comprehensible; paper will take all that is put upon it, while
abstract beings, the hollow simulacra and philosophic puppets he
concocts, are adapted to every sort of combination. - That a lunatic
in his cell should adopt and preach this theory is also
comprehensible; he is beset with phantoms and lives outside the actual
world, and, moreover in this ever-agitated democracy he is the eternal
informer and instigator of every riot and murder that takes place; he
it is who under the name of "the people's friend" becomes the arbiter
of lives and the veritable sovereign. -- That a people borne down with
taxes, wretched and starving, indoctrinated by public speakers and
sophists, should have welcomed this theory and acted under it is again
comprehensible; necessity knows no law, and where the is oppression,
that doctrine is true which serves to throw oppression off.

But that public men, legislators and statesmen, with, at last,
ministers and heads of the government, should have made this theory
their own;

* that they should have more fondly clung to it as it became more
destructive;

* that, daily for three years they should have seen social order
crumbling away piecemeal under its blows and not have recognized it as
the instrument of such vast ruin;

* that, in the light of the most disastrous experience, instead of
regarding it as a curse they should have glorified it as a boon;

* that many of them - an entire party; almost all of the Assembly -
should have venerated it as a religious dogma and carried it to