Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/31

1789–90] our two kinds of civil war; between the modern lingual or Parliamentary-logical kind, and the ancient or manual kind in the steel battlefield;—much to the disadvantage of the former. In the manual kind, where you front your foe with drawn weapon, one right stroke is final; for, physically speaking, when the brains are out the man does honestly die, and trouble you no more. But how different when it is with arguments you fight! Here no victory yet definable can be considered as final. Beat him down with Parliamentary invective, till sense be fled; cut him in two, hanging one half on this dilemma-horn, the other on that; blow the brains or thinking-faculty quite out of him for the time: it skills not; he rallies and revives on the morrow; tomorrow he repairs his golden fires! The thing that will logically extinguish him is perhaps still a desideratum in Constitutional civilisation. For how, till a man know, in some measure, at what point he becomes logically defunct, can Parliamentary Business be carried on, and Talk cease or slake?

Doubtless it was some feeling of this difficulty; and the clear insight how little such knowledge yet existed in the French Nation, new in the Constitutional career, and how defunct Aristocrats would continue to walk for unlimited periods, as Partridge the Almanac-maker did,—that had sunk into the deep mind of People's-friend Marat, an eminently practical mind; and had grown there, in that richest putrescent soil, into the most original plan of action ever submitted to a People. Not yet has it grown; but it has germinated, it is growing; rooting itself into Tartarus, branching towards Heaven: the second season hence, we shall see it risen out of the bottomless Darkness, full-grown, into disastrous Twilight,—a Hemlock-tree, great as the world; on or under whose boughs all the People's-friends of the world may lodge. 'Two hundred and Sixty thousand Aristocrat heads': that is the precisest calculation, though one would not stand on a few hundreds; yet we never rise