street with his gun under his cloak to execute it. Justice done, he
regained his stall, rejoicing as though he had slain a rabid dog. When
some fifty criminals had thus met their doom, the viceroy offered a
reward of two thousand crowns for information of the slayer, and swore
on the altar that he should have full pardon if he gave himself up. The
cobbler presented himself, and spoke thus: "I have done what was your
duty. 'Tis I who condemned and put to death the miscreants that you
ought to have punished. Behold the proofs of their crimes. There you
will see the judicial process which I observed. I was tempted to begin
with yourself; but I respected in your person the august master whom you
represent. My life is in your hands: dispose of it as you think right."
Well, cried the abbe, the cobbler, in spite of all his fine zeal for
justice, was simply a murderer. Diderot protested. His father decided
that the abbe was right, and that the cobbler was an assassin.

Nothing short of a transcript of the whole would convey a right idea of
the dramatic ease of this delightful dialogue--its variety of
illustration with unity of topic, the naturalness of movement, the
pleasant lightness of touch. At its close the old man calls for his
nightcap; Diderot embraces him, and in bidding him good-night whispers
in his ear, "Strictly speaking, father, there are no laws for the sage.
All being open to exception, 'tis for him to judge the cases in which we
ought to submit to them, or to throw them over." "I should not be
sorry," his father answers, "if there were in the town one or two
citizens like thee; but nothing would induce me to live there, if they
all thought in that way." The conclusion is just, and Diderot might have
verified it by the state of the higher society of his country at that
very moment. One cause of the moral corruption of France in the closing
years of the old _regime_ was undoubtedly the lax and shifting
interpretations, by which the Jesuit directors had softened the rigour
of general moral principles. Many generations must necessarily elapse
before a habit of loosely superseding principles in individual cases
produces widespread demoralisation, but the result is inevitable, sooner
or later; and this, just in proportion as the principles are sound. The
casuists practically constructed a system for making the observance
alike of the positive law, and of the accepted ethical maxims, flexible
and conditional. The Dide