Every revolution has its idealistic champions, its enthusiasts who inflame the masses with a fiery passion and are themselves ready to endure all the suffering of Calvary in the service of the creed which they profess. Fanatic apostles of high aims may be sympathetic even in their fatal errors; and there is always something sublimely tragical in their fall. Who would doubt the unselfish enthusiasm of Camille Desmoulins, of Jourde, or of Louise Michel for their ideals, for which they were content to suffer and die? In our moral judgment we distinguish between political and other criminals; a similar sharp distinction is made by the general conceptions of criminal law, for political agitators are liable to confinement as first-class misdemeanants, while thieves are imprisoned in common jails and murderers are condemned to the gallows. Revolution, as a movement of the masses aiming at the violent overthrow of the existing system of law, from the standpoint of criminal law is a single cumulative criminal act; committed against the community as a whole,—a movement called into being by the co-operation of individuals grouped into a mass in which individual actions are merely insignificant episodes. The masses, however, cannot be called to account under the criminal law; the judgment on them is pronounced by the nation and by history. The work of the judge is to investigate the individual guilt of the persons taking part; in this manner he finds himself dealing with numberless varieties of revolutionary acts—from agitation, riot, through destruction of movable property and numerous other offences, to murder,—the series comprising practically all the acts known to the criminal code. But of all these offences the only ones which may be classified as political crimes are those unlawful attacks against the aims of the State and the realization of the same which are of a political character by virtue alike of their objects and their nature (_e.g._, incitement against the constitution or against the binding force of the law); in cases where only the tendency or motive is of such character, while the means employed are base, as is true of most revolutionary offences,—for without violence and dangerous threats there can be no revolution,—we are confronted, not with political, but with common crimes. The incendiaries of Paris who set fire to the Tuilleries were common criminals, though they acted from a political motive. And those who, clothing themselves in the red cloak of revolution, with Phrygian caps on their heads, ‘work for their own enrichment,’ are not revolutionists at all—merely criminals.