He spoke with scorn of the "rights of
women," their demand for the suffrage, and the _cohue_ of female authors,
expressing himself in terms of ridiculous disparagement of writers so
eminent as George Sand and George Eliot; but he strenuously advocated
the claim of women to a recognised medical education. He reviled "Model
Prisons" as pampering institutes of "a universal sluggard and scoundrel
amalgamation society," and yet seldom passed on the streets one of the
"Devil's elect" without giving him a penny. He set himself against every
law or custom that tended to make harder the hard life of the poor: there
was no more consistent advocate of the abolition of the "Game Laws."
Emerson says of the mediaeval architects, "they builded better than they
knew." Carlyle felt more softly than he said, and could not have been
trusted to execute one of his own Rhadamanthine decrees.
[Footnote: _Vide_ a remarkable instance of this in the best short _Life of
Carlyle_, that by Dr. Richard Garnett, p. 147.]
Scratch the skin of the Tartar and you find beneath the despised
humanitarian. Everything that he has written on "The Condition of England
Question" has a practical bearing, and many of his suggestions have found
a place on our code, vindicating the assertion of the _Times_ of the day
after his death, that "the novelties and paradoxes of 1846 are to a large
extent nothing but the good sense of 1881.
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