ce towards the light is due
to them. They are the four vanguards of the human race, marching towards
the four cardinal points of progress. Diderot towards the beautiful,
Turgot towards the useful, Voltaire towards the true, Rousseau towards
the just. But by the side of and above the philosophers, there were the
sophists, a venomous vegetation mingled with a healthy growth, hemlock
in the virgin forest. While the executioner was burning the great
books of the liberators of the century on the grand staircase of the
court-house, writers now forgotten were publishing, with the King's
sanction, no one knows what strangely disorganizing writings, which were
eagerly read by the unfortunate. Some of these publications, odd to
say, which were patronized by a prince, are to be found in the Secret
Library. These facts, significant but unknown, were imperceptible on the
surface. Sometimes, in the very obscurity of a fact lurks its danger.
It is obscure because it is underhand. Of all these writers, the one
who probably then excavated in the masses the most unhealthy gallery was
Restif de La Bretonne.

This work, peculiar to the whole of Europe, effected more ravages in
Germany than anywhere else. In Germany, during a given period, summed up
by Schiller in his famous drama The Robbers, theft and pillage rose up
in protest against property and labor, assimilated certain specious and
false elementary ideas, which, though just in appearance, were absurd in
reality, enveloped themselves in these ideas, disappeared within them,
after a fashion, assumed an abstract name, passed into the state of
theory, and in that shape circulated among the laborious, suffering, and
honest masses, unknown even to the imprudent chemists who had prepared
the mixture, unknown even to the masses who accepted it. Whenever a fact
of this sort presents itself, the case is grave. Suffering engenders
wrath; and while the prosperous classes blind themselves or fall asleep,
which is the same thing as shutting one's eyes, the hatred of the
unfortunate classes lights its torch at some aggrieved or ill-made
spirit which dreams in a corner, and sets itself to the scrutiny of
society. The scrutiny of hatred is a terrible thing.

Hence, if the ill-fortune of the times so wills it, those fearful
commotions which were formerly called jacqueries, beside which purely
political agitations are the merest child's play, which are no longer
the conflict of the oppressed and the