THE MODERN STUDENT'S LIBRARY EACH VOLUME EDITED BY A LEADING This series is composed of such works as are conspicuous in the province of literature for their enduring influence. Every volume is recognized as essential to a liberal education and will tend to infuse a love for true literature and an appreciation of the qualities which cause it to endure. A descriptive list of the volumes published in this series appears in the last pages of this volume CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 3-25-46 INTRODUCTION Carlyle's Past and Present reads like a contemporary volume on industrial and social problems. It would seem time to revise much of the criticism that was passed upon it when conditions were in many ways different from what they are now, and when Carlyle's insight into those conditions and his prophecy of the future could not be so clearly recognized. Written in 1843, when the industrial revolutions had just taken place in England and when democracy and freedom were the watchwords of liberals and progressives, it sounds strikingly like books written during the past ten or fifteen years, when individualism and capitalistic domination of government have been under fire. Its conception of a well-organized and efficient state might be paralleled by Wells's Social Forces in England and America and especially by his chapter on "The Great State." Carlyle's statement that "liberty needs new definitions" from that which passed current in his age finds abundant support in President Wilson's The New Freedom. The ideas embodied in the chapter "The One Institution" are substantially the same as those in William James's The Moral Equivalent of War. A recent volume on socialism, the purport of which is to interpret socialism, not so much as a theory but as a tendency towards a socialized rather than an individualist state, might well have been inspired by some of the chapters of Carlyle's book. Is not even now the supreme question of the Allied democracies: "How, in conjunction with inevitable Democracy, indispensable sovereignty is to exist; certainly it is the highest question hitherto propounded to mankind.” Many things conspired to produce an unfavorable impression of Past and Present when it was written and for many years afterwards. Then, as now, its eccentric style, with its repetitions, its complicated sentences, its obscure allusions, and its marked deviations from all the canons of rhetoric, |