ebtor to the conqueror, may she not also have
written her down his implacable creditor for the moral cost of his
conquest?

The anarchy and confusion of Poland were an outrage upon political
conditions, which brought her to dependence and ruin. The manner of the
partition was an outrage on moral conditions, for which each of the
nations that profited by it paid in the lawlessness of Bonaparte. The
preliminaries of Leoben, again, and Campo-Formio were the key to
Waterloo and St. Helena. But Mr. Carlyle stops short at the triumph of
compliance with the conditions of material victory. He is content to
know that Frederick made himself master of Silesia, without considering
that the day of Jena loomed in front. It suffices to say that the whiff
of grape-shot on the Thirteenth Vendemiaire brought Sans-culottism to
order and an end, without measuring what permanent elements of disorder
were ineradicably implanted by resort to the military arm. Only the
failures are used to point the great historical moral, and if Bonaparte
had died in the Tuileries in all honour and glory, he would have ranked
with Frederick or Francia as a wholly true man. Mr. Carlyle would then
no more have declared the execution of Palm 'a palpable, tyrannous,
murderous injustice,' than he declares it of the execution of Katte or
Schlubhut. The fall of the traitor to fact, of the French monarchy, of
the windbags of the first Republic, of Charles I., is improved for our
edification, but then the other lesson, the failure of heroes like
Cromwell, remains isolated and incoherent, with no place in a morally
regulated universe. If the strength of Prussia now proves that Frederick
had a right to seize Silesia, and relieves us from inquiring further
whether he had any such right or not, why then should not the royalist
assume, from the fact of the restoration, and the consequent
obliteration of Cromwell's work, that the Protector was a usurper and a
phantasm captain?

Apart from its irreconcilableness with many of his most emphatic
judgments, Mr. Carlyle's doctrine about Nature's registration of the
penalties of injustice is intrinsically an anachronism. It is worse than
the Catholic reaction, because while De Maistre only wanted Europe to
return to the system of the twelfth century, Mr. Carlyle's theory of
history takes us back to times prehistoric, when might and right were
the same thing. It is decidedly natural that man in a state of nature
should take and k