The great masses
of humanity stand for nothing--at least nothing but nebulous raw
material; only the big planets and shining suns for him. To ideas
almost invariably languid or cold, a number-one forceful personality
was sure to rouse his eulogistic passion and savage joy. In such case,
even the standard of duty hereinafter rais'd, was to be instantly
lower'd and vail'd. All that is comprehended under the terms
republicanism and democracy were distasteful to him from the first,
and as he grew older they became hateful and contemptible. For an
undoubtedly candid and penetrating faculty such as his, the bearings
he persistently ignored were marvellous. For instance, the promise,
nay certainty of the democratic principle, to each and every State of
the current world, not so much of helping it to perfect legislators
and executives, but as the only effectual method for surely, however
slowly, training people on a large scale toward voluntarily ruling
and managing themselves (the ultimate aim of political and all other
development)--to gradually reduce the fact of _governing_ to its
minimum, and to subject all its staffs and their doings to the
telescopes and microscopes of committees and parties--and greatest of
all, to afford (not stagnation and obedient content, which went well
enough with the feudalism and ecclesiasticism of the antique and
medieval world, but) a vast and sane and recurrent ebb and tide action
for those floods of the great deep that have henceforth palpably
burst forever their old bounds--seem never to have enter'd Carlyle's
thought.
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