of aristocracy. He blundered, of course, because he did not see that
slavery has nothing in the world to do with aristocracy, that it is,
indeed, almost its opposite. The defence which Carlyle and all its
thoughtful defenders have made for aristocracy was that a few persons
could more rapidly and firmly decide public affairs in the interests of
the people. But slavery is not even supposed to be a government for the
good of the governed. It is a possession of the governed avowedly for
the good of the governors. Aristocracy uses the strong for the service
of the weak; slavery uses the weak for the service of the strong. It is
no derogation to man as a spiritual being, as Carlyle firmly believed
he was, that he should be ruled and guided for his own good like a
child--for a child who is always ruled and guided we regard as the very
type of spiritual existence. But it is a derogation and an absolute
contradiction to that human spirituality in which Carlyle believed that
a man should be owned like a tool for someone else's good, as if he had
no personal destiny in the Cosmos. We draw attention to this particular
error of Carlyle's because we think that it is a curious example of the
waste and unclean places into which that remarkable animal, "the whole
hog," more than once led him.

In this respect Carlyle has had unquestionably long and an
unquestionably bad influence. The whole of that recent political ethic
which conceives that if we only go far enough we may finish a thing for
once and all, that being strong consists chiefly in being deliberately
deaf and blind, owes a great deal of its complete sway to his example.
Out of him flows most of the philosophy of Nietzsche, who is in modern
times the supreme maniac of this moonstruck consistency. Though
Nietzsche and Carlyle were in reality profoundly different, Carlyle
being a stiff-necked peasant and Nietzsche a very fragile aristocrat,
they were alike in this one quality of which we speak, the strange and
pitiful audacity with which they applied their single ethical test to
everything in heaven and earth. The disciple of Nietzsche, indeed,
embraces immorality like an austere and difficult faith. He urges
himself to lust and cruelty with the same tremulous enthusiasm with
which a Christian urges himself to purity and patience; he struggles as
a monk struggles with bestial visions and temptations with the ancient
necessities of honour and justice and compassion. To this madh