office, and still better, to sum up in one character every public demand, give the leading part to a commoner, bastard, bohemian and valet, who, by dint of dexterity, courage and good-humor, keeps himself up, swims with the tide, and shoots ahead in his little skiff, avoiding contact with larger craft and even supplanting his master, accompanying each pull on the oar with a shower of wit cast broadside at all his rivals. After all, in France at least, the chief power is intellect. Literature in the service of philosophy is all-sufficient. The public opposes but a feeble resistance to their complicity, the mistress finding no trouble in convincing those who have already been won over by the servant ***** NOTES: [Footnote 4101: How right Taine was. The 20th century should see a rebirth of violent Jacobinism in Russia, China, Cambodia, Korea, Cuba, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia and Albania and of soft and creeping Jacobinism in the entire Western world. (SR.)] [Footnote 4102: "Who, born within the last forty years, ever read a word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, or of that whole race who called themselves freethinkers?" (Burke, "Reflexions on the French Revolutions," 1790).] [Footnote 4103: The "Oedipe," by Voltaire, belongs to the year 1718, and his "Lettres sur les Anglais," to the year 1728. The "Lettres Persanes," by Montesquieu, published in 1721, contain the germs of all the leading ideas of the century.] [Footnote 4104: "Raison" (cult of). Cult proposed by the Hébertists and aimed at replacing Christianity under the French Revolution. The Cult of Reason was celebrated in the church of Notre Dame de Paris on the 10th of November 1793. The cult disappeared with the Hébertists (March 1794) and Robespierre replaced it with the cult of the Superior Being. (SR.)] [Footnote 4105: Joseph de Maistre, Oeuvres inédites," pp. 8, 11.] [Footnote 4106: Diderot's letters on the Blind and on the Deaf and Dumb are addressed in whole or in part to women.] [Footnote 4107: "Correspondence of Gouverneur Morris," (in English), II, 89. (Letter of January 24, 1790)] [Footnote 4108: John Andrews in "A comparative view," etc. (1785).--Arthur Young, I. 123. "I should pity the man who expected, without other advantages of a very different nature, to be well received in a brilliant circle in London, because he was a fellow of the Royal Society. But this would not be the case with a member of the Academy of Sciences at Paris, he is sure of a good reception everywhere."]