ols fluttering as empty Pageants, whereof men
grudge even the expense; a World becoming dismantled: in one word, the
CHURCH fallen speechless, from obesity and apoplexy; the STATE shrunken
into a Police-Office, straitened to get its pay!'

It was when suggesting a remedy that Carlyle's Idealistic Radicalism
parted company with Utilitarian Radicalism. Failing to see that society
was in a transition period, a period so well described by Herbert
Spencer as the movement from Militarism to Industrialism, in which there
was a severe conflict of ideals, opinions, and interests, Carlyle sought
for the remedy in a return to a form of society which had been outgrown.
There was surely something pathetically absurd in the spectacle of a
great teacher endeavouring to cure social and political diseases by
preaching the resuscitation of Puritanism at a time when the intellect
of the day was parting company with theocratic conceptions. Equally
absurd was it to offer as a remedy for social anarchy the despotism of
ambitious rulers at a time when society was suffering from the effects
of previous despotism. Equally irrelevant was the attempt in _Past and
Present_ to get reformers to model modern institutions on those of the
Middle Ages. Carlyle's remedy for the evils of liberty was a return to
the apron-strings of despotism. Carlyle, in fact, forgot his conception
of society as a developing organism; he endeavoured to arrest progress
at the autocratic stage, because of his ignorance of the laws of
progress and his lack of sympathy with democratic ideas. Still, the
value of Carlyle's political writings should not be overlooked. The
Utilitarian Radicals laid themselves open to the charge of intellectual
superstition. They worshipped human nature as a fetish. Lacking clear
views of social evolution, they overlooked the relativity of political
terms. Ignorant of the conception of human nature to which Spencer has
accustomed us, the old Radicals treated it as a constant quantity which
only needed liberty for its proper development. In their eagerness to
discard theology, they discarded the truth of man's depravity which
finds expression in the creed of the Churches. We have changed all that.
We now realise the fact that political institutions are good or bad, not
as they stand or fall when tested by the first principles of a
rationalistic philosophy, but as they harmonise or conflict with
existing phases of human nature.

If in the sphere of