ons; at least it may be said is that the means
employed to produce this result were gentle and that they, before their
transformation were mere brutes. But those who the revolutionary-Jesuit
now undertakes to transform into robots, and by harsh means, are human
beings.

VIII. Comparison between despotisms.

Comparison between despotisms.--Philip II and Louis XIV.--
Cromwell and Frederick the Great.--Peter the Great and the
Sultans.--Relationship between the tasks the Jacobins are to
carry out and the assets at their disposal.--Disproportion
between the burdens they are to carry and the forces at
their disposal.--Folly of their undertaking.--Physical force
the only governmental force they possess.--They are
compelled to exercise it.--They are compelled to abuse it.--
Character of their government.--Character requisite of their
leaders.

Several times, in European history, despotism almost equally harsh have
born down heavily on human effort; but never have any of them been so
thoroughly inept; for none have ever attempted to raise so heavy a mass
with so short a lever. And to start with, no matter how authoritative
the despot might have been, his intervention was limited.--Philip
II. burned heretics, persecuted Moors and drove out Jews; Louis XIV.
forcibly converted the Protestants; but both used violence only against
dissenters, about a fifteenth or a twentieth of their subjects. If
Cromwell, on becoming Protector, remained sectarian, and the compulsory
servant of an army of sectarians, he took good care not to impose
on other churches the theology, rites and discipline of his own
church;[2218] on the contrary, he repressed fanatical outrages;
protected the Anabaptists as well as his Independents. He granted paid
curates to the Presbyterians as well as the public exercise of their
worship, he showed the Episcopalians a large tolerance and gave them
the right to worship in private; he maintained the two great Anglican
universities and allowed the Jews to erect a synagogue.--Frederick II.
drafted into his army every able-bodied peasant that he could feed; he
kept every man twenty years in the service, under a discipline worse
than slavery, with almost certain prospect of death; and in his last
war, he sacrificed about one sixth of his male subjects;[2219] but they
were serfs, and his conscription did not touch the bourgeois class. He
put his hands in the pockets