It is plain, therefore, that he did not affirm the Germans to be intrinsically good and the French intrinsically bad. His aim was to show that nations rise in proportion to the extent to which their purposes are just and their methods intelligent, and that they invariably fall if they deal unjustly with their own citizens or their neighbors. Sometimes he contrasted the French unfavorably with the Germans, as, for instance, when he says that the martial ardor of the French may be compared to blazing straw, while that of the Germans is more like the burning of anthracite coal. This, however, is due to his having, like a great many other people, an impression that the French are more likely to exhibit superficial and glittering qualities, while the Germans are conspicuous for the commonplace virtues of industry and thoroughness. Nothing was more insidious, in his opinion, than to prefer brilliancy to solid worth; and it was the danger of this preference he was emphasizing, more than the native depravity of the French national character, when he compared the Gallic temperament unfavorably with the Teutonic.
His attitude towards efficiency was also the direct opposite of the present German conception of it. To him efficiency was a matter of adaptation and improvisation, while the German theory is that it is a question of fixed method and elaborate mechanism. Nobody ever despised more than Carlyle the perennial fallacy that things can be done better by the hocus pocus of procedure than by the intelligent application of the available means to the end desired. He censured any effort to achieve things automatically. He was never tired of ridiculing trust in formulas. He insisted that the intelligence must be unfettered by preconceptions or by a rigid plan. His hero was a man who had "swallowed all the formulas," and who proceeded to adapt means to ends in any way that was effective, passing rough-shod over theory, convention, dogmas, or any other restrictions on his freedom of action. It is true that he did insist on the necessity of having accurate and comprehensive knowledge, and on thoroughness and other essentials of what the Germans regard as scientific procedure. These things, however, were to him not major but minor virtues. They were the auxiliaries to success, but they were never to be considered as sufficient to ensure success, for they had always to be supplemented by intelligence and insight. This is shown by his depreciation of mere "beaver" industry, and by his fondness for satirizing "pipe-clay," by which he meant senseless military routine. No crime, in his eyes, was worse than a failure to recognize the dominant importance of the sensibly and intellectually imponderable and intangible elements that are part of every human problem; so that he reprehended as vices the very things that have been most characteristic of the Germans during the present war.