" Carlyle
would apparently force emigration, and coerce the Australians, Americans,
and Chinese, to receive our ship-loads of living merchandise; but the
problem of population exceeds his solution of it. He everywhere inclines
to rely on coercion till it is over-mastered by resistance, and to
overstretch jurisdiction till it snaps.
In Germany, where the latest representative of the Hohenzollerns is
ostentatiously laying claim to "right divine," Carlyle's appraisal of
Autocracy may have given it countenance. In England, where the opposite
tide runs full, it is harmless: but, by a curious irony, our author's
leaning to an organised control over social and private as well as public
life, his exaltation of duties above rights, may serve as an incentive
to the very force he seemed most to dread. Events are every day
demonstrating the fallacy of his view of Democracy as an embodiment of
_laissez faire._ Kant with deeper penetration indicated its tendency to
become despotic. Good government, according to Aristotle, is that of one,
of few, or of many, for the sake of all. A Democracy where the poor rule
for the poor alone, maybe a deadly engine of oppression; it may trample
without appeal on the rights of minorities, and, in the name of the common
good, establish and enforce an almost unconditioned tyranny. Carlyle's
blindness to this superlative danger--a danger to which Mill, in many
respects his unrecognised coadjutor, became alive--emphasises the limits
of his political foresight.
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