ciple. The admiration for military methods, on condition that they
are successful, for Mr. Carlyle, like Providence, is always on the side
of big and victorious battalions, is the last outcome of a devotion to
vigorous action and practical effect, which no verbal garniture of a
transcendental kind can hinder us from perceiving to be more purely
materialist and unfeignedly brutal than anything which sprung from the
reviled thought of the eighteenth century.

It is instructive to remark that another of the most illustrious
enemies of that century and all its works, Joseph de Maistre, had the
same admiration for the effectiveness of war, and the same extreme
interest and concern in the men and things of war. He, too, declares
that 'the loftiest and most generous sentiments are probably to be found
in the soldier;' and that war, if terrible, is divine and splendid and
fascinating, the manifestation of a sublime law of the universe. We
must, however, do De Maistre the justice to point out, first, that he
gave a measure of his strange interest in Surgery and Judgment, as Mr.
Carlyle calls it, to the public executioner, a division of the honours
of social surgery which is no more than fair; while, in the second
place, he redeems the brutality of the military surgical idea after a
fashion, by an extraordinary mysticism, which led him to see in war a
divine, inscrutable force, determining success in a manner absolutely
defying all the speculations of human reason.[7] The biographer of
Frederick apparently finds no inscrutable force at all, but only will,
tenacity, and powder kept dry. There is a vast difference between this
and the absolutism of the mystic.

[7] _Soirees de Saint Petersbourg, 7ieme entretien._

'Nature,' he says in one place, 'keeps silently a most exact
Savings-bank, and official register correct to the most evanescent item,
Debtor and Creditor, in respect to one and all of us; silently marks
down, Creditor by such and such an unseen act of veracity and heroism;
Debtor to such a loud blustery blunder, twenty-seven million strong or
one unit strong, and to all acts and words and thoughts executed in
consequence of that--Debtor, Debtor, Debtor, day after day, rigorously
as Fate (for this _is_ Fate that is writing); and at the end of the
account you will have it all to pay, my friend.'[8]

[8] _Latter-Day Pamphlets_, No. V. p. 247.

That is to say, there is a law of recompense for communities of men, and
as n