The Whigs were "the grand dilettanti" or "lukewarm, withered mongrels." The Radicals were "ballot-boxing on the graves of heroic ancestors." The mass of the people were "the rotten multitudinous canaille," and manhood suffrage was as reasonable as "horsehood and doghood suffrage." The world could only be saved by the hero, and the best thing mankind could do was to entrust itself to the unfettered genius of its great men. All this, and much more wild abuse sprang from Carlyle's violent indignation against individualism. He had no respect either for the aristocratic neglect of the Whigs or for the philosophical basis of the school of _laissez faire_. For the conception of society as a collection of competing individuals, protected in their competition by the State, he endeavoured to substitute a conception of society as a mass of mutually dependent individuals, united by "organic filaments," the weaker aided and protected by the State against the competition of the stronger, and the whole rising and falling, advancing and retreating together. "Call that yet a society," he exclaimed, "where there is no longer any social idea extant; not so much as the idea of a Common Home, but only of a common overcrowded Lodging House? Where each isolated, regardless of his neighbour, turned against his neighbour, clutches what he can get, and cries 'Mine,' and calls it Peace, because in the cut-purse and cut-throat scramble no steel knives but only a far cunninger sort can be employed."[286] This is not scientific Socialism, with its logical formulae, the evolution of economic structures, the ultimate nationalization of all the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the rest. But it is a passionate appeal, in the very spirit of Socialism, to the sense of brotherhood, to the feeling that every man has as much right as every other not to be left behind in the race of industrial {236} competition, and that the State, the organization of Society for common purposes, should not be confined merely to negative functions, but should be made the active and positive instrument of the improvement of human life.