resistible and incorruptible force. It
strikes with the sword. Now, no sword is simple. Every blade has two
edges; he who wounds with the one is wounded with the other.

Having made this reservation, and made it with all severity, it is
impossible for us not to admire, whether they succeed or not, those the
glorious combatants of the future, the confessors of Utopia. Even when
they miscarry, they are worthy of veneration; and it is, perhaps, in
failure, that they possess the most majesty. Victory, when it is in
accord with progress, merits the applause of the people; but a heroic
defeat merits their tender compassion. The one is magnificent, the other
sublime. For our own part, we prefer martyrdom to success. John Brown is
greater than Washington, and Pisacane is greater than Garibaldi.

It certainly is necessary that some one should take the part of the
vanquished.

We are unjust towards these great men who attempt the future, when they
fail.

Revolutionists are accused of sowing fear abroad. Every barricade seems
a crime. Their theories are incriminated, their aim suspected, their
ulterior motive is feared, their conscience denounced. They are
reproached with raising, erecting, and heaping up, against the reigning
social state, a mass of miseries, of griefs, of iniquities, of wrongs,
of despairs, and of tearing from the lowest depths blocks of shadow
in order therein to embattle themselves and to combat. People shout
to them: "You are tearing up the pavements of hell!" They might reply:
"That is because our barricade is made of good intentions."

The best thing, assuredly, is the pacific solution. In short, let us
agree that when we behold the pavement, we think of the bear, and it is
a good will which renders society uneasy. But it depends on society
to save itself, it is to its own good will that we make our appeal.
No violent remedy is necessary. To study evil amiably, to prove its
existence, then to cure it. It is to this that we invite it.

However that may be, even when fallen, above all when fallen, these men,
who at every point of the universe, with their eyes fixed on France, are
striving for the grand work with the inflexible logic of the ideal,
are august; they give their life a free offering to progress; they
accomplish the will of providence; they perform a religious act. At the
appointed hour, with as much disinterestedness as an actor who answers
to his cue, in obedience to the divine stage-manage