s in the eloquence of Rousseau, and some of the most generous
spirits of this time and place have found it in the writer of the
_Sartor_. In ages not of faith, there will always be multitudinous
troops of people crying for the moon. If such sorrowful pastime be ever
permissible to men, it has been natural and lawful this long while in
prae-revolutionary England, as it was natural and lawful a century since
in prae-revolutionary France. A man born into a community where political
forms, from the monarchy down to the popular chamber, are mainly hollow
shams disguising the coarse supremacy of wealth, where religion is
mainly official and political, and is ever too ready to dissever itself
alike from the spirit of justice, the spirit of charity, and the spirit
of truth, and where literature does not as a rule permit itself to
discuss serious subjects frankly and worthily[4]--a community, in
short, where the great aim of all classes and orders with power is by
dint of rigorous silence, fast shutting of the eyes, and stern stopping
of the ears, somehow to keep the social pyramid on its apex, with the
fatal result of preserving for England its glorious fame as a paradise
for the well-to-do, a purgatory for the able, and a hell for the
poor--why, a man born into all this with a heart something softer than a
flint, and with intellectual vision something more acute than that of a
Troglodyte, may well be allowed to turn aside and cry for moons for a
season.

[4] Written in 1870.

Impotent unrest, however, is followed in Mr. Carlyle by what is socially
an impotent solution, just as it was with Rousseau. To bid a man do his
duty in one page, and then in the next to warn him sternly away from
utilitarianism, from political economy, from all 'theories of the moral
sense,' and from any other definite means of ascertaining what duty may
chance to be, is but a bald and naked counsel. Spiritual nullity and
material confusion in a society are not to be repaired by a
transformation of egotism, querulous, brooding, marvelling, into
egotism, active, practical, objective, not uncomplacent. The moral
movements to which the instinctive impulses of humanity fallen on evil
times uniformly give birth, early Christianity, for instance, or the
socialism of Rousseau, may destroy a society, but they cannot save it
unless in conjunction with organising policy. A thorough appreciation
of fiscal and economic truths was at least as indispensable for the l