Politics and in Life, DEMOCRACY without Reverence, and PHILANTHROPY
without Sense. In our time these two last powers have made such strides
as to threaten the Reign of Law. The Democrat without a ruler, who
protests that one man is by nature as good as another, according to
Carlyle is "shooting Niagara." In deference to the mandate of the
philanthropist the last shred of brutality, with much of decision,
has vanished from our code. Sentiment is in office and Mercy not only
tempers, but threatens to gag Justice. When Sir Samuel Romilly began his
beneficent agitation, and Carlyle was at school, talkers of treason were
liable to be disembowelled before execution; now the crime of treason is
practically erased, and the free use of dynamite brings so-called reforms
"within the range of practical politics." Individualism was still a mark
of the early years of the century. The spirit of "L'Etat c'est moi"
survived in Mirabeau's "never name to me that _bete_ of a word
'impossible';" in the first Napoleon's threat to the Austrian ambassador,
"I will break your empire like this vase"; in Nelson turning his blind
eye to the signal of retreat at Copenhagen, and Wellington fencing Torres
Vedras against the world: it lingered in Nicholas the Czar, and has found
perhaps its latest political representative in Prince Bismarck.

This is the spirit to which Carlyle has always given his undivided
sympathy. He has held out hands to Knox, Francia, Friedrich, to the men
who have made manners, not to the manners which have made men, to
the rulers of people, not to their representatives: and the not
inconsiderable following he has obtained is the most conspicuous tribute
to a power resolute to pull against the stream. How strong its currents
may be illustrated by a few lines from our leading literary journal, the
_Athenaeum,_ of the Saturday after his death :--

"The future historian of the century will have to record the marvellous