have only been the doctrinaire, the theorizer, and, latterly, in spite of myself, the standard-bearer and symbol.
These anti-patriotic ideas, moreover, are somewhat new among the masses of organized workers. And, like all new ideas, they shock public opinion; they seem shocking to you. That was the fate of early Christianity, and also of the republican idea, at the time when republicans were regarded, in the remotest parts of the country, as monsters gorged with blood, dividers-up of property, and incendiaries.
There was once a heretic named John Huss. A century before Luther he proclaimed and demanded the Protestant Reformation. For this crime a Council condemned him to be burnt. At the moment when the first martyr of Protestantism was mounting the pile of fagots, an old woman, a devotee from the town of Constance, brought a fresh fagot to the pile, which, doubtless, she did not find high enough. "Sancta simplicitas!" exclaimed John Huss, shrugging his shoulders in kindly pity.
That was the sentiment which I felt yesterday when, in this hall where the advocates rarely raise their voices except in defense of the accused, a young licentiate of the Bar said that we deserved the guillotine. It was not the guillotine, it was the stake this good young man meant.
And it is really the stake which we, like all heretics, deserve: we who are the heretics of the patriotic religion. For it is a religion this patriotism of modern peoples, a religion inculcated in us from the cradle by the same methods employed in all times to inculcate all religions.
You know how a Catholic is made? The child is taken while yet in the cradle. While fondling him the mother teaches him prayers, which he repeats like a parrot. She tells him there is a God, a Heaven, and a Hell. His brain, like wax, receives all these impressions without reacting.
When he is seven years old his well-meaning mother hands him over to the priest, who sows in his young
