Now, as in the past, students live in garrets, bohemians in lodgings,
physicians without patients and lawyers without clients in lonely
offices, so many Brissots, Dantons, Marats, Robespierres, and St.
Justs in embryo; only, for lack of air and sunshine, they never come
to maturity. At twenty, on entering society, a young man's judgment
and pride are extremely sensitive. - - Firstly, let his society be
what it will, it is for him a scandal to pure reason: for it was not
organized by a legislative philosopher in accordance with a sound
principle, but is the work of one generation after another, according
to manifold and changing necessities. It is not a product of logic,
but of history, and the new-fledged thinker shrugs his shoulders as he
looks up and sees what the ancient tenement is, the foundations of
which are arbitrary, its architecture confused, and its many repairs
plainly visible. -- In the second place, whatever degree of perfection
preceding institutions, laws, and customs have reached, these have not
received his approval; others, his predecessors, have chosen for him,
he is being subjected beforehand to moral, political, and social forms
which pleased them. Whether they please him or not is of no
consequence. Like a horse trotting along between the poles of a wagon
in the harness that happens to have been put on his back, he has to
make best of it. -- Besides, whatever its organization, as it is
essentially a hierarchy, he is nearly always subaltern in it, and must
ever remain so, either soldier, corporal or sergeant. Even under the
most liberal system, that in which the highest grades are accessible
to all, for every five or six men who take the lead or command others,
one hundred thousand must follow or be commanded. This makes it vain
to tell every conscript that he carriers a marshal's baton in his
sack, when, nine hundred and ninety-nine times out of a thousand, he
discovers too late, on rummaging his sack, that the baton is not
there. - - It is not surprising that he is tempted to kick against