in the right direction. That the State should assume to itself the supreme administration of the business of national production, is the known view of at least one class among the Socialists, that represented by M. Louis Blanc; and that the State is bound to find work and subsistence for all that cannot otherwise procure it, is a settled tenet in the creed of Socialists of all sects. That a scheme, therefore, of the nature of Mr. Carlyle's should be carried into effect; that on any terms whatever, the State should charge itself with the industrial management of three millions of destitute individuals, would be matter for unmingled satisfaction to the whole Socialist world. But, looking at the scheme as propounded by its author, they would pronounce it a Socialist idea advanced in an aristocratic spirit. Mr. Carlyle, they would say, is a man destitute of the true and characteristic sentiment of Socialism-that sentiment, namely, which delights in contemplating all mankind as equally units in a terrestrial point of view, and of which the French phrases Liberty and Equality are the much-abused expressions: he is a man accustomed rather to that solitary extra-terrestrial point of view, from which the moral inequalities of things are seen more distinctly to come out, and familiarity with which is apt to generate, in a noble man of strict temperament, a spirit of intolerance, despotism, and rigorous compulsion; and hence, while his project for the remedy of pauperism is essentially a coincidence with Socialism, he has put it forth in the language not of a genuine and sentimental equalitarian, but of an old Greek Tuρavvos, or τυραννος, resolute modern slave-owner, doing the right thing, but kicking you while he does it. But for all this, as we have said, the Socialists would welcome any attempt to put his scheme in force. All that talk about "the whip" and "shooting" with which it was according to the nature of Mr. Carlyle's genius to clothe the statement of his scheme, would come to nothing, they would say, in the tear and wear of actual experience. Once let the three millions of fustian-jackets be abroad among the morasses and hills, and all the colonels in the world, and all the cobwebs of borrowed military forms that could be invented to back them, would not guarantee society against the vast proletarian influence that would be thus concentrated and made visible;-the peace might indeed be kept and the stipulated work done; but the total effect would be as if society, tired of its slow rate of progress hitherto, had thrown the least timorous and least interested portion of its strength into the advanced guard, and thus shod itself, so to speak, with a democratic ploughshare, fast to cleave the future. Hence it partly is, as we conceive, that of almost all existing political parties, those who like Mr. Carlyle's recent appearances best are the Socialists and extreme Republi

cans. It is curious enough, too, though readily explicable, that men of the other or aristocratic extreme, with whom also we believe some of Mr. Carlyle's views find favour, are beginning, in like manner, to be popular with the Socialists.

To pass to another topic of the Pamphlets: Even more startling than Mr. Carlyle's views regarding the treatment of pauperism, are those he has put forth on the subject of Criminal Reform. To follow him into all the separate particulars of his discussion of this subject-as, for example, into his appreciation of the character and services of Howard, which we believe to be historically just and accurate; or into his defence of Capital Punishments, which appears to us to want something; or into his restatement, against the Simple-prevention School, of the true theory of Punishments in general, which we regard as highly beautiful and philosophical-is at present impossible. We select rather the passage in which he sums up his views as to the general relation in which society ought to try to stand towards the criminal part of it-in other words, his views as to the wisdom of the Criminal Reform movement.

"If I had a commonwealth to reform or to govern, certainly it should not be the Devil's regiments of the line that I should first of all concentrate my attention on! With them I should be apt to make rather brief work; to them one would apply the besom, try to sweep them with some rapidity into the dust-bin, and well out of one's road, I should rather say. Away, you; begone swiftly, ye regiments of the line. In the name of God and of His poor struggling servants, sore put to it to live in these bad days, I mean to rid myself of you with some degree of brevity. To feed you in palaces, to hire captains and schoolmasters, and the choicest spiritual and material artificers to expend their industries on you! I have quite other work for that class of artists. Seven-and-twenty millions of neglected mortals who have not yet quite declared for the Devil. Mark it, my diabolic friends, I mean to lay leather on the backs of you, collars round the necks of you; and will teach you, after the example of the gods, that this world is not your inheritance, or glad to see you in it. You, ye diabolic canaille, what has a governor much to do with you? You, I think, he will rather swiftly dismiss from his thoughts, which have the whole celestial and terrestrial for their scope, and not the subterranean of scoundreldom alone. You, I consider, he will sweep pretty rapidly into some Norfolk Island, into some special convict colony or remote domestic moorland; into some stonewalled silent-system, under hard drill-sergeants, just as Radamanthus, and inflexible as he, and there leave you to reap what you have sown; he meanwhile turning his endeavours to the thousandfold immeasurable interests of men and gods,-dismissing the one extremely contemptible interest of scoundrels; sweeping that into the cesspool, tumbling that over London Bridge, in a very brief manner, if needful.

Yonder, in those dingy habitations, and shops of red herring and tobacco-pipes, where men have not yet quite declared for the Devil; there, I say, is land, here is mere sea-beach. Thither go with your benevolence, thither to these dingy caverns of the poor; and there instruct, and drill, and manage, there where some fruit may come from it."-Model Prisons, pp. 13-16.

Now, it cannot be denied, we think, that there is much in this declaration of the author's sentiments, as true as it is striking. There are few things in the Pamphlets more touchingly conclusive than the allusion, so quaint and yet so illustrative of the author's meaning, to the "poor dark trade-shops with red herrings and tobacco-pipes crossed in the window;" and, as we read, the conviction does flash in upon us, that amid the zeal of our professional philanthropists for this special interest of criminals, the other and larger interest of our poor hard-working myriads of honest people has been wofully neglected. Hints too, we believe, there are in the particular Pamphlet under notice, that may be useful in suggesting real improvements in the practical management of our prisons; albeit we cannot but imagine, that in his representation of the comforts of a modern prison-house, with its cocoa, its cleanliness, its chaplain and its ventilation, Mr. Carlyle has omitted the very element that renders the poor trade-shop with all its discomforts even popularly preferable, namely, the imprisonment.

But, taking the passage as a whole, and trying to extract as fully as possible the general drift of it, namely, that society should dismiss this "extremely contemptible interest of scoundrels," tumble it over London Bridge, or summarily get rid of it anyhow; taking, we say, this passage as it stands, there is, we feel bound to admit, no other passage in the whole range of the Pamphlets that provoked in us at the first reading, or that does now provoke in us, such a rush of sentimental and deeply-moved negation. "Wrong, wrong!" we cried, "by these tears, this nervous tremour, noble man as thou art, thou art here wrong;" and more resolutely and less diffidently than on any other occasion of conscious difference from a great writer, did we openly recognise the difference, and feel willing to stand by it. And we feel so yet. Not that we would care, or that we should be prepared, to construct an argument in favour of the CriminalReform Movement upon statistical evidence of what has been accomplished in this way, or upon the viva voce declarations of good and sensible men largely and even officially connected with prisons, as to the proportion of committed criminals that they personally, judging by their own experience, believe to be absolutely reclaimable. Our recollection of one positive statement of this kind made in our hearing by a prison-governor, leads us

to conclude that much might be made of such an argument. Again, there is, we also believe, no small degree of argumentative value in the consideration that a large proportion of the mass of crime is hereditary and transmitted, and therefore less chargeable upon individuals than on society itself. But what we chiefly rest on is feeling, instinct, the inarticulate reason within us; that ultimate faculty of No and Yes, to the foot of whose throne, when the scuffle of all possible articulate controversy is over, every question of this sort must be dragged for decision. And, strictly considered, what is Mr. Carlyle's own deliverance on the point at issue, but the vehement Egomet dixi of his peculiar, and, though profound and generous, yet severely constituted nature? That the "interest of scoundrels" as he calls it, should be tumbled over London Bridge, and so summarily dismissed, is what he feels should be done with "the interest of scoundrels." But what if some good man, less great perhaps than he, but more tremulous to certain soft transcendentalisms, some meck-eyed village clergyman, let us say, or some pale and weak-bodied recluse, should feel otherwise; and, after consulting his own heart, should put forth this counter-assertion, that, even though not once in a thousand years should one criminal be reclaimed, yet it is the duty and part of the highest training of every society to persist in the Quixotic effort, and to place the labour of attempting to reabsorb its outcasts foremost among its systematic enterprises? And what if, seeking authority for his own timid feelings against the strength of so unequal an opponent, such a man should venture to call in certain old words once spoken in Judea, and intended to transform the soul of the world, and make it more pitiful for ever? "They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick." And again, “I will have mercy and not sacrifice: for I am not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance." And again, "How think ye? if a man have an hundred sheep, and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains, and seeketh that which is gone astray?" And again, "Joy shall be in heaven over one sinner that repenteth, more than over ninety and nine just persons, which need no repentance." All this, of course, Mr. Carlyle is aware of; and takes care to guard himself against. "Christian Religion!" he says, expressing his disgust at what he thinks the unwarrantable references made in the matter to the authority of the Gospel; "does the Christian or any religion prescribe love of scoundrels, then? I hope it prescribes a healthy hatred of scoundrels; otherwise what am I, in heaven's name, to make of it?" Notwithstanding all which, (and there is a truth in this mode of putting the thing, too,) it remains clear to us, that Mr.

Carlyle's prescription as to the treatment of the criminal interest, and the prescription of the Christian religion, are not one and the same. Hatred of scoundrels! True! but define your "scoundrel!" Will the definition, if just, carry in it an approval of your sentence with regard to what is called, in the language customary to this controversy, the criminal portion of society? Ah! far back in the vista of time, may not the reverent fancy still see the face of One who, though he drove money-changers out of the Temple, and rebuked Scribes and Pharisees, yet kept company with publicans and sinners, and told, in gentle parable, how wrong it was in the elder brother to be angry with his father because, instead of dismissing the extremely contemptible interest of the prodigal who had devoured his living with harlots at a distance, he welcomed his return with joy, and regaled him with better entertainment than had ever fallen to the lot of the righteous son who had served faithfully many years, and at no time transgressed? If there was supreme wisdom there, there is vehement error here; for according to no possible interpretation, can such passages as we have quoted from our author be said to be conceived in this spirit.

Speaking scientifically, we should be inclined to say that Mr. Carlyle's peculiar mode of thinking on this subject arises from the dominance in his mind of a very high form of that sentiment by which, in its lowest form, the world at large is accustomed to determine the degree of social consideration that shall be paid to different individuals. Who are the men that get on in the world, that make fortunes, and that rise to place and dignity? They are not the men, generally speaking, of the highest intrinsic merit, either moral or intellectual; they are men, for the most part, of a certain energy of character good solely for this one. effect, men of large jaw, and of a narrow and even morose habit of perseverance. Take, reader, any two persons of your own acquaintance, one that has accomplished, let us say even by the most honourable and legitimate means, a distinct and pronounced success in life, and another that has never got on so far as to have an account with a banker: compare all that you know of the two individuals; think of the entire sensation you have respecting the one when in his presence, as compared with the sensation you have in the same circumstances with respect to the other; calculate, if you can from this, the sum-total of the really meritorious manifestations both of head and of heart that must have gone forth from the one during his whole life, as compared with the sum-total that must have gone forth from the other; and the chances are that, though you will find certain genuine points of superiority in the richer, you will have to