become democratic as a weapon against the
deists who are generally aristocrats.

Besides, atheism fits in very well, whatever Robespierre may have
thought, with the general sentiments of the baser demagogy. To be
restrained by nothing, to be limited by nothing, that is the dominant
idea of the people, or rather it is the dominant idea of the democrat
for the people, that it should be restrained by nothing and limited by
nothing in its sovereign power. Now God is a limit, God is a restraint.
And just as the democrat will not admit of a secular constitution which
the people could not destroy and which would prevent him from making bad
laws; just as the democrat will not submit--if we may adopt the
terminology of Aristotle--to being governed by _laws_, to be governed
that is by an ancient body of law which would check the people and
obstruct it in its daily fabrication of _decrees_; so just in the same
spirit the democrat does not admit of a God Who has issued His
commandments, Who has issued His body of laws, anterior and superior to
all the laws and all the decrees of men, and Who sets His limit on the
legislative eccentricities of the people, on its capricious omnipotence,
in a word, on the sovereignty of the people.

After Sedan, Bismarck was asked: "Now that Napoleon has fallen, on whom
do you make war?" He replied: "On Louis XIV." So the democrat questioned
on his atheism could reply: "I am warring against Moses."

This is the origin of the atheism of democrats and schoolmasters. This
is the origin of the formula: "Neither God nor Master," which for the
anarchist requires no correction nor supplement, which for the democrat
has only to be modified: "Neither God nor Master, save the People."

At the end of one of his great political speeches in 1849 or 1850,
Victor Hugo said: "In the future there will only be two powers; the
People and God." The modern democrat has persuaded himself that if there
be a God, the sovereignty of the people is infringed, if he believe in
Him.

Lastly, the school teacher is confirmed in his democratic sentiments, in
all his democratic sentiments, by the political position which has been
made for him in France. It is a strange thing, a disconcerting anomaly,
that the Governments of the nineteenth century (especially, we must do
it this justice, the present Government), have very handsomely respected
the liberty of professors of higher education, and of secondary
education, and have not