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foundering amid the breakers. Finally, the people received it as an improvement upon the arbitrary authority and violence of the past.
To understand this, we must transport ourselves in imagination into the eighteenth century. Our hearts must have ached at the story of the atrocities committed by the all-powerful nobles of that time upon the men and women of the people, before we can understand what must have been the magic influence upon the peasant’s mind of the words, “Equality before the law, obedience to the law without distinction of birth or fortune.” He, who until then, had been treated more cruelly than a beast, he who had never had any rights, he who had never obtained justice against the most revolting actions on the part of a noble, unless in revenge he killed him and was hanged—he saw himself recognised by this maxim, at least in theory, at least with regard to his personal rights, as the equal of his lord. Whatever this law might be, it promised to affect lord and peasant alike; it proclaimed the equality of rich and poor before the judge. The promise was a lie, and to-day we know it; but at that period it was an advance, a homage to justice, as hypocrisy is a homage rendered to truth. This is the reason that when the saviours of the menaced middle-class (the Robespierres and the Dantons) took their stand upon the writings of the Rousseaus and the Voltaires, and proclaimed “respect for law, the same for every man,” the people accepted the compromise; for their revolutionary impetus had already spent its force in the contest with a foe whose ranks drew closer day by day. They bowed the neck beneath the yoke of law to save themselves from the arbitrary power of their lords.
The Middle-Class has ever since continued to make the most of this maxim, which, with another principle, that of representative government, sums up the whole philosophy of the bourgeois age, the xix century. It has preached this doctrine in its schools, it has propagated it in its writings, it has moulded its art and science to the same purpose, it has thrust its beliefs into every hole and corner—like a pious Englishwoman, who slips tracts under the door,—and it has done all this so successfully, that to-day we behold the issue in the detestable fact, that, at the very moment when the spirit of turbulent
