WAS CARLYLE PRUSSIAN?—In the _International Journal of Ethics_, Mr. Herbert Stewart makes a chivalrous attempt to deliver Carlyle from the charge recently brought home to him of having been a Prussian. Militarist Prussianism, he says, rests upon a postulate which would have filled Carlyle with horror, the postulate, namely, that an autocracy must be organised for war. I am not satisfied, however, that Carlyle would have been filled with anything but admiration. It is true that he did not adopt the Prussian error of identifying Might with Right. “Is Arithmetic,” he asked, “a thing more fixed by the Eternal than the laws of justice are?” Could Justice or Right, therefore, be allowed to vary with the amount of Might at its disposal—a deduction inevitable from the Prussian hypothesis? On the other hand, Carlyle cannot be said to have been equally free from the more subtle error of Prussianism, the assumption that Might can be accumulated only by Right means. Might, he said in effect, being an attribute of God, can be obtained by man only as a result of some virtue. Hence its possession presumes the possession of a proportionate virtue, and a man of Might is to that extent a man of Right also. This subtlety led Carlyle into some strange company for the moral fanatic he was. It led him to glorify Frederick the Great and to condone Frederick’s crime against Silesia. It led him to despise France and to defend West Indian slavery. Mr. Stewart must make his choice between Carlyle as a confused ethical philosopher and Carlyle as a Prussian. If he was not the latter, he was the former.