Page:Note of an English republican on the Muscovite crusade (IA noteofenglishrep00swiniala).pdf/8

 prolonged years of its defeat. For so much at least the sternest republican must concede to this illustrious enemy of all freedom; that he has not hated it only when unsuccessful, nor reviled it only when out of fashion. Liberty and justice, equality and equity, fraternity and mercy, have had but few enemies in our day for whom as much can honestly be said. This credit is Mr. Carlyle's; hoc habeat secum, servetque sepulchre. It is not only on truth in the hour of its overthrow that he has ever sought to set his heel. No man has a right to suspect him of even a partial or a passing apostasy from the great consistent principle of his prophecies and his gospel. He has always hated the very thought of liberty, abhorred the very notion of equality, abjured the very idea of fraternity, as he hates, abhors, and abjures them now. No man can doubt on which side or to what effect his potent voice would have been lifted at its utmost pitch before the throne of Herod or the judgment-seat of Pilate. No tetrarch or proconsul, no Mouravieff or Eyre of them all, would have been swifter to inflict or louder to invoke the sentence of beneficent whip, the doom of beneficent gallows, on the communist and stump-orator of Nazareth. Had there but lived and written under the shadow of the not as yet divine emperor Tiberius, doubtless as 'strictly honest and just a man' as any 'present Czar' or emperor of his kind, a pamphleteer as eloquent and as ardent an imperialist as these pitiful times of 'ballot-box, divine freedom, &c.' have brought forth even 'in this distracted country,' what