"To believe practically that the poor and luckless are here only as a nuisance to be abraded and abated, and in some permissible manner made away, and swept out of sight, is not an amiable faith." Of Ireland, too, he said:-- "We English pay, even now, the bitter smart of long centuries of injustice to Ireland." "It is the feeling of _injustice_ that is insupportable to all men. The brutalest black African feels it, and cannot bear that he should be used unjustly. No man can bear it, or ought to bear it." This seems like the "rose-water philanthropy" which he subsequently so much disliked. In this book also he speaks of a "seven years' Silesian robber-war,"--we trust not intending to call his beloved Frederick a robber! And again he proposes, as one of the best things to be done in England, to have all the people taught by government to read and write,--the same thing which this American democracy, in which he could see not one good thing, has so long been doing. That was the plan by which England was to be saved,--a plan first suggested in England in 1840,--adopted and acted on in America for two hundred years. But just as love separated from truth becomes cruelty, so _truth_ by itself--truth _not_ tempered and fulfilled by love--runs sooner or later into falsehood. _Truth_, after a while, becomes dogmatism, overbearing assertion, willful refusal to see and hear other than one's own belief; that is to say, it becomes falsehood. Such has been the case with our author. On all the subjects to which he has committed himself he closes his eyes, and refuses to see the other side. Like his own symbol, the mighty Bull, he makes his charge _with his eyes shut_. Determined, for example, to rehabilitate such men as Mirabeau, Cromwell, Frederick, and Frederick's father, he does thorough work, and defends or excuses all their enormities, palliating whenever he cannot justify. What can we call this which he says[27] concerning the execution of Lieutenant Katte, by order of old King Friedrich Wilhelm? Tired of the tyranny of his father, tired of being kicked and caned, the young prince tried to escape. He was caught and held as a deserter from the army, and his father tried to run him through the body. Lieutenant Katte, who had aided him in getting away, having been kicked and caned, was sent to a court-martial to be tried. The court-martial found him guilty not of deserting, but of intending to desert, and sentenced him to two years' imprisonment. Whereupon the king went into a rage, declared that Katte had committed high treason, and ordered him to be executed. Whereupon Carlyle thus writes:-- "'Never was such a transaction before or since in modern history,' cries the angry reader; 'cruel, like the grinding of human hearts under millstones; like----' Or, indeed, like the doings of the gods, which are cruel, but not that alone."