that wisest and best, that blend of vigor, silence, obedience, loyalty, with his surplusage of spiritual force, that it must be said-ignis fatuuus! In this romantic, political, economic tract called Past and Present Carlyle would persuade the nineteenth century that in the twelfth century the rainbow's end was reached, “the hero" was found.

He did not persuade the nineteenth century. In spite of admiration for Past and Present the nineteenth century was never convinced that Carlyle's notion of "the hero" was a practical remedy. Carlyle as a political critic is one person; Carlyle as a constructive political theorist is another. Vivid and beautiful as The Ancient Monk is, a child could impugn its practical application. One palpable falseness of analogy is that Samson's community was considerably fewer in numbers than the twentyseven millions of Englishmen for whom Past and Present was written. There were other fractions of a feudal aristocratic society coeval with Samson's régime whose history would make different reading from that of Bury St. Edmund's. Moreover, Carlyle seems to suggest that the individualistic religious growth of seven centuries can be forgotten. Can the nineteenth century believe, as did the monks of St. Edmund, in a heaven like that of Thomas A. Kempis? What Carlyle calls "diseased introspection" is an inevitable by-product of the thought of Luther, Wycliffe and Wesley, and of the scientific revelations of the nineteenth century. The perplexity is at least honest; not so much could be said of a return to blind mediaeval faith. We ought, it is true, to find better leaders or "heroes;" democracy is probably not the last stage of economic process, the ballot box may be a faute de mieux. Yet we cannot select our leaders as the Bishop of Winchester did Samson. There is hardly a detail of Samson's household management which is transferable to our own.

In fact, Carlyle cannot tell us what to do. Never expect him to do so. What he can do is to tell us, in the most profound sense, what is the matter. This service Past and Present performs in 1921 as it did in 1843. Throughout the century it was praised. "There is nothing like it," wrote Clough. Its eloquence was partly responsible for Kingsley's novel, Yeast. It roused thousands of Englishmen from inertia to a fresh consid

eration of social conditions. The very pessimism of the book stung critics out of their complacency. What if Carlyle did, as Henry James said, "scold like" an angry governess. He made men look about them more thoughtfully. “I hope,” Carlyle wrote his mother, "it will be a rather useful kind of book. It goes rather in a fiery strain about the present condition of men in general, and the strange pass they are coming to; and I calculate it may awaken here and there a slumbering blockhead to rub his eyes and consider what he is about in God's creation." This was the sum of the matter; a word from Carlyle was a call to action. There is no surrender to laissez-faire. “Ay, by God, Donald, we must help them to man it!" He seems to say: "Ich bin ein Mensch begoren. Und das muss ein Kämpfer sein." Every sentence in Past and Present is a plea against acquiesence. As Ruskin declares: "What can you say of Carlyle but that he was born in the clouds and struck by the lightning?"

Today Carlyle's idealism seems like the frantic arguments of a man attempting to prove established facts. No better idea of the change in social thought can be had than by realizing that the reforms desired by Carlyle were then considered visionary. Imagine a place now for factory inspectors; for protection against typhus; or for organization of labor. Yet these are but a few of the changes urged by Carlyle, as if he were a minority of one; now they are faits accomplis. Of the laborers of England he asks: "Where are they to find a supportable ex istence," or "cash-payment is not the sole relation of human beings!" Such reforms as insurance for workingmen, model tenements for families, the right to strike, hardly occur to Carlyle as present issues. Yet these are the commonplaces of today. And these were to come by action of the state; not through "Morrison's Pills," as Carlyle dubbed opportunist legislation, but through thoughtful constructive government. State supervision of insurance, of railroads, and factories have arrived in a manner exceeding Carlyle's wildest dreams.

Indeed what the modern reader feels about the advance of labor since 1843 is that a new Past and Present is needed. No longer is it so necessary to denounce the gospels of mammonism, dilettantism, of oppression of workmen, of extortion by capital. The boot is on the other leg. Labor's emancipation is more com

plete than even Carlyle would have guessed likely. Possibly a book proclaiming the rights of the employer would be as pertinent today as was Past and Present in 1843. During the war there appeared in an English newspaper, in adjacent columns, accounts of the imprisonment of trivial offenders, and also of the release of notorious strike leaders. The union of all labor parties of the world, without respect to nationalism, is possible. In the newspapers of today appears the notice of a strike which will hold motionless every industrial activity in the British Isles. Carlyle's pious allusion to the land belonging to "the Almighty God, and to all His children of men that have ever worked well on it" is now an acknowledged principle among some millions of Communists, though indeed there is no certainty that God is included, or the test of working on the land required by this extraordinary party. The wheel has come full circle. In three-quarters of a century men shrink not from the gospel of mammonism, but from the gospel of bolshevism.

Carlyle, as has been said, was not, in any supernatural sense, a prophet. Yet, apart from the mood of monition ever natural to him there is vision in his thoughts of the future of workingmen. The French Revolution was to him a continual memento; he honestly feared that some similar fate would be fall the industrial leaders of England. When he speaks of England “very ominously, shuddering reeling, on the cliff's edge!" he is more than rhetorical. He saw clearly that things would change 'with "the millions who rejoiced in potatoes." Of his insistence upon the spiritual truths which underlay the necessity for such changes much might be said. Who can deny that Carlyle is in some degree responsible for governments whose "business is to govern. "He was a leader in the battle against laissez-faire. It is enough to notice once more the significance of The Modern Worker as a knife-edge of economic progress. Contrast the condition of labor mirrored there with its status today. But more than this, Past and Present is, in some respects, a prophecy.

Pro-Slavery Propaganda in American

Fiction of the Fifties

JEANNETTE REID TANDY

Columbia University

PART I

Today we may flatter ourselves that we do the struggling hero and the persecuted heroine with a difference. Eliza on her ice-cake makes a less subtle appeal than Lulu Bett behind her pie pans. Little Elsie and Little Rosamund are more crudely moral than Pollyanna. Ten Nights in a Bar Room paints, perhaps, a grosser picture than anyone of the recent flood of tales pro-war, anti-German, pro-Russian, anti-labor, pro-capitalism, anti-Bolshevik, and vice versa. We have arrived at a sophisticated refinement in the art of the purpose novel. We have reached, too, as readers, a conscious appreciation of the methods of propaganda. These are the days when all salesmen are idealists and two-thirds of the novelists are promoters of social theories. The reading public can hardly escape the fascination of acquiring a slight understanding of advertising methods, even though applied to literature. There is some interest in examining the beginning from which authors have risen to their present highly specialized ways of moving minds and hearts in a good cause.

Our early efforts to "put over" ideas in fiction were ambitious and plentiful. There were anti-Catholic, anti-Mormon, anti-Masonic stories, and temperance tracts. Perhaps the most interesting and varied group of purpose-fiction in mid-century America is composed of the replies to Uncle Tom's Cabin.

In 1852, in response to the emotional appeal of Mrs. Stowe, the South began what would now be called a literary propaganda. Besides the numerous controversial pamphlets and articles in periodicals there were no fewer than fourteen proslavery novels and one long poem published in the three years (1852-4), following the appearance of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Evidently there was a spontaneous movement to combat Mrs. Stowe's fire with fire. Southern authors burned to correct the misrepresentations of outlanders, and to defend their own

serted that "a state of nature is a state of war." All men are not born free and equal. "And can we doubt," asked Harper, "that the long discipline and laborious process by which men are required to work out the elevation and improvement of their individual nature and their social condition is imposed for a great and benevolent end?" It is not only plausible that God ordained slavery; we have his own words, over and over, from the book of books. This Biblical argument, as Harper developed it, carried great conviction to the theologically-minded fifties. He added an extended comment on the advantages of the sacred institution. Slavery was as beneficial to the slave as to civilization in general. It supported him in childhood and old age, it protected him from poverty, it saved him from himself. For the negro, after all, was an inferior creation, below the white man in intellect and self-control, prone to crime and lawlessness. Under free competition he would be wiped out as rapidly as the Indian. There was, besides, the practical consideration of the danger to the economic and political structure of the nation if so large a body of laborers were freed or deported.

The moral aspect of the problem as discussed by Harper was elaborated by William Gillmore Simms with even greater frankness. Slavery had elevated the negro from savagery. By removing his prospects of advancement and poverty, it saved him from the crimes inspired by ambition or want. His peccadilloes of thievery and sexual offense were without serious consequences. He was lightly punished for misdeeds which would have brought a white northern laborer to the gallows. The black man's finer traits of fidelity and docility were encouraged in his servile position. The established order was of equal benefit to the white. The institution of slavery released the master for cultivation of the higher virtues. It elevated and spiritualized the mistress. Toilers were necessarily debased and low. Under slavery the upper classes, released from toil, were able to cultivate that refinement of manners and morals, to indulge in the exercise of the intellect, to develop the qualities of leadership for which Southern aristocrats were justly famed.

The fourth pamphlet reprinted in the Pro-Slavery Argument was Hammond's "Letters on Slavery." Governor Hammond in his series of letters illustrating conditions in the Bermudas, England and the Northern states, attempted to show that the