eed to give the tools to him who can handle
them; that government does by no means go on of itself, but more than
anything else in this world demands skill, patience, energy, long and
tenacious grip, and the constant presence of that most indispensable,
yet most rare, of all practical convictions, that the effect is the
inevitable consequent of the cause. Here was a revolution, we cannot
doubt. The French Revolution was in a manner a complement to it, as Mr.
Carlyle himself says in a place where he talks of believing both in the
French Revolution and in Frederick; 'that is to say both that Real
Kingship is eternally indispensable, and also that the destruction of
Sham Kingship (a frightful process) is occasionally so.'[18] It is
curious that an observer who could see the positive side of Frederick's
disruption of Europe in 1740, did not also see that there was a positive
side to the disruption of the French monarchy fifty years afterwards,
and that not only was a blow dealt to sham kingship, but a decisive
impulse was given to those ideas of morality and justice in government,
upon which only real kingship in whatever form is able to rest.

[17] _History of Frederick the Great_, iv. 328. See also vol. i., Proem.

[18] _Frederick the Great_, i. 9.

* * * * *

As to the other great factor in the dissolution of the old state, the
decay of ancient spiritual forms, Mr. Carlyle gives no uncertain sound.
Of the Reformation, as of the French Revolution, philosophers have
doubted how far it really contributed to the stable progress of European
civilisation. Would it have been better, if it had been possible, for
the old belief gradually as by process of nature to fall to pieces, new
doctrine as gradually and as normally emerging from the ground of
disorganised and decayed convictions, without any of that frightful
violence which stirred men's deepest passions, and gave them a sinister
interest in holding one or other of the rival creeds in its most
extreme, exclusive, and intolerant form? This question Mr. Carlyle does
not see, or, if he does see it, he rides roughshod over it. Every reader
remembers the notable passage in which he declares that the question of
Protestant or not Protestant meant everywhere, 'Is there anything of
nobleness in you, O Nation, or is there nothing?' and that afterwards it
fared with nations as they did, or did not, accept this sixteenth
century form of Truth when it