The next great event was the passing of the Reform Bill of 1867, by the Tories, educated by Mr. Disraeli to this method of "dishing the Whigs," by outbidding them in the scramble for votes. This instigated the famous tract called _Shooting Niagara_, written in the spirit of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_--Carlyle's final and unqualified denunciation of this concession to Democracy and all its works. But the upper classes in England seemed indifferent to the warning. "Niagara, or what you like," the author quotes as the saying of a certain shining countess, "we will at least have a villa on the Mediterranean when Church and State have gone." A _mot_ emphatically of the decadence. Later he fulminated against the Clerkenwell explosions being a means of bringing the Irish question within the range of practical politics. I sit in speechless admiration of our English treatment of those Fenians first and last. It is as if the rats of a house had decided to expel and extirpate the human inhabitants, which latter seemed to have neither rat-catchers, traps, nor arsenic, and are trying to prevail by the method of love. Governor Eyre, with Spenser's Essay on Ireland for text and Cromwell's storm of Drogheda for example, or Otto von Bismarck, would have been, in his view, in place at Dublin Castle. In the next great event of the century, the close of the greatest European struggle since Waterloo, the cause which pleased Cato pleased also the gods. Carlyle, especially in his later days, had a deepening confidence in the Teutonic, a growing distrust of the Gallic race. He regarded the contest between them as one between Ormuzd and Ahriman, and wrote of Sedan, as he had written of Rossbach, with exultation. When a feeling spread in this country, naming itself sympathy for the fallen,--really half that, the other half, as in the American war, being jealousy of the victor,--and threatened to be dangerous, Carlyle wrote a decisive letter to the _Times_, November 11th 1870, tracing the sources of the war back to the robberies of Louis XIV., and ridiculing the prevailing sentiment about the recaptured provinces of Lothringen and Elsass. With a possible reference to Victor Hugo and his clients, he remarks--