CARLYLE AND MR. ASQUITH.
[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPEcrATos."] SIR,—Surely Carlyle had Mr. Asquith and the present day in his prophetic eye when, some time before the summer of 1849, be wrote the following :-- "if in the present cowardly humour of most ministers and governing persons and land insane babble of anarchic men a traitorous minister did consent to help himself over the evil hour by yielding, even he, whether he saved his traitorous head or lost it, could have done nothing towards the Repeal of the Union. An Eternal Law proclaims the Union irrepealable in these centuries."
Many of us, even in the South of Ireland, believe that Carlyle's words will in the end prove true, even if there
should be much trouble and suffering in store for us before the fact is made manifest to all.
The above quotation is taken from Richard Garnett's " Life of Thomas Carlyle" (1895), p. 127. It seems to have been
originally published in either the Spectator or the Examiner.--.
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