ions for his third course of lectures, his subject
being the 'Revolutions of Modern Europe.' They did not please the
lecturer, but the audiences were as enthusiastic as ever, and he made a
clear gain of L200.

About this time Emerson was pressing him to go to Boston on a lecturing
tour. But Carlyle thought better of it. More important work awaited him
in London. 'All his life,' says Froude, 'he had been meditating on the
problem of the working-man's existence in this country at the present
epoch.... He had seen the Glasgow riots in 1819. He had heard his father
talk of the poor masons, dining silently upon water and water-cresses.
His letters are full of reflections on such things, sad or indignant, as
the humour might be. He was himself a working-man's son. He had been
bred in a peasant home, and all his sympathies were with his own class.
He was not a revolutionist; he knew well that violence would be no
remedy; that there lay only madness and deeper misery. But the fact
remained, portending frightful issues. The Reform Bill was to have
mended matters but the Reform Bill had gone by and the poor were none
the happier. The power of the State had been shifted from the
aristocracy to the mill-owners, and merchants, and shopkeepers. That was
all. The handicraftsman remained where he was, or was sinking, rather,
into an unowned Arab, to whom "freedom" meant freedom to work if the
employer had work to offer him conveniently to himself, or else freedom
to starve. The fruit of such a state of society as this was the
Sansculottism on which he had been lecturing, and he felt that he must
put his thoughts upon it in a permanent form. He had no faith in
political remedies, in extended suffrages, recognition of "the rights of
man," etc.--absolutely none. That was the road on which the French had
gone; and, if tried in England, it would end as it ended with them--in
anarchy, and hunger, and fury. The root of the mischief was the
forgetfulness on the part of the upper classes, increasing now to flat
denial, that they owed any duty to those under them beyond the payment
of contract wages at the market price. The Liberal theory, as formulated
in Political Economy, was that every one should attend exclusively to
his own interests, and that the best of all possible worlds would be the
certain result. His own conviction was that the result would be the
worst of all possible worlds, a world in which human life, such a life
as _human_ bein