ations sow, even thus they reap. But what is Mr. Carlyle's account
of the precise nature and operation of this law? What is the original
distinction between an act of veracity and a blunder? Why was the blow
struck by the Directory on the Eighteenth Fructidor a blunder, and that
struck by Bonaparte on the Eighteenth Brumaire a veracity? What
principle of registration is that which makes Nature debtor to Frederick
the Second for the seizure of Silesia, and Bonaparte debtor to Nature
for 'trampling on the world, holding it tyrannously down?' It is very
well to tell us that 'Injustice pays itself with frightful compound
interest,' but there are reasons for suspecting that Mr. Carlyle's
definition of the just and the unjust are such as to reduce this and all
his other sentences of like purport to the level of mere truism and
repetition. If you secretly or openly hold that to be just and veracious
which is successful, then it needs no further demonstration that
penalties of ultimate failure are exacted for injustice, because it is
precisely the failure that constitutes the injustice.

This is the kernel of all that is most retrograde in Mr. Carlyle's
teaching. He identifies the physical with the moral order, confounds
faithful conformity to the material conditions of success, with loyal
adherence to virtuous rule and principle, and then appeals to material
triumph as the sanction of nature and the ratification of high heaven.
Admiring with profoundest admiration the spectacle of an inflexible
will, when armed with a long-headed insight into means and quantities
and forces as its instrument, and yet deeply revering the abstract ideal
of justice; dazzled by the methods and the products of iron resolution,
yet imbued with traditional affection for virtue; he has seen no better
way of conciliating both inclinations than by insisting that they point
in the same direction, and that virtue and success, justice and victory,
merit and triumph, are in the long run all one and the same thing. The
most fatal of confusions. Compliance with material law and condition
ensures material victory, and compliance with moral condition ensures
moral triumph; but then moral triumph is as often as not physical
martyrdom. Superior military virtues must unquestionably win the verdict
of Fate, Nature, Fact, and Veracity, on the battle-field, but what then?
Has Fate no other verdicts to record than these? and at the moment while
she writes Nature down d