Authors, Scottish -- 19th century -- Biography; Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881; Historians -- Great Britain -- Biography
A full formed man is worth more than a horse.... One
man in a year, as I have understood it, if you lend him
earth will feed himself and nine others(?).... Too crowded
indeed!.... What portion of this globe have ye tilled and
delved till it will grow no more? How thick stands your
population in the Pampas and Savannahs--in the Curragh of
Kildare? Let there be an _Emigration Service,_ ... so
that every honest willing workman who found England too
strait, and the organisation of labour incomplete, might
find a bridge to carry him to western lands.... Our little
isle has grown too narrow for us, but the world
is wide enough yet for another six thousand years.... If
this small western rim of Europe is over-peopled, does not
everywhere else a whole vacant earth, as it were, call to
us "Come and till me, come and reap me"?
On this follows an eloquent passage about our friendly Colonies,
"overarched by zodiacs and stars, clasped by many-sounding seas." Carlyle
would apparently force emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans,
and Chinese, to receive our ship-loads of living merchandise; but the
problem of population exceeds his solution of it. He everywhere inclines
to rely on coercion till it is over-mastered by resistance, and to
overstretch jurisdiction till it snaps.
In Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohenzollerns is
ostentatiously laying claim to "right divine," Carlyle's appraisal of
Autocracy may have given it countenance. In England, where the opposite
tide runs full, it is harmless: but, by a curious irony, our author's
leaning to an organised control over social and private as well as public
life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve as an incentive
to the very force he seemed most to dread. Events are every day
demonstrating the fallacy of his view of Democracy as an embodiment of
_laissez faire._ Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to
become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one,
of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A Democracy where the poor rule
for the poor alone, maybe a deadly engine of oppression; it may trample
without appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the common
good, establish and enforce an almost unconditioned tyranny. Carlyle's
blindness to this superlative danger--a danger to which Mill, in many
respects his unrecognised coadjutor, became alive--emphasises the limits
of his political foresight. He has consecrated Fraternity with an
eloquence unapproached by his peers, and with equal force put to scorn the
superstition of Equality; but he has aimed at Liberty destructive shafts,
some of which may find a mark the archer little meant.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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