Carlyle's Message to His Age

Feilding Star, Volume XIII, Issue 110, 15 March 1892, Page 4

Carlyle's Message to His Age

+. •* The philosophy of competition or supply and demand w:is incessantly denouncedby Carlyleas Mammon worship, as " devil take tbe hindmost,' 1 as "pure egotism;" ''the shabbiest gospel that had been taught among men ." He declared that in the lon» run no society could flourish, or even permanently cohere, if the only relation between man and man was a mere money tie. He maintained that what he called the condition of England question, or, in other words, the great mass of struggling, anarchical poverty that was growing 1 up in the chief centres of population, was a question which imperiously demanded the most strenuous Government intervention — which was, in fact, far more important than any of the purely political questions. The whole system of factory legislation, tbe whole system of legislation about working men's dwellings, which has taken place in this century, has been a realisation of the ideas of Carlyle. When Carlyle first wrote, it was the received opinion that the education of the people was a matter in which the Government should in no degree interfere, and that it oueftt to be left altogether to individuals, or churches, or societies. In his work on Chartism, which was published as early as 1834, Carlyle argued that the " universal education of the people " was an indispensable duty of the Government. It was not until about twenty years ago that this duty was fully recognised in England. In the same work he maintained that State-aided, State-organised, Statedirected emigration must one day be undertaken on a large scale, as the only efficient agent in coping 1 with the great masses of growing pauperism. In his '* Past and Present," which was published in 1843, he brought out another idea which has proved very prolific, aud which is probably destined to be come still more so. It is that it may become both possible atd needful for the master worker "to grant his workers permanent interest in his enterprise ana theirs." — " Contemporary Review."