Carlile's death took place on this wise. He had come up from Enfield to
Bouvene Street, Fleet Street, to live on the old field of war, and edit
the _Christian Warrior._ While a van of goods were unpacking at the
door, one of his boys strayed out and went away. Carlile was fond of his
children, and he set out anxiously to seek his child. The excitement
ended in death. On Carlile's return he was seized with a fatal illness.
Bronchitus, which he was told by his medical advisers would soon destroy
him, if he came to live in the city, set in, and the power of speech
soon left him. Mr. Lawrence, the author of the famous 'Lectures on Man,'
whom Carlile always preferred in his illnesses, was sent for. He
promptly arrived, but pronounced recovery hopeless; and Richard Carlile
expired February 10,1843, in his fifty-third year.
Wishing to be useful in death as in life, Carlile devoted his body to
dissection. Always above superstition, in practice as well as in theory,
his wish had long been--that his body, if he died first, should be given
to Mr. Lawrence. At that time the prejudice against dissection was
almost universal, and only superior persons rose above it. His wish was
complied with by his family, and the post mortem examination was
published in the _Lancet_ of that year.
Carlile's burial took place at Kensal Green Cemetry. He was laid in the
consecrated part of the ground--nearly opposite the Mausoleum of the
Ducrow family. At the interment, a clergyman appeared, and with the
usual want of feeling and of delicacy, persisted in reading the Church
service over him. His eldest son Richard, who represented his sentiments
as well as his name, very properly protested against the proceeding, as
an outrage upon the principles of his father and the wishes of the
family. Of course the remonstrance was disregarded, and Richard, his
brothers, and their friends left the ground. The clergyman then
proceeded to call Carlile 'his dear departed brother,' and to declare
that he 'had died in the sure and certain hope of a glorious
resurrection.'
Carlile left six children--Richard, Alfred, and Thomas Paine, by his
wife Mrs. Jane Carlile; and Julian, Theophila, and Hypatia, by 'Isis,'
the lady to whom he united himself after his separation from his wife.
Mrs. Carlile survived him only four months. She died in the same house,
No. 1, Bouverie Street, and was buried in the same grave. It is hoped
that a suitable monument will soon mark the resting place of England's
stoutest champion of free discussion, political and religious.
All stories about the recantation of Carlile, to which the pious have
given currency, are necessarily false, as he was never able to recant.
He lost his power of speaking long before death approached so near as to
suggest recanting to him. But death had no power to make his strong
spirit quail at ideal terror or to shake the firm convictions of his
understanding. His dying words, therefore, are the last which he
addressed to the public in his _Christian Warrior_, and they were
these--'The enemy with whom I have to grapple is one with whom _no peace
can be made. Idolatry will not parley. Superstition will not treat on
covenant. They must be uprooted for public and individual safety_.'(1)
1. Christian Warrior, No. 4 p. 83.
These words which he published thirteen days only before his death, are
those which he, doubtless, would have pronounced in his last hour, had
consciousness and strength remained with him.
In the early portion of my imprisonment in Gloucester Gaol, the Rev.
Samuel Jones, in order to move me by fear to the retraction of my
convictions, told me before a class of prisoners that 'the notorious
Richard Carlile was dead, and had died horribly; but he had made what
amends he could by recanting his dreadful principles on his
death-bed--had denounced his infidel colleagues, and implored mercy of
God. You see, therefore,' added the Rev. libeller to me, 'what you have
to look forward to.' Great, however, was the Rev. Mr. Jones'
astonishment and confusion, when a short time after, Mr. Carlile himself
walked into my cell, alive and well, to offer me his generous sympathy
and advice to enable me the better to combat the old enemies of free
thought and free speech. The usual stories told of infidel recantations
are about as well founded as was this fabrication concerning Carlile, by
the Rev. Samuel Jones, visiting magistrate of Gloucester Gaol.
But _why_ should Carlile recant! Why should the unbeliever fear to die!
There are four things on which Christians hang the terrors which usually
haunt their death-beds. Let us examine them.
1. The story of the Fall.
2. The rejection of the offer of salvation.
3. The sin of unbelief.
4. The vengeance of God.
1. If man fell in the garden of Eden--who placed him there! God! Who
placed the temptation there? God! Who gave him an imperfect nature--a
nature of which it was foreknown it would fall! God! To what does this
amount!
If a parent placed his poor child near a fire at which he knew it would
be burnt to death, or near a well into which he knew it would fall and
be drowned, would any power of custom prevent our giving speech to the
indignation of the heart, and pronouncing such a parent a miscreant! And
can we pretend to believe God has so acted, and at the same time be able
_to trust_ him! If God has so acted, he may so act again. This creed can
afford no consolation in death. If he who disbelieves this dogma fears
to die, he who believes it should fear death more.
2. Salvation, it is said, is offered to the fallen. But man is not
fallen, except on the revolting hypothesis just discussed. And before
man can be accepted by God, he must, according to Christians, own
himself a degraded sinner. Is salvation worth this humiliation! But man
is not degraded. No man can be degraded by the act of another. Dishonour
can come only by his own hands: and depravity has not come thus. Man,
therefore, needs not this salvation. And, if he needed it, he could not
accept it. Debarred from purchasing it himself, he must accept it as an
act of grace. But it is not well to go even to heaven on sufferance. We
despise the poet who is not above a patron; we despise the citizen who
crawls before the throne; and shall God be said to have less love of
self-respect than man! He who will consent to be saved after this
fashion hath most need to fear that he shall perish, for he deserves it.
3. Then, in what way can there be a _sin_ of unbelief? Is not the
understanding the subject of evidence? A man, with evidence before him,
can no more help seeing it or feeling its weight, than a man with his
eyes or ears open can help seeing the house or tree before him, or
hearing the sounds made around him. If a man disbelieve, it is because
his conviction is true to his understanding. If I disbelieve a
proposition, it is through lack of evidence; and the act is as virtuous
(so far as virtue can belong to that which is inevitable), as the belief
of it, when the evidence is perfect. If it is meant that a man is to
believe, whether he sees evidence or not, it means that he is to believe
certain things, whether true or false; in fine, that he may qualify
himself for heaven by hypocrisy and lies. It is of no use that the
unbeliever is told that he will be damned if he does not believe; what
human frailty may do is another thing; but the judgment is clear, that a
man _ought_ not to believe, nor profess to believe, what seems to him to
be false, although he should be damned. The believer, who seeks to
propitiate heaven by this deceit, ought to fear its wrath, not the
unbeliever who rejects the dishonourable terms and throws himself on its
justice.
4. There is the _vengeance_ of God. But is not the savage idea destroyed
as soon as you name it? Can God have that which man ought not to
have--_vengeance_. The jurisprudence of earth has reformed itself--we no
longer _punish_ absolutely; we seek the _reformation_ of the offender.
We leave retaliation to savages; and shall we cherish in heaven an idea
we have chased from earth? But _what_ has to be punished? Can the sins
of man disturb the peace of God? If so, as men exist in myriads and
action is incessant, then is God, as Jonathan Edwards has shown, the
most miserable of beings and the _victim_ of his meanest creatures. We,
see, therefore, that sin against God is _impossible_. All sin is finite
and relative--all sin is sin against man. Will God punish this, which
punishes itself? If man errs, the bitter consequences are ever with him.
Why should he err! Does he choose the ignorance, incapacity, passion,
and blindness, through which he errs? Why is he precipitated,
imperfectly natured into a chaos of crime! Is not his destiny made for
him; and shall God punish that sin which is his misfortune rather than
his fault? shall man be condemned to misery in eternity _because_ he has
been made wretched, and weak, and erring, in time.
But if man _has_ fallen at his conscious peril--_has_ thoughtlessly
spurned salvation--_has_ offended God--will God therefore take
vengeance? Is God without dignity or magnanimity? If I do wrong to him,
who does wrong to me, I come down (has not the ancient sage warned me)
to the level of my enemy? Will God thus descend to the level of
vindictive man! Who has not thrilled at the lofty question of Volumnia
to Coriolanus:--
'Think'st thou it honourable for a noble man
Still to remember wrongs.'
Shall God be less honourable and remember the wrong done against him,
not by his equals, but by his own frail creatures! To be unable to trust
God is to degrade him. Those passages in the New Testament which give
the narratives most interest and dignity, are the parables in which a
servant is told to forgive a debt to one who had forgiven him; in which
a brother is to be forgiven until seventy times seven (that is
unlimitedly); and the prayer where men claim forgiveness as they have
themselves forgiven others their trespasses. What was this but erecting
a high moral argument against the relentlessness of future punishment of
erring man? If, therefore, man is to forgive, shall God do less? Shall
man be more just than God? Is there anything so grand in the life of
Christ as his forgiving his enemies, as he expired on the cross? Was it
God the Sufferer behaving more nobly than will God the Judge? Was this
the magnificent teaching of fraternity to vengeful man, or is it to be
regarded but as a sublime libel on the hereafter judgments of heaven?
The Infidel is Infidel to error, but he believes in truth and humanity,
and when he believes in God, he will prefer to believe that which is
noble of him. He will be able to trust him. Holding by no conscious
error, doing no dishonour in thought and offering, his homage to love
and truth, why should the unbeliever fear to die! Carlile saw not less
clearly than this, nor felt less strongly, and he knew that only those
fear death who have never thought about it at all, or thought about it
wrongly.
Carlile's early career gave evidence of that iron hauteur which
characterised him. In dedicating from Dorchester Gaol, his second volume
of the _Republican_, to Sir Robert Gifford, the Attorney General of that
day, (1820) he wrote, 'Gratitude being one of the noblest traits in the
character of animals, both rational and irrational, _to which ever you
may deem me allied_, I feel that I owe it to you.' Carlile taunted the
Society for the Suppression of Vice, or as he most correctly styled it
the Vice Society, saying that, 'next to their secretary, Pritchard, the
lawyer, he had gained most by their existence,(1) and had sold more
Deistical volumes in one year through their exertions than he should in
seven, in the ordinary course of business.'(2) Carlile's cheerful
disposition resisted the sombre influence of the dungeon, and he
declared when Wedderbum arrived at Dorchester Gaol that he would
'endeavour to get him chaplain, as the officiating one was so extremely
fat that he could hardly get up to the pulpit, and when there, he was so
long in recovering from the exertion, that he could not read the prayers
with sufficient solemnity.(3)
1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 183.
2. Repub. vol. ii. p. 185.
3. Repub. vol. iii. p. 112.
The fourth volume of the _Republican_ Carlile also dedicated to Gifford,
the Attorney General, beginning, 'My constant and learned friend,
between you and the Vice Society I am at loss how to pay my courtesies,
so as to avoid jealousy. You acted nobly with my first volume. My second
you neglected; and I had resolved to stop when I heard of your renewed
prosecutions. I am sorry we did not understand each other better
before.' A paragraph in the Dedication of his sixth volume to George IV.
was in these words, 'You are not only the head of the State but of the
Church too, and as I am an intermeddler with the matters of both, I,
your Banishment Act notwithstanding, dedicate my volume to both heads at
once, with the most profound hope and prayer that neither of them may
ache after reading it.' When Carlile took notice of Mease, he thus
addressed him--'To Mr. Thomas Mease, grocer, draper, and methodist.' The
letter to Mease, was dated 'Dorchester Gaol, December 18, year 1822; of
the God that was born of a woman, who was his own father, and who was
killed to please himself. The _immortal_ god that died.' The letter
commenced thus,--'Sir Saint and Savage.' To Mr. Dronsfield he wrote--'I
am not humble; civility to all; servility to none is the becoming
characteristic of manhood.'(1) Alluding to the extensive sale of Wat
Tyler, which had such an influence on his early fortunes, Carlile
exclaimed, 'Glory to thee, O Southey! Happy mayst thou be in singing
hexameters to thy old Royal Master, when thou hast passed the _reality_
as well as the _vision_ of judgment! Yes, my patron! to that best of thy
productions, "Wat Tyler," do I owe the encouragement I first found to
persevere.(2)
Of his own Every Woman's Book, Carlile said, 'It had sustained Mr.
Cobbett's malignity--one of the most powerful venoms which the animal
world had produced.'(3) Carlile characterised the weak point in his own
character with severe felicity, when speaking of others. 'Conceit,' said
he, 'is a malady of humanity, of which some people die.'(4) These words
might stand as the epitaph of his own public influence. The following
passage occurred in that letter to me, alluded to in the preface. 'You,
Southwell and others,' said he, 'are now where I once was, resting upon
the mere flippant vulgarisms of what you and the world consent to call
Atheistic infidelity, regulating your amount of wisdom by a critical
contrast with other people's folly.(5) I hope we were never amenable to
the censure with which this sentence opens: the concluding words are
shrewd and instructive, which I repeat for the sake of those young
gentlemen who take up infidelity as a pastime, instead as a principle.
1. Repub. vol. vii. p. 868.
2. Repub. vol. vii. p. 674.
3. Lion, vol. ii. p. 450.
4. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.
5. Oracle of Reason, vol. i. p. 366.
It is due to Carlile to observe that the annoyance he marshalled against
authority was chiefly retaliative. He disowned a placard put in his
window, which said, 'This is the Mart for Sedition and Blasphemy,' as he
deemed it an admission that he did vend something of the kind. 'I sell,'
said he, 'only truth and right reason.'(1) (In parenthesis it maybe
observed, that he denied that any human tribunal was competent to
declare what was blasphemy.) How much farther Carlile was impartial than
are Christians, is evidenced by the fact that he published Bishop
Watson's Apology for the Bible, in conjunction with Paine's Age of
Reason.(2) In another respect he behaved as Christians never behave, he
never questioned the youths he employed, nor any of his dependents as to
their opinions, nor did he use any means to induce them to comprehend or
adopt his.(3) He held his opinions too proudly to intrigue or supplicate
others to accept them.
In candour, in independency of judgment, in perfect moral fearlessness
of character, I believe Carlile cannot be paralleled among the public
men of his time. Lovel writes:
He is a slave who dare not be,
In the right with two or three.
Carlile was no slave. He was able to stand in the right by himself
against the world. One forgives his errors, his vanity, and his egotism,
for the bravery of his bearing and his speech. Though Paine was his
great prototype, he was prompt, both in his early enthusiasm and in his
latter days, to acknowledge Paine's defects as a theologian. 'About
"God" Paine,' said he, 'was not altogether wise, but less unwise than
the world at large.(4) In his earliest attachments, Carlile
discriminated, 'I neither look,' wrote he 'on Mr. Gibbon nor Mr. Hume,
as standards of infidelity to the Christian religion.'(5) He hesitated
at Shelley's views of marriage, deeming them crude.(6) Carlile was able
to take anything up or put anything down at the bidding of his judgment.
He said to Mr. Searlett, 'At present I am not a tinman, but I should
never feel ashamed to return to it to earn an honest livelihood, if
circumstances should render it necessary in this or any other
country,'(7)
1. Repub. vol. v.r. 12.
2. Repub. vol. v. p. 89
3. Repub. vi. p. 778.
4. Scourge, p. 110.
5. Repub. vol. ii. p. 168.
6. Repub. vol. v. p. 148.
7. Repub. vol. ii. p. 403.
He began a periodical or ended it at will. No taunt deterred him, no
threat intimidated him, no smile seduced him. Carlile was perfectly able
to stand alone. He avowed himself an Atheist when no one else did. When
he understood that arbitrary checks to population were necessary he said
so and distinguishing the particular kinds of checks, disguisedly hinted
at by Political Economists, or anonymously broached in handbills, he
specified them and added these words, 'I think these plans tor the
prevention of conception good, and publicly say it.'(1) Although that
saying involved his own reputation and that of his cause. If Carlile had
the querulousness, which condemned others, he had also the rarer courage
which condemned himself. If he called others fools he called himself
one, when his judgment convinced him that he had been in error. To those
whom he found he had wronged, he made no dubious acknowledgment.
Disdaining deceit always he openly made the amplest apology frank words
could express. 'I ask Mr. Cobbett's pardon, and make the due apology,'
said he, on finding that he had made an erroneous attribution to him.(2)
To Dr. Olinthus Gregory he was more emphatic still.(3) Carlile
proclaimed the excellence of Cobbett's Grammar, and the superiority of
Hunt's Roasted Corn,(4) at the same time that he roasted the authors of
both. Major Cartwright's 'English Constitution Produced and
Illustrated,' he praised in some parts, while he mercilessly assailed it
in others.(5) He acknowledged the kindness of his prosecutors, where
they were kind, with the same fullness with which he execrated them when
brutal.(6) To his bitterest enemy he was constantly thus just, and his
own faults he confessed with as little reserve as he pointed out those
or his enemies. His intellect was rude, but most robust. He had a
passion for truth and did not care whether it went against him or for
him; he told it with equal zest. He not only as many do, professed to
love free speaking; he could _bear it_ of himself. He held, as a public
man should do, his reputation in his hand, and he would toss it up as
one would a ball.
1. Repub. No. 18, vol. ii. pp. 566-6. 1825.
2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 29.
3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 727.
4. Repub. vol. vi. p. 12.
5. Repub. vol. viii. p. 18.
6. Repub. vol. x. pp. 63-4.
Carlile had a just notion of the relation of personalities to
principles. 'Human nature,' said he, 'through whatever improved
modifications it may pass, will still have its frailties, and those
frailties have no relation to the social principles that may be
advocated, nor do they emanate from newly advocated social principles,
but from the frailty of that nature,... and any exhibition of such
frailty belongs to the individual, and not to the principles
constituting the public cause.'... But it is one thing to perceive the
tenor of personalties, and another and very different thing to be able
to conduct them. Mr. Carlile was utterly unable to conduct them
usefully. They must be entered upon, not on personal, but upon public
grounds; or they lose all moral effect. If undertaken from spleen, or
vanity, they belong to the class of 'quarrels,' and damage both the
writer and nis cause. If entered upon to preserve the integrity of a
public question, such intention must be made very evident and the
_improvement_ alone, and not the mortification of the party criticised,
must be steadily kept in view. This Mr. Carlile never understood: he
wounded, he disparaged, he recriminated. He did not weigh character
through its entire extent. He mistook a part for the whole. It was in
this erroneous way, that he condemned Cobbett and Hunt, was querulous to
his friends in Parliament, and most unjust to his most important and
devoted allies. Ricardo, Hume, Brougham, Burdett, who presented
petitions for him, seem to me to have treated him much better than he
treated them.
Richard Carlile's reputation was founded on the joint profession of
Republicanism, and ultimately of Deism and Atheism. He owed much to the
_time_ when he made these professions, and not a little to the talent
with which he maintained them. But did his services rest exclusively on
the conditions under which they were rendered, their value would still
stand high in the opinion of those capable of estimating the steps of
public progress. He had to incur an obnoxious singularity, and brave
imminent danger in order to purchase a field of action for others. This
is a work which the world does not applaud like the manifestation of
genius and talent, but it is a work which requires a courage and a
sentiment of self-sacrifice, which the world's favourites rarely
display. The work of the pioneer of thought is a work done for men of
genius and talent; a work they are seldom able to do for themselves--for
talent is prudent, and genius is timid; it is a work, however, which
must be done by some one, or freedom languishes, invention is dumb,
talent is misdirected, and philosophy creeps stealthily along starting
at the sound of its own footsteps.
1. Sherwin*s Republican, No. 2, p. 21.
No adequate estimate or the merits of Carlile, and no tolerant judgment
of his faults can be formed without taking into account the aspects of
the times when he struggled, and the unscrupulous and powerful enemies
against which he contended. _Then_ the most hateful types of Toryism and
Christianity were rampant--_Then_ Castlereagh declared in Parliament
that it was necessary that 'the last spark of the spirit of the French
Revolution should be extinguished.'(1) Malignant and servile
Attorney-Generals and vindictive Judges left no man's liberty or life
safe if he professed liberal opinions. The press was intimidated, and
public meetings, who complained, butchered. It was under these
formidable circumstances that Carlile undertook to free the press, and
to make the famous works of the 'rebellious needleman' household books
in England, and to oppose himself singly to crown and mitre, ana brave
whatever political and priestly vengeance could inflict, when political
and priestly power were unchecked by public opinion.
1. The apparent offensiveness of some of his addresses was
created by Christians themselves, an Instance occurs in his
letter to 'Old William Wilberforce,' to whom he said 'sinner,'
instead of 'sir,' but this was because Wilberforce was a
self-styled sinner.--Repub. vol. ii. p. 388
It is in reference to the same public circumstances that Carlile's
faults are to be judged.
Those who in these days shall peruse the pages of Carlile's periodicals
will be startled at the fierce invective and measureless denunciation
which abound there. But let those who affect to pass over his name on
this account, call to recollection the deadly arena of antagonism in
which he had to fight the battle of freedom. The course he took is
indeed not to be imitated now. We exist in better times, when the
conflict of reason has succeeded to the strife of passion. We have
better arts, because we have a fairer field, and we owe that fairer
field to such men as Carlile. Let us not impose our modes of warfare on
men who fought with savages, and demand of the actors of other times
that virtue which belongs exclusively to our opportunities. Men who are
patriotic in easy chairs and by the fire-side only, who never incur
damped feet in the public cause, and essay the reform of society in kid
gloves and white waistcoats, know nothing, and can allow nothing for
that strife of spirit in which men live, who take up the dice box of
oppression to play for liberty, and whose stakes are their lives. Let
the Christian whose altar is protected by law, whose arrogance over
infidels is part and parcel of the statutes, and is applauded by public
opinion; let the sleek and unruffled saint beware how he judges one on
whose head was every day poured out the phials of holy malignity, whom
the highest authorities stooped to defame, whose name was sacked at the
instigation of every miserable deacon or venal informer, whose household
gods were strewn in the streets by policemen selected for their
ferocity--whose wife was consigned to a gaol, and himself doomed to
spend nine years and a half in the endurance of the unceasing indignity
of vindictive imprisonment. Where the Christian in ermine has been
brutal, vituperative, and malignant, let him not exact a perennial
delicacy of sentiment from his victim, writhing under his provocations.
Taking these circumstances into account he is little acquainted with
human nature, who will wonder that Carlile, in the sixth year of an
imprisonment caused by Lords Castlereagh, Liverpool, Sidmouth, and
Eldon, should from Dorchester Gaol, dedicate the volume of the Trials of
his Wife, Sister, and Shopmen in these words--'To the Memory of Robert
Stewart, Marquis of Londonderry, Viscount Castlereagh, etc., who
eventually did that for himself which millions wished some noble mind
would do for him--_Cut his throat_.'
The strait-laced moralist of this generation may turn to the volumes of
the Carlile's Trials, and find that Mrs. Carlile was indicted for
publishing a paragraph justifying assassination of tyrants. I have no
sympathy with this doctrine. I deem it far nobler and more useful to
society, to submit to be the victim than to victimize others. But
Carlile acted on a resolute sense of self-defence. He was a believer in
Brutus and Colonel Titus, and he lived in darker times when the policy
of moral resistance was less clear and less practicable than now.
The Society for the Suppression of Vice distinguished him in 1820, as
'that most audacious offender, Carlile.'(1) The _Age_ called him 'a
miscreant tinker.'(2) The _Sunday Times_ described him as 'a wretched
man in the very kennel of contempt, from whom his proselytes fled as if
he were emerged from a pest-house, and advised that he should rot in
oblivion.'? And in this way papers and pulpits rang fascinating changes
on such adjectives as fiend, monster, wretch, execrable, hideous,
obscene, abandoned, infamous, etc., etc., till when he took a tour
through the country in 1828, the idea of Carlile current among the pious
was that of a black griffin with red glaring eyes--a tail with forked
end, talons instead of fingers, and hoofs instead of toes.'(3)
1. Repub. vol. ii. p. 182.
2. Repub. vol. xii. p. 121
3. Repub. vol. xii. p. 151.
Yet this man whom the Government, the Pulpit, and the Press co-operated
thus to describe, was human, and not devoid of generous filial
affection. When in Dorchester Gaol, in 1820, a letter came sealed with
black wax, which, Carlile suspecting to announce the death of his
mother, he threw it aside for four hours--not finding resolution to open
it. 'I had hoped,' said he, 'that her life would have been extended a
few years, that she might have witnessed the result of my present
career. But it affords me pleasure to think that she sunk calmly to
sleep, neither tortured by priests nor superstitious notions. It affords
me pleasure,' cried he, exultingly, 'that in spite of the efforts of the
Society for the Suppression of vice, the Priests, and the
Attorney-General of a wicked administration, I have still retained a
roof to shelter her, and under which she died.'(1) The department of
progress in which Carlile worked has not yet received recognition by
society. Society only remembers the genius which is creative, not that
which is practical--though it profits in its ulterior stages more by the
practical than the creative. The world has been rich in theory ages ago,
and would have realised universal happiness by this time had it
encouraged those who reduce its theories to practice. When a great truth
is proclaimed, it produces no fruit till society is ploughed and sown
with it. The pioneer, the orator, and the journalist, are they who
practicalise truth: and he who re-asserts it, who insists upon it, and
re-echoes it by all the arts of repetition--he it is who really advances
society. He is the worker; yet society accords him no distinction, no
posthumous memory. Hence it requires more generosity of sentiment to be
useful than to be great. He who seeks distinction may advance society as
he achieves distinction: but the advancement of society is secondary
with him--the advancement of himself is the primary consideration, and
he is often careless whether society advances or retrogrades provided he
lays hold of its renown and keeps it. Hence he who seeks fame is
selfish--he who seeks utility is generous, because he is certain that
society will neglect him, as it pays its honours to those who serve it
least. The theorist provides for the future, but it is the worker who
makes the future by realising the fulness of the present. It was in this
department that Carlile laboured. He left no distinct book, he
bequeathed no invention, he is the author of no famous theory; but his
life was a poem of heroic and voluntary sacrifice, by which new freedom
was won and secured to posterity; and men are now benefited through his
exertions who remember him not, who know him not, and who would disown
him or revile him if they did. Attorney-Generals delight to prate about
the danger to society of dissemminating new opinions--the danger is to
him alone who undertakes the task. Let him who thinks that mankind are
to be set on change too rapidly, read the Life of Carlile. The deadly
opposition by which he was assailed is the answer to their fears.
Society loves its opinions, and clings to them, whether they be error or
truth. It hates him who teaches it to alter its course, however the
change may be for its benefit. It is the destiny of the Reformer to
serve mankind, and to be cursed by them for his pains. He who is not
prepared for this has no business to be a Reformer. Then has he no
reward? His proud reward is the satisfaction of contemplating the
benefit he confers upon men who are not to be conciliated by good
intentions, nor penetrated by favours bestowed. To give happiness to a
friend is but a common place delight, but the pride of conferring
pleasure upon an enemy is a noble passion, of which only exalted natures
are susceptible. This is the passion of the true Reformer, and this is
his reward.
1. Repub vol. ii. pp. 376-7.
Of Carlile's errors it may be said that they were fostered, if not
developed by the position in which he was placed. In the autumn of his
career, he grew to think better of himself than of other men, but it was
in a great measure because he had done more and dared more. He was
impatient of a rival, because his rivals as political or anti-religious
leaders wanted the proper qualification. Carlile had suffered so much,
and so long, that he not unnaturally became convinced that suffering was
the sole qualification of a public teacher. He confounded endurance with
ability, and doubted the integrity or the courage of those who had dared
nothing. He was tolerant of rivals in proportion as they had suffered
any thing. His great imprisonments were so many wounds which he had
received in the service of freedom, and he was proud of them as a
Spartan hero of scars. He graduated, as _a patriot_, in dungeons, and he
suspected the qualifications of every man who had not taken out a
diploma from the Attorney-General. Carlile was one of those men who are
tattooed by the enemy into whose hands they fall, and who are dyed by
the influences against which they struggle. He was like a man who fights
all day in the front rank; who is discoloured by the powder expended in
the battle, and never after wears the hue of peace. Cobbett and
O'Connell manifested the same peculiarity. They outlived their day. They
were living memorials of themselves and of the times which _they_ had
changed. He who judges any of these men impartially, will recognize
their virtues as arising in the greatness of their natures and their
faults, but as the accidents of their local positions. So posterity will
judge Richard Carlile.
ST. THOMAS'S HOSPITAL
Examination of the body of Mr. Richard Carlile.
The well-known Mr. Richard Carlile, bookseller, late of Fleet Street,
bequeathed his body for the purpose of anatomical dissection. By
permission of the governors of St. Thomas's Hospital, his remains were
removed from his residence in Bouverie Street, Fleet Street, to that
Institution; and, on Tuesday last, there was a numerous assemblage of
the friends of the deceased and members of the medical profession, to
witness his post mortem examination. The chest and abdomen only were
opened, and the necessity that existed for the knowledge of anatomy, not
only to the surgeon, but to the physician, was shown. Mr. Grainger
delivered a short address on the occasion, thinking that the object of
the deceased would be obtained by this proceeding in public, and by a
statement of the motives which, had actuated him in giving his remains
for dissection.
The illustrious Bentham, actuated by the same benevolent feeling, had at
the close of the last century, left his body for dissection, and that at
a time when the prejudice against anatomical examinations was so great
that bodies were procured with the utmost difficulty. That prejudice was
perhaps less at the present time, but still sufficiently strong to
interfere very materially with that due supply of subjects, so essential
to the proper education of the medical student, and of such vital
importance to the community at large. Such difficulties existed that no
lecturer in this country had ever yet been able to complete a course of
operative surgery, properly so called. Mr. Carlile deserved the
approbation of all the friends of humanity for attempting to remove this
prejudice by leaving his remains for anatomical purposes.
Mr. Grainger vindicated medical men from the charge of irreligion, and
contended that medical and anatomical studies, if _properly_ pursued,
served to demonstrate the truth, not only of natural, but of revealed
religion. _The Lancet,_ No. 1,016, p. 774, February 18, 1843.
J. Watson, Printer, 3, Queen's Head Passage, Paternoster Row.
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