Is it, then, You, or is it some burglarious Devil that has broken into your bosom and stolen your soul, who is engaged in plastering over this infernal fester with smooth euphemisms?  Are You verily the mechanic who is engaged in veneering these out-houses of hell with rosewood?  Is it your very and proper Self that stands there sprinkling eau-de-Cologne on the accursed reek of that pit of putrescence, so to disguise and commend it to the nostrils of mankind?  Is it in very deed Thomas Carlyle, Thomas the Great, who now volunteers his services as male lady’s-maid to the queen-strumpet of modern history, and offers to her sceptred foulness the benefit of his skill at the literary rouge-pots?  You?  Yes?  I give you joy of your avocations!  Truly, it was worth the while, having such a cause, to defame a noble people in the very hour of their life-and-death struggle!

Well, you have made your election; now I make mine.  It is my deliberate belief that no man ever gave heartier love and homage to another than I to you; but while one woman in America may be lawfully sent to the whipping-post on such occasion, I will hold your existence and name, if they come between me and her rescue, but as the life of a stinging gnat!  I love you,—­but cannot quite sacrifice to you the sanctity of womanhood, and all the honor and all the high hopes of a great nation.  Your scheme of “life-hire” will therefore have to undergo very essential modifications, such as will not only alter, but reverse, its most characteristic features, before I can esteem either it or the advocacy of it anything less than abominable.

But where are you now with relation to that Thomas Carlyle whose “Sartor Resartus” I read twenty years ago afoot and on horseback, sleeping with it under my pillow and wearing it in my pocket till pocket and it were worn out,—­I alone there in the remote solitudes of Maine?  We have both travelled far since then; but whither have you been travelling?  The whole wide heaven was not too wide for you then; but now you can be jolly in your “nutshell.”  Then, you held spiritual, or human, values to be final, infinite, absolute, and could gibe in your own incomparable way at the besotted conventionalism which would place commercial values above them; now, who chants with such a roaring, pious nasal at that apotheosis of Property which our modern commercial slavery essentially is?  Then, with Schiller, you desired, as a basis of political society, something better than a doctrine of personal rights, something more noble, human, unitary, something more opposed to egoistic self-assertion, namely, a doctrine of powers and their consequent duties; now, a scheme of society which is the merest riot or insurrection of property-egotism reckons you among its chiefest advocates.  Then, you struck heroically out for a society more adequate to the spiritual possibilities of man; now, social infidelity plus cotton and polite dining would seem to suffice for you.