results of the Reformation, without being obliged to defend John
of Leyden and the Munster Anabaptists?

M. D'Hericault's volume naturally suggests such reflections as these. Of
all the men of the Revolution, Robespierre has suffered most from the
audacious idolatry of some writers, and the splenetic impatience of
others. M. Louis Blanc and M. Ernest Hamel talk of him as an angel or a
prophet, and the Ninth Thermidor is a red day indeed in their
martyrology. Michelet and M. D'Hericault treat him as a mixture of
Cagliostro and Caligula, both a charlatan and a miscreant. We are
reminded of the commencement of an address of the French Senate to the
first Bonaparte: 'Sire,' they began, 'the desire for perfection is one
of the worst maladies that can afflict the human mind.' This bold
aphorism touches one of the roots of the judgments we pass both upon men
and events. It is because people so irrationally think fit to insist
upon perfection, that Robespierre's admirers would fain deny that he
ever had a fault, and the tacit adoption of the same impracticable
standard makes it easier for Robespierre's wholesale detractors to deny
that he had a single virtue or performed a single service. The point of
view is essentially unfit for history. The real subject of history is
the improvement of social arrangements, and no conspicuous actor in
public affairs since the world began saw the true direction of
improvement with an absolutely unerring eye from the beginning of his
career to the end. It is folly for the historian, as it is for the
statesman, to strain after the imaginative unity of the dramatic
creator. Social progress is an affair of many small pieces and slow
accretions, and the interest of historic study lies in tracing, amid the
immense turmoil of events and through the confusion of voices, the
devious course of the sacred torch, as it shifts from bearer to bearer.
And it is not the bearers who are most interesting, but the torch.

* * * * *

In the old Flemish town of Arras, known in the diplomatic history of the
fifteenth century by a couple of important treaties, and famous in the
industrial history of the Middle Ages for its pre-eminence in the
manufacture of the most splendid kind of tapestry hangings, Maximilian
Robespierre was born in May 1758. He was therefore no more than five and
thirty years old when he came to his ghastly end in 1794. His father was
a lawyer, and, though the su