n fact, stronger, braver, truer, or
better than the other Teutonic races: they never fought better than
the Dutch, Prussians, Swedes, etc., have done. For the rest, modify
a little: Frederick the Great was brought up on beer-sops (bread
boiled in beer), Robert Burns on oatmeal porridge; and Mahomet and
the Caliphs conquered the world on barley meal."

David Hume would have thoroughly approved of this note. Froude's
patriotism was incorrigible, and he left the passage as it stood. A
little farther on Carlyle's hatred of political economy, in which
Froude fully shared, breaks out with amusing vigour. "If," wrote the
younger historian, "the tendency of trade to assume a form of mere
self-interest be irresistible," etc. "And is it?" comments the
elder. "Let us all get prussic acid, then." A recent speculator
preferred cyanide of potassium. But if "mere self-interest"
comprises fraudulent balance-sheets, it cannot claim any support
from political economy. When Carlyle drew up a petition to the House
of Commons for amending the law of copyright, he was guided by self-
interest, but it was not a counsel of despair. The City Companies,
says Froude, "are all which now remain of a vast organisation which
once penetrated the entire trading life of England--an organisation
set on foot to realise that impossible condition of commercial
excellence under which man should deal faithfully with his brother,
and all wares offered for sale, of whatever kind, should honestly be
what they pretend to be."

For "impossible" Carlyle proposed "highly necessary, if highly
difficult," and a similar change was made. But why people who do not
understand political economy should be more honest than those who do
neither master nor disciple condescended to explain. It is much
easier to preach than to argue. More valuable than these gibes is
Carlyle's reminder that guilds were not peculiar to England.

"In Lubeck, Augsburg, Nurnberg, Dantzig, not to speak of Venice,
Genoa, Pisa,--George Hudson and the Gospel of Cheap and Nasty were
totally unknown entities. The German Gilds even made poetry
together; Herr Sachs of Nurnberg was one of the finest pious genial
master shoemakers that ever lived anywhere--his shoes and rhymes
alike genuine (I can speak for the rhymes) and worthy."

It is strange that Carlyle should have taken the trouble to correct
a misquotation from Juvenal, and still stranger that Froude should
have left the words uncorrected. Misquo