Mammon Worship, our foolish philanthropy, and our more foolish admiration for fluent, shallow platform speeches and Parliamentary oratory. Parliamentary Government, Law, The Church and its Overseers, Literature and its practitioners, Political Economy and its professors, all come in for a share of his scorn, and each comes up for a whipping. Never did a society receive such a scourging. What he would positively have he is not in a temper to tell us fully. But that he wishes much changed or removed is plain above all our Parliamentary Government. And his last thought appears to be that nothing good can be done for our society until a second Cromwell with a troop of soldiers turns the Parliament out of doors, in the name of the Lord. As the Messiah of Hebrew prophets was always an individual who would rule with justice and judgment, so Carlyle believed that the spirit of wisdom and virtue could only be found in the one, and not in the many. It was the strong, single, unselfish, enlightened Will that was wanted. He did not believe in the " Collective Wisdom" as now gathered by foolish voters, nor yet much in the collective conscience of the collective wisdom.

The one strong man might effect much that was needed by capacity and courage, and his work might continue once it had received the consecration of established law and fact. Like a sort of earthly Deity, such a one would be above the selfish interests of faction, party or class. He would be the moderator and supreme arbitrator between contending interests. Above their prejudices, he alone could

see and do justice between class and class, as between man and man. In the absence of such a one there is nothing but clashing interests, becoming constantly more antagonistic until it must come, as in France, to a Revolution and a war of classes. Between us and anarchy there is but the policeman, a frail and unsure defence, which might at any time give way.

The idea that in the solution of the great problem of modern society more may be hoped for from the powerful single ruler than from a Representative body, with its chance and shifting majorities, which, in consequence, has no single will or connected principles of action, no continued policy, whose course, on important occasions, is subject to unpredictable accidents, and where the only motive force that can be calculated upon as sure and steady, is class selfinterest tempered by fear, is significant, and may one day bear important consequences, especially if the working classes should become penetrated by it. It is an old idea that, temporarily submerged, has come up anew and is spreading. It was, as M. de Laveleye informs us in his work on "Contemporary Socialism," the notion of Lassalle, who, although Republican in principle, yet expected more for his Socialistic scheme from Prince Bismarck and the Emperor than from any Republican Chamber of Deputies, even though chosen by universal suffrage. An Imperial Socialism is always on the list of political possibilities. in France; and it came near to being a reality under Napoleon III., who, at one time, seriously contemplated it. In Germany, there is at present a competition, a bidding for the favour of the working-man,

between the State Socialism of the great Chancellor and the Emperor, which aims at insuring the future of the working-classes; and Revolutionary Socialism, that aims at confiscating land and capital; and it is by no means certain that the majority will not close with the Chancellor's "bird in the hand."

In England, besides Carlyle, one other remarkable man, who, although he climbed to eminence by means of Party, yet always maintained a certain detachment from it, having within himself the better opinions of both parties, gave expression to ideas favouring Imperial Socialism. This was Lord Beaconsfield, who, in his political novel of "Sybil, or the Two Nations," which deals essentially with the Social Question, shows his sympathies with the working classes, and with the strong sovereign. "Two powers," he declares, “have been extinguished in England, the Monarch and the Multitude;" and he wishes them both restored. Nay even, during his remarkable career, more consistent throughout than detractors allow, he did something in the direction of restoring the power of both, in addition to widening the Conservative political creed. By outbidding the Liberals in his Reform Bill of 1867, he made Universal Suffrage a necessity, by which, rightly used, the multitude may once more become a power; and at his instance the Queen of England assumed the style of Empress of India, which may in time imply more than a merely nominal extension of sovereign authority. In his novel of "Coningsby," he puts into the mouth of one of his characters his own preference for a strong monarch :—“ The tendency of advanced

civilization is in truth to pure monarchy. ... An educated nation recoils from the imperfect vicariate of what it calls a representative government." He thinks that the power of Parliament, and especially of the House of Commons, will not last. His ideal government is "a free monarchy, established on fundamental laws, itself the apex of a vast pile of municipal and local government, ruling over an intelligent and educated people, represented by a free and intellectual press," and not by a Parliament. The press would discuss and form public opinion which, in its active and administrative aspect should be concentrated in one who has no class interests. In an enlightened age, this monarch on the throne free from the vulgar prejudices and corrupt interests of the subjects, becomes again divine.” . . . "Before such royal authority, the sectional animosities of our country would disappear." Under the system "qualification would not be parliamentary, but personal," and the able and educated would occupy the commanding places, whether in the State, the Church, Diplomacy, or in the Military Service; all which put together, are strongly suggestive of St. Simonism.

But whatever be its actual future, the idea of the capable ruler, seconded by the best ability extant, with the spiritual power separated from the temporal, is the logical outcome of the St. Simonian doctrine. It is that to which it essentially comes when reduced to coherence, as it came with Carlyle, if we suppose him to have got his ideas from that quarter. It is the only form in which, as well as the only means by which, it could be made a reality, as indeed St. Simon himself

must have felt when he appealed to the king to take up his project. Cæsar, seconded by capacity, was the sole means by which it could have been introduced and maintained."

IV.

ALMOST Contemporaneously with St. Simon another Frenchman, Charles Fourier, was elaborating a different and, in the opinion of Mill, a more workable scheme of social renovation on Socialistic lines. The work, indeed, in which Fourier's main ideas are embodied, called the "Théorie des quatre Mouvements," was published in 1808, long before St. Simon had given his views to the world, but it received no attention until after the discredit of the St. Simonian scheme beginning in 1832.

Association is the central word of Fourier's as of St. Simon's industrial system. Associated groups of from 1600 to 2000 persons are to cultivate a square league of ground called the Phalange, or phalanx; and are likewise to carry on all other kinds of industry which may be necessary. The individuals are to live together in one pile of buildings, called the Phalanstery, in order to economize in buildings, in domestic arrangements, cooking, etc., and to reduce distributors' profits; they may eat at a common table or not, as seems good to them: that is, they have life

6 Even Comte, whose economical conclusions are different from the St. Simonians, and who prefers a Republic, yet thinks that a Dictatorship might be temporarily necessary to install his scheme of Positive Polity.