THOMAS CARLYLE. 393 



K 

 teraction and attrition, the crowd blazed out into open 



riot, and attacked the bakers' shops. Soldiers had 

 been summoned to meet this contingency. Acting 

 under orders, they fired upon the people, and the riot 

 was quelled at the cost of blood. 



At the very time when these things were occurring 

 in Lancashire, Thomas Carlyle was at work on ' Past 

 and Present ' at No. 5 Cheyne Kow, Chelsea. The cry 

 of the famishing weavers came up to him from the 

 North, and drew from him his memorable appeal to 

 Exeter Hall : ' In thee too is a kind of instinct to- 

 wards justice, and I will complain of nothing. Only, 

 Quashee over the seas being once provided for, wilt thou 

 not open thine eyes to the hunger-stricken, pallid, yellow- 

 coloured u Free Labourers " of Lancashire, Yorkshire, 

 Buckinghamshire, and all other shires ? These yellow- 

 coloured, for the present, absorb all my sympathies. 

 If I had a twenty millions, with model farms and Niger 

 expeditions, it is to them that I would give it. Why, 

 in one of these Lancashire weavers, dying of hunger } 

 there is more thought and heart, a greater arithmetical 

 amount of misery and desperation, than in whole gangs 

 of Quashees.' Copied into the Preston newspapers at 

 the time, these were the first words of Carlyle that I 

 ever read. After the rattle of musketry and spatter 

 of bullets, among the weavers and spinners in Lune 

 Street, they rang, I confess, with strange impressiveness 

 in my ears. 



Carlyle's defects of feeling if such there were 

 could only have reference to the distribution of his 

 sympathy, not to its amount. His pity was vast, 

 and only his division of it between black and white 

 could be called in question. The condition of his 

 toiling fellow-countrymen oppressed him like a night- 

 mare. Day and night for years he had brooded upon 



