Probably this apostasy from his better faith had begun, before this, to show itself in conversation. At least Margaret Fuller, in a letter dated 1846, finds herself in his presence admiring his brilliancy, but "disclaiming and rejecting almost everything he said." "For a couple of hours," says she, "he was talking about poetry, and the whole harangue was one eloquent proclamation of the defects in his own mind." "All Carlyle's talk, another evening," says she, "was a defence of mere force,--success the test of right; if people would not behave well, put collars round their necks; find a hero, and let them be his slaves." "Mazzini was there, and, after some vain attempts to remonstrate, became very sad. Mrs. Carlyle said to me, 'These are but opinions to Carlyle; but to Mazzini, who has given his all, and helped bring his friends to the scaffold, in pursuit of such subjects, it is a matter of life and death.'" As this mood of Mr. Carlyle comes out so strongly in the "Latter-Day Pamphlets," it is perhaps best to dwell on them at greater leisure. The first is "The Present Time." In this he describes Democracy as inevitable, but as utterly evil; calls for a government; finds most European governments, that of England included, to be shams and falsities,--no-government, or drifting, to be a yet greater evil. The object, he states, is to find the noblest and best men to govern. Democracy fails to do this; for universal balloting is not adequate to the task. Democracy answered in the old republics, when the mass were slaves, but will not answer now. The United States are no proof of its success, for (1st) anarchy is avoided merely by the quantity of cheap land, and (2d) the United States have produced no spiritual results, but only material. Democracy in America is no-government, and "its only feat is to have produced eighteen millions of the greatest _bores_ ever seen in the world." Mr. Carlyle's plan, therefore, is to find, somehow, the _best man_ for a ruler, to make him a despot, to make the mass of the English and Irish slaves, to beat them if they will not work, to shoot them if they still refuse. The only method of finding this best man, which he suggests, is to _call for him_. Accordingly, Mr. Thomas Carlyle _calls_, saying, "Best man, come forward, and govern." The sum, therefore, of his recipe for the diseases of the times is SLAVERY.