still aglow with generous heat; full of large-hearted sympathy with
the poor and oppressed, and of intense hatred of the cruel and shallow
sophistries that then passed for maxims, almost for axioms, of
government. In the year 1819, when the yeomanry round Glasgow was
called out to keep down some dreadful monsters called 'Radicals,'
Carlyle describes how he met an advocate of his acquaintance hurrying
along, musket in hand, to his drill on the Links. 'You should have the
like of this,' said he, cheerily patting his gun. 'Yes, was the reply,
'but I haven't yet quite settled on which side.' And when he did make
his choice, on the whole he chose rightly. The author of that noble
pamphlet 'Chartism,' published in 1840, was at least once a Liberal.
Let me quote a passage that has stirred to effort many a generous
heart now cold in death: 'Who would suppose that Education were a
thing which had to be advocated on the ground of local expediency, or
indeed on any ground? As if it stood not on the basis of an
everlasting duty, as a prime necessity of man! It is a thing that
should need no advocating; much as it does actually need. To impart
the gift of thinking to those who cannot think, and yet who could in
that case think: this, one would imagine, was the first function a
government had to set about discharging. Were it not a cruel thing to
see, in any province of an empire, the inhabitants living all
mutilated in their limbs, each strong man with his right arm lamed?
How much crueller to find the strong soul with its eyes still sealed--
its eyes extinct, so that it sees not! Light has come into the world;
but to this poor peasant it has come in vain. For six thousand years
the sons of Adam, in sleepless effort, have been devising, doing,
discovering; in mysterious, infinite, indissoluble communion, warring,
a little band of brothers, against the black empire of necessity and
night; they have accomplished such a conquest and conquests; and to
this man it is all as if it had not been. The four-and-twenty letters