harmonizing the passions, instead of restraining them? The very Sieyès of this moral revolution.
It is no new theory of Fourier, and of the modern French school, that a greater force is to be derived from the harmonic action of the passions than from their restraint, and that a future society is to depend upon this law. The idea is true and eternal: it is the foundation of all poetry, the dream of youth; it is argued in the first page of man's history, and the lapse of every few centuries sees the argument rehearsed. The human race has passionately clung to the belief. We are so in love with it, that we are always willing to sacrifice ourselves that another may enjoy it. We ask only that some one may enjoy; and that one is our idol. The principle of loyalty is based on it. What millions are willing slaves, that the passions of an Alexander or a Napoleon may meet no check in their superb development! We feel ourselves impersonated in them. There is no true lover that would not die, that the object of his love might be happy. Which is the more sublime object of the two? Are not these vulgar great men, after all? Is man ever sublime but when he renounces?
It is in this point that the French stand in opposition to the critical, no less than the religious, spirit of modern times. The mad belief of the Revolution was, that every man might have this theoretic freedom; the mad career of Napoleon was based on their will, that one man should have it. That which they failed to realize in the political, they now seek in the social world, and by the same process; viz. a destructive criticism of the old, and a theory of a new social state based not on experience or criticism, but upon "exact science" and arithmetic.
The end of our own Revolution was involved in the be ginning. The principle of self-government, derived through our Puritan ancestors, was full grown in us. It was a criticism in which the fate of the world was involved; and yet how little was destroyed! It was the construction of a new world on grounds derived from criticism of the old. Only so much struggle was necessary as served to unite us in the effort. The French Revolution was gradual, was blind, not
