wrong with all the intensity of his Puritan father.

His description of the deathbed of Louis XV is in itself a sermon on "the exceeding sinfulness of sin." "Yes, poor Louis, Death has found thee. No palace walls or lifeguards, gorgeous tapestries or gilt buckram of stiffest ceremonial could keep him out; but he is here, here at thy very life-breath and will extinguish it.... Unhappy man, there as thou turnest, in dull agony, on thy bed of weariness, what a thought is thine! Purgatory and Hellfire, now as all too possible in the prospect; in the retrospect, alas, what thing didst thou do that were not better undone; ... what sorrow hadst thou mercy on? Do the 'five hundred thousand' ghosts who sank shamefully on so many battlefields from Rossbach to Quebec, that thy Harlot might take revenge for an epigram-crowd round thee in this hour? Thy foul Harem; the curses of mothers, the tears and infamy of daughters? Miserable man! thou hast done evil as thou couldst': thy whole existence seems one hideous abortion and mistake of Nature; the use and meaning of thee not yet known. Wert thou a fabulous Griffin devouring the works of men; daily dragging virgins to thy cave; clad also in scales that no spear would pierce: no spear

but Death's? A Griffin not fabulous but real! Frightful, O Louis, seem these moments for thee. We will pry no further into the horrors of a sinner's deathbed."

Carlyle's ethics was not a mass of abstract philosophical theorems. It was rooted and grounded in reality. He understood the inseparable relation existing between conduct and life. His fundamental ethical viewpoint can best be expressed in the words of Emerson, "The specific stripes may follow late after the offense, but they follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that, unsuspected, ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it." It was Carlyle himself who said that Napoleon's empire was doomed to destruction because it was founded on injustice. The Scottish Puritan, like Goethe, his exceedingly unpuritanic teacher, knew full well that although "the mills of God grind slowly, they grind exceeding small.' Some have said that he taught that might makes right. This, however, is almost diametrically opposite to his teaching. Instead he believed that right makes might. He knew that the wages of sin is death, and this ancient and universal truth of life he unflinchingly faced. Taking it all in all, however, it was Carlyle's

social teachings which had the greatest influence upon the life and thought of his own and succeeding generations. Carlyle would have been a mighty force for social betterment had he done nothing more than inspire John Ruskin to devote his life to righting deepintrenched wrongs. But it cannot be denied that books like Chartism and Past and Present were potent weapons in the battle for the industrial and social liberation of the English people. Nowhere is the human problem of those early days better stated than in these words: "England is full of wealth, of multifarious produce, supply for human want of every kind; yet England is dying of inanition. With unabated bounty the land of England blooms and grows; waving with yellow harvests; thick-studded with workshops, industrial implements, with fifteen millions of workers understood to be the strongest, the cunningest, and the willingest our earth ever had; these men are here; the work they have done, the fruit they have realized is here, abundant, exuberant on every hand of us: and behold some baleful fiat as of enchantment has gone forth, saying, "Touch it not, ye workers, ye master-workers, ye master-idlers; none of you can touch it, no man of you shall be the better for it; this is enchanted fruit!' On

the poor workers such a fiat falls first, in its rudest shape; neither can the rich masteridlers, nor any richest or highest man escape, but all are alike to be brought low with it, and made poor in the money sense or a far fataler one." His description in Past and Present of the paupers in the workhouse of St. Ives is one which it is not easy to forget. Economics he excoriated as the "dismal science"; sociology was then in its dim beginnings; but he could readily see that where there was starving in the midst of plenty, poverty surrounded by luxury, sordid brutality side by side with swinish epicureanism there was a need of plain words and purposeful action.

The years between 1830 and 1850, the period in which was accomplished Carlyle's most distinctive work, were marked by a political, industrial, and social revolution of tremendous moment. The people were beginning to make themselves heard. The dominant classes were compelled to relinquish a few of the privileges which an unjust caste system had given them. In 1828 the Test Act discriminating against Protestant Dissenters was repealed. The next year the Catholics won their victory in the passage of the Catholic Emancipation Bill. The First Reform Bill after a strenuous fight

was passed in 1832. This bill was essentially a victory for the bourgeoisie in their battle with the rural landowning class. To the laborer it meant little, but it was a step in the right direction. During the next decade considerable legislation protecting the rank and file of the people from economic and social injustice was placed upon the statute books of the realm. The great event of the early years of the reign of Victoria was the AntiCorn Law movement led by Richard Cobden and John Bright. All over England men, women, and children were on the verge of starvation on account of the high tariff laws which had been passed to conserve the privileges of the landowning, game-preserving, lawmaking aristocracy. The fight was long and bitter, but June 25, 1846, the Corn Laws were repealed. Later came the agitation for a people's charter, giving the people of England still greater governmental prerogatives. This movement, which expressed the noblest idealism of many lives and contended for nothing more than simple justice, was not especially fortunate in its leadership and directly accomplished but little. Those were thrilling days in which to live. And Carlyle was not unawake to what was taking place around him.