But the upper classes in
England seemed indifferent to the warning. "Niagara, or what you like,"
the author quotes as the saying of a certain shining countess, "we will
at least have a villa on the Mediterranean when Church and State have
gone." A _mot_ emphatically of the decadence.
Later he fulminated against the Clerkenwell explosions being a means of
bringing the Irish question within the range of practical politics.
I sit in speechless admiration of our English treatment of
those Fenians first and last. It is as if the rats of a house
had decided to expel and extirpate the human inhabitants,
which latter seemed to have neither rat-catchers, traps, nor
arsenic, and are trying to prevail by the method of love.
Governor Eyre, with Spenser's Essay on Ireland for text and Cromwell's
storm of Drogheda for example, or Otto von Bismarck, would have been, in
his view, in place at Dublin Castle.
In the next great event of the century, the close of the greatest
European struggle since Waterloo, the cause which pleased Cato pleased
also the gods. Carlyle, especially in his later days, had a deepening
confidence in the Teutonic, a growing distrust of the Gallic race. He
regarded the contest between them as one between Ormuzd and Ahriman, and
wrote of Sedan, as he had written of Rossbach, with exultation. When
a feeling spread in this country, naming itself sympathy for the
fallen,--really half that, the other half, as in the American war, being
jealousy of the victor,--and threatened to be dangerous, Carlyle wrote a
decisive letter to the _Times_, November 11th 1870, tracing the sources
of the war back to the robberies of Louis XIV.
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