowell witnessed no Labor Governments, though he knew "Liberal" and Conservative, otherwise "Democratic" and Republican. It could not, therefore, have been the Labor press he wrote of in "The Pious Editor's Creed." 

I du believe in Freedom's cause,
Ez fur away ez Payris is. . . .
And a motherless girl, whose fingers thin
Pushed faintly from her want and sin.

Thet don't agree with niggers,
I du believe in bein' this
But libbaty's a kind o' thing
Or thet, ez it may happen ;
One way or t'other, hendiest is
To ketch the people nappin'.

In short, I firmly du believe
In humbug generally,
Fer it's a thing thet I perceive
To hev a solid vally;
This heth my faithful shepherd been.
In pasturs sweet heth led me,
An' this'll keep the people green,
To feed ez they hev fed me.

 And let any "Liberal" say if it was the Labor movement Lowell split the skull of in "The Debate in the Sennit."
 But all Columbia's finest sons are on our side as well. Read the words of Edwin Markham, the writer of that solemn warning to the Conservative forces, "The Man with the Hoe." He cried for the people's generals in "The Toilers." 

Their blind feet drift in the darkness, and no one is leading ;
Their toil is the pasture where hyena and harpies are feeding ;
In all lands and always, the wronged, the homeless, the humbled,
Till the cliff-like pride of the spoiler is shaken and crumbled.
Till the pillars of hell are uprooted, and left to their ruin,
And a rose garden gladdens the places no rose ever grew in,
Where now men huddle together and whisper and hearken,
Or hold their bleak hands over embers that die out and darken. . . . .

The leaves shower down and are sport for the winds that come after;
And so are the toilers in all lands the jest and the laughter
Of nobles—the toilers scourged in the furrow as cattle.
Or flung as a meat to the cannons that hunger in battle.

 On what political banner to-day would those words be most fitting?
 Or these, from "The Man with the Hoe," a poem further immortalised by the painter-democrat, Millet. 

Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow ?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain ?

Down all the stretch of hell, to its last gulf, 
There is no shape more terrible than this—
More tinged with censure of the world's blind greed—
More filled with signs and portents for the soul, 
More fraught with menace to the universe. . .

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake the world?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings,
With those who shape him to the thing he is,
When this dumb terror shall reply to God,
After the silence of the centuries ?

 There can be but little joy to "Liberalism" there, but much that has been said in prose by Labor !
 Advance Walt Whitman, the Carlyle of poetry ! Magnetic, magnificent, audacious! Let him, too, proclaim himself, as on the side of the common people; a giant of frame and of intellect, and on the people's side! Grand, and rugged, let him call out that he is with us !

For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you, ma femme ;
For you, for you I am trilling these songs.

 Have you heard that part of his "Song Of the Broad Axe," known as the Great City?

A great city is that which has the greatest men and women,
If it be a few ragged huts, it is still the greatest city in the whole world.

The place where a great city stands is not the place of stretched wharves, docks, manufactures, deposits of produce, merely,
Nor the place where money is plentiest, nor the place of the most numerous population.

Where the city stands with the brawniest breed of orators and bards . . .
Where no monuments exist to heroes but in the the common words and deeds,
Where thrift is in its place, and prudence in its place,
Where the men and women think lightly of the laws,
Where the slave ceases and the master of slaves ceases,
Where the populace rise at once against the never-ending audacity of elected persons . . .
Where the citizen is always the head and ideal, and president, mayor, governor, and what-not are agents for pay . . .
Where women walk in public processions in the streets, the same as the men,
Where they enter the public assemblage and
 Take places the same as the men,
Where the city of the healthiest fathers stands,
Where the city of the best-bodied mothers stands,
There the great city stands . . .
What is your money-making now? What can it do now ?
What is your respectability now?

 We have read those lines often enough in Labor journals, but never in "Liberal," which seem somewhat diffident about quoting; "The Good Grey Poet."
 Coming again home, we find no poet worth his ink who can write a strophe or a stanza for the profitmaker's praise, or get from his heart a throb for the party which calls us ignorant, and which itself John Stuart Mill called "stupid."
Every word of Bernard O'Dowd's, the Australian Whitman, a Whitman whose poetic march is steady, is ours. As here, "Proletaria." 

Wherever Plenty's crop invites
 Our pitiful brigades,
Lurk cannoneers of vested rights,
 Juristic ambuscades ;

And here hangs Rent, that squalid cage
 Within which Mammon thrusts,
Bound with the fetter of a wage.
 The helots of his lusts.

With palsied Doubt as guide, we wind
 Among the lanes of Need.
Where meagre Hunger's scouting find
 But slavered baits of Greed. . . .

And our reward? In this wan land.
 In clientage of Greed,
Despised, polluted, maimed, and banned,
 To wander and—to breed.

 Beside O'Dowd stand our chosen bards. Not a line can be found in the Australian poets in defence of the strong against the weak, the rich against the poor, the profit-makers against the product-makers. It is all the other way, as you know who have read Brady, Hebblethwaite, Quinn, Gordon, Evans, Daley, Lawson, and the poetic brotherhood. Can you hear the roll of Lawson's "Drums of Battersea"? 

Where the hearses hurry ever, and where man lives like a beast.
They can feel the war-drums beating—men of hell, and London East. . . .

And the drummers ! Ah, the drummers, stern and haggard men are these,
Standing grimly at their meetings; and their washed and mended clothes
Speak of worn-out wives behind them, and of grinding poverty ;
But the English of the English beat the drums of Battersea.
 More drums ! War drums;
 Drums of agony—
The big bruised heart of England's in the drums of Battersea.

For they beat for men and women, beat for Christ, and you and me;
There is hope and there is terror in the drums of Battersea.
 More drums ! War drums;
 Drums of destiny—
There's hope—there's hope for England in the drums of Battersea.

 But as the genius of the world is not confined to the pen, so are Labor's champions not so limited, but we claim the Brush and the Stage also. The Royal Academician, Walter Crane, was a Socialist of the Socialists, and all his art has been used for Labor; William Morris also.
 Who can look on Dollman's picture. "Am I My Brother's Keeper?" and claim that dreadful portrait of our social system for a "Liberal" triumph? or Mostyn's picture, "The Dross House." Seymour Lucas and other academicians are with us, and rarely is a picture of merit found extolling the system of government we know or its sordid and unbeautiful results.
 The Theatre is the constant—and too seldom used—medium of showing the people reason and unreason in our social worlds, and a few of the masters of drama and comedy here named will prove our comradeship with them. Gilbert and Sullivan's immortal satires on the upper classes make them ours; Sheridan and Beaumont and Fletcher, likewise Shaw's sword thrusts. Pineroid's and Sydney Grundy's sabre slashes, were delivered not on the Labor movement, but on its political enemies. Wilde, the splendid genius, who met a strange unpoetic injustice in ruination by the classes he chastised, hurt no friend of the people in "A Woman of No Importance," or "Lady Windemere's Fan." but those scintillating examples of dialogic paradox are said to have touched some people on the raw who are politically unfriendly to us, Ibsen also, in "Brand" and "The Pillars of Society," gave our opponents furiously to think.
 A. M. Thompson, the sub-editor of the Socialist "Clarion," ran his "Arcadians" for three years at the Shaftesbury Theatre, It was a sweet and gentle satire, and his "Mousme" has been running ever since.
 George Paston ("Nobody's Daughter"), Clyde Fitch ("The Woman in the Case"), Somerset Maugham ("Lady Frederick"), Charles Klein ("The Lion and the Mouse"), Cicely Hamilton ("Diana of Dobson's"), Henry A. Jones ("The Hypocrites") are all authors we unhesitatingly claim for democracy, for their works have been democratic polemics that cut "Liberal" hypocrisy to the marrow, and laid bare the relations between the people and those who govern them.
 Music gives us Wagner, Saint Saens, and many others; and the Church, to come no nearer home, contributes to the Labor cause, the Bishops of London, Birmingham, Wakefield, etc., and the Church Socialist League, of many hundreds of clergy, while at the last Pan-Anglican Congress, the cream of the assemblage declared unequivocally for Socialism.
 And lo ! it is said that the Labor party is composed of ignorant persons, with ignorant or vicious ideas. Whoso says this, says the thing which is not; for the thoughts of those named are the thoughts of the Labor party. The aims of the one are the ideals of the other; we have proved our claim to the poets, the philosophers, the novelists, the dramatists, and the artists (the clergy are coming presently).
 It cannot be proved that any genius ever wrote or did anything in praise of "Liberalism." John Stuart Mill called the "Liberal" party "The Stupid Party."
 "Which is the ignorant party"?

Co-operator (Sydney, NSW), 1912, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article238817054

DESPOTISM.

—But even were the sentiment which induces the many to submit to one a noble sentiment, even were the relation of autocrat and slave a morally wholesome one, and even were it possible to find the fittest man to be despot, we should still contend that such a form of government is bad. We should not contend this simply on the ground that self-government is a valuable educator, though, had we space, we might say much to show that it is better for a people to be imperfectly governed by themselves than to be perfectly governed by another. But we should take the ground that no human being, however wise and good, is fit to be sole ruler over all the doings of a vast and involved society; and that with the best intentions such an one is very likely to produce the most terrible mischiefs, which would else have been impossible. In illustration of this position, we will take the case of all others the most favourable to those who would give supreme power to the best. We will instance the man taken by Mr Carlyle as the model hero—Cromwell.
Doubtless there was much in the manners of the times when Puritanism arose to justify its disgust. Doubtless the vices, vanities, and follies bequeathed by an effete Catholicism still struggling for existence were bad enough to create a reactionary asceticism. It is in the order of nature, however, that men's habits and pleasures are not to be changed suddenly. For any permanent effect to be produced, it must be produced slowly. Better tastes, higher aspirations, must be grown up to; not enforced from without. Disaster is sure to result from the withdrawal of lower gratifications before higher ones have taken their place; for gratification of some kind is a condition to healthful existence. Whatever ascetic morality, or rather immorality, may say, pleasures and pains are the incentives and restraints by which nature keeps her progeny from destruction. No contemptuous title of "pig-philosophy" will alter the eternal fact, that misery is a highway to death; while happiness is added life, and the giver of life. But indignant Puritanism could not see this truth, and with the usual extravagance of fanaticism sought to abolish pleasure in general. Getting into power, it put down not only questionable amusements, but all others along with them. And for these repressions, Cromwell, either as enacting or maintaining them, was responsible. What, now, was the result of this attempt to dragoon men into virtue ? What came when the strong man, who thought he was thus "helping God to mend all," died ? There came a dreadful reaction, there came one of the most degraded periods of our history. Into the newly-garnished house entered "seven other spirits more wicked than the first." For generations the English character was lowered; vice was gloried in, virtue was ridiculed; dramatists made marriage the stock subject of laughter; profaneness and obscenity flourished ; high aspirations ceased ; the whole age was corrupt. Not until George III. reigned was there a better standard of living. And for this century of demoralization we have, in a great measure, to thank Cromwell. Is it, then, so clear that the domination of one man, righteous though he may be, is a blessing? Is it not apt to be a curse ?—Westminster Review.
Adelaide Observer (SA ), 14 August 1858, http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article158123615

ABOUT THE SUPERMAN.

His Origin.

 WHO THRUST HIM ON GERMANY? 

At the present moment it would require some almost unimaginably detached person — perhaps "a philosophic Chinaman "—to write a history of the Superman idea. No German can treat it fairly just now, says Mr. Sidney Low, though a German has lately tried it. Mr. Low is hardly more inclined to believe his own countrymen capable of the task, for they seem to think that the preachers of the doctrine are all Germans. Nothing can be more ridiculous, he avers, in the London 'Standard,' than to say, as some hasty people do in England, that "there would not have been war but for Nietzsche and his 'blonde beasts' and 'slave morality.' " He scoffs at the idea that Germany has been perverted by the teachings of two or three philosophers and literary men; in particular by Treitschke and Nietzsche, "of whom till last year many Germans probably knew no more than the majority of Englishmen." If you wish to find the sources of all these ideas so current in Germany and outside about Germany, England has only to look to her own classic writers, or those of the 19th century just mounted comfortably upon the classic shelves. As to Germany, she has only accepted the honours thrust upon her. Mr. Low sees her case quite differently:
 "The great social groups and forces which have supported the war policy, the military chiefs, the Prussian Junkers, the merchants and financiers who want to exploit other countries, the masses who have been scared by the bogey of Panslavism and the 'freedom of the seas,' do not read the philosophers and historians. But these latter have influenced the professors, the students, and the intellectuals generally; and through them they have supplied what is deemed a philosophic and historical warrant for the passions and ambitions that are really derived from quite other motives."

 The Superman Doctrine Not German at all.

 The doctrine of the Superman and the Super-race is, Mr. Low asserts, "like most other things in Germany, not of German invention." He finds, instead, that "it was developed in France, Italy, and England, in one form or another, before it was adopted as a distinctively Teutonic faith." In fact:
 "In its origin it was partly ethnological, partly biological, and partly political. In the last sense it was associated with that revolt against democracy, characteristic of so many leading minds in Britain and elsewhere during the 19th century. Carlyle, Ruskin, Tennyson, Newman, Samuel Butler, Renan, Ibsen, Emerson, Matthew Arnold, were all supporters, consciously or unconsciously, of the aristocratic ideal. They heard the tramp of 'the wild mob's million feet,' and did not like the sound; fearing that art, culture, religion, the refinements of life, might be crushed beneath that indiscriminating march. The ignorance, the loose thinking, the vulgarity and crudeness of the masses impressed and frightened even those of them who were in theory Liberals and Democrats. Ruskin was a Socialist, a lover of the people, an opponent of convention, plutocracy, and privilege. Yet his whole temper of mind is aristocratic. His ideal is that of Plato, an oligarchy of 'guardians,' a kind of spiritual Samurai who would rule and direct the poor and uninstructed for their own good and the greater glory of God. Arnold was a bitter critic of our 'barbarian' British governing classes, but he, too, wanted government by a genuine aristocracy of intellect and culture. So did Emerson. These literary gentlemen, in those sheltered Victorian days, naturally wanted their heroes to be rather like themselves, extremely polished persons, who thought a good library the nearest approach to a terrestrial paradise, and regarded war and violence as ill-bred anachronisms."

 Carlyle and His Fools.

 Two British writers there were who put the idea in a different form, and, we are assured, were mainly responsible for its diffusion in Germany. Carlyle was one:
 "The rugged Scots peasant, with his dyspepsia and his perpetual ill-temper, his standing grievance against the general scheme of things, laid about him with more resounding weapons. Sick of the mediocrity and insincerity which democracy, as he thought, encouraged, he fell back on the personality of the man of genius, the hero divinely inspired to set a disjointed world right. Every nation and society being composed of persons who were 'mostly fools,' the only salvation was that they should be controlled, guided, taught, if need be, thwacked, dragooned, and drummed into sense and good behaviour by the Great Man to whom, as by divine illumination, the 'eternal verities' were revealed. If the 'fools,' the lesser multitude, would not recognise their prophet and saviour, then it was eminently desirable to adopt means of coercion. Carlyle, like many other invalids, and many others whose occupations are sedentary and inactive, had a pathetic admiration for sheer physical force. His 'hero' tended sometimes to be rather like the hero of the young lady's school, the hero of the middle-aged lady's novel, a tremendously 'virile' individual, all muscle and ferocious manliness and fierce, unbridled strength. Consequently he rehabilitated the soldier, that creature so closely in touch with the eternal verities that he does not merely talk and argue and write (like Carlyle himself and all the black-coated acquaintances he despised), but can on occasion actually pull out a long knife and stick you dead with it. And if he did by the means of long knives, whips, whiffs of grapeshot, bullets, Drogheda massacres, and so forth, impress his conviction upon the slavish or the unveracious, he was only by these regrettable means pursuing his divine mission. Carlyle's favourite hero was a Hohenzollern king; his favourite heroic people were the Germans, and more particularly the Prussians. He had a great influence in Germany, and did much to foster the worship of the Superman, the physically strong Superman, in the more cultured circles of that country."

 Darwin's Influence in Germany.

 If England is to abjure the teachings that have brought the present calamitous war upon her, what will be her emotions towards the memory of the other Englishman who, in Mr. Low's view, shares with Carlyle an even greater responsibility of influence — Charles Darwin:
  "The theory of the survival of the fittest bit deep into the Teutonic mind. It was the side of Darwinism on which the heaviest stress was laid, so much so that Haeckel and other Germans attributed to it an importance which Darwin never claimed for it himself, and which the neo-Darwinians completely repudiate. But the German materialist school fastened with delight on the conception of all life as a perpetual and unending struggle, in which only the strong can survive and the weak must inevitably perish. Nature, 'red in tooth and claw,' has laid its savage fiat of rapine and destruction upon man as upon all other created beings. The idea is worked to death by Nietzsche, and is, in fact, at the basis of all his teachings. 'Be strong,' is the grim watchword of all creation. Increase and multiply; seize by force or fraud if need be the means of sustenance and power; crush the weak under your feet, lest you be yourself trampled down; for weakness is not only wickedness; it is ruin, futility, extinction. There is no room and no need for all who survive, at least no room for them to survive and develop their higher intellectual and corporeal activities. Therefore let the impotent Many be robbed, and enslaved so that the Few and Fit may go on increasing their capacities and their superiority. Men may rise on stepping-stones of other people's dead selves and bruised lives to higher things. Thus shall the 'Will to Power be fulfilled, and the Superman be born."

"The Chosen People of the North."

 Finally, there is the influence of the imperial ethnologists:
"The 19th century scholars, conspicuously represented in England by such historians as Freeman and Stubbs, gave great play to the theory of the superiority of the 'Germanic' races. The Franco-Italian Count Gobineau carried it further, and so did the Frenchman Vacher de Lapouge. These writers developed the thesis that European culture depended mainly or entirely on the chosen 'Aryan' stock, which was only found in its purity among the northern Teutonic and Scandinavian peoples. Their speculations were gathered up and exaggerated in the extravagant fantasies of Richard Houston Chamberlain, whose farrago of learned nonsense caught hold of Germany like a nightmare. Sixty thousand copies of this massive gospel of ethnic arrogance were sold in Germany in a few months. The book is one long and involved paean of Germanic triumph. "There is nothing in European culture worth having that is not 'Germanic' from King David to Peter the Great, from Homer to Dante, from the marbles of the Acropolis to the sonatas of Beethoven, from Alexander the Great to Napoleon Bonaparte. Celts, Iberians, the 'Alpine' race, Jews, Slavs, are only worthy to live as the dependents and subjects of the chosen people of the North. This is the gospel of the Superrace, whereof the German Kaiser with his legions and his guns and his gas-projectors is the apostle to the Gentiles."
 The idea will doubtless find many to attempt its philosophic solution, after the war. Just now, as Mr. Low remarks, we must not look to one of the combatant nations for any 'fair' solution.

The Catholic Press 13 January 1916  http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article105163106