234 FRESH FIELDS 



body; great is the power of reaction and recoil in 

 all organic nature. But apparently there was no 

 power of reaction in Carlyle's mind; he never reacts 

 from his own extreme views; never looks for the 

 compensations, never seeks to place himself at the 

 point of equilibrium, or adjusts his view to other 

 related facts. He saw the value of the hero, the 

 able man, and he precipitated himself upon this 

 fact with such violence, so detached it and magnified 

 it, that it fits with no modern system of things. 

 He was apparently entirely honest in his conviction 

 that modern governments and social organizations 

 were rushing swiftly to chaos and ruin, because the 

 hero, the natural leader, was not at the head of 

 affairs, — overlooking entirely the many checks and 

 compensations, and ignoring the fact that, under a 

 popular government especially, nations are neither 

 made nor unmade by the wisdom or folly of their 

 rulers, but by the character for w^isdom and virtue 

 of the mass of their citizens. "Where the great 

 mass of men is tolerably right," he himself says, 

 "all is right; where they are not right, all is 

 wrong." What difference can it make to America, 

 for instance, to the real growth and prosperity of 

 the nation, whether the ablest man goes to Congress 

 or fills the Presidency or the second or third ablest ? 

 The most that we can expect, in ordinary times at 

 least, is that the machinery of universal suffrage 

 will yield us a fair sample of the leading public 

 man, — a man who fairly represents the average 

 ability and average honesty of the better class of 



