ional dealings, while the other asserts
that such dealings were the lawful consequence of self-interest and the
contest of material forces; nor is it that the one insists on viewing
international transactions from the same moral point which would be the
right one, if independent communities actually formed one stable and
settled family, while the other declines to view their morality at all.
The vital difference is, that while the reactionary writer rigorously
confines his faith within the region of facts accomplished, the other
anticipates a time when the endeavour of the best minds in the civilised
world, co-operating with every favouring external circumstance that
arises, shall have in the international circle raised moral
considerations to an ever higher and higher pre-eminence, and in
internal conditions shall have left in the chances and training of the
individual, ever less and less excuse or grounds for a predisposition to
anti-social and barbaric moods. This hopefulness, in some shape or
other, is an indispensable mark of the most valuable thought. To stop at
the soldier and the gibbet, and such order as they can furnish, is to
close the eyes to the entire problem of the future, and we may be sure
that what omits the future is no adequate nor stable solution of the
present.

Mr. Carlyle's influence, however, was at its height before this idolatry
of the soldier became a paramount article in his creed; and it is
devoutly to be hoped that not many of those whom he first taught to
seize before all things fact and reality, will follow him into this
torrid air, where only forces and never principles are facts, and where
nothing is reality but the violent triumph of arbitrarily imposed will.
There was once a better side to it all, when the injunction to seek and
cling to fact was a valuable warning not to waste energy and hope in
seeking lights which it is not given to man ever to find, with a solemn
assurance added that in frank and untrembling recognition of
circumstance the spirit of man may find a priceless, ever-fruitful
contentment. The prolonged and thousand-times repeated glorification of
Unconsciousness, Silence, Renunciation, all comes to this: We are to
leave the region of things unknowable, and hold fast to the duty that
lies nearest. Here is the Everlasting Yea. In action only can we have
certainty.

* * * * *

The reticences of men are often only less full of meaning th