24 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



Other purpose than to preserve public peace, to keep the ring while 

 competitors fight out their individual struggle among themselves, to 

 be a gigantic policeman, in short, with the duty of restraining violence 

 but no duty of stimulating social welfare. It was the doctrine preached, 

 for example, by Nassau Senior, when he resisted the Factory Acts, 

 on the ground that to prohibit the employment of a child ten years 

 old wherever his parents chose to hire him out and the capitalist chose 

 to engage him was interference with personal liberty, a travelling 

 outside the proper function of government, and in fact the first step 

 towards the ruin of British trade. Against such a monstrous dogma 

 Carlyle reasserted that old philosophic truth — at least as old as 

 Aristotle — that the state has a spiritual end. Not just to keep open 

 the field for free competition, not just to make sure that "supply and 

 demand" is allowed its perfect work, not just to punish violence and 

 defend rights of property, but to stand towards every human being 

 in a relation like that of a parent to a child, was for Carlyle the state's 

 chief business. Hence his ferocious diatribe against political economy 

 as "the dismal science;" hence his mocking of the maxim that to buy 

 in the cheapest market and sell in the dearest is the whole duty of man ; 

 hence his constant burlesque of what he called "the Gospel according 

 to McCroudy." At present it is often maintained that the inhuman- 

 ities of the older economists were imputed to them by the spiteful 

 wit of those who dealt in caricature. But unfortunately there is much 

 on record to convince us that the current economic formulae were safe 

 from this, for they had reached the limit beyond which exaggeration 

 could not well go. When Lord Stowell, for instance, was denouncing 

 the proposal to set up schools for teaching the children of the poor, 

 he grounded himself upon the following as an admitted scientific 

 truth: "If you provide a larger amount of highly cultivated talent 

 than there is a demand for, the surplus is very likely to turn sour!" 



Thus, if Carlyle was anti-democratic, he meant by this attitude 

 something very different from the class arrogance which the word so 

 often conveys and from which it draws its evil omen. What he had 

 in mind was rather this, that the business of governing is, like every 

 other enterprise, based on science, and that if nowhere else important 

 decisions of policy are taken by a count of heads, in which those who 

 know a great deal and those who know next to nothing have equal 

 votes, it is absurd to take a plebiscite on the greatest problems of all. 

 Such a principle is open to obvious abuse, and no doubt we are agreed 

 that Carlyle pushed it much too far. But there is a kernel of momen- 

 tous truth at the heart of it. No company is guided in the details of 

 its business management by a mass meeting of all the shareholders, 

 with long debates, bursts of eloquence, and vote by ballot. It has a 



