s me shudder, and I am for
maintaining existing institutions. 'Each shall have his own thought,'
is the dictum of Christianity; 'Each man shall have his own field,' says
modern law; and in this, modern law is in harmony with Christianity.
Each shall have his own thought; that is a consecration of the rights
of intelligence; and each shall have his own field, is a consecration of
the right to property that has been acquired by toil. Hence our society.
Nature has based human life upon the instinct of self-preservation, and
social life is founded upon personal interest. Such ideas as these are,
to my thinking, the very rudiments of politics. Religion keeps these two
selfish sentiments in subordination by the thought of a future life; and
in this way the harshness of the conflict of interests has been somewhat
softened. God has mitigated the sufferings that arise from social
friction by a religious sentiment which raises self-forgetfulness into
a virtue; just as He has moderated the friction of the mechanism of the
universe by laws which we do not know. Christianity bids the poor bear
patiently with the rich, and commands the rich to lighten the burdens of
the poor; these few words, to my mind, contain the essence of all laws,
human and divine!"

"I am no statesman," said the notary; "I see in a ruler a liquidator of
society which should always remain in liquidation; he should hand over
to his successor the exact value of the assets which he received."

"I am no statesman either," said Benassis, hastily interrupting the
notary. "It takes nothing but a little common sense to better the lot of
a commune, of a canton, or of an even wider district; a department calls
for some administrative talent, but all these four spheres of action are
comparatively limited, the outlook is not too wide for ordinary powers
of vision, and there is a visible connection between their interests and
the general progress made by the State.

"But in yet higher regions, everything is on a larger scale, the horizon
widens, and from the standpoint where he is placed, the statesman
ought to grasp the whole situation. It is only necessary to consider
liabilities due ten years hence, in order to bring about a great deal
of good in the case of the department, the district, the canton, or
the commune; but when it is a question of the destinies of a nation, a
statesman must foresee a more distant future and the course that events
are likely to take for the