22 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



outside their province. Speaking of the leisured landlord, he put the 

 case as democratically as one could desire: "You ask him at the 

 year's end, 'Where is your three hundred thousand pounds ? What 

 have you realised to us with that ?' He answers in indignant surprise, 

 'Done with it ? Who are you that ask ? I have eaten it, I and my 

 flunkeys, and parasites, and slaves, two-footed and four-footed, in 

 an extremely ornamental manner, and I am here alive by it; I am 

 realised by it to you.' It is, as we have often said, such an answer 

 as was never before given under this sun." 



This gospel of work continued to be preached by our prophet all 

 his life. It was the kernel of truth underlying that otherwise very 

 questionable campaign of his against the supposed right of negroes 

 in the West Indies to leave their bountiful soil untilled and pass their 

 days in the freedom that for them meant sloth. This denunciation 

 by Carlyle is often put down to his mood of racial contempt. But 

 we do him sore injustice if we judge him so. His contempt was far 

 more for slothful nobility than for slothful negroes. "And such a 

 man," he exclaims, "calls himself a noble md.n\ His fathers worked 

 for him, he says, or successfully gambled for him; there he sits; pro- 

 fesses not in sorrow but in pride that he and his have done no work, 

 time out of mind. It is the law of the land, and is thought to be the 

 law of this Universe, that he alone of recorded men shall have no task 

 laid upon him, except that of eating his cooked victuals, and not 

 flinging himself out of window." 



The next social order to which Carlyle addressed his admonitions 

 was different. It was the rising middle class, the manufacturers, the 

 great employers of labour, the magnates of commercialism. The 

 points of moral similarity and points of moral difference between the 

 upper and middle orders a century ago constitute a subject of very 

 great historical and psychological interest. What we now call the 

 Industrial Revolution had just perfected itself, with its enormous 

 development of machinery, and the immense rush which it had oc- 

 casioned from the country to the cities. The growth of the capitalist, 

 made possible by the great mechanical inventions and by the massing 

 of skilled workers in great industrial centres, had silently withdrawn 

 from the old harmonious feudalism the basis on which it had so long 

 reposed. Intelligent mechanics would not preserve that docility 

 towards squire and parson which might be counted upon among dull 

 farmers and duller labourers. The middle class, with quite new 

 demands, had come into existence. Wealth was claiming, and could 

 compel, that social recognition which had formerly been the preroga- 

 tive of birth. The brains that had devised the spinning-jenny, con- 



