My friends, we have been thinking, perhaps, to-day, more than we ought of our masters' faults,--scarcely enough of our own. If you would have the upper classes do their duty, see that you also do yours. See that you can obey good laws, and good lords, or law-wards, if you once get them--that you believe in goodness enough to know what a good law is. A good law is one that holds, whether you recognize and pronounce it or not; a bad law is one that cannot hold, however much you ordain and pronounce it. That is the mighty truth which Carlyle has been telling you for a quarter of a century--once for all he told it you, and the landowners, and all whom it concerns, in the third book of 'Past and Present' (1845, buy Chapman and Hall's second edition if you can, it is good print, and read it till you know it by heart), and from that day to this, whatever there is in England of dullest and insolentest may be always known by the natural instinct it has to howl against Carlyle. Of late, matters coming more and more to crisis, the liberty men seeing their way, as they think, more and more broad and bright before them, and still this too legible and steady old sign-post saying, That it is not the way, lovely as it looks, the outcry against it becomes deafening. Now, I tell you once for all, Carlyle is the only living writer who has spoken the absolute and perpetual truth about yourselves and your business; and exactly in proportion to the inherent weakness of brain in your lying guides, will be their animosity against Carlyle. Your lying guides, observe, I say--not meaning that they lie wilfully--but that their nature is to do nothing else. For in the modern Liberal there is a new and wonderful form of misguidance. Of old, it was bad enough that the blind should lead the blind; still, with dog and stick, or even timid walking with recognized need of dog and stick, if not to be had, such leadership might come to good end enough; but now a worse disorder has come upon you, that the squinting should lead the squinting. Now the nature of bat, or mole, or owl, may be undesirable, at least in the day-time, but worse may be imagined. The modern Liberal politico-economist of the Stuart Mill school is essentially of the type of a flat-fish--one eyeless side of him always in the mud, and one eye, on the side that has eyes, down in the corner of his mouth,--not a desirable guide for man or beast. There was an article--I believe it got in by mistake, but the Editor, of course, won't say so--in the 'Contemporary Review,' two months back, on Mr. Morley's Essays, by a Mr. Buchanan, with an incidental page on Carlyle in it, unmatchable (to the length of my poor knowledge) for obliquitous platitude in the mud-walks of literature.