THOMAS CAELYLE. 381 



In any measure conceivable by the liveliest imagination 

 that will be candid 1 England's heavy job of work, 

 inexorably needful to be done, cannot go on at all 

 unless her back parlour, too, belong to herself. With 

 foreign controversies, parliamentary eloquences, with 

 American sympathisers, Parisian emeutiers, Ledru 

 Kollins, and a world just now [1848] fallen into bottom- 

 less anarchy, parading incessantly through her back 

 parlour, no nation can go on with any work. . . . Let 

 Irish patriots seek some other remedy than repealing 

 the Union ; let all men cease to talk or speculate on 

 that, since once for all it cannot be done. In no con- 

 ceivable circumstances could or durst a British Minister 

 propose to concede such a thing : the British Minister 

 that proposed it would deserve to be impeached as a 

 traitor to his high post, and to lose his worthless head. 

 Nay, if, in the present cowardly humour of most 

 Ministers and governing persons, and loud, insane 

 babble of anarchic men, a traitorous Minister did con- 

 sent to help himself over the evil hour by yielding to 

 it and conceding its mad demand — even he, whether he 

 saved his traitorous head or lost it, would have done 

 nothing towards the Eepeal of the Union. While a 

 British citizen is left, there is left a protestor against 

 our country being occupied by foreigners, a repealer of 

 the Eepeal.' 



Carlyle's mind was not of a texture to be greatly 

 flurried by the prospect of confusion and bloodshed 

 which the Eepeal of the Union would infallibly carry 

 in its train. He would have grimly accepted this 

 result. But he would have been moved to the depths 

 of his nature by the Liberal palinode of 1886, and the 

 consequent spread of untruth among a straightforward 

 and truth -loving people. ' A national wound,' he would 

 have said, 'may be healed by the healthy surgery of the 



