onceit and dogmatism are sensitive and
rebellious in every community.--How kept down in all
well-founded societies.--Their development in the new order
of things.--Effect of milieu on imagination and
ambitions.--The stimulants of Utopianism, abuses of speech, and
derangement of ideas.--Changes in office; interests playing
upon and perverted feeling.

That a speculator in his closet should have concocted such a theory is
comprehensible; paper will take all that is put upon it, while abstract
beings, the hollow simulacra and philosophic puppets he concocts, are
adapted to every sort of combination.--That a lunatic in his cell should
adopt and preach this theory is also comprehensible; he is beset with
phantoms and lives outside the actual world, and, moreover in this
ever-agitated democracy he is the eternal informer and instigator of
every riot and murder that takes place; he it is who under the name of
"the people's friend" becomes the arbiter of lives and the veritable
sovereign.--That a people borne down with taxes, wretched and starving,
indoctrinated by public speakers and sophists, should have welcomed this
theory and acted under it is again comprehensible; necessity knows no
law, and where the is oppression, that doctrine is true which serves to
throw oppression off.

But that public men, legislators and statesmen, with, at last, ministers
and heads of the government, should have made this theory their own;

* that they should have more fondly clung to it as it became more
destructive;

* that, daily for three years they should have seen social order
crumbling away piecemeal under its blows and not have recognized it as
the instrument of such vast ruin;

* that, in the light of the most disastrous experience, instead of
regarding it as a curse they should have glorified it as a boon;

* that many of them--an entire party; almost all of the Assembly--should
have venerated it as a religious dogma and carried it to extremes with
enthusiasm and rigor of faith;

* that, driven by it into a narrow strait, ever getting narrower and
narrower, they should have continued to crush each other at every step;

* that, finally, on reaching the visionary temple of their so-called
liberty, they should have found themselves in a slaughter-house, and,
within its precincts, should have become in turn butcher and brute;

* that, through their maxims of a universal and perfect liberty they
shoul