The Daily News. MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 1915. CARLYLE ON FRANCE AND GERMANY.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LVII, Issue 188, 18 January 1915, Page 4

The Daily News. MONDAY, JANUARY 18, 1915. CARLYLE ON FRANCE AND GERMANY.

It is now a little over forty years since there appeared in the London Times a famous letter written by Carlyle on Fiance and Germany. It wag written when tli« German forces were investing Paris, .when the Second Empire had irretrievably, fallen, and when .British opinion, long estranged from the Empt rnr Xapohjon, had begun to sliow many signs of sympathy for his prostrate country. To counteract that sympathy, and to prove that Germany had right and reason on her side in pushing her advantage to the uttermost, were the objects for which Carlyle. took his pen, and in his own prismatic and inimitable language lie belabored France and extolled the German cause, to-his heart's content. His lettter gave the liveliest satisfaction at the Prussian headquarters. But to us to-day, re-read-ing it in the instructive light of the past four and. a-half decades, what is most remarkable in the Sage's epistle is to observe how precisely everything he said in praise of Germany now applies to France, and everything he said in disparagement of France now holds good for Germany. Not only the circumstances, but the very character of the two nations might seem in the interval to have chanced places. They are again at war, but in November, 1870, France was unaided, distracted, her spirit broken, her armies defeated and dispersed. To-day, she has powerful allies, but nojie more powerful tlian her own recovered health and constancy of soul, her accumulated and inexhaustible stock of self-restraint, cheerfulness, unity and endurance. The Franco-Prus-sian War brought to a violent end an epoch of superficial brilliance and deep-seated malice. The present war found her tranquilly "confident and prepared, with steadied nerves and stiffened backbone, self-reliant, without .

toucli of bravado, facing unflinchingly ami with unanimity the crisis she had ] done'nothing to provoke. The question forty-four years ago was what terms Oruiany might impose on her beaten foe. The question to-day is how soon the soil of France will be definitely and completely cleared of the last German invader. ''That noble, patient, deep, and solid Germany," wrote Carlyle, "should be at length welded into a nation and become Queen of the Continent, instead of vaporing, vain-glor-ious, gesticulating, quarrelsome, restless, and over-sensitive France, seems to me the'hope! idlest public fact that lias occurred in my time'' That the j Germany of bis ideal still exists no I

one disputes. It lives, but it lives in chains, manacled to the service (if militarism and bureaucracy. We have learned what Carlvlc never even suspected, the vanity of attempting to distinguish between the Germany of ''culture" ami the panoplied brutality of Prussian arrogance. The one has become the handmaid of the other, its acquiescent slave, its convenient cloak. It has been indeed the destructive tragedy of German learning during the last half century to have pandered to and inflamed all the parvenu passions and meglomaniac imaginings of the German people, to have applauded and justified the very policies that have made of Berlin a centre of universal unrest and suspicion, and never to have raised a voice of warning against the excesses of Potsdam aggressiveness. Among a people peculiarly susceptible to the excitement of ideas it is the professors and philosophers and scholars, the historians, who have done most to popularize that doctrine of force which is now being worked to its inevitable and disastrous eonolusion. "To me at times," exclaimed Carlyle, "the mournfullest symptom in France is the figure 'its men of genius.' its highest literary speakers, who sbonld be propbets and seers to it, ( 'inke at present, and, indeed, for a

back have own mak.rg. It ,s utidtutly'their belief that new celestial wisdom is radiating out of France upon u.h [lie other overshadowed nations; tl at Franco is the Mount /ion of the 'universe; and tliafc all this sad, sordid, 1.111 uuiirioiis, and, in good part, infernal, stuff which French literature has been preaching to us for the ]iasi lift.v jeai'ii is a veritable new Gospel out of heaven, pregnant with blessedness for all the sons of men." Chang! but a, s.ngle word, and you have there expressed with vigor and justice the opinion with which the world has been driven since 187j, to form, not of French, but of German "culture" and its performances and practitioners. "Insolent, rapacious, insatiable, unappeasable, continually aggressive" —is it to France or to Germany that the common instinct of mankind would to-day apply these adjectives? ''Signally disgraceful to any nation," pursued the philosopher, "was iier late assault on Germany; equally signal has beeft the. ignominy of its execution on the part of France" Transpose the two countries, and the. present situation can hardly be summed up move satisfactorily. "She refuses to see the facts that are lying palpably before her face, and the penalties she. has brought upon herself The quantity

of conscious mendacity that France, oilicial and other, lias perpetrated, utterly, especially since July last, is something wonderful and fearful. And alas! perhaps that is small compared to the selfdelusion and unconscious mendacity long prevalent among the French." What comment can add to the malicious, the almost diabolical deadlincss of such a passage read in the glare of present and recent events? It leaves our friends

at whom it was aimed unscathed; it ■pierces the Hermans, on whose behalf it was launched, to the very heart. But these is more to be learned from Carlyle's letter than the old lesson that history is rotation und that there is no irony like Time's. He let drop some shrewd admonitions that will be useful

later on when sentimental bystanders and those who have persistently misjudged the character and intentions of Prussian power begin raising their

voices in favor of some trashy compromise that will leave it still capable of further mischief, (comments the London Times. ''The question for the Hermans in this crisis,'' said Carlyle, ''is not one of 'magnanimity,' of 'heroic pity and forgiveness to a fallen foe,' hut' of solid prudence and practical consideration what the fallen foe will, in all likelihood, do when once on his feet again. . . The French complain dreadfully of threatened 'loss of honor.' . . But will it save the honor of France to

refuse paying for the glass she has

voluntarily broken in her neighbor's windows? The attack upon the windows was her dishonor The honor of France can be saved only by the deep repentance of France, and by the serious determination never to do so again—to do the reverse of so for ever henceforth." Mutatis mutandis, both Germany and the, Allies will find something in this worth bearing in mind.