nds to flow, all
the healthful industry it arrests, all the madmen that it arms, all the
victims that it dupes, I question whether one man really honest, pure,
and humane, who has once gone through such an ordeal, would ever hazard
it again, unless he was assured that the victory was certain,--ay, and
the object for which he fights not to be wrested from his hands amidst
the uproar of the elements that the battle has released."

The Italian paused, shaded his brow with his hand, and remained long
silent. Then, gradually resuming his ordinary tone, he continued,--

"Revolutions that have no definite objects made clear by the positive
experience of history; revolutions, in a word, that aim less at
substituting one law or one dynasty for another, than at changing the
whole scheme of society, have been little attempted by real statesmen.
Even Lycurgus is proved to be a myth who never existed. Such organic
changes are but in the day-dreams of philosophers who lived apart from
the actual world, and whose opinions (though generally they were very
benevolent, good sort of men, and wrote in an elegant poetical style)
one would no more take on a plain matter of life, than one would look
upon Virgil's Eclogues as a faithful picture of the ordinary pains and
pleasures of the peasants who tend our sheep. Read them as you would
read poets, and they are delightful. But attempt to shape the world
according to the poetry, and fit yourself for a madhouse. The farther
off the age is from the realization of such projects, the more these
poor philosophers have indulged them. Thus, it was amidst the saddest
corruption of court manners that it became the fashion in Paris to sit
for one's picture with a crook in one's hand, as Alexis or Daphne. Just
as liberty was fast dying out of Greece, and the successors of Alexander
were founding their monarchies, and Rome was growing up to crush in its
iron grasp all States save its own, Plato withdraws his eyes from the
world, to open them in his dreamy "Atlantis." Just in the grimmest
period of English history, with the axe hanging over his head, Sir
Thomas More gives you his "Utopia." Just when the world is to be the
theatre of a new Sesostris, the sages of France tell you that the age is
too enlightened for war, that man is henceforth to be governed by pure
reason, and live in a paradise. Very pretty reading all this to a man
like me, Lenny, who can admire and smile at it. But to you, to the man
who