of the bourgeois and of every other man,
and took every crown they had; when driven to it, he adulterated coin
and stopped paying his functionaries; but, under the scrutiny of his
eyes, always open, the administration was honest, the police effective,
justice exact, toleration unlimited, and the freedom of the press
complete; the king allowed the publication of the most cutting pamphlets
against himself, and their public sale, even at Berlin.--A little
earlier, in the great empire of the east, Peter the Great,[2220] with
whip in hand, lashed his Muscovite bears and made them drill and dance
in European fashion; but were bears accustomed from father to son to the
whip and chain; moreover, he stood as the orthodox head of their faith,
and left their mir (the village commune) untouched.--Finally, at the
other extremity of Europe, and even outside of Europe, in the seventh
century the caliph, in the fifteenth century a sultan, a Mahomet or an
Omar, a fanatical Arab or brutal Turk, who had just overcome Christians
with the sword, himself assigned the limits of his own absolutism:
if the vanquished were reduced to the condition of heavily ransomed
tributaries and of inferiors daily humiliated, he allowed them
their worship, civil laws and domestic usages; he left them their
institutions, their convents and their schools; he allowed them to
administer the affairs of their own community as they pleased under
the jurisdiction of their patriarch, or other natural chieftains.--Thus
whatever the tyrant may have been, he did not attempt to entirely
recast Man, nor to subject all his subjects to the recasting. However
penetrating the tyranny, it stopped in the soul at a certain point;
that point reached, the sentiments were left free. No matter how
comprehensive this tyranny may have been, it affected only one class of
men; the others, outside the net, remained free. When it wounded all at
once all sensitive chords, it did so only to a limited minority, unable
to defend themselves. As far as the majority, able to protect itself,
their main sensibilities were respected, especially the most sensitive,
this one or that one, as the case might be, now the conscience which
binds man to his religion, now that amour-propre on which honor depends,
and now the habits which make man cling to customs, hereditary usages
and outward observances. As far as the others were concerned, those
which relate to property, personal welfare, and social positio