When one contrasts the spirit in which John Stuart Mill approached
all such subjects in his day, his patient pursuit of the facts, his
almost over-earnest efforts to get at the point of view of those who
differed with him, his steady indifference to his own fame in
dealing with all public questions, and then reads the contemptuous
way in which Carlyle disposes of him in the "Reminiscences," one
gets, we were going to say, an almost painful sense of the contrast
between the influence of the two men on their day and generation.
In so far as the "Reminiscences," therefore, ruin Carlyle as a
politician, their publication must be considered a gain for the
English race. The particular political vice his influence fostered,
that nobody who cannot thrash you in fight is worth listening to,
is, it must be said, a vice peculiar to the English race. It is only
in the Anglo-Saxon forum that a man of foreign birth and unfamiliar
ways of thinking has to obtain a _locus standi_ by making himself an
object of physical terror.
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