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"Another generation may find in the new representative system defects such as we find in the old representative system. Civilisation will proceed. Wealth will increase. Industry and trade will find out new seats. The same causes which have turned so many villages into great towns, which have turned so many thousands of square miles of fir and heath into cornfields and orchards, will continue to operate. Who can say that a hundred years hence there may not be, on the shore of some desolate and silent bay in the Hebrides, another Liverpool with its docks and warehouses and endless forests of masts? Who can say that the huge chimneys of another Manchester may not rise in the wilds of Connemara? For our children we do not pretend to legislate."

(3.) His great powers of debate appear chiefly in refutation. He is critical rather than constructive. He takes delight in exposing false analogies and false generalities, and in showing that anticipations are not warranted by previous experience.

When he can put a doctrine upon the horns of a dilemma, he tosses it with great spirit. A good instance is his assault on primogeniture; which also illustrates his habit of referring all generalities to the fundamental particulars, and his favourite manner of retorting that the facts prove exactly the opposite of what is asserted:

"It is evident that this theory, though intended to strengthen the foundations of Government, altogether unsettles them. Did the divine and immutable law of primogeniture admit females or exclude them? On either supposition, half the sovereigns of Europe must be usurpers, reigning in defiance of the commands of heaven, and might be justly dispossessed by the rightful heirs. These absurd doctrines received no countenance from the Old Testament; for in the Old Testament we read that the chosen people were blamed and punished for desiring a king, and that they were afterwards commanded to withdraw their allegiance from him. Their whole history, far from favouring the notion that primogeniture is of divine institution, would rather seem to indicate that younger brothers are under the special protection of heaven. Isaac was not the eldest son of Abraham, nor Jacob of Isaac, nor Judah of Jacob, nor David of Jesse, nor Solomon of David. Indeed, the order of seniority among children is seldom strictly regarded in countries where polygamy is practised."

Examples, actual cases, which he lays down in such numbers, often have the effect of a proof, being the actual foundation of the general proposition. His illustration in the debate on the Anatomy Bill of the assertion that the poor suffer more by bad surgery than the rich, has something of this effect:

"Who suffers by the bad state of the Russian school of surgery? The Emperor Nicholas? By no means. The whole evil falls on the peasantry. If the education of a surgeon should become very expensive, if the fees of surgeons should consequently rise, if the supply of regular surgeons should diminish, the sufferers would be, not the rich, but the poor in our country villages, who would again be left to mountebanks, and barbers, and old women, and charms, and quack medicines.'

Perhaps the best example of his irresistible use of facts to enforce his views is to be seen in his speeches on the proposals to

extend Copyright.

He runs over the principal men in English literature, and examines how the law would have operated with them. Would it have induced Dr Johnson to labour more assiduously had he known that a bookseller, whose grandfather had purchased the copyright of his works from his residuary legatee Black Frank, would be in 1841 drawing large profits from the monopoly? Would it have induced him to give one more allegory, one more life of a poet, one more imitation of Juvenal ?

Very often his concrete comparisons are of the nature of arguments by analogy. His speech on the war with China, defending the Government from the charge of having brought on the war by mismanagement, abounds in comparisons of this sort. One of the charges was that the instructions sent to the superintendent were vague and meagre, to which Macaulay replied that it would be pernicious meddling to attempt to direct in detail the action of a functionary fifteen thousand miles off :

"How indeed is it possible that they should send him directions as to the details of his administration? Consider in what a state the affairs of this country would be if they were to be conducted according to directions framed by the ablest statesman residing in Bengal. A despatch goes hence asking for instructions while London is illuminating for the peace of Amiens. The instructions arrive when the French army is encamped at Boulogne, and when the whole island is up in arms to repel invasion. A despatch is written asking for instructions when Buonaparte is at Elba. The instructions come when he is at the Tuilleries. A despatch is written asking for instructions when he is at the Tuilleries. The instructions come when he is at St Helena. It would be just as impossible to govern India in London as to govern England at Calcutta."

Here we have substantially an argument by analogy. Another of the charges brought against Government was, that they made no exertion to suppress the opium trade. This Macaulay met with the assertion that it was impossible, supporting his assertion with the following plausible parallel :

'In England we have a preventive service which costs us half a million a-year. We employ more than fifty cruisers to guard our coasts. We have six thousand effective men whose business is to intercept smugglers. And yet .. the quantity of brandy which comes in without paying duty is known to be not less than six hundred thousand gallons a-year. Some people think that the quantity of tobacco which is imported clandestinely is as great as the quantity which goes through the custom-house. And all this, observe, has been done in spite of the most effective preventive service that, I believe, ever existed in the world. If we know any

thing about the Chinese Government, we know this, that its coast-guard is neither trusty nor efficient; and we know that a coast-guard as trusty and as efficient as our own would not be able to cut off communication between the merchant longing for silver and the smoker longing for his pipe."

Any attempt at prevention, he says further, would turn the smugglers into pirates

"Have not similar causes repeatedly produced similar effects? Do we not know that the jealous vigilance with which Spain excluded the ships of other nations from her transatlantic possessions turned men who would otherwise have been honest merchant adventurers into buccaneers? The same causes which raised up one race of buccaneers in the Gulf of Mexico would soon have raised up another in the China sea."

The same sense of the effect of dealing with propositions in the concrete appears in another form. He is anxious to reduce vague and general charges to a statement of facts, with a view to show the insufficiency of the real grounds. Thus he reduces Sir James Graham's charge of Government maladministration in China to the following:

"The charge against them therefore is this, that they did not give such copious and particular directions as were sufficient, in every possible emergeney, for the guidance of a functionary who was fifteen thousand miles off."

His habit of immediately looking to the facts when a generality was asserted, often enabled him to point out that certain circumstances had not been taken into account. Thus, in the Reform debate, a member argued that it was unjust to disfranchise Aldborough, because the borough was as populous now as in the days of Edward III., when it was constituted an elective borough. True, replied Macaulay, but it ought to be much more populous now than then, if it would keep its position. Other towns have been growing enormously, while Aldborough has been standing still.

(4) Though habitually gladiatorial, and always eager to convince by argument, he shows considerable tact in recommending his own view to the feelings of the persons addressed.

Throughout his History he seeks favour for his own favourites by representing them as the champions of English glory. His account of Cromwell may be studied for artful touches of this sort. One of his most splendid paragraphs is his account of the supremacy of England during the Protectorate. In equally enthusiastic terms he celebrates the superiority of Cromwell's pikemen :

"The banished Cavaliers felt an emotion of national pride when they saw a brigade of their countrymen, outnumbered by foes and abandoned by allies, drive before it in headlong rout the finest infantry of Spain, and force a passage into a counterscarp which had just been pronounced impregnable by the ablest of the marshals of France.'

In the Reform debates his principal card was the fear of provoking the people to a revolution. Again and again he reiterated that there were grounds for such a fear. When Lord John Russell hinted at the danger of disappointing the expectations of the nation, he was accused of threatening the House. Macaulay defended the obnoxious expression as quite "parliamentary and decorous," and repeated his own belief in the reality of the danger :

"I, sir, do entertain great apprehension for the fate of my country. I do in my conscience believe that unless the plan proposed, or some similar plan, be speedily adopted, great and terrible calamities will befall us. Entertaining this opinion, I think myself bound to state it, not as a threat, but as a reason."

In more than one of the debates he held up the French Revolution as a warning :

"The French nobles delayed too long any concession to the popular demands. Because they resisted reform in 1783, they had to resist revolution in 1789. They would not endure Turgot, and they had to endure Robespierre."

In one speech he drew a vivid picture of the destruction of the nobility, and asked—

"Why were they scattered over the face of the earth, their titles abolished, their escutcheons defaced, their parks wasted, their palaces dismantled, their heritages given to strangers? Because they had no sympathy with the people, no discernment of the signs of their time; because, in the pride and narrowness of their hearts, they called those whose warnings might have saved them theorists and speculators; because they refused all concession until the time had arrived when no concession would avail."

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CHAPTER III.

THOMAS CARLYLE,

Born Dec. 4, 1795.

THOMAS CARLYLE, "The Censor of the Age," as he has been called, is an author by profession. In his famous petition on the Copyright Bill, written in 1839, he described himself as "a writer of books."

His early life was not particularly checkered; and since he adopted the profession of literature, the principal epochs of his career have been the dates of his various books.

His education was the education of hundreds of young Scotchmen in the same generation. His father, who is spoken of as a shrewd and intelligent man, had a farm near the village of Ecclefechan, in Dumfriesshire. Thomas, the eldest son, was sent with other little boys to the parish school; and in 1810, after some training in the higher branches of learning at the burgh school of Annan, proceeded to the University of Edinburgh.

When he entered the University, he had not quite completed his fifteenth year. Some of his professors were men of note: Dunbar, Professor of Greek; Leslie, Professor of Mathematics; Playfair, Professor of Natural Philosophy; Thomas Brown, Professor of Logic and Moral Philosophy. Young Carlyle was a hard student. He applied himself diligently to classics. To Brown's lectures he probably gave little attention, having a strong distaste for the analytic mode of dealing with mind, but the lectures in science he mastered thoroughly: natural liking for the subject, or the professor's enthusiasm, or accident, led him to make mathematics his principal study. He prosecuted the high mathematics for a long time with the greatest ardour. It was in his devotion to this subject that he first injured his naturally robust health.

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