hey regard their system as a very good one for the French people,
the despotic system without which there can be no army, that which
places the absolute command in the hands of one individual.--Let him put
down other Jacobins, let him revoke their late decrees on hostages
and the forced loan, let him restore safety and security to persons,
property and consciences; let him bring back order, economy and
efficiency to the administrations; let him provide for public services,
hospitals, roads and schools, the whole of civil France will welcome its
liberator, protector and restorer.[51150]--In his own words, the system
he brings is that of "the alliance of Philosophy with the Sword,"
philosophy meaning, as it was then understood, the application of
abstract principles to politics, the logical construction of a State
according to general and simple notices with a social plan, uniform and
rectilinear. Now as we have seen,[51151] two of these plans square
with this theory, one anarchical and the other despotic; naturally, the
master adopts the latter, and, like a practical man, he builds according
to that theory a substantial edifice, with sand and lime, habitable
and well suited to its purposes. All the masses of the great
work-civil code, university, Concordat, prefectoral and centralized
administration-all the details of its arrangement and distribution of
places, tend to one general effect, which is the omnipotence of the
State, the omnipresence of the government, the abolition of local and
private initiative, the suppression of voluntary free association, the
gradual dispersion of small spontaneous groupings, the preventive ban
of prolonged hereditary works, the extinction of sentiments by which the
individual lives beyond himself in the past or in the future. Never
were finer barracks constructed, more symmetrical and more decorative
in aspect, more satisfactory to superficial views, more acceptable
to vulgar good sense, more suited to narrow egoism, better kept and
cleaner, better adapted to the discipline of the average and low
elements of human nature, and better adapted to dispersing or perverting
the superior elements of human nature. In this philosophical barracks we
have lived for eighty years.

THE END.

(written in 1889).

*****

[Footnote 5101: Gaudin, Duc de Gaete, "Memoires," I., 28. Gaudin,
commissioner of the Treasury, meets the president of the revolutionary
committee of his quarter, an excellent Ja