_Victor_: "We see, like David, our Solomon's Temple only in dreams, and in our waking hours the tabernacles of the Covenant; but it were a sorrowful philosophy which should require nothing of men but what they had hitherto rendered without philosophy. We must fit reality to the ideal, not the reverse." The ardently-philosophical _Melchior_: "Most modern movements are only the starts of one sleeping under the ear-wig[86] and grasping at his bloody scalp.--But the falling stalactite of regentship forms at last with its drops one column with the ascending stalagmite of the people." _Flamin_: "But do not Spartans imply Helots, Romans and Germans Slaves, and Europeans Negroes?--Must not always the prosperity of the whole be based upon individual victims, just as one class must devote itself to tilling the soil, that another may apply itself to knowledge?" _Cato_ the elder: "Then I spit on _the whole_ if I am the victim, and despise myself if I am the whole." _Balthazar_: "It is better that the whole suffer voluntarily for the sake of a single member, than that he should against his just vote suffer for the whole." _Matthieu_: "Fiat justitia et pereat mundus." _Victor_: "In plain English: the greatest physical evil must be preferred to the least moral evil, the least unrighteousness."[87]-- _Melchior_: "The physical inequality of men produced by nature no more excuses any political inequality than pestilence does murder, or a failure of crops corn-monopoly. But inversely political equality must be the very compensation for the want of physical. In a despotic state enlightenment as well as prosperity may be greater in inward contents, but in the free state it is greater in outward contents, and is distributed among all; for freedom and enlightenment reciprocally beget each other."-- _Victor_: "As unbelief and tyranny do. Your assertion shows to nations two ways, one slower, but more just, and one which is neither. Wild clutchings at the _dial plate-wheel_ of Time, which is turned by a thousand little wheels, dislocate more than they expedite it; often they break off its teeth.[88] Hang thy own weight on the _weight_ of the clock-work, which drives all the wheels; i. e. be wise and virtuous, then wilt thou be, at the same time, great and innocent, and be building up the city of God, without the mortar of blood, and without the stone blocks of death's-heads."--