Had he done otherwise, I feel sure that by the majority of us young men of the time, in whose eyes he had something of that 'mystic sublime reputation 'which he himself attributed to Coleridge, his every word would have been weighed, and have received our most serious and careful consideration. But as he did not choose to take this course, and apparently felt that by reason of their very monstrosities he could not do justice to the doctrines of the Economists except by a wholesale denunciation and repudiation of them, his diatribes, in spite of his assurance that he had read 'barrowfuls' of their treatises and text-books, had not the slightest effect; - proving that no mere diatribes, unless they are supported point by point by reasoned criticism, are of any avail when you wish to convince, and not merely to hypnotize for the moment, the serious and thoughtful student. But in thus doing an injustice to his readers and to his opponents alike, he did a real injustice to himself also. For, strictly speaking, Carlyle was one of the most profound and penetrating thinkers on all problems bearing on human life, that the world has yet seen; and when he did go down into the depths of any problem, always struck bottom; - as I found to my surprise when in later years I had to handle some of these problems myself.

Indeed, as I have already had occasion to insist more than once, no man could have given the interpretation he did to Goethe's celebrated 'Tale' who had not the profoundest insight into all the great dynamic forces of Civilization, of Society, and of the Human Mind, in their most complex and intricate interplay, down to the minutest particulars. Speaking for myself, I am bound to admit that I cannot recall with my utmost effort and as my own experience of all these problems becomes larger, more than one great general principle in which, in my judgment, he went practically wrong; and that was, his curious insistence on the indentity of the moral and intellectual faculties in each individual, - a doctrine which led directly to his presupposition that the man who was great in one thing could, if he chose to exert himself, be equally great in all, and which ended in his 'Great Man ' theory of Politics; - a theory which Emerson spent his life in controverting by insisting on the opposite and, as I believe, truer doctrine, that the greatest 'great man' is great only at his own peculiar angle, and that Society depends, like a necklace of jewels, on a circle of great men of all kinds and shades, to give it the unity, the harmony, and the completeness it requires.

But how profound and penetrating, in spite of this, Carlyle was on all the great issues of Society and Life, may be seen in the simple fact that all we young men who at that time railed at his doctrines and prophecies, have only had to give him fifty years or so for every one of them to come true; - his prophecy, for example, of the impotence and final bankruptcy of the orthodox Political Economy; his recognition of the fact that man being an animal that goes in herds, must follow the law of all herds, and make for himself heroes real or imaginary, before whom, once made, he is only too proud to prostrate both intellect and heart; and further, his assertion that the whole chain of doctrines which hung on the denial of this great central truth - namely laissez-faire, abstract liberty and equality, the sovereignty of the ballot-box and universal suffrage, negro franchise, Utilitarianism, Scientific Materialism, and the sovereignty everywhere of abstract instead of concrete ideals - was a collection of merest half-truths, and at bottom, if we consider it well, of denials of the principle of Evolution which carries both them and their complementary halves and opposites on the bosom of its ample and all-embracing stream.

Now all these doctrines, - involving as they did an attempt to make a society progress by following its tail of mediocrities who are the veriest slaves of their environment, instead of the great initiative and controlling spirits who have to foresee, devise, invent, carve out the path, and lead the way, - were believed in at that time, thirty years ago, as words of holy writ, and hence the denunciations of Carlyle fell on unheeding ears; so that in his old age, and within a generation of the time when they were one and all to be thrown out by the world as convicted impostures that had strangled themselves when sufficient time had been given them to do it in, he had to complain that he and Ruskin in all England, as a 'minority of two,' were the only ones who could be found to seriously question them. But what with the prestige of Adam Smith and his gospel of laissez-faire, among the politicians from Pitt downward, whom the people had made their leaders not only in Politics but in Economics as well; what with the 'intellectuals' who as followers of Bentham and Mill had captured the advanced organs of opinion; what with the beautiful candid mind of Mill himself, and the glamour it threw over the elaborate logical apparatus of half-truths of which, as we have seen, his system was built up; what with the rapid succession of superficial politicians, windbags many of them, who had caught the ear of the masses, as well as of the half-baked, self-made leaders of the working classes who being mainly men 'of one book' and of one shibboleth, posed as intellectuals' and so became each again in turn a kind of subsidiary tail to these political windbags; - what with all this, the rising Science of Political Economy had got itself so entrenched and rooted in the soil of general 'public opinion ' that in spite of the people being on the verge of starvation, not only the denunciations of Carlyle but even the immense prestige of the Crown and Aristocracy (always the most potent factor in opinion of all kinds in smooth-running times) had no effect against it.