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The Life of Froude by Herbert Paul
page 67 of 357 (18%)
of Commons for amending the law of copyright, he was guided by self-
interest, but it was not a counsel of despair. The City Companies,
says Froude, "are all which now remain of a vast organisation which
once penetrated the entire trading life of England--an organisation
set on foot to realise that impossible condition of commercial
excellence under which man should deal faithfully with his brother,
and all wares offered for sale, of whatever kind, should honestly be
what they pretend to be."

For "impossible" Carlyle proposed "highly necessary, if highly
difficult," and a similar change was made. But why people who do not
understand political economy should be more honest than those who do
neither master nor disciple condescended to explain. It is much
easier to preach than to argue. More valuable than these gibes is
Carlyle's reminder that guilds were not peculiar to England.

"In Lubeck, Augsburg, Nurnberg, Dantzig, not to speak of Venice,
Genoa, Pisa,--George Hudson and the Gospel of Cheap and Nasty were
totally unknown entities. The German Gilds even made poetry
together; Herr Sachs of Nurnberg was one of the finest pious genial
master shoemakers that ever lived anywhere--his shoes and rhymes
alike genuine (I can speak for the rhymes) and worthy."

It is strange that Carlyle should have taken the trouble to correct
a misquotation from Juvenal, and still stranger that Froude should
have left the words uncorrected. Misquotation was a too frequent
habit with him. In his second chapter he applies to Henry the famous
passage in Tacitus's character of Galba, and changes capax imperii
to dignus imperil, though dignus would have required imperio, and
would then have made inferior sense. Some of Carlyle's queries were
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