Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 03.djvu/58

42 illegality, obstruct the transport of grains. Quick, ye organised Patriot Authorities, armed National Guards, meet together; unite your goodwill; in union is tenfold strength: let the concentred flash of your Patriotism strike stealthy Scoundrelism blind, paralytic, as with a coup de soleil.

Under which hat or nightcap of the Twenty-five millions, this pregnant Idea first arose, for in some one head it did rise, no man can now say. A most small idea, near at hand for the whole world: but a living one, fit; and which waxed, whether into greatness or not, into immeasurable size. When a Nation is in this state that the Fugleman can operate on it, what will the word in season, the act in season, not do! It will grow verily, like the Boy's Bean, in the Fairy-Tale, heaven-high, with habitations and adventures on it, in one night. It is nevertheless unfortunately still a Bean (for your long-lived Oak grows not so); and the next night, it may lie felled, horizontal, trodden into common mud.—But remark, at least, how natural to any agitated Nation, which has Faith, this business of Covenanting is. The Scotch, believing in a righteous Heaven above them, and also in a Gospel far other than the Jean-Jacques one, swore, in their extreme need, a Solemn League and Covenant,—as Brothers on the forlorn-hope, and imminence of battle, who embrace, looking godward: and got the whole Isle to swear it; and even, in their tough Old-Saxon Hebrew-Presbyterian way, to keep it more or less;—for the thing, as such things are, was heard in Heaven and partially ratified there: neither is it yet dead, if thou wilt look, nor like to die. The French too, with their Gallic-Ethnic excitability and effervescence, have, as we have seen, real Faith, of a sort; they are hard bestead, though in the middle of Hope: a National Solemn League and Covenant there may be in France too; under how different conditions; with how different development and issue!

Note, accordingly, the small commencement; first spark of a mighty firework: for if the particular hat cannot be fixed upon, the particular District can. On the 29th day of last