Most honest political thinkers have realised by now, for instance, how visionary and unreal is the accepted notion of the reign of “Justice”--not the justice that is administered [p182] in our Courts of Law, or which we strive to exercise in daily life, but the _justice immanente_ of Gambetta, already discussed, in which natural inequalities and their accompanying disabilities and inconveniences will be for ever removed or neutralised. But the glaring impossibility of this desideratum, and the consequent meaninglessness of the word used to designate it, does not seem to hinder millions from declaring themselves ready to fight and to lose their blood and their lives in trying to effect its realisation. And the same may be said of the ideas embodied in the words “Liberty,” “Equality,” “Fraternity,” etc. Given sufficient ingenuity in the agitator, therefore, it may be taken for granted that the grand method of fomenting social upheavals is: (1) to postulate a state of mind or body that is impossible in the society which it is intended to destroy--the fact that the particular mental or bodily state would be impossible in any society is either judiciously concealed, or else not known to the agitator; (2) to make the name for that particular state of mind or body a household word representing a universal desideratum; and (3) to exploit any existing disaffection, from whatever cause, in order to add momentum to the general desire to see this hypothetical state of mind or body realised by fair means or foul. In this way it is possible to make millions destroy opposing millions, and violence outrival violence, without anyone becoming aware, until too late, of the futility of the conflict and of the criminality of the hoax. Aye, in the exhaustion and confusion that [p183] follow, people are necessarily so busy overcoming the multifarious difficulties that the struggle has created, that frequently they have not even the time, much less the composure, to ask themselves whether they have really obtained that for which they destroyed their fellows, their own homes, and their civilisation. It is in this way that false ideas often escape condemnation and exposure. The tyranny of words and the ideas they represent, whether sound or unsound, is therefore obvious enough; and, in the history of peoples it is the principal tyranny of all. Beside it the tyranny of individual monarchs is mere child’s play, and the deeds of a national hero only stage effect. Where the ideas have been false, however, where the desiderata striven and struggled for have been wholly chimerical, this tyranny stands for the most prodigious romanticism of human life,--a romanticism which, like all romanticism, has to be paid for very heavily, and the price of which is frequently the peace, happiness and order of centuries.