n is content so soon as they
have the assurance that no force can ravish from them the fruits of
their industry, and that they labour for themselves. By a sequence of
human madness, whole nations are forced to labour, to sweat, to water
the earth with their tears, merely to keep up the luxury, the fancies,
the corruption of a handful of insensates, a few useless creatures. So
have religious and political errors changed the universe into a valley
of tears." This is an incessant refrain that sounds with hoarse
ground-tone under all the ethics and the metaphysics of the book. There
are scores of pages in which the same idea is worked out with a sombre
vehemence, that makes us feel as if Robespierre were already haranguing
in the National Assembly, Camille Desmoulins declaiming in the gardens
of the Palais Royal, and Danton thundering at the Club of the
Cordeliers. We already watch the smoke of the flaming chateaux, going up
like a savoury and righteous sacrifice to the heavens.

From this point to the end of the first part of the book, it is not so
much philosophy as the literature of a political revolution. There is a
curious parenthesis in vindication not only of a contempt for death, but
even of suicide; the writer pointing out with some malice that Samson,
Eleazar, and other worthies caused their own death, and that Jesus
Christ himself, if really the Son of God, dying of his own free grace,
was a suicide, to say nothing of the various ascetic penitents who have
killed themselves by inches.[154] "The fear of death, after all," he
says, summing up his case, "will only make cowards; the fear of its
alleged consequences will only make fanatics or melancholy pietists, as
useless to themselves as to others. Death is a resource that we do ill
to take away from oppressed virtue, reduced, as many a time it is, by
the injustice of men to desperation." This was the doctrine in which the
revolutionary generation were brought up, and the readiness with which
men in those days inflicted death on themselves and on others showed how
profoundly it had entered their souls.[155] We think, as we read, of
Vergniaud and Condorcet carrying their doses of poison, of Barbaroux
with his pistol, and Valaze with his knife, of Roland walking forth from
Rouen among the trees on the Paris road, and there driving a cane-sword
into his breast, as calmly as if he had been throwing off a useless
vesture.

[154] This is not original in Holbach. Did