France -- History -- Louis XVI, 1774-1793; France -- History -- Revolution, 1789-1799
Alas, yes! a whole world to remake, if she could see it; work for
another than she! For all is wrong, and gone out of joint; the
inward spiritual, and the outward economical; head or heart,
there is no soundness in it. As indeed, evils of all sorts are
more or less of kin, and do usually go together: especially it is
an old truth, that wherever huge physical evil is, there, as the
parent and origin of it, has moral evil to a proportionate extent
been. Before those five-and-twenty labouring Millions, for
instance, could get that haggardness of face, which old Mirabeau
now looks on, in a Nation calling itself Christian, and calling
man the brother of man,—what unspeakable, nigh infinite
Dishonesty (of _seeming_ and not _being_) in all manner of
Rulers, and appointed Watchers, spiritual and temporal, must
there not, through long ages, have gone on accumulating! It will
accumulate: moreover, it will reach a head; for the first of all
Gospels is this, that a Lie cannot endure for ever.
In fact, if we pierce through that rosepink vapour of
Sentimentalism, Philanthropy, and Feasts of Morals, there lies
behind it one of the sorriest spectacles. You might ask, What
bonds that ever held a human society happily together, or held it
together at all, are in force here? It is an unbelieving people;
which has suppositions, hypotheses, and froth-systems of
victorious Analysis; and for _belief_ this mainly, that Pleasure
is pleasant. Hunger they have for all sweet things; and the law
of Hunger; but what other law? Within them, or over them,
properly none!
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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