ntly
straining and endangering the bonds of the social union. They exist in
the midst of the most highly civilised communities, with all the
predatory or violent habits of barbarous tribes. They are the active and
unconquered remnant of the natural state, and it is as unscientific as
the experience of some unwise philanthropy has shown it to be
ineffective, to deal with them exactly as if they occupied the same
moral and social level as the best of their generation. We are amply
justified in employing towards them, wherever their offences endanger
order, the same methods of coercion which originally made society
possible. No tenable theory about free will or necessity, no theory of
praise and blame that will bear positive tests, lays us under any
obligation to spare either the comfort or the life of a man who indulges
in certain anti-social kinds of conduct. Mr. Carlyle has done much to
wear this just and austere view into the minds of his generation, and in
so far he has performed an excellent service.

The second set of relations in which the pathological element still so
largely predominates are those between nations. Separate and independent
communities are still in a state of nature. The tie between them is only
the imperfect, loose, and non-moral tie of self-interest and material
power. Many publicists and sentimental politicians are ever striving to
conceal this displeasing fact from themselves and others, and evading
the lesson of the outbreaks that now and again convulse the civilised
world. Mr. Carlyle's history of the rise and progress of the power of
the Prussian monarchy is the great illustration of the hold which he has
got of the conception of the international state as a state of nature;
and here again, in so far as he has helped to teach us to study the past
by historic methods, he has undoubtedly done laudable work.

Yet have we not to confess that there is another side to this kind of
truth, in both these fields? We may finally pronounce on a given way of
thinking, only after we have discerned its goal. Not knowing this, we
cannot accurately know its true tendency and direction. Now, every
recognition of the pathological necessity should imply a progress and
effort towards its conversion into moral relationship. The difference
between a reactionary and a truly progressive thinker or group of ideas
is not that the one assumes virtuousness and morality as having been the
conscious condition of internat