Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 02.djvu/21

Rh and conscientious blunderers may often count for little in the sum of causes as compared with those great secular forces—social, economical, industrial—which have operated through successive ages to the shaping of the political material, intractable it may be, or even ultimately and inevitably explosive, with which the ruler for the time being is, with or without a conscience, compelled to deal.

But even if we are to consider men alone, and to leave their surroundings out of account, it seems as perverse as it is depressing to hold, that the service rendered to a state by the faithful discharge of civic duty should compare so unfavourably in amount of enduring effect with the disservice done them by selfish neglect of civic obligation. From Sully to Richelieu, and from Richelieu to Turgot and Necker, France had never wanted able servants whose whole lives were dedicated by ambition or patriotism to the public good; and to believe that all the efforts of these devoted, highly-placed, and powerful men were defeated not by their own misdirection or by the inherent difficulties of the work, but by the sheer prepotence for evil of certain obscure fainéants and impostors among their contemporaries, is enough to make one despair of the future of mankind.

Surely, too, apart from all questions of the potency of their individual influence, the Quacks and Charlatans, the men 'who had pretended to be doing, and been only eating and misdoing,' come in for a far larger share of Carlyle's denunciations than their numerical importance warrants. It has been observed, ere this, that in spite of the denunciations aforesaid, the whole Carlylean gallery of lifelike revolutionary portraits contains hardly any (and absolutely no considerable) figure which can fairly be described as that of a 'Quack.' Cynics there are in plenty, like Talleyrand and the Abbé Maury, and 'Goose Gobel,' men whose frank avowal of disbelief sets them at the opposite pole to the hypocrite, of whose very essence it is to feign faith in principles or institutions in the sanctity or stability of which he has ceased to