“When this is done, my dear sir,” continues Mr. H. (for he writes very confidentially)—“you see that a great step is gained towards the dissolution of the frame of every existing community. I say nothing of _Governments_, as _their_ fall is of course implicated in that of the social system;—and you have long known that I hold every Government (that acts by coercion and restriction—by laws made by the few to bind the many) as a _malum in se_,—an evil to be eradicated,—a nuisance to be abated,—by force, if force be practicable; if not, by the artillery of reason, by pamphlets, speeches, toasts at club-dinners, and though last, not least, by didactic poems. “But where would be the advantage of the destruction of this or that Government, if the form of Society itself were to be suffered to continue such as that another must necessarily arise out of it and over it?—Society, my dear sir, in its present state, is a _hydra_. Cut off one head,—another presently sprouts out, and your labour is to begin again. At best you can only hope to find it a _polypus_;—where, by cutting off the _head_, you are sometimes fortunate enough to find a _tail_ (which answers all the same purposes) spring up in its place. This, we know, has been the case in France; the only country in which the great experiment of regeneration has been tried with anything like a fair chance of success. “Destroy the frame of society,—decompose its parts,—and see the elements fighting one against another,—insulated and individual,—every man for himself (stripped of prejudice, of bigotry, and of feeling for others) against the remainder of his species;—and there is then some hope of a totally new _order of things_,—of a _Radical Reform_ in the present corrupt system of the world. “The German Theatre appears to proceed on this judicious plan. And I have endeavoured to contribute my mite towards extending its effect and its popularity. There is one obvious advantage attending this mode of teaching;—that it can proportion the infractions of law, religion, or morality, which it recommends, to the capacity of a reader or spectator. If you tell a student, or an apprentice, or a merchant’s clerk, of the virtue of a Brutus, or of the splendour of a La Fayette, you may excite his _desire_ to be equally conspicuous; but how is he to set about it? Where is he to find the tyrant to murder? How is he to provide the monarch to be imprisoned, and the national guards to be reviewed on a white horse?—But paint the beauties of _forgery_ to him in glowing colours;—show him that the presumption of virtue is in favour of rapine and occasional murder on the highway—and he presently understands you. The highway is at hand—the till or the counter is within reach. These _haberdashers’ heroics_ come home to the business and the bosoms of men.—And you may readily make ten _footpads_, where you would not have materials nor opportunity for a single _tyrannicide_.